I built a JavaScript tool to transliterate English typing into Tamil script. It uses a phonetic mapping system for vowels and consonants, supports copy-pasting into documents, and includes a Google Gadget for searching the web in Tamil.

I've built a simple Tamil transliterator . You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Tamil. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc. You may need to turn on tamil scripts to see the Tamil fonts above. If you have Windows 98, it may not work well. If you've visited this page recently, you will need to refresh this page as well (press F5). Browse through my Javascript to see how it works. Feel free to reuse. I've also made a Google Gadget that searches Google in Tamil using this tool. Here's what to type: table#tamiltransliterator td { border-top: 1px solid #dbdbff; padding-right: 10px; } Tamil English அ a ஆ A or aa இ i ஈ I or ee உ u ஊ U or oo எ e ஏ E ஐ ai ஒ o ஓ O ஔ au க k or g ங n ச ch or s ஜ j ஞ n ட t or d ண N த th or dh ந n ப p or b ம m ய y ர r ல l வ v ழ zh ள L ற R ஷ sh ஸ S ஹ h I also have a gadget that lets you search in Tamil . Comments Arun 31 Aug 2006 8:29 am: Very cool. Why the UI change? S Anand 31 Aug 2006 10:55 am: Mostly because I wanted to shift focus from "linking" to "writing". Sathya 31 Aug 2006 11:06 am: wow ... the commenting is back ! great ! In my spare time I would test this and if possible enhance the transtamil. Currently "Aiyya" does not get transliterated and so on. S Anand 31 Aug 2006 4:19 pm: Try 'aiyya' with the small 'a'. That works. I am allowing only lowercase except for long vowels. Arun 1 Sep 2006 6:23 am: Ah, ok. Just a suggestion. Maybe you could use up more of the screen width? Lot of screen real-estate is not used currently (at least, on Firefox), so there's a lot of scrolling (down) to do. S Anand 1 Sep 2006 7:13 am: Arun, I thought a lot about this. While this makes it tougher on people who visit my site a lot, most newcomers find a linear flow easier. Since 90% of the traffic to my site is newcomers (most regular readers use RSS), I thought it best to design it this way. Just curious -- what do you scroll down for? The links? Arun 1 Sep 2006 11:55 am: I scrowl down for the links, yes. Actually, I don't check all of them out when I first see your updates. Usually, return 2-3 times a day, when I am more in the mood to read. I sometimes tend to return to your old posts 4-5 days later. Also, I was a bit confused about the separation between the links and your writings. I didn't realize that till you explained in your previous comment. Actually, I see your updates on google reader, but for whatever reason, I check your page too. Don't know why I do that! :-) sathish 21 Sep 2006 3:59 am: very nice anand. Thank you. Vidya 6 Oct 2006 5:42 am: how can i get sri? Vidya 6 Oct 2006 5:45 am: got it.. Dont bother to reply RMurali 20 Nov 2006 7:06 pm: Dear Anand, I got to know your site while searching London on youtube videos. you are doing a good job. keep it up ! Victor 17 Jan 2007 10:21 pm: try aeiou as a word. remains as aeiou. Seems to be a method to the madness since these are all vowels venkatachalam 18 Jan 2007 4:46 pm: thsi is very nice.can you please tell me which free software help me to do this transliteration.pl mail to bvchalam1946@gmail.com Siva Prasadh 12 Apr 2007 3:28 pm: Its very useful i like it very much senthil 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: its good buddy.. very easy... sridhar 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Superappu.....! sriram 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: how do you write the character 'akk'? (Aaytha ezhuthu), as in 'fa' inn faathima? meenakshi 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: great tool!! checked it and worked very well, only issue i had was i could not figure out how to get the nya working, as in kavinyar. Kavitha 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Ur site is simply excellent. Very very useful for Tamilians....Tamil Patru Ullavanga across the world. ராஜ் தொழில்நுட்பம்.com 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: வணக்கம் ஐயா,\ தமிழ் எண்கள் க, உ ஆகியவை செயல்படுத்தச்செய்தால் மிக நன்று. இருந்தாலும் மிக அருமை.\ இங்ஙனம், ராஜ்\ thozhilnutpam.com; geocities.com/tamildictionary RAAJARAM K 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: மிக அருமை. இண்டெர்னெட் ல் இல்லாத போது உபயோகிப்பது எவ்வாறு என்று தெரிவித்தால் நன்றாக இருக்கும்.

Making a Tamil transliterator


I investigated why a fan manufacturer's fixed wholesale pricing failed and discovered a secondary market in Lohar Chawl. Wholesalers used inventory bartering, territory poaching, and smuggling to bypass restrictions, showing how difficult it is to control free markets.

Over my last few years as a consultant, I've seen many interesting ways in which markets have emerged where they shouldn't have, creating havoc in pricing and scarcity. Fixed prices fluctuate, free goods acquire a value, and non-tradeable goods are traded. I'll share a few of these examples over the next few weeks. Once, a fan manufacturer asked us, We did an analysis and found that our wholesalers' margins fluctuate. How could that happen, when we are fixing their buying and selling prices? The manufacturer sells several popular fans. Their highest selling fan (call it HS), for instance, was sold to wholesalers at Rs 1,089, who would then sell it to retailers at Rs 1,100. No question of margin fluctuation. I took a trip to Lohar Chawl, the wholesale fan market, to get to the bottom of this. After a few conversations in dingy warehourses, here's what I discovered. Fans are bartered. Wholesalers keep as little cash and inventory on hand. Often, a retailer would order a fan (say X) not in stock. The wholesaler doesn't want to lose the deal, and doesn't have cash, but he would have some inventory of HS, since it's such a high-selling fan. He goes to another wholesaler, and says, "Give me some fan X, and I'll give you some HS fans instead. You'll be able to sell these HS fans fairly quickly anyway." "Why should I? Tell me your customers name and I'll sell it to him myself, and make the profit." "Tell you what. I'll give you my HS fans for Rs 1,079 instead of Rs 1,089. You'll get a higher margin when you sell it." This is a routine matter in Lohar Chawl. If you don't have a fan, barter it for another (often HS) at a discounted price. So the wholesaler's margin would depend on how many fans they bought at a bartered price! Poaching was another reason for the margin fluctuation. The manufacturer demarcated territories for each wholesaler, saying "You can sell the these 20 retailers, you can sell to those 18, and so on." Ambitious wholesalers, or those with inventory to dump, would do a side deal with a retailer. Look, your wholesaler charges Rs 1,100 for this fan. I'll sell you this lot for Rs 1,095. And let's keep it quiet." Yet another reason for margin fluctuation was smuggling. Sometimes, the wholesalers would be able to smuggle fans into Mumbai without paying octroi. And sometimes they wouldn't. The biggest lesson for me from this was, It's bloody tough to restrict a free market. I'll tell you more about this shortly. Comments ritzkini 6 Jan 2006 6:25 am: :) Bloody tough indeed ! lemme guess,these were all gujjus !rite ?? ingenuous, i tell you,these guys.. Arun 6 Jan 2006 8:27 am: Neat! Thanks for those Excel tips. And look forward to more of these! Madhu 6 Jan 2006 12:10 pm: I have noticed instances where a TN Auto Distributor comes and sells his stuff to a Karnataka retailer! How did you solve this problem? in my case, which was personal advice to a friend, we wrote to the company with some of the fake bills etc and asked for a higher discount for my friend who is a karnataka distributor, things like CST also start to matter in inter-state things. now the problem has come down bcos of VAT S Anand 6 Jan 2006 4:50 pm: I did this work as part of a proposal. We finally didn't get the project. But I suspect (and will try and show over the next few posts) that this is a problem that's probably not worth fighting. The market will eventually win! Madhu 7 Jan 2006 11:53 am: Ideally a very good supply chain management system will help solve this problem atleast. For eg: If i can order and get it immediately instead of having to bargain. Another issue is how was fan X priced? If its lower than 1089, it will also solve the problem S Anand 7 Jan 2006 7:15 pm: The problem wasn't supply chain lead-time, but shortage of cash for inventory among wholesalers. Whenever they were short of stock in one fan, they'd sell some other fan they had as inventory to get the fan they were short of. They can't order it from the manufacturer, remember: they're short of cash. They NEED to barter. joe 7 Jan 2006 11:39 pm: the fan company had no clue why the margins were fluctuating ? scary thought. how could they not know about this. I presume it is top management that did not know this Madhu 8 Jan 2006 3:53 am: Ok. A SCM which can even take in account demand considerations is ideal. But how can the HS and X be priced the same to the retailers? Isnt that failure of the market? Shouldnt a HS fan be priced different(higher?) than some random fan X? S Anand 8 Jan 2006 10:52 am: Madhu, you're right. The fans ARE priced differently. So it won't be a one-to-one barter. If Fan X is priced at 1000, the wholesaler will give agree to sell 10 HS fans at Rs 1079, give 10 HS fans PLUS 790 Rs, and get 10 Fan X in return. S Anand 8 Jan 2006 10:54 am: Joe, even the line mgmt didn't know about this bartering! One of my colleagues discovered it. This guy's a god of black money market operations, incidentally :-) shyam 9 Jan 2006 10:07 am: This is something similar to the SJP Road market in Bangalore where u can buy computer parts at " SJP Road price ". the shopkeepers will undercut even the wholesaler price and sell it for " cash "

Market emergence - fan bartering


Explore how Reliance Infocomm’s bulk-prepaid bundle backfired. By giving customers three years of talk-time upfront, they accidentally enabled a secondary market where dealers bought back and resold vouchers, cannibalizing Reliance’s own direct sales channels.

