Enlightenedsloth

Intellectualizing thoughts and stories

[enlightenedsloth]

mGPS-An invisible map on your skin

Ever got confused about whether you have to exit from the next diversion or not, while using Google Maps? A trivial problem, owing to the accuracy of GPS (Global Positioning System). Speaking about accuracy, we now have mGPS (Microbiome Geographic Population Structure). At first, the name seems like biology, geography and demography combined into one, but it’s not that complex. It is an AI tool which can track which place you have recently visited, be it a beach or a city centre.

The researchers found that when you touch a particular surface like a tree in the woods, you pick up bacteria that is unique to that area, advocating that unique populations of bacteria exist in different locations. This phenomenon of the unique existence of microorganisms is called microbiome. Eran Elhaik, who led the study stated that they analyzed extensive datasets of microbiome samples from urban environments, soil and marine ecosystems and trained the AI model to identify unique proportions of it and link them to specific locations. Simply put, it’s like analyzing the unique blend of spices in a dish to figure out which country or region it came from. The analyzing bit is done by the AI tool, which already knows which spices belong to which region as the data has been fed into it.

The research team gathered a vast collection of microbiome samples, including 4135 samples from public transit systems in 53 cities, 237 soil samples from 18 countries, and 131 marine samples from nine different water bodies. The tool was successful at identifying the city source for 92% of the urban samples.

But how was the tool trained anyway, or how are any of the AI tools trained?

First thing first- Data collection and labelling. Both go hand-in-hand, for example, the collected microbiome samples must have been labelled with their geographic origin like country or environment type (urban, soil, marine). Then, after cleaning, the data is fed to the model. The model selection part is also a crucial one. An advanced model like a supervised machine learning model or a deep learning model must have been chosen. To improve the efficiency of the tool, it will be trained continuously on the labelled data of different samples with unique compositions.

What’s even more interesting is its application-

Imagine the cops arresting a set of suspects and running their microorganism orientation through the AI tool to know where they were on the night of the crime, or, the AI tool accurately identifying the location from where a particular virus was picked up and eliminating it from the source itself. By analyzing artefacts through mGPS, archaeologists would be able to track human migration accurately.

Technologies like mGPS are not difficult to build, at least in theory. Execution might be an issue due to the collection and feeding of vast amounts of samples. However, with collaboration and support, it can be executed, and with ease as well. Ultimately, it comes down to the extent of your imagination.

You can build it if you can imagine it.

[enlightenedsloth]

A small catch for humanity

This is an engineering marvel; nothing has been seen like this before. A rocket propeller, roughly the size of a 20-storey building, falling at a speed of 8000 km/h, was caught between metal chopsticks (Mechazilla), after descending from earth’s orbit. The propeller weighs 3500 tons, justifying its name- Super Heavy. They have made the whole world root for rocket launches, which I don’t think ever happened after the 1969 Saturn V launch.

A plethora of mechanisms had to work in tandem to make this possible. GPS and various other sensors such as RADAR- used for measuring the height of the rocket by bouncing off radio waves from the ground, LIDAR- to make a 3D model of the surrounding area by throwing laser pulses, had a part to play in the precision. The rocket propeller is specifically designed to launch Starship, a spacecraft which will potentially take astronauts to the Moon and Mars, and over the years, SpaceX has invested billions into this world-bending transporter.

Why billions? Why world-bending? Why should we care?

All of this to make our species multi-planetary. Every human, every living being that ever breathed for even a second has done it only at one place-earth (at least that’s what we know as of now), a small, rocky, gaseous ball floating in the vast expanse of 8.8 x 10^23 kilometers (diameter of the observable universe), our home. But if everything goes right, consciousness will have a new place to prosper in and become more self-aware. The starship is at the heart of this plan, as it will be a fully reusable rocket, capable of being refueled in the orbit, significantly bringing down the cost of rocket launches and increasing the travel duration per trip. The starship is the biggest rocket ever built which is capable of carrying large payloads and hence, it is the perfect tool to build a colony on Mars. Once the colony is built, they also plan to make it self-sustaining by terraforming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases to alter the atmosphere that will be suitable to us. The greenhouse gases will make the planet warm which increase atmospheric pressure and melt the large frozen water reservoirs on Mars.

