2013 Reading List

1. Steve Jobs
2. The Last man (Vince flynn)
3. Forge of darkness (Steven Erikson, Karkhanas trilogy book 1)
4. Atlas Shrugged (Re read)
5. Magicians End
6. Way of kings
7. consider phelbas
8. Steelheart
9. Excession
10. Start with Why
11. Signal and the Noise

Recent Read: Super Freakonomics (A Summary)

Summary of Super Freakonomics:

 

Key themes that were overarching and illustrated in the narrative are:

1. People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest, therefore one of the most powerful laws of universe is the law of unintended consequences and this applies to a variety of people

Some interesting observations/conclusions/messages:

• A shrewd entrepreneur keeps his/her overhead low, maintains quality control, learns to price discriminate effectively, and has a good understanding of the market forces of supply and demand. they also enjoy their work
• The trait that we commonly call raw talent is vastly overrated. There is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it. Mastery arrives through deliberate practice. Deliberate practice has three components:
• Setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback, and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome

• History is studded with examples where For most problems that seem to be impervious to any solution, the fix is remarkably simple and cheap:
• Some of the examples are making doctors disinfect their hands before proceeding from autopsies to other operations
• Use of seat belt in automobile industry back in late 50s which effectively reduced the automobile fatality rate by 70%

• Positive externalities: Not all externalities are negative; one of the unlikeliest positive externalities on record came cloaked in a natural disaster: What do Al Gore and Mt. Pinatubo have in common?
• In 1991 an eroded wooded mountain on the Philippine island of Luzon began to rumble and spew sulfuric ash. It turned out that beloved mount Pinatubo was a dormant volcano.
• On June 15, Pinatubo erupted for nine furious hours, the explosions were so massive that the top of the mountain caved in on itself creating a bowl shaped crater, its new peak 850 feet lower
• Within 2 hours of the main blast sulfuric ash reached 22 miles into the sky and by the time it was done 20 MM tons of sulfur dioxide was discharged into the stratosphere. For the next two years the haze was settling out and the earth cooled off by an average of nearly 1 degree F.
• A single volcanic explosion practically reversed, albeit temporarily the cumulative global warming of the prior 100 yrs.
• A few such volcanic eruptions every few years might cool down the entire planet?

Some Interesting questions and stories about seemingly bizarre patterns:

• In the history of unintended consequences, few match the one uncovered by ignatz semmelweis:
• Medical doctors while in pursuit of live saving knowledge, conducted thousands upon thousands of autopsies and headed to maternity wards, since they did not clean their hands properly they carried infections which inturn costed thousands of lives, and was one of the biggest epidemic for which none was able to find the cause till ignatz discovered the relation by analyzing statistics and the pattern of doctors performing autopsies and then going for maternity wards
• 1840s, one of the gravest threat of childbearing in Europe was puerperal fever. Between 1841 and 1846 doctors delivered 20,000 babies and 2000 (1 in 10) of mother died by 1947 1 in every 6 mothers died due to the fever
• The solution was strikingly simple sprinkling a bit of chloride of line in the doctors hand wash and implementing it in hospitals

• Solutions to complex problems are often simple and are very cost effective too:
• By 1950s US had about 40 MM cars and nearly 40k people died in accidents in 1950. and the death rate was climbing as vehicles increased.
• Enter Robert mc namara who was hired by ford to figure out a solution. After a lot of research it was found that in a crash the driver was often impaled on the steering wheel and the passenger was injured because he'd hit the windshield or the header bar or the instrument panel.
• Though Mc namara ordered new padded steering wheel and tried to figure out what materials are drivers supposed to be wrapped when a crash occurs to avoid injuries what he realized was that the best fix was also the simplest one
• Rather than worrying about what a passengers head would hit when he was flung about during an accident, wouldn’t it be better to keep him from being flung at all. Mc namara knew that airplanes had seat belts; then why not cars?
• Seat belts at about $25 a pop are one of the most cost effective devices ever invented. To put this in perspective in a given year it costs roughly $500MM to put them in every vehicle vs.air bags cost roughly $4 billion a year

