Obituary of the 100 Dollar Laptop

Way back in March 2014, OLPC News, which used to track all the OLPC-related news and developments, bid farewell to this pipe dream riding on poor people's money. Earlier this month, Adi Robertson penned a formal detailed obituary in The Verge: OLPC’S $100 laptop was going to change the world — Then it all went wrong. Buried deep within Robertson's essay (actually, right at its end), we find this:

There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education, though. Zamora points to some case studies for individual countries, and says OLPC wants to commission more comprehensive research in the future. But the organization has mostly focused on anecdotes and distribution numbers as markers of success. “OLPC was always very averse to measuring how well they were doing versus the traditional school system,” says Gros. “There have only been a very limited number of attempts to actually measure how well students were doing with OLPC versus not, because it was very hard to do.”

Ames thinks that OLPC’s high-profile failures helped temper the hype around ed-tech programs. “There was a lot of worry that OLPC would crash and take everything with it — that there would be no funding in [educational technology], there would be no funding in tech development,” says Ames. “I think ed-tech in particular can still really draw on some of the same tropes, and hasn’t fully learned the lessons that OLPC should have taught it. But both of those spaces did have to mature to some degree, and stop being quite so naive in their tech utopianism.” Non-OLPC student laptop programs are still contentious. Maine Governor Paul LePage trashed his state’s initiative as a “massive failure” in 2016, and while it’s still running, its results have been ambiguous and difficult to measure. Mitra’s Hole-in-the-Wall project won a $1 million TED prize in 2013, but critics say he still hasn’t published any rigorous studies of its effects. Bender isn’t convinced that Mitra’s minimalist computing project proved anything. “We already knew that kids could learn to use computers. They’ve been doing that since day one,” he says. “What the project did not demonstrate is that kids could use computers for learning.”

Ames says the real question isn’t whether laptop programs help students, but whether they’re more effective than other programs competing for the same money. “I think that given unlimited funding, absolutely ... Learning about technology is very important,” she says. “That said, there’s always a tradeoff. There’s always some project that will be defunded or de-emphasized as a result of this.”

Thirteen years ago, OLPC told the world that every child should get a laptop. It never stopped to prove that they needed one.

Links

• Avery Thompson in Popular Mechanics: 5 Simple Math Problems No One Can Solve. "Easy to understand, supremely difficult to prove."
• Jordana Cepelewicz in Nautilus: The Social Physics of Trump Tactics. [Published a couple of weeks before the US elections, its title could very well have been "Phase Diagram of Bad Ideas"].
• Joanna Rothkopf in Jezebel: Here's What Happens to Your Body When You Die [video; 10 minutes].

RIP, Ramesh Mahadevan

Ramesh Mahadevan, a close friend from my grad school days, passed away last night. I'm posting a quick note here to alert some of his friends who are also among this blog's readers.

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His hilarious take on the curious subculture of desi grad students in the US in the 1980s (originally posted at the soc.culture.indian group) earned him a huge fan following. Those of us who had the great fortune to interact with him personally also got to experience his sensitive and compassionate side. Personally, he has been a source of strength ever since we met way back in 1985. I'll miss him a lot.

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Ramesh has been mentioned in several posts here. Right at this moment, his website -- mahadevanramesh.net is not working, which is a pity; however, his blog has some of his writing since his return to India.

Links

1. Prem Panicker at Smoke Signals: RIP Jayakanthan.

2. Sriram V. at Madras Heritage and Carnatic Music: A Chola Gift to Chennai.

Vinod Mehta

Vinod Mehta, the founder-editor of Outlook, passed away a few days ago. Many obituaries have noted his courageous journalism, one of its high points being the release of the Radia tapes which, by all accounts, caused his exit from the editorship of the magazine. Many also noted his liberalism. Quite a few noted his staunch defence of secularism. I too remember him, and admire him, for all this and more. But what I admire him most for is his light touch -- exemplified by his Delhi Diary columns, one of which ended with this:

Spare Me the Parsimony
Among the two or three abusive e-mails I receive daily, there is usually some mention of my being born out of wedlock. You Parsi b****** is how they frequently describe me. India is a free country, so everyone is entitled to his/her opinion, but errors of fact must be corrected. Hate mailwallahs please note I am a Punjabi, not a Parsi.

