Fooled By Randomness

I am back.

I have just finished reading a book that has motivated me sufficiently to want to write a post: "Fooled by Randomness - The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" by Nissim Nicholas Taleb (2001). Taleb subsequently wrote a second book, "The Black Swan"(2007), the title of which has become popular since the recent credit crisis in America, to describe rare, difficult-to-predict events that have a large impact. Taleb was an options trader in New York, and while both books dwell a lot on financial markets, they should be interesting to anyone who is interested in epistemology, understanding the nature of knowledge.

Let's start with "The Black Swan". Till the 17th century, people in Europe 'knew' that all swans were white. That would have been a reasonable assumption to make considering that all the swans that people had seen, and their parents and grandparents before them had seen, were all white. This is an instance of inductive reasoning, where people drew a universal conclusion (all swans are white) from a set of observations (all the swans that I have seen are white). But what if someone, somewhere, saw a black swan? Everyone would have to change their ideas about swans and their color. This did happen. The early European explorers spotted black swans (Cygnus atratus) in Australia, in a place that had not been 'discovered' till the 17th century.The colour of swans is perhaps not a significant matter for most people, and I suspect that the discovery of the Black Australian Swan did not monopolize newspaper headlines in Europe for too long. But weak inductive reasoning abounds in the modern world in matters that have far greater significance to our lives.

What about this: you are approached by a mutual fund that solicits your money. The fund is run by a fund manager who has beaten his benchmark, usually some kind of index like the Sensex or the Dow, for the last five years. Would you invest your money with him? Are five observations (the fund manager's performance for each of the last five years), sufficient for you to reach the conclusion that he will grow your money in the future? What if the guy is just a lucky fool?

What if your fund manager is just a survivor? This is how it can happen. Imagine that your fund manager was one of 10,000 fund managers who started out 5 years ago. Assume that managers suceed purely because of luck, and the odds of being lucky in any given year are 50%. At the end of the first year, 5,000 managers would beat the index, while the remaining would get fired. In the second year,the number of surviving guys from that first batch would be down to 2,500, and 1,250, 625, 312 in the each of the remaining years. Your fund manager, with his 5 year streak of winning is one of those 312. He is considered a success in his profession, draws a huge salary and comes on CNBC several times a week voicing his opinion about the direction of the market. Everyone believes that he can tell a good stock from a bad one, including probably himself, till one day, his luck runs out, and he gets fired like the others before him. You lose your money.

There is evidence that this may actually be true. The New York Times had an article, titled appropriately, "The Prescient are Few", which discussed a study called “False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance: Measuring Luck in Estimating Alphas” by three researchers who looked the fund performance between 1975 and 2006 using a statistical test called the False Discovery Rate that eliminates the possibility that a conclusion (for e.g. skill matters in success as a Mutual Fund manager) is statistically significant when it is actually random, and the reverse. The conclusion: "the number of funds that have beaten the market over their entire histories is so small that the False Discovery Rate test can’t eliminate the possibility that the few that did were merely false positives — just lucky, in other words. Very few fund managers actually showed true stock picking ability over a long period of time." You can download the original research paper here.

What applies to fund managers applies to other actors in this world. People who are considered successful by conventional standards -wealth and fame- are very often are under the illusion, (and spread this illusion) that they are successful because they were thriftier, or smarter, or more hardworking than the rest of the population. Do all hardworking, thrifty, smart people achieve an equal measure of success? Perhaps not.

I looked up the web, and found some interesting data for the chances for commercial success for an inventor. Bob Shaver is a patent attorney in the United States who noticed that only 5 in 100 inventions ended in some sort of commercial success. Most people, including me, would think inventors are both hardworking and smart.

It may be more than political correctness, therefore, to address the poor as the "less fortunate".

As you can see, by the length of this post, I liked this book very much.

Saying hello with pride

I spotted this giant hoarding advertising a new prepaid plan from Airtel, India's largest mobile company, near my home in Bangalore. The model, is of course, Shahrukh Khan, Bollywood's leading actor. The text reads, "Garv se bolo, hello!", which is Hindi for "Say it with pride - hello!".

The last time I heard a similar exhortation was in the early nineties, when India was in the grip of a particularly vicious period of violence between its two main religious groups, the Hindus and the Muslims. The cause was a 16th century mosque, the Babri Masjid, located in Ayodhya in Northern India. The Hindus claimed that Ram, one of the most popular gods in the Indian pantheon, was born at the exact location where the mosque stood. They wanted to demolish the mosque, and build a temple for Ram. The Muslims, naturally, were very unhappy about this.

