Saturday, October 20, 2007

Brakes on Breaks

Ab ek chota sa break(Hindi)....And now lets take a short break(English)

Taking off from the Reliance Mobile ad, you not only get free advice in India on any topic but also get to hear it with a lot of breaks.

...aur aage is break ke baadh...

Be it
News channels which bring you every news broken as "breaking news"
Cricket matches with Ad "breaks" when a bowler gets a crucial breakthrough
Workplaces with coffee "breaks" that put brakes on any productive work

Talking of breaks, workplace breaks are proving to be productive. Japanese have invented the art of taking productive breaks-desk naps(Source: Japan Today, Washington Post, CBS News).

With the risk of getting inspiration from Japanese productivity and applying it to the Indian workplace setting, the question is can we try this in Indian workplaces?

How about going to work with sleeping bags and desk pillows?

Let us take a snoring break :-)

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Pressure Statistics

When Rahul Dravid stepped down as the captain of the Indian Cricket team, news channels in India ran surveys galore to find the reason for his action. They found the most easiest way to gauge what was going through Rahul's mind. The sad part is even Rahul Dravid was clueless for a reason. What was Dravid's 'pressure quotient"? How much is the 'pressure'? These channels, I say...

The news channel went on like this "Our sample size is 30,000 SMS and 63% say Dravid succumbed to pressure". Then it asks the cricketer termed commentator "Sir, are you in the 63% or 37%?" The news anchor went on to extrapolate the result to India's verdict.

A news paper has gone to use fractal analytics and the probabilities to predict who will win the cricket match before the start of days play. They got it right once but lost once. Did they say 50:50 or being consistently inconsistent like Ajit Agarkar?

Better would be to predict what Sreesanth will do after bowling a wide ball.