Reliance Infocomm, after launching their prepaid business in India, introduced an new scheme. Pay Rs 4,300, and get a mobile phone PLUS prepaid vouchers worth Rs 4,300. Effectively, you're getting a mobile phone for free. The scheme made good financial sense for Reliance. With a million subscribers to this scheme, they could recover Rs 430 cr of their upfront capital investment and retire their debt. Besides, the Rs 4,300 would have normally been bought over a period of around three years by prepaid subscribers, making its present value around Rs 3,600, at an interest rate of 12%. Add to that the reduction in distribution cost due to bulk selling, and possibility of non-usage, etc... the economics might work out. But after the scheme was launched, Reliance was puzzled. Why did the sale of their normal prepaid cards dip? Any new prepaid customers would obviously go in for the new scheme. But old prepaid customers would still need prepaid cards, and should have bought them from the dealers. The dealers should have come back to Reliance to stock up their prepaid cards. Why didn't they? What happened was, they hadn't anticipated was the ingenious market. Many new customers didn't need the full Rs 4,300 worth of talk-time. Spotting this need, dealers would repurchase these prepaid vouchers at a discount. Dealer: "Look, if you don't need the entire Rs 4,300 worth of vouchers, I'll buy some of them back." Customer: "I just need Rs 1,000 of talk time. Can I return Rs 3,300 worth of vouchers and take Rs 3,300 from you?" Dealer: "I'll take Rs 3,300 worth of vouchers, but I'll pay you only Rs 3,000." Customer: "Well, I'm effectively paying Rs 1,300 for a mobile phone plus Rs 1,000 worth of talk time. Sounds good!" The dealer now has Rs 3,300 worth of vouchers. So he doesn't go back to Reliance to restock. When regular prepaid customers come in for prepaid vouchers, he'd offer some from the repurchased stock. The customer benefits (lower cash payment), the dealer benefits (higher margins), and it's only Reliance left wondering why the sales dropped. Comments Anonymous 8 Jan 2006 3:40 pm: amazing case studies..keep it coming! & thank you!! Madhu 9 Jan 2006 6:02 am: neat case study. How did they solve it? Funny, because people always thing Reliance would fool the customer in most cases, nice to see a vice versa ritzkini 9 Jan 2006 9:41 am: =)) good one !! the ingeneous indian,so streetsmart ! ritzkini 9 Jan 2006 10:31 am: kar lee duniya mutthi mein... harish 10 Jan 2006 2:31 am: odd they wanted to give away 3 years supply of exchangeable vouchers for prepaid customers. they should have thought this would happen S Anand 10 Jan 2006 12:20 pm: The vouchers aren't exchangeable, actually. The dealer is doing this behind Reliance's back. harish 11 Jan 2006 3:43 am: ince there is nothing that prevents the dealer from doing so :) you can have automatic topup into the phone on customer sending a msg. hehe of all companies reliance should know where to look for loopholes harish 11 Jan 2006 3:50 am: hey anand- as i scroll down this page,from the post dated 21 dec, the last few posts have some parts missing from the screen. wonder if its just my browser S Anand 11 Jan 2006 10:11 am: I'm having the same issue! Will look into it. Shreyas 20 Jan 2006 3:09 pm: Wonderful case study! I guess the 4300 figure was a bit too high! May be a revision to arrive at the optimal point could have helped! But did Reliance actually lose out financially? Or did only their sales dip? S Anand 20 Jan 2006 6:28 pm: Not sure if they lost out overall on this project, but the sales of their prepaid cards DID dip. saurabh 2 Apr 2007 7:16 am: I didn't understand the admin feasibility of dealer's buying back some of the purchase time out of 4300. Normally the 4300 talk time would be assigned to that number the customer is purchasing. So how could the dealer split that talktime and resell. Anyway that is why Mintzberg says executives have to understand psychology. S Anand 2 Apr 2007 9:18 am: The talk time was in the form of unregistered talk-time coupons. They were the same that were bought on the open market. Probably an oversight by Reliance in the hurry to get the product out in the market.

Market emergence - prepaid phones


Marriages in Britain are lasting longer because couples are marrying later and are more likely to be religious. Meanwhile, total marriage rates are falling as cohabitation becomes a more common alternative to formal unions.

Marriages in Britain are lasting longer. But part of the reason is that there are fewer marriages. More people just live together. The ones that do marry are older (30 years, as against 26 years a decade ago) and probably more religious.

Marriages in Britain are lasting longer


I explore how mathematics is revolutionizing the global economy as businesses increasingly rely on algorithms and data science to drive decision-making and innovation across diverse sectors.

It's a good time to be a mathematician.

Math will rock your world


I found a humorous take on mathematical expansion where a student interprets the instruction to 'expand' an algebraic expression by literally writing the terms further apart on the page instead of performing the binomial expansion.

Mathematical expansion via Vulturo

Mathematical expansion


I found this browser-based Flash business simulation that lets you manage McDonald's like a SimCity game. It covers the full supply chain and restaurant management without requiring any downloads.

McDonald's video game is a full-fledged business simulation game (like SimCity) based on McDonald's. It's written entirely in Flash. You don't need to download it -- just play the game on your browser. Comments emily burns 28 Feb 2007 8:33 pm: i think that this game is awesome.. i love it soo much love emily burns

McDonalds Video Game


Read about how meditation improves cognitive function and mental clarity. This feature from Time magazine explores research suggesting that regular mindfulness practice can actually make you smarter by physically changing the brain's structure.

How to get smarter, one breath at a time. Time magazine on the benefits of meditation.

Meditation helps


I'm checking out Meet the Author, a collection of short videos on Google Video where authors like Richard Dawkins and James Surowiecki introduce their books. It covers a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles.

Meet the Author releases short videos of authors introducing their books on Google Video. It covers fiction and non-fiction, like James Surowiecki on The Wisdom of Crowds, Richard Dawkins on The Selfish Gene, Jeffrey Archer on False Impression and Frederick Forsyth on The Avenger.

Meet the Author


Correct common scientific misconceptions found in textbooks, such as the fact that the ocean and sky are blue because water and air are inherently blue, and that clouds stay aloft due to internal warmth.

Misconceptions spread by textbooks. This site lists the facts, contrary to what most textbooks say about them. Facts: 1. The ocean is blue because water is a blue substance. Not because it reflects the blue sky. 2. The sky is blue because air is blue. 3. Clouds actually remain aloft because they are warm inside.

Misconceptions spread by textbooks


I’ve checked out the launch of Google Co-op, which enables deep content search and sharing, and Google Trends, a tool for analyzing search volume patterns over time, much like a customizable Google Zeitgeist.

Google launches Google Co-op, which lets you search deep content (and share deep content), and Google Trends, which is like Google Zeitgeist for your searches.

More Google services


I shared a couple of photos taken from my office window in Canary Wharf, London, during late 2006. The images capture the dense, busy urban landscape of the financial district from a high-rise perspective.

2006-11-29 08 Canary Wharf 2006-11-29 11 Canary Wharf Comments Chitra 14 Dec 2006 2:51 am: Hmmm...very busy view.... Anamika 12 Feb 2012 10:35 am: Oru yenthiratha pola ada ingey ulla vaalkai Ithu yengey poi solla, manam ishtapada villai Nam oora pola ooru illai...!

More views from my office


I shared a dataset of the top 1000 most popular IMDb movies, including ratings and vote counts. I marked which ones I've watched to help analyze popular but lousy films, available via an embedded spreadsheet and Excel download.

Here are the top 1000 most popular movies on the Internet Movie database, along with their ratings and number of votes. I've also marked whether I've seen them or not, as of today. This list, incidentally, is part of my source for the post on popular lousy movies . Here is the Excel list of Top 1000 movies on IMDb . Comments Arch 1 Dec 2006 10:14 am: Your site is too good.I browse thru so many blogs every other day, but hav found nothing as entertaining and as informative as this one. U must be really gifted fella...Y dont u post some pics of ur kid ... err 1 Dec 2006 10:04 pm: is to do. S Anand 1 Dec 2006 10:35 pm: Thanks, Arch. I haven't gotten around to posting any family stuff. No specific reason. Maybe I will... Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:36 pm: You have been writing movies, do you have top 10 books? DeuceLee 11 Dec 2009 2:37 am: Hi, I really love your imdb top 1000. Seriously it's great info. Can you get an updated version from imdb and swivel? Looks like it's been a while (2006). :-) Andreas Beer 20 Oct 2010 4:38 pm: Dude, you seriously should watch Yojimbo! Masterpiece! :D

Most popular movies on IMDb


I built an interactive jigsaw puzzle using jumbled movie stills. You can drag and move the blocks to reconstruct the scene and identify the film. It’s a simple web-based quiz format for movie buffs to test their recognition.

These are stills from a recent movie. I've jumbled them up. You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw . Comments Dhar 24 May 2006 3:06 pm: Got the name of the movie. But to really crack the jigsaw is difficult because the image keeps changing... Dhar 24 May 2006 3:17 pm: Damn, is there one small block missing? Dhar 24 May 2006 3:22 pm: Got it finally!! S Anand 24 May 2006 5:21 pm: How many blocks did you have to move before you guessed the movie? Arun 25 May 2006 6:31 am: Wow, totally totally awesome. Took a while, but cracked it. Knowing the movie sure helped though! sangi 31 May 2006 12:18 pm: did not move any blocks. cracked it immediately. Cool stuff. Swapnaa 12 Oct 2006 10:11 pm: Did you blur Neo's mouth to make the puzzle harder? Or is something else going on?

Movie jigsaw quiz 1


I built an interactive movie quiz using jumbled jigsaw blocks. You can rearrange the pieces to reveal scenes from a film and guess its title, while the images loop through multiple frames from that specific movie.

I've jumbled up some stills from movies. You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw . Can you guess the movie? Comments Ravi Karthik 25 May 2006 8:18 am: Pirates of the Caribbean - Your ex-VM classmate from Chennai S Anand 25 May 2006 7:34 pm: Hi Ravi, where are you these days? Anonymous 26 May 2006 9:47 am: the images keep loading and changing even when they've fully loaded. I think its a bug. Can you fix it? Otherwise the puzzle is brilliant! S Anand 26 May 2006 12:08 pm: Thanks! This may not be a bug, though. each jigsaw has 3 images from the same movie. Even after loading fully, the jigsaw will loop through images.

Movie jigsaw quiz 2


I created an interactive jigsaw quiz featuring stills from Tamil movies. You can rearrange the jumbled blocks to reveal the images and guess the titles. See if you can solve the notoriously difficult third puzzle.

These are stills from Tamil movies. Each link points to a different movie. I have jumbled the images. You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw . Can you guess the movie? Comments Guru 31 May 2006 3:42 am: Cool Stuff! sangi 31 May 2006 12:20 pm: this took me quite some time to crack. Had fun though. saranya 20 Sep 2006 9:13 am: ya sangi i solved only one out of 5 hahaha but was nice kan 13 Oct 2006 8:46 am: 3rd was the harder but found.... sabari 26 Dec 2006 10:23 am: this is really nice senthil 26 May 2006 12:00 pm: wats da 3rd movie.. its very hard.. i found da rest madhu 26 May 2006 12:00 pm: all are easy GMK 26 May 2006 12:00 pm: Got all ash 25 Oct 2008 12:41 am: cool!!!!!!!!!!1 rami 4 Nov 2010 8:32 am: coolll!!!! interesting found all.. nirmala 18 Dec 2010 10:36 am: couldnt find d third one help pls sneha 25 Mar 2012 6:50 pm: yippie!!! got all 5 correct. grt quiz anand :) priya 29 Sep 2011 4:48 pm: 3rd is very hard. :( .. clues pls. Ranjani 7 Aug 2011 2:11 pm: 3/5

Movie jigsaw quiz 3 - Tamil


I jumbled three stills from a classic film into interactive jigsaw puzzles for you to solve. Move the blocks to reveal the images and see if you can identify the movie and its actors.

