Joshua Foer, the author of the book, “Moonwalking with Einstein”, speaks at TED.
May 13, 2012
May 05, 2012
April 22, 2012
Statistical Pragmatism
Via The Big Picture :
The note summarizes that one does not need to have a split personality to apply Bayesian or Frequentist thinking to stats. Separating Real World with Theoretical World from the perspective of data shows that both the schools of thought kind of have the same assumptions.
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Frequentist OR Bayesian Inference
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Frequentist AND Bayesian Inference
Statistical Pragmatism
Bayesian and Frequentist approach
April 16, 2012
Elements of Hindustani Classical Music
This book is written by Shruti Jauhari, a noted Hindustani Classical Singer and a disciple of K.J.Yesudas. The book is an accessible introduction to the various elements of Hindustani Classical Music. To read a language, you need to know the alphabets and the grammar associated with it. In the same way, to listen to Hindustani music, you need to have a basic knowledge of Svar,Raag and Taal One often comes across terms like bandish, gharana, alap, vilambit , taal, etc in the context of Hindustani Music. Unless one has some understanding of these terms, it is difficult to be a discerning listener.
There are very few books written in English that give a sufficient knowledge with out entering the intricacies of the subject. This book belongs to such a category, where a beginner gets a good 1000 ft. view of the various aspects of Hindustani Music. It starts off with a basic history of Hindustani music in India to give a reader some idea about the way music and musical ideas developed . The book then goes in to explaining terms such as Sruti, Svar, Musical Scale, That , Raag, Taal, Laya in an intuitive manner showing the basic math behind it.
There is a chapter that gives an intro in to the basic singing process and tries to provide simple answers to questions like, what constitutes a rendition, what are the parts of a typical rendition, where does an artist get to innovate, what is the role of tabla player in a rendition etc. The book then goes in to a basic description of various gharanas. In the modern world where learning is from a guru whoever is accessible in the city or town that one lives, gharanas might not be relevant. But it is always nice to know the various gharanas and the artists associated with various gharanas. The book also lists some eminent Musicologists and their profiles.
Perhaps the most useful chapter to me in the book is a full fledged description of the prominent raagas and their attributes. Well listening to raagas is one thing but singing or playing is a completely different thing. Unless you are thoroughly aware of the structure of a raag, it is very difficult to play beyond the known composition. Your guru might teach you a few compositions in a specific raag. Playing the given composition is a matter of practice. But soon one realizes the real fun in playing lies in improvisation. I play about 7 raagas on Sitar and I maintain a chart that gives the attributes of these raagas. Sometimes the way that I maintain the chart for a specific raaga is not very systematic. This chapter has taught me a nice way to structure the chart. It has a chart for each of the 25 most popular raagas in Hindustani Music. I doubt I will ever play so many raagas in my life time!, but I guess I will refer to the structured chart given in this book from time to time.
April 15, 2012
Born Standing Up : Summary
Getting good at any craft takes a long time, be it deal making or trading or mastering a game or programming. However books/articles,etc. out in the world are stufffed with "get rich quick", "get smart quick","get skills quick" kind of messages. I can't speak of other fields but programming books, that implicitly carry these messages, are always in majority, be it in the offline and online bookstores. ‘Learn XYZs language in 30 days', ‘Become an ace coder in X weeks' etc. For all such coders who believe such books and coding something for 30 days is going to transform you, make your venture the next instagram, this book has a lot to offer. Steve Martin gives a biographical account of his life where he claims his achievement is not a result of some sudden random event that got him to spotlight and has since then remained in spotlight. Far from it, its a story of sweat, tears, rejections and occasional acceptances, smiles and rewards . Steve starts off his book saying
I did Stand-Up comedy for eighteen years.Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic. I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented. I didn't sing, dance, or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive. I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself.
