On not reading books

There are a number of books that I wanted to read around my bed and on kindle. But I have not read a single book in the last3-4 months and do not seem to feel too bad about it. That may change but meanwhile, I take some consolation from thefollowing quotes of Pankaj Mishra and Keynes. “This is the melancholy awareness that suffuses Lahiri's catalogs of desirable things and people. And so while such obvious underdogs as Nazneen and Chanu arouse pity and indignation, an overprivileged immigrant like Ni-khil leaves one with more disturbing feelings: an intimation, such as the one his father once had, of "all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world"; a suspicion that "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself."
in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16837 and
" Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." fromhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch24.htm

A Diwali Story

Our daughter from Nepal from Kiran Kumar Karlapu (via Akshay Regulagedda)

Sounds

The song

and the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE_c2BAyLEA

Links, Novemer 4th

Lant Pritchett's new book on education The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning. From the blurb "Despite great progress around the world in getting more kids into schools, too many leave without even the most basic skills. In India's rural Andhra Pradesh, for instance, only about one in twenty children in fifth grade can perform basic arithmetic.
The problem is that schooling is not the same as learning. InThe Rebirth of Education, Lant Pritchett uses two metaphors from nature to explain why. The first draws on Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book about the difference between centralized and decentralized organizations, The Starfish and the Spider. Schools systems tend be centralized and suffer from the limitations inherent in top-down designs. The second metaphor is the concept of isomorphic mimicry. Pritchett argues that many developing countries superficially imitate systems that were successful in other nations — much as a nonpoisonous snake mimics the look of a poisonous one."
Dan Little reviews Veblen The Theory of Business Enterprise. One quote from Veblen "Broadly, this class of business men, in so far as they have no ulterior strategic ends to serve, have an interest in making the disturbances of the system large and frequent, since it is in the conjunctures of change that their gain emerges."

Big finance is a problem, not an industry to be nurtured (If the link does not work google the title)

Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook

The Secret Life of Every Thing: Where Your Stuff Comes From (via Ed Yong)

And we do not even know who owns a building

Reshma passed away and the song which first brought her public attention

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku3mpd4NXnA

Two on cultural differences

Eurekalert report of recent research on 'endowment effect' (via Economist's View)
Ethan Watters, the author of 'Crazy Like Us' writes of some recent research about the (lack of) universals of human mind (via Mindhacks)

More on leaks

From a fascinating article published in FP "The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.

Few U.S. officials think of their ability to act hypocritically as a key strategic resource. Indeed, one of the reasons American hypocrisy is so effective is that it stems from sincerity: most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. Yet as the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words, it will face increasingly difficult choices -- and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches."

From another artcle an US official “It will be very difficult for the US to dig out of this, although we will over time. The short term costs in credibility and trust are enormous.”

Glen Greenwald wonders " First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of many western leaders."

Tristes Tropiques

A pdf file of the the book is available online (check also this). I read the book a few years ago mainly focussing on his Indian travels. A recent review Suggests that there are interesting speculations in the book. A longer review here and some quotes from the book here.

Variations on the AIR signature tune

The AIR signature tune is usually attributed to Walter Kaufmann and is now confirmed by Zubin Mehta (see the interview from 30 minutes onwards). Apparently, it is based on raga Shivaranjani, possibly with some east European influences. It is recently discussed in tajmahalfoxtrot. In a follow-up Amit Chaudhuri Responds to the Kaufmann story “Now the tune makes a lot of sense, and why, when I would hear East European buskers play in Berlin, I would often want to have them play with me in my version of AIR. The subterranean, tremulous East European, slightly folksy sound of the theme now becomes clearer to my ear.” 
For other interpretations and variations, see Naresh Fernandez post Still in the AIR.