I've jumbled up 3 stills from an old movie . You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw. Can you guess the actors and the movie?

Movie jigsaw quiz 4


I built an interactive Tamil movie quiz where you solve jigsaw puzzles made from Kamal Haasan film stills. Drag and reorder the jumbled blocks to reveal the image and identify each of the five movies.

These are stills from Kamal's movies. Each link points to a different movie. I have jumbled the images. You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw . Can you guess the movie? Comments Sathya 15 Sep 2006 8:03 am: its not changing colour ;-( S Anand 15 Sep 2006 8:22 am: Well, Sathya, then the answer must be wrong ;-) Nah, unlikely. There must be a spelling variation I had not anticipated. Why don't you mail me the answer, and I'll fix it. Thanks! Sathya 15 Sep 2006 9:28 am: movie 5 has a zigsaw tht does not belong to the movie. S Anand 15 Sep 2006 11:18 am: You're right. Sorry! Fixed it now. Anonymous 15 Sep 2006 4:42 pm: hey tht was nice and very easy.i was able to find out the answers even b4 moving the pics.enjoyable though Ashwin 16 Sep 2006 1:21 pm: Vettayadu Vilayadu is an excellent movie and its doing well in theatres also. Sillunu oru kadhal is not that much good.. Emtan magan is also worth watching, mostly the comedy is good. That's all about current movie status in Tamil nadu. Ashwin 16 Sep 2006 1:25 pm: I dont't know much about the old movies, any how i enjoyed playing with the Puzzle. Anand, i will call u later... saranya 20 Sep 2006 9:23 am: anand puzzle three is excellent i got in 5 mins itself its so interesting to play this saranya 20 Sep 2006 2:14 pm: i have solved the 4th puzzle Ram 13 Oct 2006 2:09 am: Can u please tell me the name of the first movie Ram 13 Oct 2006 2:10 am: I have solved 2, 3,4 and 5 but i dont know first...can any one tell me the name of the first movie.I had seen that movie but i cant remember the name of the movie..please help damind 28 Oct 2006 6:33 am: i got four, but i am not satisfied cause i know the answer for the fifth one and its not accepting the right answer ashwini 3 Nov 2006 10:06 am: Second one is varumaiyin niram sivappu only. 4th one not clear at all. subadra 5 Mar 2007 3:18 pm: we solved this too,Anand.we r enjoying it ravi 8 Mar 2007 9:36 am: very good 5one ????????????????? senthil 14 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: i got all 5 answers.. yipeee :-) dhan hak sak 17 Jun 2009 3:16 pm: ha ha ha.... Innum difficult level edhavadhu iruka Renuka 8 Jul 2009 10:40 am: I can see that I'm taking this quiz three years after it was posted - came to know of this website very recently. Awesome! This must be one of the easiest quizzes :-) Or probably the only one! 5/5. Ramki 24 Sep 2009 10:39 pm: Hi Anand, I think I got all 5 right. However, second one which I think is Varumayin Niram Sivappu is not getting highlighted. Am I wrong? TRG 8 Apr 2011 2:15 pm: well set 5/5 retna 2 Feb 2011 2:00 am: finaly i got all answer correct, but the answer for no.2 i think is correct but i don't know y its not highlighted. can anyone hepl. tq

Movie jigsaw quiz 5 - Tamil


I built an interactive movie quote quiz where you guess titles from IMDb. I used JavaScript’s onKeyUp event to validate entries against encrypted answers, instantly updating the score and background colors for correct guesses.

These are movie quotes. How many titles can you guess? (Use IMDb titles.) Comments Dhar 21 Jan 2006 1:55 am: Hmmm, I got 30 / 40. Nice one! ritzkini 21 Jan 2006 6:02 am: good one ! jake 21 Jan 2006 11:02 am: hey good quiz, i got 31: "seen me everyday for 16 years" should read "seen me everyday for 13 years". S Anand 21 Jan 2006 11:02 am: Correction: "seen me everyday for 16 years" should read "seen me everyday for 13 years". Another corrigendum 21 Jan 2006 12:55 pm: there's a 'the' mismatch in one of the answers S Anand 21 Jan 2006 1:14 pm: Oh, which quote? joe 21 Jan 2006 8:59 pm: why does the all time hits change? i remember seeing bill gates at 200 now it is done to 198. S Anand 21 Jan 2006 10:52 pm: I removed some duplicate entries last week (i.e. people accidentally clicking twice). Parshu 2 Feb 2006 6:37 am: how did you create this thng, when i type a name if right it becomes green and score gets updated. Kindly help me out with this technique. So i can too develop something on similar lines S Anand 2 Feb 2006 5:33 pm: The logic for turning stuff green is the onKeyUp function in those boxes. If what's typed matches the encrypted answer, I turn the style.background attribute to green, and increment the quizCount element (which is just a span element) by 1. Hope it doesn't sound Greek... just see the source. Ravi 3 Oct 2006 6:40 am: Good one anand. I got 34. I think i got the other 6 also but somehow not getting the names in the right format. These movies are sequels & have long names with colon etc. jb 2 Nov 2006 1:55 pm: nice Natasha & co 19 Nov 2006 6:36 am: my entire family working on this quiz for about 45 mins got 30/40! wooooo!!!! Kirsten 21 Nov 2006 11:34 am: Me n me family worked on this for lyk 30mins n we got 35/40 nice quiz...enjoyed it!!! cheers!! Kirsten & co 21 Nov 2006 11:35 am: woo! tibi 4 Jan 2007 1:41 am: i need the answers to 'How do you solve a problem like Maria?', 'Everyone's innocent in here, don't you know that?' and 'How can you do that, look at me like you haven't seen me everyday for 16 years.' please, if you could help me... i like men 23 Jan 2007 7:22 pm: uh 40 out of 40 thats a pisser journalism7thperiod 23 Jan 2007 7:23 pm: notting hill? what kind of homo movie is that? if you ever quote that in real life kill yourself now!!! Anonymous 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: cool quiz Saibal 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: I got 36/40.. Dan 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: I got 40/40 ! how sad am I ! lol, but cool quiz ! look forward to the next one :-D chunk 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: some of these dont work when the title is right. huge nerd 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: good quiz i got 40 of 40 only after about 20 entires on the final question, not in imdb form. star wars: episode I - the phantom menace. otherwise awesome. Matthew 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: I got 40/40! Just shows how gib a movie buff i am. liz 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: i totally blanked out on some Batfred 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: Nice one, some real tough ones for once too. I had to google the rest after 34/40 as the frustration was strating to annoy me. Trevor Spence 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: Not good having double films! could the person that made this not think of 40 quotes from 40 different films! rhys 20 Jan 2006 12:00 pm: what is the answer to\ "there can only be one"\ is it the jet li movie "the one" Sam 19 Sep 2008 3:16 pm: Nice one know some of the other answers but cant place them george 5 Feb 2009 11:49 pm: what if there really is no spoon Larry Buesy 13 Feb 2009 7:17 pm: didn't know much Jodie 16 Feb 2009 3:03 am: Man that was hard!!! Conner Darcy Rankin 25 Mar 2009 4:40 am: whats the answer to ... How do you solve a problem like Maria?... really sweet quiz apart from this one question!!!!!! Jq 30 Sep 2010 8:21 pm: Some very neat ones ! Inflatable Bed 3 Dec 2010 1:35 am: the most memorable movie quote that i could think of is the one on Forest Gump ': KingViz 23 Dec 2011 11:27 am: Question 9 - the title absolutely does not start with "The..." Colette Cullen 10 Aug 2011 11:41 am: Great quiz (23/40)but where are the answers?

Movie quote quiz


I conducted a blind listening test comparing CD audio to 64kbps MP3s using headphones. Since even a good ear couldn't distinguish between them, I recommend re-encoding your music at lower bitrates to maximize storage space on portable players.

At what bitrate should you encode your MP3 files? Listening tests show that at 256kbps, you can't tell the difference. But that's with 2 amplifiers and big speakers. What about headphones? I tried an experiment with my cousin, who has the best ear for music that I know. We ripped a good audio CD of his at 128 kbps. He put on a pair of headphones (the kind that fit into your ear) connected to my laptop. I played the first half a minute of the original and the ripped version 10 times, in a random order, asking him to guess which was which. Result: 5 correct and 5 wrong. He couldn't tell the difference. We tried again, ripping at 64kbps this time. Same experiment, and surprisingly, same result -- 5 correct and 5 wrong. Conclusion: With a pair of headphones, even a good ear can't tell the difference between a 64kbps MP3 and an original CD. So, if you want to cram in more songs into your iPod, just re-encode them at 64kbps. You'll easily shrink the size in half, as most of them are at least 128kbps. Comments Madhu 13 Feb 2006 5:05 am: How good were the headphones? Also i think the sample size is a little small:0 S Anand 13 Feb 2006 7:54 am: The headphones were cheap ones I bought in Bombay. Besides, this isn't a sampling thing... if he can't tell the difference, I'm pretty sure no one I know can. I certainly can't! What I should've done, though, is cut the same encodings back to a CD and played it on his system. THEN we'd have really know. Venkat 14 Feb 2006 5:42 pm: U'll find out if played in the system. But, the purpose here is to compress in a mp3 player, which anywhich way we are using with headfones right? sLaSh 16 Feb 2006 9:41 am: A Short History of Nearly Everything.... is that really a "English Fiction"????? S Anand 16 Feb 2006 10:04 pm: Sorry -- corrected that. Dhar 11 Mar 2006 12:09 am: Err, was this a variable bit rate encoding or a constant bit rate encoding that you and your cousin experimented with? S Anand 24 Mar 2006 3:42 pm: Constant bit rate. I don't know how to encode VBR. Milind 9 Apr 2006 12:27 pm: 1] What headphones you used? [2] What music you listened to? [3] What Soundcard was there? [4] Finally Wat is your cousin's qualifications as far as music engineering is concerned? Please don't feel bad, but almost any person when explained the difference, after that can tell the difference. Still you are correct somewhat in saying this. Caught off guard they almost sound same. Vaduvur Kumar 26 Feb 2007 12:38 am: Ya,its correct. I too tried on this some time. I do not care much on this as I have a good size of harddisk. Skip Kite 25 Mar 2009 2:48 pm: This is probably a dead topic but here goes: The whole purpose of mp3's is so you can take them with you on small players... not so you can reburn cd's out of them to playback on your 1000 $$$ home stereo system. I'm a bit tired of reading post after post from snooty Audiophiler's who say "Excuse me but there is a difference in quality" when I think that most of these AP's are not listening to Baroque, Classical or even something from the late Renaissance...(where sound quality really matters) but are probably listening to Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Lil Wayne, or any number of punk bands out today... I listen to everything between Renaissance music to Late 90's and haven't noticed a big deal of difference... so what's the point of having mp3's if you are going to encode every piece of music at 160 or higher. Shouldn't we try and find the right settings that balance quality and size. I also did various tests with different bit rates and didn't notice much depreciable difference so now I just encode everything at 80kbps so that I save on space and it is still pretty good to ok quality. good post S anand M 20 Sep 2009 10:03 pm: My friend swears that on his headphones (while they are excellent quality, they can't be better than a good stereo system), even 256 mbps is not even a high enough bitrate. I've never believed him. This further reassures me.

