Photo of the day: R.D. Burman

From the Source:

Rahul Dev Burman and his repertoire of Westernised beats revolutionised Hindi film music in the 1970s. With his emphasis on rhythm and beats, he had Young India of that time swinging to his tunes. At the same time, he proved his many detractors wrong by composing some of the most influential raga-based and folk-based songs.  
R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music looks at how he changed the way Indians perceived Hindi film music. With anecdotes and trivia and interactions with the musicians who were part of his team, the authors create a portrait of the man who continues to live on through his music even two decades after his death.
R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music; Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, HaperCollins, Rs. 399

Yes, I have enjoyed quite a few Hindi songs that were set to music by R.D. Burman.  Here is one of the many, thanks to him:

Poppies remind me of California ...

About this time of the year, the golden-orange colors of the California poppies bring to energetic life the Grapevine stretch over the hills between Bakersfield and Sen Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.

Often I have stopped while driving across to admire them.  I am sure my daughter remembers stopping by Gorman at least a few times to pick some of those flowers, all the while worrying that a cop or a ranger will issue us a cease and desist order.  The poppies made the warm--sometimes uncomfortably warm--drive a lot more pleasant.  No wonder Christo did that wonderful poppy-colored umbrella project.

Here in Oregon, poppies are in bloom, even by the Willamette River that I walk by practically everyday now that the cold, cold and rainy, rainy days are long gone.  There are all kinds of wildflowers displaying their beauty, attracting the bees and the humans alike.  But, it is always the poppies that draw me closer to them.  Because, ... I have stories that link me to them.  To their California cousins.    Doesn't it look like a line of poppies are meandering through on their way to California? Run, Forrest, run :)

I could watch those flowers for hours, I think, if Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" played in an extended jam session in the background :)

Proof that South Asians have made it in the US? Wall Street indictments!

Raj Raratnam, a Sri Lankan-born hedge fund tycoon, is found guilty of securities fraud, and faces up to almost twenty years in prison.  The only real question that the jury had was whether Raj was smart or stupid.

Stupid?

"He was very stupid. That was the sad part. He traded for less money than he already had. If you’re going to steal, steal big."

Or smart?

He was a “chameleon” who “could adapt to whatever personality to get whatever he wanted..."

"He knew how to pick his victims. He knew who was weak and who was crooked. It’s better to have weak and crooked people feeding you information."

But the jurors went meticulously though every detail to make sure they didn't send an innocent man to prison.

Tied to this Sri Lankan are a bunch of other characters as well, many with roots in the Subcontinent.  Including Rajat Gupta, who headed McKinsey to newer heights, before being termed out:

According to the SEC, it was on the evening of June 10, 2008, that Gupta, in "a flurry" of phone conversations with Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, allegedly divulged Goldman Sachs's still secret second-quarter earnings.
In early March, the SEC stunned global business circles when it filed a civil administrative proceeding against Gupta, accusing him of leaking information from confidential boardroom discussions held by Goldman and Procter & Gamble to Rajaratnam—accusations Gary P. Naftalis, Gupta's attorney, calls "baseless." Gupta has not been criminally charged, but for seven weeks this spring, during Rajaratnam's sensational insider-trading trial, hardly a day passed when Gupta's name was not mentioned. Although federal prosecutors called him an unindicted "co-conspirator," he never appeared at the trial. But jurors heard his voice, caught on an FBI wiretap, resonating through the courtroom, saw his face in a photograph beamed onto a large video screen, and listened as his professional and personal lives were dissected by federal witnesses. While Rajaratnam is alleged by the SEC to have made more than $17 million from Gupta's information, what Gupta himself might have earned is less clear.
Gupta has been removed from the prominent corporate and philanthropic boards on which he once served and is shunned by business leaders who were once his friends. His spectacular fall from grace has left the world's leading companies shocked and mystified. Rajaratnam's conviction on 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy on May 11 closes a central chapter in the story

There is more to this "illustrious" list mentioned in the same story, likeVictor Menezes: former Citigroup vice-chairman, and Anil Kumar: of McKinsey and Mindspirit, and Parag Saxena.

Why would Rajat Gupta go down this path?

his quest to amass great wealth led him to lapses in judgment, says Bala Balachandran, dean of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai, India, and a friend for almost three decades.
“He wanted a billionaire’s life and the question for him was how could he become a billionaire in a short time,” Balachandran says.  ...
Gupta’s former Harvard dorm mate Carberry says he’s dumbfounded as to what went wrong with his friend.
“If the SEC charges are true, something happened to Rajat,” he says. “The Rajat I knew at business school was of the highest integrity. The Rajat I’ve heard on wiretapped conversations isn’t the person I knew.”

