May 13, 2008

Warrior-scholar falls

Last week the nation lost Michael Vinay Bhatia to the war in Afghanistan (an IED of course). To say he was a unique breed of “soldier” would be an understatement:

Michael Vinay Bhatia, 31, was serving as a social scientist embedded with troops in the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Systems program.

HTS program manager Steve Fondacaro said, “He was an example of a brilliant scholar who could have made his job and done well in the U.S., but who of his own accord discovered our program and volunteered to participate as a team member fully understanding the risks. This makes him a hero three, four times over…”

A magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, Bhatia was a doctoral candidate at Oxford University. “He had a lot of integrity as a scholar in terms of studying conflict and its impact on civilians and he was willing to take that into an operational field,” said Sarah Havens, a former Brown classmate. “He was adamant that that was the right thing to do.”

Bhatia’s dream of making a difference also took him to war-torn East Timor. But friends said they believed Bhatia was looking forward to a peaceful life back home. “I got the sense this was the last hurrah for him,” Havens said. “He was building his nest egg and looking for academic positions in the States for when he came back…” [Link]

I first heard about the Human Terrain Systems Program in an NPR story a few months ago (worth listening to). The idea is quite brilliant, the type of idea that our disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could use more of if we want to see a real turn around. The basic purpose of the HTS teams is to learn about the people and customs of a region so that they can advise the military on how to win hearts and minds, not through bluster, but through mutual understanding:

Among the outpouring of grief and remembrance that arose on various blogs in the past week was this one by a classmate of Bhatia’s at Brown University:

“I wish to pass on some bad news: Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan.”

For twenty minutes, I managed to push it out of my mind and finish my meeting. As soon as I left The Landing, I fell apart.

As the day went on, I talked to other friends and colleagues of Mike’s and gathered more information. Apparently Mike was killed by a roadside bomb in Khost. He was stationed at FOB Salerno and advising the 82nd Airborne Division as part of the Human Terrain program. It was a controversial program and Mike told me he faced some criticism from colleagues for his decision to participate, but ultimately he believed he could do some good.

Mike and I were classmates at Brown, but we didn’t know each other well then. He came back to Providence in 2006 to become a visiting professor at the Watson Institute at Brown and we reconnected. If you google Mike, you’ll read a lot about his scholarly work around the world, especially in Afghanistan. Mike was a true academic, but in many ways he was more like Indiana Jones. Mike didn’t sit around and do research. He spent his time in the field: in Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and more. Mike was a genius. He was an Oxford scholar, his book The Gun in Afghanistan was just published and there’s no doubt he knew his stuff when it came to international relations. You can find academics and experts around the globe who will sing his praises. They can do a far better job than I can explaining exactly why Mike’s research was so important.

I knew Mike in a far different capacity. To me, he wasn’t an author or a professor or a scholar. To me, he was a friend. For about a year Mike and I hung out on an almost daily basis. Last summer, Mike would come over to my place and we’d drink scotch and play Halo 2 until three in the morning (he’d routinely kick my ass). I would listen to him complain about his job and he’d endure my endless moaning about the trials and tribulations of starting a new company. We would go to the Wickenden Pub with our friend Chris and debate religion or head to the Wild Colonial to commiserate about women. We watched Entourage and Firefly together. Mike was a guy’s guy, a partner in crime. The kind that you could call any day of the week and he’d be down to go out at a moment’s notice. [Link]

Coincidentally, the author of the blog entry above was one of my closest friends growing up.

The best way to understand Bhatia’s work, and the reason why people are mourning the loss of his intelligence as well as his friendship, is to read this photoessay of his published last year.

Another one of his friends wrote in to SM as well:

A scholarship fund was established in Michael’s memory. The purpose of the fund will be to provide opportunities for undergraduates to obtain experiences working abroad similar to those Michael was able to undertake. Although the precise contours of the scholarship will be developed in the coming months, a fund already exists in his name. Those who would like to contribute to this fund may do so by writing checks payable to Brown University, clearly indicating that the gift is in memory of Michael Bhatia, and mailing the contribution to the following address:

Brown University

Gift Cashier

P.O. Box 1877

Providence, RI 02912

abhi at 11:40 PM in In Memoriam, Military, Profiles, Science and Technology · 13 comment(s) · Direct link


 

May 12, 2008

Smells Like Teen Entrepreneurial Spirit

Cool kid alert: Teen entrepreneur Anshul Samar, age 14. This fiesty entrepreneurial spirit will be one of the key speakers at tomorrow’s Second Annual Teens in Tech Conference, sponsored by Sun, Microsoft, HP, and others.

Anshul is the founder and CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc. He has created a fantasy role-playing chemistry board game, Elementeo: “Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction! We don’t want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!” [more]

MSN recently featured Anshul in “Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21” (thanks to newstab posters garbanzobean and anmdavadi). How did he get started? In in his own words:

Entrepreneurship is cool, and so is chemistry! Both have lots of actions, reactions, explosions, experimentation, and most importantly, the joy and excitement of creating something new! Creating a company has been on my mind for a long time, but it was only in the 5th grade when the idea of a chemistry based card game struck me. I must have created and thrown away dozens of prototypes to get just the right concoction of education and fun. … Elementeo is a game where you create compounds, combat elements, and conquer chemistry… A game of battle, chemical reactions, and powerful scientists… And a game that kids, teenagers, college students, teachers, scientists, parents, and grandparents can all play and have fun.

The excitement Anshul has poured into his maiden entrepreneurial voyage (the game will be released this month!) is evident at his company’s homepage which is very much written in his voice … and in this video from Mark Coker of VentureBeat, taken at the 2007 TieCon conference in Silicon Valley.

Here’s to his motto of “Create, Combat, Conquer!”

Sandhya at 08:43 AM in Business, Kids, Science and Technology · 17 comment(s) · Direct link


 

March 20, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP (with excerpts from a novel)

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 — in large part for the year-around access to diving — and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke’s novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a “Prince Kalidasa,” who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named “Taprobane” — Tap-ROB-a-nee — by Clarke).

Here are a few paragraphs from the historical section involving Clarke’s Prince Kalidasa:

The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the king of the still greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half-guest, half-hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded Mahinda’s empire bore such Crests, formed of a dazzling, crystalline substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.

That ivory gleam was only three days’ march away - one along the royal road, through forests and paddy-fields, two more up the winding stairway which he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the gods; the ruler of all this land could not.

But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. There, guarded by moat and rampart, lay the pools and fountains and Pleasure Gardens on which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of these, there were the ladies of the rock-the ones of flesh and blood, whom he summoned less and less frequently-and the two hundred changeless immortals with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no others he could trust.

Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the brooding menace of the mountain, towards the distant hope of rain. The monsoon was late this season; the artificial lakes that fed the island’s complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year he should have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them all— which, as he well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father’s name: Paravana Samudra, the Sea of Paravana. It had been completed only thirty years ago, after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood proudly beside his father, when the great sluice-gates were opened and the life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the kingdom there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that immense, man-made lake, when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura, City of Gold-the ancient capital which he had abandoned for his dream.

In this made-up history of the ancient kingdom of Taprobane, Clarke actually seems to know whereof he speaks; the injections of bits of Hindu culture seem to come from a position of knowledge.

And here is a little from the main section of the novel, set in the present day. The protagonist is a Sri Lankan named Raja (short for “Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe”), who has retired from public life, and moved to an estate built on the site of “Kalidasa’s” original pleasure gardens:

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa’s architect had designed now splashed in Johan’s own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.

Securing this history-drenched piece of land for his retirement had given Johan more satisfaction than anything in his whole career, fulfilling a dream that he had never really believed could come true. The achievement had required all his diplomatic skills, plus some delicate blackmail in the Department of Archaeology. Later, questions had been asked in the State Assembly; but fortunately not answered.

He was insulated from all but the most determined tourists and students by an extension of the moat, and screened from their gaze by a thick wall of mutated Ashoka trees, blazing with flowers throughout the year. The trees also supported several families of monkeys, who were amusing to watch but occasionally invaded the villa and made off with any portable objects that took their fancy. Then there would be a brief inter-species war with fire-crackers and recorded danger-cries that distressed the humans at least as much as the simians - who would be back quickly enough, for they had long ago learned that no-one would really harm them.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of Clarke himself, one of the world’s most famous writers, living in a remote part of Sri Lanka — away from it all.

After the opening, the novel has a more conventional science fiction story arc — the goal is to build a kind of massive space elevator from the top of a mountain in Taprobane…

amardeep at 12:50 PM in Fiction, In Memoriam, Literature, Science, Science and Technology · 23 comment(s) · Direct link


 

January 10, 2008

A mind, a blog, and a vast emptiness

We often receive emails like the one below at the lonely North Dakota bunker that serves as Sepia Mutiny’s world blogging headquarters:

…I’d like to reach a wider audience and would really appreciate if you could link [to] my blog.

ps - I’m pretty good at keeping my site updated. Please take a look!

Thanks much!

To this, our standard response (if we have time to write one) is a polite “please read our F.A.Q.” But when I read the above email from a blogger, writing from a lonely bunker of his own, with nothing but his science and his blog…well, I’m not made of stone people. I’m quick to recognize a kindred spirit when I see one.

Plus, this guy’s research has direct bearing on my own work and career aspirations (and might save me some day):

I am a resident of Delhi, India, and a psychiatrist by profession (heal the mentally unwell). I’m also fond of the great outdoors, and cultures around the world. I’ll be spending 3.5 months in Antarctica winter of 2008, doing research at the Indian base station. Thru this blog, I hope to keep my friends and family updated on my stay in this incredible land.
—Sudhir Khandelwal [Link]

Of course he is going to be “good about updating his site!” What else does he have to do? :)

First, let’s let Sudhir explain, through his blog, why he is down in Antarctica:

I started thinking of Antarctica seriously after my expedition to Kailash-Mansarovar in the summer of 2006. It was Chitra, in fact, who perhaps jokingly asked me what next after Kailash Mansarovar! Antarctica? And then there were others who had visited Antarctica as members of the Indian Scientific Expedition encouraging me to submit a research proposal to the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. I proposed to study the longitudinal changes in the general and psychological health of expedition members who stay in Antarctica for short-term (3 months) and long-term (15 months) along with their coping strategies including tobacco and alcohol consumption. After being short-listed, I was called to make a presentation, and to my extreme joy I was informed in August, 2007 to get ready for joining the Pre-Antarctica Induction Training programme of two weeks starting mid-September at Auli in Garhwal Himalayas under the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. [Link]

One of the seminal works about the psychological effects of long term isolated expeditions is a book I read years ago titled Bold Endeavors : Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration. Clinical observation of mental health (mental breakdown and group dynamics) during Antarctic expeditions, as well as long term submarine deployments, helps to inform NASA astronaut training as well as crew selection for the International Space Station (and eventually Lunar and Mars missions). Simply put, when you keep people isolated as a small group (and it is freezing outside), they start to get irritable. Studying that breakdown is of major importance. Look what happened just two weeks ago:

Without releasing names, the National Science Foundation, which runs the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, confirmed that two men had to be evacuated from the base Christmas Day after what one person characterized as a “drunken Christmas punch-up.”

A C-130 Hercules military transport plane had to be dispatched from McMurdo Station, the main U.S. research base far to the north on the Antarctic coast, after one of the men suffered a broken jaw.

“There was an altercation between two people,” National Science Foundation spokesman Peter West told the New Zealand Herald. “There’s no indication of the cause or of the background between the two folks…” [Link]

Of equal importance in these studies is identifying and documenting the traits that some people possess that prevent them from breaking down like most would. I mean the natural-born-leader-types who always remain calm, collected, and stay focused on the mission at hand.

The ITBP instructors did their job of physically training us and giving us theoretical and practical demonstrations on hills and glacier with their customary sincerity and zeal. I have earlier experience ITBP personnel’s devotion and dedication in ample measures during my expedition to Kailash Mansarovar. They not only provided security and helping hand during some difficult treks and while crossing fast flowing river streams, but their presence alone was a big comfort.


I had a great time with young scientists of the group. They represented different fields about which I knew very little. But it was heartening to listen to their animated discussion on subjects like astrophysics, space physics, troposphere, ionosphere, geomagnetism etc. It appeared India’s future was secure in their hands. Some terms sounded familiar, but I was totally dumbfounded by a specialty called Limnology. I had not heard of it before. Want to hazard a guess what it is about? Well, it is the physical, chemical and biological study of water. [Link]

I am captivated by his many descriptions of the science conducted/discussed by his colleagues because of my own space and geology background, but I am equally captivated by his interpersonal observations:

Lot of activities going on now in Maitri. All scientists who are only for summer period are setting up their instruments and planning field visits. Though I have spent 2 weeks with many of them during Auli trip, however, now I feel I am senior to them; I almost feel as if they are intruders on our premises and facilities. I wonder if 26th team also felt that way when we came. May be not, since we came heralding their countdown for departing to India. How soon man starts claiming rights over anything which is not his even by any stretch of imagination.