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Here are some links: his recent interview, his month-long Twitter stream (created to promote his second book of autobiographical memoirs, Editor Unplugged), or the obituary penned by Arundhati Roy (almost all of whose non-fiction work appeared first in Mehta's magazine).

Oliver Sacks on His Last Months

He has recently learned that he has "multiple metastases in the liver," the kind of cancer that "cannot be halted." He has a detached, yet touching, article on "how [he plans] to live out the months that remain to me." Here's a section on some of his choices, and the reasons behind them:

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. [...]

Loneliness

On 24 June 2012, Lonesome George -- the last member of his subspecies of giant tortoises of Galapagos island -- died. The last years of his alone-ness attracted quite a bit of news coverage -- see, for example, this and this.

Lonesome George has been on my mind for several days since our 13-year old son has been researching the Galapagos tortoises for his holiday homework project (what a shitty concept!). And along comes this moving piece by Robert Krulwich the lone known survivor of a plant species in Namibia:

So What If It's Ugly? It Just Keeps On Going ...

Far, far, far away is a great place to be — if you want to stay marvelous. There is a plant, called Welwitschia mirabilis (mirabilis being Latin for marvelous), found only one place on Earth. You can get there, as artist/photographer Rachel Sussman did, by driving through the vast emptiness of the Namibian desert, the Namib Naukluft, in Africa.

Welwitschia, when you finally get to see one, sits apart. It's very alone. All its relatives, its cousins, nieces, nephews have died away. It is the last remaining plant in its genus, the last in its family, the last in its order. "No other organism on earth can lay such a claim to being 'one of its kind,' " writes biologist Richard Fortey. It comes from a community of plants that thrived more than 200 million years ago. All of them slowly vanished, except for Welwitschia. It has survived by doing very little, very, very slowly — sipping little wafts of dew in the early mornings, otherwise minding its own business, as the big, busy world goes by.

Links

1. Ashok Thakur, Secretary to the Government, Ministry of Human Resource Development: Despite teething troubles, new engineering admission process represents much-needed reforms.

   First, let's remember what the previous system meant for students and parents. At a personal level, my first realisation of the devaluation of school education came more than a decade ago when my son asked me if he could stop attending school classes and instead concentrate on coaching classes for the IIT-JEE exam.

2. Seema Singh: How we forgot Bhargava vs Padmanaban in the Bhagwati vs Sen spat:

   ... it could have ... benefited one and all if we had a “scientific” debate on the subject by some senior scientists. How about the most respectable pro-GM scientist G Padmanaban, professor emeritus and former director of IISc pitched against one of the founding fathers of biotechnology in India, Pushpa M Bhargava who is now one of the most ardent critics of the use of GM technology for solving some agri issues. Incidentally, the American journal Science organized a debate between the two a few months ago, conducted by editor Bruce Alberts. Alas, such debates don’t carry much charm for mainstream Indian media, both newspapers and magazines.

3. Ezra Klein on sexism in high places: Funny how gender never came up during Bernanke’s nomination. Or Greenspan’s. Or Volcker’s.

   See also Krugman's op-ed: Sex, Money, Gravitas.

4. Prof. Sukant Khurana: A Personal Tribute to Prof. Obaid Siddiqi.

5. MIT releases the report on Aaron Swartz case. See >The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed for a summary of its contents, and links to reactions.

Links

1. Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker's cartoon editor, picks ten of his favorites. Delightful stuff -- the set even includes one about Einstein's pillow talk.

   Mankoff's TED talk is pretty great too:

2. What it's like to get a national security letter -- an interview with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive ... and of the Wayback Machine, [... and] one of very few people in the United States who can talk about receiving a national-security letter."

