Review Summary Of Equations Of Lines Give An Example Of Each: Fill & Download for Free

You arrive at lecture and sit perched on the edge of your seat, notebook open to a clean page and freshly-sharpened pencil in hand. You follow every word the professor says. Well, maybe you zone out a few times in the middle, but who doesn't? Besides, you're copying everything down and can review it later.That weekend, you diligently read the textbook. Maybe you skip a few parts since it's a busy week, but you definitely study the chapter summary and read all the examples. You do the homework problems, even starting three days early. When you're stuck, you go to office hours and ask the TA for help until they show you how to do it.Before the exam, you study your notes and the published homework solutions. You try the practice exam, and it seems the pieces are finally falling into place. You can solve most of the problems and remember most of the formulas and derivations! At last you take the final, referencing the single allowed sheet of notes you prepared at length the night before. You get almost every question right, or at least partial credit, and take home a well-deserved A.Three months later, you can hardly remember what the class was all about. What's going on? Why did you forget so much? Are you the only one? Should you have memorized more and worked even harder?The answer is no. A student who memorizes the entire physics curriculum is no more a physicist than one who memorizes the dictionary is a writer. Studying physics is about building skills, specifically the skills of modeling novel situations and solving difficult problems. The results in your textbook are just the raw material. You're a builder. Don't spend all your time collecting more materials. Collect a few, then build things. Here's how.The Cathedral and the StonesWhile delivering his famous set of freshman lectures on physics, Richard Feynman held a few special review sessions. In the first of these, he discussed the problem of trying to memorize all the physics you've learned:It will not do to memorize the formulas, and to say to yourself, "I know all the formulas; all I gotta do is figure out how to put 'em in the problem!"Now, you may succeed with this for a while, and the more you work on memorizing the formulas, the longer you'll go on with this method - but it doesn't work in the end.You might say, "I'm not gonna believe him, because I've always been successful: that's the way I've always done it; I'm always gonna do it that way."You are not always going to do it that way: you're going to flunk - not this year, not next year, but eventually, when you get your job, or something - you're going to lose along the line somewhere, because physics is an enormously extended thing: there are millions of formulas! It's impossible to remember all the formulas - it's impossible!And the great thing that you're ignoring, the powerful machine that you're not using, is this: suppose Figure 1 - 19 is a map of all the physics formulas, all the relations in physics. (It should have more than two dimensions, but let's suppose it's like that.)Now, suppose that something happened to your mind, that somehow all the material in some region was erased, and there was a little spot of missing goo in there. The relations of nature are so nice that it is possible, by logic, to "triangulate" from what is known to what's in the hole. (See Fig. 1-20.)And you can re-create the things that you've forgotten perpetually - if you don't forget too much, and if you know enough. In other words, there comes a time - which you haven't quite got to, yet - where you'll know so many things that as you forget them, you can reconstruct them from the pieces that you can still remember. It is therefore of first-rate importance that you know how to "triangulate" - that is, to know how to figure something out from what you already know. It is absolutely necessary. You might say, "Ah, I don't care; I'm a good memorizer! In fact, I took a course in memory!"That still doesn't work! Because the real utility of physicists - both to discover new laws of nature, and to develop new things in industry, and so on - is not to talk about what's already known, but to do something new - and so they triangulate out from the known things: they make a "triangulation" that no one has ever made before. (See Fig. 1-21.)In order to learn how to do that, you've got to forget the memorizing of formulas, and to try to learn to understand the interrelationships of nature. That's very much more difficult at the beginning, but it's the only successful way.Feynman's advice is a common theme in learning. Beginners want to memorize the details, while experts want to communicate a gestalt.Foreign language students talk about how many words they've memorized, but teachers see this as the most trivial component of fluency. Novice musicians try to get the notes and rhythms right, while experts want to find their own interpretation of the piece's aesthetic. Math students want to memorize theorems while mathematicians seek a way of thinking instead. History students see lists of dates and facts while professors see personality, context, and narrative. In each case, the beginner is too overwhelmed by details to see the whole. They look at a cathedral and see a pile of 100,000 stones.One particularly clear description of the difference between the experts' and beginners' minds comes from George Miller's 1956 study "The magical number seven, plus or minus two." Miller presented chess boards to both master-level chess players and to novices. He found that the masters could memorize an entire board in just five seconds, whereas the novices were hopeless, getting just a few pieces. However, this was only true when the participants were memorizing positions from real chess games. When Miller instead scattered the pieces at random, he found the masters' advantage disappeared. They, like the novices, could only remember a small portion of what they'd seen.The reason is that master-level chess players have "chunked" chess information. They no longer have to remember where each pawn is; they can instead remember where the weak point in the structure lies. Once they know that, the rest is inevitable and easily reconstructed.I played some chess in high school, never making it to a high level. At a tournament, I met a master who told me about how every square on the chess board was meaningful to him. Whereas, when writing down my move, I would have to count the rows and columns to figure out where I had put my knight ("A-B-C, 1-2-3-4, knight to C4") he would know instantaneously because the target square felt like C4, with all the attendant chess knowledge about control of the center or protection of the king that a knight on C4 entails.To see this same principle working in yourself right now, memorize the following. You have two seconds:首先放花生酱，然后果冻Easy, right? Well, it would be if you were literate in Chinese. Then you’d know it’s the important maxim, “first the peanut butter, then the jelly”.You can remember the equivalent English phrase no problem, but probably don't remember the Chinese characters at all (unless you know Chinese, of course). This is because you automatically process English to an extreme level. Your brain transforms the various loops and lines and spaces displayed on your screen into letters, then words, then a familiar sandwich-related maxim, all without any effort. It's only this highest-level abstraction that you remember. Using it, you could reproduce the detail of the phrase "first the peanut butter, then the jelly" fairly accurately, but you would likely forget something like whether I capitalized the first letter or whether the font had serifs.Remembering an equally-long list of randomly-chosen English words would be harder, a random list of letters harder still, and the seemingly-random characters of Chinese almost impossible without great effort. At each step, we lose more and more ability to abstract the raw data with our installed cognitive firmware, and this makes it harder and harder to extract meaning.That is why you have such a hard time memorizing equations and derivations from your physics classes. They aren't yet meaningful to you. They don't fit into a grand framework you've constructed. So after you turn in the final, they all start slipping away.Don't worry. Those details will become more memorable with time. In tutoring beginning students, I used to be surprised at how bad their memories were. We would work a problem in basic physics over the course of 20 minutes. The next time we met, I'd ask them about it as review. Personally, I could remember what the problem was, what the answer was, how to solve it, and even details such as the minor mistakes the student made along the way and the similar problems to which we'd compared it last week. Often, I found that the student remembered none of this - not even what the problem was asking! What had happened was, while I had been thinking about how this problem fit into their understanding of physics and wondering what their mistakes told me about which concepts they were still shaky on, they had been stressed out by what the sine of thirty degrees is and the difference between "centrifugal" and "centripetal".Imagine an athlete trying to play soccer, but just yesterday they learned about things like "running" and "kicking". They'd be so distracted by making sure they moved their legs in the right order that they'd have no concept of making a feint, much less things like how the movement pattern of their midfielder was opening a hole in the opponent's defense. The result is that the player does poorly and the coach gets frustrated.Much of a technical education works this way. You are trying to understand continuum mechanics when Newton's Laws are still not cemented in your mind, or quantum mechanics when you still haven't grasped linear algebra. Inevitably, you'll need to learn subjects more than once - the first time to grapple with the details, the second to see through to what's going on beyond.Once you start to see the big picture, you'll find the details become meaningful and you'll manipulate and remember them more easily. Randall Knight's Five Easy Lessons describes research on expert vs. novice problem solvers. Both groups were given the same physics problems and asked to narrate their thoughts aloud in stream-of-consciousness while they solved them (or failed to do so). Knight cites the following summary from Reif and Heller (1982)Observations by Larkin and Reif and ourselves indicate that experts rapidly redescribe the problems presented to them, often use qualitative arguments to plan solutions before elaborating them in greater mathematical detail, and make many decisions by first exploring their consequences. Furthermore, the underlying knowledge of such experts appears to be tightly structured in hierarchical fashion.By contrast, novice students commonly encounter difficulties because they fail to describe problems adequately. They usually do little prior planning or qualitative description. Instead of proceeding by successive refinements, they try to assemble solutions by stringing together miscellaneous mathematical formulas from their repertoire. Furthermore, their underlying knowledge consists largely of a loosely connected collection of such formulas.Experts see the cathedral first, then the stones. Novices grab desperately at every stone in sight and hope one of them is worth at least partial credit.In another experiment, subjects were given a bunch of physics problems and asked to invent categories for the problems, then put the problems in whatever category they belonged. Knight writes:Experts sort the problems into relatively few categories, such as "Problems that can be solved by using Newton's second law" or "Problems that can be solved using conservation of energy." Novices, on the other hand, make a much larger number of categories, such as "inclined plane problems" and "pulley problems" and "collision problems." That is, novices see primarily surface features of a problem, not the underlying physical principles.The "Aha!" FeelingIt is clear that your job as a student is to slowly build