Mid-Year Resolution Review

It's somewhere in the middle of the year and a good time to review the goals which I set out to achieve in January.

1. Watch Avatar 3-D. Done. I first watched it in Fame, Shankarnag. The 3-D experience there was pathetic and thus was forced to watch it again in Fame, Lido. By the 3rd time the movie's charm had worn off.
2. Take up drinking again. Done. Not really a tough thing to do. I got back to it soon after I finished the Mumbai Marathon. I celebrated the successful completion of the race with Shantanu, Ankita and Rajaram at the Mumbai airport, with a beer.
3. Do a sub-20-min 5K. In Progress. At the outset itself I had realized that this is going to be a really tough goal. Till now I haven't even managed to do a sub-23-min 5K. One of the reasons being that for the past 2 months I haven't been focusing on this goal. A realistic goal at this stage might be to aim for a sub-22-min 5K by year-end instead.
4. Lose weight. In Progress. I had put on a bit of extra weight after the Mumbai Marathon. Mainly due to the pre-race "carb-loading", where I went totally berserk with food, and the post-race celebrations. I'm happy to say that I have cut down on all the extra kilos gained. There is still some more fat which I can lose though. 
5. Learn to swim properly. Not Done. I haven't put any planning or action into this. 
6. Learn a new skill. Done (partial). OK there is no way anyone can claim to put a "Done" against a skill. There's always scope for more. I still mark it as done, as I pursued Latin Dance classes for 4 months which culminated in a performance in Kyra (a theater-restaurant in Bangalore). 
7. Decrease unproductive time, while increasing productive time. In Progress. Again, this is something which I can't really mark as "Done" ever. But at the current stage I will mark this as "In Progress." Till now, I have read David Allen's "Getting Things Done."and am implementing its teachings with the help of my smart-phone and a really useful website called Todoist.

The DF Dudes

Yesterday my good friend Rakesh told me about the 'DF Dudes.' He was in BITS Pilani, to write an exam where he first discovered these guys, although I'm sure everyone knows people like these.

The DF Dudes are categorized by their frequent usage of the words 'Dude' and 'F*ck'. Where the word 'Dude' is used to express disbelief. 'F*ck' is used to denote astonishment, as the prior object of disbelief turned out to be true. Each word is used in an elongated manner and should take at least 3 seconds to say. So 'Dude' is actually 'Doooooood' and 'F*ck' is 'Faaaaaack.'

This shall become much clearer with examples:

Example 1 --
Guy 1: 'My flight is delayed by 2 hours.'
DF Dude: 'Dooooood?!!'

Guy 1: 'Seriously.'
DF Dude: 'Faaaaaaack!'

Example 2 --
Guy 2: 'India won against Zimbabwe.'
DF Dude: 'Doooooooood?!'

Guy2: 'Seriously.'
DF Dude: 'Faaaaaack!'

So watch out for these DF dudes. Maybe you are one of them.

P.S: Rakesh, sorry if you were planning to write a post on them.

Two Statements

I bring to your consideration two statements. The first from Ezra Klein in a Newsweek article, titled "How much Does a Gallon of Gas Cost?"

One of the reasons we [referring to the U.S] drill wells far offshore and in countries with poor safety and environmental records is that we don't want oil companies mucking about in shallow waters near us.

The second by U.S. state department spokesman P. J. Crowley in an article by the Hindu.

Mr. Crowley today also noted that it was hard to draw a comparison between the Bhopal gas tragedy that left over 15,000 dead and the BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico now, saying the American companies were “very mindful and respectful” of the rules of the land when they operated overseas.

Facebook Privacy Concerns

Few days ago there was a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook's privacy settings. A number of newspapers and online media reported this. In my findings, there were 4 items which were targeted, namely:

1. Articles questioned the way Facebook originated, highlighting the charges presented in a lawsuit which said that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen Facebook's idea from three of his seniors. 
2. Later there were reports of some IM conversations between Zuckerberg and a college friend, which apparently highlighted Facebook's "cavalier attitude toward user privacy."
3. There were also concerns regarding the complexity of Facebook's privacy settings. NYTimes calling it a "A bewildering tangle of options." One of the points presented in the NYTimes infographic being the length of Facebook's privacy policy, which is longer than the constitution of America, without amendments (a number of articles and tweets left out the "without amendments" part). 
4. Then there were those who claimed that deleting a Facebook account is a "complex process" and as  Facebook didn't "provide an interface to delete your account" they had "crossed the border of unethical behavior."