3. Hmmm, extending the progression towards grimness, here are a couple of links: How not to die by Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic, and How do physicians and non-physicians want to die? by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images. We also linked to an earlier article by Ken Murray making similar arguments.

Links

All of them are about Aaron Swartz, his suicide, and its aftermath.

1. First, a video of the speech by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman at the Aaron Swartz Memorial in New York.

2. Lawrence Lessig in The Atlantic blog: Aaron's Law: Violating a Site's Terms of Service Should Not Land You in Jail.

3. Following strong criticism of MIT's role in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz (especially from Aaron's family), MIT President Rafael Reif has asked Prof. Hal Abelson to review "MIT's involvement" in "events arising from actions taken by Aaron Swartz to access JSTOR through the MIT computer network." Abelson has set the ball rolling with an open letter to the MIT community, and with a website where "you [the MIT community] can suggest questions and issues to guide this review and you can comment on the questions of others." [The website is open to public to view.]

Update: CNET reports that Aaron might not have faced the threat of decades of jail term if the Federal Prosecutor had not taken the case over.

Aaron Swartz

The news about Aaron Swarz's suicide comes as such a terrible shock. I have been following his career for several years now -- primarily through his blog posts, and articles about him at other places. His activism in the cause of free information and the open web has been as admirable as his technical wizardry and accomplishments were legendary.

There have been very moving tributes from his family and partner, and ex-lover. His friends -- Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig (1, 2), and Peter Eckersley (at EFF) -- talk about his generosity and intensity.

The federal lawsuit following Aaron's JSTOR hack at MIT has been mentioned by many. His family and partner are quite blunt:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

And so is Lawrence Lessig:

... if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

[...]

[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

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See also: Henry Farrell, Boing Boing for more links.

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Update: MIT's new president, Prof. Rafael Reif has asked for a thorough review of MIT's actions in the prosecution of Aaron:

I... t pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.

... I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took.

See also the reminiscences by danah boyd, Caleb Crain.

Improbable Careers of Materials Engineers

A fascinating bit (caught by Guru) from the obituary of Verghese Kurien, Milkman of India [thanks to Guru for this good catch]:

“What do you know about pasteurisation,” an interviewer asked the young man who had applied for a Government of India fellowship for a Masters in Engineering abroad. “Something to do with milk?” was the uncertain reply. The year was 1946. In his biography From Anand: The story of Verghese Kurien , M.V. Kamath recounts the story of how the youngster was selected to do a Masters in dairy engineering by a government committee that was impervious to his pleas that he be allowed to specialise in metallurgy instead.

As it turned out, Michigan State University did not have dairy engineering, and Verghese Kurien was able to do metallurgy and Physics. But when he came back to India in 1948, it was to a small and unknown village in Gujarat called Anand that he was sent, to work out his two-year bond at the Government creamery on a salary of Rs.600 per month. Hating his job, he waited impatiently for his fetters to loosen. That did not happen. What it did was that V. Kurien, by the conjunction of politics, nationalism and professional challenge, decided to stay on. He would transform rural India.

Verghese Kurien, who became a legend in his lifetime for building a cooperative movement that transformed the lives of poor farmers while making India self-reliant in milk production, died on Sunday in Nadiad at the age of 90. ... [Bold emphasis added]

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Update: I forgot to add a couple of other names to the list of materials engineers who are better known for their exploits / achievements in other fields: Manohar Parrikar (politics) and Sidin Vadukut (journalism).

"Notes from a Dragon Mom"

A very, very moving piece by Emily Rapp on parenting a child who she knows will likely die before his third birthday.

The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

[...]

I would walk through a tunnel of fire if it would save my son. I would take my chances on a stripped battlefield with a sling and a rock à la David and Goliath if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go.

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. [...]

