From experimental philosophy

Dan Jones discusses Knobe Effect :
The good, the bad and the intentional:
"A cornerstone question for the field is how the capacity for assessing whether an action was morally permissible relates to the capacity for making other, non-moral, judgements, such as who did what to whom and when, and whether someone did something intentionally. ‘The standard view was that there was a one-way relationship between the two domains,’ says Joshua Knobe, associate professor of philosophy at Princeton University. ‘On this view, we answer these non-moral questions first, and then work out whether a particular action was morally good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy.’

Rather than consulting his own philosophical intuitions, Knobe set out to find out how ordinary people think about intentional action......
In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.

Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).
This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgements from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere."
And much mote in the article.
A related comment (?) byJohn Gray in a review of Is a Smarter World a Better World?The Idea of Justice By Amartya Sen :
" In showing why those who pursue justice do not need an ideal of a perfectly just society, only a view about what would make the world a more just place, The Idea of Justice deserves to be acclaimed as a major advance in contemporary thinking. If the book succeeds in debunking rationalistic philosophies that claim to formulate principles of justice that everyone must accept, it still asks a great deal of reason - more, in fact, than reason can give. It is one thing to accept that the demands of justice are plural, another to recognise that they can be rivals - and not only in the sense that they must be ranked on a scale of comparative urgency because they cannot all be realised at the same time. In actual conflicts justice and injustice are not always as distinct and opposed as they seem in the seminar room. Quite often they are closely intertwined, sometimes in morally horrendous ways." (via 3quarks daily)

Telugu bloggers

For me it is a late realization that Telugu is a beautiful language. I used to fail in both Telugu and English in school, was fascinated by mathematics around the age of 16 or so and did not look back. But during the last few years, I started remembering songs which I heard as a child and started to read a bit more. As Charles Brown says in his Preface to Verses of Vemana:
"It is peculiarly smooth and elegant in its sound, and the poets have cautiously preserved its euphony. Hence Europeans have called it the Italian of India. The student may at first think this remark, which is no new one, unfounded; as the pronunciation is strong and decided; and as the mixture of Sanscrit terms often gives it a degree of roughness. But the pure rustic dialect as well as that of the poets is altogether different from this colloquial language; in the pure dialect most of those Sanscrit words that had harsh sounds are softened till they are as smooth and melodious as pure Telugu."

Later it seemed to be English words not all of which were softened in Telugu and Telugu as it was spoken a few years ago did not seem really suitable for expressing difficult thoughts in science and philosophy. I thought that a first step might be to make dictionaries of Telugu words both old and currently used available online. Since these pessimistic thoughts occured to me there has been an explosion of bloggers writing on difficult topics from science to philosophy, creating dictionaries online like తెలుగుపదం, making some dictionaries available online శ్రీ శోధన ప్లగ్‌ఇన్ and many more (some mentioned here and other posts in my blog). As I get to know more, I will post more links. The future of Telugu does not seem as bleak as it did five years ago.

Mathematical Expertise

From Mathematical Expertise Brian Butterworth Chapter on Mathematical expertise. In K. A. Ericsson's (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. (pp. 553-568) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (150k) (2006), URL: http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/

Charles Darwin, in a letter to Galton, wrote "I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; I still think this an eminently important difference."

The article concludes:
"It may also be the case that some of us are born with a disposition to enjoy or even be obsessed with an orderly domain like mathematics. However, there is no evidence at the moment for differences in innate specific capacities for mathematics"

P.S. For such an eminent publisher, proof reading is poor. The formula on page 561 is wrong but can be easily corrected.
(via Evolutionary Psychology discussion group)
P.S (via 3quarksdaily) Another article in similar vein:
The truth about grit.
Maybe now one can try to find out about what makes some gritty: topic, person,environment, some gene expression...? But from the stories of various abnormal cases, it seems to me that most humans have enoramous potential if only we know how to tap it.
P.P.S.The Making of an Expert is drawing some attention in blogs.

Hadamard reexamined

Steven Hsu has a post on Hadamard's famous book "Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" in Hadamard: The Mathematician's Mind and links to the very interesting article: Mathematical Discovery: Hadamard resurected. Both worth reading. I have met a few brilliant mathematicians including some Field Medallists, but the only one I saw at close quarters is my old friend M.S. Raghunathan. He does not seem to fit in to these patterns. I saw him picking up new topics in conversations and using them immediately. He would start working on any thing for arbitrary reasons even if he did not know the topic. He would start with all sorts of absurd ideas and would not listen if somebody told him that those would not work. After throwing away hundred of approaches he would come up with some thing that worked. He also missed a few by a whisker and probably missed the Fields Medal. He was like that in his younger days. Once he started on a topological topic to help me even though it was not his area. We were trying to reprove some result following a vague announcement. Since it was my area, I kept pace with him for a few days. When it came to the final hard part, our approaches differed. I thought that one approach was natural and should work and took a bet with him. If it worked, he should buy me dinner. Raghunathan did not care. He tried some absurd approach and proved the result. And after a few days, he showed my approach worked too and bought me dinner.
It seems that even for Raghunathan thinking of topics outside his area is difficult now. Last time I tried to tell him about some thing intersting in my area, he dozed off.

Lok Satta and Hyderabad

From The importance of Hyderabad by Surendra Srivastava in 'India Together':
"Winning even half a dozen seats in the GHMC elections would catapult Lok Satta into a real force in urban politics, and encourage party volunteers and loyalists in other cities to build upon this in other elections throughout India's cities. It is the best hope before us that we can emerge from the lacklustre politics of recent decades in the near future."
(via Qalander)

Kalyan Mukherjea

My friend Kalyan Mukherjea is a talented musician and mathematician. He always had poor eye sight and that was one of the reasons he learnt sarod in his childhood. Now he is totally blind and partly paralyzed but carries on an enviable active lfe partly due to a software developed by T.V. Raman. Here is an article about T.V. Raman and software: For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can’t.
Kalyan has already written one book and now he is completing another. He also teaches some friends music. It seems that my observation about abelian groups has just come in time. He writes: "Is there some kind of telepathic link which works across space? I am in the process of finishing off my notes on Algebraic Topology;
this is just a way of keeping myself occupied. I am writing a preliminary chapter on prerequisites and was having trouble writing up the structure theorem for finitely generated abelian groups. In fact, I had asked K to come over and give me an oral account of the best exposition that he knows of. But he has been rather preoccupied. Your note is a gift from heaven! I hope that I'll be able to write up your note in LaTeX and include it in my book."
Here is another exposition that I wrote for Kalyan:

Kalyan,
I too started writing a book on algebraic topology (about 60 pages) and it came out as a part of it since I did not have too many algebra books at home. I am glad it will be useful to you. It is much simpler than what I wrote there. I was talking of internal direct sums but it is unnecessary depending on what definition of free abelian groups you take. Here it is again.
One observation needed is that if you have a free abelian group and a linear combination of the basis elements where the coefficients are co prime, that combination is also a basis element. Now start with a free abelian group A of rank n, a subgroup B, and look at all basis elements x of A and expressions for elements b of B. Choose the positive non zero coefficients of x. As x and b vary, choose the minimum of such, call this d. So we have a b=dx+ c, where c is written in terms of some other bsis elements. Now we can change x so that b=dx. To see this, if not, take out the common factor of d and the coefficients in the expression of c, so that we can write b=ky. Now k divides d and y is written in terms so that the coefficients are co prime. So y is also a basis element. So k=d. Now in the new basis if we write any other element f of B, the y coefficient of f must be a multiple of d (zero multiple included). Since this part is already in B, the remaining expression must be also in B. But the rest of the basis consists of (n-1) elements. So for the intersection of B with this part (by induction), there is basis such that for the interesection some mltiples form a basis. For the first bit we have dy. A little more thought shows that d must divide the other integers.
This is easier than my blog post.
Swarup

India gets serious on climate change

Says George Monbiot (link via Jo):

"With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.


Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England's industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India's. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India's future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.


