Aussie Optimism Program

From Curtin University; article in Huffington Post:
"A five-year-old's ability to learn mental resilience is being demonstrated in an Australian program with astounding results.

Aussie Optimism is an in-school class that treats mental health like maths or science, teaching children from Year 1 up to Year 8 how to identify their emotions and put their lives into perspective.

Co-director Rosanna Ronney told The Huffington Post Australia graduates had less likelihood of mental health difficulties and suicidal behavior. A study also showed participants were able to more quickly recover from depressive behaviour when compared to the general population. They were also shown to be less likely to drink or smoke later in life.

"I think it’s a little bit like learning spelling and maths, you can’t do too much mental health resilience training," Ronney told HuffPost Australia."

Report. They are on FaceBook too

Trudeau's cabinet

Impressive in terms representing various groups. How they will handle veteren bureaucrats ia another question.
Full list

A talk about Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastry

Here includes a transcript:
".నాకు కన్యాశుల్కం అంటే ఇష్టం గనుక నేనింత బాగా రాయగలిగేను" 

Staring at computers at night

can fry your brains. Here's one easy fix.

Rajendra Singh awarded Stockholm Water Prize

An ancient Indian technoloy is helping India's 'water man" save thousands of parched villages
A write up from 2005 Water Warriors: Rainwater Harvesting to ReplenishUnderground Water (Rajasthan, India) The article has updates upto February 2014.

RTE working in some places

From The Hindu article Leading from within "This government-run Primary School in Hamirpur district in Uttar Pradesh is one of the eight per cent of schools in India that comply with most of the norms and standards stipulated in the RTE Act. The RTE Act that came into being on April 1, 2010, casts a legal obligation on the Central and State Governments to implement the fundamental right of children to free and compulsory education. It lays down detailed guidelines for the development of curriculum, training of teachers and pupil-teacher ratios. Furthermore, it emphasises child-centric and child-friendly learning and an environment that is free of fear, trauma and anxiety for children. It has been exactly five years since the RTE Act came into being, and only a fraction of its promise has been fulfilled across the country.

Even that fraction throws up impressive statistics: 110 million children are served meals in the mid-day meal scheme making it the world’s largest school-feeding programme; 199 million children are in schools and studying. A study by the Azim Premji Foundation, quoted in the report released by the RTE Forum recently, shows that in semi-urban and rural areas, the belief that private school education is better than government schools is a myth. This was reflected in the experience of the parents in this village in Hamirpur too."

See also Five education initiatives that are changing India The above is not one of them.

Some reflections on yesterday's trip

while responding to a smoker's regrets on Anul Atluri's wall:
My story is somewhat similar. It is difficult to imagine now that one did not know the direct and indirect effects of smoking then. I have not stopped smoking but have been smoking outside the house since 1988. I did give up for four years when I was diagnosed with some sort of latent TB and I was the only breadwinner in the family and no savings or ancestral property. But Australia had and still has to a great extent, a good system of social security and Medicare; my wife realised that she could be independent here, took citizenship and refused to move. The government trained her for jobs, gave proper clothes for interviews and she started working. And I started smoking again. It is surprising that families are so forgiving. After a life of self-centredness, yesterday when whey wanted to go for an outing, one of the daughters refused to go without me. Though walking long distances is difficult now, probably due to smoking, I went along and panted and puffed along. At one stage, during steep slopes, they even tried to push me along. May be due to this sort of experiences and background, Gopichand's 'asamarthuni jeevayaatra' still resonates with me. I still find it difficult to read it again.
And:
I was always a bit rebellious and when I started smoking I did in my father's presence. Then my mother, to whom I was close later in her life, told me that my father did not like the smell and I started smoking a bit away from him. May be rebelliousness and a sudden development of passion for mathematics saved me from worse outcomes. So, I think that there is a bit of luck in survival. We learn but most are not really models and I feel that I am common man who somehow survived and raised a family and some of them see reasonably content now. Who knows?

Olinda gardens again, this time with granddaughters

Climbing up not so easy.

Amitav Ghosh on parallels between India and Turkey

About an year ago Parallel Journeys?... Some responses soon after
Gaurav Sabnis on Twitter recently about the similarities

Two on social networks

Social netwoks, ethnicity and entrepreneurship in Naked Capitalism with lots of comments
Farmers switch to social media to cope with distress About Vidarbha farmers from Times of India

Danielle Feller on Indian epics

Just started browsing The Sanskrit epics' representation of Vedic myths available free on line. Seems quite readable; some of the chapters appeared in journals earlier, sometimes under tha name Danielle Feller Jatavallabhula. A review of the book by Vishwa Adluri :  It belongs on the reading list of any student and scholar who wishes to understand the epic’s “inner coherence.”

