Links, 18th August

Anil Gupta in http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/the-forgotten-farm-labourer.html :
"The concept of 'farmers first', which promotes farmer-led agricultural innovation, has been discussed for at least twenty years. But the idea of 'farm labourers first' is yet to emerge as a priority for any political party or scientific community. When political debates do feature farm labourers, they usually stress the right to manual work, rather than the need for better technologies or knowledge.

Agricultural and other rural labourers oftenhave more technical information about local resources and variations in their use than the farmers themselves because they often work on several farms. Yet they seldom have access to technological advances or research findings, and have few opportunities to capitalise on their knowledge.

New tools for farm labourers are extremely rare. In many parts of the world there have been no advances in the design of sickles in the past thirty years, for example. Even where new technologies doexist, they are rarely made widely available to farm labourers.

Communication is key

Even so, changing the way existing institutional technologies are used can both add value to labourers' knowledge and make them more productive.

In some cases, this simply involves improving occupational safety by communicating risk and providing safety norms. For example, despite the known environmental and health effects of agrochemicals, including pesticides, there are hardly any billboards in India showing how to use these chemicals safely. Only a fraction of one per cent of labourers in the country use safety gear when applying pesticides.

Similarly, millions of women working in paddy fields could avoid the widespread fungal infections caused by keeping their feet in water all day by simply applying castor oil or fungicidal creams — if only they knew about or had access to them. No Indian labourers under any employment program are given preventive information or materials — not even a bar of soap, even though 60 per cent of diseases are waterborne. Yet making herbal soap from non-edible tree oil seeds could generate considerable employment."
What about latrine cleaners?

From"Annoying Habits of College Professors" (circa 1935 to 1937)The timeless pet peeves of American university students:
"In many respects, teaching is a peculiar problem for university professors. Most professors active in research didn’t train to be teachers, but rather they got to the lecture stand by way of their accomplishments in the quiet eden of the laboratory. Because of this, there’s almost a paradoxical selection bias for introverted people as professors. It might sound good in principle, but when you first find yourself caught in those caffeine-fueled headlights of two hundred pairs of bleary freshman eyes at nine in the morning-- eyes which are expecting to see a performance as entertaining as it is enlightening -- this tends to be the perfect climate for annoying behaviors to “present” in an otherwise shy personality. Of course, some professors are perfectly oblivious and their annoyingness isn’t exactly climate-sensitive; some get even worse. But most learn as they go and the nervous tics eventually subside. "
I am not sure whether the problems subside. There is the additional problem . Many seem to have the attitude "I have a Ph.D. I know what I am doing" (so did some bloggers with Ph.D's in economics) even when teaching outside their areas of specialization and pushing for their own areas in the curriculam. making the syallabi lopsided and some of it irrelevant. I think that some compulory training in teaching is called for.