Manna Dey RIP

Manna Dey passed away today. A short write up about him with a link to his autobiography, with the first few chapters on line. One of my favourite Manna Dey songs

A glimpse of the future

I thought that I got glimpses of this kind of future among the children of some Indian colleagues here and in India. Apparently, it is more pronounced in Japan :"A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.....A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way............... Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures? Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too. Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living at home."
P.S. A list of fertility rates. All the developed countries are below 2.8 and all except five below 2. May be the current poor will inherit the earth.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html?countryname=Singapore&countrycode=sn&regionCode=eas&rank=224#

Zubaida Khanum RIP

Here is a short announcement. Her profile at cineplot. One of her songs from Yakke Wali
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArFHH8EOIO0

Shaxson's new book on finance curse

(coauthored with John Christrnsen) is available at a nominal price and is also available for free download at some places. More about the book in opendemocracy.
P.S. An index in which Cuba leads the world http://treasureislands.org/the-finance-curse-my-new-book/

About the aid business

Angus Deaton has a new book 'The Great Escape:Health, Wealth and the  origins of Inequality", kindle edition here. An excerpt. Chris Blattman's review here. From NY Times review 'A Surprising Case Against Foreign Aid' "In his considered judgment, global poverty today is no longer a result of lack of resources or opportunity, but of poor institutions, poor government and toxic politics. Though about $134 billion in official aid still flows from donor governments to recipient governments, there is no mystery, he says, as to why foreign aid fails to erase poverty. That is not its mission, he asserts: typically it serves commercial interests at home or buys political allies abroad, too often unsavory ones."
William Easterley tweeted that this review by Clive Crook is a  "Brilliant review of a brilliant book on development: ‘The Great Escape’ " Excerpt "Above all, Deaton argues, rich countries should stop putting obstacles in the path of the development of poor countries. Rich-country trade restrictions and farm subsidies put poor countries at a disadvantage. Rules on intellectual property rights need to be reformed so that they don’t unfairly discriminate against the poor.

Freer immigration may be the best aid policy of all. Migrants from poor to rich countries are better off than before, and their remittances make their families back home better off as well. These flows, which are almost three times bigger than flows of aid, “can empower recipients to demand more from their government, improving governance rather than undermining it.”

“The Great Escape” combines, to a rare degree, technical sophistication, moral urgency, the wisdom of experience, and an engaging and accessible style. It will deepen both your appreciation of the miracle of modern economic growth and your conviction that the benefits can and should be much more widely enjoyed."

On Dulles brothers

From an interview with Stephen Kinzer author of a new book on Dulles brothers: "On the Dulles' ability to overthrow regimes in Iran and Guatemala but not in Cuba or Vietnam

They were able to succeed [at regime change] in Iran and Guatemala because those were democratic societies, they were open societies. They had free press; there were all kinds of independent organizations; there were professional groups; there were labor unions; there were student groups; there were religious organizations. When you have an open society, it's very easy for covert operatives to penetrate that society and corrupt it."

From another part of the interview:

On what's changed in the American mindset since the Dulles era

"Particularly in the reaction to the Syria bombing, I'm beginning to wonder if something profound isn't changing in the minds of at least some Americans.

"People are looking at each other and saying, 'I can't get a job and my leaders are telling me I should be focusing on fixing Syria.' I think the disconnect that that represents is slowly dawning on some Americans. Maybe we finally are burying John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles."

One reader comments "I wish the last statement of the story resonated with me as there would be nothing better than for the American public to wake up in such a way.. Unfortunately it looks like the main reason for such an aversion to the Syrian bombing was that old "black man in the White House" story. The progressive people are against the war an mass while the war hungry found themselves in a conundrum: they would habitually embrace the war but their main tactic is to oppose ANYTHING Obama does. If the next President is another Republican we will likely see the reverse course of this trend, I am sorry to say."

Bt brinjal coming back?

There was a report from GM watch "Angered by the banning of Bt brinjal, AR Reddy, co-chair of India’s Genetic Engineering Approval/Appraisal Committee that granted commercial approval, let the cat out of the bag saying it was only a matter of time before it reached the Philippines and Bangladesh, after which it would be difficult for governments to control its spread."
Now, we have a report from Bangla Desh and also from India.

As jobs disappear

new possibilities described in When Jobs Disappear and also the wikipedia article on hakerspace (also called makerspace). May be organizations will appear to utilize the talents of the precariat like those described in
 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/13/homeless-nyc-people-you-meet
written by Mary, homeless in New York.

