Recently, Jon Stewart did his piece “I give up” on the fact that while the conservative political machine has been painting the public workers (like teachers and firemen) as the greedy ones who are bleeding the nation dry, in reality it is corporations like GE who are the problem because despite a $9B profit, GE paid $0 federal income tax and got a $3.2B tax benefit. Now, it is considered common or ‘folk’ knowledge that corporations exploit all kinds of tax loopholes and lobby heavily to ensure that tax laws leave open several such loopholes to be exploited by these corporations. So why are Stewart and other so-called pundits (including news organizations) ‘noticing’ this only now and then pretending to be salient critics of such incongruities while at the same time depending on, and profiting from, the very same incongruities.  This is a real conflict of interest! One that hasn’t been adequately explained. My discussion on Facebook yielded the following.

Acting as an apologist for Stewart and co, it may be argued that while they do not contribute anything for affecting a change or reform, at least they enlighten us on how we are being screwed over. Many times we already know of it, and at other times it is news. But through it all, at least we are laughing. Then again, isn’t it a little bit like Elle Driver reading to Budd “Sidewinder” about the effects of the venom of a Black Mamba, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, after the Black Mamba has bitten him?

Consider the following hypothesis: This country has been and continues to be run by corporations. The political parties and the politicians are simply the means by which the corporations accomplish this task. There is little by means of democracy or “the system” that can be done to change this fact. So the only way out is perhaps a revolution. And the existing power brokers want to ensure that it never happens. They do this by drugging the entire population, intellectually speaking, of course.

The population in question can be broadly classified as the “vulgar” (and by vulgar I mean “Of or associated with the great masses of people”) or the “intelligentsia“. The vulgar have the numbers and the ability to affect such a revolution, but they lack the knowledge and understanding to accomplish this; the intelligentsia, on the other hand, have the knowledge and the intellect to use the abilities of the vulgar to affect the revolution. So together, the population can make the change. But they will not, by design. And here’s why.

Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and others serve as the ”opiate of the vulgar” in ensuring that the masses focus their frustrations, anger, and action against all the wrong issues and attribute the problems to all the wrong reasons. Simultaneously, Stewart, Colbert, and others serve as the “opiate of the intelligentsia” by convincing their audience to simply resign to the status quo and not advocate for any change. Between the two, the existing power structures ensure perpetuation.

In fact, the whole offensive has bipartisan support. So it’s fair to say that there are very few within the government (including the opposition party of ‘no’) who do not support the action. The major reason for this offensive is that Gaddafi did not heed to the demands of the international community which were [source]:

Gadhafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misurata, and Zawiyah, and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas. Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya. Let me be clear, these terms are not negotiable.

The fear is that if the unrest in Libya is left unchecked, then the entire nation will descend into a civil war and there will be human-rights violation which is something the US is very protective of. Interestingly, doesn’t that argument make a stronger case for intervention in Darfur, Sudan? Of course it does! Then I wonder why the US refuses to intervene in what is arguably the worst abuses of human rights since Pol Pot’s regime.

We all know what’s going on. Libya has oil and Gaddafi is not a US puppet. Currently Gaddafi is struggling to maintain complete control over Libya. So US has both the motive and the opportunity to change the status quo. To place a figurehead in an oil-rich country so as to serve US interests. Lately, the US is being increasingly candid about its intentions. I suppose it is a good thing in some ways. For example, the US intentions are now common knowledge, instead of being mutual knowledge.

The most blatant admission of America’s abandonment a moral compass came from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen. Given that the rulers in Bahrain and Yemen have used force against anti-government demonstrators, and yet, the US has intervened only Libya and not Bahrain or Yemen, Admiral Mullen argued [source]:

“We haven’t had a relationship with Libya for a long, long time. The Bahrainis and that country has been a critical ally for decades. So we’re working very hard to support a peaceful resolution there, as tragic as it has been, and we certainly decry the violence which has occurred in Bahrain. I just think the approach there needs to be different”

Translation: We don’t like Gaddafi, and so it’s ok to attack Libya under this pretext. We like the rulers of Bahrain and Yemen. They serve US interests. So we don’t care enough to ensure that the citizens of those countries actually enjoy any of the freedoms that we constantly exalt. All that matters is that US is better off in the end. Everything else is just a puppet show anyway.