Leading the campaign for building the Ram temple, was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is now one of the two leading political parties in India. One of the slogans they made popular during that period was "Garv se kaho, hum Hindu hain!", which is Hindi for "Say it with pride, I am a Hindu!". Now, sixteen years later, there is Shahrukh Khan, a Muslim, with his hand on his chest, demanding that we show pride when we say hello. If you look very closely at the photograph, you can even see a halo around his head. Very droll.

The other slogan that was very popular in those days with BJP supporters was "Jai Shri Ram", or "Victory to Lord Ram". The BJP asked its supporters to use this as a greeting, replacing other more widely used greetings such as "Namaste" ("I bow to you"), and even that universal greeting for telephone conversations, "Hello!".

In 1995, I had just started working as a trainee at an automobile manufacturer in Pune, when I received a phone call from a colleague who worked in another department. The conversation went something like this:

Me:Hello!
Colleague: Jai Shri Ram!

Me:Yes, thanks!
Colleague: Jai Shri Ram!

Me:Jai Shri Ram.

He was very friendly after that, having managed to get someone with an obviously Christian name to root for Ram's victory against the Muslims. I mentioned this to my other colleagues, all fairly conservative Hindus, and they shrugged it off, "oh him, he is a harmless nut" .

But other nuts were not so harmless. The "Jai Shri Ram" warcry accompanied BJP supporters as they demolished the Babri Masjid and slaughtered thousands of Muslims in the riots that followed. More recently, in the 2002 Gujarat Genocide, Muslims were asked to say "Jai Shri Ram" before they were murdered by Hindu mobs. To be fair, when the Muslims did manage to retaliate, their mobs proclaimed the greatness of Allah (Allahu Akbar).

Perhaps Shahrukh is right. There may be a lot of pride in saying just "Hello."

Links:

• A nice photo tutorial from About.com on how to say Namaste.

• An Australian TV clip showing the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

• A great account of the demolition of the mosque by Jeff Penberthy, then working with Time.

• A horrifying video about the Gujarat Genocide.

This really made me laugh.

"Sometimes, a joke will make a person laugh. Sometimes a funny picture or video will. Sometimes a clever song, a dramatic accident, the misfortune of others…nothing is ever guaranteed to make everyone laugh. Except for the sound of babies laughing."

See the other 6 videos at Say No To Crack. Each one of them is very, very funny.

Something useful, finally.

I just got some serious dental work done- a root canal. Like most people, a visit to the dentist is not something I look forward to, so I procrastinated until what could have been a simple filling needed the distressing blasting and excavation that is a root canal procedure.

One of the ways I manage to put off tasks that I would rather not do, is to cleverly channel my energies on a 'let's-gather-all-the-information-we-can-on-this' effort. This is a ploy from my management days, but it works best on me. So while my maxillary first premolar suffered its way to becoming a candidate for a root canal, I gathered a whole lot of information on the internet about teeth. You will now understand why this post is precious.

Here is some of the stuff I learnt:

The Basic stuff: Human beings, like all mammals, are diphyodont, meaning that they develop two sets of teeth (milk/baby teeth, and the permanent teeth that come around the age of seven). Sharks are blessed; they grow teeth every two weeks (polyphyodont), though all that teething must make them very irritable. A naughty thought: if I were a shark, and in a dentist's chair, it would be the dentist's turn to be very, very afraid, wouldn't it?
Also, while being a 'dog psychologist' could net you upto half a million dollars a year, you are likely to be very poor as a dog dentist - dogs' don't get cavities because their saliva is alkaline.

The Geeky Stuff: Dentists use three different systems (notations) for identifying teeth .

• The British use the Palmer notation, which was actually devised by a Hungarian called Adolf Zsigmondy (trust the Brits to steal the credit), who unsurprisingly, was also a politician. It is the easiest to understand, but is a pain to type because it uses some symbols which you won't find in Microsoft Word. I guess you won't find many British dentists blogging about their work.
  
• The Americans have a 'Universal Number System' which no one else follows, but must go well with their gallons, miles, pounds, and 110 volt/60 Hz appliances.
  
• The rest of the world follows the FDI World Dental Federation notation, which is very like the Palmer notation, but without the symbols. FDI, incidentally stands for 'Fédération Dentaire Internationale'; it is amazing how the French manage to insinuate themselves into the standards business - the metric system is also called the 'SI' system (for 'Système International d'Unités').
  

