What's the point of this work?

The lines were long at the gate.  The US had just assassinated an Iranian general and, we had to go through additional security protocols.

I heard a man excitedly calling out a woman.  "Long time," he said.  "How are you?"

"Doing well," she said and added something in Hindi.

I wanted to turn towards them and suggest that they speak only in English if they wanted me to listen in, because my Hindi is no good.  But, I didn't.  I didn't have to either--the rest of their chat was all in English.

They talked about the places and peoples they visited during their respective vacations in two different parts of India.  And then came the job talk.

"So, who do you work for now?"

"It has been more than four years with Microsoft," she replied.

"How are things going?"

"I have a great team. Pay is great, and the benefits are good."

I thought to myself that it was a strange response.  It was not adding up well.

"Sometimes, I wonder why I am doing all that.  What's the point of this work?"

Aha, that explained the strange response.

I wish people sincerely engaged with such questions.  What's the point of the work that they might be doing?

"So, how do you answer that question?"

I was delighted that the man was a good conversationalist.  He wasn't being the stereotypical male by any means.

"I wish I knew," she said and laughed.

He didn't let her off that easily. "I am sure you have thought about it.  How you deal with that question?"

"Art is my savior."

"You mean like painting and sketching?"

"Yes.  As an undergrad, I had taken an art class.  Now, I am building on that."

People often spin their wheels doing pointless work in order to earn what they consider to be a good salary.  But, those high earnings do not fill the emptiness within.

A long, long time ago, I was convinced that the salary and benefits that engineering promised me would never come anywhere close to being the answers to same question this woman was pondering: What's the point of this work? 

I took a different path that has led me to where I never have to worry about the point of it all.  I lucked out.

Do women dream of having sex with robots?

If only more women would get into computer science and robotics!

No, it is not because I think they will create better sex robots.  It is because of the exact opposite--I feel they will spend less time on how to dehumanize us humans that male scientists seem to want to do by merging us humans with robots.

In one of the paired opinion pieces in the NYT, Sherry Turkle, whom I have referred to a lot in this blog (like here) writes that there will never be an age of artificial intimacy.  Why?  For a simple and profound reason that I often write about: Empathy.

Robots can some day effectively fake empathy, yes.  But, it can never be the real thing.  And the loss of the real thing worries me, and worries Turkle too:

We diminish as the seeming empathy of the machine increases. It is technology forcing us to forget what we know about life.
In life, you are struck by the importance of presence, of the small moments of meaning, the miracle of your child’s breath, the feelings of deep human connection. When you are thinking about technology, your mind is not on all of that. We program machines to appear more empathic. Being human today is about the struggle to remain genuinely empathic ourselves. To remember why it matters, to remember what we cherish.
These days, to be human is to keep one’s mind on the glory that one is.

In the other commentary, Andy Clark argues that it is a good thing that we are merging with robots.  Guess what word never appears in his piece? Clark has nothing to say about empathy!

While I have no evidence to back me up here, I believe that Clark's commentary fits well with the stereotypical male approach to feelings and emotions.  Even sex, which he writes about, is apparently not about feelings and emotions and intimacy.

If indeed these male/female stereotypes do feed into robotics, then that is one more argument in favor of recruiting capable females into computer science and engineering.

In the meanwhile, all we can do is reflect on what it means to be human, especially if we are not going to promote the importance of empathy.  We have one clear example of what happens when we lose sight of empathy!

Keeping time

In my previous life ... you know, as an electrical engineering student, I worked with three other students on our project work.  The "capstone" work, as we refer to in the higher educational settings here in the US.

The project work was a microprocessor based "Maximum Demand Controller."

Wait, wait ... don't fall asleep! ;)

Alright ... I will cut to the chase.

We demonstrated our work to the supervising faculty and to an external reviewer, who was from another engineering college in town.

He looked at our work.  He shook his head this way, and that way, and every possible way.

And then he had a question.  How would this account for deviations from the 50Hz frequency?

We were stumped!  We did not have an answer.

But, hey, we graduated.  That's all that matters!

Why write about that now?

