you know who you are. The world is a mighty strange place, as Will observes astutely.
The Bishop of Hereford writes in.
==
From the "Industrial Timestudy Institute" :
Indirect labor is defined as work or tasks performed by personnel that do not produce products. Indirect labor costs are costs that cannot be specifically linked to the physical construction of specific products, but are necessary for producing those products.
Some examples of indirect labor are janitors or housekeeping personnel, utility workers, tool crib attendants, inspectors, material handling personnel, shipping/receiving personnel, clerical workers, fork lift drivers and maintenance workers. Indirect labor can also apply to the salary workforce in the office, whether clerical or executive.
There exists a pervasive belief that you cannot measure indirect labor or jobs. The usual explanation is that these types of jobs are non-repetitive and are therefore impossible to measure. Other rationales are that indirect operations may involve groups of people, the unit of output appears difficult to define, the job may entail numerous sub operations, the work cycle is long, and the operation constantly changes geographic locations.
The term timestudy brings to mind F. W. Taylor, Scientific Management and all that goodness liberals and miscellaneous farshtopterkops so love to hate. Their political and philosophical opinions and inclinations notwithstanding, they cannot easily conclude that they can impose these opinions on others.
It may be illegal for corporations to use indirect labor outputs for their own profit. In particular, it may be illegal for them to use information gleaned from HTTP headers, IMAP Mail Headers, et cetera, for their own personal profit. All persons involved in the chain of helping such a corporation may be considered abetting criminal act.
The Bishop of Hereford writes in.
==
Chris Bertram's post on Liverpool got me thinking Scouse. Over the weekend, I met a guy from Liverpool. We fell to talking. There is a giant mechanical spider than haunts Liverpool. Shelob hath no fears for me, but a giant mechanical spider that may "lay a hundred eggs"? Give up all hope ye who enter Livepool.
The Bishop of Hereford writes in.
==
How much of one's personal information can an organization that one works for use? How much ownership rests with the individual? This ties in with a more general question : If there was commercial use that a corporation could make of an individual's personal information, is it always okay for it to do so?
If maximizing shareholder value is the sole responsibility of a firm, then the personal information of employees is fair game. Berle and Means' "The Modern Corporation and Private Property" comes to mind. I have been increasingly concerned with privacy and disclosure issues related to organizations. In the last few weeks, I have been surprised to see more than a couple of surprising leaks of personal information. I know it sounds strange, but couldn't there be situations where a company exploits an individual's personal information for its own personal profit, but such is not okay? I am not questioning whether a corporation can use the direct outputs of an individual's labor for its own personal profit. The question is - can it use the indirect outputs of an individual's labor for its own personal profit particularly when it may pertain to that individual's personal life? It is certainly a question worth thinking about.
In the meantime, do step over to Crooked Timber where Henry Farrell has a post that looks at another issue not far from those considered by Berle and Means.
The Bishop of Hereford writes in.
==
Crooked Timber links to "42 writers for liberty".
Welcome to the 42 Writers for Liberty website, part of Liberty’s Charge or Release campaign opposing the Government’s proposal to extend pre-charge detention in terrorism cases from 28 to 42 days. After an overwhelming defeat in the House of Lords on 12 October 2008, the
Government has now abandoned this dangerous and unnecessary measure.
The site is constructed as a calendar to illustrate graphically the sheer length of time it was proposed that a person could be held without being charged with any offence. Simply click on a day to open up a text from one of the 42 writers who have contributed to the project. You may find a story, an essay, a poem, a statement or even an interview – all a response to the simple question ‘What do you think of the proposed extension to 42 Days?’
It is a measure of the unpopularity of the proposed legislation that not a single writer declined to contribute on the grounds that they in fact supported it. Whereas 42 of the best novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets and journalists around sent us the uniquely powerful contributions you will read on this site.
Reason says :
Stanley Fischer, a former IMF official, rightly calls the situation "scandalous." Nicholas Stern, the World Bank's chief economist, says, "It is hypocrisy to encourage poor countries to open their markets while imposing protectionist measures that cater to powerful special interests."