Thanks to KM’s blogpost, I was alerted to the news that Hari Prasad, an engineer who worked to expose the vulnerabilities of the EVM has now been arrested. Despite Hari Prasad and his colleagues’ evidence of the vulnerabilities in the EVM, the Election Commission of India maintains that the EVMs are tamper proof. This despite evidence of rampant irregularities in the 2009 elections, and a growing concern about the security of EVMs worldwide.

J. Alex Halderman, Hari K. Prasad, and Rop Gonggrijp

I am inclined to suspect that the Election Commission and the political parties are all in collusion to ensure that elections are rigged and done so quietly. Why else would an engineer be arrested for actually speaking the truth?

In fact, the EVMs are so poorly designed that the data isn’t even encrypted in the memory! Come on, even I know to design an EVM better than that! This means anyone can tap into the machine and read/write/alter the votes. Worse, you can actually attach a look-alike piece of hardware to the EVMs to alter the votes remotely through a mobile phone [For details here's the full technical paper]. This looks more like a feature than a bug to me. It looks like this was a deliberate decision to make it easier to sell the election results to the highest bidder.

Welcome to India, a country whose democracy has been bought and paid for. Anyone trying to rock that boat will not be tolerated.

First, let us examine the evidence that Newsweek provides for the decline in social media.

1. Wikimedia, after its prolific crowdsourced contribution to wikipedia until 2009 is now having to recruit contributors and editors.
2. According to Technorati, professional bloggers are on the rise whereas hobbyist loggers (like your truly) are on the decline. 95% of the blogs are abandoned in the first month. A recent Pew study found that blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as bloggers declining by half between 2006 and 2009.
3. Although twitter is adding users at an astounding rate, 90% of tweets come from 10 percent of users, according to a 2009 Harvard study. Between 60 and 70 percent of people signing up for twitter quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report.
4. While Digg won readers, it struggled to sign up voters and has forced a change in format to something similar to social networking sites like facebook.

Based on this evidence, the article concludes that (a) traditional social media and citizen journalism is on the decline (the only kind of social media that is rising is the one that allows people to connect with each other), and (b) the underlying reason for it is that people are lazy to do anything for free. Do you seen the disconnect in logic and reasoning here?

Novelty Factor

First, the author of the article chooses to completely ignore the ‘novelty’ factor that we are all subject to. Remember Beanie babies? How about the slinky? They were wildly popular when they first came out, but not any more. Is that because people got too lazy to play with them? Of course not! It’s the novelty factor. When people see something new, it will pique their interest and exploring it is a reward unto itself. So people tend to use it to understand it. Once the novelty factor wears out, only the hardcore fans and professionals occupy the niche. It explains everything from the slinky and beanie babies to blogs and twitter. I am surprised that the article did not make that connection.

Knowledge Generation and Gatekeepers

Second, how is wikimedia’s recruiting professionals a bad thing, even for social media? Knowledge validity is not subject to democracy. Evolution does not become untrue simply because a majority of our population choose to be Bible thumpers. If wikimedia intends to be taken seriously as a repository of human knowledge, it needs gatekeepers and knowledge generation agents who are proficient in their respective areas and disciplines. This ensures that crowdsourced information and knowledge is validated before it pollutes the repository.

