Metcalfe Law

Bang the Bell

I am very interested in getting some comments/views regarding, fitting people's performance/capability into the Bell Curve. The original framework was from, The publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by the late Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book is about grouping people's IQ based on various controversial factors. Maybe Gaussian distribution also suggested the similar curve with random data.
In order to satisfy any probability/theorems, I always consider two major assumptions. Size of samples have to be big enough. Sample selection has to be random.
For any organized sector, I feel point number two is mostly invalid, since people will have similar qualifications/background. Also the original Bell Curve is for the distribution based on IQ and NOT for the outputs based on IQ.
Why all companies are behind force fitting Bell Curve?

Ideas for my next cube!

Future of office cubes!

Cannibals and Vegans

Two weeks before, I got to read all the three Lecter series book from Thomas Harris.

• Red Dragon
• Silence of the lambs
• Hannibal

All the three stories have similar characters with one underdeveloped brain/character, one rational thinking person and ofcourse the transcendal, Dr. Lecter. The author has done an excellent job in not pinpointing the reason for all three types of behaviour and rather left room for our imagination. There is one more book by the same author "Black Sunday", terrorist plot to blow stadium, during SuperBowl.

Same week I got to read iCON by Jeoffrey young (unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs) Well, the way the author has portrayed the protagonist in this book, I could not resist comparing with the transcendal character of Thomas Harris.

Well, the difference being one vegan and the other a cannibal.

November -14

Part of the world where I live in, this day is celebrated as Children's Day. There were some arts/crafts exhibits done by the kids and I was going through that place. Pretty much all the adults gathered over there, went towards the kids and paid lavish praises towards their work.

Well, I was surprised to see this. You can encourage the kids by praising, at the time I feel their mistakes should also be pointed out for their improvement. I worried that praising shoddy workmanship would cause the kids to stall in their development. Why would you improve when you’re already impressing the people, who gives ice-cream/candies to you. whereas in real world, no one praises low quality work and so they should be prepared for world at earlier stages, instead of going through this painful cycle at their later stages.

Determined to set things right, I waited until one set of parents was distracted by the other. Their offspring stood in front of a wall of alleged art, admiring his work. I leaned over and whispered, “You call that Elephant, but it looks like some sort of truck. Are you sure?" Naturally he started crying. But I too cry when I learn. So I figured I was on the right track. I slipped out the side door before his parents could discover who had saved their son from a future of mediocrity.

Well, I am too determined to change small portions of this world, but not interested in taking credit for that.

Responsibility and Accountability

"I do not accept personal responsibility for what happened." Patricia Dunn, former Chairman, Hewlett-Packard, sworn testimony before the United States House of Representatives on 28 September 2006.

"Now we know the depth of what has transpired, I take full accountability to drive the actions to set it right," said HP's CEO Mark Hurd yesterday at the company's spy scandal press conference.

Hurd did not take "full accountability" for the ever-worsening spy probe but rather just "full accountability" to make things right.

On the other hand we have chief like Dr.Friden who are manly/womanly enough to take responsibilities and not shy away from accepting/admitting mistakes.
I read this article about Chief Healthcommissionerr on Dr Frieden, New York's Chief health commissioner, who tossed the city's smokers from the bar-room to the sidewalk in 2003. Dr. Friden claimed that,
"Public health is fundamentally about social justice," he says. "When anyone dies at an early age from a preventable cause in New York City, it's my fault."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/aa5856ba-0578-11db-bb76-0000779e2340.html


A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten";

EOL by Execution

Lots of debate happening around Capital Punishment. Not sure where I stand on this. Anyhow Supreme Court did not bother to ask my valuable inputs before proceeding with the verdict. So I am OK with NOT making up my mind regarding this.

What our society is going to achieve by hanging a person for a crime he committed 15 years ago. whatever be the verdict they should have a faster time limit for these type of decisions. Even Supreme Court/parliament/any other authority cannot pressurize the president and demand decisions regarding Clemency. Strange..
Lots of people (including George.W.bush) believe in Life begins at conception and ends in execution

Brain Sex

BBC has posted some tests to identify whether your brain functions in Male pattern or female pattern.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/index_cookie.shtml

I strongly believe that with conscious learning we can improve various(male/female) brain traits, like the way I did after years of going through different atlas pages, finally figured yesterday that the Japanese did not have to travel through the entire Europe or crossing Atlantic ocean to bomb Pearl Harbour. Amazing discovery for me.
For those guys/gals, who are clueless behind this euphoria for finding the obvious thing, little background about my geography skill will help.

I was having high temperature during my quarterly exams and being a good student I went to write the exam ( or was it my mom who threw me out of the house to directly land in school, after all my tantrums I made while sitting at home?) Anyhow I went to write my
H & G Quarterly exam. After all the usual questions on capitals/states etc, I have to finish the most dreaded portion of the exam - MAPS.
Slowly I turned the question for the map and was very delighted seeing the assignment is marking any Indian Railway route between Srinagar and Kanyakumari. Cool! I thought. Kashmir is at the top and Kanyakumari at the bottom, so I could connect with 3 or 4 Z lines in between these two points. Picking a map from the desk I acted upon my plan of action for the railroad between Kashmir and Kanyakumari. Big mountains like Himalayas lies in the north and so the railway gauge has to be very narrow towards the top and somewhere in the middle we have some desert portion where the gauges has to be little broader than broad gauge, since this will shrink due to alternating between high temperature in the day and very low temperature in the night (Even as a kid I believed, Science - if not applied practically does not have any values) Armed with color pencils, I properly demarcated all different(narrow, little less narrow(more high you go, more narrow it becomes, metre, broad, little broader than broad) gauges.

