Refugees at Dachau

The refugees housed at Dachau: 'Where else should I live?' “Like many other German towns, Dachau has made huge efforts to help refugees. The small community of only 45,000 inhabitants is housing about 350 refugees in the communal shelter. It is planning to open another shelter for up to 100 people in the coming months, and may see numbers rise given the current influx. Faced with such pressure on the available space, the town may not rehouse the Dachau camp residents any time soon. Hammermann, the director of the memorial site, says she could accept a compromise that would still see some of the buildings used as residential space, and the rest for exhibitions and seminars. Negotiations between the town and the state of Bavaria over the future use of the herb garden will take place this winter.”
This was from three years ago. Current situation?

Why don’t Americans take more vacations?

Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day 

Persistence of practices

During a recent trip to India, I noticed that though there is less resistance to divorce and remarriage than before, some of the attitudes widows seem unchanged. Even in the cases where widows regular saree and use bindu, when they are invited to functions either there is no bindu or it is put on the entrance of the house. This was in one area. Some practices related to ceremonies have strengthened; even those which were not observed frequently before like clothing ceremonies, and several ceremonies accompany marriages. This also seems to be true with Indian diaspora practicing various ceremonies when they buy new cars to houses. I started for looking for articles about change and persistence of practices, particularly associated with religion. In an interview with The Hindu, Daud Ali showed interest in such studies. But so far I could find only articles on friendship among the articles he authored. Perhaps there are more. Also, it seems difficult for people living abroad to observe current practices which have a lot of regional variation. Here is one more on friendship take from a book on ‘Same-sex love in India’. Unlike many interpretations of Gita, it emphsizes friendship between Krishna and Arjuna Ancient Indian materials by Ruth Vanita. Any pointers are welcome. 

Dalits among Gadars

Babu Ram and probably Pridhvi Singh Azad
Found these while listening to a story from Aruna Tella:”Aruna Tella tells me that he jumped from the train near Ongole while being transported from Andamans to Rajahmundry. He was from the Gadar party. He crawled to Mukhtinuthalapadu about four miles from Ongole. There was in the village who knew Hindi( this was in early 1920s) and his shackles were broken and are still on display in the village. He was recaptured and sent to Rajahmundry. Apparently Alluri Seetharama Raju tried to free him but failed and died soon after. So this was just before 1924. The Wikipedia entry says that he was a ‘harijan’ and also a Rajput from Punjab. He was a minister in Bhimsen Sachar cabinet in 1949 and died at the age of 96. His autobiography seems available at least in libraries and the google version confirms that he was in Ongole and Rajahmundry. He also visited Russia on the advice of Chandrasekhar Azad and a book on this trip is also available from libraries. More information welcome.”

A mosquitoe repellent

CDC lists oil of lemon eucalyptus as comparable to DEET for mosquitoes 

Devesh Kapur on social science research about India in USA

In the US, there is a rise of social science research about India – but it has little policy impact
“When asked how many of these expensive randomised control trials had moved the policy needle in India, Arvind Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the Indian government (who announced in June that he would be stepping down from the post), was hard pressed to find a single one that had helped him address the dozens of pressing policy questions that came across his table. By contrast, the compiling of just some key facts on learning outcomes by the non-governmental organisation Pratham has had a big impact on policy discussions in education, because it is backed by a degree of specific knowledge and engagement that is more credible and persuasive. One could question whether “relevance” or “timeliness” are a valid standard for good research – yes they are, when those are precisely the reasons given to funders for these projects.

One should acknowledge the wide range of social science type work in US business schools, demography, and even development economics that has been adding to a body of knowledge about India. Nonetheless, a not inconsiderable number of research articles in top journals elide facts or simply interpret them selectively, relying on reviewers’ ignorance about India. That would normally not matter, but because they are published in prestigious journals, they effectively create “new facts” and become the gatekeepers of knowledge in that area.”

Lukaku Dummy

He did not touch the ball but look what he did Romelu Lukaku Against Japan during the last moments

The monster has been with us all along

Forget it By Corey Robin

Interesting new paper by Daniel Gilbert and others

but based on relatively small samples (20-100) of Harvard graduate students:
Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgement.
Abstract:
Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
Discussion at Sciencedaily Problem with solving problems and Marginal Revolution Why Sexism and Racism Never Diminish–Even When Everyone Becomes Less Sexist and Racist

Daniel Gilbertis the author often best seller Stumbling on Happiness which has been mentioned before a few times in this blog. See also Overton window.

An autobiographical essay (talk) from Arundhati Roy

Long read. IN WHAT LANGUAGE DOES RAIN FALL OVER TORMENTED CITIES? wonderful read. But whenever I read Roy, I am reminded of the words of caution from Leela Naidu http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com/2012/05/while-reading-about-balraj-sahni-i-came.html

Periodic Table using AI

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/06/25/ai-recreates-chemistrys-periodic-table-elements/ 

“Zhang hopes that in the future, scientists can harness Atom2Vec’s knowledge to discover and design new materials. “For this project, the AI program was unsupervised, but you could imagine giving it a goal and directing it to find, for example, a material that is highly efficient at converting sunlight to energy,” Zhang said.

