Music videos of the day: leave from this turn

My sister, who is almost five years older than me, used to listen to Hindi film songs when I was young--Ameen Sayani's "Binaca Geetmala" was a favorite of hers.  And then one year she and her friend, "M," decided to practice singing a song together and, boy, they made sure that everybody in the household got that song in their heads.  Years later--almost forty years later--she does not remember what song it was.  And, even worse, she has no memory whatsoever of this insane singing session that she and her friend "M" had at home :)

"M" had a sister "S" who was my classmate for a couple of years.  Once while heading out to our respective grandmothers' places during the summer break, my brother and I led by my sister, with "M" leading her siblings, travelled together in a long train ride.  Must have been at 36 or 37 years ago!  Am I old or what!!!

Well, the song here is not what my sister pleasantly tortured us with; but, is from that era and could easily be what they practiced!!! 



So, why the subtitle of this post--that all pass this turning--you ask?  It is from the lyrics in the following video (click here for a rough translation)



And, finally, the "dream girl" of probably every young fella in India at that time:

Politicians and voters: A love-hate relationship, without the love?

 

If that was from India, how are things here in the US?

Earth Day: What would George Carlin Say? :)

George Carlin was one heck of a truth teller.  The neat thing in his sharp humor was that he was not preachy, like how sometimes Jon Stewart can get.  Carlin delivered his social criticism straight that made us squirm even as we laughed with him.  I wish we had more Carlins around.

This is a special Earth Day edition. 

George Carlin on "stuff" ... I didn't know he had this routine when I wrote something similar a couple of years ago.  His critique of the consumerist behavior, which is why we then have Earth Day, well, watch it:



However, as much as I am one of those nutcases who takes reusable bags to the grocery store and don't waste "stuff" .... well, I get ticked off at all the phony talk on Earth Day, and there is nobody better than Carlin to expose the hypocrisy.  Watch him shred to pieces all the humbug about Earth Day



If only South Park had this Smug Alert episode in an embeddable form :)

More on the Ponzi, er, higher education system

It seems like every single day there is yet another analysis of the utterly wasteful strategy of mandating college degrees for all.  If it looks, quacks, and walks the same way, isn't it about time we recognized it as a ponzi scheme?

Today's edition is from Matt Yglesias--far from a Tea Party nutcase he is.  Yglesias provides this chart (it is off the same set of data that I had blogged about last September):

See how much steeper the tuition increases are compared to even that other great ponzi scheme called housing?  Now, of course, the public tuition going up is a reflection of reduction in state allocations.  But, we can use the private tuition as the baseline index, which itself is enough.

So, as state allocations decrease, what do we do?  Increase federal grants, of course!  But then the more the feds subsidize, the more that "benefit" is immediately captured by the public institutions which jack up tuition and fees, instead of the benefit going to the poor student.  More on this here.

Against such a backdrop, faculty are already thinking about salary increases.  Welcome to the bizarro world.  Over at the Chronicle of Hr. Ed. is a lively debate on whether discussions about faculty salaries do more harm than good.  As far as I can tell, there is not any serious comment about the squeeze that we are applying on students :(

Increasingly I wonder whether students themselves realize they are being screwed.  My hunch is that they don't, or even if they do they feel like they have no choice in this matter.  oh well ...

update: this from the faculty union on campus:

Just a quick reminder that Monday (4/25) is Higher Ed. Rally Day at the state capitol steps.  Please join students and faculty for a rally which will convey our needs and goals to the Governor and the Legislature.  It startsat 12:30 on the steps and will last approximately an hour.  See you there.

So, where will the additional money come from?  Hmmmm ....

You have a daughter? Read this. Well, read it even if otherwise

Tina Fey's prayer for a daughter (ht)

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.
May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.
When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.
Guide her, protect her
When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.
Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.
What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.
O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.
And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.
“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.
Amen.

I think of this as a wonderful tribute to mothers, who deal with crap--the literal and the metaphorical. A couple of weeks ahead of Mother's Day, I suppose.

