Tag Archives: Economics

Dialectics of Energy and Intelligence : 1

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Critic, Digital, Economy, Engineering, Internet, Opinions, Perspectives, Philosophy, Psychology, Research, Science, Technology

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RV-AI719_BKRV_M_P_20121116004627Intelligence is a hot topic in technical and business circles. Intelligence is no longer an intellectual or philosophical or psychological topic of discussion. Intelligence is now regarded as the fuel for the future engines of progress for humanity. Artificial intelligence is expected to fuel the most important machines of our time. Be it IBM Watson, or Apple Siri, or Amazon Alexa or Google DeepMind, Artificial intelligence is the driving force for all these advanced information machinery.  When we are seeing a society and economy dominated by the constellation of advanced machinery and their information architecture, it is quite natural to believe that the combination of artificial intelligence and advanced information machinery is going to rule this world. Even if we accept the autonomous nature of information machinery powered by artificial intelligence, the question of energy and its dialectic relationship with intelligence comes into play.

How does energy influences intelligence? Does this question sound odd ? When I mention intelligence,  it is not only artificial intelligence. The terrain of intelligence touches upon natural intelligence, human intelligence, societal intelligence, personal intelligence, organic intelligence, cellular intelligence, atomic intelligence, sub-atomic intelligence, particle intelligence, material intelligence, fluid intelligence, entropy intelligence, fractal intelligence, quantum intelligence and so on. Artificial intelligence we are talking about is just a sub-set of human intelligence in the personal and inter-personal level. It is not even the complete mapping of human intelligence at the societal, personal and organic level. If we take into account these multitude categories of intelligence, the next question is on the dialectic relationship between energy and intelligence.

The relationship between energy, matter and space time is of profound implications. At the quantum mechanical level, energy influences space time properties such as angular momentum, velocity, wave length, frequency etc. On the galactic dimensions, space time curvature together with matter influences the nature of electromagnetic waves. The precise nature of energy, matter and space time are meshed together in the extreme dimensions, be it microscopic or macroscopic. This dialectical relationship between matter and energy is manifested in different space time conjectures differently.

Chennai city through my travelogues

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Critic, Semiotics, Travelogue

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Not sure if a sedentary Sunday night and a monstrous breakfast has an impact on these fragmented thoughts. Chennai has been my second home for more than a decade now. All throughout the significant twists and turns in my professional life and the epochs in my personal life, I kept coming to Chennai in surprising frequency. It is now that I have got some ambient time and space to jot down my thoughts.

ChennaiThe Chennai in my memories and nostalgic edges has been an exuberant city with wildest of the colors and loudest of the inner voices. It reflected a persistent soul resisting the buoyancy of a dualistic mode of livelihood. Things have changed. Perhaps these thoughts are caused as I have come back as a business professional this time. Perhaps these thoughts are result of my stay inside an information technology park.

Chennai has become silent and subdued. Metropolitan way of life has engulfed its multitudes of benign expressions and polyphonic folksonomy . It’s humane will has been dwarfed by a gargantuan tide of melancholic cult. This was something surprisingly odd . I believed Chennai had a primordial cultural lattice that can survive and withstand any social change and economic tide with grace and tenacity. Chennai has proved to be yet another city chopped of its intrinsic spirit in times of chaos.I am not sure if the economic activity is on a rate of deceleration.

When I spoke to many city inhabitants, it seems the recent flood has wiped of the confidence of its people quite substantially. It may be true that the scars of the flood will continue to haunt them for some more time. We have to remember that severe summer solitude and the monstrous Tsunami couldn’t chop its ebullient wings.  I believe the flood has caused only a temporal setback. I hope the current thread of melancholy will only be transient. I am still figuring out the extent of this mutation and the spread of this cultural shift. Let me travel a little further and beyond.

 

Cybernetics of Human Capital and the Emergence of Cognitive Business

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Digital, Economy, Essays, Internet, Media, Strategy

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Online social networks are a world of its own. Data, design, advertisements, people, aspirations, networks altogether a topology of affairs evolving on its own patterns and terrains. There is distinct politics and economics in the dynamics of social media and social networks. To locate the human capital in social networks, we need to understand and define the specific nature of communication methods and control functions in this landscape.

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The social network bandwagon is expected to grow to a gargantuan scale such that the number of worldwide users is expected to reach some 2.5 billion by 2018, around a third of world population. An estimated half a billion of these users is expected to be from China alone and approximately a quarter of a million from India. The region with the highest penetration rate of social networks is North America, where around 60 percent of the population has at least one social account. As of 2015, over 70 percent of the United States population had a social networking profile. Statistics goes on to say that 72% of all internet users are now active on social media.

