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It is hard if not impossible to tolerate, much less empathize, and patently ridiculous to even think to romanticize, a rich philistine with a paunch. This feeling is shared by not only certain sections of the high society – the only part of society that gets to write, express, and define contempt for all of ‘us’, but by all society.

Among the people of these ‘subaltern’ groups, the ones who haven’t been cleansed by the washcloth of high culture, there is a feeling of inadequacy if not disgust with oneself. They must acknowledge the impossibility of ever joining the erudite, English speaking, trim, Westernized, ever progressing and ever progressive, posh group. The chasm only seems to grow wider every day. Sometimes that impossibility takes the form of anger – who are these people feeling so uppity about their new found pretensions? Their beginnings were probably as vulgar than mine. (Caste and class – the last refuge of the bastards. ) It is as if caught in their pretensions – they have executed a double exile – alienating themselves from their roots, and sending us prematurely to our cultural exiles. But then ‘culture’ was largely lost – if not in migration then in constant contortions needed to feed the ‘family’ since then – so what is left now is an idea of culture, and this hunger - this vast orifice that wants to go on consuming. There is no escaping from it. Perhaps these kids are right, we have nothing to offer. So if they find pretensions of West and find home in it, then so be it. If only, they didn’t humiliate us. How dare they?

Among the manicured words crafted by high intellect, a philistine is ever so precisely caught in a pincer like grip, stripped, and exposed for who he is for who he is – a rat, a cheat, a miser, someone who is ugly, fat, debased, lustful, probably impotent, unblinking and stupid. There is nowhere to run.
We have all seen likes of him for the one thing about philistines is that they all look alike. In the oily paunchy sunburned carcass, there is no vestige of culture, no literacy in the “in” books, and no appreciation of the finer aspects of life. I can sympathize with the poor. They may be romanticized for their ‘simplicity’ and their poverty. They at least don’t invade. But how can one live with people with such overreach, such humdrum mediocrity, such precocious grabbing lust, such vulgarity, such hunger? Where does one go to soothe his cultivated sensibilities?

A philistine is like a ‘ghee’ stain on a Dostoevsky. It defines my connection to all that is vile and deformed, all that I want to escape for the safety of harmonic refinement. When did these people become so vile? How did I not notice before how they had encroached on culture and the air itself, and carved up their names on it like low class Romeos. (Accusations of caste and class fly back.) They are like cockroaches on the bathroom drain cover - too filthy to be squished, too filthy to be tolerated, forever to be despised.

Will they find me out? I torture over whether there exists the possibility of being good enough, whether one so completely learn all the parlor tricks that it iron outs the ugly wrinkles of low breeding, whether I can stand any scrutiny and be affirmed of higher birth, higher learning, one of them. There is always that wracking doubt that somehow the occasional word in the wrong accent, the inability to use chop sticks, will conspire and give away the years of low existence and expose you for the philistine you are. There is always that threat, if one grows up and takes up the pretensions. It is one thing if you grow up with it. Otherwise you grow up anxious and eager to stamp every little echo of your own vile history, eager to disassociate with all that is debased in your own bloodline. That is all you can do.

One day, they catch themselves staring at the mirror, and find a tired sunburned unhealthy face, the distorting paunch, their brow wrinkles when they think about the constant demands of family and friends caught in their own vicious cycles, and realize the absolute impossibility of doing better. To be branded a philistine is much like being accused of the original sin – however much you may try, you cannot rinse it off. You must acknowledge the impossibility of transcending it.

It is infinitely easy to be casually vicious, and generally feted if done with faux consideration. But writing hence pursued is a failed enterprise. It then becomes nothing more than carrying class pretensions. The mark of good writing may not be redeeming humans, whom the dominant cultural script has left warped, but bringing to light the lived emotional and social experience of people, and the historio-socio-cultural contexts remains the key to it. This ability - to write well- continues to rest upon both ones’ ability to look into oneself, and into others, and ability to look from other person’s perspective.

Preamble and Introduction

Words like “bubble” are often used to describe the shielded seclusion in which students live their lives on the Stanford campus. And the words seem appropriate. After all, Stanford has three quarters of a mile long boundary that separates it from civilization, and even that ends in the latte swilling yuppy favored downtown lined with preppy shops that further abuts multimillion dollar homes. For reaching the vast seething humanity, one has to go further – to the nether regions of Palo Alto and cross in to East Palo Alto – a task so mythically treacherous that none will volunteer, except of course to buy the chic necessities from IKEA.

But even in the famously elitist bubble, there are poor and opportunities to interact with different socio-economic strata – the employees. Stanford spends about $3.2 billion to educate its roughly 15,000 students. The figure amounts to roughly $213,000 per person. About half of this money is spent on salary and benefits of the numerous employees who work for this university. The employees range from $15/hr bus drivers or $10 hr/cafeteria workers with no benefits to administrators who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Either way you look at it, we have a substantial breadth of employees with whom students can interact and form partnerships to help some, and learn from others.

The shrinking conversational space

Most transactions involving cross-class interaction are economic interactions – when you buy something, or involving paid service – gardening, or somebody delivering a Pizza. Most of these interactions have been commercialized and bureaucratized – with greeting protocols and thank you protocols – leaving little space for real human to human interaction, exchange of stories etc. In places like India, middle class still knows about the lives of their maids, the neighborhood grocer, etc. and in knowing about their lives they form genuine bonds of empathy that help them look at policy imperatives, and their own lives much differently. I would argue, more trenchantly, that it is in fact through knowing lives of people in other classes that one can build genuine empathy (as opposed to an identity contingent one which wrist band wearing concert attending bobos – in David Brooke’s term – feel towards people in Darfur.) The damning fact of modern life is that even empathy has been implicated in superficial identity issues, and hence people’s empathy lies within the contingencies imposed upon the selling and buying, largely absent of information or care.

Proposal

So my proposal is to create a program on campus that heightens awareness of people towards people from other classes around them with whom they (don’t) interact every day. The idea is to connect students, faculty and professional staff with workers from lower economic strata, for example, cashiers, janitors, construction workers, or drivers, on whose services they rely upon every day. Another related idea would be to create an umbrella program that gives guidance to people toward helping them form hyper-local chapters (that extend to say one building) where they form programs to interact with people or help them in some way. For example computer science students may formulate a program to help teach computers to janitors while social scientist may work with them to improve their literacy skills. Obvious returns to them would include a better understanding of the world, a chance to practice or even learn a foreign language (in places where janitors are fluent in say Spanish or some other language) and myriad of other benefits that accrue from learning about the complexities of living as economic underclass.

Detailed Proposal:

There are three parts to the proposed program –

• Create a website that has the following capabilities -
  1. Matching students with Employees – The website will allow for students and employees to fill in detailed profiles and will allow them to search for possible “matches” based on their skill set, issues they want to work on, and availability (time).
  2. The website will allow for two kinds of matching – project by project matching – which will allow for students to sign for say helping an employee with his resume’ or a government form, longer term mentoring or symbiotic matching which will assign a student to an employee for a duration of an academic year.
  3. The website would feature a blog and wiki to advertise successful ventures and collaborative opportunities.
• Since creating excitement around the program is essential, the program launch will be followed by an advertisement blitz including posters, presentations, and get-to-know sessions.
• The other crucial part of this venture is ‘hardware’ – be it computers/supplies or other things that are needed to make some of this possible. So there would be two parts to the same – one would be a craigslist kind of central clearing house list that will post want and available ads, and the other would be a central fund which students or employees can draw on to make of this happen.