Here is Tina Fey accepting the Mark Twain Award for American humor:

The site traffic data revealed that there was a surge in visitors who had come to my blog because they were searching for "after the storm." Yes, those very search words.

It might have been their because of the interests to find out more about the aftereffects of the storms that destroyed property and life in a few American states.

In Japan, more than a month after the shake and the tsunami, the people and the government are still working through the storm that has not quite ended.

And, throughout the world there are people dealing with metaphorical storms in their lives every single day.

Which is why I thought it is worth it to re-post that wonderful poem by Boris Pasternak:

After the Storm

The air is full of after-thunder freshness,
And everything rejoices and revives.
With the whole outburst of its purple clusters
The lilac drinks the air of paradise.

The gutters overflow; the change of weather
Makes all you see appear alive and new.
Meanwhile the shades of sky are growing lighter,
Beyond the blackest cloud the height is blue.

An artist's hand, with mastery still greater
Wipes dirt and dust off objects in his path.
Reality and life, the past and present,
Emerge transformed out of his colour-bath.

The memory of over half a lifetime
Like swiftly passing thunder dies away.
The century is no more under wardship:
High time to let the future have its say.

It is not revolutions and upheavals
That clear the road to new and better days,
But revelations, lavishness and torments
Of someone's soul, inspired and ablaze.

1958
                 Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater 

Pasternak is, of course, known to most of us as the creator of Dr. Zhivago.  Play that the lovely music from the movie version, in the video below, and read the poem all over again. Chances are quite good that you will feel the storms clearing ...

Remembrance of things past: School ends, 30 years ago

In cyberspace, we have been marking the passing of thirty years since we completed high school. Yes, it was back in 1981. In a small town, Neyveli. A town nearly as magical as Macondo in One hundred years of solitude.

In the culture then, I know not how things are now, there wasn't any formal occasion to note the last days of school. Nothing structured, I mean. All of a sudden the exams were over, and that was it.

I remember being confused--because it was the first time in my life that I didn't know how life was going to be when the summer break, or "annual vacation" as it was called, ended.  Up until then it was easy--roam around aimlessly and simply waste time. Eat quite a few mangoes. Care not about the hot Sun, despite all the yelling from parents and grandparents. And, as one who simply loved going to classes, I missed that structured learning, but knew that the soon I would head back to that known place.

But, this time it was all brand new. All I knew was that I would report as a student at a college. And it was going to be at a new place. With strangers.

Well, thirty years later, after meeting a lot more strangers in life, we have been reconnecting with those old mates.  Our faces are barely recognizable anymore--some have changed a lot more than others.  Out of the 120 or so students in the graduating class, we have connected with 40, and four are already dead. And perhaps we have lost more?

We have been sharing memories of teachers, good and bad. Many of the teachers are now long gone. YouTube came to my rescue with "To sir, with love" as the music of the evening as I thought about my teachers.. Of course, we didn't have any male teacher a tenth as good looking as Sidney Poitier is in this movie. Heck, not a millionth even :)  But then, well, he is Poitier, and it is not fair to compare any normal person with Poitier!  But, we did have a few teachers who really cared, as much as Thackeray did. And they were not "sir" but "miss" ... I suppose it is then "to miss, with love"



Natalie Merchant did a wonderful cover of this song--can't find a decent audio/video version of hers on YouTube.  But, there is one that is good enough--with Michael Stipe of REM

What is wrong with this editorial cartoon on baby boomers and unemployment?

The cartoon, on the right, suggests that the Gen X-ers are doomed because the baby boomers not retiring early enough.

What is the fallacy in this argument? 