Famous American philosopher, Kenneth M. Sayre had taken up pioneering studies on the contours of cybernetics and information theory. He defines Cybernetics as the study of communication and control functions of living organisms, particularly human beings, in view of their possible simulation in mechanical systems. Along these lines, we can see that in online social networks there is an evident convergence of human mind and the information capital produced collectively by network society. This results in the creation of a human capital which is highly fragmented across psychographic dimensions.

Information structures in the online social networks have acquired significant control functions over the human behavior such that now we are controlled by the information we consume and create in these hyperspaces. It is an interesting development predicted by the pioneers of cybernetics. Through the simulation of real world experiences, online social networks have become highly successful in fragmenting human mind and driving the humanity to become the manifestation of intellectual capital. In this article we use the concepts of intellectual capital, information capital and human capital quite lucidly. However they follow certain economic lineage in precise terms. Human capital has primary form of existence on which information capital and intellectual capital exist as dependent forms of capital accumulation.

Recently IBM CEO, Gini Rometty has famously predicted the emergence of cognitive business and the eventual subservience of digital economy under the larger canvas of cognitive economy. Though this prediction can be perceived as a sweeping statement in the current state of affairs, there is a definite possibility for such a development. With the convergence of human capital and information capital in the techno centric data trade networks such as social media, intellectual capital gains significant autonomy and predominant market position.

Leveraging this accumulation and acculturation of intellectual capital, dependent market structures will emerge paving way for the domination of cognitive business. There is such a dire need for generating sensible insights from the dark data circulating in the global supply chains and distribution channels. Let us closely follow the patterns and trends in the data monetization networks to sense the acceleration and momentum of this seismic change and cognitive shift.

Poem : Revolutionary Installations

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Anima, Art, Critic, Economy, Imagery, Opinions, Perspectives, Philosophy, Poetry

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Far far, afar, fur further

Near, near, nether, nascent

Middle, Muddle, Muddy, mesh

Revolving chairs every where

Minting mask on a mural mix

They rule the roost of a roofless rift

You may call it a spade

They run the rim of a ripening reed

You may call it a gory

They ape through this anemic age

You may call it a refuge

River far, farther than the fatherlands

Riveted on a revolutionary protoplaza

Mitochondria exist and ever energetic

Risking a word, altars of altruism

Archetypes of arachnophobia

Reeds of revisions, faster than the fumes

Marches of Many hoists

Spectacles of axioms

Now we tether the signals

Beyond beams and beasts

Installations of the instant gratified

Inspiring the instant glorified

Instincts of the instant glossified

Cotton faces, Crystal facades

They worship the red wine in rainbow glasses

Hourglasses, are they leaning left?

Burning glasses, are you learning right?

Beyond the golden ratios and the silica hybrids

New leaders for the new facades

Old masses for the older coffins

Funnels and fins, felonious figures

Poem : Rat Race

16 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in Anima, Art, Critic, Economy, Imagery, Poetry

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Every mouse, rat, rodent and I

We have an opinion about a rat race

We believe that it is the need of the flour

That keeps us riding on the needs of the hour

We keep running on the maze, haze and you name it rat race

Every mouse, rat, rodent and I

We are earthly skins, bins and pins for your magnanimous lives

We are skinned, binned, pinned and finned by your forces

Your forces are ulterior to the interior of the exterior of your intentions

You carve money out of the mist, fist, wrist, heist and at last

We win the rat race, you win the money chains

We build the palaces, you embalm your body and mind over it

Poles apart, lives apart, parts apart, know that we know not to race this time

We still know what we are, who we are and what we have?

Do you know anything other than our skin, sin and your coins?

Digital Experience & four counter-intuitive paradigms

02 Thursday Apr 2015

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Digital communication systems have invaded the contours of our personal and social life like never imagined. As we are realizing that digitization has begun to influence our thought processes and behaviors, it is time to reflect on some digital interaction models between individual psyche and the collective society. These concepts may appear counter-intuitive at the outset. But they are playing a big role in our digital expressions and experiences.

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Digital Consciousness

The whole sum of the digital experiences and imaginations prevalent in a society. They manifest in the interfaces between technology and society, business and economy, individual and organizations. The moment social expressions interact with the digital media formats, digital consciousness comes into play. There are studies on the cognitive and behavioral processes behind digital consciousness. Digital consciousness can play a big role in the next generation information systems where cognitive computers and natural language processing algorithms are going to play a big role in extending the reach of digital business. As digital systems are becoming more conscious, conscious human beings are changing to more digital in nature. Digital consciousness will help us to understand the meeting point of these two tendencies.

