Saturday, March 31, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Diet, Culture, Stress and lack of Fitness.
Mohan Singh had his arteries by passed recently a procedure that increasing numbers of Indians are having. Last year, medical journal Lancet reported a study of 20,000 Indian patients and found that 60 per cent of the world's heart disease patients are in India, which has 15 per cent of the world's population.
This number is surprising because reports of obesity and heart disease focus on fat Americans and their food. What could account for Indians being so susceptible -- more even than burger-and-fries- eating Americans?
Four things: diet, culture, stress and lack of fitness.
There is no doctrinal prescription for vegetarianism in Hindu diet, and some texts explicitly sanction the eating of meat. But vegetarianism has become dogma.
Indian food is assumed to be strongly vegetarian, but it is actually lacking in vegetables. Our diet is centred around wheat, in the north, and rice, in the south. The second most important element is daal in its various forms. By weight, vegetables are not consumed much. You could have an entire South Indian vegetarian meal without encountering a vegetable. The most important vegetable is the starchy aloo. Greens are not cooked flash-fried in the healthy manner of the Chinese, but boiled or fried till much of the nutrient value is killed.
Gujaratis and Punjabis are the two Indian communities most susceptible to heart disease. Their vulnerability is recent. Both have a large peasant population -- Patels and Jats -- who in the last few decades have moved from an agrarian life to an urban one. They have retained their diet and if anything made it richer, but their bodies do not work as much. This transition from a physical life to a sedentary one has made them vulnerable.
Gujaratis lead the toll for diabetes as well, and the dietary aspect of this is really the fallout of the state's economic success. Unlike most Indian states, Gujarat has a rich and developed urban culture because of the mercantile nature of its society. Gujaratis have been living in cities for centuries.
Th prosperity has given the Gujarati surplus money and, importantly, surplus time. These in turn have led to snacky foods, some deep fried, some steamed and some, uniquely in India, baked with yeast. Most Indians are familiar with the Gujarati family on holiday, pulling out vast quantities of snacks the moment the train pushes off.
Gujarati peasant food -- bajra (millet) roti, a lightly cooked green, garlic and red chilli chutney, and buttermilk -- is actually supremely healthy. But the peasant Patel has succumbed to the food of the 'higher' trader and now prefers the oily and the sweet.
Marathi peasant food is similar, but not as wholesome with a thick and pasty porridge called zunka replacing the green.
Bombay's junk food was invented in the 19th century to service Gujarati traders leaving Fort's business district late in the evening after a long day. Pao bhaji, mashed leftover vegetables in a tomato gravy served with shallow-fried buns of bread, was one such invention.
The most popular snack in Bombay is vada pao, which has a batter-fried potato ball stuck in a bun. The bun -- yeast bread -- is not native to India and gets its name pao from the Portuguese who brought it in the 16th century. Bal Thackeray encouraged Bombay's unemployed Marathi boys to set up vada pao stalls in the 60s, which they did and still do.
The travelling chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain called vada pao the best Indian thing he had ever eaten, but it is heart attack food.
Though Jains are a very small part (one per cent or thereabouts) of the Gujarati population, such is their cultural dominance through trade that many South Bombay restaurants have a 'Jain' option on the menu. This is food without garlic and ginger. Since they are both tubers (as also are potatoes), Jains do not eat them, because in uprooting them from the soil, living organisms may be killed (no religious restriction on butter and cheese, however!). The vast majority of Ahmedabad's restaurants are vegetarian. Gujaratis have no tolerance for meat-eaters and one way of keeping Muslims out of their neighbourhoods is to do it through banning 'non-vegetarians' from purchasing property in apartment buildings.
Even in Bombay, this intolerance prevails. Domino's, the famous pizza chain, has a vegetarian-only pizza outlet on Malabar Hill (Jinnah's neighbourhood) . Foreigners like Indian food, and it is very popular in England, but they find our sweets too sweet. This taste for excess sugar extends also to beverage: Maulana Azad called Indian tea 'liquid halwa'. Only in the last decade have cafes begun offering sugar on the side, as diabetes has spread.
India's culture encourages swift consumption. There is no conversation at meal-time, as there is in Europe. Because there are no courses, the eating is relentless. You can be seated, served and be finished eating at a Gujarati or Marathi or South Indian thali restaurant in 15 minutes. It is eating in the manner of animals: for pure nourishment. We eat with fingers, as opposed to knives and forks, or chopsticks, resulting in the scooping up of bigger mouthfuls. Because the nature of the food does not allow for leisurely eating, Indians do not have a drink with their meals. We drink before and then stagger to the table.
As is the case in societies of scarcity, rich food is considered good -- and ghee is a sacred word in all Indian languages. There is no escape from fat. In India, advertising for healthy eating also shows food deep fried, but in lower-cholesterol oil.
The insistence by family – 'thoda aur le lo' -- at the table is part of our culture of hospitality, as is the offering of tea and perhaps also a snack to visiting guests and strangers. Middle class Indians, even families that earn Rs10,000 a month, will have servants. Work that the European and American does, the Indian does not want to do: cooking, cleaning, washing up.
