Photo of the day: Jatinga, Assam

From The Hindu:

Dimasa girls in their traditional dress taking part in the first International Jatinga Festival in Jatinga. On a moonless night, when the mist and fog bearing south-westerly winds blow over the Jatinga valley, different species of local migratory birds get attracted to strong light sources or “bird trap lights.” Photo: Ritu Raj Konwar

Awesome colors :)

Palin's America: Let's go out with a bang

Wouldn't want to find out what the worst could ever happen if Sarah Palin became the president?  Aren't you curious?  Morbidly curious?  Here is a news report just for you  :)


Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

What is the matter with academic sociologists?

I know, it is far too difficult to restrain oneself from offering a gazillion punchlines as responses to such a question.  But, I suppose we could ask such a question of many academic disciplines and their scholars, too.  It is this question about sociology and sociologists that Russel Jacoby takes up in his funny, sarcastic, and biting review of a book by the president of the American Sociological Association (ht).  Jacoby has plenty of zingers there, which had me laughing aloud.  Like these:

The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential.
In a memoir elsewhere, Wright comments that every September since kindergarten in 1952 he has been in school. It might be time for him to take a break.
That he did not label this book Volume One and promise Volumes Two through Ten shows restraint.
To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water.
[Only] sociologists force-fed as graduate students will not choke on this book. That many of them have come to adore this stuff is only striking proof of the discipline’s collapse.

 Jacoby's concluding comments?l:

C.Wright Mills, who despised sociological jargon, has been succeeded by Erik Olin Wright, once given the C.Wright Mills Distinguished Professor Award at Wisconsin, who cranks out sociological cant. With Wright as elected president of the sociological profession, the conservative nightmare of radicals taking over the university has in part come to pass. But if this book exemplifies academic Marxism, conservatives can rest easy. We should all fear, however, what it suggests about the contemporary university and its scholarship.

And in another book review, again thanks to A&L Daily, are these concluding comments, which fit into this discussion really well:

[When] it comes to the state of contemporary higher education, there are no quick fixes. That is why, today, Herbert London continues to cast his vote against liberal academia​—​but from the outside: “I realize, like G.K. Chesterton, that the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.”

Reaching new lows in political discussions :(

First up, Rush Limbaugh ...

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And, from across the political spectrum, well ... some unknown Dem with a warped sense of what it means to lower the tone after the Arizona shooting ...

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And back to Colbert who does a fantastic job with this clip (his ending comments are a letdown though!)

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How good ideas can be easily hijacked: microcredit

A few years ago, in an upper division course, I started including essays and news articles on microfinance as an innovative approach to economic development in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa.  It helped a lot when Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were recognized with the Nobel Prize for the pioneering efforts in micro finance and rural development.  Students seemed to be excited too--one of them a week or so after the class discussions sought my permission first to talk to the rest of the class about kiva.org that she had "discovered" on the web and used it ...

Slowly the idea spread in India.  And it was only a matter of time before a few Indians also decided to corrupt it as any good idea is almost always distorted in that country.  A classic example is Gandhi's message of civil disobedience and satyagraha, and fasting until corrective measures are implemented.  Within a few years of his death, every third rate politician started launching satyagrahas, and fasting photo-ops for every trivial pet cause one might imagine.  The end of the Gandhian ideas, so to say.

So, why should micro finance be exempt from such corruption in order to pursue most ulterior self-interests of profits, right? And that has what has happened in India over the last few years.  Unfortunately!  Yunus wrote in the NY Times:

I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.

I am surprised that Yunus didn't know his fellow South Asians any better :(

Microcredit has morphed into the ugly loan shark modes, with all the typical attitudes that we knew about them.  The Hindu's caption for the photo below is:

There were reports of suicides, allegedly due to extreme harassment by loan recovery officials from MFIs. A family mourns one such death reported from Rolakal village, Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh last October. Photo: Singam Venkata Ramana

Once again, it is a screw-the-poor, which is a tragic irony in a culture that talks a lot about helping the poor.  More on this in my earlier postings in the context of "Peepli Live"

As Yunus writes:

The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.
Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.

