Aditya Chakrabortty on UK riots

From UK riots: political classes see what they want to see:
"Many economists have spent the past few days passing around a paper on the Hindu-Muslim riots in India in the 80s and 90s. Written by Anjali Thomas Bohlken and Ernest John Sergeant in 2010, it finds that "just a 1% increase in the [economic] growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%". Recessions are good for riots: perhaps no surprise, there. What matters, they argue, is when people suffer abrupt drops in living standards – and that goes for Hackney as well as Athens.

That point is rammed home by a new paper from the economists Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth. Titled "Austerity and Anarchy", it should be essential reading for all those who want an academic take on what spending cuts made in Whitehall might mean on their local high streets. Ponticelli and Voth look at social unrest across Europe from 1919 to the present – and find a clear link between "fiscal retrenchment and instability" that goes beyond the misery caused by recession."
Ponticelli and Voth paper here.
Vaughan Bell on Riot Technology and Tom Stafford's When explaining becomes a sin.

Hotter than bhut jolokia

One grown in Australia seems to be the hottest now Caliente! Hottest Pepper Tips Heat Scale. From the picture it seems to e the one I tried off and on. It is pretty bad but easy to grow and the chillies are availale through out the year. So now, there seem to be at least two types of chillies hotter than bhut jolokia New “Infinity Chili” Sounds Hotter Than Homer Simpson’s “Insanity Pepper”

Alex Tabarrok on coming changes in education

The Coming Education Revolution.

Telugu words for escalator

From Escalator - ఎస్కలేటర్ (posted by Lanka Giridhar)
క. మరయును జంత్రఁపు మెట్టులు
చరసోపానఁములు కదులు చక్కెక్కుడులున్
దొర లేటవంపు టెత్తెన
లెఱుఁగజను పరిపరివిధము లెస్కలెటరమున్

మరమెట్లు, జంత్రపు మెట్లు (యంత్రపు మెట్లు), చరసోపానములు, కదులు చక్కెక్కుడులు
(లేక కదులెక్కుడులు), దొరలు యేటవాలు ఎత్తెన - ఇలా ఎన్నో విధాలుగా ఎస్కలేటరును
గుర్తుపట్టవచ్చు.

Stephen Krasner on decoupling

From Conversation with Stephen D. Krasner:

"I got the title from one of my colleagues, John Meyer, who is a sociologist at Stanford. This is actually a common concept in sociology: decoupling. The idea is that norms can be decoupled from behavior. The standard story would be something like the following. Your business: if you go to the bank to get a loan, you have to have a business plan. If you don't have a business plan, people will not take you seriously. But everybody knows you're not going to follow the business plan. So you have a set of rules, you have to behave in a certain way, but everybody knows that at some level it's not what's going to drive your behavior. You have to have a vice president for technology, but if it's some eighteen-year-old computer science major at Berkeley, no one will take you seriously. So the eighteen-year-old may actually be running your technology but you better have some thirty- or thirty-five-year-old out there with a formal title.

There are lots of situations. International relations, and life in general, is complex. We have these rules. The rules may work some of the time; often, they don't. So organized hypocrisy is in some sense inherent. I wasn't kidding when I said it's part of life, not just international relations."

He was talking about his book "Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy" reviewd here.

Here Prof. John Meyer discusses how he and Brian Rowan came up with the idea of decoupling and John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan paper
The Structure of Educational Organizations ( Also http://books.google.com/books/about/Schools_and_society.html?id=_Bxy2_3lVFoC and http://home.earthlink.net/~fheapblog/id35.html, http://www.uazuay.edu.ec/estudios/com_exterior/tamara/Meyer-Rowan-Instlzd_Orgs.pdf and a more recent discussion by another Meyer and Rowan http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61339.pdf)

Spaced repetition

Spaced repetition via the post What is the difference? by Steve Hsu provides links to several studies. A short article at Wikipedia on Spaced repetition

Some food supplements seem useful

Check Snake Oil?

A song from Jogan

by Geeta Roy (Dutt) and others:
Jogan - Uthat Chale Avadhoot (part i)
Jogan - Uthat Chale Avadhoot (part ii)

P.S. Apart from one bhajan by Lata in Nau Bahaar, I seem to like Geeta Roy's bhajans more. Some information about Geeta Roy and her fabourite songs around 1956 is here:
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/ducksoup/26/GeetaDutt.htm

Where do photons come from?

discussed in Ask Science Questions And Get Answers:
Where do photons come from, or how are they "created"?

More on the treatment of mental illnesses

MindHacks links to an article on Patients and power struggles:
"Medical History has a brief but good article on the political wranglings and scientific battles between psychiatry, psychoanalysis and clinical psychology in 20th Century America."
The article Contested Jurisdictions: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Psychology in the United States, 1940–2010 by Andrew Scull also says:
"Publication of the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association proved to be a watershed moment in the evolution of twentieth-century psychiatry. That document, and its subsequent, even more elephantine revisions, marked the advent of the so-called neo-Kraepelinian revolution in psychiatry. Embraced by the insurance industry and linked ever-more tightly to the needs and requirements of the multinational pharmaceutical industry, for whom psychotropic drugs were becoming the single most important and profitable set of products they marketed, it marked the decisive recapture of the profession by a biologically reductionist view of mental disorders."
and earlier
"Psychoanalysis had managed initially to contain the potential threat posed by the drugs revolution, but by the mid-1970s, that resolution was threatening to break down. Antipsychotic drugs had proved to be an enormously lucrative market, and questions were beginning to be raised in many quarters about precisely what therapeutic advantages accrued from adding seemingly interminable and expensive psychoanalytic treatments to the mix. A decade earlier, virtually every academic department of psychiatry was led by a psychoanalyst or a psychoanalytic fellow-traveller, but increasingly, the sums on offer to conduct laboratory research on potentially therapeutic compounds were exercising a powerful appeal, one bolstered by the critical importance of funded research in establishing pecking orders in large research universities."
Two related posts Fascinating book :"Crazy Like Us" and
Scary story

Some BT cotton updates

Bt cotton cuts pesticide poisoning - July 29, 2011 from Nature News
GM crop use makes minor pests major problem from Nature news 13 May 2010
More updates in GM Watch
Benefits of Bt cotton elude farmers in China

Better together?

Hugo Mercier in Psychology Today blogs Why So Smart? Why So Dumb? How can reasoning be both so good and so bad? (via 3quarksdaily).
An earlier discussion in Jonah Lehrer's blog The Reason We Reason

The allure of Hindi film songs

Recently a telugu relative aged about 65 came down with acute leukemia during a trip to USA. She is given about an year to live and it is not clear whether she can travel back to India. She wanted to listen to some old hindi songs and I was asked to send a list of sites. I know sites in telugu but for hindi/urdu I usually use YouTube and snd go on from there. So I sent her a list
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBkAAcXW54s&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=funBs-fw9GE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0ViVMEJMg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTVoQRm4kR8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFqGQ54WT9Y&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja3XCe4e2gc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sPcTvZx6cc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IJshvH4VJg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_BmHDD8rSM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R2yZ6y3hh4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XJx7gBLAJE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oFt8O1rrs4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2CJZiP4_Sc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQZaG5SZRYk&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyrIA2EPHzk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgwfvDh7cPc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A35PbjcKoBA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5UjceuIZ2o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGaE_PmzfVE
Apparently she has been using an IPad and listening to those songs and others using the search feauture.
It is not clear to me why Hindi films are poular (I like the songs, and sometimes songdance sequences,but usually do not watch the films). Brian Larkin has written about the popularity of hindi films outside India, particularly in Nigeria in various articles and his book 'Signal and Noise' mentioned before in
http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com/2008/12/popularity-of-bolloywood-outside-india.html
http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com/2008/11/interesting-book.html

Don Ariely at FiveBooks

FiveBooks Interview Dan Ariely on Behavioural Economics
P.S. Related
Conditions for Intutive Expertise by Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, linked in
The Great Divide between Academics and Practitioners by Ashwin Parameswaran (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader)

There is no love in most Indian marriages

since they are mostly arranged says a nephew who was born in USA. It is not clear to me what love is and what are the signs with which it can verified though it is proclaimed in the so called 'love marriages'. I assume that may be there is a skip in the hear beat or some sort of thrill when one sees the other whcih is a bit hard to verify after one is married, since one sees the other so often and in expected places. I wonder whether one can test by what happens when one sees each other unexpecedly. That happenned to me today.

