The Murphy Way

Our life is a perfect manifestation of Murphy’s laws, specifically the one, “if something has to go wrong, it will at the worst possible time”. Our attitude has long been to see, understand or analyze Murphy on the pessimistic. We often miss out on the actual viewpoint. I was googling through Murphy’s laws and later sort of explored through Sod’s, Finagle’s and all the other possible variations of them.

Let me quote some of the variations first

1) The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum
2) Bad fortune will be tailored to an individual

These set of laws have got more to do with the human perception of fate, irony and the injustice of the universe. Consider another variant – “Good fortune will occur in spite of individual’s actions”. If you look at it, this one is exemplified by the idea that, “it won’t rain if you take your umbrella”. In regular usage we call this unsympathetic magic.

I remember reading somewhere that there are actually two ways of looking at these laws. One of them is the pervasive universe way otherwise known as the jelly side down viewpoint. This viewpoint is famous for the fact that it aligns pretty much in equity with our natural tendency to behave. It’s actually the more popular version, because we (humans) like to complain. There is also another viewpoint, that has got more to do with physics, which sort of concludes, “Mother Nature is a Bitch”.

But if we look at these laws and understand them properly, there is hidden engineering in here. They kinda talk about Failsafe design. How do you counter software flaws? Go by exploring all Murphy permutations and try to counter them. All though Murphy’s alleged usage might have been completely different in outlook and attitude from this, it sort of boils down to this. It’s highest expression is in the idea of Fail Safe, a design whose failure modes are all innocuous, rather than a design with failure modes that, nonetheless can have disastrous repercussions. Remember how nuclear reactors were developed in the 50s and 60s? Safety was for the most part actively maintained, meaning a failure of safety mechanism could lead to a disaster.

If you look at it, the likelihood of a catastrophic accident seems highly unlikely. However, there is no statistical independence of adverse events. Human errors do tend to come in clusters. Simply put, things tend to break more often when they are either new (due to manufacturing defects) or when they are nearing the end of their designed life. In other words, new things have a greater likelihood of multiple component failure, as do devices near the end of their own design life. This is because designers try not to put very long-lived components with those of much shorter lives, sturdier components being more expensive. Thus, multiple component failure is more likely near the end of device design limits, aka “The Wonderful One Hoss Shay” effect.

Thus the design issues in a system could be attributed to Murphy way of thinking. When they are new they break when we least expect them to be because we haven’t put in enough effort in design and we never know when they’re nearing the end, so you wouldn’t really expect them to break, whilst they do. It’s more of a timing problem. It’s gotta do with Human perception and our overly optimistic or pessimistic mindsets. Murphy’s laws are not just random ones. They mean a lot more to Engineering design than what has been written here. Period.

The Perception Problem

I was reading through a very interesting article that talked about how our perceptions are narrow and opinionated, supported by confidence more than proof of concepts. And, how our brain refuses to come out of it and how graciously it tries to welcome these imperfections and be okay with the fact that they are there. Interesting as it sounds, there’s something more I gotta add to it along the similar lines.

Cast your memory back to the first time you sat in a train hallucinating that you were stationary and fields/lines are passing by you. Go back to those first optical illusions you had, or those films where a person changes into a lion and back.  It’s kinda funny how all of us went with our hallucinations and conveniently assumed that people around us were as foolish and as ignorant as we were or perhaps as blissful as we were.

We are used to living in an implicit assumption that the world is a sick place. And, more often than not our opinionated beliefs defy rationality and we know we’re not on the right page. But, why even if we know that we’re being hoodwinked our false perception seems so real, even if it is just for a moment? It’s a long known fact that the subjective and objective are completely different. Nature has already proven that to us on an uncountable number of occasions.  But, I’m trying to put across something even more basic than that. I remember reading an interesting write-up that talks about our brain registering the stimulus and in the process, how there is an information distortion while processing,  according to one’s own convenience and what they want to or choose to believe,  rather than the actual facts – Basically, the whole scene is rejigged, some voids are filled out and some new things are introduced depending on what we choose to believe. Above all, this metamorphosis or transformation happens without our conscious awareness.

