The Open book exam fallacy

My MBA first Trimester is over. Three months 4 subjects and 90 days of sleep deprivation! So what all did I learn in this trimester you ask? Well, I learnt a little bit of Marketing, a little bit of Operations Management and a lot of Financial Accounting and Financial Management. The finance courses involved more math than I did in most of my Engineering courses! For those of you who thought that MBA was for the "management kind" (read - mathematically challenged!) you are in for a rude shock!

This week I had exams for all the subjects that I just mentioned. And believe it or not all the exams happily proclaimed that they were "open book" exams!! Yippee, open book, you can actually "officially" cheat in the exams? Yeah! Get whatever notes, text books, periodicals, comics, magazines you want and write the damn paper!!

I was all happy. I carried like a truck load of books in the exam and there came the paper. First time in my life I figured that the appendix in the book is actually very important. It helps you track down words in the examination paper that you have never heard of before in your life!

That's not all. I opened all the books that I carried, but opening the books doesn't mean that you can make sense out of it right? So next 1 hour was spent trying to "comprehend" what the open book I was seeing actually meant :) !! All said and done, open book exams are like an open challenge in your face. They tell you that bring what you want, you are still dumb enough to not crack the exams :) !! Anyway, I am happy that I got over with my exams. This was like the first major exam I wrote after 5.5 years of merrily typing away everything on the computer. The first time that I picked up the pen to write, I felt like a 2 year old kid practicing his A,B,Cs!! By the fourth paper I scribbled words that didn't make much sense to me when I tried to read them back (Trivia - I had won in the handwriting competition that was conducted in my school ... 21 years back :) )!! Computers have crippled us in more ways than we can imagine!!

Anyway, I have this short 3 day vacation before I get on with my second Trimester...

Time tourist!

Hello fellow earthlings from a different era. Today I did the stupidest mistake of my life. I got into an innocuous looking enclosure that looked like an ordinary elevator and 40 seconds later, I came out 30 years into the future! To be precise, today's date is 7th January 2038.

Now I am old, tired and have lost the will to perform! Well for those of you who are interested in knowing about the future here is what it is:

• The world is on the brink of a recession yet again (yeah like it happened in 2008) its the sub-prime and derivates crisis again! (History always repeats itself! We are on a sinusoidal curve!)
• People still use computers, cars and other non-biodegradable pollutants
• Students still have to study for exams

So what you ask is the evidence that I time traveled? Elementary my dear friend, see the time and date in the elevator's display :) !!

Moral of the story: Before you get into an elevator see that its not taking you into another dimension.

If none of you found this post funny, its okay, with my exams less than a week away, my brain can only think so much :) !!

And now that I spoke about time travel, I would like to conclude my post by this particular statement by Stephen Hawking:

"Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"

Isn't it like the most convincing statement against time travel? Keep thinking...

Made History

So I went for the practice session of the first ever grand prix held at night in Singapore. My first experience of watching a F1 race live. Breath taking indeed. Figured out that F1 cars are really noisy and very fast. So fast that your ordinary point and click camera can do nothing but click photos of the track sans the car.

Also figured that F1 merchandise is expensive and the city looks awesome under lights. I am saving the ticket to sell for millions of dollars 30 years from now to fund my retired life. This is what I call planning ;) !! Those of you who want to drool on the priceless artifact, it is made available here for your viewing pleasure only.

 

Thought that this picture of the track makes it look serene ... enjoy!

Cleaning the floor in 15 minutes

Well, for those of you who know me, I am a cleanliness freak and at times over do it. But my hostel life has toned me down a bit, and I had been procrastinating wet cleaning my floor for a while now.

Today there is a huge thunderstorm in my part of Singapore. Talking of weather in Singapore, I bet even if you sneeze out there in India the turbulence that you create in the air is big enough for us to have a thunderstorm here!! Butterfly effect I bet. I diligently close my room windows each time that I leave my hostel room (cause like I said before, I would never know when one of you decides to sneeze in India!). But, today, my neighbor forgot to close his windows and went for his classes. The hostel rooms are so designed that there is another door that separates every room (internally connected).

Even though I had closed my windows, the water accumulated in his room came over to mine (from the gap between the connecting door and floor) and flooded here as well. And it took me a while to notice because I was day dreaming about the F1 race scheduled in Singapore from today :) and only realized the water when it reached my feet.

Back to my cleaning habits, I did clean up my room in 15 minutes flat (something which I could have easily done more often!).

Moral of the story? "God makes people clean their rooms who do not clean themselves!".

Update: The *other side* of the story can be found here

Do a good deed online...

So we all have grown up to the fact that every little thing that we find online is free!! Free to the extent that we refuse to pay for any content that we find online, however good it is. An article that Seth Godin wrote recently has gotten me all thinking about this.

Most (if not all) of my knowledge these days is derived from the Internet. And as far as I remember, I have hardly paid any of the web sites for all the amazing content that they provide to me. Most of these web sites are maintained by people like you and me who are making ends meet by juggling their jobs, family and the web site. They are driven by a passion, a passion to share, a passion to help the world.