His team is already at work on version 2.0 of their AI program, which will focus on cracking an intractable problem in medical research: designing just the right antibody to attack antigens – molecules capable of inducing an immune response – that are specific to cancer cells. Currently, one of the most promising approaches to curing cancer is cancer immunotherapy, which involves harnessing the antibodies that can attack antigens on cancer cells.

But the human body can produce more than 10 million unique antibodies, each of which is made up of a different combination of about 50 genes. “If we can map these building block genes onto a mathematical vector, then we can organize all antibodies into something similar to a periodic table,” Zhang says. “Then, if you discover that one antibody is effective against an antigen but is toxic, you can look ”

Tyler Cowen and others on asylum rights

Are asylum rights misguided?  And Australia is given as an example! “You should note, by the way, that Australia has relatively tough asylum rights, but takes in a large number of legal immigrants.  The country also goes to great lengths to stop people from showing up at the border in boats and claiming asylum.  So it seems there is at least one case where this is a sustainable posture.”

Some others A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer  “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is not actually true. But occasionally it is. Michael Clemens, an economist at the Centre for Global Development, an anti-poverty think-tank in Washington, DC, argues that there are “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk”. One seemingly simple policy could make the world twice as rich as it is: open borders.”

Fundamental rule of brain plasticity

Study reveals how, when a synapse strengthens, its neighbors weaken.
“Our brains are famously flexible, or “plastic,” because neurons can do new things by forging new or stronger connections with other neurons. But if some connections strengthen, neuroscientists have reasoned, neurons must compensate lest they become overwhelmed with input. In a new study in Science, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT demonstrate for the first time how this balance is struck: when one connection, called a synapse, strengthens, immediately neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc
....
Though the rule they found was simple, the experiments that revealed it were not. As they worked to activate plasticity in the visual cortex of mice and then track how synapses changed to make that happen, lead authors Sami El-Boustani and Jacque Pak Kan Ip, postdocs in Sur’s lab, accomplished several firsts.“

India abroad

 dosa by DOSA Redefines the Fast-Casual Restaurant with Sleek Design, Bountiful Menu 

News from India

India preparing for 'cut in oil imports from Iran' from Al Jazeera
Revise relations with Iran: Nikki Haley tells Modi from The Hindu
Frequent flier Modi ‘goes missing on key issues at home’ from Asia Times
Teachers get only 10 days to comment on government’s sweeping changes to higher education regulation from Scroll.in
Funds parked by Indians in Swiss banks rose by over 50% in 2017: Report from Scroll.in

Another inspiring story from India ‘Pardada Pardadi’

How a school for poor girls cracked the patriarchy in a rural Indian town
“During his time abroad, Singh became obsessed with a perplexing question: What keeps India from excelling? Why, for instance, do Indian Americans have the highest average household income of all ethnic groups in the US, yet in India, one in four citizens still live in abject poverty?

He gradually developed a theory that his homeland was crippled by its almost total subjugation of women. “All my life I noticed the girl child being badly discriminated against,” Singh says, adding that such discrimination crosses all social strata in India. From not receiving their fair share of inheritance to being forced to marry older men as a payback for loans, women are systematically deprived of their human rights—and the country of half its potential.”

Via Madhukar Shukla

This should explain some thing but it is not clear to me

The journey of Indian rupee from 1947
I remember a time when the US dollar was worth 3 rupees and the British pound 5 rupees. I wondered about this while reading https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/25/americans-most-inclusive-attitude-to-immigrants-global-study-finds?

Dalit women have crafted a hit

with a little help from Aparna Krishnan from The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/paalaguttapalle-bags-a-future/article24243976.ece “It all began with a lucky conversation. Aparna Krishnan, a software engineer who moved to Paalaguttapalle to become an organic farmer, was asked by one of her dealers if someone could supply cotton bags to Hyderabad. Ms. Krishnan contacted N. Annapurna, who did tailoring jobs to support her family, and gave her Rs. 1,000 to buy cloth. Once the bags were done, she had them delivered to Hyderabad. Ms. Annapurna earned Rs. 1,000 for the order.”

