Articles on financial services to the poor

From Debunking Myths about the Poor and Financial Services by Suyash Rai and Sona Varma ( via India Development Blog):
"The poor are not sophisticated in using financial services, so access to finance may end up damaging their livelihoods: On the contrary, research on the use of financial services by the poor shows that given the complexity in their financial lives, the poor are very sophisticated in their use of financial instruments. Due to the absence of well-designed formal services, they end up creating a complex mesh of informal financial mechanisms around their lives. It seems this is the only way they can meet multiple needs using informal instruments. For example, financial diaries of the poor show how they creatively use a variety of loan sources to deal with the irregularity in their incomes and expenditures. Research also shows quite convincingly that on an average the chronic poor, i.e. those who fail to move out of poverty, do take initiatives to change their conditions. Failure to move out of poverty is primarily because of lack of access to capital and relevant networks. The recent evaluation of a micro credit program in India shows how entrepreneurial households consistently use credit to start successful new businesses or improve the profitability of existing businesses."
Chris BlattmanThe main problem with living on $2 a day…:
"The central finding: cash management is even more important for the poor than it is for you and me. Every household had both savings and debt, and often those savings and debt were scattered about 4 or 5 or 10 different people and places. They spread out their risk. This built a portfolio of the poor.

Unfortunately, they’re miserable about it. Informal financial obligations are unpleasant and insecure, but the poor don’t have any alternative.

This raises an important point: people value microfinance even if it doesn’t lead to rising incomes and development (like some recent evidence might suggest). They like it because microfinance helps them manage their day to day cash problems without the messy social obligations or discomfit. They want their financial intermediation to be impersonal.

It’s a nice point, convincingly made."

Brief summaries with links some micro finance studies by Duflo, Banerjee et all( a study from the slums of Hyderabad), Karlan and Zinman ( a study in Philippines)and an article by Dennis Rodman on self help groups are in these two posts from India Development Blog:
Apples and Jackfruit?
New Light for SHGs?

Pallavi Aiyar on India and China

Interview and links here:Smoke and Mirrors: China and India. One of the links has links to excepts from her book :SMOKE & MIRRORS WINS THE VODAFONE CROSSWORD POPULAR BOOK AWARD, 2008.
An article in Asia TimesIn the men's room, China leaves India standing and a longer article:India' Untouchables and China's Internal Migrants.
From :China through Indian eyes:
"But were I one of the millions-strong legions of cleaners, sweepers, janitors or night soil workers in India, I would probably prefer by some twist of karma to have been born Chinese.

But on other days I felt differently. There were days when I spent hours hunting for a Chinese source amongst the country’s think tanks, universities and research institutes for fresh insight or an alternative point of view on an issue for a story I had been working on. It was always such dishearteningly hard work."

SRI in Tiruchi

From System of rice intensification technique boosts paddy yield :
"The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has helped farmers in Tiruchi district to cope with an unreliable monsoon and shortage of farm labour, according to the district administration.

Speaking to The Hindu, District Collector T. Soundiah said the production cost of paddy under the new cultivation technique is in the range of Rs.2,000-3,000 a hectare, whereas it is close to Rs.10,000 under traditional cultivation methods. Where traditional methods of paddy cultivation yielded about two tonnes of paddy a hectare, under SRI farmers are able to get up to 6.7 tonnes a hectare.

The use of SRI is spreading in Tiruchi: the technique is being successfully implemented here on 20,000 ha out of a total of 70,000 ha under cultivation, according to data provided by the district administration.

“For many farmers, this has meant an additional income of Rs.25,000-30,000 per acre,” according to S. Sivaraj, Deputy Director, Agriculture, Central Government Schemes.

The SRI helps economise on resources use while maximising the yield.

“It requires a high level of farmland manure and a minimum quantity of seeds,” Mr. Sivaraj said. Only 2 kg of seeds were required per acre. The minimum age of seedlings would be eight to 12 days.

“Other important factors include wider spacing between seedlings and the use of the Cono-Weeder four times during the crop cycle,” Mr. Sivaraj said. Most important, SRI requires minimal use of water, according to Mr. Soundiah.

“The aim is to maintain the soil by wetting, not by flooding the fields as traditional cultivation methods suggest,” he said.

The district administration is implementing subsidy schemes for harvester and weeder machines to further boost productivity."

