Category Archives: Science and Technology

Never trust a Ginger. Never.

Posted on by

One of you phoned me, all out of breath, to say: “Have you heard? Prince Harry said racist things about BROWN people! This is so Sepia Mutiny. Are you going to blog it? Are you? Are you? Because, like, if you do? I don’t want credit, but I can’t WAIT until SM covers it. Okay? So, are you blogging it? When?”

Well…how ’bout now, you not-annoying-at-all badger.

The video embedded above features Prince Harry disparaging darkies, his Grandmother and perhaps Canadians, as well— I couldn’t tell at times, with his accent. Well, that and a lot of people seem to insult Canadians (why?), so it seems like a safe assumption. The footage commences with time spent in an airport, waiting for a flight to the former British colony of Cyprus; after some editing, Harry is shown later on, discussing night maneuvers in Cyprus, as well as his pubes.

Speaking of those, they are what inspired the title of this post. In my title, I use the word “Ginger”, to refer to an infamous South Park episode which can help us understand why the Prince did what he did; perhaps by understanding, we may gain closure, and move on.

I had initially typed, “What next? Water is wet?” in the little Movable Type box before going the Ginger route. I only reveal this because I was really torn about which title to use. Obviously, South Park beats logic and sarcasm, every time. And for good reason, at least in this case.

Listening to Eric Cartman is especially instructive when trying to pick up the pieces after a traumatic video like the one above. Many people are asking themselves, why would Prince Harry SAY such a thing? Because water is wet? Trolls like to upset people? It’s just the way things are?

Or…is there something…more sinister…behind that pale skin and insolent mouth?

In a class presentation, Cartman argues that “Gingers” – people with red hair, freckles, and pale skin – are disgusting and are inherently evil, have no souls, and are unable to walk around during the day because of this...

Continue reading →

Satyam: The “Truth” Will Out

Posted on by

By now, most people have probably heard about the huge Satyam scandal, where the company’s founder and chairman, Ramalinga Raju, has taken responsibility for massive fraud in reporting the company’s earnings, profits, and cash balance. Satyam, one of India’s largest consulting and IT companies, has admitted it claimed $1 billion in assets that simply did not exist for just one three month period in 2008. The company is now facing the abyss, as its share prices are evaporating, and clients are starting to defect to rivals (including IBM and Accenture). Satyam currently employs 53,000 people.

As background, Reuters has an informative story on the status of Ramalinga Raju as a symbol of Hyderabad as a new IT hub (“Cyberabad”) and the whole, now deeply tarnished “India Shining” mythology.

And that’s not all. Two American legal firms are filing lawsuits against Satyam, claiming fraud. Distressingly, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, the accounting firm that signed off on Satyam’s accounting practices for years, never detected the fraud.

What went wrong? Salil Tripathi has a provocative Op-Ed at the Wall Street Journal, where he addresses the aspects of Indian business culture that enabled this to happen. For Tripathi, one of the key factors in Satyam’s case is the clan-like structure of Satyam’s upper management and Board of Directors, which are heavily populated by relatives and close friends of the chairman: Continue reading →

Sex selection accompanies immigrants to America

Posted on by

The San Jose Mercury News has an article highlighting some soon-to-be-published findings by economists at both Columbia University and the University of Texas who were studying Asian immigrant communities. The findings indicate that the practice of sex selection among Asian immigrants does not stop at American shores as many of us would like to believe:

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.

The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son…

For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child…”

Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead. [Link]

Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding. Given that the prime reason for preferring sons in Asian countries is that sons serve as a social security net, I just assumed the practice would be swept aside in America given that there are alternate means of obtaining social security and that women here have a greater ability to rise up the socio-economic ladder and support the family. I guess I did not put enough importance in the desire some of these families have to preserve their names through a male heir.

Continue reading →

Too sexy for this job?

Posted on by

News that Sanjay Gupta has been offered the position of Surgeon General has produced the classic trifecta of Golidlocks responses: Is he too sexy for the job, not sexy enough, or does he have the right amount of smouldering sex appeal to keep pace with Obama, Biden, Daschle and Hillary Clinton?

