Reuters moves to India in a big way

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Financial news and information giant Reuters announced it would shift 50 per cent of its data operations to India and add 860 workers by the end of next year. [source]
This will change the look of Reuter’s work force considerably:
[Reuters] will eventually employ up to 10 per cent of its workforce in India …The move is part of the information giant’s “Fast Forward” programme, which aims to cut staff numbers by 3,000 to 13,000 in a bid to drastically reduce costs. [source]
While Reuters is enthusiastic about Indian tech workers, they seem to be less interested in India’s journalists:
The Bangalore centre will also employ a small number of journalists who will report on company news coming out of the United States, though Reuters has stressed that the 20 Indian journalists are not replacing any US workers. [source]
Personally, I’m waiting for the news industry to outsource their anchors to India. I mean, you can get any skin color and any version of an american accent you want in India. Even simulated American anchors would be no less real than the plastic faces that sit behind newsdesks now, and they would cost alot less. Given that the evening news has shrinking ratings and usually loses money, why not make the changes where they count?

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Our Karnatic Brothers/Sisters/Aunts/Uncles/Mothers/Fathers ;-)

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Razib @ the ever excellent Gene Expressions links to a story on the genetic structure of the Kannada-speaker – Gene Expression: Genetics of Karnataka populations

For South Asians readers, Genetic structure of four socio-culturally diversified caste populations of southwest India and their affinity with related Indian and global groups:
The microsatellite study divulges a common ancestry for the four diverse populations of Karnataka, with the overall genetic differentiation among them being largely confined to intra-population variation. The practice of consanguineous marriages might have attributed to the relatively lower gene flow displayed by Gowda and Muslim as compared to Iyengar and Lyngayat….
Standard caveat, don’t read too much into one study!

Consanguineous was word of the day a little while back. 😉

India / Pakistan Set the Example…

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Though not exactly the type we want many to follow – Saddam cited Indian, Pak tests to justify WMD pursuit – The Times of India

WASHINGTON: Deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain used Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests to justify his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the chief US weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told a US Senate committee on Wednesday. ”Saddam observed that India and Pakistan had slipped across the nuclear weapons boundary quite successfully,” Duelfer told a Senate panel following the submission of his report.
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Iran got nuclear help from India?

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I don’t know, because I don’t have a subscription to The Economist. Their online edition does however post the first paragraph of what must be a good read about the recent accusation that Indian scientists were passing nuke information on to Iran. The Economist usually gives more behind the scenes coverage than most of the press.

MIGHT Iran secretly have succeeded in winning the co-operation of both of those arch nuclear rivals, India and Pakistan? The father of Pakistan’s bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted earlier this year that he sold uranium enrichment secrets to Iran, Libya (which says it got a bomb design thrown in) and North Korea. Now the United States has fingered two senior Indian scientists…

What kind of help did India provide, and how significant is its impact? The Asia Times does give us some insight into the story:

The State Department did not detail the specific offenses by the two scientists, but officials said it involved alleged assistance to Iran’s nuclear program during the first half of 2003. Analyst Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, was quoted by news agencies as having speculated that the sanctions may relate to India’s breakthrough development of an economic way to produce tritium, a radioactive isotope used in nuclear bombs. The US and other Western countries accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.

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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 punjabi al-Queda?

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The funeral of al-Qaeda suspect Amjad Farooqi has taken place overnight at a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

….Farooqi … [claimed that he] had been a personal guard to Osama Bin Laden and had recruited up to 400 men from his own district to fight a jihad, or holy war…. Farooqi had been wanted in connection with two assassination attempts on President Musharraf last December. Farooqi was also indicted for involvement in the kidnapping in 2002 and subsequent beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl [BBC]

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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USAAF vs. IAF – revisited

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Military junkies may have heard about a recent training exercise b/t a US Air Force fighter wing against the Indian Air Force. The Americans apparently got their buts whipped.

One of my favorite military blogs – Strategypage.com – has more of the backstory on what really went on (quoted in full here cuz Strategypage’s permalinks don’t work) –

October 6, 2004: More details have come out about the “losing” performance of U.S. F-15Cs (from the Alaska-based 3rd Wing) against India’s air force in the Cope India air-to-air combat exercise earlier this year. The Air Force and some members of Congress have used the “failure” to justify the need for new F/A-22 and F-35 fighters. Some are calling the results a demonstrated weakening of American air combat capabilities

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