Water problems

“The NITI Aayog released the results of a study warning that India is facing its ‘worst’ water crisis in history and that demand for potable water will outstrip supply by 2030 if steps are not taken. Nearly 600 million Indians faced high to extreme water stress and about 2,00,000 people died every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Twenty-one cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will run out of groundwater by 2020, affecting 100 million people, the study noted. If matters are to continue, there will be a 6% loss in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2050, the report says.” from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/456310/composite-water-management-index/ 

Himanshu Thakkar’s article on the index Muddying the waters 
Rahul Banerjee’s comments on his wall:
"Nicely written article by Himanshu Thakkar on the recently published Water Management Index Report of the Niti Aayog. Apart from the several important points raised by him, I would like to add a few points myself.
1. In the table on the quality of the data collected for the assessment, the report clearly says that most states do not have data regarding such crucial and heavily weighted parameters as groundwater recharging and for thosestates that do have this data it is unreliable. Under the circumstances the reliability of the index is highly questionable.
2. Moreover, since the report has acknowledged that there is severe water stress, it should have calculated a water stress index for each district as the data is available for such an exercise and is independent of the states' own reporting and so more reliable.
The proof of the pudding of water management is in the dishing and a water stress index would better show how naked the emperor is☺."

Interesting discussions on Phoenicians

spurred probably by a recent book of Josephine Quinn. This article Phatasmic Phoenecia gives a good background discussion. Interview with Josephine Quinn and a Review of her book. An older article which includes some DNA studies.

A song from Rani Rupmati

https://youtu.be/F3ji_fIosso By Rafi, Krishnarao Chonkar and Geeta Dutt

Another review of ‘Ants among elephants’

By Sujatha Gidla in Prospect Magazine https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ants-among-elephants-exposes-the-reality-of-caste-in-modern-india by Gaiutra Bahadur. I liked the review.

Gareth Dale on marketless trading

Browsing again "Michael Hudson and Baruch Levine, eds, Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World, Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology", I found this 2013 article which discusses Karl Polanyi's ideas in conjunction with the ideas from the above seminar. This is the first of the five seminars edited by Michael Hudson and others. The last and fifth one on the origins of labour was linked earlier.
Marketless Trading in Hammurabi’s Time’: A re- appraisal
Gareth Dale’s work on Karl Polanyi reviews here by Robert Kuttner in The NewYork Review of Books TheMan from Red Vienna 

Coffee may be good for the heart

from Forbes.com Researchers Figure Out Why Coffee Is Good For The Heart “The team suggests that p27 is likely the reason why caffeine administration can help after heart attack, and that caffeine may even be protective for people at higher risk for heart disease. This will no doubt be music to some people’s ears.”

on our circadian clocks

How our body’s circadian clocks affect our health beyond sleep . One excerpt:
“Our intestines, our stomach, and our gut have circadian rhythms, too. Late at night, just like our brain goes to sleep, our stomach and gut start to shut down. Our intestines and gut don’t move food down the digestive tract, so if you eat late at night, the food just sits there. At the same time, the stomach has a buildup and starts to produce acid.

During the daytime, the circadian rhythm in our mouths actually produces saliva that neutralizes that acid. But in the evening, even our mouths shut down, which is why we don’t salivate much in our sleep. When you have a lot of acid, food isn’t going down, and acid is coming to our mouths, we get acid reflux. It’s a very simple thing, but just eating early in alignment with the gut rhythm can help. 

Another idea is in terms of exercise. Exercise has many benefits for the circadian clock and sleep cycle. So for example, taking a short walk in the morning has as huge impact on synchronizing the brain clock and improving arousal and alertness.”

Some news appears and then disappears

Reliance-Run Websites, Times Now and New Indian Express Take Down Story on Amit Shah
Presumably, it is still available in a few places like this.

Long read on Stanford prison experiment

The life span of a lie by Ben Blum
“But if Zimbardo’s work was so profoundly unscientific, how can we trust the stories it claims to tell? Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment demonstrating that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in conforming to group judgments about line lengths, illustrate the profound effect our environments can have on us. The far more methodologically sound — but still controversial — Milgram experiment demonstrates how prone we are to obedience in certain settings. What is unique, and uniquely compelling, about Zimbardo’s narrative of the Stanford prison experiment is its suggestion that all it takes to make us enthusiastic sadists is a jumpsuit, a billy club, and the green light to dominate our fellow human beings.” From Lifespan of a lie.

Jerry Coyne review of ’She has her mother’s last laugh’

Twists and turns in the process of heredity “[carl]Zimmer’s book is an excellent way to get up to speed in these areas, but be aware that there are a couple of recent competitors that give much the same information. These include Siddhartha Mukherjee’s superbly written chronology “The Gene: An Intimate History,” and James Watson’s lavishly illustrated (and largely first-hand) account, “DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution.” Read at least one of the three, because this is important stuff: If the science doesn’t matter to you now, it will soon.”

James Salter

I got to know about James Salter through a post of Steven HSU. According to another author “James Salter writes American sentences better than anyone writing today.” A portrait of him The Last Book by Nick Paumgaten. HSU links to an interview (behind a firewall) but HSU quotes lot of it in another post. Here is another Why I write.

About Marxism

I stopped worrying about understanding Marx though I read about Marxism off and on. I take this to be essence of it:
“In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham.”
The quote is from an article by Kenneth Arrow.

A Balasaraswati song: oke okka sari

https://youtu.be/lNNRuJOu8zsLyrics by Arudra. More can be found at https://sanskritdocuments.org/surasa/ I might have posted this before.

Interesting Telugu blog

of Bhandaru Sreenivasa Rao: “Worked as sub editor in Andhra Jyothi,  Vijayavada. Later joined Regional News Unit of AIR,Hyderabad as news reporter in 1975. Moved to Moscow, then in USSR to work as language specialist in telugu and news reader in Radio Moscow in 1987.  Returned back to India after almost five years to join in Hyderabad, Doordarshan as news editor  and finally retired from active service in December 2005”. Noticed these posts about Vijayawada in the thirties and forties అలనాటి బెజవాడ. Search the blog or google ( which seems faster) for other posts about Vijayawada.
There is another blog karpuramanjari which has several articles on personalities from Tenali.

A discussion on low llife expectancy among Dalit women ( in Telugu)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&a=&v=No_qP_Yuh2Y The presenter seems to think that since Dalits live outside the villages, they get fresh air and ‘eat home-grown vegetables and fruits’. May be there is a city-village divide; youngsters in cities may not have seen much of village life.

Michael Hudson on Chinese economy

China’s Export Competitiveness = Underpaying Women later on there is a discussion on its current ‘mixed economy’.

Negative Economics

Michal Hudson’s talk from approximately 36 minutes to 1:18. https://youtu.be/k2_OKdKm4fU
A story told by Micharl Hudson from a different source: “Consider Plato’s Republic, another product of fourth-century Athens. The book begins when Socrates visits an old friend, a wealthy arms manufacturer, at the port of Piraeus. They get into a discussion of justice, which begins when the old man proposes that money cannot be a bad thing, since it allows those who have it to be just, and that justice consists in two things: telling the truth and always paying one’s debts. The proposal is easily demolished. What, Socrates asks, if someone lent you his sword, went violently insane, and then asked for it back (presumably so he could kill someone)? Clearly, it can never be right to arm a lunatic whatever the circumstances. The old man cheerfully shrugs the problem off and heads off to attend to some ritual, leaving his son to carry on the argument.”

Interview with Daud Ali

The interview from The Hindu
“But, somehow, I stumbled onto the work of Norbert Elias and I had, of course, read Foucault who was very fashionable at the time. I made a connection between these two scholars and became interested in how one could think about the formation of what we may call “subjects”. Foucault focuses on the formation of modern subjects and looks at disciplinary practices at large. But Elias takes a more longue durée-cum-sociological approach about the development of manners, habits, mental dispositions and attitudes, linking them with behaviour. He was trying to map them onto particular sociologies.

What occurred to me, which I have been elaborating in my work ever since, is that the material from medieval India has not been looked at from this particular point of view. Everybody has been obsessed with mapping state structures and talking about either dynastic history or social history of a more empirical type, ignoring the whole question of mental dispositions, of bodies, of emotions, of these less tangible things which are incredibly important for the understanding of state structures, social relationships and the sinews of social life. There were people coming at it from the perspective of religious studies. But in terms of history, there was an indifference to these problems; they had not been explored. So most of my career has been working on what I would consider the completely virgin territory of what you could call the history of practice or mentalité.”

“The real driver of global history in the U.S. is, sadly, the opening up of Asian markets to American educational institutions. That sounds cynical but I am afraid it is the truth. And a lot of global history is simply re-washed neoliberal claptrap about the rise of capitalism, put in a more acceptable language.”

The Wikipedia article on Daud Ali

Math, girls and socialism

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/11532/math-girls-and-socialism
“This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East-West difference is due to girls' attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes; (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.”
Two more Sources for my New York Times Op-Ed - "Why Women had Better Sex Under Socialism" from last year and e cerpts from a 1973book (long read):
Women in Russia before and after the revolution by Sheila Rowbotham.

Lakshmi Narasimhan Ikkurthi

Lakshmi Narasimhan Ikkurthi:Back to His Roots

“Lakshmi Narasimha Ikkurthi gave up his software career to take up social initiatives in his village Yazali.”

An inspiring doctor

Why This Inspiring Doctor’s Departure from Odisha Town Moved Hundreds to Tears!

About community driven development

A bombshell Evaluation of Community Driven Development by Duncan Green. See also the comments by several experts.
“3IE cast its baleful eye over the evidence from 25 impact evaluations, covering 23 CDD programmes in 21 low- and middle-income countries and concluded.

