Mawphlang is a small village in the Indian state of Meghalaya, and this village known for its sacred grove. These sacred groves or ‘Law Kyntang’ or ‘ Law Lyngdoh’ are areas of forest land that were demarcated to be used only for holy rituals and kept untouched upon. People are allowed inside it but you can’t take anything outside. Not even fallen fruits, though you may eat it there. So right after finishing our trip, with vivid images of this beautiful place, still in mind, we started off for Shillong. Descending towards the main city, we found a clearing from which we saw a glimpse of city lights. It was not exposed in the first instance due to the trees, but eventually, there was a spot from which we could see things clearly.

Thick clouds are common over the capital of Meghalaya, but it was an uncommon day for Shillong. Since we had arrived at this city, we had witnessed negligible rains and we had been quite lucky in that sense. The weather was extremely pleasant with a cool breeze trying to soothe the leaves getting parched in highly unlikely bright sun. The window of the cab was open earlier and we could feel the cool breeze which was soothing us too, though not gently as by that time, it had turned somewhat uncomfortably cold. Nevertheless, there was a girl sitting between me and the window, she was a stranger and we had not shared a single word till then. So, when I saw the city lights, I was elated. I looked around as far as my eyes could see. This part of the city that I could see had a lesser concentration of homes, they were not as bunched together as a normal city but well spaced out, which was unique in itself. The lights nowadays are mostly CFLs and LEDs so they were mostly white and had the piercing sparkle of these sharp lights. I somehow find the incandescent bulbs more soothing and gentle. They are also warm and welcoming than the white and lack a sense of character.

Through the city crevices, I could see, thin long patterns of lights settled peacefully where they were not perturbed by the moving air. It was glowing in the soft, dying light of twilight. Somewhere near the horizon, one could see them mingling with the sky, be one could never be sure, where that point would be located. The whole sky was diffused in the washing of dark navy blue. This color is the same that we see right after sunset when the sky is heavy with rain-bearing clouds. As the eyes wandered across the clouds, they would come across the small clearing in the sky where one could see a magnificent display of hues. It was like an eye in the sky. The top layer of this clearing was brightest, in the shade of purple. This gave way to a layer of red streaks that glowed like the eyes of a wild cat. It was getting its energy from the sun. The sun had set an hour back but thanks to the refraction of the sky, it was still diffusing its rays into this part of the earth. I could instantly imagine what it would feel like from a flight flying above the layer of clouds, with passengers staring awestruck outside the window. The next instant I was back into the cab and saw this girl staring at the sky too, just like me. Without any consideration, I spurted out a ‘wow’, half lost on the horizon. My friend was looking in another direction and I gestured him to look to the left into the valley.

Two birds flew across the sky, breaking the stillness that was there in the scenery. They must have been tired after a long day of wandering, just like us. In fact even more tired than us as they would have had to spend energy to fetch food for themselves. We crossed a tree that was just below the level of the road, it was there that the group of birds settled on to. My eyes wandered back at the canvas that was there, still there, right across us in its unchanged display of lights and colors. I wanted desperately to stop the cab and get down and take a picture but I knew I could not. It was at this instant when I decided to capture it as vividly as possible in my eyes. Just at that moment, an idea struck me. It would be even better if I could try to express that picture in words so that I could share it with people and they would also enjoy at least a slice of the beautiful scenery. Right then I decided to write a thousand words description of that moment to see if that image was really thousand words or not. These sights are the moments when we travel and these very moments make the journey memorable.

There was another part of the sky that did not shout out loud for any attention. It was the darker, almost black layer of the clouds that were below those bright streaks. Unassumingly they were there, unconcerned for anyone’s attention or display of what their true colors were. Maybe, they just wanted to be unseen, who knows. Looking at this scene in its entirety, I could also see what we miss in our lives, living in large cities where we don’t have time for these pleasures. People wake up after the sunrise and probably catch a fleeting glimpse of the sunset from their cubicle if lucky.

If you liked reading this, also consider subscribing to my travel channel on Youtube. Now I mostly put up content in Hindi to cater to my channel’s demographic user base in India. Some videos have English subtitles as well.

https://www.youtube.com/c/xtraveler

There is one particular researcher at the party, who happens to be a statistician. He refuses to merely shun her claim. He says he can test it out. However, it was not an easy task, since he had to devise a test that would not require too much difficulty in conducting and analyzing. Classical Chi-Square tests and G-test could not be used on smaller and skewed samples so he plans to use the Fisher’s Exact Test(that time it was not called by this name). Readers interested in this can look up the footnotes[1].

