From science news and blogs

Leonardo’s Formula Explains Why Trees Don’t Splinter(via Ed Yong)

Coffee delivers jolt deep in the brain

UCSC professor captures video of tool use by fish: Orange-dotted tuskfish cracks clams on rocks
See also the omments by Eric Charles in Tool Use in Fish = Good, Future Planning in Fish = Bad . Similarl points are repeatedly made in Louise Barrett's book 'Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds". Eric Charles has several posts on this book.

Review of 'Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding' by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy It Does Take a Village

Reviews of The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. By Robert Trivers. Basic Books; 397 pages; $28. Published in Britain as "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others" by Allen Lane:One by Bryan Appleyard here and another from 'The Guardian' here

A new book on the great divergence

Dan Little discusses in Beyond divergence a new book on the great divergence Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe by R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal.
Apart from covering a much longer period, one of the several new points seems to be:
"The competing states of Europe were frequently drawn into conflict; and conflict often resulted in warfare. R&W argue that this fact of competition had a fateful unintended consequence. It made fortified cities much safer places than open countryside. And this in turn changed the calculation about where "manufacture" could occur at lowest cost. Labor costs were higher in cities, so absent warfare, producers were well advised to pursue a putting-out system involving peasant workers (proto-industrialization; link). But with the threat of marauding armies, European producers were pushed into urban locations. And this in turn gave them incentives to develop labor-saving, capital-intensive techniques. Putting the point bluntly: China didn't have an industrial revolution because it was too safe an environment for labor-intensive production."

Links, November 16, 2011

It seems to be one of those days when several articles look interesting and connect with stuff read earlier.
NY times article Hispanics Reviving Faded Towns on the Plains
From a comment in Guljar Natarajan's post The Eurozone crisis in perspective
"Indian union has no danger of falling apart precisely because the rajasthanis have the option to seamlessly migrate to Maha/TN/Gujarat and send remittances back home. needless to say Greeks cannot do so in Germany."
An earlier post with links on the benefits of labour mobility Evidence for a development idea

MindHacks post on Challenges to the 'death of free will idea' The free will rebellion

More on faecal diet from Ed Yong Faecal diet gives bumblebees defensive bacteria that protect them from parasites
From Louise Barrett's "Beyond the Brain" reviewed here, I see that faecal diet is common among mice too. May be Morarji Desai had a point. A post from few years ago by Tara Smith Fecal transplants to cure Clostridium difficile infection

From Science News Dirty air fosters precipitation extremes and Magic trick reveals unconscious knowledge

And some fun stuff from 'Savage Minds' Buffalaxing in Reverse in Taiwan

The bard of summer gone

I started reading Peter Roebuck's columns in 1989 after moving to Australia and the first difficult years were made bearable (now I would not like to live anywhere else) by his writings and gardening. Here are some obituaries:
Peter Roebuck: a gifted writer and a complex man with a brilliant mind by Vic Marks who knew him from school days at 'The Guardian',
Cricket loses a gifted all-rounder by Greg Baum at 'The Age',
Voice that became part of our summer by Tim Lane at 'The Age'.
P.S. Possible reason for death Peter Roebuck 'faced sexual assault charge'
A sharp mind, a tormented soul
and
Peter Roebuck ... a tribute from his first African son PSYCHOLOGY MAZIWISA

Some articles on Hardwick, Vt, USA

A recent post in 'The Automatic Earth' November 12 2011: Bail Out or Revitalize? has an interesting article by Nathan Carey on "The Revitalization of Rural Economies:Profiling Small-Scale Agriculture". In part, it describes the efforts in Hardwich, Vermont:
"The best way to conceive of this revolution is by illustrating a place where the challenge of rebuilding our food systems from the soil up has begun in earnest - Hardwick, Vermont (pop. 3000). The town had its best days in the 1920s, as it was a primary source for granite. When Granite was replaced by concrete as a building material, the industry collapsed. Therefore, the town has been in a sort of stasis for generations. .....
However, there's a growing and well publicized movement happening in Vermont that could provide some clues to the rest of us on how to proceed in a systemic process of revitalizing rural economies. There are many small and medium sized agricultural businesses in Hardwick that popped up within a short time frame and have been growing and making their positive influence felt."
The town was profiled in a 2008 NY Times article Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town and a 2010 book The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt. A review here.

From the NPR article Vermont Town's Food Focus Still A Growing Concept:
"Maybe the same thing can't happen in bigger towns, or major cities. Maybe Hardwick is different. But in this small town, at least, food is moving from the fringes of local life back toward its heart"

Dreze and Sen on growth and development

in India. Dreze and Sen observe in Putting Growth In Its Place that eventhough India's economic growth in recent years has been impressive "India has started falling behind every other South Asian country (with the partial exception of Pakistan) in terms of social indicators." Some of the reasons may be "The neglect of elementary education, healthcare, social security and related matters in Indian planning fits into a general pattern of pervasive imbalance of political and economic power that leads to a massive neglect of the interests of the unprivileged. Other glaring manifestations of this pattern include disregard for agriculture and rural development, environmental plunder for private gain with huge social losses, large-scale displacement of rural communities without adequate compensation, and the odd tolerance of human rights violations when the victims come from the underdogs of society."
Thet also note that three states Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh which have followed comprehensive social policies in education, health care, child care and some other areas have best social indicatorsamong Indian states.
They conclude
"There is probably no other example in the history of world development of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of broad-based social progress.

There is no mystery in this contrast, or in the limited reach of India’s development efforts. Both reflect the nature of policy priorities in this period. But as we have argued, these priorities can change through democratic engagement—as has already happened to some extent in specific states. However, this requires a radical broadening of public discussion in India to development-related matters—rather than keeping it confined to simple comparisons of the growth of the gnp, and naive admiration (implicit or explicit) of the high living standards of a relatively small part of the population. An exaggerated concentration on the lives of the minority of the better-off, fed strongly by media interest, gives an unreal picture of the rosiness of what is happening to Indians in general, and stifles public dialogue of other issues. Imaginative democratic practice, we have argued, is essential for broadening and enhancing India’s development achievements."

Worth reading in full.


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Interview with L.Vijayalakshmi

My granddaughter Ava who is just three has been making me listen to these two songs jalakalatalalo , Varinchi Vachina (on some days quite a few times)for the last two years. One of the four actresses that appear B. Saroja Devi is well known. I found out another L.Vijayalakshmi was a popular dancer and actress who married at the peak of her career and left films. Apparently she was inspired by the dances of Kamala Laxman. Vijayantimala and others and her father transferred to Madras for her training and after a film career of around 7-8 years married following parents' advice and is now a chatered accountant working for Virginia Polytechnic. Here are a couple of dances by her L Vijayalakshmi-Dance & Music-Gundamma Kadha-2in1

A brief biography in the article MGR learnt Bangra for a month to dance with L. Vijayalakshmi and two podcasts of interviews in Telugu and English ( a few minutes in Tamil with a cameo appearence bit of an interview with Chakrapni)
Mohana Murali Interviews Legendary Dancer Smt L. Vijayalakshmi 1 of 2
Mohana Murali Interviews Legendary Dancer Smt L. Vijayalakshmi 2 of 2
and some videos at the same site like NTR, L Vijayalakshmi: Andaala Naaraaja Alukelara.

There are links to some of her dances among other things in cinemachat (the blog seems to have some links to Melbourne).

Aside: In the second interview, at one point, she says 'it is classical but (kaani) graceful'. She seemed to enjoy her dancing and (to my untrained eyes)as good as many of the more famous dancers of those days.

