Category Technology

Talking to strangers…

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I have been an introvert my whole life. By Introvert, I don’t mean that I am silent. You ask me about something I know, I will talk till you are tired, strangely, I can do this with strangers too. But I struggle with small talk. Wishing someone Good morning or saying thank you or saying you are welcome are very difficult for me. One of the reasons being I think these words are pointless. I don’t help someone for a ‘Thank you’, I do it because I can. So, I expect any one able to help me in a situation to do the same. Likewise, I don’t know what kind of a day someone is having. How can I wish their morning to be good? Anyways, because I talk a lot people think I am an extrovert. But they get it wrong. It has nothing to with how much people share or talk. An extrovert is someone who seeks company of people because they need external simulation to their brains. My mind most of the time needs a break from over stimulation. That’s what introverts are. That is why I prefer solitude to company. So, I prefer minimizing external triggers. Thanks to a world wide pandemic enforced work from home way of life, things have been good. But lately I am getting annoyed by another side effect of the pandemic. The fall in revenue for big corporations..

I do not have any financial interest in the welfare of these companies. I actually think abolishing all Stock markets will do the world a great deal of good. If there is no pressure from investors to deliver Year on year and Quarter on quarter improvement in profits, there would be less corruption, less unethical practices, less targets, less up-selling, less cross-selling, less marketing and finally less marketing calls. It’s one of the things I hate in the world. Some smart-ass with an MBA reading a couple of books by so called successful people and forcing their text book non-sense on the world through desperate people trying to make a honest living(so called telemarketers)

This is exactly the corporate world right now. Its called machine learning and artificial intelligence in marketing to enhance the lead to sales ratio. In plain English it is trying to sell stuff to people based on decisions taken by a software written by a bunch of geeks with zero social skills and no understanding of human beings. This is why Google and Facebook got a heart attack when Apple pushed an update that let users decide which apps can track them. The Facebook and Google business model is to predict things you are likely to engage with, show it on your screen and show an ad now and then. Why do you think the streaming services provide different profiles for an account. That’s because they want to separate the recommendations per profile to increase the chances of you spending more time looking at the screen. Why can’t a person have diverse interests? Why can’t someone appreciate both Les Miserables and Fast & the Furious?

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Its called targeted marketing and for that they need data. Data on what you like, what you bought, how much you earn, where do you live. Silicon valley was once a simple place, people wrote software and they sold it. Now they are giving it away for free so that they can sell ads.

I digress. So, the annoying telemarketing phone calls have increased a lot. I do understand that the country I live in has more serious problems than to think about making laws for privacy and customer data protection. I don’t mind getting calls for products I never subscribed for, I am most annoyed with the ones that I am a customer. Because, in this case, I should have say in opting in or out of promotions. It took me 4 months, 3 complaints, 2 escalations and 2 consumer affairs complaints to stop my bank from calling me everyday asking me if I wanted a loan. Why does this happen? Its because the stupid software are designed in such a way.

The angry face on top is a word cloud of all words longer than 4 characters from my first 53 blogs combined, minus the words that have occurred fewer than 5 times. The size of the font is directly proportional to the frequency of occurrence. It took me 90 odd minutes with the help of another blog Text Mining: Extracting and Analyzing to create it. Since you cannot eyeball the image for frequency, I made a chart below that shows top 15 occurring words. God knows what people are doing with their machine learning trainings and certiications.

If I would feed this to an algorithm to take a decision on my ideas or even better to lets say come up with a list of topics that I would prefer to read. This is something some websites do for click bait. Thankfully, Most of them do not spend time on analytics, they just try to use some low hanging fruits like donations to save a life, easy ways to earn money, weight loss tips. Or for men, its just random articles with photographs of women.

If you look at the analysis of my blog and decide that news on Music artists would interest me, you would be wrong. All 50 occurrences are from a single post about my taste in Music. Words ranked 2 to 13 can’t be used to judge be. That leaves Movies and Earth. Film gossip doesn’t interest me. I like movies a lot, so I do not watch many. That sounds like a contradiction but its not. If I like something very much, I would prefer quality over quantity. What would you sell me with earth? Donate to Save the earth campaign? If you actually read my blogs, you would understand that I believe that the there is no way humans can save the earth. The thing I most frequently read is Football news. I did write a blog on it. But machines can count words, not measure emotion or passion. I know guys in the IBM Watson team would disagree. I would truly love to see its results. I remember using it to try and measure the mood of customers based on emails. This as well before the Brisbane city council thought it sarcasm. May be it now knows Australian sarcasm. Again, I digress.

Some data analysts may point out that there is more to data science than just top 15 words. I know that. Linear Regression, Linear Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Naive Bayes, Decision trees. I have learnt them all and tried them out and ultimately came to a conclusion that brains are far too complex to be simulated especially when you want to use it for selling stuff. Yes, I was only telling partial truth earlier when I said it took me 90 minutes to draw a word cloud. The time was to learn to scrape the data from a WordPress site without using paid extensions, the ability to understand and interpret data takes years.

