Category: Random Draws

Sabharwal: Education’s Five Fault Lines

Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease, has an excellent op-ed in today’s Economic Times. Worth pondering over. I have some thoughts that I will put down on the piece in a bit. (Link thanks to Salil.)

As in Life, So also in Death

The Christian bible’s book of Matthew is the source of the saying, “live by the sword, die by the sword.” YSR Reddy, the late CM of Andhra Pradesh died a violent death. Not uncommon in the annals of powerful Indian politicians.
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PowerPoint is 25 Years Old

Really! It turned 25 a couple of weeks ago. I use it quite frequently. Sometimes it helps if one is prepared but it cannot rescue an ill-prepared presentation, and indeed can make a bad thing worse. I take a very poor view of people who put too much stuff on slides and/or read slides. These people should be slapped for not knowing that the audience can read. The BBC News Magazine has an article on how people mess up making presentations with it. A bit from there below the fold.
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Time to Simplify

Richard Feynman wrote that he was mystified by the different ways — ways that bear no resemblance to each other — in which a fundamental law of physics can be described. He conjectured that perhaps it was because the fundamental laws are simple. “Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.” [1]
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Can too many Rights be Wrong?

Rights appears to be all the rage these days. The right to this, that and the other. For example, in the US, the acrimonious debate about healthcare — a right to cheap medical services — is reaching unhealthy levels. Nationalized healthcare (and all other things as well) seems to be the preferred route in the US. It seems everyone has a right to a bail out from the government — sick automobile companies and banks included. In India, the newest right on the horizon is a right to “compulsory and free education.”
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How the US is Viewed around the World

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is curiously interesting: “a series of worldwide public opinion surveys that encompasses a broad array of subjects ranging from people’s assessments of their own lives to their views about the current state of the world and important issues of the day. More than 175,000 interviews in 55 countries have been conducted as part of the project’s work.” (Hat tip: Nitin.) Below is one of the opinion surveys found on the site.
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