We have made it, baby!!!  Next stop: the White House, because we now know how to say "I am not a crook."

How to print a bicycle? 3D printing

Ah, yes, changes that boggle my simple mind!

A selection of responses to my opinion piece

So, it was an interesting few minutes reading the comments to my op-ed in the Oregonian on the "college dream."

A reader, "Eddy Rock" writes:

That’s odd isn’t this a geology professor talking about social science. Perhaps what he means is that geology degrees are worthless. Or maybe he should become a sociology professor instead. Perhaps then he could better understand the complex nature of political, economic and cultural Norms.
...
A Higher education is paramount to a better future for everyone… or we can all go back living in terror of our shadows and killing small animals with our teeth. Maybe Khe, you should propose programs that help students become more informed about job requirements rather than torching the whole system. Way to slander your own profession there guy!
I think I will take one of your classes since I go to your collage.

Hmmm ... in case "Eddy Rock" reads this:

• As the byline stated, I am not a geology professor, but I work out of the geography department, which is housed in the social sciences division of the university.
• And, yes, I constantly hassle students who seek my advice about the need to do internships, even if unpaid, in order to improve their employment prospects.
• And, yes, looking forward to having you in the classroom.

Another reader, "Rlindsl" writes:

The link between degree level and employment rate is very strong. The BLS reports unemployment for Masters degree holders at 4% while non HS diploma holders is 15%, with a steady correlation for all levels in-between. Of course doing your research and checking your facts to verify expected outcome is part of a planning and management process that you learn in a school of business, so Khe probably doesn't support that kind of approach.

I refer you to this, and this, for starters, which are all based on facts.  I suppose I follow a Keynesian approach: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Reader, "whatgoeson" writes:

If this writer thinks I'm going into debt to have someone lecture me about Plato, when I can access the info online basically for free, well, it's drug test time.

 Nope, my argument was/is that it is a waste to force everybody to read about Plato. 

And then this strange letter to the editor. I suppose the comments in response to the letter address many of the issues there.  It will be interesting, however, to find out how many graduates of the program referred to have been placed--if any, at all--in those wonderful $100,000 jobs the letter-writer refers to, and about the employment and remuneration of the rest of the graduates.

Confessing another long-running love affair!

As the NASA space shuttle program comes to an end, I realize that it is the end of an affair for me; yet another affair that goes back to my teenage years in a far, far away Neyveli.

One of the high school subjects that fascinated me the most was physics.  To such an extent that once when I had a nagging question about what happens to the speed of light as it gets refracted when it travels through different media, and when my high school teacher couldn't provide me with a satisfying answer, I decided to write to a physics professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Madras.

It was those prehistoric days before the internet.  All I knew was that there was a professor named "Ram Shastri" that another physics teacher, who had moved on to a different town, had mentioned at some point.  So, I addressed that letter to Professor Ram Shastri at IIT-Madras, and detailed my question to him.

It would be a terrible understatement to say that I was ecstatic when I got a reply from a Professor Shastri, whom I had never met.  I was blown away that a professor at that level would care to respond to a student like me.  I wish I had saved that letter!

So, yes, physics fascinated me. Physics was also the opening to understanding the cosmos.  It was such a profound love for the subject that solidified my friendship with a classmate, Srikumar.  He was as much a physics nut as I was.  Though, I suppose, to him physics and philosophy went together a lot more than the physics and math combination that worked for me.

It was through Srikumar that I came to understand NASA's space shuttle program.  The miniscule resources at out local library had next to nothing on this, which meant that we had to rely on newspaper and radio reports.  I think Srikumar wrote to NASA, or perhaps it was to the US embassy in India, asking for informational materials about the space shuttle, and I recall him getting quite a bit of glossy printed materials.

One can imagine, therefore, the thrill I had following the news about the successful launch of Space Shuttle Columbia, which was about the time we were having our school leaving final exams.  It was also because of such an intense personal connection that I was devastated when Columbia did not make a successful reentry back in 2003. 

Such a teenage love doesn't die, of course, and these are the kind of affairs I hope to carry to my very end, which, for all I know, is simply round the corner :)

Outlook bleak for college graduates

A couple of days after I write about the higher education bubble, the NY Times reports that outlook is bleak even for recent college grads:

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.
...

