Thinking of buying a telescope?

For several years, I had been thinking of buying a telescope to get a closer view of planets, their moons, etc. However, it is still listed in one of my to-do lists. During any of the shopping sessions when my wife digs deeper into the products that interest her, I get to do some window shopping of products in the nearby stores. Some times I get to see telescopes priced very low. I stop my self from buying them because "I did not do a good research about telescopes, and what if this brand is not good".

Today, I wanted some break from what I was doing and I searched for telescopes in Bangalore. Interestingly, one of the articles pointed me to http://www.astrocentral.co.uk/telescope.html. This website says "The most important thing about magnification is not to get too hung up about it.", "At night in towns, as everything cools down (especially after a hot day) heat rises and causes turbulence in the air. When looking through a telescope at high magnification this causes the image to swim in and out of focus." This has given me a good introduction to what I should do when I go out for shopping for my first telescope. To begin with - I should set aside atleast Rs 20k to get a good first telescope. Then I should find a good lawn accessible in the night. Finally, the place should be dark (away from the city lights). All this means that I should move to a village after purchasing the telescope :)

Can I donate blood if I have had Hepatitis A?

Hepatitis A infection is most often identified with Jaundice (typically yellow colored eyes) symptoms. I had this in mid 1990s. Couldn't trace the reasons for my infection. It got cured in 2-3 months time and I'm healthy as ever after that. Good thing about this disease is that it leaves anti-bodies in the blood stream which will protect you from further infections (that is what the literature says).

Few years after I was cured of Hepatitis A, I used to go to medical camps for blood donation. The first thing I mention is that I had "Hepatitis A" in mid 1990s. Doctors in medical camps were not sure whether they should collect blood from me or not. I was not aware about the recommendations by the medical councils. Fortunately, because of insufficient information and doubts created by my questioning, I was told that they'd not want me to donate blood. Good that I did not donate blood !

This morning, I was thinking of going for a blood donation for my colleague. I searched the web once again and came across this CDC link http://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/a/aFAQ.htm. It says "If you had Hepatitis A when you were 11 years of age or older, you cannot donate blood. If you had Hepatitis A before age 11, you may be able donate blood. Check with your blood donation center."

Now, I have no more doubts. It is very clear that I should not donate blood. A request to everyone who had jaundice or Hepatitis -A, please refrain from donating blood because the recipient might not be immune to Hepatitis-A virus.

Some non-compete clauses unenforceable in India

http://publication.samachar.com/pub_article.php?id=8979992&nextids=8980746|8983625|8981065|8982327|8979992&nextIndex=0

The above link points to a news article that describes some of the conditions in which the non-compete clauses are not enforceable in India.

"However, Indian courts have consistently refused to enforce post-termination non-compete clauses in employment contracts, viewing them as 'restraint of trade' impermissible under Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 (the Act), and as void and against public policy because of their potential to deprive an individual of his or her fundamental right to earn a livelihood." -- Majority of Indian IT companies make every (mostly senior) employee (who exits the company) sign the non-compete agreement. Some of them make signing this document mandatory at the beginning of employment along with the non-disclosure agreements.

Majority of employers do not enforce this by taking a legal route. So, what's the point in making employees sign these agreements and increase the overhead for the company?

Also, employees do not care much about these agreements too. They join direct competitors and some disclose this future employer at the time of exit. Do these 'switchers' know that these agreements are not enforceable in India?

IRCTC : did the quota change in the recent past?

For the last few months whenever I book a ticket through IRCTC I'm always indicated that lower berths are not available. I always get a side upper berth. This happens even when the availability is more than 300. Did the quota for IRCTC bookings change in the recent past?

Another  observation is that IRCTC shows waiting list number when booking. However, on that particular day, there a lots of empty slots in the train. I had booked a ticket for my wife very early, got a confirmed ticket. Few days later when I wanted to book a ticket for myself on the same train, the status was waiting list; I had chosen not to book a ticket because the waiting list number was too high. However, to my surprise on the travel date, I had seen that there were lots of empty seats. Is this waiting list number only for IRCTC reservations? What percentage of the total seats are assigned for IRCTC quota?

Home Saver Home Loan - Watch Out!

This is my understanding of how the Home Saver loan operates (as against what is told to you when the loan product is sold).