Budget and estimated costs

I deal with the cost attributed to each point of the program individually -

1. Building the website would indeed take the most effort and money given that we need a database and other social networking tools. The web design and development would cost initially about $5000 if we hire students within Stanford to help us with it.
2. Advertisement and information campaign would be broad and we expect to spend about $2000 on the campaign.
3. Hardware fund would consume the rest of the money ($3000).

Timeline

Web development around the site would take around 4-6 months as the website will go through iterative updates. I expect the advertisement campaign to last for a month to provide an adequate window for people to sign up including some viral marketing campaign via Facebook etc. In all, I should be able to launch the initial campaign within 6-7 months at most.

“There is a possibility of a terrorist attack.” Indeed. There has always been such a ‘possibility’. “There is a heightened possibility of a terrorist attack.” With no temporal end points and no cues as to the scale – the latter will also be true for all time periods, t+1, for the prediction may still bear out in the yet undefined future.

Vagueness is the oldest form of doublespeak. Vagueness in language is often used as a strategy to provide cues to people to interpret the message in a way that is the most ideologically (more broadly - psychologically) comfortable to them. Vagueness not only allows for you to be right without being right, it allows for people to justify virtually all stances and all actions. Think about the word ‘possibility’ which is defined as something that has a chance of occurring. It doesn’t give you cues as to how probable the scenario is or the scale of the ‘possible’ unfolding. It is fair to imagine a lot of times such information is not available but then without it what are we conveying to people, aside from the strategic wink – nothing and everything – all at the same time?

Using vague words that carry a huge corroboratory burden, and whose latent concepts (variables) must unfold only a specific way to justify the argued course of action, allows policy makers to sound logically coherent without being so.

Language constrains our ability to meaningfully understand the world around us. Vagueness is merely one of the most convenient ways via which we can tune out of reality and argue whatever we want to – and that can be strategic or not. In every day usage, an important reason behind why we vague terms is because precise facts sometimes decompose quickly and people are left with nothing more than vague qualifiers that store impressionistic accounts of those facts. Additionally, vagueness allows people to shield themselves from their own ignorance. It is important to note that I am not arguing that people are not strategic actors in everyday conversation and in fact vagueness is often used as a ploy to argue what is ideologically convenient.

The lessons really are twin – if you are a strategic actor – vagueness works and if you are a citizen - be alert to vagueness as a cover for insidious reasoning.

Social Sciences are split into disciplines like Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, etc. There is certain anarchy to the way they are split. For example, while Psychology is devoted to understanding how the individual mind works, and sociology to study of groups, Political science is devoted merely to an aspect of groups – group decision making.

One of the primary reasons the social sciences are divided so is because of the history of how social sciences developed – as major figures postulated important variables that constrain the social world, fields took shape around them. The other pertinent variables that explain some of new disciplines in social sciences are changes in technology, and more broadly changing social problems. For example, the discipline of Communication took shape around the time mass media became popular.

The way the social sciences are currently divided has left them with a host of inefficiencies which leave them largely inefficacious in a variety of scenarios where they can offer substantive help. Firstly, The containerized way of understanding the social world provide inadequate ways of understanding complex social systems that are imposed upon by a variety of variables that range from the individual to the institutional. And secondly, the largely discipline specific theoretical motivations lead academic to concoct elaborate theories that often misstate their applicability in complex ecosystems. We all know how economics never met common sense till of recently. It isn’t that disciplines haven’t tried to bridge the inter-disciplinary divide, they certainly have by creating sub-disciplines ranging from social-psychology (in psychology) to political psychology (in Political Science) and in fact that is exactly where some of the most exciting research is taking place right now, the problem is that we have been slow to question the larger restructuring of social sciences. The question then arises as to what should we put at the center of our focus of our disciplines? The answer is by no means clear to me though I think it would be useful to develop competencies around primary organizing social structures/institutions.

Role of Social Science

Let me assume away the fact that most social science knowledge will end up in the society either through Capitalism or selective uptake by policy makers. Next, we need to evaluate how social science can meaningfully contribute to society. One intuitive way would be to create social engineering departments that are focused on specific social problems. The advice is by no means radical – certainly Education as a discipline has been around for some time, and relatively recently departments (or schools) devoted to Public Health, Environmental Policy have opened up across college campuses. Secondly, social science should create social engineering departments that help offer solutions for real life problems, much the same way engineering departments affiliated with natural sciences do, and try experimenting with how for example different institutional structures would affect decision making. Lastly, social scientists have a lot more to offer to third world countries which have yet to be overrun by brute Capitalism. What social science departments need to do is lead more data collection efforts in third world countries and offer solutions.

Everyday conversation is generally a site for exchanging social pleasantries, exchanging trivia and anecdotes or ’shooting the breeze’, and reaffirming identities, among other things. Occasionally these everyday conversations take the shape of amorphous dilettante arguments about politics and culture, and even more rarely they turn into serious arguments. But the habits of casual argumentation and unfamiliarity with formal argument theory doom most of these ’serious’ arguments. So rather than proceeding teleologically towards better understanding of a topic through measured refutation and agreement, the arguments either become pitched ego fights or exercises in using logical fallacies or non-existent evidence adeptly to ‘win’ the argument or some combination thereof.

“Unethical” (explained later) argumentation can leave people flustered as they realize – much too late – that the other party has changed the entire argument or distracted them with some contestable irrelevant data, or through an outright fabrication.

I use the word ‘unethical’ in reference to argumentation in the paragraph above and it is incumbent upon me to explain what I mean by that. An argument is generally understood as “discourse intended to persuade” and the idea is to stipulate ethics of persuasion. In other words, stipulating that one follow the rules of inference, logic, corroboration, and procedure ‘ethically’. Broadly construed ‘ethics’ in an argument can be seen to convey a person’s conviction in coming up with a better understanding of the issue at hand, and general introspection to all facets of argumentation. Of course ‘ethics’ alone won’t help construct a ‘better’ argument for there are objective criteria for what constitutes a better argument.

I here briefly go over some key tenets, as I see them, of conducting an ‘ethical’ argument.

Issue, Topic, Question

Most ‘arguments’ in everyday life start with an anecdote or an example and not as formally constructed questions. The conversation then slowly slides into an ‘argument’ as somebody identifies the anecdote as a hypothesis and engages with it.
It is important to be alert to this juncture and to take time at this point to think through the ‘hypothesis’, and where possible turn into a broader question devoted to understanding the ‘topic’ underlying the hypothesis. More importantly, it is necessary to pin down the question or hypothesis with more precision. Additionally, one should think through the breadth of the question and see to what degree is the question tractable.

During the course of the conversation one can renegotiate the wording of the question as more information comes along the way and conversants develop their understanding of the topic or as interests shift.

The pattern of argumentation will differ depending on the topic and question at hand. If one is to say argue about a causal claim then one must iterate through possible causes and see which ones apply to what degree and why. On the other hand if one wants to understand historical context around say origins of democracy, the task then becomes listing possible historical aspects including socio-economic and elite key actors.

