Broodings on Blogging

First and foremost, if you have come to this blog, you've done it voluntarily and without any coercion whatsoever. Having established that, I think some of the readers (if any) are gonna be mightily pissed about whats written in the text that follows. I am writing this entry while moving from Pune to Mumbai in the awsome April heat (although I am sitting in the cosy confines of a Volvo)

I have always wondered how it works that some people blog so actively while others like me just cant get used to this format of giving others a dose of your screwed-up mind..Partly I feel nobody would care to get your 2 cents on anything...coz you see everyone is someone else's whacko!!

However going by the craze and extent of reach of social networking (Orkut, FB, Foursquare), micro-blogging (Twitter, Buzz, etc.) and other similar platforms that provide you a means of developing a virtual identity of yourself, it seems there is actually a lot of guys there who want a piece of you...

I was averse to reading random blogs on the internet and limited myself only to reading the ones 'forced' on to me by my family and friends. Well, the reason lies in simple statistics. Of the 10 blogs you would read, atleast half of them are gonna be bigoted, too opinionated, too verbose or worse still all of these. In such a scenario, I dint wanna let my mind be weighed upon by someone else's crap (esp. when I ve my own to take care of) or worse still ascribe to some screwed-up notions of somebody just coz they knew how to sway the emotions their ways. The worst sortsa punishment i can think over internet is reading a long 4-5 page blog of a dumbass and finding you just cant get back those 15-20 minutes of your life...

I felt that Blogging on the internet, as I would see it is kinda akin to a small baby crying for mother's attention. Only, out here you can do that for a much larger audience and dun have the fear of getting beaten up too even if you 'misbehave' too bad..

However, I ve come across a couple of kickass frens of mine who are deep into this stuff. Once a while, I ve come across really good blogs (courtesy these kickass guys) and I ve actually liked what I read.. There were a lot of emotions all right, the blogs inadvertantly were a bit verbose but they still evoke a lot of admiration at times- maybe coz the writing style is awsome, the manner of dealing with an issue is great or better still the author subscribes exactly to the same point of views as you (pretty self-centered huh??- well isnt blogging all about just that??)

Anyway- coming to the crux of this post, I am gonna try to do more of blogging in the coming times- maybe I will ve it as a new year resolution for 2011 or something. Well the idea is not so much to crap others with all the shit that goes on in my mind but more to ve a kinda outlet to my mental framework at a point in time, which I would mostly look at sometime in the future and exclaim- "well- how naive was I then??" Whether, others read it or not is totally gonna be incidental and I would fully understand if they feel I am their whacko (remr a line above??)

and I ve this habit of closing a post of mine with some lines that i ve liked at some point in time...So here it goes-

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave, don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly

smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry

all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be.

Signing off,

Sameer

Dt- 18-APR-2010

Money..it's a gas!!

What do 3 Management graduates sitting in a conference room with time to kill talk about? The answer undoubtedly happens to be an exotic (err...esoteric) topic, mostly related to the economics, finance or politics..The fact that these conversations are intellectually heavy and emotionally charged is not in contention (well- the years of GD has prepped these guys to start shouting at the drop of the proverbial hat). However, the amusing part is that invariably the conclusions of these conversations are inconsequential :)

This time around in our case, it happened to be International Currencies-

What backs an international currency? Is it Gold, USD or its plain simple Fiat currency everywhere..

This blog seeks to answer this question and in the process understand a bit about the mechanics of the international Money markets.