Standard Chartered bank (SCB) offers Home Saver home loans where the home loan is linked with a Current Account where the borrower could deposit money. The interest to the extent of the deposited money will be waived (or what is called as interest saved). This is good because you'll save significant interest. However, there is a catch. The deposits are never treated as the payments towards the principal. This implies that your principal outstanding reduces at the same rate as it was with your normal loan.

For example: if you had taken a loan of Rs 10 lakhs, with an EMI of 10000 per month. For simplicity of calculation, let us say that the EMI comprises of Rs 9000 towards interest and Rs 1000 towards principal. Now, you made 2 lakhs in cash deposits in the linked current account. This deposit will make your interest payments go down. So if you're paying your full EMI of Rs 10000 per month then, your principal component is Rs 1000, your interest savings is Rs 2000 (approximately), this interest savings should go to the principal.

Going to an extreme case, let us say that you had deposited Rs 10 lakhs in the bank account (you could have cleared the loan - however, you wanted to have an option of taking that amount as liquid cash for you to use for other purposes - if required). This means that no interest is being paid. Ideally, since the EMI is being paid, all EMI must go to the principal.

The above story looks appealing. However, this is not how real computations might be happening. The real computation could be as follows. The EMI payment is taken as the actual EMI minus the interest saved. So, the principal deduction is very small, and happens at the same rate as if it is a normal loan. The interest savings are tracked. What effect does this have? The assumption that your full EMI is being deducted from the current account is *WRONG*. If your full EMI was deducted then the principal outstanding should have reduced rapidly because "full loan amount" is in the current account. However, since this does not happen, and the principal outstanding moves down slowly, if you'd want to close the account after few years, you'd still have a large principal outstanding. In the above example, when you have 10 lakhs in the bank account, the principal outstanding decreases (approximately) at Rs 1000 per month. Thus, after two years your principal outstanding goes down by Rs 24000. However, you'd have expected it to go down by 2.4 lakhs assuming that the entire EMI would go to the principal outstanding because you need not pay any interest. So, if you're planning to close a loan after two years, the 2.5% penalty will be applied on 9.76 lakhs (instead of 7.6 lakhs). This is a significant loss because you'd be paying an excess of around 2.5% penalty on approx. Rs 2 lakhs.

Note: Many other banks also offer similar home loan product. Most likely, they also operate the same way.

new type of internet auction sites - bid20.com

Recently a friend of mine mentioned about a new twist to internet auction sites - bid20.com. The site claims that you can win item at a very low price. Is it really true?

How does bid20 auction work? Here are some steps:

1) Buy N bids at the price specified. Each bid is prices > Rs 10, in bundles specified by bid20
2) Go to the item listing and bid one at a time when u r not the highest bidder
3) The last bidder will be the winning bidder. All the other bidders who had bid lost the money for the bids they've made.

What does the winner get?

Let us consider an item that has an MRP of Rs 1000, and assuming that each bid costs you Rs 10, here are some scenarios:
1) You are the only bidder. In this case, you'll only bid once and your cost is Rs 10, and you'll get the item for Rs 10. This is good for the buyer, and a loss for bid20. This is a very rare case.
2) When there are more than one bidder, say 20 bidders. During the bidding process let us say that each bidder bids an average of 10 bids, and you are the last and the winning bidder. In this case there are a total of 200 bids, which means the price realized by bid20 is Rs 2000, which is good for bid20. This is also good for the winner because the cost for the winner is only Rs 100 (10 bids x Rs 10). However, there are 19 bidders who lost an average of Rs 100 each, and are potentially not happy about the loss. (Note: they might recover this loss by winning another auction - gamble?)
3) Scenario same as 2. However, the winner steps in just before the auction close, and after 190 bids have come in. He has more resources to bid at because he is starting from zero and the others at an average had already bid more than 15 times. Thus, the late entrant bidder, and more importantly very sparse bidder or a bidder who spends his bids miserly, is going to benefit a lot because he needs to spend fewer bids to win the auction. Bid20 is still not at loss. The winner here will maximize his returns. However, the initial bidders will have maximum dissatisfaction.

Who is at a loss?

Often, people do not realize the potential for loss. Auctions bring out impulsive nature in the bidders. Many of them don't analyze or realize how go gain maximum out of minimum bids. Also, people are used to ebay style bidding where the bidding does not cost you, and  one has to pay only as a winner. However, in bid20 style auctions, people start losing money (except the winner) with every bid. This is where the potential for a loss exists.

