fundamental intelligence

Ninaivu

2011-05-08T01:33:00.000-05:00

நாணம் துறந்தாள்
தன் உயிற் காதல் துறந்தாள்
தன்னுள் இயங்கிய கறு துறந்தாள்
தாய்மை துறந்தாள்
வேகம் கொண்ட
இவ்வூறிமை போரில்
தன்னை துறந்தாள்
தன் இறுதி இருக்கை துறந்தாள்
...
ஐயகோ நாம் இந்த வீரரின்
நினைவு துறந்தோமே

A very concise and good summary of infinity theories

2010-01-24T02:54:00.000-05:00

Infinity Madness

2010-01-24T02:16:00.001-05:00

What is infinity?

2010-01-23T12:48:00.005-05:00

If universe is conceptualized as a binary string (not related to string theory) - which can be done if we assume universe to be nothing but the states of all that which make up universe from the start of the universe to now. Is that string infinite? Infinity is quite a vague concept and that resides only in our minds as something which goes forever like a line or series of numbers. What rigourous mathematical significance does infinity hold. If infinity is vague then so is infinitesimal. If there is no infinity, there is no infinitesimal and then that means there is no circle. Mathematical induction doesnt prove that a rule is applicable for all numbers but only that if we assume it is applicable for a number, and if it can be proved that it is also applicable for the next number - thus we can keep extending this to large numbers one number after another as much as we "wish". Now where does infinity come here?

Godel, Cantor, Turing, Chaitin all depend on that vague definition of infinity for all their theorems and discoveries to be true. Einstein and newton are different. We can have a discrete theory of general relativity or mechanics if we can use discrete calculus based on very small numbers which is not exactly infinitesimal. So all physics wont go flat but all theorems which depend entirely on the concept of infinity that it goes on forever would have a big problem. The diagnolization routine of cantor, on which all incompleteness theorem variations of godel, turing and chaitin depend on, is based on the fundamental concept of infinity. If we replace the infinity by very huge numbers these theorems will fall flat but that wouldnt entirely be the case with all other laws of physics though there needs to be considerable thought in framing laws of finite physics or discrete physics.

Boundaries like speed of light, minimum temperature, uncertainity principle (though different from other two) needs to be looked at as they are limits somewhat similar to the ones posed by godel, chaitin and turin. They like incompletness theorem might hold some clue into the true nature of real infinity.

Deciphering the universe video game!

2009-04-02T04:26:00.004-05:00

Is universe a complex video game? May be and here I scrible some random thoughts attesting to that.

Karma signfies the points you take from one level of the video game to another
Moksha is when you get released out of the video game
Quantum Decoherence happens through end user input (the video game player) when a random decision is made about the quantum state a particle occupies
Yogis and Saints have access to the cheat sheets of the video game and use it to play the game in ways ordinary players cant
All laws of physics and other sciences are laws of the video game
Vedas, Sutras, Puranas which sages gained access to are may be a glimpse into the user manuals of the video game

The question how by being within the video game can you prove that it is a video game? I think Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Hisenberg's Principle, Second Law of Thermodynamics, The Halting Problem and Bell's paradox has got something to do with this.

May be reading the sutras and puranas might give a clue as to the rules of this video game. I think even working with these sidhas and yogi's who have gotten partial access to these cheat sheets might also yield some insight.

mmm just scribling random stuff..

Turing, Brain and Universe or Machine, Conciousness and God

2009-03-26T08:14:00.006-05:00

The following order might end up being order of the power of various models of computation:

Finite Automaton (Only knowledge of current state and finite instruction set and finite states )
Pushdown Automaton (Knowledge of current state, infinite stack memory and finite instruction set and states)
Turing Machine (Knowledge of current state,infinite tape memory and finite instruction set and states)
Brain (?)
Universe (?)

If by studying the Brain if we are able to come up with a model of computation more powerful than turing machine to explain the power and complexity of the brain, we would have made a unique discovery for mathematics and biology.

If by studying the universe if we are able to come up with a model of computation more powerful than the above brain model to explain the power and complexity of the universe, we would a unique discovery for mathematics and physics.

If we are able to do the above two things then truly conciousness and god would be just synonyms for better computational models. The assumption though here is that the brain and universe's computational model is discrete.

But first we need to prove conclusively and objectively the necessity for a more powerful model than the turing machine to explain brain and universe. Only after that a search for those powerful models makes sense.

Open Cloud Computing - Decentralization is the key!

2009-03-13T02:07:00.003-05:00

Today I attended a conference in IBM on cloud computing. There I learnt quite clearly that IBM and other biggies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are planning to sell computing power and storage capacity like electricity or water or gas. Their distribution network is the internet. So all your data will reside in a set of complex datacenters hosted by these companies and even your dataprocessing will be done in these datacenters.

This helps in decreasing maintenance costs due to economies of scale and hence could be cost effective for the consumer. Due to the reduction in price, people instead of owning computing power by directly buying hardware, would start buying computing power based on usage as in the case of electricity. When more and more people move towards this model slowly an oligopoly develops similar to what you find in the case of oil companies. The oligolpoly develops as people want to store their data in a trusted place and also the sophistication of maintaining such a complex datacenter is so high that only few companies will attempt and be succesful at it. This would mean that for all all your data and computing power needs, you would slowly depend on a select few sophisticated vendors like IBM, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. The danger of concentration in control here is similar to the danger which the twin towers faced. Centralization of resources or dependency is prone to attack. By attacking a Google datacenter or Microsoft Azure datacenter, a terrorist can wreak as much damage as they achieved by attacking just 2 towers - bigger bang for the buck. This is inspite of the redundancies these companies would have incorporated. While on the other hand why is US not able to attack and capture all the terrorists? That is because the terrorists function in a very decentralized mode and hence there is less bang for the buck when you attack terrorists.

Apart from that, oligopoly is also dangerous as soon a cartel would develop which will fully control computing power prices or storage capacity prices. This is because,in an oligopoly market isn't that efficient and adam smith's invisible hand doesn't work properly. Apart from price control, this concentration of data and computing power would also have implications for nation's sovereignty as all data of the citizen's of a nation cannot be held by a corporate entity which doesnt come under the nation's jurisdiction. By simply disallowing access to the people of a particular nation to their datacenters, they can bring the country to a standstill.

My suggestion is to create a open cloud computing platform which connects all the computers in the world and creates a super grid. There would be a software fabric over the super grid, which would enable each computer in the world access the combined computing power and storage power of all the computers in the world. This will help people to minimize the wastage of storage and computing power and keep the world green. If a person consumes more power than what he provides on a average, he needs to pay the fabric the difference. This would inturn would be sent by the fabric to the person who consumes less power than what he provides on a average. So this is so decentralized like the terrorists that they wouldnt know how to attack such a network, except ofcourse if you use a virus. One idea would be to localize viruses by creating disjoint regions inside the cloud computing space. But definitely this is a problem which you need to take care of.

Randomness and Laws

2009-02-26T06:42:00.007-05:00

Currently in science, the amount of experimental data which is getting generated is extremely high. As more sophisticated technology is available for conducting experiments, more datapoints are getting generated through them. Hence it is getting more difficult to come up with abstract laws and theories which explain the gathered experimental data, as sophistication of human brain hasnt grown at the same rate as the technology propelling experimental data gathering. Hence we need automated knowledge abstracters which grind the humungus experimental data and provide a high level essence for human brain to consume. For instance one needs sophisticated pattern matching algorithms to sift through the 3 billion bases of genomes to extract the disease genes. It is a task which cannot be done through pen/paper or pure thought but through sophisticated tools and algos. As a result future Einsteins should be very proficient in usage of technology to sift through the data to reduce it to a more consumable for elegant theories. For all you know future theories may not be elegant or minimalist in nature. The theory or the rule which defines a particular process itself could be defined by a sophisticated state transition machine or in general a turing machine. The algorithmic information content of these machines could be pretty high and hence might be extremely ugly in form compared to the elegance of e=mcsquared.

