Zoo Station

French President Jacques Chirac showed his temper at the EU summit when a French business leader addressed delegates in English. He stormed out of a session when Ernest-Antoine Seilliere said he chose English "because that is the accepted business language of Europe today". Mr Chirac told reporters on Friday he was "deeply shocked" that a Frenchman chose to address the summit in English.

The hunter crouches in his blind
'Neath camouflage of every kind
And conjures up a quacking noise
To lend allure to his decoys.
This grown-up man, with pluck and luck
Is hoping to outwit a duck.

-- Ogden Nash

Rising wages reflect, in no small measure, productivity increases as Indian manufacturing and services become globally competitive. Short-term concerns about inflation are thus mitigated. But the wage increases also reflect India's unique pattern of development, which has created a relative scarcity of skilled labour. This prompts concerns about the medium term: the rising fortunes of the skilled sector may limit the vitality of industries that employ the unskilled and uneducated. It is a conundrum that one might term the "Bangalore bug", after the country's high-technology centre.

Since the 1980s, a unitary India - centralised politically and uniformly mediocre in economic performance - has given way to multiple Indias with performance more related to the capabilities of individual states. Peninsular India, including states such as Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, has grown rapidly. The hinterland, with states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, has lagged behind. The divergence relates not just to growth but to patterns of specialisation. Policy choices emphasising university education over basic education and capital-intensive manufacturing over labour-intensive manufacturing have bequeathed a strange legacy. The fast-growing states are increasingly specialising in skill-based services (information technology, finance and telecommunications) and skill-based manufacturing (petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals).

A big question is how the lagging states, with their large populations and attendant political power, can catch up. India's primary and secondary education system, as well as its labour laws, need serious attention if the benefits of the recent dynamism are to be widely shared. Reforms in these areas, along with improvements in governance and infrastructure, are necessary to attract investment and create jobs. However, even if all these reforms - on the need for which there is consensus among Indian policy economists, although not politicians - are implemented, there is another concern. Recall Dutch disease, which is about the competitive squeeze exerted on one tradeable sector (manufacturing) as a result of wage increases stemming from the rising fortunes of another (typically oil). The Bangalore bug is the contemporary Indian variant, with skill-based services substituting for oil.

Textile plants need supervisors. Bicycle factories need designers. They both require managers. Yet these are the very people whose wages are being bid up sharply, squeezing the profitability of labour-intensive and tradeable manufacturing, with its wafer-thin profit margins in an era of global competition. Thus, highly productive skill-based development in the fast-growing states, while beneficial for the nation, may indirectly undermine the profitability and growth of labour-intensive manufacturing in the others. Moreover, the rise in skilled wages also leads to an exodus of scarce skilled labour from the states lagging behind to the fast-growing ones.

The obvious solution is not to impede the growth of the fast movers but to enhance the availability of the resource in scarce supply. The strong growth in particular sectors requires India to continue to foster the supply of skilled labour, even while redressing the past neglect of primary and secondary education. Fortunately, tertiary education does not require more government resources. Instead, the government needs to remove the barriers that prevent foreigners and locals from starting new institutions, while improving accreditation procedures and disclosure standards. It should not encumber private institutions with onerous conditions and it should allow government-aided institutions to raise resources by charging students a reasonable fee. This means overcoming a number of vested interests. The irony of the Bangalore bug is that to create opportunities to benefit the poor and the unskilled, India may in fact have to produce more skilled workers.

Hindustan Lever is not alone in recognizing the vast potential for profits in rural India. As urban markets become saturated, more businesses are retooling their marketing strategies, and in many cases their products, to target rural consumers with tiny incomes but rising aspirations fueled by the media and other forces, according to experts. Companies are offering many products, from single-use shampoo packets that sell for less than a penny to $340 motor scooters available for monthly payments as low as $4.50. Banks are targeting first-time customers with $10-minimum-deposit savings accounts. Cellular phone companies are upgrading rural networks while offering monthly plans for as little as $3.40.