The book gives a background of Steve's father whose career ambition to be an actor made the family move from Texas to Hollywood to California. Amidst the various road trips, car radio introduced Steve to comedy. Later TV shows hooked him on to comedy. Meanwhile his father's acting gig was going nowhere and he reconciled to working in real estate, yielding to the pressures of raising a family. He was forever against Steve's interest in comedy as he thought it was flippant job. So, Steve's childhood , despite a doting mother was a troubled childhood. Somewhere in the book he remarks,
I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.
Thanks to his father's decision to move to Inglewood, California, Steve finds himself a job at Disneyland, the fairy tale place for any kid. His job was selling guide books. His job used to get over by noon and he had a free admission in the park. During this free time he came in contact with magic and he was enthralled by it. At the age of 10 being a regular employee at Disneyland, he learnt magic tricks from a fellow named Eddie Adamek. He was completely fascinated by one, Wally Boag, a performing artist at Disneyland. Slowly he starts attending every show of Wally Boag and tries to absorb all aspects of his performance. This stint in Disneyland comes to an end, thanks to poor sales of guide books. Steve then works on an ad-hoc job for an year before knocking the doors of local magic shops and he gets a job at one such shops. Thus, Steve began his show business career at the age of fifteen in 1960. He stood behind a counter eight hours a day, shuffling decks, manipulating Wizard decks , Mental Photography cards, and performing other magic tricks. This practice for 8 to 12 hours each day made him better and better at magic. He also developed a keen interest towards comedy after seeing Wally Boag's performance. He also starts reading various magic books and devours for magic tricks that he can use at work.While performing his magic tricks, he realizes that audience loved it when some tricks didn't work. This is when he faces a choice in his life, either be a magician or do comedy. Given that advanced magic tricks required more money, stage lighting infra etc, he takes a decision of somehow mixing comedy and magic so that he stands out.
At age eighteen, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent. Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.
He also starts learning banjo. Magic by itself might be a common place. Comedy by itself might be a regular event. But mix magic , comedy and banjo, you get a combination that will make a person stand out in any performance. That's exactly what Steve aimed for. When he picked banjo he had no teacher, he literally learnt by slowing down banjo records. When asked in a Charlie Rose interview, about his thoughts on banjo, Steve remarked,
In high school, I couldn’t play an instrument, I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying saying his is how you play the C chord, and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference. But I told myself, just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you'll know how to play.
He indeed got better as he kept playing and practicing.In 2009, Steve released his first album, 'The Crow' and it won a Grammy…Ok, Back to the story now.
Steve started working at ‘Bird Cage Theatre’ at the age of eighteen with no specific skill set, except an ambition to become good at comedy. He worked at Bird Cage Theatre four years mastering the craft.He worked steadily on his magic act, six minutes at a time, four times a day, five on Sunday, for three years. That's a ton of practice. Even though he relied less on magic in the later years, he says that the ability to judge audience reaction from all those magic shows was priceless. At Bird Cage Theatre, Steve starts using banjo in his act and tweaks his show sometimes to rely purely on comedy.While working at Bird Cage, he also starts doing part time at another theatre, ‘Prison of Socrates'. About these formative years of experience, Steve remarks
My act was eclectic, and it took ten more years for me to make sense of it. However, the opportunity to perform four and five times a day gave me confidence and poise. Even though my material had few distinguishing features, the repetition made me lose my amateur rattle.
Steve consciously starts restricting magic to one specific act so that he doesn't carry of risk of being called a magician. He wanted to be a comedian and not a magician. Really Amazing, the kind of clarity he had at such a young age. Well , he had a parallel life going on too. He got himself enrolled in a state college and started reading about Philosophy, ethics , logic. Not surprisingly, he found content for his comedy acts in these courses. Like they say, if you want to buy a car, you suddenly start noticing cars on the street. In the same way, Steve's liking for comedy made his courses on syllogism , philosophy etc, a wonderful source for his comedy acts. During these years where he was doing multiple things, he had two illuminating moments, one he decided he would write his own comedy and second, he met Nina Goldbatt who had a significant impact on his professional life. Courtesy Nina, he later got a break in the then popular show, Smother brothers show. It is not a fairy tale story after this break at Smother brothers show. Steve met with a lot of failures, experimented a lot as the material was getting obsolete very quickly. He continued to study, despite the hectic schedule and that kept his mind afresh. He could rely on the study time to energize him to come up with creative content for his acts. He improved on the comedy format where he cut off the reliance on punch lines to make the audience laugh. He improvised and developed his unique style where the act free flowing in nature.
