For dummies: trusted-client vs. server-authoritative network model

The title of this post is overly complicated but I promise you the content of the presentation is beautifully easy to understand (drop a comment if it isn’t).

Glenn Fiedler wrote an insightful post on the cheats and player-exploitable glitches in the Ubisoft video-game “Tom Clancy’s The Division”.

He says that it seems the game uses a trusted client networking model versus the more secure server-authoritative network model. After reading his post, it took me a few minutes to sit and think about what he wrote, to actually understand what he meant.

I’m not a noob to gaming… created DFBHD maps in 2004 and have tinkered quite a bit with the map-making for Counter-Strike 1.6

So I decided to go ahead and explain these two concepts in what I hope is an easier way for the average gamer to understand. If the Google Presentation fails to load here’s the direct link.

You don’t need od6 when working with Google Sheets JSON

When figuring out how to extract Google Sheets data as JSON, the top result on Google explains that you can access the JSON like this:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/SPREADSHEET-ID/od6/public/basic?alt=json

In this URL od6 represents the first sheet in the book/spreadsheet. Someone said that other sheets are represented by od8, od10 and so on, but that didn’t work with me. So dug around the comments on different posts and here’s the answer: simply use numbers instead of od6.

So the URL for your first sheet becomes:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/SPREADSHEET-ID/1/public/basic?alt=json

and the second sheet will be:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/SPREADSHEET-ID/2/public/basic?alt=json

And so on.

Reservations in Higher Education – Why I think they’re required

We hear a lot of passionate debate against reservations based on caste in higher education in India. However, there must be some logic to reservations except vote-bank politics. Here is my attempt at listing a few of those reasons, and why I believe such reservations are necessary in our country.

Why reservations based on caste, and not other forms of affirmative action, especially, reservations based on economic status?

Simply because implementing and maintaining any other forms of affirmative action are way too expensive and would require too many formalities, paperwork, administration, etc, something that is impossible given India’s size and population. And these other forms of affirmative action come with their own intrinsic drawbacks. So in the present case, reservations based on caste are the most effective, cost-efficient form of affirmative action available to India.

As for reservations based on economic status, there are many problems here, a few of which are:

  1. To implement a successful reservation policy based on economic status, the government will have to come up with that very important annual or monthly income (lets call it point x), which would demarcate the economically backward and the economically well off. If point x is too high, it would include way too many people, and those at the bottom will lose out. If point x is too low, a lot many people will be left out and this also can lead to widespread resentment. Also, many of the downtrodden are daily wage earners. Which means they have no regular annual, monthly or even weekly income .So deciding upon point x itself is a difficult task which requires considerable beforehand study.
  2. Now lets suppose that point x has been agreed upon. The number of people who will hide their incomes to get their earnings down to point x, would reduce to nothing the governments efforts at curbing non payment of income tax.
  3. Another issue that arises out of this particular situation is that not many of the down trodden will be able to complete the formalities and acquire the documents to prove their disadvantaged economic status. Very few in India’s vast hinterlands have the know-how to complete complex government forms, specially those relating to incomes and expenditure. Such a predicament would be an open invitation to touts and other unscrupulous elements, opening avenues for them to swoop in and take money from already poor families, just to make sure they qualify as economically backward.
  4. Studies have shown that slightly increased monetary resources do not guarantee the stop of discriminatory behaviour against a backward caste individual. This is especially true for scheduled castes. The maladies affecting our society have their roots in hundreds of years of constant discrimination and denial of resources, and these cannot be tackled so easily. So in this case also, the Government of India (GoI) will have to decide that income after which discrimination stops.

The fallacies of ‘Reservations undermine Merit’.

Most opponents of the reservations policy believe that it cuts down merit and propagates mediocrity, as it passes over those who have scored higher in an examination, for the reserved category who have scored lower. The problem here is that the anti-reservationists mistakenly equate the number of marks scored, to the level of merit.

Simply put, the examination system prevalent in our country in no way measures merit. It is only a screening tool which is used since it would be impossible to administer any other form of screening given the size of the students applying. And because of that it is endorsed by the society and the government as being legitimate. It is also well known that entrance tests do not test intelligence or ability in the subject, but only an aptitude for a certain type of questions.