Blogging Bubble

Third, the article seems to assume that everyone who started a blog started it with the intention of generating information to be shared with everyone. This is simply not true (see my earlier point about the novelty factor). In fact, I will hazard to assert that a vast majority of the people who blog do not do it to generate more information for the benefit of others. I will go on to claim that it is blogs like these that tend to be abandoned. Therefore, no harm no foul there. Its not too different from an economic bubble really. Much like the housing bubble gave people and unrealistic estimate of the value of real estate, the ‘blogging  bubble’ (the phenomenon of everyone on the street having a blog of their own) gave people an inflated idea of the amount of information being generated by the blogsphere. When the blogging bubble is now burst, and the `decline’ or `stagnation’ we see now is the intrinsic value of the information generated by the blogsphere all along.

Not everyone wants to generate, aggregate, and share information. That is perfectly fine. If you have everyone generating information, who is there to consume, process, and utilize them?

Social Cliques

Fourth, when it comes to platforms like Digg, they started with the premise that if a lot of people “dig” something, then the odds are that a lot more people will be interested in the information that has been “dug”. As it turns out, the premise is not entirely accurate. People are members of relative small cliques, and the value of the same piece of information varies  from one clique to another. Digg recognized this and has taken steps to reorganize the site to align with this empirical observation. That does not mean that social media is on a decline. It simply means that we are using social media differently.

Motivation for Congnitive Tasks

The article also talks about putting rewards in place to encourage participation in sites like Gawker and Huffington Post and then makes a snide remark about the next step being offering money. Obviously Newsweek is ignorant to Dan Pink’s presentation on what motivates people. The bottom line is that money is not a motivator for cognitive tasks. (in fact, it could be a de-motivator) Most of traditional social media is about performing cognitive tasks to generate and collate information.

As a counter example, consider Linux, an open-source operating system. It has thousands of contributors who work for free to create a product and then give that product away for free! It’s not too different from many bloggers who blog for free and allow viewing the blog for free. It’s not too different from wikimedia contributors adding and editing articles. Linux and the open-source movement is as strong as ever. So why should blogs and wikimedia be any different?

Then what about the data and statistics that the article presented? Well, that simply says that a whole bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon for all the wrong reasons and now they getting off the bandwagon. But there are still a sufficient number of individuals left to carry on the movement.

So yeah, the blogsphere is maturing, wikimedia is maturing, not dying. All that means is that now on, the only people who are going to get on to traditional social media are the ones who see an intrinsic value in the participation, and I am pretty confident that there will be plenty of people. Think Linux, think open source. This is no different.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b84cDbZrFIk

By his own admission, it took over nearly 40 seconds to do his research on this matter! Must be a new personal record for him!

Now if you looking for an article from a bunch of losers who have spend more than 40 seconds to get their facts and analysis right (like anyone cares about that!), I recommend the article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 25th, 2009 [link].

They even have boring bar graphs to present the data related to heart surgeries in Narayana Hrudayalaya (in Bangalore, India) vs. the US (national averages):

image source: The Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com/

Enough said. If it wasn’t for Glenn Beck, I would have never known the truth!

Delta Airlines

I was supposed to be in Costa Rica this week. Instead, I am still in College Station, Texas. Mostly because I am not Muslim. Sounds weird? Read on.

My flight on Delta Airlines was supposed to leave on Friday at 5:45 AM from Houston International Airport. I got there about an hour before departure and they stuck me on a self check-in line. I tried getting the staff’s attention but they didn’t seem interested in helping anyone. During my time there, I saw stretches of as long as 10 minutes during which the check-in counter was completely unmanned with a line of over 10 groups of passengers waiting.

After about 20 minutes of waiting on the self check-in I finally managed to get to the check-in kiosk. When I try to check-in it says it can’t do the check-in because I don’t have an US passport and I have to get to the manned check-in counter. Now they stick me at the end of the manned check-in counter which is taking 10 minutes or more to check-in each passenger. As I inch closer to the front of the line a new guy shows up to take over the counter, and simply leave the counter and starts walking around the line of people waiting for check-in.

