Author: Alind

Protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government, monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death on 11th June, 1963. Thich Quang Duc on fire Duc maintained silence and a calm composition as flames shrivelled his body and charred his head. 50 years of meditation had equipped his brain with structural-functional changes to…… Continue reading Self-Immolating Monk: Meditation for Pain Tolerance

Populism is the ideological appeal to the many against the few in power. The majority feels disenfranchised, and suspicious of those in power. Populism is executed by demagogues across the political spectrum– from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders. Given that human attitudes have gotten more progressive over the years, I found it counterintuitive to see…… Continue reading What’s up with the Populism?

I analysed worldwide city population data1 with Python to investigate city population distributions in countries. This 2015 data accounts for 32% of the worldwide population then in 49980 cities. Bucketing population in bins 1000 wide helps categorise cities for frequency analysis. Since mega-cities create a long tail in the distribution of city populations, I have…… Continue reading Analysing City Population Data

It’s widely theorised that man’s first language was gestural. Most theories attribute the development of spoken language to man’s superior intelligence. Chimpanzees have been taught sign language. So, it’s reasonable to assume that some australopithecines, evolutionary predecessors of humans, could have acquired a similar language. Though primates have the ability to produce vocalisations, these aren’t…… Continue reading Gestural Origins of Language

As life expectancy (LE) continues to increase, inequalities in life expectancy of people with disparate education levels will likely widen. The population-level LE is decreasingly informative as the average LE of sub-groups diverge. Robust forecast and informed interpretation of LE must take cohort-specific characteristics and variances into account. The Lee-Carter model (Lee, Carter, 1992) is…… Continue reading Forecasting Life Expectancy Differences by Education Levels

Natural human conversations are complex and hard for AI to mimic convincingly. Most conversational AI agents are trained to implement dialogue for goal-directed tasks such as answering questions (eg chatbots), querying information (eg Siri), setting appointments, texting people, etc. Live improvised acting takes conversation a step further through more abstract contextualisation, dynamic role-play, audience-suggested scenes,…… Continue reading Improvised Acting with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Goldberg and Norman in the 1970s hypothesised that most human personality traits can be described using 5 dimensions — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (The Big Five model). Openness to experience is the inclination to be imaginative, curious, creative, independent, and interested in variety. Conscientiousness is the affinity to work hard, and…… Continue reading Personality Types and Career Choices

A prime is a stimulus that unconsciously activates mental pathways and influences performance on cognitive tasks, language, and behaviour. For example, a word shown as a stimulus brings to mind associated words. An experimental study found that people recognised “butter” quicker than “doctor” when they were showed the word “bread”. (Meyer, 1971) In another study,…… Continue reading Priming, Habits, and Behaviour

Understanding how wealth is distributed in a society is imperative to evaluating broadly the quality of living of its people. Utilising the Wealth Distribution Database of OECD (developed) countries, Balestra et al published a comprehensive report on wealth and income distribution. Wealth inequality, which is the net wealth held by the top 10% of the…… Continue reading Distribution of wealth across countries

According to Hofstede’s (1991) definition, “individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family.” Collectivism, on the other hand, “pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s…… Continue reading Individualism and Collectivism across Cultures