The protesters who march under the banner of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence may not be inclined to hear this message when it comes from representatives of organizations they see as irredeemably evil. But perhaps they'll listen to Oxfam International, a group with impeccable "progressive" credentials that is "dedicated to fighting poverty and related injustice around the world."
Much has been written about Obama's victory and how his victory is representation for the third world finally getting something. "Representation" is fine, but it doesn't put food on the table. If the third world would do the math, it would ask for a different representation.
Obama says the North American Free Trade agreement is a bad one, and must be renegotiated. He has opposed the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement on the bogus ground that Colombia is not protecting its trade union leaders from the drug mafia. In fact, such assassinations have fallen steadily from 205 in 2001 to just 25 last year. Obama is cynically twisting facts to woo the most protectionist US trade unions. This cannot but worry India, which may also be subjected to bogus slander and trade disadvantages.
Obama favours extensive subsidies for US farmers, hitting Third World exporters like India. This has been one of the issues on which the Doha Round of WTO is gridlocked. McCain could open the gridlock, Obama will strengthen it.
Obama also favours subsidies for converting maize to ethanol. The massive diversion of maize from food to ethanol has sent global food and fertiliser prices skyrocketing, hitting countries like India.
Obama should not raise subsidies for U.S. farmers. Obama should stop promoting this idea and he should promoting this now. Obama should clarify this before the G-20 summit in Washington. Time for some reason.
Update (last update 11/15/2008): updated text, date, link.
A friend sent a link to J. K. Rowling's speech at Harvard.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
The speech ends with a few lines that I thought were quite - what's the word - apposite :
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
[Updated date. Last update 11/15/2008]
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is an idiot.
They laugh when he says something clever or elliptical or cleverly elliptical, which is much of the time. As in, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, what do you read?
"Mind," he says. "And spirit."
His voice is soft and high, the tenor of young boys and old men. Though he sleeps sometimes two or three hours a night, he says, he doesn't get weary. (Well, actually, what he says while grinning is: "Do I look tired?") He favors expressions like "if mind is kite, breath is thread," and "knowledge should be used as soap, for cleansing."
Also, "truth is always contradictory."
Why is that?
"Truth is not linear, it is spherical," Shankar says. "So it has to be contradictory. Anything that is spherical is always contradictory."
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
So Martti Ahtisaari did win the Nobel after all. Here is the Mission Statement for the Crisis Management Initiative from his website.
Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) is an independent, non-profit organisation that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable security. CMI works to strengthen the capacity of the international community in comprehensive crisis management and conflict resolution. CMI's work builds on wide stakeholder networks. It combines analysis, action and advocacy.
Found on the Internet. Reason for a spot of cheer.
Douglas Adams's increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is to be extended to six titles, after Adams's widow Jane Belson sanctioned a project which will see children's author Eoin Colfer taking up the story.
And Another Thing… by Colfer, whose involvement with the project was personally requested by Belson, will be published next October by Penguin. No information has yet emerged about the plot of the novel but Hitchhiker fans will be hoping for a resurrection of much-loved characters Arthur Dent, Trillian and Ford Prefect, who were all apparently blown to smithereens at the end of the fifth novel, Mostly Harmless.
Ravi Kuchimanchi and Aravinda Pillalamarri, AID Jeevansathis, are touring AID chapters in the United States. If you have seen Swades, you may relate to some of the work that AID has done in India.
It turns out that while scripting `Swades,' Ashutosh and his team visited Bilgaon, a tribal village in the Narmada valley where AID supported a power generation project to light up the entire hamlet. Ashutosh visited Bilgaon after spending considerable time with AID Jeevansaathis, Aravinda Pillalamarri and Ravi Kuchimanchi, who returned to India from the U.S. to work for rural development and were closely involved with the Bilgaon project.
