Wednesday, November 24, 2010

What if everything goes wrong

Positive thinking is a good attitude. But I feel thinking only positive events would occur and being unprepared is not good. For every future scenario that can happens we must first calculate the worst case scenario ("If anything can fail it surely will" -Murphy's Law) and think of steps to avoid it and also if it occurs how can we proceed further. Usually what happens is that people make decisions at the event of Crisis, this decision may not be correct as these are highly influenced by emotions. When an event has not yet occurred , your mind will be calm to analyse. This would sound like Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), yes it an application of it in life.

“Expect good, predict the bad and prepare for the worst thing can ever happen”


This policy can make u always happy, huh! If something bad happens you would be happy that your prediction is correct and you are prepared for it. If good happens obviously you would be happy and also you will be happy through the period of wait for the event as you are prepared for both. And it simply waste of time thinking of things that are not in your hand and you have nothing to do with it. What do I do then “Accept the pain- Buddha”.

Common scenarios:
Lost mobile
Lost purse
Money shortage
Lost job

It’s a best practice to maintain an online encrypted personal phone number and account number list, customer care numbers to block your lost card.
Finally “If you fail, fail safe”.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Fighting common cold

Common cold is not caused by a single virus but a group of viruses. The disease  is cause by production of excess anti bodies to fight the foreign body. I feel that there is no need for a medicine at all to cure this if you ignore it and give no importance at all to it. You may consult a doctor only if it persists more than a week or so. The feeling that cold is not a disease at all should go deep within you the it reaches your sub conscience mind. Hence the resistance to cold will be reduced. I prefer taking lime juice during cold. I feel is improves my immune system and the very feeling will improve my immunity ( even if science says vitamin c doesn't improve immunity). So if catch cold next time just try it out. If it works u have avoided a dose f chemicals i to your body else you can do the regular way.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Human judgement

Often people make judgement based on emotions. We judge people based on events that happen.
Each event has a positive or negative weight. But we forget past events in exponential way. Due to this our judgement involves only recent events. And its a well known fact that negative events have an high impact on us then positive events. Many a times we judge people on the past negative event and lose them.

This is what happens in most of the company appraisals or in judging a dear friend or in a investment in the stock market.

We are not computers to do a weighted average on all the events. Many things can be corrected when understanding the fact that our judgement may be flawed due to the past events. Systematic analysis will help us do a real judgement.

We are wired like that so we act accordingly. We also make mistakes when modeling a system that involves state change due to human decisions. We do account for the fact the humans remember little past. Our modeling is based on Statistics and this is not the way human mind judges. So the models need to adjusted for this aging factor to make it near accurate.