MP3 bitrates and sound quality


I’ve applied multicriteria decision making to industry growth and vendor selection using spidergraphs. While it seems systematic to list and weight criteria, I’ve realized this common methodology is actually fundamentally flawed for complex choices.

Decisions are usually based on multiple criteria. You have to trade off between criteria. I've been involved many such decisions over the last 5 years. Example 1: A conglomerate wanted to identify industries for growth. We shortlisted 19 industries, identified 12 criteria for the attractiveness of an industry, researched each one and plotted them on spidergraphs like below. Spidergraph for Industry 1 Spidergraph for Industry 2 The intention was that, to identify the most favourable industries, you'd just pick the ones with the largest filled area. Example 2: Another time, we had to decide among BPO vendors. Again, we picked a bunch of criteria and compared vendors against these criteria. Spidergraph for BPO Vendor 1 Spidergraph for BPO Vendor 2 Example 3: Once, we had to identify stakeholders' position on a project. Change readiness profile for Dave Change readiness profile for Uli Those who were big on the right of the graph were for, and those who were big on the left were against. In all the above cases, the same process was used for decision making. 1. List criteria exhaustively 2. Evaluate options against each criteria 3. Assign weights to criteria (equal weights implicitly assigned above) 4. Compare options Having applied this methodology it several times, I am convinced this process is fundamentally flawed. See how in this post: Errors in multicriteria decision making. Comments Sandeep 8 Oct 2006 4:06 pm: I am curious to know what the flaw is. To me it seems a pretty well-set method to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of any case, very visually and clearly. Gregory L. Chester 21 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: RE: THE WORD "SPIDERGRAPH" The above word has a Registered Trademark # 2,688,910, dated Feb. 18, 2003, as received from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Principal Registrant: Gregory L. Chester, President of GLC New Product Consultants, Previously located at 1349 Sharon Green Drive, Columbus, OH 43229-9013. Presently located at 1422 Pathfinder Road, Henderson, NV 89014-3011. This Trademark is for: Printed Material, namely, Printed Graphs and Charts for use in the comparison and analysis of alternative choices in Decision-Making Applications, in Class 16 (U.S. CLS. 2, 5, 22, 23,29,37,38, and 50). First Use: 1-17-1985; in Commerce 3-17-1986. SN 75-665,749, Filed 3-17-1999. Erica Glembocki, Examining Attorney QUESTION: Has your Company ever considered a Royalty Fee for your use of the above word or Ceasing the use thereof? Sincerely yours, Gregory L. Chester, President GLC New Product Consultants 1422 Pathfinder Road Henderson (Las Vegas), Nevada 89014-3011

Multicriteria decision making


I'm sharing this music video for Beck's cover of "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime," which is filmed entirely in reverse. It's a striking example of using backwards cinematography to create a surreal and melancholic atmosphere.

This entire music video (set to the song "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" by Beck) has been filmed backwards. Comments Jeremy Lutter 11 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: Hey Cool backwards music video! I filmed video backwards as well.. mine is a little dark and a little violent. http://www.memelabs.com/indiemv/index.php?play=475 I need your help I''m a bit behind on votes. can you help out a fellow backwards filmmaker? Jeremy www.brokenmirrorfilms.com

Music video filmed backwards


I used a spreadsheet to select the Fuji Finepix S5600 based on low-light performance and RAW support. I found that megapixels matter less than shutter control, though handling Fuji's proprietary RAF files required using a DNG converter.

My digital camera conked off. The cover that holds the battery fell off, and I can't use it any more. I went back to my buying principles, and prepared an Excel sheet to choose my next camera. Here's what I was looking for: Low-light photography. Flashes are lousy. This effectively means I need ISO control. Shutter speed control. I sometimes take really long exposure (3-10s) snaps, and sometimes can't afford the blur (1/250s). Long battery life. My current camera consumed batteries like crazy. Fast start-up. By the time I got my earlier camera out and it started, it was too late. RAW mode. Gives me more control in Photoshop. I didn't care about: megapixels. 2 megapixels (1600x1200) is more than enough, even for my printouts. Takes too much space besides. zoom. I need wide-angle more than zoom, really. removeable lens. I'm not going to carry around multiple lenses. After scouting around on Amazon for many months, I found the Fuji Finepix S5600. Not an SLR, but had all the features that I wanted, and at a pretty reasonable price. Fuji Finepix S5600 Here's a shot I took from my drawing room. This is a 3-second exposure on ISO 100 at F 3.2. The streaks on the road are car headlights. 2006-11-28 01 Newbury Park As a bonus, it had a pretty good (10X) zoom too. See the brightly lit buildings towards the top-left? That's Canary Wharf. Below is a blow-up of those buildings from the same spot I took the above photo from. 2006-11-29 01 Canary Wharf Comments Anand Srinivasan 29 Nov 2006 11:06 pm: I recently bought a camera too in the DSLR category without as much analysis as you have done. That is attributable to my reliance on informed reviews at sites such as CNET and DP Review. I did pay for features that i don't care about or do not know how to use or what they mean. With a view to learning photography i bought it. i have been using a digital camera for five years mostly using the preset modes which have served me well. I want to be able to take pictures in a natural setting. One setting in which i repeatedly fail is low light. The blur gets the better of me. I don't want a tripod. How do you manage to be steady for about 10 seconds ? I am curious whether you have a preference for a brand. Having used a Fuji earlier did you have a bias ? I like Canon and Sony not because i can articulate their strengths over those of other brands. Any suggestions on where i could get material on digital photography for basic concepts like metering,ISO speed,aperture and so on ? S Anand 30 Nov 2006 12:22 pm: Anand, I'd suggest Wikipedia. They have pretty good articles on each of these. The articles tend to get a bit technical after a while, but I think it's worth going in to that depth -- especially if you have a DSLR! S Anand 30 Nov 2006 12:23 pm: PS: I did have a Fuji earlier, but I don't have a bias there. If anything, I'd prefer a Canon -- their lenses are supposed to be good. I keep picking Fuji simply because it's the cheapest that meets all my criteria. Dhar 30 Nov 2006 12:25 pm: I too have a FinePix S5600 and am very happy with it.\ \ Anand, you are gonna have a small problem if you try using RAF files (RAW mode files from FinePix) in Photoshop. Fuji's format is proprietary and not supported by Photoshop. Instead try Adobe Lightroom or S7Raw. Both applications support RAF format.\ \ To answer Srinivasan's question, it is impossible to hold the camera steady for a shutter speed more than 1/15th of a second. Ideally use a tripod or place it on some table with timer mechanism. Another thing you can do is increase the ISO (but that comes with a noise overhead)\ \ To deal with noise, try Neat Image or Noise Ninja. Dhar 30 Nov 2006 12:28 pm: NeatImage in Action:\ Noisy Image Neat Image S Anand 30 Nov 2006 7:09 pm: Thanks for the Neat Image tip! Regarding RAF, I managed to download the Adobe DNG converter which converts RAF to DNG that Photoshop reads. Worked OK, so I heaved a sigh of relief! Swapnaa 30 Nov 2006 9:09 pm: Dhar - The noisy/neat images were awesome. I always thought one could never get "lost" data from blur, but maybe the data wasn't lost afterall! Bal - Did your camera come with a power charger? Thats pretty much the best way to battle short battery lives. Nice pictures, BTW! :) S Anand 30 Nov 2006 9:39 pm: No power charger I'm afraid :-( But rechargeable batteries are next on my purchase list. Dhar 1 Dec 2006 1:59 am: Oh, cool. Did not know about the DNG converter. Will check that out. Anand, if you have a decently powerful machine at home, do check out Adobe's Lightroom. It is currently in Beta and available as a free download. Excellent workflow application for dealing with Raw images. Dhar 1 Dec 2006 2:00 am: Swapnaa / Anand, I have been using NiMH rechargeable batteries (Sony with power rating of 2300 mAh and Sanyo with power rating of 2100 mAh) and am pretty happy with them.\ \ If you want to get maximum bang for your battery life, avoid using the LCD screen as it drains power. Further in your Fuji FinePix settings ensure that it remembers last zoom position. Every time you switch it on and use the zoom motor, means you consume addition energy. Dhar 1 Dec 2006 9:14 am: DNG converter is not working for me. It tells me that the images are in a format that it is not supported. Looks like I am doing something wrong. S Anand 1 Dec 2006 11:37 am: I had the same problem initially. I have Photoshop CS, not CS2. I had to download the DNG converter for CS2 (latest version) but use the plugin from version 2.x -- whatever the latest version for CS was. Dhar 5 Dec 2006 8:54 am: Three interesting links and writeups:\ Grey Cards\ Photographic Triangle\ DOF\ Cheers, D. Dhar 5 Dec 2006 9:43 am: Another neat application: http://www.imagenomic.com/pt.aspx Cheers, D. siddharth 29 Nov 2006 12:00 pm: hi, This is siddharth from india i have a finepix S5600 i would like to know what are the goodes u get Anant 11 Sep 2008 11:48 am: I was presented with a S5600 which I think conked off. The Cam is not turning on even with a power adapter & freshly charged NiMH batts. Can you suggest a remedy, please. S Anand 12 Sep 2008 1:16 am: Weirdly, mine conked off a few months ago as well. Looks like the same problem. I've just junked it and bought a Canon. Maybe it's a problem with the model? Lecinza 11 Jan 2009 4:13 pm: I have the same camera.\ http://microcutz.deviantart.com\ \ It serves me just as well as a true professional camera.\ And I only brought it for NZ$400.00. Ricardo Verdi 18 May 2011 12:09 am: I have Fuji s5600 too, bought amazon.co.uk December 2006 for £120 (about). Has been excellent, but occasionally won't switch on. Now more often won't switch on, or switches on & then goes off. I hope there's a simple solution. A professional repair would probably cost more than it's worth.