Last night there was a movie, ‘Bhul-Bhulaiyyan’ starring Vidya Balan, Akshay Kumar and Shiney Ahuja. It is a remake of a Malayalam/Tamil movie of Priyadarshan. It is about multiple personality and Akshay Kumar plays a psychiatrist. Hence I stayed back for watching the movie. This evening I held an informal and small discussion group on Bollywood and multiple personality. People want me to hold such discussion groups regularly. I am not sure; I may ruffle some feathers. [Link]

I’m more than a little jealous of Sudhir’s assignment. A few of my co-workers have been down there and I might still get the chance to go someday. For now it is good to learn vicariously. For those of you that liked V.V.’s food post from yesterday, here is some more “food blogging:”

People coming here for summer or winter period develop all kinds of food fads in Antarctica. The Indian station, Maitri, has practically all varieties of food suiting every taste. I was surprised to find ‘gur’ (jaggery) here, though, it does not enjoy any popularity. I am its lone consumer. When ship comes here every December/January, it brings loads of food supplies to last till next one year. However, fresh fruits and vegetables last only for a few months and then it is all frozen stuff…

Current fads among many members of 26 Team are maggie noodles and eggs. They are now sick of eating frozen vegetables and daal (lentils) for last many months. So you frequently see them boiling maggie noodles or frying eggs. Packaged fruit juices still remain popular with most of the members. They all believe it provides quality vitamins. So they consume it 3-5 times a day. They are oblivious of the effects of preservatives, chemicals or sugar in it. Most of them have a habit of drying their paratha or poori with tissue before consuming; it is another matter that they would later put pure ghee on their chapaati or in daal. [Link]

Although Sudhir doesn’t realize it yet, I am adding an entirely new dimension to his research by writing this post. Chances are that like me, a few of you will find his blog interesting and start reading it often. His readership will grow from the few friends and family that currently visit, to one much larger. Then, he will feel the curse of the blogger: The need to satisfy the masses and the sometimes terrible consequences that follow. Then, he will have two psychiatry papers to publish instead of just one. I’m willing to sacrifice him in the name of science.

abhi at 12:03 AM in Humor, Musings, Science and Technology · 28 comment(s) · Direct link


 

November 30, 2007

What Vivek would really say

Those of you who use gmail and gchat will have seen the news that gchat has gone from monogamous chatting only to full on orgy mode:

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

My reaction to this news is that it’s about time! Not the move to group chat, but the use of Vivek in an example. I mean, if you go into one of the many googleplex fine dining establishments and holler “Yo - Vivek!” you know how many people would turn around? So what took Google so long?

Of course, if they’re going for versimilitude here, Vivek would probably not be going camping with Todd (not unless they were a couple) but instead with a truckload of other desis, especially if Vivek is an IBD. The example should really say something like “Group chat - so 10 desi couples can coordinate their camping plans!” The chat would show people discussing who was bringing the dal, who was bringing the chaval, how many kinds of pickles were necessary for an overnight camping trip, whether a pressure cooker will work over a campfire, etc.

Actually, on second thought, I think we’re better off with the example provided. I don’t think even Google’s mighty servers could survive the surge in load from brown people going camping alone, not to mention brown people coordinating movies, dinners, or weddings. Back to Todd and Vivek it is.

ennis at 01:32 PM in Humor, Science and Technology · 124 comment(s) · Direct link


 

August 15, 2007

Intel's "slave ship" in Indian harbor

This print advertisement by Intel has been causing quite a stir of late [via Huffington Post]. It seems to convey the idea that owning an Intel chip will help you tackle the same amount of work as you could with a ship of slaves (while making you feel powerful):

I almost fell out of my seat when I saw Intel’s new advertising campaign. It shows six bowing African American athletes before a chino-clad, oxford-shirted white manager with the slug: “Maximize the power of your employees.” This ad reminds me of a slave-ship, and it’s hard to imagine the same imagery did not come to mind for the savvy ad exec that created it…

Intel is not just promoting insensitive images, it’s also leading a signature drive for a California ballot measure that would eliminate class action lawsuits over civil rights issues. Intel’s board of directors have been sent 25,000 faxes calling upon the company to withdraw that pending ballot measure. [Link]

There is also a YouTube clip capturing some people’s reaction to this ad:

Here is the even more interesting part. When the ad was printed in Indian print media they replaced the white dude with a very light skinned Indian “massa’”:

It should be noted that Intel has apologized for and withdrawn these ads, but seeing the same ad in two different cultural contexts does reiterate just how much the idea of “white” putting black to work was a central part of the perceived “effectiveness” of this campaign. It’s rare that you are able to so completely unmask the subtle bigotry of many advertising campaigns.

abhi at 11:39 PM in Business, Issues, Photos, Science and Technology · 277 comment(s) · Direct link


 

August 06, 2007

Love in the time of Technology

As a sequel to my “Love in the Time of Terrorism” post I wanted to offer up this new one based upon a Wall Street Journal article published today titled, “‘Til Tech Do Us Part.” Although it does not specifically cite any South Asian peeps in the article, I am sure you can all agree that it is quite relevant to a great many of us (and probably tech-savvy SM readers more so than most). Here is the oh-so-juicy synopsis of the article:

Joint bank account? Check. Merging the MP3 collection? Hold on a minute. Couples are struggling with just how much to combine the digital aspects of their lives. Why spouses are bickering over shared email accounts and his-and-hers blogs. [Link]

It’s true, it’s sooo true. This is why our parents generation just cannot understand why we sometimes (well some of us) wait so long to get married. It is no longer a question of simply making sure that your prospective wife comes from a good family and that at least one of her siblings is a doctor if she failed to become one herself. No. There is the MP3 collection-compatibility-issue that is a constant cloud which hangs over many of our serial dating lives. God forbid she leaves behind an Ipod in my car and I accidentally play Akon or Fergie when there are people around who might judge me. “I listen to Kings of Leon. I swear.” What if she bookmarks the NYPost whereas I bookmark the NYTimes? Does she pay attention to RottenTomatoes.com like I do or does she just go to the movies and blindly hope for the best like some crazy free spirit? Getting to know someone and fall in love just takes a lot more research these days.

To stay on pace during his five-mile jogging workouts, Olav Junttila keeps his iPod stocked with fast, thumping electronic music. But an unwelcome sound has been intruding on his daily runs: Britney Spears singing her bubble-gum hit “Oops, I Did It Again.”

The culprit is Mr. Junttila’s wife, Katie. Her musical taste differs, but instead of setting up a separate music library in iTunes, she mixes her Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake purchases in with his picks. “I’m going, ‘Where’d this song come from? I don’t even like this song,’ ” says Mr. Junttila, a 34-year-old New York investment banker. [Link]

Then, of course, the article moves on to an issue even more troubling than music and one that I lie awake at nights stressing about. Yep. Blogs.

The growth of blogging is responsible for many marital flare-ups. James Griffioen and his wife, Sara Woodward, decided to start a blog together after they had their first child. They were inspired by other couples who were blogging about their newborns.