Dr. Ken Murray on How Doctors Die

The subtitle -- It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be -- is a little cryptic, but these early paragraphs present a good summary of how doctors choose to live their last days, weeks and months:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

See also: Paula Span's post at The New Old Age blog at NYTimes:

Dr. Murray contends in his post that doctors know too much about the futility of aggressive end-of-life treatment to subject themselves to it. His argument is anecdotal, based on people he has known but lacking statistical underpinnings. “It’s a fair criticism,” he said.

But recently an alert reader e-mailed him a study, published in 2008 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, of more than 800 physicians who graduated from Johns Hopkins University between 1948 and 1964. Most had reached their late 60s and 70s, so questions about end-of-life treatment were not purely hypothetical.

Asked what treatment they would accept if they’d suffered irreversible brain damage that left them unable to speak or recognize people but was not terminal, the doctors overwhelmingly said they’d decline CPR, feeding tubes and a host of other common interventions. “So there is actual evidence about this,” Dr. Murray said, pleased.

Something interesting happened to me today

Blogger.com's algorithms have "identified [this blog] as a potential spam blog." See this page for a helpful definition of what spam blogs are. Among many things, it says, "[Spam blogs] can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site."

Ouch!   Looks like all those "Links ..." posts have triggered some suspicion.

The mail from Blogger.com folks informed me that a 20-day grace period is all I'll get for requesting a review, and that nasty consequences -- such as vaporization of this blog -- will follow if I fail to send in that request before that deadline.

So, I rushed and filed the request.

Until this problem is sorted out (which may take a day or two), Blogger.com is imposing on me the ignominy of having to fill out a "word verification" box to prove that I am not some automated bot that's spewing out this very post that I'm writing right now.

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This is not the first time for this humble blog to run into trouble; about a year ago, the Google gods thought it was an "attack site". I had to go through a few steps -- involving Google.com's webmaster tools -- to remedy that problem.

Links ...

1. Jonah Lehrer in Boston Globe: The Truth About Grit:

   Woody Allen once remarked that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” [Angela] Duckworth points out that it’s not enough to just show up; one must show up again and again and again. Sometimes it isn’t easy or fun to keep showing up. Success, however, requires nothing less. That’s why it takes grit.

   Much of the article revolves around the study of grit in Angela Duckworth's group; on her website, you can participate in the GRIT study.

2. Gary Laderman in Inside Higher Ed: The Death Guy:

   For the last decade or so I have taught a death and dying course at Emory University. When I first offered the course there were 8 or so students; last year when I taught it, 60 students enrolled. As a teacher it is supremely gratifying to know when you’ve truly nailed a class, and this class is a blast for me and for the students ... [who[ also teach me a thing or two each year.

   It works every year and yet for some misguided reason I thought it would be good to try something new for a change, and so I decided to teach religion and sexuality next term. I imagined it would be an easy shift from the one topic to the other. Now that I’m preparing the class, I’m already longing for the death lectures, site visits (Emory Hospital morgue; local funeral home; Oakland Cemetery; you get the picture), and lugubrious images. Ironically, I’m not too sure how to spice up the sex class.

3. Perri Klass in NYTimes: Stealing in Childhood Does Not a Criminal Make:

   ... [P]arents of most young children can be confident that stealing is a pretty routine behavior. “It might be unusual for a child to go through childhood without ever stealing anything, though the parent may not know,” Dr. Stein said. [...]

   So when we found the cache of stolen cash, I did ask my pediatrician, who told me, kindly, that this was strictly routine. Take it seriously, he said, talk about consequences, extract an apology, but don’t act as if you think it means your child is a criminal.

4. Jamil Salmi in Forbes.com: What Makes A University Great?

   The bottom line here is not that low and middle-income countries should abandon dreams to set up their own world-class universities. Instead, they ought to understand that there are trade-offs involved, and that they need not hurry. Most of the world's elite institutions began as small teaching colleges that over time, with financial stability and thoughtful leadership, grew into the envied institutions they are now.