Partly as a result, and partly because it's the quickest and easiest route to mass electrification, India has been investing heavily in coal plants, while neglecting its great potential to produce renewable energy. But suddenly this seems to be changing. Draft documents released today show that the government intends to announce 20GW of solar power investments by 2020.


This is equivalent to one eighth of India's installed capacity of all forms of electricity generation, or roughly a quarter of the UK's (we have 80GW of plant, about 70% of which is powered by fossil fuel). China and Japan have similar targets, but because most of India is closer to the equator, the capacity factor (the amount of power you get from any given amount of plant) will be higher in India.


Well that's the good news. The bad news is that India is also in the middle of a programme to increase coal capacity by 79GW – equivalent to the entire UK power sector – by 2012. The new solar plant will supplement, not substitute, its other forms of power generation. But at least the $19bn India is spending on it shows that the country is starting to get serious about climate change. Whether it makes any commitments at Copenhagen is another matter."

Salt tolerant crops

From Genetic change could make crops thrive on salty soils:
"Mark Tester, a fellow at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, and colleagues developed a GM salt-tolerant Arabidopsis thaliana plant by introducing a gene into its root that diverts sodium ions into the roots rather than the shoots.

Plants minimise this salt accumulation naturally — but the gene decreased salt levels in the shoots by up to two-thirds.

"We've used genetic modification to amplify the process, helping plants to do what they already do — but to do it much better," says Tester.

The main challenge is applying the technique to crop plants. He says the Arabidopsis gene has already performed well in rice, and the researchers are currently analysing rice, barley and wheat plants containing their own versions of the gene.

Tester says the freely-available technology can also alter the accumulation of other chemicals, with implications for human nutrition, plant growth and phytoremediation — using plants to soak up pollutants from soil — all of which are important for developing countries."
However another professor says "One might be able to grow rice on a salty soil, but the yield may not be worth it. The big advantage will be on mildly salty soils where the yield is repressed in non-tolerant crops."

More reports on Indian students in Australia

ABS newsreport on the Four corners program and College closure hits Indian students. Some earlier reports here.

Remarks on abelian groups

The structure theorem for finitely generated abelian groups asserts that any finitely generated abelian group is a direct sum of cyclic groups, some finite and some infinite. The orders of the finite cyclic groups can be arranged so that each order divides the next, but this extra requirement can be easily deduced once we know that the group is a direct sum of cyclic groups. There is a similar statement for for finitely generated modules over principal domains. The usual proof involves reducing matrices to some canonical form using elementary transformations and takes a few pages. There is a good exposition of the standard method in Chapter 3, of N.Jocobson's "Basic Algebra", Volume 1 (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1985). I taught this method for several years. Recently, writing some expository stuff, I noticed a simple argument which may be useful for teachers. Here it is:
Let A be a finitely generated (f.g.) free abelian group with basis {x(1),..., x(n)}. The fundamental theorem is equivalent to the following statement:

If B is a subgroup of A, we can find a basis {y(1),..., y(n)} of A, integers d(1),...d(n), which are greater than or equal to zero and some of which may be zero such that the non-zero elements of d(1)y(1),...,d(n)y(n) form a basis for B.

We proceed to the proof. We call An element x of A a 'basis element' if it is part of a basis of A. Given any b in B, we can write it as dx+ c, where c is a combination of the complementary basis elements. Note that if d=0 for all b in B, then B is contained in the subgroup generated by the complementary basis elements and we are through by induction since this number is (n-1). The number d depends not only on b,d but also on the basis and we may get different values of d for the same b and x. Choose all positive d (for every d, -d appears for -b and thus there are both positive and negative d) as b varies over B and x varies over the basis elements of A. This set will have a minimal element. Suppose this is achieved for some x and the minimum achieved is d(x). This means that firstly we can write for some b in B, b=d(x)x+c, with respect to some basis containing x. Further if we take any basis, and if y is one of the basis elements, then the y-coefficient of b for any b in B is either zero or a multiple of d(x).
We next claim that we can choose x so that b=d(x)x. First, we have with the above choice b=d(x)x+d(2)x(2)+...+d(n)x(n) where x(2),...,x(n)are the rest of the elements of the basis in the above choice. Let d be the greatest common divisor of d(x),d(2),...,d(n). We can write b=d[c(x)x+c(2)x(2)+...+c(n)x(n)]and the greatest common divisor of c(x), c(2),...,c(n) is one. In this case y=c(x)x+c(2)x(2)+...+c(n)x(n) is also a basis element of A and we have b=dy. Since d divides d(x), this is a contradiction unless d=d(x). Renaming y as x, we may assume that for our minimum d(x), b=d(x)x. Now fix a basis containing x, say {x,x(2),...,x(n)}. Now any c in B is of the form c=kd(x)x+c' for c' a linear combination of x(2),...,x(n). If we call C the free abelian group generated by x(2),...,x(n), then A is a direct sum the subgroup Zx generated x and C. Here k is an integer which may be zero. In any case kd(x)x is in B, and since c is also in B, we see that c' is in B. Thus we have expressed any element c of B as a sum of two elements of B, one of which is in Zx and the other in C. This gives a direct sum decomposition of B compatible with the decomposition in to Zx and C of A. We have the intersection of B and Zx is the subgroup generated by d(x)x. By induction, there is a basis {y(2),...,y(n)} of C and integers d(2),...,d(n) such that the non-zero elements of d(2)y(2),...d(n)y(n) form a basis for the intersection of B and C. Thus the basis {x,y(2),...,y(n)} and the numbers d(x),d(2),...,d(n) satisfy the conclusions of the theorem.
Remark 1. We used the fact that y=c(x)x+c(2)x(2)+...+c(n)x(n) when the greatest common divisor of c(x), c(2),...,c(n) is one. This is easily proved when the basis has two elements and this used again in induction.
Remark 2. To deduce the stronger version of the fundamental theorem, use the fact that if d=mn with m,n coprime, then the cyclic group of order d is isomorphic to the direct sum of cyclic groups of orders m and n.
Remark 3. For principal ideal domains take d(x)to be one of the d with minimal number factors in the first paragraph of the argument. But we have not checked this.
P.S. I have not yet learnt how to upload files. A more formal version may appear later.
P.P.S. (30th July) So far there are two responses. The first with in an hour from Mladen Bestvina said that it seemed good to him. The second from John Groves, a day later, said that Remark 1 can be used to see that d(x) divides d(2) and thus one can see more quickly (without Remark 2) that one can find the orders each dividing the next in the stronger statement.
P.P.P.S. (6th August)
Similar argument apears in Bourbaki:: Algebre
Chapitre 7, Modules sur les anneaux principaux, Hermann, Paris 1964.
See pages 82-84. So, we now have a complete argument!

Neon Leon

spinning the (Australian Rules)foot ball like Shane Warne Leon Davis post match interview shown around 37 seconds in to the interview. Peter Daicos used to do it often. Some say that Daniel Motlop does it better. Here is a kid practicing: Willy21- My Motlop Goals (AFL).

A recent report on the internet

Mostly about the developments in USA The News About the Internet in New York Review of Books. One excerpt:
"In a much-circulated essay, Clay Shirky, an Internet consultant and professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, compares the current turbulence in the news business to the disorder brought about by the invention of the printing press, when old forms of transmitting information were breaking down and new ones had yet to cohere—a transition accompanied by much confusion and uncertainty. The historical analogy can be taken a step further: just as the advent of printing helped break the medieval Church's hold on the flow of information, so is the rise of the Internet loosening the grip of the corporate-owned mass media. A profound if unsettling process of decentralization and democratization is taking place."

Cosma Shalizi hosts a discussion

on The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
by Scott E. Page at FDL FDL Book Salon Welcomes Scott Page: The Difference. From Cosma Shalizi's opening remarks:
"The problems we face in the real world are hard. There are always an immense array of variables which might be relevant, and an at least equally huge number of ways we might respond to them, plus overlapping constraints on our actions. Moves which seem to help part of the problem typically screw up others, because everything is interdependent, everything is connected to everything else. Even when problems are (more or less artificially) tidied up into well-defined mathematical tasks of locate-the-optimum, it is, generically, quite intractable to actually find that One Best Answer.

