CBCNet Mailing Patterns

An analysis by Supratim Deb
Dated: March 2006

1 Prelude

As we celebrate glorius 8 years (plastic jubilee) of the birth of CBCnet, its time to look back and ponder over the how our mailing patternss have been touched by different Gods. One of the avatars of this God is cricket, but there are other avatars as well that influenced our minds. The goal of this writeup is to understand some of these Gods by dissecting the mailing data. Before we get started, a big thanks to the efforts and continued support of Bhanudev, alias, Sidharth Bhan for keeping this forum alive. This report is dedicated to him.

2 Mailing Patterns

The first interesting plot is the way number of mails has come down over the last few years. This is shown in Figure 1. We started by averaging almost 150 mails per month in the initial years. This boom period of CBCNet continued up-to 2001 or 2002, i.e., till the time CBCNet was dominated by bachelors. Since then, the number of mails have have gone down and have finally stabilised in the region of 50-60 mails per month. We are seeing this for almost 4 years in a row now. One can predict this trend to continue till CBCians start retiring in another 30-35 years time. The idle life of retired might increase the mail count back to where it was during the boom time. The next plot in Figure 2 shows the number of mails exchanged in the different months. The numbers are averaged over the years 1999-2006. Not much there, except for a couple of things. The first is the zigzag pattern which indicate that a month of energetic exchanges of mails are followed by months of spirited exchanges of silences (typically broken by motivational speech on the utility of mail exchanges by Bhanudev). The second remarkable trend is the impact of temperature on the mails exchanged. A careful look suggests how the number of mails goes down in the October to March

period when the temperature is low, thus making CBCians feeling lazy and lethargic. A possible exception in these cold months is January when the the new years wishes changes the pattern somewhat.

An article on CBC mailing pattern would be incomplete without a discussion on how the cricketing events have shaped the curves we see. The Table following says it all, no further elaboration is required on this.

3 Moral

The CBCNet mailing pattern is impacted primarily by four things, two of which were far from obvious.

1. Cricket, more cricket, and more More (read Kiran More) cricket.

2. The low temperature during the winter months.

3. Sidharth Bhan's "koi hai?" mails.

4. Happy* mails (happy birthday, happy ugadi, happy rajyotsava day, happy diwali, hapy holi etc. etc.)