Links, October 15, 2013

On precarity: "Once a French neologism, precarity is now a household name describing in equal measure the fate of low-wage, part-time holders of bullshit jobs, seasonal and migrant workers, creative entrepreneurs of the self, “graduates with no future,” foreclosed homeowners, debtors and increasingly even segments of the salaried bourgeoisie. At its most basic, a term for the economic uncertainty and existential angst associated with the dissolution of fixed employment, precarity also suggests the disintegration of stable societal bonds, occupational identities, social protections and a sense of entitlement and belonging characteristic of the old proletariat. In short, then, precarity is the experiential dimension of the crisis of the society of work dating back to the 70s and 80s." At the root seems to the massive raise in production potential, a problem discussed by Chris Dillow.
Dani Rodrik on the perils of premature deindustrialization, Gavin Kennedy's response. There is also a discussion in Marginal Revolution: one comment "Employment in manufacturing may be low in Brazil but manufacturing still contributes ~30% of their GDP.

Ergo manufacturing hasn’t declined; manufacturing just needs fewer people these days. That’s a global trend."

Commonwealth Bank of Australia sends executives to an Indian village.

Monsanto bad for scientists?

Recent World Food Prize, where one of the winners is Robert Farley, chief technology officer at Monsanto is drawing protests. From my reaction in Faceook : 
 I think that Monsanto's aggressive marketing brought bad name to the science part. Probably we have to consider case by case where these worked and did not work. Glenn Davis Stone has written about BT cotton with reference to India. The final conclusions in his blog Field Questions seem to be that there may be benefits but they are overblown http://fieldquestions.com/2013/02/09/bt-cotton-is-failing-blame-the-farmers/ In the blog, if you go to 'About the author', it has links to Stone's papers which also have links to some basic information on GM technology.  
About BT brinjal, so far the reports that I found convincing are negative.http://www.gmwatch.eu/files/Andow_Report_Bt_Brinjal.pdf
I started feeling that finally it is politics and money and it is difficult to stop these things ( I think Monsanto is in some some advisory committe to Indian government on agriculture), and am not following the news as much as before. I think that GM food merchants found it difficult to penetrate Europe and have been focussing on the third world. Some of the powerful politicians in India are pro GM. In spite of Jairam stalling BT brinjal, probably there will be a comeback of GM foods without adequate research.

Interview with Maurice Bloch

(via Chapati Mystery) The Reluctant Anthropologist  "But I think we should engage with the general questions that people are ask, rather than spending our time navel gazing. .....Well, I'm very old, I should be shutting up, but I can't stop myself getting interested in questions. I'm very interested in, let's say, the frontiers of consciousness.....Since Chomsky, one of the things we're sure about is that most speakers are unaware of the grammar that they use, and therefore how it works below the level of consciousness." 

Links

K.Balagopal Relections on violence...
Brad DeLong discusses an address of Paul Krugman
CT on status problems in American universities
Duping by middle classes
A diplomatic exchange
A Namit Arora review
A recent article says "The greater a population’s genetic distance to the population on the technological frontier, the lower its relative income will be." Omar says "Pakistani Punjab could turn out to be an interesting little experiment in this regard. The genetic distance from the technological frontier is practically the same for Indian and Pakistani Punjab ..." http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/10/07/long-term-barriers-to-growth/
Why does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a "cult of irrelevance"?
 Khursheed Bano revives Saigal after he exhausts himself reviving somebody else

Wondering

I always wondered about how we can be sure that we mean exactly the same thing when different people use a word. Or whether it is with in some band width? Now I see to have some experience of that in my own case. The cataract in my left eye is removed but not yet the one in the right eye. Now I see slightly different, sometimes strikingly different varying from pink to red, with the different eyes.