up the mental structures that experts have. As you do, details will get easier. Eventually, many details will become effortless. But how do you get there?In the Mathoverflow question I linked about memorizing theorems, Timothy Gowers wroteAs far as possible, you should turn yourself into the kind of person who does not have to remember the theorem in question. To get to that stage, the best way I know is simply to attempt to prove the theorem yourself. If you've tried sufficiently hard at that and got stuck, then have a quick look at the proof -- just enough to find out what the point is that you are missing. That should give you an Aha! feeling that will make the step far easier to remember in the future than if you had just passively read it.Feynman approached the same questionThe problem of how to deduce new things from old, and how to solve problems, is really very difficult to teach, and I don't really know how to do it. I don't know how to tell you something that will transform you from a person who can't analyze new situations or solve problems, to a person who can. In the case of the mathematics, I can transform you from somebody who can't differentiate to somebody who can, by giving you all the rules. But in the case of the physics, I can't transform you from somebody who can't to somebody who can, so I don't know what to do.Because I intuitively understand what's going on physically, I find it difficult to communicate: I can only do it by showing you examples. Therefore, the rest of this lecture, as well as the next one, will consist of doing a whole lot of little examples - of applications, of phenomena in the physical world or in the industrial world, of applications of physics in different places - to show you how what you already know will permit you to understand or to analyze what's going on. Only from examples will you be able to catch on.This sounds horribly inefficient to me. Feynman and Gowers both reached the highest level of achievement in their domains, and both are renowned as superb communicators. Despite this, neither has any better advice than "do it a lot and eventually expertise will just sort of happen." Mathematicians and physicists talk about the qualities of "mathematical maturity" and "physical insight". They're essential to moving past the most basic level, but it seems that no one knows quite where they come from.Circular ReasoningThere are certainly attempts to be more systematic than Feynman or Gowers, but before we get to that, let's take a case study. I recall that as a college freshman, I knew that the formula for the acceleration of a ball orbiting in a circle was [math]a = v^2/r[/math]. I wanted to know why, so I drew a picture:I imagined a small ball starting on the right side of the circle, heading upwards where the blue velocity vector [math]v_1[/math] is drawn. The ball moves around the circle, goes counter-clockwise over the top and then heads downwards on the left hand side, where the red velocity [math]v_2[/math] is. The ball's velocity changed, which means it accelerated. The acceleration is[math]a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t}[/math][math]\Delta v[/math] is clearly [math]2v[/math], and [math]\Delta t[/math] is the time it takes to go half way around the circle, which is [math]\frac{\text{distance}}{\text{speed}} = \frac{\pi r}{v}[/math]. Hence, the acceleration is[math]a = \frac{2v}{\pi r/v} = \frac{2 v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.64 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]This isn't quite right. The answer is supposed to be [math]v^2/r[/math]. Somehow there is an extra factor of [math]2/\pi[/math] floating around.If you already understand calculus, this is a silly and obvious mistake. But for me it took quite some time - weeks, I think - until I understood that I had found the average acceleration, but the formula I was trying to derive was the instantaneous acceleration.The way I broke out of this mental rut was to think about the case where the ball has gone one quarter of the way around, like this:Then the same approach gives[math][/math][math] a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t} = \frac{2\sqrt{2}v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.90 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math],which is closer to the right value. If you try it when the ball goes 1/8 the way around, you get[math]a = \frac{4 \sqrt{2 - \sqrt{2}}v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.97 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]and you're getting the idea that what you have to do is take the limit as the ball goes an infinitesimal fraction of the way around. (By the way, if I had been clever, maybe I'd have discovered Viète's formula this way, or something like it. I only recognized this now because I remembered encountering Viete's formula. So memory certainly has its place in allowing you to make connections. It's just not as central as beginners typically believe.)How do you do that "infinitesimal fraction of the way around" thing? Well, if the ball travels an angle [math]\theta[/math] around the circle, we can draw the before and after velocities asand[math][/math][math] \Delta v = 2 \sin (\theta/2) v[/math]which in the limit [math]\theta \to 0[/math] becomes[math][/math][math] \Delta v = \theta v[/math]and[math][/math][math] a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t} = \frac{\theta v}{\theta r/v} = \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]But all of this took a long time to come together in my mind, assembling gradually, but in discrete chunks with each small epiphany. As I walk through it now, I can see there are many concepts involved, and in fact if you're a beginning student it's likely that the argument isn't clear because I skipped some steps.The main idea in that argument is calculus - we're looking at an infinitesimal displacement of the ball. To understand the entire argument, though, we also need to do a fair amount of geometry, develop the idea of sliding velocity vectors around in space so they originate at the same point, introduce the concept of an arbitrary angle of rotation [math]\theta[/math], find the time it takes to rotate by that angle for a given [math]r[/math] and [math]v[/math], use the small-angle approximation of the sine function, and maybe a couple other things I'm not seeing.That's a lot of mental exercise. It's no wonder that working all this out for yourself is both harder and more effective than reading it in the book. Just reading it, you'll skip over or fail to appreciate how much goes into the derivation. The next time you try to understand something, you want those previously-mastered ideas about geometry and calculus already there in your mind, ready to be called up. They won't be if you let a book do all the work.Today, I can solve this problem in other ways. For example, I could write down the rectangular coordinates and differentiate, describe the motion in the complex plane as [math]r e^{i\omega t}[/math] and differentiate that, or transform to a rotating reference frame and note the centrifugal force on the stationary ball and conclude it must be accelerating in an inertial frame. A cute one is to write down the position and velocity vectors by intuition, and notice that going from position to velocity you rotate 90 degrees and multiply the length by [math]v/r[/math]. To go from velocity to acceleration is mathematically identical, so rotating another 90 degrees and multiply by [math]v/r[/math] again we obtain the answer.I can argue from dimensional analysis that the only way to get something with units of acceleration is [math]v^2/r[/math], or heuristically point out that if you increase the velocity, the velocity vectors get bigger, but we also go from one to the next in less time, so the acceleration ought to scale with [math]v^2[/math], etc.I also see aspects of the problem that I didn't back then, such as that this isn't really a physics problem. There are no physical laws involved. It would become a physics problem if we included that the ball is circling due to gravitational forces and used Newton's gravitational law, for example, but as it stands this problem is just a little math.So yes, I can easily memorize this result and provide a derivation for it. I can do that for most of the undergrad physics curriculum, including the pendulum and Doppler formulas you mentioned, and I think I could ace, or at least beat the class average, on the final in any undergraduate physics course at my university without extra preparation. But I can do that because I built up a general understanding of physics, not because I remember huge lists of equations and techniques.How to Chunk ItI can do these things now because of years' of accumulated experience. Somehow, my mind built chunks for thinking about elementary physics the same way chess players do for chess. I've taught classes, worked advanced problems, listened to people, discussed with people, tutored, written about physics on the internet, etc. It's a hodgepodge of activities and approaches, and there's no way for me to tease from my own experience what was most important to the learning process. Fortunately, people from various fields have made contributions to understanding how we create the cognitive machinery of expertise. Here is a quick hit list.George Pólya's How to Solve It examines the problem-solving process as a series of stages, and suggests the student ask themselves specific questions like, "Is it clear that there enough information to solve the problem?"Scott H Young, Cal Newport, and many others give specific advice on study skills: how to take notes, how to diagram out the connections between ideas, how to test your knowledge, how to fit what you're learning into the larger scheme of things, etc.When you do need to memorize things, spaced repetition software like Anki takes an algorithmic, research-backed approach to helping you remember facts with the minimum of time and effort.K. Anders Ericsson has tried to find the key factors that make some forms of practice better than others - things like getting feedback as you go and having clear goals. He refined these into the concept of Deliberate Practice. He also believes there is no shortcut. Even if you practice effectively, it usually takes around 10,000 hours of hard work to reach the highest levels in complex fields like physics or music.Chunking and assigning meaning are your mind's ways of dealing with the information overload of the minutiae that inevitably pop up in any field. Another approach, though, is to try to expand your mind's ability to handle those minutiae. If you can push your "magical number" from seven to ten, you'll be able to remember and understand more of your physics work because it takes a bit longer to fill your cognitive buffer. Dual N-Back exercises are the most popular method of working on this. Nootropic drugs may also provide benefits to some people. Low-hanging fruit first, though. If you aren't sleeping 8-9 hours a day, getting a few hours of exercise a week, and eating healthy food for most meals, you're probably giving up some of your mind's potential power already. (There is individual variation, though.)Howard Gardner is one champion of the idea of multiple intelligences, or different learning types. When working on electric fields, for example, Gardner might advise you to study Maxwell's equations, draw pictures of vector fields and intuit their curls, get up and use your body, pointing your arms around to indicate electric field vectors, write or speak about what you're studying, learn with a friend or tutor, or maybe even create musical mnemonics to help you study, depending on where your personal strengths lie. Certainly, all students should build facility with drawing sketches, plotting functions, manipulating equations, visualizing dynamics, and writing and speaking about the material.Psychologist Carol Dweck's research studies the effect of your attitude towards learning on how much you learn, finding, for example, that children praised for their hard work are likely to press on further and learn more when given tough problems, whereas children praised for their