Interesting article by Mike Rowe, with quotes from Einstein ("People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.") and a Robert Frost poem.

Turkey's PM Erdagon calls Twitter the worst menace to society.

Interesting outsourcing:

At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.

 That is from here. Interesting to see NYT talking about big-brotherish approaches. This statement is buried deep in the article.

But the incentive to do something is strong: under new federal rules, hospitals will lose Medicare money when patients get preventable infections.

The trade-off is between monitoring workers or losing the medicare money.  

... which one will be more appropriate for eating the loud insects ? May be the spices in the curry will help ? May be just a fry ? How about some green chile ? Stop, do not eat them without talking to your doctor.

Shika Dalmia of WSJ argues for a sexual revolution in India. Not in the usual way, she wants more freedom to have sex before marriage. The key parts of the argument:

Today the average marriage age in India has risen to 22 for women and 26 for men. Yet virginity and chastity—especially for women, but also men—remain prized virtues.

Unlike rape and sex-selective abortion, which represent a genuine devaluing of women, sexual harassment in India is, I believe, an expression not of the power of Indian men but of their helplessness. It's a pathetic attempt to have a sexual encounter, no matter how meaningless and evanescent. Its real cause is free-floating male libido with no socially acceptable outlet.  

What would work? Nothing short of transforming India's puritanical culture and giving men and women more freedom to forge sexually mature relationships outside of marriage.

Very interesting argument.  The downside however is the keyword in the last line: "mature".  There is no model for this. She touches upon the problem:

But the process will take generations. Given India's starting point in ancient traditions, one can hope that it will result in a balance healthier than what has unfolded in the over-sexualized West.

It will be an interesting study to plot how the incidence of rape relates to average age of marriage.

Awesome time lapse video of Cicadas.


Found it here.

T. M. Soundararajan is  no more. What is the first song that will come to your mind when thinking about TMS ? To me it is the sound of "Murugaaaa.... ". May be because of being raised in Palani and listening to it almost all the time.

Brussels doesn't like people messing with their statue. The quote from the artist who place his own statue before the original peeing boy:

Let's face it. Belgium is a boring little country. And Brussels is a boring city. Filled with boring tourists. 

In the center of Brussels there is a horrible little statue. A small pissing boy. Where the tourists gather. 

What would happen if we changed the horrible little statue for something beautiful? 

Like a statue of Petro. Would the tourists even notice?

CDC study finds 58% of public pools have fecal matter in them ! $hit !

India is the among least diverse countries and among the worst countries to be a mother. And the focus is on installing a statue for Tamil Annai.

Georgia Tech (with Udacity) is offering a $6600 Masters degree in Computer Science. That is cheaper than a Bachelor's degree in a private engineering college in India. Great ! Now the in class degree has to have some differentiation for the $40,000 price tag.

Some Manhattan moms and some entrepreneurial people figure out how to exploit the disabled lines. Just to circumvent the infamous Disneyland lines and the speedpass options that takes 45 minutes. Note that it costs $130 an hour.

Reminds me of all the tricks I used to do in the lines to get water, train tickets and rajini movie tickets on Diwali day.

Waking away is not easy. Can you sell Satyam shares when it crashed by 50% on a single day ? Or do you buy more in the hope of averaging ?

Leave Satyam, how about Gold ?

It appears promotion focus will help you walk away. Forget what you lose, think about what you gain.

Why ? Of all the things one could do why would one would install a statue for "Mother Tamil" ?  At least the three awards announced were more meaningful than the statue erecting stuff:

Three new awards – one for translating Tamil literature into other languages; another for lifetime contribution to Tamil and Tamil literature and the third for promotion of Tamil computing – were instituted.

 Criminal waste of resources.

John McCain wants a la carte cable TV. Pay for the channels that you want. I don't need CNN or Bravo or TBS or AMC. Makes sense, right ?

There was a discussion on why a la carte cable TV doesn't necessarily end up reducing the price for consumers in the link in this post.

Vamana Avataram.

What happens if you wring out water from a wet cloth ?

The joke in this post about Westbrook and Durant turned out to be true. Westbrook is out for the season and Durant score 39 points in a quarter. The chances of OKC to overcome the spurs is low now, still I will root for them.

Couple of articles that caught my eyes

President Bush is smarter than you.

President Bush's passion for paintings.