Business Model for Bid20:
1) Bid20 benefits a lot because (a) it gets money upfront by selling the bids - whether the buyer spends the bids or not is not its concern (b) The price/bid can be adjusted by it at the time of selling the bids, which makes it realize the price of the item at the rate it decides.
2) It can make a loss if there are not many bids on that item. However, bid20 says that it reserves a right to cancel the auction - it can protect itself.

The only concern for this business model is the user dissatisfaction. Over a long run, users realize that they're losing money when they bid and they not being the winner. When people realize that winning is possible only if they enter the auction at the closing stages, each auction will see traffic at the last moment. However, there is a catch here. The auction can get indefinitely extended if bids are received within 15 seconds of the auction end. Thus, there is no right time to enter the auction unless you see lots of people had already bid on the item.

Conclusion: The bid20 model will work and will have a buzz factor until users realize what they're getting into, and realize that they are accumulating losses. Once the buzz factor fades away and user realization happens, the user participation will go down. The Nov'09-Feb'10 Alexa traffic plots indicate this trend. Bid20 can continue with their model by bringing in new users; however, retaining the users might be difficult in the current model. Some new aspect must be introduced into this model to make it work over a longer period.

Notes from internet Auction History: There were auction sites like ubid, yahoo-auction, etc., that had the concept of extending the life of auction when the bids happen within certain time frame of the end of the auction. All these auction sites had decline in traffic while ebay kept gaining share. The sellers were happy to have fixed-time auction because of better operation management, while the buyers were happy to set a maximum price and time for an auction, and spend less time for buying an item. May be, sites like bid20 must take some hints from the internet auction site performance history and reasons for their demise, and change the way they operate so that they can survive for longer periods.

Be diligent - Read all the contents of the documents you sign!

My learning in life so far is "read all the documents you sign". Be diligent. Try to be legally correct.

Where does this help?

1. Housing loan documentation in India is a very complex process. One has to sign every page of a 50 to 100 page document that has all kinds of legal wording. One would be amazed at all the clauses written there and how each clause takes away your right to own the property for which you're taking the loan of course, in case of any default or breach of those terms. For example, I was thinking of closing the loan after 5 years. I knew that there was a clause that says that there will be a penalty if the loan is closed before 5 years. I missed an interim document sent by my bank telling me that the '5 year' limit had been removed and if you don't dispute it then you're in agreement with the modification of terms. If I had been diligent in reading every communication from my bank then I could have done something to protect my rights.


2. In the house sale agreement, my builder had written a description of the property that is being sold. However, when a sale deed is being made for registering with the government body, the description of the property had been changed (probably with a profit motive). I had noticed it before the registration. After understanding the nature of modifications and some consultations with a lawyer, I could make the builder use the same property description in the sale agreement and the sale deed.


3. Protection from fraudulent transaction on credit cards vary from bank to bank and from country to country. When I was in United States, online purchase protection used to cover even non delivery of items where, on dispute, the credit card company will refund money into your account and then follow-up with the merchant. However, in India it is different. The credit card companies wash their hands off once the credit card transaction is authorized by you. In case of online transactions this means that your money is gone the moment you've done a mouse click. Hehe! now that I understood the difference, I'm very careful (mostly, don't use the credit card for online purchase).

Decline to Vote - Election Commission of India Rule

Today I came across the following on the Election Commission of India website:

11. Can you decline to cast your vote at the last stage?

11.1 The law enables a voter to decline casting his vote at the last stage. If you decide not to cast your vote after having signed on the Register of Voters and after having received the voters’ slip from the Second Polling Officer, you must inform the Presiding Officer immediately. He will then take back the voters’ slip from you and proceed to record in the remarks column of the Register of Voters that you have declined to exercise your franchise and you will be required to put your signature under such entry. After this is done, you can leave the polling station without proceeding to the Voting Compartment

Many times, I don't like to vote for the candidates because I feel that they do not deserve to be elected. However, I don't want someone else to vote in my name (poll rigging/fraud) in my absence. Thus, I go and vote for the better candidate of the two. Now, I can go to the polling station, get an entry next to my name saying that "I've declined to exercise my vote". At least, I can avoid letting people committing poll fraud using my name.

Know this before a Property Purchase

I had purchased a flat in an apartment complex in Bangalore. I got into an agreeement with the builder in August 2005. I was given the possession of the flat in August 2008 with only the flat completed to 95%. The rest of the apartment complex is still under construction; even now it is under construction but, in a decent living condition. The registration is yet to happen. There were delays at every stage of this apartment complex during these 4+ years. Many of these delays are because of the personal agenda to be run by the builder and the landowner, where the landowner had given the builder an authorization to construct via a joint development agreement. The personal agenda is about sharing all the extra construction beyond the approved plans that is happening in the apartment complex.