Completely satisfied with my work and with oozing confidence I submitted my answer sheets tied with the map. Sadly, I did not get any marks for my fantastic work.

Even now I am not sure whether it is my low IQ or High Temperature, which made me to draw the rail route between Kashmir and Kanyakumari using Europe Map.

Movies

Watched 3 movies in the last 5-6 weeks in theatre.

• Lage Raho MunnaBhai was excellent. It is very difficult for sequels to live upto its expectations from the previous one. But this one is extraordinary. I just could not resist comparing with Rang De Basanti. Though the theme was very similar, RDB theme was portayed as negative, whereas Lage Raho... is positive oriented message to the public. Kudos to the director who made Gandhigiri very popular among youth.

Dilip Prabhavalkar plays GandhijiÂ’s role in a convincing manner. He never preaches -- but offers advise in a take-it-or -leave-it manner, and with a smile. Logic behind Mahatma'sappearancee is very convincing.

• I am little faint hearted, where thriller movies are concerned and I avoid seeing thriller movies in theatres. But I got free tickets for Vettaiyadu Velaiyadu and was forced to accompany our folks to watch this movie. Good thriller. Looks like story is the adaptation of a novel I read sometime before, "The surgeon" by Tess Gernstein. They could have acknowledged somewhere that VV is based on "The Surgeon"

( Writing my own last/sur name, I make spelling mistake so I doubt whether I got this author name correctly :-)

• Jillunnu oru Kadhal Kadhai - Timepass / nothing extraordinary. One thing I noticed was the shots revolving around Ambasamudram is not really that place. Few times I noticed some Telugu letters in the nearby wall, where it is supposed to have been Ambasamudram. Is Ambasamduram that popular enough to be faked?

TM

The first few days in this new office was very funny. we were supposed to attend the transcendal Meditation course(according to our own will and wish).Some guys from Mahirishi Institute took the class.My master for this meditation class is an European( from Germany). I'll give u the few words of his lecture.

***********
"In SIS transcendal meditation(TM) everybody will be given one separate mantra. You have to SINK SE mantra slowly. Don't worry about external disturbances. SINKING mantra, SAT itself will do good. SAT brings you FOOL consciousness. To get FOOL consciousness you should do TM twice daily. SOUGH external agents may cause some disturbance you need not worry about SAT.When somebody asked about SIS mantra, you should not tell about SIS mantra"
**************

After that he performed pooja for his guru saying "guru brahma" and he did all those pooja related things. He offered NEIVEDYAM (some milk sweets) to his GURU. The worst part of it was, he did not distribute the NEIVEDYAM to us. He asked us to to close our eyes and do meditation for 20 min. That 20 min seemed 20 hrs for me. Anyhow I made my mind to do meditation, so that I can get that PRASADAM after the meditaion.When I opened my eyes after that 2....0 min I was shocked to find one milk sweet missing in that packet:-) To top that, he didn't distribute the remaining sweets after the meditation. The next 4 days he was giving some lecture about COSMIC consciousness and FOOL consciousness. Last Friday it got over. Just now I got a call from my Guru saying he'll come here next Tuesday to check our progress. I'm thinking of taking leave on that day.

Instead of Engineering, if I should've taken BA ( Bachelor of Acharyas) my life would've become better. Company is paying them Rs.2000 per employee( RS 4500/ for executives) + their expenditure for staying at HOTEL for 1 week) So everybody in my office calls himself/herself as employee, not as executives. Now I've got the "oli vattam" surrounding my head:-)

NB:Now only I realized that the Germans are pronouncing "TH" as "S". So do the needful change in his lecture. Every words in capital letters has to be converted to the below list

• SAT-that
• SINK/SINKING-think/thinking
• FOOL-full
• SIS-this
• SOUGHT-thought

After making these changes if you go through his lecture once again, we will get some sensible idea. If I knew about this before, I wouldn't have taken fun at him:-)

Follow up post:

Have you heard of the Yogic Flying Demo done by these same TM guys. They said that they have achieved this capability & that there will be a demo of Yogic Levitation in KA (The Govt. one). So we all went there - I have seen the same performed by roadside Modi Masthan, but wanted to see how well they can disguise their trick. There were tons of poojas & TMs and we were anxiously waiting for the main event. Finally, the ultimate yogis who mastered levitation showed up.

About 5 or 6 of them sat on the centre, doing Padmasanam and it was absolute silence in anticipation. Everyone expected them to slowly lift from their seats. Instead what happened was there was a suddent burst of loud music (jalras, & band & stuff like that) and these guys started jumping around (still in sitting posture). It was exactly like some frogs hopping, but frogs could jump much higher than that. And that's the end of it. The road side Modi Masthan did a hell of a job & got his money only in5 & 10 paises whereas these guys were getting more than 40 Billion dollars(estimated at that time and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself was one of the richest man in the world trailing only Sultan of Brunei, Paul Getti, SamWalton & a few others, worth at least 4 Billion Dollars). There were reporters and they asked some doubts, like - Are you not just hopping and what's so special about this 1" flying? They were responded that you guys do jumping & this is actually levitation. You don't belive it & that's why you don't see the levitation. They are already mastered & in a few years they'll also master levitation directly to heaven (they are half way there already).

I never regretted for many of things in life I did or didn't do, but thereis one thing I still seriously regret - why I didn't become a Samiyarini. Hey, it's crowded, but still not too late.