Monday, March 31, 2008

Tibet

While the world has been going crazy talking about the repression in Tibet - one newspaper article tries to look at what the Chinese think of what's happening. Looks like the Chinese Govt has used the media skillfully to play the nationalist angle - the general feeling in China seems to supportive of what the Chinese Govt is doing there.

“We couldn’t believe our government was being so weak and cowardly,” said Ms. Meng, 52, an office worker, who was appalled that the authorities had failed to initially douse the violence. “The Dalai Lama is trying to separate China, and it is not acceptable at all. We must crack down on the rioters.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Extending China's reach

While we in India fight over caste and other issues, China has been busy building a road from Kunming to Bangkok going through Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and then onto Thailand. I guess this will use part of the old WW II road - the Burma road. India has been lobbying (unsuccessfully) to get the Stillwell road going to link India's East to the Burma road and then onto Kunming. A lot of money was spent on the road:
The Chinese spent $4 billion building the highway from Kunming to the border. One particularly difficult stretch of road required the construction of 430 bridges and 15 tunnels. That portion of the road is also monitored by 168 cameras centrally controlled by highway department officials who watch for elephants — there are an estimated 275 in the area — and other stray animals. The cameras also assist the police in catching suspected criminals.

The net benefit (as always) is trade:

The new roads, as well as upgraded ports along the Mekong River, are changing the diets and spending habits of people on both sides of the border. China is selling fruit and green vegetables that favor temperate climates to its southern neighbors, and is buying tropical fruit, rubber, sugar cane, palm oil and seafood.

“You never used to see apples in the traditional markets,” said Ruth Banomyong, an expert in logistics who teaches at Thammasat University in Bangkok.

China has blasted shallow sections of the Mekong to make it more easily navigable for cargo barges, allowing traders to ship apples, pears and lettuce downriver. The price of apples in Thailand has fallen to the equivalent of about 20 cents apiece from more than a dollar a decade ago. Roses and other cut flowers from China have displaced flowers flown in from the Netherlands, making Valentine’s Day easier on the wallet for Thais. Traders now have the choice of shipping by barge, truck or both.



Saturday, March 29, 2008

The earliest audio recording - discovered!

In 1860, a French scientist - Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville - recorded 'Au Clair de la Lune' on a piece of paper blackened by oil smoke. Scientists have now reproduced that recording and and the article and the recording is on the NYT
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville has certainly been obscure, at least until now. Researchers say that in April 1860, the Parisian tinkerer used a device called a phonautograph to make visual recordings of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” That was 17 years before Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph, and 28 years before his technology was used to capture and play back a piece of a section of a Handel oratorio.

Making Beijing sweat

Dream for Darfur has done a good job of pushing China on Darfur and it seems to be working as per an article in the NYT magazine. A lot of work by Mia Farrow who coined the term "Genocide Olympics" via an op-ed in the WSJ a year ago.


Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Book of the week

The making of a monster - attempting to explain Robert Mugabe. Read the review in the Economist

Explaining Religion

The Economist has an article in it's Science and Technology Section attempting to explain religion. There are many studies and tests done on persons to test if religion is really linked to some chemicals or process in the brain:
It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have
blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the
Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of
Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease.
This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called
dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr
McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of
religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to
correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link
with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some
patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are
not.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Tibet

I have blogged here and elsewhere that the world needs to move beyond condemning China and try to find a real solution in Tibet. Clearly, China is not going to change it's stance on Tibet (will we on Kashmir?) so it's in the best interest of everyone to find a practical solution. If autonomy is what The Dalai Lama wants then India should help in setting up talks (3-way) between India, China and the Dalai Lama.

An Op-Ed in the NYT by Patrick French talks along similar lines, starting with the following:
NEARLY a decade ago, while staying with a nomad family in the remote
grasslands of northeastern Tibet, I asked Namdrub, a man who fought in
the anti-Communist resistance in the 1950s, what he thought about the
exiled Tibetans who campaigned for his freedom. “It may make them feel
good, but for us, it makes life worse,” he replied. “It makes the
Chinese create more controls over us. Tibet is too important to the
Communists for them even to discuss independence.”

The Dalai Lama likes to declare himself as an admirer of Gandhi - however the contrast is stark. Where Gandhi believed in passive resistance, the Dalai Lama has gone and tried to get support of Hollywood and others in the US - this is simply not gone down well in China. To take another example: Burma's Aung San Sui Kyi has been in house arrest for ever - she has believed in passive resistance and stuck to her ideals choosing to remain in Burma even when her husband passed away (the Junta told her that she was welcome to leave to attend his funeral but she would not be able to return).