Too sexy for this job:

My friend Dr. B objects to the idea that SG could be the SG, saying that he lacks the gravitas for the job, and that she would have preferred a more established, less erotically charged nominee in the C. Everett Koop mold.

For those of you too young to remember, despite Koop’s mad pediatric surgical skillz, he was as attractive as Bill Gates on a bad hair day. Nobody, no matter how intense their uniform fetish, ever had an erotic dream about Dr. Koop or Joycelen Elders, and Dr. B thinks that precedent should be maintained.

Similarly, when Dr. Amonymous asks for SG’s policy qualifications, pointing out that “The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the USPHS, a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency.” [wiki], it’s clear that what he’s really saying is … “how can I take him seriously when he’s so pretty?”

(Manish has a variant of this argument, claiming not that Gupta is too sexy for the job, but that the job isn’t sexy enough for him, calling it a step down from his current position to one that pays less and has less influence.)

They do have a point since “Gupta was named one of the Sexiest Men of 2003 by People magazine.” [wiki] It’s hard to see what more objective measure of sexiness there might be.

Not sexy enough for this job:

There are those, however, who reject People Magazine’s imprimature as if it were some illegible doctor’s scrawl on a prescription pad, arguing brazenly that Dr. Gupta doesn’t have the intellectual honesty sex appeal necessary for the position.

Continue reading →

Paging General Gupta. The country needs you…STAT

Posted on by

By about 3:30p.m. eastern this afternoon, every South Asian American in the country (and their mother) had already heard that Sanjay Gupta was on the verge of being announced the next Surgeon General of the United States:

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer.

When reached for comment today, Gupta did not deny the account but declined to comment.

The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said. Gupta later spoke with Tom Daschle, Obama’s White House health czar and nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and other advisers to the president-elect. [Link]

The choice of Gupta is very obvious when you think about it. It adds a touch of star power to Obama’s administration, will get lots of kudos (and donations) from the South Asian American community and, perhaps most importantly, adds another health care policy wonk to the dream team to be headed by H&HS Secretary Tom Daschle. You know all those rich Indian doctors that tend to vote Republican? Maybe not anymore.

CNN released a statement saying, “Since first learning that Dr. Gupta was under consideration for the surgeon general position, CNN has made sure that his on-air reporting has been on health and wellness matters and not on health-care policy or any matters involving the new administration…” [Link]

Taking this job, which will result in a large paycut for Gupta, will also set him up very nicely to run for office in Michigan in the future. Through some contacts I heard the rumors a few months back that Gupta at least thought about or was encouraged to run for mayor of Detroit to replace the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick.

As a college senior I once invited Dr. Gupta to the Midwest Indian American Students’s Conference at the University of Michigan (he is an alumnus). It was before he hit the big time but I remember him being really genuine and laid back. And of course who can forget his exploits with the Devil Docs at the beginning of the war where is switched between reporting for CNN and scrubbing in to brain surgery.

There is another really good potential outcome as a result of this appointment. I know a lot of desi doctors who look a lot younger than they really are. Patients always make comments to them like, “uhhh…are you old enough?” Now these desi doctors can point to Sanjay Gupta who is the top doctor in the land and also looks pretty young and say, “umm, like yeah.”

What I really wanted to do was to end this post with the really funny Gupta/Dobbs CNN ad from a few years back. Can someone find me a working link…STAT?

Continue reading →

Flying While Brown…Again.

Posted on by

Flying While Brown.jpg It shouldn’t be any surprise to people that we are ringing in 2009 with another one of these stories. (via RaceWire)

Nine Muslim passengers on a New Year’s Day flight on AirTran were kicked off a flight after others flying reportedly heard remarks about airport security. Because of the confusion, that was eventually cleared up, no one was able to fly.[RaceWire]

What could these “dangerous” remarks be? Did they say one of the handful of words that as brown people we are not allowed to say within a ten mile radius of an airport, including but apparently not exclusively, the following words: bomb, terrorist, Bin Laden, explode, die, Bush, fire, shoe, fertilizer, Allahu Akbar?

Mr. Irfan turned to his wife…wondered aloud where the safest place to sit on the airplane would be — the front? The rear? Over the wing?