"In four to five years the rural market will be a major sector that is well beyond anyone's imagination," said Rajesh Shukla, principal economist for the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. "Nobody was expecting this was going to happen."

Carma is my first film as executive producer and is directed by self-taught filmmaker (and concert pianist/Stanford Ph.D Ray Arthur Wang). At 81 minutes, Carma features Academy Award Nominee Karen Black as the voice of the main character. CARMA is a chilling tale about a CAR haunted by a psychopathic killer’s dead MA. Carma's last prestige festival stop was Cinequest Film Festival alumni 2005 (one of the Top 10 U.S. Independent Film Festivals), and after it was one of the Highlight Films at the Delray Beach Film Festival. Its next stop is the Bare Bones International Film Festival (one of the Best Truly Independent Film Festivals) 2006.

Below are the details of the screening - we hope you can come.

Stanford Young Alumni association presents: An exclusive screening/Post-screening Q&A with the cast and crew.

April 14, 2006 | 8 PM
Fisher Hall, Arillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University. Map and Directions. For more details, go here.

Carma trailer.
Teaser trailer.
"Making of" documentary.

Calling all quizzers! If you live in the northeastern USA, if you're bored with TV game shows like Jeopardy and WWTBAM, and if you want to revisit some hardcore trivia quizzing, this message is for you. The Central-NJ chapter of Asha for Education is holding their fourth annual trivia quiz festival at the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

The event runs from 9am to 4pm on Saturday, 01 April 2006. There are two quizzes, one for schoolchildren (grades 6 to 12, teams of 2) and one for adults (open, teams of 2 or 3). More information can be found in the email flyer at the bottom of this message, and at the event website where you can register for the quiz online.

Asha for Education is a non-profit action group that supports basic education for underprivileged children in India. You can support Asha by taking part in the quiz, or in many other ways; visit their website for more details.

Twinkle, twinkle little star
You're a ball of gas that's very far.
32 light years in the sky
10 parsecs which is really high.
Helium, Carbon and Hy-dro-gen
Fuse to make our starry friend.
When it enters supernova stage
It explodes with bursts of rays.
And if the star's mass is big and bold
It will become a black hole!

Correlation and causation are not the same thing. If you observe there is a relationship between the shoe size of a person and the size of his vocabulary – and note that there is a positive correlation in that the larger the shoe size, the larger the vocabulary – then you could falsely reason that having big feet causes larger vocabulary. The two are correlated but not causally related. There are other variables: older children have bigger feet and also bigger vocabularies.

There are lots of correlated variables in the world. Some of these correlations have causal connections as well. In some cases the direction of causation is evident, and in some cases it is difficult to figure out. In some other cases, the causation could be bi-directional. For instance, number of forest fires in a month and average temperatures of the month are positively correlated. It is easy to see that hot weather causes forest fires, and not the other way around–forest fires do not raise the average temperature of the month.

Now suppose we note the positive correlation between the presense of riot police and riots. Again the direction is easy to spot: clearly, riot police do not cause riots; riots cause riot police to appear. Or the presense of firemen and fires: fires cause firemen to appear, rather than the other way around. Now bidirectional causal links: chicken and eggs. Chickens causes eggs; but eggs cause chickens as well. So which is the cause and which the effect? That is the most famous chicken and egg problem: which came first? The vicious cycle is similar. If you are poor, you cannot good education; if you are not well educated, you cannot get a good job and hence you are poor, and so on. Or if you are poor, you cannot afford nutritious food and therefore your health is poor and so you cannot hold on to a good job and therefore you are poor, etc.