  1. In a pool of applicants, the number of meritorious can never be pre-determined or pre-decided. But in all institutions today, that is exactly what is happening. For instance say the IITs have 14000 seats. Which means, according to the IITs, there are only 14000 students meritorious enough to occupy these seats, from the almost 3 lakh who apply for the JEE. Most educators, professors, etc. agree that the top 20,000 to 30,000 will have the know-how to suitably understand and apply what is taught in the IITs, but they can’t make it, sometimes purely due to luck.
  2. Common sense dictates that drawing upon a wider social base increases the diversity and the quality of institutions of higher studies. Having students from a small section of society results in a “frogs in a pond” situation. Recognizing this fact, the worlds best universities like Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford strive to introduce as much diversity as possible on their campuses by actively encouraging foreign students.

Mark Galanter, in his book “Competing Equalities: Law and Backward Classes in India” spoke of three kinds of resources to produce results in competitive exams:

  1. economic resources (for prior education, training, materials, freedom from work, etc)
  2. social and cultural resources (network of contacts, confidence, guidance and advice, information, etc)
  3. inbuilt ability and hardwork

When anti-reservationists say that merit alone should be the criteria for admission to institutions of higher education, they mean that economic and cultural resources are not important, but it is differences in ability that has resulted in Hindu Upper Caste students dominating the higher education campuses of our country. The biggest counter to this argument is that these same upper caste students decide to enroll for ‘coaching’, instead relying solely on their ‘merit’, ability and hardwork to get through the examination.

In relation to the above paragraph, I’d like to present a situation that misses most of us, in spite of being right in our face. The student groups of the IITs and IIMs of our country show a strong regional bias towards urban areas with lots of “coaching institutes.” This fact is also evident from the ads that the coaching institutes place in the papers trumpeting the number of their ‘successes.’ The coaching institutes try to provide the first two resources required to enter these institutions viz. economic and social:

a) Economic – By providing study materials, coaching and training. Also, many IIT-JEE training institutes have tie ups with nearby schools, by which the students can enroll with the school but are not required to attend classes, as the school knows that these students are bound to do well in the +2 exams. This takes care of the ‘freedom from work’ point.

b) Social – If one goes through the coaching institute ads appearing on national dailies, it will be apparent  that even the faculty with their MSc and BTech. degrees from IITs and other top engineering colleges are being used as an advertising tool. Why? Because through their degrees and qualifications, the institute is promising the social resources viz. the instructor’s network of contacts, guidance, experience, advice and information.

Now, to acquire this kind of help and guidance, one requires money. Money that the majority of the backward class don’t have.

So, the situation in brief is, to get into an institution I need 3 very important resources (lets call them a, b and c). This institution is funded to a large extent by the tax payer, which includes the backward castes.  Two of these three resources (a and b) have nothing to do with ‘merit’ or ability. I take care of resource c myself, and I go out and buy resources a and b. The government recognizes that the backward castes have been discriminated against for a long period of time, and consequently are not in a position to buy or acquire resources a and b. To counter this, it provides the backward castes with positive discriminatory action.

That is when I rail against these government measures, calling them unfair and saying that the only resource needed to gain admission is resource c (hardwork and ability). By this I imply that the backward castes could not secure admission because they do not possess resource c, en masse, and it is the Hindu UC, a mere 35% (approximate) of the population, who possess this ability and ‘merit’.

As is clear from the above paragraphs, the argument, ‘reservations undermine merit’, has no factual standing at all.

The ‘Creamy Layer’ Issue

The Creamy Layer don’t deserve any form of affirmative action whatsoever. Everyone knows that they have benefitted enough from the reservations policy, and through their continued presence, are now usurping much needed seats/resources, which were originally earmarked for the really backward sections of their own castes.

Here I shall try to explain the reason behind the GoI’s continued decision to include the creamy layer in the reservations policy. Like I had written in one of the earlier points, it has been found that social discrimination does not stop against a backward caste individual even when he/she acquires wealth and resources. That’s why it is difficult for the GoI to come up with a rigid framework or set of rules which identifies when a backward caste person belongs to the creamy layer of that caste.