They agreed to give each other veto power over posts, which he exercised when she wanted to shout out into the blogosphere about his failure to do the dishes. “That’s a real sensitive issue,” says Mr. Griffioen, 30, who cares for the couple’s 2-year-old daughter at their home in Detroit. Readers of the site, sweetjuniper.blogspot.com, would have blown it out of proportion, he says: “They’re going to turn it into this whole thing of how I don’t keep up my end of the relationship…” [Link]

Sweet Jezzus. Abhi’s first rule of Blog Club is: NEVER mix blogging with pleasure (unless you have a weak will and it just happens). You would be freaking nuts to blog with your husband/wife.

“Honey, what did you think of my post on our blog? It was the bomb, right?”

“Ummmm.”

I wonder, just how common is this sort of digital angst among our readers? Here are some anecdotes. I know that SM contributing writer Cicatrix and Mr. Cicatrix have left comments on the same thread using different computers in different rooms at the same time. I also know that on a couple of occasions a commenter has emailed us because we banned their significant other/roomate who they share a computer with and they wanted us to lift the ban so as not to punish the innocent one (who still wanted to comment) too.

The bottom line is that I think it is okay to take your time and really understand if your blogs and your mp3 collections (we didn’t even talk about TiVO) are compatible before committing. Forever.

Note: For those interested there is a podcast of this story at WSJ.

abhi at 05:37 PM in Humor, Science and Technology · 125 comment(s) · Direct link


 

July 24, 2007

The Greatest Living American?

The Greatest Living American?

Greg Easterbrook writes about Norman Borlaug who played a tremendous, and often vastly underappreciated role in India’s modern development -

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed.

How did Borlaug win his Nobel back in 1970?

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes.

As a temporary American expat to India, Borlaug’s impact on India’s development was possibly greater than Deming’s on Japan…

First, some background from Wikipedia on just how bad the food situation was in India back in the heady mid 1960s -

…the Indian subcontinent was at war, and experiencing widespread famine and starvation, even though the US was making emergency shipments of millions of tons of grain, including over one fifth of its total wheat, to the region.[12] The Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies and the region’s cultural opposition to new agricultural techniques initially prevented Borlaug from fulfilling his desire to immediately plant the new wheat strains there. By the summer of 1965, the famine became so acute that the governments stepped in and allowed his projects to go forward.

Borlaug created several new wheat species through careful cross breeding of strains from all over the planet coupled with trial and error in relatively large scale production

The Face of Progress

in Mexico. Enter Borlaug’s wheat into India and voila -

In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 7.3 million tons in 1970; Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968. Yields were over 21 million tons by 2000. In India, yields increased from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20.1 million tons in 1970. By 1974, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. By 2000, India was harvesting a record 76.4 million tons of wheat. Since the 1960s, food production in both nations has increased faster than the rate of population growth.

So why, Easterbrook asks, is Borlaug relatively unknown today? Well, there are many reasons and for starters, there hasn’t been a famine in the US for a hundred years . But I think Instapundit reader Richard Fagin nails one of the modern reasons well -

It’s not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It’s that Mr. Borlaug didn’t serve the poor by giving away other people’s money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

You won’t see any accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.

I’m not sure if I’d go all the way and say that the press broadly views new tech to be as evil as money (current infatuation with GreenTech, Google, 787s, etc. being great counter examples) but, there’s a nugget of truth to Fagin’s retort.

It’s been said that publicity, medals and memorials have as much to do with the group that awards / builds them as with the folks that actually did the deed worth rewarding. In that way, arguably, they don’t document the past as much as provide a means by which the awards committees of the present try to incent their vision of the future.

The problem is that today’s Borlaug would be regarded as a “frankenfood” researcher working in common cause with global agribusiness behemoths supporting Golden Rice and/or insecticides. What Borlaug et. al. do is, in many respects, the textbook definition of “un-natural”. And, well, nowadays press accolades aren’t quite lining up for that lot. While western contemporaries might not recognize Borlaug, Desi techno-optimists however, seem to.

vinod at 02:20 PM in History, Profiles, Science and Technology · 47 comment(s) · Direct link


 

June 22, 2007

Touchdown

Sunita Williams has returned safely to Earth after setting the record for the longest time in space by a woman.

Praying for a safe Earth entry

“Welcome back,” Mission Control told Atlantis. “Congratulations on a great mission.” Controllers praised the crew for providing a “stepping stone to the rest of NASA’s exploration plan…”

Astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams returned to Earth on Atlantis after spending more than six months at the space station. She set an endurance record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 195 days. During her stay, she also set the record for most time spacewalking by a woman. [Link]

More cute pictures after the fold.

“Willeums” :)

abhi at 05:33 PM in News, Photos, Science and Technology · 40 comment(s) · Direct link


 

June 18, 2007

When landlords get all up in your bidness

It’s bad enough when your parents hound you for being single and ask why you were out so late last night, but the Christian Science Monitor points to the double standard that single women renters face in India at the hands of their prospective (and over-protective) landlords:

It took Chiya Singh three months and seven real estate agents working in tandem to find an apartment to rent in New Delhi.

The problem wasn’t her credit history or salary. It was her status as a single Indian woman. The questions blocking Ms. Singh from a room of her own were a bit personal, she says. Prospective landlords wanted to know why, at age 29, she wasn’t married and why, as a single person, she didn’t want to live with her parents.

“It was an exhausting process,” Singh says, of trying to find her own place after she divorced. “I became a broken record. They asked ‘Why do you want to live alone?’ I said, ‘Um, because I think I’m old enough.’ “

That response usually netted Singh a cold expression and a vague “We’ll let you know” from the landlord. [Link]

Because, I mean…why would a single woman want to live by herself?

In India, “If you want freedom, it can only be for one thing - sex,” Singh says. “You want to tell them [landlords], ‘That’s the last thing on my mind. I think I’m old enough to take care of myself.’ But for the landlord, it becomes an issue of respectability.” [Link]

Right. Here is the even more messed up part. It is okay to rent to single white girls because…well, they are already slutty (or at least that is what the landlord quoted below seems to imply when she says “they are used to living on their own”).

“It’s an Indian mentality,” says Sonia Kakkar, a landlord in South Delhi. “We just feel more protective. You just feel that you are responsible.”

Ms. Kakkar currently rents the second floor of her building to two French women and prefers foreigners because she does not feel as protective of them.

”They are used to living on their own,” she says. “If they have a problem with the flat, they come to us. Otherwise, there is no interaction…” [Link]

Well, to all the parents reading SM let me tell you just exactly what it is that your live-alone daughters in America are doing:

Jennifer Chowdhury just invented the hottest new game in town. Screw the Wii. Ladies, get one of these. Then invite me over (so I can blog about it for the good of the readers I mean)

abhi at 11:27 PM in Humor, News, Science and Technology · 428 comment(s) · Direct link


 

June 14, 2007

Suni side up

When my worlds align, you know I’m going to blog it:

SUNI WILLIAMS DAY AT JSC

Help celebrate a major spaceflight milestone as Expedition 15 Flight Engineer and STS-117 crew member Sunita Williams sets a new female long duration spaceflight record. She will surpass Shannon Lucid’s long-held record of 188 days, 4 hours this Saturday, June 16 at 12:47 a.m CDT.