• A few interesting ideas that are not implemented but pose some seemingly simple fixes to problems which seem beyond the reach of any solution (A few such people created an unusual laboratory called Intellectual ventures and are in Seattle)
• A laser which detects malaria causing female mosquitoes by their wing beat frequency to zap them
• Project IV: a very long hose which pumps sulfur dioxide into stratosphere, which might be able to replicate the volcano eruption effect in a very cheap way - though no one knows or any government might not agree to dump sulphur into stratosphere!
• A hurricane busting device: Hurricanes are essentially heat engines, massive storms that are formed when the topmost layer of the ocean edges above 26.7*c. However the warm water in the ocean is a thin layer of 100 ft underneath which is trillions upon trillions of cold water. So essentially the trick is to modify the surface temperature and dissipate the heat before hurricanes can gather the energy.
• Solution proposed is to strategically place an inner tube with a skirt (like a man made large jelly fish) which will allow the warm water to go down and the outer tube bubbles up the cold water. Technically this is playing with Mother Nature but well it’s an interesting idea, such a device can be constructed from materials from home depot. US gov is considering it though

• How is a street prostitute like a department-store santa?
• They both take advantage of short term job opportunities brought about by holiday spikes in demand

• Another such situation was the advent of cable tv in rural india: Indian women ran an outsize rank of unwanted risk of pregnancy and STDs including a high rate of HIV. In turn had an impact on quality of life. The government tried a multitude of initiatives to control the population growth and improve the life of women in rural areas (ranging from advertisements, charitable programs, free condoms)
• A different sort of intervention relying on technology, plain old TV, specifically cable tv in rural areas seemed to have an effect.
• Rural Indian families who got cable TV seem to have a lower birthrate than families without a TV. And in rural india lower birth rate generally meant more autonomy for women and fewer health risks. It was also found that families with TV seemed to keep their daughters in school more too.
• While there might be no way to decisively prove if cable TV did empower women in rural india but overall the problem seems to have gone down, perhaps the husbands were just too busy watching cricket!!!

• It is no exaggeration to say that potentially a person’s entire life can be greatly influenced by the fluke of his or her birth where the fluke is one of time place or circumstance
• If you know someone in southeastern Uganda who is having a baby next year in May, it will be roughly 20% more likely to have visual hearing or learning disabilities as an adult and three years from now however may would have been fine month, however the danger will have only shifted to April and not disappeared. The same pattern has been found half way round the world in Michigan
• The reason behind this troubling phenomenon is Ramadan.  Islam calls for a day time fasting from food and water for the entire month of Ramadan. Most Muslim women participate in Ramadan.  Since Islam follows a lunar calendar Ramadan comes eleven days earlier each year. Babies are prone to developmental after effects due to the fasting experienced during gestation. This effects are worst when the first month of pregnancy coincides with Ramadan and the effects have been seen upto the 8th month of coincidence with Ramadan
• Michigan with a large muslim population has one of the worst observed effects specifically when ramadan coincides with summer time where there is upto 15 hrs of daylight!
• Such effects are also observed in professional soccer  and some other sports where the cutoff date for player’s age is dec 31. Players born in earlier months like January have a physical advantage over say someone born later say October or November. Birthrate bulges are evident are everywhere. Consider the case of Major league baseball players most youth leagues in US have a july 31 cut off date. As it turns out a US born boy is ~50% more likely to make the majors if he is born in august instead of july
• But as prevalent as birth affects are, it would be wrong to over emphasize their pull. Birth timing may push a marginal child over the edge but other forces are far far more powerful. For instance there is a single factor that would make a boy 800 times more likely to play in the majors than a random boy. Having a father (or perhaps a mentor) who also played major league basketball from a young age.

• The story of Ian horsley (imaginary name): Terrorists are unlikely to buy health insurance?
• Ian designed an algorithm post the british 7/7 terrorist attacks to predict people who are likely to be terrorists based on their banking account information.
• Two variables which happened to make this possible along with a score of other general variables are
• One that a 26 -35 yr old person in general population is likely to buy life insurance due to family reasons however a suicide bomber has no incentive to buy one
• The other variable "X" a special behavioral attribute measure the intensity of a particular banking activity. While not unusual in low intensities among the general population, this behavior occurs more frequently among people who have other terrorist markers i.e
• Don’t have a savings account,
• Don’t withdraw money from an ATM on a Friday afternoon
• Predominantly men between 26-35
• Own a mobile phone, is a student, rent rather than own a home

 

 

Recent Reads: How technology and data helped President Obama win the election

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/

A recent intersting read: Quick synopsis

The significance of Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had emerged from a cadre of analysts who thought of voters as individuals and worked to aggregate projections about their opinions and behavior until they revealed a composite picture of everyone. His techniques marked the fulfillment of a new way of thinking, a decade in the making, in which voters were no longer trapped in old political geographies or tethered to traditional demographic categories, such as age or gender, depending on which attributes pollsters asked about or how consumer marketers classified them for commercial purposes. Instead, the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms. Now it was up to a candidate who wanted to lead those people to build a campaign that would interact with them the same way.