From the introduction to the book:
"Commenting on the MBh's claim to be a Veda, FITZGERALD (1991:159-160) remarks:
"As […] a new ‘Veda’, it was obvious that the Great Bhårata was a Veda only metaphorically. The Great Bhårata was a very different sort of text from the Veda in many more ways than the two were substantively similar. But the Great Bhårata was intended to function in Indian culture in the same imposing and authoritative way the ancient Vedas had, and the formulators of this Great Bhårata developed their metaphor with some care." Furthermore, BROCKINGTON (1998:5, note 11) notes that: "it may well be that the emphasis on the epic as a fifth Veda and comparisons with them in reality testifies to a break between the Vedas and the Mahåbhårata". In his review article, HILTEBEITEL (2000:163) comments on this as follows: "The notion of ‘a break’ between Veda and epic is thus worth pursuing. One might consider a break that would allow for a reclamation of Veda by poets for whom it remained of utmost importance, poets who knew their Veda well, who could now compose something new while making use of all kinds of Vedic allusions". Continuing Hiltebeitel's line of thinking, the basic assumption of this study, since it deals with the Epics' representation of Vedic mythological material, is that the epic authors knew (and understood) the Vedas. I believe that the references to the Veda involve much more than mere lip-service, and that a great part of the epic redactors' effort went into reworking the Vedic material to fit it into the Epics, at least as far as the Mahåbhårata is concerned. The representation of Vedic mythological narratives on the one hand, and the representation of the Mahåbhårata war as a sacrifice on the other, are part of this effort."

Concerns about India

India could be another US if inequality is not tackled: Angus Deaton
Heartbroken are we, Mr. Murthy? from Outlook India
Tolerance essential for proress, Rauram Rajan says
Rajan questions govt's ban culture, Swamy asks PM to sack him

Duncan Green's new book draft

invites comments. Draft here.

Lavanya Kolluri on reservations

Lavanya Kolluri after linking to an article on reservations by Sukhadev Thorat writes:
"How can one be human and not support reservations? The conditions necessitating/facilitating their removal are nowhere in sight and probably never will be. We do not have a level playing field where every child can compete on an equal footing for 'merit'. How can those who have been historically excluded from education, who are first-generation learners, who do not have the cultural, social and educational capital of the historically privileged castes, be expected to compete? But it has been my experience that if I post in support of reservations I get ugly vicious reactions... most of which assume that I am a wretched 'lower caste person ' who wants to appropriate without merit. My feet curl in shame when I think of the abuse that the so-called 'lower castes ' must be facing on a daily basis."
Around 1994, I stayed for month in a hotel in Guntur. My father was about to depart in a few months and I visited him daily in the hospital. The hotel was cheap but there were lot of young workers and it is usually frequented by farmers from neighbouring villages. I used to get a coffee in the mornins through them and spend the rest of the day with my father. When I was about to leave most of them came to say goodbye and said the customers were very abusive and they were sorry to see me go. What all I used to say in the mornings was "Can you get me a cup of coffee?" Apparently they were often addressed as donkey and such. possibly a way to keep them under control. Even now, whenever I go home, i hear a lot of complaints about unreliable domestic help in the towns and uppity labour in the villages.

P.S. I got acquinted with Lavanya Kolluri during an inquiry about her grandfather S.Minakhisundaram, one of Indiaa's most eminent mathematicians. About his work here and one in Teluu here.

Madhu Priya marries

Singer Madhu Priya's secret marriage, parents try to kidnap
The first song which brought her attention, written bt herelf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31VTeb34TOQ
Marriage did not help in Jikki's case: K. Jamuna Rani narrates a heartbreakin story

Why the state matters

by Christian Parenti in Jacobin:
"The developmental state has come under fire from both left and right. Neoliberals see the state as a rent-seeking, corrupt, inefficient, market-distorting parasite. Some on the Left reject the very concept of “development” as normalizing and teleological, fixated on economic growth at the expense of the environment and human rights.

These are often valid points. Yet development — by which I mean economic transformation and technological change — and the developmental state have much to offer."

