natural therapy

Jeevdani Rose
Originally uploaded by ganesh_inxs

autumn colours

in close-up

in close-up-Lepidoptera
Originally uploaded by ganesh_inxs

Scientific name-Lepidoptera
An amateurish attempt at capturing a macro.

basking in the light

basking in the light
Originally uploaded by ganesh_inxs

Noticed this light moth basking in the warmth of my table lamp....the stark contrasts on this picture makes it interesting.

Wireless Power System

Intel on Thursday showed off a wireless electric power system that analysts say could revolutionize modern life by freeing devices from transformers and wall outlets.

Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the California firm's annual developers forum in San Francisco.

Electricity was sent wirelessly to a lamp on stage, lighting a 60 watt bulb that uses more power than a typical laptop computer.

Most importantly, the electricity was transmitted without zapping anything or anyone that got between the sending and receiving units.

"The trick with wireless power is not can you do it; it's can you do it safely and efficiently," Intel researcher Josh Smith said in an online video explaining the breakthrough.

"It turns out the human body is not affected by magnetic fields; it is affected by elective fields. So what we are doing is transmitting energy using the magnetic field not the electric field."

Examples of potential applications include airports, offices or other buildings that could be rigged to supply power to laptops, mobile telephones or other devices toted into them.

The technology could also be built into plugged in computer components, such as monitors, to enable them to broadcast power to devices left on desks or carried into rooms, according to Smith.

"Initially it eliminates chargers and eventually it eliminates batteries all together," analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said of Intel's wireless power system.

"That is potentially a world changing event. This is the closest we've had to something being commercially available in this class."

Previous wireless power systems consisted basically of firing lightning bolts from sending to receiving units.

Smith says Intel's wireless power system is still in an early stage of development and much research remains before it can be brought to market.

Rattner spoke of technological transformations he expects by the year 2050.

"You'd like to cut the last cord," Smith said.

"It's great that we have wireless email and wireless internet and stuff like that but at the end of the day it would be nice to have wireless recharge as well."

Source:Yahoo News/AFP
Contributed by: Sriram Venkitachalam

Author Comment: Having graduated with majors in Electrical Engineering, this event is special.

Chip-kaalee!

It was around 8:30pm when a fast local to Badlapur arrived at platform number five of Thane station. A huge crowd of commuters were moving along the staircases at the time. Suddenly a loud cry, "Bachao,bachao!" baffled commuters and people started pushing one another on the staircases. Rahul Surve, a Thane resident, who was on the staircase at the CST end, said, "I was in the middle of thhe packed staircase when suddenly, all the women in the platform started shouting. Everyone, unware of the situation, started running up and out of the station....In a moment, the entire platform was empty of commuters. There wasn''t single person on it"

Jaikishen Gupta, an employee of a canteen located on the platform said, "we quickly pulled down our shutters,as we thought some kind of emergency had gripped the station". Some commuters on the platform jumped onto the tracks and a few unfortunate even fell into open drains between platforms.

Meanwhile, some commuters informed the government railway police about the commotion... the police could not fanthom what caused the panic and kept running from one platform to another, carrying a stretcher with them..assuming there was an accident".

When the police conducted an enquiry, the reason for the commotion completely baffled them. ..." It was a middle-aged woman who had shouted for help when a lizard (3 inches in length according to eye-witnesses!)fell on her from the roof of the train. people did not understand why she was screaming and instead of helping her, started running. Fortunately no one was hurt!.

Source: excerpts from a report- "How a lizard held Thane station to ransom",Mumbai Mirror edition-28th june 2008

Blog author's conclusion-railway officials should immediatly nab the accused "chip-kaalee" and charge fines for illegal travel on the roof of a train!..and the lady in this case should be recommeded for an award of the highest order for her "bravery in saving lives" of fellow commuters.

The secretary problem

The secretary problem is an optimal stopping problem that has been studied extensively in the fields of applied probability, statistics, and decision theory. It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, and the best choice problem. The problem can be stated as follows:

1. There is a single secretarial position to fill.
2. There are n applicants for the position, and the value of n is known.
3. The applicants can be ranked from best to worst with no ties.
4. The applicants are interviewed sequentially in a random order, with each order being equally likely.
5. After each interview, the applicant is accepted or rejected.
6. The decision to accept or reject an applicant can be based only on the relative ranks of the applicants interviewed so far.
7. Rejected applicants cannot be recalled.
8. The object is to select the best applicant. The payoff is 1 for the best applicant and zero otherwise.