Building a colony on Mars seems to be out of Hollywood sci-fi, but we as a species have always had it in us. Human migration to Australia 65000 odd years ago was a significant step. They didn’t have compasses, maps, or safety measures, but somehow, they crossed large seas with primitive hand-made boats and settled there. Even the 1969 Apollo 11 mission is a perfect analogy as the technology, Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had a memory of 64 KB and could perform just 85000 instructions per second compared to modern smartphones, which have millions of times more processing power.

Ah! I want to live to see a self-sustaining colony being built on Mars.

[enlightenedsloth]

Asteroids and Triviality

Fortunately or unfortunately, an asteroid named "2024 ON" recently missed a collision with our planet. It was a 720 feet-diameter asteroid-more than twice the length of two cricket pitches, traveling at an astounding speed of 1,04,761 km/h.

Why should you care? An asteroid hits our planet, leaves a crater, done-and-dusted. The reality is more complex than that. To put things into perspective, a pebble-sized object traveling at that speed and hitting the ground could cause as much damage as a hand grenade. In 2013, a much larger meteor (about 17 meters in size) exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. While much larger than a pebble, it caused damage to thousands of buildings and injured 1,500 people primarily from shattered windows.

To feed your curiosity more, let's address the elephant in the room, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Chicxulub Asteroid- the name sounds like the title of a banger club party. It was banger, just not in the context of a party. The asteroid is believed to have been about 10-15 kilometres in diameter and the impact was equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs. It left a 150 kilometres wide and 20 kilometres deep crater and vaporized a significant portion of the Earth's crust and sent molten rock flying into the atmosphere, creating glowing fragments that would have rained down across the planet causing global wildfires. It caused mega-tsunamis, thousands of meters high, earthquakes of magnitude 10-11 and a nuclear winter. Dust, ash and Sulphur were thrown into the atmosphere, effectively blocking sunlight, which caused a drop of 10-20 degrees Celsius in the earth's temperature which in turn halted photosynthesis- nuclear winter. 75% of all life was erased from the face of the earth following an asteroid impact- the 5th mass extinction event.

Can it happen again? The possibility of the event at this scale is very low because according to past data and the constant monitoring of near-earth objects (NEOs), astronomers claim that the likeliness of such an event is (cosmologically) rare. But impacts, significant enough to cause major extinction of species, including our own, are quite possible in the near future. While preventing an asteroid impact is somewhat within our technological progress, it will still require significant time and global cooperation to take shape. 

If we somehow fail and most of humanity is wiped out with very little hope of restoring its past glory, all the debate about life's meaning and its purpose would end right there. The pompous race that once claimed to be the centre of the universe would burry under rock and sand. Every crime committed, every righteous move made, every war fought and every relationship built, in the anticipation that the sowed seeds will bear fruit someday, would reduce to a tale of a species among millions, on a planet among billions, that blossomed until it didn't.

Are we really that trivial? Our faith, our hope, our progress, our conflicts, do they really not matter?

What do you think?

[enlightenedsloth]

Thinking more, doing less

“Enlightened Sloth”, odd name for blogging, isn’t it? Coming up with a name can take quite a lot of iterations but I came up with this one in a matter of a few seconds, that’s how relatable it is. Having so many ideas and plans and not being able to execute even one of them, been through it? Sloths are known to be lazy, slow-moving and not-doing-much kind, which if attributed to humans, can seriously hinder self-growth. Procrastination and lethargy affects a lot of people’s personal development, but these are not necessarily a product of low brain activity, they might have an ocean of thoughts racing through their minds. This breed thinks a lot and does very little and seems like the laziest bunch, hence the name.