D.Balasubramanian reminds us

of the benefits of yoghurt and buttermilk in Curd, buttermilk and the Nobel Prize of 1908
The wikipedia article Yoghurt describes the work of Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov in popularizing yoghurt.

Links July 25, 2011

The big-spending blues by Timothy Garton Ash :
"CALL me Oswald Spengler if you must, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that United States and the European Union are engaged in competitive decadence. The West's two leading polities seem incapable of tackling the debt and deficit burdens which their versions of liberal democratic capitalism have built up. Their politicians dance like drunkards along the cliff's edge of default."


From SCIENTIFIC american interview with Ducan Watts, the author of Everything is Obvious: Once you Know the Answer The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts:
"I started out life in physics and then mathematics, and at some point I switched over to become a sociologist—and in the process of transitioning, I noticed this interesting phenomenon: When people perceived me as a mathematician, and I would describe my research, they would say, "Wow, that's really fascinating. How do you figure these things out? It's complicated and difficult." But when a few years later I was describing the same work in terms of social phenomena and the behavior of people, fads and historical events, success and failure, and so on, people would say, "That sounds kind of obvious. Don't we all know that?""

Andrew Gelman's review of the book here:

Reinvent the toilet challenge from Gates foundation.

M.N. Roy is now a private club

From M.N.Roy:
"M.N.ROY club in Mexico City

Chic By Accident from the Franco Mexican architect Emmanuel Picault together with the French architect Ludwig Godefroy just completed a private club in Mexico City, called M.N.ROY.
.......
We kept the house as a testimony of what it was, the house where Manabendra Nath Roy founded the first clandestine Mexican communist party."

via
M.N. Roy on The "Historical Role of Islam" in 3quarksdaily where Robin Verghese points to a readable article by M.N. Roy :
Historical Role of Islam:An Essay on Islamic Culture
P.S. M.N. Roy was also one of the founders of the Communist Party of India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India

Cultural habits

I am seventy now of which I have spent first forty years in India and the last twenty three in Australia. Of the countries where I lived I find Australia the most livable (there was and still is a bit of racism but it is no worse than caste stuff in India). I retired five years ago and when I applied for a health card, I found that I can actually get some money from the government since my income was low. There were other benefits as well. I found that for taking care of grand children, one could get some money from the government. Eventhough we have been doing it for the past five years to two to three days a week, I could never bring myself to do that. Looking after grandchildren has been a pleasure and it is something that one does automatically in India. Perhaps the money might have helped for some of the charities that I have been contributing to. But since the governement has been so good with medicare and other benefits (Some extras for the retired), there does nor seem to be any harm in letting the government to keep some of that money.

Telugu On-line Dictionaries Project

I am enclosing part of message from Sri Jampala Chowdary in 'racchabanda' Telugu On-line Dictionaries Project (I have been interested in this sort of projects for a while and an old friend Sri P.P.C.Joshi has kindly allowed one of the dictioaries that he published to be put online and I am planning to contribute to this project too):

"you are probably aware of the efforts of Sri
Vadapalli Seshatalpa Sai and Sri Kalepu Nagabhushanarao in making available
searchable on-line Telugu dictionaries at www.andhrabharati.com. Already the
following eight dictionaries have been brought on line: #Sabdaratnaakaramu
(bahujanapalli); brauNya te-iM (2nd Ed.); braun^ iM-te; aadhunika
vyavahaarakOSaM; urdoo-telugu; SaMkaranaaraayaNa te-iM; SaMkaranaaraayaNa
iM-te; Sreehari nighaMTuvu # [శబ్దరత్నాకరము
(బహుజనపల్లి); బ్రౌణ్య తె-ఇం
(2nd Ed.); బ్రౌన్ ఇం-తె; ఆధునిక
వ్యవహారకోశం; ఉర్దూ-తెలుగు;
శంకరనారాయణ తె-ఇం;
శంకరనారాయణ ఇం-తె; శ్రీహరి
నిఘంటువు].


Efforts are underway to bring more dictionaries on-line in a searchable
format. These include: #telugu paryaayapada nighaMTuvu;
SabdaarthachaMdrika: saMgeetaSabdaarthachaMdrika; puraaNanaamachaMdrika;
telugu nighaMTuvu - vidyaarthulaku (saa.a.); saMskRta-telugu (vaaviLla);
sooryaraayaaMdhra nighaMTuvu (6 volumes); aaMdhravaachaspatyamu;
aaMdhraSabdaratnaakaramu (3 volumes); telugu vyutpatti kOSaM (8 volumes);
vaaviLla nighaMTuvu (4 volumes); Sabdaartha deepika; maaMDalika
vRttipadakOSamulu (9 volumes); brauNya te-iM (1st Ed.); padabaMdha
paarijaatamu (2 volumes); kriyaasvaroopa maNideepika; maaMDalika padakOSamu
(saa.a); maaMDalika padakOSamu (te.a.) # [తెలుగు
పర్యాయపద నిఘంటువు;
శబ్దార్థచంద్రిక:
సంగీతశబ్దార్థచంద్రిక;
పురాణనామచంద్రిక; తెలుగు
నిఘంటువు -
విద్యార్థులకు (సా.అ.);
సంస్కృత-తెలుగు (వావిళ్ల);
సూర్యరాయాంధ్ర నిఘంటువు
(6 volumes); ఆంధ్రవాచస్పత్యము;
ఆంధ్రశబ్దరత్నాకరము (3 volumes);
తెలుగు
వ్యుత్పత్తి కోశం (8 volumes);
వావిళ్ల నిఘంటువు (4 volumes);
శబ్దార్థ దీపిక;
మాండలిక వృత్తిపదకోశములు (9 volumes);
బ్రౌణ్య తె-ఇం (1st Ed.); పదబంధ
పారిజాతము (2 volumes); క్రియాస్వరూప
మణిదీపిక; మాండలిక పదకోశము
(సా.అ);
మాండలిక పదకోశము (తె.అ.)]

Work has already begun on these volumes after obtaining necessary
authorizations and permissions from copyright holders, with more than 15,000
pages already typed and being proof-read; work is continuing on another
25,000 pages of material.

This is a monumental effort requiring a lot of resources. We estimate that
this project may cost more than $20,000 before it is completed.

Telugu Association of North America is pleased to support this very
important Telugu language project. You can support this project by
contributing to TANA Telugu On-line Dictionaries Project.

Please Donate Today. Checks can be written in the name of TANA and mailed to
V. Chowdary Jampala, Chairperson, TANA Publications Committee, 20374
Buckthorn Ct, Mundelein, IL 60060. You can also donate with a credit card
at https://www.tana.org/donate/ (please mention the Dictionary Project in
the comments section). Please contact cjampala@... if you need more
information.

Donations to TANA are tax-deductible in US.

Regards -- V Chowdary Jampala, Chair, TANA Publications Committee

PS: This project is both important and resource incentive. I am hoping that
you can make a generous donation to this worthy cause."

ninu chuudaka neanundaleanu lyrics

here. I particularly like the lines:

"ఏ హరివిల్లు విరబూసినా..
నీ దరహాసమనుకొంటిని..
ఏ చిరుగాలి కదలాడినా..
నీ చరణాల శ్రుతి వింటిని..
నీ ప్రతి రాకలొ ఎన్ని శశి రేఖలో.."

The song on YouTube here but my friend Ganji Nagabhushanam sings it better if there are not too many in the audience.

Interesting version of 'Aye Na Balam '

by Lucknow qawwals- Azimullah and Nusrat.
The famous original version Ka Karoon Sajni Aye Na Baalam - Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan but does not seem as good as the one I heard in a concert of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan in the 60's.

