The Kama Sutra of reading

Here.

Tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean region

Nature reports:

The state-of-the-art system, set up and coordinated by the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), consists of a seismic network, a set of buoys deployed throughout the Indian Ocean, and several deep-ocean pressure centres that measure the power and propagation of waves.

All data are transmitted in real time to the existing tsunami warning centres in Japan and Hawaii, which have traditionally focussed on the Pacific. If a potentially tsunami-generating quake occurs in the Indian Ocean, these centres will issue a warning to the authorities in 24 countries around the Indian Ocean. Four countries, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are not yet linked into the system. ...

But these countries still need to find the best way to get the information out to the people. If a tsunami were to strike tonight, millions living near beaches around the Indian Ocean would still not be alerted in time, says UNESCO spokeswoman Sue Williams.

"It is the last and crucial mile which is still missing," she says. "Some countries, such as Australia, India and Malaysia, are more active than others. But we are not sure how many do actually have the capacity of warning people before a tsunami hits the beach." Coastal populations could be warned by sirens, for example.

Paul Graham on ...

...choosing good things to copy:

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through? That's what you really like.

Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

Nanotech research in India

[Even] with the NSTI [the Nano Science and Technology Initiative] in place, the level of funding has been sub-critical as compared to China with which India inevitably tends to be compared. In 2002, for example, compared to China's $200 million, India spent a mere Rs.15 crores. Over the four and a half years of the NSTI, a total of about Rs.120 crores has been spent, much of which has gone towards basic research projects and related infrastructure, the implementation of which is overseen by a National Expert Committee headed by C.N.R. Rao. ...

Besides funding about 100 basic science projects to date (worth about Rs.60 crores), part of the money (about Rs.20 crores) has gone towards establishing six centres for nanoscience at institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and the different IITs, six centres for nanotechnology each aimed at producing a product or a device within a reasonable time-frame and two national instrumentation/characterisation facilities. In all, 14 national institutions, including seven IITs, and 10 universities have been supported under the NSTI.

Pay no attention to the howler in that last sentence, and do read this Frontline article by R. Ramachandran on the state of nanoscience and nanotechnology research in India. [Thanks to Pradeepkumar for the e-mail alert.]

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Cross-posted at nanopolitan 2.0 (where there has been some activity lately); comments are welcome there.

Business Today's B-School Ranking

Madhukar Shukla gives this year's B-school ranking by Business Today something it deserves: a thorough fisking. Check it out.

When gurukul met cybernetics ...

... the result was this software:

This is the fourth generation knowledge transfer system which combines the gurukul system of education and book-based teaching, Vasanth told PTI adding that it maps the student's mind 18 times per second to work out a strategy.

"After mapping his activities, it tells the student what time of the day he is most attentive and formulates a strategy for preparations," he said.

The software evaluates the student's lack of subject- wise knowledge and its remedial teaching technologies and provides optimal learning from a huge knowledge bank compiled by 60 full-time professors, according to Vasanth.

It does all this; but it can do even more!

On the basis of its evaluation, the software may even advise a student not to take a particular examination.

In case you are wondering, this software is called 'CLEaRS,' acronym for Compuertised Learning, Evaluation and Review System.

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Thanks to Apurva Mathad for the e-mail alert.

New Yorker's review of The Long Tail

Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail has been reviewed by John Cassidy for the New Yorker. Let me excerpt the part that puts the Long Tail pheonmenon in perspective:

All this is snappily argued and thought-provoking, if not quite as original as Anderson’s publishers would have us believe. Back in 1980, another futurologist, Alvin Toffler, anticipated the “de-massifying” of society in his best-selling book “The Third Wave” (Bantam; $7.99), which is still in print. “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation and entertainment,” Toffler said in a 1999 interview. But no longer: “The era of mass society is over. . . . No more mass production. No more mass consumption. . . . No more mass entertainment.”

Not only did Toffler, writing a decade before the advent of the World Wide Web, recognize information as the basic resource of the modern economy; he also discussed concepts like knowledge workers, customization, peer production, and several other “big-think” concepts that are still providing stories for magazines like Wired, Fast Company, Business 2.0, and, indeed, The New Yorker. The Internet has accelerated the trends that Toffler identified, but that’s not news, either. In 1998, Kevin Kelly, a technology writer who also worked for Wired, published a book called “New Rules for the New Economy,” in which he described the emerging order thus: “Niche production, niche consumption, niche diversion, niche education. Niche World.”

The real novelty of Anderson’s book is not his thesis but its representation in the form of a neat, readily graspable picture: the long-tail curve. For decades, economists and scientists have been using this graph, which is formally known as a power-law distribution, to describe things like the distribution of wealth or the relative size of cities. By applying the long tail to the online world, Anderson brings intellectual order to what often looks like pointless activity. ...

The best sentence in the review:

Even in the online era, to be human is to follow the herd.

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A quick summary of the Long Tail phenonmeon is available at Anderson's blog. The original Wired article is here.

Daniel Gilbert on the psychology of threat perceptions

The editors of the Los Angeles Times asked Danil Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness:

... [For] some reason [people] don’t seem to get bent out of shape over global warming. What can psychology tell us about that?

Gilbert says on his blog:

I don’t know if I’d ever thought about this question consciously before, but I must have been thinking about it unconsciously for quite some time because once the question was posed, the answers came quickly. ... I keep having the odd thought that I will someday look back on this and realize that it was the only important thing I ever wrote.

The LATimes column that was born out of this exercise is available in the same post. In it, Gilbert identifies four possible reasons for why we don't take global warning seriously, even though the odds of lower Manhattan turning into an aquarium (due to global warming) are "better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb". Here's the first one:

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That’s why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn’t. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.

Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Greater accountability through a school-based cadre of teachers

One of the key problems that many studies and surveys have (repeatedly) identified in our system of primary education (see here, here, here) is the lack of accountability that the teachers should be held to. The underlying reason is also fairly clear: control over how a public school functions is not with the people it serves, but with a bunch of bureaucrats at the district and state levels. Urmi Goswami of the Economic Times reports on a proposed move that could help make teachers more accountable:

The Centre’s Model Right to Education Bill, ‘06, which will have to be adopted by all states, has made it mandatory for all government-run schools to move to a system of school-based cadres. Besides curbing absenteeism, this provision of the Bill is expected to deal with politicisation of teacher transfers.

A school-based cadre would mean that teachers would be appointed by the school as per its requirements, and that these teachers will not be able to seek transfers to another school. A school-based cadre would mean that school authorities and the local community which is involved in the school management committee would have greater control on the teacher.

This would mean that teachers would be accountable to the school and community and not to a faraway authority. At present, state or district authorities recruit regular teachers and place them in schools without regard for specific needs of any institution.

Monsoon forecasts

Technology is coming to the rescue of the beleaguered India Meteorological Department (IMD) to perfect the monsoon prediction system in the country. The weather office is working in collaboration with Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune; Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad; and Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation, Bangalore, to fine-tune the forecasting system. The mandate is to put in place an integrated method for studying the weather. Based on advanced technology, a dynamic model is being developed in collaboration with IISc — a welcome change from the present statistical model that is prone to inaccurate prediction.

From this story in the Financial Express. Given what happened   last year, IMD seems to have learned its lessons, and is doing the right thing by collaborating with other organizations.

Nanopolitan Saves Your Soul!

That was one of the advertising slogans dished out by the Automatic Slogan Generator for this blog. Most of its slogans are inane, and appear to be rehashed and remixed versions from ancient advertisements with expired copyrights. Still, some of them can make you smile. Like this:

Choosy Mothers Choose Nanopolitan.

Yeah, I know it's not as great as Pharyngula's.

What is the biggest lie about blogging?

High-profile bloggers give their answers. Here.

I found two that are worth quoting here. Here's the first:

Oh for sure, it's this: That people care what you say. They don't. They care what they get.
-- Seth Godin.

Here's the second, a comment by Jonathan Kranz:

I don't know what the biggest lie about blogging is, but I think I have a handle on the biggest truth:

What's the most-discussed, most-heated, most-commented-upon subject in the blogosphere? Blogging itself...

Look at the Daily Fix, for example: no other topic generates as many comments or sends as many bloggers, descending like Hitchcock's "Birds," upon this site.

Bloggers are interested in blogging.

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Hat tip: Chugs.

Website Vaastu: "Air is the HTML!"

Who knew?

Just as the world comprises of the five basic elements, each Website has five elements and these need to be in balance with one another. Earth is the layout, fire is the color, air is the HTML, space is name of the Website, and water is the font and graphics. ... [E]ach must be chosen carefully and strike a balance with the other.

If that technical wizardry doesn't get a buy-in at the highest level, this should:

... [A] Website that is not designed according to Vaastu rules will have few hits and will negatively affect the business.

So, memorize this rule: "Air is the HTML!"

A pioneer: Dakshina Kannada Police blog

The India Beats section (which "features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary"!) in today's Hindu has an interesting article about the blog of the Dakshina Kannada Police Department with posts by Mr. B. Dayananda, the Department's Superintendent of Police (the story features his picture, too!).

I had written about the DKPD blog twice: here and here.

While the use of technology is but natural in an IT-driven world, what makes the story of these blogs interesting is that it has sparked off a mini war in the cyber world. It all started when Associated Press carried an e-mail interview with B. Dayananda, Superintendent of Police, Dakshina Kannada district about the police blog started by him.

The AP report, picked up by newspapers in the United States, while making a passing reference to the DK police blog anointed the LAPD blog as the first one to come from the police force of a major U.S. city. The Boston Police, who reminded its citizens that bpdnews.com was launched on November 5, 2005, much earlier than the other two blogs, however, politely contested this.

So who was the first?

In a posting under the title "Still First in the Nation", bpdnews.com states, "So far as we can tell, this (blog launched in November 2005) makes us the first law enforcement blog anywhere (We apparently beat Mangalore, India, by a few weeks). If you know of an official police blog that was launched sooner, please let us know. Till then, we're happy to be known as the First in the Nation."

The report also goes on to say that this trend is catching on in Karnataka:

Now, even the Chitradurga and Udupi district police have followed suit by starting their blogs on April 23 and June 18 respectively. The latest entrants are just warming up to the task of blogging and their numbers are only expected to rise.

Deborah Tannen recounts her 'Blank Noise' moment ...

... in this NYTimes op-ed, which could well have been her entry to the recently concluded Blank Noise Blog-a-thon project.

After recounting her experience in a crowded train, Tannen goes on to compare the reactions of NYCity women to such violations with those of Greek women in Athens. She identifies one major difference:

The experiences the Greek women described were similar to those I'd heard from Americans. But there was a difference. Most of the American women — like those recently interviewed in the New York news media — told me they had felt humiliated and helpless and had done or said nothing. Of the 25 stories Greek women told me, only eight concluded with the speaker doing nothing. In the others, she said she had yelled, struck back or both.

What cultural differences could explain this huge difference in the American and Greek reactions to molestation? She offers two possibilities:

For one thing, most Greeks, like their Mediterranean neighbors, place value on expressiveness, whereas American culture is influenced by the Northern European and British emphasis on public decorum. That's why Americans often mistake animated Greek conversation for argument. Another cultural difference is how readily strangers get involved in others' interactions. I once saw two men arguing on an Athens street; when one raised his hand to strike, he was immediately restrained by a passer-by.