Steve summarized his eight years on this job,
My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh. In other words, like the helpless state of giddiness experienced by close friends tuned in to each other's sense of humor, you had to be there. And for the next eight years, I did that
After this eight year stint, Steve left television writing and hit the road, literally. He went on a string of road shows designed by a local agency and here is where he honed his skills as a comedian. The anonymity made him brave enough to experiment in colleges and small towns. This was also a time when he was away completely from his parents and sister. This act of doing, experimenting, getting feedback, learning from it and improvising is the classic "deliberate practice act", that he went through, during his years on the road. He also emphasizes the role of solitude in those years and says that it was a crucial element for becoming good at his craft.
The travel isolated me. Friends were available only through costly phone calls, and contact with my parents and sister spiraled down to a pinpoint. In this netherworld, I was free to experiment. These out-of-the-way and varied places provided a tough comedy education. There were no mentors to tell me what to do; there were no guidebooks for doing stand-up. Everything was learned in practice, and the lonely road, with no critical eyes watching, was the place to dig up my boldest, or dumbest, ideas and put them on stage. Because I was generally unknown, in the smaller venues I was free to gamble with material, and there were a few evenings when crucial mutations affected my developing act. THE CONSISTENT WORK enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.
So, these years spent on creating, refining, experimenting the craft made the Steve Martin that he is, today. Starting from a job at ‘Coffee and Confusion' where he had to talk to empty chairs just to attract passerby, he went on to doing comedy act for as large as 45000 jam packed auditorium. I have not been able to touch upon a lot of other subtle aspects that are mentioned in the book, that one can apply to developing skills in any craft. I guess one needs to read this book to get all the flesh and bones of the story.
Takeaway :
The basic theme that one can infer from Steve Martin's story is Diligence. His diligence played a pivotal role in his success. Diligence not just in terms of persistence, but also in the ability to ignore unrelated pursuits.
April 14, 2012
The Razor’s Edge : Summary
It has been a long time since I have read any fiction book. So, thought of reading one, on this weekend to take a break from stats, programming and the usual routine. It took me about 9 hours to read the entire book and I must say that there was not a single instance during those 9 hours that I felt like taking a break. So, the book has a smooth flow of prose with just enough characters that you don't lose the story or get bored anywhere. The plot has about 15 characters , including one played by the author himself, Somerset Maugham but not all 15 characters get the same footage(obviously) .The protagonist of the story is Laurence Larry Darrell who goes on a spiritual quest and the book tries to weave a story around that quest. The other 13 characters come and go in with varying periodicity through out the book. Besides Larry, the main characters in the story are Isabel who loves Larry but ends up marrying Gray Maturin, Elliott Templeton, Isabel's uncle whose sole purpose in life is to socialize and be at parties, Sophie MacDonald, a poetess turned whore turned dope addict, whom Larry almost ends up getting married, but thanks to a Isabel's devious plan, never does so.
The story starts off with Larry being engaged to Isabel. After a stint in the army, Larry is a changed man. He wants to understand about God, Evil, role of knowledge in salvation and whole lot of things that any spiritually inclined person would seek. The difference though is that many of us, answer or seek answers to these questions, while keeping a day job, holding the responsibilities of a spouse, a parent etc. Not Larry. He has no intention to work and he tries to argue with Isabel, that in his meager income they can live a decent life. Despite Isabel deeply in love with Larry, she rejects him. I guess for some people, economic considerations weigh far more than matters of the heart, when it comes to settling down with somebody. Isabel gets married to a business magnet,Gray Maturin. Larry then goes on a quest that takes him to Germany, Spain and India. He finally gets some clarity after staying in India at an Ashram for a few years and meeting some spiritually inclined people in India.