My tooth that got into trouble would have been '4/' in the Palmer system ( the slash being a crude approximation to the actual symbol), '12' in the American system, and '24' in the FDI notation.

The Historical Stuff: The outermost surface of teeth is composed of enamel, which is the hardest substance of the body. But obviously not hard enough to keep dentists out. Our diets are to blame, as usual. Archeologists have found a huge increase in tooth decay from around the Neolithic period (about 8500 BC) when most humans changed from being hunter-gatherers to 'settled' agriculturists, eating a lot of grain. There was apparently very little tooth decay before that, when the whole world was on the Atkins diet.

Incidentally, with the 'Neolithic Revolution' and dental decay and dentists, also came food surpluses, and kings who 'appropriated' those surpluses so that they could wage war against other kings - till Marx, and Lenin and Mao took them back for us. So that they could wage war on us. Religion came too, and the Pope, and Osama, and the War on Terror. It took John Lennon to imagine how different things could have been. But all that in a seperate post.

Something current: In 2006, nearly half a million Americans traveled abroad for medical treatment, according to this article in the New York Times, of whom about 40% are estimated to have been dental tourists. India, is apparently a very popular destination, 'putting smiles on many faces', as the Economic Times puts it.

This dentist prefers euros over dollars...

Photos are thanks to Matt Logelin who also writes an extremely moving blog here. By sheer coincidence, Vinoo sent me a Facebook message with Matt's blog just this morning. Later, while I was writing this, I came across these pictures by Matt via Google Images, and selected them, without realizing they were his.
No, the guy in the picture is not my dentist.

Secrets on a Postcard

This secret website:
how I miss
the churches of my youth!





Bad haiku? Beautiful blog

Periodicity

In the early nineties, when CERN first threw the World Wide Web open for everyone, some of the happiest people on the planet must have been chemists. They now had a neat little way to represent their beloved Period Table (PT). With hyperlinks, they could finally display all the important data about each element without being constrained by those little boxes. So, they set about populating the web with hundreds of these tables, improving them diligently as the technology improved.

Some of these online periodic tables are beautiful. See this Interactive Periodic Table, by Michael Dayah, which is clearly the best functionally. Read the 'about' page to understand how to work it. Or this more artsy one, from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Both came to me via Craig Stoltz's blog, 'Web 2.0h...really?'. I thought just these two exciting enough to warrant a post.

And then, I spoke to my friend Vinoo Samuel, and he explained the weakness chemists have for online periodic tables. I searched, and I found PTs in 'spectroscopic' colors and in spiral and circular shapes. Also, some really bizarre ones, with their elements linked to comic books where they were mentioned (Krypton - Superman - Krypton Chronicles,Volume 1, Number 1, September, 1981, cover), or to science fiction stories (the first deliveries of asteroidal cobalt were flown down to the north central Pacific Ocean in the form of lifting bodies in the year 2116...). And of course, there are the spoofs, such as this 'Creationist/State of Kansas' PT.

Offline, too, there has been some truly amazing efforts to ensure that the Periodic Table is never out of sight. Theodore Gray could never make the mistake that Time.com made (an index without an index, see my previous post). As he observes with some indignation, "In the well over a century since its invention by Dr. Mendeleev, the world has consistently failed to notice the word "Table" clearly contained in the name "Periodic Table", and has insisted in printing it on paper, hanging it on the wall, putting it in the back of chemistry textbooks, and generally doing all kinds of things with it that having nothing to do with being a table.". So of course, he created a Periodic Table that was - a real table! Chemists, I assume, were also behind this PT inspired song by Tom Lehrer.

And yes, there are the dangers of overdoing this stuff, especially if the people involved are not really chemists, as this complaint about an error riddled Periodic Table shower curtain proves.

Mendeleev would be proud.


Thanks to Ron Rinehart for leading me to most of these tables.

Time.com's First Annual Blog Index

Time.com has published an Index of The Top 25 Blogs. I found a lot of blogs there that I had never heard of, and which I have now subscribed to. If you have as much time on your hands as I do, have a look.