This problem in urban areas is not so great. Social discrimination here is not so rampant, in fact, its very subdued. Consequently, its very easy to identify a ‘creamy layer’ person. But in the rural areas of India, the situation is not so simple. Discrimination is still rampant, with the latest example being a lower caste mother and daughter who were paraded naked, raped and then murdered in cold blood, by an upper caste mob. Reports said that this was because of a land dispute.

For the GoI, not including the creamy layer can turn out to be a very dangerous issue itself, and including them is seen as the easy way out by any political party in power.

Reservations and politics

Any party which successfully promotes the reservations policy as its own, will score a virtual home run in terms of vote counts. And no opposition will let that happen. Take the current situation for example. The BJP doesn’t openly and vociferously oppose Arjun Singh’s and the Congress’s moves. But, it is a well known fact that protests such as the AIIMS protest need an influential managing force or power organising it. A power that can guarantee these protesting students their safety from the police and other law enforcement authorities, in spite of the disruptions that they were causing.

In the same manner, the last BJP government, through Murli Manohar Joshi, wanted to introduce more seats in the IIMs. Though this step should have been taken for all institutes of higher education, targeting the IIMs focused media attention on it. Even though the Congress and other parties never openly opposed the move, yet the amount of coverage, protests, etc. could not have been random, unrelated happenings.

The use of the reservation policy by the politicians, has unfortunately, made it stink in the eyes of the urban middle class, just as anything that is associated with politicians. So much so, that reservations are just seen as a vote gathering stunt, all at the cost of the general category.

(I had written this long ago in June 2008 at my old blog. Reposting because I think it’s still relevant.)

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Why our first startup failed

Our first venture was a completely new experience for me. The three other founders had a fair bit of experience in setting up and running a business (13 years, 6 years and 3 years, in descending order) while I was the only fresher around. I guess my childish enthusiasm and general naiveté led them to christen me “Sid the Kid” but thankfully, they were nice enough to stop calling me that after some time.

The business model

The best engineering colleges are the ones with the best placements (stands true for MBA colleges too). Lots of times, a college is initially able to attract a recruiter (Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, IBM, etc) but since the students don’t perform in the recruitment process, the company might not take as many people as it was ready to.

That’s where we came in. Our Placement Development Programme (PDP) would integrate in the colleges’ curriculum and faculty members would go to different colleges to deliver the session. The programme consisted of Aptitude (Mathematics and Logical Reasoning), language (English) and soft skills training (group discussion and personal interview). So, if we were working with ABCXYZ Institute of Technology, their class timetable had 2 slots (usually 4 hours) in the week where our company name was written and during that time, a faculty member would come and deliver the session.

The beauty of this model was that none of the faculty members were our full-time employees, they were consultants who went and delivered as and when required. Therefore, we really didn’t need a big office (in fact, it was a one room setup in one of the partner’s office) and most of our work was done through mobile phones and laptops.

The numbers matched up pretty well too. One faculty member on average was paid Rs. 500 per hour. For a 50 hour course, our charges would be about Rs. 2000 per student. If we worked with one large engineering college, they’d have 180 students sitting for placements from three branches of B.E. So revenues would be 180 x 2000 = 360000 minus 50 x 500 x 3 = 75000 (faculty fees) and let’s assume Rs. 75000 as cost of providing transport through taxi for some faculty members and other miscellaneous expenses, we’re left with 360000 – 150000 = Rs. 210000.

As you’ll realize, that’s not a bad amount for basically sending faculty members to colleges. And if you were to think scalability, two faculty members (English & Aptitude) taking a 2 hour session each per day in the same college (total 4 hours) can cover 5 colleges in one week. Even then, they’re working only 2 hours a day each. If they were to go to one of the areas where colleges are clustered in Jaipur (eg. Sitapura or Kukas) and give 3 sessions each, they could cover 3 colleges per day making it a total of 15 colleges per week. Let’s suppose this continues for 12 weeks so after 3 months, our company nets a cool 210000 x 15 = Rs. 31,50,000. Now consider that there isn’t a lack of teachers in Jaipur since it is one of India’s larger educational centres. In the end, you have enough number of teachers to be sent to enough number of colleges and quite a bit of money to be made.

Fair enough, so what went wrong?

