Links, 18th March, 2016 mostly Todd related

No one knows why TYrumpi winning, Here's what a conitive scientist says by Geore Lakoff:
"What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families."
That was via a David Brin post Political Delusions- Do we rationalize our emotional decisions?
That reminded me of Emmanuel Todd work. Here is a very recent article on Todd which has been in a preprint form for some time and linked before:
Testing Todd and matching Murdoch: Global data of historical family characteristics:
" Abstract:
This paper investigates the possibilities for the creation of a global dataset on family and household characteristics. This is done by scrutinizing and comparing two prominent data sources on family system classifications. We first focus on historical data, by comparing Emmanuel Todd's classification of countries by family systems with ethnographic data compiled in George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Qualitative and quantitative tests show that the two datasets frequently agree about family traits. Nonetheless, substantial differences exist that are mostly attributable to the focus of the datasets on different regions, and the difficulties in translating local, descriptive studies to hard data. We therefore emphasize that it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of the two datasets and emphasize that robustness checks are necessary in empirical research into family characteristics. We also compare these historical data with present-day data. This comparison suggests that family characteristics and the values associated with them can persist over long periods."
A 1995 article on Emmanuel Todd Keeping it in the family by Suzi Feay

A Kamal Dasupta song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzaDKwdLJr8&feature=youtu.be
Feroza Begum version and Manna Dey version

Job description for US president

I wonder who of the current US presidential candidates fit this description. "America did not come by that power through its own innate genius. It acquired it, as do all empires, in no small part through war, invasion, subterfuge and exploitation. Spying and lying about it comes with the job description for which Obama applied and was reappointed." From Is Obama worse than Bush? That's beside the point by Gary Younge.

Childhood hero Kotha Venkateswara Babu

I entrusted my marriage to him since I did not trust my father. Here he is with Lalita in 1975 while I was away in Zurich. Sadly, he passed away in 1990 smiling in the face of cancer.

Interesting article and a comment

Why do we work so hard? by Ryan Avent in 'The Economist'
AL comments:
"Although it terrifically dissects the "Cant live without it. Cant live with it" nature of work it rests almost entirely on a single distinction between types of labour in the post-industrial world: immersive,creative & satisfying "cognitive" labour vs physically demanding & emotionally taxing "service" labour. This is a false and politically self-serving distinction. For all of the intellectual satisfaction of cognitive wagework, is it not relevant to point out that newer forms of appropriation (e.g., licenses, royalties and rents based on copyright and patents instead of ownership of products) have been devised by employers to still extract value from the creative class? The social inequality impacts of this self-valorization of creative work are equally profound: Becoming blind to the lives of others, not contributing to social life outside of one's narrow professional class, and the outsourcing of emotional work to caregivers are all mentioned in the article but not causally linked to cognitivization. "

The rich are different

From http://gawker.com/this-photo-of-hillary-clinton-lovingly-hugging-george-w-1764758065
Fitzgerald quote here http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2009/11/rich-are-different-famous-quote.html

More on global economy

More on the political trilemna of the global economy by Dani Rodrik
A fundamental shift in the nature of trade agreements by Tim Taylor who quotes from an article of  Richard Baldwin:

"The megaregionals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, however, are not a good substitute for multilateralization inside the WTO. They will create an international trading system marked by fragmentation (because they are not harmonized among themselves) and exclusion (because emerging trade giants like China and India are not members now and may never be). Whatever the conceptual merits of moving the megaregionals into the WTO, I have argued elsewhere that the actual WTO does not seem well-suited to the task. ... 

"What all this suggests is that world trade governance is heading towards a two-pillar system. The first pillar, the WTO, continues to govern traditional trade as it has done since it was founded in 1995. The second pillar is a system where disciplines on trade in intermediate goods and services, investment and intellectual property protection, capital flows, and the movement of key personnel are multilateralised in megaregionals. China and certain other large emerging markets may have enough economic clout to counter their exclusion from the current megaregionals. Live and let live within this two-pillar system is a very likely outcome."

The new truth about free trade by Robert Reich
An economic lab where theories to die by Noah Smith

Land of contrasts

What New Delhi's Free Clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system by Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post
"It's actually a landrab in the name of a festival": An interview with Vimalendu Jha about WCF. More at The art of not living with dissent and its discontents
Interview with lawyers evicted from Bastar

Two talks on John Nash

John Milnor on John Nash
Pradeep Dubey on John Nash

David Card

A short profile of David Card The Challener by Peter J. Walker
From an earlier interview posted before:
" I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole." 

Lloyd Shapley RIP

Obituary from the Economist

Corporate raiders

Michael Hudson on modern corporate raiders :The commanding heights
William Dalrymple on The East India Company: The original corporate raiders : "The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current."

