Let's start respecting nature, its rules.

As someone who moved to Australia lately, the recent bushfires has been a new awakening and a grim encounter with the realities of climate change - Sydney drenched in thick smoke was a glimpse of apocalyptic events. Dense forests fraught with years of drought have turned vast swathes of land to chunks of inflammable fuel, awaiting a benign spark to rage itself. We saw this happen in the Amazon, Siberia and now in Australia, and we might see worse in the coming years at unforeseen locations.

We should definitely be addressing climate change, global warming and evolve measures to offset the effects and mend our ways to try and reverse the adverse effects of global warming, which to some extent has been a creation of our own through unfettered consumerism. The efforts to heal might take years or even decades to deliver and tangible results to manifest.

© NASA

From a crisis management point of view, we need to address the fact that climate change is real and atmosphere is getting warmer than ever before. There is extraordinary decline in polar ice caps and evaporation of water is at its peak, resulting in devastating rains and floods. Crops are being destroyed at an unprecedented scale taking a toll on the livelihoods of millions. Inundations have devastated lives of people, driven up insurance costs, medical emergencies have been unable to cope with resulting calamities and large scale climate migrations have become a reality. People and infrastructure including farmlands are being displaced and destroyed, dreams shattered and hopes lost for an entire generation. Warmer temperatures in otherwise cold places are creating a whole lot of new problems - menace of pests and the advent of otherwise unheard epidemics are just a few. The economic costs are huge - traditional sectors like the fishing industry facing death knell due to mass migration of sea life to cooler waters, the losses of which would run into billions.

An honest acknowledgment of the current crisis would certainly help us in taking on the biggest existential threat facing humanity. It is human nature to confront and tackle issues when revealed in full. Unfortunately, this time around, we cannot afford to wait for the apocalyptic unravelling of our planet - once past the tipping point, we would be at a point of no return. Going green, reducing dependency on fossil fuels and holding ourselves responsible for our own carbon footprint can go a long way in achieving sustainable living and prolonging life on this planet.

Anticipation is the key and the acknowledgement that years of drought have transformed lush green vegetation into fuel would be the first step in tackling the bush fire crisis that has gripped Australia. A tree sapped off its water is akin to a firewood awaiting to unleash hellfire - once the gravity of this risk is acknowledged we can take adequate steps and ensure such an eventuality is contained and to some extent prevented. Unlike the traditional form of fuel, it is practically impossible to insulate millions of water sapped vegetation simply because of its sheer size and the costs involved - forest strips run into thousands of kilometers.

Offsetting is not always viable and we have to accept a certain amount of risk to help us prepare better. Acknowledging the fact that forest fire is a real possibility in hot conditions would be a major first step in helping us divert our attention to devise ways on how to contain it, and even prevent such massive destruction from occurring.

Prescribed burning in Australia © The Guardian

Creating "Firebreaks" in high risk areas and prescribed burning (controlled burning) outside of the fire season could prove very effective if combined with modern science and technology - better mapping techniques and coordination of resources would certainly help employ such measures on a grand scale.

Anticipating what could go wrong in adverse conditions is critical, but at the same time, adopting indigenous aborigine tribes' ritualistic practices like the ancient prescribed burning of landscapes can go a long way in reducing the extent of destruction as witnessed recently. Respecting indigenous knowledge is as important as adhering to any modern empirical study, a tribe that has sustained itself on this land for millennia, respecting and adoring nature and its ecosystem. As an intelligent species we owe a huge responsibility to millions of our co-inhabitants residing in the earth's forests. Let us work towards making the future brighter for everyone, and if that means scaling back on some of our comforts, then let's not hesitate.

- Vinod Geeachan


References:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/11/how-first-australians-ancient-knowledge-can-help-us-survive-the-bushfires-of-the-future

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2940/greenlands-rapid-melt-will-mean-more-flooding/

https://www.kkl-jnf.org/forestry-and-ecology/fire-prevention/forest-maintenance.aspx

Contracting, outsourcing and trust

The success of any project can be attributed to its team, its cohesion and synergy. But has the concept of team cohesion been declining, at least in the IT sector where the concept of contracting and outsourcing have gained prominence in recent years?

Various methodologies have been tried and tested, recent one being Agile, which vehemently preaches the concept of ever more team interaction. The core philosophy behind all modern methodologies have been to enable teams find a better and decisive way to work together, address concerns, pacify sponsors by ensuring transparency and deliver on commitments exceeding expectations. Further analysis reveals that trust is one single attribute which binds a team together, helps achieve this amount of success – the trust between team members and trust between management and the team.

As mentioned earlier, contracting and outsourcing are big in the IT industry and the issue of trust has become a point of contention. Contractors would want to protect their jobs by becoming more valuable, and at times valuable could translate into fewer knowledge sharing sessions and less documentation affecting mutual trust and team cohesion. Working with outsourced vendors is another big issue, with each vendor trying to guard their business interests and inadvertently becoming less engaged with competitor team member(s).

The biggest challenge faced by managements in IT companies is in ensuring that trust prevails among team members and they work together as one big team. A longer-term project plan with consistent contracting and delegation schedule would certainly help in allaying the fears of contractors and vendors.

Setting out expectations and standards earlier on in relation to documentation and knowledge sharing could go a long way in ensuring that knowledge is shared among team members and no one attains the status of “cannot be dispensed with” thereby building trust and dependency.

Collaboration days where team members could share their experience of previous projects and knowledge of industry relevant technologies would certainly help imbibe a culture of sharing information - the core idea being that you only share knowledge with people you trust, at least in the professional space. Team building exercises certainly help, but managers should be wary that silos are not created in the process.

