This story about IIT Bombay (IITB) disabling internet access in its hostels between 11pm and 12:30pm is not at first glance as hair-raising as the one about Chinese Internet de-addiction clinics, but it improves upon acquaintance.

Consider the consequences: one of the finest research tools invented by man is effectively off-limits to students for half a day (Is that really right? Or did the Economic Times flip an AM into a PM?) Of course, in the name of compulsory ’socialization,’ students will crowd into university clusters, which never quite have enough machines to accommodate the crowd.

Involvement in Open Source and Web 2.0 projects will drop because budding programmers at IITB will lose access just when many of them are most productive — given extremely hot Indian summers and the lack of air-conditioning in most (practically all?) dorm rooms, night-time is often the most comfortable time to start a long hack session.

Of course, the most enterprising students (especially in departments like Electronics and Computer Science) will probably use their ability to access department networks to get around this interruption in service, but a more interesting question is: in 2007, should students really have to wrangle for network time?

The point about regulations like these is that they demonstrate the knee-jerk short-term thinking that passes for leadership in many Indian institutions. Apparently the drivers for this decision included the death of IITB’s “hostel culture” (by which they mean late night vodka parties, night shows at cinemas and card games — oh wait, that was my misspent youth) and, rather more seriously, a string of on-campus suicides by some loners. Of course, while it is regrettable, it has to be asked: are the vast majority of well-adjusted (and not-so-well adjusted, trying-to-cope) students well-served by over-paternalistic regulations? Pre-Internet hostels weren’t exactly idylls.

And if IITB is scared of internet in the hostels, wait until they hear about this newfangled thing called wifi in classrooms:

“At any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90% of the students were online,” Professor Herzog says. “And what were they doing online? They were reading The New York Times; they were shopping for clothes at Eddie Bauer; they were looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco when their new job started…. And I was just stunned.”

There’s the paternalist, knee-jerk reaction of banning the undesirable, so typical of India (Here’s another great example). Then there’s the embracing of the new, and treating students like responsible human beings:

I also tend to wander around the room a lot (I’m one of those don’t-stay-behind-the-lectern professors), which may discourage some of that behavior. And I tend to call on the students who don’t seem engaged. But I don’t make any particular effort to ensure that students aren’t surfing or IM-ing or whatever. They’re grownups. If they’re willing to risk their grades, and to look dumb when they’re called on, well, I’m willing for them to do that too.

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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).

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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!

Subscribe to the full-text 10 Things feed.

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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.

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.

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Discussing Second Life and Google’s new SketchUp product in April 2006, I wrote

What stops Google from offering a virtual-earth.google.com that is essentially a coordinate space for users to populate with their models? … [This] could be used to spice up many Google offerings, such as Google Groups’ mail list feature, IM, personal home pages and the nascent markets on Google Base.

Techcruch is now reporting a rumour that Google is turning Google Earth into a virtual world. Given Google’s strengths open standards, I would be be surprised if a Google offering didn’t improve on Second Life’s walled-garden approach. Of course, given that Google paid for YouTube’s community, it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point Google acquired Linden Labs or reached some sort of understanding to ‘join’ the two worlds.

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Some of this is old news, but I had to flush my bloggable bookmarks queue, so here goes…

• Solar Cells reach 40% efficiency. Slashdot notes that this means a sunlit area 265 miles square could meet the world’s energy needs. More practically, developing but energy-poor countries like India may have just found a way out of their energy trap. Solar panel infrastructure on roofs and two-way metering are just some innovations that would let Indian cities improve their residents’ quality of life in an environmentally friendly way.
• “…In the end, America may be stronger for it.” Anti-offshoring lobbyist Scott Irwin shuts down his lobby group. (via)
• Patent laws stifle drug innovation (via)
• The Decline of Violence (via)
• A Middle Ground on Climate, from the NYT. And reaction from RealClimate. (via)
• English: a Celtic language with Germanic words?
• “Extraterrestial Intelligent beings do not exist.”

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