Saturday, December 28, 2013
Lesser Mortal...
Couple of
months back I was coming out of a Darshini (clean - self service- stand and eat- vegetarian
restaurants common in Bangalore) in
Jayanagar, when I came across a blind
beggar, walking on the road. I dropped the 'change' I had received from
the restaurant in his plate and
continued to walk, feeling happy about having helped a poor soul, close to
noon.
By the
corner of my eyes I watched him pass the
restaurant and trying with difficulty to cross the road. For a moment, I
thought I would go back and help him. By the time I made up my mind to do so, a lady - in her late twenties - walked up to
him and held his hands, carefully helping him to cross the road, braving the
traffic. She looked like an employee from
one of the shops, on her way to run some errand during the lunch hour. By the
time, they reached the other end of the road, I had also crossed the road on my
way to the nearest bookstall. After
dropping the blind beggar on the other side, the lady started retracing her
steps.
Half way
through, she stopped at the middle of the road, thought for a moment and went
back to the beggar. 'Did you have your
lunch?', she asked him in Kannada. I was quite surprised, because one does not
get to witness such acts of compassion, often in one's life.
The beggar
replied in the negative.
'Shall I buy you a meals?, she asked. The
beggar said 'no' with a smile on his face. The very question itself must have addressed
his hunger.
She did not
push him. But she rummaged her bag, produced a few coins and gave them to him and
continued her journey.
I saluted
the lady in my mind. How couldn't I?
Then... I
realized to my sadness, I could never make myself to ask that question to
someone like him, how much ever I appreciate the deed.
In that
sense I am a much lesser mortal!!!
How about
you?
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Psychohistory, Big Data and me...
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Way back in 1942, Isaac Asimov had conceived a
new field of predictive science called 'Psychohistory' which he used later, as
the backbone of his 'Foundation' series. Asimov's 'Psychohistory' combined history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future
behavior of very large groups of people. It depended on the idea that,
while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the
general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion
of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy.
You can read all that from Wikipedia. So why am
I wasting everyone's time about what Asimov explained and expanded well in his books?
There is a reason. I believe I am on to something!
One of the limits the 'Psychohistory' approach
had so far, was the inability to capture the behavior for sufficiently large groups
of Individuals to enable meaningful predictions
and analyze the past to predict the future. It was both a technical and logistics
issue.
Now there seems to be a solution for this. Social
media data ('exhaust' in the lingo of data scientists) along with the emerging BIG
DATA technologies could provide us a great solution for the problem.
That means....?
It is only a question of time, before someone funds Psychohistory research using Big
data.
I believe, in less than a decade we could hear
fairly dependable predictions on the rise and fall of countries and empires. we
might get a chance to get back to the Newtonian clockwork universe again...
Note - One
caution here...'Psycho History' in modern science is something totally different.
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