I had an understanding that international currencies are backed by Gold. Is this true?? Well- the answer is both yes and no. I will try to explain the same in the following text-

International currencies can broadly be categorized into following 3 types-

1. Commodity money- is money whose value comes from a commodity out of which it is made. It is objects that have value in themselves as well as for use as money. Examples of commodities that have been used as mediums of exchange include gold, silver, copper, salt, cannabis, candy, barley etc. These items were sometimes used in a metric of perceived value (economics) in conjunction to one another, in various commodity valuation or price system economies.
2. Representative money- is money that consists of token coins, or other physical tokens such as certificates, that can be reliably exchanged for a fixed quantity of a commodity such as gold or silver. The value of representative money stands in direct and fixed relation to the commodity that backs it, while not itself being composed of that commodity.
3. Fiat money- is money whose value is not derived from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into a valuable commodity (such as gold). Instead, it has value only by government order (fiat). Usually, the government declares the fiat currency (typically notes and coins from a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.) to be legal tender, making it unlawful to not accept the fiat currency as a means of repayment for all debts, public and private.

Since the concept of currencies emerged, Gold has been the defacto means of monetory exchange along with Silver. Gold has served this role either thru issuance and recognition of gold coins or other bare metal quantities, or through gold-convertible paper instruments by establishing gold standards in which the total value of issued money is represented in a store of gold reserves.

However, the amount of gold in the world is finite and production has not grown in relation to the world's economies. With the sharp growth of economies in the 20th century, and increasing foreign exchange, the world's gold reserves and their trading market became a small fraction of all markets and fixed exchange rates of currencies to gold became unsustainable. At the beginning of World War I the warring nations moved to a fractional gold standard, inflating their currencies to finance the war effort.Owing to these imperfections due to the use of Gold as the commodity backing international currencies, gold was replaced by a system of convertible currency through an international mandate. Gold standards and the direct convertibility of currencies to gold have been abandoned by world governments, being replaced by fiat currency in their stead. Switzerland was the last country to tie its currency to gold; it backed 40% of its value until the Swiss joined the International Monetary Fund in 1999. Today, nearly all contemporary money systems at the national level are Fiat money systems.

Once the fact on the type of international currencies (Fiat) was established, the next logical question was-

If each currency is backed by a promise by the sovereign government and no commodity, why is there a disparity in the values of these currencies i.e. why should a country like India accept that its currency is 1/50th times that of US??

The answer to this question lies in the Bretton Woods System implemented in the post-IInd world-war scenario.

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states.

Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, the planners at Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement.

The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value—plus or minus one percent—in terms of gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. In the face of increasing financial strain, the system collapsed in 1971, after the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold. This action created the situation whereby the United States dollar became the sole backing of currencies and a reserve currency for the member states.

All would have been fine had the suggestion made by John Maynard Keynes to make the reserve currency as bancor, to be managed by the IMF. However, the United States objected and (ironically) their request was granted, making the 'reserve currency' the U.S. dollar. This meant that other countries would peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar, and—once convertibility was restored—would buy and sell U.S. dollars to keep market exchange rates within plus or minus 1% of parity. Thus, the U.S. dollar took over the role that gold had played under the gold standard in the international financial system.

Meanwhile, to bolster faith in the dollar, the U.S. agreed separately to link the dollar to gold at the rate of $35 per ounce of gold. At this rate, foreign governments and central banks were able to exchange dollars for gold. Bretton Woods established a system of payments based on the dollar, in which all currencies were defined in relation to the dollar, itself convertible into gold, and above all, "as good as gold". The U.S. currency was now effectively the world currency, the standard to which every other currency was pegged. As the world's key currency, most international transactions were denominated in US dollars.

The U.S. dollar was the currency with the most purchasing power and it was the only currency that was backed by gold. Additionally, all European nations that had been involved in World War II were highly in debt and transferred large amounts of gold into the United States, a fact that contributed to the supremacy of the United States. Thus, the U.S. dollar was strongly appreciated in the rest of the world and therefore became the key currency of the Bretton Woods system.

In conclusion, we live in an age where we claim all countries are honorable enough for their citizens to believe in their 'home-currency', but each in turn has to be dependent on Uncle Sam to gauge its currency's true worth!!

(Source- mostly Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money)

How to model a histogram/Gaussian Distribution in Microsoft Excel 2007

I had tried quite hard to model a histogram/Normal distribution given a series of data. Never quite got the hang of it..