In all these four years, I had learnt the following:

1. Do not buy in an apartment complex where the builder and the land owner are different entities. In my case, the builder had delays in the project construction (some speculate that it is induced by the land owner to gain maximum benefit), which required the builder to pay penalties to the land owner. In lieu of these penalties, the builder is giving right to the club house to the landowner. The landowner now rents out portions of this club house for commercial activities. In addition to this, the builder is constructing several unauthorized flats that are most likely to go to the land owner. Note: The total undivided share of land divided amongst the flats in the approved plan is 79% of the total land area on which the complex is built. This means the builder had intention of building more flats right at the beginning when the agreement was made.


2. Check to see if any litigations are pending. Most often, the documents do not indicate that litigations are pending. Yesterday, after reading a court order document, I realized that there was one pending litigation when the development agreement was made between the builder and the land owner, which the purchasers (like me) are unaware of.


3. Ensure that the sale agreement and sale deed (registered document) both have the same description of the property. The builders make initial agreement with wordings that are good to read. When they make the sale deed, they reduce the scope of the property significantly. This reduced scope allows them to build more in the same area.


4. Do read and understand the scope of Service Tax, VAT that needs to be paid. You might get surprises later.


5. Do all communications to the builder by sending a latter through a registered-post-acknowledgment-due.


6. Pay on time to avoid penalties for delayed payment


7. Insist on construction linked payment plan. This allows you to pay only when the construction happens.


8. Club house membership fee charged. Don't assume that you own a share in the club house unless the sale deed says so.


9. Finally, get/check approved plans from BDA even before getting into agreement

Note: Lawyers to legal verification based on the documents you give them, which are given to you by the builder. The builder might give only those documents that make him look perfectly legal :) Some of the aspects apply to a plot purchase.

Happy property purchasing :)

Flipkart - a good story in making

I had a bad online book purchasing experience with  firstandsecond.com, an online bookstore in India. I ordered a book, which was not delivered. I had another bad online purchase experience in buying a flower bouquet after which I applied brakes to online purchases.

After several months of keeping myself away from online purchases, recently, I purchased few books on Flipkart (http://www.flipkart.com), a Bangalore based startup. The first order was shipped the next day. A day later, I had the books in my hand. I was impressed.

I purchased another set of books for my daughter's birthday. There were only 4 days between the purchase date and the purchase date. The book detail page indicated 7+ days of delivery. I contacted the customer service to see if Flipkart could expedite the shipping of these books. Flipkart did not promise the result. However, they were considerate enough to try and deliver the books in two installments. The first set of books arrived in 3 days time. The second (and the last) installment the next day. This is a very pleasant experience, which makes me a loyal customer of this budding site. I hope they maintain their standards. Thank you Flipkart.

Are people in Bengaluru so insensitive to Ambulance Siren?

Today, near the Marathalli outer ring road signal, I felt really bad to see an Ambulance stuck in traffic. All drivers around the ambulance were looking at the vehicle that was emitting emergency siren. None of them tried to move away to give way to this Ambulance. The traffic signal is just 50 meters away and there were few policemen at the signal. None of these policemen made attempts to clear the traffic to get the Ambulance moving.

Even after the green signal, and the traffic started moving, several vehicles tried to move ahead of the Ambulance from the sides.

Did we loose the concept of 'emergency'? Why can't we understand that we should stop on a side and give way to emergency vehicles?

Public Service Ads by Google

I was going through this website http://www.tecrec.in. Usually, I ignore the advertisements on any page. However, this advertisement caught my attention. The advertisement was about a public service organization http://www.grameenfoundation.org, and the bottom-right of the ad reads "public service ads by Google". I was happy to see organizations trying to promote something with an intent, which is other than money making.

SEM by startups - can they win the war!

Several startups use SEM for marketing. Is this really a good idea? The answer is yes and no.

It is a 'yes' because people get instant exposure to these sites based on the bid words. Traffic to relatively unknown websites (like startups) are very welcome because website visitors are always the revenue generators.

Can this 'yes' transform into a 'no'? The answer is 'yes'.