One possible explanation for this could be that, our brain has kinda learned to deal with inconsistencies and uncertainties that it forms a meta model about the scenario, even before it’s completely presented to it. It does the processing, assuming some things (could be inconsistent) and perhaps wouldn’t attempt to clean/clear them up, for the fact that it could leave some space for some more interesting activities.  The other most common perception problem is the “whole-part fallacy”, where we make a convenient assumption that the whole could most certainly be substituted by the integral of it’s parts. It’s a fallacy we hold on to. Often it’s the case that the whole influences how the parts would have to behave. For example, consider a football team where each player possesses some skills. And, say that the coach has given an inspirational or a motivational speech at half time to get the “more” than best out of the players and win the game, which say they are eventually successful in doing. If you try to understand it, the whole (winning a game) has got properties that go beyond the integral sum of it’s parts.

Our life is too dynamic, we have new relationships building up, new people, events, changes in our day to day life – all with an element of dynamism. All these configurations will have an influence on our perception and further on our decision making process. Intuition wants us to believe that, there’s more to our life than just looking at things and merely classifying them.  Such a phenomenon/perception could lead us to joy or despair. Perception touches that part of our life in a way that has implications for how we view the world and make decisions about it.  So, the question at the end is, how do we evaluate the odds? “Look before you leap” or “Trust your guts and be bold – Boldness has got genius and power in it” are the choices we’re provided with. How you see them and what you pick is your call.

The Unconventional Sciences – Fiction and Fantasy

Whether we like it or not, the world around us has changed significantly over centuries and it is likely to change in the centuries to come. Some people might want to oppose this change, with an ardent intention to go back to what they see as a purer and simpler age. But as History shows, the past wasn’t that wonderful. It wasn’t that bad for a privileged minority, though even they had to do without modern medicine and Child birth was highly risky for women. But for a vast majority of population, Life was brutish, nasty and short. Anyway, even if we wanted to, we can’t put the Clock back to an earlier age. Knowledge and techniques must not be forgotten, nor the advancements in Science should stop.

Talking about Unconventional Science – the first thing that comes to my mind is, “Science Fiction”. Science Fiction, a subject that generates tremendous interest in all Sections could be called about as the purest form of “Applied ‘too much’ Science”. Before I try to dig deep into this, it does no harm but good to define “Science Fiction” and a bring a perspective to it. The concept of Science Fiction is pretty much open ended and the urge in everyone to have an opinion on this is very understandable. I would like to define it as “Too much of Applied Science, that ‘might converge’ to cognitive reality in a time frame”. The time frame could be centuries. When it takes 100 years for Conventional Science arguments to reach to public in the influence of “Socio-Cultural” dynamics, it should come as nothing beyond logic to comprehend the translation of a Fictional Science model to reality. More than the quality of the model, what inadvertently might act as a barrier is the belief in a Society. The Societal sentiments are the hardest, to be influenced. Once you penetrate into the thought process of the Society, you’re nearly there.

I was extremely terror-struck to see the understanding of people on the subject of Fiction and Fantasy. It’s unfortunate, but visible that the common conception of Fiction and Fantasy is indeed a misconception and it’s utterly “not” so elegant to use/read/apply one for the another. Sci-Fi adheres to the laws of Science, while Fantasies don’t. Fiction might be imaginary but not inconceivable, while Fantasies are inconceivable, more or less. Science has given birth to Science Fiction. Sci-Fi dint show up all of a sudden while Fantasies on the other hand have been mere extrapolations of human desires, their hope, their want to be superior and more so, the undying urge to see something dominating the other. All though, we can’t help but appreciate the beautiful brains that are behind all these works, we also can’t help but criticize those who use these things in a convincingly interchangeable fashion. I am being careful to not hurt the deepest sentiments of People about Fantasies, for all I know, there are quite a huge number of us, who like to live in the surreal space and I certainly don’t wish to be labeled “Anti Social” by offending the Sentiments.

Having sad that, however I would like to say there could be a point in time, when a Sci-Fi theme could converge into cognitive reality and further into reality in real. In October 1997, Gemini 12 left Earth’s orbit to Alpha Centauri with the first set of terrestrial Shuttlers. It was shown in a 1960′s Australian Television Series, “Lost in Space” that such a thing could be possible. It took Science almost around 30 years to conceive and adapt it. But something like “Harry Potter Apparation” could never happen. (Tele-Porting is different, there’s a Science behind it). The thought that should be manifested is that, Sci-Fi lives in the realm of [too much] Science while Fantasies are even far beyond, “Eternal” Science. (If there’s one)

It’s high time we realized that Science Fiction and Fantasy are two different things. All though, some elements are borrowed from one department to another (which I regard as a crime on part of the creators), one couldn’t and SHOULD NOT be explained in terms or with the help of the other. At least the flaws in the former, follow from the inherent inconsistencies in Science while the latter’s flaws are almost always unexplained. I’m going to leave it open ended for all of us to revisit their thoughts on the subjects and to put them into perspective.