Why Old Technologies are still kicking

NYT has an article on the IBM mainframe and why it's still popular - essentially because it serves a business need and does it very well:

“The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to
thrive because customers didn’t care about the underlying technology,”
said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of
the mainframe in the early 1990s and is now a visiting professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and I.B.M. made the investments to make that happen.”

Saturday, March 22, 2008

GDP per person

Very perceptive piece in the Economist on measuring GDP v/s GDP per person. I remember this from my EMBA class - that even though it looks like Japan is having a bad time with its economy, even if Japan does 0% growth in GDP on GDP per person basis they would have still grown (due to declining population):
Once you accept that growth in GDP per head is the best way to measure economic performance, the standard definition of a recession—a decline in realGDP over some period (eg, two consecutive quarters or year on year)—also seems flawed. For example, zero GDP growth in Japan, where the population is declining, would still leave the average citizen better off. But in America, the average person would be worse off. A better definition of recession, surely, is a fall in average income per person. On this basis, America has been in recession since the fourth quarter of last year when its GDP rose by an annualised 0.6%, implying that real income per head fell by 0.4%.

Friday, March 21, 2008

China - The new colonialist

The Economist (here and here) has a article on China's insatiable appetite for commodities and how that is driving it's foreign policy:

THERE is no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper—indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.

And then later:
The worst fallout from China's quest for natural resources will be seen not in the countries they come from, nor in the countries that are competing for supplies, but in China itself. Over the past few years the volume of raw materials it consumes per unit of output has risen sharply. In particular, China has gone from miser to glutton in its use of energy, and is now struggling to diet. That has involved bigger imports of oil, gas and coal, and so more foreign entanglements. But it has also led to the rapid depletion of resources that China cannot import, such as clean air and water.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Gorkhaland - Still Alive

Indian Idol winner used to fan flames on Gorkhland - this is how the new trend of reality shows are being used by smart politicians. However, the good news (if any) is really that:

But Gurung insists his will be a peaceful struggle.

"We want the right of self-determination within the Indian Constitution," he said. "We would not like to repeat the violence of 20 years ago. All protests will be held in a democratic and peaceful manner."

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Globalization

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

NYT has an article on how globalization is bringing in rose growers in Kenya much needed jobs and money.

Look at the global economy one way and Buyaki earns the equivalent of seven bunches of roses for a month's labor. That smacks of exploitation. Look at it another and she has a job she'd never have had until globalization came along.
The article ends on sad point - given the recent violence in Kenya:

But life has been hard recently. Kenya's many tribes have long flocked to the Rift Valley for economic opportunity. So when a disputed election sparked ethnic violence, the local toll was heavy.

Longonot was shut down; Luo employees fled to the west and have not returned; a camp down the road houses about 1,300 refugee Luos in tents.

This violence reflects many things, among them how critical African job-creation is. "These clashes are really about poverty. If people have money, they care less who's ruling," Julius Njuguna, a manager, told me.

Think again: roses, refugees and righting African wrongs are linked. A rose that's a social tool can smell as sweet.


Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Wronged wives

Great piece in the Boston Globe and IHT on Elliot Spitzer's wife. What was he thinking??

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Jonestown - cult of murderers

Saw a documentary on Discovery channel on Jonestown in the late 1970s. Nutcases......

Border Crossings

A NYT article discusses the effect of money being transferred by emigrants back to their home countries - this particular article talks about a World Bank official sending money back to his family in a village in Orissa, India and then goes back to see the impact that money has made.

The International Monetary Fund said the Philippines received $122 million. Mr. Ratha produced an estimate 51 times higher: $6.2 billion. His tallies, first published in 2003, showed that remittances, once dismissed as the equivalent of rounding error, were nearly three times greater than the world’s combined foreign aid...

...Back in Sindhekela for the first time in three years, Mr. Ratha went from being a migration expert to mere migrant again, with the attendant tensions. He was annoyed that the money he sent his father for medical treatment went to a relative’s wedding. His father was annoyed that Mr. Ratha refused to honor his caste by wearing a sacred thread.

Father and son had long wrangled over the house that Mr. Ratha had built as a gift. The son is proud of the big master bedroom. His father finds its size off-putting and sleeps on a living room cot.

Mr. Ratha gave the village high school a new classroom, which he intended as a science hall. The state never sent the equipment, and the room now houses some aging computers of uncertain utility.