So how do we help celebrate this kick-ass achievement?

To show your support for Suni, wear something red this Friday, June 15 (In honor of her love of the Red Sox). Also on Friday, the Starport cafés will feature 2 eggs “Suni”-side up on Texas Toast for $.99 and Chicken Indian Spiced Malai Murgh for $ 3.49 ala cart and $5.99 Combo. The Chicken breast is coated with a mixture of spices (cumin, garlic, pepper, lemon juice, chopped jalapenos, paprika, and sour cream) then roasted and served with rice.

Oh yeah! Curry in the cafeteria. Have any of you had government institutional food before? This intrepid blogger’s passion for venturing places where no man has gone before compels him to try the chicken on Friday. If I’m ever lucky enough to go in to space someday I am going to make them serve dosas with sour cream and ketchup in the cafeteria when I come down. Let’s pray our girl makes it down ok:

NASA engineers and astronauts are working on innovative ways to fix a tear in the heat shield of the shuttle Atlantis which had taken off last Friday.

One of the methods that could be used to fix the tear would be using a stainless steel wire serving as thread and an instrument with a rounded end resembling a small needle.

This is usually used to repair tears in astronaut suits but may work here as well. [Link]

By the way, Suni’s dog, the terrier she had to leave behind on Earth and who goes by the name of “Flat Gorby,” is becoming kind of famous. You know how people sometimes take pictures of gnomes at different locations around the world? Just type in Flat Gorby in Google and see all the hits the dude has and where he has “visited” while she has been up in space.

abhi at 07:55 PM in Food, Humor, Science and Technology · 6 comment(s) · Direct link


 

May 09, 2007

ABCD’s and FOB’s, Your Startup is Pre-Ordained. (Sorta)

SM Reader 3rd Eye posted an interesting stat from my corner of the RealWorld on the News Tab -

Desi’s head up 4 of 12 2007 IPO’s from Mass State

In the past two months alone, four Massachusetts based companies with Indian chief executives have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public: Starent Networks Corp, Netezza Corp, BladeLogic Inc and Virtusa Corp.

They represent a third of state companies that have filed for initial public offer (IPOs) this year.

Now Desi tech entrepreneurship is not only alive and well but also well-discussed here on the Mutiny. For a host of reasons, as the article notes, Desi’s have done an admirable job in Tech (and particularly, it appears, in MA 2007). Still, there’s an interesting angle revealed by the firms profiled here. The theme is probably quite familiar to Desi’s who live / breath the tech biz and less so to those outside of it —

Common threads? Well, as many a Valley observor has casually noted in the past, depending on how you classify Virtusa, all of ‘em are deep in the back end / infrastructure / “systems” segment of the tech biz. Unlike the consumer or “apps” space, this segment is primarily about $$$ being made by geeks selling stuff to other geeks. And as a direct result, the tech is front and center and is often Truly Hard. It’s not a stretch to say these guys are often the geekiest, most hard core of the geeks (and, uh, I really mean that as a compliment).

Second, these particular tech firms were all founded by Desi Uncles. By contrast ABCD’s are more likely to be found at App co’s rather than Systems (here’s one recently discussed example; here are some others). At an app company, user experience drives the firm far more than the efficiency of the plumbing - the underlying tech is often in a supporting role to the business model rather than the raison d’etre of the company.

Now before the usual suspects jump up and scream about stereotypes and generalizations, it’s worth pointing out that there are certainly prominent exceptions (for ex., here are some FOB-founded App companies; depending on how you want to classify me + my company, I’m an ABCD working Systems). It’s just that living and breathing Silicon Valley air makes it hard not to notice the FOB = Systems and ABCD = Apps correlation. One indirect and telling datapoint, in the Bay Area at least, both the ABCD vs FOB and Apps vs. Systems ratios co-vary as you move from downtown San Francisco / SOMA to the other end of the Bay - San Jose. One end is Banana Republic / content dotcoms, the other end, uh, Cisco. Any guess which end has more authentic Indian food?

Why? Well, part of the answer is that systems co’s are generally run by, well, older folks. ABCD’s simply haven’t been in tech long enough. I think however, part of the reason is that selling an app to the mass market requires a lot of pop cultural context - anyone wanna guess what Ms Parasol brought to the table? By contrast, success in the systems world is about discussing bits & bytes with other tech geeks - a culture which was likely more universally accessible than the secret to MySpace for IIT-grad FOB Uncles. Combine it with immigration patterns which overwhelmingly favored the Geeks rather than the Hip and you get more desi Starent’s & Junipers rather than YouTube’s and Flickr’s.

vinod at 01:41 PM in Business, Humor, Science and Technology · 49 comment(s) · Direct link


*Cough* *Cough*

Most of you have heard about the tainted pet food, right? A simple Google search yields more than 7,800 stories about the Chinese rice and wheat gluten that contained melamine to increase the apparent protein content of the food. While American pets may have died, the risk to humans posed by this, even if used as feed for chickens or fish, is pretty low.

Contrast that with the tainted cough syrup that has probably killed thousands children in the Third World. What? You haven’t heard about this? Of course not. It’s not as sexy a story. There are over 40 times as many stories about the tainted pet food in America than about tainted cough syrup overseas.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world … Researchers estimate that thousands have died… Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India. [Link]

The Bangladesh incident happened 15 years ago, yet this kind of mass poisoning continues to happen in different parts of the world, most recently in Panama:

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish … said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands…” [Link]

The bones of the story are the same in both cases. FDA issues recent warnings after a Chinese manufacturer cuts corners and substitutes a cheaper lethal ingredient for a more expensive one. With the cough syrup it was diethylene glycol for glycerine.

The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients. [Link]

Those who consumed drugs made with diethylene glycol died a horrible death:

The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die. Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents. [Link]

Deaths due to diethylene glycol poisoning in the USA led to the creation of the FDA in 1938.

The sad thing is that manufacturers aren’t bothering to even do spot checks on the compounds they are using, even though they know they are being produced in countries (like China) with very poor domestic controls. Worse yet, they don’t maintain a chain of possession so that any incidents of poisoning that are detected can be traced back. To me, that’s both lazy and greedy. Sadly, without institutions in place to oblige companies to keep complete records and spot check their ingredients, the companies will not do so on their own.

ennis at 12:06 AM in Business, Health and Medicine, Science and Technology · 75 comment(s) · Direct link


 

April 25, 2007

Radically private water

When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was hot in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning.

Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the 2 million children who die each year for want of proper water and sanitation.

