Category Archives: Science and Technology

This man made this table

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Having shunned the blue temple I have decided to do my furniture shopping on-line where I am more in control of my experience and no blue arrows will show me the way. Per a friend’s recommendation I have been checking out the website Overstock.com. As many of you know, online shopping is now easier than ever. Not only can you read the (often fake) opinions of other buyers, but they also offer you several enlarged views of the item(s) in question. While shopping for a coffee and end table I came upon this find: Kishu End Table (India). “Oh, it’s from India,” I thought. Maybe I should help my peoples out. I decided to take a closer look at the enlarged pictures and this is what I found:

Product Description: Add a touch of India to your decor with the Kishu end table.

I mean, what the hell?!? Does seeing a picture of the man who supposedly made this table make me somehow more inclined to buy it? Do they similarly put up pictures of the 10-year-old Chinese kids who make most of the other products? I couldn’t find any other products where they pulled some exotification crap like this. Any yet strangely, I am now drawn to this table. Maybe a touch of India is what is called for in these mass produced times.

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The Real Hard-Knock Life

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Erstwhile Sepia guest blogger Saheli is amazing for many reasons, but now I have confirmation that it’s obviously genetic; her Uncle is Arunabha Ghosh, who recently accompanied rapper Jay-Z to Africa. Uncle Arunabha (do you like how I totally mooched him?) is involved with many worthy issues:

He worked on the rights of indigenous people, international migration, and the rise of culturally intolerant movements around the world. He recently delivered a lecture on the integration of immigrants at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona. [link]

What caught my attention and what Saheli just blogged about, however, is water:

Over a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Every day–including today, Christmas Eve–over 4000 children lacking good drinking water will die of diarrhea-causing diseases.
It’s hard to wrap our heads around such astonishing statistics, or understand what causes this great gaping need, and how simple some of the solutions are. Last month MTV put up a set of videos in which Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter went on a tour of a home and a school in Africa to understand the basic issues. He was accompanied by his “homeboy,” my uncle, Arunabha Ghosh, a Policy Specialist and one of the authors of the UNDP Human Development Report. Arunabha has spent the last few years tirelessly running around the world, raising the alarm about development needs and spreading the word about development solutions. Last week he addressed an Indian Parliamentary forum on national water issues.[link]

Saheli does a fantastic job of breaking down the plight of children who spend hours fetching something which most of us shamefully take for granted, as we let the faucets run while brushing our teeth (wasting 3-7 gallons per minute). See for yourself, on her “More Fantasticness” blog, here. And if you want to know what I want for my birthday, see for yourself, here. Continue reading →

Sudhir Venkatesh Runs the Voodoo Down

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Venkatesh.jpg“The Wire meets academia” is how Slate describes Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, the fascinating new book by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Here’s Emily Bazelon’s summary:

Venkatesh, who is now a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia, spent 1995 to 2003 following the money in 10 square blocks of the Chicago ghetto. He finds an intricate underground web. In it are dealers and prostitutes—and also pastors who take their money, nannies who don’t report income, unlicensed cab drivers, off-the-books car mechanics, purveyors of home-cooked soul food, and homeless men paid to sleep outside stores. Venkatesh’s insight is that the neighborhood doesn’t divide between “decent” and “street”—almost everyone has a foot in both worlds.

Readers of Freakonomics will remember Venkatesh as the University of Chicago graduate student whose fieldwork in the ghetto led him to realize why, for instance, drug dealers still live with their mothers. But his really important previous credit is his first book, American Project (2000), which intricately described the life within, and the social and physical disintegration of, several large blocks of South Side housing projects. Like Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk (1999), which investigated the social and economic life of the brothers who sell used books and miscellany on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Venkatesh’s projects are urban sociology of the most compelling type, and well written to boot.

Yesterday Sudhir was on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC [disclosure: I work for WNYC] and you can hear the conversation, punctuated by some interesting listener calls, here. But all y’all macacas might also enjoy taking a look at the prologue and first chapter of the book, which Harvard University Press makes available on its website. Here’s a quick excerpt from the prologue that points out, among other things, a desi angle: Continue reading →

We are "GO" for launch

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Lift-off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with Astronaut Sunita Williams aboard is scheduled for 8:47:35 p.m. EST. Watch it LIVE by clicking the picture below or turning on the news (CNN has it LIVE):

Good Luck and Godspeed.

UPDATE (8:57p.m. EST): They just jettisoned the External Tank. SUCCESS!! Time for orbital insertion.

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Oh, All Right. But You Asked For It

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READERS are blowing up the tip line asking us to cover the story below. Here’s a sampler:

  • “Where to even start?”
  • “I think the title says enough”
  • “I think this one is fairly obvious”
  • “interesting/ridiculous contrasts between public health awareness vs. outrageous journalism”
  • “I think it’s pretty self-explanatory why this is interesting. Scientific fact? Post-colonial subjugation through emasculation? What do desi women (or gay men) think?”