Hypothesis and Data

One can use deductive or empirical reasoning (or both) to support one’s claims. Both obviously lend themselves to different types of problems. For making empirical arguments, one needs to rely on data and there it becomes necessary to think through how applicable the data is, how generalizable the instance is if you use an instance to say corroborate a claim, and any major data or instances that exist that will rebut the hypothesis or sometimes provide insight into contextual variables. Aside from applicability there is also the issue of how probable each of the datum is and how large the effect sizes are. Of course part of argumentation also involves judging other people’s data. You can judge data using the criteria I describe above.

One may run into problems of insufficient data or unreliable data and there you can choose to continue the conversation at a later stage after getting the data or pursue the argument by making conditional arguments. For example, if X were true, then the following event is likely to occur.

The caveat that accompanies all empirical reasoning is that it is easy to think that you know more than you do, especially about topics that seem familiar but go largely un-inspected. Systematic analysis of an issue will often uncover troubling gaps in one’s own knowledge and one must allay the instinct to fabricate and instead be conscientious in acknowledge the gaps.

Psychology of argumentation

The most pernicious and bankrupt argumentation occurs when the ego gets involved. To avoid it, focus your critiques on the data or argument and offer them in a manner that is broad minded and acknowledges opposing contribution. The unsaid point here is that your commitment should be towards reaching a better understanding of the issue at hand rather than ‘winning’ or whatever that means.

An important part of conducting an ethical argument is to acknowledge gracefully where you are wrong. This habit goes a long way in ameliorating any tensions that may emerge during the course of argumentation.

Another thing to keep in mind is that almost always people don’t start from polar opposites of an argument (that I believe is a function of conversational norm and selection bias as in whom you choose to ‘argue’ with), though there might be sub-arguments where they may have opposing stances. Hence there would be a large number of cases where both arguments can survive.

Avoid Common Logical Fallacies

Straw Man – “A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “set up a straw man” or “set up a straw-man argument” is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent.” (Wikipedia)

You can find other common logical fallacies at the bottom of Wikipedia’s page.

Corporate Beneficence, which was once limited to the rarefied realm of funding Opera Houses and Classical Music, has lately found itself immersed in a variety of ‘charitable activities’ to advance ‘human welfare’.

As identity and consumption have become conflated, corporations have aggressively spent money on a variety of ‘charitable causes’ to reposition their brands.

Apple

“Apple has agreed to host music for an organization that uses African music to help people caught in the escalating ethnic violence in Darfur, Sudan.” MacWorld. Apple really understands its upper middle-class pretend-liberal bourgeoisie customers, whose participation in liberal causes starts with Gay rights and ends with attending music concerts about Darfur, and never ever extends to any substantive political action. By the way, where is Darfur again?

McDonald’s

The mission of Ronald McDonald House Charities is to “provide a “home away from home” for families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at nearby hospitals.” The other, better known, mission of McDonald’s is of course to get those children to be sick.

Coca-Cola

The company which has been accused of depleting ground water resources in rural India and which earned a profit of nearly $5 billion in 2005 announced that it would invest “$20 million over five years to improve global water conservation. The plan is part of the company’s effort to adapt to global warming and to address a crucial constraint to growth in emerging markets.”

Shell

“Shell Foundation’s mission is to develop, scale-up and promote enterprise-based solutions to the challenges arising from the impact of energy and globalisation on poverty.”

Beyond Petroleum
British Petroleum, the company that was once part of the Global Climate Coalition, an organization set up to promote global warming skepticism, and a company that is facing criminal charges for “allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to seep across the Alaskan tundra” (Wikipedia) is now ‘Beyond Petroleum’.

Crystal Geyser

The bottled water company is a ‘proud sponsor’ of “American Forests”.

Walmart

Walmart, which has been widely decried for its low wages, inadequate healthcare benefits, and for ‘burying’ local mom and pop stores (pdf), and a corporation which had a net profit of close to $11.2 billion in 2005, had the following statement on its website, “Walmart charity begins with giving the local community financial support through community giving. Our community giving programs provide direct contributions to the local communities from the Walmart charity fund. Last year, Walmart charity initiatives were to exceed $170 million in support of local communities and non-profit organizations.”

Halliburton

The company sponsors a Charity Golf event. “The 2006 event raised more than $625,000, and over the past 13 years, I’m happy to report that this event has now provided more than $2.1 million to more than 48 local nonprofit charities.”

Bechtel Corp.

The corporation accused of trafficking women in the Balkans, and myriad other charges of fraud in handling its contracts in Iraq generously helped fund an International Center at Stanford University.

A khaki clad western aid worker is helping unload a truck in a sun baked dusty barren place surrounded by black (or brown) faces. It could be any of the countless news clips shown by news organizations about the equally countless number of crisis that continue to rain down upon obscure parts of the world. The clips are ubiquitous and they all look the same and yet nobody notices the egregious role of the western aid worker. If you are still floundering as to exactly what I am getting at then think again about why the western aid worker, who has ostensibly flown around from wherever s/he was living earlier, doing the readily “outsource-able” job of loading or unloading aid from a truck? It is oddities like these that have long dotted the world of aid organizations.

The mission: confounded by the missionary

The modern “aid” industry can trace its antecedents back to Christian missionaries, whose mission was to “civilize the savages” in the colonies and beyond. Hence, it is not particularly surprising that the fundamentalist supremacist mentality of bible thumping colonial front men pervades the NGO aid industry. If one looks closer, one will find that in fact the modern “aid workers” have much in common with the foot soldiers of prior era in their conviction that they are there to help by offering their supreme knowledge to these poor naked subhuman creatures. NGO aid workers, a majority of whom are social misfits, careerists, uneducated ideologues, and bible thumpers, are particularly unsuited in the job of providing “aid”. Their ‘work’, mostly directed towards helping prove their self worth to themselves, translates into being the people who unload the aid trucks. The fact that most have nothing better to offer than physical labor, of course plays a part in their decision to unload trucks and erect tents.

Planners versus “the Searchers”

Dr. William Easterly, an NYU economics professor and a former research economist at the World Bank, in his book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”, argues that the aid efforts led by west have failed primarily because their utopian aid plans are based on the assumption that they know what is best for everyone. While implementing these gargantuan plans, they have sometimes ignored even the basics conditions on the ground. For example, he observes that “The West spent $2.3 trillion in foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get 12 cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.” He argues that the west needs to get away from the model of “Planners”, imposing top-down solutions, and rather adopt the “Searchers” model, that tries to adapt innovations that come from native cultures.

Careerism and Bureaucratization

Rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the NGO industry are partly responsibly for the failure of development assistance to the third world, according to Dr. Thomas Dichter, an anthropologist at University of Chicago and author of “Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed”

Increased bureaucratization has led to demand for “trained professionals” to fill the teeming ranks. Paying heed to the rising demand, “entire college programs have sprung up, such as Wayne State University’s Nonprofit Sector Studies Program (NPSS). The NPSS mission sates, “The nation’s fastest growing sector needs administrators, policy makers, program managers, and advocates who will guide them into the future”" writes Michael Donnely for Peace Corps Online. One may expect that the rising compensation packages at non-profit organizations would attract better talent, instead it has largely meant that the organizations are paying more for the same work or/and are led by ever more ambitious dimwits who want to push for ever larger projects at the expense of some little ones that do work.