So-once, when I finally got the leads in the right direction thanks to my Project Management faculty, I decided to put it up here :)

You need to use the Analysis ToolPak in Microsoft Excel to use the Statistics Toolpacks for modeling a histogram. The Analysis ToolPak is a Microsoft Office Excel add-in program that is available when you install Microsoft Office or Excel. To use it in Excel, however, you need to load it first.

Here's how to go about the whole thing-

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Excel Options.
2. Click Add-Ins, and then in the Manage box, select Excel Add-ins.
3. Click Go.
4. In the Add-Ins available box, select the Analysis ToolPak check box, and then click OK.

   Note- If you get prompted that the Analysis ToolPak is not currently installed on your computer, click Yes to install it.

5. After you load the Analysis ToolPak, the Data Analysis command is available in the Analysis group on the Data tab.

Once the Data Analysis command is showing in the Data tab, you need to use the following steps to get the histogram-

1. Create the bins(buckets) to put along the X-axis. Preferably, use equally-spaced intervals, so you would be able to identify the skewness in a better manner.
2. On pressing the Data Analysis command on the Analysis section in the Data tab, you will be prompted with a set of tools to use. This list ranges from 'Anova-Single factor' to 'z-test: Two Samples for Means'. Choose Histogram in this list and press OK.
3. You will get a prompt asking you to enter the input range and the Bin range. Enter these 2 values in the prompt and you are all set.
4. Excel returns you a frequency chart with the intervals(Bins) and frequency in a separate tab. You can change the options here, if you want the frequency chart to be created in the same tab or on a new worksheet.
5. Once you have the frequency chart, use the 'Insert Charts' option and add a 'Clustered Column chart' in the 'Column charts' to obtain a histogram chart. You can thus get a far bit of an idea if the pattern approximates the normal distribution.
6. If you are still not convinced and would like to get a nice bell-curve rather, that's possible too. Use the 'Scatter' chart and select the 'Scatter with smooth lines' to get the same.

Voila- there you are matching it up with Mr. Gauss on his own distribution ;)

-Sameer

Sex and Objectivism

By Ayn Rand
Date: 10 March 2001
Excerpt from "Atlas Shrugged"[Note: It's not written gender neutral because this was before Political Correctness. Don't let this fool you into thinking it appliesonly to men!]

[Some people] think that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice, or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you -- just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment -- just try to think of performing it as an act of selfless charity! -- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience -- or to fake -- a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own valuewill want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer, because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to gain his value, but to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body...

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives -- and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence -- let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration but of charity, not in response to values but in response to flaws, -- and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying... Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom and sex nothing but shame....

Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

Us and them..

Sitting here at the office desk writin this blog might seem incestuous to some, but to me its nothin but a logical extension to the practice of impregnating my personal life with the official one more and more as the time progresses.

Well..how I landed up here is a nobody's guess..I am another one of those dreamy-eyed engineering graduates who feel they really are going to make a difference to the organization that they would be joining. Only after being a part of this 'corporate bandwagon' does one realise the obvious futility thats a part of the charade that you are made to go thru at the engineering college.

Anyway...I sit here today in my cubicle looking out of the window into the open spaces outside and that alone makes me realize that there are horizons to span, skies to reach...While the guy next to me is all work and no play, the female sitting cross to me has this liking to hum all the recent Bollywood tunes while doing her work...cant tell you how that made me go nuts, till I came to find her alternate hobby. The only time when she isn't lending odes to bollywood, she is talking to her near and dear ones about everythin frm her next holiday plans to the problems with her maid at home and all this is loud enough for me not to have a miniscule chance at missing any of this...I ve come to make peace with her humming offlate!!!

I again look out of the window to relax my eyes of constant staring at the terminal n I suddenly realize that the sun has set down..I look at the watch then and see that the hands are showing 7:15 p.m. That doesnt mean that the work-day's over thou, for instead; like thousands like me the day for the Indian s/w industry has just begun!!!!