The people of Bilgaon did 2000 person-days of `shramdaan' (labour) to make their village-energy self-sufficient. (http://www.aidindia.org/projects/illus/pedal.htm)
Marian Fitzwalter writes in.
==
The 700 billion dollar bailout has set the rumor mills churning. Much the Miller's son links to an article from May of 2008 in the Pakistani Daily.
SH: Our case is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen. Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East. I also wanted to point out that, just quickly, I went to school with some of these neocons. At the University of Chicago, in the late 60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others and so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject - how to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least 35 years.
The Bush government behind 9/11? Are you kidding? The folks are not competent enough to pull off something like that.
Marian Fitzwalter writes in.
==
I have been following with growing dismay the downward spiral of the Yahoo front page. Yesterday, Yahoo.com carried as the top-left "Featured" entry a post that purported to provide the "real Olympic medal count". (Today the featured post was Five Hoaxes that Fooled the World. Please answer the door. The Barbarians may well be at the gates.)
The REAL Olympic medal count
By Chris Chase
Look, I don't know much about gymnastics, but I do know that landing a vault on two feet is better than landing one on two knees. Olympic gymnastics judges evidently disagree with me, as they awarded China's Cheng Fei a bronze medal yesterday even after she fell on her vault landing. American Alicia Sacramone finished fourth despite, you know, not falling.
And today, 12-year old 16-year old Chinese gymnast He Kexin won gold over Nastia Liukin based on an obscure tiebreaking rule. The two received the same score from the judges, but He won a tiebreak because an Australian judge apparently was watching a different competition.
Every judging break seems to have gone China's way during these Olympics. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, I just think that judges are humans who are influenced by big names, fans and other external factors. Oh, and they're also terrible. Judged events will always be viewed with skepticism by those who lose for this reason, particularly those who lose to a member of the home delegation. (Think Roy Jones Jr. at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.)
It is because of this skewed inconsistency that Fourth-Place Medal introduces The Real 2008 Medal Count. Our medal count will tally medals won in sports decided on the field of play, not by a judge in a teal blazer.
The judged Olympic events we will ignore for our tally are: boxing, diving, equestrian, gymnastics, judo, taekwondo, trampoline and wrestling. We debated whether to include boxing, wrestling and the martial arts in the list, as they can be decided by competitors. However, because the judging is prone to error and shenaningans, we will include it.
The Real 2008 Medal Count
China: 22 gold; 11 silver; 11 bronze
United States: 21 gold; 19 silver; 21 bronze
As you can see, in the events where medals are determined by competitors rather than judges, the gold medal gap between China and the U.S. is greatly narrowed, and the total medal count is an American runaway. Counting the judged events, China has a commanding lead in golds. Hmmm... Nope, nothing fishy about that!
The post looks like nothing so much as the rant of a sore loser. It is one of the reasons that I have stopped reading Yahoo News lest I pollute my poor little grey cells.
Yahoo's Olympic coverage has left much to be desired. There is none of the video jazz that the NBCOympics.com site features. And for some reason, Yahoo News counts the total number of medals in ranking countries. The traditional methodology has been to rank countries on the basis of gold medals (followed by silver medals in case of a tie followed by bronze medals to break further ties). The Yahoo News method is to list countries on the basis of the total number of medals won. But a weighting of 1:1:1 for gold:silver:bronze? That is just mad.
There may be some method in that madness. When I first saw this listing, it occurred to me that the United States would rank higher than it ordinarily would under the traditional methodology because the United States had been favored to win more medals overall than any other team. It has been known for a while that China would win more golds than the United States, and if the traditional methodology were followed, the United States would clock in second. This has been known for a while - certainly from before this installation of the Olympics. An article published in the Social Science Quarterly authored by Prof. Daniel Johnson and Ayfer Ali has attempted to predict the number of Olympic medals won by each team on the basis of various determinants.