The Difference draws on about half a century of research into how to deal with complex, intractable problems. Faced with an overwhelming array of considerations that could be relevant, people assume perspectives from which some variables are visible and the rest are hidden. Within those perspectives, they apply heuristics, approximate rules for getting from where you are now to someplace that is usually better, though not guaranteed to be the best. A heuristic for a problem will do better or worse on different instances of the problem, and different heuristics will do better or worse on the same instance. One heuristic may do better than another on most instances, which makes the former stronger; a weak heuristic does only a little better, on average, than a random guess.

The key insight is that a single strong heuristic will do worse than a collective of individually weak but diverse heuristics. The problems are too hard for any one heuristic to solve perfectly, but the diverse heuristics can, so to speak, cover each others' weaknesses and help each other out when they get stuck; a single strong heuristic can't. A collection of diverse strong heuristics would be even better, but the strong heuristics for a problem tend to be similar to each other, so a group of them lacks diversity. In problem solving and prediction, diversity is exactly as important as individual ability.

This is the answer to "why do we need diverse X-ers instead of just the best X-ers?": if there's going to be one person who does X and they'll solve all their problems by their lonesome, sure, go for the one who's individually best at it, the one with the strongest heuristics. Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, everyone works in teams and groups and networks, and even if all you want is the very best job of X-ing possible, you have no reason to ignore diversity and every reason to seek it out, foster it, and make sure that all voices are heard and aren't just token presences.

I doubt it's escaped the reader that the problems facing progressives (how to we get universal health care? how do we keep our country from getting into more stupid wars?) are full of the kind of difficulty and complexity I described. Which means it's no good hoping for an inspired leader to figure out how to do them, or even a small clique of super-geniuses... There are lots of us, from many backgrounds, and we're self-selected to agree, mostly, on what we want to happen. So there should ways to use our internal diversity, our range of perspectives and approaches, to better accomplish progressive goals. But before we can do that we need to understand how and when diversity improves problem-solving capacity, and we really need to think about the ways in which we can bring that diversity to bear on our common problems — which is the whole "better societies" part of the book."
And much discussion. There is much about the sort of problems that I have been wondering about and I hope to read the rest of the discussion over the next few days.(Via 3quarksdaily)

Another Telugu blog

which looks very promising సైన్యం . It is a new group blog and some of the posts that I have seen like భావి భారతి నా ఉజ్వల సాంకేతిక భారతి are very interesting.

New Telugu blog

Kuffir has a Telugu blog now: Fakeeram.

Another one from Gary, Indiana

The Most Misunderstood Man in America: Joseph Stiglitz predicted the global financial meltdown. So why can't he get any respect here at home?from Newsweek.
P.S. Discussion in Economist's View. See in particular Bruce Wilder's comments.

Book recommendation from Fatima Bhutto

from an interesting interview In My Place: An interview with Fatima Bhutto via 3quarksdaily :

Empires of the Indus: From Tibet to Pakistan - The Story of a River by Alice Albinia.
Extract from the book here and The Guardian review
A river trickles through it .
P.S. Alice Albinia's home page here .

From science blogs

From Mind Hacks For whom the ball tolls :
"I was just re-reading the excellent Prospect magazine article on psychotherapy and cricket when I was struck by a bit about the high rate of suicides in professional cricket players that I'd not noticed before."
And links to several interesting articles 2009-07-10 Spike activity
Ed Young discusses some recent studies of Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton Will vs. Grace - are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don't feel it? via Gene Expression :
"Obviously, the study has its limitations. Greene and Paxton couldn't work out how many of their dishonest volunteers were aware of their deceit, whether the honest lot wilfully pushed aside temptation well before the brain-scanning commenced, what the motivations of either group were, or whether their degree of honesty in the experiment carries over into their normal lives. Nonetheless, it's an intriguing start, and as the duo concludes: "The present findings do suggest, however, that some individuals can, at least temporarily, achieve a state of moral grace.""
Jonah Lehrer on Schizophrenia and Smoking :
"Nicotine, it turns out, can significantly reduce the sensory symptoms associated with the mental illness."

From Telugu sites

Kanneganti Ramarao in TANA 09 -- A trip report:
"Here are the general problems about these talks. Why is that
when we talk about some ancient poet, we are forced to admire
them uncritically? I don't know about you, but if somebody likes
everything that I say, I will immediately look for a bridge that
they are trying sell me.

Simpler explanation is this: We are not trained to separate the
wheat from chaff. When Nannaya writes "meeTina viccu
gubbala" we do not see if it is appropriate, even discounting for
the modern tastes. It is as though each of them got a champion
filly and they are trying to sell to the audience like a infomercial
sales person."
Katti Mahesh Kumar maintains a very hectic pace in పర్ణశాల . The language is a bit too bookish for me. Usually I have to run to Brown's Telugu_English Dictionary only to find that some of the words have evolved and mean different things now. It is a pity that there is no dictionary of modern Telugu usage available online except the small "Adhunika Vyavahars Kosam" from Prachee Publications, Who have also published Rahul Banerjee's "Recovering the Lost Tongue: The Saga of Environmental Struggles in Central India".
Coming back to Katti Mahesh Kumar, I find the posts stimulating and I wonder how he manages to post interesting thoughts each day. Possibly, he is a brilliant chap who read and thought a lot earlier. It turns out that he is a Dalit and seems to be receiving a lot of flak and returning it. Kuffir says that caste does'nt need the village .

Two reports on overseas students in Australia

From Australia's overseas education 'a scam':
"Thousands of Indians are being enrolled in "dodgy" courses in Australia, while others are paying up to $20,000 for a good result in the International English Language Test System exam, an investigation into the overseas student industry has found.

Following a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, The Australian reports the nation's $14-billion international education sector has turned into a recognised immigration racket."

From Foreign students 'slave trade':
"THOUSANDS of overseas students are being made to work for nothing — or even pay to work — by businesses exploiting loopholes in immigration and education laws in what experts describe as a system of economic slavery.

The vast pool of unpaid labour was created in 2005 when vocational students were required to do 900 hours work experience. There was no requirement that they be paid.

Overseas students remained bound to the system as completion of such courses became a near-guaranteed pathway to permanent residency in Australia."
P.S. (July, 23) Another horror story
P.P.S.(July, 27) Reports keep coming: Lifting the lid on Australia's 'visa factories':
"Reports had been circulating for the best part of a year about dodgy private colleges and the visa factories of Sydney and Melbourne.

In one year alone the vocational education sector had grown by over 50 per cent, fuelled by over 70,000 Indian students coming to buy an education.

Egged on by immigration and education agents, many were told that if they enrolled in cooking and hairdressing they could not only get a diploma but they could qualify for permanent residency in Australia.

And indeed they could.

The Government had instituted a deliberate immigration pathway through education, but the trouble was many of the training schools were supplying qualifications that were worthless, and the policing of standards in the colleges was woefully inept.

Four Corners discovered that not only were many of the courses bogus, but other illegal scams were keeping the system afloat.

If a student wants to apply for permanent residency they must pass an English language test. Four Corners has clear evidence that unscrupulous education agents are offering the tests for thousands of dollars.

Similarly with the work experience certificates that students need to acquire as part of their training. These too can be procured through networks of corrupt businesspeople for thousands of dollars.

The question is - how is this being allowed to happen? "
Well, one of the answers may be economy. House prices seem to be an important part of the economy. Demand from students, and easing residence restrictions for foreigners to own houses in Australia have maintained the house prices. With just a few cities in the country, this type of manipulation seems easy. Moreover student pay full fares, more than fair prices for housing, provide cheap labour.

