Category Archives: Science and Technology

Star-rupees

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Following the lead of Hooters, Starbucks says it will expand into India soon, trying to reverse hundreds of years of tea plantation history dating back to the East India Company (thanks, Super Jagjit!):

“China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country[,] but we turned them into coffee drinkers,” Schultz told a gathering of analysts earlier this month…

But their Asia marketing director, speaking not to Wall Street but to Indian consumers, is singing a gentler hymn:

“India is a tea-based culture. We””””re not saying coffee is a substitute. We””””re saying Starbucks is a place to hang out, to eat and drink, to see and be seen.”

In other words, a place to flirt. And, in fact, gourmet coffee cafes serve exactly that function in Indian cities today:

“With the liberalization of the economy, there are a large number of young Indians with good jobs and attractive incomes,” said Banerjee. “Many still live with their parents. So their income is largely disposable and they need to spend it on something.“

Methinks the key part of that quote is ‘many still live with their parents.’ Cafes function as extended living rooms in space-impaired Manhattan and as libidinous hotspots in privacy-impaired India. They’re just the place for your silken mocha pick-me-up.

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Hemachandra numbers everywhere

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Supplesomething forwarded me an interesting NPR piece on Manjul Bhargava, 28, a professor of number theory at Princeton who discusses how the Fibonacci series pops up not just in mathematics but also in the arts.

The Fibonacci series is the set of numbers beginning with 1, 1 where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The series begins with 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. They were known in India before Fibonacci as the Hemachandra numbers. And the ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers approximates a ratio, ~1.618, called the golden section or golden mean.

It’s long been known that the Fibonacci series turns up frequently in nature. The numbers of petals on a daisy and the dimensions of a section of a spiral nautilus shell are usually Fibonacci numbers. For plants, this is because the fractional part of the golden mean, a constant called phi (0.618), is the rotation fraction (222.5 degrees) which yields the most efficient and scalable packing of circular objects such as seeds, petals and leaves.

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Revenge of the nerds

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NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says Americans need to emulate Asian and desi nerds:

The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they’ll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid’s idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

Patenting the chapati

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Last week, the European Patent Office revoked agricultural conglomerate Monsanto’s patent on a variety of Indian Nap Hal wheat, widely used in chapatis because it doesn’t rise when baked (via Boing Boing). Indians had cried biopiracy, reacting the way we would if France had patented apple pie (Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri).

The wheat’s low gluten content gives it low water absorption and elasticity. One scientist elaborated on how the patent’s central claim was not novel:

The Indian wheat patent by Monsanto has lower gluten, which is responsible for its lower elasticity… This is the trait that is the core of Monsanto’s patent and it is a trait evolved by farmers breeding in India. Introducing the trait into a cross… is an obvious step any breeder familiar with the art of breeding can undertake. Monsanto’s claim is clearly not novel. This is a clear case of piracy of India’s indigenous knowledge of breeding and cooking.

Yes, breeding and cooking: the desi core competencies. The patent opposition was filed in conjunction with Greenpeace.

Monsanto denied the patents would be used to block Indian farmers from using their Nap Hal seed. “Indian users can use Nap Hal for chapatis or whatever else, now and just as they’ve always been used to,” McDermott told The Scientist. “The idea that Indian farmers would have to pay royalties to use Nap Hal, that’s just inflammatory and ridiculous.”

The controversy echoes the neem patent case in 2000. Neem leaves are widely used in ayurvedic remedies. The EPO revoked this patent, held by the U.S. government and W.R. Grace on a neem-based fungicide.

Here is the patent text.

Western scientists hop aboard Indian Moon mission

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As reported in a previous SM post, it seems like India is serious this time about their moon mission. It is healthy to be skeptical because they have balked at various space exploration ventures before, but this time it appears to be legit. Science magazine reports that western scientists are now clamoring to get their experiments on board:

Western researchers often beat a path to developing countries to study endangered species, ancient civilizations, or traditional medicine, among other subjects. Now it’s time to add planetary science to that list. Five scientists from around the world are jostling to get their experiments aboard an Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, that is slated to fly to the moon in September 2007.

“Chandrayaan offers a very cost-effective means to gather critical and unique data on the moon while forging new cooperative relationships in lunar exploration,” says one of the finalists, Paul Spudis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Another finalist, Manuel Grande of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, U.K., says he welcomes “the increasing opportunities for flying experiments on emerging space-nation launch vehicles and satellites.”

There were 30 scientists from 11 countries vying for a spot on Chandrayaan, but the list has been narrowed to five. Several other countries including the U.S. are planning robotic moon missions toward the end of this decade. However, with NASA’s budget always in flux and space science cuts looming, even American scientists were looking for a spot on the Indian spacecraft.