The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm.

Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.

For example, the Lifestraw is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:

… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [Link]

The original Lifestraw was field tested amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir.

Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product - that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [Link].

There there is Dean Kamen’s Slingshot project. Kamen is the inventor of the Segway, and his idea was to use cow dung (and other easily available fuels) to run a special high efficiency Stirling Engine which would produce electricity and clean water for sale:

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, has invented two new devices, each about the size of a washing machine, that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day from any water source, even sewage. The power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.

The prototypes cost about $100,000 but eventually he hopes to mass produce them for about $1000 to $2000 which he will lease to local entrepreneurs, who will resell the power and water to local rural villagers in third world countries. The market potential is huge - about 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and another 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. [Link]

He’s working with Iqbal Qadir, founder of the Grameen Phone business, to try to create the entrepreneurial infrastructure for this to work:

The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water … and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine’s waste heat.

“Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies…”

Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.[Link]

I haven’t heard anything since the project was unveiled in February, and couldn’t find a website for it, so I hope the project hasn’t fallen by the wayside already.

Both of these approaches have the virtue of bypassing an ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy. Both also seem too expensive to work as purely for-profit ventures. Despite what advocates of the Bottom of the Pyramid approach argue, it’s very hard to make money off of the poorest of the poor since they have so little to spend. Even when it might make sense for the poor to invest in private water systems, they simply don’t have the cash to do so.

This is where a third approach comes in, one that emphasizes finance over technical innovation:

The WaterCredit Initiative has a more scaleable approach. Recognizing the creditworthiness of the poor, it has moved from one-time grants to providing small loans, successfully applying microfinance principles to cover the upfront costs of water systems. [Link]

This is more eclectic, and relies purely on available technology. It is not likely to be a full solution to the problem either - people can only invest in water where it is cheap enough to provide a short term economic benefit as opposed to a long term health benefit, which again leaves out the poorest of the poor. Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle. The Water Credit Initiative has field projects in Bangladesh and India as well as Ethiopia, Honduras and Kenya.

This problem will not be solved overnight. Instead, this is a battle that can only be won drop by drop.

Related posts: World Water Day, A nation parched, Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Paani?

ennis at 12:02 AM in Economics, Health and Medicine, Science and Technology · 63 comment(s) · Direct link


 

April 24, 2007

Easy Devanagari

If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.

The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:

The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]

They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.

If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.

The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:

The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.

Related Posts: Mass literacy can be fun

ennis at 06:11 PM in Science and Technology · 32 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link


 

April 18, 2007

Wet below but Suni above

Monday was Patriot’s day, the date of the annual Boston Marathon. While the streets of Boston were wet, the most famous desi entrant was shielded from inclement weather in her special climate controlled gym. While some had to pound hard pavement, she ran the marathon many times higher than a kite, floating on air. And while it took her 4 hours and 24 minutes to cover the 26 miles, in that same time she circled the globe twice.

I refer here to Sunita Williams, of course, who unofficially ran the marathon with bib 14,000. Although she was spared Heartbreak Hill, her race wasn’t just a walk in the park. In order to complete the run she had to be harnessed in place (so she didn’t just float away) on top of the Space Station’s Treadmill Vibration Isolation System, which, believe it or not, served to keep the space station steady while she ran:

you know when you run on the ground or on a treadmill at the gym, you are stomping on the ground/treadmill pretty hard - right? Well, the ISS can’t really take that stomping around. We’ve got huge solar arrays, radiators, module attachment systems, etc., which will feel the load of that stomping… The engineers came up with a vibration isolation system for both the treadmill and the cycle. The treadmill rides on a gyro which spins up and takes the loads of the runner. [Link]

This apparently isn’t easy on her body:

“That harness gets hard on her back and her shoulders or her hips …. Her foot was going numb because the strap was on her hip so much…” [Link]

But honestly, the hardest part of this experience would seem to be the inability to bathe or shower afterwards:

… astronauts wash their hair with no-rinse shampoo, their bodies with cleanser-soaked gauzy fabric, and their hands with baby wipes. [Link]

Wow. And she’s not going to be able to shower until she returns to earth, at the end of summer at the earliest. I guess the good news is that they won’t be able to smell the atomized wasabi any more.

ennis at 11:25 PM in Science and Technology, Sports · 47 comment(s) · Direct link


 

April 10, 2007

Freeman Dyson on Desi Techno-Optimism

There’s an interesting interview with “Rebel Scientist” Freeman Dyson over at TCS (the longer version of it is here). Desi angle? I particularly liked this blurb where he points out the similarities between the technological mood of India / China today and an emergent US of the 1930’s -

…the western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence. Fortunately, the countries that matter now are China and India, and the Chinese and Indian experts do not share the mood of doom and gloom. It is amusing to see China and India take on today the role that America took in the nineteen-thirties, still believing in technology as the key to a better life for everyone.

Now, when Dyson speaks of a “western academic world” that’s losing power and influence, it’s really one specific Old Skool corner that brashly found the answer to man’s Tragedy in more / bigger / cooler tech . In its stead, there’s no shortage of academic influence amongst the segment that’s apt to equate economic growth with Global Warming / Consumerism / Corporate Tyranny and that finds the answer not in exuberance but in restraint. Luckily, it appears that message doesn’t sell so well in India.

vinod at 11:42 AM in Science and Technology, Short · 36 comment(s) · Direct link


 

April 03, 2007

Conversational Excursions -- Faculty Lounge Edition

Intellectual$ingh3141592: Good afternoon, Sudo-Ji.

SudoSecularSAsian: Greetings, my good fellow. How goes it? I trust all is well on your end?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: Today I am, I must confess, a tad jealous of our colleague over at MIT.

SudoSecularSAsian: Please elaborate, if you would be so kind. I am, as they say, all “ears” — though what precisely that means in the context of Internet Messaging is an open question.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: It appears that Professor Deb Roy, of MIT’s Cognitive Machines Group, is pursuing a gargantuan project oriented to the study of language acquisition in human infants. What is most impressive is, he is using his own son as the source of the data!

SudoSecularSAsian: His partner must be outraged — I know my own spouse places strict rules on the degree to which I can allow my academic projects to interfere with our personal lives. In my occasional forays into the world of “weblogs” — with which you are well-acquainted — I have been asked to delineate a fairly sharp line between matters of public discussion and our own private affairs.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I completely understand. However, in this case, the baby’s name is being shielded from participants in the study (he is merely referred to as “Dwayne,” after a character in a popular Ridley Scott film). Moreover, Roy’s partner, the eminent speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Northwestern), is apparently fully on board with the project.