But passengers sitting behind them evidently overheard the remark, saw Mr. Irfan’s beard and his wife’s head scarf, and grew concerned…The worried passengers contacted flight attendants, who contacted Transportation Security Administration officials, and soon, Mr. Irfan and his wife were off the plane and being questioned in the jetway.[NYT]

Oh! The trigger word was ‘safest.’ How ironic.

Before long…the F.B.I. concluded that the incident was obviously just a misunderstanding, and told AirTran officials that the family was cleared to travel. But he said AirTran still refused to rebook them, offering only to refund their tickets. The F.B.I. agents helped the family get on a later USAirways flight to Orlando, but those seats cost them twice as much.[NYT]

It took me a while to get to posting this up because frankly, this is a dime a dozen story. In 2008 alone, the Transportation Department reported 87 cases of complaints alleging discrimination by airlines and only four were security related. Flying while brown stories happen all the time. I’m tired of blogging about stories like this and that these incidences are still happening. These stories are a part of our lives on the margin and being brown. I’m not implying that we should stand by the wayside and merely accept the injustice. Which is exactly what Mr. Irfan didn’t do. Instead he got organized. Continue reading →

Driving substantive health care reform

Posted on by

While we are busy debating the merits of one potential Obama appointee and fawning over another (ok, I know, I am the only one fawning), there is a third that might end up having the most substantive role of all in Obama’s administration. Neera Tanden, who I first wrote about back in 2004, in all likelihood is about to occupy a position that will greatly influence this nation’s health care policy. First, remember that Tom Daschle will serve a new dual role. He will not only be named as the cabinet level head of Health and Human Services, but will also be director of a new WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF HEALTH REFORM. This essentially gives him the powers of a Health Czar and indicates that we will see a major legislative push in the direction of comprehensive health care reform. Tanden is a member of the transition team’s health advisors, having come over from Clinton’s campaign. She is a battle-hardened survivor of Hillary-care and knows the lessons learned and can be a great asset to Daschle. Here is an interesting footnote about Tanden’s role at the inception of Hillary’s campaign:

On a cold midmorning in January 2007, Hillary sat in the sunny living room of her house on Whitehaven Street in Washington, a well-to-do enclave off Embassy Row where she lived with her mother and, on occasion, her husband. She was finishing a last round of policy prep with her aides before getting on a plane to Iowa for her first big campaign swing. In a moment of quiet, she looked around the living room and said, to no one in particular, “I so love this house. Why am I doing this?”

Her policy director, Neera Tanden, and her advertising director, Mandy Grunwald, laughed, a little too lightheartedly. Clinton went on. “I’m so comfortable here. Why am I doing this?”

Tanden spoke up. “The White House isn’t so bad,” she said. [Link]

The New York Times had a good article on Tanden way back in 2000 [via Manish]:

How smart is the smart kid in Hillary Clinton’s Senate bid?

From all appearances — including a law degree from Yale — very.

It was Ms. Tanden, signing on with the exploratory committee in July 1999, who moved to New York from the White House and worked with Mrs. Clinton, researching and developing policies. She was 29.

It was Ms. Tanden — with, she wants you to know, her staff of six — who challenged Rick A. Lazio’s first major policy proposal, a tax-reduction plan, in August. In two hours Ms. Tanden prepared a detailed financial response. Finding the facts and figures to defend her candidate’s position is a large part of her work.

Watching Ms. Tanden in action at the Hillary 2000 headquarters on 34th Street is not permitted.

But you can accompany Ms. Tanden, informal, fast-talking, connected to her cell phone as to a body part, across the street to the restaurant she frequents these days, the cafeteria in Macy’s basement. She works 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Her husband hates her work, Ms. Tanden allows in an unguarded moment. She makes a quick, politic adjustment: he doesn’t hate the work; he hates the way she brings the work home, the stress. [Link]

Continue reading →

“Catalist” for Change: Q& A with Vijay Ravindran

Posted on by

A few weeks ago, I posted “Data Crunching for Obama,” a look at the Democratic campaign’s microtargeting strategies led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at Catalist, Harold Icke’s start-up political technology company that built a national voter database of information on more than 260 million people for progressive groups, including the Obama campaign. vijayr.jpg

At Catalist, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company’s software products and services. The data banks and web-based tools he helped develop could answer questions such as: “How many Indian-Americans gave money to me, said they were an Obama supporter, voted in the last general election, own their home and live in Baltimore?”