After descring the state role in the development of various countries, he concludes:

"But for the state to act, political elites must be targeted by movements, made to feel threatened enough to exercise the state’srelative autonomy to capital’s short-term prerogatives. Local initiatives, moral suasion, rational appeals — none of these will suffice.

We need movements that, at least for now, seek to use state power to force capital into new patterns of investment and technological development. Thankfully, the US climate movement is increasingly doing that, for example, by targeting the federal government’s fossil-fuel leasing on public lands, but much more is needed."

Not clear to me. Various treaties like TPP are being passed eo usurp democracy and state power even more.

FT Alaphaville chats with Angus Deaton

Videos here. The trascript should come out in week.
More about India in the second video:

[00:23] On hunger, nutrition and the poverty trap

[03:27] Why so much of his work focuses on India, and his findings on Indian price indices

[11:56] The usefulness of self-reported measures of well-being

[14:00] His problems with the way foreign aid works now

[21:15] Unconditional cash transfers

[24:43] Mixed assessment of Randomised Control Trials

[34:16] What has surprised him

[40:22] Deaton-ian optimism

Ancient earthworks in Kazhakistan

“The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake large-scale projects — like creating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs — has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated large-scale human organization as one that predates settled and civilized societies,” Dr. Clarkson wrote in an email. From NASA adds to evidence of ancient mysterious earthworks
Similar evidence from Gobekli Tepe too. With all these findings it seems that big scale oranizations, heierarchy etc came with agriculture seems doubtful.

Interesting Telugu books available online

at http://www.teluguthesis.com/ like http://www.teluguthesis.com/2015/09/veturi-prabhakara-shastri-writings.html http://www.teluguthesis.com/2013/05/kavitva-tatva-vicharamu.html

C.R.Reddi on Vemana

Transcript of a speech. The speech itself is a bit unclear but it gets better after a while. At one stage C.R.Reddi (see the transcripthttp://eemaata.com/misc/Vemana_CRReddy_Bangore_1970.pdf) says "Usually in most religions the idea prevails that individual's salvation could be acquired irrespective of one's conduct as a member of society." I am not sure whether this is true of all religions or which religion. Pavan K.Varma in "Being Indian" says that it is more true of Hinduism.

From a discussion on facebook

From Anil Atluri's wall:
Me: I may be misunderstanding but Ramarao's concern is not really about aphorisms but about Indians. With the wide variety of people he meets in different countries, he probably noticed some problems in discussions like information, logic etc and probably thinks that popularising aphorisms may make these worse. I contend that the problems are more deep rooted. Ours is a culture of primacy of exegesis. Truths were there in some great writers and writings and what all we had to do is to interpret them and we often depend even for this interpretation on those who are supposed to have read them. Indians did some great stuff in astronomy and mathematics but there were never complete proofs. Though astronomy was probably always connected with observation of cosmic events for predictions from food gathering to agriculture, there were also connections with religion. In our case, the development of astronomy and mathematics seems to be primarily for astrology.. When astronomical observations did not tally with puranic accounts, Puranas were supposed to be primary.see, for example, Christopher Minkowski's 'The Pandit as a public intellectua'. My contention is that 'primacy of exegesis' is deep rooted in Indian culture and a few aphorisms are not going to make much difference.http://www.columbia.edu/.../sks/papers/minkowski_pandit.pdf
Ramarao Kanneanti: Anandaswarup Gadde garu: I think you are right. I think aphorisms may be not my focus. It is not so much about the other countries, but other education systems that I was a part of, other text books that I have read perhaps influenced my views. From what I read from Meher, I think he too shares my concerns. His seeking out of scholars outside of the standard pantheon itself attests to that.

To large extent, my dissatisfaction with the western intellectual tradition is neglecting of mathematics, logic, model theory, statistics, and such in the literary and philosophical discourses. In the first part of 1900's, there was such an exhilarating confluence of these ideas -- perhaps I was unduly influenced by it.

And, in India, my dissatisfaction is all those and a few more. The culture of primacy of exegesis, as you put it may be manifesting those symptoms. The predominance of pathos, in preference to logos in public discourse, -- in particular excess of that -- strikes me as counter productive. Also, the openness to criticism or learning from criticism is something I find more open in the west. Is this preference for pathos make them seek spiritual solace or even words enriched with vivid imagery? I do not know.