I propose here two hypothesis.

Hypothesis 1:

The law of entropy or second law of thermodynamics states entropy increases with time in a closed system (and example of which is universe). From this we can deduce laws/rules which have taken shape later in time when entropy is more would be less elegant in form and will have more algorithmic content (requiring greater randomness for explanation) than laws which were formed early on. So at any point the algorithmic content of all laws/rules in the universe increases with time. This doesnt include mathematics laws but only physical laws.

So in short I propose similar to entropy, the algorithmic complexity of the turing machine which explains all aspects of the universe is increasing with time. So the final ends state of the universe would have infinite algorithmic complexity or infinite algorithmic information content (AIC as defined by Chaitin). So the universe is moving from lawfulness to lawlessness or anarchy.

Hypothesis 2:

The other contrary hypothesis is that the second law of thermodynamics doesnt apply to universe as a closed system. The algorithmic information content of the universe is constant and minimal. It is just that the universe has mechanism to inject pseudo randomness to fool us to think that the complexity is increasing. We lack the ability to compress the apparent AIC to a lesser minimal real AIC. Invoking Chaitin's interpretation of Godel's theorem, we can never be sure that if a given randomn string can be compressed further or not. Same thing might be in play in the universe as well. So correlating that with second law of thermodynamics it could be that there is pseudo entropy which is increasing and not true entropy.

Bell's Paradox

2008-09-01T07:10:00.028-05:00

Though string theory, currently the forerunner for unified theory, has made a lot of progress, I we have still not understood the true essence of what probability means. We are will still left with mathematical equations which work but continue to fall short of attaining true cognizance.

I have tried defining probability a million times now but I havent come with one good definition and it seems to me that probability is just a reflection of our inability to measure or predict accurately. When a coin is tossed, it IS possible for you to calculate the outcome, but that's a very cumbersome calculation which involves millions of minute variables - and hence we settle down to an empirical approximation.

But quantum mechanics says that a particular quantum property of an object doesnt inherently have a value, but attains a value only when measured. That too if you measure it n times, the object will be attain different property values everytime and we cannot predict which value will be attained before a particular measurement is made. But what we can predict approximately is the frequency pattern of the values attained. To put it in perspective of a coin toss when the coin is tossed we arent sure whether the result is going to be head or tail, only when we see the result we know it and also we cannot predict the result of next coin toss, but what we can know is approximately the ratio of number of head and tail results for the tosses done till now. Please note that your information is actually about the history of coin tosses done till now and we just extrapolate that to the future. In other words if some one claims that a true unbiased coin will have the ratio of (Heads/Tails) as 1, then it is a definition of an unbiased coin and nothing more than that. If your real coin has ratio of .95 till now then you could say that your coin is biased as far as what you have observed till NOW. So again statistics of past is one thing and using it to predict future is totally another thing. This is different from physics laws which typically has some elementary causality attached to it instead of relying on empirical curve fitting and extrapolation. This empiricity makes me uncomfortable with the concept of probability and randomness.

The coin toss experiment and its associated probability explanation doesnt explain exactly the concept of quantum mechanical probability. Extending further the coin toss example, suppose the coin has been tossed and it is now lying in the ground, but say no one has looked at the result. According to Quantum Mechanics, as no one has observed it, even now it is in a hybrid state of Head-Tail and it takes on a concrete head or tail state only when someone sees the result. The attainment of state happens not when it settles in the ground but when you see it or measure it. Though the parallel is not exactly perfect, it provides the necessary insight to understand what qmech means by "only when observed an object attains its quantum property state".

If the question is - but then before we measured what state is it in? The answer is - it is in a fuzzy state defined by the probability function - in the coin (unbiased). It is just a statistical probalistic state imagery based on the curve which approximately fits the result frequencies. The right answer is we do not know or we do not care (qmech extremists pov).

If suppose we really care, then the question is can we measure the fuzzy state without measuring? What a meaningless question that is, some would say? Not so, Infact this was considered to be one of the most important questions in modern physics and multiple actors including Einstein and Bohr played a part in answering that. Stating again as per QMech, when when we measure the fuzzy state, we disturb the measured and as a result the measured moves from fuzziness to a concrete state and hence lose the fuzzy state. So how do we find out what was the fuzzy value before we measured?.

For understanding this we need to discuss another topic called entanglement. Entanglement happens between two particles which are setup in such a manner that if we measure the value of a canonical property of one of the particles then we will automatically know the value of the same canonical property of the other particle - typically particles are entangled in such a manner that they give opposite results. So let us take two such entangled coins and my blind friend takes one coin to an uninhabited galaxy outside the milky way - we both toss that coin at the same time and I look at the result (the canonical property) and see it is heads. My blind friend cannot look at the result (has not measured) and hence should I say that the coin my friend has is still in a fuzzy state - that is not true as once I see "heads" result in my coin I automatically know that the result in my friend's coin is "tails" because of the entanglement. So my friend's coin without any "active or disturbing" measurement seems to have attained a concrete state which is not what QMech told us in the first place.

Now there was a trick which I slowly injected in the above paragraph. I made the assumption that me measuring the result of my coin will not affect or disturb my friend's coin as it is very far away. In other words I assumed the measurement I made on my coin will not somehow make my friend's coin attain a concrete state instead of remaining in the fuzzy state (whether my friend looks at it or not). This I assume because nothing can travel faster than the speed of the light and hence my measurement action on my coin cannot affect my friend's coin instantly. This is fancifully called "locality". If we remove this assumption and state that these coins are entangled in such a way that measuring one of it means in essence measuring both however separate they may be in space, then we will go back to where we started.

Now that we have explained the topic of entanglement and the complications it brings to the table let us see what Einstein thought of quantum mechanical measurements - we will get back to entanglement shortly. Einstein claimd that a state (result) already exists and that is the state which gets revealed when you measure and the state is not attained because you measure. While Bohr said no such state exists before measurement and the object attains the state only when measured and because you measure.

But if "Locality" assumption is really true (nothing travels faster than light), we would have known the result (quantum state) of my friend's coin without measuring it (or without making it attain a state by measuring it) and Einstein argued this is so because it already posseses a predefined concrete classical state and not a fuzzy quantum state. So entanglement and locality combined provided Einstein to bring home his contention.

Through this argumnet Einstein tried to prove quantum mechanics, though succesful in accurately predicting result frequencies, is limited as it cannot predict the result itself. More importantly it cannot hide behind the assumption that there is no concrete result (internal state) before measurement as that is not true based on the above paragraph. To put it differently, concrete (non fuzzy) result does exist before measurement (as in the case of my friend's coin) but quantum mechanics cannot predict it. It has to be improved further so that this limitation is removed.

So now having given this argument, Einstein wanted come up with a theory which without violating the Locality assumption, provide a mechanism to predict the result rather than just the result frequencies. Now we will get into Meta world. Let us for a moment assume such a theory H exists - a theory more complete than QMech yet operating within the Locality constraint. Now for an important point - here - This theory (as per Einstein) is such that it "reveals" the inherently existing concrete result before measurement is made and we do NOT play a part in attainment of the result. We are NOT in the business of merely predicting result frequencies "if measurements are made". This theory is not about predicting the "result of a measurement", but revealing the "result or inherent state" which exist whether we measure it or not. Hope that subtlety is appreciated. But then this is just conjecturing as we do not whether such a theory can exist at all. Now is it possible to prove that such a theory Einstein can never exist and hence can never be discovered? This is similar to Godel's theorem which states that no formal structure can be created in mathematics which can be used to completely prove all theorems in mathematics. The above statement is not fully accurate but sufficient enough for our current discussion.