A Japanese bread making experiment

From the Wikipedia aricle on Tacit Knowledge:
"As apprentices learn the craft of their masters through observation, imitation, and practice, so do employees of a firm learn new skills through on-the-job training. When Matsushita started developing its automatic home bread-making machine in 1985, an early problem was how to mechanize the dough-kneading process, a process that takes a master baker years of practice to perfect. To learn this tacit knowledge, a member of the software development team, Ikuko Tanaka, decided to volunteer herself as an apprentice to the head baker of the Osaka International Hotel, who was reputed to produce the area’s best bread. After a period of imitation and practice, one day she observed that the baker was not only stretching but also twisting the dough in a particular fashion (“twisting stretch”), which turned out to be the secret for making tasty bread. The Matsushita home bakery team drew together eleven members from completely different specializations and cultures: product planning, mechanical engineering, control systems, and software development. The “twisting stretch” motion was finally materialized in a prototype after a year of iterative experimentation by the engineers and team members working closely together, combining their explicit knowledge. For example, the engineers added ribs to the inside of the dough case in order to hold the dough better as it is being churned. Another team member suggested a method (later patented) to add yeast at a later stage in the process, thereby preventing the yeast from over-fermenting in high temperatures."
This was popolularized by Nonaka and colloborators and a survey article on related researchresearch
Tacit Knoeldge and Knowledge Conversion:Controversy and Advancement in Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory by Nonaka and Krogh.

Some psychology articles

Via The appliance of psychological science Psychology to the rescue has a 'series of articles from well-known psychologists that describe how psychology has helped them out in everyday life'. More impoertantly, all the articles are about 200 words long. One completeltly new to me
The Zeigarnik effect .

Some books online by Nataraja Ramakrishna

From Nataraja Ramakrishna:
"He was the architect of the revival of the Andhra Natyam dance form, a devotional temple dance tradition performed in Andhra Pradesh for over 400 years until virtually extinct.[3].He is also known for reviving Perini Shivatandavam, 700 year old dance form and brought international fame to it along with Kuchipudi -another traditional dance form. On request of the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy he established Nritya Niketan - a dance school at Hyderabad. "

A semiauto biagraphical bookARDASHATABDI ANDRA NATYAM. syllabus for a course
ANDHRA NATYAM-SILABAS-VAKYANAM and a few more books by him here and here. All in Telugu. I browsed through the first and found them quite interesting with lots of information about great dancers of yesteryears, discussion on various forms of dances in Andhra as well as other parts of India, lines from a number of songs...
Obituaryin Narthaki and 'The Hindu'. I hope that somebody like Paruchuri Sreenivas will write about him som day and put his work in perspective.

Adoptability

It Happens only in India !! Genius Cow... .

Eemaata November issue

has several interesting articles including a Telugu translation of A.K. Ramanujan's essay on three hundred ramayanas విషయ సూచిక: నవంబర్ 2011. Interestingly, there is 1978 Telugu book by Arudra covering some of the same ground Ramudiki Sita Yemautundi? or Are ye' sure, Sita was his wife. In any case, Delhi University seems to be doing its bit to popularize Ramanujan's excellent article ( I find that two posts about Ramanujan in my blog are getting a large number of hits recently).
There is also an article by the very erudite Paruchuri Sreenivas on 'Visual Culture:Cinema Posters' దృశ్య సంస్కృతి: సినిమా పోస్టర్లు.
There are also continuationsof the series of articles by Suresh Kolichala, Kodavatiganti Rohiniprasad, J.K. Mohana Rao and many more. Some of the links take to English articles and Hindi/Urdu songs. A wonderful e-magazine.

Saadat Hasan Manto's book on Bolloywood stars

Reviewed here Stars From Another Sky . Though I do not know Hindi, I watched some Hindi films in the fifties and always enjoyed Hindi film songs. More recently, I watched several clips on the net. Hindi film songs and dances (from films)seems to be a strong part of my background. I enjoyed these pieces from Manto's book (the two seem seem very different; one gentle with genuine affection and the other difficult to describe; the first of which I came across though Qalander's twitter feed).
Ashok Kumar: The Evergreen Hero
Nur Jehan: One in a million

Vilasini Natyam

Fascinated by a dance from an old Pakistani film, I started browsing the net on the origins of some of these dances and found that there is a revival in my home state of some of the devadasi dances under the name 'vilasini natyam' Dancing like the devadasis. Apparently, Arudra started the revival and encouraged the dancer Swapnasundari who has a book on the topic Vilasini Natyam : Bharatam of Telugu Temple and Court Dancers .
Here is a quick write upon the topic:

"VILASINI NATYAM refers to the Bharatham or solo dance- tradition which prevailed in those regions of Peninsular India where Telugu cultural forms were practiced for many centuries. Andhra Bharatham’s past and present history was initially researched by the renowned Telugu cultural historian , late Dr.Arudra .

Noted dancer Swapnasundari had taken up independent pursuit of the Telugu people’ Bharatham from the early ‘nineties, by directly learning from the descendants of erstwhile temple & court dancers of Telugu regions.

From 1994, Dr. Arudra guided Swapnasundari by monitored her dance-training under the hereditary Telugu hereditary female dancers while simultaneously guiding her in the historical aspects of Andhra Bharatham. The successful reclamation of Andhra Bharatham and its recasting as Vilasini Natyam is the result of their pioneering efforts."

The names Arudraand his son in law Kalyan Mukherjea appeared a few times in this blog.
P.S. A nice article about dvadasi type dances in films here

More music from Pakistani films

Classical Music Competition from a Pakistani film..
The MD seems to be the same as that of a film mentioned in an earlier post A Pakistani flm song

Growing luffa in Melbourne

My efforts to grow beerakaaya (బీరకాయ, Luffa acutangula)in Melbourne seem to be taking a beating for a second year. They take about four-five months to yield mature vegetables (For the Love of Luffa, or is it Loufah?)and last year the winter was long and by the time I got one luffa, the summer was over. So this year I decided to grow the seedlings indoor and plant them outside as soon as it got warm. But as soon as I took them outside, they were eaten by insects.
I should try to consult some experts before next year.

Nandita Das inducted into the International Women's Forum Hall of Fame

From The Hindu article ‘My work is motivated by the realities around me':
"Will the award impact her future work? “The motivation for that [my work] is life and the disturbing realities we live in, and not recognition. I deeply care about issues concerning women and much of my work, be it acting, writing, directing or speaking, is about advocating these concerns. It is but half a drop in the ocean. Still, we all need to do our little bit,” says she."

Teen batti char rasta

is apparently a film about national integration Teen Batti Char Rasta (1953). Browsing through YouTube songs, I found this
Multilingual song. Another multilingual song Shamshad Begum singing multilingual song for P.Bhanumathi in Nishan 1949 . In the Telugu and Tamil versions (Apurvasahodarulu) Bhanumati sings for herself.

Two more songs by Suraiya

Suraiya-'Tum meet mere...' in 'Jeet'
Murli Waale Murli Baja - Dillagi [1949]
Apparently Suraiya was not trained to sing or dance.
And one by Sulochana Kadam:
Chori Chori Aag Si Dil Mein Lagaake Chal Diye- Dholak 1951

IMF Book Forum: "Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery"

IMF Book Forum Video and transcript on Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery.
Menzie Chin says "...a lot of the ideas that we have here, I think, resonate strongly with Professor Akerlof’s paper with Paul Romer about how distortions in one part of the economy, particularly incentives to extract or loot, can distort a whole financial and economic system." George Akerlof and Paul Romer paper:
Looting:The Economic Underworld of bankruptcy for Profit

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein on conditions for intuitive expertise

Conclusions from
Conditions for Intutive Expertise :

"In an effort that spanned several years, we attempted to answer one basic question:
Under what conditions are the intuitions of professionals worthy of trust? We do not
claim that the conclusions we reached are surprising (many were anticipated by Shanteau, 1992, Hogarth, 2001, and Myers, 2002, among others),but we believe that they add up to a coherent view of expert intuition, which is more than we expected to achieve when we began.