intelligence are more likely to give up.Productivity guru David Allen helps people organize their lives and defeat procrastination with specific techniques, such as dividing complicated tasks into small, specific "next actions" and deciding when to do them, then organizing them in a planner system.Mihály Csíkszentmihályi believes that people operate best in a state of "flow", where they are so focused on the task they find it enjoyable and engrossing to the point they're innately motivated to continue. He emphasizes, for example, that the task needs to be the right level of difficulty - not too hard and not too easy - to find the flow state. (Some people think this state doesn't jibe with deliberate practice; others contend it's possible to achieve both simultaneously.)Taken together, this yields enough practical advice to chew on for months or years. To summarize, when you are learning something new:Try to figure it out for yourselfIf you get stuck, take a peek at your textbook to get the main ideaTeach the idea to someone elseOnce you've learned something, repeat the entire reasoning behind it for yourself, working through each detailAsk yourself Pólya's questions when you're stuckUse Young and Newport's techniques to map out the ideas of your class and relate them to your prior knowledgeMake Anki decks and review them a few minutes a day to retain what you've learnedMake sure your study sessions include all the principles of deliberate practice, especially feedback, challenge, and attentionBuild an image of yourself as someone motivated by learning and proud of having worked hard and effectively rather than as someone proud of being smart or renowned.Find a organizational system that lets you handle all the details of life smoothly and efficiently.Search for the flow state, notice when you enter it, and put yourself in position to find flow more and more often.Work on different subjects, reviewing both advanced and basic material. They will eventually all form together in your mind, and you're likely to have to take at least two passes at any subject before you understand it well.Take care of your physical health.This list does not include reading every page of the textbook or solving every problem at the end of the chapter. Those things aren't necessarily bad, but they can easily become rote. Building the material up for yourself while dipping into reference materials for hints is likely to be more effective and more engaging, once you learn to do it. It is a slow, difficult process. It can be frustrating, sitting there wracking your brain and feeling incredibly stupid for not understanding something you know you're supposed to have down. And strangely, once you have it figured out, it will probably seem completely obvious! That's your reward. Once the thing is obvious, you've chunked it, and you can move on. (Though you still need to review with spaced repetition.) This is the opposite of the usual pattern of sitting in lectures and feeling you understand everything quite clearly, only to find it all evaporated the next day, or acing a final only to find your knowledge is all gone the next month.That, I believe, summarizes the practical knowledge and advice about the learning process. Memorizing equations and derivations is difficult and ineffective because they are just the details. You can only handle a few details before your mind gets swamped. To cope, train yourself to the point where you process equations and physical reasoning automatically. This will free your conscious effort up to take in the big picture and see what the subject is all about.It Just Gets In The Way, You SeeSomehow, I've developed a "this is calculus" instinct, so that if I see the problem about acceleration in circular motion, or any other problem about rates of change, I know that it's talking about a limit of some kind. Where does this instinct exist in my brain? What form does it take? How does it get called up at the right time?George Lakoff believes that almost everything we understand is via metaphor. Any sort of abstract concept is understood by linking it to concrete concepts we've previously understood. For example, in Where Mathematics Comes From, Lakoff and coauthor Rafael Nuñez argue that we think of the mathematical concept of a "set" as a sort of box or container with things stacked in it. We reason about sets using our intuition about boxes, then later go back and support our conclusions with the technical details. Learning to reason about sets, then, is learning to think about the box metaphor and translate it back and forth into the formal language of axioms and theorems. This seems to fit with the introspective reports of many mathematicians, who say they build intuitive or visual models of their mathematics when finding results, then add in the deltas and epsilons at the end.This may be why we so often see beginning students asking things like, "but what is the electron, really?" If they were told it is just a tiny little ball, that would work, because it's a very easy metaphor. But instead, they're told it's not a ball, not a particle, not a wave, not spinning even though it has spin, etc. In fact, they're told to dismiss all prior concepts entirely! This is something Lakoff believes is simply impossible. No wonder students are bobbing in an ocean of confused thought bubbles, with nothing but mixed metaphors to grasp at until the last straw evaporates, across the board.Linguists like Steven Pinker believe that the language we use tells us how our mind works. Physicists certainly do have a specialized lexicon, and the ability to use it correctly correlates pretty well to general physics intuition, in my experience. In his review of Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, Douglas Hofstadter summarizes:Pinker shows, for example, how subtle features of English verbs reveal hidden operations of the human mind. Consider such contrasting sentences as "The farmer loaded hay into the wagon" and "The farmer loaded the wagon with hay." In this pair, the verb "load" has two different kinds of objects: the stuff that gets moved and the place it goes. Also, in the first sentence, the destination is the object of one preposition; in the second, the stuff is the object of another. Pinker sees these "alternations" as constituting a "microclass" of verbs acting this way, such as "spray" ("spray water on the roses" versus "spray the roses with water"). Where does this observation lead him? To the idea that we sometimes frame events in terms of motion in physical space (moving hay; moving water) and sometimes in terms of motion in state-space (wagon becoming full; roses becoming wet).Moreover, there are verbs that refuse such alternations: for instance, "pour." We can say "I poured water into the glass" but not "I poured the glass with water." What accounts for this curious difference between "load" and "pour"? Pinker claims that pouring merely lets a liquid move under gravity's influence, whereas loading is motion determined by the human agent. "Pour" and "load" thus belong to different microclasses, and these microclasses reveal how we construe events. "[W]e have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force," Pinker writes. " . . . [S]ome philosophers consider [these concepts] to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life. . . . But we've stumbled upon these great categories of cognition . . . by trying to make sense of a small phenomenon in language acquisition."If correct, then in order to think about physics the way an expert does, we should learn to speak the way experts do. If we try to solve physics problems using the words "load" and "pour", we may be carrying around a bunch of distracting anthropocentric baggage. If we don't recognize that, we'll get stuck, saying the problem "doesn't make sense", when really it's our linguistically-instilled expectations that are wrong. To combat this, it may be just as helpful to gain facility with the language of physics as with its equations.Five Easy Lessons provides a clear example of such difficulties: the case study of "force". As I type this, my laptop is sitting on a desk which exerts an upward force on it. Few beginning students believe this is really a force, even after they've been browbeaten into drawing arrows for the "normal force" on exam diagrams.The problem is in the way we use "force":"The robber forced the door open.""Your apology sounded forced.""...the force of the explosion...""...the force of righteousness...""I'm being forced to take physics even though I'll never use it."Literally or figuratively, we think of "force" as implying not only motion, but intent or purpose, and also control. Force is for people pushing on things, or maybe for cars and projectiles. These things are using energy and will run down if left alone. But the desk under my laptop? It's just sitting there, totally passive. How could it be "exerting a force" when it doesn't even get tired? Needing some sort of rationalization for why the laptop doesn't fall, beginners say that it's not that the desk exerts a force on the laptop, the desk just provides something for the laptop to sit on. Or if something falls on the desk, the desk didn't exert a force to stop it. It just got in the way is all. Why doesn't the professor understand this obvious difference? A desk exerting a force? Come on...Five Easy Lessons describes how students only overcome this difficulty after seeing a classroom demonstration where, using a laser pointer and a mirror laid on the desk top, the professor demonstrates how when a heavy cinder block is laid on the desk, the surface responds by bending out of its natural shape, exerting force on the cinder block like a compressed spring would.You may need to find many such visualizations before you can reconcile your colloquial use of words with their use in physics. But this might also be dangerous, because although finding a way to make physics obey your idea about what a word means works decently in this case, in other instances it's your expectations for the word that ought to change. (Relativity, with words like "contraction", "slowing down", etc. is a good example.)Mythologist Joseph Campbell believes that we understand the world primarily through story. Perhaps we understand derivations, experimental evidence, and the logic behind physical conclusions as a sort of story, and it's in building this story that our cognitive chunks are formed.Mind The Neural Gap JunctionsYou are the pattern of neural activity in your brain. When a part of you changes, building a new memory, installing a new habit, or constructing a tool to approach a class of problems, that change must be reflected somewhere in your brain.Lesswrong user kalla724 describes this process in "Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation"First thing to keep in mind is the plasticity of cortical maps. In essence, particular functional areas of our brain can expand or shrink based on how often (and how intensely) they are used. A small amount of this growth is physical, as new axons grow, expanding the white matter; most of it happens by repurposing any less-used circuitry in the vicinity of the active area. For example, our sense of sight is processed by our visual cortex, which turns signals from our eyes into lines, shapes, colors and movement. In blind people, however, this part of the brain becomes invaded by other senses, and begins to process sensations like touch and hearing, such that they become significantly more sensitive than in sighted people. Similarly, in deaf people, auditory cortex (part of the brain that processes sounds) becomes adapted to process visual information and gather language clues by sight.But, they caution, these neural changes occur primarily to those parts of our minds to which we pay conscious attention:A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the next move, about his chess strategy, and about the future possibilities of the game. His neural networks are optimizing, making him a better chess player.A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the music he hears, listening to the chords and anticipating the sounds still to come. His neural networks are