The Quotes of the Day feature on Google's personalized page is a treasure:
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."
-- Robert Wilensky
Sometime ago, this Tehelka story quoted me on the 100 dollar laptops (aka OLPC or the Children's Machine XO). Yesterday, I was asked to give my comments on the same topic for an NDTV show, and my soundbites were captured on camera. I have no idea if -- and how much of -- what I said will make it to the show.
So, on NDTV one of these days (and probably on a Sunday), you may see a grumpy man looking sternly into the camera and uttering some serious (but somewhat incoherent) stuff about the 100 dollar laptops.
You have been warned. You don't want to scare your children, do you?
In any event, here's something that I wanted to say, and I have no idea how well I said it (heck, I don't even know if I said all of it!):
There is a technology appropriate for educating young children. It's called school. Not just any old school, but a school with other supporting technologies such as a classroom, a teacher, a blackboard, and yes, a toilet. An unbelievably large fraction of our children don't have access to these basic and essential technologies. We must concentrate on reaching these essential technologies to our children. This should be our priority.
We must not forget that these basic things are like bread. And we are absolutely right to say 'no' when someone comes along and says, "let them eat cake", ... and proceeds to set up a cake shop!
Have you tried Google Reader? I have been using it for a while, and I recommend it. Its user interface is clean and pleasant, and its responses are quick. Adding new subscriptions is easy -- and fast!
Reader allows me to scan my subscriptions, and add a 'star' to items. Similarly, if I find something worth linking to here, or at DesiPundit , I add a tag to it. I can revisit these tagged or starred items whenever I find time. My initial scan takes a surprisingly short time -- typically, just a few minutes.
I'm gradually migrating my subscriptions from BlogLines which, with its frames-based user interface, isn't as quick as Reader.
A nice features in Reader allows me to "share" some of the items I like, and they get added -- magically -- to a blog-like site (with a clunky URL!) that anyone can read. More importantly, Reader also provides a short javascript code that I can embed here in my blog, which displays a box with my "shared" links. It's sort of like a 'link blog', and I have added it in the sidebar.
Here's one feature that I would really like: within a particular feed (or a set of feeds), I would like to read only the "starred" items. I guess I want Reader to display items with two (or more) tags.
That's the tentative title of a coffee-table book by Natasha, IISc's very own award-winning wildlife photographer. Her book's theme? The amazing and wonderful biodiversity in the IISc campus.
The book follows a somewhat alternative view to biodiversity. As opposed to following the idea of taxa as many do, it follows the idea of process, a more mechanistic view. It would be interesting to a wider audience I think. A few of the chapters I plan are: 'Food', 'Water', ' Sex' , 'Babies'. Its largely going to be in a coffee table format, while the text will be engaging, well researched, you won't really need it to enjoy this book. The books about photographs!
And Natasha's seeking help/suggestions:
I've put up a chapter here so you can get a better idea of what it will look like. Here's what I would like you to do, please pass this on! Particularly to any IIScian / exIIScian you know, but everyone really! And please let me know what you think, I would really really appreciate the feedback! Quite a bit about this book is open, including the title, so feel free to suggest one!
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
That's a quote from "the maverick American cultural theorist Kenneth Burke", and I took it from this essay on academic blogging by Scott McLemee. Among other things, the essay also reveals the identity of Bitch Ph.D. -- with her permission, of course.
I received this bit of geeky humour through e-mail today from a friend:
Teacher arrested in New York
NEW YORK -- A public school teacher was arrested today at JFK Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
"Al-gebra is a problem for US," Gonzales said. "They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'There are 3 sides to every triangle'."
When asked to comment on the arrest, George W. Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."
Aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President.
Does anyone know the original source?
What's the difference? In a fascinating New Yorker article Malcolm Gladwell explains:
The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.
The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.
He then uses the rest of the article to argue that Enron was essentially a mystery that threw too much information at people, essentially challenging them to unmask it.
Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have any special training. They were in their twenties at the time of Watergate. In “All the President’s Men,” they even joke about their inexperience: Woodward’s expertise was mainly in office politics; Bernstein was a college dropout. But it hardly mattered, because coverups, whistle-blowers, secret tapes, and exposés—the principal elements of the puzzle—all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight. Woodward and Bernstein would never have broken the Enron story.
“There have been scandals in corporate history where people are really making stuff up, but this wasn’t a criminal enterprise of that kind,” Macey says. “Enron was vanishingly close, in my view, to having complied with the accounting rules. They were going over the edge, just a little bit. And this kind of financial fraud—where people are simply stretching the truth—falls into the area that analysts and short-sellers are supposed to ferret out. The truth wasn’t hidden. But you’d have to look at their financial statements, and you would have to say to yourself, What’s that about? It’s almost as if they were saying, ‘We’re doing some really sleazy stuff in footnote 42, and if you want to know more about it ask us.’ And that’s the thing. Nobody did.” [...]
... Mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. Because if you can’t find the truth in a mystery—even a mystery shrouded in propaganda—it’s not just the fault of the propagandist. It’s your fault as well.