This may be a waste of a college degree, but it also displaces the less-educated workers who would normally take these jobs.
“The less schooling you had, the more likely you were to get thrown out of the labor market altogether,” said Mr. Sum, noting that unemployment rates for high school graduates and dropouts are always much higher than those for college graduates. “There is complete displacement all the way down.”
Meanwhile, college graduates are having trouble paying off student loan debt, which is at a median of $20,000 for graduates of classes 2006 to 2010.

The Chronicle adds more to this discussion from another perspective:

A report by Rutgers University, "Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy," says that 53 percent of college graduates from 2006 to 2010 have full-time jobs, while 21 percent are in graduate school, 12 percent are working part time, and 9 percent are unemployed.

Awful, the situation is.  I hope we will put an end to this soon.

Ashton Kucher as bin Laden's replacement?

As a replacement for raving mad men :)

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Photo of the day: census and caste in India

A census official marking a house in India.

More here on India's "a caste-based census along with the socio-economic profiling."

Makes me worry that much more that the caste system will never be eliminated :(

The forgotten many: America's unemployed

Newspapers in Oregon have been trumpeting that unemployment in the state is now down to 9.6%
But, other than to spin any such positive story, the media has gone dead:

Major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit, a National Journal analysis shows.

The analysis -- based on a measure of how often the words "unemployment" and "deficit" appear in major publications -- portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media's consciousness. ...

Mentions of unemployment have been dwindling since they spiked to 154 in the month ending August 15, 2010; over the month ending Sunday, there were 63. ...

That major newspapers and other media outlets have covered the deficit with greater intensity in recent months should come as no surprise given the focus of the politicians and policymakers they cover. The declining mentions of unemployment are perhaps more surprising, as the issue remains salient for millions of Americans.

The 9.6 percent in Oregon or the nationwide 9% is an under-count in many ways.  When looking at the entire labor force, unemployment is at 16.5 percent.

Of course, there is an entirely separate discussion to be had on what happens to the labor-age population that has been incarcerated?  "The overall unemployment rate among men would be about 8 percent higher if those in prison were out and experiencing the same labor market as others of their race and age. By expanding our prison population, we have reduced the unemployment numbers."

It is not only the journalistic media that has forgotten the unemployed--the literary and entertainment media, too, has apparently shut itself off:

Hollywood and the publishing industry have learned just one historical lesson from the Depression: people want entertainment in tough times.
The Grapes of Wrath, the films of King Vidor, even socially conscious gangster films from Warner Brothers were only a fraction of Hollywood's output then. The Depression was also the era of Fred and Ginger, Nick and Nora, screwball comedy and Busby Berkeley.
That hasn't changed. Writers, film-makers, game designers all want to eat - and that's the market they have to create for.
A line of poetry by T S Eliot composed at the same time Steinbeck was writing Grapes of Wrath, and Agee and Walker were having their report spiked, says it best. "Humankind / cannot bear too much reality."
But humankind has to live in the real world with other human beings. And if writers and artists won't put a human face on the jobless numbers, who will?

Running Scared. From Waterloo? Not me :)

The Eurovision winner from Azerbaijan:



A favorite of mine from a previous Eurovision contest:



The most famous Eurovision winner among all ...

Lonely planet, yes. But, with less than a billion hungry people?

The cover says it all, doesn't it?

Lester Brown's essay is more of the same kind of worries expressed over the years decades. 

The essay by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, on the other hand, has lots of observations that might challenge conventional wisdom.  Like this one, for instance:

If there is any chance that by eating a bit more the poor could start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone, then they should eat as much as possible. Yet most people living on less than a dollar a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. In an 18-country data set we assembled on the lives of the poor, food represents 36 to 79 percent of consumption among the rural extremely poor, and 53 to 74 percent among their urban counterparts. 

So, where else do they spend? On other basic necessities?  Not so, they add:

The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food. Equally remarkable is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories....
All told, many poor people might eat fewer calories than we -- or the FAO -- think is appropriate. But this does not seem to be because they have no other choice; rather, they are not hungry enough to seize every opportunity to eat more. So perhaps there aren't a billion "hungry" people in the world after all....
We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.

Life is complicated, as much as it is beautiful.

Colbert Super PAC ... for the PAC-less Americans

Only in America can things get so twisted and knotted up into shapes and PACs that nobody can understand anymore ... :)

Remember the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United?

Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.

So, Colbert did this a few weeks ago:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Colbert Super PAC - Trevor Potter
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

And then Colbert gets to the FEC to complete the process, by requesting its opinion on the formation of a Super PAC to make a better tomorrow, tomorrow ...



Life in the USA!

In the jungle the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight

Was searching for a photo in my collections when I came across this clip of lions and cubs just having a great day at Mukumi National Park in Tanzania--from my trip there in December 2009.



Which then, naturally, led me to think about The Tokens singing their classic:

Federal Debt: The US is no PIGS

I am probably worried more than the average American is when it comes to federal debt.

But, listening to news reports, I am concerned that they could mislead many of my fellow citizens into thinking that all the trillions and trillions of government debt is owned by foreigners. (editor: there is your problem--listening to the news!)

Note that the most significant part of this pie is owned locally.  As Reason put it in its typically sarcastic tone, "70 percent of the debt is held by domestic suckers and by elements of our trusted and trustworthy government."

This domestic versus external debt makes a hell of a difference.  Greece or Ireland is in trouble because of the overwhelming proportion of external debts, as in the figure below:

 It is highly probably that Paul Krugman wrote about this and I missed out on it; damn!

That we should begin to slim down the debt, by tackling the underlying causes, is a no-brainer.  The questions are how and, more importantly, when?  I am not sure if this is the right time to start a dramatic diet overhaul.

The college dream: Is it higher education or a job-training program?

(My op-ed published in the Oregonian)

If only we were all aware of the cost of higher education and engaged in those discussions as much as we are painfully in sync with gas prices.

Every once in a while I point out to students that in the academic quarter system, it costs about $110 every week, per term, for each of the four-credit classes that I teach. A majority of that $110 is paid for by students through tuition and fees. Taxpayers chip in a significant amount as well.

Such an expensive investment is guided by a belief that college education is about future employment and economic productivity, but that's not entirely true. In fact, this linkage of higher education to economic performance is relatively new in human history.

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades. As one looks back to the days of gurukula in India or Plato's academy, it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing. Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

Thus, higher education wasn't an industry, either. Galileo pursued research on the cosmos because of his undying, and heretical, curiosity, not because he thought of it as a convenient opportunity to charge students fees that they could not afford.

But especially since the post-World War II years, there has been a transformation that's resulted in a twisted understanding that higher education is some sort of a credentialing service for young adults interested in joining the 21st-century equivalents of trade guilds.

The irony is that it doesn't require an undergraduate degree to complete the tasks in service-sector jobs. Yet we've managed to convince ourselves that a college diploma is a must-have for mere survival, let alone prosperity. Most students I talk to feel that they have no choice but to get a college diploma if they want to get any sort of job anymore. And that presents a horrible choice.

After spending $110 week after week for classes like mine, students graduate, typically, with about $20,000 in debt, only to realize the realities of employment. Despite all my full disclosures in the classroom, they are shocked to find that there really isn't a job waiting for them and that their diploma isn't necessarily the guaranteed route across the (un)employment gates. In fact, trade guilds often add and require their own training and certification.

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases -- even in my classes in the summer. This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever. As economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families and taxpayers, begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

Maybe students and taxpayers will then demand a refund of the money they spent on my classes, eh?

Postscript:
In addition to the comments at the newspaper's site, two emails, thus far, to me. (I have withheld names and email addresses)

A reader:

Thank you for the EXCELLENT OP-ED piece in the Oregonian: I wished I would have read it 40 YEARS ago; True then also: 3 Degrees Later and OUTCOME SAME: Jobs R in CHINA !

A faculty colleague:

That was an excellent piece in the paper this morning.  I, too, feel that the objective of a university education must be to encourage intellectual growth rather than simply being a minimal qualifier for employment.  We have community colleges for that purpose.  My observation has been that many, if not most, WOU students are intellectually adrift.  We, as an institution, can help young people discover significance.  I believe that should be our mission.

Another reader:

"The world needs ditch diggers too".  Judge Schmels, CaddyShack

A GREAT piece on education.  Unfortunately, the (educational) system is not made up of individuals such as yourself, but of "intellectuals" who have been installed by society as those that must know, and therefore we must follow.  We will be following right into the abyss.