• CDD programmes have no impact on social cohesion or governance.
• Many community members may hear about CDD programmes but not many attend meetings.
• Few people speak at the meeting and fewer still participate in decision-making.
• Women are only half as likely as men to be aware of CDD programmes and even less likely to attend or speak at community meetings.
• CDD programmes have made a substantial contribution to improving the quantity of small-scale infrastructure.
• They have a weak effect on health outcomes and mostly insignificant effects on education and other welfare outcomes.
• There is impact on improved water supply leading to time savings.”

Seven Common rules

Seven moral rules found all around the world
“Converging lines of evidence – from game theory, ethology, psychology, and anthropology – suggest that morality is a collection of tools for promoting cooperation.
.........
And, as predicted by the theory, these seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. “

Long read on how Harvard lost Russia

via David Warsh. In News Values “There’s been a tendency in recent years to rely more heavily than before on professional economists as journalists. Paul Krugman, of The New York Times, and Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, are the most prominent examples. There are many others, tucked away in business pages, magazines, or on websites of their own.
....

There’s a downside, though. Membership in the economics guild brings with it a natural reluctance to tangle with the leadership of the profession, on any other than strictly professional grounds. To put this slightly differently, economists who enter journalism remain economists; they are not there to police their peers.

As far as I know, neither Krugman nor Wolf has ever mentioned the Harvard-Russia story. Only The Wall Street Journal actually covered it.........

As for the “Further Reading” section of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, not even McClitick’s 25,000-word article rated a mention there – perhaps because Harvard professor Andrei Shleifer was JEP‘s editor from 2003-2008.“

Here is the article How Harvard Lost Russia by David McClitick from 2006.
A follow up from 2014 Some Russian money flows back to Harvard by an ex-dean from Harvard.

Peter Scott retiring today

My collaborator and friend  Peter Scott is retiring today. I first met him in Liverpool during 1968-69 and have been collaborating with him since 1986 and quite intensely since 1994. He moved to The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1987. I retired in 2005 but there have been periods of collaboration even after retirement. We still have two long papers in progress but the progress is slow as the work seems essentially complete. Peter has made several basic contributions to three dimensional manifolds without mentioning his results. His first famous paper Finitely generated three manifold groups are finitely presented appeared in 1973. A note of mine written for his sixtieth birthday here. 

A biography f Lejuene Dirichlet and his work

In This volume 

Stories of bravery

Moral rules around the world “morality is a collection of tools for promoting cooperation”

Seven moral rules found all around the world
“And, as predicted by the theory, these seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. ”

An interesting perspective on development by Tobias Haque

Are economists’ standard solutions part of the problem in fragile states? By Tobias Haque
“Authors such as Douglas North and Mushtaq Khanhave emphasised the important role of rent generation and distribution in supporting social stability and preventing violence in the absence of strong state institutions. Elites’ capacity to generate rents and distribute them to followers both underpins their willingness to refrain from violence and the inter-elite bargaining that eventually leads to organic institutionalisation of political organisation, contracts, and property rights. This theory suggests a fundamental paradox. Attempts to implement market-enabling institutions in post-conflict settings are explicitly intended to eliminate economic distortions and rent-generating opportunities. Through an institutionalist lens, such reforms are not only unlikely to succeed in spurring economic growth and security, but may generate political instability and violence by undermining the generation of rent flows upon which social order depends.”
The supporting article A ‘good governance’ paradox? Re- examining reform of economic institutions in post-conflict contexts 

Aruna Tella update

Recently, she organised another intercate marriage. While in a meeting, she got a phone call from the girl saying that her father came to their apartment and was beating up her husband. She rushed to her rescue after phoning the police since the police did not arrive by then. She too was beaten up together her women assistants. She was hospitalised for a few hours and a case was registered against the parents of the girl. The case is still in progress. Here a post from her wall:
https://www.facebook.com/aruna.tella.3/posts/441456322970148

Benjamin Kaila update

i have written about him before. He is involved in Dalit upliftment through various projects including educational scholalarships. He has been living in USA for the past few years and is around 57 years old now. He posted this recently:
https://www.facebook.com/benjamin.kaila/posts/10156154094576023

Nassim Taleb's conversations with Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan

and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on What’s Missing in Education There are also links to 'clarifications' by Taleb and Caplan at the end.Both emphasise practice over theory. The difference seems to be
"COWEN: I would just like to interject a question. I’d like a sentence from each of you on what you is see the biggest difference between you. You agree on a lot, but let me give you my one-sentence take on what I’ve heard is the biggest difference: The extent to which you take a kind of shaped civilization for granted is different.

Bryan, you take it for granted. You don’t think formal education is so much needed to produce it. And Nassim, you’re taking it less for granted, and you still see some room for poetry, the humanities and so on, provided they’re treated the proper way and segregated from the actual doing of stuff.

Each of you give your take. That was my takeaway."

Walker there was a conversation with Tyler Cowen:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Self-Education and Doing the Math

I could not understand much of this except that Taleb still likes and does mathematics.