Jeremy Harding on Castro in Angola

A fascinating long read reviewing several books on Angola.
Apartheid's Last Stand:
"The pending collapse of the Soviet Union played its part in the regional settlement, but Moscow was still pouring in arms when the Cubans took matters into their own hands, and Mandela never failed to thank them for their role. The outcome in Angola, he said, had ‘destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor’. But the price was high. Angolans paid for the shortcomings of a war administration that was slow to learn the arts of war and failed entirely to administer; the population lived under a Soviet-style economy in which the only working outposts were vast, flourishing informal markets – Roque Santeiro was the biggest in Luanda (named for a Brazilian TV soap) – and Sonangol, the state oil company, which lubricated the war effort. South Africa made good use of Savimbi and played cleverly on Washington’s anxieties, compounding the chaos, repression and heartbreak in a mismanaged country: widespread hunger and disease; dispossession and displacement; provincial towns crowded with landmine victims; hospitals full of ailing civilians but bare of medication; ANC militants jailed in pits by their leaders, Swapo fighters tortured as traitors by their commissars; hundreds of Angolan ‘fractionist’ dissidents dead or jailed. Apartheid was a creature that fumbling, self-interested democracies in the West were unwilling to slay. Only another kind of monster, with friends in Havana, could point it towards the exit."

Labour mobility in India

I am not really of this but interesting if correct.
Why is labor mobility in India so low?: "Migration from rural areas of India to the city is surprisingly low compared with other large developing countries, leaving higher paying job opportunities unexploited. This research shows that well-functioning rural insurance networks are in part responsible for this misallocation in the labor market, creating incentives that keep adult males in the village."

Imprinting

Penguin swims 5,000 miles every year for reunion with the man who saved his life
Learning who is your mother: The behaviour of imprinting

Links 11th March, 2016

Parable of the polygons
Fighting draughts
Land for ladies
'Stunning' operation regenerates eye's lens
Syntax is not unique to human language
In defence of (some) economics by Chris Dillow

Dani Rodrik's overview of current politics

The politics of anger : "If one lesson of history is the danger of globalization running amok, another is the malleability of capitalism. It was the New Deal, the welfare state, and controlled globalization (under the Bretton Woods regime) that eventually gave market-oriented societies a new lease on life and produced the post-war boom. It was not tinkering and minor modification of existing policies that produced these achievements, but radical institutional engineering.

Moderate politicians, take note."

An update on SRI

(via Shambu Prasad whose 2006 paper on adoptions of SRI in India was linked before)) SRI: A practice that transforms lives of women
See also The seeds of hope "She reaped 3,223 kilos of TRY 3 variety of paddy with just two kilos of the seed planted in 50 cents in 130 days. It was the highest yield adopting SRI method in the State for 2014-15. The award carried Rs.5 lakhs cash and a medal.....Women involved in farming activities is nothing new but there are only handful of them who are farmers. Though 75 percent of the agriculture work from sowing seeds to planting saplings, removing weeds and harvesting paddy are done by women, not many go on to become a farmer. “They find it difficult to balance between household duties and field work,” says Prasanna, “but what they miss here is just little knowledge about technical inputs in agriculture and expertise in man management. I focussed on these points and that stood me in good stead,” says Prasanna."

Back to some mathematics?

My wife Jhansi thinks that recent struggles with mathematics suited me and that I should ontinue doing some mathematics. May be I will.

Did Dayabhaga help bengali wives in the nineteenth century?

From Reflections on Kulin polygamy: Nistarini Debi's Sekeley Katha by Malavika Karlelar
"Calling it 'wholesale polygamy', H.H. Risley commented that 'several middle-aged Kulins are known to have had more than a hundred wives and to have spent their lives on a round of visits to their mothers-in-law' (Risley 1915: 166). Not unexpectedly, many of these women who were widowed or deserted found their way to the brothels of Calcutta (Banerjee 1993). According to one official estimate of the mid-nineteenth century, out of the 12,000 prostitutes in the growing metropolitan area, almost 10,000 were the wives, widows or daughters of Kulin Brahmins (Chakrabarty 1963)......
It would not be out of place to draw attention to the fact that Bengal is governed by the Dayabhaga school of law which, in the absence of a son, grandson and great grandson, gives the wife a right not only in joint family property but also in her husband's self-acquired assets. The link between sati and women's inheritance has been discussed elsewhere (Nandy 1980; Mukherjee, 1957); here, it needs to be pointed out that the more liberal law of inheritance in Bengal appeared only to harden attitudes towards wives. Unwanted widows became prostitutes and satis as Kulin wives and widows were never welcome in their husbands' homes."
Some discussion of Benali famil names and castes here.