Instead of the constant mantra of "go to college", I hope that we will finally get our educators - particularly in elementary and high school - to say "get a skill" and then teach them how to get that skill.  We have wasted at least two generations on this notion that a four year degree is absolutely necessary.  Gather the industrialists, the business leaders, the employers that want to groom their future workers.  Let the school system(s) produce a crop ready to learn the skills, and then guide those with the aptitudes to the right industry. We could make a tremendous difference in our society, in our educational system, and in our pocket books.  Free the schools from being the catchall of what a child "needs", and just TEACH.  

Thank you for the thoughtful and enlightening opinion piece. 

A letter to the editor:

I was very disappointed in Sriram Khé's analysis of higher education ("The college dream: Is it higher education or a job-training program?" In My Opinion, May 15). Indeed, his opinion seems to confirm the worst and ignore the best of what is actually happening in higher education today. As professors (and as a society), we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled by a siren song of doom and a lack of imagination.

Why can't we provide classical training AND prepare students for the job market? In my field, criminal justice, I am able to teach historical, philosophical and analytical thinking in addition to giving students face time with real-world employers.

To suggest that increasing employment options for our students is somehow a bad thing is shortsighted. Recently, I was able to provide my students with an opportunity to obtain $100,000-a-year jobs with an out-of-state criminal justice agency. Guess what? The hiring folks are actively and eagerly recruiting from the higher-ed pool. Our students are desirable candidates precisely because they have been educated and not simply trained.

Robert Swan
Swan is a visiting assistant professor of criminal justice at Western Oregon University. 

Word of the day: "sphexishness" ... explains the Afghan quagmire!

An email from a friend "D" led me to this LA Times op-ed on why humans, and Americans in particular, persist in irrational and counterproductive behavior.

The author, Barry Goldman, describes a situation that most of us are familiar with--how dogs like golden retrievers can seem to play fetch forever.  However, we have also noticed situations when they stand rather confused and start barking at the ball or the stick; it is:

because of two fixed, internal rules he has. The first rule is that he must stay on land until he is as close as possible to the ball and then swim the rest of the way. The second rule is that he must enter the water gradually. He won't jump in from the side. This makes playing in the Pacific Ocean easy, but the pool presents a problem. If the ball is closer to one of the edges of the pool than it is to the steps, all he can do is run to the closest edge, look at the ball with trembling excitement and bark.

Do we humans do anything like this?  Or, are we way smarter than the retriever that barks from the edge of the pool?

To get to this, Goldman explains the psychology:  

Cognitive scientists call this kind of difficulty "sphexishness" after the behavior of the female sphex wasp. She will sting and paralyze a cricket, stash it in a hole in a tree and lay her eggs on it. When the eggs hatch, the baby wasps have fresh cricket to eat. But the mama sphex also has an internal rule. When she brings a cricket to the opening of the hole, she always goes inside for a look around before she drags it in. If an experimenter moves the cricket a few inches away while the sphex is in the hole, she will repeat the process, bringing the cricket back to the opening and going inside for a look. If the experimenter moves the cricket again, the wasp will repeat the behavior. Her internal rule calls for her to look in the hole before she drags the cricket inside, and that is what she will do. If the experimenter moves the cricket 40 times, the sphex will repeat the behavior 40 times. We don't know how many more times she would do it because the experimenters always give up.

By now, you are thinking that we humans are way smarter than this, right?  Are you sure?  Take it away, Goldman.  Give us a couple of human analogies:

We continue to think that Americans, no matter how crazy, should be able to buy guns, no matter how lethal. ...
We continue to believe that business can regulate itself....
We persist in throwing endless blood and treasure into the endless, pointless war on drugs.  ...
We continue to believe in the fantasies of smart bombs, surgical strikes and limited wars. ...

Now, speaking of wars, from what Nicholas Kristof writes in the NY Times, it appears that we might/would be able to get out of our sphexishness--if we and our President listened to the late Richard Holbrooke.

Kristof writes:

Holbrooke opposed the military “surge” in Afghanistan and would see the demise of Bin Laden as an opportunity to go into diplomatic overdrive....
Vali Nasr, a member of Holbrooke’s team at the State Department, puts it this way: “He understood from his experience that every conflict has to end at the negotiating table.”
Nasr says that Holbrooke’s aim for Afghanistan was “not cut-and-run, but a viable, lasting solution” to end the civil war there. If Holbrooke were still alive, Nasr says, he would be shuttling frantically between Islamabad and Kabul, trying to take advantage of Bin Laden’s killing to lay the groundwork for a peace process.

So, Mr. President, more sphexishness?