Friday, February 03, 2006

Devine retribution?


Well, if you are someone who is easily offended, you should not be visiting this page in the Onion. It appears in "This Day in History" section, and has headlines that scream "India's Nationalist Leader Pummeled Senseless by Practitioners of British 'Violence' Movement." If you do go there, don't forget to look at the other headlines, too. Particularly, the 'editorial opinion' by a 'Lutheran Pastor'.

While there at the Onion, I was poking around this morning at some of the other stuff. I found this prediction for Gemini, my sunsign, for the week of February 1, 2006:

You've seen some disturbing displays of faith in your lifetime, but next week's encounter with a highly devout theoretical mathematician who expresses his love for Jesus Christ as an "unbounded dynamical system" takes the cake.

I'm terrified. Is this devine retribution for linking to this poem this morning?

Politicians' blogs and websites


Sometime ago, I saw (via slashdot) this story about American politicians who have their own blogs. One of the prominent ones Senator John Kerry, whose blog is a part of Daily Kos. Another one is Senator Barak Obama, one of the Democratic Party's rising stars.

Through Krishworld, I learnt of a few websites of some of our own politicans. Don't you want to know what our new Petroleum Minister (Murli Deora)'s website looks like? Sadly, it's quite basic. However, his son, Milind Deora, has a better website with some details that one may actually be interested in. For example, this page has info on the projects financed by his Local Area Development fund (worth 20 million rupees a year).

Harper Lee


While reading the interview of Harper Lee, the author of To kill a mockingbird, I realized that it was a part of a very nice website dedicated to her. The website has been so lovingly put together by Jane Kansas, and has tons of (neatly organized) information, together with the other writings of Harper Lee.

For example, I found this 'foreword' by her to the the 35th anniversary edition of Mockingbird, except that was a letter she wrote to her agent protesting that she didn't want one! "Introductions inhibit pleasure", she says, "they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity".

Do check out the entire site. It's a must see for all fans of Mockingbird.

"What gets measured, gets done"


This is how Ashok Kamath starts this India Together article about the recently released first Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER). The massive survey, meant to determine the outcomes of our school system, was conducted by Pratham, a network of social missions to achieve universal primary education in India. The survey itself is a pretty impressive affair:

Between Nov 11 and Dec 18, volunteers visited randomly picked villages in each district of India and surveyed 20 randomly chosen households in each village. In each household, children in the age group of 6-14 years were interviewed and tested for basic reading, writing, and arithmetic on a one-on-one basis. In all, Pratham and its partners surveyed nearly 6 lakh children in 2.4 lakh households from 12,000 villages in 525 rural districts.

As Kamath says, "the entire exercise was conducted by a total of 776 NGOs and institutions from all over the country." And, Kamath himself is with Akshara, a Bangalore based NGO that partnered with Pratham on this survey.

The full report is here. Gurcharan Das devoted an entire column in the Times of India last Sunday.

Some of the results are quite revealing:

This was not an elaborate survey but one that stuck to the basics: standard 2 competencies in language and math were tested for all children in the 6-14 years age group. [...]

[...]

It should both numb us and excite us that we have nearly 190 million children in the 6-14 years age group. What is exciting about this number is the tremendous human resources we have access to if we are able to train and tap this huge pool of young citizens; on the other hand what is numbing is that any statistic beyond this tells you that our problems are in the many millions. What do I mean? ASER says that 51.9% of children cannot read Standard 2 level material � this means 98 million children need remedial help in language. ASER says that 65.5% of the children cannot do division � this means that 124 million need remedial help in arithmetic.

Pratham and its partners have promised to return to this survey again next year, and the year after, and so on. They are right to shine the spotlight on learning outcomes and their measurement. Hats off to them.

Horror, prime mathematician, great novelist


The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

From this really, really great story by Carl Zimmer about an interesting species belonging to a class of "free-living organisms [that] have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision."

Link via Guru, a friend with an amazing range of interests. For example, he points us (in other posts) to a poem about a "mathematician who slept with his wife only on prime-numbered days", and to an interview with Harper Lee.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Economic value of rude waiters


Tim Harford has an interesting (and sometimes funny) article about a classy and expensive restaurant that employs rude waiters in its bar section (which is less expensive). He uses it as an example of some similar strategies used by companies such as IBM and Intel.

Arnold Kling on blogging


One way to distinguish a fad from a trend is to ask what would happen if you reversed the order in which technologies were invented. For example, suppose that we had all of the highly-touted electronic technologies for distance learning, and then someone came along and invented the book. My guess is that the book would be greeted as a technological marvel--easy to hold, convenient to carry, outstanding resolution, and so forth. This thought experiment leads me to suspect that electronic distance learning is a fad.

On the other hand, suppose that everyone had recordable DVD players (or DVD's with hard drives to record), and someone invented the VCR. Would anyone buy the VCR? If the answer is "no," then DVD's are not a fad.

Using this approach, Arnold Kling tries to answer the question Is Blogging a Fad?. He identifies some situations in which blogging it is good (i.e., not a fad), and others where it might not be so.

In defence of ...


...the minimum wage. This great post is by a blogger who calls himself 'Red', is a lawyer and a graduate student. Since I just discovered this blog, I lingered around; it has quite a few interesting posts, including a top 10 list of baddest women in movies! [in the December archive].

I must link to one other post: Techie boys' fantasies and women engineers. It has some jokes techie boys and girls tell about 'the other'. Along the way, I was pleasantly surprised to get a link to this really funny piece by a great friend.