He looks distinctly south Asian seems to be curiously interested in the diaspora in the passenger line. He walks up a group in front of me and two groups (all south Asian) behind me. He asks both of them where they are going to. Then he proceeds to ask “Hindu or Muslim?” It left me a little more than surprised! When they say Muslim, he says he’s Iqbal from Pakistan and just pulls them out of the line and proceeds to expedite their check-in for a flight that over an hour away while mine is in 30 minutes.

I try to get his attention but he doesn’t seem to care. Finally after he checks them in, he comes up to me. I try to check in and he says “Sorry, you are too late for the flight. I’m afraid you have missed it.” And this is my fault how? He says “You should have been here 2 hrs before the departure” Never mind the fact that I was passed over for two groups of over 5-6 passengers each. And then when I ask about reschedule he just scorns at us and walks to the next Muslim group behind us!

At this point I was shocked! What the hell! I really was out of words to verbalize my thoughts. Finally the lady in the First Class check-in section noticed that I had been waiting for over 40 minutes and calls us over to see if she could help us. By then it was too late for her to help us with anything. She was trying to be as helpful as she could, but the damage was done. All other tickets/flights to Costa Rica was too expensive for me to afford. I was enraged at the discrimination and wanted to speak with the person in-charge. Guess who was in-charge! Yup, it was Iqbal! So much for redress. In fact, the staff there went so far as saying that they have no obligation to reschedule my flight or give me a single penny of what I had spent buying the ticket, and it was their generosity that they were even entertaining a reschedule at higher prices. (Behold the glory of deregulated capitalism).

With all options exhausted, all I could do was drive back to College Station, all the the while wondering “If only I was Muslim….”

So yeah, when I saw those T-shirts, I knew they were Aggies and they were Republicans. As Obama was giving his acceptence speech we started hearing comments that went something like this:

He made it because the pussy liberals wanted to vote for a Muslim…

Looks like gold teeth and fried chicken will now be tax exempt…

We now have an Arab for a president. Looks like the terrorists won…

And I am not making any of this up! The Aggies are notorious for their racist views, hate, and bias anyway. Patrix’s post on Egg tossing at Obama (an incident which made it to the national news) should give you an idea of how antiquated (almost pre-integration) the Aggies’ ideology is. In fact, my earlier post about Aggie racism suggests an institutional investment in fostering such an environment.

In other news: Here’s what a (University of) Texas football player Buck Brunette had to say about Obama’s election “All the hunters gather up, we have a [nigger] in the White House.” That’s what he said on his Facebook page and was promptly kicked off the team.

Last week, the US government took control over Freddie Mac and Fanny May, the financial gaints of the US martage industry (and the crisis). Now this puts the US government in control of nearly half of the $12tn mortgage debt in the US (The two companies have lent or underwritten about $5.3 trillion mortgage debt in the United States). There have been several justifications for why such a bail out was necessary, and how it will keep the US economy from collapse, blah, blah, blah…This is not what this post is about. This post is about personal and ideological consequences of this action.

Just to put things in perspective, the $5.3tn bailout has effectively doubled the US national debt over a weekend! Worse, the actual cost of the bailout is yet to be ascertained, simply because nobody knows how much of the $5.3tn debt will be defaulted and/or foreclosed, and not to mention that ensuing expense for when the companies dispose off the foreclosed property. If the actions of the Republican VP pick — Sarah Palin — with respect to selling off state property is any indication of government attitude towards it, then looks like the US government will be losing a lot of money in the near future.

Now the question is, where is all this money going to come from? Answer: the tax payers. So suddenly some third party’s unwise decision to give a sub-prime loan to thousands of unqualified individuals, a decision that I had no control over, is now going to cost ME money?!?! And again, I have no control over that decision! Am I the only one who thinks its a wee bit backwards?

Personal gripe aside, this decision does have other implications which may seem too ‘theoretical’, but should be of significant concern. The decision has implications on social and personal responsibility, ideological fidelity, and designed failure of free market economics.

