To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize – Voltaire

Not much to say beyond saying that this is a great quote, cuts straight to the core of human behaviour and society. As a libertarian and freedom of speech absolutist, this is clearly very important.

Two US bloggers were banned from entering UK. This is clearly a failure of the Sharansky test. The book is very good, and the test is simple:

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a "fear society" has finally won their freedom.

I saw so many people wittering on along two lines, “i support freedom of speech but…” that but means you are not a freedom of speech supporter.

Second was, what kind of a society are we producing if we allow people like these guys in? Well, as the Sharansky test says, we are living in a fear society. USA is happy to have freedom of speech, but here in the UK?

ESPHOKS on the Home Office Minister, bah

The Centroid

Kannu

We like the idea of centres. Centres of gravity. Centres of concentration in yoga. Our human architectures look for centres. When we look at humans we seek the centre and people whose faces are symmetrical around the centre are considered better looking. Our home has its centre in the kitchen or living room. London's centre is measured from charing cross. Financial markets are mean reverting - an example of coming to the centre. People tend to congregate in crowds and centres. Recognise this tendency and therefore you can take advantage of it. Learn how to create your comfort spot. Learn how others come to the mean or centre. Learn why people are so attracted by the concept of centres. 

Fascinating to see the calculations so if you are interested in cartography or geography or economics or history or demographics or anthropology this article will be good to read. 

Love

Baba

The  Centroid | Orion Magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7377

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On the road with the population of a restless nation

By Jeremy Miller

Published in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion magazine

ON A WARM DAY in March 2011, I find myself in the back seat of a white, government-issue Chevy Suburban, rolling over spongy pasturelands in the sparsely populated foothills of the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. The vehicle is being piloted by Brian Ward, a geodetic advisor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dave Doyle, the chief surveyor with NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey division, sits in the passenger seat, looking intently at a dashboard-mounted GPS screen. “Almost there. Just a little farther on,” Doyle mutters as Ward slaloms through an agitated herd of beef cattle.

We are aimed at the mean population center—or centroid—of the United States, a hypothetical and highly mathematical point calculated every ten years as part of the decennial census. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population center is “the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all 308,745,538 residents counted in the 2010 Census were of identical weight.” Picture that if you can.

“Looks like we continue on and then veer left,” says Doyle, a gregarious man with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, glasses resting precariously at the tip of his nose. The edge of the pasture gives way to a stand of leafless hickories and dogwoods covered in white blooms. Due to the unusually warm weather, the small, four-petaled flowers have emerged a few weeks earlier than usual.

After God: What can atheists learn from believers?

Kannu

I have what can be called in Facebook speak as a complicated relationship with God throughout my life. I believed in him then became an atheist and then a firm believer when you two were born and have now settled into a situation which can politely be described as a secular spiritual humanist. 

Don't believe in religion. Hinduism is a good philosophy. It's great for historians and for people who want to exercise their mental muscles. All religions are powerful in terms of the hold they have on their worshippers. So whatever you decide to believe in, be careful of religions son. They are on the retreat and that's when they are the worst. 

Love

Baba

After God: What can atheists learn from believers?
http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/religion/2013/03/god-dead-long-live-our-souls

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From the art series “A Place Beyond Belief, 2012” by Nathan Coley. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Jonathan Derbyshire writes: Jeremy Bentham, his disciple John Stuart Mill once wrote, would always ask of a proposition or belief, “Is it true?” By contrast, Bentham’s contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mill observed, thought “What is the meaning of it?” was a much more interesting question.

Today’s New Atheists –Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens principal among them – are the heirs of Bentham, rather than Coleridge. For them, religion – or the great monotheistic faiths, at any rate – are bundles of beliefs (about the existence of a supernatural being, the origins of the universe and so on) whose claims to truth don’t stand up to rational scrutiny. And once the falsity of those beliefs has been established, they imply, there is nothing much left to say.

The New Atheists remind one of Edward Gibbon, who said of a visit to the cathedral at Chartres: “I paused only to dart a look at the stately pile of superstition and passed on.” They glance at the stately pile of story and myth bequeathed to humanity by religion and quickly move on, pausing only to ask of the benighted millions who continue to profess one faith or another that they keep their beliefs to themselves and don’t demand that they be heard in the public square.

How to Be a Stuffed Animal

Kannu

Your didu's father was a big game hunter. Like teddy Roosevelt. In our house in Allahabad we had variety of animals mounted and framed. Tigers leopards cheetah crocodile antelope bears. for a young child, entering the drawing room in the dark was scary with the glass eyes glinting at you. 

We got some back in Bhopal, bear skins, cheetah head deer skins etc. can't complain son. It was a different time and world. Your Didu went hunting and she was a crack shot as well. I've done my share of hunting as well but it's no longer considered 'good'. So I do my hunting with a camera. 

So why do people do it? Pretty much the same reason why people go on a roller coaster. For the thrill of it. 

So it goes. 