Earlier posts on SRI here and here.
SRIHome page.

Higher education in developing countries, Pakistan experiment

discussed in 3quarks daily Pakistan's Higher Education Reform Experiment. There have been several posts in Nanopolitan about Indian higher education. Anoop Kumar has some relevant comments here. See in particular Pervez Hoodbhoy's letter in 3quarksdaily:
""Pakistan's Reform Experiment" (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009) gives the impression of providing a factual balance sheet of Pakistan's higher education under General Pervez Musharraf's former government. Unfortunately, several critical omissions indicate a partisan bias.

Mention of the billions wasted on mindless prestige mega-projects is noticeably absent. Example: nine new universities were hastily conceived and partially constructed, but abandoned and finally scrapped after it became obvious that it was impossible to provide them with the most crucial ingredient - trained faculty. Similarly, fantastically expensive scientific equipment, imported with funds from the Higher Education Commission, remain hopelessly under-utilized many years later. They litter the country's length and breadth. For instance, my university has been
forced to house a "souped-up" Van de Graaf accelerator facility, purchased in 2005 with HEC funds. A research purpose is still being sought in 2009.

The authors conveniently choose not to mention that the 400% claimed increase in the number of publications was largely a consequence of giving huge payments to professors for publishing in international journals, irrespective of actual substance and quality. Not surprisingly these cash-per-paper injections had the effect of producing a plagiarism pandemic, one that is still out of control. In a country where academic ethics are poor and about a third of all students cheat in examinations, penalties for plagiarism by teachers and researchers are virtually
non-existent.

Citing Thomson Scientific, the authors claim a large rise in the "relative impact" in some disciplines, based upon citation levels of papers published between 2003 and 2007. But did the authors try to eliminate self-citations (a deliberate ploy) from this count? If they had - as I did using an available option in the Thomson Scientific package - they might actually have found the opposite result."

Two tributes to YSR

The more complementary part from YSR: Searching For History's Verdict By K.V. Baparao
"His political success as a grassroots Congress leader is especially remarkable, given the AP tradition of senior Congress leaders who, almost without exception, made an infantile subservience to the High Command their sole qualification for high office; if they failed to obtain the Chief Minister's post, these leaders would seek to make the state ungovernable by anyone else, by engineering riots or perhaps a violent agitation. There was always a premise that the Congress High Command did not look kindly upon strong state leaders who were competent and popular in their own right, but will placate those who throw violent tantrums.

Given this climate, for YSR to have succeeded in balancing his personal power in the state with what is from all accounts an excellent relationship with the High Command, while taking his rivals along, speaks of a high degree of political astuteness and skill.

He also deserves special appreciation for taking steps to improve public access to health care, including emergency services. The ubiquitous presence of ambulances, and the increased use of modern hospitals and clinics by the poor, speaks of an interest in improving health matters on the part of the late Chief Minister who started out as a doctor. Because this has historically not been a widely-shared interest among the numerous doctor-politicians and doctor-businesspersons who populate the upper echelons of the state, YSR's death gives rise to concerns as to whether these nascent services are doomed to stagnate and perish from entropy, or whether they will grow into a serious policy of delivering measurable and accountable health services to all."


From Remembering YSR by Pushpa Iyengar:
"Stories were legion about him......And what a paradox it was that a man known as a “permanent dissident” had brought the Congress together after many years of bitter infighting."
I gather from some friends in Hyderabad that his principal secretary K Subramanyam who also died in the crash was an outstanding IAS officer. Apparently he came from very poor background and some local christians saw that he was bright and helped with his education. He married a christian lady and left two children behind. The son suffers from autism and the daughter is considered very bright.
P.S. See also Kuffir's post r.i.p. victims of hyderabad riots, december 1990. and the comments.
Some say that property rights have taken a tumble. Land and site occupation with the help of mobile goondas seemsto have increased.

A demonstration of India's Diversity?

Food Choices on Indian Airlines from Language Log.

Do teachers discriminate?