Travancore sisters and a cousin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CqBuuIYL_0

Obscure songs from an unreleased film

by Dolly Katrak (Dolly Kwatra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=us79cQh8Nxg&ebc=ANyPxKrDAAmaZmA7jLziPfBdekB6kPAr8Jb55Q0URg5lB2HPIr1Oe_eZ8NNfmLD1J2X3oDZbPjpOShfRBbT30Rt6gI9tidXJIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF6Gz3ArF5A&feature=youtu.be

India related links, March 6, 2016

Masters of their own world by Nahla Nainar :

"Ahead of International Women’s Day (March 8), we take a look at how self-help groups have raised the profile of rural women as successful entrepreneur"

Reality that stinks by Kuldeep Kumar : "..the belief that market forces operate solely on the basis of economic logic and eventually break down caste-based social structure is not borne out by the prevalent business practices and attitudes. "

Kanhaiya Kumar speech

This article from 2011 may explain some of current animosity against Sheldon Polloch in some Hindu circles Columbia Univeristy Professor broadens access to Sanskrit, the ancient language of the elite
On Mahishasura http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/jnu-smriti-irani-speech-lets-not-fight-jharkhand-tribals-say-as-they-pray-to-mahishasur/

Atiyah at 86

"The crazy part of mathematics is when an idea appears in your head. Usually when you’re asleep, because that’s when you have the fewest inhibitions. The idea floats in from heaven knows where. It floats around in the sky; you look at it, and admire its colors. It’s just there. And then at some stage, when you try to freeze it, put it into a solid frame, or make it face reality, then it vanishes, it’s gone. But it’s been replaced by a structure, capturing certain aspects, but it’s a clumsy interpretation." from 
Michael Atiyah's imaginative state of mind

Daisy Rockwell explains why she translated Tamas again

Tamas 3.0: How to retranlate novel already translated twice "Tamas is one of those rare Hindi novels that has been translated not once, but twice. The first translation, by the indefatigable translator of Hindi and Urdu, Jai Ratan, was published in 1981.

The second was undertaken by Sahni himself, who came to realise there were serious problems with the Ratan translation, and published in 2001. Ratan’s translation is marked by frequent omissions, inaccuracies and outright flights of fancy. Whilst Sahni’s translation corrects these, he was unable to resist the impulse, common among authors translating their own writing, to edit and revise the original work. Consequently, changes appear mysteriously here and there when the inspiration hit him."

Earlier article by Daisy Rockwell and Jai Ratan's translation at arvindguptatoys. More on Jai Ratan's translations  and some good translations by Daisy Rockwell. Her translation does not seem currently available for purchase.

More Geeta Dutt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6uheSnJdEw
Version song from Chori Chori
one of her best from Parneeta 1953 chand hai wohi
Another one with Meenakumari from Tamasha 1952

Manan Ahmed on the recent Sheldon Pollock controversy

Why Sheldon Pollock "This attack on Pollock has a genealogy, more precise and more general, than what is readily evident– the Hindutva Right has long targeted historical production on Indian past that was anti-caste, anti-communal or feminist, and it has long targeted Sheldon Pollock for articulating how political imagination frames historical thinking."
Some contributions of Sheldon Pollock:
Sheldon pollock's introduction to Indian Knowledge Systems on the eve of colonialism
Sanskrit Knowledge Systems Project Some more here

Virat Kohli sang this recently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ioONenaAQ
Lyrics and translation from Mr. and Mrs. 55

Ramarao Kanneganti on 'Pollution and Urbanization'

Pollution and Urbanization includes links and comments

Still doing mathematics

Two books ( by Shedon Pollock and Amitav Ghosh)

seem to be available online.
'In an antique land' by Amitav Ghosh and a long meditation on the first four novels of Amitav Ghosh by Jesper Hansen
'Language of Gods in the World of Men' by Sheldon Pollock and an article by the same author 'Crisis in the Classics'. Check also https://archive.org/details/LanguageOfTheGodsInTheWorldOfMen
P.S. I had doubts about fictionalized version of history in Amitav Ghosh novels. But I did not realize that Ghost started in the subaltern group and one part of 'In an antique land' first appeared there. Jesper Hansen explains
"Ghosh’s argument here is in line with the one presented by the Subaltern Studies Group and also by Spivak. Power and the making of history - even the act of writing itself - are closely intertwined, and in the novel they are closely associated with the elite (wazirs, sultans, etc.). Thus Ghosh does not have direct access to Bomma and his life; rather he has access to Ben Yiju, so Bomma’s consciousnessmbecomes what Spivak calls a “negative consciousness”: a consciousness created by a (deconstructive) interpretation of the letters of the Geniza in which they were originally found. One of the questions is thus how much interpretation - and implicit in this question how much deviation from the verifiable “truth” - should be allowed. Ghosh’s answer to the question is definitely that fiction should be
allowed to see the possibilities in the facts rather than let the facts limit the fiction, which is also suggested by Claire Chambers’ argument that Ghosh is committed
“to the view that fiction is as valid a way of explaining events as the more
prestigious authority of scientific reason.” " 

About some recent events in India

Goon's Justice, Mob's Democracy by Rajeev Dhavan (via Akshay Reulagedda)

The Age of Fracture

by Daniel T.Rodgers was mentioned in favourable terms by David Warsh recently. Here is a summary by L.D.Burnett. One passage from the summary "I glean three important points that are crucial to understanding Rodgers’s text as a whole:
1. “Intellectual history” or “the history of ideas” not only can, but must, look beyond the writings and lives of those who considered themselves to be intellectuals, or who were considered as such by others. Ronald Reagan, an actor-turned-politician, and Peggy Noonan, a political hack writer, are just as important to understanding American thought as Noam Chomsky or Judith Butler."

