The Great Pot-hole Controversy

The Great Pot-hole Controversy

So how many pot-holes do Mumbai’s roads actually have? 18, 20,895 as media and citizens claim or just 40 as per Brihan-mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) would like us to believe? I decided to get to the bottom of this. After-all how deep can a pot-hole be? I am not sure if Arnab Goswami wants to know that or not but the nation might just want to know.

I decided to tackle my old friend Gulu. Now, Gulu is one of those guys who love to convert threats into opportunities.  He has no MBA or any other formal management degree but  he has consistently used all tricks that they don’t teach you at Harvard and I am sure has invented dozens of his own that would leave Mark McCormack more than a bit dazed.  I will refer to Gulu only as Gulu to protect his identity.

Gulu is now one of the top bureaucrats in BMC and supposedly controls the road repairs. He was busy as usual but called me to Hyatt where he was attending a meeting of CHOR (Confederation of Highway Organizers  and  Repairers) a body of construction companies engaged in, you guessed it, road-building and repairs. As I entered the lobby, I saw him scurrying towards me.

Me : “”Hi Gulu”

Gulu : “Hi, Old chap. I am terribly busy you know. Have to attend another meeting at Renaissance. Why don’t you jump in my car. We can catch up on our way. “

The car which came to pick us was a BMW i8.

Me : “Wow, Gulu. Didn’t know BMC provided such cars to the execs.”

Gulu : “ No No,  this is not my official car”

Me : “ Well, even better. I know the salaries of BMC staff had risen quite well over last few years but I didn’t know they had reached this stratospheric region.”

Gulu :  No No, this is not my car.  We poor BMC guys can’t afford such luxuries you know. This is my wife’s car”

Me : “ Oh I see.” Obviously impressed. “What does she do?” Fully expecting to be told that she was some top dog venture capitalist or a banker or maybe Gulu had lucked out on a very rich father-in-law.  Some people have all the luck.

Gulu : “ She is a consultant”  

Me : “ Consultant?”. This was getting too much as most consultants I know use that as a cover to convey  that they are free birds  and available for some gainful employment. I am yet to come across a consultant who could flash a BMW i8.

Gulu : “Yes, She is a Consultant to ABCD Projects Ltd”. (Name changed for obvious reasons)

Me : “ABCD? Aren’t they the ones which keep on getting huge construction and road-building projects everywhere? She must be a terrific engineer to be consulting such a big company.”

Gulu : “ No no not an a engineer. She is good, no doubt. She is a vaastu consultant and a tarot card reader. In fact she is so good that she just makes a single visit to ABCD office every month and finishes her work in less than an hour. This is her car which I get to use.”

Too stunned to digest this, I quietly got into the car, making a mental note to tell my children and all and sundry nephews and nieces to give up all this engineering and medical rubbish and start taking vaastu classes instead. 

Gulu : “ Ok. What did you want to see me about?”

Me : “Er..  Gulu this is about the pot-holes.  The roads are just full of them and you guys are insisting that there are only 40 pot-holes on Mumbai roads.  This is preposterous you know” I was now getting into my responsible citizen role quite seriously. “You guys have spent thousands of crores of rupees; literally poured them down the drain. It’s the citizen’s money, you know.”

 Gulu : “ I know I know dear. There are a lot of misgivings about these pot-holes. Here.” He pulled out his laptop and showed me a map of the city which had clear markings labeled “pot-holes”.  

Gulu : “ As you can see there are exactly 40 as we mentioned in yesterday’s Press Conference. “ 

Just at that point of time, the car passed over what appeared to be a major pot-holes although Gulu’s map showed presence of no pot-holes on that particular stretch of road.  

Me : “ And pray what was that?”

Gulu : “ That was just a rumbler that is routinely put up for slowing the traffic near a junction.

Right on the cue came another jolt which rattled the car and my bones.  I looked at Gulu quizzically.

Gulu responded coolly “Oh this. Let me see. And typing furiously on his laptop came up with a different map “Ah, yes this is a ‘tumbler-hole’.  You see the whole controversy has arisen because we keep on talking at cross-purposes. There has been a lot of confusion about what constitutes a pot-hole. So we have now taken steps to define each type of hole. We have now classified the holes on the road as ‘thimble-holes’, ‘tumbler-holes’ , ‘pot-holes’ and so on, each with specific  well-defined size range commensurate with size of container each hole can comfortably accommodate.  In order to standardize that we have defined the sizes of containers that could be safely dipped into the hole eg a pot-hole is defined to have dimensions of  30 cm by 30 cm and 30 cms deep with a plus / minus of 5 cm on each dimension. With this strictly defined classification, now there is no confusion and we can safely state that there are only 40 pot-holes in the city. Unfortunately the media refuses to understand such a simple thing and keeps on issuing grossly inflated figures of pot-holes.”

