Pankaj Mishra's response to Martin Amis

Pl. check:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1874132,00.html
Excerpts:
"For the 'war on terror' is not just a political and military fiasco but also an intellectual one, combining fatally the arrogance of power with the arrogance of mind."

"Shocked, like many Europeans, by the ferocity and unexpectedness of the First World War, French poet and essayist Paul Valery was one of the first to warn against intellectual over-reaching in a world grown bewilderingly complex and intransigent. 'The system of causes,' he wrote, 'controlling the fate of every one of us, and now extending over the whole globe, makes it reverberate throughout at every shock; there are no more questions that can be settled by being settled at one point.'

Valery could sense that the West was no longer the sole engine of global history. 'Nothing,' he asserted, 'can ever happen again without the whole world's taking a hand and for this reason no one will ever be able to predict or circumscribe the almost immediate consequences of any undertaking whatever.' "
(Pointer from Jo. I rarely read Martin Amis))

S.N.Bose on popular science in vernacular

From http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/snbose/bosenew.htm
"Bose was a great populariser of science. He strongly felt that it was duty to present science to the common man in his own language. For popularizing science Bose wrote in Bengali. This is the reason why his contribution in popularizing science is not known outside Bengal. It were largely Bose’s efforts which led to the establishment of the Bangiya Bijnan Parishad (Science Association of Bengal), a registered society with the sole objective of promoting and popularizing science through the vernacular. The Parishad was formally inaugurated on January 25, 1948. The circular announcing the formation of the Parishad stated: “We need science at every step, but our system of education does not prepare us for it, so that we are not able to utilize science in our everyday life. The main obstacle so far was a foreign language through which education was being imparted. Today the ties have changed. New hopes and aspiration are emerging. Now it is the duty and the responsibility of our scientists to popularize science through the medium of vernacular and thus help to create a healthy scientific attitude among the people. As a first step to this effort it has been resolved to form a `Bangiya Bijnan Parishad’. It was mainly through the inspired leadership of Professor Satyendranath Bose.” The Parishad started a monthly magazine on popular science in Bengali, Jnan O Bijnan (Knowledge and Science). As part of his attempt in popularizing science through the vernacular Bose even started teaching Relativity to post-graduate students in colloquial Bengali."
( I omitted a bit from the quotation which seemed to be a repetetion).

Deepavali songs in Telugu

Sreenath jonnavithula, one of the persons responsible for oldtelugusongs and Ghantasala sites, wants to know of Telugu film songs about deepavali for the coming Deepavali celebrations. I know only four, two from Shavukaru (around 1952) and Pellikanuka (around 1960). Those who know more recent ones can post at
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/oldtelugusongs/

Logos

From a recent speech of the Pope http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=46474
"Logos means both reason and word-- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason."
" “Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university."
UPDATE: Two commentaries, one by Johann Hari and another by Sam Harris are available at the Dawkins site:
http://richarddawkins.net/

Marshall on mathematics in economics

Greg Mankiw has a post on mathematics required in economics: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
Long ago Marshall said (taken from 'Economics for Mathematicians' by J.W.S. Cassels, Cambridge University Press):
"But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work on the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules-(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them till you know you are done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you cannot succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I did often."
I wonder how many in these days of 'Publish or Perish' are prepared to do (6). Long ago, I was asked to learn and lecture on a sophisticated piece of mathematics ('iterated maps of interval', Sarkowski's Theorem etc.) by some economist friends to understand a paper by a professor from a prestigious American University. Finally, when we read the paper, we found that the conclusion was ' in a market economy with a certain utility function, poor people's choices are rational whereas the rich people's choices are whimsical'.

A charity group for profit

According to The Age, Google hasstarted a charity group which will try to make profits and spend it on attempts to tackle poverty, disease and global warming. Pl. see:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/googles-spin-on-charity/2006/09/14/1157827090890.html
Excerpt:
"Ventures that grow out of Google.org could be seen to have a competitive edge because they do not need to show a financial profit.

But financial returns from a project like the high-mileage car are not necessarily the aim.

"I think how you count profit is the issue here," said Peter Hero, president of Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, a charitable foundation with about $1 billion in assets.

"Google.org is measuring return on cleaner air and quality of life. Their bottom line isn't just financial. It's environmental and social.""

Madhukar Shukla has another blog

Pl. check http://inspired-pragmatism.blogspot.com/
The first post is "Revisiting the 'Bottom of the Pyramid'".