Here the null hypothesis was that ‘She cannot discern between both types of tea’. The two types of tea ( milk-over-tea and tea-over-milk) are prepared incognito and presented to her in form of 4 cups of the variety each. Here just for the reference, we should note that Fisher was one of the early proponents of methodical scientific experiments[2]. He made sure that the cups were randomized too. It means that it was not four cups of type1 then four cups of type2. It was such that they were kept and offered randomly for the lady to try. Here, as an advanced reader would note, the treatment was the ‘tea preparation’ process which is a categorical variable. You cannot appropriately assign ‘number’ to whether you poured tea-over-milk and vice-versa. On the other hand, the outcome of the experiment was that she could correctly classify the method of preparation. This reduced to a problem of classification with the classification result being either correct or incorrect. All Dr. Bristol had to do was to say which four came from the same method. A combinatorial approach was taken to enlist all the outcomes, which in this case is 70[3]. There is only one possibility among 70 to get all of them right. There are 16 ways to choose 3 correct and 1 incorrect cup, similarly, 16 ways to choose 1 correct and 3 incorrect cups[4]. Now, for rejection of Null Hypothesis, there is a standard cut-ff in the scientific community. Conservative significance level of 1% means that it should such that there is only a 1% chance that the Null Hypothesis could be rejected by ‘chance’. While a liberal and a more common cutoff for social sciences lie at 5%. If we take the case of her getting 1 cup right out of 4 then she getting it right by chance would be 1/70 of the possible ways of classifying the cups which is just 1.4%, which if we accept her to discern the cups by classifying at least 3 out of 4 cups correctly, then she could have guessed it correctly just by chance at 22.86% plus 1.4% chance of guessing all four right which makes it 24.2%. This would not be acceptable. Hence, for her claim to be accepted that she could indeed discern just by taste, the two types of mixing of tea, she would have to correctly classify all four cups from the eight cups.

As it turns out, she did exactly that. She got all four cups right! [5]

Footnotes:

[1] Interested readers may look up Fisher’s Exact Test, Barnard’s Exact Test for 2x2 matrix situations and Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel test for stratified samples.

[2] Suggested readings :

Fisher, R. A. (1937). The design of experiments. Oliver And Boyd; Edinburgh; London.

Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. C. (1967). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research (2. print). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Comp.

Dunning, T. (2012). Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084444

Kempthorne, O. (1977). Why randomize? Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 1(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-3758(77)90002-7

[3] There is a total of 8 cups of which one has to choose 4 cups. It can be done in NCk ways or 8C4 ways = 8!/4!(8–4)! = 70

[4]Choosing 1 correct and 3 incorrect or another way round can be possible in following ways: 4C1 = 4C3 = 4!/1!(4–3)!= 4 and there are 4 ways to choose them so total is 16

[5] Salsburg, D. (2001). The lady tasting tea. Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York, NY.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea ( for the lazy ones, check out this source)

Stock image source : Pexels.com

It is a common belief in some countries that if a cat crosses the road then it becomes inauspicious to move forward and break the ‘virtual line of crossing’. Some people believe that sneezing while leaving home may lead to a bad day. Similarly, some may assume that they have a ‘lucky pen’ for the examination and they attribute the results to the pen. What is even more interesting is that it is not just novices who fall for the trap, there have been legends who believed in such notions. The example of football star Pelé is commonly known. The football star once gave his shirt to a fan and saw a decline in his performance. He assumed that giving the shirt caused him to play badly. He immediately set a friend with the task of retrieving the same. He made it clear that he needed it at any cost. Subsequently, he got back the shirt. Lo and behold, he was back in form within a week! Talk about the lucky charm effect. This evidently reinforced his belief in his ‘lucky shirt’. However, it was later revealed by his friend that he simply gave him his new ‘unlucky shirt’ after a failed attempt at finding the old ‘lucky one’. There are lesser but even more bizarre ways of rituals that footballers have practiced like listening to specific songs before the match, keeping an even number of items in the fridge to even urinating in the leftmost urinal or urinating when the washroom is empty, the list goes on and on.