optimizing, making him better at understanding music and hearing subtleties within a melody.A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, gritting his teeth as another flash of pain comes from his bad back. His neural networks are optimizing, making the pain more intense, easier to feel, harder to ignore.You need to pay attention not just to doing physics, but to the right parts of doing physics - the parts most related to intuition.James Nearing gave his advice on how to do this in Mathematical Tools for PhysicistsHow do you learn intuition?When you've finished a problem and your answer agrees with the back of the book or with your friends or even a teacher, you're not done. The way do get an intuitive understanding of the mathematics and of the physics is to analyze your solution thoroughly. Does it make sense? There are almost always several parameters that enter the problem, so what happens to your solution when you push these parameters to their limits? In a mechanics problem, what if one mass is much larger than another? Does your solution do the right thing? In electromagnetism, if you make a couple of parameters equal to each other does it reduce everything to a simple, special case? When you're doing a surface integral should the answer be positive or negative and does your answer agree?When you address these questions to every problem you ever solve, you do several things. First, you'll find your own mistakes before someone else does. Second, you acquire an intuition about how the equations ought to behave and how the world that they describe ought to behave. Third, It makes all your later efforts easier because you will then have some clue about why the equations work the way they do. It reifies the algebra.Does it take extra time? Of course. It will however be some of the most valuable extra time you can spend.Is it only the students in my classes, or is it a widespread phenomenon that no one is willing to sketch a graph? (\Pulling teeth" is the cliche that comes to mind.) Maybe you've never been taught that there are a few basic methods that work, so look at section 1.8. And keep referring to it. This is one of those basic tools that is far more important than you've ever been told. It is astounding how many problems become simpler after you've sketched a graph. Also, until you've sketched some graphsof functions you really don't know how they behave.(To see the advice on graphs, along with a detailed step-by-step example, see his book, free online)Brown Big SpidersOne of the difficulties with chunks is that they're mostly subconscious. We may ultimately know of their existence, as did the chess master who told me he knew how each square of the chess board felt, but their precise nature and the process of their creation are almost immune to introspection. The study methods I've talked about above are empirically useful in creating chunks, so we have guidelines for how to make new chunks in general, but we usually don't know which ones we are creating.Lesswrong user Yvain comments on the essay Being a teacherI used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.In other words, the chunkiest cognitive process we have - language - develops largely without our awareness. (In retelling this story, I've met a surprising number of people who actually did know about adjective order in English, but most of them either learned English as a second language or had studied it in psychology or linguistics course.)This makes it incredibly difficult for physics teachers or textbook writers to communicate with beginners. It's inevitable that beginners will say that a certain lecturer or book just doesn't explain it clearly enough, or needs to give more examples. Meanwhile, the lecturer has no idea why what they said wasn't already perfectly clear and thinks the example was completely explicit. Neither party can articulate the problem, the student because they can't see the incorrect assumption they're making, the professor because they don't realize they've already made such an assumption.For example, once I was proctoring a test in a physics class for biology majors. A question on the test described a certain situation with light going through a prism and asked, "What is the sign of the phase shift?" A student came up to ask for clarification, and it wasn't until they'd asked their question three times that I finally got it. They thought they were supposed to find the "sign" as in a signpost, or marker. There would be some sort of observable behavior that would indicate that a phase shift had occurred, and that was the "sign of the phase shift." Until then, I was only able to think of "sign" as meaning positive or negative - did the wave get advanced or retarded?If you want to learn a language with all those rules you don't even know about, you need to immerse yourself. Endless drills and exercises from a book won't be enough, as millions of Americans a decade out of high school straining to remember, "Dondé esta el baño?" can attest. You need to read, speak, see, and hear that language all around you before it takes.To learn physics, then, read, speak, and hear it all around you. Attend colloquia. Read papers. Solve problems. Read books. Talk to professors and TA's, and expose yourself to all the patterns of thought that are the native language of the field.As you learn, you will build the right chunks to think about physics without realizing what they are. But there's a flip side to this problem, which is that when you're not doing physics, you can build the wrong chunks. They can get in the way, and again you don't realize it.In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards discusses an exercise she gave her art students:One day, on impulse, I asked the students to copy a Picasso drawing upside down. That small experiment, more than anything else I had tried, showed that something very different is going on during the act of drawing. To my surprise, and to the students' surprise, the finished drawings were so extremely well done that I asked the class, "How come you can draw upside down when you can't draw right-side up?" The students responded, "Upside down, we didn't know what we were drawing."When we see a recognizable image, unconscious chunking immediately gets to work, interpreting, imparting meaning, and inevitably distorting. Learning to draw, according to Edwards, involves circumventing harmful chunks as much as building helpful ones.So it is with physics. The ideas about force, animation, and intent discussed in the laptop-and-desk example seem to illustrate just this problem. Five Easy Lessons lists many of the known misconceptions that students have somehow taught themselves in each topic of introductory physics - for example that electric current gets used up as it goes around a circuit. But I think it's likely that there are many more such obstructive thought patterns that we don't yet know exist. These might be more general notions about such things as cause and effect, what nature "wants" to accomplish, etc.I Feel DumbEducators are perpetually frustrated by what seems like an outrageous pattern. They explain something clearly. The students all claim to understand perfectly, and can even solve quantitative problems. Still, when you ask the students to answer basic conceptual questions, they get it all wrong. How is this possible?In this YouTube video, Veritasium explores what happens when you explain something clearly:Amazingly, the clearer the explanation, the less students learn. Humans have a huge array of cognitive biases. In general, these various biases work so that we'll keep believing whatever it was we believed to begin with, unless there's a really good reason not to. Someone giving a clear, authoritative physics lecture does not register in your mind as a good reason to check your beliefs, so you listen happily and rave about what a great lecture it was, all while maintaining your wrong ideas.However, with the right stimulus you can get your brain to throw out the old, wrong ideas. Entering such a state is a prerequisite to true learning, and fortunately we can detect it in ourselves. We call it confusion.Confusion is a message from your emotional mind (the part that tells your analytical mind what decisions to start justifying). It's saying, "Hey, something about our beliefs is very wrong, and this is actually important. Pay attention and figure it out."A great lecturer, instead of being clear, will confuse students by asking them to predict ahead of time what a demonstration will show, then do it, and the opposite actually occurs. Or they will ask students to solve questions that sound straightforward, but in fact the students can't figure out. Only after confusion sets in will the teacher reveal the trick.You want to defeat your biases, toss out your wrong beliefs, and learn physics to the Feynman level - the level where you create the knowledge as you go along. Even many specialists never fully get there, instead rising to increasingly-sophisticated levels of rehashing the same memorized arguments in a way that can carry them quite far and trick most people. The only way to avoid this is to spend many, many hours thoroughly confused.Have you ever lost an argument, only to think of the perfect retort two days later when stopped at a traffic light? This shows how your mind will continue working on hard problems in the background. It eventually comes up with a great answer, but only if you first prime it with what to chew on. This works for physics problems just as well as for clever comebacks, once you find good problems to grapple with. I conjecture that engaging this subconscious system requires a strong emotional connection to the problem, such as the frustration or embarrassment of being dumbstruck in an argument or the confusion of being stumped by a hard problem.Confusion is essential, but often also unpleasant. When you repeatedly feel frustrated or upset by your confusion, your mind unconsciously learns to shy away from hard thinking. You develop an ugh field.This could happen for different reasons. A common one arises in people who judge themselves by their intellect. Confusion for such people is a harsh reminder of just how limited they are; it's a challenge to their very identity. Whether for this reason or some other, it's common for students and academics to fall into patterns of procrastination and impostor syndrome when navigating the maze of confusion that come with their chosen path.I don't have the answer for this. I have heard many people tell their stories, but I have yet to figure out my own. Sometimes confusion feels awful, and my story in physics is a jerky, convoluted one because of how I've dealt with that. But once in a while a problem is so good that none of that matters. When I find one of these problems, it hijacks my mind like Cordyceps in a bullet ant, jerking me back to a fresh piece of scratch paper again and again, sometimes for days. If you reach this state over and over, you'll know Feynman meant by, "What I cannot create I do not understand"Get confused. Solve problems. Repeat. The universe is waiting for you.ReferencesIn order of appearance in this answerFeynman's Tips on Physics: Richard P. Feynman, Michael A. Gottlieb, Ralph Leighton: 9780465027972: Amazon.com: Bookssoft question - Memorizing theorems - MathOverflowThe Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (wikipedia)The Magical Number Seven (original paper)Google Translate (Chinese phrase)Knight, Randall. Five Easy Lessons pp 37Reif and Heller, 1982Viète's formulaHow To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Amazon)How To Solve It (summary)How to Solve It (Wikipedia)Learn Faster with the Feynman Technique (Scott Young. His page is start to get spammy.)Study Hacks " About (Cal Newport)Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcardsSpaced repetition (review by Gwern)K. Anders Ericsson (Wikipedia)The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert PerformanceDual N-Back FAQ (gwern)Food Rules An Eater`s Manual (Amazon, how to eat)Core Performance Essentials (Amazon, exercise) Exercise is an interesting case because not everyone responds very well. For the majority of people it's