Let us say that an applicant is a candidate only if it is better than all the applicants viewed previously. Clearly, since the objective in the problem is to select the single best applicant, only candidates will be considered for acceptance. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) has a surprising feature. Specifically, for large n the optimal policy is to skip the first n / e applicants (where e is the base of the natural logarithm) and then to accept the next candidate that is better than all those previously interviewed. As n gets larger, the probability of selecting the best applicant from the pool goes to 1 / e, which is around 37%. Whether one is searching through 100 or 100,000,000 applicants, the optimal policy will select the single best one about 37% of the time.

For an arbitrary cutoff r, the probability that the best applicant is selected is

Letting n tend to infinity, writing x as the limit of r / n, using t for j / n and dt for 1 / n, the sum can be approximated by the integral

Taking the derivative of P(r) with respect to x, setting it to 0, and solving for x, we find that the optimal x is equal to 1 / e. Thus, the optimal cutoff tends to n / e as n increases, and the best applicant is selected with probability 1 / e.

In summary:

Psychologists and experimental economists have studied the decision behavior of actual people in secretary problems . In large part, this work has shown that people tend to stop searching too soon. This may be explained, at least in part, by the cost of evaluating candidates. Extrapolating to real world settings, this might suggest that people do not search enough whenever they are faced with problems where the decision alternatives are encountered sequentially. For example, when trying to decide at which gas station to stop for gas, people might not search enough before stopping. If true, then they would tend to pay more for gas than they might had they searched longer. The same may be true when people search online for airline tickets, say. Experimental research on problems such as the secretary problem is sometimes referred to as behavioral operations research.

source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
related site:http://utilitymill.com/utility/Secretary_Problem_Optimizer

A temple cave

Batu Caves, Malaysia

Picture taken by: C.K.Venkataraman Reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Caves

Time!...for game,set and match

The All England Lawn Tennis Club's-
WIMBLEDON Championships 2008
23 June- 8 July

ROLEX-The official time-keepers for a timeless event

to the estranged

"Nobody said it was easy,
Oh it's such a shame for us to part.
Nobody said it was easy,
No one ever said it would be so hard.

I'm goin' back to the start..."

-coldplay, the scientist

Rain Man

The iconic MRF Muscle Man declaring arrival of the monsoons.

Frames of Time

Published by: Hindustan Times
Pictures taken by: Kulwant Roy

Brunel University

Brunel University
Msc Distributed Information System(2003-2004)
Dept. of Information Systems and Computing

fait accompli...

A hindu horoscope...

Horoscope-(noun)

1. A diagram of the heavens, showing the relative position of the planets and the signs of the zodiac, for use in calculating births, foretelling events in person's life etc.
2. A prediction of future events or advice for future behavior based on such a diagram
3. Used in match-making of prospective marriage couples as per Hindu religious beliefs

Divine communications...

A techno-savvy Hindu priest.!..notice the mobile bluetooth device.

Picture by: Sriram Venkitachalam

Thought provoking!

Simran.

Kashmir- is it this?

If there is paradise on earth....it is this, it is this, it is this

...or is it this?
image source-Times of India, March 24th 2008.

Are Divorce Settlements Like Games?

By Gregg Herman

As it appeared in the American Journal of Family Law
Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 2004

Recently, ESPN2 presented coverage of the World Series of Poker. The game of choice was called "Texas Hold-em". The rules bear a remarkable similarity to divorce settlement negotiations. In "Texas Hold-em", players are dealt two cards down ("hole" cards), while five cards are dealt face-up ("community" cards). The players bet, with the usual bluffing, of course. The winner is the best 5-card poker hand of any combination of the player’s hole cards with the community cards.

In divorce settlement, both parties have information which is held privately and information which is known to both parties. Both sides typically will know (or at least should know) some information, like the community cards in "Texas Hold-em". In addition, each party has information which they do not share with the other side, the equivalent of the hole cards. For example, both sides typically know the vocational history of both parties and their present income. However, their future plans are typically held secret. Therefore, in negotiations, they "play" with the known factors and hold back on the secrets. The resulting negotiations lead to suspicion and mistrust, which may affect the relationship of the parties far into the future.

Consider the following real life situation. The husband is offered a new position with his company. While accepting the position would result in substantially more income, it would also cause a major relocation and substantially increased hours and stress. As a result, a family court would not force him to accept the new position. Husband takes the position that the job is only worth it if he does not have to share all of the positive attributes with his ex-wife. Although he is willing to accept sharing some of the additional benefits with her, there is a point where there would not be enough left over to warrant taking the position. From the ex-wife’s point of view, she would like (naturally) to share as much of the increased income as possible. How much? She doesn’t say. How much would husband have paid? He doesn’t say, either. The result of the suspicion and mistrust is that the husband rejected promotion and both parties lost.