Digital Archetypes:

While digital represents the most advanced facet of communications and technology, archetypes are the constructs that denote the most primitive and subtle psychic realms of human society. Digital archetypes are the subtle and submerged drivers for further digitization in our society. According to this notion, digitization is not an accidental occurrence, rather an economic and scientific manifestation of an enduring tendency in the history of mankind. Humans have invented symbols and expressions from primordial times. These acts of symbolism and poly-morphs can be seen in digital expressions as well. Due to their historic existence, digital archetypes run through the cultural and racial threads. Thus digital archetypes are excellent sources of information for digital ethnography, anthropology and design research.

Digital Duality:

This is an interesting concept. The contradictions between content and form has been perennial in the world of art and literature. Now we can see the dichotomy between content and form very prominent in digital expressions and experiences. Digital content and digital form are overlapping into each other’s domains. Digital content can exist in an physical form as well as digital form. The quantum signal processing and quantum cryptography are some good examples. These systems employ physical properties to encode and decode digital information. Likewise, with the digital form can encapsulate both physical and digital content. Optical and acoustic signal processing systems and wearable devices are some excellent examples for encoding physical information within digital formats without digital transformation operations.

Digital Semiotics

Semiotics is the scientific study of symbols and morphs. Digital semiotics will be the study of digital signs and morphs. To study signs and morphs we should understand the communication systems and models. Man and machines cannot be isolated while we study communication systems from a semiotic perspective. Hence we should take a holistic approach to enlist a few fundamental processes relevant to digital semiotics.

These four paradigms operate on three distinct layers of digital experience. Digital consciousness is something we can evolve through digital experience. Digital archetypes are the immutable principles of digital experience which we can learn to improve our delivery of services and engagements. Digital duality is an inherent ambiguity in the digital communication that need to be managed through intelligent transformation methods.  Digital semiotics will help us to streamline our digital expressions and symbols so that they are better understood and digested by the audiences.

Understanding digital archetypes in Generation X ,Y and Z !

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Economy, Essays, Opinions, Perspectives, Philosophy

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Famous psychologist Carl Gustav Jung popularized the term ‘Archetype’ in social psychology and cultural anthropology through his observations on the primitive models of human mind that transcends the immediate neighborhoods of human life. It is interesting to note that human mind can permeate the cultural identities of social life beyond the boundaries of an individual psyche. When we look at the emerging digital consciousness in our contemporary society through the Jungian lens, we can observe hidden but subtle archetype formations.

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To understand the subtle processes of digital archetypes, we may need to pause a while and digest the nature of digital consciousness. It is inherent in digital lifestyles and aspirations. Human memory is an interesting specimen here. It has undergone substantial changes after the emergence of digital lifestyles.

Our memory tends to be more faster and disjointed such that we tend to remember immediate past more precise and clear compared to our distant past. A decade ago, we had vivid memories of the distant past but our recollections of the immediate past was not this precise and fine grained.

Our perception is another example. Many cultural theoreticians acknowledge that our contemporary society is more image centered and logo driven compared to previous times. Now let us examine the roots of digital archetypes in our emerging digital consciousness.

It is interesting to note that while our digital consciousness is more discrete and finite, our digital archetypes exhibit a generic pattern. When digital consciousness varies between Gen X, Y and Z, digital archetypes will be of common nature.

Our crowd like behavior in a digital experience and image centered memory are a few digital archetypes. We are embracing ‘digirati’ or digital lifestyle in an era when our society is exhibiting more crowd like behavior in every walk of life. Technology and fast pace of monetary exchange seems to influence this crowd formation. They appear to be the centripetal forces behind the crowd formation.

This crowding behavior is a natural response to the accelerating pace of social changes and upheaval. Not only business models, our political ideologies, governance models, and cultural values are undergoing rapid transformation. Our individual psyche is finding it difficult to define its unique existence in this flux of affairs.

When did human society witness similar rate of change?

It was during an era before the agrarian settlements and river valley civilizations. We were natural crowds during those times known as nomadic tribes. If we look at the cave inscriptions of those times, we can see that those were mostly images or pictures. We worshiped natural logos then. Now we worship technology driven logos.

Thus the digital archetypes of our times is a reflection of our distant nomadic life. It will be further more interesting to see how human society develops settlements in this rapidly varying digital landscape.

Quantum Chaos and the Digital Universe : How to surf through the Tower of Babel 2.0?

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Essays, Opinions, Psychology, Research, Science, Technology

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Internet is evolving and revolutionizing every media ecosystem connected and dependent on it. The relativistic acceleration and the quantum of information gravity of digital communication systems is so much high that we have already started thinking about digital universes and digital consciousness vividly. Digital time and analog time have already become distinctive dimensions! May be we can define this state of affairs as a hyper computation landscape where computation itself has become a relativistic communication between analog and digital universes. There no need to mystify this kind of a perspective as we humanity will coexist in digital and analog universes.