Yet to large extent, I am afraid of querying along these lines. I feel that is is a measure of hubris to think the world should satisfy us. From my experience, it leads to heart break, misery, or at least active sense of being wronged by the world. I am sure I will grow out of it, but for now, I often try to make peace with it. And, "being in between many worlds helps me with that. May be that is my lack of commitment to one world that shows I am yet to grow up.

Now, back to my other world of high performance event driven architectures (for this week, at least)...

P.S. I acquired the phrase 'primacy of exgesis' from Aravindhan during a discussion in the site Hub. Some of his comments reproduced in a earlier poset ."Panini's grammar, from a methodological perspective, embodies two trends. The first is the trend towards the primacy of exegesis in scholarly discourse. For some reason, texts by renowned scholars came to have a very special status, eventually becoming a source of knowledge equal to or superior than observation. The second trend is the increasing importance of inductive reasoning, where you used specific examples to derive generalised rules. Taken together, these are capable of producing devastating errors.

Original sin in an economic sense

"More than a decade ago, the economists Barry Eichengreen and Ricardo Hausmann named the emerging markets’ inability to borrow abroad in their local currency as “original sin”. from here  via Paul Krugman

Conversations on FaceBook

I posted on FaceBook, a link to C.Rajendran's article posted here earlier and commented

Anandaswarup Gadde What surprisised me was the fine tuning of descrimination through literature at that early stage, whenever it is.

Like · Reply · 1 · October 20 at 1:43pm

Sreenivas Paruchuri After being an active reader and poster on various Internet forums for more than 6-8 years still you believe that creative writing has to be democratic, plebian, non-disxriminatory, ...!? I am tempted to ask you if you could name one politically correct work, that over a long period of time. Sorry if I am harsh, but I find this kind of argument very problematic.

Anandaswarup Gadde Not sure. The one I can think of is Gurajada Apparao during recent times. I think that there are a few early pieces of poetry I have seen in Women's writing in India. Generally I am surprised at the taxonomy of various things which comes in indian writing, 64 of this, 96 of that,...http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/.../taxonomy-in-some... But I am not a very well read person; these are more queries and surprises from a non-lierary person. Most of my reading is very scattered mainly focussed on poverty and development.

Anandaswarup Gadde Actually this relates to some thing that I have been wondering about. From my readings which is basically after retirement, I felt that Indian society has been discriminatory for a much longer period than most societies. This seems to be entrenched inseveral accepts including in literature. Even to this day I find people growing nearby have very different tastes and inner lives depending on their caste and similar classifications. If this is true, I wonder what are the reasons. Is it endogamy? Some recent research indicates that Indians generally came from a few thousand founding families a few thousand years ago and somehow kept those identities through endogamy. Do you know other similar societies? Caste like societies seem to common in lot of areas but not as strong as in India. Just wondering about the mix that makes India different.

.........

No further enlightement. I posted a link to the article System that replaces human intution with algorithms outperforms human teams

Purnaprajna Bangere A narrow set of rigged stuff, like for instance a game...cute news item, means little, unless of course for those hounded by Scientism! smile emoticon

Like · Reply · October 21 at 12:04am · Edited

Anandaswarup Gadde Can you explain a bit more? Some of the friends who visit his wall are interested in data science.

.....

Again no further enlightenment.

Similarity

Pakistan: Music under sieze
Is India the new Pakistan?

Complexity

Complexity Economics by Brian Arthur via Chris Dillow who gives an overview. This was posted before but an article today in a different area reminded of the above.
Is it foolish to model nature's complexirt with equations?:
"Sugihara and others are now starting to apply his methods not just in ecology but in finance, neuroscience and even genetics. These fields all involve complex, constantly changing phenomena that are difficult or impossible to predict using the equation-based models that have dominated science for the past 300 years. For such systems, DeAngelis said, empirical dynamic modeling “may very well be the future.”...............Based on the plankton data as well as work on measles and chicken-pox cases by other researchers, Sugihara and May published a paper in Nature in 1990 showing how Takens’ theorem could help make short-term predictions of some nonlinear systems. The essence of the method involves identifying points in a system’s attractor graph that are close to the point representing the system’s present state. For one or two time steps, one can then predict that the system will evolve similarly to how it did in the past."
An old interview with Floris Takens.