From Do teachers discriminate against minorities in India? (ungated version of the original paper here):
"Teachers discriminated against minority students in the grading of exams, but the results were modest. It is important to note that our study only facilitates reflection on one element of discrimination within the classroom. Other, more blatant types of discrimination may exist in the classroom as well. If we hope that education can help “level the playing field,” further work needs to be done to understand how to improve the treatment of minority students in the classroom."
P.S. Related post by Anoop Kumar Pandit Ramchandra Guha and the post of Mysore University Vice-Chancellor -II (via Blogbharti)

It is 'arrant nonsense'

says William Safire in Arrant Nonsense:
"If you Google errant, you get nearly three million citations, their sense "roving, straying, sometimes from high standards"; arrant gets only one-tenth as many. But if you enter the phrase "arrant nonsense," you get 35,000 to a mere 772 for "errant nonsense." People know the word with the a means "utter, thoroughgoing, complete," usually carrying the connotation of disapproval. Arrant, the former variant, is now out on its own, its meaning independent of the wandering errant. Let the dictionaries catch up with the living language."
The link from a comment in the very interesting post The Nature of Modern Finance:
"Is modern finance more like electricity or junk food? This is, of course, the big question of the day.
.........
Given what we’ve seen over the past 12 months, which way should we lean: towards believing in the positive power of finance, until the opposite is proven; or towards being skeptical of finance in its modern form, until we see evidence that this actually makes sense?

Surely out skepticism should extend to financial innovation. Show me the evidence that this kind of innovation really adds value, socially speaking – rather than providing a very modern way to extract amazing “rents”."

The comment which drew the response is from "Old Lady in Red":
"To summarize the common understanding of the principle, “Of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the explanation containing just the facts will do.”

What is happening today in finance is errant nonsense, fantastical craziness, bizarre lunacy and, fifty years from now, we will not be able to fathom how we could have been so stupid for so long."

Review of "Recovering the Lost Tongue"

by Rachna Singh :The forgotten world

Crowd behaviour in emergencies

From Emergencies inspire crowd cooperation, not panic (via Mind Hacks http://www.mindhacks.com/):
"Crowd plus emergency equals mass panic, or so urban myths and Hollywood films would have us believe. The reality, recognised by social psychology for some time, is that people in crowds often behave in remarkably cooperative and selfless ways. A new study by John Drury and colleagues suggests that this kind of collaborative behaviour emerges when people in a crowd acquire a shared identity. And contrary to the "mass panic" perspective, an emergency can be the very catalyst that brings people together."
There are links to John Drury's papers as well as a recent book "A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL:The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster" by Rebecca Solnit reviewd here: The Better Angels of Our Nature. Excerpt from the review:
"Her accounts of these five events are so stirring that her book is worth reading for its storytelling alone.

But what makes it even more fascinating is Solnit's demonstration that disasters give rise to small, temporary utopias in which the best of human nature emerges and a remarkable spirit of generosity and cooperation takes over. "Disaster," she writes, "along with moments of social upheaval, is when the shackles of conventional belief and role fall away and the possibilities open up." People suffering unimaginable misfortune often revert not to savagery but to an almost beatific selflessness, comforting themselves in extremis by aiding others. Solnit cites many examples of those who remember a disaster as, paradoxically, one of the great moments of their lives. The reaction is similar to that of some who recall the Great Depression as a time of spiritual and social richness."

Ted Kennedy Tributes

An American Greek by Bernard-Henri Levy (via Amitava Kumar)
From Silliman's Blog (via a comment from Accidental Blogger)
"In my job at the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice, I managed to arrange an out-of-state parole plan for Lovedahl through the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, but I still had to persuade the North Carolina political establishment, and especially that pol, that putting Lovedahl on the streets 2,500 miles from home wasn’t going to come back to haunt him. There was only one person I knew who might be able to accomplish this, so I called Ted Kennedy’s office in Massachusetts. Without even once asking “What’s in it for me?” Kennedy made the call, and Lovedahl got his parole. That might have been the end of the story but Lovedahl broke parole – after 20 years in prison, he found Delancey Street’s restrictions hard to take – & headed to Nevada, where he was arrested as a parole violator. An extradition hearing was held, but it was easy for the Wabash County public defender to show that Lovedahl should never have been convicted in the first place. Free so long as he remained in Nevada, Lovedahl stayed there the rest of his life.

I’ve always wondered just how many times over 46 years in the U.S. Senate Kennedy made those kinds of phone calls. He was not only the one senator in 1973 who might have made that gesture, he was also the only one who could have gotten that result. I fear that the same may have been true as recently as last week."