Some links

Old Cambridge Days by Leonard Roth, via a comment in The Wranglers.
Miracles from medical research Lessons from an Unexpected Life:A doctor, a patient, and a formerly fatal disease by David G. Nathan via 3quarksdaily

Puddle-Muddle of multilinguals: Amitava Kumar reviews Amit Chaudhuri's "The Immortals"; link in The Artist As Part-Genius Part-Householder. This leads to other articles:Amit Chaudhri's review of A.K. Ramanujam's Poems The twin-lobed brahmin with this comment:
"...the creative life of the modern Indian English poet or writer arises from his or her multilingual consciousness, and depends upon traffic, or commerce, between the official and the vernacular tongues."
and to a previous post Puddle-Muddle of Amitava Kumar, commenting on Mukul Kesavan's article Do anglophones paddle in the shadows?.
It may be interesting to recall Vikram Chandra's comment in the famous article The Cult of Authenticity:

"I will not presume to claim Maharashtra or even the entire city of Bombay as my region. I will only claim part of the western suburbs, let us say north from the highway junction at Mahim causeway, roughly an area containing Dharavi, Bandra West, Khar, Santa Cruz, Juhu, Andheri West, and Goregaon West. This is my region. I live in it, in the locality of Andheri, in the colony called Lokhandwalla.

My region is a hugely cosmopolitan place. Every single person who lives in my region is a cosmopolitan. I am of course a cosmopolitan; I travel away from my region every few months to make a living. My neighbors do also. There are the Gujarati diamond merchants who spend three weeks out of every four travelling from Africa to Belgium to Holland; flight attendants who fly to Beijing; businessmen who sell textiles in Australia; mechanics and welders and engineers who keep Saudi Arabia running; merchant navy sailors who carry cargo to Brazil; nurses who give care and nurture in Sharjah; and gangsters who shuttle between Bombay and Indonesia and Dubai as part of their everyday trade. But there are many other cosmopolitans in my regions. I mean the men who have left their homes in Muzzafarnagar and Patna to drive cabs in Bombay; the chauffeurs who send money home to Trivandrum; the road-laborers from Madhya Pradesh; the maids from the Konkan coast; the cooks from Sylhet in Bangladesh; the Tamil bakers; the struggling actresses from Ludhiana; the security guards from Bihar; the painters from Nashik who stand on roped lengths of bamboo three hundred feet in the air to color Bombay’s lofty skylines. They are all cosmopolitan. A woman born and bred in Dharavi, in the heart of the city, is a cosmopolitan because she lives and works in this city of many nationalities and languages, this city that has become a vatan or homeland for people who have travelled very far from their vatans.

Now, in this, my region, it is very very common for a person to speak one language at home, use another on the street, do business in a third, and make love in a fourth."

Change in Kashmir?

From Hindu temple, Muslim priests:
“We have guarded this place for the Hindus. It is their “amanat”. But now the situation has improved. We want that a Hindu priest should take over this holy place. Being Muslims, we tried to do whatever best we could to keep the temple functional, but it should ideally be run by a Hindu priest”.

David Warsh on Mark Thoma

From The Perpendicular:
"Traditional journalists sometimes assert that blogs are about opinion and interpretation rather than fact and reporting, when the truth is that a great deal of new and ultimately reliable material first appears on blogs.

Therein lies the significance of Thoma’s blog – and other sites like it, including those of Romenesko and David Johnson, the man behind the Russia List. The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.
......
But demand for unifying narrative remains strong, at every level, including the version that newspapers traditionally have supplied. This itch for reading on the same page must begin to be satisfied, inevitably, with just the sort of daily record that Thoma and others of his ilk compile from all that fevered discourse in the public square."

Interesting site

I enjoy music but my knowledge of music is confined to a few film songs (mostly Telugu, Hindi) and what I pick up from YouTube. One of my favourites is Lapak Japhak from Boot Polish. I was amazed to find this discussion inspired by that song The 'semblance' of râga, rasa, and hâsya (links to the song and many more links).

Writing a book!

For a long time, I wanted to write a book for beginners on Algebraic Topology, which was my first love in things academic. Now that I have retired for a few years, it seems to be good time to recall the elementary and nice topics which I still remember and indicate the flavour of the topics that fascinated me. It is coming back and apart from visualization of things in the small, what I still like is the power of general nonsense (my term for abstract thinking). But writing is a pain, too much latex symbols, diagrams going back and forth, changing the earlier chapters when progressing with the later chapters. It seems that it be a quite a mess. Once completed, it will be available online to see whether it will be useful to some. My experience with Rahul Banerjee's "Recovering the Lost Tongue: The Saga of Environmental Struggles in Central India" was that it was easier to read the published book than the online material. May be, it will be different with mathematics.

Quote of the day

From Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India by Abhjit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, Jean Lafortune:
"So the institution that the economic forces are not able to destroy may be endangered by love"

Mindhacks recommends

a few science articles from Newsweek in A neurobiology of the disordered mind: . The articles Beyond the Book of Life on epigenetics and A Biology of Mind by Eric Kandel are very readable as well as the Mindhacks article itself with links to some of the concepts used.

The Age investigations on foreign students in Australia

From Foreign student death details suppressed:
"DETAILS of the deaths of more than 50 overseas students have been suppressed by Australian coroners amid evidence the death toll is higher than the Federal Government has admitted.

State and territory coroners, under the National Coroners Information System, have refused an application by The Age for data on the deaths of overseas students in the year to November 2008.
.....
A leading expert on international education, Monash University business professor Chris Nyland, said he was concerned that a drive to protect Australia's lucrative $15.5 billion higher education export market was masking the suffering of foreign students.

"All countries that compete for the education market should be reporting that information," he said. "And … it would be wonderful if we had good data saying that it was not the case they are harmed at any greater rate than domestic students."

Professor Nyland said there was a need for a federal advisory body on student safety, made up of independent members free from "vested interests in seeing this thing dampened down and going away quietly". He called for mandatory statistical reporting of international student deaths.

National Union of Students president David Barrow said the Government faced losing billions in revenue if it failed to protect overseas students. "The time has come for a full-scale inquiry," he said. "Australian society and government needs to see all the facts."

Currently, if an overseas student dies here, the education provider is not required to give a cause of death when it reports the matter to the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Under the law, a college needs to report a death within a fortnight of early "termination" of studies. But it is left up to the college how thoroughly it reacts.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said the law would be reviewed this year and next.

Opposition Immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone said she sought the data in February because foreign-student organisations suspected under-reporting of deaths. "To have 34 cited as unknown is an extraordinary statistic," she said.

"It will no doubt be raising further anxiety and alarm, particularly in the Indian student community and their parents and relatives and friends."

At least three overseas students died in the 12-month period after violent attacks, including an 18-year-old Chinese woman who was allegedly sexual assaulted by a knife-wielding assailant before she and her boyfriend fell from a balcony at Waterloo in Sydney.

Although the number of these deaths was well below homicide rates for the Australian population, it raises questions about reporting procedures from the booming private education providers."
The age also queries 'How did he die?' asks Indian family.

In the early 90's 'The Age' ran a sustained campaign against racism in Austrian Rules Football both among spectators and players. There seems to be a general improvement since then.

Popularity and reliability of research

Abstract of Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research:
"Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. We therefore argue that for increasing the reliability of research it is essential to assess the negative effects of popularity and develop approaches to diminish these effects."

I came across this from the comments in Are we playing it too safe in cancer research? (Oops, Orac missed one).

Sleep and Learning

Jonah Lehrer in Naps, Learning and REM :
"Numerous studies have now demonstrated that REM sleep is an essential part of the learning process. Before you can know something, you have to dream about it."
That is why, there is not much point in doing one semester courses in one or two week crash courses. But, when one has plans of using them immediately, it works differently I think. Similarly, it is easier to learn new stuff when one is working on a problem and the stuff seems useful. I guess that one should not depend on any one simple prescription.

A slip of the tongue?

From Yahoo News and also reported by several news agencies:
"The U.S. president said he did not take seriously Ahmadinejad's call for him to apologize for criticizing Tehran, "particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran.""