Now cell phones and growth in GDP is positively correlated. For every 1 percent increase in teledensity, the GDP growth rate goes up 0.6 percent. (Figures for illustration only.) It is not easy to tease out which direction the causal relationship is, if at all there is a causal relationship. There need not be a causal relationship, merely a correlation. For instance, more cell phones and more GDP could be both due to the underlying factor that the country has suddenly become very very successful in BPO services. Even if cell phones adoption and GDP growth rates are causally related, it is not at all evident which way the causality holds: it could be that GDP growth increased per capita incomes so that people could afford phones; or it could be the other way around, that more people having phones made them more productive and this pushed up the GDP. Or both.

Topics covered include: Indian development options; should India be treated as a single country; should India concentrate on services as an engine of growth; the role of public education in economic development; what role should the Indian government play in economic development, and what is their current 5 year plan; and prospects for the next 10 years.

• Brokeback Heat
• Broke Mac Mountain
• Brokeback to the Future
• Kickback Mountain
• Brokeback Mountain: Christian Edition (no offence intended, so no link)

Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, was intrigued and decided to study the rain with his student Santhosh Kumar. The pair compiled more than 120 reports of the rain from local newspapers and other sources, and gathered samples of the red rain from spots more than 100 kilometres apart. Under the microscope, they could see red particles 4 to 10 micrometres wide with an average density of about 9 million particles per millilitre. When they dried the samples they found that each cubic metre of rainwater contained about 100 grams of the red stuff. Louis suggests 5 millimetres of red rain would typically have fallen over a square-kilometre area during each of about 100 downpours. That would make 500,000 cubic metres of water in total, containing a staggering 50 tonnes of red particles. What could they be? One possibility was that fine red sand had blown over Kerala from some distant desert. Sand can travel amazingly far.
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But under the microscope, the red particles that rained on Kerala were clearly not sand. Electron micrographs show that they are shaped like biological cells. "They don't look anything like sand, they look biological," says Monica Grady, a meteorite expert at the UK's Open University in Milton Keynes. The cells, if that's what they are, are mostly cup-shaped and have a thick wall. One type of analysis shows their chemical make-up is about 50 per cent carbon and 45 per cent oxygen by weight, along with traces of other elements such as sodium and iron. That's consistent with the components of a biological cell, according to Jeffrey Walker, a molecular biologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder. But although many of the cells have some kind of detached inner capsule, there is no visible cell nucleus, and tests for DNA that Louis carried out came back negative.

Louis rules out a distant terrestrial source for the mysterious particles, because the red rain was concentrated over Kerala for two months despite changes in climate and wind patterns. Could the cells instead be local pollen or fungal spores washed off trees and houses by the rain? Louis says no, because red rain was collected in buckets placed in wide-open spaces. Equally, he says, the red particles can't be pollen or spores from the ground that accumulated in the atmosphere, because the rain would then have been red at the start of a shower; often the colour came later.

Instead, he links the coloured rain to a meteor airburst. During the early hours of 25 July 2001, just hours before the first red rain fell, several people in the Kottayam district heard a loud sonic boom that made their houses rattle. Louis has interviewed some of those who heard it, and concluded that it was too loud to have been an ordinary thunderclap. It's possible that an incoming meteor exploded in the atmosphere.
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What other explanations are there? Wainwright likens the red cells to spores from a rust fungus, or possibly pollen or algae. With Wickramasinghe and others, Wainwright has shown in balloon experiments that winds can carry microbes from the ground to high altitudes. Particles the size of those in the red rain could soar several kilometres above the Earth's surface. The dimpled shape could easily have arisen when the cells collapsed in the microscopy process. If that were true, he says, then the only mystery concerns the lack of DNA. "You wouldn 't expect spores, microbes or algae not to have any DNA," he says. The simplest explanation is that Louis's experiments missed it, so Wainwright wants to repeat the tests. If the cells do turn out to contain DNA, then there is no great mystery. "I'd kind of relax if there was DNA there," says Wainwright.