The NGO-Ivy league Nexus

In the past two decades, an internship at an NGO has become a right of passage for countless Ivy League undergraduates, primarily in social sciences and humanities but increasingly in fields like biology, interested in pursuing further graduate school education. Experience with a foreign NGO has become the best way for the ambitious ivy educated dolts to pad up résumé’s and impress law or medical admissions committee of their sociotropic ideals. There is little that these self-absorbed individuals bring to third world countries in terms of talent or ability to help but every year thousands of such students are farmed out to NGOs across the world and there they leech money and time from NGOs to get training to hang their mosquito nets and make their calls to mom and dad and make safari trips and learn the language.

NGO workers – what’s so special? Why do they get paid more?

“Government employees have complained their co-workers employed by some non-governmental organizations are getting high salaries that cause socio-economic imbalance in the society. The high-paid workers of NGOs have clouded the status and standard of life of the low-paid government employees. Prestigious social status and high income of the NGOs workers have created envies in the poverty-stricken government employees.” South Asian Media Net “Venting her spleen, Torpikai, a government employee, told Pajhwok Afghan News on Sunday despite 18 years experience she was paid 2,000 afghanis (40$) but her younger and inexperienced neighbour with same qualification was getting double than her salary.” And wages are only part of the issue, real bills pour in from conferences at five star hotels, and extravagant perks enjoyed by foreign aid employees like use of SUVs, PDAs, and stays in five-star hotels. The sad fact is that majority of the “aid” is actually funneled back to pay for the perks and salary of the western aid workers.

Lack of accountability

The logic that underpins all NGO wastefulness is lack of accountability, both in tallying funds and actual accomplishments. Washington Post a couple of years reported that employees in non-profits often times take loans from the NGO funds at no or ridiculously low interest rates. Other egregious ethical violations are also rampant within NGOs. For example, Oxfam, an NGO and a 25% stakeholder of Cafedirect, campaigned vigorously against CafeDirect’s competitors, accusing them of exploiting coffee growers by paying them a small fraction of their earnings.

I would like to end with an excerpt from a New York Times article that passingly compares aid strategies between the west and china.
“The industrial nations conducted a sort of moral crusade, with advocacy organizations exposing Africa’s dreadful sores and crying shame on the leaders of wealthy nations and those leaders then heroically pledging, at the G8 meeting in July, to raise their development assistance by billions and to open their markets to Africa. Once everyone had gone home, the aid increase turned out to be largely ephemeral and trade reform merely wishful. China, by contrast, offers a pragmatic relationship between equals: the “strategic partnership” promised in China’s African policy is premised on “mutual benefit, reciprocity and common prosperity.” And the benefits are very tangible.”

Chaste, who has contributed earlier to the site, critiques an article by the reigning doyenne of Science, Technology and Society, Dr. Sherry Turkle.

Her article can be accessed here -
http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/whitherpsychoanalysis.html

Chaste’s response -

My main issue is that it is a sloppily done article. A thorough piece generally bases itself on a careful theoretical apparatus or produces such solid evidence that most of its claims are very difficult to argue against. This author simply strings together a bunch of speculations, at least 70+% of which have at least equally convincing arguments against them. I simply do not see the point of such pieces, for they are little better than chat-like aggregation of ideas. And her efforts at an MIT-based incestuous self-aggrandizement do little for the credibility of her analysis.

Here are just a few examples to show how very thorough she is in her sloppiness. She talks about the possibility of exploring alternative personas in cyberspace, and how this represents a very different possibility of self-exploration than anything that went before. But isn’t she led to such conclusions by assuming as given that the “virtual reality” of cyberspace is more analogous to “reality” than to fantasy as “virtual” would suggest? Thus, couldn’t a man in his fantasy life in decades and centuries past explore alternative personas based on the films he watched from day to day or the gossip stories he read in newspapers or heard from neighbors? Or take her example of the effect of HCI affection in the shaping of emotions. None of her examples go beyond children aged 10: a time at which they have barely outgrown belief in the tooth-fairy. Unless she can give substantial evidence of emotions in adult lives, why should we distinguish HCI from the countless other things that children set store by? And when she does venture into adult HCI, her ineptness is only laughable. She talks of a man who chooses a female persona as a convenient outlet for his assertiveness. First, the man’s responses are reactive rather than exploration-oriented; second, his choice of a female persona appears to be dictated by little more than convenience. Only in an age of post-modernist sloppiness can the choice of a convenient medium be confused with meaningful self-exploration. And I do not need to tell you that avatars are not aspects or sub-personalities of Hindu gods, but are their incarnations: the latter is a discrete entity at a point in time throughout all space.

And now to the couple of things in this essay that actually sparked my interest. First of course is the definition of what it is to be human, and why I find it rather absurd that humans would ever accord machines a similar status. At one time, I had toyed with the idea that what gives human beings their uniqueness is an arbitrariness induced by biochemical arbitrariness in their responses to various stimuli. But frankly all that is pointless palaver. No one has ever seriously taken any definition of humanity based on objective ideas like intelligence. All those crappy definitions of race were largely based in politics and economics, and what support they got from neutral academics was largely based on those academics being at their wits end to produce a logical rebuttal. What people perceive as most worthy about themselves is inevitably what has always driven their definition of what is human. Thus, there were very few serious Christians who ever subscribed to the racial hierarchies of 19th century race science, precisely because they saw in non-white people the same capacity for Christian redemption that they most valued in themselves. What people regard as valuable can of course change. But let me glance at some of the odds stacked against machine creations. I will stat by assuming a sophisticated persona that is not programmed with a limited set of instructions but is constantly changing itself based on selective crawling of web data. As such it would be a store-house of information and insights on any topic including the manners of various subgroups of our times that a human could only dream of. Given current IP laws, digitally generated personas cannot be owned by the owner of the persona generator. Besides, such persona generators are unlikely to be monopolies. Hence the personas will lack that most important value in human eyes, namely, market value. They will be infinitely reproducible. It is also impossible to conceive of personas as serious stake holders which could accrue value for themselves through participation in the market and in social spaces. Who would allow a persona a serious stake in anything when that demand for a stake could simply be disposed of with a mouse-click? It is difficult to see why personas should be much more effective than the characters in Shakespeare or in Emily Bronte. Claiming this would be succumbing to the seduction by the latest medium: no different from claims by conservatives about the effect of media violence based on an assumed confusion between reality and screen by the audience.

The other point that interested me pertains to the possible psycho-pharmacological uses of such personas. I think she is trying to make the point seem more important than it is by using some trendy term like “psycho-pharmacological.” The fact that she talks about them primarily in relation to children and the elderly points out the less glamorous spin on it, namely, that they are more effective toys at killing time and keeping unproductive people occupied at low cost. She could have pointed out (which she does not) that intelligent personas could be used as effective and cheap socializing tools both for children and for entrants into a new culture. But doubtless that sounds less sexy.