Two things:

  1. We were lazy and did not move our butts as much as we should have
  2. We didn’t understand the colleges’ incentives until it was too late – The engineering colleges don’t really care that their students should be smart enough to handle the companies’ recruitment processes. They just care that they get placed. Anywhere, anyhow. Therefore, a college focuses primarily on the number of companies coming to campus and not preparation of the students. So more often than not, the concerned Training & Placement Officer (TPO) said to us “If you’re doing training for placements, why don’t you just go ahead and get these students placed”. They were ok with getting them placed anywhere in any kind of company as long as they were “placed from college”. That is really shady business to get in to.
  3. We got distracted – You get a bunch of smart people together under one roof and go out to the market looking for work, you’ll realize there’s no dearth of it. In such a situation, navigating the trade-off about how quickly can it be done, how easily can it be done, how much does it pay and do I want to continue doing this forever?, is crucial. We sucked at that. We worked with these guys (they just got arrested) developing a marketing management course for them and got one very crucial bit of learning out of the entire project: don’t ever work with MLM companies. However, in spite of the awesome life learning and all that cute bit, we had burnt up the meager amount of startup capital we had while executing their project and basically received fuckall for it.

Therefore, to sum up: Not working hard enough, not understanding your customer, losing focus and consequently running out of cash. As you’ll realize, dear reader, these 4 are deal-breakers big enough to kill any business organisation.

Case Study of Change Management and Online Magazines

Continued from my last post, probably the most difficult thing to do is bringing in “change”. In my experience, this is so usually because of the following reasons

  • The person(s) trying to bring in the change did not completely understand the incentives that drove the activity/function as it was being done.
  • The “soft” issues: wherein the concerned people get attached to the status quo and change being brought from outside seems to them an affront to their authority.
  • New ideas take time and effort to implement. The first roadblock or small failure is usually trotted out as the reason why the “new way” cannot work, discouraging even the few who might have believed that it was the right thing to do.

As always, I’ll use some live examples here. The general culture in Indian MBA colleges today is to publish magazines; magazines on Finance, Marketing, Trade or whatever other specialization. Why are magazines published?

  1. They’re supposed to show the students’ expertise in a particular domain.
  2. Being an indicator of the quality of students, they’re supposed to help in building the brand of the institution.
  3. And finally, they’re supposed to help spread knowledge.

Currently, the model being followed in most places is thus

  • The Magazine Edit Board decides on a theme for the month.
  • The Ed. Board puts out a “Call for Articles” through various fora like Dare2compete, Facebook, email newsletter and on an internal message board. A small prize in the form of cash/gifts might be offered for the best/all articles.
  • Entries are received from the MBA ecosystem and while the rest edit, one member of the team (the designated “designer”) starts either crafting a whole new Corel Draw/Adobe InDesign file or tries to force-fit the articles in to an already existing template. This edit+design job goes through multiple revisions.
  • After finalizing, PDF is generated and then this is distributed through as many channels as possible; Facebook, Twitter, own website, emails to alumni and the student bodies of other colleges, Slideshare, etc.
  • In certain cases, actual paper copies might be printed.

In terms of time taken, a monthly magazine can be divided in to something like this: 15 days to get articles, 10 days to edit and design and about one or two nights when the magazine is “marketed”, or tried to spread as far and wide as possible. That means the mag comes out a couple of days before end-of-month.

What about the numbers?

No idea. There was no way of knowing how many people read the magazine, because there is no way of actually knowing how many people downloaded the PDF from their inbox and then went on to open it. After opening, again no way of knowing which articles were of most interest to the readers.

So we started putting all our magazines (PDFs) on a website (www.mbadox.com) and tracked downloads + views through Google Analytics.

What are the incentives for the volunteers in the Magazine Edit Board?

The biggest incentive is a “CV point” and then there are the additional benefits of knowledge, social standing (within the college) and contacts one might acquire while following up with an industry person for an interview or an article.

What was the change suggested?

Take magazines online to a format on the lines of http://www.cbsnews.comhttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/http://www.businessinsider.com/, etc.

Why?