I was speechless. What clarity of thought! What a scientific way of tackling problems! As the management experts keep on telling us “first define the problem”. Utterly brilliant. Then everything else has to fall in place; I mean in right size of holes. No confusion any more.  

“Secondly, about the money spent you talk about” clearly Gulu was just warming up “the money could not have been better spent. As you know the BMC has a lot of reserves (more than Rs 30,000 crs  - a fact which I knew) and with all this threat of recession and slow-down in the world economy, we are doing our bit to pump-prime the economy. You know what happens to economies which consistently run up surpluses. Don’t you? I mean, look at Japan, look at China for that matter. It’s all Macro-economics 101 you know. All our expenditure will go a long way to boost our GDP. Media should be happy that we are contributing to the national economy in a big way.”      

I was stunned to hear such brilliant exposition about GDP and such intricate aspects of international finance matters. My admiration for Gulu and the dedication with which he was pursuing national interests had gone sky-high. I was now fully convinced that all this pot-hole controversy was all a media conspiracy. All done to achieve an increase their TRPs and poor guys like me and you were getting exercised for no reason.

Suddenly I was brought to earth as I saw a bike rider who was a little ahead of us disappear in a water-filled hole. Just the top of his helmet was visible above the road level.

Me : “My God, Gulu did you see that?  The guy is totally submerged in water.”

Gulu : “ Yeah. That’s what we call a ‘tub-hole’, 200 cms long x 100 cms wide and at least 50 cms deep, basically the size of your bath tub. This one seems to be deeper than minimum prescribed.” 

Me : “ You are not worried? That guy may lose a limb or even his life.”

Gulu : “ We will need to invest Rs 10 crore in that hole. Think how much it will add to the GDP.”

Just then we came across a SUV stuck in a hole up to its bonnet.

Gulu : “ This is what we call a ‘tank-hole’, 500 cms x 300 cms and at least a 100 cms deep, enough for a swim you know. We haven’t had too many of these, but I guess a 100 crs should take care of it.”

I was about to tell Gulu to pull over so that I could get off. All this was too much for me. Just then Fate gave one of her quirky crooked smiles. There was a 40 ft container trundling along a few meters ahead of the car and a MSRTC Volvo trying to overtake it, suddenly both the large vehicles and a few smaller ones just disappeared from our sight amidst cries and chaos and a huge plume of dust. Luckily we could stop in time and found ourselves staring at a seemingly bottom-less pit which had opened up in the middle of the highway and had swallowed those vehicles.

Gulu appeared a bit taken aback. “A sink–hole!!!. Can you imagine?” there was awe and wonder in his voice. But BMC chooses their execs well. No emergency can be too big for them. Gulu recovered pretty quickly.

Gulu :  “ There was one in Florida recently and one in Guatemala before that. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams that we could have one. This one is at least 10,000 crs. We are sure to record a double-digit growth in GDP this year!!!”  

LazyBee

30^th September 2016

The Clairvoyant Americans!

The Clairvoyant Americans!

The Americans have been called a lot of names and things, bold, brash, belligerent depending upon, I guess, viewpoints of name-callers.  Anurag Mathur even labored over a couple of hundred pages (full of extremely readable stuff) scrutinizing the Americans and finally declared them to be inscrutable. But one aspect of American character has by and large remained unnoticed and that is how clairvoyant they are.  

 Last week a friend of mine sent me two recordings of songs. Both foot-tapping numbers meant for young generation. One from the US, ‘Watermelon song’ by Tennesse Ernie Ford (1957),  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OAgcsVNzE4  and another from our own bollywood blockbuster Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, ‘ hum the wo thi  aur sama rangeen’  (1958). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OAgcsVNzE4 .  

And I was immediately stuck by the clairvoyance of the Americans. Here was S D Burman,  one of our talented music directors of Bollywood and before he could even compose his tune, there was this guy Ford sitting somewhere in US of A who just went ahead and created  his version of that song. True, Ford got a few tunes not exactly right but overall I guess he did a pretty good job.  Guess we should give him 8 or 9 on the Clairvoyant Scale (0 for no clairvoyancy and 10 for perfect clairvoyancy).