Mr. Ratha, who named the building for his long-deceased mother, professes no donors’ remorse. “The building has served a great purpose,” he said.

He does worry that his generosity may have hurt his half-brother, Tarun, who spent the money on gadgets and a motorcycle and did not finish high school. At 23, he is unemployed and the family blames remittance dependency. “I think it has affected his drive in a negative way,” Mr. Ratha said.

At the same time, his sister Rina said that without his support she would not have earned her degrees or married an architect. “Whatever I am, I am because of him,” she said of Mr. Ratha.


Iraq

There seems to be no end in sight to the mess in Iraq. You'd imagine that after Saddam's fall and with the 2nd (or 3rd) largest oil reserves in the world, some of the oil revenue would trickle back into helping people rebuild their lives. Not so, writes the NYT

The sea of oil under Iraq is supposed to rebuild the nation, then make it prosper. But at least one-third, and possibly much more, of the fuel from Iraq’s largest refinery here is diverted to the black market, according to American military officials. Tankers are hijacked, drivers are bribed, papers are forged and meters are manipulated — and some of the earnings go to insurgents who are still killing more than 100 Iraqis a week.

“It’s the money pit of the insurgency,” said Capt. Joe Da Silva, who commands several platoons stationed at the refinery.

And then later, the article says:

Before the invasion of Iraq, eight gasoline stations dotted the region around Sharqat, an hour north of the refinery at the northern edge of Saddam Hussein’s home province, Salahuddin. Now there are more than 50.

Economic growth? Not exactly. It is one of the more audacious schemes that feed money to the black marketeers. Most tanker trucks intended for Sharqat never make it there. “It’s all a bluff,” said Taha Mahmoud Ahmed, the official who oversees fuel distribution in Salahuddin. “The fuel is not going to the stations. It’s going to the black market.”

Life for the ordinary citizen has changed dramatically.

With her fair skin and large brown eyes, Ms. Abood is considered a beauty in these parts. A Shiite teacher, she married Amjad Ubeid, a Sunni electrician, in 2002, back when the two sects lived peacefully in many neighborhoods. She was 28; he was 31. The young couple owned a three-story home in the comfortable Huriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. They filled it with the luxuries of a middle-class life: nice furniture, a CD player and a large television.

March 19 also marks the 5th anniversary of the start of the war. In another great analytical article in the NYT the author looks back on the war and talks about what went wrong (in hindsight) and what (if anything) good came out of the war:

It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time. To walk Baghdad’s streets on the voting days, especially during the December election that produced the Shiite-led government now in power, was inspiriting. With 12 million people casting ballots, a turnout of about 75 per cent, it was natural enough for President Bush to say Iraqis had embraced the American vision. In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, and deeply wounded, if not outright vengeful, Shiite majority.





The laws of physics

Something seems to be wrong with the laws of physics writes The Economist

Even Einstein, however, may not have got it right. Modern instruments have shown a departure from his predictions, too. In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America's unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.

Battling the Babu Raj

The Economist has a special briefing on India and what's holding India back.

RIGZIN SAMPHEL, a 33-year-old civil servant, wakes to the screeching of peacocks outside his bedroom window. Stepping into the gentle sunshine of a north Indian spring morning, he hears the lowing of three brown cows tasked with providing his milk. A scuffling attends him, as armed guards, peons, gardeners and orderlies—tasked with catering to Mr Samphel's other needs—hop to attention.

A four-year veteran of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Mr Samphel is the district magistrate of Jalaun, in Uttar Pradesh (UP) province. More often called the collector, or district officer, the district magistrate is the senior official of India's key administrative unit, the district. In Jalaun, an expanse of arid plain between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, Mr Samphel is in charge of 564 villages and 1.4m people.

After a hearty breakfast, he leaves his residence—requisitioned from a local maharajah around 1840—and gets into his car: a white Ambassador, curvaceous clone of the 1948 Morris Oxford, complete with siren and flashing blue light, which has symbolised officialdom in India for six decades. Mr Samphel takes the back seat; a policeman rides machinegun in the front; and in two minutes they arrive at Mr Samphel's main office, the “collectorate”.

There for the next four hours, beneath a portrait of a beaming Mohandas Gandhi, Mr Samphel receives a stream of poor people. A turbaned flunkey regulates the flow, letting in a dozen at a time. Many are old and ragged, or blind. Paraplegics slither to the collector's feet on broken limbs. Most bring a written plea, for the resumption of a widow's pension that has mysteriously dried up; for money for an operation; for a tube-well or a blanket. Many bear complaints against corrupt officials. One supplicant wants permission to erect a statue of a dead politician: a former champion of the Hindu outcastes who comprise nearly half of Jalaun's population.

