the oldest american 13thc Maya manuscript is now proved to be the real deal

what an interesting news item. 

I quote

Brown University’s Stephen Houston and a team of leading researchers in anthropology and Maya archeology methodically verify the authenticity of the oldest known manuscript in ancient America.PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s.But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America.Stephen Houston, the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and co-director of the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University, worked with Michael Coe, professor emeritus of archeology and anthropology at Yale and leader of the research team, along with Mary Miller of Yale and Karl Taube of the University of California-Riverside. They reviewed “all known research on the manuscript,” analyzing it “without regard to the politics, academic and otherwise, that have enveloped the Grolier,” the team wrote in its study “The Fourth Maya Codex.”The paper, published in the journal Maya Archaeology, fills a special section of the publication and includes a lavish facsimile of the codex.The study, Houston said, “is a confirmation that the manuscript, counter to some claims, is quite real. The manuscript was sitting unremarked in a basement of the National Museum in Mexico City, and its history is cloaked in great drama. It was found in a cave in Mexico, and a wealthy Mexican collector, Josué Sáenz, had sent it abroad before its eventual return to the Mexican authorities.”

When I went to the Mexico Museum, i fell in love with the manuscripts displayed there, the colours, the vibrancy, the art, it was just amazing. One day, I will have my own copy...and a Sumerian Clay tablet :)

Discoveries At Teotihuacan's Pyramid Of The Moon Help Unlock Mysteries Of Western Hemisphere's First Major Metropolis

Kids

I visited these pyramids last nov. and have posted a photo essay so check it out if you can. 

Funny comparisons with the Giza and Saqqara pyramids in Egypt. . Both are old but I was more familiar with the Egyptian ones as we know more about them. I could stand there and imagine the ordinary Egyptians walking living eating loving there. 

But in Mexico it was a different feeling. First nothing. I couldn't hear anything. Not a peep. Yes you could feel the antiquity and feeling of old age but no sense of the people who lived and died there. I usually employ a trick at these old mouldy buildings. Sit and close your eyes, try to tune out the current noises and feel the stones talk to you son. Think of it as your attempt to be so silent that a butterfly lands on you. Then the ancients talk to you. 

It moved me. That kind of an experience changes lives :) I hope you will also experience what I did in saqqara. 

But fascinating. Giant structures and no idea if the people who made these. 

Love

Baba. 

Discoveries At  Pyramid Of The Moon Help Unlock Mysteries Of Western Hemisphere's First Major Metropolis
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/09/990921071513.htm

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Sep. 21, 1999 — An unexpected set of new discoveries in the ongoing excavation beneath the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan may provide critical clues in reconstructing a 2,000-year old history still mysteriously missing from the ruins of the ancient master-planned metropolis, located 25 miles from current Mexico City.

Announced today, the latest discovery at the site is a tomb apparently made to dedicate the fifth phase of construction of the pyramid, containing four human skeletons, animal bones, large conch shells, jewelry, obsidian blades and a wide variety of other offerings. Excavation is expected to continue for another two weeks.

Found by a team of archaeologists led by Saburo Sugiyama, associate professor at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan and adjunct faculty at Arizona State University, and Ruben Cabrera of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the burial contains important evidence that may help archaeologists define and examine a particularly active period in Teotihuacan’s history and perhaps one of the culture’s “defining moments.”

Aztec codices

Kids

I saw these codices in the Mexico City museum of anthropology. They are extraordinarily beautiful works of art. They don't have words or letters. But like the Han script or the mandarin or Japanese or Korean script, they are ideograms. Pictures. The Chinese Japanese and Korean characters have now evolved from the original picture to an idealised character but in these codices, you can see the original diagrams. Each of them tell a story. They are long, anything between 5 to 15 meters long, folded up and people will read from them. 

The colours are vibrant, 600 years since they were created. And I fogged up the glass cabinet by peering so closely at them. 

I'm trying to find a replica of these documents for our home but in the meantime you can read about them here or if kannu goes to oxford, then we can go see them in that museum. 

Absolutely beautiful. And Diya, these are examples of what you want to do, illustrations :) 

Love

Baba

Aztec codices - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codices

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Detail of first page from the Boturini Codex, depicting the departure fromAztlán.

Aztec codices (Nahuatl: Mēxihcatl āmoxtli Nahuatl pronunciation: [meː'ʃiʔkatɬ aː'moʃtɬi]) are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they are largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives.^[1] The colonial era codices not only contain Aztec pictograms, but also Classical Nahuatl (in the Latin alphabet), Spanish, and occasionally Latin.

