A game changer?

A new paper by William Press and Freeman Dyson is drawing a lot of attention (via Steven Hsu who also links to relevant papers). From the summary by William Poundstone:
"Executive summary: Robert Axelrod's 1980 tournaments of iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies have been condensed into the slogan, Don't be too clever, don't be unfair. Press and Dyson have shown that cleverness and unfairness triumph after all."
From a response by KARL SIGMUND & MARTIN NOWAK:
"With their splendidly 'mischievous' extortionate strategies, Press and Dyson contribute to classical game theory, by considering two players who grapple with each other in a kind of mental jiu-jitsu. The leverage afforded by zero-determinant strategies offers a splendid new arsenal of throws, locks, and holds.

Which of these strategies can flourish in an evolutionary setting is less clear. Being successful, in this context, feeds back at the population level. It means that more and more players will act like you, be they your offspring or your epigones. Thus you are increasingly likely to encounter your own kind. If your 'extortionate' strategy guarantees that you do twice as well as your opponent, and your opponents' strategy guarantees that she does twice as well as you, this only means that both get nothing. The only norm which is not self-defeating through population dynamics requires players to guarantee each other as much as themselves. We are then back to Tit For Tat. Press and Dyson are perfectly aware of this, of course. In a nutshell, they have uncovered a vast set of strategies linking the scores of two players deterministically (as TFT does), but asymmetrically (unlike TFT). This enriches the canvas of individual interactions, but not necessarily the range of outcomes open to evolving populations."

Building local economies

From The Humble Origins of New Global Economy. Don't Miss Out (via Naked Capitalism):
"What is evident to me, in the geeky splendor of the photos, is that this type of event is where the future is being made.
....
Here’s an example of what is available. The machine pictured is an Amaya Bravo. It’s a 16-thread computer controlled embroidery machine that can rapidly and flawlessly embroider complex designs onto hats, shirts, and dresses. It’s probably not of much interest to most readers, but IF you want to build an artisanal clothing business that uses embroidery, you will be well served to buy one of these machines.

Unfortunately, while the machine’s price has been DRASTICALLY reduced and the size of the machine is MUCH smaller than it used to be, the basic model still costs $9,000. As such, it’s a tough purchase for someone starting or running a micro-business.
Fortunately, makerspaces are being established in communities all around the world to make it easier for people to get access to tools like this.
It’s simple. If you want to build a thriving local economy. A local economy that makes your community resilient to economic failure and shocks, you need to find ways to help the innovators in your community make things."

P.S. Related An Inspiring Story

An excellent book on some devadasis

in coastal Andhra and parts of Tamilnadu Unfinished Business:Devadasis, and Modernity in South India by Davesh Soneji. Apart from the politics, economics, legislations, the author actually meets several devadasis over a period of several years. The book is interspersed with accounts of these meetings, particularly chapters 2,4 and 5. A version of parts of Chapter 5 is available online
http://acceleratedmotion.wesleyan.edu/primary_sources/texts/bharatanatyam/memory_recovery.pdf
and also of Chapter 2
http://www.fwalive.ualberta.ca/mediawiki/images/6/67/Soneji_Book_Chapter.pdf
Some of these ladies are in their seventies, their reminiscences, still singing and dancing for themselves and their friends are some of the most enjoyable parts of the book. Some of these arts are to some extent preserved under the names Andhra Natyam by Nataraja Ramakrishna and Vilasini Natyam by Swapnasundari.
On the whole a very enjoyable book for laymen like me. I became aware of this book through Minai whose excellent posts on dances have been mentioned several times before.

Amirbai Karnataki background song forgtten artists

There seem to be more like her sister Goharbai Karnataki (who had an interesting life with Bal Gandharva), Hirabai Barodekar etc. Music seems to be one thing which somewhat unifies the subcontinent.
P.S. See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eWlfejlJRQ&feature=related from the same people who uploaded the above http://www.filmimpressions.com/

What made Indian democracy work?

In a long article After Nehru by Perry Anderson, an ex-editor of  New Left Review:
"Why then has the sheer pressure of the famished masses, who apparently hold an electoral whip-hand, not exploded in demands for social reparation incompatible with the capitalist framework of this – as of every other – liberal democracy?
......
The answer lies, and has always lain, in what also sets India apart from any other country in the world, the historic peculiarities of its system of social stratification. Structurally, by reason of their smaller numbers and greater resources, virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in their capacity for collective action. Their internal lines of communication are more compact; their wealth offers an all-purpose medium of power, convertible into any number of forms of domination; their intelligence systems scan the political landscape from a greater height. More numerous and more dispersed, less equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be ‘organisationally outflanked’ by those above them. Nowhere has this condition been more extreme than in India. There the country is divided into some thirty major linguistic groups, under the cornice of the colonial language – the only one in which rulings on the constitution are accessible – of which, at most, a tenth of the population has any command. These would be obstacles in themselves daunting enough to any national co-ordination of the poor.


But the truly deep impediments to collective action, even within language communities, let alone across them, lay in the impassable trenches of the caste system. "
(via quarksdaily)

Dawn on Anil Gupta

Notable Inventions Discovered by Indian Professor
Some of the previous posts about Anil Gupta here and here.

Brief glimpses of Lalita and Padmini in Kalpana (1948)

here (around two minutes)
But Indians may have to wait for some more time since the resored reels are stuck in customs godown. Hoever there is an adverisement announcing a DVD related to Kalpana.

Interesting paper

The Clan and the City: Sustaining Cooperation in China and Europe by Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini  (via Chris Blattman) Abstract:


Over the last millennium, the clan and the city have been the locus of cooperation in China and Europe respectively. This paper examines -- analytically, historically, and empirically -- the cultural, social, and institutional co-evolution that led to this bifurcation. We highlight that groups with which individuals identify are basic units of cooperation. Such groups impact institutional development because intra-group moral commitment reduces enforcement cost implying a comparative advantage in pursuing collective actions. Moral groups perpetuate due to positive feedbacks between morality, institutions, and the implied pattern of cooperation.

Zachary Latif discusses caste

http://www.brownpundits.com/2012/07/25/help-black-power-need-in-the-subcontinent-the-desi-version-telling-caste-by-picture-surname/
There seem to be mistakes and over simplifications but the thrust of the article seems right to me. There are some follow up posts as well.