Time and time again I have noticed this clairvoyance. Take for example Ittefaq, a  murder mystery of 1969 -  Rajesh Khanna  - Nanda starrer with Yash Chopra as the Director -  which sort of brought in a new genre in the Indian cinema. Someone in US clairvoyantly caught the waves that producer BR Chopra was to generate in 5 years time and managed to put it all together in Signpost To Murder (1964).  MGM  got most of the plot right, murderer confined to mental asylum – escaping only to run headlong into another murder – and how he gets out of the trap. But I guess the powers of clairvoyance must not be 100% foolproof because I thought that Ittefaq was a much better movie.  The plot of Signpost to Murder was definitely weak in the sense that the second murder was planned under the assumption that the protagonist will manage to escape from the asylum AND reach the exact place where the second murder would take place; even Bollywood would have baulked at such one in a zillion coincidence.  The second murder is actually planned in anticipation of the convict making his getaway and is effected before he reaches the “scene of crime”.  In Ittefaq, thankfully, the two events were independent of each other and only coincidence was that the convict lands up in the wrong place. It is then that baddies decide to pin the crime on him.  This much coincidence is on par with the Bollywood standards, so it is acceptable. The unraveling of both murders was also done quite sleekly in Ittefaq  unlike Signpost to Murder.  I would rate Signpost to Murder, a  poor 6 or 7 on the Clairvoyant Scale.

My second case of clairvoyance is much better one where AVM Production Chori Chori in (1956) found an uncanny pre-incarnation in “It Happened One Night” (1934), the Clark Gable  -  Claudette Colbert starrer directed by Frank Capra from Columbia Pictures.  The film went on break all the records by winning 5 Oscars, Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Actor, Best  Actress and Best Screenplay -  it was the first time any movie had swept the Oscars.  Chori Chori didn’t manage all that success, I guess because these clairvoyant Americans had beaten it to the punch.  But Raj Kapoor and Nargis gave a wonderful performance in what was to be their last picture together as a lead-pair and the music of  Shankar  - Jaikishen, in my opinion, was the best that they had ever composed.  I am not aware if any other clairvoyant American musician had tried to usurp SJ’s claim to fame but, as usual, I am open for correction.  As for the Clairvoyance Scale I am pretty certain that “It happened One Night” scores a perfect 10.    

LazyBee

17^th September 2016     

This-N-That 4th September 2016

This-N-That

And for another week-end, a few stray thoughts and a few general observations and a few points of view (some of it my own work and some as reported by media):

Ø  Just as most of us thought that the Timeless Test was finally drawing to a close, there is another twist in the tale like we feared. BCCI top brass, loathe to give up any of their privileges, perks and other spoils of office, have come out with another one of their stalling tactics. Enter ex-CJI Mr Markandey Katju.  Ostensibly Mr Katju has been given the assignment of “interpreting” the Lodha panel’s recommendations to BCCI. Mr Katju will represent BCCI in the meetings with Lodha panel and convey whatever reservations BCCI has about implementation of Lodha Panel’s recommendations and help in implementing the changes as warranted by the Lodha panel.

Now Mr Katju has often been in the limelight, especially after his retirement as CJI and majority of the times for controversial topics. BCCI’s game-plan seems to be clear. Let loose an ex-CJI on the Supreme Court and let the fireworks begin. Mr Katju has already started doing his job for his new client who is known to have his coffers overflowing and an iron resolve not to yield an inch for the fear of losing the whole 22-yards. He has started with asking for a full bench review of Lodha panel recommendations and questioning the very basis of Lodha panel. At the same time the political bigwigs behind BCCI and various state boards are busy pooling their considerable resources to engineer a legislation which will one way or other keep the politicians out of ambit of any of the earlier restrictions imposed by the apex court.  We, the gullible, will have to wait and watch how the Timeless Test unfolds.

Ø    An international team of six scientists has recently completed a stay of one year at a deserted site on Mauna Loa in Hawaii under conditions which simulated the conditions that humans would encounter on Mars except I guess the gravity of the red planet. The project, known as HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), put an international team of scientists in a solar-powered habitat. The habitat had electricity and internet access, but there was a 20-minute delay in sending or receiving messages to mimic the time lag between Mars and Earth. The crew wore spacesuits when they ventured outside the dome. The objectives of this experiment were to study the possible physiological and psychological effects on the crew of a long duration space flight and inhabitants of a colony on an alien planet.

Elsewhere in the Atacama desert in Peru, the scientists have found soil which they feel is equivalent to the Martian soil and are experimenting how the soil can be used to cultivate food for the future colonization of Mars. I am sure Elon Musk must be very happy that more and more people are taking up the Project Mars seriously. And the recent blow-up of SpaceX rocket notwithstanding, I feel we as a race are now getting ready for our first big leap into future.

