The creator and the created.

If someone told you that God and Nature are one and the same, that there is no God seperate from the universe sitting in some hyperspace (Heaven?),  yet that there does seem to be a greater force that can be discerned in nature a pattern if you will.. then that person is a Pantheist. The word Pantheism, which resmbles advaita and buddhism closely was coined by John Tolland in 1705 to refer to Spinoza's philosophy. Yes its true that Spinoza is the guy who spoke of this idea to the West. Himself considered to be a great rationlist like Descartes himself, Spinoza had a lasting impression on Goethe.

If someone talked to you about fire and how it seems to change and continues to remain the same you would probably think of Zarathustra and the Parsi faith. But Heraclitus, the of sixth century BC, was the one who popularized the concept to the Western world.

If you are shot, you wont die of lead poisoning.

CNN.com - Feds take shot at unleaded ammo - Jul 27, 2004

Ha ha ha, law enforcement agencies are trying to replace bullets that have lead in them for health purposes! So next time you get shot, at least it wont be the lead that kills you! The human rights report, worldwatch 2003, mentions executions in India which are called police "Encounters". These encounters take place between "criminals" and "terrorists" (put in quotes because they dont have a fair trial) and highly trained police sharpshooters. They have no intention of taking any prisoners. If you wanted to take people into custody for a trial why would anyone use REAL bullets rather than, say rubber ones or something else that debilitates but does not kill? There are those who believe that encounters also help to kill any leads to other people who may be BEHIND the scenes. Like in the case of Mrs. Indira Gandhi's assasination or of the death of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Students, beware of what you write!!

Did you know that Britain's Intelligence Dossier on Iraq was Plagiarized from a Grad Student? The link given in that sentence also gives links to the original and to the Dossier. Ofcourse all this is old hat. Now Bush has done it again. This time suggesting that cuba officially supports child prostitution. The LaTimes apparently found out that this too was lifted from a student's paper.

I request all students to be careful of all papers that you write. If you do write, please be careful that neither George Bush or Tony Blair sees the documents. Or you may have another invasion to answer for!

Wired News: Free Speech Behind the Razor Wire

Wired News: Free Speech Behind the Razor Wire

Another interesting article I found on the Democratic National Convention. Dont forget to click on the images to see bigger pictures. Auschwitz looks far better than this!

pop-art and politics

When I was running the Talk Shop, a marketing consulting firm, I used to ask my consultants to go and see every blockbuster movie that comes to town. Ofcourse they hated it, but I said that if they cannot understand the power that draws audiences to these movies they cannot understand how people around them think.  Ofcourse they never complained when I asked them to do media analysis of debonair or of playboy. Politicians would do well to follow similar advice. Social crticism is, thankfully alive and well in the  form of art.  Outstanding proof of this is the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is the first documentary to have achieved star status in hollywood (This CNN link may expire, but there should be enough evidence of its track record on other websites.. This follows the success of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism".

Linda Ronstadt is a singer who was popular in our childhood days. She came under the limelight again today when she was thrown out of a casino in Las Vegas for calling Micheal Moore a hero and dedicating the Eagles' song "Desperado" to him. The lyrics of the song could have perhaps foretold these events? Do pop-art and politics mix? Bruce Springstien's song "Born in the USA" was picked up by Ronald Reagan as a patriotic song when it was actually a critique! Check out its lyrics here.

And finally, here is an article from Scotsman that inspired me to write this article.  Its about politics and pop-art.

Mathai

Did phillipines do the right thing?

Did phillipines do the right thing? Yes it did. The war in Iraq is not that of phillipines or anyone elses. Yet people did join in because of the spoils of war. Even Europe wanted a hand in the pie of the estimated "reconstruction" contracts. But now Phillipines have pulled out, perhaps India will too?


India to 'go to any extent' to free hostages - Sify.com
Kenya to withdraw from Iraq

Right and Wrong : pirated movies and the like.

I just got back from a conversation with Fr. V.C. George during coffee break.  Fr. George is teaching Business Ethics in XLRI at the moment. Earlier he was teaching "Logic" at a college in South India. With a background in Logic AND Ethics, its not surprising our conversation turned to the question of right and wrong. I thought it would be fun to write my take on it.

