Crime and punishment
In a world where the perpetrators of crime and bad behavior are given sufficient disincentives from repeating the same, the frequency of such acts should decline with time. At the limit, if the genealogy of crime is sufficiently understood, disincentives can be designed to optimally remove the proclivity to crime from future generations. In this case, a society with no crime can be ultimately achieved. However, there does not appear to be any abatement in the frequency of crime over time. For example, white collar crime even appears to be increasing. With higher levels of regulations, better technology for discovery and apparently more stringent punishment, one has to wonder why

All the God's Men put Humpty Dumpty back again
In the relative safety of the European Union, the high flying CEO of an investment (commercial) bank recently described, how his subordinates, if not himself, are doing God's work. It is unclear if he had a crisp definition of what God's men are supposed to do, but on the surface it appears to be a compelling statement. I am sure even God will be happy making $35 Mil/day, doing His work, whatever that turns out to be. In this case, it may be saving the world by lending money generously provided to them by the Federal Reserve or perhaps using the "bailout" that did not require a "payback." to pay themselves bonuses. In either case, one has to tip her hat to both the ch

Leadership
Recently, I received an education on leadership from somebody I do not yet know. It appears that the term “leadership” means different things to different people. For some, the iconic leader is Rambo – who takes matters into his own hands and has only scorn for facilitation and consensus building. A leader, apparently, is somebody who steamrolls over everybody else in an attempt to accomplish some set objectives, even at the face of new or conflicting information. It appears that any attempt to understand opposing views or to debate differing ideas will automatically disqualify somebody from being a leader. Rambo never attempted anything like that as such

Artificial Intelligence
Lately, an old theme has been surfacing again – that insurmountable fear of grown men that computers ultimately are going to take over the world. Artificial intelligence was a high flying area in the 80s – many students and academics, yours truly included, had dreams of making machines think and act like humans. It seemed like such a natural course to take. The brain is like a computer and hence a computer can be designed to act like the brain. It is possible that we went wrong on both of these assumptions. Unfortunately, a worse outcome may be awaiting humanity – humans are now acting like computers and taking over work that computers can easily handle. This mo

Water, water - Everywhere
Purveyors of extra-terrestrial life have been obsessed with water. Although such obsession may be understood in the narrow context of Carbon based life, it has created chaos in many other areas. For example, missions to Mars and the rekindled interest in the Moon have been squarely focused on this innocuous chemical that takes two atoms of the most abundant Hydrogen and one of the lesser known Oxygen. Some of these are based on the idea of finding life and others on the possibility of transporting the mighty human from Earth. Lately, this obsession has bled into an incredible panic of running out of water on our beloved Earth, which is made largely of water. This has led to such insane i