Given these uncertainties [in the funding of other nation’s space programs], space researchers say they welcome the chance to vie for a spot on the Indian probe. And the benefits cut both ways. The competition is designed to ensure “maximum scientific knowledge about the moon,” says ISRO chair Gopalan Madhavan Nair. Former ISRO chief Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan says it should also “enhance India’s status as a potential partner in future space exploration.”

Half of all films ever are Indian?

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Salon is blogging a conference called Web 2.0, about the future of the Web. Entrepreneur Brewster Kahle (Alexa, Internet Archive, WAIS) just said something interesting. Kahle wants to offer all books and films ever created, online:

Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable.

Take that, Hong Kong and China! You may have some stylish martial arts and crime films, but we’ve got scads of third-rate melodrama under our collective belts, and we ‘make it up in volume.’

UFOs over the Himalayas

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Stories like this are why I blog. From NewKerala.com:

A group of Indian scientists here are pouring over a bunch of photographs they took in the northern Himalayas depicting a mystery object that could be either of the two but are nowhere near cracking the mystery.

“The object was about four feet in height with a red balloon and many white ones. It hovered around for about 45 minutes some 200 metres from us. We were curious to know more and took photographs,” said Anil Kulkarni, a marine and water resources scientist with the city-based Space Application Centre (SAC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

He was part of the team that spotted and photographed the object during a just-concluded study trip to the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, bordering China.

But did the UFO have special chameleon like technology?

“Interestingly when it was exposed to the sun, it turned black and in the shadow of the hill, it became white,” the scientist said.

As the article acknowledges, it was more than likely a spy device. Still, am I the only one suspicious of the “balloon” excuse? Isn’t that what they told us about Roswell? Let’s see how Indian fighter plane handle this new threat.

The rise of subtle markets

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Wired has a piece on how online businesses roll up niche markets into a larger, virtual whole. Here’s my take:

Netflix claims that, unlike Blockbuster, 99% of its extensive catalog is rented out every single year… people are wired differently from birth and then actively fragment their interests. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s skimmed the morass of offbeat personal Web sites… [or] readers of Sepia Mutiny or one of its spiritual ancestors, the Usenet group alt.culture.us.asian-indian in its heyday.

But what does surprise new Netflix members is the service’s extensive selection of Bollywood films, which it apparently rents out profitably… Outside Netflix… the situation is grim:

An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India’s film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon’s Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

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Mapping Delhi

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I couldn’t beleive this one, but Stanford sophomore Rohan Verma has created a Mapquest type service for Delhi called, MapMyIndia.com. Never again will a rickshawallah take me for a crazy trip. How the heck can you possibly make a map of Indian roads? When I lived in Delhi a couple years ago I was at the mercy of drivers who didn’t understand my horrible Hindi when I told them where I wanted to go. Well I guess it wasn’t so bad as long as I stuck to main roads. From IndiaWest:

…Rohan Verma has been working day and night in New Delhi to put together the sort of Web site that’s mundane for U.S. Web surfers but unheard of in India – a navigational tool that produces printable maps to provide directions to destinations in India.

The result – after three-and-a-half months of work leading a team of 10 people -is Mapmyindia.com. “My role started from conceptualizing it, managing and execution of it, and deploying it, which we did on Sept. 10, and also marketing,” Verma, who is all of 19 years, told India-West.

Bio researcher wins genius grant

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Bio researcher Vamsi Mootha, 33, just won a $500K MacArthur fellowship (via Political Animal). Mootha is an assistant professor at Harvard who researches mitochondrial gene expression to combat disease.

By comparing the protein fingerprints with gene expression databases, more than 100 previously unknown mitochondrial proteins were identified. He used a similar, coordinated approach to identify the gene that causes Leigh Syndrome French Canadian variant, a fatal metabolic disease.  In diseases resulting not from a single gene but the interaction of sets of genes, he introduced a computational method for identifying patterns of gene activity in specific diseases… As importantly, Mootha has pioneered powerful, adaptable computational strategies for mining data collected in laboratories throughout the world, providing an efficient means to hunt down gene interactions that lead to a wide variety of diseases.

The James Logan debate coach won one as well. The Fremont-Newark-Union City area across from San Francisco has desi and Afghan gang problems, so this guy’s in the thick of it.

For 15 years, against long odds, Tommie Lindsey has held together an award-winning speech and debate team at James Logan High School in the blue- collar suburb of Union City. His students frequently defeat well-heeled competitors from elite high schools.

His teams have won four state championships; three James Logan students have been top winners at the national level and 25 at the state level. This year the team has more than 200 students. Ninety percent of Lindsey’s students go on to four-year colleges. Overall at Logan, just one-third of students qualify for the state university systems… In recent years, the team has been featured in a documentary and won a $100,000 award from Oprah Winfrey.

A 200-person debate team is enormous.