If there is no DNA, Wainwright argues, the cells might be something extraordinary. He speculates, like Louis, that the lack of DNA might point to some kind of exotic life form, although he admits it would be paradoxical for cells without DNA to be classed as "living". Cockell argues that there could be a simpler explCanation - the red particles are actually blood. "They look like red blood cells to me," he says. The size fits just right; red blood cells are normally about 6 to 8 micrometres wide. They are naturally dimpled just like the red rain particles. What's more, mammalian red blood cells contain no DNA because they don't have a cell nucleus.

It's tough to explain, however, how 50 tonnes of mammal blood could have ended up in rain clouds. Cockell takes a wild guess that maybe a meteor explosion massacred a flock of bats, splattering their blood in all directions. India is home to around 100 species of bats, which sometimes fly to altitudes of 3 kilometres or more. "A giant flock of bats is actually a possibility - maybe a meteor airburst occurred during a bat migration," he says. "But one would have to wonder where the bat wings are." Walker agrees that the particles in the red rain look uncannily like red blood cells. He says a simple test for haemoglobin could resolve this quickly. "If they believe they aren't red blood cells, then they need to explain how they 've managed to eliminate that possibility," says Cockell. "I would have thought some more basic biochemical analysis of these cells would be worthwhile, and that should identify it, whatever it is."

"It's a pity that they don't realise this is interesting without all the extraterrestrial hype," Cockell adds. "How might you get blood into rain? I don't think anyone has observed an event where they've seen an animal ripped apart and its blood distributed in clouds. In some ways, that whole process is far more interesting than what Louis is trying to prove." For blood cells to survive would be astonishing: normally they would be destroyed within minutes if kept in rainwater, unless the salinity was the same as inside the blood cell.

Someone will have to verify an observation that Louis made which even he finds astonishing: that the cells replicate. In earlier unpublished papers, Louis says he cultured the red rain cells in unconventional nutrients, such as cedar wood oil, and showed that these DNA-devoid microbes divide happily at a temperature of 300 °C. Louis admits he left these claims out of his latest paper because he thought they would be considered "too extraordinary".

Extraordinary is an understatement: if the cells really do replicate we'll have found the first evidence of extraterrestrial life. In the end, though, I didn't find any scientist willing to bet that the red rain of Kerala contained aliens. But everyone agreed it's a cracking good story that's crying out for a proper explanation. "I think you've got to be intrigued," said Wainwright. "If you're not intrigued, then what are you doing in science?"

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.

Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.

Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'. But a few researchers believe Louis may be on to something and are following up his work. Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist at Sheffield, is now testing samples of Kerala's red rain. 'It is too early to say what's in the phial,' he said. 'But it is certainly not dust. Nor is there any DNA there, but then alien bacteria would not necessarily contain DNA.'

Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says. In addition, one analysis showed the particles were 50 per cent carbon, 45 per cent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron: consistent with biological material. Louis also discovered that, hours before the first red rain fell, there was a loud sonic boom that shook houses in Kerala. Only an incoming meteorite could have triggered such a blast, he claims. This had broken from a passing comet and shot towards the coast, shedding microbes as it travelled. These then mixed with clouds and fell with the rain.

When he first came up with this theory in 2003, it was expected to die quickly but now an international journal, Astrophysics and Space Science, has accepted his paper. And New Scientist, in its latest issue, has a cover story ‘It’s raining aliens’ in which it has spoken to several scientists on Louis’s theory.
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The international scientific community agrees that what fell was biological—the cell structure is unmistakable but there is no consensus on where it came from.
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Louis suggests that the meteor was a fragment of a comet carrying microbes from space. The meteor burst shedding these alien microbes in the upper atmosphere. Some of the red microbes mixed with rain clouds and fell immediately, while the rest settled into clouds and fell in rain over the following weeks.