Behavioral Modeling – Beyond Mathematics

I have always lived in an illusion that Mathematics can solve almost all of our problems. Besides,I believed in a theory that anything that’s posed on us, could be solved by efficient Mathematical systems, sometimes Linear, sometimes Non Linear and sometimes higher order. My prerogatives were completely shattered today where I discovered there is much more beyond Mathematics and you can’t necessarily model everything with a set of formulas. Of course, the realization should’ve come early, but better late than ever.

Anyway, I’m  completely outwitted by the way Agent Based Models work. First let us define a model first. A model is something that is “hypothetically” closer to real world. Observe the term, “hypothetically”. The amount of guarantee that one could give saying some certain Model can effectively translate into a real world phenomenon is almost a null. Models are typically associated, not with Math, not with rule based assertions or not even with Formulations. They’re associated with the trend, they form a part of the belief in the society at that point in time. So however good your model is, the probability that your model could gain Social Acceptance, given you’re contrasting the existing beliefs of the Society is minimum.

The Ptolemic, Copernicus theories that earth was the center of the Universe was widely accepted and believed for a long time. So, when someone like Galileo tried to break those Myths, he was confiscated. He was out-casted. He was considered uncanny because the society had a strong set of beliefs and it was not in their great interests to break their beliefs, so apparently Galileo had to suffer. However, those are models based on observations and evidences. But, what about an Agent Based System? or a Behavioral Model that analyzes the behavior of an interactive game playing system or a Social Network for that matter. Virtually, all Models are closed world. You draw some boundaries around your problem and tend to solve your problems. With that, you also make some certain assumptions. Typically, assumptions are context specific. Assumptions made about a Social Network in India, might not hold good in the US for the fact that the behavior of the people is not consistent owing to geographical, cultural, traditional and other differences. So, it is accepted that there’s no uniformity. When we model something, how do we assure that, the model we’ve come up with is Universally Socially acceptable. What is that point beyond which you say, it caters to all of us. Perhaps there’s no point like that. When it took 2000 years to prove Aristotle’s hypothesis, and agree upon them. There’s no real good way to determine, when does a model translate into a System. It’s not got to do with the accuracy of the model, it’s got to do with the various social, political, civil forces acting on that society at that point in time. If only there was one law of Physics or one law of Mathematics that could quantify everything in the Universe. Aah, I wish!

Information Networks

Yesterday, I was listening to my Professor talk about Information and how it’s organized on the web. All of a sudden, he started to relate it with networks and how information exchange takes place where I wondered, if anyone could streamline the principles behind Information networks and effectively distinguish them from the material networks.

Material networks as you would assume, operate on the ‘move’ principle. For example, a node in the network is transmitting a packet to another node and when the other node receives it, the original node discards the packet. The fundamental difference between material networks and Information networks, as I presume is in it’s principle. Information networks operate on ‘copy’ rule. When some piece of information has been passed from one node to another, the information content of the first node is not lost but only shared. How beautiful and selfless a network that is!

A totally different, all though uncanny – perspective could be given to Information. In the primitive days, it was verbal – synchronous and volatile and then there were writings – asynchronous and persistent. And, there is a sign language and “the gorilla expressionate”. All though what got me stumped was, currency and it’s representation. What is a dollar note? In that case, what is a 100 rupee note? It’s just a piece of paper, may be a colored one. Above all, I wonder who would’ve come up with that representation for it, or more – the value for it, that it claims to be. ‘I promise to pay the bearer a sum of 100 rupees’ is it what is required to pump up the value quotient? So, if one who is paying to bearer is a holder. That is, the holder pays certain value to bearer depending upon the service that holder receives from the respective bearer. To abstract this concept, I choose to call it Value for Service quotient.

If the Value for Service quotient is 10 $ in the USA, to talk in Units, say it is 10 units for the service received, considering dollar as their primitive unit. If you convert into INR, it is around 500 INR for service, that is 500 units. So, does that mean value for service significantly changes geographically? If yes, then that leads to other interesting question, as to why the whole world is not uniform? Wouldn’t be magnificent if the whole world adhered to uniformity in standards? Wouldn’t information exchange be much simpler? Wouldn’t there then be a subdued concept of ‘more or less’? Often, these questions go unanswered.