worth the time.Howard Gardner (wikipedia)The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach: Howard E. Gardner (Amazon)The Perils and Promises of Praise (article by Dweck)Mindset, Dweck's book.Flow (psychology) (Wikipedia)Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: 9780061339202: Amazon.com: BooksDavid Allen, Getting Things Done® and GTD®Online to-do list and task management (One possible GTD software)How to Setup Remember The Milk for GTDGeorge Lakoff (professional site)George Lakoff (Wikipedia)Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being: George Lakoff, Rafael Nuñez: 9780465037711: Amazon.com: BooksLoaded sentences (Hofstadter reviews Pinker)The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature: Steven Pinker: 9780143114246: Amazon.com: BooksThe Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers: 9780385418867: Amazon.com: BooksAttention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivationMathematical Tools for Physics (Nearing)Being a teacher - Less WrongDrawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive, 4th Edition: Betty Edwards: 9781585429202: Amazon.com: BooksVeritasium (channel)List of cognitive biases (wikipedia)Dunning–Kruger effect (wikipedia)Ugh fields - Less WrongUseful Quora AnswersSomeone anonymous's answer to What is it like to understand advanced mathematics? Does it feel analogous to having mastery of another language like in programming or linguistics?Satvik Beri's answer to How do math geniuses understand extremely hard math concepts so quickly?Qiaochu Yuan's answer to Why is it almost impossible to learn a mathematical concept on Wikipedia? They are very difficult to follow, especially if one doesn't have a solid background in the subject.Christopher VanLang's answer to What should I do if my PhD advisor and lab colleagues think I'm stupid?What did Richard Feynman mean when he said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand"?Debo Olaosebikan's answer to What are some words, phrases, or expressions that physicists frequently use in ordinary conversation?Paul King's answer to How does the arbitrary become meaningful? How does the human mind convert things like art into emotion and experience?What are some English language rules that native speakers don't know, but still follow?User's answer to What's an efficient way to overcome procrastination?Further ReadingI feel a little sleazy writing this answer because when I mention, for example, Carol Dweck doing research on the psychology of mindsets or K. Anders Ericsson studying deliberate practice, in fact there are thousands of people working in those fields. The ones I've mentioned are simply the most public figures or those I've come across by chance. I haven't even read the original research in most of these cases, relying on summaries instead.The answer is also preliminary and incomplete. There's lots of research left to be done, and I'm not an expert in what's out there. Still, here is a guide to some further resources that have informed this answer.For an overview of the psychology of learning, I like Monisha Pasupathi's audio course How We Learn from The Teaching Company. It covers many clever experiments designed to help you build a model of what happens in your mind as you learn.Bret Victor explores software solutions to visualizing the connection between physical world, mathematical representation, and mental models. Check outThe Ladder of AbstractionExplorable ExplanationsI think it's helpful to build an innate impression of your mind as not perceiving the world directly, but as concocting its own, tailored interpretation from sense data. All your consciousness ever gets to experience is the highly-censored version. The books of Oliver Sacks are great for making this clear by illustrating what happens with people for whom some of the processing machinery breaks down.The LessWrong Sequences were, for me, a powerful introduction to the quirks of human thought, preliminary steps towards how to work best with the firmware we've got, and what it means to seek truth.Selected BibliographyThese are some physics books to which have helped me so far. I'm not choosing them for clear exposition or specialty knowledge in a certain subject, but for how I think they helped me understand the way to think about physics generally.Blandford and Thorne, Applications of Classical PhysicsEpstein, Thinking PhysicsFeynman, Lectures on Physics------------ The Character of Physical Law------------ QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter------------ Tips on PhysicsGeroch, General Relativity from A to BLevi, The Mathematical MechanicLewin, Walter "Classical Mechanics", "Electricity and Magnetism" (video lectures with demonstrations on MIT OpenCourseWare)Mahajan, Street-Fighting MathematicsMorin, Introduction to Classical MechanicsNearing, Mathematical Tools for PhysicsPurcell, Electricity and Magnetism----------, Back of the Envelope ProblemsSchey, Div, Grad, Curl, and All ThatThomas and Raine, Physics to a DegreeThompson, Thinking Like a PhysicistWeisskopf, "The Search for Simplicity" (articles in Am. J. Physics)ImagesFeynman's Tips on Physics, Feynman, Gottlieb, LeightonArchitectural detail- cut stone wallFile:NotreDameI.jpg

(Please note that this was written in February 2019. None of the arguments have changed or needed to be changed, unlike the constantly shifting pro-Brexit “messaging”).TL;DRIf we recognise that No Deal Brexit involves a significant re-configuration of the UK’s current economy and trading practices, then any “logical rational reason” needs to be quantifiable and justifiable as worthwhile to the country as a whole. It is not the same as the logic involved with helping an old lady cross the road or doing something grumpy just because you woke up with a hangover. This is simply because it is not logical or rational to disrupt an entire economy and 63 million people’s lives based on fallacies, vague assumptions, grouses, personal dissatisfactions, hidden motives, etc. (as then there is no way to quantify the benefits, if any).Bearing the above in mind, let’s now explore some common supposedly “rational reasons” why people want No Deal Brexit.“Reason” 1Here is a common one: “Because the UK voted to leave the EU.”I acknowledge it is a fact that 52% of voters chose to leave the EU. However, please let me propose another example of such a “fact”, which goes:Let’s say someone called Boris, promises to a group of people that they will get a free lunch every day cooked by Gordon Ramsay, and all they have to do to get quality free lunches is just vote for “Free Lunch”. Needless to say, “Free Lunch” won the vote. And these people winning the vote for a free lunch would be an undeniable fact.However, Boris has never talked with Gordon Ramsay, Boris does not know how much Mr Ramsay will charge, Boris has no idea what sort of dishes the voters like to eat, and worst of all: Boris does not have any money or budget anyway. But his voters still want to believe that the fact that they voted for free lunches is relevant, even though they realise by now that Boris can never deliver them anything, let alone free lunches from a world-class cook.In short, all the Brexit promises were made by people with no responsibility or capacity or understanding of how to deliver any of the conflicting promises. That is why Brexit promises often conflict with each other and reality - they are just empty words made up by people who have no ownership of the problems they cause because they do not have to deliver anything.The question therefore is, Are “facts” like this relevant? Clearly not when no feasible delivery mechanism is available - it’s even worse than “the cheque’s in the post”. Accepting No Deal therefore would be like picking up and eating grass after being promised free fine lunches. It is actually a quantifiable negative reason to not want No Deal Brexit under any circumstances because believing in an undeliverable “fact” is the same as believing a lie and it actually places you in a worse situation. Here is an example:For those who still fret about the principle of “democracy”, consider this: the Brexit situation is like asking passengers on a plane to vote for which landing strip they want to land on at the destination airport. Although it is very important to land the plane, the passengers are not qualified to know how weather, winds, other traffic, runway conditions, availability of ground staff, etc, would affect the safety of the plane. In cases like this, democracy is useless and in fact, downright dangerous and meaningless. Democracy works only when people are well-informed, and not ignorant about what they are voting for.Even the Leave campaign admitted their lies to the UK public: Vote Leave director admits they won because they lied to the publicThe following “reasons” may also help you understand more.“Reason” 2Another common argument is that there is nothing to worry about: “There will be teething trouble, but there are no drivers for long-term prolonged economic disruption.”Note the complete lack of any information about “teething trouble” or the duration of “long-term”. However, we have actual data about the cost of Brexit even before the “teething trouble” period begins, and it is 2% of GDP, or £40 billion, or roughly £800 million a week. This data comes from the authority monitoring the UK’s economic performance, the Bank of England. Importantly, it reflects what has actually happened and is not a forecast. Brexit uncertainty costs UK £800m a week, Cost of Brexit to UK economy running at £40bn a year – Bank rate-setter, Brexit already costing UK £800m per weekThe Bank of England also states that it expects this under-performance to continue for a “teething trouble” period of unknown length in a No Deal Brexit.So what about “long-term”? In a No Deal situation, it would be imperative to sign up new trade agreements, and five years for a large trade deal would be optimistic. Also we will need at least three large deals to compensate for losing the EU. Although this analysis had sounded dire when it was originally written as it assumed a -1.1% hit on GDP, the reality of -2.0% makes the calculated expected cost to the UK of £129.565 billion over five years look almost cheap now:What is the arithmetic of Brexit?There is to date no similar analysis provided by Leave voters that can determine what “long-term” means or the plausible benefits after such a vague period. Nobody can even list which industries will benefit from a No Deal Brexit.The best Leave can do is this bungling forecast, easily debunked, just by looking at the real data:What will the long-term impact of Brexit be on the UK economy?