There are some other common life examples of this phenomenon. If you give your car to your friend and he returns it next day. Sadly for you, the car breaks down ten minutes into your drive. You may attribute the break-down to the friend and think that it was caused by him. Possibly he could have used it in a rash manner. However, there could be finitely other possibilities which would not be dependent on the event of the car being used by someone else. Similarly, someone moves into a new house and next month, she is laid off from the job. After a few days, her kid falls ill. These events could make her believe that there is some ‘bad spell’ in the house which leads to the bad occurrences and she could think that shifting to the new house has caused these troubles. This kind of the wrong attribution of the events can be found everywhere around us. We are so used to them that it would not raise an eyebrow. Many of us may believe in them too. It is not all lost until it is limited to personal lives, however, it becomes a major concern when it creeps into the analysis for on a professional level. The very nature of two events occurring in succession could drive us to believe that first event has caused the second. The chronological sequence is misleadingly taken as causality in many cases. Many times, we adults, and even more embarrassingly, as researchers, we commit a similar mistake. There are numerous studies where the researcher may jump to conclusion using statistical tools which show a very high correlation between two events and believe them to be causation. The fallacy of ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ also called ‘post hoc’ is due to the attribution of causality simply because of the order of the occurrence of the events rather than consideration of the antecedents for the second event. With a better inquiry, we may possibly rule out the event 1 as one of the consequents for event 2. There are many ways to test this, however, it all begins with the researcher.

The reasoning that we may have for knowledge about some event may be a priori or a posteriori. The Scotland yard found a dead body beside a river. We know for sure that if the death is caused due to unnatural means like stabbing then it would have been a result of murder while on the other hand to know the time of death, we need an autopsy to analyze the body and come to conclusion about it. The statements that are of the first type may be derived purely from the logical derivation while for the second type we need empirical verification.

“Although all our cognition begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises [is caused by] from experience”- Immanuel Kant.

Finally, an easy process to avoid having the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is to not take the causality at face value of two consecutive events A and B. Firstly, think of a ‘logical’ explanation for the statement that ‘how exactly A causes B? Apart from the occurrence of an event, is there any explanation for this? Usually, the causality can be logically explained if it is there. We could test for some intermediate steps between A and B. Consider the same person in the house example. She was told by her manager that she was fired because she was frequently late to the work. When she sits down, she remembers that her old house was near to her work while the new one is far away with uncertain delays in traffic. Could she then attribute that her moving to new house lead to her firing? Also, another great way to eliminate such statement is the use of control based causation. In a number of replications of the event, we need to observe the occurrence of both events. If we assume that A has caused B, we could see that whether there are cases where B does not follow the occurrence of A. As with any empirical validation, we are essentially trying to find support for invalidation of the assumption of ‘causal relationship’ from A to B and we need to be careful as it may be that after ’n’ number of observations, we may find our black swan.

You are not alone in this, this is a common problem faced by all of us. The very nature of maximizing pleasures and avoiding effort is deeply there in all of us. We would show a preference for instant gratification over delayed one. I hope these tips would help you inch a little closer to being a better version of you:

1. Simplify — less things means more focus on them. Do you really need to be active on so many social network sites? Do you need to post every moment of your life online? Do you need to watch the new TV series about zombie aliens? Do you need to follow every trend that comes up? Do you need to read/watch news? In essence — don’t install every new app start starts trending, reduce the number of interactions online to few, meaningful ones. Don’t start new TV series. It is much easier not to start than to stop watching.

2. Partition you time — set aside some time only for work, only for fun and only for others. You will instantly feel more satisfied with life. Don’t forget the time for others — take out time for your close ones and community. Also take out time for far ones(in the age of social media, they also deserve your attention) — help people on forums, answer questions on social media, write a blog about self-discipline, etc.

3. Kaizen your efforts — these changes won’t happen suddenly. Just be happy if you are 1% better today than yesterday. In a year 1% will lead to ~40% change due to compounding. First define some habbit like watching Netflix that you want to reduce. Start tracking the total time you spent manually or using time-tracking apps. Try to keep weekly targets and reduce it week-over week.

4. Reduce or eliminate abuse-substances –It is not just about your health or fitness. The issue is that it makes you dependent on them for every small thing, happy or sad occasion. Reduce the intake and take more control of your life.

5. Meditate — A simple 5 min time to focus on your breath will help you stay little bit more calm and focused through the day. You can try to increase the time gradually.

6. Connect with nature — We feel better and happier in company of nature. Take in fresh air and relax. Sit down and observe the creation of nature. It is almost like a meditation.

7. Set up a routine — wake up early and do the most important work in these 1–3 hours of morning session. Keep time just before sleeping for calming activity. Don’t keep this time for media consumption, it can ruin your sleep time. Listening to music (pure music, not Youtube) would be better than binge watching a TV-series.