Fascinating book :"Crazy Like Us"

Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters has been drawing good reviews for over an year. Here are two reviews in Neuroscptic
and in MindHacks .
An article by Ethan Watters outlining some of the ideas:
The Americanization of Mental Illness
One of the points of the book seems that some sort of centralization of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses is taking place through DSM of American Psychiatric Association.
A summary in four parts with the first part here Crazy Like Us, Part 1: Anorexia in Hong Kong

I am reminded of a study of the Economics profession by Marion Foucarde:
The Construction of a global profession; The Transnationalization of Economics

Tim Lambert asks

"How are scientists supposed to discover whether it is safe to eat if you destroy experiments that would address that question?"
Greenpeace destroy genetically modified wheat experiment

Sakharov's biography

The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom by Gennady Gorelik
Boris L. Altshuler report on Sakharov from a recent conference:
Andrei Sakharov as a physicist in all facets of his life

Diagnosis?

Depression: From Treatment to Diagnosis?:
"A diagnosis is meant to be an objective statement about the nature of your illness; treatments (if any) come afterwards. It would be odd if the treatments on offer influenced what diagnosis you got.

An interesting paper just out suggests that exactly this kind of reverse influence has happened. The authors looked at what happened in the USA in 2003 when antidepressants were slapped with a "black box" warning, cautioning against their use in children and adolescents, due to concerns over suicide in young people."

TheLastPsychiatrist responds " The symptoms were first, and then a cognitive heuristic as to what to call it and what to give:

1998: irritability = depression
2008: irritability = bipolar"

P.S. It is not clear to me whether symptoms to diagnosis is clear cut in many cases. depending on the case relief and 'or stabilization may be important before disgnosis in many cases. the diagnoses and treatments seem vary with time and what were condidered breakthroughs at some stage may become only a part of the treatments later on. This sort of examples abound in Siddhartha Mukherjee's book "The emperor of all Maladies". As TLP says in another place The Decline Effect Is Stupid:
"Medicine is not a science, and despite the white coats and antisocial demeanor doctors are not scientists. Docs and patients both need to get that into their heads and plan accordingly. That why we say doctors 'practice' medicine."

Some microfinance related photos

microfinance photos via 3quarksdaily

Curious Telugu songs

celebrating
wine (bhale bhale phalarasam)
cigarettes
and killi (pan)

Two views of why two sexes

Carl Zimmer describes an experiment supporting the traditional view of the evolution of sex. The theory Why is there sex? To fight the parasite army:
"In the 1970s, several researchers built mathematical models of how parasites influenced the evolution of their hosts and vice versa. Their research suggested that both partners go through cycles of boom and bust. Natural selection favors parasites that can infect the most common strain of host. But as they kill off those hosts, another host strain rises to dominate the population. Then a new parasite strain better adapted to the new host strain begins to thrive, leaving the old parasite strain in the dust.

This model of host-parasite coevolution came to be known as the Red Queen hypothesis, after the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, who takes Alice on a run that never seems to go anywhere. “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen explains.

The Red Queen conundrum, some researchers have argued, may give an evolutionary edge to sex. Asexual strains can never beat out sexual strains, because whenever they get too successful, parasites build up and devastate the strain. Sexual organisms, meanwhile, can avoid these dramatic booms and busts because they can shuffle their genes into new combinations that are harder for parasites to adapt to."

Recent paper supporting the view Running with the Red Queen: Host-Parasite Coevolution Selects for Biparental Sex

The contray view reported here Sex Is Not About Promoting Genetic Variation, Researchers Argue:
"Although many scientists have offered answers to this question, most have focused on the benefit of mixing or purifying genes. But by taking the genome theory into account, Heng's findings may have dethroned the queen of problems in evolutionary biology.

According to Heng, the hidden advantage sex has over asexual reproduction is that it constrains macroevolution -- evolution at the genome level -- to allow a species' identity to survive. In other words, it prevents "Species A" from morphing into "Species B." Meanwhile, it also allows for microevolution -- evolution at the gene level -- to allow members of the species to adapt to the environment.

Considering their observations and those of paleontologists, population geneticists and ecologists cited in the article, Heng and Gorelick argue that new research should focus on the genome, not just the individual genes, because the genome serves as both the genetic information unit and selection package for evolution."

The article available here:

Sex Reduces Genetic Variation: A Multidisciplinary Review by Root Gorelick, Henry H. Q. Heng

Some links, July 7th

Farm Size and Productivity: Understanding the Strengths of Smallholder and Improving Their Livelihoods by Ramesh Chand , P A Lakshmi Prasanna and Aruna Singh
Abstract:"During the 1960s and 1970s there was an intense debate on the observed inverse relationship between farm size and per hectare agricultural productivity in India. It was subsequently argued that the higher productivity of smallholdings would disappear with the adoption of superior technology, modernisation and growth in general. However, close to half a century later, National Sample Survey data from the initial years of the 21st century show that smallholdings in Indian agriculture still exhibit a higher productivity than large holdings. These smallholdings however show lower per capita productivity and the incidence of poverty is widespread. Strategies for Indian agriculture and smallholding households should include reducing the inequality in land distribution and promoting off-farm work in the rural areas itself. The strategy of improving the crop land-man ratio by facilitating migration from rural India has not worked and will not work. The lives of smallholding families can be improved only by building on their higher per acre agricultural productivity and by promoting off-farm rural employment."

Last year: Arsenic life. This year: Chlorine life? by Carl Zimmer. More at A First Step Toward A New Form of Life

Sangakkara's challenge to cricket by Peter Roebuck. The transcript of the speech The Spirit of Sri Lanka's Cricket - A celebration of our uniqueness

In Eyes, a Clock Calibrated by Wavelengths of Light From NY Times "What do these findings mean to everyday life? Some experts believe that any kind of light too late into the evening could have broad health effects, independent of any effect on sleep. For example, a report published last year in the journal PNAS found that mice exposed to light at night gained more weight than those housed in normal light, even though both groups consumed the same number of calories.

Light at night has been examined as a contributor to breast cancer for two decades. While there is still no consensus, enough laboratory and epidemiological studies have supported the idea that in 2007, the World Health Organization declared shift work a probable carcinogen. Body clock disruptions “can alter sleep-activity patterns, suppress melatonin production and disregulate genes involved in tumor development,” the agency concluded."

Aging: To Treat, or Not to Treat? (via 3quarksdaily)

Nutrition advice: The vitamin D-lemma (via 3quarksdaily): "He(Dr. Clifford Rosen) suspects that unbiased, systematic reviews such as this one will increasingly come under fire when they lead to hard recommendations. "This is the beginning of a whole new phase," he says. "In the old days of medicine we believed experts, and now we say, show us the data.""

Mark Ames on V.S. Naipaul

Discussion in Naked Capitalism Mark Ames: Why the American Right Never Liked V.S. Naipaul:
"I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere.....

Now that Naipaul could compare the two Eldridge Cleavers–the Black Panther vs. the Republican lackey–the message was clear. If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American Right-Wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front-lines of the ideological battle of the 1970′s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.

Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American Right by doing what he was always best at: Describing exactly what he saw at the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering."

As thet say, read the whole thing. In the comments section Yves Smith has some comments on Australia "I’ve lived in Australian and done business in Canada. They are so far from libertarian it isn’t funny.

Both are WAY to the left of the US. They have universal health care, much more progressive taxation (and far more cumbersome tax reporting in Oz than here), much higher minimum wages, have laws more favorable to unions, far more aggressive regulation (Australia’s version of the FDA makes the FDA look like pussies; they shut down a major drug maker while I was there and have much tougher policies on food than we do. Similarly Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have more extensive and intrusive bank regulation by a country mile).

Voting is MANDATORY in Australia, for Chrissakes. Paid political advertising on TV is forbidden. People there do not believe CEO of companies they did not build deserve to be paid a lot. Hedge fund manager John Hempton has said flat out no CEO is worth more than $2 million a year, and I’m sure if I asked him he would not object to confiscatory taxation to support that. And he has plenty of company in the top tier in Oz (I know because I met about half the people at that level in Sydney, they are very accessible if you make the effort).

And Australia is also rated as having one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world, in the same category as the US, the UK, and China. So how libertarian is that?"