I heard on NPR, and then read in the NY Times that clocks are running slow in Europe ... because of a row between Kosovo and Serbia.

A dispute between Serbia and Kosovo has disrupted the electric power grid for most of the Continent, making certain kinds of clocks — many of those on ovens, in heating systems and on radios — run up to six minutes slow.
It is one of the stranger examples of technology binding together far-flung parts of the world, and one quirky effect of more than two decades of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
The slowdown began in mid-January, and since then clocks in 25 countries, from Poland to Portugal and Denmark to Turkey, have lost time.

So, what does this have to do with my undergraduate project work and the deviation from the 50Hz that we did not account for?

In technical terms, power systems in Europe, and much of Asia and Africa, run on alternating current at 50 hertz, meaning that the flow of electricity changes directions 50 times per second. (In the United States and most of the Americas, the standard is 60 hertz.)
Because of the disruption in the Balkans, the grid for most of Europe has run since January at an average of 49.996 hertz.

You see, even a small deviation from that number can lead to disruptions.

Most clocks tell time using internal mechanisms or, like cellphones, get the time from a radio signal, and those have been fine. But clocks that measure time by that alternating current have been fooled by the drop in frequency.

This is the same mistake that we had committed in the project work.  We had programmed the microprocessor chip to count the alternating current cycle as a way to measure time.  We did that mistake 33 years ago though--we were pioneers in screwing things up ;)

What is higher education for?

I have blogged in plenty about how when I was a high school student, an overwhelming majority of students aimed for engineering or medicine.  Even though I never really had any dreams of engineering, I too went that route because I did not know any better as a seventeen year old.

People in India then, and in many developing countries even now, have this obsession with engineering and medicine for very good reasons--they seem to provide a higher probability of jobs and income compared to other routes.  And,  perhaps even a path out of the country should one choose to leave.

As one who has always been interested in understanding the humanity, I schemed and planned to make my exit from engineering and from the country too.  But, the young and idealistic commie in me could have been easily misled into less constructive paths; thankfully, I have never believed in violence.  

Soon after the events of 9/11, and with incidents thereafter, it was interesting to see that many of the agents of destruction had been well educated and, yes, with a technology background.  That set of issues is the context for this essay, which begins with:

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad hoped to kill dozens of pedestrians when he parked his Nissan Pathfinder near Times Square, loaded with improvised bombs. Four months earlier, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight carrying 289 passengers by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear. Last year, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military facilities in Tennessee, killing five soldiers.
Like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Azahari Husin, and Mohamed Atta, these men sought to commit acts of terror in the name of Islam.
But all six also shared something else. They had studied engineering.
Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. 

To which we need to also add Osama bin Laden, who graduated with a degree in civil engineering.  (His fellow brain, Zawahiri, was a medical graduate--a surgeon.)  It does not mean that engineering breeds terrorists.  It is simply a reflection of the fact that many of the thinking young in developing countries study engineering.    

My interest in this post is not to explore terrorism, but about one of the threads in that essay:

Donna M. Riley, a professor in the department of engineering education at Virginia Tech, thinks that traditional programs not only attract certain kinds of minds but also reinforce positivist patterns of thinking. General-education courses are intended to broaden students’ perspectives, but those requirements are increasingly being narrowed. And she worries that the less exposure that nascent engineers have to the humanities and social sciences, the less they will be able to appreciate other people’s perspectives. As it is, she says, "engineers spend almost all their time with the same set of epistemological rules."
Gambetta and Hertog describe how traditional engineering programs might inadvertently spur the kind of loss of significance that Kruglanski describes. "Engineering curricula anywhere are a giant showcase of Western technological achievements," they write. In developing countries, such triumphalism carries an edge of humiliation: "They throw the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."

The engineering program that I did was no different from programs at other colleges back then (which is the case even now)--we had no contextualization of engineering against the background of the humanities and the social sciences.  There was not even one course that made us think about what we could contribute to society through engineering.  It was simply engineering for the sake of engineering, which then threw "the economic backwardness of local societies into sharp relief."  To most engineering students this backwardness becomes an incentive for their own material progress.  But, for me, this contrast was unbearable.  I had to understand the reasons for the relative backwardness.  I needed to understand the world.

