The Education Divide: A call to arms

I have followed PISA scores in the past, India has never participated in PISA before, when I heard Barack Obama stating that Chinese students are beating Americans at math, science and reading, I always assumed Indians would too, after all don't we have millions of students appearing for competitive exams each year, don't we all study nights to become good "engineers", as mummy and daddy want?

PISA is an international forum for assessment in math, reading and science (I checked out the sample questions, they are quite simple with no cultural bias, so those claiming cultural biases can keep their mum), PISA is given a large sample space by the government of a country, after which they randomly select schools in that region to administer the standard test. Traditionally US has finished somewhere in the middle, beaten by most other first world countries and China and few other Asian  countries (notably Japan).

 "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will." 
-Thomas Jefferson

Education is paramount to keeping the progress in India on track, I already had a bad opinion of our generation (based on the observation of a larger non-university set), after looking at the PISA scores I feel like a curtain was cruelly lifted and the world view I saw was very far removed from the reality. I feel enraged that our students are deliberately kept in the dark through means like vernacular learning, bad teachers and inadequate funding. I have subtly pointed out in past posts that languages spoken by smaller groups of people across the world need to be eradicated, and a universal standard language needs to be adopted, this will standardize all channels of communication. These results are a huge reason to do so.

These results were taken from Tamil Nadu and Himachal pradesh, 5000 students from english medium schools sat for the tests, now the problem is that most states switch to english as a medium of instruction only after primary school or middle schools, and the state governments encourage this as they get a voter base fiercly divided on linguistic lines, basically brainwashing them from primary school. As a result of this when these students facesay science and history in english, they are baffled, and this leads to de-motivation and poor performance and will result in stunted academics, as the tests show.

A simple solution to this problem is to universalize the medium of instruction.

This issue should be of paramount importance, pushing aside middle-class non-issues such as the Lokpal Bill, the country needs to get enraged and fast, because as we speak our next generation of half-baked engineers and politicians is being eduated to be as bad as we are. 

The Power of Mortality

Steve Jobs in his Stanford address mentions that one of the most powerful tools he uses to get things done is, ponder over death, the realization that we are all here temporarily has the amazing power to clear away the mundane. I believe in everyone's life there comes a time when they realize that they are nothing but frail pieces of matter that will dissolve. This can be brought upon by a near death experience or by the death of a loved one, or the realization simply strikes. At this point you can take two paths, ignore the event and push the thought out of your life, and resume with the routine, or you can pause and meditate over this fact. Most people choose the former, I decide to experiment with the latter.

My observations were, first there is a feeling of extreme hopelessness, and perhaps anger at that hopelessness and a strong desire to forget about it. This phase can severely disrupt activities as it will inevitably lead to the question "What's the point?". This is followed an urgent need to get as much done as possible (in pursuit of an imaginary bucket list perhaps), this can last weeks and will lead to decisions which will be completely out of character. The third phase is reflection, which is that you will reflect upon and regret many of your actions (especially in the distant past), at this point popular wisdom will instruct us not to regret, move on and live in the present (and so forth), however I am of the opinion that this is a great fallacy, as the ability to regret is one of the fundamental things that make us human, not feeling regret is a sure sign of psychopathy, when we feel regret, we are feeding the positive loop of not repeating actions that have bad consequences for the people they affect (including oneself), and may also provide a form of closure.

The reflection moves on to analyzing important people in one's life, one's parents, one's relatives,one's friends and so forth, followed by a desire to reach out and right past wrongs, help people, and reassure oneself that one is not alone in this cold dark universe. This has a positive on both parties, as it is a back-stroke for the ponderer and a reminder to those being analyzed that they too are not alone. After this is the most important phase, acceptance, acceptance of one's finiteness, of one's goals, aspirations, relationships, and mortality. This will result in inner peace and harmony. And then the ponderer can begin using this acceptance to get things moving.

Whenever we are faced with a decision, or a task, we can always pause and reflect, this will automatically clear the choices which are not ideal, and lead to optimum solutions. Basically enable us to lead fuller lives and grant meaning to our actions.