Around 1960 a person named Bell, thought about proving the existence or non existence of such inherent states prior to measurements and existence of such local hidden variable or H theories which can extract such states. He also thought of an experiment which can be performed and came up with a set of proability equations (inequalties) which the results of the experiments should confirm to if it were to be explained by any local hidden variable theory. By doing this Bell provided a way to check out whether such a theory is possible to construct. Please note Bell didnt come up with such a theory - he just indicated for any theory which assumes internal state these probability equations has to be true. Hence if it is found that if these equations dont hold good using the experimental values got from actual observations, then the actual observations cannot be explained by these theories. Hence the class of such theories is false!

Now before moving to that experiment and the probality equations the results of that experiment should conform to, we need to cover some basic ground.

I have been using the coins and its results to explain till now. To conform with other concepts which Bell is going to discuss, I am planning to introduce the coin dice. This coin dice is similar to normal dice and has six faces, but each face doesnt have a number but is printed with head or tails. The opposing faces will have opposite impressions (head or tail). So if the top face has head, the bottom one will have tail. This is similar in the other two face pairs. Let us also color these three face pairs into Red, Blue and Green. Now say you roll the dice and it settles down and green face is facing you, if some one asked whether the result is head or tails - you would say it is heads for the green face. But then if they prod and ask what about the red face - you dont know what to say. You can only get a valid result only in one of the face (pairs) anytime you roll the dice and not in other faces (you could think of the other two faces as faces of a coin which is standing on its edge not settling down to a head or a tail). Seems reasonable?

This is similar to what Quantum Mechanics tells you about noncommuting observables. The red, blue and green faces of the dice are noncommuting observables as at any point of time you can only measure only one of those. When you measure with certainity one of those like our green face which had a "head" - we are totally unsure of the other two variables - infact we say they dont have a state.Infact we say they have a fuzzy state. So isnt quantum mechanics intuitive enough?

Now we have set the stage for discussing Bell.

Asssume in our previous experiment of entangled coins, we have entangled coin-dices (descibed above). They are entangled in such a way that if I get a head on the green face in my dice, then my blind friend will get tail on his green face (it is like my friend looks at the opposite face of my dice). This way if I roll the dice and measure head on a green face, then I know for sure that if my blind friends rolls the dice and if it falls on the green face the result will be tails whether he sees it or not. But if my friend rolls his dice and get a red face and then sees (my friend is no more blind - he got eyes) his result is heads, then we indirectly know my red face result is tails as both dices are engtangled. This way now I know the result of two faces of my dice - Red and Green though I personally measured only one. I have tricked using entanglement and I seemed to have violated a basic principle of noncommuting variables in quantum mechanics.

Now this is where Bell comes in.

To extend futher, assume me an my friend start rolling a lot of these entangled dices at agreed upon times one by one so that we make a lot of repeated measurements simultaneously. After a lot of dice rolling, we compare results and as a first step we strike all measurements where the dice rolls and same color face appear in both places. We are left with measurements where different color faces appear. Now if we calculate the probability then we would see of the n rolls of dice, 1/3 of the rolls will involve same color ~0.66n will have different colors in different places which is what we are bothered about.So we take that set of observations and try to compute some inequalities with those trials. Typically measurements are made specifically for the green and red faces, but in our case I am making random measurements being true to the dice paradigm. For the below discussion this doesnt have an implication, but I think some thought needs to go into this assumption as I believe it has some potential in explaining something.

In those (0.66n) if we assume this convention - N(Gh,Rt) means the number of rolls where I had a Green face with head showing as a result and my friend had Red face with tails.

And we write N(Gh,Rt:Bh)for those trials N(Gh,Rt) where B not explicitly measured has actually a value of head. This is where the possibilty of an inherent concrete state is getting introduced and this is a critical assumption. As for an unmeasured quantity having a definite concrete state and a numbers associated with it might not make sense from qmech point of view or for that matter even in our coin-dice roll POV.

Now if we console ourselves, take that assumption and proceed in that direction, we see that:

N(Gh,Rt:Bh) + N(Gt,Rh:Bt) >= 0 [we are using : to denote the unmeasured quantity] - Equation 1(both numbers at LHS correspond to no of trials and cant be negative)

Question - but can these numbers interfere?? and should we use addition or inteference addition - but then we postpone thinking about that disturbing thought for now.

Adding N(Gh,Rt:Bt) + N(Gh,Rh:Bt) to both sides of the above equation.

N(Gh,Rt:Bh) + N(Gt,Rh:Bt) + N(Gh,Rt:Bt) + N(Gh,Rh:Bt) >= N(Gh,Rt:Bt) + N(Gh,Rh:Bt) - Equation 2

If we can assume ->

N(Gh,Rt) = N(Gh,Rt:Bt)+ N(Gh,Rt:Bh) - Equation 3

Meaning Blue face could have head or tail in those trials we measured Green having head and Read having tail. So the above equation holds good. Now again we assume that it has the possibility of only two definite different concrete states and not a fuzzy state.

Similarly we can write -

N(Rh:Bt) = N(Gt,Rh:Bt)+ N(Gh,Rh:Bt) - Equation 4
N(Gh:Bt) = N(Gh,Rt:Bt) + N(Gh,Rh:Bt) -Equation 5
(These additions are even more intriguing to interpret)

So combining equation 2, 3 and 4 we get (I am using the : which is slightly different from how it is done. I want to use it as to treat it with context than treating this as just a set theory exercise)

N(Gh,Rt)+ N(Rh:Bt) >= N(Gh:Bt) - Bells inequality.

We could create similarly other inequalities using the same logic.

For deriving this inequality we used logic and apart from that we made two major assumptions which Einstein made of his theory:

a. Measuring value of one dice doesnt disturb other dice as they are so far apart (locality)
b. Even if a coin dice face value is not measured it has an inherent concrete state (head or tails)

Now there have been experiments for counting these Ns in the above equations and they found that the actual Ns from certain experiments (not all) dont confirm to the above inequality. So something is definitely wrong in one of our assumptions in arriving at these inequalities which we had a hint or two when we were deriving these inequalities. One way to resolve the paradox is to say that hidden variable theories cannot explain the experimental observations and are false. Another is to say Hidden Variable theories exist, but they are non local. Obviously we could have both assumptions wrong. There is another POV which suggest that the logic of set theory we used to derive the inequalities could be itself wrong and do not apply to our current situation which is like shaking all foundations!.

The last but not the least, the observations themselves could be wrong. There have been different attempts at understanding the reasoning behind the violations of Bell's Inequality in experiments but I think there is not full consensus.

But one thing which needs to noted is that the observations of these experiments tie very well with predictions of these observations through quantum mechanical theory. So even though quantum mechanical theories may be incomplete, they explain observations of all experiments conducted till now. On the other hand we dont yet have a credible local hidden variable theory, but yet Bell has dealt a blow in the hope of finding a credible one. This is quite similar to what Godel did for the Hilbert program.

The Flatteners and Non Flatteners

2005-08-16T17:29:00.000-05:00

Here is a video feed of a talk Tom Friedman gave recently at the International Finance Corporation, partly to plug the book. If you like Friedman's arguments, watch it.
PS: Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor of The Hindu, has a critique of Friedman's book on his new blog.

My Review:

Contrary to my expectations, I liked Tom Friedman's speech. I have read his lexus and blah blah, but then I didnt find it impressive.I also read Siddharth's Blog, which through a series of anecdotes pin pointed the flaws in Tom's argument. But overall I had a feel he was just nitpicking and not abstracting with clarity, the impending consequences of globalization.

The main objections of the anti globalization brigade are

Globalization based progress is too unplanned and hence destroys the environment irreversibly.
Globalization increases the inequality divide.

In this blogpost I will be lookin the latter. There has always been inequalities and will continue to be. During Pre globalization there was a different kind of inequality. It can be defined thus.

All countries had rich and poor.
There were poor countries and rich countries.

This equilibrium state was maintained because there were many impediments because of geography, culture, language as a result work couldnt flow and hence wealth couldnt freely flow between these countries. Now that these are slowly being taken apart due to the technological advancements in the past few decades, the old equilibrium is disturbed and we are in a continuous journey of finding the new equilibrium in this new John Lennon world.