P{art of a review by Corey Robin is discussed at CT.

An old favourite

I have been watching videos of this performance since 1970 but did not know the background. From Rolling Stone:
"[Richie] Havens wasn't supposed to be the first act to open the festival; that slot originally was intended for the band Sweetwater, but that band wound up being stuck in traffic. Backstage, co-organizer Michael Lang approached Havens and practically begged him to go on instead. "It had to be Richie – I knew he could handle it," Lang later wrote.

After performing a half-dozen songs, Havens ran out of material – until, he later said, he remembered "that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was: freedom." Havens began chanting that word over and over, backed by his second guitarist and conga player, and eventually segued into the gospel song "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," which he had heard in church as a child. The combined, surging medley wasn't just a crowd-pleaser; it later became a highlight of the Woodstock movie, which also immortalized Havens' orange dashiki. (What many didn't know at the time was that Havens wore dentures, which also gave his singing voice a unique tone.) "My fondest memory was realizing that I was seeing something I never thought I'd ever see in my lifetime – an assemblage of such numbers of people who had the same spirit and consciousness," he later recalled of Woodstock to Rolling Stone."

Good Bye to Pure Mathematics

Hopefully I do not have to do any more research in pure mathematics. The remaining difficulties in the last paper seem to be sorted out. The collaborators will complete writing it and I doubt whether I will even read it. Good Bye to pure mathematics before I complete 75. Back to Price Equation.

Religion and the secular left

"My hope is that the analysis presented here may help us better understand one of the crucial paradoxes of the contemporary world. This is the question of why the decline of radical left wing secular movements is so often accompanied by the flourishing of religious movements that can be harnessed by extreme right wing forces." says Alpa Shaw in Religion and the secular left: Subaltern studies Birsa Munda and the Maists Apprently Birsa Munda story will come out in a new book by Synil Khilnani.
Report on a recent paper 'Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality' (behind a firewall) in Washington Post and a discussion by Razib Khan who quotes from the paper "Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality."

The problems here are social as much as everything. You are seen as weak if you don’t steal.

Post-war Iraq:'Everybody is corrupt from top to bottom. including me' says iraq's anti-corrption chief.
I heard similar thins in India. In dowry negotiation 'The salary is 5000 rupees but extra earnins are 20000 rupees foe month'.

A nation which can't cope with a few anti-national slogans isn't much of a nation.

http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/can-india-really-not-cope-with-a-few-anti-national-slogans-1278410?pfrom=home-lateststories

Turbulance in 'The Starry Night'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMerSm2ToFY
There are several articles like this :

“In a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind.”

David Shulman wins Israel Prize

Education Minister Naftali Bennett approved Prof. David Dean Shulman for the award, stating that his affiliation with left-wing activist group Ta'ayush has nothing to do with the honor.
Review of Dark Hope by David Shulman

During Azuri 1980 visit to india

An interesting article for filmi buffs http://hindi-films-songs.com/articles/Azurie-kaustubh-pingle.pdf via a comment by SK in Richard Singer's post https://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/azurie/#comment-12270

One of the ways that NRIs can help rural India

with a few phone calls. But think of JagLAG group http://forbesindia.com/article/30-under-30/guneet-kaur-isha-khandelwal-and-parijata-bhardwaj-bringing-law-to-the-land/39601/1 and their current status http://scroll.in/article/803821/how-the-chhattisgarh-police-succeeded-in-hounding-out-those-who-questioned-it

Mathematics seems to be hard

I have been trying to do mathematics again with a collaborator after a long gap. It takes long to understand even the stuff one used to know and longer to sort out simple mistakes. After a few days with a lot of help from Peter, I got into thinking mathematics. But it was difficult to put those things on paper and when I tried they kept changing. Finally after a month, I have been able to write six pages which may help. The ability to keep a problem in front and thinking about a problem for days which I acquired late in life still seems to be there and strangely it seems to make me feel physically better. At the moment I can walk longer and work more than before in the garden if there is enough time. What is surprising is that it takes so long to get some thing sensible. If it is like this in mathematics (for me) I wonder how much I goof outside mathematics. One guess is that many ideas and words are not precise in one's thinking and there is a sort of band width to them. In a subject like mathematics, there are mechanisms of proof which helps sorting things out and fitting them together. It is not so clear cut in many other areas.

Some Irish writers

I am not a literary person but read some stuff off and on for no particular reason. Once I read J.M. Synge plays like 'Riders to the sea' which I found moving. Apparently there is anothergood Irish writer who is not so well know. 3quarks daily links to this article about James Stephens. May be the clue is as Marianne Moore says 
"The Irish say that your trouble is their
trouble and your joy their joy?
I wish I could believe it;
I am troubled, dissatisfied, I am Irish."
Wikipedia article about 'Riders to the sea' and it has a link to the play.

Dietrich Vollarth remembers a paper of Greg Clark

I have read this very peripherally and am posting this for future reference since I am busy with other things now.
Why is not the whole world developed?

Maryland's Route 40 role in Civil rights Movement

The Junction:The Cold War, and the African Diplomats of Maryland's Route 40 by Nicholaqs Murray Vachon via J.K.Mohana Rao:
"But the significance of the Route 40 incidents does not stem from the success or failure of the campaign for civil rights legislation it produced. Rather, it lies in the fact that such a campaign occurred, born on a Maryland highway out of the collision between foreign and domestic forces. In their attempts to end discrimination against African diplomats, civil rights organizations and the Kennedy administration alike enacted strategies that revealed the difficulties of comprehending the various forces at work on Route 40. Both groups made missteps as they tried to navigate simultaneously the politics of Cold War, Civil Rights, and colonial Africa, and ultimately addressed the uniqueness of the Route 40 incidents with uncharacteristic actions. The Kennedy administration, having vowed not to pursue civil rights legislation during its first year in the White House, led a campaign for public accommodations legislation in Maryland. And civil rights organizations, having removed themselves from the international sphere since the 1940s, promoted a policy that would benefit the United States’ global struggle against the Soviet Union. The Route 40 incidents, therefore, serve as a window to the issues of the 1960s, a lens through which to observe the uncertainties created in the context of a changing world."
Pedro Sanjuan's obituary

Working with Peter Scott

Doing mathematics again

since January 13 after a gap of at least two years. Even before, after retirement in 2015, it was only off and on work when Peter Scott wrote to me on older joint projects.It is a bit strange.but because a collaborator was in constant contact, it was not difficult to start working. First it was difficult to understand the statements and more difficult to understand proofs. After a little while I could start seeing some things in the particular topic. But when I started writing down arguments what I thought that I have seen did not work out the same way and after several attempts, the proofs were nothing like what I imagined first. Finally I was able to get some traction on the topic and it is looking progressivly clearer. This is in a topic where I supposedly developed expertise over years since the early 1960s and with an active mathematician constantly answering my questions.I wonder why one so easily responds on social topics with opinions and comments, partcularly on Facebook. I wonder whether Facebook is trivializing discussions.

Review of a biography of Michael Harrinton, the author of 'The Other America'

The (still) relevant Socialistby Harold Meyerson reviews The Other American by Maurice Isserman.
An article on Michael Harrington by Maurice Isserman

Ramarao Kanneganti among mathermaticians

Next to him are Peter Scott from The University of Michigan, Hyam Rubinstein a nd Chuck Miller from The University of Melbourne. Ramrao's homepage
 

Rohith Vemula story

from severtal people Rohith Vemula-An Unfished Portrait
I am enclosing some of the comments I made on different FB walls: Benjamin P Kaila, Pramadahnath Sastry, and J.K. Mohana Rao. I made contacts with some Dalit activists through Benjamin Kaila about ten years ago.
1)I am a bit surprised by this statement in the article "He says that there were only a few casteist elements on campus and most of the teachers were secular at the Hindu College in Guntur." If it is true, there is hope. I used to chat with people of my father's generation who studied in this college. My impressions is that many kammas who studied here in thise days resented the brahmin dominance ( many leaders in political parties , Pattabhi Seetharamaiah, Perepa Mrityijajudu... , were brahhmins) and cut their teeth there for political representation and later dominance. Anyway, my imporession is some of the castes who came up, did that throuh cooperative societies, hostels, entrepreneurs who were helped by their communities to start new enterprises (kammas, Nadars, Iranian chai restaurants..). Most communities have poor people and in our endoamous societies people tend to help their relatives. So one strategy may be somewhat seperate casteist enterprises by dalits.
2) Related thoughts from a few years ao (some of the links do not work now) http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com.au/.../a-report-about...
3)More recent. For the last ten years, I have been invoved in some dalit struggles but from afar. Two years ao, i met a dalit boy who finished B.Tech. via resrvations , but could not find a job and was working as a agricultural labourer along with his parents. Interestingly a brahmin classmate of his who came up through regular channels did well and immediately ot a job. She liked the boy and wanted to marry him. He did not want to marry until he got a job and helped his parents. I advised him to take training and job-placement courses and forced some money on him He went to Hyderabad but tried to save money on food and got sick. Meanwhile I wrote to several people for advice and placement possibilities. There was no response from any dalit activists I contacted. I saw an advertisement about a dalit placement aency in Vijayawada and could not decide whether it was bogus or not. One brahmin Ph.d. student and another non-dalit IT professional Avineni Bhaskar offered to help. Meanwhile the boy got an apprenticeship in an a government enterprice, just enouh to get by, and is progressing. It seems that dalits are not really using their market power to build enough institutions in which they can help themselves. There should be some focus on building cooperative socities, institutions which help dalit entrepreneurs... And role models are movin away to cities or foreign countries to avoid oppression back home. Some stray thoughts from an outsider.