Paduchdamam railubandi 1956

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbf6nycgqAA
Full movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ0E7F-BkVQ 
lyrics in an earlier post
Seems to be adoption of a C.ramchandra tune  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVU-LNCiHWc&feature=related

Olinda Rhododendron Gardens

Yesterday in the Olinda Rhododendron Gardens

Pogo in 1970

Fine-tuning descrimination

Languages and dialects in Sudraka's Mrcchakatika by Dr.C.Rajendran
More on the play by Anu Kumar How the ancient 'Mrcchakatika' time travbelled to become 'Utsav'

Intolerance on the rise in India?

A journalist's reaction:
"Veteran journalist Ravish Kumar is upset and very angry. He is agitated not only at the rising intolerance in India and the systematic targeting of journalists, but also at society in general and “lazy liberals” for failing to demand freedom of speech and a questioning media. In this in-depth interview, Ravish Kumar talks about how the lynching of a Muslim man at Dadri impacted him, why he went off Facebook and Twitter, and how he’s dealing with the pressures building on him."

Two on secularism in India

(via Chapati Mystery)
What is secularism is and where it needs to be headed? by Romilla Thapar
Secularism in India: An interview with Partha Chatterjee

Nava manmadhuda from Pelli Sandadi 1996

I attended the weddin of a relative two years ago and had to sty for a ceremony most of the day and the band kept repeating bthis song and I could not get rid of it since then.

Lyrics in Telugu here

Michael Hudson again on Marx

From the Paradox of Financial Industrialization (These remarks were made at the World Congress on Marxism, 2015, at the School of Marxism, Peking University, October 10, 2015. The presentation was part of a debate with Bertell Ollman (NYU)).:
"Marx expected industrial capitalism to act in its own self-interest by industrializing banking, as Germany was doing along the lines that the French reformer Saint-Simon had urged. However, industrial capitalism has failed to break free of pre-industrial usurious banking practice."
In the comments, he corrects himself on a point about China "I should indeed have said that China was ADDRESSING the “Volume I” problem. No economy will ever solve it, until there is full socialism."
Check also Chris Dillow post Technical Change as a collective action problem

Obama with Marilynne Robinson

The audio of the first part of the conversation as well as an interview by Bill Moyers (last October) in
Marilynne Robinson on America's Fear of the "Sinister Other"
Transcrpt of the interview (first part) with Obama
Interview in 2008 in Paris Review
The second and final part of the interview will come out in two weeks.

Possible alien life?

Weird star: (via 3quraksdaily)"The star is called KIC 8462852, and it’s one of more than a hundred thousand stars that was observed by NASA’s Kepler mission. Kepler stared at these stars, looking for dips in their brightness. These very slight dimmings can be due to many factors, but one is if the star has planets, and one (or more) of them orbits the star in such a way that it passes directly in front of the star as seen from Earth. If it does—what we call a transit—we see a tiny diminution of starlight, usually by less than a percent.

Thousands of exoplanets have been found this way. Usually the planet is on a short orbit, so the dip we see is periodic, repeating every few days, weeks, or months, depending on the size of the planet’s orbit.

KIC 8462852 is a star somewhat more massive, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. It’s about 1,500 light-years away, a decent distance, so it’s too faint to see with the naked eye. The Kepler data for the star are pretty bizarre: There are dips in the light, but they aren’t periodic. They can be very deep; one dropped the amount of starlight by 15 percent, and another by a whopping 22 percent!"

Secrets

How the Tories are allowing big business to design their own tax loopholes by Aditys Chakrabortty
In Australia "The law, which tax transparency campaigners branded a "big step backwards", will exempt private companies with revenues of more than $100 million a year from a requirement to disclose how much tax they pay....

The government had originally argued that the exemption was needed to protect business owners from kidnapping and extortion if their wealth was made public but it dropped that defence after Fairfax Media revealed that security agencies, including the Australian Federal Police, had not even been consulted on whether any threat existed."

From Wikipedia, Senator Wyden about TPP "The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations—like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America—are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement."

From IOndependent October 5: TPP trade areement text won't be made public for four years

The most influential economist in the world?

possibly Du Runsheng "He was one of the primary authors of the rural reform policies China adopted in the early 1980s, which reversed agricultural collectivization and returned control of farmland to individual farm households. It is no exaggeration to say that as a result, hundreds of millions of people were able to escape poverty. If you measure influence by the sheer number of lives affected, then it seems Du would have to rank pretty high."

Near Federation Square, Melbourne