.
Our starting point is that intuitive judgments can arise from genuine skill—the focus of the NDM [Naturalitic Decision Making] approach—but that they can also arise
from inappropriate application of the heuristic processes on which students of the HB [Heuristics and Biases] tradition have focused.
.
Skilled judges are often unaware of the cues that guide them, and individuals whose intuitions are not skilled are even less likely to know where their judgments come
from.
.
True experts, it is said, know when they don’t know. However, nonexperts (whether or
not they think they are) certainly do not know when they don’t know. Subjective confidence is therefore an unreliable indication of the validity of intuitive judgments and decisions.
.
The determination of whether intuitive judgments can be trusted requires an examination of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the opportunity
that the judge has had to learn the regularities of that environment.
.
We describe task environments as “high-validity” if there are stable relationships between objectively identifiable cues and subsequent events or between cues and the
outcomes of possible actions. Medicine and firefighting are practiced in environments of fairly high validity. In contrast, outcomes are effectively unpredictable in zero-validity environments. To a good approximation, predictions
of the future value of individual stocks and long-term forecasts of political events
are made in a zero-validity environment.
.
Validity and uncertainty are not incompatible. Some environments are both highly valid and substantially uncertain. Poker and warfare are examples. The best moves in
such situations reliably increase the potential for success.
.
An environment of high validity is a necessary condition for the development of
skilled intuitions. Other necessary conditions include adequate opportunities for
learning the environment (prolonged practice and feedback that is both rapid and
unequivocal). If an environment provides valid cues and good feedback, skill and expert intuition will eventually develop in individuals of sufficient talent.
.
Although true skill cannot develop in irregular or unpredictable environments,
individuals will some-times make judgments and decisions that are successful by
chance. These “lucky” individuals will be susceptible to an illusion of skill and to
overconfidence (Arkes, 2001). The financial industry is a rich source of examples.
.
The situation that we have labeled fractionation of skill is another source of overconfidence. Professionals who have expertise in some tasks are sometimes called upon to make judgments in areas in which they have no real skill. (For example, financial analysts may be skilled at evaluating the likely commercial success of a
firm, but this skill does not extend to the judgment of whether the stock of that firm is underpriced.) It is difficult both for the professionals and for those who
observe them to determine the boundaries of their true expertise.
.
We agree that the weak regularities available in low-validity situations can sometimes support the development of algorithms that do better than chance. These
algorithms only achieve limited accuracy, but they outperform humans because of their advantage of consistency. However, the introduction of algorithms to replace
human judgment is likely to evoke substantial resistance and sometimes has undesirable side effects.

Another conclusion that we both accept is that the approaches of our respective communities have built-in limitations. For historical and methodological reasons, HB researchers generally find errors more interesting and instructive than correct performance; but a psychology of judgment and decision making that ignores intuitive skill is seriously blinkered. Because their intellectual attitudes developed in reaction to the HB tradition, members of the NDM community have an aversion to the word bias and to the corresponding concept; but a psychology of professional judgment that neglects predictable errors cannot be adequate. Although we agree with both of these conclusions, we have yet to move much beyond recognition of the problem. DK is still fascinated by persistent errors, and GK still recoils when biases are mentioned. We hope, however, that our effort may help others do more than we have been able to do in bringing the insights of both communities to bear on their common subject. "

Street songs from films

Through Minai's Cinema Nritya Gharana, I have come across wonderful blgs like Dances on the Footpath which made it easier to spend the last few weeks pleasantly through two bouts of flu. I do not have any knowledge of classical music or dance though I heard my mother singing some carnatic music and various film songs from different languages. From early days I could not stand lots of carnatic music or bharatanatyam; lot of it seemed gymnastics to me and not too natural unless one had some training in its various intricacies. But north Indian classical music seemed more melodious but overall film songs and some of the dances where themes and movements seemed natural and graceful appealed to me. Even now, it is the same except I am enjoying some shorter bits of classical stuff. It seems to me that films, for whatever reason (possibly for the money at the bottom of the pyramid) adopted more to what appealed to common people. As Stephen Putnam Hughes says in Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema:
"To contemporaries, the rise of Tamil cinema and the ubiquity of films songs both offered a democratic promise to make music accessible for everyone and threatened to upset the social and cultural hierarchies of professional drama and classical Karnatic music. These sources also mark the shift from the music boom of the 1920s and early 1930s as it transformed into a cinema-based mass culture of music by the 1940s. This collaboration around film songs produced a new form and institutionalization of popular music at the center of an emergent cultural industry of Tamil cinema, which, in many ways, is still with us and still dominates to this day."
It is possible that the shifts in dance appreciation took a different trajectory but it is still the street dances from many films which appeal to me more. There are lots from Hindi films like Ramayya Vastawaiyya ; here are a couple from Telugu films:
Vagaloy Vagalu
Ithihasam Vinnaara
eruvaka sagaroo rannoo chinnananna
kulamulo emudira
(Kannada version Kuladalli Melyavudo )

Happy Deepavali

Deepavali Deepavali from Shavukaru

An old Tamil song

I remember my mother singing this around 1947-48, she even had the lyrics written in Telugu script in her song book (a book which I inherited and lost). She learnt it from the daughters of Tamilian teacher in Gudavalli who lived near us. The tune and a few Tamil words is all I remembered. Apparently, it is well known as I found in this wonderful blog yesterday: the song from 5:36 onwards

A dance square off

During flu/pneumonia time
Tamil version Padmini & Vyjayanthimala's classic Tamil dance-off (HQ)
Hindi version Aaja To Aaja - Raj Tilak

A comparison Comparing Vyjayanthimala and Padmini's Dance-off in Vanjikottai Valiban and Raj Tilak and the corresponding blog post Vyjayanthimala and Padmini's Dance-off: Vanjikottai Valiban vs. Raj Tilak

A horror video from China

WTF?!?! 2YR Chinese girl ruthlessly run over twice and pedestrians do nothing :'(

Some papers on economic development

Browsing through Natural Experiments in History edited by Jarred Diamond and James Robinson, I find several of these articles are available online. Some of these and similar papers have also been discussed in
The Importance of History in Economic Development by Nathan Nunn. Here are links to some of the papers; the others may also be available online.

History, Institutions and Ebonomic Development: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure System in India by Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer
From Ancien Regime to Capitalismby Darren Acegmolu and others
Politics of Financial Debelopment: Evidence from New World Economies by Stephen Haber
Schackled to the Past: The Causes and Consequences of African Slave trade by Nathan Nunn

P.S. Some of these links have been mentioned before in a link to http://bayesianheresy.blogspot.com/2010/02/book-recommendation.html, See also the Haiti links in this post

John Quiggin on Australian Carbon Tax

Carbon tax in Australia and A long time coming …
"Australia’s House of Representatives has just passed legislation for a carbon tax[1]. Passage by the Senate is assured, so that, as long as the government can survive another year (it needs the support of three independents to muster a one-vote majority), the tax will come into effect in mid-2012. The political history of this proposal is too complicated to recount, but is symbolised by the current Prime Minister (who previously dumped the policy, but has now succeeded in bringing it into effect) receiving a congratulatory kiss from the previous Prime Minister (who supported the policy but was unable to get it passed into law, and was replaced as a result of this)" and
"Getting this legislation passed was a big achievement, but a great many voters will never forgive Gillard for the promises she made before the election (and semantic disputes about whether it’s a price or a tax won’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced). I remain of the view that she could do most to salvage her place in history by gracefully stepping aside once the bill passes the Senate."

