Links

Problems in online education. David McGrath teach English online. He ends up … spending hours copying excerpts from her paper into cheater catching software programs and search engines to verify that it was authentic. [It is not authentic] 30 to 40 percent of the time. Universities today certify the ability to do original work, in addition to training students. Corporates, I think, value the ability to create a good quality report, irrespective of originality. This is a mismatch. Maybe the whole objective of courses, at least online courses, will change shortly. via Plastic.

Nicholas Negroponte on “Being Wireless”. Five years ago, I put a wireless LAN in my home in Boston. At the time it cost about $2,000 for the base station and $500 for each device I wanted to connect. Today, it costs $120 and $50, respectively, and the price is dropping. That’s about Rs. 10,000. My next gadget is identified.

Lessig argues copyright to the Supreme Court. Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford, and argues against excessive legislation of the Internet and related technologies. Good guy.

The Economist on the Nobel prize in medicine. The Human Genome Project was a formidable achievement, but one that was managerial as much as scientific, and there is no Nobel prize for management. Instead, Sir John has been given a prize for real scientific work which nobody could doubt was of Nobel quality.

India to go the Linux way. Department of IT will support Linux as the de facto standard in academic institutions. Possibly elsewhere in the future.

Amrita has mirrored pictures of the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet. Since she has no bandwidth restrictions, please visit that site.

Spotted this ad on Business Standard. It was at the bottom of the page, and initially, I thought it really was an ant crawling across my laptop. Incidentally, catching the ant is not all that easy. Took me a minute. But once you catch it, it stays put. Business Standard no longer has an ad with an ant crawling across the bottom of the page.

Escher’s Ascending and Descending in LEGO. Also Belvedere and Balcony. via Metafilter

IGPC makes 65% of the world’s stamps. Their site has pictures of some recent stamps issued by India. via Metafilter

Tomorrow’s leaders: opinion on IIT/IIM grads by T N Ninan at Business Standard. From his interviews for the Aditya Birla scholarships, and observes that there is a lack of awareness about India among them, and that the real value of the IITs/IIMs is in the selection process, not the education. I disagree on the latter. I think the 4+2 years of intense competition also adds value. The curriculum, however, may or may not.

India in the eyes of Al Beruni, an Arabic historian around 1000AD. It is interesting to note the reversal of several customs among Hindus and Muslims. Particularly that “In all consultations and emergencies they [Hindus] take advice of the women.” via Narayana Murthy’s comment

The Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet photos are out of action. The site should be back some time today. The page is about 1.5MB (including pictures), and my quota is 50MB per day. So about 33 hits is enough to kill the page.

Growth, Form, Function, and Crashes: an article from the Santa Fe institute. It explains scale-free fairly well. The point is, scale-free networks have a few hubs. If you knock a hub out, the network is fragmented. But your chance of knocking a hub out by random is small, since there are so few of them. That makes scale-free networks reliable as well as vulnerable. Slightly more technical details at PhysicsWeb by the creators of scale-free networks. It also says that if you design a network, it may not be scale-free. But if you let it evolve, it probably will be.

Yahoo’s “Magic Crystal Ball” New Age Oracle or Ouija2K? I got a mail from a Brian, who found my chat with [email protected] through a Yahoo search. I did the same, and came up with this even more hilarious conversation.

Photos from the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet.

The Internet is a scale free network.

The world’s funniest joke. The joke deals with a man getting shot. And when I think about it, I can’t phrase is better than Asimov did in Jokester. “The point is,” said Meyerhof, “that I have pictured a husband being humiliated by his wife; a marriage that is such a failure that the wife is convinced that her husband lacks any virtue. Yet you laugh at that. If you were the husband, would you find it funny?”. ...

Indian TV commercial storyboards. The plots of several TV ads, in pictures and words. via Someplace Simple

Lavish weddings. Sounds a bit of a waste… but if I were offered a wedding in Disneyland, with “Cinderella’s Crystal Coach”, I’d probably pay the $40,000. If I had it, that is.

After reading my post on the ET article mentioning “expected to see a higher than expected rise”, a certain CA gold-medallist friend of mine wrote back this obscure note that I refuse to understand: … if you take it literally it is not possible. To put it more technically, something called a law of iterated expectation comes to play. Today’s expectation of tomorrow’s expectation about what will happen day after is just today’s expectation of what will happen day after. ...