Even while disagreeing with Yunus' argument, David Roodman has this important observation:

Credit is not an ordinary product. It is weighed down by millennia of baggage, for the good reason that it can do real harm. It is like a drug in that it is potentially healthy in small doses, but also potentially addictive. So it stands to reason that sellers of this product must take unusual steps to counteract its special problems of reputation and risk.

Things have taken quite a nasty turn, and Yunus is being compelled to defend those ideas and himself:

[In] his native Bangladesh Mr Yunus’s reputation is under attack. His supporters fear that the government plans to remove him from Grameen Bank, the microlender he founded, and take it over. In late December Mr Yunus had to issue a statement denying claims by some in the Bangladeshi government that he had resigned from his post as the managing director of Grameen. ...
Mr Yunus denies all the charges against him but has made powerful enemies among Bangladesh’s politicians. During a period of rule by a military-backed caretaker government a few years ago, he announced the formation of a political party, a project he soon dropped. Some reckon Sheikh Hasina is miffed that Mr Yunus and Grameen got the Nobel prize. It remains unclear how far the government, which already has three seats on Grameen Bank’s board, will go. Some fear that if the government succeeds in taking Grameen over it could turn its sights on other successful outfits, like BRAC. Bangladeshi microlenders can no longer consider themselves safe from the country’s messy politics.

The strange story of Yunus doesn't end there; he was hauled before the court, but not for any wrongdoings related to Grameen:

The current defamation charges against Yunus stem from comments he made in an interview with French news agency AFP four years ago, in which he reportedly criticized politicians and said they were only in "power to make money." The remarks came shortly after a military-backed interim government took over amid deadly political violence in Bangladesh.
A leftist politician in Mymensingh filed the defamation case on January 21, 2007, with a local magistrate court after Yunus' interview was published in local media.
The court last month asked Yunus to appear after a judicial probe found enough evidence to support the allegations, court inspector Md. Shahid Sukrana told CNN.
Nazrul Islam Chunnu, who filed the case, is a politician and district joint general secretary of the socialist party JSD. He charged that Yunus branded politicians as "corrupt and greedy" and said the politicians were "devoid of ideologies."
If Yunus is convicted of the charges, he faces a maximum two years in prison and/or a fine, said a court official.

That is right--all because Yunus aired in public the truth that is well known that politicians are corrupt and greedy!  How dare he, eh!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Facebook votes to disband UN

In 2040 ... according to this scenario of life in megacities, visualized by Forum for the Future (ht)

The emphasis here is on individual neighborhoods rather than cities, lessening transportation issues since people don't have to travel as far. Robotic cars have completely taken over from mass transit.

Megacities on the move - Communi-city from Forum for the Future on Vimeo.

Eric Hobsbawm's comments on liberal democracy. Wait, he is alive?

It was in the early part of my graduate student life that I went across town to UCLA to listen to a bunch of visiting academics, including Eric Hobsbawm.  He was old even then, and I had assumed that he would have been gone by now.

Turns out that not only is he alive and well at 93, he has even published a book:

Eric himself has changed. He suffered a nasty fall over Christmas and can no longer escape the physical constraints of his 93 years. But the humour and the hospitality of himself and his wife, Marlene, as well as the intellect, political incisiveness and breadth of vision, remain wonderfully undimmed. With a well-thumbed copy of the Financial Times on the coffee table, Eric moved seamlessly from the outgoing President Lula of Brazil's poll ratings to the ideological difficulties faced by the Communist party in West Bengal to the convulsions in Indonesia following the 1857 global crash. The global sensibility and lack of parochialism, always such a strength of his work, continue to shape his politics and history.

I wish I were this alive even now, while I am only half his age!