A dream example for situationists

The blue and the green via 3quarksdaily . More links and explanations in the comments.

Interesting Telugu blogs-5

Religion, history etc. discussed in a series of conversations with humour:పెడ్రో చెప్పిన చరిత్ర కతలు - Greek Bards and Philosophers and
పెడ్రో చెప్పిన చరిత్ర కతలు - Jews, Roman Empire and Christians . Interesting sentences in passing with an element of truth:
"...They cease being just stories, but they become the experience of a collective psyche of the country."
Possibly not of the whole country but of some dominant groups, text communities and possibly changing from region to region and from period to period.

Links to some Telugu sites

I have been sent the following links in response to an old request about links for online material and developing online dictionaries.

1a
మీరు ఈ గుంపుని చూసారా : తెలుగుపదం
http://groups.google.com/group/telugupadam/?pli=1

1b
తెలుగు విక్షనరీ గూర్చి విన్నారా
http://te.wiktionary.org
_____________________________________
2a
ఈ సైటు గురించి విన్నారా : ఆర్కైవ్.ఓఆర్జి
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=telugu

2b
ఇండియను డిజిటలు లైబ్రెరీలను చూసారా :
http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/
______________________________________
3
అలాగే కొన్ని సైటులలోనూ తెలుగు పుస్తకాలు చదువుకోదగిన రూపంలో
లభ్యం అవుతున్నాయి . తెలుగువన్ ని ప్రముఖంగా చెప్పుకోవాలి .
http://teluguone.com/kathaluNovels/
http://teluguone.com/vinodam/
______________________________________
4
వీలుంటే ఈ సైటునీ ఒకసారి చూడండి (పైరేటెడ్)

http://www.parimalam.com/Books-telugupustakalu.html

_______________________________________

5 చివరగా
http://www.telugubhavitha.org/
http://teluguthesis.com/

David Mumford dontates Wolf Prize money

U.S. prof. gives Israeli prize money to Palestinian university (via Shivsankar):
"The American mathematician David Mumford, co-winner of the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics, announced upon receiving the award yesterday that he will donate the money to Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah, and to Gisha, an Israeli organization that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement.

"I decided to donate my share of the Wolf Prize to enable the academic community in occupied Palestine to survive and thrive," Mumford told Haaretz. "I am very grateful for the prize, but I believe that Palestinian students should have an opportunity to go elsewhere to acquire an education. Students in the West Bank and Gaza today do not have an opportunity to do that." "
More about Mumford here and here. He visited TIFR frequently and adopted an Indian child.

Blogs with Telugu lyrics

There is a list here Blogs with Telugu Song Lyrics .
A few more (possibly some duplicates):
గీత లహరి
Annamacharya Samkirtanalu

చిత్ర గీత సాహిత్యము
Jyothi

Mana Ghantasala

Telugu video songs:
Mana GhaTelugu Video Songs Watch Online or Download
saradaga,com

Review of a book on private education schools

The Private Schools No One Sees: In the world’s slums, the poor have taken to educating themselves (via Evolutionary Psychology Discussion group). Excerpts:
"...what Tooley saw in the slums of Hyderabad, where he returned several times to visit schools, observe classes, and chat with students, parents, teachers, and owners. The schools’ physical structures were indeed mostly ramshackle, but they were assembled no worse (and often far better) than the homes of the neighborhood children who learned in them. The owners seemed responsible and often caring, the teachers engaged and capable. And the parents Tooley met were adamant that the tuition they paid—between $1 and $2 per child, per month—was money well spent. They would never send their kids to the local public schools, they said, where facilities were fancier but teachers were truant.
....
Development experts,” as Tooley calls them, have long believed that if citizens of developing countries are to be educated, their governments, helped by heaps of money from rich nations, must invest in free and universal public schooling. If the resultant public education is lousy—as it is in India, for instance—then it must simply be reformed through more money and more regulation. Meanwhile, the poor must be patient.

But the poor have run short of patience, Tooley found, and so they have rejected the development experts’ failed syllogism and created one of their own: You open a school, and we’ll pay you to teach our children. If they don’t learn, we’ll stop paying. Therefore, you will ensure that our children receive a solid education."

And the results of one study by experts:
"In mathematics, mean scores of children in government schools were 24.5 percent, whereas they were 42.1 percent in private unrecognized schools and 43.9 percent in private recognized. That is, children in unrecognized private schools scored nearly 18 percentage points more in math than children in government schools (a 72 percent advantage!), while children in recognized private schools scored over 19 percentage points more than children in government schools (a 79 percent advantage)."

P.S.Discussion in Sepia Mutiny http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005836.html#comments
See comments 11 and 19.

Links, June 22nd

Discussion in Steve Hsu's blog on Bruce Charlton's answer to why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? .
There is much Bruce Charlton's answer quoted there that I agree with. At the same time, I think that there is some flexibility in the system and the system is not uniform all over the world, for some non-conformists to survive. Moreover, compared to 60-70 years, there are many more cumulative achievements in science ) in mathematics, one has only to think of Fermat, Poincare conjectures. Still, there is much to worry about and I think that it is a useful discussion.

Bruce Wilder defines economics in the comments to "How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations":
"The economy is something we do, something we make -- an artifact and outcome of social action. It's not the weather. It's not a gift of divine providence. It is an instrument for living in a material world, and an evolving product of strategic conflict and cooperation."
His version of "'social affiliation' seems less interesting to me:
"It's not just facebook and twitter, is my point -- and it is not just about "identity" but about translating individual ambition into the primacy of collective achievement in a highly organized world: learning voice for a world of no exit, and learning to find power and make a life out of highly-specialized insignificance."

Outlookindia has a few articles on racism in India :
Our True Colours and 'India Is Racist, And Happy About It'.

"Bands of Iron"

wins the Top Quark. A nice write up by Steven Pinker here The Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily 2009 Prize in Science. May be it is reading these posts; I just noticed that the garden spray that I am using uses Bernoulli Principle.

“I am Gokhale. She is Iyer. What are you?”

The answer is simply, `I don’t know…’ by Sujata Anandan via merit without antecedents in Kuffir's blog. Excerpt:
"It was a lesson well learnt but I realised that my father was romanticising too much. India had moved on from the early days of Independence and Nehruvian ideals. And while I was brought up completely without awareness of being either a Hindu or a Muslim, Brahmin or Dalit, everyone now wears both religion and caste on their sleeves.

So I try not to get angry when they ask me for my antecedents, though I still stick with the “I don’t know.” And when others flaunt their identities based on anything but their merit, I still squirm but let it be."
My own suspicion is that these identities accord status without having to work for it and that and endogamy perpetuate it.

Evelyn Waugh: The Best and the Worst

Long ago, I read a few books by Evelyn Waugh. Though I liked some of them, I did not take to him. Here is an interesting article about him Evelyn Waugh: The Best and the Worst by Charles J. Rolo. A sample excerpt:
"This core of tragic awareness gives to Waugh's comic vision the dimension of serious art. The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness."
That was from 1954. A more recent article Two of a Kind , a review of book which compares George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. The provocation for looking at Evelyn Waugh is a quote of his in CT: "It is a marvel of medical science that they could first locate the one part of Randolph that was not malignant, and, having found it, immediately remove it."

Bayt al-Hikma

Excerpts from The House of Wisdom:"How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization". Book recommended by Juan Cole. More excerpts about the spread to the west here. A review by James Buchan Invaders of the mind. Excerpt from the review:
"Why Muslim science and medicine remained in their medieval state in certain regions well into our lifetimes belongs to another book. For all Lyons's wonder and admiration, the falasifa were always out of the mainstream of Muslim thought; they are best understood as a sort of sect, like the Shia, and were just as vulnerable to charges of heresy."

Another take on diversity

from Seed Magazine Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.
See also ... a global effort is underway to collect and cache the genetic resources contained in seeds.
Lera Boroditsky on HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?.