SudoSecularSAsian: Singh-saab, I just checked the link you forwarded and I have to ask you… Do you really think this type of grandiose, pie-in-the-sky study is really a worthwhile usage of resources? Is it really likely that the scattered attempted phonemes of an infant in the earliest stages of language acquisition will offer significant new data? Isn’t it possible — or I daresay, probable, given Chomsky’s universal grammar — that the real root of language is to be found not in the “babble” of a child attempting to mimic adult sounds but in the neural-cognitive framework on which the linguistic capacity is built?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I must concede I am not qualified to respond to your conjectures, though I should perhaps remind you that Chomsky’s thesis has been widely discredited in the field of linguistics. However, one thing you say does ring true — the sheer expenditure of electricity required to support the massive arrays of hard disks (1.4 petabytes!) is deeply irresponsible in this era of imminent global warming. Did you have the chance to peruse the latest tidbit in the Times about the responsibility the wealthier countries have to the global south?

SudoSecularSAsian: Yes, and it’s quite distressing. I’m afraid our beloved South Asia may bear the brunt of the developed world’s resource profligacy. The Himalayan glaciers are in trouble, and a “brown cloud” of pollutants is steadily building up over the Indian Ocean, with results on the climate-scenario that are extremely difficult to foretell, though the consequences are unlikely to be pleasant.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: :-(. (Please forgive the emoticon — it’s a childish expedient, but sometimes an eloquent one.) Well, I must be off, I’m afraid.

SudoSecularSAsian: ;-) All is forgiven. This is the brave new world of lexico-typographical expressivity! Au revoir!

amardeep at 05:43 PM in Science and Technology · 23 comment(s) · Direct link


 

February 21, 2007

Give me a ring sometime

[Cue crabby uncle voice] The crazy things that kids do these days! They’re glued to their mobile handsets. They eat, sleep, and even go to the bathroom while jabbering away. Why, just the other day, a Pakistani man in Italy even got married over the phone:

In Milan, the man told a court that he feared losing his job in Italy if he had flown to Pakistan to get married. Instead, he got married over the phone and had an official Pakistani marriage certificate to prove it. He even showed the court a video of relatives celebrating the wedding - without the happy couple.

The groom is legally resident in Italy and had won the approval of the local police chief for his plans to marry over the phone and then bring his bride to his new hometown in northern Italy… All that mattered, the judge said, was that a telephone wedding was recognised by law in the two spouses’ home country. [Link]

Of course, Italian immigration wasn’t too happy about it, but the judge had no problem with the idea. And who would expect less from a judge in the city of … Milan.

Is this idea so strange? If you can get divorced via text message [Exhibit A, Exhibit B*] , and if you can (ahem) perform “marital activities” over the phone [topic NSFW, but link OK], then why not get married over the phone too? I have friends whose entire LDRs seem to be over the phone these days anyway, so why not include the wedding as well?

Before you think that this is just modern technology run amuck, there was actually a similar event close to 160 years ago, on the “Victorian Internet” i.e. the telegraph:

… with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York… the bride’s father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding. [Link]

There truly is nothing new under the sun.

*Yes, I know in K-Fed’s case he was just being informed not talaqed, but I couldn’t resist

ennis at 07:18 AM in Issues, Science and Technology · 20 comment(s) · Direct link


 

February 06, 2007

Maximum absorbancy

Quite predictably, my inbox was blowing up this morning and the news of a bizarre love triangle at the workplace was the only thing people wanted to talk about. It was the first item at our weekly office meet-up (under the heading “safety”). At my workplace safety always comes first. So THIS is what they mean by a “water cooler topic”:

This is the story everyone’s talking about at the water cooler today. (Fortunately, I sit right next to the water cooler.) NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak has been charged with attempted murder of another astronaut, who was in a astronaut love triangle with another astronaut. She also had on diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive. Okay, so attempted murder and kidnapping aren’t cool, but if they have to happen, I’m pretty happy that astronauts are involved. [Link]

First of all, if I was a rockstar I would totally name my band “astronaut love triangle.” It’s so edgy. If you click on my first link it will lead you to the arrest report which provides details about the steel mallet, rubber tubing, knife, pepper spray, large trash bags, wigs, and trench coat involved. I will spare you re-hashing the details that have been replayed on the news all day. This far into my post I am SURE you are all wondering “where is the desi angle?” Stay with me a moment.

Earlier this week Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams (see previous posts 1,2,3) set the spacewalking record for a woman. This is an amazing achievement that took many long hours of hard work in a dangerous environment!:

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams has now spent more time in space [outside of a vehicle] than any other woman, setting the record on Sunday.

She and a crew mate upgraded the international space station’s cooling system.

Williams broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria completed the second of what could be a precedent-setting three spacewalks in nine days. The new record is 22 hours and 27 minutes. [Link]

So what do these two seemingly unrelated news stories have in common besides the fact that they both involve astronauts? Three words: Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG).

The idiot civilian journalists in the mainstream press keep using the term “diaper.” It is NOT a diaper. It is, like the name says, a MAG. In both cases the MAG proved to be, what we in the industry like to refer to as, “mission enabling.” You see, there is no way that Nowak could have driven the 1000 miles from Houston to Orlando fast enough to rendezvous with her victim’s inbound flight…unless she was able to skip the bathroom breaks along the way. Likewise, there is no way Sunita Williams could have worked on assembling the International Space Station all day (while sipping Tang no doubt) unless she was wearing a MAG while doing it. The MAG helped her set the spacewalking record, which in turn makes us all proud to be Indian Americans.

And now for a little confession. Remember back in the first year of our operations here at SM when I was pumping out 3 blog posts a day and often more than a dozen a week? Yeah, you know what I’m saying. Just how do you think I was able to blog for eight straight hours?

Here is to the MAG and the wonders of NASA technology. I’m a believer.

abhi at 10:47 PM in Humor, Law, News, Science and Technology · 40 comment(s) · Direct link


 

January 31, 2007

17 Year Old Desi Girl Makes Scientific Breakthrough

Madhavi Gavini is a student at a math/science high school in Mississippi, the Mississippi Institute of Math and Science. mahdavi-scope.jpg At age 14 she got interested in cystic fibrosis, especially the lung infections that kill many people suffering from CF:

It was that thirst for knowledge that drove Madhavi to search for a way to help a friend with cystic fibrosis. “I found out that most people who have CF die of pseudomonas infections,” she recalls, “so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help.” She was 14 at the time. “I guess the thought that a 14-year-old can’t really do much to help, didn’t really occur to me,” she says with a shrug.

Pseudomonas bacteria — in addition to killing people with cystic fibrosis — can cause deadly secondary infections in people with immune-suppressing conditions such as AIDS, cancer and severe burns. This opportunistic pathogen forms a thick, protective layer around itself, making it nearly impossible for antibiotics to penetrate and destroy it. (link)

That’s the background. Interestingly, the technique she used to find a way to kill the Pseudomonas bacteria started with Ayurvedic medicine:

With an herb book from her grandparents as her guide, Madhavi sampled common grocery store and green houseplants, such as cinnamon, ginger and aloe. She obtained a strain of pseudomonas bacteria from the local university and began subjecting the germs to various plant extracts.