The many sides of Ted Kennedy (from Salon.com):
" Newt Gingrich, Congressman and Speaker of the House (1995-1999). "Clever tactician"

Every conservative should take a lesson from the liberals in the uses of deliberate, sustained, permanent offense. Ever since they became a majority in 1930, the liberals have learned to keep taking as much as they can get in the way of legislation every day. A model for this is Ted Kennedy. Truth to tell, I have grown to respect the way he handles the process. You may not like him or his politics, but it is hard not to take your hat off to the steady, tough-minded, straightforward way he pushes for what he wants. As soon as we Republicans became the majority in the Senate, Kennedy realized he needed allies on the Republican side and began reaching out to them. He never quits looking for new opportunities to expand the government, and he is remarkably skilled at getting Republicans to sign on to bills with him. We on our side are as yet not nearly as tenacious, as firm, as clear about our ends, nor as clever in our tactics as the good senator; and any would-be conservative legislative leader could learn a lot about permanently being on offense by studying his ability to get hit, attacked, dismissed, and smilingly keep moving forward. (Washington, D.C., early 1990s)"

Winter gardening

in Melbourne has not been easy with cold and rain. Silverbeet grew like a weed and provided much food for us and our friends. Chillies survided and kept yielding until now but there may be a gap of couple of months before we have garden chillies again. Coriander and lettuce did OK, particularly in pots, possibly because the potting mix was freah. Spinach and capsicum did not do too well. May be they will do better in spring. It is time to finish weeding, pruning, mulching and start on the main vegetables for summer.

Links, August 25

Amazonian Fashion and a Lack of Financial Services (via Chris Blattman)
Expanding microenterprise credit access: Using Randomized Supply Decisions to Estimate the Impacts in Manila (via 3quarksdaily which also has links to an interview with the author Dean Karlan)
Revolutionary Minds (via Rajib)
Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. More links in Nanopolitan
Qalandar is pleased that somebody is talking of land reforms: Will it take a war to focus on Swat’s problems?

Two posts in Indian films

'kanTi chooputO champEsta by Kuffir to lots of links to his and others' earlier articles. Excerpt:
"the faction genre isn't actually unique to the erroneously classified telugu cinema- the line i quoted was from the remake of an original tamil movie (one of those movies which glorify the lives of rural gounder-thevar-naicker-etc tyrants). telugu cinema is essentially the handiwork of kammas, reddies and brahmins with significant contributions from rajus, kapus (some sub-castes) and velamas. mostly brahminized intermediate castes. all of them together make up not more than 20% of the state's population. what we call telugu cinema is a product of their kanTichoopu, or vision or nazariya. and there's definitely nothing pan-telugu about it. i've talked about whose nazariya is reflected in hindi cinema in this post- who speaks through so-called tamil, bengali, malayalam etc cinema?"

and Utpal Dutt on theatre and film by Chandrahas Chowdary. Excerpt:
"“I believe any discussion on films in semi-colonial or newly independent countries must start from the illiteracy, poverty and cultural starvation of the masses,” wrote the great stalwart of Indian theatre and film Utpal Dutt in an essay in 1979. “It seems blasphemous to engage in comfortable talk about the aesthetics of cinema in a country where the majority starves.” What can we say about this clearly Marxist aesthetic? Is it true? Was it more relevant thirty years ago than it is now? Shouldn’t art be seen as a site, a force, independent of social and economic realities? Are artworks themselves a product of class and power interests, or can they be seen as something more ambiguous and capacious, combating propaganda as often as complicit with it?"

Possibly related: this comment by an anon. in IIT faculty go to war :
"...what IITians are asking not exactly “more”, but what they actually deserve. Obviously they compare the salaries with that of salaries from where they came and joined in IITs ( premier institutes of abroad, industries )."

National innovations?

After seeing this link in Nanopolitan Pluck an innovation, I looked up Honybee network since this seemed to be the type of problem they would be interested in. From this post of about an year ago India’s National Innovation Foundation and Honeybee Network By rahulbrown, they seem to be hamstrung. Anil Gupta says in the comments:
"much of your criticism is valid and i can only say that if the issue was only dissemination, then you have done a good job of it. But then visit NIF and find out the stress under which a small team works days and night with highly limited resources,m static for last eight years( though in the same period, the number has swelled to more than hundred thousand practices, ideas, traditional knowledge practices, and of course innovations from over 545 districts ). May be you can be a valuable part of the solution rather than just finding out why much could not be done.