But this being Time, the Index of The Top 25 Blogs does not have an index! You must click through 25 pages (each page carrying a writeup on one blog). Fortunately, the good folks at Valleywag.com (inexplicably left out of this list) have compiled a one page version which you can read here. Vallewag's article is very appropriately tagged "Blogging for Dollars", since at least here, Time.com, is guilty of a 'crass campaign to generate more pageviews'. As Fark.com's Drew Curtis, quoted in the same Valleywag article, eloquently puts it, "That's the point — pick shit people don't agree with, generate controversy, SPREAD THE FUCKING THING OVER 50 PAGES WITH NO INDEX, profit."

Or maybe, Time thinks that their readers miss the experience of turning pages in a magazine, so they gave them "Next" buttons? Naah...

If you still want to read the original article, it's here.

But of course, at the Valleywag page, you cannot tell what each blog in the list is about. If you were reading the list in a magazine, that would be a problem. But if, like me, you are reading it on the internet, and you have a decent browser like Firefox, you could right click each name, open each blog in a new tab, and see for yourself what the fuss is about.

"...we like the big fish"

The little fish like the mangroves, the big fish like the little fish -- and we like the big fish. - Mr. Ahmed Shengabay, Eritrean fisherman/farmer.

I loved this line; hence this post. In the photo, Mr. Shengabay is on the right. To his left is Mr. Simon Tecleab, an Eritrean marine scientist, and they are planting a mangrove seed in the Eritrean Red Sea village of Hirgigo. The photo is from AFP.

I came across this in an AFP story in Yahoo! about how Eritrean villagers, working with an American scientist, Dr. Gordon Sato, are planting mangroves along the coast to improve fishing yields, provide feed for livestock, fuel for their kitchens, and combat desertification. The project is apparently very successful. You can read more about this remarkable story here, here and here.

It occurred to me that this is the sort of post that would be ideal as a Tumblelog at Tumblr. All I wanted to do here was to quote Mr. Shengabay.

The 'mouthfeel' of water?

In my last job, I was the boss of the Indian unit of an American outsourcing company. Our customers would visit from America, and it was my job to entertain them, and make sure that they were comfortable. Most of these guys liked Indian cuisine, but every once in a while, you would get a few who wanted more familiar, less spicy food. I would take them to a restaurant close to our office called Sunny's

I hate going to Sunny's.

Sunny's is not a bad restaurant. The food is good, if expensive, and the decor is not displeasing. What gets my goat is that Sunny's, like a lot of expensive restaurants in India, offers Evian water by default to its customers. Bottles of Evian are placed on your table, and should you want to drink Indian bottled water, at a tenth of the price, you have to make a special request. The waiter comes, takes the Evian away, and replaces it with the Indian water. I would have to do this each time I went there - at the risk of seeming cheap to my guests. But this was a scam that I was determined not to fall for.

HTF did water from the French Alps become the automatic choice in a restaurant in Bangalore?

Danone, the owner of the Evian brand is hard at work in India increasing sales - changing its local partner, trying to get into joint ventures with large Indian firms, identifying Indian companies for acquisition. They also have an active marketing programme that includes sponsoring parties for 'beautiful people', and working the newspapers with stories about the 'miracles of water therapy'. You absolutely must read this astonishing article in the Times of India.

Water is clearly big business.

I was reminded of this when I read this great post by Zahra at Grub Scout about how water is becoming the next wine. There are, already, 'water connoiseurs' writing books to educate people on 'the epicurean delights of water' . Companies have introduced water that costs as much as $37 for a 750 ml bottle!

While you are at Grub Scout, you can also read Zahra's earlier post about how several New York city restaurants are banning bottled water. Reason and commonsense may still win.

The March of the Meat Eating Chinese

World food prices have doubled or tripled over the past few years, with most of the increases happening in the last few months. A particularly depressing article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times looks at why this has happened, and what could be done to correct it (very little apparently). One of the reasons for the rise in prices, he says, is that the Chinese are eating more meat as they get richer, which puts more pressure on global stocks of foodgrains.

Read it here.

Open Outcry

Raymond Carbone trades in energy options on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Traders such as Mr. Carbone buy and sell billions of dollars worth of various metals and energy products, including crude oil and electricity. And they do this using the Open Outcry system, where traders shout and use hand signals on a physical trading floor.

Most exchanges in the world have moved to electronic systems, but defendants of the Open Outcry system claim that physical contact allows traders to 'speculate as to a buyer/seller's motives or intentions'. Mr. Carbone says he 'can signal a trade faster than you can type it.'

In this article by Ben Schott in the New York Times, Mr Carbone demonstrates the hand signals he uses on the trading floor. Fascinating.