Now the new equilibrium will read as:

There are no countries.
There are rich and poor.

The rich and poor divide in the new globalized world will be higher than the old non globalized world. The new equilibrium is attained by a lot of people (middle class and poor) in USA getting poorer and the lot of people (middle class and poor) in say India, getting little richer. Obviously there is difference between the amount of the increase in riches and the amount of decrease in riches of the middle class and poor.

This difference goes into the pockets of the common rich of the world, whether it be an Indian or an American.But then this a dangerous game where there are a lot of unhappy people, suddenly getting robbed off their existing standard of living though there are also an equal number of happy people who got benefited because of the equilibrium shift.

This is not only about money. Not only money is flowing, so is culture, language. We are heading towards a monoculture where the identities like "Nation" and "Religion" becomes little fuzzy. The people who are successful in this kind of atmosphere, would be ok with fuzziness and move ahead. But those unsuccesful and those who are not able to adapt themselves to the changing world order, will try to resist this change through blogs and bombs.A survival war between the adapters and resistors, is bound to happen and is happening as we speak. What my gut feel is the adapters will prevail in this war.

But then the adapters are very opportunistic and pragmatic, but not necessarily visionaries. So they think short term. This short term thinking will lead to long term consequences to the ecological balance of the world. I am not talking about the social ecology's balance as that will be acheived to an extent after the above war. I am talking about earth's ecological balance. This might lead to destruction of our race if we arent brilliant enough by then to control the ecological behaviour of earth or invade other planets and make it habitable or make our physical body adpatable to changing ecological conditions of earth through breakthroughs in genetics and science.

Gobalization is continoulsly evolving starting with the neolithic man as opposed to a recent demarcation between pre-globalized world and post-globalized world. It has something, which has been happening for ages. Yet even in a continuous evolution process there are the Cambrian periods, where the speed of change will happen in a frenetic pace like say, 1900-1930 in the evolution of modern physics where the basic structure of physics was being modified by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and other stalwarts on a daily basis. One can draw feeble parallel to Mandelbrot’s fractal trading time where the there are moments in stock market where a lot of activity happens in a very limited time window, while there are other periods where very less activity happens in a elongated period of time. So if we need to actually understand the stock price variation, one needs to plot it against trading time instead of real time. (Yet I am not sure whether his fractal scaling process works with the financial markets.)I feel we are living in very interesting times, these are times of packed time, as Andy Grove would call it, inflection points. In that sense, I feel there is a difference in the speed of evolution of globalization which was present during the times of Alexander and now (Tholkapiyam a tamil epic written 3000 years ago has talked about trade between Tamilnadu and Greece). The difference is in the order of intensity, but when intensity reaches a different order, sometimes there is a possibility of incurring a qualitative difference in the consequences. In that sense I feel this is the Cambrian era for globalization.

We have to wait and see if the humans can adapt faster and control the impending destruction.

A Case for Product Morality Rating

2005-05-22T01:06:00.000-05:00

I read an article on American Capitalism (Damaged goods, May 19th 2005) in economist where the author had indicated that the challenge of corporate governance reformers is to make managers more accountable to shareholders. Apart from some bad apples, the world of American Capitalism has always strived to keep the shareholders happy, as I believe one definitely can’t fool the market for long due to the well defined process of auditing and accountability. I would say the more concerning fact is the corporate accountability to its other stakeholders, the employees, community and the environment where no such accountability/auditing process in place like SOX. There have been isolated attacks by independent documentary creators and media at specific corporations. Though these attacks create limited awareness of the rampant corporate greed, it hasn’t yielded any specific actionable agenda for the people who are socially conscious. In this era of extreme specialization, where self-sufficiency is out of the door, all citizens are extremely dependent on the products created by these corporations who are accused of immoral acts of greed. Even if a citizen want to dissociate himself from these immoral acts of these corporations, does he have an alternative, a sensible means of identifying, which product is immoral and which product is moral? Is there an objective way of charting out something called brand morality index, or a company morality index or a product morality index? Price is the only concrete quantitative factor in decision making, when choosing a product. List of available features can also to an extent aid in deciding which product to choose. It starts becoming hazy when it comes to quality and totally vague, when it comes to morality or sin attached to each product. There are many sites, which provide comparative pricing from computers to auto insurance, and hence market plays most efficiently in regards to price. There are very many sites in the Internet where you can find good customer reviews and product rating. Though largely subjective, it gives a good idea to the consumer in gauging product quality. What is lacking in this panorama of product information sites is a site highlighting morality information associated with the product. The exact amount of sin associated with each product hasn’t been captured in an objective and quantitative fashion to aid customers in decision-making. There is no such thing as a Product Morality Rating. Here lies the flaw and one thinks for a moment that Adam Smith's invisible hand is error prone. In this case for the invisible hand to function properly, it needs an important ingredient called transparency and dissemination of relevant information to concerned parties similar to say publishing quarterly results. So I think here there is a distinctive need to maintain a bureau, which monitors and calculates the "Product Morality Rating" (PMR) and make it transparent to the public. Also there is a need for transparency law, which requires each company to publish company wide morality metrics and product specific morality metrics, which needs to be calculated and audited in an objective manner similar to corporate annual results. So after publication of morality metrics or rating to the consumers, based on the consumer preference, the invisible hand will start functioning. If the public prefers a moral product to an immoral one, the companies will automatically find it more profitable to be moral than being immoral. Of course quantitatively speaking, the price, quality, morality rating and profits will adjust itself to a new equilibrium, which will reflect the morality of a society, which has all the information to choose. Though the above mechanism I feel would provide more value to morality currency, the reached morality equilibrium is not a true reflection of the morality of the nation, but a combination of the purchasing power distribution and morality of the distribution classes. So the number of votes for morality, a citizen has is dependent on the purchasing power of the citizen, but then that is as far as Adam Smith's invisible hand can take you in the land of capitalism. My wife and I have started creating a information repository using the publicly available information in finding the morally best product in the commodities which we use for daily life like Milk, Cereals, Bathing Items, Clothing, etc. Certain metrics we are planning to calculate are minimum wage of the laborer who was involved in the production of the product, the amount of environmental pollution caused, the normalized wage inequality of the company, the amount of animal cruelty involved etc. We soon hope to publish in a blog named “Living Morally”. The same concept can be extended to the stock market, as the morality metrics of companies can be used to cumulatively measure the stock holder's morality rating based on the stocks he posseses. Depending on the morality preferences of the stock holders, the invsible hand will operate to attain a new "morality adjusted stock price".

Contemplating Democracy and Capitalism

2005-05-18T17:12:00.000-05:00

The other day, my wife mentioned the term ‘Checks and Balance’ forming the foundation of a healthy democracy. We concluded that the absence a free forum to express diverse individual opinions and absence of freedom to choose one’s personal stance about the present state of things would result in a monoculture, and a stale status quo.

America in spite of the criticisms at least provides a free forum for an individual’s expression. A country which boasts of a block-buster documentary film, the core theme of which is to show the president of the that country as a clown truly upholds the ideals of free opinion. The more interesting testimony that democracy truly works in America is that the country re-elected this clown for another term in spite of the film.
This would mostly be the case when moderates and not radicals or extremists decide. If unlimited ruling power is in the hands of limited number of people, for unlimited amount of time, you always run the risk of monoculture and suppression of free opinion. Of course when moderates are ruling, progress is slow, reforms take a long time to get implemented, change is limited. So aren’t we in the same rut of stale status quo.
But then here we are assuming that there are two equally vociferous and powerful radicals at both end of the spectrum. This normally might not be the case. For the Right Wing Radicals power takes the form of Money or the “Vengeful Majority”. For the Left Wing Radicals power takes the form of ‘Anger of impoverished Majority’ or Alienated Minority. In this power struggle at various points of history at various places, the Left or the Right has won. The Bolshevik and French Revolution were major victories of the Left. But the present economic revolution of the developed and developing nations is a thumping victory for the right. At present the world is tilted in the favor of the Right.

Initially we had the Monarchy, before the democracy or representation as a paradigm of governance spread by Locke, who reinstated Pericles (431 BC) vision:

“Our constitution is named democracy, because it is in the hands not of the few but of the many. But our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes and our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every branch of achievement… on grounds of excellence alone…”

John Locke’s cardinal concepts of democracy where “equality, individual freedom, government based upon consent of the governed, and limitations upon the state”

Economic Liberalism or Capitalism was also gaining currency, with pioneers like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mills. Their concept was in alignment with democracy, but instead of power, they were bothered about property and distribution of the same based on grounds of excellence.
Democracy and Capitalism combined, wanted to distribute property and power, which was held only by aristocracy to all citizens without any discrimination. This opened the “Game of Attaining Individual Prosperity” to all. Everything was even and fair. Though initially voting rights were limited, but then as time passed, universal suffrage became inevitable.

This was a good move. This followed a more rational approach for division of property and power (On Grounds of Excellence), than the approach followed in the days of Monarchy (On Grounds of Inheritance). This was also true in the matters of ‘Truth’ during the renaissance period where the Monopoly of ‘Truth’ held by the church was being broken. Rational science based on rigid principles, proof and scientific method replaced the clergy. So Truth, Power and Property were liberated from the clutches of few and were given to the masses.

All was well and good. Capitalism combined with Democracy reigned as the ideal solution for world problems and equitable sharing of wealth and property. Scientific method was touted as the proper approach for understanding and explanation of the hidden truth. The great game of capitalism started with much fanfare and hope. Everybody participated with the aim of winning. As every game, this game also had winners and losers. This game had a unique problem, that the winners had more probability of winning than the losers. So as the game was played for more than a century, they found that there were miserable losers and super winners. As with all games, in this game too, the winners were less and losers were more. Gradually the status of affairs seemed like old times for the losers. Now the Monarchy was replaced by the Winners of the capitalist game. Inheritance, like in monarchy remained and so the offsprings of winners without any talent on their part already enjoyed a distinct advantage (e.g. George Bush, Rajiv Gandhi , Birlas and Tatas). Pericles classic notion of democracy based on only ‘Grounds of Excellence’ was being falsified.

Some might say that let us do away with the inheritance of property and make it truly a game based on human capacity and not family’s capacity. May be. But then there is another kind of inheritance, which you would never be able to do away with. The inheritance of genes, qualities. Assuming the genes which are passed on, provides the offspring the similar advantage (like the inheritance of wealth) in winning the capitalist game, how can we do away with that?. What about the surroundings where the child is reared? Doesn’t that give the child an advantage?

So that puts us to the most elementary question.
A question for Pericles: What is this “grounds of excellence”? How do we measure it without bias or partiality?
But the I believe in any game, which has a set of rules for winning, there will be people who are intrinsically better positioned to win the game than others. This intrinsic quality, can be attributed to genes, inherited wealth, surroundings and the most dreaded ‘Even Luck’. So however we try to manipulate the game to attain equality (say reservation system for minorities, domestic protection and subsidies), we are bound to fail. In the new game, only the victors will change, there will always be losers.

So how do we handle this problem? Remove the game?

Beware! This was not what Marx, Lenin or Mao did. They just played a different game, more or less like Monarchy, may be worse than democracy. Stalin was in the league of Hitler and his game was worse than Monarchy itself. In fact all these communists fooled the people with their unjustified rhetoric (read ‘Communist Manifesto’) and unscientific analysis (read ‘Capital’ by Marx) and showcased an appealing ideology without any concern to implementation details. They were in a hurry to change the world like George Bush, without any clear-cut agenda of how to go about it. This mentality of these intellectuals (Marx and Engels) resulted in the most buggy implementation of a not a bad design (but definitely not perfect). World was offered Stalin. Obviously after a lot of patches and service packs, the software crashed.
Some would say Total Free Market is the only solution. Even that is a game and as with every game will have winners and losers and inequality.

So what the hell is the answer? I have witnessed a lot of arguments, read some theories and heard a lot of rhetoric with utmost conviction advocating this and that. There have been great philosophers and great scholars, who have devoted their entire life, to understand this problem and have accepted that they have failed to come up with a convincing solution or have come up with a less convincing solution. There are also half-baked self-proclaimed gurus (including me) with some limited knowledge which they would have gained reading some few books on philosophy and ideology who aver with true unshakeable faith “ This is the way”.
Till now I haven’t truly heard one convincing solution to the world problems, more specifically this survival game problem where every one is a winner or every one is happy (or at least 80% of them are happy).
The closest has been Budha’s Sutra or The Gita, where they both ask of us, humans to quit the game or at least not play the game in the way it is played now. That is asking for too much from us, “Who doesn’t want to win when other are”?

But all set and done, before we find the right way we need check and balances, so we need a Healthy Right and a Healthy Left and a healthy clash of ideas and a healthy argument. So in these times of the winning Right, I tend to support the underdog “The Left” so that we keep it balanced.

Modelling Policy Management

2005-05-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

My thoughts on policies and its application.

What is policy?
Policy is a Ruling/Law which is created by a centralised ruling body. E.g 'Nobody below the age of 18 years are allowed to enter a pub'.

To whom does the policy apply?
Policy is enforced on the subjects who come under the jurisdiction of the centralised ruling body. E.g 'The centralised ruling body is the US Department Of Justice and whose jurisdiction are the subjects of USA'.

Who creates the policy?
The governing body which introduces these policies to enable them to govern effectively and satisfy the important stake holders. Who are important is a totally context oriented question and we will not go into the discussion now.

Who enforces the policy?
The policy can be enforced by people who are in a situation to enforce the policy. E,g 'A pub owner enforces the above policy by disallowing kids less than 18 years of age in his premises'.

Policy Semantics
Policies are statements with complex meaning hidden beneath the semantics of the statements.

Action and Action Application Scope
Policy Statements can be divided into Action and Action Application scope. For instance "Pay State tax' is an Action and the Action Application Scope could be 'California and Arizona'. Action Application Scope is defined based on an attribute 'Location of Residence'. This translates as subjects whose Location of Residence' attribute is California or Arizona have to pay state tax.

Application Scope Variation
The policy application scope indicated in the above example can be thought of as a static policy scope as it bases itself on a mostly static concept of residence. Though many would argue that residence is not a static attribute as one can relocate to a different location. More static and a chauvinistic attribute would be 'Gender' which except for exceptional scenarios is
mostly static. So the application of policy is strictly related to the subject's attribute and the application would be based on the current value of the attribute.

Contained Set and Application Scope
In this Tax example the policy enforcer is subject himself. Suppose a person is residing in 'los angeles' and he looks up for the action 'Pay State Tax' , and finds the action scope doesnt contain 'los angeles' can he decide that he neednt pay state tax? Obviously not. Here the concept of contained set/inheritance comes into play. The application scope is defined as 'California' and
'Arizona' and all sets contained with in. As 'los angeles' is contained with in California it inherits the policies applied to the container. Here we are using the attribute location to create our containers and placing the subject inside the losangeles , which is inside california , which is inside USA . This specific attribute is hierarchial in nature. We will deal more on application scope later in the blog.

Subject Address
In this tree the subject has a unique address (Adam Singer -Apt 21-Meadows Street-Losangeles-California-USA) to identify himself based on the hierarchial property location. In this categorisation we arent considering the homeless and new born babies with no names.

Non Hierarchial Attributes
Apart from the primary hierarchial attribute there might be additional non hierarchial attributes which would reduce/increase the scope of policy. For instance in the 'Pay State Tax' policy, an additional filter attribute would be his age. Here the attribute is an integer list attribute which typically takes values from 1-200 values. We would discuss the concept of implicit grouping based on hierarchial and non hiererachial attributes later in this blog.