Well, the only NBA player who can hold Kevin Durant under 30 points a game is Russell Westbrook. More like that in the link. It is going to be OKC this year !

Margaret Thatcher is dead. The most memorable video of her arguing against socialism:


 Something that made me read about income gap.

The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.

And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again. 

We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance. 

So we have.

May be we can revise judge to be just a verb and use "a person who has the authority to judge" for someone !

Jay Leno's suggested term : "Undocumented democrats" .

A search for little philosopher lead to reading about a philosopher from a different century - John Stuart Mill. An interesting letter written by him when he was a six year old:

My dear Sir,

Mr. Walker³ is a very intimate friend of mine, who lives at No. 31 in Berkeley Square. I have engaged him, as he is soon coming here, first to go to your house, and get for me the 3.^d and 4.^th volumes of Hooke’s Roman history.⁴ But I am recapitulating⁵ the 1.^st and 2.^d volumes, having finished them all except a few pages of the 2.^d. I will be glad if you will let him have the 3.^d and 4.^th volumes.

I am yours sincerely

John Stuart Mill.

John Stuart Mill was trained rigorously by his father. Compare that to the little philosopher from Washington suburb, who they say is not trained at all.

Here is a new map of the US based on dollar bill mobility.

Makes complete sense why I get strange looks when I say I like OKC and not the Mavericks. Still, New Mexico is a loner.

Perspective of a 9 year old


"I think there are a lot of kids who think about interesting things," Zia says. "It's my guess no one really asks them about it."

Manmohan might be soggy. But he is vengeful. The CBI raids Stalin's house for a car. The car is not new. Rumors are that it was the car used in that soggy movie Manmathan Ambu, Most knowledgeable drivers in Chennai know that car.

An old article in FT over crunchiness vs sogginess. Manmohan is soggy. Not Modi. Mani Ratnam was once crunchy. May be he never was.

I hope the conclave made a better choice than the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Hope !

Are you into the Before and After Pictures ? Not from diets or hair restoration projects, but from the 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami. To me the telling picture is #18 - the difference between before and after is just the water and the couple of cars. It is as if nothing happened and the water turned quite.

When we are thinking about Japan, here is how to demolish a building Japanese style.

Remember those swarm of spider like robots flying in Minority Report ? Here is a video from Air Force Research labs on Micro Air Vehicles.



If you think Rand Paul's question on UAV's is important (or not), then think what are the consequences of MAV ? What are the limits of these ? Here is the video from Minority Report.

The New York Times has a article on the subject of UAVs and MAVs:

“It’s not merely the black helicopter crowd of the folks on the far right,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups. “What Rand Paul had to say about drones absolutely fired up conspiracy theorists on the left as well as the right.”

Speaking of black helicopters we love the Syma Helicopter. Its missions are limited to our living room and dining room.

Eric Holder clarifies that the President would not have the authority to order a drone to kill an American citizen on U.S. soil who was "not engaged in combat". Everybody is on the same page. 

Bipartisan filibuster of a Senate nomination by Rand Paul over

"Obama administration's lack of clarity over whether a suspected terrorist who is an American citizen can be targeted with a drone strike within U.S. borders."

and the democrats won't go with him

Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois objected to Paul's request that the Senate take up a non-binding sense of the Senate resolution stating that the U.S. government cannot target "noncombatants" with drones on American soil.

The WH may not want to say that explicitly and keep the options open. They don't have to say anything. It is, however, good to remember who was asking the question and who objected, for future.

Writer Sadanand Dhume won't be speaking at the Wharton India Economic forum. He makes a very nice argument why they should have let Narendra Modi speak after inviting him. The surprising thing is Shashi Tharoor has come out against the Wharton's decision. This has got to hurt. At the least no one would want organizing 2013 WIEF as part of their resume, which is what the students were probably looking forward to.

Wharton India Economic Forum cancels Narendra Modi's speech citing reactions of multiple stakeholders, which is a petition organized by three Indian-American professors with 135 signatures.

People forget Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia few years ago. The Indian community's tolerance for opposing views is reaching new lows. Toorjo Ghose (not Ghosh as the article says) one of the three professors who originated the petition says:

"I think it is important to keep talking about what development is. The model that Narendra Modi has put forward is seriously flawed and is based on some extremely egregious flouting of human rights. That is his economic model," 

Why not let Modi talk then ? Let him answer the questions about development.