Max Liberman's comments on Lera Boroditsky's earlier work Sapir/Whorf: sex (pro) and space (anti):
"However, there are a few recent pieces of (pro- and anti-) Whorfian work that I can wholeheartedly recommend. On the pro side, Lera Boroditsky has been doing some neat stuff. Try her paper on Sex, Syntax and Semantics, for example. On the anti side, Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman have a great paper Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning, debunking the theory (due to the MPI Language and Cognition group) that Mayan speakers have different customary spatial-coordinate systems from Dutch or English speakers."

Some science articles, June 14th

Cosma Shalizi reviews Flynn The Domestication of the Savage Mind Vis 2quarksdaily.) I rarely read articles about IQ tests. This one is probably the first. Excerpt:
"I am committed to the kind of culture IQ tests favor, as I suspect are most of the readers of this review. Progress of many kinds is difficult or impossible without scientific knowledge and the habits of abstract thought that go with it. Spreading this kind of thinking is a Good Thing, and worth great efforts. Yet it’s also true that thinking this way presupposes a specific kind of culture, and it is a mistake to confuse our favorite mental exercises with intelligence as such.

That mistake is particularly tempting because of how we use IQ tests. Up through the 19th century, members of elites mostly viewed democracy with emotions that ranged from ambivalence to terror, even in France and the United States. They saw the masses as incapable of thinking, let alone leading. Meritocracy was a later compromise with democracy: There would still be elite leaders, but they would be chosen on the basis of talent rather than birth. This ideal helped institutionalize IQ testing and reliance on that modified IQ test, the SAT.

Flynn’s arguments suggest that these fears and hopes were at most half right. The masses were not bad at thinking, or at managing their own affairs; they were just bad at thinking like intellectuals. Meritocracy, as Flynn says, is an incoherent ideal—even if we agreed on “merit,” and allocated rewards on that basis, the winners would use some of their resources to give their children unfair advantages. But spreading educational opportunities and opening up positions of influence to broader peaceful competition has been widely beneficial.

If Flynn is right, knowing how many picture-puzzles different cohorts of Dutch teenagers could solve is actually a window through which we can see a momentous change, the “liberation from the concrete,” not just among a few clerics and scribes, but as the common condition of humanity. It would almost be damning this book with faint praise to say that it’s a valuable addition to the IQ debate (although it is); it’s an important take on what we have made of ourselves over the past few centuries and might yet make of ourselves in the future."

Holes of Silence(via Economist's View). Excerpt:
"We have created the analogue of a black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this sonic black hole, sound waves, rather than light waves, cannot escape the event horizon."

From a discussion in 'Evol. Psy. Discussion group'. Robert Karl Stonjek's first response to The Problem With Selfish Gene Theory (the first link may be available to only members of the group):
"A gene is where most intergenerational information is stored. Other information storehouses are RNA and there are epigenetic vectors. Prions are also candidate information storehouses, but to a very limited degree.

As a storage device it can be read, modified, added to and subtracted from. The agent of this change is entirely outside the gene, but the selfish gene analogy assigns agency to the gene itself, even if by analogy alone. Even so, selfish gene advocates continue the agency analogy far to readily and freely in my opinion.

By analogy, would we claim that the journal entry is the goal of science and that papers are the agent of scientific change? Clearly the aim of science is not to be stored in journals but to be expressed in the environment. Evolution is the same - expression is the goal, the purpose and the function of evolution. Sure, information needs to have intergenerational storage.

And we must give credit to what was once called 'junk DNA' for the regulatory role it is now known to perform, though this area of genetics is relatively new.

Thus the position of the gene is now one of being the most prominent known agent of intergenerational storage of certain kinds of information. We also known that there are more genes than can be stored in a single individual and so the replicator of the genes of a species is a population. It has long been known that it would be incredibly difficult to breed a population of a just about any species of animal from a single genome ~ one some clonal insects appear to have achieved this trick and their species footprint appear to be limited (few older than the last ice age, for instance).

Dawkins certainly drew our attention to the importance of thinking from the perspective of the gene and this continues to be an important perspective to take. But it is just another tool in the evolutionist's toolkit and by no means should it be the only perspective ever taken."

From The recent sequencing of the bovine genome will dramatically transform more than just the cattle industry(Seed Magazine):
"...“What’s special about the bovine genome is that it maintains protein similarities to the human sequences that are greater than those found in mice and rats. So it provides a better window for human biology.” And because the cow diverged from the human branch so long ago, analysis of its genome makes it possible to identify which human traits are well-conserved: These are the portions of the genome that haven’t changed much over hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary constraint and are thereby most essential to fitness (i.e., not junk DNA).
....
Over the last 100 years, 17 Nobel Prizes have been won on the backs of farm animals such as cows, sheep, horses, and pigs. A rural English doctor, Edward Jenner, revolutionized immunology in 1796 when he discovered that injecting people with the crusts of lesions from cows infected with cowpox provided immunity to human smallpox. (The word vaccine in fact comes from the Latin root for cow, vaca.) “That’s how the smallpox epidemic plaguing Europe in the 18th century was stopped in its tracks,” says Lewin. Cryopreservation of sperm for artificial insemination was first performed in cattle in the 1940s before the technology was applied to humans in the 1950s. And since 1960, hundreds of thousands of pigs and cows have provided valves to pump the blood of human hearts.
....
Being strictly herbivores, cows derive most of their protein from the bacteria residing on the grass they eat. These microbial populations live in the ruminant’s gut and are very efficient at breaking down complex cellular structures like cell walls in plants. Lewin predicts that mimicking this cellulytic process and understanding the cow’s microbial degradation process may prove vital in producing biofuels. "

From EPW editorial of June 6th, 2009

Fracured Social Sciences:
"...what emerges is that we are today presented with two contrasting depictions of that same social reality which are also contradictory in what they are saying. The first account argues that the failures to meet its development goals are structural to the system and the State. Democracy is contingent to this reality and those in power, it is argued, can easily abrogate it if they feel threatened by its growth.
The second account argues that democracy has become, in some sense, irreversible
in India. It does not deny the failures of the development State, but seems to imply that these failures can be rectified. Crucially, the research which is emerging
from the study of democracy and its practices seems to suggest that it is the poor and marginalised who are convinced about this power of the vote. Underdevelopment, then, can be dissolved and overcome by struggles and negotiations
within democracy.
....
One of the challenges before social sciences in India today is to transcend this
contradiction within its own body and work towards a richer and better understanding of the linkages between democracy and underdevelopment."

May be both the processes are going on at the same time with tension between them varying from place to place until TBTF institutions emerge.

Science blog contest from 3quarksdaily

The Seven Finalists for the 3QD Science Prize 2009.
Unfortnuately, I only browsed through some of the posts and read only one in detail
Bands of Iron which I found excellent. It did make to the final seven.

On the outlook of societies

from Rajib Abortion & religion - an international view:

"What significance does this have? People tend to assume that their beliefs are driven by specific and distinctive individual abstract principles and beliefs, but these data suggest that cultural Zeitgeist matters much more Within a given society a group X may have a particular disposition, but the general outlook of the society shapes their ultimate mean viewpoint far more than their distinctive group identity."

What about immigrants? From In the blood:

"Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views."

Mathematics in retirement

I always wanted to do mathematics without insitutional affiliations but that was possible only in retirement. Here is a recent note Splittings and C-complexes. Part of my share of the work was done in Vivekananda University, Belur Math at the instance of Swami Vidyanadhananda.
Now, without the pressure to publish, I can wait for comments and see how it goes. In any case, it clarified some things that I wodered about off and on. Some more papers that I put in the archives which may or may not be published are:
Delzant's variation on Scott complexity and Annulus-Torus decompositions for Poincaré duality pairs. The last one is too long and I hope that some one will simplify it.

On the evolution of morality and culture

From Blood and Treasure:
"TWO of the oddest things about people are morality and culture. Neither is unique to humans, but Homo sapiens has both in an abundance missing from other species. Indeed, that abundance—of concern for the well-being of others, (even unrelated others), and of finely crafted material objects both useful and ornamental—is seen by many as the mark of man, as what distinguishes humanity from mere beasts.