An early Azurie dance

Azuri (Anna Marie Gueizelor) is considered the first 'item dancer' in Indian films. A quick biography of her by Arunkumar Deshmukh here. Her first dance according to Cineplot is in the 1934 film Nadira. 
This seems to be a 1935 Azuri dance though in silhoutte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBoaWYwlHD0 according to AK of Songs of Yore in the discussion herehttp://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/azurie/ 
The dance is also discussed in a very interesting post by Minaihttp://cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/dance-in-early-indian-cinema-some-video.html
Some information about her life in Pakistan is on pages 39 andf 99-100 0f this thesis http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8km963tz

Shutdown links

What it means
It's going to get much worse than a shutdown by Matt Yglesias
The perils of presidentialism by Juan Linz.
January 2013 Interview with Juan Linz
Along the way, he says "But China doesn’t have any channels for the discontent which the changes are causing and it’s causing anger that’s unbelievable, and the disconnect between the rhetoric and the realities might explode in time. It’s less of a stable system than some people think. I don’t think it’ll evolve that easily into a liberal system, in the political sphere.

India will have more trouble here or there, but is an infinitely more flexible system that can channel or respond to crises in a way that is less dangerous for the system than in China. I don’t know if I would bet on India so much on the economy, but I would bet more on the political system of India than the political system of China."

Effect on NSA

Views from the left:Three cheers for the Shutdown from CounterpunchA bipartisan war against the working class from the World Socialist Website

Gandhi as a lyricist

via http://atulsongaday.me/2013/10/02/he-namrta-ke-samrat/
Another version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD0W9CQJeo0

Battle between the Far-Right and Less-Far-Right

We seem to be threatened with temporary pain for long term losses.: Three Cheers for the Shutdown from CounterPunch

Gandhi Jayanti

Limits to export competitiveness?

From FT Why why trade growth lost its mojo by Gavyn Davies
Krugman disagrees

On contract teachers in primary education; evidence from A.P.

(Via Chris Blattman) Contract Teachers:Expermental Evodence fro India
Abstract: The large-scale expansion of primary education in developing countries has led to the
increasing use of locally-hired teachers on fixed-term renewable contracts who are not professionally trained and who are paid much lower salaries than regular civil service teachers. This has been a very controversial policy, and there is limited evidence about the effectiveness of such contract teachers. We present experimental evidence from a program that provided an extra contract teacher to 100 randomly-chosen government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of two years, students in schools with an extra contract teacher performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.15 and 0.13 standard deviations, in math and language tests respectively. While all students gain from the program, the extra contract teacher was particularly beneficial for students in their first year of school and students in remote schools.Contract teachers were significantly less likely to be absent from school than civil-service teachers (16% vs. 27%). We also find using four different non-experimental estimation procedures that contract teachers are no less effective in improving student learning than regular civil-service teachers who are more qualified, better trained, and paid five times higher salaries.

Links

More into Facebook these days, some recent links from there.
An overview of Indian economy and Raghram Rajan from Caravan Magazine by Mark Bergen
Chris Blattman on an interesting paper on development "Continued existence of Cows Disproves Central Tenets of Capitalism"
Highlights of a document on development via Duncan Green
NY Times portrait of Bhaskar Sunkara Taking Marx to the Main Stream and Bhaskar Sunkara about himself in The Guardian
Loosing is Good for You
How stress can make things smell bad from ScienceDaily

Smart pots for gardening

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-npUkW7KsM
This esplains how to make your own smart pot
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c3Z8Cn-kb4
I started with this one about seven weeks ago in a plastic green house and the tomato plants are already 3 feet tall.

Traffic in Hyderabad

Recently, I eatched traffic at a T-junction in Hyderabad while smoking outside on the stairs. The picture below was very early in the morning when there was little traffic. After 8 AM or so, the atreets were full of cars on all the three sides. The partition on the left only made it to some extent two way traffic on both sides and there were also U-turns. There were no traffic lights or traffic cops but I did not see any accidents during the week I watched. I wondered whether there is some self organizing mechanism at work. Ed Yong has a popular artcle on such phenomena, and I am sure that there are many books and articles studying various aspects of swarms and applications. 

