Sunday, July 30, 2006

A new kind of evolution


The NYTimes has a great article (first in a series) about how different the present-day humans are compared to those who lived just a hundred years ago. The studies mentioned in the article are all about the US and other Western countries, but the conclusions are valid for other populations too.

New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.

“What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging,” said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.

An outrage comes to an end


It is atrocious that our media even dared to 'announce' -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that Prof. V.S. Arunachalam (former Scientific Advisor to the Defence Minister) was the 'mole' mentioned by Jaswant Singh in his recent book; such an outrage could never have happened in a country with strong libel laws. This episode must surely count as among our media's darkest.

Do read this HT column by Arunachalam to get a feel for what he and his family went through:

... [T]he front gate had to be locked to prevent people invading our privacy. That didn’t stop a few overzealous cameramen and reporters from squatting outside hoping for some sensational developments. What then followed could only be described as pure nightmare. I was left scrambling with all the phones at home ringing incessantly and all asking the same questions about my alleged betrayal. My factual denials didn’t satisfy. With nothing to hide, I decided to stay at home, despite a few well meaning friends advising me otherwise. In hindsight, I wish I had done that at least for the sake of my family members. On seeing all the calls and people waiting outside, my sister, a heart patient had a few episodes of pain and all I could pray was that the tablets stashed under the tongue would work their magic. My son who took all the calls in the night, refusing to even think that his father was a traitor, was a broken young man in the morning after hearing numerous summary judgments from speculators and sensationalist media-men.

The ordeal ended only after Jaswant Singh 'clarified' that "it was irresponsible to accuse me." Here's the concluding paragraph from Arunachalam's piece:

Many years ago, I stood before President Venkataraman in the hallowed hall of Rashtrapati Bhavan receiving one of the nation’s highest honours. Yet a few days ago, because of a whodunit gone awry, I was being accused by zealots of unspeakable crimes against my country. I now know the transience of such recognitions: “We are all naked when faced with the absurd”.

The man with a capitalist mind and a socialist heart


Um, that would be N.R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys' co-founder and chief mentor.

You used to be a socialist who gave your money away. How does that go with heading a captialist organisation, doing business with America?

When I left the French software company where I first worked, I kept $450 for hitchhiking from Paris to Mysore, and donated the rest to the organisation "Brothers of the Third World".

I'm a capitalist in mind, a socialist at heart — a compassionate capitalist, because we need clear thinking about the creation of wealth and jobs. But for those of us who live in a poor country where the gap between the haves and have-nots is large, where suffering is visible, we need to have our hearts in the right place.

I see no conflict in being a capitalist and a socialist at the same time. As Bernard Shaw said, "If you're not an idealist in your 20s you have no heart, if you're an idealist in your 40s you have no brain."

Murthy has already announced that he will retire from his role as the chief mentor at Infosys. What does he plan to do?

I'm on the boards of several companies and universities worldwide. As it is, I spend a week each month in the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, and India. I'll continue to do that and may spend most of my Indian time at our Global Education Centre in Mysore among young people — they energise me. Youth is about confidence, enthusiasm, big dreams, new ideas, openness. Teaching is my primary interest — I have offers from well-known business schools. My son, who's doing his Ph. D. at Harvard, thinks I should do one, too! I'll read a lot. I'll be the non-executive chairman of Infosys, in charge of the board, responsible for governance — ensuring our value system remains intact. I'll go there once a month, retain an office there — but in another building.

And, no, he doesn't plan to run for public office.

... I know my limitations. Managing people with homogeneous backgrounds and aspirations is not the same as managing a country with such multiple divides — rich and poor, educated and illiterate, urban and rural.

* * *

Do read this interview from six years ago in which he describes his transformation from a 'staunch leftist' to a 'compassionate capitalist'.

What prompted your change of heart from being a staunch leftist?

After my Paris stay, I donated my earnings and with $450 in my pocket decided to return home overland. I came to Nis, a border town between the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to take the Sofia Express. I struck up conversation with a girl in the compartment. After about 45 minutes the train stopped, the police took the girl away, ransacked my backpack, and put me in a room that had no mattress and a window 10 ft high. They kept me there for 60 hours after which they freed me saying that since I was from a friendly country they were letting me go. I felt that if this system treats friends this way then I did not want anything to do with it. This experience really shook me.

So the socialist in you became a committed capitalist?

I am a 100% free marketeer but I call myself a compassionate capitalist. While I’m very conservative in economic matters I’m very liberal about social matters. But I have no illusions about socialism. In a country like India, when we have to make capitalism an attractive alternative to people, it is extremely important for us to show tremendous compassion to the less fortunate. That doesn’t mean that you should give jobs to people who don’t deserve them or that you should make less profits but wherever you can show compassion you should.