Number of foreign students studying in US increased for the first time in four years buoyed by a 32% increase in number of Indians joining graduate programs. Graduate education in US has become increasingly popular for Indians meanwhile undergraduate population of Indian students in US is still far behind (about a sixth of the graduate population) and for good reason. Here below I try to come up with a guide of issues that an incoming undergraduate applicant may want to think about before coming to US.

Why not?

Finances: Undergraduate education in US is extremely expensive, especially at top-tier private schools, and given the income disparity (in dollar terms) between India and US. In addition, the chances that an international student will get hired right away after graduation with a top-notch salary are slim given visa issues. A prospective undergraduate applicant may also want to factor in the pressure that s/he is likely to come under (or feel) if his/her parents are taking a large loan to finance their education. There is also a good chance that the undergraduate will probably have to work 20 hours per week (or more illegally) to supplement his or her income, which in turn will cut into the study time.

Age and associated factors: Add to the above the fact the relative immaturity and youth that make it harder to adjust to a completely new culture. It is not merely adjusting to a new culture but adapting to it to such a degree, and with enough rapidity, so as not distract you from studies for a significant time.

Why?

Going to a liberal arts college in US allows one a lot of choice in sampling different courses. This kind of choice is relatively absent in colleges in Asia or even Europe. Then there are top-tier facilities, labs, faculty etc. which may make the expense seem worth while. In addition, doing an undergraduate degree will almost certainly improve your chances of doing graduate school here.

If you have considered the above arguments and still want to apply for getting an undergraduate degree in US, then here is the drill –

Decided? Then Prepare

The preparation should ideally start at least about a year and a half before you want to join the school. An international student needs to give TOEFL (Test for English as a foreign language), SAT and generally SAT 2s in at least one or more subjects - especially if you are applying to top universities. English of course would be the main challenge. Given that SAT now has a writing section; it is of paramount important that students develop good writing skills. You may want to engage a tutor to understand “expository” writing techniques. A preparation program can be really helpful especially because you will get to meet people who are in the same boat. Preparation center staff can also provide you helpful pointers on admission essays etc.

Schools: It is foolhardy to limit your choices to Harvard or MIT or two other top universities that you may have heard of in India. There are a lot of top-tier universities in US including Princeton, Stanford, Darmouth, Yale, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Georgetown etc. It is imperative that you apply to at least 8 -10 universities. There may also be an argument for applying to mid ranked private schools like Boston University or NYU for typically they have the dollars to fund top international students. One type of university you don’t want to apply to is - large state universities that never fund international students at undergraduate level and typically won’t do much for your career prospects.

Funding: A lot of top universities engage in what is called “need blind admission”. Chances are that once you are admitted into Harvard or Yale and don’t have the money to pay for their tuition, they will pony up the rest. On the other hand, chances are that your family will still need to contribute a good 10-15 grand an year. It is also a mistake to imagine that all the “aid” from universities will be in the form of grants, a majority of the aid is in the form of subsidized loans.

Application: The art of getting into a US university is self-aggradizement and careful positioning. It is expected that your application will include records of volunteer activity, membership to various clubs and other “leadership” experience. The other important thing in application is how you place yourself academically - here’s what I mean - say, if you are great in Chemistry - give a SAT II exam for Chemistry and get a 750 plus score on it and then write how much you want to get a Chemistry degree in your “Statement of Purpose”. Given the way universities in US work, one can change fields on the first day of the school so you can still do engineering or English literature.

By Deepti Sood

Long lines at security check in, delayed flights, to unprofessional staff, and unclean planes have turned air travel into a virtual nightmare over the past five years. Unfortunately, my job requires me to travel by air nearly every week. As one would expect, I have had my share of exasperating experiences but my recent experience with Northwest easily counts as the worst. The incident left me close to tears, and really angry and I feel strongly enough about the incident to come forth and share it in public.

I was scheduled to take a flight back to Stewart International Airport from Champaign, IL on 13th October, 2006. After a long day at work, I reached the check in desk 27 minutes before the flight departure time. Given that I didn’t have any luggage to check in and given that it was a very small airport, I didn’t have any problems checking in. I was at the gate in next 5 minutes and I boarded the flight. While boarding, a lady at the gate was making an announcement asking for volunteers to give up their seats. When the boarding had ended, a flight stewardess announced again that they were looking for volunteers. In response to this, a person got up and volunteered. A little while later stewardess announced that they were looking for one more volunteer. No one else got up.

After about 10 minutes or so, a male staff member came up to my seat and without preamble shouted, “Miss you need to gather all your things and get out of the plane right now.” Caught by surprise and chagrined by the fact that everyone on the plane was looking at me, I fumbled and asked what had happened and why did I have to get down? He behaved as if he never heard me and merely repeated his exhortation, this time more loudly, “MISS YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF THE PLANE RIGHT NOW.” I felt close to tears, feeling deeply humiliated, unable to think what had happened. Afraid, I quietly follow this guy out. Once outside, I asked him the same question. He again pretended that he never heard my question and rudely asked: Which color is your luggage?’ He started to make his way back to the plane and I started following him when he turned back and spat, “Why are you coming after me. Get out of here right now.”

When he came back with my luggage, I asked him again about what had happened. He responded, “Miss you better start marching up the stairs to the gate right now.” I asked him why and he said that this flight has to leave and you are delaying it. “You better go up the stairs right now,” he added.

I went back to the gate and the lady at the gate said, “I am sorry for the trouble but you were thrown off because you checked in 27 minutes prior to departure time. The official check in time is 30minutes.”

When I asked her if I was eligible for any compensation, she said that I wasn’t eligible for I checked in late. (I talked to the North West customer care representative today and they hinted that I did qualify.) Anyways she finally gave me a $300 travel voucher without asking me if I wanted that or a free ticket.

Shaken, I left the gate and went to the ticketing area. I waited there for a NW agent to register a complaint against the guy. As luck would have it, he was the person manning the ticket counter. More incredulously, he came up to me with my boarding pass and asked me to go back to the gate. I asked him what had changed and he responded “You better run up if you do not want to miss the flight”. He repeated this when I questioned him again.

I went back up through security and all and the lady at the gate tells me, “You know, I did not realize that one person had already volunteered. We are going to put you back on the plane.” I was really infuriated by then for they had “deplaned” me in a manner that suggested that it was a security issue and when instead they had merely overbooked the flight. Then the lady at the gate had the temerity to ask me to return the $300 voucher. I refused citing the hassle I had to go through. She then acquiesced and said “Ma’am you can keep the voucher for your troubles.”

Guess what - she had cancelled that voucher.

Statistics are only meaningful to the extent that people can identify the phenomenon being measured, come up with a sensible measurement scales to measure primary or secondary observable phenomena and then interpret the results and display them in a lucid fashion. Often times that’s too much to ask and our world is now crumbling under the load of heaps of pointless incomprehensible statistics.

Increasingly, we are trying to understand the world around us via numbers. To this end, a host of research centers and organizations now annually release rankings on issues ranging from corruption to democracy to freedom of press. These rankings are then featured on prime real estate across media and used in homilies, laudatory notes and everything in-between; to buttress indefensible claims; and to bring a sense of “objectivity” to a media saturated with rants of crazed morons.

“Lost in translation” are subtleties of data, methods of data collection and of analysis, and the caveats. What remains, often times, are savaged numbers that peddle whatever theory that you want them to hawk.

