Mental health

I was at a middle school in Bellevue today. It's striking how there are predominantly 2 types of pamphlets on the message board there: those talking about therapists/mental health and those about domestic abuse.

This, in one of the top school districts of the the nation.

Also, check this trend out. This is from all the books scanned by Google written from 1900. It clearly tells us what people are more interested in.

Expected? Or do we take ourselves more seriously than we have to?

Social Q&A Systems

A lot of times you need answers to long or open ended questions. e.g. "How are hiking trail distances calculated?" or "Are there any places where you can watch the 4th of July fireworks over Lake Union while avoiding the crowds? " or "Any good popular science book recommendations?" (all questions which I've had in the past).

Current search engines don't do great for these queries, since they search by keywords aim for speed. But there are a lot of Q&A systems such as Yahoo Answers, Quora etc. out there which are meant to help you with these. Having tried out a few over the past 2-3 years, here is a rundown on them:

Yahoo Answers

Pros: Lots of users, has been around for a long time.

Cons: Not really useful for genuine questions. Funny/not so useful answers tend to be voted up.

Yahoo Answers is a good example of "what doesn’t work".

Twitter/Facebook status messages

Pros: Asks questions to your friends. Decent search capability.

Cons: Asks questions to your friends, which for most people is a limited set of folks with little or no subject expertise.

Quora

Pros: Focuses of collaboration. Almost wiki-like

Cons: No user-reputation system makes answering questions less gratifying. New and hence not many users.

Aardvark

Pros: Asks questions to topic experts as determined by their internal algorithms.

Cons: Not as many users. A lot of questions go unanswered. No reputation system.

Facebook Questions

Pros: Lots of users. Uses the social graph information for question discovery.

Cons: No reputation system. Very poor search functionality.

Stack Exchange websites (e.g. StackOverflow)

Pros: Very detailed reputation/badge system which incentivizes people to give good & thorough answers to questions. Decent search functionality.

Cons: Niche set of websites for specific topics like programming, hence not generic. Not many users because of being niche websites.

So based of these experiences, here is what I think will make an ideal Q&A system:

1. Has a lot of active users

2. Has a reputation system which incentivizes good "answerers".

3. Easy to use, via Desktop/Phone/IM.

4. All the questions and answers are well-tagged and easily searchable.

5. Seeks out topic experts for answering questions.

6. Has a social element (people prefer answering questions from their friends instead of random strangers), but does not overdo it (since you might want real experts a lot of times).

Points 2, 3, 4 are achievable design goals for a startup. 1, 5 and 6 are much harder since you need a critical mass of users to achieve them, which would be tough for a startup to achieve. So it has to come from one of the big players. Or a startup bought over by a big player (Aardvark was bought by Google recently). That said, Facebook seems to be best positioned to build such a system if they wish to. Yes, it's Facebook's world, we just live in it.

Dark side of the moon

No, this post is not about the awesome Pink Floyd album. It's about the real dark side of the moon. As some of you well know, the moon has a dark side or a "far" side, which constantly faces away from the earth. And a "near" side which constantly faces the earth. In other words, it takes the Moon exactly the same amount of time to rotate around its axis as it does for it to go around the Earth once (~27.322 days). Ever wondered why this happens?

This phenomenon is known as synchronous rotation and it is quite common between planets and their satellites. It is caused due to something known as tidal locking. Just like the moon affects the tides on the earth, the mass and speed of rotation of the earth influences the moon, but in a much larger way (because the earth is much more massive). Early in its life, the moon spun much faster. But slowly, its rotation locked in with its revolution around the earth due to the tidal forces, and we got the "near side" and the "far side". The Wikipedia link above has more info if you are interested in further reading.

Turns out almost all moons in the solar system are tidally locked with their corresponding planets. In fact, Pluto and its moon Charon, are tidally locked with each other i.e. both of them show just one side to other and revolve around each other as if joined with a rod. Astonishing!!!

On Natural Selection and Free Markets

Since 4 billion years, life has evolved on this planet by a process called natural selection. Simply put, the individuals and species best adapted to their current surroundings survive and propagate their traits to their offspring, while the other struggle for survival and die out.

I think at some level, the concept of free markets is similar to natural selection. The people or enterprises best suited to the current market conditions survive and thrive. (Note that I am not saying that free market theory = natural selection, but merely that they are similar to some extent). And the one thing we know from our 4 billion year history is that the system works. Give it enough time and space and we might end up with something rich and diverse, like life on planet earth.

Does that mean laissez-faire free markets are the way to go for the various national economies today?

I think this is where we should think about this problem a little bit more. Here are a couple of my thoughts on this.

The first is that natural selection works, but only for the species best adapted to their surroundings. The rest die out. It is estimated that around 99.9% of all the species that ever lived are now extinct. Similarly free markets may not be the kindest to the folks who are least fit to survive in the market: people who are currently unemployed or poor, especially the kids born homeless and poor. Most of us don’t fall in this group, so we might not be the best set of people to decide for them.

