Greenspan's words

From BL archives:

Alan Greenspan, during his speech in 1996 at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research said: “Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when - - has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” Fill in the blanks with a two-word phrase, which has now become famous among investors.

Who's this tennis player?

This South American tennis player’s surname is Persian for “One who makes horseshoes.” Who’s he?

Novel and controversial ...

From BL archives:

It wasn't the first time the No. 9 batsman was using this brand in a Test match. It was, in fact, the second time! But it came under close scrutiny from rivals England during a Test match at Perth in December 1979. The batsman would later recount in his autobiography Menace that he was merely marketing the product. The No. 9 batsman was the business partner of Graham Monoghan, who is said to have developed the product for recreation use. Which product or brand are we talking about?

The all-important boundary!

It was an unusual role for me. For some reason, which I don't recall now, I featured in the second-half of the batting order (instead of the usual two-down). A brilliant 12-year-old all-rounder with a name quite absurd for a Tamilian, Raja Singh, had just turned around the game with a fantastic cameo. He couldn't continue his exploits for long and I soon found myself in the middle (as the expression goes) with the propect of undoing whatever good Singh had done in the past 30 minutes if I played my natural game, which was looking for the ones and twos.

I was by no measure an aggressive batsman. My USP, if at all there was one, was holding on to one end. And my Kashimir willow bat helped me achieve that without much fuss. But the situation of that day demanded a different approach, and also a different bat.

Singh handed me his Symonds (which by virtue of its English willow make was at the top of the bat hierarchy; and it was heavy). I don't remember the minute details of my innings that afternoon in plus 40 degree Celsuis temperatures (and I don't mind that) but one of the things that I do remember vividly is an uncharacateristic slog over mid-wicket that fetched me a boundary.

I have never seen a coaching manual but I am pretty sure you won't find that shot there. What made the four even sweeter was the fact that the left-arm medium pace bowler, representing another summer camp team, though talented didn't earn himself many fans. His own teammates considered him a snob. And his upright gait (people used to make fun of that) and a general aloofness possibly helped enhance that image.

So, to get back to the replay, I swung the ball pitched just short-of-a-good length on leg stump wildly and it just about managed to reach the boundary. Actually, the fielders chasing it weren't convinced as to whether it actually crossed the boundary but our entire team had camped there and that helped settle matters in our favour.

The left-arm seamer had the last laugh, though. The next ball was on good length and directed at the middle stump. I tried repeating the shot, this time over the bowler, only to get a top-edge. I was out, caught and bowled by the bowler, Kartik M. That was how Murali Kartik, India's hero in the just-concluded series against Australia, was known then.

Ever since Kartik made his debut some seven or eight years back, I have been telling this story to my friends and relatives (good timing, isn't it!). There are three essential components in this story: that I played alongside Kartik; I hit him for a four; and I got out. The first two ensure people are aware of my cricketing skills. The third is to make sure it doesn't sound boastful.

I think not long after that Kartik's father got transferred to Delhi, where the medium-pacer converted to spin. And I think he has been quite an impressive spinner, having the gift of beating batsmen in the air, and could have achieved much more till now had Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid given him enough chances. It's great that Dhoni's backing him now.

Nassim's take on journalists

Nassim Nicholas Taleb isn't surely a fan of the present-day journalist. Below are lines from his Fooled By Randomness. Actually, makes sense! Or, does it? (This last line has been added after debating this issue with a couple of friends!).

1) "On the rare occasions when I boarded the 6:42 train to New York I observed with amazement the hordes of depressed business commuters (who seemed to prefer to be elsewhere) studiously buried in The Wall Street Journal, apprised of the minutiae of companies that, at the time of writing now, are probably out of business. Indeed it is difficult to ascertain whether they seem depressed because they are reading the newspaper, or if depressive people tend to read the newspaper, or if people who are living outside their genetic habitat both read the newspaper and look sleepy and depressed. But while early on in my career such focus on noise would have offended me intellectually, as I would have deemed such information as too statistically insignificant for the derivation of any meaningful conclusion, I currently look at it with delight. I am happy to see such mass-scale idiotic decision making, prone to overreaction in their postperusal investment orders - in other words, I currently see in the fact that people read such material an insurance for my continuing in the entertaining business of option trading against the fools of randomness. (It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent 'studying' the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world. This problem is similar to the weaknesses in our ability to correct past errors: Like a health club membership taken out to satisfy a New Year's resolution, people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)

2) "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic. I will say here that such respect for the time-honored provides arguments to rule out any commerce with the babbling modern journalist and implies a minimal exposure to the media as a guiding principle for someone involved in decision making under uncertainty. If there is anything better than noise in the mass of 'urgent' news pounding us, it would be like a needle in a haystack. People do not realise that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word."

3) "To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying 'Today the market went up, but this information is not too relevant as it emanates mostly from noise.' He would certainly lose his job by trivialising the value of the information in his hands. Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist."

Which is this instrument?

Russian origin, triangular body and three strings. Can you name this guitar-style instrument? (For Tamil film fans, there can't be a more topical question!)

Ebbinghaus Illusion

This is for those of us who have, at some point or the other in their lives, been hit hard/irritated by comparison with their peers.

The fact is that perception is relative as the Ebbinghaus Illusion shows. (See this Wikipedia write-up.) And this is explained best by an image of two identical circles (here). One is surrounded by giant circles while the other is surrounded by tiny ones. As Vilayanur Ramachandran puts it, in his 'Phantoms in the Brain': "To most eyes, the two central disks do not look the same size. The one surrounded by the big disks looks about 30 per cent smaller that the one with small disks - an illusion called size contrast." In this case, the orange circle to your left seems smaller to the one to your right.

Perception is always dependent on the surrounding context.

So, if you have been on the receiving end as a result of comparisons with your peers, just remember that you could be just as good (or bad) as the person you are being compared with!

Here I am again

I'm back. And this comeback post recounts a joke narrated by Vinod Dasari, COO of Ashok Leyland, at a seminar recently. Disclaimer: You might have heard this before, but I heard it for the first time and I found it a smart joke!

Here it goes: Son asks his father why he goes to work. Father uses an analogy to explain what he does. He says he's the capitalist of the family, for he brings home the money. The son's mother, the capitalist's wife, is the management. The house maid is the labour class. Management and labour together try to grow the product (which is the son, who asked the question to his father initially).

Son gets up one night to the screams of his months-old younger brother, who needs a diaper change. He tries to wake up mother but can't. His father is missing and futher investigation reveals he's harassing the maid. So, summing up, the situation is: Capitalist is harassing labour, management is fast asleep, product is ignored and the future (baby) stinks!

Hope your organisation is different!