5. This cartoon by Barry Deutsch on libertarian freedom is pretty fantastic.

Necropolises rebrand themselves

The dinner was first-class, with butlers serving hors d’oeuvres and the strains of “Blue Danube” tastefully muffling the festive din. This nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard an ill-fated ocean liner was the culmination of Titanic Day at Laurel Hill Cemetery, one of a growing number of historic cemeteries to rebrand themselves as destination necropolises for weekend tourists.

Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar.

More details in this story.

Tsunami: Two years later

Today marks the second anniversary of the huge South Asian Tsunami that consumed 230,000 lives and devastated the lives of millions more [see the pictures posted here to get an idea about the power of this particular tsunami]. In the Hindu, Gopal Raj updates us on the tsunami early warning system that will be in place by September 2007. Ramya Kannan has a story on the new inequalities created by the huge inflow of aid into the tsunami-hit areas of Tamil Nadu: those poor who were not affected by the tsunami are the have nots.

... A woman whose husband died at sea before the tsunami struck is only partly joking when she says: "Had he died during the tsunami, our family would have at least got the benefits!"

Kiruba offers an anecdote from Vani. [Via Bruno].

By a freaky coincidence, there was an earthquake off southwestern Taiwan; there were fears of a tsunami that could hit countries like the Philippines. Apparently, there's no danger.

Update: Shunya has a picture of the tsunami memorial at Kanyakumari where, he notes, over a thousand people died.

'How do you want to go out?'

In an admirable move, the Kannada movie icon Raj Kumar had pledged to donate his eyes on his death. When he died a few months ago, his family honoured his pledge. Narayana Nethralaya's chief, Dr. Bhujang Shetty, and his team did the eye-harvesting. [Full disclosure: Padma, my wife, is a consultant at NN.] Among cine stars, I know Kamal Haasan insists that the members of his Fan Club must pledge to donate their eyes.

Well, this is the limit of my imagination about what people might want to do with their 'bodies' after their death: donate their bodies to be used for some medical purpose or the other. To my great surprise, I found the following in Janet Stemwedel's review of Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's book Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death:

... [It] is a book whose author shares her surprise at some of the non-standard ways for dealing with human remains. Want to be mummified? Get in touch with Corky Ra to prepay (and get your $60K ready). If you feel a connection to the sea, you can get your ashes scattered over it (helping a pilot make ends meet in a post-9/11 world), or, you can have your ashes mixed with cement and cast into a "reef ball", then placed in the sea as part of a reef-building program. Want to help protect open space? Arrange to be buried in a "green cemetary" frequented by hikers and protected by developers. (Also, if you want to be good fertilizer for the native plants, opt for whole-body burial -- hold the embalming -- rather than cremation.) A bit of an exhibitionist? Perhaps you'd like to sign up for post-mortem plastination so you can tour with a "Body Worlds" exhibit.

Or maybe you'd like your ashes to be pressed into diamonds. [...]

Fascinating stuff!

Quit smoking ...

Over at Cyborg's Contemplative Corner, Swati is moved by recent news about the terminal illness of a dear one to write a strongly worded post urging smokers to quit smoking. The combined effect of reason and emotion in her post is powerful indeed.

Let's get this straight: THERE IS NOTHING COOL STYLISH OR TRENDY ABOUT SMOKING.Those who in a fit of mistaken bravado continue to smoke in the face of overwhelming evidence about the harm it causes have absolutely no idea of the misery of being afflicted with a deadly disease. Both for themselves, and for their family members. They have no idea of the excruciating physical pain of cancer and its treatments, and the emotional pain of dealing with terminal illness in the prime of life. ...

if you continue smoking, there's a 50 per cent chance that you will die of a smoking related illness. None of us would ever drive a car which has a 50 per cent chance of spontaneously catching fire. None of us would ever consume food with a 50 per cent chance of poisoning you. And yet, many of us would continue smoking, oblivious to the grave risk it poses to ourselves and those around us.