Click here to find out

Stephen Colbert explains the significance of Easter eggs

:)

The travelin' man ... and his classmates? :)

In an earlier post, I wrote about how much, it turns out, my high school classmates have traveled all over the world.  One of them, apparently lived a life of island hopping from one island to another for many years, from Seychelles to Micronesia to Polynesia ... and now to Fiji ... As I was driving later, and thought about Polynesian islands, my mind kept going back to Ricky Nelson's "The Travelin' Man"



My first trip abroad was to the US.  It was from here, at the end of my first year, that I went to Venezuela.  During this trip that my fellow-grad students (I can't recall their names, except two!) introduced me to Belafonte's music.  His "Sweetheart from Venezuela" is a classic indeed.

The song that we did sing often was, of course, Belaftonte's "Banana boat song"

More on Gandhi's (bi)sexuality. Wait, the Mahatma or Rahul?

The nerd and the junkie in me are delighted with the craziness in this world, including all the attention on Gandhi's (bi)sexuality.  So, here I am three weeks after that first post, yet again yakking about it :)

The best one I read about all this was in the New Yorker.  But, that will be towards the end of this post.  Because, well, here is Aravind Adiga writing that Gandhi was the symbol of manliness in a country that was otherwise devoid of strong male figures, and where, he quotes MJ Akbar here, young boys were forever in the shades of the saris of their mothers and grandmothers. 

He exaggerates, but then he is a fiction writer :)  Plus, Adiga seems to confuse courage with sexuality and manliness. 

There were no Charles de Gaulles or Fidel 
Castros to inspire us. Independent India’s most important statesman,
 Jawaharlal Nehru, suffered from an air of masculine inadequacy, 
stemming from his failure to forestall the Chinese invasion of India 
in 1962. Liberal, tolerant Indian politicians almost always looked
 like pathetic specimens of masculinity; the charismatic men were 
either those who had advocated military action against the British—or the even more macho Hindu nationalists.

I am all the more convinced that Adiga should restrict himself to fiction, where he excels.

The New Yorker has one hilarious piece on this: "I was Gandhi's boyfriend"  ... I envy these writers for being so creative :) Here is one really funny moment there:

he eventually dumped me for this German-Jewish bodybuilder, and I warned him, I said, “Hello, been there, and I know that at first it sounds hot, but pretty soon it’s all ‘Nein, I can’t stay out late, because I have to get up early for the gym,’ and ‘Nein, we can’t do your rally for South Africa, because we’ve got my cousin’s Seder, remember?’ And his mother will be all ‘So, Mr. Gandhi, I’m told you like to lie down in front of railroad cars, to demonstrate a political point. Can you make a living from this?’ ”

 Meanwhile, there is loud talk that Rahul Gandhi is gay.  

Who cares, right?  Makes for interesting discussions, and blog posts though!

All we are is dust in the wind ...

Triggered by the NPR story on four hundred years since the King James Bible, which I was listening to when driving back home. 

A wonderful song it is ...

Crazy U.: Not recognizing that higher education is a business is to be in denial!

Over the last few years, one important buzz-phrase in higher education has been "enrollment management."  There are a few good aspects to it, yes.  But, all the good aspects are largely ignored by the overriding objective of all: maximization of student enrollment.

If student numbers--those enrolled--go up, the institution is happy.  I don't merely mean administrators being happy, but faculty too.  Faculty, true to their (our) parochial interests, see increase in numbers as a wonderful opportunity to offer that rare and special topic that nobody else cares about or, worse, outrightly bizarre courses.  Administrators compete for awards in their worlds, and the faculty-administrative complex is happy.

Except, this is not a happy situation.  Because, we are forgetting the students, aren't we? 

But, students, too, seem to be happy with this--high school continues on, and their adolescence extends well into twenty-something years.  And, of course, academic researchers validate this as "emergent adulthood."  So, if anybody asks questions, well, simply throw that phrase to spin a story that the youth of today are graduating into adulthood along paths and time-frames different from mine, leave alone my grandfather's!