China's Environmental Problem

I love reading The New Yorker, for the excellent writing, yes, but also for the incredible detail to which they go when following a story. The country that gets blamed the most for shortening attention spans across the world, is also the home of magazines that think nothing of devoting 40% of their pages to a single story. You read that story, and the feeling is similar to what you get when you have really done well for yourself at a feast.

Want to read such an article about the environmental damage in China? I found this feature by Jacques Leslie at Mother Jones. I counted the words-8901. There is also a photoessay by James Whitlow Delano at the same site. All lovely stuff.

Thanks to Treehugger, for leading me to this article.

Consolidate multiple email addresses with Gmail

My primary email account is now Gmail. I also have Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, which I opened years ago. These mostly receive emails from websites that I have registered with, and since those are rarely important, I don't normally check these accounts very often. However, every once in a while, a friend or acquaintance sends a mail to my Hotmail or Yahoo addresses, and several weeks pass before I read them.

I recently found an interesting article on Lifehacker which explained how you could consolidate multiple email addresses with Gmail. It worked for my Hotmail address, which accounts for most of my non-Gmail email. It didn't work with Yahoo!- I would have to upgrade to a 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' email account for $19.99 per year to pop or forward email to other accounts. So I guess I will wait till Microsoft takes over Yahoo!, and comes up with a hybrid Hotmail/Yahoo! mail service. I wonder what they would call that - Windows Live Hoomail?

Pardon my French

Ever been in a position where you are holding forth on your favourite French, Spanish, or Russian author/artist/director, and you hesitate, because you are not sure how to pronounce their names?

You could bluff your way through, and hope that no one in your audience is going to correct you, or, you could look up Forvo, a Web 2.0 service where you can listen to the pronunciation of the word.

At the time of writing this, Forvo had 2510 pronounced words in 177 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi. Users can add words, either anonymously or with their usernames. Adding new words is easy.

However, as with all sites that rely on user generated content, Forvo is not perfect; the two most popular words in English are both what Forvo calls 'bad words', and the only two entries for Hindi, 'Mahatma Gandhi' and 'Tilaklakshmikanth(?)', are clearly fake. Still, as with other such websites, the proportion of idiots posting misleading entries should decline with time, and Forvo could end up being a really useful site.

Dignity

Sometimes, understanding comes from the strangest sources, and at the most unexpected times. You read, you think you know all the facts, you form an opinion, and then, one day, suddenly, something happens, and you understand, you really get it.

A couple of days ago, I watched 'Black Snake Moan' , a movie set in the southern United States, directed by Craig Brewer, and starring Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Ricci plays a young girl, who, tormented by the sexual abuse she suffered during her childhood, has turned into a nymphomaniac seeking escape in sex with strangers. Samuel L. Jackson is a divorced ex-blues singer. It's a film worth watching, though it is unlikely to have featured in most lists of the best movies of 2006.

After the movie, I watched the special features on the DVD. And Christina Ricci, talking about why she loved acting in the movie, said this:

"You know, the whole idea of you take (sic) someone's dignity away from them so early and then you expect them to behave in some kind of dignified manner is something that I talk about when I am on my soapbox."

The next morning, I came across this article by K.A.Shaji in Tehelka, arguably the best general interest magazine in India:

Masti Ki Pathashala( school full of fun)
A celebrated school for Wayanad’s Adivasi (tribal) children has now been handed to old students to run

KANAVU MEANS dream. And a dream it was for writer-turned activist KJ Baby when he first thought of a school exclusively for Adivasi children that would not only educate them, but also cultivate a sense of pride in themselves. The dream turned into reality about 15 years back when ‘Kanavu’ was started in a cluster of thatched structures on six acres of land donated by a trust in Wayanad district of North Kerala. As many as 60 tribal children started their knowledge expedition there, a possibility that would have been unthinkable in the past, when landlords and settlers held their clan in bondage.

Read the rest of the article here.

If aboriginal peoples all over the world, the desperately poor, the victims of conflict and war, seem to exhibit common patterns of alcoholism and drug abuse, broken homes and poor parenting, is it really such a surprise?

Google wants to help

On Tuesday, Google launched Google for Non-Profits, a collection of free tools to "promote your work, raise money, and operate more efficiently.". While most of the applications are already available free to anyone, there are two additions, Google Checkout and Google Grants, which should be of interest to you if you run an NGO and are looking to improve the way you do things.

The standard applications included in the package that are already available free to anyone are Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Blogger, Analytics, Groups, Gadgets, Maps & Earth, & You Tube.

