Somalia in tatters again

Mogadishu is once again the most dangerous place to live in the world, but we have displaced the Islamic government. In the 15 years that Somalia had no government (as opposed to a dysfunctional one), no one bothered about it. When the Islamic courts came in, the governments of the world gave Ethiopia tacit support in its fight against them.



The EU has appealed to the Somali President to intervene! Wow, the same president that had no real power until Ethiopia showed up to help it.



http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71805

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Matrubhoomi

Watched this movie called Matrubhoomi. The acting is great (few Hindi movies can boast of that), and good direction.



The movie has a really tragic story, which is sadly much closer to reality than I would like. It is about a young girl who is "married" to  a five brothers (there were some press reports similar to this) and her survival through regular rape and torture.  Horrors like this are still going on in this world and most of us turn a blind eye. How do we get out of these nightmares?

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Could Naboj save scientific publication?

Anyone who has tried to read a scientific journal knows how complicated getting access to them is. If you don't live in the US or Europe, you have to working at a pretty wealthy organization to be able to access the latest research. It is mostly because of the established publishing clique that the inefficient practice still abounds. I would love to see the day that all scientific articles are published to be freely accessible by all citizens of the world. Science advances not by restricting information but by making it available to everyone. Open systems would also allow automated tools for information harvesting (did I make that term up?).

The physics and math people had understood this long back. So they set up http://arxiv.org . arXiv is a great resource with all the latest research available for free and on time. But it has the drawback that the articles haven't been refereed. Now there is a new open reviewing system -- Naboj. Naboj allows anyone to review the papers on arXiv. It will be interesting to see how well this process works. I hope someday every technical publication will be similarly available.

IEEE needs to reform

From there Mission page:

Vision



To advance global prosperity by fostering technological innovation, enabling members' careers and promoting community worldwide.



Mission



The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

Let's check that with reality:

1. They require the copyright for papers to be transferred to them and preprints to be taken down once the article is published. Of course, their journal subscriptions are so cheap that most people in the world can't afford them. Section 7 of their copyright policy allows use of public domain articles. But see http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html for contrary actual practice.
2. They don't disclose how much they spend on lobbying efforts. In the latest financial report, I saw $60m for membership and public services. I am assuming public services includes lobbying.
   
   
3. IEEE opposes H1B visa program. They also oppose "off-shoring". The idea of being able to protect domestic wages by simply restricting others from coming in is bogus. People need to wake-up and realize that national economies are slowly giving way to international economies. Protectionism is also another name for inefficiency. Markets may not be entirely efficient, but the increasing possibility of separating the workers from the market means, protectionism is only going to hurt the US economy. The US is still a pretty good place to do business in spite of higher wages because of lower taxes, consistently enforced laws and highly skilled worker pool. Try protectionism and that's going end pretty soon.
   
   
4. They support software patents.
   
   
5. They support tax credits for a whole array of things. Tax system has been overused over the years as an instrument of policy instead of a revenue collection system. No need to burden the system with credits for things that companies want to do anyway. The trouble with the R&D scenario today is not incentives, but disincentives of the quarterly reporting phenomenon.
   
   

To be fair, they have some decent positions too:

1. They support reverse engineering.
2. They have come out somewhat in support fair-use limitations on DMCA, though I think their stance is not strong enough.

I will post again if I find more information.

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Thou and You

Once upon a time, you used to be the plural form of thou. Then the language changed and you became the formal way of addressing a superior. For some reason, thou stopped being used. The only place it shows up is in the King James Bible and some ancient text that is still read (Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc). These days, because of association with the Bible, thou has come to take on connotations of respect, while you is the egalitarian second person pronoun. Interesting how they flipped positions.

Economics and Political Weekly

The "Economics and Political Weekly" is a pretty erudite publication that is reportedly one of the more influential ones that affect policy formation in India. I read their analysis of the budget for 2007-2008. Have to admit, it reads like a peer reviewed paper, but is on topics that actually are of interest to normal people.

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