And particularly on web, when people are going too much social the volume of data on internet is humongous. With the advent of social networking sites, it has grown even more significantly. What if there was not enough security? As a primitive, how would one define security? Is it total abstraction? or A bunch of rules that only define who can access and who can’t? Is there no broader perspective to it? I am not sure how many of these could be reasoned, for I can come up with more counter arguments to them than otherwise, at least at the control level.

To formulate or postulate this might take ages. All we might do now is to contribute to it or sit back and enjoy the whole wealth of information. Thoughts welcome.

Scientification

Now when I sit and wonder about the approaches for maintaining large amounts of data, say scientific, I dont quite like to agree with the traditional methods.

For kicks, read on. Or may be, bear with it. In mood now!

The ability to store large volumes of data is increasing faster than processing power. Some existing data management methods often result in data loss, inaccessibility or repetition of scientific simulations.
Contrary to current day methodologies,there should be an efficient framework which promotes collaboration and simplifies data management. That must ideally be an implementation independent frame-work to promote collaboration and data management across a distributed environment. Some thing like a Store and Process Frame-work. It is generally accepted that processing power doubles every 18 – 24 months and data storage density every 12 –18 months. The result is that the cost per GiB to the end user is falling which indicates that the ratio of processing power to data storage will decrease. This opens up new opportunities to consider more efficient methods of data management.

Databases for example , provide a low level data management repository capable of storing and manipulating data. They are often considered too rigid for dynamic data and too complex for non-technical users. Many users utilize proprietary or custom applications as an alternative to generic databases . These are usually designed for a particular task and tend to be more user friendly but often less flexible. Something like, BioSimGrid is establishing a worldwide repository for simulation results using Grid technologies to distribute and manage the large volumes of data.

Filesystems are ideal for managing data but support for storing and searching the metadata is minimal. Users prefer to keep data in a format with which they are familiar. File systems are capable of dealing with large volumes of data and databases are suitable for managing metadata about the data. There is a need to leverage the benefits of both advanced databases and robust filesystems to provide a simple and easy to use data management solution for scientific users.

Most operating systems are capable of associating an application to a specific data file type, e.g. files with the extension txt are often associated with a text editor. This enables the user to open the file by ‘double-clicking’ an icon and relying on the operating system to open the appropriate application, capable of reading the file. This mechanism is achieved either by associating the file extension, txt with an application or by associating the MIME type with an application. Alternatively it is possible to inspect the content of the file to determine its type using a file signature. When a user loads an application associated with a data file, the application can be thought of as a library of functions or methods which are capable of operating on that file. For example a txt file is opened using an editor which has features to count the words or change the data encoding.

An infrastructure to extend this common functionality to support custom ‘applications’, in the form of user defined code would be pretty effective. Instead of a data file having an associated application where the data file has associated functions and methods which originate from user code would be a real thing.

Just an idea from what I’ve read, perhaps it could go wrong. I’m certainly not trying to give anyone a run for their money.

Javascripts

I was not able to jot it down as I said I would. Javascript indeed is much more eventful (yes, you head me) than what I thought it was. You could do all kinds of clever and “horrible” things with it.

When I was for the first time required to write something in JavaScript, I quickly came to despise the language. It would accept almost anything I typed, but interpret it in a way that was completely different from what I meant. This had a lot to do with the fact that I did not have a clue what I was doing, but there is also a real issue here: JavaScript is ridiculously liberal in what it allows. One horrible thing is, it would make finding problems in your code harder because your system wouldn’t print out the errors to you.

However the flexibility of the language is the advantage there, for the most part on it you needn’t be worried about the nuances of programming.

var x=2;  will assign a value 2 to x and var x=”string”; wil give the value “string” to x.  And you could use them as they are! It allows you for the most part to work on the flow of the program rather than the ways to figure out the nitty stuff.

Javascript, as wrongly viewed by many people doesn’t really define a language, not atleast in my opinion. It’s much of a “programming” framework than a language. It effectively illustrates the structure of programming to you and more often than not,  proves why it is termed developer-friendly.

Initial explorations about javascript gave me as much joy as you might ever comprehend and the exploration continues…