Painting the house, changing tyres, tinkering in the garage, moving things around, getting a cup of tea at the office, these are things the Indian gets someone else to do for him. There is no sense of private space and the constant presence of the servant is accepted.
Gandhi's value to India was not on his political side, but through his religious and cultural reforms. What Gandhi attempted to drill into Indians through living a life of action was a change in our culture of lethargy and dependence. Gandhi stressed physical self-sufficiency, and even cleaned his toilet out himself.
But he wasn't successful in making us change, and most Indians will not associate Gandhi with physical self-sufficiency though that was his principal message. Indian men do no work around the house. Middle class women do little, especially after childbirth. Many cook, but the cutting and cleaning is done by the servant. Slim in their teens, they turn thick-waisted in their 20s, within a few years of marriage.
Since we are dependent on other people, we have less control over events. The Indian is under stress and is anxious. This is bad for his health. He must be on constant guard against the world, which takes advantage of him: the servant's perfidy, encroachment by his neighbours, cars cutting in front of him in traffic, the vendor's rate that must be haggled down. Almost nothing is orderly and everything must be worried about.
In the Indian office, the payroll is a secret, and nobody is told what the other makes. Knowledge causes great stress, though the lack of information is also stressful, leading to spy games and office gossip. Because there is no individualism in India, merit comes from seniority and the talented but young executive is stressed by the knowledge that he's not holding the position he deserves. Indians are peerless detectors of social standing and the vertical hierarchy of the Indian office is sacrosanct.
Dennis Kux pointed out that Indian diplomats do not engage officially with an American of lower rank, even if the American was authorised to decide the matter. In the last decade, when Indians began owning companies abroad, the Wall Street Journal reported on cultural problems that arose. Their foreign employees learnt quickly that saying 'no' would cause their Indian bosses great offence, so they learnt to communicate with them as with children.
Indians shine in the west where their culture doesn't hold them back. In India honor is high and the individual is alert to slights from those below him, which discomfort him greatly. There is no culture of physical fitness, and because of this Indians don't have an active old age.
Past 60, they crumble. Within society they must step back and play their scripted role. Widows at that age, even younger, have no hope of remarriage because sacrifice is expected of them. Widowers at 60 must also reconcile to singlehood, and the family would be aghast if they showed interest in the opposite sex at that age, even though this would be normal in another culture.
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Monday, March 26, 2012
Corporate fraud : Mind your language
Corporate fraud
Mind your language
How linguistic software helps companies catch crooks
Feb 18th 2012 | NEW YORK AND PARIS | from the print edition of the Economist
IN THE film "Superman 3", a lowly computer programmer (played by Richard Pryor, pictured) embezzles a fat wad of money from his employer. The boss laments that it will be hard to catch the thief, because "he won't do a thing to call attention to himself. Unless, of course, he is a complete and utter moron." Just then the thief screeches into the car park in a brand new red sports car, radio blaring.
In the real world, embezzlers are seldom so obvious. The traditional way to snare them is to hire an accountant to scrutinise accounts for anomalies. But this is like looking for a contact lens in a snowdrift. So firms are turning to linguistic software to narrow the search.
Rip-offs tend to occur in what gumshoes call the "fraud triangle": where incentive, rationalisation and opportunity meet. To spot staff with the incentive to steal (over and above the obvious fact that money is quite useful), anti-fraud software scans e-mails for evidence of money troubles. Phrases like "under the gun" and "make sales quota" can indicate that an employee is desperate for a bit extra.
Spotting rationalisation is harder. One technique is to identify those who seem unhappy about their jobs, since some may rationalise wrongdoing by telling themselves that their employer is an evil corporation that deserves to be ripped off.
Ernst & Young (E&Y), a consultancy, offers software that purports to show an employee's emotional state over time: spikes in trend-lines reading "confused", "secretive" or "angry" help investigators know whose e-mail to check, and when. Other software can help firms find potential malefactors moronic enough to gripe online, says Jean-François Legault of Deloitte, another consultancy.
To work well, linguistic software must adjust to the way different people talk. For example, when software gurus at E&Y looked at e-mails among financial traders, their first impression was that "these guys' hair is on fire," recalls Vincent Walden, a fraudbuster at the firm. The e-mails were packed solid with swear-words. But this is how traders normally talk. It is when they go quiet that the software must prick up its electronic ears.
Dick Oehrle, the chief linguist on the project, explains how it works. First, the algorithm digests a big bundle of e-mails to get used to employees' language. Then human lawyers code the same e-mails, sorting things as irrelevant, relevant or serious. The human feedback and the computers' results are then reconciled, so the system gets smarter. Mr Oehrle says the lawyers also learn from the computers (presumably such things as empathy and the difference between right and wrong).
To find employees with the opportunity to steal, the software looks for what snoops call "out of band" events: messages such as "call my mobile" or "come by my office" suggest a desire to talk without being overheard. E-mails between an employee and an outsider that contain the words "beer", "Facebook" or "evening" can suggest a personal relationship.