How these human traits evolved is controversial. But two papers in this week’s Science may throw light on the process. In one, Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico fleshes out his paradoxical theory that much of human virtue was forged in the crucible of war. Comrades in arms, he believes, become comrades in other things, too.

In the other paper, Mark Thomas and his colleagues at University College, London, suggest that cultural sophistication depends on more than just the evolution of intelligence. It also requires a dense population. If correct, this would explain some puzzling features of the archaeological record that have hitherto been put down to the arbitrary nature of what has survived to the present and what has not."

Like many I wondered about these topicsoff and on but do not have enough grasp on the literature for any informedcomments. Informed comments on such topics are usually in Rajib's blog, for example, in this post:

Group selection, red in tooth and claw .

Recent news on Indian students in Melbourne

Bashings undermine image blitz from The Age and
Indian students in Oz to be trained in self-defence skills from Samachar.com
Here is an article from The Outlook by Namrata Goswami'Racism' Down Under
where the views are similar to my impressions. One excerpt:
"Higher education sectors in Melbourne like hospitality, teaching etc have been taken over by the private sector which is mostly unregulated by the government. Most of these private institutes attract students from India and China with the promise of world class courses, accommodation and jobs but end up ‘way short’ in reality."
I met student from Hyderabad yesterday who utilized one of these private sector organizations with are cruiting adency in Hyderabad. Apparently it costs about 2 to 3lakh rupees for bribes and applications for various certificates and there was no orentation advice. He was told that he could go and do whatever he liked. I know of one private institute which provides these courses in Melbourne. It did provide jobs for many Indians here. When I enquired about part time work for an Indian student, I was told that he could teach their institute! There are stories that one of the 'owners' was beaten up by disgruntled students and left for USA. A few who worked in that institute are now starting their own institute.

The passion of Benjamin Kaila

During the last few years Benjamin Kaila has organized Ambedkar Scholarships with a small group of friends (see also Friends for Education International) though he himself had some job problems off and on in USA. I came to know of his efforts through Shivam Vij and have been in touch with him. Yesterday I sent this link to him
Cowherd excels in Class XII exams

and he already got in touch with the student and arranged a small loan. Since there were communication problems (Ramakant could not speak either English or Telugu), Benjamin has alerted a small network of friends that he developed.
Here is an old write up on Benjamin Kaila To Learn With Dignity by Shivam and a more recent one Change Makers Inc in Tehelka.

P.S. Photos of some of the beneficiaries of the micro loan program organized by Benjamin Kaila are in the photo section of this blog.

Future directions in science?

In Generalization and truth, MaxLiberman said:
"Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones."
I hope that the following series is not in this vein WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science (via3quarksdaily).
P.S. A review in the New Scientist here.

Kim Plofker's book on Indian mathematics

Kim Plofker's book on Indian mathematics which has been mentioned before Indian mathematics miscelleny is reviewd by Pervez Hoodbhoy in Naure An Indian history of numbers. It seems to be a lazy review. Having gone through her long article in The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam: A Sourcebook, I am not planning to read her new book any time soon and assume that it is good. Excerpts of thelater book are available here. Here is a review of the later book in which Kim Plofker's contribution is discussed in some detail by Clemency Montelle.

Why I follow blogs

From my comment in Qalandar:
Anon.
Many thanks for the detailed comments. I have been following topics outside mathematics only for five years or so and so my comments may be quite uninformed. This interest was sparked by roughly two events. One was the war in Iraq and I felt that I could not ignore the outside world any longer. Secondly, after about 50 years of professional life with most of the reading and communications in English, I suddenly started remembering Telugu songs that I have not heard for 40-50 years. I started following blogs and other sources both in English and Telugu. At first Telugu blogs and sites were disappointing with a lot of abuse and language that did not seem equipped to express difficult ideas and nuianced thought. Then suddenly lot of young people started blogging in Telugu and already the usage is much better than before and many topics from science to philosophy are discussed reasonably in some of the blogs. Internet and blogs seem to be making a lot of difference. I think that the situation may be better in languages like Tamil, Bengali, Urdu..
Secondly, I find many books are appearing published in India written by many living in India of high standard on history, etymolgy.. Some are in English (like 'Comprehensive History and Culture of Andhra Pradesh') but there are also books and translations in Telugu. For example P.V. Parabrahma Satry's 'Kakatiyas' isrecently translated in to Telugu is a nice complement to Cynthia Talbot's book.
Some of these changes seem to be coming from the cumulative power of number of bright people using the new facilities rather than a few outstanding individuals. I have seen David Shulman's articles but I have also seen posts by some bloggers working in IT with detailed knowledge of vedas. So it may not be too long before more work with reasonable methodologies will emerge from the subcontinent.

A Telugu (film) music blog

Musicologist Raja

He has a column in Koumidi and used to write in the defunct Haasam.

Things academic

Interesting article How to Learn About Everything (via Marginal Revolution which has interesting comments). Some excerpts:
"Note that the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.

This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it. The cross-disciplinary reach of nanotechnology almost demands this as a condition of competence.

Studying to learn about everything
I recommend that intellectually ambitious students invest considerable time in a mode of study may set off subconscious alarm signals that conflicts with almost instinctive impulses imparted by classroom experience:


Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. . Include Science and Nature.
Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity, as if you had to pass a test on it.
Don’t drop a subject because you know you’d fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.
Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.
Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
Why is this effective?
You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary. With comprehension of words and the unstructured curriculum of life came what we call “common sense”.

The aim of what I’ve described is to learn an expanded language and to develop what amounts to common sense, but about an uncommonly broad slice of the world. Immersion and gradual comprehension work, and I don’t know of any other way."

The general thrust of this and his previous article seem interesting and useful to me, even with in one subject. It is not so hard to get a grasp of the structure of related areas or possible areas which may have a bearing on the problems one is interested in. Sometimes, one may be even able to contribute to these areas if one has an understanding of the general structure and not the worn-out techniques. I think that it avoids narrow specialization and some later thinking type of approaches. I think that I followed this type of approach without actually articulating and has been useful in my research.

Somewhat related article Tenure and the Future of the University. Summary (need subscription for the full artcle):
"The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking. Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom (1). Those arguments are still being made today (2) and are still valid. However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market."
I think that the tenure system worked fairly well in USA. Howit works in each country may depend on the culture and institutions.

Zooming for science

From Billion-Pixel Pictures Allow Ultra-Zooming for Science:

"GigaPan "is not quite being there, but it's coming close," Tuckey said.

Tuckey also hopes to use GigaPan to enlist virtual volunteers.

For example, he said, "to manage [our grassland habitat] successfully, we have to know the numbers and density of different wildflowers, and we have to keep monitoring, to see the impact we're having with grazing or cutting."

GigaPan images could help many hands make light work of these types of environmental-monitoring tasks, whether at threatened coral reefs, in vanishing rain forests, or on Durlston's grasslands.

"With a great shot of a meadow, people could actually zoom in and count the numbers and varieties of different wildflowers," Tuckey said.

"If we make these astonishing images available on the Web, people could potentially log on at home and do actual research. And it doesn't matter if they are in Birmingham or Singapore." "

Prizes

3 Quarks Daily Announces Four Annual Blog Prizes: The Quarks!. I read a fair number of posts from science blogs but cannot remember any particular post that I would like to recommend; in any case I do not like prizes. Usually, those who get prizes do not need them and those who hanker for prizes do not deserve them. As Brian Switek says in The dangerous link between science and hype:
"Science proceeds through discovery and debate, and hypotheses do not become accepted by flooding the media with press releases."
(via the excellent blog Gene Expression of Rajib)
There are many excellent blogs, some by professional writers, but there seems to be news of breathtaking discoveries from some fmri scans and/or experiments on a few students and such almost every day both from universities and bloggers. Some like Max Liberman of Language Log and Andrew Gellman(http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/)seem to bring some sobriety to the discussions. However, the particular post in 3qurksdaily may be useful in giving list of some interesting posts on science.
P.S. The list HERE.