Gunslingers with itchy trigger fingers


That's how Businessweek described bloggers in its story on corporate blogging. Take a look:

... [E]stablishing a corporate blog is not a risk-free proposition. The blogosphere is full of quasi-journalistic gunslingers with anticorporate leanings and itchy trigger fingers. If your blog falls afoul of their unwritten code—as it almost surely will—they'll shoot first and think later. Having a blog can actually make your company a more inviting target.

Interestingly, the story begins with pitfalls of corporate blogging, and only after recounting some scary stories does it move on to what the possible advantages might be.

... By providing companies with unvarnished feedback from customers, it can serve as an early-warning system for product or service problems. It can also provide an easy and inexpensive way to deliver specialized information to narrow segments of the market. And because subscribing to a blog is a snap, it can be a great way to distribute technical updates, new product announcements, and other periodic messages.

It's a pity the article doesn't mention the Official Google Blog. Google uses it to announce product launches, feature launches, and programming contests. It also uses it to get across its views on important policies, and legal and regulatory battles. When it also throws in occasional feel-good stories and medical advice for geeks, the effect is about right. Sure, it's a tightly controlled blog, but you wouldn't want some itchy-fingered' blogger taking over your company's blog and making a mess of it, would you?

Saturday, July 29, 2006

The expert mind - Part Deux


How to be an expert on anything by Stephen Colbert, whose expertise, in such fields as Civil Lights, is legendary.

The expert mind


In the latest issue of Scientific American, Philip E. Ross presents an overview of what we know about the Expert Mind, culled from decades of research on chess (which he calls the Drosophila of cognitive science). Here are some of the key conclusions:

The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones...

... [T]he expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge ...

... [E]xperts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis ...

... [A]bility in one area tends not to transfer to another.

... [I]t takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. [Herbert] Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others. ...

... [K. Anders] Ericsson [whose views on expertise was linked to here] eargues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. ...

... [M]otivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families. ...

... [S]uccess builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation.

All of which lead to the ultimate conclusion:

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.

Designing the 100 dollar laptop


eWeek did a story (with pictures) sometime ago about the latest version of the 100 dollar laptop.

Technology Review did a story about the design of the laptop's human-powered generator.

Wired has a profile of Yves Béhar, the designer behind some of the nifty things in the 100 dollar laptop from the OLPC initiative.

Figuring out how to protect everything from dust and moisture was harder. Béhar replaced the traditional keyboard on Design Continuum’s model with a sealed rubber one and built a sensor right into the palm rest to eliminate the seam between it and the trackpad found on a regular laptop. Other problems: The USB ports were exposed to the elements, and a pair of radio antennas had to stay outside the machine. (The Media Lab wanted the antennas to have a half-mile range for building a city- or village-wide mesh network, with each laptop acting as a node.) Solving one problem solved the other: Béhar turned the antennas into a pair of playful “ears”that swivel up for reception or down to cover the laptop’s naked ports.

“Everything on the laptop serves at least two purposes,” he says.

There are at least two places where Wired sounds skeptical of the whole OLPC initiative:

... Depending on who you asked, it was either soon-to-be-legendary vaporware or a shortcut to modern education for tens of millions of poor kids around the world. [...]

If it succeeds, Béhar’s design will become an icon. If it fails, it will be something more like the first English-Esperanto dictionary – an artifact of ill-fated idealism.

The skepticism expressed in the Wired piece is about the technology, its feasibility and its acceptability. These technical problems may well be overcome, if a lot of smart minds (and money) are thrown at them. What I would question is the OLPC's strategy of selling the laptops directly to bureaucrats, but not to the actual users.

Finally, Nicholas Negroponte is quoted in the Wired story as saying that he is willing to delay the launch of the laptop until he is able to sell a self-imposed minimum of 5 million units. This is an interesting confession.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Just how competitive can scientists get?


Put yourself in the shoes of a young, hot-shot post-doc who has got several offers for a faculty position, including one from a Great University in your field. Naturally, you are keen on joining GU, except for one small glitch. GU also has a leading senior researcher -- a Nobel laureate, no less! -- with research interests that overlap yours considerably; the glitch is that this senior researcher is not keen on having you as a colleague. He says so in so many words in his e-mails (doc):

... I am afraid that accommodating your lab would be difficult.

