Poverty Line Limit in India: an experiment

According to the Indian government you are above the poverty line if you earn Rs.32 (about 60 cents) a day. This is an interesting experiment by two guys who try to survive in Kerala with that kind of money.
http://rs100aday.com/category/rs-32-a-day/
(Thanks to Vipindas Pala’s post on Facebook)

Climate talks and game theory

An article in guardian on a proposed new way to resolve climate talks using game theory

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/06/game-theory-un-climate-talks

Data Liberation

Recently I read this interesting article (link) where the author describes his attempts to try to live without all the google services – including even gmail, search and youtube. While reading the article, I came across these two very useful links:
Google Dashboard : On a single page, this link shows you how much of your data google has in store. Sometimes you can get surprised at the sheer size of data.
Data Liberation : Here you will get help for moving out your data from Google products and downloading it to your machine in recognizable formats.

It is surprising that Google themselves offer these services to customers. Not only this, they also offer you a plug-in to help you opt out of their targeted advertising – i.e. with this plug-in, if you click on an advertisement, the data will not be stored with Google. Perhaps this kind of open nature of services will be precisely the reason for people to stick with Google.

(btw, in the article, the author found youtube most difficult to get rid of than gmail and search engine.)

The Power Factor

The plot tells you the percentage of total electricity lost in transmission in 2004. Look at where India stands, rather look at all sorts of countries ahead of India! See this link for more data.

Notes:
1. For simplicity, I selected few points from 131 rated countries.
2. Numbers at the end of bars denote % electricity lost.
3. Number in brackets after a country’s name denotes its rank. Luxembourg is most efficient.

Rock Paper Scissors

Often people vote for political parties if they like their agenda and they expect the parties to stand for it. It can lead to some interesting situations. Suppose in the assembly of 12 seats we have three parties with 5, 4, 3 seats respectively. Each party has its own flagship bill to be passed to which all the other parties vehemently oppose. (Kind of rock-paper-scissors situation.) As a result, none of the bills will get passed. Taking principled stance can lead to deadlocks.

But there is a hidden possibility which may even be worse. Now each party can oppose the bills only on the face of it and can demand its price behind the curtain for the required votes. Now each and every bill becomes kind of an auction. Which situation do we prefer – sticking to principles and get nothing done OR getting few things done by encouraging malpractices? Hard to answer that!

Restless Grasshoppers

Suppose a triangle is divided in 100 equal sized triangular cells by drawing parallel lines inside to its sides. There is a grasshopper in each cell. At every turn, every grasshopper jumps into one of the neighboring cells – two cells are neighbors if they share a side. Prove that after 5 turns, at least 10 cells will be empty.

Too many choices!

Sometimes people complain that the big supermarkets offer too many choices for an item and that makes life difficult. But maybe too many choices isn’t the root of the problem. For example, if you have a single criterion like cost, you can impose what is called total order on all the items i.e. the whole list can be sorted without any problem and you can choose the best. The problem is that the supermarkets introduce too many considerations so that imposing a total order (or even partial order) becomes difficult, if not impossible.

For example, if you go to Walmart to buy cereals and  have a single criterion of price, no matter how many choices are available you can still buy the best. But now there is factor of taste. You can still manage it preparing two sorted arrays and by trying to judge the best trade-off. But the consideration factors do not stop at these. There are more -
1. Base material (corn/bran/oat)
2. Price
3. Combinations like oat-flakes and bran
4. Artificial flavors added or not added
5. Addition of dry-fruits
6. Deals e.g. buy two different flavors, get an additional pack free
7. Experimentation

Now it becomes a hopeless situation. People react to such situation in different ways. Perhaps one strategy would be to eliminate most of the factors. Another may be to reduce the list by comparing only between the best item in each category. It seems that there is a whole book written on this topic – here is the wiki link for it.

I want a bigger piece!

Alice and Bob both want the bigger piece of the cake and their mother wants no fights. How can she go about cutting the cake to solve the problem?

Here is a brilliant trick: The mother tells Alice that Alice will cut the cake into two pieces but Bob gets the first chance to choose among the two pieces. Problem solved!

In fact, how to share a cake (resource) among given number of people so that nobody is unhappy is an active area of research! Here are mathworld-wolfram, wikipedia links for the same and here is a presentation from stanford.  I haven’t read through the wikipedia link and the presentation though.

(Note: This example was given in my algorithms class by Prof Anshelevich)

Crabs and Curbs

The often heard story about crab mentality is: There were many crabs in a huge deep vessel. All wanted to come out but everyone wanted to be the first one. As a result no crab did ever come out because they kept on pulling each other’s legs in order to get ahead.

Few days back I read an interesting argument parallel to this crab mentality in the context of pollution curbs. To tell it simply – suppose there are 3 nations which heavily contribute to pollution. Now we want to bring the emissions down.

1. Suppose stopping own emissions will cost a nation $2 billion because it needs technology.
2. If a nation does not choose to stop emissions, it will cost only $1 billion. However, it will add $1 billion to every other nation’s cost through environmental hazards.

Now suppose each nation initially agrees to be good, not selfish and so on. Each has to pay $2B. Suppose one of the nations decides to get ahead in the competition by secretly violating the agreement. Now the costs read ($1B, $3B, $3B). When second nation realizes this, it cheats too. Because of (2), now the costs are ($2B, $2B, $4B). A little late, even the third nation realizes the cheating, it too violates the agreement and now the costs are ($3B,$3B,$3B)!

So now not only they end up polluting but also pay more! Even if one nation tries to be selfish, everyone else suffers!! This phenomenon relates to the classic concept of Nash equilibrium in game theory.

Ames Room

This is really funny. Is it this easy to fool your perception?
Check out this youtube video of Ames Room demonstration. This is the wiki link for the same.
Is this how the so called “mayawi” warriors used to fight in Mahabharata?