We estimate that major participating nations requires a $260 rise in income per capita to send an extra participant. Similarly the "cost" of an extra medal is $1700 per capita and $4750 per capita for an additional gold medal. Predictions for participation and medal counts (including gold medals in particular) for the 2002 Salt Lake City Games are presented as a test of our analysis.
Included in their determinants are GDP and per capita income. Their prediction? In terms of total golds won : China first, then the United States and then Russia. In terms of total medals : the United States first, then Russia, and then China.
Eszter Hargittai takes up one of my pet peeves - the fact that American TV networks spend a disproportionate amount of time on sports that the U.S. contingent happens to be good at.
I thought I’d get this rant out of the way before the season hits. Watching the Olympics in the US is no fun, because the only thing you can watch is Americans winning. You’d think the U.S. is the only country ever winning from the coverage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Americans to win, but I’m happy for other people to win, too. In fact, in some ways it’s much more interesting when you have a diversity of folks competing and this is portrayed clearly in the coverage. It gets boring fast when all you can hear is the U.S. national anthem.
Web 2.0 changes the equation a bit, I think. It, of course, allows people to customize their viewing based on their preferences and their schedules. But also, blogs, youtube and wikis reach niche audiences (such as the audience for the paralympics) which thanks to their geographical dispersion have never before been reached so effectively.
The Olympics this year promises to be unlike any before for the Indian disapora. Not only because Abhinav Bindra has won the first ever individual gold medal for India, but also because of Web 2.0. Because the diaspora is geographically dispersed (and therefore have not constituted a major media market anywhere outside of India), narrowcasting by means of Web 2.0 and related technologies appears to be quite effective in reaching this demographic. I would have missed the video of the Abhinav Bindra medal ceremony - for several days at least - had it not been linked to under "Videos being watched right now..." off the Youtube home page. I feel like the Beijing Olympics has already delivered, and it is still the first week. Here is wishing Raj, Saina and the rest much luck.
Update: Raj and the United States gymnastics team win bronze!
Marian Fitzwalter sends this in.
=
Paul Rogers argues that "the waves of social discontent and insurgency in Asia's rising powers place [India and China] at the centre of questions about the world's dominant economic orthodoxy."
The exponential growth of the economies of China and India has won for these Asian giants a position of global economic and political prominence. But this process has been accompanied by profound internal discontent, some of which takes violent forms. The respective domestic experiences may be very different, but there are enough commonalities to suggest a lesson for the dominant economic model to which both states now adhere.
The east's far west
The killing of sixteen police officers and the wounding of sixteen others in an operation in the western Chinese oasis city of Kashgar on 4 August 2008 was the most severe incident of anti-authority political violence in China for many months. The precise responsibility remains to be established, but it is likely to have been perpetrated by a separatist Islamist group which sees itself as acting on behalf of the majority Uighur population of Xinjiang region (where Kashgar is situated). The timing, in the very week of the opening of the Olympic games in Beijing on 8 August - and following an apparently coordinated attack on two buses in Kunming in the southwest province of Yunnan on 21 July which killed two people - further suggests a political motivation.
Marian Fitzwalter sends this in.
==
Neil Gray on the rise of "Hindu Nation" :
The abject poverty and extreme wealth divisions created by the ‘brutal simplicities’ of neo-liberal economic regimes require legitimising forms of national ideology to mediate and obfuscate their wrath. In the context of deepening neoliberalism, cultural nationalism has come to the fore as an ideology which gives coherence to the activities of the nation-state and capital, and which best serves and manages the conflicting requirements of accumulation and legitimation for neoliberal elites. Thus Radhika Desai contends:
... the deployment of the language of particularity, of cultural difference and nationalism, in counterfeit answer to the accelerating universalism of capitalism, which it supports and promotes, is the ingenious reality of the right today.i
In India, the chief cultural nationalist movement is Hindutva: a communalist Hindu nationalist ideology seeking to conflate the very idea of ‘Indian-ness’ with ‘Hindu-ness’. The core practitioners of Hindutva are organised under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar organisation, which is avowedly inspired and influenced by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a ‘social and cultural organisation’ with a known fascist pedigree and a Hindu majoritarian political agenda. The importance of this movement, a deeply conservative multi-headed Hydra, can be measured by the presence within its ranks of the former ruling party of India, now the main party of opposition, the Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP).From "Organizations" (March and Simon):
Not only are organizational communications characteristically specific with respect to the channels they follow, but they also exhibit a high degree of specificity with respect to content. Here there is a strong contrast between organizational communications and communications through mass media. The audiences to whom newspapers and radio address themselves possess no common technical vocabulary; there is no subject about which they have any shared special knowledge; there is no good way of predicting what they will be thinking about when the mass communication reaches then. In principle at least, the recipient of an organizational communication is at the opposite pole. A great deal is known about his special abilities and characteristics. This knowledge is gained from considerable past experience with him and from a detailed knowledge of the work environment in which he operates.
