Saturday, April 13, 2013

Links


  1. Blog Discovery of the Year: Data Stories (Tag line: "... On India one chart at a time"). It's a personal blog maintained by "a Delhi based journalist" -- that's all we know about the blogger behind this wonderful site. Here's the first post. Here's a post with a catchy title -- We are the 5 %:

    I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what it means to be ‘privileged’ in this country. I also leave you with this question: If the census takers had asked each one of these households, what ‘class’ of society they thought they belonged to, or where they fit in within the income distribution, what do you think their response would have been ( and by ‘their’, I also mean ‘our’)?

  2. NYTimes obituary: Robert G. Edwards Dies at 87; Changed Rules of Conception With First ‘Test Tube Baby’.

  3. Amy Freitag at Southern Fried Science: I’m a scientist. A social scientist. Please opine on the validity of my discipline.

  4. Jenny Rohn at Occam's Corner: Show me the money: is grant writing taking over science?

2 Comments:

  1. gaddeswarup said...

    Abi,
    The post about five percent is a surprise. I thought that it would be more like twenty to thirty percent. May be computer makes a difference. I know a lot of acquaintances in Andhra with assets of at least a crore of rupees, mainly in terms of house and land prices, who do not have personal computers.

  2. gaddeswarup said...

    Going through another post 'This is not about India or China' I find that America and Britain have declined with respect to India after 1979. When I was young US dollar was worth around three rupees and British pound about five rupees. I do not know what this signifies.
    Recently I found a poor relative broke his back and got free medical treatment under some government scheme. He is even getting a pension now even though he never worked. He essentially lived off his land and sold it bit by bit. Again, this is some thing which is not common in countries like USA, though such services are still available in Australia. Again I wonder how widespread this kind of benefits ate in India. Sometimes, I feel that India may not be doing all that badly but this is impression from a distance based on phone calls to friends and relatives.