“Reason” 3A popular argument is that the UK will be freed from the shackles of EU laws: “It allows the UK to diverge from the EU’s trade and regulatory policy. Divergence from the EU’s trade and regulatory policy is exactly where all the benefits of Brexit are to be found. No deal allows us to start working on them immediately.”There is a huge plausibility deficit in this EU regulatory argument (which also smacks of the “sovereignty” argument), and the deficit can be exposed quite easily. In the decades of UK being a member of the EU, the UK has objected to only 72 EU regulations out of 4,514 proposed. The entire list is here: The 72 laws the UK voted againstThe argument of running free of EU regulation means that each and every one of these laws have had a negative economic impact on the UK, so a diligent Leave voter should be able to place a value on each of the 72 laws.So, as examples, the UK voted againstA ban on livestock growth-boosters with hormonal, thyrostatic or beta-agonist effects (carcinogenic residue in meat) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:01996L0022-20081218&from=ITSafety advisers dealing with transport of dangerous goods on public roads must be properly trained and regulated https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31996L0035&from=ENTrucks for livestock journeys over 8 hours must have bedding, feed, water, ventilation, partitions and access for inspectors EUR-Lex - 31998R0411 - EN - EUR-LexTherefore, what is the calculated loss to the UK? If there is such an urgent need to break free of such laws, then what is the benefit to the UK of voting against a human anti-cancer directive? Has anyone done any calculations at all? I would suggest not, else we would have seen them by now. In the absence of any quantifiable benefits, this is a spurious contrived argument. In any case, Ireland also has the English legal system and they have absolutely no problems working within the EU.But. There is a even worse outcome once we are free of EU regulations. In a No Deal Brexit situation, the UK would be desperate to sign trade agreements with other large countries - it would simply be a fact as the UK needs to trade, or collapse economically. Each and every of the 163 other countries in the WTO know this, and they will extract a price, especially the big economic sharks such as the USA, China and Japan.To put it simply, larger countries will want concessions from the UK, to protect their businesses, their citizens, their investments - and they will want these protections written into UK law.Read that again please: Our new trade partners will require laws which benefit their interests over the interests of the UK before they will do trade deals. That is because they are not stupid. They are large sharks circling a wounded small fish without any trade deals.The simple issue is, once we've left the EU and can “make our own rules”, wouldn't our (new) trading partners then also be involved in making these rules? If our telecoms rules don't suit AT&T or other US telecoms companies, what makes you think the UK government will adopt different rules relative to the ones demanded by our new (and possibly new largest) trading partners, especially if we urgently need a FTA with them?In short, it's all very noble and grand to claim to think of the “interests” of the UK, but the reality is that ALL such interests are linked significantly to those of our big trading partners. If they are happy, then only can we afford to be happy unless we are much bigger sharks than they are, in which case we impose our rules on them first if they don’t have something that we want more.For example, peace is in the interest of the UK, but that doesn't stop the UK selling arms to the Saudis for use in destroying Yemen, an already impoverished country. We want Saudi money more than peace and human rights in Yemen - so the Saudis make us ignore our own principles (UK's Saudi weapons sales unlawful). Food safety is in the interest of the UK, but the UK isn’t even able to object to the US demand that all standards must be dropped prior to opening trade negotiations.What many Leavers are proposing therefore is just exceptionalism without the quantification. Hence it is extraordinarily difficult to justify - it is the same as wandering into a minefield without even an indication of the number of mines under your feet.However, in the EU, we are in an organisation large enough to be able to force even the USA to lower medicine prices. The rationale for staying within a big trade bloc is tangible, as we avoid hormone beef, pus-laden dairy products, chlorinated chickens, overpriced medicines, etc. Instead, we will soon have: Trump threatens to use US trade talks to force NHS to pay more for drugs and Trump tells May to abandon 'unjustified' food standards for Brexit trade deal.Trade department would lobby for government to accept Trump's demands for weaker food hygiene after Brexit, Whitehall memo saysWhere’s the sovereignty when another country can force you to eat what the EU considers to be substandard food? Where’s even the dignity in that?The iron fist in the USA’s gloves have also been exposed recently: Brexit Wish-List For Trump: What US Lobbyists Want From A Trade Deal With The UKLatest is US tells Britain: Fall into line over China and Huawei, or no trade dealAnd the actual terms the US are demanding from the UK are downloadable on Summary of Specific US-UK Negotiating ObjectivesThe above is all supported in a video interview with the US ambassador: WATCH: US ambassador says the NHS will be 'on the table' in a post-Brexit trade dealAnd to ram home the point, we now see that even Mr Johnson is “disappointed”: Boris Johnson 'disappointed' as Trump aims tariffs at UK productsAs for relying on the US as a “partner”, one might like assess the reliability of such a “partner”, thus:Trump threatens to drop Isis fighters at UK border: 'Have fun capturing them again'The UK will also lose the benefits of the EU’s huge bargaining power which has kept the prices of foreign medications in check, saving money and ensuring supply. Left alone, the UK will face situations such as this:Trump Administration Is Waiving the Public’s Right to Affordable Coronavirus TreatmentsTherein ends that argument.One final point. Some people are led to believe that the EU is some form of oppressive force against the “freedom of the UK.” This is such a lame insulting argument to the people of Turkey, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, etc, where there is real oppression of the people, where people starve and die every single day, sometimes supported by UK arms sales. UK citizens who believe this imbecilic lie should be ashamed that getting £5 billion a year from the EU for regeneration projects can be twisted into some form of “oppression”. Also look at Reason 5 below.“Reason” 4A lot has been said about unfair EU tariffs, which are not attuned to the UK’s needs: “The UK will be able to immediately be able to cut the EU’s tariffs on food, clothing and footwear and diverge from its VAT rules. This will allow for rapid reductions in the cost of essentials and this will disproportionately benefit the poor.”I have to agree that not all EU tariffs are fine-tuned to suit the UK, but that is because the UK is part of a large group of countries. I am not making excuses, but just spelling out the reality.However, what Leave voters do not define is the actual impact of leaving the EU to trade under WTO rules. For example, the UK may well cut tariffs on food, clothing and footwear and that may indeed help low-income shoppers at Morrisons and Primark if it was not for the fact that the over 15% drop in sterling has already pushed up prices for the poor people these Leave voters claim to care about. It also does not mention that the EU tariffs for clothes are under 12% and footwear at 4%, both less than what sterling has fallen by. Once again, fine words, but actual quantification proves that it is a spurious argument.But, the impact actually is not only on imports which can get waived through on zero tariffs, but on exports which will now encounter Most Favoured Nation tariffs from all the countries in the WTO in the absence of trade agreements.So let’s quantify just one UK sector: Farming. And it will be easy because Parliament has already done it for us on points 15–19 in their own review of the impact: Brexit: Trade in Food15. The average EU tariff on dairy products is over 30%, while tariffs could be as high as 87% for frozen beef. Some other examples include a tariff of 46% for cheese or 21% for tomatoes. Some individual products have tariffs over 100%.16. Witnesses told us that tariff-free access to the EU was “crucial”. Tariffs would have a detrimental impact on those agricultural sectors that were dependent on EU exports for their profitability.17. We heard particular concerns about the impact of tariffs on the sheep sector. The EU is very important for UK sheep meat exports, with more than 95% of its export volume destined for the EU. The Welsh lamb market is very dependent on the EU market, with 92% of exports (by value) and 85% (by volume) destined for the EU.18. Sheep exports, with a tariff of at least 50%, would become uncompetitive on the EU market. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) told us that this would have a “devastating” effect on the sector. The Andersons Centre estimated that in Northern Ireland alone, exports to the EU would drop by about 90%. It would have serious consequences in Wales, where sheep farming was such a vital part of the Welsh economy, with producer prices estimated to decrease by 30%.19. The EU market is also important to the beef market, with more than 90% of UK beef exports shipped to other EU countries in 2015/16Additionally, if food is allowed in on zero or low tariffs, then that is the end of most of the UK’s farming industry.And this does not even cover the extreme likelihood of serious problems to do with the transportation/haulage industry. If WTO rules are such a good idea, as proposed by the ERG, then why do nations seek free trade agreements?So, yet another case of fine words, but they make no sense once we attempt quantification.For more detailed explanations about the WTO fallacies regularly trotted out by Leavers, their ignorance is clearly exposed in this great link: Brexit and Trade: An Interviewer's Guide to Exposing Nonsense — ExplainTradeBut that is not the end of the problem with the loss of free movement. A high proportion of the goods transported between the EU and the UK are consolidated consignments, mixed pallets or other forms of groupages. Each item in such mixed loads needs to have individual customs declarations filled in, and will contribute to the estimated 250 million new paper or electronic forms complicating shipments at an estimated cost of £12 billion which will be passed to consumers. And then such new formalities will lead to delays of potentially weeks, resulting in new requirements such as the largest lorry park in Europe being built in Kent. No European freight company will want to transport goods to the UK, especially without knowing when their trucks would be able to return.“Reason” 5We pay the EU for “nothing”. Very often we hear Leave voters say things like: “There is no net benefit for Britain paying into the EU. Britain is a net contributor nation, so Britain would be far better off keeping the net money which is currently lost to other EU states.”Again, this is easy to disprove because it is possible to quantify the real benefit of being in the EU. The analysis is summarised as follows:The simple reality is that a net benefit of between 4%–5% of our GDP is derived from being a member of the EU. This equates to a tangible economic benefit of £62 billion to £78 billion a year. In relative terms, the UK currently derives between +660% to +830% return on its contribution to the EU. It may be more but it is very unlikely to be less. Membership of the EU also raises well over £20 billion a year in tax revenues which can be spent on the country. In tax revenues terms alone, the UK derives between 220% to 276% return on its contribution.The full analysis is on:Are Brexit supporters correct or wrong to assume there's no net benefit of paying into the EU?