A few decades back theoretical physicists and the most elusive mathematical algorithms were dedicated to the realms of astronomy and high energy physics. Within a short span of 25 years or more, internet and world wide web demands attention from the club of exotic mathematicians . Theoretical computation has absolutely no boundaries at this moment. It traverses through neural networks and genomic sequences.  This is no wonder or miracle for any science student of our times when we consider the pace at which our databases and named graph stores are growing. Data has become the prime mover for the global finance capital and hence it moves faster than the flight of capital between nations and markets.

Can you imagine what will John Von Neuman, Charles Babbage and Alan Turing will do if they were offered a re-birth in this earth of evolving internet architecture?

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They would have seen internet as a tower of babel in the making. It is because our inventions and innovations in the internet ecosystem is happening in silos and the confined walls of enterprises such that there is so much of redundancy in the systemic design. Whenever a new protocol or a new communication media emerges, such as web sockets and web RTC, leading technology players start to develop their own private incubators around the base idea and come up with their own separate solutions. It is good that there is a democratization of protocols and media types. But are we really optimizing our systems around our freedom to innovate?

In a system perspective, Internet revolves around the possibilities and horizons of protocols and media types. HTTP is just one protocol among the myriads of communication possibilities around us. Even hypertext is not a rudimentary concept though it has become one of the fundamental premise for the internet architecture. Considering the deeper aspects, the very existence and adaptability of hypertext, hyper links, intelligent session management methods, digital and analog state of information etc makes internet one of the most creative inventions of our time. Nations and corporations are aspiring to control the future road map of internet. IETF and W3C are sometimes the battlefield of ideas and lobbying interests.

Is internet becoming yet another Tower of Babel in the biblical sense ? We have to remember that once we failed to build this architectural marvel though it was the foremost ambitious project of the prehistoric times. What we need is the business agility, technical maturity and architectural creativity to open up internet once again getting rid off the redundant protocol stacks, operational frameworks, chaotic varieties of content types, rigid and lack luster algorithms and computational models. I can assure you that it is not a small task upfront considering the quantum of chaos in the digital universe.

A hasty note on the theory of economic networks

11 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in Essays, Opinions, Perspectives, Research, Science

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Culture, nation, problems of language and ethnic and racial dimensions. These questions plague every governments worldwide. India is also not alien to these probing thoughts. What makes me curious is the complex theme known as cultural nationalism. We know that the themes of culture exist before the formation of nations. However nation as the structure of post-capitalist societies around the world is undergoing rapid transformations. When capital produces, circulates and consumes cultural tropes and memes through it’s media fabric, culture becomes just a vestige of the capital circuitry. Current form of global capitalism need to be seen as a network of inequalities that tries to balance itself through non- linear means. People like John Nash have tried to see the intricacies of these economic circuits. It will only be a limited truth to believe that the world economy is always in a perennial state of equilibrium. If it was a true axiom in itself we would not have had any crises or recessions or great depressions and catastrophic cataclysmic events in different historic phases.

Applying Econometric Insights on the vivid spectrum of software engineering projects

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Engineering, Essays, Opinions, Perspectives

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Econometric study is always an exciting area of research. We use a plenitude of qualitative and quantitative measurement methods and techniques here. Traditional econometric methods were applied to measure the business performance improvement in software development and maintenance projects. These methods were largely relying on the metrics restricted to the quantitative and qualitative aspects of code. When we apply the traditional methods, the key question will be surrounding the real value of knowledge and software engineering labor accumulated or realized in a code.

Various econometric measures on code are defect density per lines of code, application stability and performance per cycles of compilation etc. These are largely structural measures. The econometric approaches on the scope of code quality and quantity will be successful for linear labor patterns such as waterfall model of project delivery.

At the same time, when we analyze the project management paradigms such as agile, scrum, Personal Software Process (PSP), Team Software Process (TSP), we can see a larger share of non-linearity in their strategy and execution. Hence traditional methods will not be much handy in this regard. Hence we need to explore a stack of non-linear and code independent measures to evaluate and critically analyze agile and lean methodology based projects.

When we think of agile projects, the iterative cycles of code construction, verification, integration, end user validation etc will come to our mind. We can see that people, process, business and technology relevant values are imparted to the labor process here. Hence the econometric aspects of code will be influenced by the environmental factors such as people, process, business and technology. The design of these econometric measures should be able to encapsulate the dynamics of code creation, maintenance and rework in its totality. It will be the key challenge whether you are consciously attempting to measure the success of agile and lean initiatives in your software engineering delivery platforms.