Rohiniprasad on Bhairavi

భావతరంగాల సింధువు: భైరవి with lonks to lots of songs( many in Hindi).
P.S. See also the articles by విష్ణుభొట్ల లక్ష్మన్న

A.K.Ramanujan's famous essay

Is there an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay online.
Some commentaries:
Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan by Candy Wagoner ""Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" is a cultural essay that appears in social anthropologist, McKim Marriot's India Through Hindu Categories (1990). Ramanujan's ultimate answer to the title question is yes; it is what he calls "context-sensitive" as opposed to "context-free." These terms, he takes from linguistics, in which they refer to different kinds of grammatical rules. In applying them to cultures or ways of thinking, Ramanujan relies primarily on a text-based analysis. He cautions that they are "overall tendencies." "Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor guiding the behavior" (47). Context-sensitive is, he suggests, the more appropriate term for what others have taken for an Indian tendency toward inconsistency and hypocrisy, as well as, perhaps tolerance and mimicry. Ramanujan cites Said's Orientalism here, suggesting a European source for these stereotypes created out of a necessity to essentialize and exoticize the Eastern world.

Context-free thinking, which he attributes to Euro-American culture, gives rise to universal testaments of law, such as in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the European philosophical tradition, e.g. Hegel. Context-sensitive thinking, on the other hand, gives rise to more complicated sets of standards such as the Laws of Manu, by which appropriateness depends on various factors, especially factors of identity and personhood, such as birth, occupation, life stage, karma, dharma, etc. Ramanujan stresses that this difference in philosophical outcome is not a symptom of irrationality, but a different kind of rationale."

In People Of The Grammar, Anil Menon quotes from the article "...And grammar is the central model of thinking in many Hindu texts. As Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to the European thought, the grammarian Panini is to the Indian. Even the Kama Sutra is literally a grammar of love — which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects."

Respective influences of Euclid and Panini have also been discussed by Swiss Samskrit scholar Johannes Bronkhorst in "Panini and Euclid:Reflections on Indian Geometry", which appeared in Journal of Indian Philosophy, 29, pp 43-80. In a discussion forum Aravindhan remarks:
"I think he identifies an important problem, and does it well, but misidentifies its cause. He seems to suggest that the problem could have been that science was influenced by grammatical methodology (though there is no clear evidence for this). In my opinion, it was much deeper than that.

Panini's grammar, from a methodological perspective, embodies two trends. The first is the trend towards the primacy of exegesis in scholarly discourse. For some reason, texts by renowned scholars came to have a very special status, eventually becoming a source of knowledge equal to or superior than observation. The second trend is the increasing importance of inductive reasoning, where you used specific examples to derive generalised rules. Taken together, these are capable of producing devastating errors.

But Panini's grammar did not create these trends, nor were they confined to grammatics. You find them equally in philosophical works of the period which - unlike earlier texts - only try to interpret, expound on and clarify the meanings of existing texts; and even the original work that is done still seeks support in interpretation of existing texts.

We see exactly the same disease in the mathematics of the period. Bhaskara tries to argue mathematics using rules of mimamsa. Mimamsa, for heaven's sake! And proofs - where they are provided - tend to be anecdotal, rather than deductive. Bronkhorst argues that philosophy in that period understood the concept of proof. He's right, technically speaking, but the form of proofs they used lacked rigour and routinely accepted exegetic and anectdotal evidence as "proof". Just as the mathematicians did.

So I don't think Bronkhorst adequately looks at what was happening in other disciplines. I think there is a readily available explanation for why the problems he identifies happened in Ancient India, as I've tried to outline above.

There is also a clear parallel with certain modern trends (not just confined to India), where ancient knowledge is being venerated without much independent inquiry. I would like to quote one passage from Bronkhorst's paper:

"Aryabhatta is wrong where he gives the volume of a pyramid as: "Half the product of the height and the [surface of the triangular base] is the volume called 'pyramid'." The correct volume of a pyramid is a third, not half, of the product here specified... The same is true of Aryabhatta's incorrect rule for the volume of a sphere."
These errors are discussed in greater detail in a 1985 paper published in a French journal. It tends to flabbergast people because the idea that Sanskrit texts might actually be wrong is not something people think about (which is absurd - no human science can ever be wholly right about everything at any point of time).

And that, I think, is the biggest danger in the current trend of constantly exalting ancient works. Science (and any other field of inquiry) progresses best when it is most open and least dogmatic. Which is why (in my opinion) Indian science didn't progress beyond a point - and why even mathematicians as obviously gifted as Aryabhatta and Bhaskara made such glaring errors."

And finally Amit Chaudhuri reviewing a book of poems by A.K. ramanujan in The twin-lobed brahmin quotes extensively from the famous article and says "I quote this passage at length not only because of its intrinsic readability, but also because of the way it embodies some of the most characteristic features of Ramanujan's poetry. First, there is the exploration of an idea, not through metaphor or analogy, but through an "image" of a member of Ramanujan's family, in this case his father."

On China Pakistan Alliance

From
For Lt Gen Patnaik, “Chinese footprints are too close for comfort”. A worse prospect might be their being too far off."

Amit Menghani

FISA leader Amit Menghani is ‘Young Victorian of the Year 2011′
An earlier opinion piece by him: AMIT MENGHANI: Discrimination and Victoria

Sports moments

From The Guardian sports blog:
Drazen Petrovic - Basketball Mozart
ESPN 30 for 30 - Once Brothers (1/6)
MANSOUR BAHRAMI - Tennis' Greatest Entertainer

Glenn Davis Stone revisits Warangal

Field versus Farm in Warangal; Bt Cotton, Higher Yields. and Larger Questions
A recent survey article by Glenn Stone
The Anthropology of Genetically Modified Crops
Earier articles available at http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/stone_glenn and for discussion of some of his earlier articles by Andrew Leonard see The Napster pirates of transgenic biotech How genetically modified cotton escaped Monsanto's control in India, with a little help from Robin Hood

P.S. I just noticed that Glenn Davis Stone has a blog. Here is a recent post
GM Eggplant and Ayurveda in India

Scary story

by Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, linked in several blogs (see, in particular, the comment by Felix E F Larocca MD which gives several more references):
The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?
The Illusions of Psychiatry
P.S. Daniel Little comments on the above articles Mental illness, big pharma and agent-based simulation.

Related In Medicine, New Isn’t Always Improved

From byliner.com science articles (just added list)

In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain

Women and collective intelligence

From Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women
"The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises."
via Mind Hacks post A dose of female intelligence
The original article:
Evidence of Collective Intelligence in the Performance of Human Groups

The Telegraph reviews "River of Smoke"

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh: review:

"His taste for obscure words aside, Ghosh can be a rather ponderous storyteller. Far too much of the book is taken up by windy letters from an English painter. But there are some nice comic touches, mainly involving characters talking pidgin English, and moments of real lyricism.

Best of all, Ghosh, through the depth of his research, lightly worn, has captured the many cross-currents of a fascinating historical period."

His "In an Antique Land" is one of the best books I read and I liked much of his non-fiction that I read. But I thought that his "The glass Palace" is a soap opera and this type of historical fiction seems to be a bit of cop out, which does not allow much discussion. I think that I will skip this book.

Dreaming of cancer

Recently on the way back from USA I was stuck in San Francisco airport for two nights, the first night because I did not check the times carefully and the second night because of United Airlines computer problems. It gave me chance to finish Siddhartha Mukherjee's excellent book " The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" and now I imagine that I have precancer conditions. May be I will give up smoking now. In any case, I am back home to celebrate my 70th birthday today.

Kuffir on farmers

Kuffir wonders how farmers in India survive when the returns are so low:no mantras or miracles will work here . More in the Indian Farmers website linked in the article.

A comment in the post 'Academic Writing' by Amitava Kumar

From a comment in Academic Writing:
"A couple of years ago, I sent this as a puzzle to my colleagues in a course with a reading from Partha Chatterjee:

“The illusion of normative values is consistent with the legitimation of the nation-state. The logic of civil society carries with it the ideology of agency. Rival conceptions of collective identity have become implicated in rival claims to autonomous subjectivity, and the reification of capitalist hegemony opens a space for the historicization of the nation-state. The emergence of history as such functions as the conceptual frame for the politics of power.”