Strange ways of the market

US exports ehanol to Brazil and also imports ethanol of different grade from Brazil. Read the details, implications to food prices and a discussion of alternative enery resources in the discussion 'US ethanol policies set to reach their illogical conclusion'

Links July 24, 2012

To preserve competetion, nationalize the largest ones from NY Times
Wealth does not tricle down... from The Guardian about the $2 trillion dollars or so stashed offshore by the rich with a graphic on the off shore destinations and loosers. Surprisingly India is not in the list of top 20 loosers. But India figures in the next
Why India is so bad for women?
See also Captain Lakshmi Dahgal: A Life of Struggle :Freedom comes in three forms,” the diminutive doctor goes on to say on camera in her unadorned and direct manner. “The first is political emancipation from the conqueror, the second is economic [emancipation] and the third is social… India has only achieved the first.”

May be the last post for now by Carl Zimmer on Chromosome fusion in humans http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/07/23/and-finally-the-hounding-duck-can-rest/
A nice article on the real value of Higgs Boson
And Noisy sex may mean death for some flies
Finally Choking dog saves its own life by dialling 999 (via Naked Capitalism)
P.S. Data for developing world about secret offshore wealth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/datablog/2012/jul/19/developing-world-offshore-wealth-external-debt

gayegi duniya geet mere

From the 1962 film Mousimqar, seems appropriate for Noor Jejan to sing

There are better versions on the YouTube without subtitles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aicyhqgyj-Y
and some by Noor Jehan in concert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpLFz-puznM

US science quite healthy

says a new book Is American Science in Decline? by Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald. A comprehensive review in an editorial of Current Science by P.Balaram Animal Spirits : A Powerful Prescription

Pankaj Mishra's new book

review From the Ruins of the Empire by Pankaj Mishra (via 3quarksdaily) concludes
"The book concludes by tracing the painful legacies of Asia's responses to the west: Japan's near-genocidal pan-Asian revenge for earlier imperial slights; Maoism's disastrous pursuit of a post-imperial modernity; the violent anti-westernism of global Islam. Despite widespread western admiration for the contemporary Asian miracle, Mishra sees in China a country in which some "stand up, while most others are forced to stand down, and the privileged Chinese minority aspire for nothing higher than the conveniences and gadgets of their western consumer counterparts". He hails India as a democracy in which "numbers of the disenchanted and the frustrated" are growing, along with a huge sense of hopelessness among landless peasants. And to those who read China's and India's embrace of capitalism as a comforting sign of their reconciliation with western ways, he offers a warning. Environmental apocalypse, he anticipates, will be the final consequence of these centuries-old collisions between Europe and America, and Asia: "the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of western modernity, which turns the revenge of the east into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic"."
From a recent NPR interview Slowed Growth reflects China's Uphill Battle

"If you went back in the '90s, like people who didn't have a lot of money were looking to visas to get out, and may be opportunities in America. Now, it's all the winners who are trying to get out. Two of the biggest banks in China did this survey of their high net worth individuals, that $1.6 million in assets or more - which is a lot of money in China. Sixty percent in both surveys said that they were considering emigrating, maybe in the process of getting a green card.


And they said things like education for their children. You know, everybody in America raves about the Chinese education system. Well, Chinese people want for their kids, they want critical learning, which they can't really quite get in the Chinese system.

They're looking for clean air. And the other thing is they're looking for ways to, frankly, protect their assets 'cause there's no rule of law. And everybody sort of feels there that, you know, if something bad happens or if I get on the wrong side of the government, I could lose all that I've made"

Curry may be ancient

From the Science magazine article The ingredients for a 4000 year old proto-curry
by Andrew Lawler. Summary:
"When cooks in the ancient Indus River civilization prepared their meals 4000 years ago, the results may not have been much different from what you might order today in an Indian restaurant. Recent studies presented at the meeting found a surprisingly diverse Indus diet that incorporated spices such as ginger and turmeric, beans such as lentils and mung, grains such as rice and millet, and even bananas. An explosion in food-related studies, thanks to both new tools and new interest in rural villages, provides exciting clues to day-to-day life in the Indus, experts say. "
The article is behind a pay wall. The article says that the results from the teeth of humans dated between 2500 BC to 2200 BC in the town of  Farmana near Delhi, and also from a cooking pot found cooked ginger and turmeric. Apparently cow teeth from Harappa yielded the same material. Even banana turn up.but no black pepper or chilli pepper. "Examining two sites near today's Masudpur, west of Delhi, University of Cambridge archaeologist Jennifer Bates compared carbonized seed and phytolith density per liter of soil near hearths to determine the relative abundance of crops by period and site. Bates found that both villages practiced summer and winter cropping, and both ate wheat, barley, millet, and rice from early Indus times, as shown by nearby pottery; she also identified lentils and mung beans. Rice has long been assumed to be only a late addition in the Indus, yet one village apparently ate more rice than wheat or barley, although millet dominated."

"Boot Polish" again on YouTube

I have posted about this film before a few times but many of the links have disappeared including some of the links to the reviews posted in
http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/raj-kapoors-boot-polish.html

I find now the film is again available on YouTube with English subtitles.
The link to one of my favourite songs also is not working and I found a new link from Atul's Bollywoodsongaday

More gloom and doom

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/07/can-the-banking-industry-make-it-24-hours-without-a-new-scandal/ from the Big Picture
Regulatory Thrombosis  by Dan Little
Former Monsanto employee speaks again
Indo_US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (from 2010)
There have been articles recently that education is not for everybody, some sort of hierarchy may be needed for society to function etc. Another article from reputedscientists in the same vein Social Status: Why All Men Are Not Created Equal

Shubha Khote sings a bit

Dustedoff reviews the film and says that the title comes from a couplet of Kabir
http://dustedoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/dekh-kabira-roya-1957/
Several nice songs in the film.