The book does have a dose of aspects from Hinduism like karma, renunciation, rebirth, etc. But the author makes it clear that he never intends of summarizing or even talking at length about such aspects in his book. He is clear about his role, i.e a storyteller. I must say he has played his role as a character and as an author with perfection , as he make spiritual elements, the various locations , a dozen characters as props to show the conversion of an atheist Larry to a devout spiritual person by the end of the book. No wonder this book is rated as one of the finest works of Somerset Maugham. However the movie adaption met with a commercial failure.
Some quotes / conversation that I found interesting amongst the various characters in the novel are :
- I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you are up in a plane by yourself, high, high and only infinity surrounds you.You are intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn't exchange it for all the power and glory in the world.
- I had not the heart to laugh at Elliott any more, he seemed to me a profoundly pathetic object. Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked to one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification; and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid. It made me sad to think how silly, useless and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They have forgotten him already.
- We are all greater than we know and the wisdom is the means to freedom. For Salvation, it is not essential to retire from the world , but only renounce the self. Work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.
April 08, 2012
April 06, 2012
Steal like an Artist
Austin Kleon’s book is essentially a blog post turned in to a book .The basic theme of the book is that in art as in other forms, you have to steal. The word steal has a negative connotation and hence the book differentiates between two kinds of thefts:
Basically theft in this sense means that you are free from the burden of trying to be completely original. Most of the book is common sense stuff but how often do we really follow commonsense ?
There are some nice visuals in the book. Some of them that I found interesting are :
Very often, ONLY when you have multiple ideas,
that you are capable of coming up with a perfect idea that works
It is better to separate your workspace in to analog and digital mode
Paul Graham in one of his essays says that he follows a similar configuration where he uses two computers, one connected to internet and the other offline, so that while working on something that requires concentration, the urge to browse randomly, check email, tweets, blogs is eliminated.
As Steve Jobs says, you cannot connect dots going forward.
However, dots you create in fact make you what you are.
All you need is a little space and a little time—a place to work, and some time to do it;
a little self-imposed solitude and temporary captivity.
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
— Gustave Flaubert
Univariate Distribution Relationships
There are a ton of relationships between various distributions. One typically understands them, remembers them based on the kind of stats work that one does. If one does a lot of Bayesian stuff, one tends to remember the conjugate priors and related distributions. If you are doing survival modeling, you tend to focus on specific distributions like weibull etc. If you are in to OR work, Erlang, gamma, beta distribution parameters are at your finger tips. Irrespective of the type of analysis that one does, it is always good to have a decent overview of various random variables and the connections between them. The connections that one must understand should typically encompass :
- If I am given a random variable from a distribution F1, How do I generate a random variable with distribution F2 ?
- Does a distribution F1, tend to another distribution in the limiting case involving one of the parameters ?
- If you take a convolution of random variables belonging to a specific family of distribution, does the resulting variable belong to the same family ?
- What if you scale a random variable, Does the distribution change ? What if you invert ?
- What if you take a min or max of sample data from a distribution ,Does the resulting statistic belong to the same distribution family ?
- Is the conditional density of a random variable same as unconditional density of the random variable ?
- Does a linear combination of random variables from a family result in a variable that belongs to the same family ?
- Does the CDF allow you to do inverse transformation ( for simulation purpose)
Answering the above questions for the various distributions and more importantly remembering them is a challenging task,at least to me. Recently I stumbled on to a fantastic visual from The American Statistician that summarizes the relationships between 76 univariate distributions that includes 57 continuous probability distributions and 19 discrete probability distributions. Tremendous effort seems to have gone behind making this visual. By merely looking at various segments of the visual, you will get to learn and remember the deep connections between the various probability distributions. If you work out the relations using pen and paper, then you will tend to appreciate them more.
May 2012
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