Also natural selection kept species interdependent via the food chain i.e. change in the population of one species caused a change in the population of the other species up and down the food chain. This was only true until humans evolved and made all their scientific progresses. Now food can be produced in factories. We don’t need to keep the millions of species around to survive. A parallel can be drawn between invasive species like humans and the big monopolies which are bound to arise in a free market without regulations. A big enough monopoly can take control of the market and bend it to its will. It can kill all the competition exacerbating the problems I mentioned in the paragraph above.

So what’s the best solution if we had the option of choosing one? I’m not sure. Clearly the other extremes (e.g. communism) don’t work either, and have been utter failures wherever employed.

One thing I am fairly confident about is that in the long term, we cannot have a perfect system (economic or otherwise). Perfect systems are a myth. And in spite of the criticisms, I think the current American system is pretty good and ideal results might be achieved by making small incremental changes to it. Obama’s “reforms” might serve as a good experiment to test whether moving to the left of the current system works or not. They might succeed or they might fail, but we will come out wiser on the other side.

A Change is gonna come

USA finally elected an African-American president. Even if the pre-election polls virtually guaranteed an Obama victory, I was afraid of the so-called Bradley effect coming into play. It's the theory that "some voters tend to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet, on election day, vote for his white opponent.". Thankfully it never happened. Maybe it is a sign of the changing America.

At the same time I'm still surprised that after 8 years of Bush, after such a negative campaign run by the McCain camp and such a poor running mate choice of Sarah Palin, 46% of popular vote still went to the McCain-Palin ticket.

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Losing my Religion: A brilliant piece in Cricinfo about the beginning of the end of era in cricket. For all of us who grew up watching Sachin and Kumble and Dada and Dravid, cricket truly is never going to be the same. Change is happening in cricket too, a slightly sad one.

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Finally a word on the global financial meltdowns. Some say this is the death of the free-market ideology. Some say this is further proof that we need totally unregulated free markets. There a whole bunch of "I told you so" opinionating, and very less rational thinking. It should be interesting to see how the Obama government handles this. If more regulations indeed fixes the mess, does that mean the free-market experiment is over? I hope not, but would not be surprised if we come out on the other side with a completely different way of running the economy.

Nexus

Another cool data visualization tool. This one graphs out your friend network from Facebook. Here's my friend graph. It's is pretty cool how neat clusters are formed between different sets of your friends, like your old school buddies, undergrad/grad school friends, work friends/colleagues etc. And how some people act as "Connectors" across multiple groups. Studying social graphs has been around for a while now, and it is nice to have simple visualization apps which everyone can use easily.

Wordle

Here is a list of the most commonly used words on my blog, courtesy the cool app "Wordle". Looks like I talk a lot about Federer and science fiction and winning. Who would have thought....

Xenophobia

But a fair-minded person can look around and see that it really is too crowded. Somebody needs to go. But who? Well, you start with the poorest. Or the newest. Or the one farthest away from yourself, however you define yourself. Immigrants hope, ultimately, to be in a position where they have the right to keep out new immigrants, to tell the next person to get off the train in your city that he must go back, he can't stay. That's when you know you're truly native.

From Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

So true for Mumbai or any other community/city/country in the world. This kind of xenophobia is a natural instinct, honed by generations of human evolution. Can we triumph over this instinct?

Wimbledon's gonna be fun...

We have 3 people who have a very good chance of winning at Wimbledon. We got Novak Djokovic, a great all-court player, the Aussie open champion and arguably the next world no. 1. We got Rafael Nadal, who is on cruise control right now, blowing past Federer in the French Open and then running though the draw on the grass courts at Queens. And then we got Roger Federer, the 5 time defending champion, one of the best tennis players of all time.

Going by current form, I would not bet against Nadal actually winning Wimbledon. He is playing the best tennis of life, even on grass, where he beat Roddick and Djokovic back-to-back at Queens. Federer, on the other hand had a horrible start to the year, but is playing much better now having made it to the French Open finals and winning the Gerry Weber Open on grass. Is this going to be the year Federer is finally toppled at Wimbledon? Or is Federer going to turn around the year, with his 6th consecutive victory at his favorite venue?

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

One of my favorite science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday. Back in my school days, his book 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book, not the movie) was probably the first book which had a major impact on me, challenging my preconceived notions about the universe, god, religion etc. It also got me hooked on science fiction books: the smart ones (Clarke, Asimov, Niven etc.), not the Star Wars/Star Trek types. I believe good science fiction is probably the only genre which lets you 'stretch your imagination' beyond what you thought was possible.

I leave you with a video he broadcasted on his 90th birthday, just 3 months ago, in which he talks about the past, present and especially the future. Great stuff.