Mr Samphel listens, asks questions and, in red ink, scrawls on the petitions his response. For desperate cases, he orders an immediate payment of alms, typically 2,000 rupees ($50), from the district Red Cross society, of which he is president. More often, he writes a note to the official to whom the petition should have been directed in the first place—or, wretchedly often, to whom it has already been directed: “Act upon this according to the law.”

Mr Samphel reckons he spends 60% of his time dealing with individual supplicants—also outside the collectorate. As the Ambassador turns back on to the road, it is waylaid by a tractor bringing a cartload of petitioners in from a distant village. Then one of Mr Samphel's three mobile phones bleeps. Someone wants firewood; Mr Samphel calls a forestry official to relay the request. It is a hugely impressive performance. Mr Samphel works 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and reckons he has had two days off since 2003. But this is hardly an efficient way to minister to a needy population almost half the size of New Zealand's.


Why Shariah?

The New York Times Magazine has a great article on the history of the Shariah and what it was supposed to be and what it has become. Very interesting read.

Singapore's severe lesson in complacency

How this guy with a limb managed to escape and still remains at large is mystifying. Complacency is probably the best way to describe this.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

India's bestselling author

IHT article on Chetan Bhagat - India's best selling author.....

Tibet

Lot of news on Tibet today, specifically on the riots on Lhasa and how countries like Nepal and India are stopping protesters in their cities.

Of course, the world decries the oppression in Tibet while the Dalai Lama sits in India. The question I have is - what should India do? Have the Tibetans in India over-stayed their welcome in India? My own view is yes they have. For anyone who has been to Dharamsala or McCleodganj can testify, the Tibetans there are a law onto themselves. An Indian cannot buy property there without the permission of the Tibetans, young Tibetans thrive on the hefty UN grants they get (in US$) drinking and committing crime. Quite frankly, I felt like a foreigner in Dharamsala.

And what of the Hollywood actors who support the Dalai Lama? Well, I think they should be told that if this is a problem that's close to their heart they should go petition their government to accept all the Tibetans as refugees - something Washington will never do...

Friday, March 14, 2008

Mother's influence

Great Article in IHT on Obama's mother and her influence on him. Great read!

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The long silence

Great article in the WP on a project in India on recording history of the Partition. It's high time someone did it before that generation dies out. I've members of my family who are displaced by Partition and they've always been reluctant to talk about it. Urvashi Butalia's book was a great first step

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Bridge on the River Kwai?

A lot of death and destruction accompanied the construction of the bridge by Japan in WWII. Even after so many years, governments are still choosing to ignore hardships their own citizens went through. Life is indeed cheap!

The end of TV as we know it

Great sets of articles in the NYT (here and here). If you look at the statistics in the first link, 9M viewers saw the The Office Season 4 Premiere on the TV and 3 M saw it on-line. Amazing.

Big Brother is watching....


Scary Stuff - now it seems there is way to know if you're a dog on the internet


Sunday, March 9, 2008

Baba Amte - RIP

Great obituary of Baba Amte in the Economist - really nice to read about someone who really made a difference to the lives of India's villagers - unfortunately we have forgotten Gandhi's ideals - village development is key to our success as a nation.

Business in South-East Asia

Great article in the Economist on the former South East Asian "Tigers" - references a book by Joe Studwell on Asian Godfathers. Joe has also written a previous book on the "China dream" - highly recommended.

Top 3 trends in IT

In IT

  1. SOA
  2. Green computing
  3. Web 2.0

Saturday, March 8, 2008

The Truth about Autism

Wired magazine's got this fantastic article on Autism

Watch the video:



The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?

But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn't speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.

And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.

Cycle of Violence - will it ever end?

One more attack in Israel - there will be reprisals from Israel for sure. How long will this go on? How will (will it) this end? The other day I heard over BBC radio that a UN resolution over condemning the attack could not pass because some Middle Eastern countries opposed the resolution - they wanted language in there condemning Israel's attack on Gaza a few days ago which killed about 50 civilians. The Libyan delegate to the UN said (and I agree with him) that passing the resolution meant that we valued Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives - why doesn't the world get together and condemn Israel when they launch an attack in Gaza killing civilians?
In closed-door discussion among the 15-nation council's diplomats, Libya insisted the statement should be "balanced" by including condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza, a Libyan U.N. representative said after the meeting.