8. Take a walk — It has been shown that physical exercise will help you stay focused and have been shown to make you happier overall. So just take a stroll, jog or gym, whatever rocks your boat. Your body and mind will thank you later. Rigorous exercise can be tough for some people to follow and they give up. In that case, make it a point to walk for some time whenever you feel comfortable.

9. Spacial partitioning — mentally set up specific places for specific tasks. It is better to work/study on a table and it helps in posture as well as concentration. Keep your phone on silent no notification mode and at least 4 feet away from you while sleeping. Some phones have option to supress the 1st call and allow only repeat calls to get through, use that.

“A device that has interconnection, automation, assistance and self-upgradation capabilities with clear gain in efficiency due to these attributes is a smart device”

Let’s take a step back and understand the very essence of these terms. This will help us figure out the true meaning of these sci-fi-sounding words. Consequently, it shall help us differentiate the pseudo-smart devices from the smart ones. Firstly, let’s start with dumb devices. Well, these are not as dumb as they are shown to be. You were perfectly using your everyday things perfectly earlier, and just adding a chip onto something won’t make it redundant. Let’s put it this way: dumb devices are essentially those, which lack some or all of these interconnections, automation, assistance, and self-upgradation capabilities. If you bought a traditional gas-cooktop, which works as per your setting, that is also a dumb device, same is the case of most of the non-electronic controlled vehicles. Next in line is the automated devices that can take decisions based upon certain programs. These programs are either based on condition-based logic or a lookup table. The engine in a typical internal combustion engine car can essentially take tens of small but helpful decisions on its own, based upon the range of sensors that feed data into the electronic control unit. Here we talk about automated devices that are a step up from non-automated ones. As per the marketing pushed by the start-ups, consulting companies, and like, both automated and non-automated devices are sometimes put under the category of dumb devices, however, that is debatable.

On the other hand, there are smart devices which by the very definition, should aid in their use, due to the presence of onboard decision-making abilities based on sensors and they should be interconnected with the network of other such devices, have self-upgradability, and offer assistance that would not be just automated but should go a step beyond that. These devices should take control of certain events and reduce the involvement of the user. This is where most of the products are misleading. While the self-drive cars of Tesla are a good example of a smart device which in this case is a smart car, there are some like smart air-conditioners which when analyzed thoroughly, seem like a gimmick. Here’s why: the manufacturer of this particular AC has essentially put a wireless transmitter that sends the temperature and humidity sensor data to a smartphone app where the user can adjust the settings as per their liking. This is just an example of a new channel of ‘Human-computer-interface’. It is like adding a new remote control not adding ‘smartness’. For this device to be truly smart, it needs to have an ‘intelligence engine’. A brain that can collect data, process it, and decide the cooling curve, humidity levels on its own and help you reduce both electricity bills as well as increase your comfort levels. A similar story is there in many cases where essentially a sensor sends data to a smartphone and they call it a smart device. Well, finally, could we call a smartphone a smart device? In its native form, the smartphone was used to categorize phones that ‘behaved like a computer’ with downloadable apps and used internet access to run them, had a touchscreen interface. Regardless of that, it fulfills the criteria for interconnection, automation, assistance, and self-upgradation. A smartphone is undeniable a smart device. Sometimes, the smart devices have automatic settings set as default like having resolutions for Youtube(read more).

Coming to the final buzzword ‘intelligent’. This is another area of confusion, or rather opportunism for the marketeers of certain products who are misusing it to such an extent, that it even results in fading of the value associated with the intelligence of devices. Intelligence is defined as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” this holds true for both humans as well as machines. These abilities in quantitative, verbal, emotional or spatial dimensions would allow the machine to act and behave in a similar manner as human beings. An example of this is the voice assistant on your phone. It may be Siri or Android Assistant or Alexa. All of them use AI to interact with the user in a human-like manner. We are nowhere close to having a detailed and lucid conversation with a friend but it can get basic tasks done like setting up reminders, telling a joke, reading out the news, etc. In the case of a car, the intelligent car would be again exemplified by our example of Tesla model ‘X’. Self-drive cars use advanced intelligence in a number of ways: artificial vision, image processing, decision making and even giving up the control to humans when it is beyond its boundary conditions. As I write this article, Grammarly is helping me eliminate some embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors. Is it intelligent or just smart? Yes, it is intelligent. While MS Word’s spell check uses the lookup-table along with morphology and n-grams, it has inherent limitations when it comes to words that are not part of the system. It also faces issues in contexts that its algorithm was not programmed to handle. On the other hand, Grammarly is vastly superior in both spelling and grammar recommendations because it also learns from the use of language and adjusts itself. It ‘learns’ from the writings and that helps the model to get trained in nuances. It can offer tone and context-specific suggestions too, which are all signs of intelligence.