Another review of 'Country Driving'

by David King. Except:
"While it is possible to look at descriptive statistics and analysis to understand what is happening, a work like Country Driving provides valuable insights into how economics, incentives, and cultural factors play out among people"

Three hundred Ramayanas

by A.K. Ramanujan (link to the article) has been removed from Delhi University syllabi says Sepoy in Transformative Texts:
"Ramanujan’s essay is, in my view, one of the best pieces of scholarship the discipline of South Asian Studies has produced – theoretically rich, innovative and amazingly perceptive about the lived ways in which texts continue to exist – the importance of reading, of listening. It ought to be, if it already isn’t, required reading for anyone working on epic or performative texts in any historical or geographical period.

So, when I hear that the Delhi University has removed the essay from History syllabi, I feel the urge to grab my print copy, a chair, walk to the busiest intersection on campus, stand on the chair and start reading out loud his essay. Every word. Make them listen. They will be transformed."

Eeroju bhale roju

and several other songs from Chandirani here. These seem to cheer me up during flu season.

Interviw with Thomas Sargent

wide ranging and seems partly understandable here
via a comment by Ashwin Parameswaran in the MR post Thomas Sargent, Nobel Laureate
The same interviewer Arthur Rolnick interviews the other 2011 Nobel prize winner Christopher Sims (The interview is from 2007 and the first one from 2010)
P.S. See also Three cheers for Sargent & Sims, one and a half for the "Economics Nobel" :
"Macroeconomies all over the world are doing some really weird stuff. There are lots of ideas, but little consensus, about which theories we should be using to understand events like the financial crisis, Little Depression, and current relapse, not to mention globalization and China. In times like these, it is best to look to the data first. Pruning the idea tree is more important now than ever. If today's award to Sargent and Sims has a political message, it is that.

But in the long run, I think it would be better if the Bank of Sweden adopted more stringent criteria for the awarding of the prize, more akin to the criteria for the Nobel in Medicine. That may mean fewer winners - perhaps only one a year, or even some years of "no recipient." It will certainly tilt the award toward microeconomists. But so be it. If you're going to call it the "Prize in Economic Sciences," then my opinion is that you should back that up."
P.S. A more recent (phone) intrview

Atriums

I remember Mahan Maharaj feeling sad about the waste of money and space caused by the atrium in his university building. Apparently well planned atriums can be useful:
Steve Jobs: “Technology Alone Is Not Enough”
(via Rajeev Ramachandran again)

Old Indian records

Listening to old Hindi songs on YouTube, I came across Miss Wazir Jan - Chhum Chhananana Bichhua Baaje [Raag Jaunpuri] , the date of which seems uncertain. Google search led to
The Gramaphone Company's first Indian recordings, 1899-1908 By Michael S. Kinnear. Many of the pages are available and the list at the end indicates that it was recorded in between 1906 and 1907 but the quality is surprisingly good.

Rajiv Sethi on worldly philosophers

Rajiv Sethi in Notes on a Worldly Philosopher:
"The very first book on economics that I remember reading was Robert Heilbroner's majesterial history of thought The Worldly Philosophers. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who was drawn to the study of economics by that wonderfully lucid work. Heilbroner managed to convey the complexity of the subject matter, the depth of the great ideas, and the enormous social value that the discipline at its best is capable of generating.

I was reminded of Heilbroner's book by Robert Solow's review of Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. Solow begins by arguing that the book does not quite deliver on the promise of its subtitle, and then goes on to fill the gap by providing his own encapsulated history of ideas. Like Heilbroner before him, he manages to convey with great lucidity the essence of some pathbreaking contributions. I was especially struck by the following passages on Keynes:"

Robert Solow's review Working in the Dark

Discussion of Solow review Solow: Keynesian Economics Has Become Dramatically Relevant Again Today as well as a discussion of Rajiv Sethi's post in Economist's View.

P.S. A quick summary of the part in Solow's review on Keynes
Solow on Keynes and Uncertainty by Donald Marron
Another readable book introducing economic ideas which I read along with Heilbrinner's book is "Man's Worldly Goods" by Leo Huberman. Two books of comletely different nature which look at economics and development in practice "North of South" by Shiva Naipaul and "Country Driving" by Peter Hessler.

Drug prices in different countries

I just noticed this blog post (after hearing from a relative that a cancer drug which costs 100,000 dollars in USA costs about 500 dollars in India and the price comparisons for bone marrow transplants do not seem any better)
DRUG PRICES - AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON
The author is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology in Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. This seems to be one of the several blogs in
Pharmainfo.net
P.S. Correction March 8, 2012:From a further enquiry; it is 10,000 dollars and not 100,000.
See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/high-cost-of-medical-procedures-in-the-us/

The formidable Steve Jobs

From Close Encounters of the Steve Kind:

"I was sitting in Steve's office when Lynn Takahashi, Steve's assistant, announced Knuth's arrival. Steve bounced out of his chair, bounded over to the door and extended a welcoming hand.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded."

(via Rajeev Ramachandran's Google Reader)

Climbing ladders

Recently I was told by some Indian friends that I should not climb ladders at my age (70). But my neighbour Frank Burke climbed a ladder when he was eighty to make temporary repairs to our roof after a heavy downpour. So yestereday I brought out our ladder to spray some fruit trees but then left it outside for further spraying. When my granddaughter Ava arrived, she decided that it was fun climbing ladders. But each time she climbed and got down she decided that it was my turn to climb. It turned out quite tiring after about ten times. May be climbing ladders is not so bad but leaving then outside seems to a bad idea.

Links, October 5th

From The Hidu news From barren land to rose fields, a success story:
"There are over 1,000 acres of agricultural land in the village and it is mostly rain-fed. With poor access to water, farmers had to be content with a single crop during kharif season. Annual average rainfall here is about 700 mm and during a good monsoon, the excess rainwater used to drain away without serving any purpose.

Pepsico, under its corporate social responsibility activity, in association with the ADI conducted a water resource assessment study in 2009. Check-dams were constructed on three rivulets that pass through the village and over 100 water recharge structures in the locality, to facilitate better water access to the farming community, says Vaishakh Palsodkar of ADI.

With check-dams, the groundwater levels have improved over the last two years. Most 30-40 feet deep wells in the vicinity are now filled to the brim. With adequate water, farmers are now also cultivating sweet lime and other crops in the Rabi season, which was once a rarity, points out the former sarpanch, Laxman Bobade."

From The Hibdu opinion Chinese herbal garden leads the way:
"More than 40 years ago, amidst the upheaval and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in China, and against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, hundreds of Chinese scientists embarked on an ambitious effort to find a drug that would conquer drug-resistant malaria. The result was the discovery of artemisinin, a compound found in plants, which, with its derivatives, is now widely used around the world to treat the disease.

This year, a highly prestigious Lasker Award went to Youyou Tu, an 81-year-old Chinese scientist who played a key part in that discovery."

Concensus seems to emerge quickly in mathematics.From Big News (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader):
"Just to be clear, here: That’s Ed Nelson cheerfully acknowledging that the book-length argument he’s been painstakingly constructing for (probably) years, and which was intended to shake the mathematical world to its foundations, doesn’t work. This says so many good things about the culture of mathematics, and so many good things about the Internet, and so many good things about the way they interact (see here and here for more examples), and it says those things so eloquently, that I see no further need for comment." See also The (in)consistency of PA and consensus in mathematics .