Death of Dalit student

Rohit Davula: The student who died for Dalit Rights (from BBC News)
A documentary from 2011 I'M DALIT HOW ARE YOU? (via Madhukar Shukla)
Ancient prejudice, modern inequality by Anjaya vajpaye from The Hindu
MHRD's Trail of Letters Hounding Dalit Students of UoH (via Lavanya Kolluri)

From The Hindu 19/01/2016 (via Rahul Siddharthan)

Sean Rice on Price Equation

Peter Scott has braught me a copy of Sean H. Rice: "Evolutionary Theory:Mathematical and Conceptual Foundations" which is not available in our library. It seems excellent, though, with my weak background in biology, it may take several moths to get some grip on the topics. At the end of Chapter 6, he says:
"In deriving equation 6.4, Price started with only a basic description of the kind of quantities involved in evolution; phenotypes of parents, phenotypes of their offsprings, and numbers of offspring. He then asked mhat mathematical relations must hold between these basic pieices, without imposing any further restrictions.
The resulting equation initially seems so simple that it is hard to seehow it relates to actual evolutionary questions. When we look closely at this result, though, we see that it shows an underlying unity that was obscured by our special case models. It also provides a foundation on which to build new models, a fact that we will use in the following chapters of the book.

Not all fields of science have the kind of foundational analytical results that we have used in this chapter. In many subjects, building special case models is the only approach to theory. It is hardly surprising, though, that evolutionary biology has such foundations. Since the initial work of Darwin and Wallace, it has seemed to many people that at its core evolution has simple and universal principles. What we have seen in this chapter is that phrasing these universal principles mathematically need not narrow them, but rather allows us to see their full significance."

With Peter Scott

Friend since 1968 and coll;aborator since 1986. Some of the hardest work (and Peter says the same) that I have done is with Peter, mostly on problems that bothered me for a long time. Though it is not popular, that work gave both of us a lot of satisfaction. That is how it goes in research.  Even though, we have not met for three years and I have not done any mathematics for two years, we started working as soon as we met and could find a small mistake in one of our papers to be completed.

Depressing links

RBS tells investors:'Sell everything'
More at Automatic Earth
Aaron Swartz died three years ago
NASA study about the end of ivilization
HBR on income inequality
Africa hit by China's woes
Gender descrimination in scientific credit
The case of Lise Meitner

Economic prosperity and religiosity

Eighty per cent of Indians consider religion 'very important' in their lives, against 3% Chinese from Scroll.in
Karl Marx and some others on religion from Wikipedia

Sankranti days

A film song from my childhood. More about the film here.

Telugu dhoti those days: NTR in Shavukaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSlWcbc_jD0
And the new generation from https://www.facebook.com/Tollyfilms/photos/a.286380191479117.66282.257212947729175/873667872750343/?type=3&pnref=story:

David Bowie in Australia

David Bowie - Let's Dance (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2HWuR2mq5M
from The Guardian article via Chapati Mystery

Nearly 400,000 people under siege in Syria

Communities under siege in Syria

Links, January 12, 2016

Bloomberg Business on Bowie Bonds:"The man behind “The Man Who Sold the World” was the first recording artist to go to Wall Street to tap the future earnings of his music, paving the way for a thriving market for esotericsecurities backed by everything from racehorse stud rights to commercial washing machines."

Razib Khan discusses in a thread "The secret of our success" by Joseph Henrich: "I’m done with Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the field of cultural evolution (the author is one of the major people behind the idea of WEIRD psychology). For myself, one of the main upsides was that the book had a lot of empirical illustrations I wasn’t familiar with. Unfortunately some of the references to genomics are out of date, because he was writing the book in 2014. Also, I found the chapter on language somewhat unsatisfying."

Lot of links on development in this post by Chris Blattman (also in the comments)

MinHacks discussion of an article in The Guardian on CBT vs psuchoanalysis 'Psychotherapies and the space between us' : "There’s an in-depth article at The Guardianrevisiting an old debate about cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) versus psychoanalysis that falls into the trap of asking some rather clichéd questions."
Language Log on Spoken Sanskrit. Check also the discussion on Suresh Kolichala's wall

Peter Scott visting

for six weeks. I met him in 1968 (Liverpool. He left for University of Michigan in the mid eighties) and have been actively collaborating with him since 1994 though I have not been active mathematically in the recent years. But we have some work to complete and hope to finish it in the next few weeks. So, there will be very few postings in the next few weeks: most probably things that I find interesting but have not read carefully or done any backround checking (not that I do it all the time).

Meet Aravinda and Ravi

The inspiration behind Shah Rukh Khan Movie Swades
There have been posts about Ravi Kuchimanchi before. From one of them, this:
 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ravi-kuchimanchi-tapping-the-potential-of-non-resident-indians-to-help-the-rural-poor/

P.S. The report seems to be more or less what was reported by Madhukar Shukla in 2008. Internet search has not yielded any further information.

