Authored By: Arnab Sinha:

Blessed by a sudden off day at work, yesterday, I called up my old time friend Richa. She is an HR pro who till last November was working with an FMCG major. She got married in December and eventually quit her job to move in with her husband- who was based out of a different city. “Marriage doesn’t change too many things, life is same”, she tried to play down my attempts to scare her with pending nuptial responsibilities. “The pain is when you are labeled a housewife”, she quipped, recalling that a week back the Census guys were at her place. As part of their demographic profiling duty and not convinced that she was simply between jobs, the field officers had put her in the ‘Housewife’ bracket. “I am aghast”, she yelled with her trademark scream. 

Adding salt to the wound, I pointed her to a Census theory, which classifies housewives under economically non-productive category of the Indian population. Quoting a news article (link here),

“This bias is shockingly prevalent in the work of Census. In the Census of 2001, it appears that those who are doing household duties like cooking, cleaning of utensils, looking after children have been categorized as non-workers and equated with beggars, prostitutes and prisoners who, according to Census, are not engaged in economically productive work.” 

We laughed at the callousness of this classification. “If I don’t cook and do the dishes, my hubby will not be able to put in the 10 hours at work. And that will be real loss to the economy”, she argued with a naïve credibility in her voice. She almost hung up on me, when I reminded her that Census being a decennial exercise, she will remain a non-productive citizen for the next ten years. As we ended the call, I pondered at the intricacies of this pressing issue. 

Needless to say, the heart of the problem is absence of any explicit market for housewives – which means no demand and supply curve and hence no equilibrium price. Much of the economics research these days is centered on these typical dilemmas- situations where the market fails – from pollution to population control. Most of these studies single around a popular concept in economics - opportunity cost

– which is the cost of alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Putting simply, if you decide to do an MBA after your engineering, the opportunity cost of your decision is the salary you would have earned if you worked instead.

Taking the opportunity cost hypothesis into our case, we can arrive at a model for pricing housewives. Say, your mother, a pediatrician leaves her full time job, to take care of her kids and never joins back the workforce. She quits at the age of 33, was drawing Rs X per annum and retirement age for her service is 60 years. Assuming no increment in her salary, the opportunity cost of her decision is Rs 27X (27 being the number of years left for retirement) at today’s prices. Since this is the cost of the alternative she is foregoing, a fair price for her being a housewife is therefore, Rs 27X.

Of course, this model has its own fallacies. Purists will argue that not every housewife will have a viable alternative and hence no opportunity to forego. This necessitates a more complex method of evaluating the housewife price. I will call it the weighted average method of pricing. 

Assume our housewife, Mrs Sharma, multitasks between cooking for her family and teaching her kids. For simplicity, let us say that these are the only 2 household activities she indulges into. Everyday, she spends a good 2 hours to cook and 3 hours to teach. Also assume, in the free market, a hired cook charges Rs 120 for a 6 hour cooking job and a private tutor commands Rs 500 for a 6 hour teaching session per day. Since Mrs Sharma is cooking for 2 hours and teaching for 3 hours, she is working 33% of a full time cook and 50% of a full time tutor. With our assumptions, Mrs Sharma’s daily price for household activities is therefore (33% of Rs 120)+ (50% of Rs 500) which is Rs 290. 

Since a typical housewife dons the hats of a chef, a nanny, a teacher, a maid and so many other things, the market based price of these roles can be weighted down and summed up to arrive at a fair valuation of her contribution.

How do you price the housewife who is pregnant? Does a market exist? Ask the surrogate mother, how much she charges to rent her womb. (Interesting, huh?) 

Sparing a thought for our Census Board, replicating these academic models into real life is a challenge indeed. Irony, it might seem, the easiest to price among the non-productive categories are the prostitutes. A market already exists and is certain semi-organized red light areas there is a demand and supply that can be fairly measured and price is regulated. Without going into the ethics of the issue, one can broadly say that simple legalization can take them into the productive half of the population.

One of the many reasons why housewives should be priced is to calculate compensation packages in the event of an untimely death. Many a times, people are short changed citing non-productivity of housewives. Read this article, here, for more interesting insights into the same.

As we leave for the day, can you think of similar pricing approaches for beggars? Whack your brain and put down your thoughts.

Postscript: Are prisoners productive? A Raja’s one year tenure as Telecom Minister resulted in a loss of Rs 22,000 crores to state exchequer. If he serves six month tenure in Tihar jail, how much will the nation save? Do the arithmetic!

Productive, right?

Authored by Harish R

With the tension building up in several parts of the world and talks about nuclear warfare often coming up, the term missiles are often discussed. This post aims to throw some light on these missiles. 

A missile can be defined in modern war terms as a carrier vessel which contains a huge load of explosives that is launched from a safe place which upon reaching the target detonates causing huge destruction. Without going into the details, it can be said that missiles are largely classified into two types: ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. 