A comment by Aravindhan

 I do not know whether I learnt any thing from keeping a blog. There are some comments I seem to keep going back to by BenjaminFranklin, Nabokov, and others. Another constant is a comment by Aravindhan in forum Hub in May 2005. The link does not work in some places)and so I am pasting his full comment here:
Quote Originally Posted by gaddeswarup
An article in this direction is written by a Swiss Samskrit scholar Johannes Bronkhorst : "Panini and Euclid:Reflections on Indian Geometry", which appeared in Journal of Indian Philosophy, 29, pp 43-80, 2001. I do not have a URL to this but if anybody is interested, I can send a pdf file of the article.
I've read Bronkhorst's paper. I think he identifies an important problem, and does it well, but misidentifies its cause. He seems to suggest that the problem could have been that science was influenced by grammatical methodology (though there is no clear evidence for this). In my opinion, it was much deeper than that. 

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.

But Panini's grammar did not create these trends, nor were they confined to grammatics. You find them equally in philosophical works of the period which - unlike earlier texts - only try to interpret, expound on and clarify the meanings of existing texts; and even the original work that is done still seeks support in interpretation of existing texts. 

We see exactly the same disease in the mathematics of the period. Bhaskara tries to argue mathematics using rules of mimamsa. Mimamsa, for heaven's sake! And proofs - where they are provided - tend to be anecdotal, rather than deductive. Bronkhorst argues that philosophy in that period understood the concept of proof. He's right, technically speaking, but the form of proofs they used lacked rigour and routinely accepted exegetic and anectdotal evidence as "proof". Just as the mathematicians did.

So I don't think Bronkhorst adequately looks at what was happening in other disciplines. I think there is a readily available explanation for why the problems he identifies happened in Ancient India, as I've tried to outline above. 

There is also a clear parallel with certain modern trends (not just confined to India), where ancient knowledge is being venerated without much independent inquiry. I would like to quote one passage from Bronkhorst's paper:

Aryabhatta is wrong where he gives the volume of a pyramid as: "Half the product of the height and the [surface of the triangular base] is the volume called 'pyramid'." The correct volume of a pyramid is a third, not half, of the product here specified... The same is true of Aryabhatta's incorrect rule for the volume of a sphere.
These errors are discussed in greater detail in a 1985 paper published in a French journal. It tends to flabbergast people because the idea that Sanskrit texts might actually be wrong is not something people think about (which is absurd - no human science can ever be wholly right about everything at any point of time). 

And that, I think, is the biggest danger in the current trend of constantly exalting ancient works. Science (and any other field of inquiry) progresses best when it is most open and least dogmatic. Which is why (in my opinion) Indian science didn't progress beyond a point - and why even mathematicians as obviously gifted as Aryabhatta and Bhaskara made such glaring errors.

Another review of Gidla Sujatha’s book

Inwrote several times positively about the book. Here is a negative review by somebody who knew the area and some of the characters more intimately than me. How not to write a Dalit memoir by Chinnaiah Jangam, an assistant professor in the Department of History, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Migration blues

How cultivating watermelon has changed lives of poor villagers in Odisha’s hunger belt 

Beginnings of railways and canals in india

Long reads

CAPITAL, ‘DEVELOPMENT’ AND CANAL IRRIGATION IN COLONIAL INDIA Patrick McGinn “Early development of railways and canals in India seem to be driven by investors in London and were either detrimental or not particularly beneficial to the Indians. The later developments in Godavari delta and other places may be a different story.”  Railways started first.

Ruling by Canal: Governance and System-Level Design Characteristics of Large-Scale Irrigation Infrastructure in India and Uzbekistan “ABSTRACT: This paper explores the relationship between governance regime and large-scale irrigation system design by investigating three cases: 1) protective irrigation design in post-independent South India; 2) canal irrigation system design in Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan, as implemented in the USSR period, and 3) canal design by the Madras Irrigation and Canal Company, as part of an experiment to do canal irrigation development in colonial India on commercial terms in the 1850s-1860s. The mutual shaping of irrigation infrastructure design characteristics on the one hand and management requirements and conditions on the other has been documented primarily at lower, within-system levels of the irrigation systems, notably at the level of division structures. Taking a 'social construction of technology' perspective, the paper analyses the relationship between technological structures and management and governance arrangements at irrigation system level. The paper finds qualitative differences in the infrastructural configuration of the three irrigation systems expressing and facilitating particular forms of governance and rule, differ that matter for management and use, and their effects and impacts.“

Quotas and descrimination

 When quota reduce descrimination by Victories Girard
“Discrimination is notoriously difficult to measure. I am able to overcome this difficulty thanks to exceptional features of the Indian setting. I exploit a question from the Rural Economic and Development Survey asking households whether they were excluded from some streets because of their caste in the years 1996 and 2006. In India, members of the marginalised Scheduled castes still face widespread discrimination (see the variation across states in Figure 1). ”

“Conclusion

Overall, affirmative action policies allow for a big push toward reducing discriminatory practices. I document that ongoing electoral quotas reduce the practice of everyday caste-based discrimination by about one fifth. A one-shot quota is already enough to observe this effect. However, a one-time electoral quota does not appear to be enough to affect stereotypes and aspirations – the reduction in discriminatory practices is transitory and tied to the ongoing quota. “

Transplanting memory

 Scientists have transplanted memory from one snail to another. So, what does it mean for humans?
"The dominant model of learning and neuroscience today is that when an animal learns something, there is growth in new synaptic connections or change in existing ones," Glanzman said. "So essentially, memory is stored in synapses. Our study suggests that can't be true."