“Reason” 6Some Leavers have a way with words, such as: “You will no longer have it your way. You are going to feel threatened as we have felt threatened. You can lose your hope as we lost ours.”Clearly there can be no quantification of such a “reason”, but it does not mean we should ignore it. And without doing the maths for once, some suggestions for answers are (i) Is the UK doomed to becoming meaner and angrier no matter how Brexit turns out? and (ii) Is Brexit a symptom or the cause of the political turmoil we are currently seeing in the UK?As for any democracy “deficit” with the EU, I suggest you review what the UK government has done to our democracy to date. These are all undeniable facts:UK versus EU democracy“Reason” 7Many Leavers often moan abstractly that the UK joined a trade bloc in 1973 and did not subscribe to becoming more integrated into the EU. This is an unfair, revisionist view and patently not true as shown in the following letter to the people written by the Prime Minister in 1972 before the UK signed up to join the EEC:And there was another referendum held about EEC membership later on Thursday 5 June 1975, and UK voters approved continued EC/EEC membership by 67% to 33% on a national turnout of 64%.From a chronological viewpoint to explain this result, the facts are that in 1950, UK’s per capita GDP was almost a third larger than the EU6 average. But by 1973, it was about 10% below the EU6 average when it joined the EC. It has then risen within less than a decade of joining and have been comparatively stable ever since.The UK joined in 1973 and one common Leave point is that this act prompted a recession later that year which continued into 1974. The implication is the economic impact was so bad that joining the EC prompted an immediate recession. However, they never mention the widespread industrial actions happening all around the UK that year; they pretend that nation-stopping strikes did not have any economic impact, nor the serious oil crisis at the time. They even seem to be able to forget the 3-Day Week which the country had to impose: Three-Day WeekLeavers then also claim joining the EU killed off the “extant markets” of the UK. By this, they mean the Commonwealth (which had already started to stop trading with the UK) and/or the free trade area integration idea which never worked in the first place; in short, nobody cared about the UK’s economic plight.So, in that case, how would a Leaver explain the change from a negative 10% economic underperformance to parity and above within a decade or so? I mean, what was the single significant event that tipped the balance and got the UK economy going in the 1970s? Is it possibly joining the EC? Else what was the UK going to do? Even the IMF would not lend to the UK.As for the UK’s much-maligned EU membership fee (the next Leave misinformed argument), even Vote Leave figured out it was still beneficial to pay it:Are Brexit supporters correct or wrong to assume there's no net benefit of paying into the EU?So in light of the facts and history, it is staggering that these ill-informed people can still offer any credibility to Minford and co:What will the long-term impact of Brexit be on the UK economy?“Reason” 8Some of the economic arguments for Brexit claim that the EU has a continuously shrinking share of the global market, and the economic share of world GDP is a line continuously going downwards. This is totally true and is an undeniable fact. However, every G7 country’s share of global GDP is also falling, and this is because most of the less developed countries around the world are finally catching up on economic growth.Regardless of the falling global GDP share of the EU, the UK had the best growing economy of all the G7 countries for years, so saying the EU has been a drag on the UK is like saying Gordon Ramsay’s 3-Michelin star restaurant is rubbish because the same street has 10 bad restaurants. There is simply no correlation or link. In the following chart, note how well the UK has been doing in the years before the referendum, and this is a chart of the UK against the biggest economies of the world, not the EU:However, Leavers also promote the fallacy that because the world outside the EU is growing faster economically than the EU, that this is somehow a good reason to leave as we can trade more outside the EU. But this is a ridiculous, shallow, egoistic fallacy, and the explanation is as follows:The world’s population is 7 billion, of which around 80% earn less than $10 a day. The figures for people earning more than $10 is harder to quantify as there is little research available, but let’s assume, from simple extrapolation, that less than 10% earn more than $50 a day (£38.50 a day, £192 a week, £10,000 a year) - in reality, the steepening of the wealth curve implies a much lower number than 10%, but let’s never mind about it and stick with an optimistic 10%. Nearly Half the World Lives on Less than $5.50 a DayNote also that in 2016, the poverty line in the UK was annual incomes of £15,000 or less: The poverty line in BritainThat optimistically-estimated 10% of the world earning $50 a day or more gives a population of around 700 million around the world who can actually potentially afford to purchase the high-quality expensive secondary goods/services that the UK produces. The populous Far East already produces most, if not all, of the goods/services that the UK offers (and at lower costs) so there are few unique selling points for UK products there. Probably ditto for the USA, especially under Trump. That leaves a huge wealthy bloc called the EU, which we want to leave. So if you consider the actual size of the markets available to the UK outside the EU (700 million - 450 million EU citizens = 250 million people), the reality is that we are already dealing with most of these non-EU markets already.And before anyone mentions UK’s exports of services, here are the facts: “Europe has been a major destination for UK exports of services; this trend continued in 2017 when UK exports of services to Europe (£80,938 million) accounted for nearly half of the overall total for UK exports of services (£162,141 million).” International trade in services, UKSo although it is a fact that markets are growing faster outside the EU, the thing is: most of them cannot afford UK goods/services anyway, so how does this help the UK when these growing markets can buy cheaper and better from themselves, other blocs and other countries? At present, the UK has a captive market of around 450 million people in the EU who can actually afford UK goods and services, but after Brexit, the EU can revert to being a self-sufficient bloc or buying cheaper than from the UK and the UK becomes just another non-EU country competing to export goods and services to the EU.The only way the UK can effectively compete and expand in the non-EU market is to lower costs significantly. That usually can only mean fewer worker protections, less safety, fewer rights, less oversight of working conditions plus probably more lower cost migrants as the UK aim to climb back down to sordid working conditions, like many of the non-EU countries.Note that at least 4.1 million children are already living in poverty in the UK today, implying that their families themselves cannot afford premium UK goods and services, so how can the UK closing off their largest, most accessible market of 450 million people help UK citizens in any way? UK Poverty 2018But that is not all. In the modern world, supply and demand forces need to be balanced pretty quickly. If a customer wants re-supplies or new parts to fit in his factory, he wants it NOW, not on some indeterminate date in the future. This is part of the gravity theory of trade, which is simply that we tend to deal with our closest neighbours more than we deal with far away countries. As a member of the EU, we also have the benefit of frictionless trade which allows our factories to operate using a JIT (Just In Time) production model which is very efficient and cost-effective - parts and supplies take a very few days or sometimes just hours to arrive. JIT is much less feasible if your suppliers are far away:The Brexit fallacy of “better trade” outside the EU looks like this:Our new target customer countries will be very far away and it is highly unlikely they will engage the UK as high-volume, reliable suppliers for their factories.Furthermore, lest you still think there is hope, we should analyse the very “best case” scenario for Brexit by Patrick Minford, and the full analysis is on:What would be the long term effects, both positive and negative, of brexit on British economy?Reason 9? I am still searching for a single logical, rational reason for a No Deal Brexit. In all honesty, No Deal Brexit can only make sense if you benefit in some way from the UK’s economic disaster, such as disaster capitalists, social engineers or foreign capitalists wanting to break up institutions like the NHS. Or if you are wealthy enough not to care. Or if you are one of the manipulators and lobbyists who have been undermining citizens’ welfare for decades: Is Brexit the result of political corruption going back many years?But the question is: are these people’s private, selfish motives offering a logical and rational reason for No Deal Brexit for the country as a whole?Anyway, as the question request, don’t think emotionally - think rationally and logically and you will immediately smell the fetid stink of incompetence, manipulation, cynical misinformation and outrageous rank lies.Mostly, Brexit was/is about fallacies, as explained in Was the entire Brexit campaign based on lies?AddendumTo be honest, I am not a huge fan of many economists, having worked with quite a few over decades, and the ones I like/respect are those who think quantitatively and is able to process empirical data sensibly while relying on real-life historical scenarios. Such a gentleman is Adam Posen, and if you can spare 20 minutes or so to watch the video below, it is possible that your understanding of Brexit will be enhanced exponentially:

One of the best articles with regards to preparation for XLRI Interview is given by a student of mine Akshay Gupta, who has now passed from XLRI. This is the article written by him. It is really inspiring: (reproduced with his permission)XLRI(HR)Batch of 2013-2015: How I went about the interview preparation.7 April 2013At the outset,I am going to warn you that this post is going to be long and tedious.I am writing this piece not for my personal satisfaction,but for thousands of aspirants who are mediocre like me;who ruined their high school/graduation academics,and did not achieve anything significant in last 20 odd years of existence.I just want to tell you,all of you,who are reading this post is that YOU CAN MAKE IT if you are mad enough to burn yourself. I owe my success to many(MMDT-12 members: Sid,Rishi,Om,Harshil;Patrick Sir,Kamath Sir, Raghunath Sir),and it is my obligation to do my bit for others.@Omkarp , @retry , @rishi1415 , @sid2222000 , @PatrickDsouzaThese are the people who made it possible for me.Their names should be here as well.Hope,it helps...Giving back to PG.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>A brief introduction about myself-Name-Akshay Gupta10th-79.6% (CBSE)12th-67.6% (CBSE)Graduation(SRM University,Chennai)--CGPA of 8.911 out of 10(Worked very hard in college;Hit gold here)-ECE Engineering.I have no extracurricular activities to justify my High school http://debacle.It took me 2.5-3 years of extreme efforts to crack XAT entrance test(98.83%)—I will write a post later on how a person with 0 aptitude and no foundation cracked the toughest MBA entrance exam on http://earth.It's a myth that one can't learn aptitude.Infact,one can learn any Goddamn thing on this earth if one is motivated enough,and willing to go under fire.Now words come cheap,so let's have some statistics-XAT 2011-44.22%XAT 2013-98.83%Once I reached this far ,I promised myself that I will force them to think 100 times before they reject me in an interview.XLRI interview shortlist came on 17 Jan 2013.I was in Goa;I heard myself getting shortlisted for both interviews(BM and HRM).I left my friends,and came back to Mumbai the same day.Next 2-3 days,I was very tense on how to go about preparing for the interviews.There were millions of things to be covered,and I knew I have to give an exceptional interview if I have the slightest chance of making to the hallowed portals of XLRI. The ratio for XLRI convert always has been around 1:10 (For 120 seats in HR, they call 1200 people for interview). Also, this year because of goof up in marks, the ratio went on to become 1:13!Firstly,I benefitted immensely from keeler.drummer/Implex post on IIM C conversion(Pagalguy).I got in touch with few XLRI seniors,but it was rather demotivating because they all were special in some way or the other.I had to walk alone,and I had to find something special about myself.On 20 Jan 2013,I started preparing and asked one of our Mumbai Maverick Dream Team 2012,Harshil(Retry) to collaborate our efforts.Material Used-I made a fat notebook(Around 200 pages or more I really don't know but it really is fat! ),and everything that I used to see,read,hear…Any relevant detail,I used to put it in that DIARY.IT had numbers,figures,charts,quotes,drew India Maps,world Maps,electronics diagrams,equations,world capitals,major sports…Some strange idea or http://thought.Everything.It was one thing that I kept with me even when I slept.The purpose was to devote last week on revising that diary.I answered 18 straight questions in numbers,figures and quotes in the HR Interview bcz I revised that diary 6 times.General Reading--Took last 8-9 editions of The Chronicle(IAS preparatory material,monthy magazine used by IAS aspirants),and marked all the important articles that can be talked about.Read each important article twice…Wrote all the numbers,figures,and made a small summary of each in my above mentioned diary.