Love

Baba

How to Be a Stuffed Animal - Lapham’s Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/how-to-be-a-stuffed-animal.php?page=all

 

The fire that destroyed P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was the spectacle to end all spectacles. It started in a basement shortly after noon on July 13, 1865, and spread with an energy befitting the museum’s restive owner. By midafternoon it had attracted an audience of thirty thousand to the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in Lower Manhattan. As the Prince of Humbugs’ palace of wonders hissed and cracked and roared under the pressure of its own combustion, so the crowd responded to the conflagration with cheers and shrieks and “uncontrollable laughter,” reported the New York Times.

Gone were the flea circus, the loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which the disciples of Jesus had sat, the hat worn by Ulysses S. Grant, the waxworks, the Feejee mermaid, the taxidermy displays of “monkeys in all imaginable attitudes, stuffed and waxed and furnished with curiously wrought glass eyes, sacred white cows filled with hay, monstrous turtles varnished and stuffed, camels with humps, zebras with the traditional 365 stripes, lions with shaggy manes, and tigers with beautiful skins.” These, and tens of thousands of other curiosities and collectibles, the entire contents of Barnum’s Wunderkammer, were all incinerated.

Buzz Bissinger Shopping Addiction Story

At first, son, when I read this, I was amazed and felt quite superior thinking of this chap as a muppet. As a person whose clothing skills range from boring off the shelf ill fitting suits to crack exposing shabby jeans, the idea of spending 1/2 million dollars on Gucci clothes is preposterous. 

Then I figured, actually I'm guilty of obsessions and addictions as well. I used to smoke for decades! So that was an addiction. 

I'm obsessed with buying books and to a lesser extent watches and cuff links. It's long past the point that I can logically justify buying more books as I already have more than enough unread books to last me couple of years. It's tough to beat addiction and obsessions. 

So salutary lessons kannu. Avoid. 

Then again, what are the heights of humankind other than obsessions and addictions? Where would we be without Michelangelo's magnificent obsession with art? 

Tough one eh? 

Love 

Baba

Buzz Bissinger Shopping Addiction Story: Newsmakers: GQ
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201304/buzz-bissinger-shopaholic-gucci-addiction?printable=true

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Newsmakers

In the past few years, I’ve bought eighty-one leather jackets. Dozens of boots and leather gloves. I’ve purchased pants that cost $5,000. I own a $22,000 coat. This winter I took a tour of Milan’s Fashion Week (all expenses paid by Gucci, in appreciation of my many, many purchases), where I spent tens of thousands more and began to seriously grapple, once and for all, with a compulsion that could cost me more than just my life savings. My name is Buzz Bissinger. I am 58 years old, the best-selling author of ‘Friday Night Lights,’ father of three, husband. And I am a shopaholic

Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?

Kannu

Here's an interesting take and I agree with it. To get ahead help others. More you help the more you get better. 

I'm not talking about a Mario Puzo style godfather help in terms of 'I collect favours' son but just helping out. 

Do read that book if you get a chance son

Really is good strategy :) 

Love 

Baba

Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/is-giving-the-secret-to-getting-ahead.html?&pagewanted=all

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Just after noon on a Wednesday in November, Adam Grant wrapped up a lecture at the Wharton School and headed toward his office, a six-minute speed walk away. Several students trailed him, as often happens; at conferences, Grant attracts something more like a swarm. Grant chatted calmly with them but kept up the pace. He knew there would be more students waiting outside his office, and he said, more than once, “I really don’t like to keep students waiting.”

Grant, 31, is the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Wharton. He is also one of the most prolific academics in his field, organizational psychology, the study of workplace dynamics. Grant took three years to get his Ph.D., and in the seven years since, he has published more papers in his field’s top-tier journals than colleagues who have won lifetime-achievement awards. His influence extends beyond academia. He regularly advises companies about how to get the most out of their employees and how to help their employees get the most out of their jobs. It is Grant whom Google calls when “we are thinking about big problems we are trying to solve,” says Prasad Setty, who heads Google’s people analytics group. Plenty of people have made piles of money by promising the secrets to getting things done or working a four-hour week or figuring out what color your parachute is or how to be a brilliant one-minute manager. But in an academic field that is preoccupied with the study of efficiency and productivity, Grant would seem to be the most efficient and productive.

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

Children

An interesting article on doing a PhD in humanities. 3 down and 4th in planning, I can well recognise this situation. Nobody will pay you to teach others which really don't show clear economic value. 

You may not like it but the brutal truth of the matter is that your main piece of education is to ensure you get paid for the value you add. 

Take it forward as a teacher. If what you teach isn't valued then you won't get paid. As simple as this. When I became a professor, I got into trouble with my senior colleagues when I would say things like, ' if a student hasn't learnt then the teacher hasn't taught'. That kind of personal responsibility is unfortunately missing in quite a lot of teacher which is the reason why they tend to blame parents, universities, governments, students, porn, you name it. 

Bad. 

So my advise is to do a good first degree what will give you skills to earn a shed load of money and add huge amounts of value.  Then do a graduate degree to boost your earning potential. 