Will Scarlet writes in.
==
I have been having a number of fascinating discussions on accents, especially in the context of Bollywood, over the last few days. The issue came up once again that Bollywood actors usually have people dub in for them. In other words, that voice you hear may not be that of the actor herself. Saheli had a great comment on Sepia Mutiny some months back on dubbing and accents that popped into my mind as I was thinking about this post.
Just to bring in a different perspective: Michelle Yeoh can't speak proper Mandarin to save her life. But one of her most famous movies was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is in Mandarin. Born in Malaysia, her first languages are Malay and English, and her Chinese is Cantonese. Someone--sometimes even Ang Lee himself-- would have to write out the day's shooting script in pinyin (phonetic Chinese) and help her pronounce it. She would spend hours memorizing lines phonetically, and when Ang Lee would change the script during shooting she would have minor nervous breakdowns. This in a physically demanding role and after a broken knee. I'm told that her accent was audible and distracting even to American-raised Chinese who are non-Mandarin dialect speakers themselves. Knowing all this, Ang Lee--who had plenty of fx tech available to him--still used her voice, with sync sound. And I've never heard someone complain about her accent vehemently enough to suggest he should have dubbed her; they still wanted Michelle Yeoh to do the acting. I think this speaks to the extent to which most directors take sound and voice incredibly seriously. There's a great making-of on the Harold and Kumar DVD mocking this seriousness, but it can be mocked to good effect precisely b/c it's real and important. Now, Ang Lee might not have taken so much trouble with a lesser actress, or for a lesser film, but all things being equal, it was obviously important to him. And she worked really hard to fit in with that priority. Ever watch the making-of portions of the latest Chinese exports? The sense of artistic discipline and drive you get from the actors is amazing. Takeshi Kaneshiro works in three languages (Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin), and read up on archaic Tang Era expression. so he could inflect his Mandarin properly.
Now that's a very different market structure from Bollywood, and a very different class of films. It requires a lot of time and effort, a real market for that kind of quality, and a good script that is solidified long before shooting to base your preparations around. It's absolutely unfair to compare Sarkar to House of Flying Daggers, for instance. But even the highest production value, lovingly scripted films like Devdas and Lagaan often seem to lack that final buff of perfectionist polish. A good counterexample: it's really inspiring to watch Monsoon Wedding and hear the director's commentary; which lines were spoken in Hindi, English, or Punjabi was all carefully thought about.
To build on Saheli's comments a bit: part of the reason for this is the way the Bollywood industry is structured. Organizationally, Bollywood is not organized into studios but is rather a network-organized set of independent producers.
As is often the case, the organization determines the process. In Bollywood, the process is not nescessarily executed in the usual fashion - starting with a script, and then moving on to casting, and then production. Actors are often doing several movies at the same time. Dubbing is often used since the leader actors often don't have the time to deploy their own voice. Directors pay another person for the dubbing since it is rather cheap to get a decent dubber. The end result is that the actor's accent is not faithfully reproduced.
