One response I anticipate to this post is that people will ask me “So are you saying that there should be no regulation at all?” I will answer that in length, but here is the short answer – we need laws, not regulations. The difference is in how intrusive they are, whether you make people ask for permission to do things or whether you let people free to do things, but punish them for doing wrong things, and whether you punish actual harm or potential harm.

But more importantly, the question is wrong. My whole point is that to support a regulation, you need to look at the regulatory mechanism and see how it will work. So the onus is on you to prove that an individual regulation will work, not on me to prove a negative – that there is no regulation that will ever work.

When you are talking of reliability. I had a problem with comments a few days back. Perfectly good comments were being held up for moderation. I never noticed till Michael Higgins sent me a mail and told me about it. Luckily he had my email id. (I don’t publish my email on my site to keep away spam and legal notices.)

So the point is, Spam Karma was working so well before it broke down that I had set up filters to move all mails telling me about comments being held up for moderation away from the inbox, to be disposed of at leisure. I was so used to it not catching false positives that I felt comfortable neglecting the task of approving or deleting moderated comments. If it had gone wrong more often, I would have been better prepared. The moral of the story is, 99% reliability is better than 99.99%.

Oh, and the problem should be fixed by now. The friendly neighbourhood Madman upgraded everything for me.

Yes they are. This can be confirmed by casual observation. Peruse the average blog, and you will find that it is filled with unoriginal thoughts, sloppy reasoning, excessive ranting, bad grammar and poor spelling. So the average journalist compares the average newspaper article with the average blog entry, and asks, “Are these guys serious about blogs being the new form of journalism? This crappy stuff will threaten the newspaper industry?”

I have not yet formed an opinion on whether blogs will threaten newspapers, but I am quite certain that looking at the average blog is the wrong way to estimate the quality of the blogosphere. The average blog might be crap, but the best blogs are not. The best bloggers write better, reason better and – this is the most important point – are more intelligent and knowledgeable than the average journalist. I would also say that they are better on all those counts than even the best journalists, but that is debatable.

There ought to be no mystery about why bloggers are more knowledgeable. Journalists often claim that bloggers are amateurs, but then, journalists are professionals only the art of writing, while bloggers are often professionals in the subject they are writing on. I would wager that it is easier for a professional to pick up writing skills than for a professional writer to gain an understanding of a subject well enough to write a 1500 word article about it.

The best bloggers are writing only because the worst bloggers can. The worst blogs come into existence because it is extraordinarily easy to set up a blog. It is free, takes a couple of minutes and keystrokes are free.
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Navin has answered my question. Unfortunately, there is no way to comment on his blog (It says “comments”, but clicking there does not get me anywhere.) So I have to answer here.

Firstly, he still hasn’t explained what he meant by throwing that equation at me. What did that equation “show clearly”?

Then he answers my question saying “Productivity”. That of course, explains everything. So I need an extra half a pane of glass next year. So the simple answer is to produce more. You have to do so with the same number of workers, so the only way to do it is… increase productivity! Yes, it is all clear now. Mathematics is the solution to all the world’s problems.

This is really embarrassing. It turns out that my argument about investment leading to an increase in GDP comes from a simple ignorance of mathematics. Navin clearly points this out for me.

1. GDP = consumption + investment + exports – imports

This clearly shows a GDP can grow even without investments when other factors help. Currently, America’s savings rate is below 0% (hence no investments as per ravi), so the GDP growth is also not there ? Indeed, its there,a good 3.3% !! This example makes it clear that ravi’s statement is a bit off ( I wouldn’t say wrong. That would be rude ;-))

How silly of me to forget this equation! As you can clearly see, raising investment on the Right Hand Side will of course raise the GDP on the Left Hand Side, but the same can be achieved by increasing consumption! So all that I have to do is to increase the consumption and GDP increases! So it was just silly of me not to know of this basic mathematical fact. So to put it very simply, if I consume 1 pane of glass for my window this year, I just need to place another order for 1.5 panes of glass for my bigger window next year, and hey presto! the GDP will grow by (0.5 panes)* (price of 0.5 panes of glass).
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Surprisingly, I did not get any comment to my post here. I will assume that this is only because most people did not know the answer, or could not understand he question, rather than because of a sudden decline in the popularity of my blog.

Actually, I had already given away the answer in the title, because I had fully intended to give the answer right there. The GDP “contribution” from inefficiency may not make a difference this year, but it certainly will the next year. Ergo, the growth rate will go down.
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Dilip D’Souza makes a plausible sounding point here. At first I thought that he was committing the good old Broken Window fallacy. Many others in his comments section thought so too. But a closer reading will make it clearer that he is in fact pointing out the Broken Window fallacy. To be precise, he is pointing out that the GDP calculation fails to correct for the broken window problem.

If you haven’t clicked on either link, here is the problem in short. If you break my window glass, I need to replace it. When I pay for the new window, it contributes to the GDP. If you had not broken my window glass, I would have done something else with my money and the country’s GDP would still have gone up – and that is Dilip’s point. According to him, the calculation fails to distinguish between the contribution to GDP from such inefficiencies and the contributions from things that will actually make people happy.

