Tuesday, April 04, 2006

The highest paid job

He was reading a crap magazine, 90% material of which was a soup of Japanese Katakanas, Hiraganas and kanjis. As usual, he had nothing but to look through the pseudo-lingual calligraphy to pass his time, till it would be eight in the night when he would start preparing for his dinner. And suddenly he caught a few english lines. The news was really catchy! It was a result of some statistical analysis, based on a 10 hours per day, 6 days a week job pay-scale consideration in Canada. The newsline from the Canadian HRD was Mothers should be paid the highest of all the existing professions......."it should be" he muttered turning to the next page.

The next day of him was eaten up mostly by his coding jobs and improving results for the upcoming talk. Nothing great to happen, any way! The other day, he was implementing some neural network techniques in his code.....

........It is really tough to guess how it works if we accept that there are atleast a thousand million neurons in an average human brain and each active neuron is connected to every other active neuron directly or indirectly (in the sense of whether it is fired or not). In the language of computers, making one neuron active implies making around a million synaptic (electronically) connections and hence doubling all the storage capacity evrytime! Incredible it appears, but simply it works. And simple it appears, but impossibly tough it is to design a real neural network.

So, basically all practical NNs have a finite number of perceptrons (which represent a simple neural node) interwoven in a feed-forward mesh, with a few hidden layers all together....conceptually far far away from the real brain....

And, with a simple circuitry, one expects a very specific job: pattern recognition, or what is called the feature extraction.....No, no...the actual job starts here...educating the network...believe me, it is THE toughest job ever faced by a programmer...and even today (after about 40 years of active research), there is practically no algorithm which can teach with even 90% efficiency.....

......and he started daydreaming: if he could develop such an algo, if he could teach a NN effectively, with all his patience till his NN starts expelling fantastic results.....and suppose he could develop...whom will he approach first....how well should he advertise his success....what will be his pay-scale....will it be 70k? or more?......if he patents this idea.....they will have to pay him whatever he demands...and then he will be the highest paid human on the earth...highest paid....

And then he returned to the ground....should he be paid the highest?.....why not....if there is no one superior to him, he should be....if there is no one....but, is there no one superior to him.....No...that's not true...there is someone superior to him...who has been doing the same job for a long time now....on quite involved systems...teaching/developing brain...a real brain....and not a small meager NN......and unfortunately for no payment at all.......who is it?....

It is his mother......who taught him the most basic things...who taught him the first word he spoke...who taught him the meaning of touch.....meaning of love...meaning of everything...

Yes, Mothers should be paid the highest.....this time he meant it!

2 comments:

Dr Shanta Laishram said...

Interesting Post! Mothers should be paid the highest, at least in love and respect!

Nikhil Joshi said...

that is pretty subjective...but, eventhough these characters are removed, for her teaching, management, resourcefulness, service, protection and security, and also insurrence....all should be summed up:)