From a letter about a cousin

Gadde Babu Rajendra Prasad. He is 84 now and has been donating ninety percent of his pension to charities. One of them is a school for orphans in India, it is very well funded and has much better facilities than many such in the west. I suggested to him to donate part of the money to a Short Stay Home for women in difficulties. It is funded by the government. But government funds come late and the organisers are forced to borrow money with interests going up to five rupees for one hundred rupees in a month. So much of the money is wasted in interest payment and they are often in financial distress. But he said that he does not like to contribute to government institiond. Here is part of the letter:

”మరి ఎందుకలా ? ఉండచ్చుకదా అమ్మాయ్ దగ్గర అన్నాను..నాకిష్టం ఉండదన్నారు..వారికి నెలకు 60,000 రూపాయల పెన్షన్ వస్తుందట! 6000 రూపాయలు ఆయనఖర్చులకోసం అట్టిపెట్టుకుంటారట! మిగిల్నదంతా *హీల్ *కి ఇస్తుంటారట! హీల్...తల్లిదండ్రులు లేని పిల్లలను అమ్మలా సాకే ఆశ్రమం..గౌరవనీయులు పూజ్యులు నన్నపనేని మంగాదేవిగారు నడుపుతుంది..

అన్నం తినమన్నా! గొడవచేసినా వద్దన్నారు..నన్ను వెళ్ళిపోనిస్తే నాపాటికి నన్ను నాకు హాయిగా ఉంటుందన్నారు..అప్పటికే ఎండమాడుతుంది..బస్ లలో ఎందుకు? ఈ వయసులో? కార్ మాటాడుకురావచ్చు కదా! అన్నాను..
రావచ్చును..కానీ నా పెన్షనైనా వాడుకోడానికి అది నా డబ్బు కాదుకదా! అది అనాధపిల్లలకోసం నేను ఇవ్వవలసిన డబ్బు! అది వారిది కదా! దానిని నాకోసం వాడుకోడం నాకిష్టముండదన్నారు..మెడిటేషన్ చేస్తుండేవారు..కామ్ గా స్టేబుల్ గా ఉండే వీరిలాటి వారేకదా! నిజమైన మనుషులు...భగవంతుని దగ్గరకు చేరడం ఎలానో ఇలాటివారికి కాక ఎవరికి తెలుస్తుంది ..

ఈ మాటలు విన్నాక అలా 84 సంవత్సరాల వయసులో కార్ మాటాడుకుని రాడానికి తన పెన్షన్ డబ్బులు తనవి కావనుకుని ఆలోచించే వారిలా నేను ఇప్పటిదాకా నా జన్మలో ఆలోచించలేదు..కాకపోతే మనది కాదు .ఇదంతా ! అంతా ఆయనదే అనుకుంటానేమో! అవసరమైనవారికి చేతనైనంతలో ఇస్తుండవచ్చు! చేస్తుండవచ్చు! కానీ బస్ లో వెళ్తే డబ్బులు మిగులుతాయ్! అవీ ఆ పాపలకు బాబులకు ఉపయోగపడతాయని అలా అంత *నేను* ని వదలి ఆలోచిస్తున్న వారిలోని ప్రేమహృదయానికి..నిరాడంబరతకు..వారి స్పిరిచువల్ హృదయానికి వారాలోచించే పద్దతికి పాదాభివందనం చేస్తుంటే వద్దొద్దు! అలా చేయద్దన్నానా అన్నారు..మీలో ప్రేమహృదయానికి అన్నాను..మీరూ నేనూ వేరా అన్నారు! ఏమనగలనింకా! నేనూ వారు వేరెలా అనగలను..మనుషులంటే భగవంతుని అంశలమని అంతకుముందు మాటలలో మాటాడిననేను”

Another interesting thing about this cousin. His daughter went through a divorce and was in considerable difficulties. He helped her with a small business for several years helping raising two daughters from two different marriages. This was in spite of considerable opposition fro his sons who were afraid that he was giving all his money to the daughter. Now the grand daughters are working and helping their mother. Recently the father of the oldest grand daughter left half his property to her but she refused. This cousin himself wanted to leave some property to his daughter and she too refused after ll those troubles with brothers.