Policy Association Linkage
Suppose two contradicting polcies are applied seperately in parent and grand parent containers (assuming hierarchial attribute classification), which should be applied is matter of concern in policy enforcement. By default the policy application would be based on the policy of the closest ancestor. But the policy linkage could also be provided a specific linkage strength at each level and which ever is the strongest could be applied. Total non overridable policy can be set at an ancestor level such that no child can override the policy. Certain policies can be blocked from inheritance and as a result the application scope ends at that level and is not percolated down till the leaves.

Resultant Set Of Policies
There might be multiple policies which would be enforced on the subjects and if we consider one of them if we were tasked to enumerate the set of policies which are applicable to him, that would be a non trivial execrcise of resolving all the inherited and direct policy clashes and creating a resultant set of policies.

The need for cyber policy?
We have touched briefly upond some fundamental concepts of policies and we would restate them again with a different perspective below.

The goverments ruling nations now are dealing with the greater challenge of Policy Restrictions at the national levels for dealing with increasing crime and terrorists. Similarly Cyber Policy is extremely important in this age of rampant computer terrorism and crime. The connected cyber world is filled with domains and sites containing virtual users and computers as its citizens are ruled by companies. These virtual users , computers and network resources which acts as corporate cyber citizen has to be policed with proper policies to prevent cyber crimes hapenning in their corporate country. Let us see what we need to police the cyber country.

List of cyber citizens who we need to apply Policy on:
We need to have directory or a citizen list in which each policed citizen needs to be listed with the citizen's identifier like social security number. This is reflected as directory services in the cyber world. There are different products which provide directory services.

Policy Maker
There has to be a set of policy makers who discuss and create which policy is beneficial to the country and which is not and they create a set of policies which are meaningful. Then there are local policy makers who make policies for states, clubs etc. These are reflected in the Cyber Policy world in different ways and one of them is the set of proprietary policies provided by Windows OS e.g 'Do not edit registry'. These policies only make sense to Windows applications and kernel, though they derive from a generic set of policy standards which reside in everyone's minds but not standardized. The world will sit together and do that sometime, like SOAP,XML and other such things.

Policy Categories
Then there are different sets of Policies. One set of policies catering to Road Laws, one set catering to home owners, one set catering to company owners. These also have a parallel cyber world as network security policies,desktop organisation policy, installed applications policy...

How are policies published and citizens made aware
These policies are laws which are passed as bills and acts. Some policies are part of budget and some fundamental ones are a part of the constitution. It is assumed that all citizens of a country, by the virtue of them being a part of the country needs to follow this policy. The question which arises is suppose in a country a person is illetrate and doesnt have access to all these laws and constitution does an act contrary to the policy what happens in that case? Should he be punished? These are certain fundamental questions which even now policy makers are struggling with. But cyber policies havent reached such maturity till now. The basic difference between real world and cyber world is that the cyber world necessitates some mechanism by which the cyber citizen gets to know of the policy. In most places the cyber policy is specifically pushed to the cyber citizens through policy publishing software like GPMC. A parallel is when a government passes a bill, they personally deliver the copy of the passed bill or amendment to you. This doesnt happen in the government, but it is more of pull where the citizen on need basis can pull that information from the government. So there is a bit of difference between cyber world and actual world in this case.

How does policy affect citizen's behaviour?
The citizen is not aware of a particular policy before its existence, but once the policy is passed and the citizen is made aware of the policy, how does the citizen change its behaviour to follow the policy. For instance let us take the policy of alchohol prohibition in a state. Once the policy is passed, the citizen reorients his behaviour to not to drink alchohol in that state. This is the remarkable capacity of human mind which makes us learn policies and react to it. Is there a parallel in the cyber environment.Unfortunately the applications arent super intelligent to do dynamic policy learning. The applications have hardcoded logic to modify their behaviour to a predefined set of policies. This is the case for Windows OS and Application. If I bring in a new policy would Windows have the capacity to dynamically learn it and modify the OS behaviour to reflect it? Not really.We are not yet there , but will go in the future. The first step is to create a generic policy schema and a policy standard which the global community will get together and do someday.

Policy Enforcement
This is done by observers who are in the lookout for citizens violating policies and these are police officers or cops. Once it is found that they have violated policy, these citizens are punished appropriately to train their human brains not to violate policy. These are advanced concepts which have limited parallels in the cyber policy world. We will look one by one.

Policy Violation Monitoring
This is done by police using closed circuit televisions, patrol cops, survielance and other means. The monitoring is usually done by understanding what is the aim of the policy and monitoring that aim is achieved. Mostly it is manifested in state of the objects in the world. A particular policy dictates certain desired states, while a violation would mean it has changed into an undesired state. E.g A locker unbroken with cash in it, is changed to a state to a locker broken without cash. These state changes can be monitored to see if the policy is effectively enforced and not violated. This is exactly what can be done using WMI/SNMP by subscribing to the state change events and ensuring that the states do go into an undesirable state. When such a change happens, this can be treated as a violation and appropriate alerts can be raised so that it can be looked into by the system administrators or LAPD.

Policy Violation Auditing
Any law violator's violation would be recorded in the national archives to be looked up later. This could also be used for future Policy Violation Monitoring and Enforcement. In the above section we know when a violation occurs in the cyber world and when such violation occurs we record it in our logs so that in future we can do intelligent monitoring to concentrate more on cyber citizens who have more violation records.

Policy Effectiveness
The government reviews policies to understand whether it is applicable in present circumstance and whether it is efective in getting the desired need. One popular debate is the gun possesion policy. The government wanted to reduce crime and they thought arming citizens with weapons would decrease crime and passes the gun possesion bill. Then they found that this policy has actually not been instrumental in reducing crime and wanted to see how to amend the policy to achieve the objective. Some ways would be to change the application scope of the policy. In relation to cyber world, let us say there is a policy which doesnt allow users to do registry editing as they found that the users screw up their systems by improper registry editing and precious man hours are spent in resolving such screw ups. They implemented this policy to all, but then they found lot of registry change requests from the development arm of the company as they stored thier configuration there. The administrators now ammend their policy to not apply it to the dev arm of the company. This way of measuring policy effectiveness and changing it is an important function and need.

Policy Changes
Some policies are changing due to many reasons and some of which I have detailed above and we bring out amendments and we keep track of all amendments. In cyber world we use the fancy word Policy Change Management or Policy Configuration Management keeping tracks of all policy change versions.

Policy Testing
In certain cases, to gauge the public reaction, a particular policy is enforced on avery limited set of citizens and if succesful is adopted with other citizens. This normally doesnt happen as this will bring out human inequality issues. In cyber world this is done using a test domain or a pilot domain.

Summarising cyber policy management
The virtual citizen in cyber environment, when comparing to the actual citizen is not just the name of the citizen, but his capabilities. The capabilities translates to the capability of the applications he can run on the network resource he is operating on. He runs these applications with his cyber identity. So the applications which the user is using should be aware of cyber policies. But then there is no generic set of cyber policy and also the cyber identity is also varied depending on from where the cyber identity is procured. If the cyber identity is procured from windows domain, then your cyber citizenship makes sense only to windows applications. Morover as there is no generic set of cyber policies defined for the whole of cyber world, hence we need to limit ourselves to the proprietary policies which makes sense to windows platform or any other OS platform. These policies only make sense to applications from Microsoft Area. Third party windows applications can also choose to follow these policies and code it in that manner. But now what happens if windows brings in new policies and how does our policy compliant third party applications learn to follow these new policies like how human do? These are unanswered questions. Infact windows platform itself is a not policy learning platform and the policy interpretation is hardwired and if there are new policies, then new patches needs to be installed to interpret the same. Let us leave dynamic policy learning as a technology for future.

In the present technology, one needs to make each cyber citizen aware of the policies which are applicable to the cyber citizen, and this is done using Policy Publishing software like GPMC of MS.

Then Policy Enforcement is done by the base platform itself and also by Policy compliant application.

Policy Monitoring is done by examining the state of the system the citizen is working on using WMI and other mechanisms so that when there is a change in the system which is not adhering to the policy applicable to the citizen, the policy breach is reported to the centralised policy survielence

Policy Violation Auditing can also be done by recording these violations for future reference.