Then comes a PhD. Or two. Or if you are mad as me then more. Study for a PhD for pure pleasure and the fun of learning. Otherwise it's a bit dodgy. Of course the situation is better in economics and business PhD's :) but if you want to do a history or English lit PhD then forget it. 

Love

Baba

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846

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By Thomas H. Benton

Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.’s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience.

It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.

All these years later, I still get letters from undergraduates who stumble onto that column. They tell me about their interests and accomplishments and ask whether they should go to graduate school, somehow expecting me to encourage them. I usually write back, explaining that in this era of grade inflation (and recommendation inflation), there’s an almost unlimited supply of students with perfect grades and glowing letters. Of course, some doctoral program may admit them with full financing, but that doesn’t mean they are going to find work as professors when it’s all over. The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions.

Islamic vs. conventional banking: Business model, efficiency and stability

This paper was quite an interesting one. I quote the abstract:

How different are Islamic banks from conventional banks? Does the recent crisis justify a closer look at the Sharia-compliant business model for banking? When comparing conventional and Islamic banks, controlling for time-variant country-fixed effects, we find few significant differences in business orientation. There is evidence however, that Islamic banks are less cost-effective, but have a higher intermediation ratio, higher asset quality and are better capitalized. We also find large cross-country variation in the differences between conventional and Islamic banks as well as across Islamic banks of different sizes. Furthermore, we find that Islamic banks are better capitalized, have higher asset quality and are less likely to disintermediate during crises. The better stock performance of listed Islamic banks during the recent crisis is also due to their higher capitalization and better asset quality.

Given the financial crisis, this new model has quite a lot of lessons for the modern Anglo Saxon world of banking. I've been keeping track of Islamic Finance for some time now and this has changed quite a lot since the early days.

 

The profit sharing element has quite an interesting behaviour as they end up being better capitalised with lower loan losses. In other words, they become a sort of private equity type of firm. Interesting, I wonder if these lessons will be learned by the regulators? Or force bad performing loans to be converted into equity like the CoCo’s? Not for the banks but for the firms to which the banks have lent to?

Won an award for communications

So I receive this press release.

 

I was just going to delete it when I saw something and burst out laughing. Check out the spelling of Communications and Professional.

Good heavens, Lauren Rutter will get into serious trouble…But the irony of a press release claiming being the leader of communications and professional services and making a typo on that was just too delicious not to point out.

Ben-Hur and Lew Wallace: How the scapegoat of Shiloh became one of the best-selling novelists in American history

I have to admit Kannu that I never read the book. The film itself made a huge impact on me. Judah Ben hur was such a heroic man, going through huge trials and tribulations. Then wins through. Takes revenge over his enemies. Becomes wealthy. Finds god. For I had seen the movie as a teenager. My aunt took me to see this in Calcutta. Big impression. Do see it if you can. 

But the backstory is perhaps more interesting. Didn't know the link to the carnage of the civil war. 

Fascinating. 

Love

Baba

Ben-Hur and Lew Wallace: How the scapegoat of Shiloh became one of the best-selling novelists in American history. - Slate Magazine
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2013/03/ben_hur_and_lew_wallace_how_the_scapegoat_of_shiloh_became_one_of_the_best.single.html

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Gen. Lew Wallace, circa 1861. Courtesy of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection/Library of Congress

You can also listen to John Swansburg read this piece using the player below:

I.

Lew Wallace was making conversation with the other gentlemen in his sleeper car when a man in a nightgown appeared in the doorway. The train was bound for Indianapolis and the Third National Soldiers Reunion, where thousands of Union Army veterans planned to rally, reminisce, and march in a parade the New York Times would later describe as “the grandest street display ever seen in the United States.” It was Sept. 19, 1876, more than a decade since the Civil War had ended. Wallace had grayed a bit, but still wore the sweeping imperial moustache he’d had at the Battle of Shiloh. “Is that you, General Wallace?” the man in the nightgown asked. “Won’t you come to my room? I want to talk.”

Robert Ingersoll, also a veteran of Shiloh, was now the nation’s most prominent atheist, a renowned orator who toured the country challenging religious orthodoxy and championing a healthy separation of church and state. Wallace recognized him from earlier that summer, when he’d heard Ingersoll, a fellow Republican, make a rousing speech at the party’s nominating convention. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God.

Ingersoll talked until the train reached its destination. “He went over the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell,” Wallace later recalled. “He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano.” The arguments had a powerful effect on Wallace. Departing the train, he walked the pre-dawn streets of Indianapolis alone. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, “a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.” He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, “if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.”

But how to go about such a study? Wallace knew himself well enough to predict that a syllabus of sermons and Biblical commentaries would fail to hold his interest. He devised instead what he called “an incidental employment,” a task that would compel him to complete a thorough investigation of the eternal questions while entertaining his distractible mind. A few years earlier, he’d published a historical romance about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to modest success. His idea now was to inquire after the divinity of Christ by writing a novel about him.

It took four years, but in 1880, Wallace finished his incidental employment. He called it Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since.