You asked for it. And here it is, via the BBC:

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men. …

Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.

The scientists even checked their sample was representative of India as a whole in terms of class, religion and urban and rural dwellers.

The conclusion of all this scientific endeavour is that about 60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimetres shorter than international standards used in condom manufacture.

This news is the top item in William Saletan’s science round-up this morning in Slate, which offers a translation of the key finding for any macacas that aren’t down with the metric system:

Thirty percent of Indian men are 1 inch short, and another 30 percent are 2 inches short.

Cue up another round of outrage, snark, statistics, exotification and sundry manifestations of sexual anxiety. As you can see, two of the tipsters left comments questioning the reporting of this story. Media hype? Colonial plot? Lou Dobbs?

Speaking of sexual anxiety: For those of you who read this site because you are considering becoming involved with a diasporic macaca, I would caution that you not jump to any conclusions about his member until you’ve had a chance to inspect it for yourself. Emigration leads to changes in diet and other health factors, which results in changes in body type. Just because your macaca’s grandpapa might have had a teeny weeny doesn’t mean your wholesome, corn fed, suburban cul-de-sac raised American desi shares the predicament. Whew!

Discuss. [Previous Sepia jimmyhat analysis here.] Continue reading →

Last nights on Earth

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Just a reminder to everyone that STS-116’s first launch window opens up in ~three days and two hours. The mission will take Astronaut Sunita Williams up to the International Space Station where she will live and work for at least 6 months. You can watch the launch live on the internet at NASA TV (or on CNN). The best blogs to follow along at (besides us) are the official NASA blog and The Flame Trench. You can read about the whole crew here.

For those of you who are feeling a bit inspired by Williams’ impending flight, particularly if you are under ~30-years-old, you should also note that NASA is smack in the middle of an aggressive plan to return the United States to the Moon (in competition with both China and India) and just today announced plans for a permanently-manned international base by 2024 near the lunar south pole (close to Aiken Basin). If you are an undeclared undergrad then take note that engineering and science (besides just the life sciences) are about to become sexy once again.

NASA may be going to the same old moon with a ship that looks a lot like a 1960s Apollo capsule, but the space agency said Monday that it’s going to do something dramatically different this time: Stay there.

Unveiling the agency’s bold plan for a return to the moon, NASA said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon’s poles, permanently staffing it by 2024, four years after astronauts land there.

It is a sweeping departure from the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and represents a new phase of space exploration after space shuttles are retired in 2010.

NASA chose a “lunar outpost” over the short expeditions of the ’60s. Apollo flights were all around the middle area of the moon, but NASA decided to go to the moon’s poles because they are best for longer-term settlements. And this time NASA is welcoming other nations on its journey. [Link]

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India in Focus on World AIDS Day

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THE VIRUS. The fever. The disease. The cocktail. The alphabet soup. The death. By any other red ribbon or name, today is December 1, World AIDS Day, and much of the day’s significant news on the topic comes, for better or worse, from India. (Photo: “An Indian sex worker wears AIDS symbols as she takes part in a rally in Siliguri,” AFP via Yahoo! News.)

aidsday06.jpgFor better, former US president Bill Clinton announced yesterday in Delhi a deal to dramatically reduce the price of effective treatment for children with HIV/AIDS. Among other things this is a fascinating example of a new approach to achieving health outcomes that combines public action with market tools. With funding from five countries, three European and two South American, the foundation has negotiated volume discounts on behalf of 40 destination countries. Thanks to the bulk purchase, the Indian generic manufacturers Cipla and Ranbaxy can sell single-pill tri-therapy drugs at 460 for a whole year’s supply. So the $35 million put up by France, Britain, Norway, Brazil and Chile ends up going a long, long way. $35 million! That’s NOTHING. Imagine if, say, the United States tossed in a little spare change from its daily Iraq expenditure. Grrrrr…..

Anyway, here’s a news story with details:

Only about 80,000 of the 660,000 children with AIDS who need treatment now get it, the United Nations AIDS agency estimates, and half the children who do not get the drugs die by the time they turn 2 years old. The United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, has described children as the invisible face of the AIDS pandemic because they are so much less likely than adults to get life-saving medicines. …

Cipla and Ranbaxy Laboratories, Indian generic drug manufacturers, will be providing pills that combine three antiretroviral drugs into a single tablet, a formulation that is easier to transport, store and use than multiple pills and syrups. The combination tablets also need no refrigeration, an important advantage in poor countries lacking electricity, and can be dissolved in water for babies and infants too young to swallow pills.

Sandeep Juneja, the H.I.V. project head for Ranbaxy, said in a telephone interview that the company was able to provide the lower prices because of the larger volume of sales and because the Clinton Foundation, buying on Unitaid’s behalf, would consolidate many small purchases. He explained that the market for pediatric AIDS drugs was relatively small, fragmented and spread thinly across many countries.