Take a moment to think about Copernicus, the man who came up with the idea of helio-centric universe. Google is paying tribute.

I am not against death penalty. I may not be for it too. It depends. Hanging someone without informing the family is a new low for the family-run congress government. “Our worst enemies couldn’t have done it better.” says Fali Nariman.

We can all sleep better. Asteroid flyby and Meteor blasts will not change our commitment to keep drinking high quality alcohol. We asked and Maker's Mark listened. The Whiskey will not be diluted. Let us drink and write more songs, like Loosu penne !

Doesn't it take lot of guts to start a song like "Loosu Penne ... Loosu Penne" ? May be one has to be just a little crazy ?

Bill Gates argues in his letter that measurement is the key to improving human condition.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve amazing progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal-in a feedback loop similar to the one Rosen describes. This may seem pretty basic, but it is amazing to me how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.

What to measure ?

Given a goal, you decide on what key variable you need to change to achieve it-the same way a business picks objectives for inside the company like customer satisfaction-and develop a plan for change and a way of measuring the change. You use the measurement as feedback to make adjustments. I think a lot of efforts fail because they don't focus on the right measure or they don't invest enough in doing it accurately.

Also buried in the long letter

Ethiopia found a successful model for achieving this goal in the Indian state of Kerala, which had lowered its child mortality rate and improved a host of other health indicators, in part through a vast network of community health care posts. 

The data oriented way to approach to solve  lot of problems is like a CEO and they can back it up with success stories.

Why will there be such a rule ?  Makes the position sound like a job.

I was discussing this with a colleague the other day. If you are in Mexico thinking about crossing the border in the next year or two, what will you do ? Will you do it now and try to take advantage of the immigration reform bill or will you wait till next year ? That is also brought up in this WaPo article on the new urgency to cross the border.

“Mexico was beautiful,” he said, “but man, it sucks to be poor.”

Why will the Indian government hang someone without informing his family ? It is not as if the Justice was swift. The actual crime happened in 2001. Why such a hurry now ? Upcoming elections ? Nithya Ramakrishnan in The Hindu asks an important question

A constitutional republic that is insecure about letting a man in chains say his final goodbyes is something that we all need to worry about. Is a state that resorts to secret executions out of fear of demonstrations and protests capable of dealing with the many serious challenges that face this republic?

What are you looking for ? Cute Dogs or the very neat Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100? All of them are on sale.

NPR Story on the Ikea Effect talks about this paper.

Our account suggests that labor leads to increased valuation only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; thus when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated.

The logic is the love is due to the labor, sense of accomplishment. From there,

Mochon's experiments actually have serious big-picture implications. The world over, companies and managers fall in love with their own ideas — and reject better ideas from the outside because they were not designed in-house.

Is it true for everything you do ? Does your expertise in the task count ? Personally, I have different bars for assembling furniture vs the work I do.

People are fighting to make new vaccines. Idiots avoid the vaccines and end up bringing back the diseases. What a mess !

Somebody is starting to pay attention to the - "going to the back of the line" -  rhetoric in the immigration debate. Daniel M. Kowalski is trying to explain the myths about the immigration line in Washington Post. This is something I mentioned sometime ago in the post about the what is left unspecified in the proposal to address the illegal immigration. Daniel is an immigration lawyer, so knows what exactly he is talking about. The key point is the lines are too long and there is quota of how many people can get a green card every year. A reform that doesn't address the quota is impractical.

For comprehensive immigration reform to work, Congress will have to substantially increase the number of green cards available each year in every visa preference. This may mean, for example, allowing a one-time surge of visas to wipe out the backlog, then doubling or tripling some quotas.

When the broader immigration reform does not address which line illegal immigrants will get into (employment based or family based), the proposal to include same-sex couples certainly looks like family-based lines. Both lines are useless without changing the quotas.

The telegraph is out with a story that will be impossible to publish in India now. Was Gandhi really the saint as he is portrayed now ? They quote Nehru:

Mahatma Gandhi’s pronouncements on sex were “abnormal and unnatural” and “can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills… I do not know why he is so obsessed by this problem of sex”. 