Links, September 24

Interesting discussion on argument in 3quarksdaily. Behind all this, I think, is a basic disease of humans: trying to understand complex things where neat formulations may not be possible. It gets even worse in physics concepts which go beyond everyday experience. Nevertheless worth looking at.http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/09/arguing-about-argument.html#more
I am suspicious of that vision thing from big minds. From the ever interesting Chapati Mystery Facebook http://fadesingh.tumblr.com/post/55849407168/the-strange-friendship-of-indira-gandhi-and-buckminster
Rajiv Sethi on Information, Trading and Beliefs "If there's a message in all this, it is that markets aggregate not just information, but also fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives. Prices, as John Kay puts it, "are the product of a clash between competing narratives about the world." Some of the volatility that one observes in asset markets arises from changes in perspectives, which can happen independently of the arrival of information. This is why substantial "corrections" can occur even in the absence of significant news, and why stock prices appear to "move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in dividends." What makes markets appear invincible is not the perfect aggregation of information that is sometimes attributed to them, but the sheer unpredictability of persuasion, exhortation, and social influence that can give rise to major shifts in the distribution of narratives. "
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/orwell-nsa-surveillance-alan-rusbridger "The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything inGeorge Orwell's 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday."
The Logic Behind Assad's use of Chemical Weapons (via Naked Capitalism) "Using chemical weapons didn’t help Assad make gains on the battlefield. It didn’t signal to Syrians that he was willing to use these weapons — he’d already proved that he was willing to use them. What it did do was provide hard evidence that the United States was not coming to the defense of Syrian civilians under any conditions, and that the US would allow Assad to continue to fight to remain in power. Both of these signals would have the effect of undercutting support for the opposition."

Yves Smith on Obama

This seems right to me. Yves Smith comment on Obama responding to Krugman:
The Crazy Party Paul Krugman. True only up to a point. First, crazy is a very good strategy. Kissinger promoted the idea of Nixon as crazy (before Watergate really did make him paranoid) to improve US bargaining leverage. What is more scary than a rabid crazy anti Commie with nukes? Second, when Obama had more power (as in was less lame-ducky) he used Republican craziness as his air cover for doing what he wanted to do. That rewarded and encouraged super extreme behavior.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/links-92113.html#ZcAbe70u0Feu3JXz.99

Bollywood's Jewish Sounds

from http://www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com/?p=2973 including a link to this deleted song from C.I.D.

The song starts from 4:27

With Abinandanan of nanopolitan

http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com.au/

FP on research in International Relations

mainly in USA "Why does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a "cult of irrelevance"? Is it because IR scholars are pursuing a misleading model of "science," patterned after physics, chemistry, or biology? Or is it because many prominent academics fear criticism and are deathly afraid of being controversial, and prefer to hide behind arcane vocabulary, abstruse mathematics, or incomprehensible postmodern jargon?

Both motivations are probably at work to some degree, but I would argue that academics are for the most part just responding to the prevailing incentive structures and metrics that are used to evaluate scholarly merit. " from http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/18/grading_academia via 3quarksdaily. FP has also a list of top tren books on IR recommended for students.

Alternatives to DSM developing

A revolution in mental health from The Chronicles of Higher Education via a MindHacks post which has a summary. There have been several posts related to DSM efore; here are two of them.

Two big picture articles

One an old review of Landes book 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' byJoel Moykr and a recent article, in part a review from N+1 Slave Capitaliosm (via Chapati Mystery Facebook). The concluding paragraph frpm the second "The enlightening, progressive force of liberalism has carried us far from slavery, we like to think. We are not those people and never could have been. In River of Dark Dreams, we are reminded that between the slave empire and our own age lies only a handful of generations. Johnson shows the historical meaning of this proximity. We are connected not just through the shortness of time but through the persistence of the liberal capitalist tradition itself. The form of freedom fantasized by the slaveholding South, in turn, is the freedom of our own society: ensuring a standard of living sufficient to confirm our self-image and limit domestic conflict; built upon ecological degradation, the conquest of darker nations by international bureaucracies, their enslavement by debt, their forcible integration into a global commercial network; enforced by our own armies of the night, surveilling, killing, torturing without oversight. The myth of our great distance from slavery—of the old South’s fundamental illiberalism—exists precisely to give us a way of managing our experience of this continuity, and to let us continue to enact it."