My Fuji Finepix S5600


Exposure to angry or negative people can actively damage your cognitive health and brain function. Learn why protecting your mental state from emotional contagion is essential for maintaining productivity and overall psychological well-being.

Angry or negative people can be bad for your brain.

Negative people bad for your brain


Netflix is offering a $1 million prize for a recommendation algorithm that beats their current system. You can download 700 MB of movie rating data to train and test your model against their benchmarks.

Netflix has released a sample of its customers' movie ratings at Netflix Prize. You can download these (700 MB), create an algorithm that rates the training data, run it against the test data, and see if you can get better ratings than their algorithm. If you do, you win $1 million. (Chris Anderson explains why.)

Netflix prize


I highlight new features in the Picasa Beta, specifically geotagging, color-based search, and Picasa Web integration. I also discuss the service's privacy limitations compared to Flickr, focusing on how unlisted albums and selective sharing work.

New in Picasa's beta: geotagging (place photos on the map) search by colour (find photos with red and yellow) hide pictures: that's useful, sometimes... upload to Google video and to Picasa Web FTP your photos Comments Anand 15 Jun 2006 11:39 am: I got an invitation from Google to try Picasa Web Albums. How does one selectively share some photos and not all in an album ? I do not want to mail these photos instead would like to make only some public. Could you highlight the major differences between this service and that from Flickr ? S Anand 15 Jun 2006 8:51 pm: You can select photos from your Picasa album to upload -- you don't need to upload all of them. When compared with Flickr, PWA is more for sharing with friends and family than for photo discovery. So no tagging, no groups, no top-10 photos now browsing for other users. Anand 16 Jun 2006 1:52 pm: I know I can selectively upload photos from Picasa to web albums. I may want to recover space on my PC by uploading all the photos from my hard disk to web albums. from that collection of photos online i may want to share only some publicly. I suppose then I have to create a pair of albums online for every album in Picasa so that one album online can have the private pictures and the other can have the public pictures S Anand 17 Jun 2006 10:25 am: Yes - you can't mark individual photos as private. Actually, PicasaWeb doesn't have any such thing as private. Even if you mark an album as unlisted, if a person knows its URL, they can always access it. Anand Srini 17 Jun 2006 4:33 pm: If a user has not chosent to make any album public then knowing the URL does not reveal those pictures. try it out. make all your albums unlisted and see for yourself what you can see using your URL.I have tested it. the only solution to my problem is to move private pictures from one album to another album and make it unlisted S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:54 am: Oh, OK. But looks like privacy problems will continue to plague Picasa Web Albums for a while. Just do a google search for site:picasaweb.google.com

New features in Picasa Beta


I'm highlighting the launch of Google Finance and Google Mars, two new services providing market data and high-resolution planetary imagery. These tools represent Google's early expansion into niche data domains like financial services and astronomy.

New from Google: Google Finance, and Google Mars. Comments Sathya 22 Mar 2006 8:30 am: Welcome Back !

New Google services


I explain why I avoid using registry cleaners, noting that these tools often cause more harm than good. Modern Windows versions rarely benefit from aggressive pruning, and the risk of system instability outweighs any potential performance gains.

Why I don't use a registry cleaner

No registry cleaners


I found a hidden shortcut for 'No to all' in Windows file dialogs. Instead of clicking No repeatedly, simply hold Shift while clicking the No button to skip all remaining file conflicts instantly.

Windows has a "Yes to all" in some of its dialogs -- for example when replacing files. Here's how you can simulate a "No to all". (Just shift-click the "No" button).

No to all in Windows


I found that force-fitting a normal distribution to banking and bond data drastically understates tail risk. By ignoring power-law distributions, I underestimated worst-case scenarios that actually occur much more frequently than the bell curve predicts.

I was working with the treasury of a bank. They were trying to estimate how much money could flow out of their savings account in a day, worst case. I took their total savings account balance at the end of each day and found the standard deviation. I took thrice the standard deviation, and said, "You can be 99.7% sure that your daily loss won't be more than 1.5% of the balance." That would be right if it were a normal distribution. But it's not. Banks have millions of savings accounts, each of which is like a random variable. But unless they're independent, and they have finite standard deviations, the central limit theorem won't work. Firstly, savings account transactions are not independent. If there's a run on the bank, they'd all pull out their money. Whenever a company declares dividend, a large number of savings account are credited. Salary accounts are credited at the end of the month. As a rule of thumb, you could say that if one savings account goes up, the others are likely to as well. Secondly, savings account transactions are not normally distributed. If you take a single savings account, you won't find a bunch of debits and credits. Every month, you'll find one large credit for the salary, one mid-sized debit for monthly expenses, and several small debits for individual transactions (bills, ATM, etc.) Once in several years, you'll find a gigantic debit (purchase of car or house, wedding, etc.) or a gigantic credit (retirement / pension fund, sale of property, etc.) As a result, the savings account is likely to fluctuate a LOT more than if it were a normal distribution. If I had just looked at the data, I'd have found several occurrences of fluctuations greater than 1.5%. The normal distribution predicts that there should be fewer than 0.3% of such cases. That's about 1 per year. I'd have visually been able to spot nearly one a month. I'd also have been able to spot the huge 4% swings that do happen once in a few years. People wiser than me have made the same mistake. I was interning at Lehman Brothers when they were planning to launch a new electronic bond-trading product. My task was to trace the bond price movement. The data we had was bad. Many bonds jumped as much as 40% in a single day, due to data errors. The bulk of my task was to clean out these errors. After cleaning up, there was still two jumps that couldn't be explained. I went to my boss, who recognised them at sight. One was a sudden drop in price of all Government bonds in December 1998. The other was a 32% drop in price of Hikari Tsushin -- a mobile phone retailer -- on the day they went bankrupt. We concluded that the daily price drop wouldn't be more than 9%, to a 95% confidence level. If that was right, a 32% drop in one day would happen once in a million years. Yet, we had Hikari Tsushin just the previous year. We didn't bother about it. In fact, we didn't even think about it. If we'd checked, we'd have found that the daily price drop was closer to 12% or something, to a 95% confidence level. Summary: Force-fit a normal distribution on non-normal data can understate the worst-case scenario. Often you're better off just inferring confidence levels from the raw data than from a fitted distribution. Sourced statistic from: www.forex.academy Comments Sriram 24 Jul 2006 7:53 am: what you are talking about are outliers which would be there in even the most normal of the normal distributions. One always has to take them out. This is not an "un-normal" phenomenon. S Anand 24 Jul 2006 11:20 am: No, I'm not. The normal distribution asserts that the probability distribution falls of exponentially. These transactions are power-law distributed. The distribution falls off as a power law. Specifically, this means that the normal distribution has a finite standard deviation. Power law distributions have an infinite standard deviation. You can check this from the wikipedia articles on power law distributions. RaviM 3 Aug 2006 7:09 am: When I was doing Risk Management for a mutual fund, we were facing the same problems. So we used to take two approaches to calculate VaR for various products- Assuming Normal distribution of stock price changes(the problem here is that you are not sure what is the current Std dev of any Stock... which can change drastically on a single day in case of events. I still remember Mastek which dropped 50% on a single day). We also used to take historical data to figure out what are the past occurances when such events has happened. but here the disadvantage is that we assume that stock price movements are historically dependent, which is also not correct Naresh 21 Sep 2010 8:45 pm: Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers. The world does not run on a normal distribution. If we could predict the future behaviour (even heavily populated datasets) using a normal distribution, the world would be a different place, wouldn't it? The answer to this problem is to use a time weighted average of data with the latest data having the highest weight, or using the exponentially weighted moving average formula developed by Riskmetrics. Use a lambda of .94 for daily observations. You can alternatively use an empirical lambda. Use it to predict earthquakes (?), junior miners, venture investments, come what may. And then you will find that too is inadequate as a risk tool. The Curse of the Bell Curve – Part 2 | Jigsaw Academy | Training for careers in Analytics 16 Jan 2013 8:55 am (pingback): [...] in Checking/Saving account – This is an interesting article written by a friend during his consulting days. He illustrates how we tend to blindly apply the [...]

Normalising non-normal distributions is bad


I realized my movie ratings aren't normally distributed because I selectively watch good films. Forced ranking in companies or schools is inherently flawed because it ignores this sampling bias and unfairly penalizes high performers in selective environments.

I rate movies on a scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (good). This is an absolute scale. Initially, I assumed that I would watch as many good movies as bad ones. So I'd have about as many 1s as 5s, and 2s as 4s. But, when I looked at my ratings for movies over the last year, I had far more 4s than 2s. My movie ratings were not normal . Rating Frequency 1 8 2 31 3 98 4 81 5 18 The reason is clear. I pick good movies rather than bad ones , based on reviews. If I rated every movie there was, the ratings may be normally distributed (or they may not). But when I pick movies, I consciously reject those I know would have a low rating (based on reviews), so my ratings would be more clustered around the top. Even if I redefined my scale, I'd still have more than 50% above the average. This is not a contradiction. I watch a LOT of good movies with very similar ratings, and a few disastrously bad movies. The good movies will have a higher-than-average rating, and there'll be more of them than the bad movies. This is a skewed or asymmetric distribution. So, selective picking can wreck the normal curve . Yet, almost everything is selectively picked . Colleges try and pick the best students. Organisations tend to pick the best employees. If they rate performance, they're likely to find a bias towards the higher side -- at least, the good colleges and organisations. Force fitting a normal distribution pushes down genuinely good people . (In bad colleges and organisations, it pushes up genuinely bad people). Comments Swapnaa Jayaraman 28 Jul 2006 12:07 am: I wonder if your movie rating scale is really absolute. I can imagine 1 being "one of the greatest movies I've ever seen" and 5 being "can't get worse than that", but how about the ones in between? Do you not go "hmm, this one's nice, but not as nice as Mauna Raagam (which got a 2), so I'll give this one a 3.."? S Anand 31 Jul 2006 8:20 pm: This really is an absolute scale. 1 means I stopped watching the movie midway. 2 - I won't watch it again. 3 - I watched it twice, but won't watch it any more (or I plan to watch it only once more). 4 - I can watch it a few times. 5 - I can watch it forever. (4 and 5 are slightly fuzzy, I admit)

Normalising non-random samples is bad


I used to normalize everything from work performance to movie ratings, but I’ve realized that blindly assuming a normal distribution is often incorrect. Many real-life variables, like stock prices, violate the Central Limit Theorem’s requirements.

14 years ago, I was introduced to the process of normalising grades. Professors "fit" students' marks into a normal distribution and assign grades based on that. (I still don't know how they do it). Since then, I've encountered normalising a lot. My performance at work is normalised. I normalise my song ratings and movie ratings. I've normalised all kinds of things at work: lead-time of delivery of fans, movements in savings account balances, calls to a call centre, demand for a resource... you name it. (What I mean by normalising is, I find the mean and standard deviation, and assume that it's a normal distribution with that mean and standard deviation. For things under my control, like movie ratings, I revise the ratings to fit a normal distribution.) In fact, I normalise everything I encounter by default. A few years ago, I started feeling uncomfortable about this. I've now figured out why normalising is bad -- at least when done blindly like I do. First, let's explore why normalising is good. Normalising eliminates biases. If the Prof in Section A grades higher than the Prof in Section B, normalising takes care of it. If a Prof is extremist (more A's as well as F's), normalising takes care of it. If a Prof is skewed (lots below average, few extremely high above average), normalising takes care of it. Eliminating biases makes sense if Section A is fundamentally like Section B. It's not better, nor more extremist, nor more skewed. If the sections are large enough and picked randomly, this assumption is correct. If Section A represents the smarter half, or people born in the second half of the year, or people from the Western states, or any other non-random selection, this need not be correct. An aside: You may wonder why people born in the second half of the year is non-random. If school admissions start in September, and admissions start when you're 3 years old, kids born in September will be nearly 4 years old when they join. Kids born in August will be between just over 3 years. That one-year difference, to a three-year old, is HUGE. For example, you will find a birth date bias in football, with most premiership players being born in the months of September - November. Normalising goes a step further than eliminating bias, however. Normalising forces a normal distribution. This would be right if the underlying data is normally distributed. But if not, we may be making a mistake by force-fitting. The Central Limit Theorem says that if you add up random variables, you get a normal distribution. Provided it's a large sample, variables are independent, and each has a finite standard deviation. This means that many things you get by adding random variables are normally distributed. For example: Number of heads when you toss a coin (add up each coin toss) Average age of an army platoon (add up each soldier's age) Terminus-to-terminus time for a bus (add up the time between each stop) Price movement of an stock exchange index (add up each stock's price movement) But a lot of real-life data is NOT normally distributed. The usual reasons are: 1. It's not the sum of random variables 2. It doesn't satisfy the central limit theorem (independence, large sample, finite standard deviations) Here are some non-normal distributions that are NOT the sum of random variables: Soldier's age within an army platoon. What random variables could you add up? You'll probably find a lot of people at age 18, because that's the minimum age. A little fewer at age 19 -- last year's recruits. Far less at age 20 -- 2 years minimum service accomplished. Certainly not a normal distribution. Price movement of a single stock. What random variables could you add up? You'll find that there are far larger price movements than a normal distribution predicts. Here are some non-normal distributions that don't satisfy the central limit theorem. (These are, in fact, things I said were normally distributed earlier. You see? It's easy to think things are normal, but in reality they're not.) The terminus-to-terminus time for a bus. The number of bus stops is quite small. More importantly, the time between stops isn't independent. If there's a traffic jam, an entire section of the route will take more time. If there's a delay between point 2 to 3, it's likely that there'll be a delay between points 1-2 and 3-4 as well. The price movement of a stock exchange index. The price movement of stocks follows a power-law distribution, which does not have finite standard deviations. Also, the price movements are not independent. See more non-normal distributions. Summary: Don't assume that anything you see is a normal distribution. It usually isn't. I'll shortly talk about what happens when you assume something's a normal distribution, when it really is not. Comments Wil 18 Nov 2010 9:14 pm: Great article - you brought it to the point!

Not all distributions are normal


I explain that the Notepad 'easter egg' is actually an encoding bug. Strings like 'bush hid the facts' are misidentified as Chinese Unicode, causing them to display as boxes due to flaws in the detection algorithm.

If you create a file in Windows Notepad with the string "bush hid the facts", save it and reopen it, it shows you boxes. Same with "this app can break". Here's why. It has nothing to do with George Bush or Microsoft. It's just that these strings are in ASCII, but they also constitute valid Unicode strings, and Notepad guesses (wrongly) that they are in fact Chinese Unicode files.

Notepad easter egg is really a bug


I explore a sensory substitution device that allows the tongue to perceive visual information and consider Clive Thomson's suggestion that this technology could serve as a novel interface for immersive video gaming.

Now your tongue can see. Clive Thomson suggests that this could be a good interface for video games too. Comments rajkumarc 6 May 2006 12:00 pm: 10/10

Now your tongue can see


Learn how computers draw curves with this gentle introduction to Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS). This accessible resource breaks down the complex mathematics of splines and surfaces for developers and students.

A gentle introduction to NURBS. That's Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, or, "how to draw a curve on a computer". Comments Dana Qi 1 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: Clear and brief for non-mathmatics student. Excellent job.

NURBS introduction


I found O'Reilly's tool for searching code across their entire book library. Use it to quickly find specific implementations, snippets, and technical examples from their authoritative programming guides and reference materials.

Code search within O'Reilly books.

O Reilly Code Search


I’ve shared a link to Google’s job openings as hosted on Google Base. This early implementation highlights how the company used its own structured data platform for recruitment, potentially disrupting traditional job boards like Monster.

Job openings at Google on Google Base. Comments Gautam 30 Mar 2006 6:39 am: Yeah, naukri, Monster and Recruitment Management Systems need to spruce up their offerings

Openings at Google


I found this collection of O'Reilly Hacks, which provides community-sourced technical tips and creative workarounds for hardware and software. It is a valuable repository for discovering clever ways to optimize workflows and solve specific technical challenges.

O'Reilly hacks.

OReilly Hacks


I examine how innovative packaging like Heinz's inverted ketchup bottle solves hidden user frustrations and builds brand loyalty. I've found that functional design improvements significantly changed my consumption habits and purchasing decisions for everyday products.

Packaging can make a huge difference to products. It really hit me when I saw this bottle of Heinz's ketchup. My two big problems with normal ketchup bottles are: (a) the sauce spills to the side of the bottle and sticks to the cap, and (b) it's tough to pour the last bits of sauce -- you have to hit the bottle a lot. Heinz Inverted Ketchup Now, I didn't know I had these problems. But when I saw this bottle, it hit me. You keep the bottle upside down -- so it's easy to pour the last bits of sauce. And they way the nozzle valve is designed, the sauce doesn't stick to the cap. Perfect! Since then, I don't buy any other ketchup bottle. Even if I WANT ketchup, I don't buy it unless I get this bottle. Packaging made be brand loyal. (Caveat: I'm not REALLY brand loyal. I'd buy any ketchup with this packaging. But only Heinz has it right now.) The same thing with honey. The same packaging with honey gives me a third advantage. I can drink a bit of honey directly by holding up the bottle over my mouth and squeezing it. Plus, I don't need a spoon. Because of this, my consumption of honey has shot up to 1 bottle of honey every month. Further, I have started spreading honey over ice cream these days. Note: packaging changed my eating pattern. So, impressed by all this, I wandered around superstores, exploring the innovations in packaging (mainly in food). I will shortly blog about that. In the meantime, here are some innovative packages introduced around when Heinz's inverted ketchup was. Comments reshma anand 25 Nov 2006 10:20 pm: most shampoo and shower gel packs have this 'inverted bottle' concept. it would be interesting to know who got it first. other examples which come to mind, which seem (so commonsensical in hindsight) are the parachute oil jar with a wide mouth and milkmaid in the form of a squeezy tube. there was also a ketchup advert on air in uk, showing ketchup through a squeezy tube some months back. maybe that packaging could have you brand-flirting again.

Packaging


I share Ev Williams' perspective on why pageviews are an obsolete metric for web success. He suggests that tracking unique visitors and time spent offers a more meaningful look at how people consume content.

Ev of Blogger argues that pageviews are obsolete. Number of unique visitors and time spent on a site are better measures.

Pageviews are obsolete


I highlight Karthik Laxman’s viral "Pallu baby" saga at IIM-A, exploring the fallout after his teaching assistant discovered his blog. It’s a hilarious look at the unintended consequences of email signatures and the chaos of anonymous internet comments.