One or two sentences are from Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought. The rest are generated from the U of Chicago Automatic Sentence Generator. No one guessed the auto-generated part correctly."

M.F. Husain RIP

One of India's most famous artists, MF Husain, has died in hospital in London aged 95 after years of self-imposed exile. For 15 years, I used to see his paintings almost daily in TIFR, Bomay (now Mumbai).

Buchibabu's article on 'kaaruloe shikaaru keLLea'

here in Koumudi.

Evolutionary Spontaneous Orders

The Role of Reason in Evolutionary Spontaneous Orders
via Larry Arnhart Writes Good Sense About Societies and their Evolution .

Farmer Networks in Mexico

From Farmer Networks Hold Key to Agricultural Innovation in Developing Countries, Study Finds:
"In Yaqui Valley, credit unions hold sway among the majority of farmers, McCullough said. In addition to providing loans, crop insurance, fertilizer and seed, credit unions have taken over the government's role in providing technical expertise and management advice.

Valley growers also have a long history of working with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a world-renowned agricultural research center known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.

But interviews conducted for the PNAS study revealed that most farmers take their cues from local credit unions and not from experts at CIMMYT. As an example, McCullough pointed to a collaborative effort between CIMMYT scientists and farmers to develop a nitrogen diagnostic tool that reduces fertilizer use without sacrificing crop yields.

The device, which gives real-time readings of nitrogen levels in the soil, proved early on that it could save farmers 12 to 17 percent of their profits. Yet most farmers rejected the new technology until CIMMYT researchers finally convinced credit union officials that it was a worthwhile investment.

"The most successful innovations that have been adopted by farmers in the Yaqui Valley have come from collaborations among researchers, farmers and local establishments, like the credit unions," McCullough said. Because of their considerable influence among farmers, credit unions should be included in any effort to effect environmental change in the region, she added."

Last interview with Syed Saleem Shahzad

Splits in Pakistan's Military Over New Agreement to Cooperate with US
Syed Saleem Shahzad, A Pakistani journalist and correspondent of Asia Times, who was killed between May 29 and 31.

Salim Durrani wins C.K. Nayudu Award

Salim Durrani the only Test cricketer to have been born in Afghanistan wins C K Nayudu Award lifetime achievement award for his contribution to Indian cricket A first person account and When Salim Durrani did a Shane Warne .... Ramachandra Guha on Salim Durrani's background and career.

Atul Gawande's commencement address at Harvard Medical School.

Cowboys and Pit Crews is the talk of town according to Lyla.

Two on Australian political leaders

John Quiggin on May 19 Turnbull for PM
Michael Pascoe today Lucky country out of luck with its leaders

Two articles from Dawn

Have we really seen the enemy? by Ardeshir Cowasjee and Many degrees of separation by M.J. Akbar

New experiment on Casimir effect

From First Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect :
""One of the most surprising predictions of modern quantum theory is that the vacuum of space is not empty. In fact, quantum theory predicts that it teems with virtual particles flitting in and out of existence."

So begin Christopher Wilson from Chalmers University in Sweden and friends in their marvellously readable paper about a rather extraordinary piece of science.

This maelstrom of quantum activity is far from benign. Physicists have known since 1948 that if two flat mirrors are held close together and parallel with each other, they will be pushed together by these virtual particles.

The reason is straightforward. When the gap between the mirrors is smaller than the wavelength of the virtual particles, they are excluded from this space. The vacuum pressure inside the gap is then less than outside it and this forces the mirrors.

This is the static Casimir effect and it was first measured in 1998 by two teams in the US.

But there is another phenomenon called the dynamical Casimir effect that has never been seen.

It occurs when a mirror moves through space at relativistic speeds. Here's what happens. At slow speeds, the sea of virtual particles can easily adapt to the mirror's movement and continue to come into existence in pairs and then disappear as they annihilate each other.

But when the speed of the mirror begins to match the the speed of the photons, in other words at relativistic speeds, some photons become separated from their partners and so do not get annihilated. These virtual photons then become real and the mirror begins to produce light.

That's the theory. The problem in practice is that it's hard to get an ordinary mirror moving at anything like relativistic speeds."
(via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader)

Travelling for a while

Off to USA tomorrow to attend a conference in honour of a collaborator on the occasion of his 65th birthday; a person who reminds of K.L. Krishna who retired from Delhi School of Economics a few years ago. Will use this opportunity to visit a few friends and relatives on the east coast.

Some science links, May 14th

Razib Khan responds to Edge question 2011 WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT? with a quote from John Ioannidis "There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false....."

With that proviso here are some research reports that I found interesting.

Blind fish in dark caves shed light on the evolution of sleep (via 3quarksdaily)

Why sons inherit their mother’s curse.

Artificial Grammar Reveals Inborn Language Sense, Study Shows

Language Log in Let me count the ways has a quote of Cosma Shalizi which echoes Razib Khan's worries: "While perhaps not a truly epic fail, this is not a creditable performance. The paper probes a hugely complex tangle of issues relating individual minds, communication, social norms, artistic expression, social change and cultural transformation. There is no shame in not unraveling the whole snarl at once, but between the incompetent data analysis, the failure of logical imagination, and the deep misunderstanding of how works of art are made and used, it does nothing to advance our knowledge of anything."

A science blog contributes to research

A memory for pain, stored in the spine:
"You slam your hand in a door, and the experience becomes etched into your brain. You carry a memory of the swinging panel, the sound as it crushes your flesh and the shooting pain as your skin gives way. Your body remembers it too. For days afterwards, the neurons in your spine carry pain signals more easily form your hand to your brain. As a result, your hand feels more sensitive, and even the lightest touch will trigger an unpleasant reaction. It’s as if your spine carries a memory for pain.

This is more than a metaphor. Two groups of scientists have found that one special molecule underlies both processes. It helps to store memories in our brains, and it sensitises neurons in our spines after a painful experience. It’s a protein called PKMzeta. It’s the engine of memory."

Brad DeLong's query

Why Is the Higher Education Market Failing?:
"None of this is clear to me.

I do observe that education and medical care are the two large sectors in which the private market did not have a strong presence a century ago and are also the two large sectors where market competition does not seem to produce lower prices. And I feel that there must be some connection."
Interesting comments. I would say ask David Labaree.

More good news about Binayak Sen

Binayak Sen on Plan panel committee .
See also Binayak Sen allowed to visit South Korea to receive award.

జానుతెనుగు

Several items of interest to Telugus in Maganti site http://www.maganti.org/newgen/index1.html.. Recent additions include several programs from All India Radio. For the recent additions check the site
జానుతెనుగు సొగసులు .

Gandhi in Abbottabad

From Gopalakrishna Gandhi's aricle Once in Abbottabad..., it seems to be an area where the Frontier Gandhi was popular at one time and Mahatma Gandhi visited thrice and on one occasion wrote to Hitler.
More from Amitabh Pal, and Ashish Vashi.

Dan Quillen RIP

A great mathemacian passes away unnoticed and Steve Landsburg is outraged The Architect.
A description of some of his work here with the following comment of Hyman Bass:
"Mathematical talent tends to express itself either in problem solving or in theory building. It is with rare cases like Quillen that one has the satisfaction of seeing hard, concrete problems solved with general ideas of great force and scope and by the unification of methods from diverse fields of mathematics. Quillen has had a deep impact on the perceptions and the very thinking habits of a whole generation of young algebraists and topologists. One studies his work not only to be informed, but to be edified."
Algebraic Topology mailing list carries a message from his widow.
From Mathoverflow Which of Quillen’s Papers Should I read?

A review of 4 books about Pakistan

by Ahmed Rashid Cry, the Beloved Country
The endlessly deepening crisis that is Pakistan (via 3quarksdaily)
P.S. Reading recommendations from Nilanjana Roy Speaking Volumes: The Bin Laden bookshelf. The list includes a book by Ahmed Rashid

Hot Hands and Reasoning

Jonah Lehrer writes in The Reason We Reason:
"Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row – an utterly unremarkable event – we start thinking about the possibility of a streak. Maybe he’s hot? Why isn’t he getting the ball? It’s at this point that our faulty reasoning mechanisms kick in, as we start ignoring the misses and focusing on the makes. In other words, we seek out evidence that confirms our suspicions of streakiness. The end result is that a mental fiction dominates our perception of the game.

Here’s where things get meta: Even though I know all about Tversky and Gilovich’s research – and fully believe the data – I still perceive the hot hand. I can’t help but watch the NBA playoffs and marvel at the streakiness of shooters, from Kobe to Rose. (Personally, I’d love to see an analysis of Ray Allen. If that man doesn’t show the hot hand, then it really doesn’t exist.) And I’m not alone in my stubborn skepticism. Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Celtics, reportedly responded to Tversky’s statistical analysis with a blunt dismissal. “So he makes a study,” Auerbach said. “I couldn’t care less.”

The larger question, of course, is why confirmation bias exists. This is the sort of mental mistake that seems ripe for fixing by natural selection, since it always leads to erroneous beliefs and faulty causal theories. We’d be a hell of a lot smarter if we weren’t only drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.

And this leads me to a fascinating and provocative new theory of reasoning put forth by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. In essence, they argue that human reason has nothing to do with finding the truth, or locating the best alternative. Instead, it’s all about being able to argue with others"

One of the authors of the new study Hugo Mercier comments "The production of arguments is biased--as you describe. But argument evaluation ought to be fairly objective: after all, in many cases you're better off being convinced rather than clinging to false beliefs. One of the commenters suggests "Hopefully at some point winning an argument will become more correlated with having the truth on your side." In fact, this is already the case. When people are in groups and argue about logical, mathematical or factual problems, they robustly converge on the best solution.
If the production of argument was unable to influence other people, it would be pointless. But if listeners were not mostly influenced for their better good, they would not be listening. The evolutionary logic suggests that reasoning can lead us towards the truth, if only we reason with people who disagree with us to start with."

But I still believe in 'hot hand', partly because I have not studied the work of Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich and do not know the assumptions involved. It would be also interesting to study these biases in complex cases like the recent death of Osama and what happenned. About Pakistan's knowledge or lack of Osama's whereabouts, two secular people of Pakistani origin seem to have different opinions The curious case of Osama Bin Laden..(Omar). The case may not matter to some but is of importance to many in various decision making processes. The information is incomplete or distorted for security or other reasons. One can expect a whole spectrum of opnions and beliefs on various aspects of the case and I wonder what lessons can be drawn from them about cognitive biases.
P.S. Slate's complete coverage of the fall of al-Qaida's leader.

From Timbuktu Chronicles

I came across this post in the Seed Magazine Opening up Science . It has a video:
"The video below looks at scientific knowledge building using wikis and other web 2.0 tools to pass along agriculture methods at the local level, but it also hints at how one could pass along science at the local level if there was the language to talk about it."

Some reactions to Osama's demise

Kristen Breitweiser in Huffington Post Today Is Not a Day of Celebration for Me :
"When my husband was killed on the morning of 9/11, television stations around the world ran split-screen video. They showed the buildings still burning juxtaposed against young Arabs celebrating in the streets. That disturbing vision left me incredulous; it was forever emblazoned on my psyche.

Ten years later, now fully awake in the bright sunlight of the day, when I contemplate the definition of victory for our country when it comes to the death of Osama bin Laden, I can only think about the damage that has been done.

I think about the thousands of lives lost -- American, Afghani, Iraqi. I know firsthand the sorrow those families have felt. I ponder how the billions -- maybe trillions -- of dollars could have been better spent. I remain alarmed about the continued expansion of absolute Executive power in the name of fighting this seemingly ongoing and never-ending "war on terror." I worry about the further erosion of our constitutional rights. I wonder when our troops will ever be called home. I know all too well, that thousands of young American men and women soldiers will never have the opportunity to return home. And of course, I fear reprisal.

But more than anything, I cannot seem to remove the optics of the giddy, gleeful throngs of Americans who took to the streets celebrating in the early morning hours."

Amanda Marcotte in Slate Bin Laden's Dead, Let's Party (via 3quarksdaily):
"I understand the urge to silence and shame people for being ecstatic that we finally got Bin Laden. The fear that jubilation could turn into nationalism and then to bloodlust has real world evidence to back it up. But I would argue that liberals do ourselves no favors by shushing and shaming people's joy. There's another option that is both more humanistic and more productive in the long run: grappling with this celebratory mood and channeling it toward policy goals such as shutting down Gitmo and getting out of Afghanistan.
One reason the war on terror has dragged on and on with no end in sight is that Americans have been deprived of a victory, and politicians both Republican and Democrat are afraid of being seen as losers who backed out of a fight without obtaining that victory. Well, now we have it. And if you doubt that, we have the crowds of celebrants in the street to back it up. That is, after all, what victory looks like in the American imagination. We think of the end of WWII and we don't think about the bomb or Hitler in a bunker. We immediately think of a sailor kissing a strange woman on the street. We think of joy. Joy provides emotional closure, which we never got after 9/11 and the distraction in Iraq. Maybe this joy at Osama Bin Laden's death can provide that for us. And maybe then we can finally have politicians say that we won, and so we can finally shut down the illegal prisons, the ongoing war, and maybe even the ridiculous security theater at airports. But if we scold and silence the joy away, we'll never get a chance to find out."
More at The Econmist Killing bin Laden: Let's call it a day (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader)

Second article of the series by Suresh Kolichala

పలుకుబడి: వ్యుత్పత్తి, నిరుక్తము

Two reviews by William Easterly

Measuring How and Why Aid Works—or Doesn't , a review of More Than Good Intentions By Dean Karlan & Jacob Appel and Poor Economics By Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo (via Chris Blattman):
"Unfortunately, the books also indulge another sort of irrationality: the demand for big, general statements even if you're discussing limited, context-specific matters. The authors criticize over-promising and generalizing in the aid business, but they too often do their own exaggerating when it comes to what their methods can deliver. Both books end with overselling, "five key lessons" (Banerjee and Duflo) or "seven ideas that work" (Karlan and Appel), ignoring their own previous cautions about sensitivity to context and the limits to each intervention. Other economists criticize overselling as a common fault of those who do these small experiments.

But let's extend the same consideration to these authors that they show for the people they study. They have fought to establish a beachhead of honesty and rigor about evidence, evaluation and complexity in an aid world that would prefer to stick to glossy brochures and celebrity photo-ops. For this they deserve to be congratulated—and to be read."

The Happiness Wars , a review of International Differences in Well-Being, edited by Ed Diner, Daniel Kahneman, and John Helliwell
via the post Money buys happiness after all

Ravi Kannan wins the Knuth prize

A description of some of his work by a colloborator with the recent royal wedding thrown in here

Greater specialization makes innovation much harder

From Innovation Shortfall, Low Hanging Fruit, and the Frontiers of Knowledge via a link in Adapt*, by Tim Harford:
"Big takeaway: “The shorter the period that innovators spend innovating, the less their output as individuals over their lifetime. If innovation is central to technological progress, then forces that reduce the length of active innovative careers will reduce the rate of technological progress. This effect will be particularly strong if innovators do their best work when they are young.”

These facts ought to give us pause. Jones postulates that the main reason we see an age shift is because the frontiers of knowledge are farther and farther away. The shoulders of giants are higher. The low fruit has been taken. Because of how complex and specialized our knowledge has become, Jones says the young must spend more and more years training and acquiring knowledge to reach the cutting edge.

Now it may be that the “burden of knowledge” is heavier than it used to be. But my own take is that we shouldn’t confuse the accumulation of credential crud for the difficulty of reaching the frontiers of knowledge. On the macro scale, we often cite the Mancur Olson thesis that special interests sap the dynamism of economic growth over time. I believe the Jones data and Cowen’s arguments present further evidence supporting the Olson story. For instance, why should we believe PhD programs are designed to efficiently move students from ignorance to the frontier of knowledge as quickly as possible? Academics are not mainly truth-seekers. They’re incentivized to pursue other aims such as pleasing their advisors, their tenure review panel, or a grant making body. These aims do not coincide with discovering new and useful knowledge. Secondly, we can go back further. A lot of education from K-12 to college core requirements is a waste of time. How much of this knowledge is relevant to future work making discoveries? If anything, Jones should suggest we try to make education more efficient.

But I digress. In all this discussion, Cardwell’s Law looms in the background. No country stays technologically superior forever. As yesterday’s innovators becomes today’s vested interests, stagnation follows. There are reasons for that. All of these arguments–Thiel’s, Cowen’s, Jones’s–suggest we may need a thousand nations sooner than we think. We will soon find not the singularity, but the stagnation is near."

Two more nice pieces from Carl Zimmer

Memories Are Crucial for Looking Into the Future
Carl Zimmer on The Strangeness of Life

Links, April 28, 2011

David McKenzie's review Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics: Micro-steps towards a quiet revolution? ( short and the best I have seen so far, via Chris Blattman)
Genius at work Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks: The Untold Story ( from Tabula Rasa comment in Flotsam)
Mark Changizi:The next giant leap in human evolution may not come from new fields like genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, but rather from appreciating our ancient brains. (From Seed Magazine)
Herman Daly applies a biophysical lens to the economy and finds that bigger isn’t necessarily better. (From Seed Magazine)

Robin Dunbar revisits Dunbar Number

in Friends to count on.
More discussion in Local & Distant Friendships – A Dunbar Number Conundrum (via Rajib Khan):
"If we can handle only 150 substantive relationships, how can we increase and strengthen local connections of the sort Dunbar speaks of here while still maintaining the extra-local connections many of us need to work in an extralocal information economy?"

Rajib Khan summarizes the recent research on

The genetic origin of Indians:
"What’s the biggest surprise from these results? For me I think it is the deep and incredibly thorough biological synthesis which characterizes the Indian subcontinent. We all know that there is a big difference between a Kashmiri Pandit and an Adivasi from South India. But about one third of the Pandit’s ancestry is “Ancestral South Indian,” which is almost absent outside of the subcontinent. And about one third of the Adivasi’s ancestry is “Ancestral North Indian,” which connects this individual with the populations which span the Atlantic, to the Urals, to the Sahara. The past is a strange and mysterious land. But the veil of ignorance is slowly lifting…."

Omar Ali gives links to other posts of Rajib Khan in Science sheds light on population history and living standards
.
P.S. See also Rajib Khan's South Asian endogamy predates the British.

Satya Sai Baba passes away

I never met him; I heard about him from my mother around 1958 when he assured her that I would go back to college. He seems to be allright as far as godmen go. The following write up in The Hindu A secular spiritual leader.

Links, April 24, 2011

Obama’s Young Mother Abroad
The Psychology of the 'Birther' Myth
Why economists study what they do — and how the crisis might change it
Google Uses My Credit Card Without Telling Me
Review of 'Poor Economics' by A. Banerjee and E. Duflo, which will be available tomorrow from Kindle
The Other Temple Entry
: "Ask the Dalit crorepatis, and they say they don’t see the need for reservations for their children. Let others not as fortunate as us avail of its benefits, they say. They are set on consolidating on the gains they have made so far. And maybe get into Fortune’s list of billionaires. With a firm named Fortune Constructions, Kamble just might make it there."

Reading recommendations for psychologists

The books and journal articles all psychologists should read. William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890)among the most recommended. Strangely most might have a read a few of those books.

Robert Sapolsky lectures on YouTube

Links to these and others in Robert Sapolsky and Human Behavioral Biology (via Ed Yong)

On 'brain time'

and other things in this portrait of neuroscientist David Eagleman The Possibilian via the MindHacks post Time flies when you’re having fun.Some excerpts from the article:
"Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”
......
One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass."
And so on... to Francis Crick's advice and brains of drummers.

Links April 21

Richard Florida on Immigrants and the Wealth of Nations:
"Americans like think of their country as the world’s great melting pot. But this new immigration index and our analysis suggest that that’s no longer an assumption that can be taken for granted.

While America’s pundits and politicians obsess over the alleged social costs of illegal immigration, they should be worried that we may not always be the premier destination for legal immigrants, who bring the skills, energy and ambition that provide so much of the punch for the twin engines of innovation and entrepreneurship. As Scott Page wrote in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, “When we meet people who think differently than we do, who speak different languages, who have different experiences, training, and values, we should see opportunity and possibility. We should recognize that a talented ‘I’ and a talented ‘they’ can become an even more talented ‘we.’”

Nations that welcome the best and most diverse talent win, while those that close their borders to it fall further and further behind. The ability not just to attract immigrants but to integrate and effectively harness their skills is a key axis of global economic success, now and even more so in the future."

C.P. Chandrasekhar on Development Banks: Their role and importance for development. Abstract:
"The role of development banks in the development trajectories of late industrialising, developing countries cannot be overemphasised. However, with financial liberalisation of the neoliberal variety transforming financial structures, some countries are doing away with specialised development banking institutions on the grounds that equity and bond markets would do the job. This is bound to lead to a shortfall in finance for long-term investments, especially for medium and small enterprises."

two posts on Jonathan Levin: John Bates Clark Winner 2011: "How could we take what we’ve learned from the mathematical theory of auctions, or mathematical theories of information economics, and actually do it. How could you find interesting markets in the world and apply those ideas, and when would they apply?"

Two reviews of 'The Information' by James Gleick. I found the book informative and largely enjoyable but clutteres and spluttering towards the end. There is also an interesting 'review' by Freeman Dyson How We Know and a detailed one in NewYork Times James Gleick’s History of Information.

The critical period for vision

may not be so critical:
Formerly Blind Children Shed Light on a Centuries-Old Puzzle
An earlier report on Pawan Sinha's work and Project Prakash:
SfN Presidential Lecture | Significant behavioral and neural plasticity after the onset of sight in the congenitally blind

A song from Penki Pellam

whose lyrics I posted earlier is available here:
Paduchudanam Railubandi
or here

From an old speech of Balraj Sahni

'Today We Need A Messiah' :
"A rough and ready type of Hindustani is used by the working masses all over India. They make practical use of it by discarding all academic and grammatical flourishes. In this type of Hindustani, "Larka bhi jata hei" and "Larki bhi jata hei". There is an atmosphere of rare freedom in this patois and even the intellectuals indulge in it when they want to relax. And actually this is in the best tradition of Hindustani. This is how it was born, made progress, and acquired currency all over India. In the old days it was contemptuously called Urdu—or the language of the camps or bazaars.

Today in this bazaari Hindustani the word 'university' becomes univrasti—a much better word than vishwa vidyalaya, 'lantern' becomes laltain, the 'chasis' of a car becomes chesi, 'spanner' becomes pana, i.e. anything and everything is possible. The string with which the soldier cleans his rifle is called 'pullthrough' in English. In Roman Hindustani it becomes fultroo—a beautiful word. 'Barn-door' is the term the Hollywood lights man uses for a particular type of two blade cover. The Bombay film worker has changed it to bandar, an excellent transformation. This Hindustani has untold and unlimited possibilities. It can absorb the international scientific and technological vocabulary with the greatest of ease. It can take words from every source and enrich itself. One has no need to run only to the Sanskrit dictionary."

Askscience discussion on

Unlike the rest of reddit, /r/AskScience is not about discussion or speculation: it is about authoritative answers from genuine experts

Peddana's famous stanza

seems to be borrowed from Kannada. From తెలుగు - కన్నడములలో ఆదాన ప్రదానాలు
by జానుమద్ది హనుమచ్ఛాస్ర్తీ:
"అల్లసాని పెద్దనకు దాదాపు మూడు వందల సంవత్సరాల క్రితం వుండిన మల్లికార్జున కవి
‘నిరుపహతి స్థలంబు మృదుకరాసన, మెళ్లుణి సింపు దంబులం
సరసిద పుస్తక వ్రతతి లేఖక వాచక సంహ్రం, నిరం
తర గృహ నిశ్చిత స్థితి, విచారక సంగతి, సత్కళత్ర సా
దరతయునొళ్ళ సత్కవియు మీనుప దాగె కావ్యనార్థియుం’
పెద్దనార్యుల:
‘నిరుపహతి స్థలంబు రమణీప్రి ధూతిక తెచ్చి యిచ్చు క
ప్పురవిడె మాత్మ కింపయిన భోజన మాయల మంచ మెప్పు త
తప్పరయు రసజ్ఞ లూహ తెలియంగల లేఖక పాఠకోత్తముల్
దొరికిన గాక యూరక గృతుల్ రచియింపుమటన్న శక్యమే!’’
ఈ పద్యం కన్నడ పద్యానువాదంగా కనిపిస్తుంది."