Contemporary engineering education in the United States is also increasingly about engineering for the sake of engineering, which has serious social implications of a different kind:

Engineering curricula in the United States may unintentionally close minds, too, according to a 2014 study by Erin A. Cech, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. Cech, who earned undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, analyzed survey responses by 326 students in four engineering programs. Between their freshman year and graduation, their self-reported answers showed drops in measures of public-mindedness, including a commitment to professional and ethical responsibilities and a social consciousness.
The discipline’s culture and curricula emphasize "an ideology of depoliticization," she argues, which treats nontechnical factors as irrelevant to the work of "real" engineering. The notion of meritocracy also runs through the discipline, she writes, but this ideal tends to accept existing social structures and relationships as inherently fair. "Engineering education," Cech writes, "fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering."

Meritocracy run amok is the story of contemporary Silicon Valley.  Public welfare?  Social consciousness?

If only higher education could help us think about issues that are much bigger, and more important, than our selves!

Can we please eliminate the damn liberal arts? Right now?

As one can imagine, I have been thinking a lot more about education and the miserable state of affairs that contemporary higher education has become.  And then I read this in the New York Times that a growing number of elected officials want to nudge students toward more job-friendly subjects like electrical engineering.  Ah, yes, if only I had known that the world needed electrical engineers and not ditch-diggers!

In my case, misery does not mean drowning in alcohol, though I wonder if that might help!  Instead of carrying my water bottle to class, maybe I should take with me something clear and water-like gin or vodka ;)  Oh well, all I know is to drink coffee and to then read essays that really smart people have authored.

As comforting as this exercise is, well, it is equally depressing that the issues that I worry about now were the same set of issues that were talked and written about even a few years ago, and the situation has only worsened.  For instance, in this essay from almost sixteen years ago!  Jackson Lears writes:

The contemporary academic crisis is not about job security any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the most resources. It is about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. Professors are constantly berating themselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular  world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right in front of us, in the classroom; it is composed of students, 99 percent of whom have no intention of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they require us, however implicitly and imperfectly, to become public intellectuals.

The attitude towards students and their learning is appalling, to put it mildly.  Increasingly, colleges see students as nothing more than warm bodies who bring in monies, which they can use to build Taj Mahals and create more "student-services" administrative positions.  Faculty, too, are only happy to be active participants in fashioning revenue-maximizing strategies.  Thus, the higher education industry keeps charging ahead at full speed, consuming the monies students, taxpayers, and philanthropists keep throwing its way.  Are we surprised then at all with the following sentences from Jackson Lears?

Prussian productivism melded with American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism–the love of the practical, the demand for cash value now. The result was the accentuation of a fundamental conflict in the university’s mission, between furthering the pursuit of truth and serving the needs of established power. The modern American university was to continue to preserve a place for the free play of ideas, but also to provide technical expertise for government and business elites. 

In that same issue of the Hedgehog Review, Russell Jacoby writes:

Driven by academic discontent and boredom, professors might want to reinvent themselves as public writers. ... 

But, simultaneously recognizes the challenge when we have:

institutional imperatives that reward technical rather than public contributions.Will they be successful? It is not clear.

It is a lot clearer now, sixteen years later, that only technical contributions matter, even if they are less than third-rate.  Public contributions, well, who cares!

Jacoby worried then about specialization, well before the introduction of gerontology as a major in a small time public university where I teach!  Jacoby wrote:

it should be possible to raise the issue of insular specialization without pledging fealty to progress and industrial society. The incarceration of specialists and a return to bloodletting or phrenology is hardly the goal; nor is the point to foster anti-intellectual populism or half-educated generalists. Specialization inheres in industrial society. We need specialists. No one wants to hear a cheery announcement that today your airline pilot will be a family therapist. Nevertheless this truth does not justify every micro-field or subdiscipline or new jargon. Specialization can also be obscurantism, turf building, careerism, and regression, as well as a simple waste of talent and resources.