Scientific thinking (read logical positivism) is based on the logic of mathematics. Haven't you heard that mathematics is the language of science? In mathematics there is usually ONE correct answer to a question, as in many questions of science. For example, the density of water, the acceleration due to gravity, the velocity of light are all questions to which there is a single correct answer. Of course  there are many things we dont have answers YET, but we will have them soon enough... until then, they remain as hypothesis. There are a small clutch of problems that are probablistic in nature, and we answers we cannot know for sure...whether light is a wave or a particle.

Yet there is another realm in which one single answer is NOT the preferred answer.  Take a symphony composed by a famous composer. How many renderings can there be of it? How many renderings of swan lake can be performed, each unique in its own way, each "correct". In this context its interesting to see the difference between a play and a movie. There is one "original" movie and other (pirated) copies of the movie. But if I put up a play of..say julius ceasar, have I pirated the "original" or have I created another "original".

In terms of learning, I have learnt something more of the composition every time I perform it. Every time I recreate it, I understand it differently, but more important, I understand it more and more. It seems that the more correct answers there are, the more I understand it. Fr. George, I suspect would have told me this is not "logical" and it is "subjective" or "aesthetic" with a dismissive wave of his hand. He would tell me that all theories have to use logic to prove their worth. Logic is not a theory, but a "key" to all theories.

I continue to believe that growth from a good combination of anlytic and synthetic knowledge. The latter involves inputs from the world around us while the former involves our ability to think about and analyze the inputs that we have received. Further I also believe that logic (at least the way aristotle thought about it) is only ONE way of acquiring knowledge or of UNDERSTANDING. Knowledge constitutes of knowing something from the outside. You may know of Mathai Fenn, but do you UNDERSTAND him? Understanding requires you to use your heart, not just your mind. A different way of knowing altogether.

Mathai

The movie ICE AGE really happened!!

Heres an interesting piece of news. Remember the chipmunk from the movie ICE AGE?

Chipmunks toughed out last ice age

Just a piece of news I found interesting

About an ice-age cave with lots of paintings.
Discovery Channel :: News :: Ice Age 'Sistine Chapel' Found

You are responsible for Enron!

Every now and then we hear of corporate scandals and of questionable ethical practices. We curse the business men and move on. We say that all corporations want is to make big bucks at ANY cost, and we pretend that ofcourse, we have nothing to do with it. Well, surprise, surprise, we DO have something (a lot, actually) to do with it.


(Read here how the chief of enron was indicted)
Former Corporate Leaders Take a Fall .

(Here are more links if you want to do further research on enron)
http://power.about.com/library/weekly/aa071201a.htm
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Energy/Enron/History/


Not so long ago, people were largely involved in agriculture. Typically a person (or a family) owned the fields in which paid workers worked in. Whatever may be the problems with this society, it had one good thing. At the time, a worker knew exactly who he or she was working for. This made it easier for worker to approach the owners and the owners had a responsibility to treat people well, after all to quote from Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility".

Now consider the scene at a corporate office, an employee who's father is sick, and needs leave to look after him. Lets say John (the employee) goes to Smith (the manager)

"Hmmm Mr. Smith, I need some leave to look after my dad."

"Very sorry to hear he is unwell, but ofcourse you can take the leave that you have earned."

"Dad has been sick for a while, and I have already exhausted the leave that is due to me, and it seems like a long haul ahead for us."

"Well YOU are not sick so I can't give you sick leave. You see the company has to work, the show must go on. If I dont show results, I could lose my job!"

John is answerable to Smith and Smith is answerable to his boss, where does the chain end? How about the CEO? After all the Chief Executive Officer, is the Boss of all Bosses right? Well it appears not, the CEO is answerable to a board of directors who (in theory) guide the company on all policy issues and let the CEO do the day to day running.

In reality, the board of directors are the representatives of the share holders. They represent the REAL OWNERS accurately by merely asking how much money the company has made. Most of a copany's shares are held by Financial Institutions (FIs), who have representatives on the boards of various companies. So who are these representatives accountable to? What interests do they represent? Most FIs get their money from small investors like you and me. Hence the final owners of these companies are those who have invested in mutual funds, individual investors like you and me.

What was the basis of your investments in Mutual Funds?