Policy Effectiveness measuring is not a field which is really matured in the cyber world.

Policy Changes can be tracked through policy change management software.

Policy Testing is also undertaken through a pilot or staging environment.

Windows Implementation of the above principles

Windows Policies
The policies dictated by windows are enforced by windows operating systems and windows applications and application which are written such that they are windows policy aware.E.g 'Do not allow registry editing'

Windows Directory Services
In an organisation which has deployed ADS, the users,computers,printers and other resources are categorized into a hierarchial structure each with a unique address UserId-OrganizationalUnit-Site-Domain-Forest-Root. This hierarchial pseudo location property is extensively used for deciding policy application scope. All the above principles of generic policy management is followed in Windows Policy Management as well.

Windows Policy Application Scope Filters
Certain WMI properties of the computer are used for filtering and also certain security restrictions based on users and user groups can also be applied as a filter for restricting the application scope.

Complex Application Scoping
Windows Policies are modeled on an One Dimensional Hierarchial attribute filtering + One dimensional flat attribute(WMI) + One dimensional set attribute (Security). Suppose if this were modelled on N dimensional(Hierarchial or flat or set) attribute scheme then the application of the same would extremely complicated and challenging. This sort of policy management is needed in certain applications.

Windows Group Policy
Windows Policy Actions are seen by Windows Application and OS in the form of a) Presence of certain Registry Setting b) Secuity Options c) Installed Software Options d) Start,Shut Down,Logon,Logoff Scripts e) Folder Redirection

Third Party Windows Applications - Policy Management
Support Provision for client extensions to provide policy management support for third party user applications is also available. This is one of the key gateways which needs to be exploited by the third party application creators to provide customised policy enforcement. If this approach is taken by third part application providers, then the policy management for these applications becomes easy and gets combined with normal windows policy management. This hasnt been exploited much by any third party application provider.

Group Policy Management Software Companies
These companies have restricted themselves to Windows Policies and Management of these policies. They provide tools for management, staging, testing and migration,RSOP Calculation,Version management. What these companies do is fill the gap left my microsoft to manage their own OS and applications. The issue with such a product is Microsoft after some time will come around and close their gaps. At that time, these products would lose their need. One more major concern is how microsoft implement their policy and policy enforcement is also subject to change and would again cause a big issue for such companies.

What is the future?

Short Term:
Fill Holes and Gaps created by microsoft in their policy management:
- Through client side extensions (Policy Processing Plugins) lock down areas which Microsoft hasnt provided facility to lock down.
- Use GPM as a the primary tool for controlling sofware updates.
- Address more the Mobile and Mostly UnConnected cyber citizens to enforce something like a local offline policy which can be synchronised once in a while when they get connected.

The issue here is Microsoft how the created GPMC will come around and close these gaps and provide a holistic solution in future and when that happens the above efforts will be at risk.

LongTerm:
- Create a set of generic policy standards which can be adopted by any application and which is homegenously extendable.
- Create generic attribute based implict grouping and application scoping instead of letting the administrators create a static hierarchial structure like AD for their management as these typically mirror the organisation structure or geography and might not be the right classification or organisation for applying policies.
- Create generic policy publishing and policy enforcement frameworks on existing Windows Policy Management Framework to be used by third party applications so that it eases the jobs of administrator for administering and controlling thrid party application policy.
- Create fine tuned and intelligent Policy Monitoring and Auditing software
- Create Policy Effectiveness Gauging software using Policy Goal parameters and Policy Goal Data Mining.
- Create Dynamic Policy Learning Softwares

Modelling Utopia

2005-01-16T16:56:00.000-05:00

I was listening to Vandana Shiva on poverty yesterday
http://radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8203

I read Silvia Ribeiro column on Walmartization.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=7034

I read Will Braun’s article on Water Wars
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=7033

Also read Vandana Shiva’s article on Delhi’s Water Regime
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-12/15shiva.cfm

I need George Orwell to articulate my fear and excitement of what’s happening in the world and what’s yet to come. After all Orwell was a true prophet, only problem is he attacked the wrong ideology, ‘communism’. The villain I am talking about is so clever, that he was able to corrupt an unparalleled mind like Orwell into believing communism is the problem. We needed more sharper minds as above and more material evidence to uncover the greatest villain of our times or any time.

I always wanted to live in interesting times. I wanted to live during the times of October Revolution, The Communist Massacre, Hitler’s Jolly Ride, Indian Independence Movement, where I would have fulfilled my romantic dream of fighting injustice. I am a megalomaniacal injustice fighter. I want to fight only the greatest and the most egregious of Villains like Hitler, Stalin and the British Empire. A small villain like say a [corrupt politician] or [myself using environment-depleting plastics everyday] is not worthy of my glorious fight against injustice movement.

Hey, the time has come to fight against the most powerful, totally wicked, pathologically non-repentant, shrewd and highly articulate villain. Are you thinking I am talking about Wal - mart (19th among the 100 most powerful economies in the world – only 49 of which are now countries.)? No not at all. Do you think I am talking about all the corporations and the Governments (who are behaving as just slaves of these corporations)? No you are mistaken. It is not that.

It can be this - The concept of centralized control or a centralized power. In democracy the control is wielded by an elected body, in communism it is nominated through some klugey indirect election. I am talking about the “cracy” part (Latin -cratia, from Greek -krati , from kratos, strength, power). The problem is none of the elected bodies are ideally suited for the job. It might be due to lack of proper choice in such an election, resulting in a corrupt ‘cracy’. For a moment let us think and see if this argument is correct. How can a good person win an election? More deeply are there good people? (slight hint at what my villain is) and are there so many good people to fill so many government positions, who will remain good even after elected? I am really skeptical about this.

Let me take a poor slum dweller in India and the management of Wal-Mart and WTO. Who is a better choice for ‘cracy’ or who is morally better? The poor slum dweller? I am not sure. Lets see. If this slum dweller is made overnight the chairman of Walmart (ofcourse using Matrix (the movie) technology to provide with objective business knowledge without any transfer of emotion and bias), now what will he do? Will he shut down Walmart ? I think he will buy a grand house for his family, buy them a ticket to USA, may be donate some little amount of money to help the slum dwellers, and carry on with his new life of running Walmart and taking it to newer horizons like Mozambique for example.

The goodness, ideas and actions of an individual are circumstantial and destiny driven.

So ‘cracy’ is bad. But no ‘cracy’ is also bad. If there are no rulers, we know what will happen, anarchy, chaos, Mafiadom and utter destruction. Similar to what happened to USSR just after Gorbachev.

(Some Calculus)
Do you recognize this? The function is an equation with ‘cracy’ as a variable and global peace, harmony, equality and happiness (GPHEH) as the function value.

GPHEH = Fn(‘cracy level’)

All we need to do is to differentiate Fn and equate it to zero to find the minima and maxima, and then use that cracy level, which will cause maximum value for GPHEH.

Oh god, we forgot two points
a. We do not know this function Fn.
b. We do not know whether maximum value for GPHEH is the desired goal. I am not sure. The poor slum dweller who became Walmart chairman will have a different objective function (as per Operations Research) and that would be PH (Personal Happiness). The poor slum dweller is I would say the true representation of the humans of the world.

This leads to the classic problem.
: Personal Happiness vs Global Happiness.

Adams Smith’s Hypothesis:
Pursue Personal Happiness, Global Happiness will automatically follow.

Mr Smith, we all are doing that, for we can’t do anything else , as the pursuit of personal happiness is a no brainer for the human psyche. You know what! Personal Happiness is working fine for me, but the side effect doesn’t seem to be happening. One more thing Mr Smith, my next-door neighbor is a pedophile and his personal happiness lies in an area which the government is not allowing him to pursue. Where I live is not a free country and they have rules and regulations. A ‘Cracy’ body which has been constituted for global happiness, even though it is at the cost of personal happiness. Mr Smith would you agree to these kind of strict rules? They call it a welfare state policy. Infact in a land called the Red Land, they thought global happiness was very important at any cost and started killing people. Good Lord!! This ‘Cracy’ variable is one crazy variable, the world is struggling to find the right balance, and the right value for the ‘Cracy’ variable.