-Economic and Political Weekly (Economic & Political Weekly) : It is a website which has extremely high quality content.The website uses articles by Phds(Doctorates) on their thesis.It can extremely taxing to read articles by them but you have to…Again numbers,figures,quotes in my diary of every article that I read.Wrote summaries.My each good article used to take me 30 mins in making notes,summaries,diagrams,charts,learning author names for references etc.-The Hindu,The Indian express,Business Standard: I used to read Indian express and Business Standard completely everyday…Devoted 2 hours on these 2 papers everyday,and editorials in The Hindu…Again the same notes,quotes,numbers etc. I can cite one particular example-James H Buchanan died recently at that time,and I was reading about his obituary.I made notes about his economic and political theories,his nobel prize etc and I talked about him in my interview when we discussed corruption in India.The Economist,Project Syndicate,India today,TIME,BBC etc- I used to use my TCS library to read articles in these magazines and make notes when I was tired doing the normal stuff…This exercise was mainly focused on international world.TIME,Career Launcher etc-I collaborated material with my friends from TIME institute,Career launcher etc,and used their material as well.Competition Success Review year book 2013-Marked all the major events and relevant static GK,and put it in my http://diary.My HR GD Topic was-UN the security council.I was the only one in 13 people who was throwing numbers about when it was formed,how it was formed,why it was formed,how many current members,General assembly etc etc…For eg-UN formed in 1942,during the 2nd World war,during the time of Winston Churchill(England PM) with 193 countries in general assembly,the latest being South Sudan comprises of 5 permanent veto powers etc etc…I cannot remember or write what all I read and from where but I read,read and read till my eyes hurt to the point of watering and not opening.I hardly slept for 45 nights.About myself(THE WHOLE UNIVERSE SURROUNDING ME)--Used Wikipedia and google maps to read about India and world in DETAIL and make notes(I drew India Maps and world maps to remember what all places are where)…Our History,all civilizations-Vedic,Indus Valley,Mughals,British,Mauryas etc etc…Geography-Rivers,lakes,Mountains,terrain,oceans,weather,temperature,winds etc.Politics-NDA,Congress,PMs,Presidents,Parliaments,Upper house and lower house…Its no of members,How they are chosen,States assembly etc.Our neighbours,Our area,Human development Index,Asia,World…Everything.-My name,My family,History of Guptas,History of ChandraGuptas,Kalidas,Aryabhatta…Keep branching out.Each link will take you to the next link.From Guptas to history of Chandraguptas to Kalidasa(During this empire,he wrote),from kalidasa to his works,from his works to why he was special,to Ajanta and Ellora,from there to Allahabad ,from Allahabad to Kumbh Mela from kumbh Mela to its size,no of people,area,recent news etc,from Kumbh details to Mythology/religion,from religion to Islam,Buddhism,Science…Wars……………..PHEW!Keep branching out,and anticipate questions what else can be asked.-My job,TCS,TATA…Tata sons,their history,remembering each year and name,Major businesses,Which countries and what,How,Recent developments,Major competitors etc…Everything-HR-HR verticals,companies,HR course structure,favourite subjects,How HR works,Major HR professionals,Recent HR trends,learnt everything about best HR firm in the world ie. MERCER-how,when,why,what,who etc…Numbers and figures.Everything.Hobbies-I developed reading habit to improve my verbal in last 3 years or so.I had read 75 plus books,and I researched each and every book and categorized it into fiction and non-fiction,and put the list in my interview folder.Also,I read a large number of good non-fiction books(Around 32 non-fiction books) i.e Amartya Sen,Mohd. Yunus(I converted HR bcz of this),CK Prahalad,Malcom Gladwell,VS Naipaul,Joseph Glitz,Frijita Kapra,Stephen Hawking,Larry Collins etc.This had to be my strength…Something special about me.I wanted to drive interview on my reading habit,so I prepared it like crazy.Academics-My engineering scores are mind boggling after my 12th ,so it appears to be a farce.I bought a foundation book on Electronics and Communication engineering,and prepared from there.I had great difficulties initially but by the end,I was thorough on major areas.I am tired of writing all this,but this is not even 1% of what all I did…I was so so so desperate to make it that I could have died preparing for XL.I left nothing on luck,and I was a time bomb waiting to be exploded.Just to give you a brief glimpse of my interview:-Prof1-Akshay,we made you wait so long for this interview.You are the last person…You must have been very bored and tired by waiting for more than 3 hours.Me-No,Sir.I am feeling very upbeat.I was preoccupied with the newspaper,so it was not an issue at all.Prof1-What newspaper were you reading?Was it provided in the reading hall?Me-Sir,newspapers were provided in the waiting hall but I used Business Standard that I brought from my home.Prof1(Hmmm)So is BS your favourite newspaper?Me-Sir,I try to keep myself abreast of the latest happenings in the world.Profs 1,2,3 together…K,so what did you read today?Me-CAG reprimanding UPA for a new scam.Profs 1,2,3 together…This CAG is a foolish organization.They have brought the whole country to a halt.They make exaggerated claims.Bureaucrats fear making decisions…Nothing is happening in this country.Me(Took Chairman name because I wanted to show my knowlesge) Sir,You are talking about Vinod Rai ,the chairman or CAG all together?Prof1-CAG.Me-Sir,They estimated 1.28 lakh crore loss based on the 3G auctions that took place in 2010…Sir,their claims are not of out thin air or notional.Prof2-But the country is not able to work.Me-Sir,then you would say the same thing about judiciary…The current judicial activism.You cannot use corrupt means to get things going.Everyone is quiet in room.Prof3-First they said 1.28 lakh crore loss then they changed to 2000 crore loss…What is this?Me-I thought for 5-10 seconds…Sir,irrespective of the figures and numbers,there was something wrong that happened.If CAG wouldn't have brought it out in notice then things would have gone the same way.This cannot be the excuse for civil servants not to work.Profs 1,2,3(Impressed).Prof2-This essay of your's on India…What are you trying to say?Me-Sir,It is not the corruption;the bureaucracy;the red tape that affects our country…It is our attitude.For eg: I am a 24 year old boy who has not voted even http://once.So Am I correct on my part to blame others?We should look within ourselves before looking outside.Prof3(Staring at me-Interested and curious)Etc etc etc…I cannot write everything……….Prof1-So you read?Do you know what is a booker prize?Me-Sir,the first booker prize was given in year XXXX…Definition of Booker Prize…I started counting the names of Booker prize winners from 1971.Prof1(Irritated)-No no no…What 1971?Tell us some latest Indian booker prize winners.Me-In 2006 the booker prize was won by Kiran Desai for her work The inheritance of loss.She is the daughter of Anita Desai,another renowned author of Games at twilight. In 2008,Arvind Adiga won the booker prize for The White Tiger:it is a black humour genre;There is something also called as Booker of the booker prize which is given once in 25 years to the best of the booker prizes;It was won by Salman Rushdie who writes on Magical realism and is famed for Midnight's children which is about post Indian independence condition till emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi.Prof1- VS Naipaul,Salman Rushdie,Amartya Sen,Malcom Gladwell,George Orwell…You read all crazy authors.Starts laughing aloud.Me- There is a very thin line demarcating a genius and a crazy person,Sir.DEAD SILENCE IN ROOM.Prof1-Hmmm so you read a lot.What one book would you suggest as an HR?Me-Sir,I would recommend,”Banker to the poor by Mohd. http://Yunus”.It is a book by a nobel prize winner who founded the Grameen Bank in bangladesh.it is a book that tells you how a sustainable business can be developed from the section neglected by the corporate sector.For reference,we can use CK Prahlad work on Bottom of the pyramid theory or James H Buchanan about development economics.We can also talk about Amartya Sen paper on Nutrition and development that he presented in 1998.Prof2(Amazed)-What do you know about Microfinance (related to Grameen bank that I talked about in my last answer)?Me-Sir,the 2005 Krishna crisis?Prof2-No,something recent.Me-Sir, the 2008 Malegaon report?Prof2-No,something more recent.Me-Sir,the SKS microfinance scandal in 2010?Prof2(Disgusted and irritated)-No more recent.Me-Sir,the 2011,Microfinance bill?Prof2(Expression for is this guy mad?)-No more recent.Me-Sir,the AP crisi s in 2012?Prof2(Shocked)Yes…Tell me about it.Me-Sir,the NABARD and state banks work…Cuts me in between.Prof2(Gave in)-Quiet.He thought for 2 mins to ask me something that I wont be able to answer,and then asked me the rate of Microfinance that the institutes charge in India.Me-Sir,I don't know but can I make a logical guess?http://Proff3-Nods.Me-Sir,since the poor people have no option but to resort to the money lenders if Microfinance institutes don't provide them money so,I think, they would take benefit of this position.The money lenders charge outrageously high interest,so MF too would charge something around 14-15%.As per the govt. priority sector lending norms,govt. banks are supposed to provide loan to poor without any collateral of about 10% out of their earnings but the banks hardly follow it.This gives MF to create a monopoly and charge high interest,failing the whole objective of microfinance.All three professors show respect to me…The portion that I have written above lasted for just 5-6 mins,and my interview was of 21-23 mins.I completely overwhelmed,all of them,all the time.They were shocked,impressed,irritated at the same time.In the end,professor3 says to me(Very slowly and appreciatively),”Do you want to say something that would increase your chances of candidature?”I thought for 30 seconds(bringing all the pain,all the insults,my parents' faces,my disfigured body into my memory,the sacrifices that I have made,living every single day with the fear that I will never make it…I am not cut out for the cream),and said on the verge of tears,”Sir,I have made mistakes in my life…My 10th and 12th scores are very low,but…If you see my engineering scores…The kind of work that I have done…The kind of books that I have read…I have really improved in life,Sir…I have really improved.”Colour of the Prof3 face changed,and he couldn't speak anything for 2 mins…He just looked into my eyes,and NODDED!I knew that I had nailed it at that very instant…Nothing could stop me.Note-I was extremely fluent that day,and I used quality words and expressions because of extreme reading for 45 days.I wrote a poem on EUROZONE CRISIS 2 days before the interview to show my creativity and writing talent,and improved my essay on VS NAIPAUL that I had written 1 year back…They really liked http://both.My GD was exceptional too,and they talked about that in interview.I put in index in my folder,marked stickers of different colours,arranged things in a very organized and neat & clean way.I did everything that I could meticulously.Everyday around 8-9 hours and 15-16 hours on weekends saw an average guy getting through.“When determination wins over fate,honour comes calling.”Aks Gupta,XLRI Batch of 2013-2015.Some of my most motivating songs.Pay attention to their lyrics-1) Eminem: Lose yourself2) Fort Minor: Remember the name3) Nike commercial: Rise and ShineAmazing Inspirational Videos. It will motivate you like crazy-1) Mateusz M on youtube (Dream, why do we fall etcetera)2) Eric Thomas on youtube