One of the interesting aspects of a mysterious, ‘this changes everything’ kind of tech is that it polarizes opinions. There are always some stop-watch critics for any new technology, while there are also many over-enthusiasts who find it amusing. This kind of polarization is manifested in the case of the upcoming new technology platform, the Internet of Things aka IOT. Looking at things from a layman’s perspective, one can’t really see any ‘practically’ existent real life impact of IOT. Though there are examples here and there, we are still far from the true sense of ‘interconnected information driven world’. It would definitely take around a decade to know if it would really turn out to be as ground breaking as it has been hyped to be. So, the question arises, who exactly gains from all this hype around this magical three letter word? This article discusses the potential gainers from the hype around this technology and how they benefit from it.

Who benefits from popularity and how?

1. Consultants — they can smell a phenomena years ahead and use people’s fascination, fear, curiosity, zealousness or even fear to sell their services. The websites of most if not all of the big firms don’t forget to mention how IOT is going to change the business landscape and brag about their prowess in IOT; how they can help your business grow in the face of it, or better yet leverage it to have unprecedented growth.Which may be or may not be useful. When it is bundled with other offerings it becomes even more difficult to point a finger as to what worked and what did not work. However, some of the initial success stories do set good examples to follow and people to improve upon.

2. Media — there is a major spike in the Google search for the term IOT. If you check the Google Trends, you will find testimony to the amount of inquisitiveness people have for this fascinating three letter acronym. These searches lead to plethora of websites, videos, blogs,etc which publish in this context. These are some of the early cash-in avenues for the hype around this tech or any other tech for that matter. In an age of click-baits and ‘leaked’ product pre-launch information, any hype has eyeballs and earlobes to cater which definitely helps in cashing-into the halo around these buzzwords.

3. Startups — the valuation for any startup around 1999 would shoot up if they added .com to their name(ironically the perceived valuation just after the dotcom bust had an exponentially higher negative impact in the other direction). Right now many VCs have openly disclosed that they are looking for ideas related to IOT. While others would implicitly fancy an idea of being associated with the next unicorn. This would help many of the ideas get initial funding and traction they need to get ahead. However they would succeed only if they have a solid business model and create some value for the end users. Microsoft will invest $5 Billion globally on IOT over the next 5 years.

4. Development technology providers — There are many kits now available to try your hands on IOT. These kits or even individual chips, sensors, wireless trans-receivers, etc all mean very good business for the companies like ARM, Cisco, Intel, etc. There are also bigger players like IBM who want to capture the market where they can cater to the potentially millions of developers! The kits start from $10 and go upto $1000. The revenue streams are from both the hardware as well as software development kits, with the potential buyers across the globe tinkering on their boards, you can get a rough idea of the huge market around this concept.

5. Consumer electronics manufacturers — Very soon there will be proliferation of products that claim to use/abuse the concept of IOT. Many of the smart devices that essentially allow the users to use smartphones to control a lock are also claiming to be IOT. However, truly they are not yet in the spirit of IOT : the true IOT based devices would have ‘intelligent’, ‘data driven’ and ‘interconnectedness’ at their core, which is a long way to go from here.

6. Academicians — You may see many courses and micro-degree programs offered right now on various online courses platforms both in MOOC and non-MOOC formats. The formal education sector is a bit slow to pickup on trends but soon enough there will be full fledged courses being offered in the technical domains of IOT. However, that being said, education industry would benefit more from the post-hype, actualized developments from IOT than from the hype that is created.

7. Society — Can we really take a stand whether it is a hype or not? However we would be able to see in a clearer picture in retrospect, looking back at these times. As Edison said that you can’t see the value and benefits of a small baby. In the same way, I do believe that IOT is a grand idea, which may turn out to be as great as it is being speculated by some. However, in case it does not have that great impact as it is being speculated in terms like “this changes everything”. It will definitely provide people new ways to look at old problems. Some of the solutions would come through that route. Society moves forwards though experimentation and this is one of the best ideas of our times. Just like internet disrupted the business models, this could potentially do the same in future. Moreover, if you believe in the Gartner’s hype cycle then it is all about the different points of time when a tech goes through it it’s share of hype and disillusion. Let’s see where this tech journey leads to!