One of the common tropical plant extracts penetrated the bacterium’s protective layer. Next, Madhavi isolated the specific molecule in the extract that was able to inhibit bacterial growth. She found that the molecule was heat resistant, and resistant to pressure. “It kills the cell,” she explains, “by preventing the transcription of the genes involved in energy, metabolism, adaptation, membrane transport, and toxin secretion.” (link)

The herb she started with, incidentally, is Terminalia Chebula, known in Sanskrit as Haritaki. As for which molecule exactly kills the biofilm that protects the Pseudomonas, the coverage I’ve read doesn’t say.

Wow.

amardeep at 07:45 AM in Science and Technology · 78 comment(s) · Direct link


 

January 12, 2007

A loud boom from the bathroom

I was in the middle of a meeting at work this morning when a co-worker (a meteorite expert no less) forwarded me an article about the strange goings-on in a New Jersey bathroom. I knew that I would have to write a post about it before going to bed:

A hole in the roof, a bathroom full of debris and a strange, silvery rock near the toilet — the Nageswaran family soon realized they needed an astronomer, not a contractor, to fully explain what damaged their house.

Scientists determined it was a meteorite that crashed through the roof of their central New Jersey home more than a week ago.

While extraterrestrial rocks fall to the Earth with some regularity, it is rare for them to strike homes.

“The fact that something from outer space hit our house … it’s overwhelming,” said Shankari Nageswaran in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. [Link]

Apparently the grandma heard sounds in the bathroom that didn’t sound like those she typically associated with her son:

On the night of Jan. 2, Nageswaran walked into his bathroom and spotted a hole in the ceiling and noticed small chunks of drywall and insulation littering the room.

His mother, who has been staying with the family, recalled that she had heard a loud boom and thought it was a post-New Year’s fireworks explosion. But that didn’t explain the mess in the bathroom. [Link]

Don’t those look more like bloody footprints?

I’ll bet this ends up on Ebay within 24 hours.

Turns out it is an iron meteorite, a type of find that scientists love for what it tells us about the origins of our solar system. Think of these objects as the left-over construction material after all the houses (the planets) were built.

About 50 meteorites reach the Earth’s surface each year, but with humans occupying only a small part of the planet, there is only one report every year or two of meteorites hitting buildings, said Tim McCoy, curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s meteorite collection.

Every meteorite serves as a “poor man’s space probe,” yielding information on how the solar system formed, McCoy said.

“There’s been fewer than 5,000 meteorites found over the surface of the Earth in the recorded history of mankind,” McCoy said. “Every time we get a new one, it’s an important event…” [Link]

abhi at 12:00 AM in Humor, News, Science and Technology · 23 comment(s) · Direct link


 

January 04, 2007

The new entrepreneurs

Indolink.com reports on a study released today that breaks down the impact of Indian immigrants on several key U.S. economic sectors. Titled, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” the document is full of interesting pie and bar charts that reveal the disproportionate influence that Indian immigrants have had in the last couple of decades. However, I’m here for those of you who don’t like pie and bar charts (slackers).

The joint Duke University - UC Berkeley study reveals that Indian immigrants have founded more engineering and technology companies from 1995 to 2005 than immigrants from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan combined. The report also shows that Indians have overtaken the Chinese, albeit marginally, as the leading group of immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

The immigrant contributions must be viewed as part of a “U.S. global advantage” and provide a pointer to what “the U.S. must do to keep its edge,” the study says. In addition the study reveals that the patents awarded to non-citizen immigrants - typically foreign graduate students completing their PhD’s, green card holders awaiting citizenship, and employees of multinationals on temporary visas - increased from 7.8% in 1998 to 24.2% in 2006.

It’s “a report that will without doubt rock the boat,” claims Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, the primary author of the study. [Link]

originoftechies.jpg

Here are the key findings of the report.

• At least one key founder in 25.3% of the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005 was foreign-born, with 26% of all immigrant-founded companies having Indian founders.

• Indians have founded more engineering and technology companies in the US in the past decade than immigrants from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan combined.

• Nationwide, the immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.

• States with an above-average rate of immigrant-founded companies include California (39%), New Jersey (38%), Georgia (30%), and Massachusetts (29%). Below average includes Washington (11%), Ohio (14%), North Carolina (14%) and Texas (18%). Indian immigrant-founders were well represented in California, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey

• Indian and U.K. entrepreneurs tend to be dispersed around the country, with Indians having sizable concentrations in California and New Jersey and the British in California and Georgia. Chinese and Taiwanese entrepreneurs strongly favor California with 49% of Chinese and 81% of Taiwanese companies located there.

• The mix of immigrants varies by state. Hispanics constitute the dominant group in Florida with immigrants from Cuba, Columbia, Brazil, Venezuela, Guatemala founding 35% of the companies. Israelis constitute the largest founding group in Massachusetts with 17%. Indians dominate New Jersey with 47% of all startups.

• Almost 80% of immigrant-founded companies in the US were within just two industry fields: software and innovation/manufacturing-related services.

• Immigrants were least likely to start companies in the defense/aerospace and environmental industries. They were most highly represented as founders in the semiconductor, computer, communications, and software fields. [Link]

The basic conclusion of the study is obvious. We NEED MORE IMMIGRANTS to maintain our edge as a nation. In case you doubt this check out this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. Apparently the U.S. government has finally begun to accept the fact that if it doesn’t start making science and engineering a sexier option then we are headed for disaster. The Department of Defense is holding screenwriting classes to show people that studying science can lead to a glamorous job:

So what they’ve done for the past three years is convene a three-to-five-day screenwriting class at the venerated American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Called the Catalyst Workshop, it’s a lot like other screenwriting classes that have become a cottage industry across the nation. But here’s the twist - all participants in this one are actually scientists. Hardcore, PhD-laden, lab-certified scientists. Here’s the second twist - the training was all paid for by the Pentagon.

These screenwriting classes are indeed your Department of Defense tax dollars at work. Egregious example of DOD waste? Some bizarre recruiting promise? The cinematic equivalent of $700 toilet seats? Actually, it’s the Pentagon’s way of trying to enhance the nation’s science-and-technology adroitness. [Link]

Anyways, take a look at the report. The graphs make it a quick read with some nice insights.

abhi at 10:47 AM in Science and Technology · 118 comment(s) · Direct link


 

December 09, 2006

We are "GO" for launch

Lift-off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with Astronaut Sunita Williams aboard is scheduled for 8:47:35 p.m. EST. Watch it LIVE by clicking the picture below or turning on the news (CNN has it LIVE):