The Guardian on Terry Deary

The Man Behind the Horrible Histories
From the Wikipedia article on Terry Deary:
 "I've no interest in schools. They have no relevance in the 21st century. They were a Victorian idea to get kids off the street. Who decided that putting 30 kids with only their age in common in a classroom with one teacher was the best way of educating? At my school there were 52 kids in the class and all I learned was how to pass the 11-plus. Testing is the death of education. Kids should leave school at 11 and go to work. Not down the mines or up chimneys, mind, but working with computers or something relevant. Everything I learned after 11 was a waste of time. Trigonometry, Boyle's law: it's never been of any use to me. They should have been teaching me the life skills I was going to need, such as building relationships, parenting and managing money. I didn't have a clue about any of these things at 18. Schools need to change."
From The Guardian article:
"He still harbours a profound mistrust of all things school-related, and is unhappy that Horrible Histories have become classroom texts in some schools ("If they're part of the curriculum, kids will get turned off them. Then how can I be subversive?")"
And the final indignity, according to Wikipedia, Deary received an honorary doctorate for education from the University of Sunderland

Two Telugu translations

at Kinige
ఇస్మత్ చుగ్తాయ్ కథలు(Some of Ismat Chughtai stories) http://kinige.com/kbook.php?id=1008
translation of Kuldip Nayar's Scoop http://kinige.com/kbook.php?id=727

Street corner science

from Leon Lederman (via Ed Yong)

Many more on YouTube.

Dani Rodrik's prognosis

in The New Global Economy's (Relative) Winners
"Those that do relatively better will share three characteristics. First, they will not be weighed down by high levels of public debt. Second, they will not be overly reliant on the world economy, and their engine of economic growth will be internal rather than external. Finally, they will be robust democracies.
......
Having low to moderate levels of public debt is important, because debt levels that reach 80-90% of GDP become a serious drag on economic growth. They immobilize fiscal policy, lead to serious distortions in the financial system, trigger political fights over taxation, and incite costly distributional conflicts. Governments preoccupied with reducing debt are unlikely to undertake the investments needed for long-term structural change. With few exceptions (such as Australia and New Zealand), the vast majority of the world’s advanced economies are or will soon be in this category."

Discussing emerging maket-economies, he says

"Domestic demand-led growth will be a more reliable strategy than export-led growth. That means that countries with a large domestic market and a prosperous middle class will have an important advantage.

Finally, democracies will do better because they have the institutionalized mechanisms of conflict management that authoritarian regimes lack. Democracies such as India may seem at times to move too slowly and be prone to paralysis. But they provide the arenas of consultation, cooperation, and give-and-take among opposing social groups that are crucial in times of turbulence and shocks.


In the absence of such institutions, distributive conflict can easily spill over into protests, riots, and civil disorder. This is where democratic India and South Africa have the upper hand over China or Russia."

Brenda Rosser reminds us that it is Thoreau's birthday

Economy:Lives of Quiet Desperation and quotes from Thoeau's Walden (one of our txtbooks in Intermediate, Andhra University 1954-56) which has this passage
"...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind..."

From Aaron Sorkin's 'The Newsroom'

More about the show here

Maybe the best mathematician living at the moment

according to J.P.Serre of  P.Deligne.  Interview and write up here
via Not Even Wrong
Long ago (1974, Paris) I lived for few months in the same apartment complex as P.Deigne. I remember him as a very nice person who liked Indian pickles. I did not dare discuss any mathematics with him. He used to leave his apartment door inlocked so that Grothendieck's girl friend and baby could use it when they wanted.

Pakistan experience with generic drugs

Ayyaz Kiyani writes in India goes down the generic mrdicines path
"Pakistan was one of the first countries, in 1972, to introduce the Generic Drugs Act. The policy brought out by the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s People’s Party was politically motivated and poorly designed. Soon after its promulgation, the parties hurt by the new policy (doctors lead by the Pakistan Medical Association and the Big Pharma), got together and started to conspire against the policy. They lead a ferocious campaign against it alleging generic drugs were of poor quality and low efficacy. Unfortunately, the subsequent lack of regulation or control of generics led effectively to the market being flooded by poor quality drugs, and the scheme needlessly failed a couple of years later."
He hopes that India will fare better.
Ed Yong writes of Silk cages that preserve vaccines and antibiotics for months without refrigeration
A commenter says that it will help if factories are not blown up
P.S. See also A historic move to make drugs affordable and India refuses to hike cancer drug price

Bose's second paper?

While reading a popular Outlook article about S.N.Bose http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281539, I came across this passage
"There is also, it must be said, a group of scientists who believe that Einstein let Bose down: if he had helped Bose get his brilliant second paper published, they allege, he’d have almost certainly won the Nobel."
From http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/snbose/bosenew.htm
"After reaching Paris he wrote to Einstein requesting his permission to work with him and also for his opinion on his second paper. Bose wrote:

“My heartfelt gratitude for taking trouble of translating the paper yourself and publishing it. I just saw it in print before I left India. I have also sent the middle of June a second paper entitled, “Thermal equilibrium in Radiation Field in the presence of Matter.”
I am rather anxious to know your opinion about it, as I think it to be rather important. I don’t know whether it will be possible also to have this paper published in Zeitschrift für Physic.
I have been granted leave by my university for 2 years. I have arrived just a week ago in Paris. I don’t know whether it will be possible for me to work under you in Germany. I shall be glad, however, if you will grant me permission to work under you, for it will mean for me the realization of a long-cherished dream…”
While Einstein did not acknowledge the receipt of Bose’s second paper but this time Einstein replied. In his letter to Bose dated November 03, 1924, Einstein wrote: “Thank you sincerely for your letter of 26 October. I am glad that I shall have the opportunity soon of making your personal acquaintance. Your papers have already appeared sometime ago. Unfortunately the reprints have been sent to me instead of you. You may have them at any time. I am not in agreement with your basic principle concerning the probability of interaction between radiation and matter, and have given the reasons in a remark which has appeared together with your paper…We may discuss this together in detail when you come here.” Bose was naturally disappointed by Einstein’s comments on his second paper. However, he started thinking deeply about the objections raised by Einstein. He informed Einstein that he was attempting to answer Einstein’s criticism in the form of a paper. In fact Bose had shown the manuscript to Paul Langevin(1872-1946) in Paris, who thought it worth publishing. However, the paper was never published."

Siimilar accounts appears in http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0508/0508237.pdf with mention of much stronger criticism of the paper by Einstein, in  Stachel's article "Bose and Einstein" and Wali's book on Bose, but these are too technical for me. In any case, no injustice seems to have been done to Bose. Bose himself seems to have said "“I was like a comet, a comet which came once and never returned again.”

(quoted in NY Times article http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/the-man-behind-boson/)

Online education potential

From Guardian article http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/04/open-educational-resources-and-economic-growth
"But what crystallised at the Unesco Congress are the larger economic implications of the OER (Open Education Resources) movement and its potential to dramatically expand the global knowledge economy. As policymakers struggle to apply traditional fiscal and monetary tools to mend world markets restrained by weak purchasing power, accelerated learning based on OERs could do more to stimulate global economic demand and growth than all the world's tax holidays combined - then multiplied ten-fold.

........................
Moreover, there is mounting evidence that learners can be trained more quickly using OER. A recent study conducted by scholars associated with Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative demonstrated that students who use OERs can obtain the same or better learning outcomes in half the time compared with students using traditional methods."
Link via Marginal Revolution post Measuring the results of on-line learning
The linked paper
http://oli.cmu.edu/wp-oli/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Lovett_2008_Statistics_Accelerated_Learning_Study.pdf
I never liked classes and mostly learnt  (mathematics, but it may not be possible in all subjects) myself. I think what helps is having people to talk with. Possibly online tutorials and learning with a group of friends and other avenues are worth exploring. See also the earlier post http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/interesting-discussion-on-education.html
( where the Stanford president John Hennessey and Salman Khan of  Khan Academy discuss even the possibility of medical education online) and the posts about Sugata Mitra

Snehprabha Pradhan remembered

Another star with an interesting life http://cineplot.com/music/snehprabha-pradhan/ The article also includes a famous song-dance by her from the 1940 film Puran Milan. Several pieces by a British soldier Edward Sparkes who was friends with her are available on the net. It seems that he wrote some things about India on the ship while coming to India and a juxtaposition of pictures was found objectionable by Indians and there was a protest in which one of the leaders was K.A. Abbas. Abbas accepted Sparkes' explanations about the juxtaposition and actually liked some of what Sparkes wrote and invited him to visit him. That is how he got to know Snehprabha who became an interesting part of his life until after a few years after the war. Sparkes also has stories about Ram Gopal. General Thimmayya and some of the theatres of war. I have not looked for independent confirmation of these stories but at least some of it rings true. Every section of  http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/sparkes/india1.htm has a link to the contents and one can go back and forth. I mainly read the sections about Snehprabha and Ram Gopal.
From what I can gather, Snehprabha Pradhan (1920-1993) had an eventful and full life. She was the daughter of social workers (the father married her mother who was a widow and much younger than him). She entered films to help the family. After some success in Hindi and Marathi films and a colourful life ( apparently, she was one of Dev Anand's dream girls) she married and more or less disappeared. This information is from the above link in Cineplot and one of the comments  in
http://atulsongaday.me/2011/09/28/o-main-banke-jogan-aayi-tori-gali/
There are also more posts of her songs like
http://atulsongaday.me/2012/04/17/naacho-naacho-pyaare-man-ke-mor/
and
http://atulsongaday.me/2011/09/29/man-mein-uthhe-uchhaale-mere/.
I remember reading somewhere, but cannot find the link now, that after marriage she reentered Marathi stage and was too busy and did not have the time or inclination to struggle back into Hindi films. Like Kanan Devi she seems to have spent the last decades of her life in social work. Probably much more information will be available in Marathi publications. Altogether, it seems to be an exciting and rewarding life. I will end with a link to the famous song-dance which appeared in several sites

Shanta Apte remembered

Her profile http://cineplot.com/shanta-apte-profile/
A seies of videos to remember her on YouTube, one of which is

Higgs Boson explained

At http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12547980-the-higgs-boson-made-simple?lite

Too big to fail

Glaxo Agrees to Pat $3 Billion in Settlement via Dean Baker. But
"Despite the large amount, $3 billion represents only a portion of what Glaxo made on the drugs. Avandia, for example, racked up $10.4 billion in sales, Paxil brought in $11.6 billion, and Wellbutrin sales were $5.9 billion during the years covered by the settlement, according to IMS Health, a data group that consults for drugmakers.

"So a $3 billion settlement for half a dozen drugs over 10 years can be rationalized as the cost of doing business,” Mr. Burns said. "
From Barclays Libor Scandal... by Aditya Chakraborty:
"Through tampering with lending rates, financiers at Barclaysand elsewhere distorted everything from how much home-owners paid on their tracker mortgages to the deals struck by pension funds purely to pump up bank profit margins and their own bonuses. The lawsuits for Barclays alone are likely to cost billions.

Against that, the punishment meted out to Bob Diamond's company barely figures. The £290m fine slapped on it by regulators is tax-deductible, making it equivalent to just 13 days' profit. In any case, the bill will be paid by shareholders, rather than traders or senior management."
And a Bloomberg editorial There's Something Rotten in Banking via Naked Capitalism July 3rd Links.

A vigorous dance

but seems incongruent with lyrics. I do not mind vigorous dances like this

Teaching fractions

There seem to be suggestions that some kids never get fractions http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/the-myth-of-they-werent-ever-taught/
"Teachers know something that educational policy folk of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing: it’s the students, not the teachers. They  taught. And why they don’t remember is an issue we really should start to treat as a key piece of the puzzle." The conclusion seems to be that some kids cannot be taught.
I think that fractions are hard to understand teach "The history of teaching fractions is long and colourful. In 1958 Hartung wrote, "The fraction concept is complex and cannot be grasped all at once. It must be acquired through a long process of sequential development." This sequential development of the fraction concept needs to be well understood if we are to develop widespread access to learning fractions with understanding." says http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/secondary/mathematics/years7_10/teaching/frac.htm
I myself find confused about (a/b)/c and a/(b/c) until I remeber that it is a notational problem. In any case, I would find it difficult to teach the division of a fraction by a fraction. The words like 'negative', 'irrational', 'complex' indicate the difficulty of the concepts and the suspicion with which they were received. I do not think that there is much point in saying that some kids do not get it. These are difficult conceptually and notationally and it takes a long time to get them and one has to experiment with different methods of teaching and perhaps group learning..

Interesting discussion on education

http://infoproc.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/future-of-higher-education.html
John Hennessey (Stanford president) and Salman Khan (Khan Academy) discuss higher education and digital technology.
Steve Hsu seems pessimistic but the discussion and comments paint a more optimistic outlook of combining online education and university education. It seems that Stanford and Khan Academy are discussing the possibility of medical degrees with that kind of combination. It may be also worth remembering Sugata Mitra's experiments on learnibg in groups posted earlier.