From Darwinian Tax Reform via Adam Smith's Lost Legacy :
"Frank observes a similar pattern of arms race-like competition in the quest to obtain social status through luxury purchases. As the wealthiest acquire status symbols so too do the middle and lower classes race to keep up by spending money in a never ending competition for prestige. The result is a society living beyond its means. Whereas elk “voting” to change their antler size is a fantasy, we can use policy to alter wasteful spending patterns and increase savings by replacing our progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. This is not to be confused with a valued added tax, national sales tax or flat tax endorsed by some libertarians, which he recognizes is rightly decried as regressive. Frank’s formula goes like this:

Taxes Paid = (Adjusted Gross Income – Annual Savings) * (Progressive Rate Structure)

The result of implanting this tax structure, Frank writes, would be that the wealthiest would reign in excessive spending on status goods to avoid the consumption tax. This would relax the pressure to “keep up with the Jones,” prompting the middle and lower classes to follow suit. Of course, there would still be competition for prestige expressed in consumer goods, cars, and real estate, but everything would be scaled back. The progressive consumption tax would generate an economic surplus at the household level. It is the tax structure Charles Darwin would have endorsed and Adam Smith never would have thought of."
The point of the review seems to be that robert Frank did not understand Darwin well but not really a critique of Frank's ideas. Ideas similar to 'Frank's weird ideas about social prstige' have been proposed along ago by Fred Hirsch:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aespop/positionalgoods.htm
http://repositorio-iul.iscte.pt/bitstream/10071/515/1/wp43-2005.pdf

Enjoying one's own cooking

I noticed that I do not enjoy my own cooking, at least soon after cooking. Some of them which last (like pappucharu, chicken curry etc) seem ok the next day though sometimes I got high praise for my cooking on the day the food was cooked. It seems that this may not be uncommon according to this MR post Why Do Sandwiches Taste Better When Someone Else Makes Them?

Slime molds

According to the Wikipedia article on Slime mold :
"Professor John Tyler Bonner, who has spent a lifetime studying slime moulds argues that Slime molds are "no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia -- that is, simple brains.""
See also the videos ohn Bonner's slime mold movies ", Slime mold form a map of the Tokyo-area railway system and Rebuilding Iberian motorways with slime mould .

Carl Zimmer wonders Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime?. See also his post .

Kuffir on Paramakudi killings

Manufacturing complicity: Paramakudi killings via Kuffir's post lessons from paramakudi for telangana
An earlier incident in Tamilnadu Justice, at last . Justice faster than in the Karamchedu case.

Food may tweak our genes

From New Scientist editorial The good news about how food tweaks our genes ( via Ed Yong I’ve got your missing links right here (1 October 2011)):
"EVER since we began farming some 10,000 years ago, we have been genetically modifying the plants we eat. Now it seems that plants have been toggling our genetic switches too, by slipping bits of RNA into our intestines and bloodstreams (see "Eating your greens alters your genes" )."

From the article "Eating your greens alters your genes":
"In what is the strongest evidence yet that the genetic material in food survives digestion and circulates through the body, fragments of plant RNA have been found swimming in the bloodstreams of people and cows. What's more the study by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University in China and his colleagues shows that some of these plant RNAs muffle gene expression and raise cholesterol levels in mice. The discovery opens up a new way to turn food into medicine: we may be able to design plants that change our genes for the better."
It also suggests that further studies are needed for GM foods and the possibility of concocting useful GM foods.

Too much medicine?

Recent experiences with doctors made me wonder whether we are getting too much medical care by the way testing, treatment, follow ups ad so on ( I had some minor discomfort while chewing for a few months and one of the doctors I visit for arthritic problems immediately suspected temporal arteritis and after a battery of preliminary tests wanted me to go for an invasive biopsy near the jaw. I decided that I had enough and resisted for a few weeks ad later blood tests indicated that there was probably an error in the diagnosis. But the doubts linger on. Just as with cars, I decided not to go to doctors, particularly specialists unless the system seems near breakdown). The result is that I googled 'too much medicine' and found various reports like this:
Patients get too much medical care, doctors say:28% of doctors say they overtreat their patients
Too Much Medicine: A Doctor's Guide to Better and More Affordable Health Care
both about US but I have heard similar stories here in Australia and in India. A recent article of Atul Gawande Cowboys and Pit Crews suggests that the problem may be even more basic:
"The doctors of former generations lament what medicine has become. If they could start over, the surveys tell us, they wouldn’t choose the profession today. They recall a simpler past without insurance-company hassles, government regulations, malpractice litigation, not to mention nurses and doctors bearing tattoos and talking of wanting “balance” in their lives. These are not the cause of their unease, however. They are symptoms of a deeper condition—which is the reality that medicine’s complexity has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors."

In the case of mental illnesses, problems may be even worse suggests Ethan Watters in Crazy like us: the globalization of the American psyche. Compare the third chapter on Schizophrenia in Zanzibar summarized here and the recent report in Neurosceptic Schizophrenia And The Developing World Revisited.

The world of documents

After reading Country Driving I could not resist picking up another book of Peter Hessler: Oracle Bones.
Very early in the book, he introduces the China scholar Imre Galambos in whose opinion 'China's most important literary unification took place during the Han. They produced their history book, as well as the first dictioary, and their emphasis on written word established the foundation for two millinea of empire'. Hessler quotes Galambos:
"People talk about this idea of literary worlds. There are certain cultures, like the Byzantine and the Chinese, in which the written documents create a world that is more significant than the real world. The officials who ran the country in ancient China — they were selected through exams, through this process of memorizing the classics. They lived in this quasi world of letters. Whoever came in from the outside became a part of it. Even the Mongolian tribes that eventually became the Yuan dynasty — for God’s sake, they were complete nomads, with very little written language. But they became like the Chinese for a time; they assimilated themselves. I think this literary world is the link in time that permits this thing we call 'Chinese history.' It’s not the number of people or anything like that; it’s the enormous written world that they produced. They produced this world that’s so big that it eats them up and it eats up everybody around them."
Somewhat reminiscent of the world of Sanskrit documents explored in Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (mentioned in this post earlier).

Stretching without wrinkles

This report Stretch, but without the wrinkles of the recent paper Three-Dimensional Polymer Constructs Exhibiting a Tunable Negative Poisson’s Ratio may be interesting to mathematicians. From the report:
"A team of nanoengineers have constructed new materials that don't wrinkle when you stretch them. This makes them similar to tissue found in the human body, so they may in the future be used to repair damaged heart walls, blood vessels and skin.
.....
The secret of the two new materials lies in their geometry. Engineered tissue is made using a porous scaffold structure. It's the shape of the pores that's important. Square and circular pores, or those shaped like regular hexagons, give you a positive Poisson ratio. But it's possible to achieve a negative ratio by cleverly tweaking such basic geometries."
The modern research in this area seems to have started with a paper of Rod Lakes in 1987, partly reproduced in his site
P.S. Videos Negative Poisson Ratio Material and The strange behaviour of auxetic foams

A swamiji wins Bhatnagar prize

Mahan Maharaj, a senior researcher at the Howrah-based Ramkrishna Mission Vivekananda University, was among 11 scientists selected today for the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, India's highest science award.Maharaj and Palash Kumar of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata received the prize in the Mathematical Science category.
Swami Vidyanadhananda, originally Mahan Mitra, usually called Mahan Maharaj I have known since 1995 through his work and met him for the first time around 2005. After a Ph.D. in Berkeley he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and suddenly decided to join Ramakrishna Mission and disappeared for about seven years. During this period I slightly revised one of his papers (and also worked on the proof sheets of another) that I used and helped publishing it; I am not sure whether his permission was taken. Towards the end of his training Kalyan Mukherjea got to know about Mahan through Mahan's brother and persuaded him to come back to mathematics. The long break seemed to have no effect and he seemed even stronger than before. He continued with his monkly duties, has been doing strong mathematics, meanwhile helping set up a mathematics department in Vivekananda University in Belur Math. I spent a month in Belur Math during 2009 and had the pleasure of coloborating with him and saw him training several Ph.D. students. It was a fun stay and I hope to visit him again.