So much has been said in the years past by intellectuals that there is very little for this pseudo-intellectual to contribute, it seems like!  May I have a martini, please?  On second thoughts, make that a double-shot cappuccino ;)

My life might be a "C" .. .not because of these "C" places

By April 1986, I had quit my first job straight out of college at Coimbatore. I had spent all of three months on the job in Calcutta and was convinced that I did not want to waste my life in engineering.

Those were the days before the proliferation of phones in India and, therefore, my parents did not know anything about me having quit the job.  And that, as it would turn out later on, I would simply loaf around doing nothing for a few months after that.

My parents lived in a small town called Choudhwar, a little outside of C ttack.    Father was the consulting engineer there for an industrial construction.  I showed up unannounced, with the few belongings that were packed into one suitcase and with a briefcase in another hand.  I told them that I was done with my job in Calcutta and that I needed time to figure things out.

I am sure my parents were worried that I would turn out to be one heck of a loser. (There is a fair chance that they don't think that anymore.  I know the reality that I am a loser!  But, hey, I am in America!!!)

After a few days of puttering around there--nothing much to do in that small town--I headed to Madras.  Yes, it was Madras those days, before it went through the name change to Chennai.

In those old days, newspapers and radio were pretty much all we had, with the Indian television (Doordharshan) news on a competition against itself on how much lamer its soap operas could get.  I recall thinking that the C ernobyl disaster must be a serious one if the Swedes were complaining about the radioactivity detected in the sky above them.

After more loafing around, taking up a job that I quit after three weeks, and then taking up another job in which I lasted for nearly six months, I took off for the US with a conviction that I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life.  I bet my parents were relieved that I was no longer a nasty reminder of a wasted life.

A couple of years after that, the Soviet Union itself was gone.  As more than one commentator, like this one, has pointed out when looking at the events in the rear view mirror of life,

Chernobyl, then, represented a fundamental shift in the relationship between the Soviet citizenry and the state. Before the explosion, most Soviets were not discontented dissidents; they believed in the Soviet system, forgave its flaws, and hoped for a better future within its confines. But after Chernobyl, the system seemed potentially unredeemable—and actively dangerous. In the early days of glasnost, stories of Stalin’s mass murders decades earlier slowly bubbled to the fore, but those generally receded, so far removed were they from everyday life. After Chernobyl, though, every citizen’s safety was at stake.

On this anniversary of that Chernobyl disaster, I am reminded of a dinner from two years ago.  I had invited for dinner a visiting Ukrainian environmental attorney,Olga, and her host, "M,"who is a friend.  Of course, I couldn't wait to ask Olga about Chernobyl, and so after dinner I did.

"Where were you when Chernobyl exploded?" I asked her.

Olga said that they lived in Kiev, which is just about 100 kilometers from Chernobyl.  But, 100 km in the Soviet era was a lot more than the mere physical distance, particularly given the state of telecommunications then.  Thus, they had no news about the disaster for days, and went about their daily business.  Children played outside.  And, children and people marched like they did every year to celebrate May Day.

But then, Olga said, there was one notable absence--the children of senior party and government officials were not in town but had gone away to far away places like Moscow.  A week later, many of them were not present at the rah-rah May Day parades and celebrations.  Only later when the news of the disaster started trickling in did they understand that those with the inside information had scooted away their children to the safer environs of Moscow, far away from potential radiation fallout.

Olga's father was apparently one of the many men who volunteered to go to Chernobyl to help move women and children out of that place.  And, like many of them, he now lives with a thyroid problem as a result.

Chernobyl is, thus, a symbol not only about the huge downsides associated with a careless and reckless use of nuclear energy but also a tragic reminder of the horrible totalitarian state that was in existence up until a mere two decades ago.  The Fukushima event from two years ago is a stark contrast--when the entire world could watch and follow in real time how that nuclear accident was being handled.

Over the years in between Chernobyl and Fukushima, I have certainly figured out what to do with my life.  It was about eleven years ago about this time in 2002 that I submitted my notice to quit the job that I had in California.  Yes, there are plenty of people who would prefer that I am not one of their colleagues where I now work; but, I have no plans to quit what I am doing.  Especially when I live in a place that proudly proclaims that it is a nuclear-free-zone!