The reason for this endless cycle of violence between the Muslim world and rest is in my opinion a flawed US foreign policy - nobody looks at the real reasons behind why the Muslim world is unhappy but choose to focus on the manifestation of that anger. This has to change.

For a background of the Palestine mandate and the formation of Israel see Alistair Cooke's brilliant Letter from America.

Did you notice something that Lord Balfour's declaration and the famous United Nations resolution have in common?

A fatal omission of one word.

Balfour said Britain favoured "a national home in Palestine". The Jews took this to mean Palestine would be it - the national home.

The Arabs said - No, no the declaration says only "a national home" meaning in part of Palestine.

A quarter century later the UN resolution said Israel must withdraw from occupied territories, which to the Israelis meant some territories. To the Arabs it meant the, all the occupied territories.

Each of them through decades of bloodshed and unstinting hate have held to these opposing interpretations. All because of a missing "the".

Next time you draft a treaty pay attention to the simplest English words that can say so much like "by" and "with" and "from" and "for" - and pay special attention to the definite article, the harmless word of three letters: T H E.

Zimbabwe - Regime Change anyone?

Why didn't anyone look at regime change in Zimbabwe? This nutcase of a guy who started by meaning well and leading the country to independence against the British and white rule under Ian Smith (and here) is out of control. Inflation is running at a whopping 100,000% and Zimbabwe has gone from a economic bread basket of Africa to her basket case. Hopefully the elections bring an end to this but it looks dismal for now...

Friday, March 7, 2008

Sri Lanka

Conflict in Srilanka seems to be getting worse - the truce seems to be off and the Tamils and Sinhalese are at each other's throats - yet again. And to think the whole thing really kicked off due to the majority (Sinhalese) trying to push down their language on the Tamils. Talk about short-sighted political leadership

Empowering India's villages

Tarun Khanna puts a strong argument forward that India must do something similar to what happened in China in the late 70 and early 80s - bring villages up and get them to share in "India Shining". If that doesn't happens then India will never be able to catch and India's farmer will not be able to improve their lot. The following is an excerpt from the article

So India should take a page from China’s book and fix its villages, but not by trying to do it China’s way. China’s strong government forced the rapid dissemination of the Anhui experiment. India’s weak state cannot accomplish anything remotely comparable. Rather, India should play to its private-sector strengths. Corporations need a seat at the table of village reform. India’s vibrant indigenous entrepreneurial class – unlike China’s counterpart, largely decimated by the socialist experiment and the Cultural Revolution – must be courted. Reliance Fresh is an indigenous example in India. Even multinationals should be welcomed, the task is so enormous. Metro Cash and Carry is an example, and joint ventures between indigenous entrepreneurs like Bharti Enterprises and multinationals like Wal-Mart can complete the private-investment picture. A modern agricultural supply chain linking the village tomato farmer to his urban market could reduce waste by 25 percent and end-user prices by 21 percent.

Only then will the 70 percent living in villages begin to share in India, allegedly “rising” today.

Books - The Sexual Paradox

Book by Susan Pinker in the NYT.

The book seems to provide a different and interesting view on why girls do better than boys in school but "seem" to drop off later in life. As the author points out, it has nothing to do with decrease in intelligence but really how the brains are wired. The excerpt below says it all..

Pinker, a psychologist and a columnist at The Globe and Mail in Canada, is careful to remind her readers that statistics say nothing about the choices women and men make individually. Nor does she entirely discount the effect of sex discrimination or culture in shaping women’s choices. But she thinks these forces play only a bit part. To support this, Pinker quotes a female Ivy League law professor: “I am very skeptical of the notion that society discourages talented women from becoming scientists,” the professor writes. “My experience, at least from the educational phase of my life, is that the very opposite is true.” If women aren’t racing to the upper echelons of science, government and the corporate world despite decades of efforts to woo them, Pinker argues, then it must be because they are wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.

Thus, Pinker parks herself firmly among “difference” feminists. Women’s brains aren’t inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from men’s, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide. Women care more about intrinsic rewards, they have broader interests, they are more service-oriented and they are better at gauging the effect they have on others. They are “wired for empathy.” These aren’t learned traits; they’re the result of genes and hormones. Beginning in utero, men are generally exposed to higher levels of testosterone, driving them to be more competitive, assertive, vengeful and daring. Women, meanwhile, get a regular dose of oxytocin, which helps them read people’s emotions, “the truest social enabler.” Then there’s prolactin, which, along with oxytocin, surges during pregnancy, breast-feeding and caretaking. Together, the hormones produce such a high that mother rats choose their newborns over cocaine.