The privacy concerns debate also started online activist movements, couple of which I personally noted:

1. Quit Facebook Day. A movement aimed at making Facebook users delete their accounts by May 31st 2010.
2. Diaspora. Which calls itself an "open source social network" which is "privacy aware." It's being developed by 4 college students. NYTimes did an article on them in which the time needed to write the code for the social network system is given as "three or four months."

To all these Facebook responded through:

1. Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, who answered privacy related questions on NYTimes.
2. At a later stage, towards the end of May, Facebook updated their privacy settings UI aimed to "simplify the controls."

Although the debate has more or less died down, I felt it worthwhile to investigate the news articles and the online activist movements. I have listed below my opinions regarding each.

1. Questions regarding the origins of Facebook. There is no denying the fact that there was a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg. The judge presiding over the case said that the allegations were "tissue thin" and both the parties eventually agreed to settle. Most of the article seems to be based on speculation and story-telling. 
2. Zuckerberg's IM conversations. The article says that in the IM conversation Zuckerberg was joking and also the conversation was presented out of context: "Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure." As far as I'm concerned drawing conclusions from anything presented out of context is wrong. I don't see how something like this could show "Facebook's aggressive attitude towards privacy." 
3. Complexity of Privacy Settings and Length of Privacy Policy. I agree that the earlier privacy settings UI was quite deep and a novice user must have found it difficult. But for an advanced user, it did provide a greater amount of granularity. The privacy policy is lengthy, but it was compared against the American Constitution (without amendments). Most people, and many other articles which I read, tended to ignore the "without amendments" part and started believing that the privacy policy is lengthier than the American Constitution -- which is false. 
4. Difficulty in deleting a Facebook account. I didn't find the procedure to delete a Facebook account difficult. Searching for "delete account" in the Facebook help center pulls up the link which guides you how to delete your account permanently. I don't think the process is complex and Facebook does provide an interface to delete your account. Facebook's decision to first deactivate your account before deleting it makes sense for three reasons. First, Facebook wants to retain you as a user. Second, if you mistakenly delete your account you have a means to revert your action. Third, if someone else hacks into your account and deletes it, you can recover.
5. Quit Facebook Day. I would call this movement a failure. According to this PCWorld article only 26000 people committed to delete their accounts. Note that they only "committed" to delete their account. It doesn't mean that they actually did. 26000 is not a large number if you think about the total number of users in Facebook. The number of people committed to quit is only 0.005 percent.
6. Diaspora. I find no point in speculating over how great a new online social networking site is going to be without it even having a sign-up page. 
7. Facebook's UI Change. The recent UI change, I feel, does give novice users an easier interface to control their privacy settings while allowing advanced ones to achieve more granular control. That seems to have quietened the skeptics, at least for now. 

I don't believe that Facebook is a company which doesn't do any evil. Just like Microsoft, Apple or Google, I'm sure that Facebook has skeletons in its closet. The point which I'm trying to make is that the media has been trying to concoct stories by wrongly interpreting facts or by paying no attention to facts.

The Return of the Passport Ordeal -I

I'm in Delhi again and this time around it's not a vacation or illness. The reason I'm here is to get my passport renewed. Renewed, mind you, not reissued ... read on.

Five years ago, after a lot of struggle, I was issued a passport. That passport was issued under the Tatkaal scheme. A scheme which allows people to obtain fresh passports within a week's time by paying an extra amount. The only catch being that these passports might only be valid for 5 years and not the whole 10 years. Such passports are called short term validity passports and mine is one of them.

The problem with short term validity passports is that you can't, in passport terminology, get them reissued but only renewed. Reissue means that you get a fresh passport, provided your previous passport is nearing expiration. Renewal, on the other hand, means an extension of the validity period, from under 10 years, to the whole 10 years. For example, in my case the 5 years' validity will be extended to 10 years.

Knowing all this, with complete forms, I went to the passport office. I reached there early enough to be the 6th or 7th person in the queue for the miscellaneous services (renewal is a miscellaneous service, unlike reissue). When I came to the front, I was told that renewal is going to take time ... 25 days (his exact words were "इसमें टाइम लगेगा; पचीस दिन"). He also gave me a bunch of other forms to fill. Now 25 days in babudom-speak can be an eternity. Also it requires another round of police verification.

Hoping that there will be another faster route to get it done, I didn't submit the forms. After a lot of investigation and talking to people, it turns out there isn't any faster way.

Given that I need to go for a US visa interview for my further studies, the delay in this passport renewal formality could become a disaster. My future hangs precariously.