A recent interview with Kamla Bhasin

At IDR " When I got there, I spent six months trying to start a literacy project. When we asked the community initially, they said they wanted the project. A few months later, when there was no progress, I grew impatient. It was then that I realised the problem. “You are blind,” they said to me. “Don’t you see that this village hasn’t had water for the last two years?” Rajasthan was at the time going through one of the worst droughts in its history and a literacy centre was certainly not what people wanted.

The villagers said they had only agreed to the literacy centre plan because they didn’t know who I really was or what connections I had. They were used to development workers coming to their communities for six months and then disappearing. Saying ‘yes’ to me was a way to stay out of trouble.”

An older Video about her background 

Siddhartha Mukherjee on checklists

Surgical Checklists Save Lives — but Once in a While, They Don’t. Why :”In 2014, Gawande’s team (now an organization called Ariadne Labs in Boston) started perhaps their most ambitious study on the impact of checklists. This time, the team focused its attention on the practice of childbirth in India: Could adherence to a checklist containing “essential birth practices” reduce the rates of infant and maternal mortality? The Ariadne team identified 60 matching pairs of facilities in cities like Lucknow and Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh. A 28-item checklist was created: Was a clean towel provided at birth? Were there sterile scissors at hand? Did the birth attendant remember to wash his or her hands? Was the infant’s temperature measured after delivery? An intensive eight-month peer-coaching program to implement this checklist was used in half the paired hospitals. The study enrolled nearly 160,000 pregnant women. The chances of mother or infant dying, or of severe maternal complications, was measured. Despite the team’s strenuous attempts to implement this checklist, there was no discernible impact: The rate of adverse outcomes in the experimental group was identical to the rate in the control group — around 15 percent. About 7,400 babies were stillborn or died within the first week of life.”

A long read on A.I.

How frightened should we be A.I.? Via Steven HSU AI, AGI, and ANI in The New Yorker 

Khursheed Mano song from Tansen

with brief biographies of Khursheed and Khemchand Prakash http://mukhtarlyallpuri.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/khursheed-bano-barso-re-tansen.html

Steve Keen on Marx

This appeared in RT Karl Marx sacrificed logic on the altar of his desire for revolution
It is clear that Marx wrote over a long period and said inconsistent things. Various people have tried to put his insights together to find some consistent interpretations. For example David Harvey whose work was described by Benjamin Kunkel in LRB. Another is Michael Hudson and his latest note here .“Creating Wealth” through Debt: The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road. For both ‘credit’ and ‘rent’ are crucial concepts.
Another variation vis Yves Smith:
:https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/forgotten-vision-market-socialism.html 

Scrapping the Iran nuclear deal

How Talks with North Korea Convinced Trump to Scrap the Iran Deal
How India may be affected by US scrapping Iran nuclear deal 

Barriers to interbreeding

Baffling Genetic Barrier Prevents Similar Animals from Interbreeding from Scientific American
"In new research published in June in the journal Science, Wolf’s team has found that a surprisingly small chunk of DNA may hold the answer. A comparison of the carrion and hooded-crow genomes showed that the sequences are almost identical. Differences in just 82 DNA letters, out of a total of about 1.2 billion, appear to separate the two groups."

Mahathir then and now

Mahathir in His Own Words: On Markets, Islam and Anwar Ibrahim
Mahathir Reassures Business, Aims to Boost Malaysia Stock Market
Both from Bloomberg business news.

Joseph Stiglitz on Costa Rica

How Costa Rica Gets It Right :
"With inequality still a problem (though nowhere near as acute as elsewhere in Latin America), more progressive and comprehensive income, capital gains, and property taxes are essential. The rich receive a disproportionately large share of their income through capital gains, and to tax capital gains at rates lower than other forms of income exacerbates inequality and leads to distortions. While economists differ on many matters, one thing they can agree on is that taxing the revenues or capital gains derived from Costa Rica’s land won’t cause the land to move away. That’s one reason why the great nineteenth-century economist Henry George argued that the best taxes are land taxes.

The biggest challenges are political: a presidential system like Costa Rica’s works well in a polity divided into two main parties, with rules designed to ensure that minority views are adequately respected. But such a system can quickly lead to political gridlock when the electorate becomes more fractured. And in a fast-changing world, political gridlock can be costly. Deficits and debts can explode, with no path towards resolution."

Another contribution of Alan Turing

Alan Turing’s chemistry hypothesis turned into a desalination filter 

Jerri-Lynn Scofield on job guarantee

What India Can Teach the US About a Federal Job Guarantee Posted by Jerri-Lynn Scofield in Naked Capitalism (I note in passing that Baker seems to assume– mistakenly– that the new workers would have a guaranteed federal job, rather than a federal job guarantee– a point I don’t intend to discuss further– see the Galbraith piece above for further analysis).