Indian students in Melbourne

Manmohan raises attacks on students with Rudd . Some tipsTips: How not to be attacked in Australia.
I am not surprised and had similar but less severe experiences when we arrived in 1988. After wandering around several countries, I was eager to own a house and do some gardening. Melbourne has wide tree lined streets, houses with large yards and lots of parks and open spaces. We found a house on a plot of over 900 square metres, on a bus route between two universities. I enquired about the suitability with a few in our dept. and there were no comments. After we moved to the house, we found that many in the neighbourhood were on dole and lots of the houses were the so called 'commision housing' owned by the government and rented to those on dole or low income. There were many youngsters idle and some not going to school and they would wander around in groups having fun harassing whomever they could. Our children were easy targers and epithets like 'black dogs', 'blackies' and 'abos' were common. There were even graffiti like 'black c...s' in front of the house. And thefts. Once I got into a shoving match with one of the kids but it got worse when he came in a group. The police said that there was not much point complaining since the kids would at the most get a rap on their wrists. Colleagues did not want to seem hear unpleasant things about their country. Finally, we sold the house at a considerable loss and moved to another area. Ther was very little trouble later on and there seemed to be some general improvement due to news paper campaign against racial sledging of aborinal athletes. It did not seem to have a lasting effect on the children who grew up here and most of them did well in school and college and usually got jobs before the locals.
Now with many foreign students visible in poor areas, there is an increase in this mindless fun by local youngsters. Some of the advice given in the Rediff piece seems sensible.

P.S. One of the results of my Australian experiance is to try to help with some of the 'dalit' organizations in India working in microfinance and education. There also seem to be many muslim groups isolated and virtually untouched by prosperity. A friend in Hyderabad tells me of a muslim area and a family in which only the mother or the daughter can go out since they have only good set of clothes to wear.

P.P.S. From Trujillo remarks may have legs: ex-Westpac boss:

"This week's accusation from the former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo that Australia is "backward and racist" has provoked a defensive reaction from many Australians.

But there are some who believe that rather than sour grapes, Sol Trujillo might have a point."

Post Poll studies of Indian elections

Shivam's post on UP elections UP’s Dalits remind Mayawati: Democracy is a beautiful thing. In a later post he
recommends looking at the CSDS=Lokniti post poll Study.
The studies are probably preliminary and might have to be studied state by state and region by region.(links via http://qalandari.blogspot.com/).

Mourning Nehru in Pakistan

Mourning Nehru in Pakistan via Sundeep Dougal's blog:
"Asrar Ahmed, a Pakistani colleague, asked me whether something worthwhile would come out of the Nehru-Ayub talks. With my unfailing knack for stressing the obvious, I replied that it all depended on how much time Nehru had. Whereupon Asrar and others exclaimed in unison, “May Allah prolong his life”. As if on cue, Hafeez Jullundari — the nearest thing Pakistan had to the poet laureate as well as a sort of minister-in-waiting during the Sheikh’s stay — stalked up to our table and sat down. Wagging his finger, he told me: “Inder Malhotra, you people have had a long ride feeling superior to us because you were lucky to have Nehru. Our misfortune was that after the early deaths of Jinnah and Liaquat, all our leaders were useless. Now Nehru is about to go. You will be down to our level, and then we will see”. All the Pakistanis around the table were horrified. They started remonstrating with the renowned poet but their attempt was drowned in the sudden flurry and noise. Sheikh Sahib had come down and everyone was being directed to his or her vehicle.


I do not know whether Murree’s Lintot restaurant still exists. On that day, however, it served us excellent breakfast in its balcony. It was there that the news of Nehru’s illness caught up with us. He died at the precise moment when the Sheikh set foot in Muzaffarabad. The thought uppermost in my mind was that the capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir was not the best place to to be in at the time of Nehru’s passing. But what followed stunned me.


The huge crowd that had assembled to welcome Sheikh Abdullah instantly turned into a mourning mass. Every man, woman and child, hands raised skywards, was praying for Nehru. Some of them were crying. No one touched the elaborate wazwan laid out. Suddenly, there was commotion at a short distance. A tall man was shouting my name, beating his head with both his hands and cursing his “black tongue”. It was Hafeez Jullundari. As he apologised to me profusely, Sheikh Sahib arrived to calm him. Instead, the two embraced each other and sobbed.
...

After the dinner trays were cleared, most of us got busy writing our dispatches. The airhostess came, sat down in the empty seat next to me, and asked if she could read what I was typing. When, while reading my homage to the iconic leader for The Statesman, my paper then, she reached my brief reference to the Pakistani reaction to his death, she broke down. Rushing to the washroom, she came back composed, and said: “Sir, I am sure we cannot be enemies for ever”. I told her that these were exactly the words Nehru had used seven years earlier."

Book recommendations from a linguist

Scientists' Nightstand: Derek Bickerton from American Scientist. A site about one of the recommendations Niche Construction.

Some old telugu songs back on youtube

Due to some alleged copyright problems, they keep disappearing but some of my favourites are back:
vacchindoyi samkranti, both Ghantasala and M.S.Ramarao are among the singers, snatches of music reminds me Barsaat music (Palleturu around 1952, and Barsaat 1949?).
aa manasulona aa choopulona; the sort of houses in which I grew up.
cheyetti jaigottu telugoda, a rousing (andhra) nationalist song written by Vemulapalli Srikrishna, later communisi MLA from Mangalagiri.
MELUKO VENKATA RAMANA ; some sort of lullaby.
kulamulo emundira ; Rajanala lights up the screen. Apparently, the Kannada version is still very popular.
chigurakulalo chilakamma; very nice lyrics and clearly Pendyala's music.

These
sites have some video songs and movies.
P.S. Telugu articles by K. Rohiniprasad on Indian Music. A few are on film music.
Shaji Chennai has also some nicearticles on film music.
The following post has somereferences to cross cultural influences even on classical south indian music:
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/oldtelugusongs/message/2343
See in particular the passage:
"1. Surprizingly no one mentioned about the very early entry of "western
instruments" into India and Indian classical music. I thought that a
person like UVR, who is well acquainted with Carnatic classical music
would refer to Dikshitar brothers (Muttuswami & Baluswami), their early
exposure to British bands at Fort St. George, Baluswamy's interest in
Violin (and how this instrument got so popularized even replacing veeNa
as accomp. instrument in concerts), paTnam subrahmaNya ayyar's
compositions like "raghuvaMSa sudhaaMbudhi chandrasi" (raaga:
kadanakutoohalam), or Tyaagayya's "SaraSara samaraika" (raaga:
kuntalavaraaLi), etc. etc."

Binayak Sen gets bail

From Civil rights activist Binayak sen gets bail :
"The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to civil rights activist Binayak sen, who has been lodged in a Raipur jail for over two years under unproven charges of links with Maoists in Chhattisgarh.

The bail was granted by a vacation bench of Justice Markandey Katju and Justice Deepak Verma.

Former law minister Shanti Bhushan, appearing for Sen, had earlier pleaded to the court to accord an urgent hearing to Sen's bail plea in view of his precarious health condition.

A bench of Justice DK Jain and Justice BS Reddy had on May 4 issued notice to the Chhattisgarh government on Sen's bail plea.

While seeking its reply, the bench had also ordered the state government to provide him the "best possible medical aid" for the heart ailment he has been suffering from.

The Chhattisgarh government has booked Sen, the vice president of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) under the stringent anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, for his alleged links with Maoists.

He was arrested on May 14, 2007 and accused of acting as a courier for an alleged Maoist lodged in jail.

On May 4, former law minister Ram Jethmalani, appearing for Sen, had sought bail for him pleading that "the case against him has already been demolished in the trial court as all the material witnesses in the case have been examined" and none of them have deposed against him.

Jethmalani had contended that despite the case against Sen having been demolished, the Chhattisgarh High Court was not entertaining his bail plea."