Links, July 1, 2012

Discussion of Jonah Lehrer transgressions http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2012/06/28/sciwritelabs-8-1-the-lehrer-affair-consequence-free-plagiarism-and-rules-for-blogging/ Perhaps Jonah saw success too young and too early and may be this is a way of challenging himself.

Rajiv Sethi on 'Fighting over claims" http://rajivsethi.blogspot.de/2012/06/fighting-over-claims.html and Paine for once comments more or less  in prose "super sir superb".
Rio+20 report 'longest suicide note in history' (via Ed Yong Sunday links)
How global mining corporations undermine democracy from Triple Crisis
Excerpts from 'Dylan Grice - The tyranny of targets: process, outcome and the complexity of it all"  in http://www.zerohedge.com/news/keynesian-lunacy-targeting-outcomes#comments. one excerpt "But I’d argue that for even mildly complex systems, any outcome is the wrong thing to target. As we just saw, targeting one outcome of such a process changes that process, and changing the process subsequently changes all the other outcomes. In any kind of complex system where the underlying outcome generating processes aren’t well understood – whether a company, or a society – the effects of changing the process won’t be well understood either. Unintended consequences must ensue." The full article may be available in a few weeks for non-subscribers.
Finally a recent review of one my favourite Telugu movies from Cinema Chaat Devadasu (1953). Recently I watched a few Telugu movies mentioned in http://cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com.au/ and enjoyed them. Then I watched a couple of Telugu movies famous for their songs 'Anarkali' and 'Suvarna Sundari' and found them terrible except for the songs. But in Devadasu I liked both the songs and the film. Surprisingly Vedantam Raghavaiah directed all the three films.

Two old songs

one by  C.H.Atma via http://atulsongaday.me/2012/06/28/chalo-na-gori-machal-machal-ke/ which gives the lyrics and an English translation

I wonder whether anybody else except Saigal could have sung such a flat song with so much charm and ease. May be M.S. Ramarao in Chenguna Ala Meeda

Why supermarket tomatoes do not taste that great

Ed Yong explains http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supermarket-tomatoes-look-great-but-taste-bland/
"Ann Powell from the University of California, Davis has found that farmers have inadvertently ruined the taste of tomatoes by selecting for ones that ripen together and look good. That aesthetic appeal has been driven by a single change in a single gene, which also affects how the fruits taste."
Even for the standard varieties, the homegrown ones taste better, may be because as a commenter explains "Tomatoes are also harvested before ripening fully, if at all, to give them better shipping qualities and then exposed to ethylene to bring them to a ripened state. Unfortunately, green tomatoes lack the sugars and, presumably, the nutritional value of vine-ripened varieties."
My experience is that our garden tomaoes taste better than market ones if one can get them before birds do. I started covering them with nets but that does not stop possums which eat even green tomatoes. There is also a discussion in http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supermarket-tomatoes-look-great-but-taste-bland/.

Tom Slee on open data

Tom Slee has written a few pieces about his discomfiture with the open data movements, an early piece which I find clearer than others here. Some of the points:

"1.The rhetoric of citizen engagement too often masks a reality of commercialization (last time)

2.Information is not always democratizing.

3.Information is not always the problem.

4.Transparency is an arms race.

5.Privacy is the other side of the coin.

6.Money flows to Silicon Valley."

More recent articles Why the "Open Data Movement" is a joke and Seeing Like a Geek. The last article in Crooked Timber is leading to a seminar which will probably confuse me even further much like the confusions on climate change http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2012/06/uncertainty-principle-for-climate-and.html
One take away point for me is the quote "this attempt to enhance democratic participation has ended up providing an additional opportunity for those who already, because of their income, education, and overall conventional characteristics of higher status (age, gender etc.) have the means to communicate with and influence politicians. The additional information and an additional communications channel thus has the effect of reinforcing patterns of opportunity that are already there rather than widening the base of participation and influence." of Gurstein. This is a point which seems known in development circles and written about by John Harriss and others, see for example, Middle Class Activism and Poor People's Politics: An exploration of civil society in Chennai. Other India related articles by Solomon Benjamin and others are linked in Tom Slee's articles.

Inspiring story

via http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/06/feminine-hygiene-man.html
P.S. His wife is back according to
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679008/an-indian-inventor-disrupts-the-period-industry
and http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/entrepreneur-a-passion-periods
and http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/true-life/the-man-who-wore-a-sanitary-napkin

A moving scene from Yogi Vemana (1947)

Vemana finds an old woman shivering from cold at the steps of a temple takes her in to the temple and covers her with the shawl of the resident goddess. The scene starts approximately at 2: 40. More about Vemana athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vemana and a recent write up about the film http://www.thehindu.com/arts/cinema/article3562373.ece
(via J.K. Mohana Rao). The year 1947 was also the year of India's independence and the famous Nehru speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryst_with_destiny

Sustainable vs sustained

The final draft of  The Future We Want from the Rio United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development is now available. As George Monbiot says in http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jun/22/rio-20-earth-summit-brazil
"In 1992, world leaders signed up to something called "sustainability". Few of them were clear about what it meant; I suspect that many of them had no idea. Perhaps as a result, it did not take long for this concept to mutate into something subtly different: "sustainable development". Then it made a short jump to another term: "sustainable growth". And now, in the 2012 Rio+20 text that world leaders are about to adopt, it has subtly mutated once more: into "sustained growth".

This term crops up 16 times in the document, where it is used interchangeably with sustainability and sustainable development. But if sustainability means anything, it is surely the opposite of sustained growth. Sustained growth on a finite planet is the essence of unsustainability."
Monbiot also says "Several of the more outrageous deletions proposed by the United States – such as any mention of rights or equity or of common but differentiated responsibilities – have been rebuffed. In other respects the Obama government's purge has succeeded, striking out such concepts as "unsustainable consumption and production patterns" and the proposed decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources.

At least the states due to sign this document haven't ripped up the declarations from the last Earth summit, 20 years ago. But in terms of progress since then, that's as far as it goes. Reaffirming the Rio 1992 commitments is perhaps the most radical principle in the entire declaration." The changes that United States wanted to make are linked in an earlier article The Mendacity of Hope.
The BBC report Rio summit ends with warning on carporate power is not enthusiastic either:
"Environment and development charities say the Rio+20 agreement is too weak to tackle social and environmental crises.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, author of a major UN sustainable development report 25 years ago, said corporate power was one reason for lack of progress."
There have been several reports of the conference in http://triplecrisis.com/ and probably there will be several more. Perhapd Duncan Green at From Poverty to Power  will also have report soon.

Two duets from Manthiri Kumari (1950)

Just found this feast of songs and dances; Jikki participates in both duets. The full movie is available on YouTube.

The second is a duet of Jikki with M.L.Vasantakumari and one of the strangest dances that I have seen:

There is also a dance in which all the Travancore sisters participate.

Dilip D'Souza wins an award

Dilip who was one of the people behind the defunct blog 'The Other Half'' (that is where I got to know about him) who blogs at Death Ends Fun, who trained as a computer scientist, son of a famous bureaucrat, a writer , journalist and above all a man who loves India has won a prize http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/20/newsweek-the-daily-beast-open-hands-prize-winner.html
I do not think that it is any measure of him but I am pleased because he seems pleased; at least pleased enough to send the news to people on his mailing list. I do not know him, my only contact with him through comments in the above two blogs. He writes very well sometimes, but seems to waste his time by getting into seemingly silly discussions in blogs.  Perhaps the reason is that he loves India and cannot see how other Indians can be so narrow minded. Despite such waste of time, I think that he produced a body of work : mainly his reports on the underpriviliged in India ( information his blog), and some of his travel writing which will last. He is still young (at least younger than me) and I hope that he will continue his good work for a long time and will not waste too much time on his blog.

GM crops good for environment?

suggests a Guardian article GMcrops good for environment, study finds looking at a recent study by Kongming Wu and collaborators, but see an earlier paper http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5982/1151
by the same group. There are names of various British professors enthusiatic about the research. It seems that one has to check GM watch
 http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/13992-bt-cotton-and-pests-in-chinese-fields or lobbywatch http://www.lobbywatch.org/lobbywatch.html even to read what seem to be fairly straightforward science reports.

An old Telugu song for my birthday

Lyrics
        


ఓ... ఓ... చిగురాకులలో చిలకమ్మా

చిన్నమాట వినరావమ్మా

ఓ... ఓ...మరుమల్లెలలో మావయ్యా

మంచి మాట సెలవీవయ్య



పున్నమి వెన్నెల గిలిగింతలకు

పూచిన మల్లెల మురిపాలు

నీ చిరునవ్వుకు సరికావమ్మ ... ఓ...

ఓ... ఓ... చిగురాకులలో చిలకమ్మా



ఎవరన్నారు ఈ మాట ... వింటున్నాను నీ నోట

తెలిసీ పలికిన విలువేనా... ఆ...

ఓ... ఓ... మరుమల్లెలలో మావయ్యా



వలచే కోమలి వయ్యారాలకు

తలచే మనసుల తియ్యదనాలకు

కలవా విలువలు సెలవీయ ... ఓ...

ఓ... ఓ... చిగురాకులలో చిలకమ్మా



పై మెరుగులకే భ్రమపడకయ్య

మనసే మాయని సొగసయ్య

గుణమే తరుగని ధనమయ్యా



ఓ... ఓ... మరుమల్లెలలో మావయ్యా

మంచి మాట సెలవీవయ్య

ఓ... ఓ... చిగురాకులలో చిలకమ్మా

చిన్న మాట వినరావమ్మా


from http://raji-oldisgoldsongs.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/blog-post_11.html

A song by Binota Chakraborty

She might have also sung 'Dilli se aaya bhai Tingu' in 'Ek Thi Ladki' (1949) according to
http://atulsongaday.me/2009/05/09/dilli-se-aaya-bhai-tingu/ and her name before marriage Vinita Raghavendra Amladi.

Pogo may be right

Pogo famously said " We have met the enemy and he is us"  (http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm). Some recent echos:
Predators and Professors by Simon Johnson and the book Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy by Christopher Hayes. The book has attracted some attention is reviewd in various places like Slate Atlantic and Truth Out. Most of the reviews seem to be in some agreement of his analysis; though not with the proposed solutions. There is a favourable review in Crooked Timber with lots of erudite comments. From the Slate review:
"Twilight is a book that has been written dozens of times before. It’s part of a great tradition of American writing, the rangy, pop diagnostic manual of Our Current Predicament. These are books of lofty, multidisciplinary ambition that are meant to theorize the tectonic shifts underfoot for as many readers as possible. Their measure isn’t whether they’re right or wrong, but whether they begin to successfully colonize the way their readers decode everyday life.
.........
Twilight is at its most effective as a restless brew of data and feeling. The most ambitious kinds of social criticism often feel like epic games of pattern recognition: You acquire some suspicion about how the world actually works and then set about finding examples to shade in the outline. In this way, they are no different than conspiracy theories. In both cases, the inner workings of society fail our basic expectations of how things are supposed to be. Everything seems predetermined. Even those in charge are revealed to be middle-managers at the mercy of an invisible hand.


There is ultimately no supervillain at the controls of Twilight, no symbols encoded in the dollar bill. Instead, its greatest ambition is to merely draw attention to the logic that structures our lives, the intellectual rationale offered us for ironic detachment or resignation. A contest in which everyone but the spectators have agreed to play with rigged rules, and you feel crazy for ever believing it might have been otherwise."

Healthy Kids Check coming?

From Home visits urged for checks on kids in The Age:
"...the federal government's Healthy Kids Check will screen three-year-olds for early signs of mental disorders, using a checklist that will include behaviour such as sleeping with the light on, temper tantrums or extreme shyness."
The Australian Psychological Society and The Australian Childhood Foundation are supporting the move. Professor Julian Savulescu seems to want to go even further in Label with care.

An Attenborough moment

A lyre bird imitating other birds and then ironically singing its own doom, imitating the chain saw

and a bird that uses its wings to sing and court

From a tribute to Mehdi Hasan

Master of Melody
"Talking about those who preceded him he makes a special mention of Begum Akhtar. “She was a consummate singer of ghazals and thumris. I have great admiration for her,” he says. When I ask him to mention his favourite film singer, he answers without batting an eyelid “Lata Mangeshkar. She is a complete singer.”

“But she is an Indian,” someone in the room says. “So what? Music and poetry know no boundaries.” He says and one can’t disagree with him."

Elinor Ostrom RIP

Obituary by Barkley Rosser. A passage:
"...systems organized by the people who use the resources work better than ones imposed by outsiders. The classic case involves the forests of Nepal since WW II, a case emphasized by Ostrom. The forests ended up in basically three different kinds of systems. Some of them owned by corporations, influence from the British Raj, some of them were in state-owned and controlled systems from various socialist governments, and about a third remained in the hands of local groups managed in traditional ways. Today, most of the first two are gone, over-harvested and deforested. What is left of the forests of Nepal are those where the local traditional managers were able to keep on keeping on."
A recent message from Elinor Ostrom Greens from the Grassroots
A recent story from India How to make a forest:
"A teacher in the village intermediate school, Bharati had cut his teeth as a young volunteer in the Chipko movement of the 1970s, hanging around environmentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. He was well known in the neighbourhood for rallying the villagers of the area against a government logging permit in 1982 to fell the forests that sustained them. His efforts were non-violent and successful: the government had to rescind the logging permit. But the forests were degraded because rain, which was plentiful, ran off the slopes into distant valleys, eroding the soil along the way. The rainwater had to be retained on the slopes.

But there were no accounts to be found of building khaals and chaals to catch the gushing runoff. Bharati decided to experiment with designs and sites in 1993. The hill folk knew their terrain, knew terraced farms and thought, as Bharati found, in three dimensions, unlike the plainspeople. But the water scarcity and the degraded forests had made livelihoods impossible, and the villages were bereft of men, who had gone ‘down’ in search of employment.
Bharati began talking to the women who were left behind. In the first year, they built a chaal on a monsoonal channel that had dried up. After the next monsoon, it retained water longer, the surrounding soil remained moist, the forest looked healthier. Over the next five years, Bharati’s Doodhatoli Lok Vikas Sansthan built several chaals in Ufrainkhaal and neighbouring villages, improving their design through trial.
They had broken free of the vicious cycle of drought/flood—more water meant the forests were getting more dense, which in turn retained even more water.
.......
Bharati and his colleagues have steadfastly rejected the trappings of a formal organisation. They don’t issue press releases or seek publicity, they do not demand development funding. In fact, they once refused an FAO offer of a grant of Rs 1 crore. The villagers here know a healthy forest is essential to survive, and they revel in being its protectors. When the government offered a watershed development project, Bharati politely refused."
P.S. Previous posts on Elinor Ostrom
 http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2009/10/participatory-irrigation-management.html
http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2009/10/economics-nobel-for-political-scientist.html
http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/2009/10/more-links-to-economics-nobelists.html

Looking for Vidyapati

a 1937 film starring Kanan Devi, I found this blog  post http://8ate.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/choli-pay-nazariya-jaye.html which led to many other interesting posts in the blog. Here are a few http://8ate.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/iqbal-masuds-dream-merchants.html
http://8ate.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/madhubala-rare-shoot-photographer.html
http://8ate.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/hindu-hollywood-1944.html
The last has an article by Beverley Nicholls written in 1944 which has passages like this:
"And the other reason why Indian films may one day flash brilliantly across the world's screen? I have already indicated it. It is hidden deep in the eyes of Mother India herself; it is written in every wrinkle of her ancient face. Mother India is the world's greatest story-teller; her legends are inexhaustible, and every league of her sun-scarred territory has a tale to tell, of blood or of passion or of sacred fire. And now that at last Mother India is awakening, to all this store of ancient history will be added the thrill of history in the making; the air will be strident with the echo of snapping chains and rending veils. It is for Mother India herself to walk out of her ancient prison, which is so largely of her own making, to breathe the fresh air and think the free thoughts of the new world, and then, to translate them into terms of art.
Can she do so?"
I do not know. I do not see many films only songs and dances.
There are many non-filmi posts as well, for example Rows of Inappropriate Indian Political Cartoons. It seems that I can spend many wintry afternoons in Melbourne reading this blog.

Ariel Rubinstein interviw

at Five Books . One of the books mentioned in the interview, his own Economic Fables is available online.

Poincare's hundredth death anniniversary

Dilip D'Souza reminds us that it is almost a century since Poincare died. Here is a nice article published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/notices/200509/comm-mawhin.pdf which describes his contributions including the first mention of the 'butterfly effect'. This is after he found a mistake in a prize winning paper and had to republish the paper ar his own expense which was more than the prize money. See also Poincare's cmments about earth's rotation which still seems to cause confusion in some ciecles.
Everybody has his own interpretation of Poincare's work and influence. According to Vladimir Arnold http://basepub.dauphine.fr/bitstream/handle/123456789/6842/polymathematics.PDF  (page 14)Poncare created modern mathematics and also said that 'only non-interesting problems might be formulated unambigously and solved completely'.

Two Kanan Devi songs

Though I vaguely remember a couple of her songs, it is only recently that I have been listening to Kanan Devi songs, particularly her songs from Jawab (1942). Today I found through 'Songs on the Footpath', the Bengali versions which are much better preserved and have a translations

Some of the posts in 'Songs on the Footpath' relating to Kanan Devi
here, here and here.
P.S. The music director was Kamal Dasgupta who also was the composer for 'Tum Bhulaye na Gaye' sung by Feroza Begum

Aamir Khan vs Doctors

From CHURUMURI
"...Aamir Khan showed the Sunday morning TV audience how doctors take a cut from pathological laboratories and specialists to refer patients, how patients are misled to make them undergo unnecessary and expensive treatment; and how doctors are paid by pharma companies to prescribe specific medicine brands. Victims spoke openly and bravely of how their illnesses were exaggerated for the personal gain of doctors, etc.

Now IMA wants an apology from Khan for having “defamed” the medical fraternity and for having given only one side of the story. There is talk of legal action although IMA’s honchos admit there are “black sheep” in the profession. So, is Aamir Khan right in exposing medical frauds, or is the IMA barking up the wrong tree?"

Browsing filmi blogs

After discovering Minai's Cinema Nritya Gharana and Dances on the Footpath last year, everyday seems to bringing some thing new from the array of blogs linked in their blogs. I am nominally interested in Hindi film songs and dances, having seen a few in the forties and fifties starting with Rattan and probably ending around the period of some of Raj Kappor's early films. Many of the things I was curious about like tunes, music, dances their background are slowly becoming clearer. Many of the blogs seem to by westerners, some of those of Indian origin though I cannot tell from the names and titles and some of them, particularly Minai's seem to be like research papers. Thet are checked and crosschecked (if somebody makes a mistake everybody jumps in) and there are well researched articles to those giving glimpses of the lives of the artists even the obscure ones who somehow were an integral part of making those films what they were with stories of human interest to erudite discussions. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to make lists (like the old Indian stuff of sins, punishments, Mudras and other catalogues) but somehow one has to post once in a while. Anyway, the provocation for this post is that I was curious about Anglo-Indians partly because one of my sons in law is an Anglo Indian. But I do not mix much with their family since they are very strongly Roman Catholic and I usually keep away from religion. My general impression is that they are not well accepted in India since they are scattered all over the place and do not have strong constituency of their own. But they do not seem to be that well accepted here and seem to go for many Indian things from food to Tendulkar. In one of the film blogs I have come across, I find soms glimpses of Anglo-Indian life. Here is the fourth part of a seies about one of the dancers Edwina Lyons in Hindi films around the sixties from Dusted Off. Here is a passage, probably very generalized, but came from a very tough and good person from the group "Like I already said that most Anglo Indians in My Opinion just live for the day ‘One Day at A Time Sweet Jesus’ Tomorrow is always another day so no need to stress & Limited almost everything they did in Their Lives If they passed through High School was more than enough to get by with & not really Ambitious as such Planning was definitely out of the Question & did Things Mainly on Impulse Majority of them Anyway! Yet They were Full of Airs & Graces & Almost felt that They were Superior to Others & I Personally called Them ‘Hard Cases’ just a Name instead of calling Them worse I know that I Am ‘Anglo Indian’ as well unfortunately! I know that I Worked Very Hard & Still Do but then I Might just be one of the Minority eh! Mind You I am not over the Moon being an A.I. but I cannot help being what I am We cannot call Ourselves Indian here in India because the Indians would not accept that.."
There are glimpses of many minor, major, forgotten, not-so-forgotten dancers and actors from that period amd a moving story about Edwina and Mehmood in memsaabstory.
Sometimes, the posts get very technical about ragas and what not. I like the songs as they are and do not care about ragaas. Possibly the knowledge and practice is useful but for somebody like for whom film songs and dances are a relaxation, these technical things seem a bit too much. And sometimes they cannot decide which raga it is because some innovators changed various things. Here is a very scholarly article about one song http://www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/Sunthar-LapakJhapak/LapakJhapak-frame.php
"We have here an apparently bizarre situation where everyone is ravished by Lapak Jhapak and attributes its musical appeal to the sublime power of the underlying râga, and yet there is little agreement and much confusion as to its identity!

Online listings of film music tend to classify this song as Darbarî Kanada or Miyan kî Malhâr, though instances of its being labeled as Megh Malhâr, Adânâ, etc., or even “Jai Malhâr” (invented solely for the occasion :-) ..."

P.S. I only quickly browsed through the four articles in 'Dusted Off'; I did not notice any information about Anglo_Indian actresses like Honey O'Brian from a slightly earlier period, and of course there were many in the very early days.

Tum Bhulaye na Gaye

There is a morphed version of this Feroza Begum song 'Tum Bhulaye na Gaye' which I posted last year http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/search?q=feroza+begum
The morphed version has also lyrics and transalation of the lyrics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjQpdVCQSMg&feature=related
Another version of the song was recently posted in http://atulsongaday.me/2012/05/31/tum-bhulaaye-na-gaye/ which says that it was used in a 1957 film. I posted in a Tamil site (which I find very cosmopolitan) http://www.mayyam.com/talk/index.php and one participant is very enthusiastic about it; his reaction made be repost the link to the song.

Some recent articles of Cosma Shalizi

Cognitive Democracy with Henry Farrell
In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You
Versions of both articles appeared in http://crookedtimber.org/ which allows comments but I did not read them.
Cosma Shalizi's review of Jack Knight and James Johnson's book 'The Priority of Democracy' http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/knight-johnson.html
More reviews by Cosma Shalizi http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/
Some of the ideas seem to fit in with Sugata Mitra's ideas on teaching and the recnt struggle of civil society organizations frustrating the efforts of developed countries to limit the mandate of UNCTAD. In any case, I will be spending the next few weeks reading around these articles.

Orwell on Dickens

Among several interesting things in Charles Dickens, George Orwll says "...he is an institution that there is no getting away from. How often one really thinks about any writer, even a writer one cares for, is a difficult thing to decide; but I should doubt whether anyone who has actually read Dickens can go a week without remembering him in one context or another." I wonder whether some writers enter the consciousness people in their extended linguistic regions and shapre their tastes and thoughts. Two of the writers that I remember almost every week are Gurajada Apparao and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee.
The article came via David Brin's post http://davidbrin.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/republican-salvationraise-gipper.html in which he remembers another part (at the end os srction 1 in Orwell's article):
"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds."

Thinking about mathematics and other things

These days, I rarely work on mathematics though off and on I still have dreams on mathematical topics, the most recent was about "Thom Isomorphism'. The only times I work seems to be when somebody sends a question or whwn colloborators write about a paper started in 2005, just around retirement time as the last of a series outling and completing the work done over the previous ten years. Now it seems to be to be taking shape and I started working on it three days ago. Immediatly I find that I can still spot mistakes of colloborators but I cannot sleep well and head starts throbbing my midday. But main interest during the last few years has been to understand a bit about poverty and developments. Reading various blogs and books about these topics somehow does not seem to produce the same level of intense thinking and headthrob. I wonder whether it is the nature of the topic where the structures are different for intense thinking and the solutions depend very much on the context, which is variable with time even in one region. With this proviso about lack of deep and intense thinking on my part, I see some reasons for optimism.. One is the social audit activity in India reported earlier in RTI and Social Audit and Right to Information. Here a strong right to information act from 2005 seems to be a useful driver of that activity. Now Oxfam has Reports from different countries linked in Duncan Green's post http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=10309 (How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries) which give other stategies in addition to social audit:
"All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya."