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to edit in the embryo stage should we discourage the consumption of crispr based foods by calling them gmo after all selective breeding of crops has been going on for millennia should we let people edit their offspring s genes for greater intelligence very hard how about eye color easier how long can you stop them from not trying editing humanity is rich in detail and highly engaging sooner or later all of us will hear and learn about crispr this is a great book to start that journey dec 20 2020 self driving cars in india the world economic forum recently released the results of a global survey about attitudes towards self driving cars it turns out that india is the country most open to self driving cars apparently 85 of indian respondents said likely or very likely to the question are you likely to try a self driving car most of the developed world came in under 60 the japanese at 36 pretty much gave it a thumbs down this from a country that is so wired that 20 of men aged 25 29 aren t interested in sex at all link otaku men a japanese term meaning geek find it easier to fall in love with the 2d female characters from anime and manga instead of human women anyone who has been on the road in any indian city metro class a b c pretty much any town city or inter city highway and knows a little about how self driving car technology works will tell you that it is quite impossible to design a machine that can traverse an indian city on its own at least not before the singularity arrives so then how do we explain these survey results my best guess is that the indians completely misunderstood the question you see self driving in indian english can mean driving yourself for example friend isn t your driver on chhutti leave who drove you here mr myself mangey ram friend abey i know you are mangey ram who drove your car mr self driving many indian car owners have drivers chauffeurs without peaked caps these car owners rarely drive themselves in the survey it is quite possible that they understood the question to be how likely are you to drive your own car many of them probably answered yes but only on weekends but that was not one of the options on the multiple choice but all indian car owners don t have drivers unless the survey was conducted among the indian delegates at davos a village in switzerland that is the venue for the world economic forum s annual bash where the global elite gather to ski attend cocktail parties and discuss income inequality 100 of the indians who attend the davos conference are driven by drivers guaranteed but i digress if the survey was actually conducted in india and the sample was representative of all car owners in india a significantly high percentage of respondents must be driving their cars themselves these respondents must know that a self driving car on indian roads will last as long as an ice cube in the thar desert for instance take the task of making a u turn on a divided road in just about any indian metro city for the indian driver making a u turn is not about rules or methods it is a test of mental strength he must make a real time assessment of each vehicle in the oncoming traffic whether they will or won t crash into you while slowly inching forward and progressively creating a logjam of madly honking vehicles sometimes an oncoming car may speed up when they see you attempting the u turn and then deliberately come to a screeching halt right next to your window just to scare you how do you train a self driving car to tell the difference between a car that is too fast to stop before hitting you and a car that just accelerated to make you think that it is too fast to stop before hitting you a self driving vehicle trained in pittsburgh will wait all evening to make that u turn until its windows shatter from the blaring horns of the vehicles behind it and it is physically lifted and removed by irate auto rickshaw wallahs for the foreseeable future self driving cars in india is a fantasy but like hindu mythology it seems that most indians are open to the idea regardless of how absurd it sounds i m just waiting for the day when a minister or party functionary claims that indians were riding self driving chariots in the mahabharata sep 22 2016 september 22 2016 perverse incentives wells fargo was fined 185 million for fraudulently opening customer accounts link why because bank employees had incentive targets for number of accounts opened as many as 5300 employees were involved so this was widespread and systemic management must have known but i guess everyone was riding high on beating their targets on customer accounts opened who was going to stop the gravy train as is the customary practice in such cases the company settled the matter with the government without admitting wrongdoing this is done to avoid lengthy lawsuits obviously if the government drags management into it the company will defend itself and take the matter to court instead it is easier to negotiate a sizable fine and move on i bank with wells fargo and while i haven t seen any fraudulent accounts in my name so far i do sense that their rules are geared towards opening more accounts for example they have or had a rule that you must have at least 3 products to avoid a monthly fee i needed a checking account and a debit card but i never wanted a savings account have you noticed the interest rates lately or a credit card groan not another piece of plastic from them because this was just 2 products i would incur monthly fees unless i kept a minimum balance with them wells fargo is not the only bank that puts this kind of pressure on their employees for new accounts at the other end of the world in india icici bank applies the same kind of pressure for targets on its branch managers which is why when i tried to close my account with icici bank a few years ago i couldn t there was always some document missing and of course there would constantly be these helpful suggestions thrown at me just leave a few hundred rupees in the account how does it matter i guess they hadn t heard of fbar same story everywhere sep 09 2016 fair vs balanced paul krugman is unhappy about the state of journalism in the us link so i would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo and urge the public to read with a critical eye clearly some journalists think differently chris wallace of fox news says that it is not his job to call out the candidates in the presidential debate if he knows they are lying youtube link 2 40 kurtz what do you do if they make assertions that you know are untrue wallace that s not my job i do not believe it s my job to be a truth squad elsewhere in the video 2 17 wallace i view it as kind of like being a referee at a heavyweight fight also interesting is how he calls the selection process that selected him as one of the four debate moderators fair and balanced quite ironic actually chris wallace is being forthright about the presidential debate probably because he thinks that moderating the presidential debates is not journalism maybe we should ask comedians to moderate it then it ll get larger audiences but truth seeking does not seem to be high on the agenda of any tv news network out there or newspaper so what s going on i think that fundamentally for profit news organizations are incentivized to be balanced not fair people want to read or watch news that reinforces their own beliefs news organizations that want eyeballs and readers are therefore just mirrors to society they dish out what their readers and viewers want to hear they don t form opinion there s no money in that they just reflect the opinion of their audiences they give them what they want in this respect they are exactly like consumer marketing companies opinion nowadays seems to range along a single dimension that goes left and right you have the people on the far right who are served by news organizations like fox news they are all spoken for on the left you have your liberal newspapers though liberals aren t entirely happy with new york times these days and then there are the people in the middle an amorphous audience of millions they aren t spoken for news organizations aren t sure which way they lean on which issue or do they just vote for the best candidate the safe approach to target this audience is to not lean one way or another in other words be balanced how does a news organization be balanced criticize clinton as often as you dump on trump what they may have done to deserve it may be vastly different but that shouldn t get in the way of headlines that make it seem like the publication is equally critical of both candidates like treating clinton granting access to raise donations for a non profit the same way as trump s illegal campaign contributions to state attorneys general that may not be fair reporting but it is balanced and it is profitable soledad o brien says it very well cnn is the high priest of balanced reporting they may be laughing all the way to the bank but they are also putting white supremacists on air and legitimizing them sep 07 2016 september 8 2016 friends roman for your mother tongue the other day i started reading parineeta by sarat chandra chattopadhyay in hindi i found the translation to be horrible i could have downloaded an english translation that might have been better i suppose but really what i would have loved to do is to read it in the original bengali i am bengali on my mother s side odiya on my father s side i understand bengali well enough but can t read wouldn t it be nice i thought if parineeta was available in the original bengali but written in the roman script the script used to write english commonly and mistakenly referred to as english script for that matter wouldn t it be nice if the many of us who understand an indian language well but can t read its script could easily lay our hands on its literature in the roman script the script in which we read every day shoaib daniyal argues very convincingly in scroll in that devanagari should give way to roman as the de facto script for hindi while there is no official sanction for it and it is unlikely to happen any time soon on the ground the shift is happening already while more hindi is still being read in devanagari think dainik jagran more hindi is definitely being written in roman think social media and texting the tyranny of technology the qwerty keyboard and the implacable advance in english medium education in india point to a future with a lot more roman and much less of devanagari this is of course true not just about devanagari but of all indian scripts in fact moving all indian languages en masse to roman has great advantage not only will we make writing in individual indian languages more accessible to their speakers we will also make other indian languages more accessible i may not ever want to read kannada literature but it would be nice to be able to read the road signs in jayanagar back to parineeta and making literary classics accessible if someone has the inclination here is an idea that would get someone a lot of punya as a non profit i hope someone does i ll be the first one to buy its product there s a large body of work from indian language writers like tagore sarat chandra chattopadhyay and premchand that are now public domain in india copyright ceases to exist 60 years after the death of the author all these books are now free to translate transliterate or make derivative works out of your readers will be all the lovers of great literature from a generation in india that placed such a great emphasis on english that it crowded out the possibility to be a fluent reader in one s mother tongue many of them understand speak but do not read or do not read fluently their mother tongue s script if they could buy parineeta in sarat chandra s original bengali but written in the roman script i think many of them would be willing to plunk down cash like me you would publish these books on paper as well as on e readers like the kindle even if i can understand some bengali i may still have trouble understanding a work of literature but with the help of a custom dictionary which allows me to pull up the meaning of a word by just clicking it much better no it won t be easy to get to a critical mass of books but it is quite doable the first hurdle is going to be to get electronic copies not scans of the original works for writers like tagore they are already available online but for others it might be necessary to recreate the electronic versions project gutenberg has had much success with solving the same problem with english language books actually a project gutenberg for indian language classics would be just what the doctor ordered unfortunately project gutenberg seems far too busy to take up non european books at this time the next step would be to decide what romanization standard to use the hunterian standard seems to have the blessing of the government of india for bibliographies but there are many other competing standards like itrans it should be fairly easy to develop software that converts the indian script to standardized roman an e reader like the kindle would be the perfect device to read on the book would need a custom dictionary which the kindle supports charging a small price for the books even though they are public domain would be totally fair and legal it s done all the time by book publishers in a few years english will be everywhere we will all be lamenting how nobody cares about our own languages any more the way to think about this is to not conflate the language with its script once we set the language free it will get a new lease of life jan 01 2016 february 18 2016 are there no good companies nityanand jayraman has a piece in scroll in which is a damning indictment of hindustan unilever s role in contaminating a thermometer factory site in kodaikanal with mercury the sordid story carries the usual villainy of an evil corporation that puts its commercial interests above the safety of its workers the community around it and the environment while this was a while ago things haven t changed much even today we see this movie playing out in company after company around the world unilever dumped broken thermometers at the site and let the mercury leach into the ground it did not train its workers adequately in safety procedures and when confronted with the clean up after the government shut down the factory it argued for laxer standards and denied wrongdoing pretty standard fare for such cases what makes the story uglier though is that this thermometer factory in kodaikanal was moved from watertown in new york state in 1980 after the us started cracking down on environmentally hazardous factories the standards that the us was pushing for made it economically unviable to operate however environmental regulations in developing countries like india are either weak or weakly enforced so...