Leaving Uganda - Sepia Mutiny

Book review for "Child of Dandelions"
http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005267.html --- We've talked about it here before: In 1972, Idi Amin gave all 80,000 Asian Indians living in the Uganda 90 days to pack up and leave. As the BBC reported on August 7, 1972, "Asians, who are the backbone of the Ugandan economy, have been living in the country for more than a century. But resentment against them has been building up within Uganda's black majority. General Amin has called the Asians "bloodsuckers" and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth."

State of the Art - Grocery Shopping Made Easy - NYTimes.com

The company itself says that it will replace the laser scanning mechanism with a  camera. What stops iPhone from building this app into it ? What stops the next line of microwaves which will come with displays and wiFi/Zigbee connections from having this app. What is the company going to make out of this I wonder ? The idea is pretty cool though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/technology/personaltech/19pogue.html?8cir=&_r=1&emc=cirb1&pagewanted=all --- The mission of this $400 device is to eliminate trips to the grocery store. The hardware component is a bulbous bar code scanner, dressed up in Any-Décor White and mounted on a countertop stand, an undercabinet bracket or a wall mount. It offers a color screen on the front, a laser scanner underneath and a Wi-Fi antenna inside that connects to your home wireless network. Each time you're about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

Meet Mukesh Ambani - India’s Richest Man - Biography - NYTimes.com

Anand Girharadas writes about Mukesh Ambani in the NYT this weekend.
I totally dont see the point of this article though. Whats wrong with this guy, why is he comparing Ambani to Gandhi.
"In the last century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was India's most famous and powerful private citizen. Today, Mr. Ambani is widely regarded as playing that role, though in a very different way."
In no imaginable way do the Ambanis seem to be doing anything that will help India unless it happens as a unintended byproduct of their "pursuit of wealthiness".
Anand seems to be a fairly good with some other articles (you can see on his blog). Is he reflecting whats in the minds of the young "India Shining"? We, the young India, are moving too fast to even know what Gandhi did for us.

Freedom of choice: Harnessing the benefits of an open approach to system design - 6/13/2008 - EDN

I was reading this article  " EDN : --- Freedom of choice: Harnessing the benefits of an open approach to system design "
Looks like what the author is trying to say is that in an ideal world we would have the ability to use a single set of tools which would allow us to graphically describe our system using boxes to identify the major components and interconnects. Also these tools will let us describe any glue logic in plain English. Then with the push of a button map the design to any FPGA device. Also there is a point about need a platform that will help us do this.
But then this is a need in the ASIC industry too. IF we had all the IP blocks you would just connect them up with GUI or scripts. I wonder if he is trying to say that for the set of applications that typically map to FPGAs this is more the case. I can see a lot of value in building a generic design on the system designers desk. But this is hardly a new thought.

However what if for small blocks which are prone to more bugs because of late changing specs, what if I could get my synthesizer to map them to FPGA like blocks, which could be loaded through the scan chain.

NatGeo : Smart Chimp

There is a whole series of videos on natGeo on smart apes.

EETimes.com - Intel CTO rethinks analog as computational problem

I like the Camera example he uses. But this is an idea being pursued by a TI as well, why is it continuously being packaged as a new idea. I can understand  trumpeting new milestones along achieving this goal.

EE Times --- Rattner used the evolution of photography as an example. "Except for the light from the complex lens creating a digital image, nothing much has changed in the camera since film has gone away. Now if you replace the lens apparatus with a computational 'light field', then you can use software to choose which image among many possible light field images you want to capture. "The problem moves to the computational domain and the focus and depth of field can be adjusted at will at the time of image capture," added Rattner. The camera and lens can then be simplified, a good thing since today's mechanical lenses are at the limit of their optical performance. If radio design is considered as a "computational problem," this would allow one radio to act as many. Rattner said this would dramatically simplify radio architectures by utilizing fewer transistors to implement many radio modulation schemes.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Boy, 9, rides US subway alone

Wow I never realized that parents in the west live in such constant fear. At 10 most kids in India go to school by themselves.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7449795.stm --- A US woman who let her 9-year-old son travel on the New York City underground system by himself has been dubbed 'America's worst mom'. Lenore Skenazy's actions have sparked a huge debate about parenting. Heather Alexander reports from New York. Story Tools