If you read Honey Bee newsletter, you will find in the last several issues in which we have published similar innovations which are found in China, Africa, and India.

I do not know about the right or wrong management at nif, but it is open management and colleagues are welcome to critique it, contribute to improve it ( every criticism helps in improving it) and take it forward.

there is no other public institution which has scaled up the knowledge about creativity and innovation in the country with budget going down in real terms in the last eight years.

we are always looking for mavericks who believe in making thsi ocuntry more creative, comassionate and collaborative, may be you will also collaborate

all the best and keep critiquing because that indeed helps"
P.S. See also Invent a coconut-picking machine and scoop a million rupees according to which "In Thailand and Malaysia, pigtailed macaques, a type of monkey, are trained to gather the fruit. In parts of India, hydraulic platforms are used to lift harvesters.
However, Mr Balakrishnan said that previous experiments in Kerala — from the planting of dwarf varieties to the provision of long sticks to farmers to prod nuts from trees — had proven unsatisfactory. “We are looking for a device that will help people to pluck the nuts without having to climb; ideally, one that will allow even women and the elderly to harvest the nuts from the ground,” he said.

The competition opens officially at the end of September and will run for six months. If a workable solution is found, the Kerala state government will help the inventor to set up a factory to supply the winning device to the international coconut industry."
Tender coconuts are exported from Thailand to Australia and are sold for 2-3 Aus. dollars. I understand that coconuts in Queensland are not harvested and go waste.

William Calley says 'sorry'

according to BBC News Vietnam massacre soldier 'sorry' . The story of one who curtailed the massacre Hugh Thompson, Jr.

Micro loan defaults

Indian Development Blog discusses a recent WSJ article A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum in Micro Credit Bubble? :
"Although it can be argued that the WSJ piece is not very well-researched and has instances of generalization and poor attribution, it is interesting to see that MFIs choose to underplay the mass-default that has occurred in Karnataka and dismiss the possibility that it could be partly due to faulty operational models."
I have been involved in one small project for a couple of years and so far there are no defaults. We work through a local pastor who knows the people, their needs and capabilities and has some standing in the community. Because, there are no defaults, the interest rate is low and sometimes used to finance other loans. Now it has reached two other places, in one of them through a local union. Such models may work on a small scale.

More Telugu dictionaries

The following పత్రికా పదకోశం is currently available online.
A few years ago, while trying to find some dictionaries for technical terms in Telugu, I came across the name of Digavalli Venkata Siva Rao, through his grandson of the same name. Today I saw mention of his two books in the following openlibrary article:
Digavalli Venkata Siva Rao
Quote from the article:
"Another well recognized work of Siva rao was his book “Vyvahara kosamu” (1933) and his “ Sastra paribhasha”(1934). This is English-Telugu Dictionary of Scientific and Technical terms. Both these books were approved by Text Book Committee. This was a pioneering attempt to find suitable Telugu terms for technical and scientific words. There was no work of its kind before this book. Several Universities including Madras and Andhra approved its use for Telugu translations of technical and scientific literature. Several appreciations were received from many well known personalities including Vepa Rameswam and several others like Vembu Iyer[sessions judge] and the Hindu paper. Long before Glossary work was started by Andhra Govt, Siva rao did this ground breaking work. Above two books were combined and reprinted by J.Jetley of Asian Educational Services, New Delhi in
1991. "
The flavour of the dictionary can be seen at google books English-Telugu Dictionary Technical and Scientific
P.S. See also

gwynn

brown

Adhunika Vyavahara Kosam

శ్రీ శోధన

See also discussions at telugupadam

Chandra Latha's blog

I just noticed that the well-known writer చంద్ర లత (Chandra Latha)has started blogging: మడత పేజీ
P.S. A recent post has the video of a speechడా. విజయ్ గుప్తా గారి మాట of Modadugu Vijay Gupta, the recipient of the World Food Prize in 2005. Dr. Gupta is from Bapatla. Mathematicians Komaravolu Chandrasekharan and Madhav Nori come from the same place.

Nice article on Annanamayya and Prajanatyamandali

జానపదం ఎవరిసొమ్ము? in Andhra Jyoti, vividha section.

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.

Rational Fortune Telling?