Add to that his suggestion to the woman of East Bengal to commit suicide to avoid being raped. (I wonder what will be say to the woman of New Delhi now). All the white-washing and the nursery rhymes portraying saint-like quality of the man can mask his eccentricities only so much, isn't it ?

Amazon Valentine's Day Deals:Offers on Hearts . May be you are not a jewelery person, but there hearts abound even in the Kitchen and Dining.

Former first dog Barney is dead. The picture is a an oil painting of Barney - painted by the President himself. Another reason to like that man.

but I will defend to the the death your right to say it" - "The Friends of Voltaire".

The immigration reform is gaining some traction. Here is the proposal. The key piece is

Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants.

What is left unsaid, missing in most commentary and something that most people don't know is there is a quota of how many employment based green-cards can be granted every year (about 140K). Then each country gets a 7% share of that, irrespective of the population. Assuming more than half of the 11 million illegal immigrants are from Mexico the 10K visas per year is not very useful.

If one considers all the 225K visas for the family based green-cards to go to illegal immigrants, still the wait will be more than a decade. The "agriculture loophole" solves this problem for 3% of the illegal workers.  Relaxing the quota once can be easily branded as amnesty. However, any solution that doesn't address the quota of visa will not be practical.

are too smart to assume cops will protect them. They are buying more guns. They should.

Madras High Court is suggesting Kamal Haasan to consider a "amicable settlement"  with the Muslim groups who were offended by his film. It suggests

"The nation’s unity was more important than individuals’ rights. Any action taken by the petitioner or the other side should not be at the cost of the unity of the nation."

It appears the Court is acknowledging the actor's rights to make a film. What is left unsaid is how the court sees Nation's unity. Check the Hindu's editorial as well.

They were a pair. They walked a lot and often. Almost daily. There was always a yard or two between them. Never too much for a motorcycle to go between them. Never too close for comfort.

May be they never had to whisper. The distance was constant. Like those between the tamarind trees in NH-45.  The way it unfolded day after day was classy. All that stays is the walk, the pair disappeared like those trees in NH-45.

will they claim like S. Janaki did when rejecting the Padma Bhushan award ? May be she is comparing herself to Lata Mangeshkar, still will the claim itself disqualify her ? When thinking about it, here is one of my favorites of S. Janaki.

the girl on that bus in Delhi had a concealed carry permit and a gun ?

Rotal wants you to match 3D  objects in a 2D screen within a few seconds. Addictive.

Wisconsin is leading the way in offering competency-based degrees: essentially testing-out for an entire degree or most of it.

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system. 

With so many options to learn the subjects from MOOC ("massively open online courses) like Udacity and coursera the last missing step was how to get the knowledge "accredited".  Wisconsin is addressing that now.

No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

A public University system, where Republicans control the state assembly, senate and a Republican is the Governor, leads the way !

United States has the most requests for users' Google data. India is second. You can get all the charts here.

Amazon Deals: Get 2% Back in Rewards point and shoot and DSLR Cameras.

Check out the Canon EOS Rebel T4i 18.0 MP CMOS Digital SLR.

The US education system is fine.

NY Times had an entire debate section on this question: Is there an Asian-American quota in Ivy League Universities? Let us look at the arguments for yes and no.

Statistics says, yes, there is an asian-american quota. Number of asian-americans in CalTech grew from 20% in 1990 to 40% in 2011. The asian-american population doubled in the same period, however, the percentage of asian-americans in the Ivy leagues remain roughly the same.


The argument against that:
 In reality, there is no evidence that this is the case. ..... It has long been illegal for universities to impose quotas or ceilings on enrollment of any racial group.
Essentially saying no one does it because it is illegal.

One more argument against the notion that there is racial quota (my para-phrasing):

• Admissions officers seek those who exceed expectations.
• Only few asian-americans have strong comprehensive applications, but lot of them have better scores.
• Only few asian-americans have the skills that enhance classroom discussion or interpersonal dynamics, but they do have better scores.

Sounds offensive to me without any data to prove it and no data to say there is no asian-american quota.

On the other hand, look at why it is obvious there is a asian-american quota. Check the study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshad: “to receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600)." 
27 percent of Presidential Scholars in 2006 are asian-americans. Look at the data!

Someone from Harvard responding to all this: We have a highly individualized and holistic admission process. That could be from the brochure.

