Sridhar Vembu’s Blog

I found this quote from Keynes interesting. As a follower of the Austrian School http://www.mises.org, it is sad to see how so many academic economists today, many of them Keynesians, promote printing money as the cure for the burst bubble. The $50 oil and rising commodity prices surely signal more inflation ahead …

Hearing about the cricketing exploits of our folks brought back some fond memories. When you enter IIT, there was this rule (is it still there?) that you had to participate in sports of some kind, or you will have the privilege of NCC. NCC isn’t much fun if you are not the disciplined kind who can make it to Saturday (early!) morning drills and such. Needless to add, NCC was to avoided, by qualifying for some sport.

I was a “rubber ball” cricket player in school; even tennis balls were costly in India at that time, so we had to make do with rubber balls. It is a lot safer (and that is not just for the players!) than cricket balls, but doens’t do you much good when it comes to play “real” cricket.

With that background, I still decided to try my luck in the cricket selection process. I figured I had nothing to lose. Cricket attracted a lot of students, most of them way better than I was. As I watched the selection process go on, I wasn’t even sure I should put my hat in the ring. Batsman after batsman went in and were showing off their stuff, and I was standing there thinking “No way can I face that kind of a ball”. The bowlers were so fast, I realized I had no hope whatsoever as a batsman (or as a bowler for that matter!), and was resigning myself to the inevitability of NCC.

As the day wore on, the crowd thinned. People got selected, or they tried their luck and didn’t make it and left. Most of the rejects were way better than me, so I couldn’t muster enough courage to even ask for a chance yet, knowing it would be instant death for my hopes.

Towards the very end, the captain of the IIT team, who was doing the selecting, announced “We are really short of leg spinners. Any spinners here?”. There were off-spinners plenty, but they didn’t consider themselves ready for the vagaries of leg spin. There were no takers. That is when I stepped forward and announced myself as a leg spinner. The captain gave me the ball.

I delivered the first ball OK, but there was no spin, off spin or leg spin, to be had. It was a slow delivery, but then that was all I knew how to bowl. I knew enough to at least bowl at the right length. Then the second ball was delivered a little short, and miraculously for me, the batsman attemped something big, and the ball hit the stumps. The captain said “That is good, you are in”. I wasn’t very sure if the ball had spun at all, but then it was getting dark, and the captain had to wrap things up.

I wasn’t much good to the team - in fact, the Captain realized within a couple of weeks how good a spinner I was, so I was relegated to stand near the boundary and watch the proceeding as my team mates practiced. I would often just slip away or not show up at all, saving them the agony of having to endure my bowling. Worked out well for both sides, I am guessing, because I never heard a complaint about not showing up for practice!

I have noticed something interesting. In the US, SMS seems pretty rare. In India SMS is quite popular. I hear that in Europe it is wildly popular as well.

Watching this phenomenon in India & US, something interesting strikes me. In India voice mail is not popular, and answering machines are practically non-existent, though phones themselves are getting ubiquitous. Most Indians would find it “funny” to speak to a machine. But in the US, it is done all the time. I don’t know the voice mail situation in Europe, but I am guessing it is not as popular (if that is the right word!) as in the US.

If so, that would explain why SMS is so popular in Europe and India, and not popular at all in the US. I just find it easy to make a short call rather than futz around with the cell phone keys typing a cryptic message. If the other side is busy, it just goes to voice mail, where I leave a quick message. In fact, when I am calling a cellphone - which means there is caller ID - I sometimes don’t even bother to leave a message, because the call log itself is the message to call back. Way easier than an SMS saying “pls call”.

So may be the lack of a “voicemail culture” is responsible for the popularity of SMS?

I have been reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

It mentions a research paper co-authored by William Sethares on how independent uncoordinated “agents” solve decision problems. My very first published paper, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, titled “Convex Cost Functions in Blind Equaliation” was co-authored with Sethares (published sometime in 1991 or 1992, I forget now). Here is the funny thing: I have never met him, and I don’t believe I have even spoken to him once!

This is the power of social networking: my advisor at Princeton, Sergio Verdu, worked with Rod Kennedy of Australian National University on this problem, who in turn was working with Sethares. That was when I got involved with it. We got some “results” as they say, published it together. Later on, I ended up switching my PhD topic to something else.

When I saw the mention of Sethares in that book (the research reported in the book is not connected to what we published in 91), it triggered recollection of that long-forgotten research paper, and the fact that I don’t even know him!

If you have been a regular visitor to AdventNet (I mean the virtual AdventNet!), you may already know we have a good-sized development center in India. You will find many voices on these pages from our India center. This is thrilling to see, because just 15 years ago, this kind of thing would have been utterly unimaginable, especially in the India I grew up in.

This is just one more small nano-step in the global connectivity revolution. But it does feel worth commenting on.

This is my first public blog post. The goal is to give you, our dear visitor, a glimpse of the human side of AdventNet.

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