A significant number of students I encounter don't seem to be interested in knowledge at all. Today, one student slept through most of the 100-minute meeting. And it was not as if I was even talking the whole time. Before we took a break midway, I handed their assignments back and, picture this: I am calling out students' names, most of whom I now know anyway. I call out this student's name, and well, he is fast asleep. I joke that perhaps somebody ought to wake him up. A few students sport a nonplussed look. We move on, take that break, resume classes, and this student sleeps through it all.  A few minutes before class ends, he wakes up startled. Looks around (I am watching all these even as I am explaining the dynamic changes in birthrates!) and as class ends, rushes out without collecting his paper. In fact, there has not been a single class over the last four weeks that he has not slept. Not a quick nap, but deep sleep. Well, I can only hope it is not some serious medical issue.  And if it is a medical problem, I hope he is getting appropriate care.

Some students, of course, go on a totally different track--questioning the very idea that education is about knowing.  Last term, one student complained--yes, complained--that he was being forced to take courses in subjects that he didn't care for at all.  No, his grudge was not against linear differential equations, but was about the very heart of the liberal arts--in the humanities and the social sciences!

Across the Atlantic, notes, Spiked, the newly elected leader of the National Union of Students said:

‘I think we should be honest about our priorities’, he said. ‘At the end of the day, the point of the university has changed. If you look at when only five per cent of the population went, that was about knowledge, discovery, pushing boundaries, people talked about the crème de la crème. [Now], it is about social mobility and people changing their lives. The reality is you need that bit of paper [a degree] to get into better jobs with greater earning potential and influence. So we want as many people to get one as possible, at the expense of quality if necessary.’

Wait, don't nod in agreement.  Re-read this.  Did you catch what he said? "we want as many people to get [a degree] as possible, at the expense of quality if necessary.’"  There, if ever we needed a clear articulation on how much education is all about numbers and not about quality, well, hey, thank this brilliant student leader for making it clear.

Spiked comments on this sorry state of education:

It is a remarkably naked assertion of the denigration of education from being about quality (knowledge, reflection, truth) to being about quantity (getting as many young people through as possible in order to improve their ‘earning potential’).

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether college really needs to be for everybody. Why shove it down everybody's throat by making a college degree a requirement for every bloody job there is?

The more we engage in this, the more higher education operates as an out-of-control industry whose only business is taking care of itself.  And, yes, Crazy U is a good metaphor :(

We are one of the great apes. Bananas please!

When I was driving back from Seattle, for a while I listened to the conversation with Richard Leakey in Ira Flatow's program. 

It was such a delight to be able to listen to a casual, and yet informative and educational, conversation.  I tracked down from the transcript the following exchange:

FLATOW: You know, a lot of people who are creationists and do not believe in human evolution, they like to say that no human has descended from a monkey or an ape or a chimpanzee. And that's exactly correct, isn't it? It's not that we were descendants from them, but there's a common ancestry somewhere.
Dr. LEAKEY: Well, indeed. And I think if we were very fair, which humans aren't, and one did - had the classification of primates done by a non-primate, there would be six great apes, not five, because we are just an ape. We just happened to have been a more intelligent one who did the classification ourselves.

I am not sure which one will be a tougher sell with the anti-evolution crowd: that we descended from an ape, or that we are also apes!

 I'm quite sure had Charles Darwin not suggested that we, too, had evolved, evolution would have been perfectly acceptable to everybody. But it wasn't thus and all the evidence today, and there's abundant evidence and very clear evidence, is that we have evolved. And if you go back far enough, our ancestors don't look anything like we do today.

I wasn't sure if Leakey meant it in all seriousness, or was making a political point of sorts that we--the surviving homo sapiens--ought to be recognized as a separate ape.  I am ok with knowing that I am on the planet of the apes :)

Leakey then went on to add this:

people didn't like the idea that the world wasn't the center of the universe. People didn't like the idea that the world wasn't flat. Given time and evidence, people learn to accept these things if they're true. And I think there's no question of the truth of human evolution. None at all.

