Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

On May 1st all adults in India are eligible for getting vaccinated against Covid-19. Unfortunately, I have heard a few folks repeating the standard Anti-vaxer nonsense about how the vaccine is not safe and we don’t know the long term results of the injection. This is from educated folks who I thought would know better. Then there were some folks who were waiting to see what happens before getting vaccinated. I usually end up scolding all of them about vaccines. In India we have given 13,56,67,949 vaccine doses as of now, how many more do you need to see before you are willing to take the vaccine?

Another fact people keep bringing up is that people have gotten Covid even after getting the second shot. There was a study done to look at the numbers of infections after the second vaccine shot and as per the research, only .04 (.03 if you got Covishield) of the people were infected after the second shot and even in those folks the infection was not as deadly as it is in folks who didn’t get a shot. Compare this with the infection rate without the vaccine: As of today Positivity rate over 15% (15.9% in Karnataka) in 146 districts, 5-15% in 274 others. Please look at the numbers, we can’t handle the increasing numbers and you have seen the situation in the hospitals where people are frantically looking for ICU beds and oxygen tanks.

Covid infection numbers after second vaccination

It’s easy to blame the government for not doing enough to control the pandemic but I must ask you, are you doing enough to control it? The basic measure is to wear your mask when out side. This means that the mask should cover your nose and mouth fully. Having a mask over your chin does not stop the spread of Corona, it just makes you look like an idiot.

Also, there is no 5G tracking chip in the vaccine. The government/Bill Gates/Whoever does not need to inject you with a chip to track you, they can very easily (and much more cheaply) track you using your phone or using the multiple camera’s out there everywhere. The image below came up in my feed a little while ago, it claims that the item shown is a 5G tracking antenna which was injected into their niece when they got vaccinated. This claim is ridiculous at so many level but lets take a walk down logic lane and do some calculations to show how stupid this is. The length of this ‘chip’ is about the same as the width of the finger in the photo, a quick search gives us the average thickness of a human finger as 1.6 to 2 cm. Now lets try to get the thickness of the ‘chip’. Using GIMP I see that the ‘chip’ is ~168 pixels long and ~35 pixels wide at its thickest point. A quick calculation allows us to convert this pixel thickness to cm: 1.6/168 * 35 = .33 cm (3.3 mm). To give you an idea of how thick that is, check out this 3mm thick ring that is available for sale on Amazon.

So, coming back to the injection. In order for someone to inject you with a 3mm thick chip/antenna, the needle has to be atleast 3.5mm thick (maybe more because this is just rough calculations). As per the CDC guidelines the needle used for Covid injections should be 21 gauge for Pfizer and for Covaxin a 23 – 25 gauge needle should be used. Looking up the gauge scale on Wikipedia we see that this translates to 0.8192mm (21 Gauge) – 0.5144mm (23 gauge) – 0.6414mm (25 Gauge) of thickness. Now please explain to me how we can fit 3.3mm thick antenna into a needle that is less than a millimeter thick.

Please use your brains when looking at these forwards because most of them don’t make sense. You just need to look at them logically.

To close the post, I would like to say that the best way to stop the spread is to get vaccinated. While that is going on, we need to continue wearing masks and social distance because that is the only way to control the disease. I don’t know about you but I am tired of not being able to meet friends and going out for a few drinks or just watching a movie in the theater.

Let’s work together to end this pandemic.

– Suramya

Stereotypes are basically over generalized beliefs about a particular group or class of people. By stereotyping we infer that a person belonging to a particular group has all the characteristics all members of that group are supposed to have. Evolutionally stereotypes help us respond to situations faster because we have encountered a similar situation before.

These stereotypes in turn lead to social categorization because we have a tendency to group things together. This creates the us-vs-them mentality and creates in-groups and out-groups which in turn lead to prejudice. Basically that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image and bond within the group because then the group members will be less likely to leave the group as they are prejudiced against the other groups. Prejudiced views can and do result in racism which in its extreme forms may result in genocide. This happened in Germany with the Jews and in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis. There are countless more such examples.

Stereotypes are created when we listen to the people around us. Our friends, relatives co-workers etc would talk about people in a certain way or we see movies, read stories that depict people in a particular way and slowly we internalize that outlook without realizing it. For example, Chinese and Indians are supposed to be really good at math and during my freshman year in college, my advisor put me in Honors math course on his own because as per him “You are Indian so you should be good at math.” Personally I really dislike math so I hated that course. This is a minor example, but there are extreme cases where these stereotypes cause real harm, for example the stereotypical African American is supposed to be lazy, rude and in a gang, so people from these communities don’t get the opportunities that other communities get because it is expected that a majority of the folks in that community would join a gang. Over time this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as kids join gangs because they don’t have other options.