Earlier Julie Rehmeyer has written about the work of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:Mathematical Fortune-Telling :
"The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran." (mentioned in this blog :Synthesizing the wisdom of experts). Recently, there is a more detailed article in The New York Times:
Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? (via 3quarksdaily). Some of it is a bit scary:
"For Bueno de Mesquita, the first prominent use of the model came in 1979, when the State Department was canvassing academics with expertise on India, including Bueno de Mesquita, to see how some parliamentary maneuverings would unfold. Bueno de Mesquita decided to use his first version of the software (which was, as he puts it, “barely working”) and his own knowledge of India to determine the power players and each of their numbers. Then the university’s mainframe computer worked on the data all night.

In the morning, Bueno de Mesquita said, he was astonished: the predicted victor was a seemingly minor figure, someone discounted by the experts. Bueno de Mesquita shared their opinion, he told me, but he accepted the computer’s verdict anyway. “So I called the person back at the State Department, and told him what I had concluded,” Bueno de Mesquita went on. “And there was a long, quiet period and some laughing. He said: ‘How did you arrive at that? Nobody’s saying that.’ So I told him I had a little computer model. He just guffawed. He said, ‘I wouldn’t repeat that if I were you.’ ”

Three months later, according to Bueno de Mesquita, his prediction turned out to be right....
Soon Bueno de Mesquita and Organski (who died in 1998) acquired clients ranging from Arthur Andersen to Union Carbide, which tapped them for advice on placating the Indian government after the Bhopal chemical spill. Today Bueno de Mesquita’s firm essentially consists of himself and Harry Roundell, a former banker at J. P. Morgan who met Bueno de Mesquita when Roundell hired him in 1995 to help the bank figure out how to push for new, favorable regulations in the U.S. They charge $50,000 and up to do a prediction and offer negotiating tips, and they take on 18 to 20 of these assignments a year. Beyond saying it was “a reasonable amount of money,” Bueno de Mesquita would not describe his income from the company."
However, there are doubts about his predictions:
"Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of international affairs, says that Bueno de Mesquita’s nonprediction work — like his theory of the “political survival” of heads of state — make him a “respected scholar, deservedly so.” It’s the predictions that Walt doesn’t trust, because Bueno de Mesquita does not publish the actual computer code of his model. (Bueno de Mesquita cannot do so because his former firm owns the actual code, but he counters that he has outlined the math behind his model in enough academic papers and books for anyone to replicate something close to his work.) While Bueno de Mesquita has published many predictions in academic journals, the vast majority of his forecasts have been done in secret for corporate or government clients, where no independent academics can verify them. “We have no idea if he’s right 9 times out of 10, or 9 times out of a hundred, or 9 times out of a thousand,” Walt says. Walt also isn’t impressed by Stanley Feder’s C.I.A. study showing Bueno de Mesquita’s 90 percent hit rate. “It’s one midlevel C.I.A. bureaucrat saying, ‘This was a useful tool,’ ” Walt says. “It’s not like he’s got Brent Scowcroft saying, ‘Back in the Bush administration, we didn’t make a decision without consulting Bueno de Mesquita.’ ” Other academics point out that rational-actor theory has come under increasing criticism in recent years, as more evidence accumulates that people make many decisions irrationally."

NEFA in the news again

On Indian Independence Day, this news from The Age: Tensions mount on Chinese-Indian border:
"Feathers were ruffled in Delhi last weekend when Google satellite maps showed the names of several towns in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in Mandarin and not English or Hindi, making it appear as if the region was part of China.

Hackles were also raised two months ago when Beijing objected to a $US60 million Asian Development Bank loan to India for a project in the territory which China claims.

The disputed border follows the ''McMahon Line'' drawn up in 1914 when the British ruled India. Beijing does not recognise this demarcation and claims a large portion of territory on the Indian side, including the town of Tawang, the birthplace of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

In June, the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh, J. J. Singh, said up to 30,000 new troops would be deployed in the region. Also in June, a state-run newspaper in China accused India of ''unwise military moves'' along the border. The article said India's response was ''dangerous if it is based on a false anticipation that China will cave in''.

Professor Chellaney says the tensions are ominous. ''Any doubts that the Indian foreign policy establishment might have had about the threat posed by China have evaporated in recent months, that's for sure,'' he says."

This 1984 report by a US navy commander The China-India Border War gives the background and suggests that at one stage Chinese were agreeable to a settlement on the eastern front.

Kalyan Mukherjea's tribute to Ali Akbar Khan

Remembering Ali Akbar Khan - I

Remembering Ali Akbar Khan - II

New direction for treating schizophrenia

From Traffic jam in brain causes schizophrenia symptoms:
"Schizophrenia waits silently until a seemingly normal child becomes a teenager or young adult. Then it swoops down and derails a young life.
Scientists have not understood what causes the severe mental disorder, which affects up to 1 percent of the population and results in hallucinations, memory loss and social withdrawal.

But new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has revealed how schizophrenia works in the brain and provided a fresh opportunity for treatment. In a new, genetically engineered mouse model, scientists have discovered the disease symptoms are triggered by a low level of a brain protein necessary for neurons to talk to one another.

A Traffic Jam in Brain

In human and mouse brains, kalirin is the brain protein needed to build the dense network of highways, called dendritic spines, which allow information to flow from one neuron to another. Northwestern scientists have found that without adequate kalirin, the frontal cortex of the brain of a person with schizophrenia only has a few narrow roads. The information from neurons gets jammed up like rush hour traffic on an interstate highway squeezed to a single lane.

"Without enough pathways, the information takes much longer to travel between neurons and much of it will never arrive," said Peter Penzes, assistant professor of physiology at the Feinberg School. .....

This discovery opens a new direction for treating the devastating cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia," Penzes said. "There is currently no treatment for that. It suggests that if you can stimulate and amplify the activity of the protein kalirin that remains in the brain, perhaps we can help the symptoms." "

Views of Ann Dunham Soetoro

From Dreams From His Mother :
"Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, “many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,” who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.

These same observations also led her to start working with institutions like the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development to devise alternate pathways for reaching and working with the poor. She helped to pioneer microcredit programs that made small amounts of capital available to weavers, blacksmiths and other low-income groups — people who would otherwise have had no access to credit."

(via Kalyan Mukherjea)

Three-in-one oven

From SciDev.net Researchers trial 'three-in-one' oven:

"A new 'three-in-one' stove that provides electricity as well as acting as a cooker and refrigerator is undergoing field trials in Nepal and the United Kingdom.

Developed by scientists at the UK-based University of Nottingham, the stove harnesses 'thermoacoustic' energy.

A fire at one end of a gas-filled pipe creates a temperature gradient, which triggers sound waves as gas moves from hot to cold regions, similar to a 'singing' kettle. The mechanical energy of the sound waves is then converted into electrical energy.

A separate thermoacoustic engine works in reverse to generate a cooling effect for the refrigerator, and food can be cooked on the heat from the fire. All three processes can occur simultaneously.

The oven is more efficient than similar devices and can be built using local materials, as recent tests in Nepal using propane as the energy source showed.

The team are hoping to develop a generator that runs on biomass — wood or dung for example — and weighs between ten and 20 kilograms, at a cost of no more than £20 (US$33). They believe that communities in the Indian subcontinent, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America could benefit from the stove.

The project, known as SCORE (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity Supply) was launched two years ago."
P.S. Some similar earlier posts: Ravi Kuchimanchi , Gadgets for the poor ,'Glacier man' Chewang Norphel brings water to Ladakh,
Sugata Mitra.
Malapati Raja Sekhar has similar posts in Rural Development of India .

Rajesh Kochhar's blog

Vaguely following up a post in a Telugu blog Sainyam. I started wondering about Rigveda
here. Kalyan Mukherjea directed me to the work of an Indian astrophysicist Rajesh Kochhar. His website and blog are here. A chapter of a book by him and Jayant Narliker is posted there as well as a review of his book The Vedic People