There is a 2009 photograph of Mahan in the photos section of this blog (currently on page 3).
P.S. Link to Mahan's papers and a young researcher meets Mahan:"Thankfully he doesn't wear his religion on his sleeve." My impression after staying in Belur Mission for a month: The organization is more into service than religion and there are monks of various religions in the RK Mission. But I have not enquired whether there were any atheists.
A nice picture here

Andrew Leonard faerwells HTWW

A farewell to How the World Works :
"Was the experiment a success? I'd give it a mixed grade. Traffic grew steadily throughout the blog's tenure (and peaked, actually, during the recent debt ceiling nuttiness), but there are definite limitations to how deeply you can report or think or how much you can craft your prose when you are attempting to post three times or more per day. When I was learning new things, the pace was fine -- invigorating, even -- but when I found myself simply reacting to news events with insta-analysis, and repeating myself over and over again, it became considerably less satisfying."
I read HTWW regularly for a couple of years and was introduced to work of Glenn Davis Stone through it and have not been reading it that much in the recent months probably for the reasons mentioned above.

A Telugu film review

of 1948 film Drohi:Drohi film review in Roopavani magazine. I did not remember that L.V.Prasad (Akkineni Lakshmi Vara Prasada Rao) made one of my favourite films 'shavukaru' or that he was in the first talkies in three languages. Googling about him, I found this film review.
Here are some songs from Drohi and more information including lyrics here and here.

China on the move

Excellent Country Driving by Peter Hessler reviewd here and here. From the second review:
"There is a myth, one believed by many Chinese, that foreigners do not and cannot understand China. This book shows that this myth is simply nonsense.

Hessler makes the effort. He drives through many of the least developed provinces and villages in China and down little country lanes for months on end. He camps in the open air and lives on Red Bull, chocolate bars and Oreos. He saw the China where villagers worked for months to dig useless tree holes even though the diggers only received two bags of instant noodles each day to show for their work; the China where young people move away to cities or towns to find jobs while the elderly cling to their old life in the villages; the China where desperate migrants have to lie about their age and identities to seize a job in a booming industrial coastal town. Even many Chinese, especially those who live in the cosmopolitan illusion of Shanghai and Beijing, are unaware of this China. It may not always be pretty in pieces, but there is great beauty in the mosaic of a people living their lives in a time of great change and working to make a better life for themselves and their children. It is a China I want more people to know about."
Author Peter Hessler reads from his China memoir Country Driving before a Q & A with Emily Parker of the Center on US-China Relations. (1 hr., 6 min.) from Asia Society which has many other interesting interviews.
Thanks to Jack Morava for sending the book.

Tom Slee's review of "Everything is Obvious"

(a book which I read and liked) An Uncertain World III: Everything is Obvious, by Duncan J. Watts

Glenn Greenwald on public opinion surprises

Public opinion surprises (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader):
"I confess to being amazed that 43% of Americans -- close to a plurality -- believe that "U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated attacks" by Terrorists. I'm not amazed because it's untrue -- it plainly is true -- but because that is a view almost never heard in establishment media discourse. To the contrary, the notion that American "wrongdoing" is a cause of anti-U.S. Terrorism is one of the most rigidly enforced taboos. Nothing provokes allegations of "unpatrotism" or "anti-Americanism" -- or intellectually dishonest claims that one is "justifying" Terrorism -- more than pointing out this obvious causation. Despite that, and despite the natural jingoistic bias of believing that one's own country does not engage in truly bad acts (certainly not sufficiently bad to provoke Terrorism), a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to that conclusion on its own. That's a very encouraging finding."

A duet by S.Varalakshmi and Jikki

Navaneeta Chorudu from the 1961 film 'Krishna Prema'. Many others in the link are from a 1943 film with the same name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOlhjlKt5M

Straddling Science and Medicine

Carl Zimmer writes about Arthur Horwich who with his colleagues discovered 'that HSP60 is like a changing room for proteins' Horwich Wins Lasker Award by Straddling Science and Medicine

Five men from Hyderabad

A misfortune for five men [Hyderabad]:
"The five men - Nizam's finance minister Moin Nawaz Jung, Muhammad Hameedullah, Yousuf Hussain Khan, Zaheer Ahmed and Pingle Venkatram Reddy - comprised the delegation that went to the UN to argue Hyderabad's case for independence in September 1948."
Three returned to India and the article sketches their later careers "Upon his return from the unfinished job, Khan, a historian and litterateur at OU, and the brother of Zakir Hussain, the former president, returned to his alma matar. But he soon quit his job and went to Aligarh where he later became the pro vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University.

Venkatram Reddy was arrested on his return and interned at Chanchalguda jail. He was later shifted to his residence but was kept under house arrest for a long time. Anuradha Reddy, a relative, revealed that his loyalty to the Nizam's government was unquestionable as he believed that his presence in the administration would 'save' Hindus from the menace of Razakars.

After the wrath of the government subsided, Reddy took up social work. His son Jagan Mohan Reddy became the chief justice of AP High Court and later vice- chancellor of OU during the crucial emergency years.

But the most rewarding return was that of Zaheer Ahmed. He sailed over to the Indian government smoothly and got plum postings, including a stint in the UN.

After his retirement, he served for several years former prince Mukarram Jah Bahdur - grandson and successor to the seventh Nizam. He also served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s."

Photo of an old lady

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL: IRON LADY BEGS JOB FOR HIS SON,Saturday, August 15, 2009. She passed away next year FREEDOM FIGHTER BASANTI WADDEDAR PASSED AWAY

Dan Little revisits 'A Jobless Future'

by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio in A jobless future?
Other reviews here and here
Related posts with similar themes
here, here, here and a recent post by Yves Smith The Decline of Manufacturing in America: The Role of Government Neglect

Cliff Robertson RIP

This earlier write up also mentions some of his charity work Cliff Robertson

Some telugu words

in several places from Andhra Bhoomi in the links here, particularly in the links titled మాటల మూటలు. For example, from
http://121.241.226.28/nudi/maatala-mootalu-507
"తనివి: అంటే తృప్తి - తమి: అంటే ఆసక్తి - ఆరయిక: అంటే పరిశోధన - మెలన: అంటే చరిత్ర - చవి: అంటే రుచి - గురి: అంటే లక్ష్యం"
One of the links on the last page http://121.241.226.28/nudi/thanks-849 says
"‘థ్యాంక్స్’ అనడం మనకు బాగా అలవాటయిపోయింది. దానికే కొందరు ‘ధ‌న్యవాదాలు’ అంటున్నారు. ఇదే అర్థంలో ఇంతకంటే కమ్మగా చెప్పగల ‘మప్పితాలు’ అనే తెలుగుమాట ఒకటుంది" but this does not seem to agree with the comment of Seshatalpasayee in అచ్చ తెలుగు పదాలు.