Hilarious post on Pallu baby. Nice read, Karthik. Stay on course. Here's his follow-up (which I can't find on his blog any more). Confluence 2005 is happening and there are students from so many B-schools who have come down to IIM-A. Some of my friends from BITS, now studying in other B-schools, have come down as well. Yesterday I happened to get a call from one such friend of mine who's studying in ISB (with whom I wasnt in touch at all). After a couple of hi-bye statements, the first thing she asked me was "How's Pallu baby? And why arent you blogging at all? Your blog is very widely read in ISB. Everyone knows your blog in ISB. That Pallu baby post was circulated around like crazy." I felt a pang of guilt when I thought about all those who check my URL every day only to find the same 2-month old post on it. So I thought I should let you guys in on the post-Pallu-baby-disaster developments. (For those of you who have no clue what I am talking about, read about the Pallu-baby episode in the following post, Fool's Proof) Now, I didnt really talk about how we survived the whole thing in that post. Well, luckily for us, we had a couple of other messages between us which passed around the assignment and had nothing scandalous written on them. So, we could take print outs of those messages and submit it to the prof. I was basking in all the appreciation I was receiving for my Pallu-baby post just after writing it when the phone rang. "Hey Atul, wassup?" "I just read your post. Damn funny man." "Ha ha. Seriously dude. What an episode!" "But did you realize one thing ?" "What?" "The print outs you submitted to the profs were messages from you to the others." "Okay. So?" "You have your blog's URL in your signature." "SHIT !!!" After getting over my initial shock, I congratulated myself on the second blunder in two days. Then I contemplated on whether I should delete that post. After a brief struggle between ego and sense, ego prevailed (sense never stood a chance anyway) and the post prevailed. Besides I justified it with the theory that profs wouldnt really have the patience to go over the stuff students write in their blogs. (Actually, the prof did make some comment about how we guys go home and talk about women and happened to look at me when she said that. The whole class roared with laughter, leaving me struggling to find a place to bury my head into). \ A few weeks back, when the mid-terms were going on, I met BV on the road. He greeted me in an interesting fashion. "Hey, what the fuck did you tell Pallu baby?" "Huh ?" "Did you tell her anything about the blog?" "Are you crazy? Why would I do that?" "She was the invigilator today. She almost accosted me and said 'Hey Mister. What did you write in your blog?'" "What !" I exclaimed. "What did you say?" "What the fuck, I told her I dont blog. Then she said, 'Oh yeah, go ask Karthik Laxman'" "Wait a minute. It doesnt make sense at all. If she knew I was the one who wrote it, why didnt she come to me directly? Hell, I have my snap on the blog." "Beats me, man." "Thats because she likes you, BV. She really does. I have been observing all those coy looks she gives you whenever she bumps into you." "Shut up, dude. I am gonna whip your ass if anything happens to our ID grades because of this." We laughed and parted ways. Finally she came to know. A part of me however felt betrayed. After all that I have done for her, is this how she thanks me ? Does she have any idea how famous she is the world over? My estimates are that at least 2000 people know about her. Okay, so what if she's known as Pallu baby and not by her real name? One of the major motivations of my blog-readers from ISB in coming to IIM-A for Confluence was to meet Pallu baby. :) I wonder how many more people have been motivated to participate in Confluence because of her. I am thinking of creating a counter especially for these people. I'll probably call the counter "The Pallu baby interaction cell". I have my own theories on why she'd not be too happy with the developments. And I would probably attach 70 % of the blame to you guys - my esteemed blog readers. Following were some of the comments you guys put up to the post. "Oka, you are a naughty boy. No hard feelings, but we have a job to do as TAs.\ Moreover, its fun to make you guys cringe!\ Well, until the next assignment...\ Pallu baby aka Pallavi Desai (Name changed intentionally)" And this, "was i looking pretty in the class today?? I kept looking in your direction but you were only paying attention to the girl sitting next to you. What is her name again?? I am quite jealous\ Pallu baby." And soon there were so many wanna be Pallu baby commentors on my blog. "Wats all this non sense going on in your blog. Who are all these people pretending to be me. As for you, stop staring at me in the class, especially with that cheap smirk on your face. Come to mu office tomorrow and we shal talk this over in detail. Its completely unacceptable. \ I am the Real Pallu Baby." "Hey..'the original' is a definate fake. I am the real one and i really admire your writing style.Thanks for writing about me \ Pallu Baby" And this one probably takes the cake. "you keep talking bout pallu baby,all the while ignoring me (the other TA in ID). Wait till i grade your end term exams. Or else you could always ask me out.\ love struck , \ Prajakta (name changed to protect identity)" \ She must have digested all these in silence. And then one day things would have come to a point where she simply couldnt take it anymore. Something very inconsequential would have happened and all her pent up feelings would have burst out. And the person who would be responsible for this inconsequential incident could be someone totally irrelevant as well. Something similar to the squirrel with the nut in Ice Age. (By the way, I dont know if thats a squirrel for sure. I just picked the closest animal). Earlier in the day she confronted BV about the issue, one of my section-mates happened to bump into her on the road. As they were walking towards each other, they smiled at each other in recognition. And then when he was close enough to be heard by her, he said, "Hi Pallavi". Comments Sathya 27 Jan 2006 1:12 pm: I have written a greasemonkey scripts that might probably skew your statistics ! First, since I dont like the addressbar not reflecting the link clicked, I change the location to rootnode.freestarthost.com. Next, I see that all links are redirected from a perl script. I replace all http://rootnode.freestarthost.com/exe/r.pl?u= with blanks ! This was not the intention, I just wanted to practice GM scripting ... S Anand 27 Jan 2006 5:41 pm: No problem. Play around! I'm not very fussed about the stats. Dhar 28 Jan 2006 4:56 am: Hey Anand, what did you think of The Belgariad? I have seen it quite often at various bookshops, but somehow resisted picking it up feeling it might not be that great. S Anand 28 Jan 2006 8:24 am: I really liked Belgariad. Not classy, but entertaining and readable. Think of it as the masala movie of fantasy fiction :-) Dhar 29 Jan 2006 2:12 am: LOL! I will be doing a bit of travelling soon and need some of these masala movie types. Guess, I will give David Eddings a try then.

Pallu baby


I found some stunning gigapixel-sized panoramas at xRez that use the Google Maps interface for zooming. These high-resolution images are similar to the Gigapixel project and offer an incredible level of detail.

xRez has some stunning, large (gigapixel-sized) panoramas that you can zoom into using the Google Maps interface. It's similar to the Gigapixel project, I think.

Panoramas on Google Maps


I'm exploring Paul Graham’s idea that blogging is essentially "thinking out loud." He argues that the process of expressing thoughts to others actually creates those ideas, making the act of writing a generative tool for thinking.

What Drives Bloggers? I think what most bloggers are doing is thinking out loud. It's a little misleading to talk of "putting things into words," because that implies the ideas come first. In fact, expressing thoughts creates them. And especially expressing thoughts to other people, even people you don't know. So I think the reason many people like blogging is that they like the thinking it causes.

Paul Graham on What Drives Bloggers


I'm sharing Julian Beever's incredible pavement drawings that use forced perspective to create mind-bending 3D illusions on flat ground. The level of detail, including the realistic shadows, makes them look like actual objects.

These are pavement drawings. They are NOT 3D objects. But it's hard to believe. (Even the shadows are perfect.) See more at Julian Beaver's site. Julian Beever - Batman and Robin Julian Beever - Waterfall Julian Beever - Little and Large Comments Abbie 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hey these are cool drawing they actualy look 3-D and like the come right out of the ground alex meneses 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: UNBELIEVABLE......AMAZING.....WISH I CAN SEE YOUR DRAWINGS IN PERSON....

Pavement drawings in perspective


I share a convincing PayPal phishing email that almost fooled me. This example illustrates how sophisticated spam can look, mimicking official branding and layout to trick even cautious users into clicking malicious links.

I almost fell for this piece of spam. PayPal-like spam message

Paypal spam


I found a detailed guide on digital photography techniques and lighting. It offers practical methods for improving your shots, alongside community-recommended resources for further photography tutorials and tips.

Digital photography how-to. Comments Dhar 8 Sep 2006 6:09 am: In addition to the link you have given, do check out Photonhead for tips, tricks and tutorials on Digital Photography. Incidentally, I have recently started shooting again and a few of the shots I have taken are available here.

Photography Howto


I explored the new Picasa Web Albums, finding its integration with Picasa and Google Earth for geotagging impressive. While it lags behind Flickr in social features, the seamless workflow with Google's desktop photo software is a major plus.

Google has released Picasa Web Albums and I managed to sign up. See my web albums. The bad part about Picasa Web is that it's a long way from Flickr in terms of tagging and sharing. But it probably wasn't built for that. The good part is that it's integrated with Picasa (integration with Flickr was my top wishlist item for Picasa) and best of all, with Google Earth. You can geotag photos on the new Beta version of Picasa. Comments Dhar 14 Jun 2006 9:25 am: Two quick questions: \ 1. Can I view the orginal size of the image or will I be restricted to some lower resolution image? \ 2. Are there any upload limits (per image or per month)?\ Cheers, D. Dhar 14 Jun 2006 9:28 am: Oh OK. Question answered:\ "High-quality photos, automatically resized and optimized to fill available screen space"\ "Each Picasa Web Albums account comes with 250MB of free storage space"\ Details here.

Picasa Web Albums


I highlight 2005 statistics from the International Maritime Organisation revealing that modern piracy remains a violent reality. The data shows over 266 incidents involving organized attacks, crew abductions, and hijacked ships across global shipping lanes.

Pirates still exist. According to the International Maritime Organisation, 266 committed or attempted acts of piracy were reported last year. Although this was a lower figure than in 2004, in part because many small-time pirates died in that December's tsunami, risk experts say that a more brazen, violent and organised strain has emerged. Pirates are said to have injured or assaulted 152 crew in 2005; they abducted 652, of whom 11 are still missing. They hijacked 16 ships; a tug and a barge are unaccounted for. Comments I-want-answers 23 Apr 2006 12:00 pm: I want to know the truth, are there pirates or not... blair 23 Apr 2006 12:00 pm: i want to know where pirates exist and fight not when they attacked the ships and stuff. Karissa 23 Apr 2006 12:00 pm: Well i was watching pirates of the carribeean and my cousin ashton asked me if i think that pirates still exist so i found this website and i'm just woundering if i were to give you my e-mail address ir you could send me REAL PROOF THAT PIRATES STILL EXIST, PLEASE???? Laura 23 Apr 2006 12:00 pm: like god, there are somethings you just have to have faith in. there are some things you really can't prove, you just have to make up your own mind whether you believe or not. if you want to know if they exist because you'd like to be one, honestly you need to not be scared of anything to be a pirate and going against the grain is who you are as a pirate. so if you want to be a pirate, learn everything there is to know about ships and you'll need at least 6 or so people to run the ship and then you have to actually acquire a ship then you get supplies for that ship and then you and your crew can head out to sea and never look back.

Pirates still exist


I reversed audio clips of music and instruments to see why backward sound is harder to recognize than backward video. By comparing asymmetric waveforms, I explored how our brains process temporal audio signals versus spatial visual data.