The tin-man's fallacy

barren barks, leaves fall,
sadness I do not see,
New beginnings all around me, a stolen stare, a nervous glance,
to observe, to understand, to articulate,
while the cold wind kindles a long expunged fire deep within

the tin man quickly fades,
making way for a new beginning,
this I know not, but fear it I must, as it is new,
stone walls built over millennia come crashing,
pessimistic rational arguments break

we debated this remember,
the meaning of life is nought,we concluded,
efficiency must triumph over humanity, logic will prevail,
for long I have sparred with you, found a system that enables me to function,
mirroring a laugh, observing loss to understand sadness,
dismissing tears as the great human fallacy, obstacles in the way of progress

all those debates, the soul searching, the conclusions, the rational system broke,
for the tin man fades, giving way to the human,
tin man, I now understand an embrace, compassion, humanity,
they cannot be rationally expressed,
for that is their very essence

in this cold, logical world,
a beginning and an end

Facebook Timeline: A Lifebook? And how to view your timeline now!

The internet is buzzing with posts about the new Facebook feature, timeline, first of all what is it? Timeline is a chronological ordering of all your activities on facebook (and more, more on that later). But isn't that what the wall is for, the problem with the wall is that it is very current, a month old post is lost to the sands of time (unless you go on clicking the more posts button). Also the wall only shows what you post and what people post about you, so if you are the kind of person who updates their status once a month then it will be impossible to gloss over what happened on your wall. The timeline solves this with new kinds of posts, such as significant events, leaving a job, joining school, breaking an arm are some examples. This gives the whole thing a very organized chronicaly feel.

I was recently reading a book called "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything", the book describes a state of mind which everyone has experienced, loss of memory because of consistently repetitive days, days which meld into one another completely, same lunch, same people, same routine (what we commonly call a rut). The author says that the best way out of this is to surround oneself with unique and new activities everyday, for the sole purpose of generating new memories, even simple changes like taking an unexpected walk can hasten this process, this leads to the formation of a mental rolodex of memories which are ordered chronologically, so you would be immediately able to recall last month with all the new things you did. Timeline builds on this and allow you tangibly create a list of all significant stuff you did for all posterity (of course you can hide posts). You can at an instant glance at all the fun weekends you had based on the pictures and events, how many new people you met. You can drill this down to individual posts, or take a high level view, looking at all the graduations, the location changes, the jobs, the relationships all beautifully arranged in a timeline. Its as though you have a personal historian.

When I first opened my timeline I was shocked to realize how much I had forgotten about how many things, I had forgotten so much, and looking at it all at once brought about a kind of "life flashing before your eyes" feeling (the kind people describe after a near death experience), it was a shocker, and all at once my mental rolodex was spinning recollecting everything. Yes there are privacy issues, but the sheer awesomeness of seeing such an arrangement of your life as though from a third person was amazing. I can see this really catching on.

Now how can you see your timeline before the official rollout on October 1st, 2011. Follow these steps:

1. Type developer in the fb search bar, go to the first link.
2. Grant permissions, click create an app.
3. Create any app (give any name) and click next.
4. Once the app is created click open graph and follow the prompts.
5. Go to your homepage and you will see an invite to try out timeline.

Biostar Board: Two devices one IDE port

Gist: If all BIOS option and all configurations in the 40 Pin and 80 Pin cables fail, try using the jumpers.

I got a Biostar N68S3B for a HTPC which I wanted to build with very old hardware, to cut a long story short, I had two IDE devices (a DVD drive, and a IDE Hard Disk) and only one port. I have largely only worked with SATA devices so I had to do a little research on how to get it to work, it is possible to get two IDE devices sharing the same Bus with a Master\Slave arrangement.

First off there are two types of IDE cable, 80-pin and 40-pin, I had both, the 80 pin connected my HDD and the 40 Pin connected my DVD drive to my erstwhile motherboard.

The main difference between an 80 Pin and 40 Pin cable is the one pin that is blocked in an 80 Pin cable (this is done so that the cable is installed with the right orientation). Now the IDE is supposed to recognize Master\Slave based on position of the cable (The cable has three connectors, the lowest one goes to the board and the two which are close together go into two devices).

1. 40-Pin: The Master device goes into the middle connector and the Slave goes into the end.
2. 80-Pin: The Master goes into the end connector and the Slave to the middle.This cable is also color coded, the blue end goes into the mobo, the grey end into the master.

While adding the devices to the cables I had to move the DVD drive closer to the HDD as the cable length is quite small. These were all the configs I tried:

1. 40 Pin connector with DVD as master and HDD as slave and vice versa: The bios didnot detect the Slave in both cases and booted from the master, booting from the HDDresulted in a BSOD in XP.
2. 80 Pin connected with DVD as master and HDD as slave and vice versa: same result asabove.
3. I tried force detection by defining which device was a master and which was slave(assigning type in BIOS IDE section), this resulted in a POST error.
4. Disabled SATA on the BIOS completely, no effect.