... [As] you are very aware, two competing labs in the same building is something we should avoid by all means. Some people who are promoting your arrival here are ignoring this basic principle, but I don't believe that they are doing a service to you.

I am sorry, but I have to say to you that at present and under the present circumstances, I do not feel comfortable at all to have you here as a junior faculty colleague. ... I am most happy to support you if you and I are going to work with some distance between us.

What would you do? How would you react?

* * *

After thinking this over, do read these two reports in Boston Globe about the sordid saga that played itself out in MIT, involving a star neuroscientist (Alla Karpova) and a Nobel laureate (Susumu Tonegawa). Links via Inside Higher Ed (1, 2).

* * *

Cross-posted at nanopolitan 2.0

Vidya Subrahmaniam on communal harmony in Varanasi


Vidya Subrahmaniam has a two-part series in the Hindu on how Varanasi has been coping with the aftermath of the March 7 bomb blasts at the Sankat Mochan temple and at the railway station. In particular, the series emphasizes the stellar role played by two key religious leaders: Veer Bhadra Mishra (Mahant at the Sankat Mochan temple) and Maulana Abdul Batin Nomani (Mufti-e-Banaras). Some excerpts:

The Mahant's brilliant management of the blast aftermath is the talk of the town — resuming puja and aarti before nightfall, converting the evening bhajan to a shanti aur satbuddhi (peace and equanimity) prayer for communal harmony, and evicting those — Vinay Katiyar's entourage arrived to shouts of Har Har Mahadev and Jai Shri Ram — looking to stir the communal pot. To quote the Mahant, "Katiyar wanted to sit on a dharna and Advani wanted to start a rath yatra from the temple. I said nothing doing." For Muslims, the gallantry could come only from a true man of God, and with the Mufti responding in kind — swift and emphatic condemnation of the blasts followed by visits to the temple, hospitals, and appeals for calm — it was as if the floodgates had opened. Says Mahant Misra: "These days I'm very popular with Muslims. But I remind them that I'm not a neta." Yet the respect the two men command is, in fact, because they are not netas, because they foiled the politicisation of the blasts. If the Mahant has lost count of the invitations for Muslim seminars and festivities, the Mufti is a similar attraction at Hindu gatherings.

Today the Mahant and the Mufti, each a visionary in his own way, are local heroes whose communal spirit has spawned a rush of copycat gestures — on both sides. Consider the following: The temple city's showcase annual event is the Ram Katha Mandakini Shobha Yatra — an illuminated procession of motorboat-driven tableaux along the Ganga on Ram Navami day. The yatra is flagged off by Mahant Misra with a celebrity invited to be the chief guest. This year, there were two chief guests, the Mufti-e-Banaras and Noor Fatima, a practising criminal lawyer who last year built a temple in the city. A third attraction was Bismillah Khan's son, Mohammad Jamin Khan, who played the Ram dhun.

Yatra over, Varanasi was witness to a unique sight — of burqa-clad Muslim women taking to the streets, shouting "Khichdi hai saara Hindustan, alag na honge Hindu, Musalman (We are a composite people, no one can divide us) and "Muslim mahilaon ne thana hai, aatankwad mitana hai (it is our promise to end terrorism)." The chunauti rally (challenge rally) ended at the Sankat Mochan mandir where the women assembled at the very spot where the bombs had gone off and recited the hanuman chalisa. The same evening, the temple resounded to the strains of Hindustani classical music — again a composite annual festival. But this year the festival became a statement with the biggest names in music and dance turning up to support the Mahant — Birju Maharaj, Pandit Jasraj, Rajan and Sajan Misra, and so forth.

Subrahmaniam uses the famed Banaras silk sarees as a metaphor for the HIndu-Muslim harmony. In the second article, for example, we get this:

Most wholesalers are Hindu while most weavers are Muslim, and the six yards of shimmering silk is quite the metaphor for Varanasi's composite culture. Enter any shop, and you will hear paeans sung to the city's ganga-jamuni sanskriti (complementary like the Ganga and the Jamuna) and to the reshmi mizaz (gracious manner) of its people. "Kashi jahan banti hai yeh saadi, Hindu uska tana hai, Muslim uska bana hai (Kashi where the Banarasi saree is made, Hindu is its warp and Muslim its weft)," goes an ode to the intertwined lives of Varanasi's Hindus and Muslims. This is not made-in-Bollywood integration but integration born of proximity, interdependence, and of an understanding shaped by years of sharing each other's joys and sorrows, of celebrating holi and Id as secular festivals. In these parts, it is the Hindu wholesaler who hosts the Roza iftar during Ramzan.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

100 Dollar laptops: MHRD takes a sane stand


The Ministry of Human Resource Development has taken a lot of flak on the reservation front from almost all quarters; but it did get something right. And, that is to say a firm 'No' to the 'One Laptop Per Child' (OLPC) project aka the 100 Dollar Laptop project. Among the several arguments it has put together, this is probably the most important.