So what is the right value? Phew! Now I understood who the real villain is. It is not ‘Cracy’, but the fact that global happiness depends on attaining the right value of ‘Cracy’. Let us again think why we need ‘Cracy’? The most fundamental reason would be to prevent crime and ‘EVIL’ acts by humans upon other fellow human beings. Other reasons would be to enforce equitable and just sharing of resources to denizens. Further reasons may be to enable collective contribution for organized advancement and progress of fellow denizens.

Now atlast the Villain.

1. The Villain is ‘Darwins’s Survival Game’.
2. The Villain’s sidekick ‘The Human Mind’.

The present Darwins’s Survival Game

The rules of the game at present are “I survive and I survive”.

What I propose is a modified Darwins’s Survival Game

The modified rule is “All survive or Nobody does”.

Assume there is a comet which is stationed outside earth, monitoring the denizens and checking if everyone is happy. If some one is unhappy, the Comet collides with the earth and kills everyone. So, that is a good game. But then, this game will result in ‘nobody happy boundary condition’ as everyone will live in fear of the omnipotent Comet.

So that is not a good idea. Better Idea. Modify the Side Kick. The core problem of the side kick is its desire and its amplified form ‘Greed and Gluttony’

This is my final solution. Genetically modify each human so that all offsprings will have no greed and gluttony. Religious institutions have been trying to do this differently, but I don’t think they are having any success. This is a task for science. The task of “Mass Benevolentization”. Now this will make humans genetically unable to compete and hence they can’t take part in any game, and more importantly in Darwin’s Survival Game.!!

That is wishful thinking at its peak!

Alas.
But its probably the only way one can attain “Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinaha”.

Hey wait a minute! It is not that easy. What about the animals? If humans are so benevolent, then they wont kill the animals, in fact not even hurt them, so becoming an easy prey to animals. Ok. Then we will extend the “Benevolentization” to animals as well. Now, is it done ?

No. We are missing what will happen to the ecological balance, when all of them (animals and humans) don’t hurt or eat each other and population explodes!. May be we need to find a new ecological balance or equilibrium with conditions where all organisms are vegetarians. The growth rate of all organisms should attain an equilibrium value, so that earth reaches ecological balance. That will take some time, but after that, we will all coexist peacefully. A world full of Vegetarians, growth rates of each species adjusted to the new found conversion, the delicate interactions between species modified to suit the continuance of new found order. Is there still a problem, are we teaching God how to achieve utopia? I suspect my feeble mind wouldn’t have thought of all problems arising from this theory as well, and may never understand why God chose the present world order as the most optimum way of working. What is god’s Objective Function? Does anybody know?

Analyst and His Peace

2004-09-30T15:37:00.001-05:00

In the mind of an analyst, the world is a problem to solve and not a picture to admire. He constantly taxes his brain for finding answers which normally doesnt exist. He struggles without respite to find more problems to solve. He is not an adventurer who takes a journey and relishes it, but a theoritical investigator who takes a journey as a tool for his quest for a theory which he will never find. Where does such a person find peace?

What is Fundamental Modelling?

2004-09-04T06:10:00.000-05:00

What is fundamental? Now that is a really fundamental question! I believe that any truth or concept for which one doesnt need a more fundamental truth or concept to explain can be termed as fundamental.In that sense, the whole body of physics laws and knowledge is non fundamental, but always tending or striving towards finding the fundamental.

The field of Economics bases itself on a reasoning and logic on human behaviour in its act ofutilizing and sharing scarce resources.This field is based on common logic and entirely not fundamental as for most of the laws and theories proposed by economists we can always ask the question why and why not?

Then if physics and economics are not fundamental then what is?Isnt there any thing which is fundamental?

There is.Things created by humans. For instance rules of a chess game is a fundamental concept as it is meaningless to ask why are the rules of the chess game as they are? The 'why' question doesnt arise as we arent explaning an observation, but creating a base concept totally brand new.So any realm of the world which originated brand new like the 'Chess' game or the 'C' Language doesnt need explanation as they are bound and manmade concepts. They are fundamental concepts.

Then what about mathematics?Can we treat the whole field of mathematics as pure and fundamental and manmade. The fact that the concepts of mathematics are used for explaining or creating non fundamental concepts of physics, biology and economics is secondary as the pure concept of mathematics doesnt stand on the physical world but the other way round. But then though fundamental, there are many questions in the field of mathematics which are unsolved. For instance the value of Pi is untenable and a disgrace to mathematical world. The concept of geometry is extremely intriguing as that definitely has originated from the relation with the physical world and sometimes I feel may not be as pure as numbers. The concept of numbers too owes its existence to reality.But though mathematics of numbers draws inspiration from reality, it doesnt try to explain anything physical or god made. It is purely abstract or rather the question we need to ask is would we have evolved a different kind of mathematics if we have had a different universe governed by different physical laws? Would there be a place where the concept of counting thought of as meaningless? If so what mathematical form would it take? With the imagination I have I cannot imagine a different kind of mathematics, though I can do so for other bodies of knowledge. Mathematics is as fundamental as one can get.

Fine. Now we know that there are lot of non fundamental theories floating around in the world and most of them are used to explain, predict and make decisions.Each theory is trying to model using mathematical and conceptual tools the system which is under scrutiny or of interest. Using such a model, one would be able to explain , predict and make decisions. Physics tries to model everything. Biology tries to model the living. Economics model financial behaviour. These models are no way fundamental. For instance let us take the stock value of Cisco. The value of it was
ever increasing during the internet boom era. So one of the reasons for the Boom one would say is the greediness of people to make a quick buck. So one factor which influences the stock value of Cisco is the greediness of people. So if we were to make a financial model to predict the future stock value of Cisco we need to also consider the greediness value of the people influencing the financial markets.

Is it feasible to list all such factors which will affect Cisco's stock?

In one way as everything is connected it is impossible as it would be a list of every event in the world. Let me give an example. Say a particular person (Frank) has a daughter (Anita) calls her friend's mobile, but due to the fact that there was slight problem in the telephone exchange or coverage she wasnt able to reach her friend. She is travelling in a train and a nice young man is seated besides her and she borrows his mobile to make the call. After the call she returns the mobile and strikes a conversation with him. She finds that he is a tourist to newyork and also finds that he is taking the wrong train. So she helps him out in finding his way and in that time they get attracted to each other and in next few months they agree to marry. The father is pleased and decides to arrange for a grand wedding and sells his stock to arrange for the grandeur. Yes he was holding Cisco's stock. His sale though a limited amount would definitely have have had an influence on the Cisco's stock value. So while modelling the Cisco's stock value should we include in our model, the faulty coverage of mobile service providers. It is infeasible to create such exact models as there would be millions of shareholders each one with a different story.

So is such a modelling meaningful?
May be not in the stock market, but may be somewhere else. May be.In certain industries such a modelling however crude is paramount in running the business. For instance the insurance industry definitely has to model risk however crude it might be, as but for the model how would they calculate their premiums and run a meaningful business.In case of predicting weather we definitely need to model the best we can, so that we can predict the future to avert catastrophies and loss of human life. These crude laws and models have helped us immensely though it hasnt been accurate and correct. We are better off with crude laws than without any. These non fundamental laws/models are refined every day and we are moving in the direction of fundamentality in all fields.

Modelling can be achieved through human logic, reasoning and experience or though brute force of pattern recognition or curve fitting. The latter doesnt have any preconceived notions and it operates merely on datapoints and ends with a statistical model which explains the present datapoints and predicts the future datapoints. The former introduces human reasoning and common sense also with the aid of the observed data points to come up with a feasible model to explain complex system behaviour.