Perepa P.C. Joshi

People in my age group are falling one by one and it may be time to pay some tribute to my old friend Perepa Joshi, named after Puran Chand Joshi. It was a friendship formed accidentally in Hyderabad. I was rebellious about university courses, was in and out of college, finally decided to complete a degree and landed in Hyderabad with very little money. Joshi's father Perepa Mrityumjayudu was shot dead in 48-49 in Telangana struggle ans some of his colleagues like Pucchalapalli Sundarayya, Chandra Rajeswara Rao who felt grateful that he did not reveal their whereabouts took interest in Joshi's welfare and started helping with his education. We ended up in the same college and rented a triangular room which we shared with a fellow student. We duly completed our degrees and went our separate ways. Once in a while I would try to look him up in Hyderabad. On one such occasion I found that he was already married and living with his children in a small room made under a stair case. Later I heard that he became manager of the Visalandhra Publishing House and visited him a few times in Vijayawada. He always seemed poor (but is reasonably comfortable now), did not have his own house but was always cheerful, talking of books, publishing and editing Gurajada and others. I kept running him in to various places, in Mumbai, Delhi, Chicago and once on a flight to UK. At some stage, he seemed to quit the hurly burly of publishing for others. A contractor friend forced him to buy a small house with deferred payments. Meanwhile children completed their studies. Joshi decided to start his own publishing house and publish old telugu books for which copy rights have expired.
I have not really kept in touch with him in early days. It is a friendship which grew over years. I still do not know what sort of communist denomination he belongs to. But over years, there have been many conversations, particularly about Telugu literaray figures many of whom he knew personally from Visvanatha Satyanarayana, Arudra to Kutumba Rao others. He had some guesses about the change in Visvanatha possibly due to the ill-treatment in in the Christian college he taught and many stories about publishing, how Gurajada's manuscripts were put in two trunks and carted around when communists were umderground for fear that they may be burnt when some houses were set on fire by the police. Recently he had a stroke. I hope that somebody in Hyderabad will find out more about these stories which may be lost.
He is a man with strong beliefs and integrity and who with his wife Lalita( another admirable person who has spent a lot of her life in social work. On the last trip she was telling me of the lot of poor muslims in Hyderabad; how a mother and her daughter had only one proper set of clothes and only one of them could go out at a time)contributed to the welfare of people around them in various places. I hope that he will recover soon and spread his cheerfulness around for a long time.

Some India-related books

I have often wondered about the fact that many of the areas associated with India and Hinduism are in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, Gandhari may be from Peshawar area, Panini from near Swat Valley, originial Kambhoja is in Afghanistan, the Mohenjodaro-Harappa civilization might have stated from Mehrgarh... Alice Albinia started dreaming about Rig Veda in Delhi and her engrossing account "Empires of the Sind" describes her travels along the Sind, then in to Afghanistan, later to Ladakh and Tibet up to the souce of Sind. I read it recently after a Book recommendation from Fatima Bhutto. It is not a coneventional history book but there is lot of history, its influences on the present, conflicts of nations and perils of development. Along the way, there is some day dreaming about where Rig Veda was written which is not too covincing. There is no discussions of the 'fact' that devas and dasa were interchanged for Iranian aryans and Indo Aryans; this later is discussed briefly in John Keay's "India: a History". But Alice Albinia has some additional information about trade between Harappa and Manda in Kashmir. Pankaj Mishra travelled some of the same territory in his "Temptations of the West" and his account will complement Albinia's account of the current conflicts. Another history book that I found interesting is Burton Stein' posthumous book prepared for publication for by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others.
There are some heavy tomes like "Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia", edited by Sheldon Pollock, and "The Language of the Gods in the World of Men" by Sheldon Pollock which I read after a suggestion from Paruchuri Sreenivas. Somebody recently gave me a copy of "Classical Indian Metaphysics" by Stephen Phillips which looks readable. Indian history seems to be still unfolding and I hope to get some glimpses of it.

Information overload

An interesting discussion in 3quarks daily and a comment led to the following

A Conversation on Information: An interview with Umberto Eco, by Patrick Coppock. I resist the temptation to quote from it or paraphrase it.

Who is Paruchuri Sreenivas?

My response to a query in
a Telugu blog:


Paruchuri Sreenivas is the most knowledgeable person about Indology topics that I know. He has suggested to me and many others articles , books etc and seems to have the knack for finding significant articles. Even scholars like Velcheru Narayana Rao (Krishnadevaraya professor in University of Wisconsin and one of the best writers on Telugu poetry etc. in English)consult him for references.

I never met him personally but heard that his father and my father taught in the same school; but I think that he is much younger than me. He gets a bit impatient with sloppy people like me but is very helpful. By profession, he is a plastics engineer. He is the owner of the group racchabanda, and one of the people responsible for oldtelugusongs, ghantasala.inf. He has not written many articles but has many informative and sometimes encyclopedic posts in various places like racchabanda, oldtelugusongs discussion groups and vatious archives like telusa.

I think that he is a treasure and possibly a good position for him would be some sort of directorship of a Telugu Institute. But he does not have the right 'qualifications'.

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.