Update: Over at Orgtheory.net, Brayden King looks at educational implications of Gladwell's article:
As educators, many of us try to teach our students how to do both of these things. Teaching students to find the right information is hard enough, but I’m finding lately that teaching students how to solve mysteries is the real challenge. However, in my estimation it is the most important skill that any student can learn. Students need to learn how to put together all of the right information to make the right inferences. [...]
But if Gladwell nd the Time article are correct (which I think they are), mystery solvers will be those individuals who benefit the most in our information age. We just have to figure out how to help students realize the importance of it and come up with better ways to apply it in the classroom.
How many of these award-winning Web 2.0 and social networking sites have you even heard of?
Web 2.0 is a different country. In my present state, I think I will flunk the visa interview ...
The National Knowledge Commission [update: the website address has changed] has weighed in on our higher education system:
India will need 1,500 universities to attain a gross enrolment ratio of at least 15 per cent by 2015. This is a key observation made by the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) in its note to the Prime Minister on higher education.
Stating that opportunities for higher education "are simply not enough in relation to our needs," the NKC has called for a massive expansion of opportunities.
As of today, there are about 350 universities. "This number is simply not enough with reference to our needs in higher education or in comparison with China, which authorised the creation of 1,250 new universities in the last three years," the commission has noted. It pointed out that only seven per cent of the population in the 18-24 age group has access to higher education.
NKC's note to the Prime Minister (is this note online, by any chance?) makes familiar demands on certain things. Government expenditure of 1.5 percent of GDP on higher education, for example (I don't know where we stand today). On certain other things, it has made some new suggestions (they are 'new' for an official body, but they have been around for a while now):
While the focus should be on setting up new universities, some clusters of affiliated colleges could be turned into universities, a move that will require changes in the regulatory mechanism. For this, the NKC has suggested creation of an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education.
At the same time, it says, some universities are much too large for ensuring academic standards and good governance. "We need to create more appropriately scaled and more nimble universities. The moral of the story is that we need not only a much larger number of universities ... but also smaller universities which are responsive to change and easier to manage."
It will be interesting to watch how our Prime Minister responds to these preliminary suggestions.
I'm sure you have heard about the faculty crunch in our academic institutions, including high profile ones such as the IITs. The latest assertion about this crunch came from our President himself: "it is ironical that the IIT, which is mandated to produce the best minds for teaching and research is unable to attract the best faculty today." However, a recent e-mail from a faculty aspirant -- a friend who's a post-doc at a top university in the West -- left me devastated and utterly speechless. With his permission, I'm sharing his e-mail, edited to protect the identities of the persons and institutions involved.
I can personally tell you my experiences which are not that encouraging. So far I have applied to three places in India. ... I had sent a formal application to [Institution One] when they advertised [for a position some months ago]. The deadline was [sometime in the following month]. ... My profile exactly matched that position. Unfortunately, till today I haven't got even an acknowledgment from them. I know that they had received my application because I Fedexed it also I asked my referees to send the recommendation letters. I felt very bad about their attitude.
From [Institution Two] I got a response saying that I should visit them during my trip to India. I wrote them in [a few months ago] stating that I am coming to India the following month. They replied after a week saying that they don't have free slots during that entire month! I felt that if they really want to talk to me they should have invited me for one Saturday. ... The deadline [for Institution Three] was [sometime ago] and ... it's too early to get a response from them. [...]
Another interesting story. ... Some months ago, I wrote a mail to [a senior scientist] asking some advice from him about my possibilities of finding a position in India. Basically I asked him which Institutes I should try etc.. Since he understands my field well I attached my CV and summary of current and proposed research. He never replied! However, few weeks later I [saw him] crying about the shortage scientific professionals in India. I found such talks are highly hypocritical.
My Ph.D. colleague from [Country X] who is now in [a top university in the US] had similar experience with [Institution Four]. He filed a formal application and they asked for reference letters. He arranged that and they never replied back. His profile is too good and he has got [quite a few papers in a leading journal in his field] to his credit! Later he came to know that this institution recruited a couple of guys who are no way comparable to my friend. My another friend had similar experience with [Institution One, but in a different field]. After repeated queries, he finally got a negative response [despite his excellent record]. I am telling you these are people who really want to go back to India. But they have been hurt badly.
Phanikumar has a bunch of tips (all of which are very sensible, if you ask me) on applying for faculty positions in India. In particular, he describes a few circumstances under which it's not advisable to plunge into this enterprise. Here's one of them.
When you are on your own for money and have little or no bank balance.
Academic organizations in India do not take care of your initial establishment costs like many IT firms do. If you were a student till you started looking for a faculty position, chances are that you were staying in a hostel room and have no possessions apart from a suitcase of clothes and few trunks of books.
Take a look at the cost of starting off life: Two cots with beds (15K), DiningTable+Chairs(15K), Typical Indian Kitchen (20K), Bike(40K), TV (10K), Fridge (7K), Almera(8K), Washing machine (20K), AC (20K), Sofa (20K), Vacuum Cleaner (10K), Home PC (20K) etc., all this easily comes to about 200K. You may not need them all on the first day you land the job but once you start living at home independently, you will need them one after the other. If you are married, then you will need more things and more urgently.