Predicting Race Times Through Curve Fitting

You will find many race time calculators on the web, which will ask you to enter your time for a specific distance and you will get back the predicted race times for various distances. More often than not, the race times predicted are either too high or too low than what you observe in real life.

Take me, for example. My best 10KM time is 48:48. If I enter this into the runningforfitness.org race predictor, the predicted race times which I get are:

5 KM - 23:26
Half Marathon - 01:47:35
Full Marathon - 03:46:58

Whereas my best times for these distances are

5 KM - 23:06 (predicted race time higher)
Half Marathon - 01:51:23 (predicted race time lower)
Full Marathon - 04:50:26 (predicted race time significantly lower)

These race predictors take one race time and apply a formula to get all race times.

Taking the same race times which I had:

Distance	Hours	Minutes	Seconds	Equivalent Minutes
5	0	23	6	23.1
10	0	48	47	48.78
21.1	1	51	23	111.38
42.2	4	50	26	290.43

Table 1: Race Distances and Times

 Now if I take that data and plot it, here's what I get:

Figure 1: Distance Vs Time According To Race Times

The blue curve which you see in the above chart, is a polynomial curve which has been fitted onto the data points (race times). The curve is in fact almost a perfect fit, the R-Squared value being 0.99.  

The formula for the polynomial curve is:

 y = 0.0799x² + 3.3858x + 5.2075

Armed with this perfect formula, I thought I could predict race times for any distance. So I fired up IDLE and started putting in values:

>>> def CalculateTime(distance):
    time = .0799 * (distance**2) + (3.3858*distance) + 5.2075
    hours = math.floor(time/60)
    mins = math.floor(time%60)
    sec = int((time - math.floor(time)) * 60)
    print str(hours) + " hours " + str(mins) + " minutes " + str(sec) + " seconds"

    
>>> CalculateTime(10)
0.0 hours 47.0 minutes 3 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(12)
0.0 hours 57.0 minutes 20 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(21.1)
1.0 hours 52.0 minutes 13 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(42.2)
4.0 hours 50.0 minutes 22 seconds

Everything looks as expected. So I thought, let's predict other times, say for a 50K...

 >>> CalculateTime(50)
6.0 hours 14.0 minutes 14 seconds

That seemed reasonable. So what about shorter distances?

>>> CalculateTime(5)
0.0 hours 24.0 minutes 8 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(3)
0.0 hours 16.0 minutes 5 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(2)
0.0 hours 12.0 minutes 17 seconds
>>> CalculateTime(1)
0.0 hours 8.0 minutes 40 seconds

Woah! According to this model, I will be doing my 5K at a slower pace than my 10K and if I were running a 1K, I would be walking?!!

Not satisfied, I tried fitting other curves -- exponential, power, linear. But none actually gave me reasonable predictions across distances.

The polynomial curve was the only one which gave the relatively better predictions, but only for distances greater than 10KM.

The only place where I can use the polynomial formula, would be to define a lower limit of performance in a race or, in other words, the least expected time.

Which leads me to the conclusion that you can't reliably predict race times through mathematical formula. What a waste of time!

Sunfeast 10K 2010: Race Report

The Sunfeast 10K 2010 went mostly according to plan. I finished the race in 48:48 which translates to an average pace of 4:51/KM.

My goals were as follows:

1. Finish -- Pass
2. Get a personal best (beat 50:36) -- Pass
3. Finish Sub-50 min -- Pass
4. Finish Sub-48 min -- Fail

I was there at the race venue (Kanteerava Stadium) at around 7:30 AM. The Open 10K was scheduled to start at 8:10 AM, shortly after the elite women's start. By that time I had managed to get myself very close to the holding area gate. This was essential because last time I was far back in the holding area and it took me quite a bit of time to get to the start line, due to which I was dodging the crowd for most of the run.

When the gate opened there was a lot of pushing and shoving. Like last year, people did jump the fencing and come on to the track. When the race was officially started, there were a bunch of people who, with the pushing and shoving going on, fell on the track. Although, I don't think any of them got seriously hurt.

The weather was cloudy before the start of the race. It seemed that we will be racing in ideal conditions. But as soon as the gates were opened and the race started, the sun came out and it remained hot for the entire duration of the race.

I stuck to my target pace for the initial stage of the race and didn't take water for the first 5 KM. Things started getting a bit tough between the 5 and 6 K mark, where we had to deal with a slight gradual incline. When I started getting side-stitches, I decided to try what Paula Radcliffe does when the pain starts: count backwards from 100. 

I kept the counting going till the last stretch. I was pretty drained out towards the end and couldn't manage a final sprint.

Regardless, a good race.