Consider that you have a basketball in hand. Lets say you wish to score a 3 point shoot. You stand at a distance from the ring and throw the ball. If your throw is good enough, it goes through the ring and you score 3 points. Lets look at this deeper. With the ball in hand, you calculate mentally the distance to the ring, the wind speed, other factors and finally calculate the angle at which you must send the ball into the air at a particular speed. If your calculation is correct, it will go through the ring. This is precisely how a ballistic missile works. It is launched from the base after making lots of calculations and if everything is correct, it will hit the target and explodes. 

Now consider an intelligent basketball that will automatically navigate in air, find the ring correctly and go through it. That is a cruise missile. As you would have guessed, cruise missiles are costlier than the ballistic ones but are highly accurate. So they are mostly used to carry nuclear weapons of high destruction and are then called nuclear-warheads. Cruise missile is one of the much researched areas in defence in several countries. 

Some famous cruise missiles that exist are Brahmos, Tomahawk, C-101, C-301 etc. What is more appealing to these cruise missiles other than their accuracy is their stealth mode. The normal radars used in defence cannot detect objects flying within a certain height. These cruise missiles, since they have their own navigation systems, can fly at very low altitudes, evade the radar detection and hit the target with the element of surprise. What is more interesting is that, some of these missiles can reach speeds upto 3 times the speed of sound and by the time they are spotted, it is already too late to try and stop them. News items say that research work is going on to create cruise missiles that can travel 5 times the speed of sound making them the ultimate deadly weapons in war. 

Cruise missiles can be classifed based on speed, range and target. Based on speed, they can be classified as subsonic (upto 0.8 times the speed of sound), supersonic (upto 3 times the speed of sound) and hypersonic (upto 5 times the speed of sound). Based on range they are classified as short range (upto 300 km), medium range (upto 1000 km) and long range (over 1000 km). Based on the target they can be classified by mentioning their source as surface, water or air and target as surface, water or air. So next time when someone tells you medium range subsonic surface to air cruise missile, you will know what it means. 

The most interesting thing about a cruise missile is its technology. The technology that helps the missile to stay on track. The path that a missile travels is divided into three segments namely boost phase, mid course phase and terminal phase in that order and specific technologies are used for each. 

The boost phase is very similar to a ballistic missile launch. Calculations are made based on the environment and the missile is launched. But in a cruise missile, at the end of the boost phase the missile does not explode or even reach the target. It would have reached its cruising orbit just outside the location of the launch. Not much fancy technologies are used here. 

During the mid course phase, the missile travels the entire length of its intended path. It ends once the target is spotted. The most commonly used methods in this phase are GPS, INS and TERCOM. A GPS device that is installed in the missile stays in contact with a sattelite and the missile is guided accordingly. Functionally this is very simple but if the signal to the sattelite is lost or jammed, the system fails. The second method is INS or Inertial Navigation System. There is one cool feature in iPhones, that is if you rotate the phone by 90 degrees, the content displayed also rotates. This is achieved by using accelerometers installed in the phone. The similar technology is used in INS in cruise missiles. The pitch, yaw and roll of the missile is measured by using accelerometers and gyroscopes and the missile is guided accordingly. Though this system cannot be jammed by external factors, even a slight error in a very long range missile can miss the target by miles. The third method is TERCOM or Terrain Contour Matching. It is done by first storing the elevations of land above which the missile is to travel and guiding the missile based on it. There are two problems with this method. One is that getting the correct elevation of the land for long distances is tough and the other is that this method will fail if the missile flies above sea or forest. Since none of the methods is fool proof, a combination of these is used in missiles to guarantee greater accuracy. 

Now to the final course, the terminal guidance part. Here, the missile has reached a position from where the target is in the vicinity. Algorithms are needed in this segment which give maximum accuracy with minimal processing because the target is fast approaching. So the algorithms used in the previous courses cannot be used here. One of the methods commonly used is by infra red heat seeking. If the target is another high heat body like a fighter jet, the temperature of its engine or emission is used as a reference and the missile is directed towards it. Yes, this method can be fooled by how you see in Swat Kats by using decoys. This method however cannot be used clearly for normal buildings and other targets which are at comparitively the same heat level as their surroundings. Another common method is to bounce laser off the target, read the properties of the reflected light, find the target and direct the missile towards it. This pretty much works like SONAR in ships. This method though is very simple to implement, it cannot work in adverse climatic conditions. The final and the most popular method is called DSMAC (Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator). Pictures of the target are taken from satellite at various altitudes and stored in the missile. The missile takes pictures using a high speed camera in its head, matches it with the satellite image using the statistical correlation formula, finds the target and directs the missile towards it. This is one of the most effecient algorithms on which a lot of research happens. Various techniques of imagery are used to counter the effects of adverse climatic conditions. This algorithm however fails in deserts and similar places where the terrain changes often. Lot of research is happening on countering this problem as well. 

Just in case you were wondering Brahmos is a super sonic short and medium range wherever to wherever cruise missile. 

Until my next post, take care!