My salary finally is up to what I earned twelve years ago!

I do not know if money can or can't buy one love, but I do know that I never have cared to test out that proposition because I have not been drawn to earning a lot in the first place.

My daughter has joked many times, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that she has rarely met anybody like me who has systematically changed careers in order to earn lower earnings. 

The engineering undergraduate track would have, in the normal process, led someone like me to a management degree or the IT revolution, or both, in India or the US, and in either scenario I would be immensely richer than where I am now.

After that first transition away from engineering, I worked as a transportation planner.  Continuing in that profession would have translated to quite a few more tens of thousands of dollars over the years.

The move after that was to the academic world, where it was clear at the interview with the Dean and in the employment contract that I received later that my earnings would drop by twenty-five percent.

As if all these were not enough, I moved from California to Oregon, and the contract, at the university where I teach even after ten years, brought my salary down a further fifth from the academic salary at California.

I noticed that finally, my contracted salary for this academic year has risen to the dollar amount that I earned in my final year as a transportation planner.

Of course, all these are nominal numbers, without adjusting for inflation over the twelve years.

Yet, I am fairly confident that I am where I can truly be myself.  I am doing what I really, really like doing. 

In the language of economics, it is all about tradeoff.  Matt Yglesias briefly notes about how such tradeoffs affect the conventional approaches to calculations of national incomes and productivity.  He writes:

Another thing people can do is deliberately earn lower wages in order to obtain better job amenities. I was reading the other day about Pecan Lodge in Dallas: Newcomer of the Year at the 2012 Texas Monthly BBQ Festival. Its founders used to be consultants with Accenture, but they decided they'd rather quit and smoke meat.
That's really the same kind of leisure/income tradeoff as you see if workers cut back their hours, but it'll show up differently in national statistics. Instead of wages and productivity rising while income stays flat and hours fall, you'll see hours stay flat while wages and productivity fall. Phlogiston economics will say that Pecan Lodge is an example of technological innovation slowing down since it reduces total factor productivity, when it's really just an example of people taking advantage of the fact that America is a wealthy society to try to improve their unpriced job amenities.

The important point to note is the one that Yglesias also raises: this is possible only because I live in a phenomenally wealthy society where I have the luxury of engaging in such tradeoffs that do not push me into a daily battle for mere survival.

To a large extent, such a leisure/income tradeoff is what one would expect as individuals and societies get wealthier.  But, ironically, it is turning out that the rich and the super-rich estimate leisure in terms of earnings foregone and, perhaps not irrationally, decide against giving up those dollars, as Steven Landsburg noted a few years ago.

The tradeoff works for me. For the most part.

Oh! Calcutta :) to OMG, Kolkata :(

In one of my previous avatars (!) I was a final semester engineering student.

There was a campus interview.  I had no idea what the hiring company was and nor did I care.  I had no idea what I was supposed to wear, or how I ought to behave, and I cared not.

It was quite an interesting interview I had with the personnel guy.  He easily figured out that I was not keen on an engineering career.  We talked and talked about societal and political issues.

He then took out a blank paper and drew concentric circles.  Pointing to the innermost, and the smallest circle, he said that was the limit to which I can directly act. An immediate outer ring, he said, is where perhaps I could influence actions.  Anything beyond that was stuff that I could only talk about and can't do a damn thing.

I thought it was all over.

But, surprise, surprise, I got a job offer.  And, a choice of locations as well!

"Calcutta, or Madras?" he asked.

"Calcutta" I said.

I figured it was a wonderful opportunity to go to a part of the world about which I had read and heard about a lot, and to experience it.  I loved rasagollas, and the literary and political influences that Bengal had played in India's freedom struggles.
I was also aware then about how much Calcutta's glory days were long over.  Rajiv Gandhi, who was the prime minister then, invited the wrath of Bengalis everywhere on the planet by declaring that Calcutta is a dying city.

But, there was no doubt in my mind that I needed to take that option over Madras. 

That is how my global wandering began.