Sharon Lowen's Odissi dance in Swarna kamalam

Sharon Lowen notices Minai's post from 2012 on her dance nd responds to Minai's queries. Minai is pleased.
Found: Sharon Lowen's Odissi dance in Swarnakamalam (Telugu, 1988)

Status and prestige

While reading 'The secret of our success', I was reminded that status seemed to be particularly important among Indians and started searching. It seems that there are some evolutionary reasons mentioned in a few places. On the otherhand, Joseph Henrich discusses its positive role in learning, imitation and fostering cooperation. It is also in this paper co-written by him: The Big Man Mechanism: How prestige fosters cooperation and creates prosocial leaders
On the otherhand, rembering that status and prestige are not quite the same, it seemed that among many Indians that I met (others too but more intense among Indians), status pursuit seems to be for its own sake. Some of the conversations from Telugu people from coastal Andhra who normally do not read books outside what is needed in their professions: " I have not really met any who is more intelligent than me". " Same in my case". " I have international standing. What do these people think?" The first two were reactions to my statement about some wonderful mathematicians that I met like William Thurston. The third was somebody who resents lack of promotion from a lecturership and has not been treated with great respect and admiration in a Telugu party. 

Savitri's first film

It seems to be Samsaram 1951 (Telugu). She was selected for the role of heroine but too nervous and was replaced and had a small role in the film. In the dubbed (remade ?) Tamil version with the same, she is standing on the extreme left in the back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cklW1BKPgeQ

A dubbed film and a song

In Prema Lekhalu 1953 A. M. Rajah starts the duet. In the Hindi version Lata Mangeshkar. The Telugu version here, video not available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmNU6GrY810&feature=youtu.be
Hindi version by Lata Mangeahkar and Mukesh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sver9O8K3t8&feature=youtu.be
In the Tamil version Avan  is similar to the Telugu one, both sung by A.M.Rajah and Jikki. Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLiTZKt-G9Y&feature=youtu.be

Reading 'The secret of our success'

Just finished reading 'The secret if our success' by Joseph Henrich. Because of the imminent arrival of a collaborator, I rushed through the later parts of this very interesting book. Because of the scope of the book, there are bound to be some discrepancies. I will probably start with chapters 6, 15, and 17 in the next reading. Razib Khan will probably write a detailed review soon. Apart from saying that it is very interesting and that I will read it again, I cannot say any thing concrete now.

Mother and baby wars

Sazanne Sadedin last year in Aeon War in the womb
Carl Zimmer in Sptember this year A pregnancy souveir: Cells that not your own

Idli

From The tale of Idli: "K.T. Acharya, the food historian, speculates that the modern idli might have originated in the region that is now Indonesia (also about what ancient characters ate), which has had a long tradition of fermented food. According to him, cooks employed by the Hindu kings of the local kingdom may have invented the steamed idli there, and brought the recipe to India during the period 800-1200 CE. But this theory is being questioned by modern food historians such as Lizzie Collingham, Kristen Gremillion, Raymond Grew, Makhdoom Al-Salaqi (Syria), Zahiruddin Afiyaab (Lebanon). "
Some information about K.T.Acharya here. Another Indianfood expert Pushpesh Pant
More on what Rama and Sita ate (by D.Balasubramanian, here too) rom K.T. Acharya: "Lords Rama, Lakshmana and Devi Sita ate a vast menu that contained fruits, leafy vegetables, rice and meat. Achaya quotes a book stating that Rama and Lakshmana, while in exile at Dandakaranya, hunted animals for the pot, and that a favourite of Sita was rice cooked with venison, vegetables and spices (the dish called Mamsabhutadana). Of course, Lord Rama enjoyed eating the fruit ber (zizyphus) that Sabari tasted and gave him." Probably more in his book, some quotes here.

Pentagon carbon footprint

Missing from the Paris agreement: the Pentagon's monstrous boot print (via Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

A passage from "The secret of our success" by Joseph Henrich

From chapter 10, 'Intergroup competetion shapes cultural evolution': "As I discuss intergroup competetion, keep in mind that there are manyu other cultural evolutionary forces that do not favour proscial institutions. When the fotrces of intergroup competetion are spent and weakened, success-biased cultural learning (or purely rational self-interest) will cause individuals to seek out any "cracks" in their roups' institutions to manipulate or exploit for their own benefit or that of their kith and kin.Ovet time, history suiggests that all prosocial institutions age and eventually collapse at the hands of self-interest, unless they are renewed by the dynamics of interroup competetion.That is, although it may take a lon time, individuals and coalitions figure out how to beat or manipulate the system to their own ends, and these techniques spread and corrode any prosocial effects."