This blog focuses on a specific set of young adults just starting their careers who constantly question self-worth, resulting in self-doubt, which causes Imposter Syndrome. They are highly motivated individuals with a lot of potential but can’t get through the cluttered structure of breadth and depth (explained later in the blog) of things. A goal planning issue with overthinkers, which starts at an early age, “What is my calling?”, “Which field to pursue?”, “Will I be able to achieve my goals?”, and goes on till they have reached a point in life where further self-discovery is limited due to responsibilities. Once you decide on something, and start pursuing it, there is a sigh of relief, you have that motivation of becoming the best in the room. Good intentions, but how do you achieve it? Getting a degree or certification is easy because it is structured, you learn, you score and that’s it, you have it, but now the times are such that merely getting a degree is not enough, you have to become, as they call it “4x”, at your work. You have to go beyond the boundaries of your curriculum to be at the top of the game. So, you start evaluating alternatives and finally, out of a plethora of options (Breadth), you make up your mind to pursue something, a project or learning another skill, then the questions start flooding in, is it relevant what you are doing, if it is, how deep do you need to go in your pursuit (Depth). The result of so many variables, the questions and doubts, is that you get stuck and are not able to move forward with anything.

When nothing works out, you start questioning your worth, why are you not able to do it, do you not have it in you, what if you chose the wrong path in the first place? More and more questions form a loop which is quite difficult to break. Sometimes, introspection and self-reflection helps, merely being aware of the loop, a result of higher emotional intelligence, lets you identify the reason, and identifying the cause is a problem half solved.

To all the enlightened sloths, think less, do more.

[enlightenedsloth]

Decoding the communication process of exceptional geniuses

Everyone must have heard the name Elon Musk recently, I mean why not, he became the richest man on earth for sometime and we are always updated on who is the richest person in the world. At a young age, everyone knew the name Bill Gates because he was the richest and not because what he did. But for men like these, becoming the richest isn’t even the last wish on their ‘bucket list’. One can only imagine what Elon Musk’s ‘bucket list’ looks like, I think it would start from making electric cars and end on colonizing mars or fitting a chip in the human skull. So, the bottom line is that the people who achieve the most aren’t even driven by the thought of achieving for themselves, rather, driven by goals of changing or bringing a revolution to the world. The fact that most of these people start with negligible resources and yet succeed among people who have all the resources in the world proves that the only purpose of doing what they do is innovate to make our lives better. So how do they succeed?

Because they communicate from the innermost part of the brain called the Limbic brain. This part is responsible for emotion, behaviour etc.

This is what is called The Golden Circle.

It is like a codified version of how organizations/entrepreneurs communicate. It matches perfectly with the framework of the human brain. The circles in red represent the Limbic brain and the circle in black represent the Neocortex brain which is responsible for analytical and rational thinking, understanding facts and figures and language. So, the ‘why’ and ‘how’ comes from the Limbic brain and the ‘what’ comes from the Neocortex.

Now, why should you care about what represents what. Because The Golden Circle is the foundational block of your mindset based on which you build an organization or pretty much anything. Here’s the thought behind it

WHY- Why you do what you do. Do you believe it?

HOW- How do you do it.

WHAT- What do you do.

Everyone surely knows what they do and how do they do it but do they believe it, do they know the reason. Most leaders communicate from the outside in, they explain what they do, e.g. make the best smartphones, then they explain how do they do it i.e. by making it thin, fast, durable etc. and expect an action i.e. a vote or a purchase. Is it convincing? NO. The inspiring leaders do something completely opposite, they communicate from inside out. They first convey what they believe e.g. we believe in revolutionizing the way people use something which is required in day-to-day life. How do we do it? By making it fast, simple to use, and long lasting, we just happen to make the best smartphones.

Now do we have a product here. YES

This is how Elon Musk communicates, from inside out. He believes what he does and has proved it time and again. When General Motors announced that they are going to double their budget for developing electric cars, Musk welcomed the competition saying the whole point of Tesla Inc. is accelerating sustainable transport across the globe and if someone makes better cars than Tesla and it loses much of the market share, he is totally cool with it.