Even though I have always disagreed with his ideological framework, I am always humbled by how much he knows (and by contrast, how little I do!)  But, there is no disagreement with the following point he makes:

What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out.
What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States.

I wish that in the US we would get rid of the rigid political/ideological bottom-line that the partisans spout, and begin to explore a 21st century approach.  Which is why I hope the LibCons would be daring enough ...

Unemployment data leave economists puzzled. Can they explain anything at all?

For corporate America, the Great Recession is over. For the American work force, it’s not. 

No, this is not a quote from Robert Reich, who has consistently been trying to get policymakers to focus on the horrendous joblessness of the economic recovery.
That was a quote from the NY Times' business columnist, David Leonhardt, who writes:

The unemployment rate is higher in this country than in Britain or Russia and much higher than in Germany or Japan, according to a study of worldwide job markets that Gallup will release on Wednesday. The American jobless rate is also higher than China’s, Gallup found. The European countries with worse unemployment than the United States tend to be those still mired in crisis, like Greece, Ireland and Spain.
Economists are now engaged in a spirited debate, much of it conducted on popular blogs like Marginal Revolution, about the causes of the American jobs slump. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard labor economist, calls the full picture “genuinely puzzling.”

Leonhardt notes that employees having a lot more power in Western Europe or Canada, compared to here in the US, where employers reign supreme, might be a significant factor.  Whatever the reasons might be, I agree with him that:

The jobs slump has become too severe to disappear anytime soon. It will be part of the American economy and American politics for years to come. But there is no reason to treat it as a problem that’s immune from solutions. For starters, it would be worth figuring out what other countries are doing right.

Meanwhile, here in Oregon, unemployment rates don't want to budge:

Oregon lost 1,800 payroll jobs in December as the unemployment rate held flat at 10.6 percent, essentially unchanged for more than a year. 

Just awful.  A leading economics blogger, and a fellow Oregonian, Mark Thoma, has a timely column on the urgency to reinforce America's social safety net

Image of the day: How large is the new Trenta from Starbucks?

This much! (ht)

MLK Day sell-a-bration :)

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The Ponzi scheme called higher education is "Academically Adrift"

Today is one of those days that I am wearing dress-shirt and a tie.  Oh, yes, am wearing pants too :)  Students who have never seen me this way are bound to be surprised.  Some faculty colleagues, the ones who talk to me (editor: there are a few, still? awshutup!) might wisecrack that perhaps somebody died, more so because of the color of the tie--black.  If such a remark comes up, my response is ready--yes, I am mourning the death of higher education.

Here is one more reason to add to the list--this one resulting from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) study:

Forty-five percent of students made no gains on the CLA during their first two years in college. Thirty-six percent made no gains over the entire four years. They learned nothing. On average, students improved by less than half a standard deviation in four years. "American higher education," the researchers found, "is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."

Apparently the worst culprits include some of the fastest growing majors across the US--"business"

Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

Makes sense, give that it is the world of business that taught us about Ponzi schemes :)
So, who gets messed up the most in this scheme?

Students saddled with thousands of dollars in debt and no valuable skills, certainly. Even worse, workers who never went to college in the first place, languishing in their careers for lack of a college credential. To them, the higher-education system must seem like a gigantic confidence game, with students and colleges conspiring to produce hollow degrees that nonetheless define the boundaries of opportunity.

Terrible.  Any way out?

Federal and state lawmakers should stop providing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies based purely on enrollment, and should start holding colleges accountable for learning. Lawmakers also need to shore up crumbling budgets, restrain college prices, and mitigate higher education's growing dependence on debt.
Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.
It has been a conspiracy of convenience. This study should bring the "trust us" era of American higher education to a close.