"It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds. ... It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.

Veteran readers of this humble blog would know that I have been a strong opponent of these low-priced laptops being dumped on the poor countries in millions -- at public expense. [I would welcome it if they are sold in the open market for individuals to buy for themselves/their children] What our poor children need are good schools, with real classrooms, real blackboards, real infrastructure (including toilets) and real teachers. In the absence of these real things on the ground, spending money on fancy gadgets is a cruel scam. I applaud the MHRD for putting its foot down and saying 'No'. I applaud them even more for this special touch:

It also finds it intriguing as to "why no developed country has been chosen" for MIT's OLPC experiment "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group".

Saturday, July 22, 2006

The popular -- but unknown -- Google artist


[Dennis Hwang] has been manipulating the six letters in the Google name into shamrocks, fireworks, hearts and goblins since shortly after he got an internship there in 2000. Company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin found out that he was an art major in college.

"They said 'Hey Dennis, why don't you give this a shot,' and I've been doing it ever since," he said.

From this CNN story about the man who has possibly the world's most enviable job: creating Google logos. The story also has a link to a slide show of his logos.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Blog block: A few more links


This time, the links are to commentary that treats the government's attempts to muzzle free speech at just the appropriate level of analysis: contempt and ridicule.

Gawker:

Goddamnit, can't the Indian government even indulge in some freedom-curtailing and dictatorial authoritarianism without skewering its dignity in the process? How can one trust a government to pursue and catch the perpetrators of the Mumbai bomb blasts when it can't even bring its ludicrously wrong-headed policies to a successful conclusion? Christ, these clowns can't even do the wrong things right. It's like the neighbourhood peeping Tom who climbs the wrong tree in front of the wrong house and spends the night trying to peep into the wrong window. Shit, this government sickens and embarasses me with its ineptitude.

Angry Fix:

BREAKING NEWS: angry fix has heard from reliable sources that birdsellers in Crawford Market are jubilant. Apparently, the demand for homing pigeons is skyrocketing.

A Crawford Market birdseller looking for pigeons he's not sold yet.

The more internet-savvy birdsellers claim to know the real reason behind the sudden surge, but they aren't telling.

When we contacted our friendly neighbourhood policeman, he said he believed the ban on blogs was the prime cause for the increase in demand for homing pigeons. He said terrorists, desperate to contact each other, and crippled by the ban on blocks, were forced to use homing pigeons. He said, not without a touch of pride, that terrorists, considerably cramped by the acute shortage of homing pigeons, have been thinking of using other alternatives (see below), but the other alternatives have been thinking otherwise.

Hawkeye:

Kabali Times Special Correspondent(s) Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, July 19 2006:

Home Minister of Government of India received a note from RAW stating that certain Small Intenstine Manipulating Individuals (SIMI), were using Internet 'addresses' to communicate among themselves. The RAW apparently were dissapointed to find that their agents constantly developed bowel movement problems after eating in the military canteen and wanted to communicate this to the minister. The Home Minister, who in school had never passed into a standard, where Social Studies actually diversified into Geography and History (but has a honorary PhD doctorate to cheat all his 23 grandchildren), assumed that the 'Internet' was a 'Madrasi' town near Vijayawada and sent a GOI notification that banned several addresses. This would prevent people from actually walking into/visiting several home addresses. Press agencies say that major colonies and suburban places have also been blocked off. All service providers were intimated of the government block notice. As a result in many places in Mumbai and Chennai - autos, trains and buses refused to travel to certain parts of the city.

Blog block: A few links


Dilip:

All well in god's own country? Sure enough. Except for one small detail. As I write this, the instructions to ban those few specified sites still stand.

Any anger about that? Should there be?

To my mind, of course. That's the point of all this, after all: the government's decision to shut down my access to some sites. (As, before, governments have decided to shut down my access to some books, some films, etc). The lifting of a stupid blanket ban, by itself, was never the point.

So any RTI queries, any legal action, any blogger anger, must focus, first, on getting government to explain exactly why and how it took this decision about these specific sites; second, on using that information to set up the framework that will prevent government from banning anything, and I mean anything.