• Social and personal responsibility:The bailout decision is essentially sending the following message: “If you screw up, no worries, we will try to fix it at no cost to you!”. So essentially we are divorcing people from the responsibility of their actions. The bigger the screw up, the better are chances of the the government fixing it for you. So if you are going to screw up, make sure your screw up big, really big. Once people start hurting from it, then you will be taken care of. In the end, there is nothing to dissuade you from doing it all over again. This is effectively rewarding bad behavior! And this will come back to bite you in the back eventually.
• Ideological Fidelity: The environment for such reckless lending as set up by the continual deregulation of the economy since the 1980s. Such deregulation was in the ‘spirit’ of capitalism and free market economics. If the over arching idea is that a free market will correct itself, then why is the government messing with it by bailing Freddie and Fanny out? If such an intervention is necessary, then what does that say of the capitalistic and/or free market ideology? So is free-market capitalism a flawed concept, which when allowed to run its course will only serve to destabilize the economy? If that’s the case, then would the US come out and say it? Of course not! Its the free market and the pursuit of the ‘American dream’ that makes US so special, so different, so un-Russian, so un-commie. Yet, when it comes down to it, this bailout is largest nationalization in the history of mankind! Now people want to have the cake and eat it too. They want a deregulated economy because free market is where progress is at, and every time it fails (which it inevitably does), either no one wants to suffer through the market’s natural correction process (which is painful at the least), or the system itself is too flawed to correct itself and hence requires an socialistic style intervention. Despite that its still free market. What kind of the ticking time bomb is this? Eventually, US’s debt with catch up with the economy, and then what? There wont be any more money for bailouts. So are we looking at a spectacular collapse in the future? Mostly because all the stake holders are opportunistic hypocritical prostitutes of their ideology?
• Failure of the free market: Is this bailout a slam-dunk argument against free market economy? That’s a tough question to answer. It is quite possible that a free-market system is sufficiently robust and self-stabilizing to a point where it can recover from any jolt it might receive. However, the stakeholders in the economy are not willing to labor through the painful transitional period when the economy is healing itself. In fact, such acute volatility may be a part of growth, maturation, and robustness of the economy (much like a human body learning from experience, diseases, and vaccinations). Such intervention, however, has effectively thwarted the healing that the economy must naturally go through in order to be more robust in the future. So effectively, this bailout is building a near-fatal design flaw into the free market operations to where such bailouts are going to be an infinitely often deal, or there will be more economic crashes and collapses to look forward to in the future.

So either way you look at it, the bailout is at best a short term relief which addresses the symptoms but exacerbates that root cause making the economy even more vulnerable that before to such volatility.

Image source: allposters.com

Abhinav Bindra has been conferred with an honorary doctorate from SRM University in Chennai. Honest! I am not making this up! Ask Times of India and NDTV!

What amazed me was that very few were outraged by it, well except for Mekhala. She makes a good point in her blog post when she asks, “…[sic] but doesn’t a doctorate demand academic scholarship?” That’s a very good question. But, before I move forward I must add the disclaimer that I am awfully proud of Abhinav Bindra, and I am not undervaluing what he has achieved. It is a great accomplishment for both the nation, and him personally. However, I do believe that giving away doctorates to people who have not demonstrated academic excellence, and who have not made original contributions to their field only serves to devalue the degree. But what is the value of a PhD degree anyway? One way to ascertain that is to see what it takes to get a PhD (full merit, non-reservation style).

