February 2007 — Monthly Archive
Prahalad v Karnani re Fair and Lovely
Aneel Karnani and CK Prahalad lock horns on whether hawking Fair and Lovely cream to India’s poor constitutes socially responsible selling (argument, counter-argument, counter-counter-argument) (via Salon).
10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week
There’s lots of cool content on the web that doesn’t have RSS feeds (or good RSS feeds). Thankfully, synthesizing feeds for most of them is pretty easy (Here’s an example in Python, from back when the Day by Day comic had lousy feeds that forced one to click to see the comic).
Now Yahoo Pipes makes it even simpler, at least for some feeds. The BBC’s Magazine publishes a blog with a great “10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week” feature, but it doesn’t have its own feed! Thanks to Pipes, I was easily able to come up with a feed only for 10 things. Pipes won’t replace Perl anytime soon, but anything that makes it easier for people to remix data is great to find (and oh, their development environment is very cool indeed).
Update: As Aaron points out below, 10 Things does have its own feed, which I would have discovered if I had bothered to scroll down the page instead of clicking the Subscribe icon in my browser’s status bar (perhaps there’s a usability lesson in there somewhere?). Oh well, it was still a great way to get my feet wet with Pipes.
Update 2: It turns out the BBC 10 Things feed isn’t full-text but my Pipes output is, because the feed it’s based on happens to be full-text. So it turns out Pipes is useful after all. Hooray for remixing!
India’s Research Gap
The Telegraph writes about a recent scientometric exercise comparing India’s and China’s science & technology workforce. The results are eye-opening for anyone who still believes that China and India can still be compared at roughly the same level. If I were an Indian policymaker I’d give up the organized S&T stats game as lost for the medium term and focus on other things instead.
| China | India | |
| Research Workforce | 850,000 | 115,000 |
| Fresh doctorates per year | 40,000 | 4,500 |
| Per Capita Research Spending | $12.15 | $3.53 |
| Share of global research publications | 5% | 1.9% |
1. Re-architect the education system starting at the primary level. China’s education push in the late 1970s is really paying off now, while India is bedazzled by its IITs and IIMs that service a vanishingly small fraction of its population. Merely rebranding other institutions with the IIT rubric isn’t helpful, what’s far more essential is a commitment to good universal primary education — something we have just not seen in the past.
2. Promote private research and entrepreneurship. India’s free-er society ought to produce world-class companies — and India’s large conglomerates are doing well in this regard. What’s missing is a systematic effort to encourage start-ups as low-cost test-tubes of innovation. It’s great that the SEZs are trying to cut red tape and aiming at a 7-day approval cycle for new companies, but why can’t a similar time-frame be applied across the country?
3. Stop complaining about talent being poached away. (which is what the PM’s scientific advisor is doing in the Telegraph article.) Instead figure out what how you can network with the poachers and use their help to help you grow the economy to the point where you’re less worried about poaching.
The communication in Current Science can be found here.