India-Pakistan border

Whose bright idea was that? Border between India and Pakistan is so brightly lit it can be seen from space (via Chris Blattman)
Meanwhile ‘Bol’ gets Indians talking, Sara Raza Khan sings a Madan Mohan song (from 4.55 onwards) and Hasan Altaf wonders about Gandhara art and Takshasila

Vernon Ruttan on the role of Public sector in technology development

The Role of Public Sector in Technology Development: Generalizations from General Purpose Technologies  (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.8326&rep=rep1&type=pdf) by Vernon Rutton:
"Abstract: In the new science and technology policy literature that emerged in the
early 1980's it was held , while public support for science is appropriate, that
public support for technology development represents an unproductive use of public resources. The perspective that emerges in my recent book, Technology, Growth and Development: An Induced innovation Perspective, is quite different. Government has played an important role in technology development and transfer in almost every U.S. industry that has become competitive on a global scale."
Towards the end of the article, he also discusses cases which do not fit into this scheme and says "A second lesson that emerges from U.S. experience is the importance of a decentralized national research system. The structure of the U.S. national research system took its present form in the half century between 1880 and 1930. This period witnessed the formation of scientific and technical bureaus within the federal government, the establishment of industrial research laboratories, the formation and growth of public and private research universities, and the emergence of philanthropic foundations to support research and education. These institutions drew on each other for their entrepreneurship and leadership. This decentralized structure has given the United States greater capacity to adjust to changing national and global priorities, and to direct research to the exploration of commercial opportunities, than in countries in which government-funded research is conducted primarily in national laboratories or research institutes only marginally linked with universities and in which private sector research is limited primarily to large firms"
The above article is drawn from his 2001 book mentioned above and in a 2006 article, he goes further to discuss the role of military and defence related research:IS WAR NECESSARY FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH?
P.S. I came across the articles though comments of E. Barandiaran in the MR post Who invented interchangeable parts?. E. Barandiaran also suggests the paper Modeling the Transition to a New Economy: Lessons from Two Technological Revolutions by Andrew Atkeson and Patrick J. Kehoe.

Shiv Visvanathan on saving the Hazare process

Excerpt from Hazare vs Hazare: A Scenario as a Warning by Shiv Visvanathan:
"The question is how do we move from the critique to construct and salvage ­another impressive movement from going underground? How can we prevent the good Hazare from losing out to the bad Hazare? Let us face it; every movement has the possibility of eventually making an ass of itself. His core team is not very reassuring in terms of presence or competence. I am not saying they have not ­surprised me so far but I have a sense that the group is heading towards the usual ­inertias of such struggle.

To open up the playfulness of Phase II requires some change in mentalities. First, Anna Hazare has to move from being prophet to sage, while guaranteeing that his disciples do not become the high priests of legislative reform. Second, the group must break the clichés about the State and governance. The State is often seen as wooden and unresponsive. But of late, whether on the RTI or the debate on ­genetic seeds, the State in collaboration with NGOs, has sought to experiment with partici­patory frameworks where stakeholders openly debate the politics of expertise. For instance, Jairam Ramesh in collaboration with sensitive environ­mental activists like Kartikeya Sarabhai at the Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad, created the dialogic possibilities of such controversy, letting scientists, farmers and seed manufacturers debate with each other. We need to create sites for such debate so that governance can also be seen as a ludic exercise at least in terms of the future.

Dogma also has to yield to method and particularly methods of resolution. The politics of movements need to be captured as ethical norms or as institutional methods. What is the goal of the movement beyond the holy grail of the Lokpal? At what level does the Lokpal operate? Or are we creating an alternative behemoth, a byzantine bureaucracy more Kafkaesque and inquisitorial than the current structure?"

Wired.com on Aadhaar

Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID via Ed Yong. Some of the benefits:
"One of his [Nandan Nilekani's] first major coups was persuading India’s central bank to declare the Aadhaar number adequate identification to issue no-frills accounts. Bringing biometrically verified banking to the poor could lead to enormous savings in government benefit programs—for both the recipients and the state. Today, a pensioner in a village like Gagenahalli has to take a bus to the nearest town to collect his monthly payment in cash. That’s time and money lost for him. Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of the government’s $250 billion in subsidies and other spending on the poor will be siphoned off by scammers over the next five years, according to investment group CLSA. Both problems could largely be solved if instead the funds were sent straight to bank accounts held by biometrically verified recipients. “It’s like having 1.2 billion pipes through which you can send the benefits directly,” Sharma says. Connecting the poor to banks could also enable some of them to get loans to start businesses or pay for their children’s education."
See also the NYTimes article Scanning 2.4 Billion Eyes, India Tries to Connect Poor to Growth

Prosperity without growth

a report by Tim Jackson available here. A review of the later book in The Guardian
Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson

Another song by R. Balasraswati Devi

and several songs from Shavukaru here (misprint attributes it to S.P.B.)
P.S. Savitri in one of her early films (around 2.20 minutes into the video)
here

September issue of Eemaata

has several interesting articles. Of particular interest me are
తిక్కన భారతంలో పలుకులపొందు by Bhadriraju Krishnamurthy, and
పలుకుబడి: సంఖ్యా పదాలు – 2 by Suresh Kolichala

Some science links, september 1, 2011

From guts to brains – eating probiotic bacteria changes behaviour in mice,can one extrapolate to humans?
Men’s spatial superiority takes cultural cues
Saffron takes on cancer
The Psychologist on Milgram and the shock of the old
Wakeup Call for College Students: New Research Finds You Need to Catch More Z's

Two songs by Feroza Begum

Tum Bhulaye Na Gaye
Ogo Priyo tobo Gaan

and one by Kamal Dasgupta
Katodin dekhini tomay

A poem and a discussion on norms and giving

in Underground Norms via Andrew Gelman
And Happy Telugu Language Day. By some accident, my brother Kamalakar has chosen this day as his birthday since the records were not kept and he was born around this time of the year approximately a week before a cousin whose date of birth is more certain. My brother worked hard after his college education and has given much in charities while buying for himself things on sale and I join many who know him in wishing him a happy birthday.

Telugu Language Day, August 29th

in honour of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gidugu_Venkata_Ramamoorty. Some articles by Gidugu and about వ్యవహారిక భాషా ఉద్యమం (common Telugu movement)and about Bhadriraju Krishnamurthy are in this issue of Eemaata ఈమాట జూన్ 2008 ప్రత్యేక సంచిక
A few Telugu songs for the occasion
Maa telugu Talliki
Cheyetti jai kottu Telugoda
Veera Gandham
Andhruda levara

Links, mostly to old stuff

Hirsch: The positional economy
The Continuing Relevance of Fred Hirsch's Insights on Markets and Morality
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, a review by Ann Mayhew
Tacit Knowledge Revisited -- We Can Still Learn from (Michael)Polanyi

and some new:

The Inevitable Superpower by Arvind Subramanian
What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber

Technology Review's annual list of 35 Innovators under 35

Technology Review's annual list of 35 Innovators under 35

Among the four winners of Indian origin:
Aishwarya Ratan, 30 Converting paper records to digital in real time
Ajit Narayanan, 30 Affordable speech synthesizers

and from Pakistan:
Umar Saif, 32 Improving connectivity in poor nations

Research in Peace

Dangers of research into chronic fatigue syndrome
"As for Professor Wessely, he gave up active research on CFS/ME 10 years ago. He now specialises in the problems of war veterans. “I now go to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I feel a lot safer,” he says.
More discussion in 'The Loom' Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Death threats for scientists?

Science marches on

Incredible Science Discoveries in 'The Big Picture' including 'printing solar panels on pieces of paper' and 'how to triple the yield of plants using only 10% of the water typically needed'.