Back home

For my tastes, this gives the best links

https://www.facebook.com/chapatimystery

Links September 3,2013

Tim Harford on common pool problems and the work of Lin Ostrom
Discussion on entrepreneurial state in Economist's View
Syria tensions vs NSA spying stories
US effect in behavioural research

Krugman on the rupee crisis http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/the-asian-crisis-versus-the-euro-crisis/

Travelling in India

Some photos etc in https://www.facebook.com/anandaswarup.gadde

Geeta Dutt : Toote bandhan toote aaj re- Kamal (1949)

(Via http://atulsongaday.me/)

Limks August 15th, 2013

Travelling a bit, some links for the road
Stephanie Nolen's farewell to India
Response from Bill Black to Rajan's criticism of Krugman
Anant Maringanti on Telangana decision
Obama continues to disappoint
World Literature (via Chapati Mystery Facebook)
Possibly related to the above Jan Myrdal on Srisri
Malaria vaccine hopes (via Rd Yong)
Bottle light
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=163614
An old favourite, sort of mushy songs I was brought up on
And another 
Minai tries to give credit where it is due
but thet were fairky arbitrary in the old days via Chapati Mystery  "...it was the tradition at Filmistan for one person to actually direct the film, and another to get the official credit."
P.S. Good News http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10242882/Solar-power-to-trump-shale-helped-by-US-military.html

Articles on BT cotton in India

by Glenn Davis Stone and Ronald Herring in August 17 issue of EPW http://www.epw.in/
Glenn Stone's articles have een linked several times before. EPW articles are free online for four weeks.

Vyjayanthimala - Piya Milan - 1958 - RARE

via http://cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/found-vyjayanthimalas-devadasi-dance-in.html#more

Michael Perelman on the invention of capitalsm

seems to be available online http://libcom.org/files/The%20Invention%20of%20Capitalism.pdf
Here is a Naked Capitalism link to a review y Yasha Levine. The title of the review comes from the quote “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

Sautoy videos on the story of mathematics

Marcus du Sautoy, history of mathematics with subtitles in Chinese, originally a BBC series
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZsvCbKz8Uw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t0aBLU7lk4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obWBCm0pgpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHJxC-qK5JQ
The part about India which appears in the second part extracted here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pElvQdcaGXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJbR_FdvFM

Vanity Fair article on Cyber Wars

Silent War long article about cyer wars maily between USA and Iran "Fundamentally, cyber-warfare is a story about proliferation. Iran’s nuclear program crossed a line that Israel and the U.S. deemed unacceptable, so the U.S. and its allies used a secret new weapon to try to stop it. With Stuxnet becoming public, the U.S. effectively legitimized the use of cyber-attacks outside the context of overt military conflict. Stuxnet also appears to have emboldened Iran to mount attacks on targets of its choosing. One former government official says, “What did we anticipate that Iran’s reaction [to Stuxnet] was going to be? I bet it wasn’t going after Saudi aramco.”

The paradox is that the nuclear weapons whose development the U.S. has sought to control are very difficult to make, and their use has been limited—for nearly seven decades—by obvious deterrents. In the years since August 1945, a nuclear weapon has never been used in war. Cyber-weapons, by contrast, are easy to make, and their potential use is limited by no obvious deterrents. In seeking to escape a known danger, the U.S. may have hastened the development of a greater one."

It seems that many countries will develop capabilities similar to that of NSA of US and more local internet systems will develop.

Oxfam debates on the future of agriculture

The Future of Agriculture: Synthesis of an online debate From the conclusion
"While the debate was not aimed at creating a consensus, nearly all participants appeared to agree that a one-size-fits-all approach is not possible. Only very few people said that a choice is inevitable between the two opposing models of agriculture: premaculture/organic, and oil/chemical dependent. At the same time many contributors suggested that current policies and politics favour the latter. And there was general agreement that multi-pronged approaches are needed, with much more attention paid to the potential of agro-ecological, bio-diverse systems to address problems related to climate change, resource scarcity and fossil fuel dependency. The labour-intensive agriculture practiced by the estimated 1.5 to 2 billion people currently living in rural food-producing households was seen by many, not as a cause of hunger and poverty, but rather a vehicle for escaping those scourges – if invested in properly. Agriculture is the only sector that can usefully absorb a large labour force. Several referred to the fact that in many developing countries small-scale producers are the largest source of investment in agriculture, biodiversity, and related knowledge systems. Too often, however, government policies marginalize them, or create incentives geared to supporting commercial investments that compete with, or displace these small-scale producers. There is no denying that enormous capital flows and practices of both private and public institutions are geared towards industrialscale production. This debate has shown that redressing this imbalance is a critical challenge
for all stakeholders."
P.S  About India's dwindling female workforce.