Understanding with numbers

The field of social science has been revolutionized in the recent decades with “positivist” approaches using statistics dominating the field. The rise in importance of “numbers” in research is not incidental for numbers provide powerful new ways, particularly statistics, to analyze concepts. Today numbers are used to understand everything from democracy to emotions. But how do we go about measuring things and assigning number to thing which we haven’t yet even been able to define, much less explain?

Let me narrow my focus to creation, interpretation and usage of rankings to substantiate the problems with using statistics.

More Specifically, Rankings

Reporters Sans Frontiers (Reporters without Borders and henceforth called RSF) came out with its annual “Worldwide Press Freedom Rankings”. The latest rankings place USA at 53, along with Botswana and Tonga, India at 105 while Jamaica and Liberia are ranked 26 and 83 respectively. The top ranked South Asian country in the rankings is Bhutan at 98. Intuitively, the rankings don’t make any sense and a little digging into RSF’s methodology for compiling these rankings explains why.

Media’s fascination with rankings

The rankings received wide attention and made it to the front pages of countless newspapers. There is a reason why rankings are the choice nourishment of media starved of any “real information”. Numbers capture, or so is thought, a piece of “objective” information about the “reality”. Their usage is buoyed by the fact that rankings are seductively simple and easy to interpret. Everyone seems to intuitively know the difference between first and second. All that needs to be done is present the fluff, the requisite shock and horror and the article is written.

On to the problems with rankings or the “rank smell”

How can you measure objectively when you need a subjective criterion to come up with a scale?

This is something I raise earlier when I talk about how we can understand concepts like democracy or say emotions using numbers. Researchers do it by assigning number or related phenomenon – in the case of emotions it may be checking the heart rate or doing a brain scan or counting the number of times you use certain words, while in the case of democracy it can be how frequently the elites change, or how many people vote in the elections. But still numerous problems remain especially when we try to order these relatively hazily defined concepts. Say for example the elite turnover in US Congress has of late been fairly close to 2% and that doesn’t seem fairly democratic to me and how does it compare with somewhere like India, where elite turnover may be higher but where members of one family have held key positions in India politics since inception.

Relativity
To rank something means to determine the relative position of something. Rankings NEVER tell one about absolute position of something unless of course they are an incidental result of a score on a shared scale. For instance – RSF’s ranking of USA at 53 in the worldwide press freedom rankings doesn’t tell one whether USA’s press enjoys freedom over say a particular bare threshold below which a functioning press can’t be legitimately said to exist. A lot of people have misinterpreted India’s slide from 80, in 2002, to 105. They believe that it is a slide in absolute terms but the rankings only tell us of a slide in relative terms. There may be an argument to made that India is doing better than it is doing in 2002 in absolute terms but not in relative terms to say other countries. In other words, the press freedom in India may have improved since 2002 but as compared to other countries, India’s press is less free today.

The scale of things

To rank something, one has to use a common scale. Generally a scale, especially one measuring a complex concept like democracy, would be a composite scale of a variety of variables. One now needs to think of a couple of things. How does one weight the variables in the scale between time periods and between countries? For example how do you account for higher usage rates of media in one country (and possibly associated higher level of censorship) to say a country with low media usage and possibly lower total censorship? One may also argue that the media penetration is lower by deliberate action (as in limitation for foreign content owners to broadcast) or other factors (poverty). One must also tackle the problem of assigning “weight” to each facet.

Methodology

RSF ranking are based on a non-representative survey of pre-chosen experts. Hence it is more of a poorly conducted opinion poll rather than a scientific survey. Statistics gets its power of generalizability from the concept of randomization. RSF methodology is more akin to conducting a poll of television pundits on who will win the elections and I am fairly sure that the results would be more often wrong than right.

Secondly, questionnaire includes questions about topics like Internet censorship. No explicit mechanism has been detailed where we know that these scores are weighted based on say Internet penetration in each country. If no cases of Internet censorship was reported in Ghana, and it consequently gets a higher ranking as compared to a country Y whose press is freer but did report one case of Internet censorship – it implies the system is flawed. Let me give you another example. India has the largest number of newspapers in the world and there is a good chance that the total number of journalists harassed may well exceed that of Eritrea. It doesn’t automatically flow that Eritrean press is freer. One may need to account for not only the number of journalists (for more journalists per capita may mean a freer press) but also crime against journalists per capita. In the same vein we may need to account for countries which in general have a high crime rate and where journalists by pure chance, rather than say a government witch hunt, may have a higher chance of dying.

One also need to account for the fact that statistics on these crimes are hard to come by especially in poor countries with barebones media and there is a good chance that they are under-reported there.

On the positive side
Rankings do give one some estimate about the relative freedom of a country. Proximity to Saudi Arabia in the ranking does give us an idea about the relative media freedom.

A lot of the criticism lobbed against India’s low placement in the RSF rankings has been prompted by people’s perception of India as a functioning democracy with a relatively free press. What go unmentioned are episodes like Tehelka and the one faced by Rajdeep Sardesai of recently. India’s press, especially in small towns, is constantly under pressure from the local politicians who monitor aggressively.

What can RSF do?
I would like to see a more detailed report on each country especially marking areas where India is lagging behind. Release more data. Aside from protecting sources, there should be no concerns regarding release of more data. Release it to the world so policy makers and citizens can better understand where improvements need be made.

Release a composite score index that is comparable across time rather than countries. There are far too many problems comparing countries. Controlling for major variables like economic growth etc., we can get a fairly good estimate of how things changed in the course of a set of years.

Conclusion

Whenever we do use numbers to understand concepts, we sacrifice something in what we understand or our conceptual understanding. Some numbers like demographics are relatively non-debatable. Even there debates have arisen in defining who are say Caucasians etc? More debatable are how numbers are used in say the realm of content analysis. What does it mean when a person says a particular word in a sentence? Does it mean that somebody who uses the word “evil” twice in describing Bush hates him twice as much as the person who only uses it once? The understanding and “counting” of words has largely been limited to simple linear additions. We haven’t yet tried understanding strength of words as an equation of countless variables or more importantly learnt how to work with that much data so we use shortcuts in our understanding.

Numbers can give one a sense of false objectivity. The ways numbers are trimmed and chopped to support a particular point of view leave them meaningless, yet powerful.

The problems that I describe above are twin fold – errors in coming up with rankings and errors in reporting the rankings. In all we need to be careful about the numbers we see and use. It doesn’t mean that we need to distrust all the statistics that we see and burrow our nose but we can do well by being careful and honest.

Closing Thought

According to UNECA, Ethiopia “counted 75 000 computers in 2001 and 367 000 television sets in 2000. Only 2.8 % of the total number of households of the country had access to television and approximately 18.4 % of people had a radio station in 1999 and 2000.” These numbers do inform. They talk about poverty. For the West, obsessed with issues of liberty and running from its own increasingly authoritarian regimes, press freedom is “the” issue. In the hustle they miss some of the more important numbers coming from other countries that tell different stories.

This article was prompted by my review of a résumé for a friend of mine.
While resume’ remains the most important document for potential job seekers, it is often times a victim of lackadaisical attitude towards organization, grammar and thought. To correct this malaise, I offer here below general guidelines along with examples for writing a successful résumé for experienced professionals in technical fields. Most of the ideas I mention can be applied to other kind of résumés.

The word résumé comes from the Middle French word résumér, which means “to summarize”. Writing a résumé involves a certain kind of summarization – a targeted pithy easy-to-read summarization of only the pertinent career highlights. Résumé, in short, is written for a particular job in a particular company. One should not go about writing a general purpose résumé. Once you are clear about the idea that résumé is a targeted summarization – a pitch or spiel directed towards the hiring manager of a particular organization advertising for a particular job, you would have a better idea about what kind of details to include and how to organize those details. The organization and the form of a résumé will differ depending on whether the résumé is being emailed or printed or submitted to a company database. More on this later.

Modern résumés should give the person reading your contact information, a summary of your skills, relevant job experience with a bulleted list of mostly pertinent details (if you are switching fields), and a summary of your education.

Résumés for experienced professional should start with a bulleted summarization of professional experience and skills. The summarization should be keyword heavy – keywords will vary according to job and industry – but still should come across as articulate and interesting.

Here’s a sample summarization for a UI designer:

• Three years of progressive industry experience in developing and designing user interface for web and desktop applications.
• Experienced in conducting user interface studies with focus groups, analyzing user needs and preferences, researching information hierarchy and information flows.
• Dexterous in rapid prototyping using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, storyboarding, creating mock-ups, developing information architecture.
• Excellent communication skills including ability to deliver information in a clear and articulate manner befitting audience profile; ability to present in an interesting, and persuasive manner.

*Graphic designers and web developers may choose to provide a link to their portfolio right after the summarization. If you are providing links to your website – make sure that all the links work and that it the material is professionally presented and doesn’t link to your page on your dog or your buddy Mike’s stories about his drinking escapades.

Experienced professionals should next mention pertinent professional experience in reverse chronological order. In providing details about your job, mention key projects and accomplishments at the job along with the key technical skills/ programs that you used. For example, here’s a sample job summary for a web developer position

• Developed a web-based language learning application using Flash, XML, Oracle, and Perl. The application allows instructors to create new quizzes, and surveys, lets students record their responses to the questions and provides instructional staff with a way to leave written and voice feedback for students.
• Created a complimentary module to the above application for secure authentication using Perl and PGP.
• Created a secure job management tool using Perl, JavaScript, and Oracle. The management tool helps manage the assignment and track the completion of jobs given to creative services for production.

Next, you may want to provide a summary of your education including any certification courses that you achieved. In case a certification is required or in case it is a valuable related certification that will be valued by prospective employers- mention it in your summarization at the top.

Volunteer Experience sections are optional and should only be included if they showcase your leadership ability or some other facet that goes under/unmentioned in your resume’. For example:

• Managed a team of fifteen volunteers in charge of soliciting donations from local stores for the homeless kitchen.
• As a member of the student council, I worked with the school administration to help create a supplementary fund for impoverished students.

Organization and Presentation –

• If submitting your resume’ to an online database, make the top of your resume’ keyword heavy
• If submitting to some hiring manager via email – spend some time in refining the visual aesthetics and making the résumé easy to read.
• Create a text only format by saving Word files are text only with line breaks and then going in and manually replacing things so that everything looks clear.
• Be clutter free. Don’t let the sentences drag on to the end of the sheet. Provide generous margins.
• Tweak line spacing where applicable to separate section headings and to provide a better reading experience.

Aside from the above, some general comments –

Keep the “tense” in bulleted lists. For example
• Accomplished this
• Completed that
• Analyzed something
• Revise your work
• Use action words and active voice. You did something rather than something was done by you.

Get to work now and good luck!

“In the Sentinel interview, Young was asked about whether he was concerned Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

“Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the paper quoted Young as saying. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”

Washington Post

What makes the episode priceless is that Andrew Young, respected civil rights leader, was hired expressly to improve Walmart’s public image.

“Not long ago, the value of a company consisted largely of its “book value”: physical assets such as factories and equipment plus money in the bank. But today book value accounts for only about a third of the stock market capitalization of the top 150 U.S. companies, down from three-quarters two decades ago. In the new economy, corporate value lies in intangible assets: patents, databases, know-how — and brands,” notes Sebastian Mallaby in his latest column for the Washington Post, A New Brand of Power.

As the importance of brand to a company’s bottom-line has grown, so has the money spent to market the brand. Today companies spend millions of dollars to market to you what kind of cereal is cool to eat and what kind of footwear is “in”. The reliance on marketing (or information control) has provided an unexpected chink in the armor of the behemoths. “As brands have grown bigger, they have also grown more vulnerable,” notes Mallaby. The vulnerability stems from two sources – aware consumers and the distributed nature of the Internet. Consumer awareness, generally limited to certain brands and causes and primarily propelled by NGOs like GreenPeace etc., has put pressure on corporations to reform their practices – e.g. Nike paying its sweat shop employees better or McDonald’s, the erstwhile king of transfat, introducing a line of salads. The other, and by far more challenging problem comes from the distributed information architecture of the Internet that makes it all but virtually impossible to control information, a vital need for brands. As the recent fiasco of AOL, in which a recorded phone conversation with an aggressive sales rep. was released on the Internet, has shown brands are increasingly vulnerable.

A horde of economists and analysts have said that this is a virtually un-pluggable hole and hence committed activists and distraught consumers can launch successful action against brands. Unfortunately, this positive prognosis of the growing influence of consumer power doesn’t always hold true. Yes, the Internet is distributed but users still rely on a very narrow range of websites for their daily information. If the recent mergers and acquisitions on the internet are any indication, the future of the Internet looks a lot more like the current media environment. It may very well be so that the little openness we saw while the conglomerates hesitated to join the Internet bandwagon may just be a small window that will shut down as the media agglomeration gathers pace. More importantly, the channels through which Internet is run is almost all owned by large conglomerates that may change the way information is delivered as in the two-speed Internet where corporate content is prioritized while “some websites” can only be accessible via a special fee, much like cable. The other damning piece to this is that today companies can easily build successful “underground” Internet marketing campaigns by buying ad space on blogs, sponsoring bloggers and starting up their own sites and blogs to funnel propaganda.

The analysts also seem to underestimate the corporation’s ability to spin given their vast resources. For example, “BP” has gone “beyond petroleum” without ever quitting petroleum and McDonald’s is selling salads with dressings that lace them with more calories than some of their sandwiches. Add to this the fact that corporate marketing departments are perfectly positioned to take advantages of the rapid advances in our understanding of cognitive science that are coming our way. And with rapid advances in IT, that allow data mining and cognitive science, they will have a far better understanding of each of us.

Lastly, it is important to realize that information rarely translates into action. A lot of people in this country know that eating fatty food is bad for health and yet they consume it in ever increasing amounts. And thats why consumer awareness hasn’t always translated into consumer action. We all want sweat shop labor to stop but then “Walmart is just to close by” or “the prices so cheap” or “I don’t want to think about it”. Billions of dollars rides on consumer apathy and millions are spent to keep the consumer apathetic. So it is no wonder that consumer chooses against his/her conscience or health. This, unfortunately, is the biggest spanner in the sunny optimism of the brand power enthusiasts. The future doesn’t look bright.