The reason I mentioned the cost of establishing a comfortable home is because you could experience a financial shock if you have to pay for all that from your salary. And that is because your salary is going to be sooooooo small. Whatever people may say about pay commissions or purchase parity blah blah, after taxes and compulsory deductions you will have a maximum of 18K in hand at the end of each month as an assistant professor. If you got the arithmetic right and take power/phone/taxes etc., in to account, you will notice that you cannot setup home and still eat during the first one year of your job.
The solution is simple. Work abroad as postdoc till you have reasonable savings that will see you through these financial shocks. Remember that every new faculty has an initial phase of frustration (new environment, things not as good as dreamt etc,). Adding a financial frustration to it is only going to make things worse.
If you are curious about who said what about "pay commissions or purchase parity [or] blah blah", you might want to try this. ;-)
M.S. Swaminathan recommends adopting a Common Minimum Programme for 2007 to give our agricultural sector a "growth momentum" without which, he warns, "there will be widespread agrarian distress and the prospect of reverting to a ship-to-mouth existence." An important part of this programme is risk mitigation (through insurance and easier credit):
Thirdly, timely availability of credit at an affordable rate of interest and the wider adoption of insurance will help to reduce farmers' distress. Agricultural insurance now covers only about four per cent of farmers. Risks are increasing in farming due to meteorological and marketing factors. The position is likely to get worse in the years ahead due to global warming and climate change. Studies in the agrarian hot spot areas of Vidharbha have shown that credit is needed not only for agriculture but also for digging tube wells, healthcare, and domestic needs such as marriage. Integrated group insurance packages, with low transaction cost and the village as the unit of assessment, are needed to save farmers from moneylenders.
To understand for the devastating consequences of debt on the rural poor, listen to what Dilip says:
We have increasing numbers of small farmers -- in many ways the heart and soul of this country -- swallowing rat poison to kill themselves. In Vidarbha last April, I met the family of one such, took his life over a debt of -- are you ready? -- Rs 2000. Two thousand rupees, and he couldn't pay. Think of that. What does two thousand rupees mean to you? To this man, it was life. Death.
Risk mitigation figures quite prominently as one of the policy measures suggested by the research of Prof. Anirudh Krishna, Duke University professor (and an ex-IAS officer). Krishna has done field studies in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh to gain a better understanding of how some of the previously poor manage to escape poverty, and how some of the previously non-poor end up falling into it. I wrote two days ago a summary of Krishna's research over at How the Other Half Lives.
Krishna’s research identifies the reasons for the once non-poor families to fall into poverty (some 8 % of all the families). The most important among them are: “health and health related expenses, high-interest private debt, and social and customary expenses”. Other reasons of smaller significance included failed irrigation ventures — “borrowing money to pay for a well or a tube-well that failed to provide water continuously. [The risk inherent in such ventures can be clearly seen from the fact that the same type of investment, when it succeeds, can lift the once poor to non-poor.]
Brad DeLong's column addresses the question of the weight we assign to the well-being of our (probably much richer) descendants a century from now. How we answer this question has consequences for how richer countries deal with poorer ones now. Money quote:
In short, if the world's rich are stingy today toward our much richer descendants, and if we want to leave our environmental mess to them to deal with, we should be lavish toward the world's poor. Likewise, if we are stingy today toward the world's poor, we should be lavish toward our descendants.
Knowing that you can change your behavior, even by an iota, is essential for holding yourself in esteem. We’re often cynical about how resolutions are never kept, but we shouldn’t be. Resolutions are perhaps lies, but they’re lies of good faith, necessary illusions.
Pascal Bruckner on new year resolutions.
With that golden phrase, let me first wish you all a happy new year!
* * *
I have heard ofgolden parachutes or golden handshakes in the context of executive compensation (and the latter is used quite frequently in India for worker layoffs), but "golden hello" is a new one -- at least to me. This fabulous NYTimes piece leads off with it:
It’s called the “golden hello.”
For a chief executive of a large corporation, it is the one thing — more than the corporate jet or any other perk — that must be guaranteed before the executive will move to run another company. [...]
Such golden hello payments are intended to make the executive “whole” — in essence to treat the executive as if his career were one smooth ascent with no costly interruptions. And these multimillion-dollar payments and perks are used to draw in not only chief executives, but virtually every member of the executive suite. If “golden parachutes” — rich exit packages of extra cash, stock or retirement benefits — are needed at times to kick out chief executives, golden hellos are increasingly needed to get them in the door.
Link via Mark Thoma who quotes from an e-mail he received:
The "golden hello" is a new term to me. A good example of it is Carly Fiorina's package when she left Lucent: HP picked up the "value" of her Lucent options, nice for her since Lucent proceeded to nose dive shortly after she left.
When the next company picks up the options it removes what the options are supposed to do in the first place: bind the CEO to the company and give him/her incentive to perform. Combined with the golden parachute the CEO has little incentive to do anything. using Fiorina again, estimates are as high as $200mil for her total compensation at HP for a pretty lousy performance. Now she wants to take credit for HP's rise after she was fired, but funny, she isn't interested in taking credit for Lucent's fall.