I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but rather that it is an artifact of the organizational structure. Things are getting more organized, but given the way Bollywood is structured today, how would things change? How would you get "Bollywood" to recognize a problem such as this and act upon it? A key problem here is that you don't have command and control flows like in a typical hierarchical structure. Would mass media help? What would blogging about it or writing about it in newspapers cause to happen? Bollywood is probably going to continue doing what they have been doing all along. That is, zilch. Zero. Nada. (Unless, of course, there is a consumer-side push.) There have been complaints about Bollywood being kitschy for years, but little has changed. Personally, I expect these aspects of Bollywood to persist. Dubbing, songs in the rain and many many other aspects of Bollywood are going to be around for a bit longer. I think it is best to make peace with that!
Will Scarlet writes in.
==
Saheli Datta links to a Matthew Yglesias post on Obama which starts off with "The fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5". (Saheli is back to blogging again. Yay!).
It's a fundamentally bold, hopeful brand of politics. And I think it's no coincidence that that theme's been at the center of his campaign. Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.
All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails.
Arguably, Obama had it wrapped up as early as March because - all said and done - he has had the numbers since then. A"super-delegate candidate" would not, in my mind, have been terribly democratic in any case, and so in the end, the right candidate has been chosen.
I really hope that the Hillary supporters will end up swinging around to Obama. The failure of some of Obama's policies - as I suppose some of them inevitably will fail - will not nescessarily turn me into a pessimist about Obama. And surely, it is too early to count one's omelettes before the eggs have hatched and are broken. The question, to me, is still if the alternative is any better. Here is a graph with the employment numbers over the past 14 years, which sufficiently makes my point.
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
Uma Mysorekar, President of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, was on the Colbert Show, that bastion of investigative journalism. It seems all too usual for segments on Hinduism to do a not entirely adequate job, and this one was no exception. I was not quite satisfied with Mysorekar's comments on Hinduism. (Nor, for that matter, with all of Colbert's one liners. It is not quite true that Hindus don't eat meat. A significant fraction do.) Mysorekar's comments didn't quite cut it. Perhaps it represented her own Hindu tradition, but I don't think that her remarks made for an accurate representation of the religion as a whole.
An issue that must be dealt with while dissecting Hinduism is the problem of essentialism. While the most popular varieties of Hinduism are essentialist, it cannot be said that all varieties of Hinduism are essentialist. Hinduism is not necessarily bound to an essentialist approach. This makes it impossible to make definitive statements about certain aspects of the religion. Hinduism has possibly as much diversity within it as other religions have between them. Belief in God, for instance, is not a single position under Hinduism. It spans a range of positions from atheism to agnosticism to polytheism to monotheism. The Hindu tradition includes a whole range of traditions, each of which has its own particular beliefs on the matter. Mysorekar's opinions are just those - her own personal opinions on what Hinduism is.
Samanth will be starting a new column over at the Mint called Raagtime. His first piece entitled "Change and Continuity" is absolutely lovely.
In my mind, for many years, the word “classical” evoked a vision of Ancient Greek or Roman statuary: pristine, stern, inflexible marble, the very literal example of being “set in stone.” The classical arts are popularly imagined to be just as unyielding, not to be sullied by any stray influences. An image that daunting can, and does, put people off; just as unfortunately, it can also be thoroughly misleading.
Carnatic music shows how a classical art can also be an open and pliant art, and how change and evolution can be the breath of life, rather than the kiss of death. There’s no doubting its classicism, of course. Many of the ragas in Carnatic music today derive from the musical “moods” of Tamil music from the first few centuries of the Common Era, and notable scholarship dates back to at least the 17th century. This is an old, old art.
But the quintessential Carnatic music concert today is a product of the times it has passed through. The violin, for instance, is an integral part of the ensemble today, but it was introduced into Carnatic music less than 200 years ago, when it rode the wave of European influences that crashed on Indian shores.