Everything that could be wrong in a city was there in Calcutta: cramped quarters that were dark even when there was ample light outside, potholes, crowds on buses, crowds in slow moving trams that seemed ancient, smoke everywhere from generators that were used because of power shortage, ....

But, it was all ok--I ate rasagollas every single day :)

I didn't stay on the job and in Calcutta for too long though.  Ten weeks later, I turned in my quit notice. The personnel guy tried to convince me that I could stay on and yet take the GRE and work on the applications.

But, I couldn't.

I was tired of engineering.

I left the city.

A few years into graduate school, I visited Calcutta again.  This time, I was devoid of any romantic notions about Calcutta, and had also lost my taste for sweets.  There was no charm in Calcutta.  The curtains had been peeled back to reveal all the negatives.

Reading this piece in The Economist makes me think that the city's conditions have only worsened:

Calcutta lost its title as India’s capital a century ago, and its status as the country’s industrial engine in the 1950s. By the early 1970s visitors were making apocalyptic predictions of plagues and starving, rampaging mobs, and by the end of that decade Marxists were in charge. Today Kolkata evokes Havana, beautiful but shabby, the last city to remain largely untouched by India’s 20-year boom.

When Calcutta is compared to Cuba, well, it is time the people there got on lifeboats and rafts and rowed their ways to the equivalent of Miami!

Notes from the reunion: More than "3 Idiots" getting together?

Soon after the movie "3 Idiots" was released, Surya emailed me about it and strongly encouraged me to watch it.  She is the sister of my school mate, Rangayya, who was also a good friend and a neighbor.

Yes, "was."

In the primitive days before the internet and emails, most of us classmates had drifted away from each other.  I lost track of most, including Rangayya.

More than 25 years later, I got an email from Surya.  I was surprised and excited.  But the content of the email was nothing but tragic--Rangayya was no more.  Tears rolled down as I read that email.

The departures of Rangayya and Manibaba were the emotional triggers for me to begin to re-connect with old school mates.  I was, therefore, happy to say hello to the living classmates, even if I had no clue about them back when we were in the same school.

Later, as we settled into emailing about more mundane topics, Surya emailed me about "3 Idiots."

I didn't watch the movie. Even when it appeared as an option in the in-flight movie listings, I was not keen on watching it.

For a simple reason: I knew from the movie reviews that the plot was not going to be anything new for me--I had lived it.

Something like how a friend's husband, who is a public defender in capital punishment cases, said he cared not to watch "Dead Man Walking" because he lived with those very issues everyday in his work. 

I was one of the many idiots who went to study engineering because, well, that was what boys did, while girls went to medical colleges.

It didn't take me even a few weeks to figure out that I cared not for engineering.

So, why watch the movie, right?  After all, my own life is as complicated and exciting for me to live it, and no movie with the same plot can be any better :)

But, my brother was keen on us watching it, and we did.  While made quite differently from typical formulaic Bollywood movies, it is still one long movie at almost three hours!  We ended up watching in bits.

Even the scenes of the freshman hazing at college were all too familiar.  The demonstration in the movie that salt water is a conductor of electricity was not humorous to me as the director intended--it reminded me about how the "raggers" directed the fully nude me to pee on exposed electric coils in a corner of the room, which I stubbornly refused, and for which I was slapped as well.

At the end of the movie, I told my brother and mother that I routinely tell my students I would be a college professor teaching the topics that I do, even if I got paid nothing at all.  My profession is my hobby too, with the result that it is all fun and play for me.

Life is not about money, nor about fancy gadgets, all of which would have been in plenty had I continued with engineering.

But, that would not have been my life.

I am happy to be an idiot, who lives paycheck-to-paycheck.  Well, it is stressful at times, yes!  But, it's my life :)

All izz well!

Don't think yourself stupid! :)

My brother and I walked over to my sister's place.

"Let's get something from that sweet store across from her flat" he said.

After a detour to that store, we walked in with keera vadai, vegetable cutlets, and chumchum.  Sister made tea (black for me, of course!) and we talked about stuff.

Somehow the chat turned to the topic of real estate prices in the city.  The figures are simply astounding.  So, naturally, I asked, "how do people afford such prices?"