As a child he was always fascinated by innovations, ideas and big thoughts. His former boss says that they used to spend a lot of time talking about physics, meaning of life and the essence of the universe. At a very young age, he used to quit spending time with his brothers and sisters and stand next to and listen to the person he perceived to be successful in whatever field he/she was in. Christie Nicholson, the daughter of an advisor to Elon Musk says that even as a college student he was so into technology and sustainable future that in a room of 12 people, they said ‘hi’ to each other, then two sentences in he asked ‘what do you think about electric cars?’. Now, some years into the future, he is living his every belief and idea. Some of his companies or should I say contributions to human beings include-

Tesla Inc.- Manufacturer of electric cars with self-driving technology.

SpaceX- A space exploration company with the ultimate goal of making the human civilization multi-planetary with its reusable rockets and funding this project with the help of another project- Starlink, which aims to launch 42000 satellites in the earth’s orbit to provide internet connectivity anywhere and everywhere on earth.

The Boring Company- A low-cost transportation and freight tunnel digging company. The company with its project- Loop aims to dig tunnels with express system which allows people travelling through it to directly reach their destination without having to stop anywhere between the starting point and the destination. Also, the company under its project Prufrock has developed a faster way to dig tunnels. The machine digs at a rate of 1 mile per week.

Hyperloop- Not a company but a significant contribution from his side to this concept of high-speed transportation. He holds annual competitions involving international student teams to design and build the best version of this concept. These competitions are funded by Boring company which also builds hyperloop tubes.

Neuralink- A neurotechnology company driven by linking a chip fitted in the skull and the neurons in the brain. The technology’s first goal is to give people with severe spinal cord injury and paralysis the ability to control computers. As the person thinks of moving his fingers, Neuralink decodes the information and sends it to the user’s computer. And as the technology develops, there will be more utility from it. Just imagine if engineers find a way to wirelessly connect the chip to a prosthetic.

Paypal- An ‘ahead of its time’ idea. Paypal is a digital payment system launched by Elon Musk in 1999 and sold to Ebay in 2002. It was a rapidly growing digital payment platform back then and even today, it has a high transaction rate.

SolarCity Corp.- This is a company which Musk helped his cousins start in 2006 and in 2016 combined Tesla Inc. with it. The company strives to achieve a sustainable future by making solar panels with the idea to push people to put those on their house’s roofs and every purchase of panels comes with an energy storage container.

The man lives for humanity and success is just the byproduct of it. He resonates with people’s beliefs and works almost 20 hours a day to convert it into a reality. The success also depends on people’s support. There are very less people who believe or even think about sustainable future and becoming a multi-planetary civilization, just ask yourself that how many times in a week do you think about all this. That’s where the innovators and early adopters come into play. The figure below is an innovation diffusion model developed by Everett M. Rogers.

The innovators and early adopters are the ones who are responsible for the success of these people. The figure explains the percentage of consumers in the following stages-

Innovators- The kind of people willing to be the first to purchase the product for their belief in it or for the sake of trying something new.

Early Adopters- These are the people who embrace change and have leadership opinions.

Early Majority- They adopt change before the average person and typically need an evidence of the effectiveness of the innovation.

Late Majority- They are sceptical of change and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by majority and has a strong evidence of effectiveness.

Laggards- They are the most sceptical and conservative people. They only adopt an innovation because the alternative they used before doesn’t exist anymore.

Any innovation’s first customers are innovators and early adopters and the technology only captures the market after it ‘crosses the chasm’ as said by Geoffrey Moore which means after it penetrates into the change adoption mindset of Early Majority.

But is knowing the reason or believing in what you do is enough for success? NO. Nikola Tesla believed in what he did and put together some parts and invented things which shape our modern world, but he wasn’t successful. By success here, I don’t mean in monetary terms or ‘fans’, I mean was he able to achieve his goal of causing a revolution, he did but not at the level of what he intended.