My Amazon recommendations are so inaccurate that I turned off the notifications. May be it’s also because since the app Wunderlist was purchased and killed by Microsoft, me and my wife have been using Amazon app for shared shopping list. That may be messing up the algorithm. My Netflix recommendations have the same accuracy of my daily horoscope no matter how many movies I rate. The machine may decide the recommendations, but its a human who is tagging and categorizing the movie. Yesterday I saw a category, “Asian movies with strong female lead”. I mean what the fuck is that? My wife watches a lot of Korean movies and may be a couple of the last ones had a female oriented plot. But WTF? That’s what algorithms do. In case of movies or books, doesn’t sticking to same genre or style bore you?

Cathy O’Neil starts her book Weapons of Math Destruction with an example of a horrible failed idea of using AI to grade the performance of teachers. Read it, it’s a nice book. In the theoretical world of computers, the parameters are fixed, in real world they aren’t. The real world doesn’t abide by the rules of the digital world.

If you think that I am against technology, I am anything but that. Just like movies I like technology very much. Just as I hate bad and mediocre movies, I hate seeing technology being used for stupid things. I will give you an example, I once spoke with a guy who told me that they put GPS trackers on their construction equipment to know if they are being used on non-working days. I asked him about the accuracy of the reading. He told me 200 meters. Then I asked him “A crane or a poclain or a fork lift can be used in a construction site without moving for more than 50 meters. The only time they move more than 200 mts is when they are moved to a different site”. He did not give me a response for that.

You can use data or technology for good things too. I would prefer technology being used to eliminate malaria, not selling burgers. If people need it, they will buy it. If you make stuff that people don’t need, you have to find stupid ways to sell it. The irony of all this is that, they are asking computer programs to think like humans and asking their humans to stick to per-determined responses like a computer program .

 "Would you like fries with that?"

Pack of wolves

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Any typical school kid from India must have learnt about Ashoka – The Great. He once ruled the entire Indian subcontinent. What we were thought in school was that he was a great king, he got trees planted along the side of the road to make travel easy. It may not be the most important thing he did in his life but again I did not write my text books. The symbol of a 24 spoke wheel on Indian flag is his legacy being celebrated. But he wasn’t always great, in fact he started out a terrible ruler and only changed after the battle of Kalinga. He self reflected and had a realization after massacring thousands of people. He did not completely cut out violence after that but he became a far better person. If he were living in this day and age, #AskohaTheTerrible would have been trending after his first war. I am actually waiting for some descendant of the people he killed to start an online petition to remove the Chakra from the Indian flag.

In the movie Munnabhai MBBS, there is a scene where a pick pocket tries to pinch the wallet of an elderly person. Get gets caught in the act and immediately the people in the vicinity transform into a lync mob and start trashing the wanna be thief. The elderly man intervenes and asks the thief if he wishes to be left at the mercy of the angry mob. He goes on “These are the citizens of our country. See the anger in their eyes? One just had a fight with his wife, someone’s son isn’t heeding his words, another is jealous of their neighbor and someone got a scolding from their landlord in the morning. They never speak up there, because they lack the courage. They will show all their anger on you.” Even though the move came out in 2003, it was right on point about the general outrage not just in India but around the world. In a way that scene was written well ahead of its time.

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, says that there are no worthless people, they are like that because of their upbringing. I do not agree completely to the statement. I understand the premise, but I feel that there is a point in every ones life when they are a weed. But most people in normal circumstances, get out of this phase and do make something better of themselves. At least they try. The ones that do not try, even if the conditions are favorable are really worthless. There is a difference between a person who sends you an email that he is a Nigerian Price who can send you his fortune if you pay the customs fee and Lehman brothers. There is a difference between a guy who ogles women in a bus stop and someone like Harvey Weinstein. The former are either victims of circumstance or still in that stupid phase. The latter are the worthless people. If Hugo was alive, he would definitely call them the result of bad farmers.

But, just like the people who tried to trash the pickpocket in the movie, the people now a days are finding it difficult, in fact even more difficult to distinguish between the two. The social media, especially twitter is full of people who, like a pack of wolves waiting to pounce on any and every mistake made. I have been hearing about the numerous lives destroyed for something someone did or said decades ago. Last year, a top executive in Boeing had to leave the company for an article he wrote 29 years earlier that argued women shouldn’t be in the defense forces. There is a separate pack on stand by to attack people on separate issues, ideologies. When the liberals do it, the conservatives call it Cancel culture, but when they do it they refer it to as protecting the moral standard of the society.

Be honest and name an Ideal person. A person who never did any mistake in their life? Aren’t you yourself embarrassed if not ashamed by things you did or said? I am. I have many instances of things that I did that I was not particularly proud of . I am sure many of the poor souls who got kicked out of their jobs because of the cancel culture are too. Most Indians would name Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation as an example of an Ideal person. But he too did not stand against racial injustice as soon as he saw it. He did not change until things got personal and he was kicked out of a 1st class carriage on a train in South Africa. Speaking of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s first wife accused him of beating and being threatened with an axe.