But, it is quite a challenge:

Dr. LEAKEY: I personally believe that if we could accept human evolution and evolution, science would be much more acceptable. And I think the only way out of the mess this species that's in today is for science to get greater currency value in the world. And I think a lot of biological natural science has been discounted because of the fear of evolution.
Evolution is nothing to be afraid of. And if we could get a lot of money and a lot of attention and look at the last 100,000 years - which I think we can do now - I think we can clear this up once and for all. And it's late, but there is still time.
FLATOW: Are you saying it's a worldwide fear of evolution, or is it mostly in the United States?
Dr. LEAKEY: I think it's growing. I think it's - it is worldwide. I think it's much more of a case in areas where Christianity is - and Islam have a lot of influence. And I think the fundamentalist approach to religion that you're seeing both in those two great religions is making this worse. But you find it in Europe. You find it in England. You find it in Africa. In fact, there are very few African leaders who believe in human evolution and science.
FLATOW: Is that right?
Dr. LEAKEY: And it's very, very worrying, because Africa's problems will only be resolved by African scientists working on those problems. And if we don't teach science from early on, we're not going to get out of this hole, because nobody is going to pull us out of the hole, because they're in one themselves.
FLATOW: Does it make it hard to excavate in these African countries if they don't believe?
Dr. LEAKEY: Funny enough, it doesn't. Because if they don't believe we're looking for human ancestors, they don't care what you're doing.

The New Yorker on man versus machine :)

Hilarious:

I blame my fascination for such humor on Madan, who had awesome cartoons in the Vikatan, during my younger days in India.

Ok, back to man v. machine:

Speaking of Madan, the cartoons I have spotted online seem to be from recent years.  I would love to get a hold of his collections from the 1970s.  Often, the punchline was a one-liner, like most New Yorker cartoons are.  Here is one of Madan's, which seems like a screen-grab from his talk:

Teaching credentials. One heck of a ponzi scheme?

A week ago, I had invited over for dinner at home four students who will soon graduate, and one with a graduate degree in teaching.  I asked "L" whether that grad degree is really needed when teaching in the third grade classroom, which is the career goal here.  Turns out that a mere grad degree is not that much of an employment credential anymore--additional certifications and licenses are also needed to land that job!

Unless all the four soon-to-be-graduates (all four in different fields of study) were faking it because I was the host (!), they were unanimous that the entire higher education came across to them as one "huge corporation."

This expensive credential inflation bankrupts the youth who are spending the money they don't have.  It, of course, makes colleges and universities rich and they can then build multimillion dollar gyms with climbing walls and student union buildings with wine bars.

The system is also rigged that teachers with graduate degrees get paid more too.  I have noted before--almost two years ago--the cost escalation to the system because of the additional compensation for teachers with graduate degrees:

A 2007 study estimated that 2.1 percent of all current expenditures can be attributed to teacher compensation related to master’s degrees. Seen another way, the master’s bump costs the average school district $174 per pupil.
... A Nebraska lawmaker, for example, should probably be aware that, on a yearly basis, roughly $81 million dollars—$279 per pupil—are tied up in master’s degrees and thus unavailable for other purposes. During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates over 3 percent of the average per pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement.

Here in Oregon, according to this study, the extra cost as a result of this master's bump is $109,520,560.

Forget everything else, and merely use logical and rational thinking here.  How is a graduate degree holder better than an undergraduate degree holder when explaining anything to students in the third grade?  What do we Oregonians, for example, get for this additional 109 million dollar investment?  Nothing!  We spend all that money for nothing.

On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement. Master’s degrees in math and science have been linked to improved student achievement in those subjects, but 90 percent of teachers’ master’s degrees are in education programs—a notoriously unfocused and process-dominated course of study.

And, hey, if you want it from the proverbial horse's mouth, well, I blogged about that too a few months ago:

In a speech at an American Enterprise Institute forum on Wednesday, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, said state and local governments should rethink their policies of giving pay raises to teachers who have master’s degrees because evidence suggests that the degree alone does not improve student achievement.

Coming soon to the third grade classroom in your neighborhood school: teachers with doctorates!