Omizutori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omizutori --- Omizutori (お水取り), or Water-Drawing festival, is a Japanese Buddhist festival that takes place in the Nigatsu-dō of Tōdai-ji, Nara, Japan. The festival is the final rite in observance of the two week-long Shuni-e ceremony. The rite occurs on the last night, when monks bearing torches come to the Wakasa Well, underneath the Nigatsu-dō Hall, which according to legend only springs forth water once a year. The monks draw water from the well and offer it first to the Bodhisattva Kannon, and then offer it to the public. It is believed that the water, being blessed, can cure ailments. The water is actually drawn into two pots, one pot containing water from the previous year, and another that contains the water from all previous ceremonies.

theAtlantic | Free will

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/primarysources --- What would happen if no one believed in free will, but instead assumed that all their actions were predetermined? For one thing, according to a recent study, we'd end up with a lot of greedy cheaters. A psychologist and a marketing professor asked two groups of undergraduates to read passages from a book by the biophysicist Francis Crick. Students in one group read a passage that argued against the possibility of free will, while students in the other group read a neutral passage on consciousness. The subjects then took a basic arithmetic test on a computer but were told that, because of a glitch in the program, the computer would automatically feed them the right answer to each question unless they pressed a key to stop it. The computer secretly recorded what they did. The researchers found that those students who had read Crick's argument against individual agency were substantially more likely to cheat, and that they showed less faith in free will than their counterparts in a follow-up survey. The authors conclude that even if free will is an illusion, it is "an illusion that nevertheless offers some functionality" when it comes to encouraging moral behavior.

India Together: Diary of the displaced at Bawana Resettlement Camp - 07 June 2008

Interesting question that Kalpana Sharma poses. We do see richer people moving to the suburbs in the US. Also an important note about

http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/jun/ksh-sweptoff.htm --- In industrialised countries, suburbanisation has meant the rich move out of cities and commute to work. They can absorb the additional expenditure. In our country, the poor are being forced to do this. Why should the poor be compelled to pay the price for the creation of the 'global' city? Can we not envisage an 'inclusive' city that caters to the needs of all its citizens? At the moment, it would seem that the planners of cities like Delhi see these as mutually exclusive

Feminist research!!
Explaining this, they write: "Methodologically, feminist research differs from traditional research because it actively seeks to address and account for the power imbalances between women and men, and between researcher and subject. It is also a strategy for challenging the social inequality built into mainstream research methods. Most significantly, it recognises and builds on the standpoints and experiences of women in particular and other marginalised groups in general."

In other words, you don't study women as subjects but study everything from the perspective of women. The results of applying such a lens to research are very different as is evident from this particular study.

New Zealand seeks to curb livestock's gas emissions - Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-burp8-2008jun08,0,6244547.story --- Livestock produce an estimated 20% of the world's methane output, which also comes from landfill sites, coal mining, rice paddies and other sources. Methane and the even more potent nitrous oxide make up about half the greenhouse gases that New Zealand adds to Earth's air. Most of it rises from bucolic pastures where the country's iconic sheep and cattle graze, chewing, regurgitating and chewing again, and pumping out methane -- the bulk of it in their belches.

Would it be better to stop drinking milk ?

Cud-chewing farm animals produce a lot of methane because their food passes through a first stomach, called the rumen, where it ferments in a soup of saliva, bacteria and other microbes. Those bugs break down the food for digestion.New Zealand researchers are looking for ways to inhibit or eliminate a group of microbes called methanogens, which transform rumen gases into methane. They're also studying the animals' diet to see whether low-fiber, high-sugar substitutes will help the climate.

BBC NEWS | The capital of Palestinian escapism

This is interesting. Survival of the human spirit once again ? Its not totally unbelievable having lived in Bombay during the riots and bombings. But then its not too difficult to engineer the spirit of this city by controlling the frequency and intensity of violent attacks.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7433063.stm --- Arab TV channels had spent the day broadcasting the final footage of a cameraman killed by a tank shell, and pictures the bodies of five children blown apart in the shelling. Ramallah streets witness activities seldom encountered elsewhere That same night, Ramallah, was having a street party. A stage was set up, with dancers, music and fireworks. It was an event to mark the centenary of Ramallah being accorded city status - death wasn't going to get in the way. Some Palestinians suggest this city is a product of an Israeli plot, to create a place for the foreign diplomats and journalists to visit, and wonder what all the occupation fuss is about.

Op-Ed Contributor - Put a Little Science in Your Life - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01greene.html?ei=5087&em=&en=b8d2f5a9a25f1d82&ex=1212552000&pagewanted=all --- most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science's underlying technical details. In fact, many students I've spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, "Wow, that's science?"