“It would be a nightmare handling those small orders,” he said.”Imagine 40 to 60 countries buying a few hundred bottles individually, with no way to predict how many bottles would be needed.”

The new prices for 19 pediatric AIDS drugs are on average 45 percent less than the lowest rates offered to poor countries in Doctors Without Borders’ listing of AIDS drug prices, and were more than 60 percent lower than the prices the World Health Organization reported were actually paid by developing countries, the foundation said.

On the other hand — and here’s the “for worse” part — even the most abundant supply of inexpensive drugs can’t overcome poor distribution networks and, even worse, bonehead ignorance, especially when it comes from the people in charge of administering AIDS programs. Here’s a horror story this week from rural Gujarat: Continue reading →

They’re Having Fun at College. Are They Learning Anything?

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The Times has a piece on a familiar theme: lots of people are getting college educations in India that aren’t especially useful.

India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.

Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them. (link)

I know many readers will wince when the centrality of English is reinforced (especially by a western media outfit). And the idea that caste is now totally irrelevant seems far-fetched given the intensity of the current debate over reservations and the “creamy layer.” But Anand Giridharadas’s point isn’t so much the English language or the eradication of caste as methodology and ethos — and the fact that 17% of India’s college graduates are unemployed even as the top companies are desperate for talent. His examples of how to do it wrong are Hinduja College and Dahanukar College in Mumbai. In Giridharadas’s analysis, the problem at these colleges is the emphasis on things like obedience and punctuality, rote memorization, and the failure to inculcate the confidence amongst students to question authority.

It seems to me these are problems that could be fixed without overhauling the entire system. Leaving space for questions in a lecture is a start; guest-lecturers from industry might be another. If you agree with Girdharadas’s assessment of the problem, can you think of solutions that don’t involve waiting for the government to fix everything? Continue reading →

Lo Tek or High Tech?

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Chiraag from Pardon My Hindi recently posted a video onto YouTube of his harrowing experience flying Air Deccan (via BoingBoing). Says Chiraag:

I dug up this video I shot back in December ’04 when I was aboard an Air Deccan flight from Bangalore to Mumbai. Looked out my window and what did I see, A group of guys repairing the wing with some sort of muthafcukin’ duct tape. There’s some more repairs to the left of the one they are working on with what seems to be the same technique. Crossed my fingers, tossed back a shot of Black Label, and stayed on the flight. [Link]

Honestly, I probably would have reacted the same way, sans Black Label. It looks like a typically desi “Kam Challao” scene – equal mixtures of ingenuity and utter disregard for the principles of safety, like a bus patched together with baling wire, careening down a Himalayan road.

However, looks can be deceiving. This isn’t a 19th century desi solution, it’s a thoroughly modern one. As the comments on Turbanhead reveal, that isn’t duct tape it’s “Speed tape” – it’s specially formulated for use on airplanes (and racing cars and possibly even nuclear reactors). Those employees were actually doing what they would have in any first world airport!

“What you see is the perfectly safe and legal application of some heavy-duty aluminum bonding tape, called “speed tape” in the mechanic’s lexicon. Depending on what a plane’s maintenance manual stipulates — according to the dictates of the FAA — certain noncritical components can be temporarily patched with this material, embarrassing as it sometimes looks. It’s extremely strong, durable, and able to expand and contract through an extreme range of temperatures…” [Link]

Here’s a similar story of a passenger freaking out after watching the application of speed tape on a plane in Seattle.

Poor desi aircraft workers – even when they’re using the most expensive, cutting edge products, we still suspect them of cutting corners and endangering our lives.

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The cost of illness

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A friend working in public health once told me that while mortality rates were highest in Africa, morbidity rates (the rate of non-fatal illness) were highest in India. If I remember correctly, she told me that this had to do with relatively high rates of innoculation – which cut all the nasty childhood diseases that lead to low life expectancy at birth – but a poor health system over all.

While I’m not sure if this is still true, what I do know is that getting sick is expensive, anywhere. Consider the impact of illness on financial health in the USA:

50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses… Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. [Link]

And this is even though “68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance” [Link].

If illness wipes out the savings of relatively high (by world standards) earning Americans, you can imagine what it does to the poor in India. While the cost of medical care is cheaper in absolute terms in India, it is still a large share of already meager resources. Couple that with lost earnings, and the impact can be dire.

About one-fourth of hospitalized Indians fall below the poverty line as a direct result of their hospital expenses, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Many people take out steep loans or sell their homes in order to pay. And for the poor, losing even a day’s wages while waiting in the hospital can be devastating.

“A health event is a bigger risk to farmers than an unsuccessful crop. Once they sell their land or livestock, they become indentured laborers. That takes a generation to fix,”… [Link]
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