Atanu Dey on India’s Development

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Google getting into education. Not directly, of course, because Google does not create content. Google enables the transmission of content. So here is UC Berkeley on Google Video.
The University of California, Berkeley is the preeminent public research and teaching institution in the nation . From classic literature to […]

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Today is the first of the five days of Puja, the worship of the goddess Bengalis call Ma Durga. Oct 2nd is Vijaya Dashami, the day the Puja (worship) ends. As children, we are told that Durga comes with her children (Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik, and Ganesh) to visit her parents. Another story goes that Rama, […]

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wwww
I do believe that the world wide web is one of the greatest instruments ever for comprehending the world. What makes it so powerful? The tens of thousands of wonderful things you can find there. It should be called wwww — wonderful world wide web.
Visualizing Data
Wandering around the wwww, I came across Ola Rosling’s […]

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Re-inventing wheels is silly enough but re-inventing square wheels is whacky beyond belief. The smart way is to take what others have figured out and improve on it. Adopting the existing smart solution is the first step to successful innovation. The great thing about the world today is that the total number of human brains […]

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To an essentially homeless person like me, the San Francisco Bay Area is as much home as any place ever gets to be. A few days ago when I arrived at the SFO immigration counter, the INS agent said, “Welcome back home.” Made me more acutely aware than ever before that I was a wanderer […]

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To paraphrase one Nobel prize-winning economist, once you start thinking about Indian education, you cannot think of anything else. The subject fills you with awe, wonder, anger, disappointment, hope, despair, and immense sadness.
India has an astounding number of schools: more than one million by some estimates. But it is deeply disappointing that over ninety […]

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Tonight I leave for California. For the next three weeks, I will once again call the San Francisco Bay Area home. Blogging will resume from there in the next couple of days. In the meanwhile, do check out the archives if the mood strikes you. I especially suggest the September 2005 archives.
Be well, do […]

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Some news just give me the warm and fuzzies. Like this one about Google philanthropy as reported by the NYTimes. It is starting off with a billion dollars and (like the winner of a beauty pageant), aims to tackle poverty, disease, and global warming.

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I attempted to access the site http://www.hinduunity.org/ and could not do so from India. I then used a proxy script found here http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php and could access the site.
Land of the freedom of speech, eh? Land of secularism? Now, we cannot have Hindus uniting, can we? We owe our allegiance to the Pope, thank you very […]

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Tell me a good story and I will listen with wide-eyed childlike wonder. Tell me a good tale and I will learn the lessons that humanity has accumulated over the ages. Spin me a yarn and I will consider you my teacher. There is no more effective way to make me understand what the truth […]

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“Where were you on Sept 11th?” is always going to be an easy question to answer for me, and I guess for a few hundred million others. Not only the day but the exact set of events that led up to the shock of learning that something extraordinary was happening would be forever remembered […]

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My stay in Sydney ends tonight. I will be on the road and off the web. This is my final post from Sydney.
I leave you with a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau:

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Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died in a freak accident.
Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast.
Mr Irwin, 44, died after being struck in the chest by the stingray’s barb while he was filming a documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.
. . […]

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Following up on the post “The False Bottom of the Pyramid” thanks to Raja Sekhar Malapati once again for the responses of Prahalad and Hammond to Karnani’s critique of the Bottom of the Pyramid propostion.

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Thanks to Ameet Deshpande, I was introduced to Ted Talks. TED is “Technology, Entertainment, Design.”

Since then, I have delighted in listening to many of the talks. Here is Sir Ken Robinson (mp3 audio ~18 minutes): “Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert […]

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