I like his polite phrasing--"conspiracy of convenience" .... Ponzi scheme is straightforward.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lot more to say on this--all related to the latest addition to research and books critiquing the state of higher education.  Check them out here and click here for an excerpt from the book

Photo of the day: True love

Completely outsourced to Andrew Sullivan:

A dog, 'Leao', sits for a second consecutive day, next to the grave of her owner, Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, who died in the week's catastrophic landslides in Brazil, at the cemetery in Teresopolis, near Rio de Janiero, on January 15, 2011. By Vanderlei Almeida/AFP/Getty.

The State of the Union, in a cartoon :)

The President will address Congress and the country on January 25th.  Senator Mark Udall has pitched the idea of a bipartisan seating arrangement.
Cartoonists, take it away :)

More on the darkening space, Pongal, and gods in India

Since the earlier post, I have been thinking a lot about physics--a love for the subject that goes all the way back to high school days.  And, about the wonderfully gifted popularizer of science and physics: Carl Sagan.  Of course, growing up in India, and without television, meant that I had no idea about Sagan; I hadn't even completed high school when PBS began airing Cosmos here in the US.  It was much later in life, as a graduate student, that I started reading/watching Sagan.  (One of my greatest regrets was that I missed out on an opportunity to go to a Richard Feynman lecture at Caltech, during my first semester in this country, and a year later he died!!!)

Anyway, thinking more about how lonely we humans are in this universe, which is rapidly expanding, made me go back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  What a coincidence it was that I should watch it now, as in during this time of January--"Pongal" that Sagan talks about in this video was two days ago, and I watched this video on "Maattu Pongal"!  Of course, Sagan butchers the pronunciation, but that is ok :)

It is shame that even a series like Cosmos has not been able to rid the creationists who make a caricature of American scientific enterprise.  The pursuit of science and truth is being ridiculed on a daily basis, when it really ought to be the other way around.  This ought to worry us a lot as a metric of the decline of America :(

No more debutante balls for the rich

The economic divide between the rich and the rest of us is very different from the Great Gatsby of F.Scott Fitzgerald, writes Chrystia Freeland in the Atlantic.  While the inequality numbers might seem to be the same, there are plenty of differences between the two, such as this one:

To grasp the difference between today’s plutocrats and the hereditary elite, who (to use John Stuart Mill’s memorable phrase) “grow rich in their sleep,” one need merely glance at the events that now fill high-end social calendars. The debutante balls and hunts and regattas of yesteryear may not be quite obsolete, but they are headed in that direction. The real community life of the 21st-century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit. 

What happens in in the international conference circuit?

it has the intense, earnest atmosphere of a gathering of college summa cum laudes. This is not a group that plays hooky: the conference room is full from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their BlackBerrys and iPads. ... Though the china is Sèvres and the paintings are museum quality (Marie-Josée is, after all, president of the Museum of Modern Art’s board), the dinner-table conversation would not be out of place in a graduate seminar.

And then, of course, even the latest gazillionaires like Facebook's Zuckerberg soon becomes a philanthrocapitalist:

What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or endow existing institutions (though they of course do this as well), they are using their wealth to test new ways to solve big problems. The journalists Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have dubbed the approach “philanthrocapitalism” in their book of the same name. “There is a connection between their ways of thinking as businesspeople and their ways of giving,” Bishop told me. “They are used to operating on a grand scale, and so they operate on a grand scale in their philanthropy as well. And they are doing it at a much earlier age.”

So, ... ?

America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.
There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is.
It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.
But if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda

Patriots lose to Jets. Behlichick throws acid on Brady

Onion SportsDome

Ahem, that was from the Onion's new show :)

Portlandia: where young people go to retire :)

Pretty funny, actually

More on the senior citizen faculty

According to my blog statistics, an earlier post on the problems related to senior-citizen faculty in higher education is one of the more visited posts.  The interesting aspect is that visitors did not come there because they searched for it.  (So, how then did they visit, you ask?  Hey, there is more than one way to Rome, because, after all, all roads lead to it!!!)