Authored By Harish R

How many times have we cursed our education system and its rote learning methods? Some of us keep it to ourself while others air their views in blogs and social networking sites. Very few of such people with the appropriate authority have tried and implemented methods in their teaching and academic setting that aim to stimulate the analytical thinking in children and not rote learn. Some of these methods have been successful while others have not been. But all these methods are aimed at helping the students to apply the knowledge they acquire to real world scenarios so that they learn the concepts better and are also motivated to do so.

Authored By: Harish R:

Every firm is started with a specific target market and it caters to the needs of that segment. Once that is satisfied and the firm is established as a market leader or a monopoly, they move on to cover other market segements or entirely different markets even. One such example is Google TV. Read on to find out more. Google as we all know started as a simple search engine project of two graduate students in Stanford and later got developed into the most dominant IT firm ever that reached a place like no other company by becoming a verb in the Oxford dictionary. Now that they have conquered the search engine market, they decided to add other products to their catalogue.

Authored By Arnab Sinha:

If you are a real foodie and exotic desserts like chocolate dipped strawberries or honey dipped nachos make your mouth water, then the title of this story might just sound like a gourmet delight to you. Well, I am not a food connoisseur (and my cooking acumen is only limited to the genre of instant noodles and ready made pastas), but what we will be discussing here might make your jaws drop, because this is a recipe of a disaster in the making, and it might just be coming our way.The double dip is the new fancy word economists around the globe are using to describe the possible shape of the recession we entered into.

A double-dip refers to a recession followed by a short-lived recovery, followed by another recession.After a slew of sustained low grow, while global economies are trying to limp back to normalcy (as I write this article, Sensex is at a 32-month high), the million dollar question is will the recession haunt us again and hence, will we again go into the second dip? To begin, lets try to understand, what were the steps taken post the 2008 recession (i.e the first dip) and what effect they had on the economy. The knee jerk reaction was to dole out large fiscal stimulus packages to offset the reduction in private sector demand caused by the crisis. The U.S. executed two stimulus packages, totaling nearly $1 trillion during 2008 and 2009.

Authored By Harish R:

“Necessity is the mother of all inventions.” This is very true for the greatest technological innovations and revolutions ever happened in the world. A prominent example that I can quote is the invention of telephone. The need for a telephone for customers on-the-go created the mobile phone. A similar connection is what I find between another two greatest creations, computers and cloud computing. Yes, you got it right, cloud computing is more or less like a computer on-the-go. There is a great level of similarity between mobile phones and cloud computing. Read on to find out how. Before I go on to explain what cloud computing is, I feel it is proper to know its need first. In today's world, almost every individual has access to a computer and also an email ID. Let us try comparing both. A computer and email have their own applications which they solve well.

Authored By Sangeeta Rakesh Goswami:

On hearing the news about synthetic cell I recalled the 3D version of movie T-Rex. Just imagine we have dinosaurs’ eggs preserved in the laboratory, by studying the DNA pattern of them with the help of computer, we synthesize the similar DNA from chemicals and after re-sequencing them we insert them into modified cell of peacock or a crocodile  and there you make dinosaurs live…. and think if  tigers and leopards which are being extinct in Asia can be reproduced by creating artificial genes without going to Jungle of Africa, or we may produce an apple from a seed of a berry.

American biologist Craig Venter and noble award winner scientist Hamilton Smith are at the verge of doing these wonders which, till now, have been seen only in Hollywood movies. They have created the largest synthetic DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the base pair genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides) and synthesized the gene sequences from chemicals as needed and put them together. This synthetic genome was then transplanted into another modified bacterial cell (Mycoplasma capricolum) of a goat germ, and left to its own devices. Soon the recipient cells integrated the synthetic genome and immediately began to carry out the instructions encoded within.

Authored By:Harish R

As discussed in my previous article where I had related the need for distributed computing in case of a company as big as google with general stores example and mentioned as to how and why Hadoop came into existence, here I explain  how intriguing is the concept and how it is implemented. Let us start by understanding what MapReduce is first.

The MapReduce Concept

Any problem can be solved in MapReduce in just 2 steps. The first one is called Map and the second one is called Reduce. For better understanding, I shall continue with the general stores example  used in the previous article. For now, you are the owner of a large chain of general stores with people working at various levels.

Authored By:Sameer Peesapati

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) and Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles(UCAVs) made their grand appearance during the Cold War era. They were machines of reconnaissance, seldom helped the men in the field of espionage with vital information, used in combat for missile and munition deployment. UCAVs are required to be more precisely engineered as they carry the responsibility of hitting targets causing less collateral damage. As time progressed the applications diversified from being limited to the armed forces to aiding the government in surveillance during the times of natural calamities and accidents.

Authored by Harish R

I log in to my computer. Connect to a specific remote server. I type in a few keywords and immediately that remote server orders over half a million computers to work in tandem to solve the problem that I had presented them with and gives me the output. This is not a fantasy story nor am I a millionaire to have such equipment with me. I am just a normal engineering student from a normal college in India. But how do I get access to such a resource? The truth is, not only me but everyone reading this has access to the very same resource I had mentioned earlier. Wondering how?