However,
 In 1990, when Harvard University was investigated for discriminating against Asian-American applicants, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that part of the reason Asian-American students fared less well than similarly qualified white applicants was that they were less likely to be legacies.

When one side uses data and other side uses words like holistic admission process and interpersonal dynmaics, who do you think is correct ? Independent of your answer to that question, who will win the argument ?

with the data from the social networks. Avoid Oklahoma, may be Chicago too. Trouble is now this post will get New Mexico flagged in the same database ! I hope it is smarter than that.

Mitch Daniels (who considered the republican nomination for President, but instead chose to become President of Purdue) writes a letter to the Purdue community. A long, but interesting read, especially if you are interested in the higher education institutions, their costs and the models for future.

• “M.I.T. claimed they were neutral — but we don’t believe they acted in a neutral way,” he said, adding, “My belief is they put their institutional concerns first.”
• Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and Jstor declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney in Boston, decided to press on. 
• “When I was at M.I.T., if someone went to hack the system, say by downloading databases to play with them, might be called a hero, get a degree, and start a company. But they called the cops on him. Cops.”

Jupiter and Moon are really close. They are not going to be this close for a long time.

Weekly Deals on Toys. We especially like the Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100. Started from that and then graduated to Snap Circuits SC-300. Lots of fun.

Note: If you use the links here and buy something the blog gets a tiny cut at no additional cost to you :-).

Noah Zerkin, a wearable computing and augmented reality enthusiast/hardware prototyper, spotted Sergey Brin in NYC subway sporting the Google glasses. How long do you think before we get one ?

See also : An interview with Larry Page.

One would think that the concept of high expectations might encompass such notions as identifying skills and instilling the sense that any talent from maths, to drama, to sport, are worthy of celebration. To point kids in the direction of places where they can develop these talents outside school. To give the children the opportunity to explore and experience the very best literature, music, art, and give them the tools to create their own. To nurture skills of critical thinking, leadership, mentoring and reflection. To see children not as buckets to be filled in hourly doses with whatever information has been deemed useful, but as a disparate group of individuals who will learn in a myriad of individual, valid ways.

Can you do this and set up SMART objectives for a teacher? Or grade a student?

Jagdish Bhagwati on Indian economy, reforms, elections:

• Our growth has indeed been “inclusive”.
• We can now spend more on Track 2 policies, which involve what economists call “social engineering”; they need constant experimentation and a lack of ideological blinkers to succeed.

His track 2 is "directly spending the revenues generated by the enhanced growth, on health and education of the poor and on employment generating transfers to them".


Interesting to see how the UID is being called "Nilekani UID" multiple times.

It is getting closer to Valentine's Day.

Amazon deals for Valentine's Day are here.

A long interview of Larry Page in wired. 

• Anything is scalable.
• It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time.
•  If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.
• I realized that there’s a lot of sad stories about inventors like Nikola Tesla, amazing people who didn’t have much impact, because they never turned their inventions into businesses.

Developer outsources his own tech job, watches cat videos at work.

Amazon Deals : Extra 15% Off Select Carbon Monoxide and Smoke Alarms . We have the kidde brand battery operated one and it serves its purpose well.

Some really cool HTML5 based designs. I rarely use a mouse. This makes my touchpad obsolete as well. So cumbersome to swipe to the next picture or flick the wiper.

A discussion of why cable TV bundles are priced the way they are and why Bravo viewers are non making ESPN cheaper.

CA teacher fired for working in the adult industry in the past. What past jobs disqualify one from teaching ?

Georgia mom who did not own a car can be prosecuted for vehicular homicide.

The latest report on economic freedom in Indian states is out. Tamilnadu is #2. Guess the #1.

 "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." -- Herbert Stein

Every one is starting notice the cost of higher education in US.

The ROI for college costs should factor the cost of interest rates, the number of years for that to be repaid after the living expenses, the median salary in the field etc. College is not an experience, it is one of the biggest investments and should be treated like one.

If you are moving from India, for a masters in engineering, math or science, the ROI will still be reasonable. Not high, but reasonable. Factor the intangibles, it might just workout.

When I try mit.edu I am getting mst.edu (Missouri University of Science and Technology). On searching, I am getting that Anonymous is replacing mit's site with Aaron Swartz memorial. This must be related.

On the other hand, I also see that the MIT is soul searching. What does that even mean ?