So, there is indeed a price to going global!


The IIMs' freedom to go global did not come free. Not surprisingly, they have been told "opportunities for students in the country need to be expanded by increasing intake, creating additional infrastructure and introducing new courses."

Okay, some face-saving stuff was needed for each side to step away from the confrontation that they set themselves up for. The government asked for increased intake, and the IIMs agreed. Great, right?

It sounded great to me too, until I read this bit at the end of the report:

or the next academic session, nearly two lakh students have appeared for the common admission test (CAT). Of these, only 1,200 will finally make it to the six IIMs. Mr Singh also asked the IIMs to set up new campuses and programmes in the country. Professor Apte said that IIM-B proposed to increase its intake from the current level of 250 students to 300 in ’07. Similarly, IIM-Calcutta’s Shekhar Chaudhuri said IIM-C proposes to increase intake from 270 to 300 .

Just yesterday, I wrote about IIT-Kharagpur's plans for its intellectual property law program. Specifically, I said it was refreshing to see its creators think big, and talk about expanding the intake, within three years, to 800. My understanding is that, globally, the big guns in management (Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton) have huge graduating classes. Our own biggie in the private sector, the Indian School of Business, admitted 349 for its class of 2006 (according to this page). It has been in business for less than a decade! Business press keeps talking about its big plans to eventually go to some 700+ graduates every year.

Autonomy does have its price, but it's not too high!

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Namma Bengaluru ...


I knew it is a great and unique city. But I could never, ever have guessed it's so different from the other cities in India.

Why are American universities coming to India?


For a variety of economic, political and educational reasons, leaders of American colleges are finding it increasingly worth their time to visit India, where they are trying to attract more students, negotiate distance learning agreements, set up joint ventures and raise money.

India has long been a place of study for scholars of the region’s history, religions and cultures. And India has long been a major supplier of foreign students for American colleges, but the numbers have shot up dramatically in the last decade, such that India now sends more students to the United States than any other country and students from India now make up 14 percent of all foreign students in the United States (double the share of 10 years ago).

From this information-packed news story by Scott Jaschik over at Inside HigherEd.

India and the 100 dollar laptop


At a private breakfast meeting on the digital divide at the forum on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.

From this NYTimes report about two competing visions for how computing can reach the poor (via).

When I saw 'India' in that list of countries that were "close to a final commitment", my heart sank. This is terrible.

A country that does such a poor job of educating its kids (and particularly in its primary schools) should not be spending serious money on laptops. Look at it this way: 100 dollars or 4500 rupees is roughly the amount of money that our government spends on educating each child. When so many are out of our school system, shouldn't we be spending money to bring all these missing children back into our schools?

I wanna hold your hand ...


Lying in the jaws of an M.R.I. scanning machine and knowing that they would periodically receive a mild electric shock to an ankle, the women were noticeably apprehensive. Brain images showed peaks of activation in regions involved in anticipating pain, heightening physical arousal and regulating negative emotions, among other systems.

But the moment that they felt their husbands' hands — the men reached into the imaging machine — each woman's activity level plunged in all the regions gearing up for the threat. A stranger's hand also provided some comfort, though less so.

From this story in the New York Times.

Two great new blogs


On 30 January 2006, the 58th anniversary of the killing of the Mahatma, The Other India, a new collaborative blog, was born. It will feature contributions from Anand, Dilip, Shivam, Uma, and Vikrum. From the "About Us" page of this blog:

The vast number of homeless immigrants who pour into India’s metropolises every day and live in slums are the other half of a shining India. We know that India still remains deeply divided between its elites and its have-nots; a divide so great that much of the elite does not even see it, happily believing that the nation as a whole is on its way to superpower status. There is no doubt at all that economic liberalisation has helped a section of the economy, yet there is equally no doubt that there are faultlines in economic growth and equitability. Social rifts - such as those pertaining to caste and communal tensions - intersect in complex ways with the changing economic landscape.

This blog will attempt to explore that uncertain terrain. It will focus on the “other half” that is often ignored by a market-driven mainstream media. It will attempt to present a fuller picture of India and a fuller examination of issues of concern than what we normally see around us.

Considering the passion, commitment and intellectual firepower of the people behind this initiative (I am not even talking here about their great writing!), this blog promises to be a great venue for issues affecting the 'other India': India's poor and/or rural folks.

The other collaborative blog is Sthreeling, by a group of feminists (two women and three men):

... this blog is more about discussing the issues that feminism deals with, with as much of an Indian perspective as we* are able to bring in.

I look forward to great things from both these blogs. They are already on my Bloglines subscription list.

IIT-Kharagpur does some right things


There have been several calls for IITs to expand their footprint to include social sciences, by using their management schools as a nucleus. I'm not too sure if the other IITs are taking this proposal seriously, but IIT-Kharagpur is making some nifty moves indeed: Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law.

Not only are they planning an interesting venture, they are also thinking big.

According to Kalyan Chakravarti, project leader of the task force for setting up of the law school, the centre will start with 30-50 students for both courses. “There is lot of demand for people trained in IP law. Our five-year plan is to hike the intake to 500 and by eigth years reach 800 students. We will then move the school to Kolkata from Kharagpur,” he added.

This is something I really, really like (and I don't mean the proposed move to Kolkata!). Most government funded institutions have been rather diffident in increasing their intake of students. Wherever such an increase did take place, the institutions were taken to that decision kicking and screaming; even when it happened, the increase has been -- at best -- modest. In this scenario, the thinking of the top people behind the law school is very refreshing.