Two great singers, same song

Raghuram Rajan, next RBI governor

Seems to be a good choice. Some links from FT Alphaville like Why India Slowed indicate what Rajan will try to do "If all goes well, India’s economy should recover and return to its recent 8% average in the next couple of years."
From a 2012 interview "You need austerity because government debts have blown out too much, but you do not want to have that level of austerity that you get riots on the streets and the economyitself is paralysed. This means that government spending has to be targeted very, very effectively at the weaker segments of society --- the elderly, the people who are in real need -- so that the economy does not implode and people suffer tremendously."

Some U.R. Ananthamurthy videos

On Dalit contributions to Indian literature, main speech from 18 to 64 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34RiZ_MllU8
Shorter version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SajALSSbNKw
Conversation with Smt. Videhihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VfAJ9s6Juk
Short transcript of the conversation  http://barefootphilosophers.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/ananthamurthy-and-vaidehi-a-conversation/

Joe Studwell lecture

with questions and answers after 23 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N3rxIs-Zv4

On state's role in innovation

Martin Wolf in the review A much-maligned engine of innovation :
"This book has a controversial thesis. But it is basically right. The failure to recognise the role of the government in driving innovation may well be the greatest threat to rising prosperity."

Vernon Ruttan in 'The Role of Public Sector in Technolgy Development: Generalizations from General Purpose Technologies'  (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/19/2193894/going-off-gold-did-the-opposite-of-what-many-people-think/) says "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.", one of the exceptios to the thesis being the electricity industry. He also talks of the rise of The University-Industrial Complex since the late 1970s, particularly in biotechnology. We now have this revolving door between government and big business indicated by The Guardian article Government bee scientist behind controversial study joins pesticide firm. A recent article by Amy Harmon A race to save the orange by altering its DNA indicated the pressures on the industry to find quick solutions. Possibly long term basic university research on such problems could have avoided the need for quick fixes. But it is not clear to me whether it is possible with all the pressures on funding basic research or at what stage of development a country should shift focus from basic research in universities to university-industrial complexes. Hopefully never but change has already taken place at different levels in different countries.

Democracy in Australia

from today' Age
Australians funding feared PNG's feared cops "Papua New Guinea's most thuggish paramilitary police unit - allegedly responsible for rapes, murders and other human rights abuses - is being discreetly funded by the Australian Immigration Department to secure the Manus Island asylum seeker detention centre."
Murdoch sends trusted general 'Colonel Pot' to bring down Rudd over NBN
But Rudd hires veterans from Obama campaign How Barack Obama is changing the face of Australian politics

Links, August 3, 2013

Chris Dillow on Marxism vs Social Democracy, and also his ealier post
The Transition to Socialism
Noah Smith on Conservative White America also discussed in Brad DeLong's blog
Juan Cole on Xkeyscore
Yves Smith recommends " The most dishonest bankers get away with most money"
Evolution of monogamy in some mammals from ScienceNews
Ed Yong summarizes an article by himself in The plagues we are least prepared for
MindHacks Love is a cognitive enhancer

Another discussion on online education

particularly about MOOCs (Massive open online Courses). There seem to be criticisms of the type that conveying middle class norms will be missing and also the teacher-student interactions which enable 'deep learning' See Clay Shirky's responses at 46, 51 and 54.

Practicing water conservation in agriculture

Story about an old manuscript on water conservation/ A recent story via milieu. An older story He grew a forest only to harvest water water
A manual on traditional practices in Karnataka from Indiawaterportal.
An example of  forming networks to pool knowledge and spread it.