So, given the economics of it all, it is not a surprise that many university systems have implemented, and are trying, variations of policies that would provide incentives for the senior-citizen faculty to walk away from their offices forever.  Like this in Texas:

More than 130 tenured professors at Texas' two flagship universities have accepted buyouts that are expected to save their financially constrained departments nearly $18-million a year.
The offers, which included up to two years of pay for some liberal-arts professors, have provided a needed cushion for faculty members who were ready to retire, a bonus for some who wanted to move to other jobs, and new leases on life for a few lecturers who were due to be terminated. But they also created end-of-semester headaches for department chairs who had to quickly reshuffle their teaching rosters.
The retirement incentives are the latest responses by the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station to continued state budget cuts. State universities absorbed a 5-percent cut during the 2010-11 biennium and have been asked to plan for an additional 2.5-percent cut this fiscal year and a possible 10-percent reduction over the next two-year budget period, which starts this coming fall.

I would hypothesize that faculty in the sciences stick around way less than those in the social sciences and humanities.  The logic here being that the nature of inquiry in the sciences requires a great deal of constant updating of one's technological skills and bringing in research money, which is not necessarily the case in the humanities and the social sciences.  In the non-science fields, the situation is analogous to owning a car that you have fully paid up--every single day that you can get from using it, without going in for any major repair work, is a wonderful return on the investment :)

So, would you retire for a buyout?  And, no, I am far too young for your tempting offers, though many times it seems that many of my faculty and administrative colleagues wish that I were gone :)

Lunatics running the asylum that Pakistan has become

What a ghastly story of an assassination it was when Salman Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard, all because Taseer had advocated for clemency for a woman who expressed her thoughts, and happened to be a Christian.  The killer is now being celebrated by ignorant fundamentalists, who have increased their ever tightening grip on the political arteries:

The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended: a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari and numerous other politicians didn’t show up. A group of mullahs had declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself.

Tariq Ali, while reminiscing fond memories of Taseer, warns about the increasingly loud chants within Pakistan that clamor for a military coup, yet again.  Everything is going the wrong way for this country, which seems to have been cursed at birth. The decade-long US presence in Afghanistan is further precipitating the internal crisis:

Take the Af-Pak war. Few now would dispute that its escalation has further destabilised Pakistan, increasing the flow of recruits to suicide bomber command. The CIA’s New Year message to Pakistan consisted of three drone attacks in North Waziristan, killing 19 people. There were 116 drone strikes in 2010, double the number ordered in the first year of the Obama presidency. Serious Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and the News, claim that 98 per cent of those killed in the strikes over the last five years – the number of deaths is estimated to be between two and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every ten civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to military rules of engagement

What a mess!  I wonder how this story will end--will the lunatics win, or will we be able to take control?

Alone in a darkening space

when future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. The past will have drifted beyond the cliffs of space. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness

Why so?  Because the universe is expanding at faster and faster rates, writes Brian Greene:

A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)
Light emitted by such galaxies will therefore fight a losing battle to traverse the rapidly widening gulf that separates us. The light will never reach Earth and so the galaxies will slip permanently beyond our capacity to see, regardless of how powerful our telescopes may become.

Greene, who came to our campus a few years ago, presents a very depressing situation; well, depressing to me:

If astronomers in the far future have records handed down from our era, attesting to an expanding cosmos filled with galaxies, they will face a peculiar choice: Should they believe “primitive” knowledge that speaks of a cosmos very much at odds with what anyone has seen for billions and billions of years? Or should they focus on their own observations and valiantly seek explanations for an island universe containing a small cluster of galaxies floating within an unchanging sea of darkness — a conception of the cosmos that we know definitively to be wrong?
And what if future astronomers have no such records, perhaps because on their planet scientific acumen developed long after the deep night sky faded to black? For them, the notion of an expanding universe teeming with galaxies would be a wholly theoretical construct, bereft of empirical evidence.

Hmmm ....