Other alien instruments have been accepted, even by relatively conservative audiences, with an alacrity that is both surprising and pleasing. U Srinivas began playing Carnatic music on the mandolin in 1978, and today he plays to a packed Music Academy, in a prestigious evening slot, during the December Season. Kadri Gopalnath plays Carnatic music on a saxophone as golden as his regulation kurta. R. Prasanna is so indelibly associated with his instrument that he is simply known as “Guitar Prasanna.”
For more, step over to the Mint's website.
Bonnie Blue Butler had the situation come up at work where they had to find a good way to translate the English word "guarantee" into Hindi. This was a real-world marketing problem, and eventually they decided to go with "gaaranti", the word "guarantee" transliterated into Hindi.
I discussed it with her and I think it was the right thing to do. Now, this may be a pedantic point, but I must assure you that Hindi does not lack for an equivalent to the word "guarantee". Noting that Hindi owes its roots to both Sanskrit as well as the Middle Eastern languages, there are two separate vocabularies and therefore there are at least two different ways to express the word 'guarantee' in Hindi. One equivalent is the word "zamaanat". Another equivalent is the Sanskrit-nisht word "prathyabhoot". The problem for the marketers, of course, is that neither set of words may be particularly accessible. Given the complex linguistic situation in South Asia, the transliterated English word "guarantee" is likely the best bet.
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
One small step for Sharon Stone.... err.. file under boneheaded stupidity.
Radiohead sings of the "karma police", called in to arrest those who upset Thom Yorke: "This is what you get when you mess with us." And Boy George warbles about a "karma chameleon", in a toxic relationship because he's not "so sweet" anymore.
Cause and effect, see. Actions have consequences.
And Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, has claimed - to much criticism - that the earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people in China was bad karma for Beijing policy in Tibet. "I thought, is that karma - when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?" she mused at the Cannes Film Festival. .
Paulo Coelho is pirating his own books using BitTorrent. Be sure to check out the video linked.
Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.
So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:
Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…
In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.
Just for fun, I thought I would try Digraphifying C. Here is the code for Bubblesort in Digraphic C :
f0r (k=0; k
An article on Language Log on Hindi-Urdu :
Hindi and Urdu are variants of the same language characterized by extreme digraphia: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right, Urdu in a script derived from a Persian modification of Arabic script written from right to left. High variants of Hindi look to Sanskrit for inspiration and linguistic enrichment, high variants of Urdu to Persian and Arabic. Hindi and Urdu diverge from each other cumulatively, mostly in vocabulary, as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms, and in their highest -- and therefore most artificial -- forms the two languages are mutually incomprehensible. The battle between Hindi and Urdu, the graphemic conflict in particular, was a major flash point of Hindu/Muslim animosity before the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947.
As the article notes, there are multiple variants of Hindi and Urdu. Having learnt Hindi, I would mention that Hindi and Urdu as languages spoken as part of every day can be mutually comprehensible if the speakers choose their words carefully. There are, however, differences in script as well, and these differences make seamless communication harder. (For the problem of script, there is transliteration software available to transliterate English to Urdu and to Hindi.).
There is a prodigal visual difference between the Devanagari script (also called Nagari) used to write Hindi and the Perso-Arabic script ordinarily used to write Urdu. The Devanagari script of Hindi is"squarish,'' "chunky,'' "has edges'' -- conventional characterizations all -- written left to right, with words set off from each other by an overhead horizontal line connected to the graphemes and running from the beginning of the word to its end. The Perso-Arabic script of Urdu is "graceful,'' "flowing,'' "has curves,'' written right to left, with word boundaries marked as much by final forms of consonants as by spaces. The immediate visually iconic associations are: Hindi script = India, South Asia, Hinduism; Urdu script = Middle East, Islam. The graphemic difference between Hindi and Urdu is far more dramatic, for example, than the difference between the Cyrillic script of Serbian and the Roman script of Croatian.
Hindi and Urdu get more highly differentiated as we step up the High scale with each borrowing from distinct vocabularies. So High Hindi is quite different from High Urdu.
