Barbara Liskov - The Power of Abstraction

Software Defined Networking

My friend N.K. dislikes networking, and in the technical talk here, Professor Scott Shenker, from the University of California, Berkeley, in the first 16 minutes explains why. As the Professor says, if one of his computer science students designed some of these networking protocols, he'd be failed. The good thing is that Software Defined Networking can change that.

Be warned, this is a technical talk. The second frame below begins the talk from the beginning; but first link starts the talk in at a point where there is a message that is useful for everyone.
http://youtu.be/WVs7Pc99S7w?t=36m47s

Non-survivor

Dropped Quantum Diaries Survivor from the blog-roll for promoting a really bad pseudo-scientific pre-print.  Being open-minded is one thing, having your brain fall out is altogether another.

Definitely not a hummer!

Definitely not a hummer!, a photo by macgupta on Flickr.

Seen this morning.

Racism in India

The Washington Post published an article: A fascinating map of the world's most and least racially tolerant countries.  India shows on the map as the least racially tolerant country.

Tracing back from the newspaper article to the journal article to the source of data lands one at the World Values Survey  (WVS) (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org).  The data on which the findings are based date to the WVS survey questionnaire from 2005, that was conducted in India in 2006.  The questionnaire was translated into Hindi by some of the researchers, back-translated to English by someone else, and the whole thing was approved by the WVS organization.  The Hindi master was used for translation into other Indian languages.   The way the polling was conducted was exit polling - random selection of voters at randomly selected polling stations at randomly selected constituencies in 19 or so states.

So this is a survey of opinions of actual voters, at the time of elections - which are emotionally charged times, when politicians appeal to caste and religion.

Apart from the WVS survey, there was an extensive questionnaire on the respondents's background.  I do not know whether this was done before or after the WVS questions.  I do know that question 18 of this background survey had a very fine-grained division into castes,  including e.g., just for Muslims - Muslim Ashraf, Muslim Mughal (Khan),  various Muslim OBCs, Muslim Dalit, so you can imagine the categorization of Hindus.  Why this is significant is if one asked the background questions before the WVS questions one has made the respondent intensely aware of his caste identity at the time of posing the WVS question. (Question 77 of the background survey is about language.)

Apart from that the survey question in Hindi was posed with "jaati" for "race".   "Jaati" does not have the meaning or connotations of "race".  "Jaati", IMO, is best defined as an endogamous group of people, and a connotation will be "having a common profession".  The survey question is at the end of this post.

Anyway, what is interesting is that the WVS survey was conducted in India in 1990, 1995, 2001 also.  I do not know how the survey sample was conducted or how the question was posed in those surveys. Let us assume that these are all comparable.   Then what is interesting - more so than the absolute numbers - is the trend.

(You would not like to have as neighbors people of different race.)
1990 - 34.9% (2500 respondents)
1995 - 36.0% (2040 respondents)
2001 - 41.8% (2002 respondents)
2006 - 48.8% (1786 respondents)

For comparison (You would not like to have as neighbors immigrants/foreign workers)
1990 - 36.6%
1995 - 33.1%
2001 - 38.2%
2006 - 39.2%

Interestingly, only in the 2001 survey the question was posed (You would not like to have as neighbors people of the same religion)
2001 - 41.8%.   I'm guessing this must be a data-entry error.

"Jaati"-intolerance seems to have risen, while intolerance of  immigrants/foreign workers - who are almost certainly of a different jaati,  but maybe common profession -  has not moved much.

Assuming the data at each survey is meaningful and the data is comparable across surveys, this trend in jaati-intolerance is to be explained - why has it risen so much in 15 years?

Krugman in the New York Review of Books

About the current economic woes, and the policy response, Krugman wrote:

I’d argue that what happened next—the way policymakers turned their back on practically everything economists had learned about how to deal with depressions, the way elite opinion seized on anything that could be used to justify austerity—was a much greater sin. The financial crisis of 2008 was a surprise, and happened very fast; but we’ve been stuck in a regime of slow growth and desperately high unemployment for years now. And during all that time policymakers have been ignoring the lessons of theory and history.

It’s a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It’s also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right.

Please to read in full.

Stephen Colbert on the dark art of race craft

Here, a great demolition job.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the dark art of racecraft

Prof. Delong's preface is worth noting,  or you can jump straight to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history.

The Dumbification of America

A real school science quiz. Read and weep!