Game Theory

In Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, "A Beautiful Mind", she describes Nash's obsession with game theory, which resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economics. While not professing to understand much of the extraordinary complexity of the mathematics, I also see a correlation between game theory and divorce settlement negotiations. In fact, some game theory explains the importance of how divorce negotiations can be handled for the benefit of all involved.

For example, take the famous puzzle "The Prisoner's Dilemma". Originated by Nash's contemporaries at Princeton, the puzzle posits that two people are arrested for the same crime. Since the police do not have sufficient evidence to charge either one, they separate them for interrogation and try to get each one to turn state's evidence against the other (Having served as an Assistant District Attorney for seven years, this is exactly how real life works!). Each prisoner is told that the other one is betraying him or her and that it would be to their advantage to cut a deal. The "best" scenario is if both cooperate with each other, refuse to talk, and they both walk free. However, if one of them does not cooperate with the codefendant, but talks to the police, the defector will get a reduced sentence, while the other one will get full punishment. If they both talk, they will both be punished, but less severely than if they had refused to talk. The dilemma is that each prisoner has a choice between only two options, but cannot make a good decision without knowing what the other one will do.

Isn't this precisely what happens in standard divorce negotiations? Both parties are meeting with their attorneys privately, each suspicious of what is going on with the other side. If they cooperate with each other, they have the best chance for optimum results for both. What typically happens instead is that the mistrust and lack of communication lead to the worst results for both. In the example of the husband being offered a promotion, cooperation and trust could have worked to the benefit of both parties. Being in separate attorney’s offices while negotiating is akin to the prisoners being separated during interrogation.

Zero Sum or Non-Zero Sum

Another mathematics game described in Nasar’s book is the "zero sum" game. In such a game, in order for one player to win, another player has to lose. A poker game is an example of a "zero-sum" game. In a "non-zero sum" game, on the other hand, all of the players may benefit. Some of John Nash's Nobel Prize-winning work involved using "non-zero" sum games to describe the working of a nation's economy, where everyone can benefit from growth.

The application to divorce is obvious. Most cases are "zero-sum" games. The more the payor pays, the less he has. Wouldn't it be nice to negotiate a settlement which expands the pie available, rather than divides it? In the above example, if the husband takes the higher paying job, more money is available for both parties. More typically, by using tax tables, sometimes divorce can be a "non-zero-sum" game, where there is more money to divide between the parties.

Why are divorce negotiations usually played as a "zero-sum" game? Again, the mistrust between the parties frequently causes one to believe that "any money going to the other party must come from me".

Cooperative and Collaborative Divorce

How can these concepts be utilized in divorce? Divorces can be handled on a cooperative basis. In a cooperative divorce, both parties voluntarily disclose all of their interests without the need for formal discovery. After all, they have to make full disclosure anyway. In a cooperative divorce, all of the cards are immediately put on the table. All appraisers are jointly hired by the parties. Settlement negotiations are handled openly, usually through 4-way meetings with the parties and their attorneys.

Collaborative divorce is even better. In a collaborative divorce, both parties have mental health coaches during the settlement process to keep the emotional aspects from interfering with the legal process. As a means of enforcing compliance with the process, both attorneys agree to withdraw from the case if the process fails and the case goes to trial, at great cost to both parties and attorneys.

Whether by a cooperative approach or a true collaborative divorce, by placing the "hole" cards of "Texas hold-em" face up, the "prisoner's dilemma" can be eliminated by having the negotiations take place in the open, rather than in secret. By doing so, the divorce "game" can become a larger game than "zero sum", to the benefit of all involved.
Other methodologies hopefully will develop over the years in addition to cooperative and collaborative divorce. It is hoped that these methods can be improved by means of other disciplines - be they economic or just game theory - to avoid the "lose-lose" scenarios so common in divorce. Perhaps the best "game" theory is when children play and are told "you are all winners". In divorce, both parties can be winners, as well.

Netscape to Mozilla-a milestone in Internet bowser history

Got this sudden urge to update my knowledge of the internet!...and irony as it might be...I ended up on a blog with the title "End of support for Netscape web browsers"
http://blog.netscape.com/2007/12/28/end-of-support-for-netscape-web-browsers/46#c9942621

I managed to tip-tap a few comments to this blog...it gives a feeling of contentment, when you are able to put your thoughts into words.

hope to keep blogging...thatastu!