Una verdad simulada

Since there are some of my students reading this blog, I thought posting this might be useful for some. I was invigilating an exam today, my first “oh why the heck do I have to do this” job.

There are a few students who go into the exam hall with just one pen. I don’t understand this at all. A pen costs hardly any money. If it stops writing in the midst of an exam, you are in trouble. Already, a time-bound exam is somewhat stressful. Just carry two pens (at least) that work and a pencil and eraser. Don’t carry just a refil; carry an extra pen.

Even if you are not interested in that course, it does not hurt you to carry an extra pen.

When there are a minute or two left, just put your pen down. No matter how frantically you write, the damage has been done (or undone) in the last hour. An extra minute of scribbling will not yield you anything.

A final piece of advice is that write only what is essential. Don’t give the examiner opportunity to deduct points. There is no need for page-long description when all I have asked you to find transfer function for a second-order process.

Tags: General by Niket
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• Two words that need to be banned are ”yes sir!” The answer to any question is “yes sir.” However impossible a task it, “can you do it” will always yield a “yes sir” response.
• You spend 30 minutes explaining something to a student. Every time you ask him is he is following you, he says yes. Half an hour later, you realize that he hasn’t even understood the first sentence.
• This is related to the above point. It didn’t happen to me. A colleague spends 20 minutes explaining the research project and his experimental setup. Student replies, “but sir, I am not interested in theory; I want to do experiments.” *&%^$#!
• You go to the SBI branch to open an account or activate your internet banking. You get handed a form to fill, with instructions to fill it at leasure and come in the next day. You don’t want to waste more of your time, so you fill in the form and meet the same person 15 minutes later. He takes the form, and coolly tells you “come tomorrow.” Period. End of story.
• An old geezer gives you a lecture about “respecting elders.” Translation: toe the line or you will be shown your place. Thankfully (and touchwood :-)) this hasn’t happened in the Chem Engg department.

Tags: General, Personal by Niket
4 Comments »

Since labour is cheap in India, the losses that arise due to various inefficiencies are intangible. You can hire a carpenter and get some work done for a hundred rupees instead of spending ten times that amount to buy a good toolkit. Since the carpenter comes so cheap, the opportunity cost and the time lost in hiring, haggling and waiting for carpenter (who almost never arrives on time) gets neglected. Likewise, the cost to the country’s economy due to poor infrastructure is well known. Simply put, the two hours one spends caught in a traffic jam would be well spent doing something productive.

What prompted me to write this post was the waste of resources, mostly human resources, that I observed with the furniture and equipment installation service that I got when I moved into my quarters about a fortnight ago.

First off, everyone in customer service or installation comes to your home with a sidekick. “Customer experience executives” that help you with your “investments” when you have a certain sum of money in a checking/savings account in India visit your home with a sidekick. The only job of sidekick is to accompany the main fellow. Why do you need the sidekick if he/she is just sitting there doing nothing.

One enterprising executive had the sidekick fill all the forms; I spelled my name to the executive, who in turn spelled it so that the sidekick could jot it down on the form. I mean, come on!

The guy who came to install the washing machine arrived with no tools. He just plugged in the washing machine, realized that the water outlet was too large for the hose and left saying that he will come the next day with the tools. Why did you think I asked for an installation guy who would do some plumbing? I explained exactly what needed to be done, still the guy arrived with no tools. The next day, he purchases some stuff such as a T-junction, a tap and a few more things. But he forgets the wrech. You must be f&%#ing kidding me to come for a plumbing job without your wrench.

The same guy came for installing the refrigerator. Why? If all I have to do is to connect the voltage stabilizer and plug in that equipment, can I not do it myself? Do I have “idiot” written on my face? This guy came from Thiruvanmyur, a 30-minute ride on bike, and spent 30 minutes installing the refrigerator. What a waste of an hour!

Same story for the AC. Voltas technicians arrived at my doorstep in spite of me telling the sales guy 4 times that I will need a carpenter to make an opening in the window to fit the AC. All that the Voltas guys did was to advice me that I need to request IIT engineering unit to do this because they don’t have the tools to cut the wood and the grill (old construction is strong).

The lack of any concept of time hurts us in ways beyond what we imagine. A carpenter promises to come at 1 pm. After waiting for an hour, I call him to find that he hasn’t yet left his shop. He promises to leave in five minutes and arrives an hour and a half later (just a 15-minute walk from his store). Getting a 30-minute job done required me to spend a whopping 3 hours of my time.

In another case, the installation guys appear at my doorstep 5 minutes before my lecture. I have specifically instructed them not to come before 4:30 pm since I have a class to teach from 3 to 4 pm. Finding the door locked, this dude calls me on my cell. I express my inability to be there for the next hour and a half, and ask him to come later. I call him after my lecture to find that he has spent the entire hour and quarter doing nothing outside my house. This was totally unbelievable.

I guess “wait till I arrive” might be a routine thing; perhaps that explains the need for the side-kick.

Tags: General, Personal by Niket
1 Comment »

[This post is recovered from my old site kaisare.net and posted here with minor modifications. Originally posted in October 2005.] 

Here is a Matlab code for making camera-ready plots for presentations or papers. I found these values to be the optimum for journals that use two-column format. Save the figure as eps for use with LaTeX, or copy it and paste in a word file. If you do the latter, make sure that in Edit >> Copy Options >> Clipboard Format, the option “Preserve information (metafile if possible)” is selected.

This code is released under CC Attribution 2.5 license. You may use, modify, share or sell this code provided the second line (”Niket Kaisare, nkaisare [at] gmail.com”) is kept intact. I assume no liability for any problems the use of this code may cause.


% Niceplot: Make print-ready figures
% Niket Kaisare, nkaisare [at] gmail.com
%
% Usage:
%    niceplot(x1, y1[, s1], [x2, y2[, s2], ...], ...
%       xlabel, ylabel, title)
% Where:
%    (x1, y1), (x2, y2), ..., are data to be plotted
% Optional: String (s1, s2, ...) to specify line styles
% Required: X axis label, Y axis label and Title
%           Use blank [] if none exist
%
% Examples
%    niceplot(a, b, '-bx', 'hour', 'rainfall (in)', [])
%    niceplot(a, b, x, y, [], [], 'Brownian Motion')
function niceplot(varargin)n = nargin;
xl = varargin{n-2};     % X Label
yl = varargin{n-1};     % Y Label
tt = varargin{n};       % Axis Title
plot(varargin{1:n-3});  % Plotting Data

% Make lines thicker
lin = get(gca,’children’);
for i = 1:length(lin)
    set(lin(i), ‘linewidth’, 2.0);
end

% Make nice title
if (tt)
    set(gca,’position’, [0.13, 0.13, 0.83, 0.78]);
    title(tt,’fontname’,’times’,’fontsize’, 20);
else
    set(gca,’position’, [0.13, 0.13, 0.83, 0.8]);
end% Make nice axes labels
set(gca,’fontname’,’times’,’fontsize’, 20);
xlabel(xl,’fontname’,’times’,’fontsize’, 20);
ylabel(yl,’fontname’,’times’,’fontsize’, 20);

Tags: Technical by Niket
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