ఆంధ్రుల కథ by MVR Sastry

ఆంధ్రుల కథ. Interesting story of struggles for an Andhra state from 1911 onwards upto the current problems. Flavour:
"రాజకీయ కల్లలకు ప్రాంతాల ఎల్లలు లేవు. ఒక తెలంగాణ, ఒక రాయలసీమ అనే ఏమిటి... మొత్తం తెలుగుదేశమే తరతరాలుగా తీరని అన్యాయాలకు లోనైంది. నమ్మకూడని వారిని నమ్మి ఘోరంగా మోసపోయింది. నీతులమారి నేతల సుభాషితాలకు భ్రమసి, గోమాయువులమీద అమాయకంగా ఆశలు పెంచుకుని అడుగడుగునా అడియాసల పాలైంది. తడవకో రకంగా దగాపడింది. కడచిన నూరేళ్ల ఆంధ్రావని చరిత్ర అబద్ధాల పుట్ట. కపటాల కట్ట. నమ్మకద్రోహాల చిట్టా. ఏ ప్రాంతపు ప్రారబ్ధానికి ఆ ప్రాంతపు నాయక ప్రబుద్ధులే మొదటి ముద్దాయిలు. మనవాళ్లనుకున్నవారే మొదటినుంచీ మనకు పగవాళ్లు."
(Thanks to Kodavatiganti Rohiniprasad)

Some popular music from Pakistan

See Jhoom (Ali Zafar) – Music Review
Though I always enjoyed music, it is mostly confined to film songs in Telugu and hindi ( a language which I do not understand but am planning to learn) and popular music that I randomly come across. Carnatic music has been a no-go area even though I sometimes I heard my mother practicing; I remember her rendering of film songs better particularly those from Rattan. Recently I read a couple of books on South Indian Classical music By Amanda Weidman and Lakshmi Subramaniam
Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern:The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India and
From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India.

There is a fascinating overview of some of these books in From Threatened by Modernity to Reinvented by Modernity: The History of the History of Indian Classical Music 1980 – 2006 by Garrett Fileld. Excerpts:
"This paper has shown how Weidman and Subramanian’s conclusions differed from those of Neuman and Higgins. While Neuman and Higgins argued Indian classical music was threatened by modernity the latter argued that it was created in modernity and argued that the Brahman middle class undertook the project to modernize, spiritualize, standardize and disseminate their brand of Indian classical music because music was emblematic of the very nation for which they sought independence.
......
It is clear that the works of Anderson and Chatterjee have significantly influenced the shift in historicism of Indian classical music in the modern period. Yet, as mentioned above, confining an investigation into this paradigm shift to only texts reduces change to the words of scholars. It ignores the historical context in which they wrote. Thus, I propose scholars write histories of modern scholarly patronage. Studying the ideological climate at American Universities where Neuman and Higgins studied and worked, compared with Weidman and Subramanian’s milieu, would be a first step."
But I am nowhere near understanding why I do not like Carnatic music ( I did like a couple of pieces by Mangalampalli balamuralikrishna).

Annie Zaidi on urban women's lives in modern India, and how that has changed over a generation

What happened was that she learnt to walk, and then, I did too

Lamia Karim on the fall of Muhammad Yunus

From Lamia Karim: The fall of Muhammad Yunus and its consequences for the women of Grameen Bank:
"With more than 9 million borrowers, the resource-rich Grameen Bank is a formidable vote bank. If its charismatic leader goes into politics, he can take away votes from Hasina’s ruling party, although he cannot undermine the party. Moreover, government bureaucrats, such as the director of the Bangladesh Bank, find Yunus as a law unto himself because of his international stature. Bureaucrats feel that Grameen Bank (and other NGOs) receive donor funds that should go to the government. Finally, there are ongoing turf battles among the largest microfinance NGOs in the country. The removal of Yunus and the weakening of Grameen Bank would give these competitor NGOs an advantage to recruit “credit-worthy” members, and to create more power and resources for themselves. It is this toxic brew of power and envy that has embroiled Nobel laureate Yunus in a legal dispute with the current government.

In the western fetishization of this iconic individual, the real issue is that the ever-deepening debt crisis for poor women is forgotten. And that is the saddest part of the story."

Tanurabh Khaitan on the Jan Lokpal Bill

On the 'movement' against corruption :
"Our politicians, and indeed most people with requisite influence, manage to avoid convictions not just for corruption but for all other crimes, including murder. Nor are the politicians the only people who are corrupt - what about the corporate houses only recently exposed in the Radia tapes? Structural reform of the criminal justice system does not translate into sexy slogan, but then India Against Corruption's Jan Lokpal Bill will do nothing to address the problem of corruption, and create others we can do without."

Sesame Street version of Mast Qalandar

The Astonishing Voice of Albert Hirschman via
Pakistaniat.

Rajiv Sethi on Albert Hirschman

On his 96th birthday The Self-Subversion of Albert Hirschman
.
On his 95th birthday The Astonishing Voice of Albert Hirschman .

From Telugu blogs

Some rare articles from blogs organized by Innaiah Narisetti and others కవిరాజు హేతువాదం -సూతపురాణం-AGK masterly analysis. See also the Narla blog V.R. Narla. Some of these are possibly parts of the struggles between rationalists and tradilaists long ago. There are also possibly some caste connotations. But there is no doubt that V.R. Narla and AGK were outstanding influences in their era and these documents are valuable resources. Innaiah published a political hisory book Political History of Andhra Pradesh - Narisetti Innaiah, which I found strange. There are lot of refrences and lists at the end but very few references in the body of the book. Without refrences to contemporary books or newspapers, it is difficult to know which are fact and which are stories modified by memories. There was a reference to Ongole Zilla Parishad in the thirties and when I enquired whether there was a such so early, the author asserted in the affirmative without giving any verifiable sources. Still, the lists and references at the end will be useful, I think. Innaiah is known for his support of various progressive causes The Other Attack on Taslima Nasrin at Hyderabad .

Student innovations

Student innovations use simple tech to solve everyday problems

The Geography of Poverty

from The Atlantic The Geography Of Poverty

Marx in brief

See the comments in Brad DeLong's postWhat Was Karl Marx's Principal Contribution?

On India's World Cup victory

Dhoni acknowledges role of quartet
Vivek Menezes has a cautionary article Get a grip, India!. There are many good points in the article but I see it slightly differently. Many of the Indian players come from middle classes without many political or family connections. Eknath Solkar from Bombay was the son of a groundsman. M.S. Dhoni was ticket collecror in the railways for three years. Apart from giving hope and pride to several middle class and poor people, cricket also seems to some thing of uniting factor in a country with so much diversity like India. Many players came from different parts of the country and belong to different religions. The politics which plagued games like hockey seem to have subsided to a large extent in cricket. Influential players like saurav Ganguly backed players from many parts of the country outside Bengal. May be at the moment cricket's popularity cannot be begrudged. Perhaps similar events are taking place in Pakistan and Sri lanka too. There is also a tendency to define one country against the other which is unfortunate Indians Not As Large-Hearted As Pakistanis: Afridi
P.S. It seems that there are a number of scholarly works on cricket in India. There are some references in Cricket and Indian National consciousness by Emily Crick. In a different direction, there is an interesting paper by Aniruth Krishna and Eric Haglund Why do Some Countries Win More Olympic Medals? Lessons for Social Mobilty and Poverty Reduction in terms of 'effective participating population'.
P.P.S.Dhoni's 91 one of the greatest innings: Michael Atherton

George Monbiot on nuclear power

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power:
"You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation."

I still think that we have to wait awhile to guage the effects.

All those stories

about Condom problem for Indian men may be correct: The Penis Size Worldwide (country) (link via Ed Yong)