Excel Lent Depression: Part 2

Microsoft's new offering Office 365(of which Excel is also a part) is being thrust upon 80 lakh Indian college students reports The Hindu. Remember, it was not the fault of Excel that Reinhart and Rogoff did a coding error. Microsoft Excel is the purest spreadsheet that was ever invented. Ha! Ha! How can we ever blame MS Excel if the learned professors made an error in coding?

Is it all hunky dory then? Not at all, as the daily Hindu suggests:

Come June 30, over 80 lakh college students all over India would have little choice but to use Microsoft Office 365 in their college computers, locked by a government contract that may well be more expensive than the use of an open source equivalent in the long run.

The decision by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) will limit engineering students to a particular product at a time when their exposure should be widened, say experts. It also forces college administrations to adopt one technology instead of giving them the flexibility to install whatever suits their students’ needs best, they said.

The Hindu then contrasts open-source software against proprietary software:

Open-source software such as Linux has become popular among college students in recent times as its zero-cost approach promotes inclusivity, with former President Abdul Kalam stating “In India, open source software will have to come and stay in a big way, for the benefit of our billion people.”
Remember there are enough open source Office suites available that are free and are as good if not better than Microsoft Office. Also note that even one rupee is costlier than zero rupees.

The thing about Office 365 (unlike previous MS Office offerings) is that you cannot buy an instance outright. You need to keep paying rental every month. So Microsoft is going to pocket billions every year just by renting out Office 365 to poor college-going Indian students.

Compare the old policy of 'buy once (or download for free, if it happens to be open-source) and use it forever' to the new policy of 'rent once and keep paying forever'.

So will this new policy lead to Excel lent student Depression? Only time will tell.

Tailpiece:

While Microsoft has no qualms about milking poor Indian students dry, the Company joins the chorus in America in branding Indian software companies like Infosys, Wipro and Tata as outsourcing companies. The result is a proposed comprehensive immigration bill which if passed would bar companies from hiring people on H-1B visa if 50 percent of their employees are not Americans.

Read about this in a recent Times of India Article here.

Excel Lent Depression: Part 1

Krugman, while writing in his blog in The New York Times, titled his recent post 'Excel Depression' . I have gone ahead and tweaked the title and have named my blog 'Excel Lent Depression'. The reason is that Microsoft Excel, which is one of the apps in the Microsoft Office suite, has lent itself to be used and cause a huge depression in Europe. That 'Excel Lent Depression' sounds like 'Excellent Depression' is only incidental. 

The genesis of the story as recounted by Krugman is:

At the beginning of 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, circulated a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that purported to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.

The problem with this theory, continues Krugman:

First, the learned Professors omitted some data; second, they used unusual and highly questionable statistical procedures; and finally, yes, they made an Excel coding error. Correct these oddities and errors, and you get what other researchers have found: some correlation between high debt and slow growth, with no indication of which is causing which, but no sign at all of that 90 percent “threshold.”

To explain why all this led to Excel Depression, Krugman points out:

Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff had credibility thanks to a widely admired earlier book on the history of financial crises, and their timing was impeccable. The paper came out just after Greece went into crisis and played right into the desire of many officials to “pivot” from stimulus to austerity. As a result, the paper instantly became famous; it was, and is, surely the most influential economic analysis of recent years.

I know there is something called self fulfilling prophecy. Is there also something called self fulfilling data?

Ah, but the learned Professors while acknowledging the Excel coding error, 'defended their other decisions and claimed that they never asserted that debt necessarily causes slow growth.' This defence is much like the way that I have asserted in this blog that while 'Excel Lent Depression' sounds like 'Excellent Depression', they are totally different. We need to recognise the two as homophonic expressions and nothing more.

How the Indian press reports the death of 6 soldiers in the Siachen Glacier

Six soldiers are dead and one is missing in the Siachen Glacier. A lonely death in the highest battlefield of the world.
Unfortunately they do not find place in the Indian newspapers' front pages. On its front page, The Times of India today (17Dec2012) reports the death of a businessman while attempting to board a train. May his soul rest in peace. The death of the valorous finds a terse mention deep inside the pages of  TOI. May the valiants' souls rest in peace.
Do we really care for our soldiers? Do we even know what they are going through during their lonely vigil in the Siachen Glacier.
What a shame this is.

25 years hence celebrating today's youth

The following blog in HBR will set most of us thinking:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/outsourcing_the_old_folks.html

Here are some statistics from the Indian Government's census report:

(a) Those in the age bracket of 25-44 years are 27.6 percent of the Indian population. The absolute number is 284008819.

(b) Those in the age bracket of 45-64 years are 13.5 percent of the Indian population. The absolute number is 139166661.

Here in India - as elsewhere - we celebrate youth. The Indian population profile is young and energetic and is raring to go.

But think of 25 years hence. Folks part of that magic figure of 284 million (28.4 crores) will turn 50 plus. There will be many a gray among their shiny black. Currently, the middle-aged 13.5 percent are struggling to keep their jobs or get new jobs. And the struggle gets tougher with each passing day. Every company wants young hands and nimble feet. No one wants a 45 plus. What will happen to the 284 million, 25 years hence? (I don't talk in percentages because percentages will change given the projected population growth of 2.1%) Think of the old in Greece who barely existing now. Their savings have eroded and their pensions do not even cover minimum wages. Our current young population could well end up like the elderly Greeks of today. Unless...

Unless we build enough structures where 50 plus can work and prosper. We have to create structures that enable 50 plus people to work in an enabling, creative and constructive environment. Structures have to be built where they are of use to the society. Structures where the 50 plus is a genuine contributor and not a burden or is considered deadwood.

Just as the young are citizens of the world, the middle aged and the old too deserve a right to livelihood and a life of dignity.

Unfortunately, getting old is a one way ticket and this journey happens to everyone. We all eventually reach there. In fact, there is enough research to suggest that those born after 2000 have a good chance to survive 100 years on this earth. It's better that we recognise this truth and start giving space to the current middle aged and the old. That way, once we reach there, there will be others who will give us space.

Mocking the male gender

Today there were two separate articles in the press / TV channel where the male gender has been needlessly needled. Both the TV channel and the e-paper have immense reputation and prestige.
I was wondering whether this is a coincidence or whether the mocking of the male species is becoming more and more virulent. By all indications the latter seems to be nearer the truth.
This really is gender discrimination in reverse.

Here are the snippets from the articles:

The following thumbnail came up in today's (04 May 2012) BBC's e-edition:

Do Indian or British male players look like this? Decide for yourself.

The following is the title of an article in New York Times e-paper.

Man hole lid theft is on the rise

This is absurd. Who would want to steal a man's innerwear? This is really the limit of insinuation and innuendo


Here is the link to that article:

Man hole Lid Theft Is On the Rise

.

Heed the cry of the teacher

The unfortunate death of young teachers in Chennai and Sonepat got lukewarm response in the electronic and the print media. Understandable. In today's context teachers are expendable commodity and they cannot garner TRPs for the electronic media. We saw anchors getting reactions from self-styled psychologists and Principals. I didn't hear the voice of any ordinary teacher in all the TV programmes that I saw.
The psychologists, as expected, pontificated how we need to change our mindset, how we should be more sensitive towards a high school goer's emotinal needs. The Principals told us how the students, the teachers and the parents are all stakeholders in the fight against violence in school. In other words we need to boil the oceans to save a few good teachers.
I saw not a tear shed for the families of the unfortunate teachers.
Can we start with little things, though?
1. Make it mandatory for schools to insure teachers against intimidation, coercion and bodily harm. We must make sure that the teachers do not have to pay for this insurance.
2. Security arrangements during exam time, correction time and results declaration time.
3. A responsive helpline for teachers.
4. Make parents also accountable for any intimidation or bodily harm done to the teacher by the students.

Are we aware how intimidated a teacher feels when she walks into a class of 12th standard? Each one of the students tower over her by at least one to two feet. It is no use saying that a teacher should be able to control and bring discipline into the students. Teachers are teachers and not drill sergeants. Days of such homilies and platitudes are gone. They went out of the window when we started adopting the Western way of teaching. The gun culture of the Western schools are all before us and yet we want to emulate such soulless culture. We reap what we sow. Smartboard type of education will only produce googlesque students. Who was Mahatma Gandhi? Let's google and find out in our ipads.

The 4 points that I wrote above are immediate steps. The other steps are about dignity for the teacher:
1. A minimum standard of work station in classrooms and staff rooms for the teachers. Although most teachers today are women, we know that most schools do not even have toilets for female teachers. Today it is fashionable to remove tables and chairs meant for teachers from classrooms. Our great educationists will tell us that somehow a teacher teaches better if she keeps standing throughout her 8 hours in school.
2. Medical benefits for teachers. We know that most teachers are women. All medical cover for pregnancies must be borne by the school.
3. The management of the school must be made accountable for any mishap or untoward happening in the school. The management are the people who make the mega bucks but the wrath of the parents and students are faced only by defenceless teachers.
4. Teachers' children must be given free education in the school that he/she teaches. This should not be left to the whims and fancies of the school management.
5. The hours a teacher spends doing corrections/marking test papers outside of school must be compensated. Somehow we feel that a teacher does not deserve any free time while at home.

Heed the cry of the teacher before it is too late. Heed the cry before we have many 5 Star air conditioned schools but no teachers. Just for fun find out how many of us want to become teachers of our own volition. No one wants to become a teacher yet we want great teachers in our schools. Respect teachers only then will you find great and good teachers. A teacher by the name Dr Radhakrishnan became the Indian President. When will the time come when we have a Prime Minister who was an ex school teacher?

Rear view mirror

You were fast receding,
Slipping out from my view
I tried to slow down
To keep you in my rear view mirror
But the drivers behind me
Were driving me crazy
With their honking,
And Coercion:
Step on it Or 
Exit the fast lane, they said
I stepped on it
But kept looking
At the rear view mirror
Trying to straddle two worlds:
One ahead of the windshield
The other that tiny speck
In the rear view mirror.
But you had already vanished
From the scene
And I looked ahead
No longer irresolute.