Neha:

[Let us] remind ourselves that somebody sitting in the Government office has decided on your behalf that you are not capable of digesting some content online. I might wake up tomorrow and find just my blog blocked. I share my server with perhaps seventeen other websites. Some of you may notice tomorrow that you get strange errors on my page. You’ll come once, twice and maybe even an odd third time when you google for something. You’ll get irritated and never come again. I won’t have an army of bloggers to defend my rights then. Even suppose you are inordinately fond of reading me - you won’t find anyone to support your right to read. You may never realize that the blog is blocked because the government doesn’t even find it fit to tell you what is blocked. And let’s face it - one piddly little navel gazing blog isn’t going to make someone fish for a copy of a government note and fax it to anyone.

In the end - a drop will go missing from the ocean. Somebody somewhere will tsk away and say something about how it’s not censorship - just the state’s good intentions.

Ramnath:

i wonder how many of us would even have noticed that indian government had asked internet service providers to block some 20 urls, if it's not for technical incompetence of these isps, who ended up blocking thousands of them. i guess they would get around the problem sooner than later. after that, what?

Madhukar:

3-4 days back, when it became apparent that the Govt of India had once again asked India's 153 ISPs to block some internet sites, I had thought that I will start this post with a quote often attributed to Voltaire:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Unfortunately, I found soon that quoting Voltaire in this situation will be an anticlimax.

I realised that one was up against, not a conspiracy against freedom of speech/information, but plain ignorance and stupidity!!!

The Hindu:

Various forms of speech have been growing on the Internet to the discomfiture of governments, some of which have responded with broad restrictions on their dissemination through laws and technological barriers. The reasonableness of such curbs, which can only be the rare exception in an open society, depends on whether the banned material can cause immediate violence or harm. Such a principle may apply to some online activities such as child pornography and incitement to hate crimes of a direct nature. In general, though, free speech must remain unfettered and protected vigorously as one of the most prized of freedoms. The order of the DoT to the Internet Service Providers appears to meet none of the tests restricting the freedom of speech and smacks of arbitrariness.

Kingsley:

While following the groundswell of conversation that welled up among Indian bloggers (even a touching offer of help from Pakistan), something became frightfully clear: most of the people who were writing against censorship and for freedom believed in no such thing. I repeatedly came across messages that said “If the government wants to block a few websites, that’s alright, but blocking all of blogspot is terrible.” I have a name for these people, and it’s “free speech free riders“.

Kiran:

... It is perfectly natural that bloggers are more concerned about themselves than about a distant event. If you sat in a Mumbai train and listened to the conversation, we bet they’ll be talking about the bombings, not blogs.

If bloggers were talking about the bombings without either first-hand experience or new insight, that is when you should be calling them pretentious. The fallacy is in assuming that bloggers or the blogosphere have a greater purpose than navel-gazing.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Victory ...


... er, sort of. Shivam Vij informs us that the blog block will be lifted within a day (it has already happened for me!). I think we are all justified to feel hugely relieved.

But, this is only a partial victory. As Dilip and Neha have observed, the censorship is still on. Some sites are still being blocked, on the pretext that they have objectionable content. It's not clear who decides what's objectionable, and whether a blanket ban can be ordered without any due process (that would allow the content owners to offer their defence). [Let's not even get into the meaning of a 'ban' or a 'block' that is so laughably easy to circumvent ...]

Several applications under the Right to Information Act have been filed demanding why these sites were sought to be blocked in the first place. We should continue to support the people behind these moves.

Now, can this momentum be sustained in the fight for lifting the ban on the few sites that are still blocked? I certainly hope so. Getting to a "framework that will prevent government from banning anything" is, as Dilip says, "a huge goal, and it will take some doing to get there". I agree with him that it's worth fighting for.

* * *

Having said that, I would still say that this episode has done something quite invaluable. And that's to make issues such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press real and relevant to a set of people who are thought to be full of apathy: the youth. These freedoms are not some lofty ideals that talking heads discuss on TV; they have now become personal, and personally valuable to a huge number of people and, in particular, young, educated, tech-savvy people. And, this can only be a good thing.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Blogspot.com being blocked by some Indian ISPs?


It appears to be so. Mridula and Neha have the details.

At Mridula's suggestion, I called up the Spectranet's Call Centre in Delhi, and their agent told me that the Ministry of Communications had indeed sent a letter asking them to block the blogspot.com sites. He was unaware of the reasons behind this move.

So, blogspot-blocking is real, but appears (at least, as of now) to be localized. In Bangalore, for example, I have been able to access both my blogger account and blogs on the blogspot.com domain from my home, where I use BSNL dial-up.

If you have any clue about what's going on, do please head over to Mridula's blog and leave a comment. She has been following up on this one.