Although there are very few surviving pre-conquest codices, the tlacuilo (codex painter) tradition endured the transition to colonial culture; scholars now have access to a body of around 500 colonial-era codices.

India has the largest labour market gender inequality

Sad statement, India, the country with the greatest physical labour requirements, exhibits the largest labour market gender inequality.

The author asks a good question.

Since WWII, women in the United States have greatly benefited from job requirements shifting away from physical attributes (“brain”) toward their comparative advantage in intellectual attributes (“brawn”) (seeRendall, 2010). While some of the shifting demand favoring women is related to job requirements changing intra-occupation, a large portion of the decrease in physical requirements is due to a structural shift toward services (Rendall, 2011). Hence, the last 60-years have seen an explosion in job opportunities for women in the United States, coupled with higher wages and relatively large returns to education. Can this structural transformation mechanism provide some insight into gender inequality in developing countries?

So how did they work out?

All the 4 countries, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and India were ranked on their changes between brawn and brain. India, typically, didnt shift the brain demand upwards.

Given factor requirements, , and estimates of “prices,” , the decomposition of individual traits and factor effects on wage changes is given by,

(2)

where ω is the average (natural) log of wages, and bars without time subscripts denote averages over time, e.g., .

Thus, the wage gap from period 0 to t is decomposed into four categories:

1.

Relative changes in standard male and standard female characteristics, given average returns across time.

2.

Relative price changes, given average male and female standard characteristics (including changes in general gender discrimination λ).

3.

Relative changes in skill endowments, given average skill prices.

4.

Relative skill price changes, given average male and female skills.

I am not sure about the usage of average returns across time, that can actually hide quite a lot of rather interesting movements. Perhaps median returns would have been more accurate. Same with the average skill prices. There have been quite a lot of fertility changes as well so that impact needs to be considered.

The policy implications are good enough to be quoted in full

The wage analysis of Section 4 strongly suggests that falling brawn requirements and rising brain requirements can have a large impact on women’s relative wages. Section 5 provides evidence for policies related to improving the labor supply of women.

More specifically, Brazil is a clear example of rising brain requirements and falling brawn requirements significantly closing the gender wage gap. In contrast, India is a striking counterexample, where women work primarily in the highly brawn dependent agricultural sector. Thailand is a good example of a country that experienced major structural transformation within the labor market. This has allowed Thai women greater labor market flexibility and better opportunities to match innate abilities with skill requirements. While some of the gains in Mexico were undone by the rise of maquiladoras (low-brain jobs) in the 1990s, it could be argued that, as countries move along the development path and become richer, gender equality should naturally follow. However, at the same time, policy makers should promote an open environment with respect to education and employment opportunities for both genders. In particular, improving the quality of education will likely help strengthen and develop women’s comparative advantage in brain endowments. This policy recommendation is supported by findings in Pitt et al. (2010) for Bangladesh and Klasen and Pieters (2012)for India.

Mexico also provides a cautionary tale, as suggested by Gonzalez (2001). Mexico pursued manufacturing sector growth in the 1990s. This lead to diminishing returns to brain endowments, and was considered counterproductive when accounting for the effects on female employment opportunities. Thus, if improving gender equality is a goal, policy makers should encourage the development of service sector employment. Specific policies aimed at attracting firms or FDI in the knowledge industry would seem most beneficial in generating greater gender equality in terms of wages. India has started moving along this path relatively recently with its information technology focus (see Winters & Yusuf, 2007), and the results of this paper suggest this is a good first-step.

Note however, that policies just aimed at increasing the knowledge industry might not be enough to persuade women to participate in the labor market. Section 5 provides clear evidence in this regard. Specifically, fostering a good environment for high-quality education is extremely important. However, as can be seen from the predicted gender employment ratios in all countries, higher brain demands still favor men. This means that equal access to education is imperative for the strengthening of female employment opportunities.

In conclusion, a policy aimed at attracting firms to create employment in the service sector (knowledge industries) with good access to education for both men and women should result in greater gender equality in terms of labor market outcomes

net net, educate women, more and more and more….and reduce their fertility impact..

The Country That Stopped Reading

this was a seriously tragic piece of penmanship. How sad.

I quote

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

and then this sentence

We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that in secondary school we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.

how sad, eh?

and then this final kicker

But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training.

this is what is quite true, the government is afraid.

A bookshop called as Gandhi in Mexico

How interesting.

Another great ad of Gandhi Bookstores in México.

The phrase is a twist of a popular Mexican pickup line “¿A qué hora sales por el pan?” that literally means “At what time do you get out to buy bread?”.

Gandhi bookstores is known for their witty campaing to promote reading and culture in general.

Here is their facebook page.