Henrich takes great trouble to explain his ideas lucidly and many of the statements are based on research and often he gives references. But there are none for the above. As Razib Khan said "...I think that he wrote at an unfortunate time when it comes to drawing lessons from human genomics, because some of his assertions have been falsified! (he wrote the preface in January of 2015, a year ago)."
I think that it is an excellent book but the statements should be treated cautiously and one should look for reviews and such for comments.

More on abc conjecture

Hope Rekindled for perplexing Proof from Quanta Magazine
An earlier article in Nature by Davide Castlevecchi: The biggest mystery in mathematics: Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof

Razib Khan on 'The secret of our success'

"I’m about halfway through The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Yes, it’s as good as readers have told me. But, I’ll be honest and state that I knew most of it already in the generality, though not the ethnographic details (for example, I did not know that Inuit ate deer feces like “berries”; thanks for that Joe!). Part of this has to due with the fact that I’ve kept up on the author’s research since 2004, when I encountered his models of skill decay in Tasmanian Aboriginals. And, I’m familiar with the fields of cultural evolution more broadly. Additionally, I’ll bring it up in my review, but I think that he wrote at an unfortunate time when it comes to drawing lessons from human genomics, because some of his assertions have been falsified! (he wrote the preface in January of 2015, a year ago)." in the recent post.

Men coping

Woman coping

via Facebook Feed

Voices of women

Rahul Banerjee : Here is an invigorating quote from nineteenth century Argentinian feminists to start the year on a revolutionary note - 
“fed up as we are with so many tears and so much misery; fed up with the never ending drudgery of children (dear though they are); fed up with asking and begging; of being a plaything for our infamous exploiters or vile husbands, we have decided to raise our voices in the concert of society and demand, yes, demand our bit of pleasure in the banquet of life.”
- La Voz de la Mujer (The Voice of The Woman, the mouth piece of Argentinian Anarcha-Feminists)

 From Women writing in India, vol1, Songs of the nuns, sixth century BC. Sumangalalatamata, pages 68-69 :

A woman well set free! How free I am

 How wonderfully free from kitchen drudgery.

Free from harsh grip of hunger,

 And from empty cooking pots.

 Free too of that unscrupulous man,

 The weaver of sunshades.

 Calm now, and serene I am,

All lust and hatred purged.

To the shade of the spreading tree I go

 And contemplate my happiness.

And one from Mutta: 

So free I am, so gloriously free,

 Free from three petty things-

 From mortar, from pestle and from my twisted lord,

Freed from rebirth and death I am,

And all that held me down

 Is hurled away.

Seymour Hersh on military strategies in Syria

Military to Military in LRB. This sort of perception is around for some time but I think Obama is playin a deeper game. He wants continued US economic hegemony and easy solutions in the Middle East may help Russia and China.

Culture driven genetic evolution

Lactase persistence (the ability to of older children, adoloscents, and adults to access milk's nutrition) is apparently 63% in North India and 23% in the South. This is from Chapter 6 of 'The secret of our success' by Joseph  Henrich, where he outlines three best documented cases examples of culture driven genetic evolution, the others being 'blue eyes' and booze-inhibiting genes co-evolving with rice cultivation. Apparently, these evolutions took different routes in different places.
P.S. Another difference between North and South India was mentioned by Emmanuel Todd. He distinguishes the North and South Indian family systems as Exogamous Community Family and Assymetrical Community Family respectively. Part of the difference, outside Kerala which is more matrilinear, comes from the marriage stem where the children of brother and sister can marry. Apparently, this gives women a bigger role in the society though not as much as in matrilinear societies.

Two posts from Songs of Yore

The latest by Shalan Lal "During the last April I went along with some friends to see the arrival of the New Yorker Hudsonian migratory birds called “Godwit”, who were supposed to be flying back to Canada, just a journey about two hundred miles from New York. But their magnetic field in their heads changed due to too much electrification in New York and they got in a different current of the air (AK also noticed this in his reading of the news and mentioned it in his email to me on another matter) and made a non-stop four thousand miles journey to England. Some say they got unwittingly in another caravan of migratory birds and made off-beam and very wide of the mark journey." Story here.That starts her off on bird songs in Hindi films and some others.
and an old puzzle "Twin songs: A front runner and a laggard" by AK; "If you somehow block the memory of the male versions and listen to the female versions of the above songs, they are technically sound and quite melodious. Then why even Lata versions pale in comparison to their male counterparts seems inexplicable. Perhaps it has to do with something abstract in the way our senses respond to when the same song is sung by a male and a female singer, and we always seem to be favouring the former."
Some theories of music

Links 1st January, 2016

Economists' evolving understanding of the zero-rate liquidity trap from The Economist
One country, but no single market from The Economist: "India’s excitable politics is blocking the best chance of promoting growth"
The concentration of U.S. wealth from Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis
Will "innovation from the edge" help with global warming? by David Warsh at Economic Principals
Turkey's dangerous game in Syria from WSJ and Turkey's campaign against kurdish militants takes toll on civilians from NYTimes
Angela Merkel says that refugee crisis is 'opportunity' for Germany in New Year's Eve address 
Joseph Henrich Edge page