The reasons were various

  1. Submissions can be put up as and when they arrive after only the editing process (grammatical, factual & anti-plagiarism check). Since a CMS (WordPress) handles the design part, there is no need for extensive time spent on force-fitting or creating a new template.
  2. The author’s are attributed by linking to their FB and LinkedIn profiles. Since authors are likely to share it on their FB, LinkedIn and Twitter, it was anticipated that there would be more sharing of the content/website.
  3. All references are linked in, meaning readers can go off exploring related tangents.
  4. A discussion can ensue on each post, meaning readers engage with other readers and the author using the website’s comments section as the platform.
  5. Major tracking and analytics.

Was the proposed change accepted? No.

For the simple reason that it would not remain a “magazine”. And that was the overriding thought process that powered the team: they were the Editorial Board of a Magazine and not an online blog. They wanted to see a magazine being printed, they wanted the “Editor’s Note” in every issue, they wanted their little blurbs on the inside-of-cover page and they wanted the 3 column layout on real paper.

What I learnt and how would I handle the situation now?

In this case, I’ll try and avoid conflict. Instead of fighting and forcing stuff down people’s throats, I’d rather create a new, two-person team that takes the edited article and simple puts it online on the website. This team also does as much of social media marketing as possible.

The Best of MBA Gyaan (Part 1)

MBA Gyaan

  1. The best learning happens when people smarter & better informed than yourself challenge and rip apart your presentations. The downside to this; even the idiots think they should chip in with their DCP-esque questions, leaving you mindfucked for the rest of the day. At least in marketing, most of your peers don’t have the intellectual capacity or understanding to challenge much of what you say. [Example: in an Advertising and Promotion Management (APM) class exercise, one bunch of idiots came up and loudly proclaimed that a Talwalker like gym opened in a posh area faces its primary competition from local Rs. 300-a-month gyms. After being shredded to pieces by all and sundry, they go on to question each and every other group’s ppt, asking all their questions on basic STP assumptions.]
  2. Then comes case-study competitions floated by different companies/colleges. Fruitful ones to go to are those which have good judges (the best are from the big brands or the consulting firms). Usually the case studies are problems currently being faced by a business unit of the company. The judges expect a solid, coherent & logical story that goes about answering the questions.
  3. Last comes classes. Most are stuff you could do in two days with the right powerpoint presentations, but once in a while you come across a professor who actually challenges you and forces you to think. Never miss this person’s class.

What is it to feel like a Mother?

Tiger Cub resting on Mother from http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=tiger+mom#/d37mjji

I went to meet a friend yesterday and she has a baby girl. Something ran in my head and I asked her “What is it to feel like a mother?”

She didn’t say anything then, but an hour after I had left sent an SMS “What are the parameters on which on which one judges that one is/feels like a mom?”

Hmm, I absolutely love this friend. She always asks very interesting questions, maybe because she has a knack for picking up on times when I misspeak.

I should have asked her specifics, like how much of your freedom do you feel has been curbed due to the presence of a child? What major lifestyle changes have you noticed after the arrival of the kid, and so on and so forth.

Coming to the point, why the question? My image of a mother is based on Mama. When we were younger, Mama was strict, always in control and kept an eagle eye on us at all times. She was very mindful of the language we used, our behaviour towards relatives, guests & seniors and would not tolerate any untoward manners. She was authoritative  & in-control at all times, and one look from her would send us scampering.

My friend is very similar, in that she takes the child’s behaviour very seriously. However, that’s where the similarity ends. The friend is a woman of a much different generation than my mother, a lot closer to my generation actually. She’s more lenient with the child, spends time doing things that she likes and has a life of her own which isn’t necessarily intertwined with the family (not so with Mama, almost everything she did was with us and Papa).

So I guess this is the difference: Mama did everything with her children and husband while the friend has a family life, a professional life and a third life which hardly overlaps with the other two. When I asked whether she feels like a mother, I was asking the friend how does she manage her three different roles without any overlaps, since this was something new to me.

Of course, now that we’ve grown up, Mama has a lot more free time. She’s currently hooked to a popular social network and happily tells us to go take a hike when we ask her for stuff we took for granted in years gone by 🙂

The first post – a reason to blog

You could consider this the “About Me”. My name is Siddharth Deswal and I want to be able to write very well. To this end, I’ve starting blogs at various times in the past but never stuck with them due to lack of a “topic”.

This time, all I’ll write about is me: my life, my thoughts and my experiences. Let’s hope this one sticks.