India and the Olympics

Well, at least some one is trying to do something about India's pathetic show at the Olympics.

The "old" economy finally catches with up the "new" one

Silicon valley is seeing movement of staff from start-ups to old established companies. People are seeing an imminent recession and moving to safer grounds - WSJ article has an article here

Mr. Kher grew concerned, especially when several colleagues fled for nearby Cisco and other large Silicon Valley companies. A self-professed "Wall Street junkie," Mr. Kher trades his own portfolio of tech stocks, and his fears heightened after he watched reports on CNBC about the stock market's volatility and a possible recession. "The economy will go down eventually," he recalls thinking.

In December, he posted his résumé on several Internet job sites. His wife, also a software engineer, encouraged him to pursue a variety of options. But "I wanted to go back to a big company," he says. "Start-ups throw money at you, but after two quarters, they can disappear." He adds that he and his wife have discussed buying a house this year, despite the area's high home prices. In January, the median price of a single-family home in Santa Clara County was $750,000, according to the California Association of Realtors.



Wednesday, March 5, 2008

On Langauge

Brilliant article by William Safire in the NYT on language - especially on the new adjective Transformative doing the rounds in political debates in the US. The last piece on use of Presumptive was simply brilliant!

MSFT and Online Services

MSFT is launching on-line services - looks like SaaS but the devil is in the details. Looks like the Portal (Sharepoint) is the front end of the hosted mail/calendar etc. As the article on ZDNet says, it looks like the same strategy of Windows = DOS 5 + GUI. Time will tell....

Microsoft opens Pandora’s box on online services, betting convenience is the killer app by ZDNet's Dana Gardner -- And what Microsoft must do, in addition to making the true cost-benefits analysis murky, is to absolutely win on packaging and convenience. And this is where Google is vulnerable. Google has still to show, aside from costs, how businesses of all sorts can adopt their services and approach in an easy to manage way, that packages things up neatly for the IT folks, and that make a transition from the hairball easy, convenient, and well-understood.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Base of the Pyramid

WSJ has an article on what the BoP guys are doing in Andhra Pradesh - creating slum roof-top gardens encouraging slum dwellers to grow their own food.

The Trouble with India's IT strategy

Sramana Mitra has given very good reasons on what is wrong with India's IT strategy. Outsourcing as a strategy will fail eventually as India's salary rise makes it more productive for IT companies to go elsewhere (Eastern Europe etc etc). What is lacking is really a strategy to create products - I haven't seen this by any of our IT giants - TCS, WIPRO, Infosys etc. Zoho (featured in the article above seems to have got something right at least.

Outsourcing motherhood to India

This can't be right - ethically, morally or whichever way you look at it. This is bound to have serious social consequences down the road.

The Torture of Turning Everything Off

Great Article in the NYT on turning off your cellphones, PDAs etc and do some old fashioned reading and relaxing. As one of my friend used to say - spend some time with no input or output - just let the mind wander.....

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Chandigarh

Great article in IHT on discarded furniture from Chandigarh being auctioned in NY

Russia

Great Article in the NY Times on Edward Limonov one of Russia's opposition politicians by Andrew Meier. Also read Andrew Meier's great book on Russia - Black Earth. especially the chapter on Chechnya

Kosovo

Great op-ed in the NY Times by Serbia's foreign minister. While the world is generally excited about the Kosovo breaking free - it does raise an interesting question - what stops every province (not withstanding their troubles) in every part of the world to break free and declare independence. The US and the UK seemed to have gone along with Kosovo - that's just not right.

Prince Harry in Afghanistan

There seems to a lot of support for Harry's service in Afghanistan - based on what I've seen on media - although on TV there were a couple of guys from South Asia based in the UK saying they don't support. Wonder why - was it because he was fighting in Afghanistan or because they didn't like the idea of putting the life of the 3rd in line to the throne in danger ?! The New York times has a very complimentary article.

SaaS - Business Model or Feature

SaaS: Business model or feature? It depends by ZDNet's Larry Dignan -- Software as a service is about to approach a crossroads in a few years and at issue is whether it becomes a dominant business model or a feature that becomes just another way for a vendor to deliver an application. To Salesforce.com and NetSuite SaaS is clearly the dominant business model–or at least will be in [...]

Google Sites - Hype??


Google Sites: evaluate first and don’t believe the hype by ZDNet's Dennis Howlett -- Nice article - good point about sending your enterprise's data thru your firewall to Google's server. Here is the complete article -

Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites