Category Archives: Science and Technology

Ferengis invade the Gaon Federation

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I never thought I’d see the day…

Graduate students from top schools in the United States, most from [MBA] programs, are vying for internships at India’s biggest private companies… Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street… they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi…

Infosys Technologies, the country’s second-largest outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans when the company began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications… [Link]

This brings a tear to my eye. It also makes me want to warn Gurgaon (‘the village of gurus’) and Bangalore (‘lots of banging’) of the mercenary MBA hordes of Genghis Cant. During the Net bubble, they descended en masse upon our quaint silvered shire in their X3s, treating the muscular engine of history like a poodle to be shorn, bobbed and bowed. Like life-sized Edna Modes, they declared technology first supernova-hot and then old and busted within months, fleeing back to Manhattan with hype in tow.

The final 40, who cut a wide academic swath from engineering schools like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, have since arrived on campus for average stays of three months… They live in a 500-room hotel complex on Infosys’s expansive campus in the suburbs of Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food court and riding the company bus downtown to decompress at the many pubs and bars… Many are in India to study globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is often not possible in China because, unlike India, English is not widely spoken there… [Link]

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Private Health Care Is Higher Quality

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Indians love to boast about the quality of Indian doctors. “The best in the world! And now India is becoming a center for world class health care, even Americans are flying to India now!” But just between us brown folks, we also know the other side of the story. Many of the best doctors leave the country, and if they come back, they come back only to some high end establishment. The quality of the average doctor in India is … well … rather hit or miss.

As a matter of public policy, what should be done? A study of doctors in Delhi finds that increased training helps, but even then the quality of health care remains sensitive to the right incentives:

The quality of medical care received by patients varies for two reasons: Differences in doctors’ competence or differences in doctors’ incentives.  We find three patterns in the data.

First, what doctors do is less than what they know they should do-doctors operate well inside their knowledge frontier.

Second, competence and effort are complementary so that doctors who know more also do more.

Third, the gap between what doctors do and what they know responds to incentives: Doctors in the fee-for-service private sector are closer in practice to their knowledge frontier than those in the fixed-salary public sector. Under-qualified private sector doctors, even though they know less, provide better care on average than their better-qualified counterparts in the public sector. These results indicate that to improve medical services, at least for poor people, there should be greater emphasis on changing the incentives of public providers rather than increasing provider competence through training. [cite]

Although doctors love to tell you that they work out of a sense of seva, and that the quality of care has little to do with the fee structure, it simply isn’t true. Surprising as it seems, the researchers find that you’re better off with a less trained private doctor than a better trained public doctor. Why? Because the private doctors try harder. The difference in quality was significant:

Public sector doctors did less than a third of what they knew to be important in terms of diagnosis, taking about fifteen percent of the time required to fully diagnose complaints. Over-prescribing and mis-prescribing were also rampant. [cite]

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Hollywood/Bollywood

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The giant, shiny flying phallus of American cultural export parks its hairy business end in Bombay next year (via Desi Flavor):

The first Planet Hollywood will open in Mumbai in 2006 and muscular superstars Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis will be flying down for the occasion… Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Goa and Hyderabad [are] the destinations of choice. [Link]

Selling cowburgers and crappy food: it’s the ideal business plan for India  Actually, people are just as Hollystruck as Bollystruck, and you’ll notice they send out the action stars to overseas destinations — Rambo and Die Hard, with their limited dialogue, are amenable to cheap translation. Indian restaurants have decked themselves in Bollywood memorabilia for ages. And if there’s one culture that has an unironic affinity for kitsch…

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Seen in San Francisco… pt II

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Greetings Mutineers. I’ve been far from the home office for far too long and my current travels take me to the distant land of Seoul, S. Korea. If there’s a Little India out here, I’m sure I’ll find it. In between travels, I had some precious weekend time in San Francisco where Anna & I held a Mutineer Meetup (Brimful’s excellent writeup is here) and I snapped the shot below with my trusty cameraphone on my way back home.

My chronicle of the Desi conquest of America earlier showcased downtown SF’s gyms; we will now take to the streets –

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You too can pick up an authentic Bajaj scooter from the SF Scooter showroom for a mere $2699.

Dunno about you but seeing that logo sure brought back the memories… As a kid, I was never really impressed with the Ringling Bros “10 clowns in a Volkswagen Beetle” act cuz I’d seen the real thing in da motherland. Except instead of 10 clowns in a spacious car, we’re talking about an entire Desi-sized family perched atop a rickety little Bajaj scooter while darting in and out of downtown Cochin traffic at high speed. Everyone’s a clown and noone’s an atheist on them roads.

In less space than a friggin’ Mercury space capsule, Desi families managed to squeeze in a couple kids standing single file between dad’s arms & knees, and a couple more clutching him from behind. But the real trophy goes to mom, dearest mom, who sat in the rear with her knees vise-gripped together and daintily off to one side, with kid #5 screaming at the top of his lungs whilst in her lap. Of course, the good wife never questioned her husband’s driving nor sense of direction. Truly a sight to behold – 7 people and nary a helmet between them.

By contrast, BajajUSA’s website prefers to go with some different imagery to entice American riders – Continue reading →

Prison Yoga may be bad for your health

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I have long flirted with the idea of attending a Yoga class.  I have heard that once you approach your 30s you should stop lifting weights as often, and concentrate instead on maintaining your flexibility and cardiovascular health.  Plus, everyone says that Yoga is supposed to be relaxing.  Well…not everyone.  Norwegian prison officials have another take.  The BBC reported earlier this week:

A prison in Norway has stopped holding yoga classes after it found that instead of calming inmates, they were actually making some more aggressive.

High-security Ringerike jail near Oslo offered the classes to eight inmates on a trial basis earlier this year.

Prison warden Sigbjoern Hagen said some of the inmates became more irritable and agitated and had trouble sleeping.

He said the prison did not have the resources to treat emotions unleashed by the deep breathing exercises.

Yeah, I don’t know.  Call me a prude but I am not sure it is wise to practice something like a Dog Pose, Spread Leg Forward Fold, or a Bridge Pose in a prison anyways.  I would definitely not want to be on the receiving end of “emotions unleashed.”  I kid, I kid.  A sample of eight prisoners is pretty unscientific to say the least.  Maybe they just had an incredibly annoying instructor.  I have long believed that both Andy Dufresne and the Count of Monte Cristo probably had to perform Yoga in order to remain sane and escape.  Determination to both stay sane and escape will more than likely be my ultimate motivation for dropping in on a Yoga class as well.

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Politicians are full of …

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It’s a very common observation to remark that politicians are full of fecal matter[NSFW], but usually this is a metaphorical remark about their character and moral worth. Very little attention has been paid by people to literal politician droppings … until now. It turns out there is no topic beneath the attention of the Indian bureaucrat: squat.JPG

Village council candidates in India should be allowed to stand for election only if they have a toilet at home, the rural development minister says. He said too many elected members “do not have toilet facilities in their own houses and defecate in the open”. Mr Singh said this activity was the main cause of the high incidence of diarrhoea in rural areas. [BBC]

Nor (surprisingly) is this a new issue:

Some states have already made amendments in the Panchayati Raj Act, which deals with the election of village councils, to ensure that elected members have toilet facilities in their households. The rural development minister suggested all chief ministers make similar provisions. [BBC]

Actually, concern with morning stool has long been a staple of desi culture. Mahatma Gandhi’s daily greeting to women was:

“Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?” [cite]

Indeed, one critic pointed out that

… Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning [cite]

It seems the minister is merely following a path made by giants … Continue reading →

The profiling myth

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The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):

Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]

… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]

Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:

I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]

· Â· Â· Â· Â·

I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.

The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.

On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.

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Tracing my roots

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Some of the comments on SM of late have disturbed me greatly.  I am begining to realize that a lot of people are very confused about who they are.  Even worse they seem obsessed with trying to convince people who they are not.  While sitting in a jury pool all day last Tuesday I did a little bit of reading.  I learned of National Geographic’s Genographic Project which attempts to trace the path of humans as they left Africa.

[Spencer] Wells, 36, is a population geneticist using science in global pursuit of the greatest story not yet told: the story of how humankind traveled from its origins in Africa to populate the planet. The most telling clues lie with isolated, indigenous tribes like the Tubu, for their DNA remains, in a sense, the purest. Their unique genetic markers, characteristic mutations in a defined sequence of DNA, are like flags waving from the place their ancestors have inhabited for thousands of years–the starting point for ancient migrations. Any venturesome Tubu who crossed the Sahara to see the outlying world, and propagated in the process, passed on one or another of those genetic markers to his or her offspring. Any traveler who came through the Tibesti and intermarried did the same. Wells might take a cheek swab from an investment banker in Boston and find that same genetic marker: proof that one of those Tubu created a family line that leads, in some circuitous way, over continents and generations, from the Tibesti to an oak-paneled office in Back Bay. It’s in the hope of tracing myriad journeys such as this that Wells, a newly named National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, is undertaking one of the most ambitious and expensive research adventures in the National Geographic Society’s 117-year history: the grandly named Genographic Project.