You can play a video backwards and still recognise the scenes quite well. Can you do that with sound? I tried it on this Bryan Adams clip of Summer of '69 (mp3). When played backwards (mp3), it almost sounds like Arabic! Instruments sound weird backwards too, like the guitar played backwards and drums played backwards. It's seems obvious once you see the wave file. The picture below shows the guitar. The sounds are clearly not symmetric left to right. Sound wave diagram of a guitar Whereas this guitar is a lot more symmetric, and doesn't sound too different backwards. Sound wave diagram of another guitar So how come we can't recognise sounds played backwards, but can recognise video played backwards? (Initially, I thought it was a trivial question. But I couldn't find a trivial answer. The question may be subtler than it looks.) Comments B anand Prasad 25 Sep 2006 12:35 pm: its nothing to do with the technology Mr. Anand let me give an example dnana ....you just spell it... it sounds something like (d-na-na) now if we know that reversing it could(possibly) result in Anand --- dnanA, then we could recognize all backward sounds its just that we r not acustomed to hear sounds backward. now practice daily some words which are often used like "good morning" "thanks" now say them to someone in a correct situation...90% of them will recognize it.. thats it my friend....sorry for reversing "Anand" name....its my name too S Anand 25 Sep 2006 1:48 pm: Anand, if I've understood you right, we don't recognise sounds backwards because we're not used to hearing them. Agreed. My reasoning was: we're not used to seeing things backwards either. How come we're so much better at recognising those? A part of the answer is, we recognise sounds mainly by their movement in time, but images by their spread across space. But I wonder if there's more to it... ND 26 Sep 2006 3:07 am: I think this may have to do with the fact that seeing consists of detecting multiple facets like motion, pattern etc. The brain may have more data points decompose and "meaningfully" analyze backward. While hearing consists of analyzing the frequencies and amplitude implying lesser data points to "meaningfully" analyze backward with the same speed as visual stimuli. Caveat - Just my guess! S Anand 26 Sep 2006 6:23 am: Hmm... ND, that's a possibility! Certainly, in terms of information content, there's more coming in visually than aurally. ND 27 Sep 2006 12:42 pm: I asked three intelligent folks (an american, a german and an indian) to read "eye", "racecar", "malayalam" and "never odd or even" and waited for their reaction. Got blank stares! But it was sitter when explained. Guess some humans find it difficult to recognize a palindrome while reading and speaking. Taking a few million huge steps to infer humans normally normally don't even try to process sound or reading alphabets backward. Is it easier to recognize a popular word like one's name or a tune like Happy B'day when spoken or sung backward? A related front and back concept - I have always wondered why the bar showing s/w installing moves from left to right. And the same when uninstalling also. Is it convention? Why not show something more perceptive like a container getting filled or getting drained? Sudeep Nair 20 Nov 2006 5:40 am: Anand, I feel that the fundamental difference between a reversed text and reversed sound is that the text is still completely visible to the eye at once, and so there is a subconscious process where the brain is able to decipher the text by trying out some permutations, whereas in case of sound, the individual notes reach the ears and disappear. They do not remain "static" or "stationary" for the brain to be able to try some reverse permuations of individual notes and identify the original sound. This reminds me of another observation that in case of English text, the reader is able to decipher the words if the first and last letter of every word is kept fixed and all other letters in between are jumbled. Msot raeedrs wlil be albe to udnreatsnd tihs snetncee atlohugh the lteerts are jbulmed. Anonymous 20 Nov 2006 6:15 am: If we extend this logic from text to video, I think there is some degree of "persistence of vision" which allows the brain to "refer back", unjumble and make sense of video images, but there is no persistence of sound. So in addition to anand prasad's point about "familiarity of words", and ND's point about "more meaningful data points", I would think that "persistence of images" is a major factor helping us understand visual images better than sound.

Playing sounds backwards


I plotted IMDb ratings against vote counts to find outliers. I discovered that popular movies with low ratings, like Titanic and Star Wars: Episode I, are almost always big-budget blockbusters, while high-rated unpopular entries are usually TV shows.

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating. Popular lousy movies on IMDb I was interested two things: 1. Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies? 2. Which are the popular, but lousy, movies? The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies -- they're TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development). The answer to the second is: there are 9 really popular lousy movies. Titanic Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones Independence Day Armageddon Pearl Harbor Batman & Robin Godzilla Wild Wild West It's interesting that every single one of these had a huge budget. (Perhaps this is understandable: more people would see a big-budget film and vote on it.) Comments Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:37 pm: Hey! Do you have about top 100 anything? Except for movies?

Popular lousy movies


I share Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of how homelessness follows a power law distribution. It highlights how focusing resources on a small percentage of chronically homeless individuals can be more effective and cheaper than traditional broad-based social services.

Malcolm Gladwell on how homelessness obeys the power law distribution, and its implications. Comments bharani 10 Feb 2006 12:39 am: u got a new look! cool!

Power law distributions in homelessness


I highlight Jeff Atwood's essential requirements for developer productivity, covering dual monitors, fast hardware, ergonomic chairs, and quiet workspaces. These fundamental rights ensure programmers have the necessary tools and environment to work effectively.

Jeff proposes a Programmer's Bill of Rights. Every programmer shall have two monitors Every programmer shall have a fast PC Every programmer shall have their choice of mouse and keyboard Every programmer shall have a comfortable chair Every programmer shall have a fast internet connection Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions

Programmers Bill of Rights


I've collected several programming theorems that highlight the realities of software maintenance, like the persistence of Perl and the deceptive complexity of CSV. I emphasize that active coding is far more valuable than reading about new languages.

Programming theorems. The likelihood of Perl being involved in a system is directly proportional to the length of time the system has been in maintenance. Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is. Think twice before presuming that CSV is a nice little easy file format. (see Leon)

Programming theorems


I highlight how psychological framing in bank loan offers often outweighs interest rates. A study showed that small changes, like using a woman's photo, increased demand as much as a five percentage point rate drop.

People act on the spur of the moment, most of the time. So, as you can see from this example below, psychology can be more important than economics. Senthil Mullainathan worked with a bank in South Africa that wanted to make more loans. A neoclassical economist would have offered simple counsel: lower the interest rate, and people will borrow more. Instead, the bank chose to investigate some contextual factors in the process of making its offer. It mailed letters to 70,000 previous borrowers saying, "Congratulations! You're eligible for a special interest rate on a new loan." But the interest rate was randomized on the letters: some got a low rate, others a high one. "It was done like a randomized clinical trial of a drug," Mullainathan explains. The bank also randomized several aspects of the letter. In one corner there was a photo-varied by gender and race-of a bank employee. Different types of tables, some simple, others complex, showed examples of loans. Some letters offered a chance to win a cell phone in a lottery if the customer came in to inquire about a loan. Some had deadlines. Randomizing these elements allowed Mullainathan to evaluate the effect of psychological factors as opposed to the things that economists care about, i.e., interest rates-and to quantify their effect on response in basis points. "What we found stunned me," he says. "We found that any one of these things had an effect equal to one to five percentage points of interest! A woman's photo instead of a man's increased demand among men by as much as dropping the interest rate five points! Comments Lesson 1: What Is Behavioral Economics? « The Innovative Economics Initiative 15 Nov 2011 6:25 am (pingback): [...] (the background). This concept, presenting the same object in different formats, is known as framing, and is one of the most well-known biases used by Behavioral Economists. For example, if I asked [...] bala 8 May 2012 2:37 pm: i have written a tamil book on behavioral economics it can be downloaded from the link www.scribd.com/doc/88128740 the book குகைமனிதனும் கோடிரூபாயும் நூல் 1000 வாசகர்களுக்கு மேல் வாசிக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது may you go through it and give your comments. and forward to your friends if it is good thank you bala

Psychological framing in behavioral economics


I’ve curated this list of Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction from 1962 to 2005. Inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach and Guns, Germs and Steel, I'm working through the collection, targeting titles like Ants and Dragons of Eden next.

These are the Pulitzer prize winning non-fiction books. I've read only two: Godel, Escher, Bach and Guns, Germs and Steel. These were the very best books I have EVER read. If that's any indication to go by, I want to finish this whole list. 1962: The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore H White 1963: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman 1964: Anti-intellectualism in America by Richard Hofstadter 1965: O Strange New World by Howard M Jones 1966: Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale 1967: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis 1968: Rousseau & Revolution Story of CIV Volume 10 by Will Durant 1969: Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer 1970: Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H Erikson 1971: The Rising Sun by John Toland 1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman 1973: Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald 1974: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker 1975: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 1976: Why Survive?: Being Old in America by Robert N Butler 1977: Beautiful Swimmers by William W Warner 1978: Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan 1979: On Human Nature by Edward Osborne Wilson 1980: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter 1981: Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl Schorske 1982: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder 1983: Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan 1984: The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr 1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War II by Studs Terkel 1986: Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas 1987: Arab and Jew by David K Shipler 1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes 1989: A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan 1990: And Their Children After Them by Michael Williamson 1991: Ants by Bert Holldobler 1992: Prize by Daniel Yergin 1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills 1994: Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick 1995: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner 1996: The Haunted Land by Tina Rosenberg 1997: Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger 1998: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond 1999: The Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower 2001: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix 2002: Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter 2003: A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power 2004: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum 2005: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll Comments Jayant 30 Mar 2006 2:12 pm: Thanks a ton for the list. Pulitzer books in non-fiction are just gems! Arun 31 Mar 2006 8:08 am: Ouch, haven't read even one of these. And i thought i read more non-fiction than most!!! S Anand 31 Mar 2006 9:45 am: Next on my reading list are Ants (don't be fooled: though it's really about ants, it's apparantly a fascinating read), Annals of the Former World (which I developed a liking for since I read A Short History of Everything), and Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden. Sanchaari 31 Mar 2006 2:14 pm: Hi Anand, I liked your Bolg style, can I take some ideas from here? Which blogging site you are using? S Anand 31 Mar 2006 4:47 pm: Feel free to pull ideas. But I don't use any blogging software. I write entries in Excel, and my Perl program converts that to HTML, which I then I FTP. Not much help, I'm afraid...

Pulitzer Prize non-fiction


I prefer Perl over Python for data processing, relying on it for over a decade to handle large datasets where Access and SPSS failed. Using Perl with Excel and CPAN provides all the data analysis power I need.

Python vs Perl. Sums up my feelings perfectly: Python may be better for larger projects, but for my meddling, I'll stick to Perl. It's served me well for 10 years. Until 1999, I used Perl a fair bit, but no more than Java or C or anything else. My first "real-life" use of Perl was in 2000, when I was processing 600MB of IBES data. Access and SPSS couldn't handle the load. Perl slurped all the data in a few seconds, though. A few years later, when processing bank data (3GB worth, this time), Perl again was the only saviour. In fact, between Excel and Perl (and CPAN), I think I have all the data analysis power I've ever needed. This blog, for instance, is written in an Excel spreadsheet, exported to XML, and converted into the blog format by Perl.

Python vs Perl