But even here, Google offers to host your email free should you have your own domain (e.g. children-of-bangalore.com), and even help you get one (for $10) should you not have one. Also, once you have a few videos, YouTube will help you create a YouTube non profit channel, with "premium branding capabilities, and increased uploading capacity, rotation of your videos in the "Promoted Videos" areas throughout the site, and the option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout "Donate" button"

What is really interesting in Google Non-Profit, however, are these two:

1. Google Checkout, which will collect donations online and process them for free, with no monthly, setup, or gateway fees, till at least 2009.
2. Google Grants, which will provide you with free advertising, using Google AdWords.
   

I think this is a fairly good package, and if you know how to use these tools as part of a well thought out marketing program, you should be able to get great results.

But be warned; being an NGO does not automatically entitle to you to these goodies:

1. To be eligible, your organization must have 501(c)(3) status, as assigned by the IRS, if you are in the United States. If you are in India, you must be a charitable institution that is either a Registered Society, Public Charitable Trust or company under Section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956, as provided for under the Income Tax Act, 1961.
2. Also, "...organizations that are either religious or political in nature are not eligible, including those groups focused primarily on lobbying for political or policy change."

And who decides whether you fulfill the eligibility criteria? A team of about 250 Google employees who volunteer to work on the project.
I think that's fair.

Chain Letters

Like most people, every once in a while I receive a chain letter by email - of the kind that promises cash from Bill Gates, or free cellphones and laptops from Nokia and Ericsson, if I would only forward the email to my friends. I diligently reply with a polite mail explaining why the email was likely to be a hoax, using information from Snopes.com, a remarkable site that is like an encyclopedia for urban legends of various kinds. I rarely get a response, but it is usually enough to dissuade the sender from including me in his/her mailing list the next time around.

Chain letters have been around for a while. The Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' was a sort of chain letter that promised resurrection to those entombed with a copy. In the Middle Ages, Europe had its 'Himmelsbrief', or 'Letters from Heaven', allegedly written by God, or one of the saints, that protected those who propagated it, and punished those who disbelieved.

With email, the costs of propagating chain mail have dropped to zero. I am not even sure whether most of the people in a chain are believers; I have never known people asking others in the chain whether they got the money or the laptop that was promised. Nor have I heard of people in my circle responding with angry emails to chain mail, since most of these tend to be sent to friends. Its easy to imagine why, with zero costs, and a possibility, however remote, of a win, it probably still makes sense to some people to participate.

There are, however, some technical problems that can come between that money and you. As Leo Notenboom of Ask-Leo.com explains, it is next to impossible to effectively track email. No one can tell, including Bill Gates, how many people an email was forwarded to. Of course, this is no obstacle if it's the gods who are keeping count; 'Letters from Heaven' are still popular. I received this email with a Latin flavour a couple of weeks back. I think the accompanying picture is of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a popular object of veneration in South America.

The President of Argentina received this picture and called it "junk mail." Eight days later, his son died.
A man received this picture and immediately sent out copies. His surprise was winning the lottery.
Alberto Martinez received this picture, gave it to his secretary to make copies but they forgot to distribute it. She lost her job and he lost his family.
This picture is miraculous and sacred, don't forget to forward this within 13 days to at least 20 people.
Do Not Forget to forward and you will receive a huge surprise!!

The mail is brief, it does not claim divine authorship (unlike the 'Letters from Heaven' of the Middle Ages), it has a deadline (13 days), a minimum quota ('at least 20 people'), a testimonial ('the President, the 'man', and Alberto Martinez), and a list of all the people who participated in the chain mail, all of which make it a good example of a 20th century chain, according to this exhaustive article on the evolution of chain letters.

However, the mail did carry a somewhat apologetic subject line:

' See Carefully............dont believe in it .but try to play safe :)'

Does this presage the end of such mails? According to this entry in Wikipedia, chain letters are a kind of meme, the cultural equivalent of the gene, and are likely to mutate, evolve, and survive. The Ericsson laptop (I have never seen one in my life) will likely be replaced by an Apple Macbook Air, and Bill Gates, whose wealth for long nourished modern chain mails, by Warren Buffet.

Curiously enough, I have not received any mails promising largesse from an Indian billionaire: "Mukesh Ambani wants to give you a year's supply of groceries", or "Kushal Pal Singh promises a free apartment in Gurgaon". Even to the most gullible of Indians, these may just be too hard to believe.

Calvin gets a Chain Letter...