The public shaming has now gone on to such ridiculous lengths that one mistake in judgement can end your life as you know it. It doesn’t matter if its a simple joke between friends, or even if the so called victim the twitterati imagined was not even offended by the action. It doesn’t matter if the matter is stupid and personal or even purely accidental. The world is a complex and messed up place. You cannot apply the same medicine to every disease, each and every one of the have to be looked objectively. If one feels outraged or angry at someone, take a moment pause and think about if what they did was just stupid or unintentional. Check if you are really looking at a weed or if its a plant that needs to be forgiven for one mistake. May be sometimes they were speakeing the truth and you just didn’t like it.

It is necessary to take out the weeds but it is also important not to take an axe to every tree with a crooked branch. If we do that, we may end up in a world with no trees. Our society as a whole is becoming too politically correct for its own well being. There is a saying in India that a person with Jaundice sees the entire world as green, which is equivalent to seeing the world with ‘Tinted’ glasses. They also say a picture is worth a 1000 words, not sure how much a video is worth (24 frames*number of seconds*1000?)

Taking a Q

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Our blind-spots and their consequences

When you first start learning how to drive any decent instructor would have explained how to set your rear-view mirrors and explained the concept of the blind spot. The area that is invisible to you if you just look at your mirrors. The instructor I had was a little over the top in his ways, so when ever I changed lanes without checking the blind spots, he used to yell you just killed a kid driving a bicycle or you just killed a person on a bike. In a way, it did help to hammer home the point he was trying to make. Though hypothetical, he was just explaining the consequences of my actions in the real world. Just like in a car, the driving seat of the journey called life also has blind spots. How often do you check for them?

In your opinion, what’s wrong with the world? I’m not concerned about everything that is wrong in this world. What is one thing that in your opinion, the biggest problem in the world? Well! The answers would differ. Based on your nationality, financial status, Age, gender etc, the answers might vary. What if I told you there is a more prominent thing that influenced your answer?

As the old English saying (correctly) goes, Birds of a feather flock together. That’s the way of the nature. But in the era of globalization, different birds are having to flock together. The street you live in, the bus you take, the super market you use, the place your work… all of them have people from various cultures, races and backgrounds. I am not going to be a saint an say everyone is same. We are different… well that sounds a little negative.. let me try it this way. We are all unique in our own ways. Even the twins may only look same. In terms of ideas and ideologies they can be polar opposites.

When it comes to inconsequential things like favorite color/food/actor, there is never any harm. They may argue a little and may have trouble ordering food as a group in a restaurant. But when it comes to matters that are more serious and uncompromising in our petty minds, we tend to seek birds of same feather. This is because these so called uncompromising things are mostly beliefs and its never fun to be challenged to defend something that cannot be logically defended. Things such as political or religious affiliation, where there is no flawless/perfect choice, people get offended easily because they will not be able to make a clear logical argument for their choice.

So, naturally we tend to interact with people with similar political/religious affiliations be it physical or as it is becoming more and more common – virtual. Those Twitter/Facebook/Instagram feeds filled with memes, jokes and news that consciously and sub-consciously create echo chambers where you keep hearing the same thing again and again. You know what… if you hear something long enough, even if it is horrible you will start to find it tolerating. I owned a house near a highway for 4 years. All the long distance buses used to queue there and from 8 pm to 11 pm and the drivers used to honk like hell. First week was horrible, but after a couple of months, they did not bother me. I got used to it. Okay… you may say that I started ignoring those sounds. But another case in point, again me. I spent about an year driving 260 kms for work every day. That meant I spent 4 hours on road. For the fear of dozing off, I used to play music at full volume. Some of that music was horrible, the only criteria for the songs that I used was good bass and a fast beat. After an year of hearing to them, these horrible songs with stupid lyrics became some of my favorites. They still are my guilty pleasures of music.

Social media echo chambers and democracy - Technology vs Humanity: the ...

This is what happens over time, you tend to develop selective blindness and selective deafness to things that normal people would cringe at. This is exactly what has happened since 2017 when an anonymous used started a theory and that ended up in the attack on the US capitol building 3 years layer. The Q Anon movement is a big thing in America. In reality, it might be a playful guy putting a wild theory on a message board and that in-turn being used by some politically motivated groups to further their self interests. Last week I was going through some applications of machine learning in word processing and I came across someone who actually did an analysis of the posts from this so called Q and came to a conclusion that they were 2 different people. A lot of people who had were aligned with the ideas or just wished the things said by Q were true. So they took a cue from what every he said and converted a small dumpster fire into a wild fire that has started to engulf an entire nation.

Two authors are behind QAnon messages, shows machine learning analysis from Swiss company Orphanalytics.
Source: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qanon-is-two-different-people-shows-machine-learning-analysis-from-orphanalytics-301192981.html

So, it is very important to discover if you are living in an echo chamber. Technology provides some options such as Ground news. But it is ultimately up-to you. How diverse is your network? How many people do you know are different from you? Try to be more open in your choice of people you hang out with, you have a better chance of not being sucked into an echo chamber.