Nikola Tesla was one of the most intellectual people in the world with his gifted intuition of finding hidden scientific secrets but also was very impractical in financial matters, an eccentric, naive to worldliness and had a very few friends. Nikola started constructing wireless world broadcasting tower with a loan of $150000 from an American financier Pierpont Morgan. The tower was expected to provide worldwide communication and to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather warnings and stock reports but the project was abandoned due to financial and labour troubles and Morgan’s withdrawal of support. Due to a lack of funds, much of his ideas remained in his books which are still examined by enthusiasts for clues. Reporters and scientists were reluctant about considering his future prophecies. He was greeted with caustic criticism when he claimed to have communication with other planets, that he could split the earth like an apple and having invented a death ray which could destroy 10000 airplanes at a distance of 400 kms.

So believing in what you do is not a success mantra, rather an ingredient in the recipe. Maybe it’s time to rephrase ‘follow your passion’ to ‘follow your belief’.

Blog inspired by Simon Sinek

[enlightenedsloth]

India: A Cashless Economy

What is a cashless economy?

A cashless economy refers to an economy which does not involve informal cash transactions, rather, involves digital transactions at every level i.e. from day-to-day to large business transactions.

Why cashless economy?

In the current times, where operating without cash doesn’t seem a fantasy, it is very beneficial to go cashless. For a country like India, going cashless means working one’s fingers to the bone for the government because for a metamorphosis this big, there has to be many complementary developments. However, if India can achieve it and achieve it fast then it will be the most favourable evolution since the I.T. revolution. All the advantages like protection from theft, ease of carrying money, elimination of the struggle for low denomination currency etc. are obviously there but the long term and the most salient advantages are:

Drastic decline in corruption-

Black money is something which is generated when a transaction is done through cash. Any transaction done through cash doesn’t get recorded with the government authorities like tax department (unless intended by the party) and hence used as a medium to save tax. The result of this devilish practice is that the government collects less tax and to compensate for it, the burden is shifted onto the honest tax payers. So, what the government needs to do is create a system where such transactions are recorded and the foundation of that system lies in a cashless economy. If every transaction is done digitally, there is no scope for pilferage of tax because it will be automatically recorded in the database.

Dealing with the pandemic-

Covid-19 has hit the world hard, probably the longest most disruptive onslaught the modern world has ever seen. Cash is the king they say but that might not be the case now. Social distancing norms have been imposed all over the globe and amid that no one would want to be dealing in cash which will destroy the whole point of these norms. Already, digital payment firms such as PhonePe, Paytm, Amazon Pay and others have seen nearly 50% spike in transactions since the start of the pandemic. The focus in this situation should be to move ahead in the game and further remove all the hurdles from the digital payment ecosystem. In conclusion, digital payments can be a benison in this regard.

Expansion of credit-

An economy grows when people spend and the money that is spent is either an asset on which they don’t need to pay any interest or it is a credit which is subject to incur some form of cost like interest. Credit comes from banks and other financial institutions and these institutions can only give credit if they themselves have enough money. Now, to pay digitally you have to park the physical cash you have with banks which means more money in the bank. With more money in the banks, they will be able to extend more credit which in turn will provide businesses money to spend changing the course of economy for good. This system is especially very advantageous to MSMEs and startups which struggle to get their hands on credit.

What will it take to go cashless?

In India, going cashless is not something which is achievable soon because of the work to be done on the infrastructure, citizens’ reluctance in accepting change and the insignificant politics that becomes a stumbling block all the time. Building an infrastructure for a cashless economy involves

1. Every citizen having a smartphone.

2. Availability of High-speed internet.

3. Integrating banking services with technology.

4. A strong wall of cyber security.

And the list goes on.

Smartphone users in India are expected to grow to 760 million in 2021. According to PMGDISHA (a government initiative to make people digitally literate). There is only 41% internet penetration in the country i.e. only 41% people have access to proper internet services. In the wake of the pandemic, banks were forced to provide their services digitally. They introduced digital KYC (Know your customer) and started processing card and loan applications online. But despite having considerable developments in the digital space, still there are significant struggles and one such example is outages. In June 2020, within a period of 5 days, there were about 40000 cyberattacks on India’s banking industry. To protect the industry from such ambush, there has to be a large and skilled workforce which is not the case as of now. According to DSCI (Data Security Council of India), there is a shortage of cybersecurity workforce in India. As we analyse the data, only the possession of smartphone is a striking factor and rest all suggest that the road to a financially digital India is a long one.