Modern architecture with its heavy use of bleached wood, glass and aluminum has robbed countless buildings of charm and turned entire buildings into soulless boxes where people only have a tentative relationship with the environment.

Architecture has a huge impact on the way people interact with their surroundings. The severity of the lines, soulless glass vistas all together reflect a sense of oppressiveness detachment, making one feel lonelier and almost afraid of interacting with the environment. The sense one gets at being in the building is that of the powerlessness and of the fact that the environment is controlled by same faceless czar. This dehumanizing architecture today has become the most felicitated form of architecture and countless new architects use concrete, glass and aluminum to carve out a new form of social death every day.

When I look at buildings today, I can’t imagine how these buildings will age. It is hard to imagine that the building is even inhabited by people today and that these people have personalities and that the building will allow space so that people can leave an imprint of their personalities on them. The little poster boards on which people will stick their family photos in these vacuous orifices are dwarfed and overwhelmed by the almost too bright sunlight shining on the aluminum bar through the glass wall.

These inert architectural spaces are here for a reason and that the rapid commercialization of the social spaces. When you come to really think of it – where do we interact now with people – in malls and in movie theaters and restaurants. The public, non-commercial physical space in which we can interact with other people is rapidly coming to an end. We must reclaim our space before it overwhelms us.

College application process in US is now overrun by blatant self-serving marketing and cronyism. We must reform the application process if we need to change the way students look at education.

Graduate application process:

While US based schools uniformly ask for a “Statement of Purpose” and occasionally a personal biography so as to mention things which “may not have been covered otherwise”, UK based schools like LSE only ask for a formal thesis proposal from their Ph.D. applicants. The subjectivity introduced by essays like the “Statement of Purpose” gives the admissions committee enough elbow room to fit in candidates whose backgrounds may otherwise be suspect. LSE’s demands only a formal thesis proposal, which includes research design and bibliography, and gives a better understanding of a student’s intellectual ability to handle research than say 3-4 pages of carefully crafted spiel to please the head honcho of the department or to whomever holds the key to your admission.

On to undergraduate application process:

Today an application to a top-echelon school passes through many rounds of editing before it reaches the desk of the admissions officer. There are numerous websites and books dedicated to the craft of writing a successful admissions essay. The key to a successful admissions essay is to have “an angle” around which you weave your life story and tell the admissions officer why your life has led you to ‘this’ particular program at this college. Of course the logic and events are sham or nip-tucked to give them the exaggerated appearance that is needed for the storyline. The sham stories, I believe, give admissions officers a poor idea of student’s interests and capabilities especially because they can so easily be spun around to sound and say what is wanted. In writing dishonest essays students also fail to analyze if they really want to join a particular school or a program. Still by far the more insidious effect of the growing importance of the extra-curricular activities in the college application process is that today high-school students are hustling to get into multiple extra curricular activities at the expense of studying. It may also be argued that the admissions essays unfairly favor the rich students who can carefully tend to the admissions essay with the help of online services. Let me actually refine my statement - I think the admissions essays reward the ‘hustlers’, and not the people with the best academic records. It is this thing, which is in fact unique to US, that it rewards entrepreneurship and salesmanship over scholarship.

Cure?

Application process at undergraduate level should highlight the importance of academic achievement in schools and pay little or scant attention to frivolities like admission essays.

Leave it to the New York Times to come up with serious sounding articles about Hip-Hop and DMX. Khelifa Sanneh, writes in today’s NY Times about the ‘tortured’ soul of DMX and how rap stars excepting him generally like to portray themselves in control.

The fact that DMX is ‘tortured’ is evident to everyone. DMX over the years has developed a personality that borders on that of a demented Jehovah’s Witness on crack, with the dogs barking in the background. What is more curious though is the ham lined doggerel that passes of as an attempt to analyze the hitherto unknown mystery of DMX. Ms. Sanneh is of the type that may equally easily come up with an analysis about the beauty of a trash bag floating in air. But then again it has already been covered in the movie version of pretentious vapidity that passes on as serious analysis.

There is obviously a method to the vapidness. The ‘critique’ seems like it was written by a person who has had little or no familiarity with Hip-Hop and finds a little excitement in the curiosity that it is. It is a perfectly condescending account that tries to compensate through facts the utter lack of interest in this ‘type of music’.

Maybe the next time NY Times will skip the trouble of going to that place where the music was perfectly horrid and the food was sort of stale.

“Conspicuous nonconsumption” ( Alessandra Stanley, NY Times article) very fittingly captures the tailored lifestyle of celebrities (like Angelina Jolie) interested in molding a public persona that appeals to the liberal-cause-identifying ‘bobos’, an acronym for ‘Bourgeosie Bohemian’ as coined by NY Times columnist, David Brooks.

In a way, there is nothing new to this trends. Celebrities have always chosen to consume ‘appropriate’ ‘well-regarded’ brands except once upon a time money was the sole criteria (never made explicit) behind discriminating between what was well regarded and what wasn’t. Now, ‘well meaning’ liberal rational has come to be used to justify (almost equally expensive) consumption habits. So now you have to drink organic fair price near sourced soy-chai-latte with extra Karmic force instead of some $100 cup of coffee at a fashionable restaurant. Smarter yet, do both.

The identity affiliation with brands is a convenient way to rope in ‘righteousness’ and ’self-concept’ along with merely ‘looking good’. For that is really the final frontier of consumption. What wouldn’t you pay for what you consider is ‘right’ and ‘believe in’. Both concepts by the way are generally disjointed from reality.

War is deadly for both sexes. A missile doesn’t differentiate between a man and a woman. Then, what is the role of gender in war?

Nearly all active militaries in the world have substantially more male soldier than female soldiers and far more men die on the battle fields than women. But the impact of wars is never limited to artificial battlefields. War enters civilian life through hunger, inadequate health care, decline in availability of potable water, rape, pillage, and many other ways, reducing life expectancy drastically for both men and women. For example, life expectancy in Afghanistan is 46 years (men), 46 years (women) according to UN figures. The figures hide an important fact that on an average women will generally live longer than men. These figure mean that more women are dying as a result of war than men. These figures still don’t take into account the large number of crimes like rape that are committed predominantly against women.

There are 34 countries in Africa with life expectancy at birth of either men and women less than 50. Data is from 2003 UN estimates.

Name of country	Av. Age of Men	Av. Age of Women

Angola		39		41
Benin		48		51
Botswana	39		40
Burkina Faso	45		46
Burundi		40		41
Cameroon	45		47
Central African	38		40
Republic
Chad		44		46
Rep of Congo	47		50
DR Congo	41		43
Djibouti	45		47
Equatorial	48 		50
Guinea
Ethiopia	45  		46
Guinea		49 		49
Guinea Bissau	44 		47
Ivory Coast	41  		41
Kenya		43  		46
Lesotho		32  		38
Liberia		41  		42
Malawi		37   		38
Mali		48   		49
Mozambique	37		40
Namibia		43		46
Niger		46		46
Rwanda		39		40
Sierra Leone	33		35
Somalia 	45		48
South Africa	45		51
Swaziland	33		35
Tanzania	42		44
Togo		48		51
Uganda		45		47
Zambia		33		32
Zimbabwe	34		33

* Life expectancy at birth figures are strongly impacted by infant mortality.