Ø  Supreme Court has ruled that Tatas must return all the land which was acquired (through the aegis of state government) for their automobile plant at Singur. This plant would have been the most important investment in West Bengal since the Haldia Petrochemicals project around the turn of the millennium. It would have hopefully sparked off some sort of industrial revival in West Bengal by developing  a cluster of ancillaries along with the main Tata plant. When the project had to be called off, Ratan Tata had kept the door open for a return to WB at some future date if the circumstances changed.  Now with this development, it is doubtful if the house of Tatas, now  under a new leadership, would consider going back to aamar shonar bangla in a hurry. Message is loud and clear. As for the Nano, Make In India if it pleases you, but Make In West Bengal? It’s a no-no.

The entire episode should make both government and industry rethink such projects in future. The farmers who lose their land must be made stake-holders in the project not just by a promise of jobs in the new unit which may or may not materialize but also some sort of profit-share. We are seeing some move towards such a scenario at least on paper but equally importantly the central & state governments which go all out to attract investment must  be made to give iron-clad guarantees that no governments which comes to power subsequently in the centre or state  can revoke or do so at a very heavy penalty which will give potential  investors some relief if the things go wrong as they very often do in India.   

My friend Guy Wise says that politics may well be the art of possible for the rest of the world, for Indian politicians it is the science of making things impossible for anybody who wants to do something constructive unless it serves politicians’  vested interests.  This is “indigenization” for you.  

LazyBee

4^th September  2016

Elementary My Dear ......

Elementary My Dear ......

“Elementary, my dear Watson” or so would the greatest detective in English literature supposedly state with smug satisfaction and then proceed to walk his assistant Dr John Watson through a complex maze of facts and observations and his deductions based thereon to unravel what had seemed an unfathomable mystery to readers till that point of time. Dr Watson has been portrayed as ‘astute’ but nowhere as intelligent as Holmes. No doubt he served an important part in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories; duly recording the proceedings of each case, but I rather felt sorry for the old chap who must have felt thoroughly humiliated a number of times by lack of his analytical abilities.

Well, the fictional Dr Watson seems to have finally had his revenge in real life through a namesake of his, Watson the computer developed by IBM (named after its first CEO Thomas J. Watson).  The objective of IBM in developing Watson has been "....... to have computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify." 

Such a computer is a natural evolution of machine intelligence which IBM has been diligently developing starting from IBM 704 which was built to play checkers in the 1950’s and had an inbuilt capacity for self-learning.  In the years that followed, IBM developed Deep Blue computer which defeated Gary Kasparov in the historic match between the two in 1997 which defined the moment when human intelligence was surpassed by a computer. But the Deep Blue was a still a machine, a hugely capable machine able to compute 200 million positions per second, but still just a machine. It could follow the algorithms laid down by its programmers and evaluate the various lines of play in terms of gains and losses such moves would result in. IBM itself never claimed that Deep Blue was endowed with “artificial intelligence” though Kasparov himself did mention that he sensed something akin to “human intelligence” in some of its moves.  Deep Blue was placed somewhere halfway in the Top 500 Supercomputers list at that point of time.    

IBM Watson goes far beyond that. It was developed from IBM’s DeepQA technology which was designed for playing Jeopardy, a quiz program on NBC. DeepQA had to confront the unstructured way we humans interact with each other;  half-formed sentences, flexible syntax, colloquial terms, multiple meanings of the same word etc and, most importantly,  speech recognition and interpretation of  pictorial data . DeepQA team had to build all these functionalities into Watson’s working and more to enable Watson to continually learn from its experience, the technologies that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation,  automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies Watson accomplished the assignment for which it had been created without a demur and ultimately won against champion Jeopardy players  Ken Jennings and Brad Sutter who had had long unbeaten runs previously. One can safely say that the era of cognitive computing has arrived.

The processing capability that Watson has are extremely impressive to say the least. It works on a 3000 core assembly of processors with RAM of 16 terabytes and processes 500 giga bytes of information per second equivalent to about a million books per second. As an aside, high as this processing capacity seems, we humans should take satisfaction that it takes all that computing power to match the one and quarter kg of white and gray matter that each of us have been endowed with. Watson requires  as much space as eight refrigerators to do what we do very routinely as we walk and run doing our daily chores. Watson may not be able to match what we may know intuitively but as far as crunching raw data and making a dispassionate analysis without any pre-conceived notions or taboos that we hold, Watson will be the winner.  