Guaranteeing stability and growth, clear purpose and exhibiting road map of projects ahead certainly helps in allaying anxiety of employees. This would certainly prompt team members to trust each other and interact effectively achieving greater results.

- Vinod Geeachan

Image courtesy:
http://coachesnetwork.com/content/building-team-cohesion (accessed on 10/12/2019).

Tipping point for Artificial Intelligence

I have always struggled to understand intelligence, its evolution, and its variation across species. Even among humans who share the same DNA and cell structure, how can somebody be more intelligent, think differently and be more creative? Agreed, each human is born differently, with varying abilities, but, in addition to genetics, wouldn't those skills have formed over years and years of conditioning? Wouldn’t climate, food habits, flora and fauna, and myriad other subtle factors have had an influence on how living beings’ intelligence evolved?

Oxford dictionary defines intelligence as ‘the ability to learn, understand and think in a logical way about things’.  Can we not then assess Intelligence as an ability, the acquisition of which warrants the existence of an opportunity along with the inclination to learn? Rightly so, someone with the right traits could be conditioned to be intelligent. Computers have memory, they remember things and follow a set of logical instructions – can they be trained to understand, think, reason and use knowledge? Can machines be trained to be intellectuals? The answer is tilted towards “yes” and no wonder Artificial Intelligence has gained prominence in recent years.

How do we distinguish natural and artificial intelligence? Natural intelligence or the intelligence as we know of is the cognitive ability acquired by living organisms, especially human beings, where they apply decisions based on contexts. Could we then assess the reasoning capacity acquired by a non-living apparatus as Artificial Intelligence (AI), or to extend it a little further – reasoning capacity plus the ability to arrive at a credible decision? Credibility and validity of a decision is always relative, but for the sake of this article let us tend towards the art of decision making.

How do we arrive at a decision, or to put it aesthetically, when do we perform the art of decision making? Can they be preconceived, programmed, or would they be born from experiences and lessons learnt from failures? Decisions are sometimes born from endurance, not necessarily experiences encountered by the protagonist themselves, but through what others endured and their emotions - similar to how the world today understands the perils of a nuclear catastrophe, through studying and understanding such events. The ability of machines to learn and arrive at decisions critically based on experiences is one crucial tipping point for the realization of Artificial Intelligence.

- Vinod Geeachan

References:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/hide-and-seek/201811/what-is-intelligence

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/

Image courtesy:
https://unsplash.com/photos/YKW0JjP7rlU

Google Analytics Home Screen

Once you have finished up setting up you GA account and added your tracking code to website and Apps (Android & IOS), log into Google Analytics. You end up on the Home page where you can see a list of all of the websites/Apps you have set up in your account. This list shows you some basic data such as your number of sessions, average session duration, bounce rate and goal conversion rate as shown in fig 1.7

Fig 1.7 GA home screen.

If you have a lot of websites (like I do), you can use the search box under the date range to search for a particular domain. If you only wish to view the domains that are most critical to your business, you can mark them (with a star) and change the Show settings to list only the starred websites.

You can use the date range to see your data over any specified time period. You can also use it to compare the current time period to a previous time period to see the change in sessions, average session duration, bounce rate and goal conversion rate as shown in fig 1.8.

Fig 1.8 selecting date range.

Once you have selected the date ranges that you want to compare, click on Apply to see the results as shown in fig 1.9

Fig 1.9 graph for the selected date range.

Before we get into more details here are some common technical terms used in analytics.

Term	Explanation
Visits	A visit occurs when someone finds your site. Each time someone opens your website, it counts as 1 visit. The same person can generate many visits if they open your site many times.
Unique visitors	The number of different people who visited your site within a given time period.
Page views	Whenever someone views a page on your site, such as the home page or a blog post, it counts as one page view. If the person then looks at another page, that will count as an additional page view.
Pages / Visit	This shows how many pages people are looking at when they visit. Example: If a site has 5,000 visits and 10,000 page views, that’s an average of 2 pages per visit. 5,000 visits and 5,000 page views would give an average of 1 page per visit. Avg. Visit Duration The average time that each visit lasted on your site, in minutes and seconds.
Bounce Rate	The percentage of people who visited your site and immediately moved on without looking at any other pages. A bounce rate of 100% would mean that everyone who found your site left without clicking anywhere else on your site. The lower the bounce rate, the better.
% New Visits	How many visits came from people who found your site for the first time?

GA tracking code for mobile app

When you have finished setting up GA account for the mobile apps, click tracking info and a tracking code will be provided along with the SDK’s for both Android and IOS. This needs to be integrated with your app as shown in Fig 1.6

Fig 1.6 GA tracking code for apps.

You can find more information about the integration of SDK to your app by clicking on ‘Getting started guide’ for both IOS and Android.

Once you have installed the code on your Web site or App, it can take up to 24 hours before any statistics shows up.

GA tracking code for website

Once you are finished setting up your GA account, you will click the Get Tracking ID button. You will get a popup of the Google Analytics terms and conditions, which you have to accept and then you will get your Google Analytics code as shown in Fig 1.5

Fig 1.5 GA tracking code for website.

The tracking code must be installed on every page on your website. The installation will depend on what type of website(s) you have.

Once you've installed Google Analytics on your website(s), set up your goals, and set up site search after which you should wait for approximately 24 hours in order to start analysing data. 

Setting up GA for Mobile App’s

For mobile apps you need to select mobile app and follow the same process. You can use the same login details for website. To set up GA for app, login into analytics as Admin and click on admin on the top right hand corner, click under account and then click on create a new account as shown in Fig 1.3.

Fig 1.3 GA to set up new account.

Select Mobile app, Enter all the details and click save as shown in Fig 1.4

Fig 1.4 GA set up for apps.