There are so many examples of stereo types and how they harm the communities that entire books have been written on the subject. All I want to say is that people should be judged on their own merits and not on how they look like.

The best way to reduce stereotypes is to expose folks to other cultures and people without diluting them. Travel is a great way of achieving this and I can personally vouch for it as I have met folks from across the world during my trips and nothing beats meeting someone from another part of the world and realizing that they are just like you and have similar wants and needs.

– Suramya

There are times when I feel that the latest hits in movies or TV shows are just trying to recycle the same ‘formula’ for success. You take what worked before in another movie and try to do the same thing again, either in another setting or just a do another remake of a hit movie. However, till date at least there was some element of human ‘innovation’ involved. If it is up to the Researchers from the Spanish universities of Granada and Cádiz this will no longer be the case. They have created an AI which will use machine learning and AI to ‘assist film scriptwriters produce storylines with the best chance of box-office success‘.

Be prepared to get the 400th reimagining of a pirate story, or a space opera or love story because the AI will predict success and because it will use existing tropes to figure out what is successful there will be a lot fewer movies/shows that push the boundaries. So, movies like the Matrix, ‘Inception’, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Blair Witch Project etc will become more and more rare because the studios would be unwilling to risk putting in money into movies that are not a sure hit.

There are a lot of things that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can do, but artistry and innovation is not one of them.

The full Paper is available here: The Simpsons did it: Exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure

– Suramya

Violence in media is something that has become a cornerstone of the belief amongst some people as to how the society nowadays is more decadent and violent than what it was a few decades ago. One of the reasoning people give is that the amount of violence on TV and in media is increasing because people are getting desensitized to it and want more. Most of the research into this phenomenon agrees that there are both short-term and long term impacts of watching violence in Media. For example, we have a study that uni-vocally claims that there are significant short-term effects of violent media in adults and long-term effects in children after exposure to violent media. (Bushman & Huesmann, 2006)

Media violence scholars have identified several basic psychological processes involved. Short-term effects are those that occur immediately after exposure. The main ways that media violence exposure increases aggression in the short term are:

• Direct imitation of the observed behavior
• Observational learning of attitudes, beliefs and expected benefits of aggression
• Increased excitation
• Priming of aggression-related ways of thinking and feeling

Basically, the more normalized a particular behavior becomes the more people will think and act in that way. For example, in a lot on Indian movies there is a theme of the boy falling in love with a girl who does not love them back. The hero then proceeds to stalk, harass the girl who then falls in love with him and they live happily ever after. There have been a few instances where college kids tried the same approach in real life not realizing that this is not appropriate behavior. In essence, for at least a brief period after viewing or playing violent media, the exposed person thinks in more aggressive ways, feels more aggressive, perceives that others are hostile towards him or her and sees aggressive solutions as being more acceptable and beneficial.

The short-term effects typically dissipate quickly. However, with repeated exposure to violent media, these short-term lessons are learned in a more permanent way and the person comes to lean towards more aggressive solutions to conflict. There also is growing evidence that repeated exposure to blood, gore and other aspects of extremely violent media can lead to emotional desensitization to the pain and suffering of others. If a person is already mentally leaning towards violent behavior or socially maladjusted, they will get more influenced by the violent depictions on screen and be tempted to try it out in real life. However, in other people it has been found that watching violence on screen or in video games acts as a sort of pressure release and allows them to channel the anger and hurt in a way that does not harm actual people.

Habituation is a form of non-associative learning in which response to a stimulus decreases after repeated or prolonged presentations of that stimulus. Basically, it means that if someone is exposed to a stimulus (like violence in media) repeatedly there is a decrease in their response to the stimulus. For example, if a new sound like a loud is happening next to you it will draw your attention initially and be very distracting but if it keeps happening then a person becomes accustomed to the sound and pay less attention to the noise reducing their response to it. I have seen it happen with people living next to airports, over a period of time they do not even notice the sounds of the planes landing even though visitors to their house comment on it.

Cultivation theory on the other hand suggests that people who are exposed to media regularly over a prolonged period of time will start to perceive the world as presented in the media they consume. For example, if someone is constantly consuming far-right videos and talking points about how the immigrants in the US are the cause of most of the country’s problems and how they are violent and lazy they will start thinking this is real and behave accordingly in the real world as well. There have been documented cases of people attacking immigrants in the US because they believed that their way of life is under threat from them. The fact that this may or may not be true does not come into the picture as they are conditioned to believe in this ‘fact’.

Media has a tremendous power to change the public perception and that is why people are worried about the amount of violence being depected in it. Movies like the Joker and similar movies normalize the violent behavior and that is what scares most physiologists.

– Suramya

PS: This essay was originally written for my Social Psychology class. Hence the really more formal writing style.