The response was that professionals earn quite a salary these days.

"But, what about people like the domestic help?  I mean, where do they live?  How do they survive?  After the cyclone rains the domestic help didn't come over because of the water-logging."

Turns out that Earl has sane advice for idiots like me:

I laugh now, but I know I will keep asking these questions forever.  After all, that is why I ditched engineering!

My blog attracts traffic. even for searches like ...

I thought I might check the keyword searches that apparently generated some of the traffic to my blog. Interesting patterns.

Get this: my blog comes out as the first link (at least when I checked last) for quite a few.  I was impressed with these examples (all are Google searches)

• For readers who are curious about the intellectual (and personal) debate between Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan: the search for krugman rajan shows that my post is #1, even ahead of Greg Mankiw :)
• For those who are thinking of quitting engineering in favor of a different profession; such a search results in traffic to my page 

Who would have thought! 

And, of course, all the interest in the Ambanis and Tina Munim :)

I suppose this is why I quit engineering!

I don't think of my job as a "job" at all (ed: maybe that is a problem?) It is almost like something I do for fun.

Suppose I were in some other "job".  What would I want to do in my spare time then? Precisely what I do now as my "job" ... Of course, I lucked out; if not, I would have been .... oh well!!!

And, therefore, I can absolutely relate to this post that I landed at after clicking on a few links.  And, here is the excerpt that I like:

A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it -- often to the detriment of your life outside of it.     There’s no shame in either. Each has costs and benefits. There is no reason to make a fetish of your career. There are activities other than work in which to find meaning and pleasure and even a sense of self-importance -- you just need to learn how to look.     ...

So which is it: job or calling? You can answer the question directly, or allow time to answer it for you. Either way, I think you’d be happier if you stopped thinking of what the world had to offer you, and started thinking a bit more about what you had to offer the world. Real excitement isn’t just in whatever you happen to be doing, but in what you bring to it.

Hmmm .... today's excitement? I cooked Cheppankizhangu :)

I started with this, ...

and ended with this

Not anywhere near the fantastic taste I had/have in my memory, but good enough to satisfy the urge.
Perhaps I need to check with mom on how she makes it tasty .... Maybe better luck next time, eh!

From engineering to terrorism ....

I present you this excerpt from an interesting piece in Slate!

A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.

And here is the best part:

Is there some set of traits that makes engineers more likely to participate in acts of terrorism? To answer this question, Gambetta and Hertog updated a study that was first published in 1972, when a pair of researchers named Seymour Lipset and Carl Ladd surveyed the ideological bent of their fellow American academics. According to the original paper, engineers described themselves as "strongly conservative" and "deeply religious" more often than professors in any other field. Gambetta and Hertog repeated this analysis for data gathered in 1984, so it might better match up with their terrorist sample. They found similar results, with 46 percent of the (male American) engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22 percent of scientists.

Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote.

Terrorist organizations seem to have recognized this proclivity—in Abdulmutallab, obviously, but also among engineers in general. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for "inquisitive" students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers.

I used to be an engineer. How about that for full disclosure!!!! hey, hey, don't you call up the FBI on me :-)

Mobile phone ops in Tanzania: a story of globalization by itself

Kuwait-based Zain Group has awarded Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) a five-year outsourcing contract to manage and upgrade its mobile networks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

So, a corporation based in Kuwait is responsible for the mobile phone operations in Tanzania--and Kenya, and Uganda.  And this corporation awards the contract for the day-to-day management to Nokia Siemens, the global headquarters for which are in, Finland I assume!

The eternally curious guy that I am, I thought I would explore who actually runs Nokia Siemens. 

Laugh not: the CEO is Rajeev Suri.  Of course, not only an Indian name, the guy is from India :-)  And the second in command there? Ashish Chowdhary.  Turns out Suri is three years younger than me, and Chowdhary is one year older than me.  It is because of such reasons that my parents for a long time could not understand why I ditched electrical engineering when quite a few from my cohort--the larger sense--were raking in money like crazy, even at a middle management level. 

It is one crazy world, man, one crazy world!