A common paradox

About 2-3 years ago I tried to learn some Statistics and got stuck in Simpson's Paradox at the very beginning. This seems to be a very common paradox which still causes problems in various arguments:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=65634
A very simple example is in Pearle's article http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/R264.pdf
It is this: A drug tried on 30 males and 18 recovered and with no drug in a sample of 10 males 7 recovered.. So the recovery rate is 60% with drug and 70% without the drug.
The drug was tried on 10 females of whom only 2 recovered and in a sample of 30 females with no drug 9 recovered giving success rates of 20% and 30% respectively.
Now if we take the total number of both males and females for the trials with and without drug, it is 40 in both cases. With the drug, 20 out of 40 recovered giving a success rate of 50% and without the drug 16 out of 40 recovered giving a success rate of 40%.
So, even though the recovery rate for both males and females separately is 10% better without the drug, yet it seems beneficial to population as a whole.
Apparently this was first observed by the geneticist Pearson who warned about looking upon correlations as cause and effect in mixed populations.
I could not understand the rest of Pearle's article. If anybody does pl. let me know.

100th anniversary of satyagrapha

For a brief recall and an interview with Arun Gandhi, pl. check:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/1349257

On education

A blog around the clock is wondering about education and teachers:
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/09/teacherphilosophers_in_a_fastc.php

Owen Dixon, a justice in the Australian Supreme Court reminded in 1954 that a university's responsibility remained unchanged: to produce people whose " minds have become better instruments of thought, whose intellectual interests have been stimulated and will often be sustained, and above all who can combine knowledge with reason and both with experience so as to meet the problems of real life."

I think that remains a good descrption of the aims of education and what teachers should strive for. Awareness of the lack of this in current education in most countries and the opportunities provided by internet may be why lot of people are flocking to blogs. But many popular blogs seem to be contesting with each other popularity and reacting to each other. I hope that some of them will take the new found opportunities to become more responsive teacher-philosophers.

Academic blogging

I have not gone through this carefully yet but Abi and others may be interested:
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/741/
There also discussions in http://madisonian.net/ a blog about law etc. I do not understand many things here but browse through once in a while after Crazyfinger convinced me (http://www.crazyfinger.org/2006/03/its_the_law_not.html#comments) that legal studies are imortant and that a large variety of “free-market failures” are really failures of the law.

What made them different?

Some periods in history seem to be throw up groups of remarkable people, who are different from each other but can work together, can see beyond their times and show some wisdom relevant in all ages. India and USA have seen such a groups during their freedom struggles and as one would expect many more studies are available about the Americans and Tom Paine. Gore Vidal has written extensively about the founding fathers. There is a recent book by Gordon Wood "Revolutionary characters: What made the founders different" which gives a clue. From the excellent review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19295
by Fred Anderson ( this needs subscription):
"Wood finds the key to the Founders' leadership in the hierarchical world into which they had been born. Eighteenth-century British America, like Britain itself, was dominated socially and politically by "gentlemen" —a comparatively tiny minority of men whose liberal education and public spirit, so it was thought, enabled them to perceive the common good, and whose fortunes gave them the leisure to pursue it without compromising their livelihoods. Such advantages of wisdom and wealth obliged gentlemen to take the lead in public life. Those who did so demonstrated their "virtue," or ability to rise above the self-interest that absorbed the energies and limited the views of lesser men. All of the Founders, Wood argues, aspired to this kind of leadership, and all the more intensely because none was a gentleman by birth."
"The Founders' consciousness that they acted on a public stage, defending the common good and pursuing fame, explains much about their leadership in the 1770s and 1780s. Unfortunately for them and their values, Gordon Wood writes, the Revolution released acquisitive, individualist energies that no one had foreseen, and which could not be contained. As the nineteenth century began and ordinary Americans seized the opportunity to pursue private interests without restraint, the disinterested aristocratic ideal central to the Founders' identity crumbled. In a scrambling, self-interested, petit-bourgeois America, the common good became a concept that somehow arose from the sum of all individual strivings. The self-sacrificing political virtue that had been the supreme attribute of a gentleman fragmented into the private virtues of honesty, temperance, charity, prudence, and piety."
I hope that there will be a similar study about the Indian stalwarts.

A meeting of stalwarts

Seed magazine has a transcript http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/noam_chomsky_robert_trivers.php
and a video of a discussion between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers. When two such stalwarts meet one expects sparks of insights to fly. The conversation is interesting but a bit tame. Some excerpts:
Chomsky: "And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit."
Interesting and mostly true, I think. But, did not Gramsci say such things before? what are the alternatives?
There is a quite a bit about self deception, a topic about which Trivers had some insights in the 70's but never really got down to a careful analysis.
Trivers: "So let me ask you, when you think about the leaders—let's say the present set of organisms that launched this dreadful Iraq misadventure—how important is their level of self-deception? We know they launched the whole thing in a swarm of lies, the evidence for which is too overwhelming to even need to be referred to now. My view is that their deception leads to self-deception very easily."
Chomsky's reply:" I agree, though I'm not sure they launched it with lies, and it's perfectly possible they believed it."
Is Chomsky getting old?