Aren't we then, as consumers of this information, obligated to help these guys in some way? So saying, if they are using online advertising as their revenue model, aren't we expected to consume (view) those innocuous advertisements? What harm can be done to your soul by seeing some advertisements everyday? Not only will this help you continue to get great content online everyday but also it will support the entire online advertising industry, one click at a time! Who knows, this might just help to eliminate that spam that you get everyday? After all, they are just seeking your attention...

As Seth says .. "If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks". And before you start searching for ads on my site, wait! I don't have any. But if you think hard there are at least a billion other web sites that need your help!

And before I end, here is a sweet ad from Coca Cola (no I am not getting paid for putting it up here ;)) that fits right into this context .. "Give a little love and it all comes back to you.." .. And if you don't get the humor in this advertisement, its time you go play "Grand Theft Auto".

Yupp, you guessed it right, I am in the mood to spread some love ;) !!

Chimp with chopsticks

Whoever thinks that I don't have patience should come and see me eat with chopsticks..

Gimme a pair of chopsticks and I will try to lift anything and everything with my chopsticks under the pretext of learning to use them :) !! I make a big mess at the end of a rather long lunch/dinner (how about 1 hour?) spent fiddling with the chopsticks. The seemingly easy task of lifting things off the plate and putting them in my big mouth has now become a complex process involving my clumsy fingers, the awkwardly held chopsticks and finally gravity!!

However, I think I have already mastered the art of eating with chopsticks in a weightless environment. But then, I still have to live on planet earth, yeah with gravity around, things held between the chopsticks tend to fall back into the bowl splashing whichever colored liquid it held on everything in its vicinity. I have a t-shirt which has a horizontal line on its chest which most people can't decipher as my artwork with chopsticks :) !!

But then, the warrior in me refuses to give up. After all, how hard can it be to chase that last morsel of rice left on your plate with a pair of chopsticks?

Biological Magnetic Compass?

For those of you who have followed my blog long enough know that I have this something (called respect) for cows. Yeah, cows for me are those benign creatures who just go around "ruminating" and posing for photographs for silly strangers on highways. They provide milk, cow-dung (mind you, no bull-shit) and directions!

Directions? Yeah, on the highway you just walk up to a friendly-neighborhood cow and ask her for directions. Its as easy as that! Don't believe me? Read this article. Yeah technically they are just magnetic compasses (as of now!). So all cows in this world tend to point north :) !! Which means, if you are lost at night, you no longer need to look up to the north star. Just search for the nearest cow and see where she is looking at. Life is easy!!

Now we just wait till Google acquires some cows and comes up with a Google-maps mashup on them. Once Google has acquired them, you just walk up to any cow and say "I am feeling lucky". The cow will give you exact directions and also the time required to reach there. I know my imagination is running wild, but then .. I am sleep deprived :( !!!

Email subscription available

So I figured that there are some people in this big bad world that rely on their email inboxes to get news and other worthless information (like my blog :) !!). So to be of service to them, starting today, I have enabled Email subscription to my blog. That means, if you want, every time that I post a rant over here, you will get an email containing the same blog post in your inbox. No more fumbling around with an RSS reader and all. You can subscribe by email here.

I don't have an official privacy policy, but am not gonna spam your inbox. So relax and subscribe. For those of you who use RSS readers, ignore this post cause my RSS feed remains alive and kicking.

And finally, those of you who do not understand what RSS is .. see this amazing video by Common Craft that explains the concept ...

Cultural Ambassadors

Indians in foreign countries become cultural ambassadors of their country per se. So if an Indian does something weird, then it is assumed that "all Indians" do that and its an Indian cultural thing. Its funny how things get generalized to Indians. Some of the funniest assumptions about Indians that I have come across are:

1. Indians are vegetarians - If I take the ratio of number of veggie to non-veggie Indians I know it will be 1:8 (remember, statistics are always made up on the spot)
2. Indians are non-alcoholics - The less said the better
3. Indians are aggressive - Look at me, am so naive and laid back
4. Indians are good at math - Err.. am I really Indian?
5. Indians are poor - Go check the Forbes list of richest people in 2008 we have 47 billionaires too :)

If you come to think of it .. not all of us eat the same food, speak the same language, follow the same religion or have the same festivals. Not all of us are dark/fair, short/tall, fat/lean, rich/poor, funny or crazy.

I think its time we tell the world that our languages, cultures, traditions, food habits and everything else is absolutely diverse, and there is nothing in common between two randomly chosen Indians out of a population of 1.13 billion, other than the passport of course :) !!

Decisions

Yeah, so for those of you who have not figured it out yet, I have enrolled myself up in an MBA course. First 3 weeks of my program already over and here is an *executive summary* ;) of my learning:

Put 5 MBA students in a room to come up with a decision and after 3 hours you will still have them contemplating and arguing. I had read somewhere that the maximum learning in an MBA course happens from your colleagues. And I figured that people from all countries and all backgrounds can argue on any silly topic as much as I can :) !! We all are one ... we all are equally crazy ...

And I have been trying to play catch up with all the pre-reads, post-reads, case studies and presentations that I have to make. Figured that some subjects just *sound* good. When you actually open the text books to read, they are instant sleep inducers. Also figured that having a nice campus with amazing sporting facilities is a major distraction. For all you MBA aspirants .. choose a school that just has a library and the hostel ....