Below the fold is a Q&A with Vijay Ravindran, where he talks about his engagement with politics, the 2008 election efforts, Catalist’s role in it, and what South Asian voter data tells us about the “brown” community.

Incidentally, the 34 year old is on a roll. Just yesterday, it was announced that as of February ’09, Ravindran will be the senior vice president and chief digital officer of The Washington Post Company. Per the press release that went out:

“We are fortunate to have Vijay join the Company as we focus increasingly on electronic media,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “Vijay is widely recognized as one of the top innovators in the field. I am delighted that he will bring his extraordinary skills, talent and experience to our efforts to expand our digital business.”

Continue reading →

India Heading to the Moon

Posted on by

nyt chandrayaan.jpg

India is sending an unmanned space-ship to the moon, with take-off possibly as soon as Wednesday morning, Indian time [UPDATE: Take-off was successful!]:

The launch of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called (it means, roughly translated, “Moon Craft-1”) comes about a year after China’s first moon mission. The Indian mission is scheduled to last for two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect its surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or I.S.R.O. Allusions to an Asian space race could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due for a visit to China later in the week. (link)

Most of the Times article on the event focuses on the “Asian space race,” between India and China. Some more coverage in the Indian newspapers here, here, and especially here. The ExpressIndia story has the most technical information about the trip I’ve seen:

Earlier in the day, Prof J N Goswami, director of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, who is also the principal scientist for the Chandrayaan-1 mission, spoke about the possibility of finding helium-3 on the lunar surface. “Although generating power through nuclear fusion of helium-3 is a distant dream, but the possibilities are immense,” he said. The samples brought to Earth by the Apollo mission have indicated that Iron titanium oxide traps helium-3 molecules on the lunar surface, he said.

Goswami said he-3 content is very low. For every 100,000 helium-4 molecules, there is only one helium-3 molecule on the lunar surface. Besides, the scientific community is yet to simulate the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion. But, if Chandrayaan-1 is able to locate probable areas for finding helium-3, that in itself will be a very big achievement. It will help eliminate the two stages of producing deuterium from hydrogen and then producing helium-3 from deuterium, he added. (link)

Though I can hardly claim to be an expert on the science, from what I’ve been reading I’m skeptical at the outset about the search for uranium or helium-3 on the moon, mainly because I’m not sure what they would do with these materials even if they were to find some — build a lab? Bring it back? (Can anyone find more detailed accounts regarding the specific scientific goals for this mission? What exactly is going in Chandrayaan-1’s various payloads?)

One could argue — and I’m sure some will — that it’s hard to justify spending lots of money on a mission to the moon, when India obviously has lots of other issues to contend with right now.

I can see the objections, but I still think it’s pretty cool. Events like this can have huge symbolic significance, and I hope the launch tomorrow goes well. [UPDATE: It did. The rocket is supposed to reach the moon in fifteen days.] Continue reading →

Something to cleanse the palate

Posted on by

After a weekend of discussing all the hate and intolerance surrounding the U.S. Presidential campaign, I just couldn’t go to bed without doing something to help cleanse our collective palate of the distasteful business. And so, let me point you to some cute pictures and a story in the Daily Mail that will help you feel all warm and fuzzy again…for a few moments.

When two white tiger cubs were born during a hurricane they had to be separated from their mother after their sanctuary flooded. However they have since found an unlikely surrogate mother in chimpanzee Anjana, who has taken on the role of caring for the cubs….

The two-year-old chimp has been helping keeper China York care for the 21-day-old cubs at The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS) in South Carolina.

‘Mitra and Shiva, were born during Hurricane Hannah,’ said Dr Bhagavan, founder of TIGERS. “During that time everything flooded in the sanctuary and they had to be moved into the house as their mother became stressed.

‘It was important for their safety that they were separated.’

Placed into the care of infant animal care giver China and her chimpanzee companion, Anjna, the cubs have become almost inseparable from their new motherly figures. [Link]

There are a lot more cute pictures embedded in the article.

Continue reading →