Your e-mails may be aired in court
Financial Tracking Technologies, a firm based in Connecticut, goes a step further, making software that can go through calendar apps and travel-expense claims to determine who has come into contact with certain outside investors. This can be married with information about the timing of trades: for example, a short sale before the public release of bad news, says Tony Turner, the company's boss.
Or consider a broker who e-mails someone a question about the trading volume at which a certain stock would be likely to rise (or fall). This might indicate an interest in manipulating the price. So the software will sift through other data to see if the broker would benefit, even indirectly, perhaps by increasing the value of a derivative in his personal portfolio, says Frédéric Boulier, a Paris-based director of NICE Actimize, an American firm.
Employers without such technology are "operating blind", says Alton Sizemore, a former fraud detective at America's FBI. They often pursue costly investigations based on hunches, which are usually wrong, he says. Mr Sizemore, who now works for Forensic/Strategic Solutions, an anti-fraud consultancy in Alabama, reckons that nearly all giant financial firms now run anti-fraud linguistic software, but fewer than half of medium-sized or small financial firms do.
So there is plenty of room for growth. NICE Actimize says its revenues are steadily rising, though it declines to give figures. Prospective users typically pay for a single "snapshot" search of 12 months of company records, according to APEX Analytix, a developer of the software in Greensboro, North Carolina. For a company with 10,000 employees, this costs about $45,000. Unless a company is very small, evidence of fraud almost always surfaces, convincing clients to sign up for a yearly package that costs three or four times as much as a spot-check, says John Brocar of APEX Analytix.
Why spend the money? Partly because no one likes to be ripped off. But also because laws on bribery (which is harder to spot than theft) have grown tougher. American bosses can in theory be jailed if their underlings grease palms. Jonas Dischl-Luell of AWK Group, a Swiss firm, sells software that scans e-mail addresses to see if any employees are in contact, even indirectly, with officials in corrupt governments. If a company shows it has systems in place to detect this kind of thing, and starts investigating before outsiders do, it may have an easier time in court.
From alpha to smart beta ( from the Economist)
The industry's language is changing
Feb 18th 2012 | from the print edition
Dear investor,
In line with the rest of our industry we are making some changes to the language we use in our marketing and communications. We are writing this letter so we can explain these changes properly. Most importantly, Zilch Capital used to refer to itself as a "hedge fund" but 2008 made it embarrassingly clear we didn't know how to hedge. At all. So like many others, we have embraced the title of "alternative asset manager". It's clunky but ambiguous enough to shield us from criticism next time around.
We know we used to promise "absolute returns" (ie, that you would make money regardless of market conditions) but this pledge has proved impossible to honour. Instead we're going to give you "risk-adjusted" returns or, failing that, "relative" returns. In years like 2011, when we delivered much less than the S&P 500, you may find that we don't talk about returns at all.
It is also time to move on from the concept of delivering "alpha", the skill you've paid us such fat fees for. Upon reflection, we have decided that we're actually much better at giving you "smart beta". This term is already being touted at industry conferences and we hope shortly to be able to explain what it means. Like our peers we have also started talking a lot about how we are "multi-strategy" and "capital-structure agnostic", and boasting about the benefits of our "unconstrained" investment approach. This is better than saying we don't really understand what's going on.
Some parts of the lexicon will not see style drift. We are still trying to keep alive "two and twenty", the industry's shorthand for 2% management fees and 20% performance fees. It is, we're sure you'll agree, important to keep up some traditions. Thank you for your continued partnership.
Zilch Capital LLC
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Matter of Perspective
Absolutely FANTASTIC and is amazing……………….
From the tiniest thing we know to the largest .......………..
<http://htwins.net/scale2/>
move cursor on scroll bar
RSK
The World in the Year You Were Born.....
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Says Press Council Chairman Justice Markandey Katju ........
"Ninety per cent of media coverage goes to entertainment. The problems of the country are not price rise, employment, poverty but whether Sachin Tendulkar has scored his 100th century. Once he has scored his 100th century, issues like unemployment, hunger and poverty are finished and rivers of milk and honey will flow here."
"When Rahul Dravid retires, it is the greatest catastrophy in history. Rahul Dravid retired, the country is doomed. For days on end, the media hyped it up. This is your Indian media," he added.
18 years = 2 coins
"Once a famous yogi went to Ramakrishna Paramhans who was sitting on the bank of the Ganga. He said, "Ramakrishna, what are you doing sitting here? Let us go for a walk over the Ganga."
Ramakrishna asked him, "How many years did it take for you to walk on water?" He said, "Eighteen years practising in the Himalayas, hard work, fasting, yoga postures etc. Now I have this power to walk on the water. Can't you walk on the water?"
Ramakrishna said, "I am not so foolish. When I want to go to the other bank I give the ferryman only two small coins, and that's enough! Your eighteen years are worth just two coins."
Friday, March 23, 2012
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