After tinkering a lot with the BIOS, I decided to give the jumper pins (pictured below) a try, turns out LG (the DVD drive manufacturer) does not follow standards with the jumper positions, after two trials, it turned out the pushing the cap on the middle jumper pins configured the DVD Drive as a Slave. After this the IDE drives worked.

Using the N900 (or any linux machine) to control windows applications like iTunes

First of all the possibilities of the technique described here are limitless, you can literally control all aspects of the Windows environment (remote and local) from the phone or any linux machine, including organizing your videos automatically to managing remote SQL Servers, this opens up everything.

I have been looking for a decent remote control for iTunes for a long time, but I haven't been able to find one (on Symbian I used the Salling Clicker), few days back I stumbled on a way to do it via the terminal on Maemo, so here goes..

First off powershell on windows can control a lot of applications (which expose their API to PS, in case of itunes the scripting interface is exposed), the code for doing this on PS is:

$rr = new-object -com itunes.application
$rr.play()
$rr.pause()
$rr.newttrack()

There are a ton of other functions that I am still exploring, these are the basic ones that should get you started..

Now getting to the interesting part, how to open up the interface, simple, SSH, the most versatile remote terminal, just install the package openssh on the N900 (first add the development repositories, or testing too) then use:

sudo gainroot
apt-get install openssh

This should install the SSH client as well as the server (yes you can connect to the phone from Putty or a native linux terminal).

Next you need the powershell server from here, its free, install it on your PC, run 'Start Server' and click start server (play button).

On your phone do the following:

ssh @ipaddress
password:

That's it! You are in, absolute control!

My post on TMO.

Munnabhai MBBS: A Non-Medieval Review

I saw Munnabhai MBBS after a long time again, this time via centrist-modern eyes. When I saw the same movie as a child I just saw it as a harmless comedy movie, and the fact that so many adults around me endorsed and praised the film is appalling to me now. I shudder to think about all the other Indian movies, which must be portraying negative values, sexism (bordering on misogyny) to Indians.

The entire movie seems to be anti-modern. Some examples include, the way the protagonist seeks the affection of the deans daughter, "I think I like you, therefore I assume you will like me and find me acceptable, and I will speak to your dad". What about what she thinks? Is that solely governed by what her father thinks. In another instance, a kid who is suicidal is "taught" by Munna, that women are objects in a barrel of fish, and he may dive in anytime and have his fill. And one more, a guy with cancer is "taught" that he should spend his remaining time ogling at strippers and generally treat women as objects.

The female protagonist (Chinki), in order to spurn Munna's affections, and to stymie his further moves asks one of her friends to pretend being her and "scare" Munna. She dons a provocative dress and dances with a few guys and this "scares" our hero. The woman he is supposed to like is "indecent", I quote from the film here, Munna "advices" the father after meeting his "promiscuous" daughter, "You should keep your daughter under control, I can understand that you are a single father, but still" and this was accepted as "decent". Shouldn't a woman choose who she marries or dates? Or what clothes she wears? She is not property. Does she have no will?

The whole movie oozes bad values. In order to gain admission Munna kidnaps a doctor's father (and plays carrom with him, to paint a rosy picture I guess), who should be terrified, and gets the doctor to write all his exams for him, under severe duress. This endorsement of "chalta hai, side se le lo" is rife in Indian pop-culture. Most people are swayed by this and believe that if a man should be "accomplished" (buttload of money) he should be willing to grease rails all over and perform all sorts of misdeeds, and this we see in practice (scams anyone).

It is the rallying call of media everywhere that the Middle-Class must participate in politics, however I am of the opinion that what is reflected in our government now is what we are (the majority at least), we all believe one may do anything to get ahead (and in the process elbow each other into the ground), we all participate in and propagate these ills via our day-to-day behavior, and at the end of the day if we go to the temple to wash our sins (break a few coconuts, pay some money, again) "god" has forgiven us and we can retain our holier than thou status.

It is this, I am always right, our ancestors were always right attitude that should scare any sane person. You need to witness this brand of arrogance to understand it, Glenn Beck is not even close. We believe our ancestors were mathematical geniuses (and slave traders on the side, we forget that), we believe they achieved "divinity" long back, all we need to do is interpret it from shlokas. Many of us believe, the entire western civilization is copied from us, and that we were fantastically rich and living in a utopia(with slaves!!) before Vasco came and disturbed us.