Moral sense

There seem to be continuous discussions about whether there is a universal sense of right and wrong ( usually more discussions if there is a review in The New YorK Times):
http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2006/09/the_moral_instinct.php
There seems to be universal sense of right and wrong ( though the content may be different for different groups. What is right for Bush and many Americans does not seem right to me):
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10022-physical-washing-may-help-clean-your-conscience.html
An excerpt:
"Those who were given an opportunity to wash their hands after recalling incidents of immoral behaviour showed signs of a clearer conscious than those who had not washed."
Do they mean Conscience?
"This final experiment establishes a link between moral and physical cleanliness, says Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, US, who was not involved in the study.

“When you have been associated with something immoral, there are two ways you can cleanse yourself – engaging in moral behaviour or physically cleaning yourself,” Tetlock says. “We talk about things being dirty, slimy, or rotten. A lot of people would say those are just metaphors, but this study shows that there is a connection on a visceral level.”"
What about consciousness? I have my own doubts. Just like Russell's paradox in set theory, there may be questions that one cannot ask in a system.

On math. topics

I will post on some mathematics topics here:
http://www.arunn.net/scienceblog/

Some blogs that I follow regularly:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.tompaine.com/
http://delong.typepad.com/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/
http://www.physorg.com/
I follow and comment often here:
http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/

Some friends

Pl. check this http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9916
and http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1865918,00.html
These seem to happen in our family on a regular basis.

Granddaughter Leila with Jhansi

Granddaughter Leila with Jhansi
Originally uploaded by jhansil.

Devaluing the race card

It seems to me that the feeling that one is underprivileged while growing up may contribute to poor performance. The following study, still in preliminary stages, seems to support the view. It may also be useful in experimenting with strategies to improve the lot of underprivileged classes in India.
From http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/831/2?etoc
( via Evolutionary-Psychology group)

Devaluing the Race Card

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
ScienceNOW Daily News
31 August 2006

The life of African-American middle-school students can be pretty stressful. From the moment they step into the classroom, some must contend with not only coursework but also the anxiety that performing badly might confirm negative stereotypes. That fear can itself lead to poor performance, researchers have known for a while; now they've come up with a simple antidote: getting students to reflect on their sense of self-worth by writing a personal essay about what they value.
Geoffrey Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues tested the strategy among 243 seventh graders at a northeastern U.S. school that had a roughly 50:50 ratio of African-American and white students. Each student was asked to complete a 15-minute writing assignment that included a page with a list of values such as one's relationships with friends, athletic ability, and creativity. Students circled their top two or three values. On the next page, they wrote a few sentences explaining their choices and describing moments when they had felt the importance of the chosen values. The researchers designed a similar assignment for a control group in which students had to circle the value they thought was least important to them and explain why that value could be important to other people. The students were not told the purpose of the assignment.

At the end of the term, the researchers found that African-American students in the treatment group got significantly better grades than same-race students in the control group. Low-performing African Americans seemed to have benefited the most. The assignment didn't have any effect on white students. Overall, the intervention closed the racial achievement gap by 40%, the team reports tomorrow in Science. "The results exceeded our expectations," says Cohen. "It was remarkable."

To find out how the treatment worked, the researchers had the students complete 34 word fragments, seven of which--such as _ACE--could be completed to form either a stereotype-relevant word such as RACE or a stereotype-irrelevant word such as FACE. African-American students who got the intervention formed fewer stereotype-relevant words than did African Americans in the control group. This suggests that the intervention allowed students to distance themselves from racial stereotypes, Cohen says.

The researchers also found that African Americans in the control group did progressively worse as the academic term went on, while those in the treatment group stabilized or started improving after the intervention. "There is something about the stereotype threat that feeds off its consequence: You are stressed that you'll do badly, and so you do; then you get even more stressed and do even worse," Cohen explains. "Our intervention seems to halt this downward spiral."

"These are very exciting results," says Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was among the first to show that the threat of reinforcing negative stereotypes can impair performance among minority students. "They suggest some powerful and simple ways of fixing things in American education." Cohen warns, however, against viewing the intervention as a silver bullet for improving minority-student performance. "It worked in this particular school," he says. "Whether it'll work in a predominantly minority school or at a different grade level, we can't say."

Why are breast pumps so expensive?

In Australia it costs abpout 30 dollars to rent one for a month. they do not seem to be cheap in USA either:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/health/01nurse.html?
As more and more women work at various levels, there is a need to produce these cheaply and for lactation centres in work places.

Left and right

After Daniel Bell, I thought that the division between left and right is over and it is only arguments between different defenders of 'truth'. Dilip D'Souza has this blurb on his blog; 'I am not leftist, I am not rightist, I am a typist". But looking at the alignment in Indian blogs, there seems to be a division. Apparently in USA too. Greg Mankiw in the post "Are rich a form of pollution?" (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/) says

"Brad DeLong reveals his inner Veblen:

"I'm enough of a touchy-feely sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor."
This quotation goes to the heart of one reason left-leaning economists like Brad and right-leaning economists like me differ in their policy views".