There is a flip side to every coin, so let’s look at some arguments against a cashless economy

A cultural-economic revolution-

Going financially digital is a cultural-economic revolution because Indians culturally believe in cash and a paradigm shift in thinking will require time and resources. Some sections of society in India still believe that depositing cash into banks means giving their hard-earned money away.

Poverty-

As of now, the banking system is not much favourable towards the poor because they conduct transactions in cash. Handling cash transaction is expensive for the banks because it brings additional costs of storing, processing, transporting etc.

Economic disruption-

Whenever there is an economic disruption like the 2008 crisis, business like fintech and banking suffer the most and find it difficult to pay back the money to its depositors. So, in such event, cash might be the best bet.

The burden of merchant fees-

Ever wondered how payment processing companies like Mastercard and Visa earn money? They charge a fee called a merchant fee on every transaction done through their platform. The fee is a percentage of the amount for which the transaction is done and a fixed charge per transaction (in some cases). The fixed charge can be a burden to the businesses which sell very low-priced products. Suppose there is a tea seller which charges 7 Rs per cup and the merchant fees is 2.5% + a fixed charge of 75 paise per transaction. The total merchant fee comes to 0.925 which is almost 14% of the price of the cup, irrespective of the scale of the business, loss of 14% of selling price is a threat. Now this wouldn’t be the case for products sold at a high price because the fixed charge will be a very small percentage of the price of that product. So, if businesses as small as a tea stall start accepting digital payments, a large amount of their earnings will be spent for just processing the payments.

How can a blog on cashless economy end without the mention of cryptocurrency amid all the buzz around it. So here are some insights.

Ever thought that cryptocurrency might be the answer to the world’s quest for paper free transactions? governments think not. As far as India is concerned, the government is not willing to give cryptocurrency the status of legal tender. But why?

It’s because the cryptocurrency is decentralized i.e. it is not regulated by any body of authority which can be an advantage to those willing to evade taxes and deal in illegitimate activities. While the transaction details are kept in open ledger in the blockchain technology, the identity of the person involved in the transaction is hidden.

The second main concern is that cryptocurrencies are highly volatile with prices changing in a matter of seconds. With such uncertain value, it will destabilize the economy.

Not only India, but countries like China, Turkey, Algeria and Egypt have also banned or planning to ban cryptocurrency. Understandable, the concerns that the governments have with cryptocurrency.

So, cryptocurrency might not be the answer to a digital economy.

Opinion: Why banning cryptocurrency is not an option

India is the world leader in BPO (Business processing outsourcing) and is sitting on a gold mine that is talent, so just imagine if cryptocurrency is not banned, how willing the foreign companies will be to hire Indians because of the convenience to pay them. The coronavirus has fuelled the remote working culture across the world and it is predicted that even in the post covid world, many companies will resort to work-from-home framework. So, for the millions of talented unemployed Indians, it will be a life-changing move and therefore subsequently good for India.

Governments are planning to ban cryptocurrency because they fear the inception of a new black- market trade, but banning it might only change the type of black market and not eliminate it completely, here’s how. Transferring crypto can be as simple as sharing a file via USB, so if it is banned, Indians will just have to find a person outside the country who can give the equivalent money in exchange of crypto creating a new black market.

If blockchain ban is a by-product of crypto ban, then India will miss out on something it can be a leader in. Think about it, the internet was created to share information across governments and government departments and then someone found a way to sell products on it. Similarly, blockchain was merely a technology on which cryptocurrency was based and now many financial products and some crazy innovations like user generated capital, decentralized stock market, user-controlled identity, decentralized social network are based on the blockchain technology and who knows what innovations the future holds.

I believe that an economy can never and should never go completely cashless, instead a widely used digital economic framework should co-exist with hard cash. What do you think?