So what does IBM propose to use Watson for? Given its abilities, Watson is best suited for crunching a huge amount of data like any of the Supercomputers would, but its ability to work with unstructured data and arrive at answers to various questions in a human-like manner is what it would give an edge as an ideal decision support system.  Such a platform which can search huge and disparate databases and extract necessary information can far surpass any human’s capabilities especially in today’s world where our knowledge base is growing exponentially.  With this sort of data crunching capabilities, Watson is sure to surprise us with finding hidden and even hitherto unsuspected correlations between two or more parameters. 

When posed a hypothesis, Watson comes up with a few alternatives indicating possible solutions with varying degrees of confidence and it also lays down the reasoning it has used to arrive at the solutions. The same process can be refined though interaction with the researcher who is seeking a solution. The whole process acts as a learning experience for Watson who can then further improve his reasoning or modify the weightages that it may have assigned to various factors. 

IBM is hopeful of leveraging just these abilities of Watson. IBM has been working with medical schools like Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center to develop a system to suggest best line/s of treatment for cancer.  Ginni Rometty, Chairperson, President and CEO of IBM, explains IBM’s decision to go after cancer as a philosophy of IBM to go after the most challenging of problems that they could find.  The system demo with a hypothetical patient which you can find on YouTube will give you a good idea about the interactive process which a doctor can follow with Watson’s assistance to arrive at the most plausible line of treatment and further tests that will need to be done to improve the chances of making the treatment work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbqDknMc_Bo. 

In India, Manipal Hospitals have signed up to provide help to cancer patients through Watson. As time goes by and the word spreads about availability of Watson’s expertise, one feels that a second opinion from Watson will be a must for every cancer patient who wants to get his / her diagnosis confirmed and plan for the best treatment under the circumstances specifying the constraints that each patient is likely to have. I am sure that over next few years any cancer hospital worth its name will sign up for this service.    

IBM has identified a number of fields where the Watson platform can be employed to improve the decision-making. Genetics with its huge data is one such field. True we have mapped the human genome, but just consider this. Each human being is different from any other human as far as actual genetic code is concerned, to the extent that you and me, each have uniquely different variations in our genes to make each one of us the only person to have ever walked on this earth with this particular genetic  map. We therefore need to do mapping of a lot more individuals to begin to understand the variations that are possible in different ethnic groups. Then there is a question of how each gene functions or “expresses” itself, and the sequential interactions that it has to have with numerous other genes to express itself.  A huge lot of work is being done in this field by a veritable army of scientists spread all over the globe. It is doubtful if any human can hope to keep track of the torrent of data that these developments are throwing up.  With Watson’s data analysis capabilities, it would be possible to do that and bring the goal of personalizing medical treatment for individuals a bit closer

.

IBM is encouraging a wider acceptance of Watson platform by inviting industry partners to work together and develop apps tailored to their own needs. A number of companies are already actively using Watson for applications as diverse as hospitality, music, travel, financial services, call centres and even analysis of satellite imagery for resource management.  A novel example of leveraging Watson is that of Prof Ashok Goel, of Computer Science department at Georgia Tech who used a bot developed on Watson as a Teaching  Assistant. The students  interacted with the bot through the term without knowing that Jill Watson they were dealing with was an artificial entity. Jill Watson, by the way, was named by the students as the best among the 10 TAs who were assisting Prof Goel for that term.

Major usage of Watson would be in fields where inputs to decision making are extremely unstructured for example legal, governmental regulations. It will indeed be a great help to the judiciary if Watson can analyze whole range of legal records (both national and international) and point the judges in the right direction rather than depend upon cases cited by litigants. 

As long as data can be gathered within acceptable range of accuracy, Watson can be brought to bear upon tackling developmental problems.  In fact IBM has already embarked upon a program supported by Watson to assist African countries in healthcare and education sectors. 

As stated earlier apart from the governmental sector, large private organizations will be greatly helped by Watson. Top management of global conglomerates working across industries and geographies would ultimately have a tool to have all the data available at a single point of reference. Whether it would finally mean a single person seated in his chair and controlling the entire world in consultation with his desktop/  laptop / handheld Watson only the time will tell. 

Ginni Rometty even goes as far as to say that cognitive computing will now be used for each and every decision that mankind will make henceforth.  It is estimated that approximately 80% of data generated by us is unstructured, and cognitive computing is the best resource that we have if we have to make decisions which can draw upon all the data which is available to us. Pretty soon it will be Watson telling us “Elementary my dear folks!”

Lazybee

3^rd September 2016