Let us go back and look at SEM on Google. A startup xyz.com bids on keyword(s) and gets itself to the top rank for those keyword(s). Similarly, a very well known company pqr.com, which also has a good SEM click history bids on the same keyword set. The bid value of xyz.com will be higher than pqr.com. When the user searches using the keyword, Google will show these first xyz.com and then pqr.com in the advertising box. Let us consider the following scenarios:

1. xyz.com has a better ad content. The user is impressed and clicks on the advertisement. xyz.com is charged for this click. Many sites have very high bounce rates. The cause for the bounce off could be because of the site content, the site organization and flow, and also because of the trust level of the user on that site (xyz.com). Majority of times this click results in a loss to xyz.com. However, the SEM optimization engine thinks this as a success for xyz.com and increases its credibility/trust factor. A good vote in favor of xyz.com. If b% of users convert then the effectiveness of the amount spend is b%


2. The user does not click on xyz.com even though it is at a higher rank but, this user clicks on pqr.com because pqr.com is a known website. There are publications that indicate the effectiveness of having ads positioning at positions 2 or 3. At these positions, statistics indicate higher click through rate. This click for pqr.com (and not for xyz.com) reduces the trust factor for xyz.com.

For a relatively unknown xyz.com the probability of 2 is much higher than 1. Thus, the SEM optimization engine is likely to penalize xyz.com because it did not receive the clicks even though it was positioned higher. Now, if xyz.com wants to maintain its ranking, it needs to bid higher. Further clicks not-in-favor of xyz.com will cause xyz.com to bid higher for the same set of keywords. The same is not true for pqr.com, which has already established its trust factor. Also, the b% effectiveness due to bounce rate also adds to the SEM expenses of xyz.com.  Thus, in SEM space, startups rarely win a war against well established companies.

What are the alternatives?

One alternative is to reduce the cost of SEM while keeping the effectiveness of keywords higher. This is something SEM experts are known to achieve. These experts are known to find keywords that are effective and cost low (mainly due to lack of competition). However, their search volume is also very low. A startup has to identify and dynamically modify its keyword set on which it bids to increase visitors through SEM program. This is a search through a long tail of rare search keywords, and user typography errors. Can this search go on for ever?

There is this other alternative some companies had adopted to get to their target user base. Instead of making users come to their website, these companies started to go to the users by identifying areas where the users are more likely to visit. One such approach is to create applications on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, and MySpace. Partially, this was a step in right direction. Users, who rarely visit sites like xyz.com, would visit/add the application on facebook/Orkut/... with some curiosity, and after some clever marketing strategies by the application developers. After spending considerable amount of time on this application, these users get used to the content of the xyz application, which establishes a trust factor. Now, getting these users on social networking sites to xyz.com is another big hurdle. Note: I did not see an application that had converted the entire user base to its independent website. Thus, this step is 'partially' in the right direction. It only established the brand of the application. It would have been a completely successful approach if it had made people come to xyz.com.

Disclaimer: xyz.com and pqr.com were used just for explanation. These pointers are not to the actual websites (I did not check  if real websites exist and what they do). Also, my thrust on the trust factor being one of the variables in computing the bid value/ranking for a site by Google is based on some discussions I've read over the internet about Google's way of optimizing its SEM systems.

Netflix Prize Contest - recommendations

Netflix prize contest is about designing a recommendation system that can do 10% better than Netflix's own reference system. The grand price was set to $1 million. It had the buzz factor when it was launched. Very soon, people had realized that it is very difficult to achieve the 10% improvement target that was set by Netflix.

People tried several approaches. One of the very popular initial approaches was "Simon's Approach", which was almost similar to the LMS algorithm.

Researchers are trying several methods to grain incremental gain in the score. They are spending significant energy, time, and effort in achieving the target. Many of these researchers are combining their individual approaches to obtain further improvements.

Yes, after trying several approaches and tweaking the algorithm parameters, these researchers might reach the ultimate goal of 10% improvement. However, are all these approaches practical to implement? Even if these could be implemented very efficiently, do these really give good movie recommendations for the real user? Finally, can these approaches be used for recommendations in other domains?

This research has brought many teams to collaborate with each other. It has given graduate students a research topic to work on and get their thesis/publications. More importantly, this research has given a common ground for researchers to compare individual algorithms.

Finally, I'm not sure how much Netflix benefited from the practical use of the submitted algorithms and approaches. It has definitely benefited in terms of getting the right to use several algorithms in their recommendation system, and getting hundreds of researchers to work on a problem by paying a small amount (per annum per researcher).