Is Dilip right?
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As a public service, I have decided to explain to people how to improve the pagerank of their site. First you need to understand what pagerank is. That is the easy part. PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. It can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm. The rest of the details can be found here. Once that is understood, then we can move on to how to increase pagerank.

One thing we should do is to ensure that anyone who tries to google “IIPM” gets a link to a page giving fair warning about the institute. We should aim to get this page into the top ten results, preferably the first result.

The obvious page? Why, the Wikipedia link for IIPM! It doesn’t contain much yet, but with your co-operation, it will soon. (Update: Now there is a fairly decent article! Please link to it.)
So here is what we should all do.

1. Link to the page on your blog. Use the string “IIPM”. Put this in a post for now, but make sure that you put it somewhere where it will be permanently up. Everyone who has a blog can and should do this.
2. Edit the entry above to write about the controversy. Use a neutral tone. Prefer reports of facts rather than judgements. For example. “IIPM is a slimy institute” is your judgement. That is liable to get edited out of Wikipedia. On the other hand, “IIPM has been described as a slimy institute by many blogs that were outraged by what they saw as its aggressive tactics” is better. It is not a judgement. It is a statement of fact that some other blogs have called it so. But better still, give the facts that will enable the reader to make that decision for himself. (“IIPM promises X, but students who attended have reported that they get Y instead.”)
3. Keep a watch on the page. Create a user account and add it to your watchlist. Ensure that no one deletes sentences surreptitiously. If anyone writes exaggerated stuff about the institute, tone it down. Change the language from “The institute does …. ” to “The institute claims to do…. ” blah blah blah. You get the point?
4. Tell everyone who will be interested to do the same. Post about this. Make sure that every blogger who cares gets involved and makes a post.
5. Keep up the vigil. Make sure that the page stays alive and continues to give a fair picture even after the controversy dies down.

As you can see, I’ve made a start, but I’ve got to run right now. By the time I get on the net next, you guys should have an article ready.

I had been planning to restart this blog for quite some time. The only problem was that I’d naturally have to comment on the IIPM episode and every time I thought of their antics I doubled up with laughter. An institute that handles criticism so ineptly surely does not need to be taken seriously, I thought. I read those comments on Rashmi Bansal’s blog and I saw them with the morbid fascination of watching a trainwreck. What are these guys upto? I thought. If IIPM hadn’t dredged them up, Rashmi’s and Gaurav’s posts would have been lost in cyberspace. Hardly anyone would have found those posts. The gullible would have continued to join the institute and paid their exorbitant fees. By picking up a fight (and what kind of fight they fought!) they ensured that their reputation would spread far and wide. It was just another case of a megalomaniac leading an organization to a path of self-destruction, I thought. I met Gaurav over the weekend along with a few other bloggers and I saw no need to change my mind. These guys were a bunch of jokers, I thought. The only thing that needed to be done was to keep the information about the institute in view, so that anyone who joins it does not do so out of ignorance, only out of stupidity.

That was till two hours ago when I read this. I was stunned. It isn’t funny any more. Gaurav Sabnis has had to resign to protect his employer, IBM, from “bad publicity”. He had to choose between withdrawing his posts and resigning from his job. He did the right thing. He quit rather than take back his posts and apologise.

You know what they say, that it takes a minute to know a man’s character? This was that minute. I have met Gaurav many times before, but I know him only now. Yes, it is one thing to talk of principles, it is another to take a stand for them. It is not easy to do it these days when cynicism is the norm.

In doing so, he showed up how pathetic the opposition is. Do the IIPM guys know what a mess they’ve got themselves into? Who loses from this episode? Gaurav? Oh well, resigning a job is something of a setback for him, but figure this out – he is a PGDM from IIML. Do they think that such a guy will stay jobless for long? On the other hand, IIM guys are everywhere and they are likely to be the ones interviewing the foul-mouthed creeps who will graduate from that “institute”. Now everyone is talking about the episode. If there was even the slightest chance that a sane prospective student will miss out on the truth about that institute, it is gone now. Who’s going to lose out now?

So let’s keep up the fight. Let’s keep hammering the truth about IIPM. Ultimately it is not their reputation in the job market that they are bothered about. They don’t have a reputation. They don’t care much about whether their students get a job or not. They are only concerned about getting ignorant students who will pay their exorbitant fees. The more we keep up this pressure, the less chance that there remain people who are ignorant about the institute. Every post we make, every media mention we get will help.

August 14th was the third anniversary of my blog. This long silence was to mourn that occasion.

Please note that if an investigative journalist does a search of my archives, he will find records dating back only to April 2004. That might lead him to conclude that the founding date of my blog is like the founding year of the Japanese empire. But that is not the case. I used to maintain a blog in a system that was hacked out on ASP and MS Access. The posts exist, but it will take some effort to import them into my current installation. I will do it some day when I am in the mood.

Long time readers of my blog will know that one of the traditions of my blog, other than making bad jokes, is taking long breaks. Now is the time for another one. I shall not be posting or commenting in September. See you in October.