Distributed Intelligence in Organizations and Traffic

The experts in Knowledge Management tell me that this is the age of shared knowledge where successful organizations are able to pool together information found in databases spread across the organization with the aid of computer based database management technologies. I can understand and appreciate how that would improve efficiency of an organization significantly. What I have in mind is, however different. What if intelligence itself were distributed? In the domain of IT, this would be closer to the debate of server client architecture as opposed to peer to peer distributed computing.

When the industrial revolution took place, there was a great need for workers in the factory. These workers largely performed mechanical jobs like assembling items on an “assembly line” or maybe even stoking a furnace. Borrowing a term from the agricultural context, these were “hired hands”. With the rapid adoption of automation in the work place, the work in the factories began to change where brains are more important than brawns. It is in the Industrial era, that protection of information became such a crucial thing. Companies were built around secrets.. a colonel who had a secret formula to make great fried chicken, secrets about new cars under development, etc. etc. Much of this was already compromised by the 80’s because people often left one organization to join another. The advent of the Internet made matters worse, where we can communicate to our peers (outside the organization) with the touch of a button. Pooling of databases made matters worse. What was once knowledge spread across an organization now became available to everyone...at least the kind of knowledge that can be written down and represented in words. The power of organizations was considered to be the power of the knowledge that they held within their boundaries. With this came a whole new era of protecting data and information and along with tools and organizational practices that went with it. Along side, also grew the need for sharing knowledge and the tools to do it.
Today, knowledge is no longer enough to stay ahead. Knowledge is often available easily and whatever knowledge you hold on to is soon antiquated. Intelligence, on the other hand, is a whole different ball game. Intelligence is not knowledge, but the ability to process information/knowledge. This is far more difficult to replicate than knowledge is, since intelligence in an organization is a combination of formal procedures, informal and adhoc systems and interpersonal relationships. Yet our organizations have yet to recognize this as a major shift in the way we organize business. In the Knowledge Era, information was to be protected and often was centralized, as was decision making, since obviously you need data to make decision. The knowledge era was also the time when data was protected from prying eyes. After all if I could steal a blue print, or a prototype, I needed little else to beat a company to the market and gain the advantage. Relationships and softer skills were not important to people with knowledge, like Teachers, Scientists and Doctors, since their knowledge assured them their place.
In my own field, I find the two approaches strikingly different. On the one hand there are teachers and institutions who are constantly trying to protect data that they have, to prevent someone else from taking away their “core strength”. On the other, MIT has announced a project by which they will put ALL their teaching content online. Increasingly the complexities of business and quick response times needed in the market are moving organizations towards greater empowerment and decision making at the lower levels. Reduction of middle managers in an effort to cut costs is another factor that is doing this. Yet we have only begun to examine theoretical models that involve the idea or distributed intelligence. One such approach is to study colonies of animals like beehives or anthills, where animals seem to behave in organized patterns, even without any central processing (what I call the CIA – The Central Intelligence Agency).

Roby Mathew, a friend of mine with Saatchi in Banglore, once gave me an idea. He talked about traffic and how each city has a “feel” for traffic. How true! Despite international laws and conventions about traffic, the way traffic behaves in Bombay is very different from the way it behaves in Calcutta or Delhi. Having just completed a 6125 KM road trip by car, I appreciate the wisdom of this statement. Each driver does not coordinate with another driver. The official conventions and rules are the same for all cities, yet each city develops its own flavour. How does one imbibe this flavour and can we describe what is the essence of this flavour?

Oedipus Revisited.

Have you ever had a sexual interest in your mother? Ever felt like killing your father so you could have sex with your mother? Could these thoughts be lurking in your UNCONSCIOUS mind? Every now and then I get questions like these when I explain discuss Oedipus in my Psychoanalysis class. It takes me a while to explain what I think Freud meant. I believe the first mistake is in the understanding of “SEX”. When most of us think of sex, we are thinking of “genital sexuality”. I suspect to Freud, sexuality had a greater meaning, a kind of life force, perhaps. After all he does suggest that libido, the life energy behind everything is sexual in nature. So let us take a look relook at the whole concept a kind of retelling the story.

When a child is born he knows only one other human being, his mother. His mother is everything in the world to him. His source of food, warmth, affection, etc. etc. And he grows up with the safety and security of knowing that she will always be there for him. Yet when he enters the Phallic Stage of psycho-sexual development, he begins to be aware of his phallus. This is the stage when children enjoy fondling their own phallus, paying attention to it, etc. Its also the age of awareness, when he notices the need for clothes as adam and even did in the garden of eden.