Most universities follows a format similar to what I am about to describe. They may skip some steps, or combine them with others, but by-and-large, this is the procedure. First, there is the whole selection process which serves to filter out the people who just aren’t the doctorate type. Second, depending on which university you go to, there are courses you have to take and maintain a GPR of at least 3.0. Third, you have to take what are called ‘qualifiers’ in which you take tests in your area of specialization for 9 hours (that’s right, 9 hours) within a day and a half. Forth, you have your preliminaries in which each member of your doctoral advisory committee (your Guides/Advisors) will each give you either an open problem (i.e. a problem whioch hasn’t been solved yet), or ask you to appraise current research in your area. After you have answered these questions to they satisfaction you go ahead with your proposal. Fifth, is your disseration proposal. In your proposal you clearly outline what you intend to achieve for your PhD and argue why the problem you have chosen to tackle is unsolved, novel, interesting, and how it will benefit your community, and above all argue that the problem is difficult enough to merit a PhD. And then begins the actual research which often yields peer-reviewed publications in internationally renouned venues like conferences and journals. This is how you demonstrate that your research is novel, interesting, and tackles unsolved problems. And finally, you write your dissertation, and then defend that dissertation to your adviosry committee’s satisfaction, following which you are deemed worthy of a PhD.

Now, one might argue that the rigor, training, and dedication that fetch Bindra an olympic gold is comparable to the rigors of a PhD program. However, there is a universally singular critical element to a PhD effort which Bindra does not meet: original contribution to the field. If Abhinav Bindra had come up with a novel technique for shooting, or had contributed something new to shooting that was the first of its kind — it could be anything from new benchmarking tools to better cross-wires — then I would be more sympathetic to him being conferred a doctorate (I guess that makes a good case for Ajantha Mendis for his carrom ball). However, Abhinav hasn’t done anything of that nature.

Here’s an analogy that might make things clearer: You cannot get a PhD for being the best Java programmer in the world, but you can make a case for something who invents a new programming language that sets a new standard. The same is true here with Bindra. He may be the best shooter in the world, but that does not qualify him for a PhD.

I have no objections to giving him a Khel Ratna, but a PhD? No! There is certain snactity associated with PhD. It says that this person has proved him/herself by going through the process and contributing something new and worth to the community; this person is capable of independent research, and is primed to serve the community by expanding our collective knowledge. By giving away PhDs to people who do not meet such criterion, you have effectively devalued the PhDs of all the people who do.

I guess when I graduate with my PhD, I’d have to insist that I not be called ‘Doctor’, as Robert Heinlein put it best in Stranger in a Strange Land:

I don’t like to be called ‘Doctor’… When they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk-dancing and advanced fly fishing, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

Last month, we lost 6 Aggies. The second Tuesday of this month, they will be honored in the ceremony of the Silver Taps (a solemn ritual that is to be experienced, not explained). This is the first Silver Taps of the year.

The Aggie college newspaper, The Battalion, decided to run an article paying their tribute to the six deceased Aggies. They talked to the students’ friends, family, and compiled a eulogy of all the six students; or did they? The oddest thing was that each student’s eulogy ran from anywhere between 25 lines to 50 lines, except one. Olanrewaju (Lanre) Olusola Sanu’s eulogy was 2 lines long and it read [link]:

The senior chemical engineering major from Houston died on Aug. 2. The Battalion was unable to reach his family for information to compile a story.

Really?!? You couldn’t find out anything about Lanre. Nothing from friends, nothing from Facebook, nothing from his lecturers and professors? Nothing at all? Not even a photograph! Everyone else had their photographs in the article, except Lanre.

This enraged quite a few Aggies. Some of them complained about this on the comments section of the article on the Battalion website. In response to that, the Editors simple disabled comments on the post. Check it out for yourselves, all other articles on www.thebatt.com have comments enabled except for this one!

I wonder why? Does it have anything to do with the fact that he happens to be the only person of color among the six and has an African sounding name? Maybe its ok not to try too hard to find out more about Lanre, and simply ignore when people protest. Maybe this is what politically-correct racism looks like.

For all of you who think I may be over-reacting to the whole thing, Texas A&M (and the surrounding areas) have history of racism. In the past people have attacked international students, charged higher cover charge for non-whites in bars, and made racist videos and posted them online. In fact, multiple assessments have concluded that Texas A&M practices institutional racism [link1, link2].

The world may be changing, but Aggie Racism marches on!