I will have to visit them the next time I am in Mexico City fascinating.

Visualising the decline of empires

This is brilliant. The bumps and humps and splits have meaning, keep an eye out on the splits.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

India receives $27 bn in remittances in 2007

Way to go, do more and more, get rid of this habit of getting monies from government bodies and multi-lateral bodies. Savings, investments and personal funds transfers are far more economic and effective than other flows and do more for the poor than all the gods, religious leaders, NGOs and governments combined. Read and applaud. I quote:

The top five recipients of remittances in 2007 were India ($27 billion), China ($25.7 billion), Mexico ($25 billion), the Philippines ($17 billion), and France ($12.5 billion), according to the report titled 'Migration and Remittances Factbook 2008'.

"In many developing countries, remittances provide a life line for the poor. They are often an essential source of foreign exchange and a stabilising force for the economy in turbulent times," said Dilip Ratha, senior economist with the World Bank, and co-author of the report.

But found that figure for France curious, why are people remitting money into France?

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

An Iranian upset with a Moroccan in Mexico!

Sounds like a bloody globalisation joke to me! Read and wonder!

MEXICO CITY - Iran’s ambassador angrily demanded that a Moroccan artist withdraw from an art exhibit in Mexico a photograph he deems offensive to Islam, before it provokes a diplomatic crisis, exhibition organisers and media reports said.

The photograph of a vagina covered by a Mosque-like dome "is considered an offence to Islam" by Iran’s Ambassador to Mexico, Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri Abyaneh, and "he has addressed his protest to (the artist) Fouad Bellamine...asking him to withdraw it," an organiser of the Puebla Festival told AFP.

"The two had an argument and the ambassador left in a huff," said the source, who asked not to be identified.

The Proceso weekly said the ambassador has accused Bellamine of insulting Islam and has warned that "if the picture continues to be exhibited it could provoke a diplomatic crisis between the two countries."

The exhibition organiser said the matter was out of his hands, saying: "It’s up to Fouad Bellamine and Mexican authorities to decide what to do."

The 57-year-old artist, in a statement given to AFP in Rabat, said there was no profanity in his work. "Its very serious and unacceptable to turn my work into an act of provocation that demands to be censured under the threat of a culture war."

He added that he never intended any harm to Islam. "My work is open to all interpretations. The viewer is free to see in it whatever he wants."

Puebla state culture authorities told AFP that so far there has been no official demand from the Iranian Embassy to take down the photograph.

They organised the Mirages exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa to run from November 16 to February 3 at the San Pedro de Puebla museum.

Technorati Tags: Mexico , Iran , Morocco , Freedom of Speech , Humour

Which nationality provides the most engaged employees?

Well, as it turns out, it is Mexicans, followed by Indians! But seriously, Towers Perrin have found that there is a significant engagement gap amongst global employees. I quote:

¾ Employees do not believe their organizations or their senior management are doing enough to help them become fully engaged and contribute to their companies' success, according to a new global workforce study conducted by Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm.

Just 21% of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Fully 38% are partly to fully disengaged. The result is a gap ¾ which Towers Perrin has dubbed the "engagement gap" ¾ between the discretionary effort companies need and people actually want to invest and companies' effectiveness in channeling this effort to enhance performance.

The study found that companies with the highest levels of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees than companies with lower levels of engagement.

Technorati Tags: Worker Rights

Transfer Money via mobile phones back home

Mobile phones are about to become the simplest and quickest way to transfer money across borders, under a deal announced yesterday by Western Union and GSM Association, the main mobile phone operators’ body.

The agreement could have a big impact on global cross-border remittances, worth an estimated $300bn a year, and provide a springboard for mobile carriers and Western Union to offer other mobile banking services using “mobile wallet” technology.

Cross-border money transfers valued at up to $100 in countries such as India, the Philippines, Mexico and China – which have large volumes of remittances from migrant workers – will be an early priority of the deal.

Brilliant idea, see how it will work:

Under the scheme, mobile operators will connect to Western Union’s existing global money transfer system, which processed some 17 per cent of the world’s remittance volume in 2006.

Once connected to the Western Union service, mobile operators will be able to use their own “mobile wallet”’ software to enable person-to-person mobile money transfers over Western Union’s cross-border remittance network.

Very interesting news indeed!, I love it. But what do global banks do to cater for this? Between this and the hawala, they are missing out on the micro payments industry.

Mind you, this will have another very big impact on counter terrorism and will make it easier for the terrorists to transfer monies.

Technorati Tags: Mobile Communications , Financial Institutions , India , Philippines , Indonesia , Mexico , China , Terrorism Financing