The phallic stage is also a time of gender identity, when the boy realizes that he is one species (male) and his mother is another species (female) and there will be, forever, an unbridgeable gap. The sense of loss that he experiences at this time is profound. In many families this is also the time when boys who could have been sleeping with their mothers until then, are shifted to their own room because of his growing awareness of sexuality. He also discovers that the father can continue to sleep with the mother, while he cannot. Hence his loss, already so tragic now becomes doubled. As he struggles to re-discover his own identity, he comes into conflict with the other MALE in the house, the father, which could account for a certain degree of hostility that is exhibited around the time.

One of the criticisms that is often leveled against Freudian Psychoanalysis is that its too male oriented. The feminine counterpart of the Oedipus stage is the Electra stage. This is particularly true of young girls who grow up with strong bonds with their father. At the phallic stage, they too realize that they belong to a different species from their father. They also realize that they cannot be everything their father is, or everything the father wants his son to be. For the first time she recognizes the inferior role women have in society. Hence they begin to resent the male role and the envy the freedom (to achieve) that men/boys have. In his typical style Freud refers to this as “Penis Envy”, a term when taken literally is downright hilarious!

Men who get fixated at the phallic stage, either over-emphasize their manhood by adopting Machissmo traits or they under-emphasize their manhood in an attempt to remain effeminate so that they can stay close to their mother. Women who don’t make the transition, often remain closely attached to their fathers, often neglecting the relationship with their mother. They tend to be over-achievers in an attempt to prove they are as good as the next BOY. While they enjoy attention, they reject their sexuality, since sex would mean acknowledging their feminity.
Hence in short here is my interpretation SEX = general life energy, not just genital sexuality, PHALLIC STAGE= a greater awareness of one’s sexual organ and the growing awareness of gender differences, OEDIPAL STAGE= Represents the time when a boy realizes that he is “different” from his mother, PENIS ENVY = is the woman’s envy of the more important role society has given men, rather than the idea that women could actually envy the physical organ!

Citibank on "How to lose your customer in 5 days or less"

Some time ago, I was offered an option to subscribe to a service that sends my credit card statement by email from Citibank. Any customer of Citibank knows how many telemarketing calls they get from the company… I should have learnt my lesson when I made the mistake of giving them my phone number. Now my mailbox gets spammed regularly with Citibank “offers”. Citibank is clearly the leader where it comes to spamming their OWN customers with emails and telemarketing offers. I decided to see if something can be done about this.

My first email to indiaservice@citicorp.com on june 28th 2004 read as follows

One of my greatest concerns of giving CITIBANK my email id is that they will spam the account. Having got hold of my home phone number I get a lot of calls telling me about new products that CITIBANK has. Can you give me some idea of the frequency or nature of the spam email I may recieve at this account?

Mathai Fenn

The first reply I got (not counting the automated reponse I got with a tracking number) on 30th June 2004 read as follows

Dear Customer,
This is in reference to your e-mail bearing our reference number 816776 . We are unable to respond to you within the committed time frame since the query involves investigation. We apologise for this delay. However we assure you of our effort to resolve this shortly.

Thanking you

Sincerely Yours
Manager Customer Care
On 05/07/2004 I got this email which I guess represents closing the “Case”

Dear Mr.Fenn,

We are concerned to note that you are receiving spam mailers regarding your account details.

The e-mails received by you, is not authorised by M/s Citibank. Hence, we request you to not to disclose your Credit card/Debit card details online for security reasons.

We also thank you for bringing it to our attention. We have taken up the matter with the concerned unit for appropriate action in this regard.

Thank you for your valued patronage.

M.Yogaraj
Customer Service Executive.

Interestingly it had a P.S.

PS: In recognition of your patronage, we are delighted to offer a loan on your card. This loan does not require any documentation. It is also being offered to you at a very nominal transaction fee on the loan amount.

For further details, please contact the Toll Free Number 1600-444455 on Business Days, between 10.00 a.m. and 6.00 p.m.

On the next day I get another spam email from Citibank. Offering…what they offer all the time… a loan. When I clicked on the “remove me” link. It opened my email with a mail id to indiaservice@citicorp.com !! Is this the theory of Eternal Return ??