Common words like chai 'tea', milna 'to meet', and mashin 'machine' are the same in either Hindi or Urdu. Vocabulary diverges sharply as we move from Low to High. The Hindi words for 'south' and 'temperature' (as in weather) are dakshin and tapman, the Urdu words junub and darja-e-hararat. The sentence "Who is the prime minister at the moment?'' is ajkal pradhan mantri kaun hai? in Hindi, ajkal vazir-e azam kaun hai? in Urdu.
An Indian linguist has illustrated how far the styles deviate from each other by asking how the abstract expression "salvation's true path'' might be translated into Hindi and Urdu at different style levels and among different ethnic-social groups. Village people would render this as mukti-ki sacci sarak (Bazaar Hindustani). Pandits or educated Hindus would say mukti-ki satya upay (Highbrow Hindi). Cultured Muslims would translate the phrase as nájat-ki haqq rah (Highbrow Urdu). Indians who speak English as their second language might say salweshan-ki tru path. The only indication that these four "languages'' are in some sense variants of the same language is the genitive marker -ki. Words like satya and upay in the Highbrow Hindi rendering are from Sanskrit. Every single content morpheme in the Highbrow Urdu version is from Persian or Arabic. One sees how dramatically the character of a language is changed when the sources of borrowed words for new concepts are as far apart as they are in Hindi and Urdu: we might as well be dealing with different languages.
A minor point on diction would be in order here. Based on the Hindi that I have learnt, using the word "sarak" in that sentence would be inappropriate diction. "raah" (or maybe 'raastaa') would be my word of choice there. Quibbling aside, the article does make some very interesting comments : one, that Hindi and Urdu are two languages with digraphic differences; two, that digraphia can be a separative force; three, that there are high and low variants of Hindi-Urdu and that these language "diverge from each other cumulatively as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms"; four, that this digraphia may have been perceived as a somewhat divisive issue between the different religions in the Indian subcontinent; and five, that there were political differences of opinion regarding script as well.
Gandhi's comments on the topic have much good sense.
Gandhi's tendency overall was to minimize the role of script. In a 1918 speech he laid out his thinking:
Hind[ustani] is that language which is spoken in the north by both Hindus and Muslims and which is written either in the Nagari or the Persian script. [It] is neither too Sanskritized nor too Persianized .... The distinction made between Hindus and Muslims is unreal. The same unreality is found in the distinction between Hindi and Urdu ... . There is no doubt or difficulty in regard to script. As things are, Muslims will patronize the Arabic script while Hindus will mostly use the Nagari script.
Robert X. Cringely on why Moore's law might extend for another 15 years.
This extra chip heat comes generally from four sources. The first is simply reduced surface area; yes the voltage is lower, but if the ratio of old voltage to new voltage is less than the ratio of old surface area to new surface area from the previous product generation and manufacturing process, well then the chip simply has to get hotter, since it is dramatically smaller yet doing the same work. Voltages drop linearly while surface areas decrease as a far more rapid square function.
The second reason chips -- especially microprocessors -- are getting hotter is the demands of keeping various clocks in sync. Using synchronous logic, some significant percentage of transistors is required simply to keep all the clock signals aligned on a 400 million transistor chip. Asynchronous -- clockless -- logic can do away with the need for that extra, power-wasting circuitry, as I wrote about in this space many years ago (it's in this week's links). As such companies including Sun and Intel are trying to make more and more of their chip circuitry asynchronous, but that is a long and crooked path toward chips that consume no power at all in the milliseconds they aren't being used.
But the greatest producers of heat are relatively new on the scene: two forms of current leakage that are especially prevalent at feature sizes substantially below 100 nanometers. The smaller we go the tougher it gets.
The first type of current leakage is called "gate leakage," which is a quantum effect in which electrons mysteriously migrate through materials they aren't supposed to be migrating through. Gate leakage is active, meaning it takes place only when the chip is actually running. Any leakage consumes power and creates heat without doing usable work, so of course we hate it unless, like I did with my old PDP-8, you are relying on your computer to heat your house.