At a cost of 40 million dollars over five years, the brunt of it borne by National Geographic, IBM, and the Waitt Family Foundation, the Genographic Project under Wells’s direction is establishing 11 DNA-sampling centers around the world, with the goal of collecting 100,000 cheek swabs or blood samples from mostly indigenous peoples like the Tubu. A sense of urgency infuses the project: Year by year, at an ever quickening rate, the outside world is crowding in on, and at the same time absorbing, indigenous peoples. A Tubu who moves to Paris will still have the genetic markers that distinguish him as a Tubu, but the geographical context for his markers will be gone. As for the Tubu who remain in the Tibesti mountains, they may marry more with outsiders as modern technology makes contact more likely. Generation by generation, tracing the last routes of historical migration of such isolated people grows that much harder. Wells wants to map as many routes as he can while their geographical origins are relatively intact.

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Pointing the finger

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An innocent bystander is dead, shot by the good guys. Now the London mayor is claiming that Jean Charles de Menezes, the ‘South Asian-looking’ guy shot by British special forces, was actually a victim of terrorism rather than the cops. It’s Livingstone, I presume:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone described Mr Menezes as a “victim of the terrorist attacks”. [Link]

More innocent people could be shot dead by police… Scotland Yard’s chief admitted yesterday. [Link]

Livingstone’s statement is faulty moral calculus and actively blocks the solution. First and foremost, you must assign responsibility accurately, otherwise you’ll never fix the problem. The terrorist attacks are a contributing cause. The primary cause is the commando who held him down and shot him seven times in the head.

Shoot to kill is indeed a good policy when you’re highly certain the suspect is a suicide bomber. But the criteria have to be tightened and the threshold for action tweaked. We have empirical proof of it: it’s de Menezes’ body. ‘He ran’ and ‘he had brown skin’ aren’t reason enough to kill someone. The criminal justice system doesn’t execute or even imprison people for those reasons.

This is an issue apart from the terrorists, who are obviously mass murderers. It’s of interest because society holds sway over its government’s shoot-to-kill criteria in a way that it doesn’t over deluded, nihilist 19-year-olds. We grant governments a monopoly on the use of force precisely because they have the duty and the means to use it correctly.

Several nonlethal weapons which might work exist today: bomb jammers, stun guns, beanbag guns, rubber bullets, plastic bullets, pepperball guns, sticky shockers, immobilizing goo, veiling glare lasers, flash bang grenades, pain-inducing microwaves and millimeter wave body scanners for detecting explosives.

Even more advanced solutions such as electromagnetic pulse guns and microwave guns which only affect electronics are under development. Many waves (electromagnetic and laser) affect different materials in different ways, for example by discriminating between the human body and explosives or detonators. X-rays, CAT scans, surgical and dental lasers, and luggage scanners rely on a variety of these effects.

But when you say ‘it wasn’t our fault,’ when you go into denial, you immediately truncate the search for a fix and the R&D investment needed to solve the problem. Western militaries have invested significantly in technology to curtail friendly fire. It’s worth doing so for law enforcement as well.

Previous post here.

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Sussing out an honest bureaucrat

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Dr. Krishna Ella is an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin and the founder of Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad. MIT’s Technology Review recently covered the unique challenges he faced when doing business in India. His first challenge, before the Indian economic boom: desis skeptical of returnees.

Ella and his wife had to spend the first months convincing banks to loan them money. It didn’t help that Ella was a repatriate. “Nobody could understand why someone would come back to India,” Ella says. “Everyone’s first question was: ‘What went wrong in America? Did you break some sort of law?'” [Link]

That’s actually still a good question, given that the former chairman of U.S. Airways left that collapsing company and is launching an Indian airline. Ella’s second challenge: routing around the famously inflexible Indian labor market.

As Ella’s business blossomed, though, he faced a classic Indian problem: how to avoid becoming dependent on local labor unions. His solution was practical — and radical: “We chose a poor village in three of the poorest states of India and offered training to their best students, with a promise of at least two years’ employment…” Today, much of the company’s skilled labor force is made up of people who sometimes can support an entire village with their salaries… [Link]

Third challenge: preparing dossiers on which bureaucrats were the least corrupt.

“It was my experience that 90% of the bureaucrats were just in it for the bribes and 10% were really interested in using their position to help the people and the country,” Ella says. He did background research on the employees of an agency from which he needed permits or regulatory approvals, then concentrated his paperwork on the most honest clerk in the department. Further, if a bureaucrat was rude or unhelpful, Ella approached them like he would a potential customer, returning several times to explain his situation in polite and persuasive language. [Link]

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