Nadireyi ye Jamulo (నడిరేయి ఏ జాములో)

on YouTube here
lyrics from here (which has lyrics of many other Telugu songs)
నడిరేయి ఏ జాములో స్వామి నిను చేర దిగి వచ్చునో
తిరుమల శిఖరాలు దిగి వచ్చునో(నడిరేయి)
మముగన్న మాయమ్మ అలివేలు మంగమ్మ(2)
పతిదేవు ఒడిలోన మురిసేటివేళ
స్వామి చిరునవ్వు వెన్నెలలు కురిసేటి వేళ
విభునికి మా మాట వినిపించవమ్మా
ప్రభువుకు మా మనవి వినిపించవమ్మా

ఏడేడు శిఖరాల నే నడువలేను
ఏపాటి కానుకలందించలేను
వెంకన్న పాదాలు దర్శించలేను
నేను వివరించి న బాధ వినిపించలేను
అమ్మా....ఆ...ఆ..ఆ..
మముగన్న మాయమ్మ
అలివేలుమంగా....ఆ...ఆ...
మముగన్న మాయమ్మ
అలివేలుమంగా(విభునికి)

కలవారినేగాని కరుణించలేడా
నిరుపేద మొరలేవి వినిపించుకోడా
కన్నీటి బ్రతుకుల కనలేని నాడు
స్వామి కరుణామయుండన్న బిరుదేలనమ్మా
అడగవే మా తల్లీ అనురగవల్లీ
అడగవే మాయమ్మ అలివేలు మంగా(నడిరేయి)
P.S. From this artucle by Rihiniprasad http://www.pranahita.org/2009/06/music01_cinema_patallo_vayidyalu/ it appears thar Chittibabu played veena for this song.

Small words

The test Your "I" Exam:Is your social vision 20/20? . I scored four out of ten but having recently read some books on cognitive dissonance, guessed the score.

From What Your Choice of Words Says about Your Personality:
"No one doubts that the words we write or speak are an expression of our inner thoughts and personalities. But beyond the meaningful content of language, a wealth of unique insights into an author’s mind are hidden in the style of a text—in such elements as how often certain words and word categories are used, regardless of context.
It is how an author expresses his or her thoughts that reveals character, asserts social psychologist James W. Pennebaker /a> of the University of Texas at Austin. When people try to present themselves a certain way, they tend to select what they think are appropriate nouns and verbs, but they are unlikely to control their use of articles and pronouns. These small words create the style of a text, which is less subject to conscious manipulation."

Language Log post with a contribution by James Pennebaker What is "I" saying?

Another Language Log post Little words with an appendix on "Linguistic Structure Matching"

Recent Scientific American interview with James Pennebaker The Secret Language Code via MindHacks

It is a young science with some potential:"Several labs, including ours, have now conducted studies to evaluate the prospect of building a linguistic lie detector. The preliminary findings are promising. In controlled studies, we can catch lying about 67% of the time where 50% is chance. Humans, reading the same transcripts, only catch lying 53% of the time. This is actually quite impressive unless you are a person in the judicial system. If you are waiting for a language-based system to catch real world lying at rates of 90 or 95 percent of the time, it won’t happen in your lifetime. It’s simply too complicated."

Mobility in science careers: Science magazine links

Content Collection: International Mobility :
"International mobility is becoming increasingly important for a successful research career. But, while international scientific experience offers many career-related benefits, it can be difficult to make it happen. And there are some disadvantages.

Over the years, Science Careers has investigated the pros and cons of training in a foreign lab. We've talked to mobile researchers about the many challenges of moving, working, and living abroad. Our interviewees have offered tips on dealing with the logistics of the move, finding a foreign lab, getting funding, applying for a visa -- even finding a school for the kids. We have asked scientist globetrotters about their experiences in a new culture, in and outside the lab. We have solicited advice on how to maximize the benefits of your research experience and ensure it's an enjoyable one. We have wondered whether it is always possible for expatriated scientists to find their way back home and have looked at ways to improve the odds.

Below is a list of what we consider our most valuable articles exploring international research experiences and what makes them successful."

Some useful sites

Top 100 little-known sites Everyone should know about (via Rajeev Ramachandran's google reader)

'Controlled disintegration' and related matters

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich says Warren Buffett
Roubini: Is Capitalism Doomed?, a discussion in economist's View
The Failure of Individualism Review of Fred Hirsch's 1977 book 'Social Limits to Growth':
"Hirsch shows that the individualism and competitiveness fostered by capitalism will not work in an affluent society in which people’s basic material needs for food, clothing and shelter are met. He sees an economic impasse stemming not primarily from the depletion of the world’s natural resources through unbridled economic growth, but from an unprecedented situation in which the main things people want from the economic system can be had only by a small minority at the top of the social hierarchy.

Capitalism’s great merit has been the goods it has been able to deliver. Each generation could count on seeing its children enjoy a host of new products. The luxuries of one generation became necessities for the next. Society was a column moving steadily forward, with the rich first tasting the fruits that eventually would be conveyed to the mass of humanity. Hirsch maintains that this process, which gave economic inequality its philosophical justification as the best spur for advancing the living conditions of all, is no longer functioning. In the future we can expect to see people competing in an ever more vicious rat race and completing the course frustrated at a sense of having fallen behind their starting point."

In The Econobubble Revisited Yanis Varoufakis recalls the phrase "Controlled disintegration" used by Fred Hirsch and Paul Volcker in the 70s.

The crisis of the global economy. Was it a planned disintegration? , a recent post by Brenda Rosser with some links like
PROJECT 80S: THE CFR'S PROGRAM FOR "CONTROLLED DISINTEGRATION"

Links, August 15

Redefining the Public University: Developing an Analytical Framework has some interesting points (via 3quarksdaily):
"The configuration of national university systems is shaped by and shapes its insertion into a global context. Again our two models of regulation and commodification reflect pressures operating at the global level. Regulation refers to the systems of global competition for place in international ranking systems. This entails nation states applying pressure to universities to compete globally along a range of indices, but most fundamentally to publish scholarly papers in major international journals, to teach and research in English, making US or European societies the reference point for everything. This draws the best university faculty into the orbit of an international community but in so doing they lose contact with national issues. While this most obviously affects the social sciences and humanities, it can also affect the hard sciences in that the medical and engineering problems faced by a country in the Global South can be very different from those faced in the Global North."

Abi on Misconduct in India and the West: A Key Difference

From a 2009 article in NYTimes The Looting of America’s Coffers (via 'The Big Picture' post The Meaning of the British Riots ):
"Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting .”
...
The paper’s message is that the promise of government bailouts isn’t merely one aspect of the problem. It is the core problem.
...
Mr. Akerlof and Mr. Romer finished writing their paper in the early 1990s, when the economy was still suffering a hangover from the excesses of the 1980s. But Mr. Akerlof told Mr. Romer — a skeptical Mr. Romer, as he acknowledged with a laugh on Tuesday — that the next candidate for looting already seemed to be taking shape.

It was an obscure little market called credit derivatives."

From Memory: I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means. An Interview with Dan Simons:
"Do you believe that memory works sort of like a video camera, faithfully recording your experiences so that you can go back later and revisit those memories, captured in pristine condition? Do you believe that if something unexpected walked into your field of vision you’d notice? Can forgotten memories be recalled through hypnosis?

If you’re like 50-80% of the US population, you might answer yes to each of those questions, but you’d be wrong."

From Lessons in history: Pakistan’s bright future :
"To value the progress of Pakistani Muslims, we should look at the demographics of pre-1947."

Churimuri Has the IT boom quelled Bangalore’s tensions?. What about Hyderabad?

Condensed Wealth of Nations

and "The Incredibly Condensed Theory of Moral Sentiments" available at http://adamsmith.org/files/condensed-WoN.pdf via Adam Smith's Lost Legacy

A succinct take on some of the current problems

It’s the Political Economy, Stupid! :
"Idea-smiths provide language, narratives and tools for those in control, but the broad contours of policy depend on who the controllers happen to be."

More discussion at Economist's View

Grandparenthood

From Are grandchildren better than children?:
"The findings suggest that even though children may not contribute significantly to parents' satisfaction with life overall, there may well be long-term benefits to having children, provided that our children go on and have children of their own."

Source Life Satisfaction and Grandparenthood: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey/a>