His (Chidambaram's) budget was able to include big spending increases and a return to fiscal prudence. Last year, mindful of promises to spend more on relieving poverty and on health, education and infrastructure, Mr Chidambaram suspended efforts towards fiscal correction, though the outcome was not as bad as he feared. The central government's deficit rose only fractionally, to 4.1% of GDP. When India's state governments are added in, the overall government deficit climbs sharply, to an expected 7.7% of GDP in the present year. But, at the turn of the decade, it was hovering around 10%, so even fiscal hawks congratulated Mr Chidambaram.
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Mr Chidambaram himself lists four main threats to the economy: high oil prices, rising interest rates, external shocks and “the temptation to stray from the path of fiscal prudence”. The government has not passed the full impact of rising oil prices on to consumers. The IMF has estimated the cost of this, mostly borne by state oil companies, as 0.5% of annual GDP in the first half of this fiscal year.

Partly for this reason, inflation, at around 5% a year, remains subdued. Despite this, the Reserve Bank (the central bank) raised interest rates in January. This will help contain the expansion of bank credit, which in the year ending March 2005 was the fastest in Asia, at more than 30%, and of economic growth itself. Indeed, according to figures released this week, the economy is already slowing slightly—to an annualised rate of 7.6% in the last quarter of 2005. This will ease the pressure on India's current account, which after three years of modest surplus is now back in deficit—by as much as 4.6% of GDP in the third quarter of last year.

But the IMF also noted that India's large reserves of foreign exchange ($133 billion) [Ed: The true number is $140 billion] and its capital controls provide a buffer. The bigger danger may turn out to be that India misses opportunities. The present boom should offer the chance for a more rapid fiscal clean-up. Obvious candidates for reform are the inefficient price subsidies—on food and fertiliser as well as petroleum products—that take up 10% of current expenditure.

(Ramesh) Sarin, a Microsoft researcher, created a wooden box with what looks like an old maritime compass on it. No matter where he goes in Seattle, the box's needle points to the nearest Starbucks. The box contains a GPS antenna, a magnetometer and a computerized list of Starbucks locations in Seattle.

The direct gains from the India-US nuclear agreement, legitimisation of India’s nuclear weapons, the end of the high-tech apartheid and rapid growth of nuclear power capacity are considerable. But the real significance lies much beyond the N-word. And please, please, do not get confused by that utter nonsense on how the US will help India become a super power.

This is not merely an India-US agreement and the fallout of this is not merely nuclear. If India plays it right, it could be the beginning of a process of breakout from the ‘lower middle class’ status in the community of nations to which it had been consigned for half a century, some of it a conspiracy of circumstances, and some of it self-inflicted. In the name of non-alignment we tilted too far the other way, as our voting record on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shows. Our politicians tried to exploit this sloganeering foreign policy through domestic politics, embracing Castro one day, and naming a major avenue in New Delhi after Tito, on another. Incidentally, do a google search for how many cities in the world, even in former Yugoslavia, still have a street named after that dictator our school history textbooks taught us to admire!
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We shifted a bit as the ground shifted under our feet after the end of the cold war, but we never abandoned the notion of the non-aligned movement, or our having a permanent abode in that comity of the “lower middle classes” in the international power game, led by some of the world’s most dictatorial regimes and despots.
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We are a long way from being a big power yet. But our place in the world is a lot better than it ever was in the so-called, Soviet-included non-aligned movement. And how terrific was that non-aligned “solidarity”? Please check out the way most members of that “movement” voted at international forums on issues of India’s vital security interest, not just Kashmir but also on both series of Pokharan tests. On each occasion, ’74 and ’98, they were firmly “aligned” with the big powers, against us. India, who so stupidly arrogated to itself the leadership of that motley group, continued naming its streets after international thugs and despots.

We must not delude ourselves into believing we are in the same league now as China and Russia (listed in that order deliberately). But if we continue to act with sense and maturity, we can form the third point of a new triangle of stability in a vast Asian region, stretching from Korea to Israel, Kazakhstan to Sri Lanka. Or, if you don’t like triangles, you can look at it as an opportunity for India to join — along with China, Russia and Japan — a new arc of strategic calm. That is the new slot that the world wants India to occupy in its new batting order. The beauty of it all is, you can do it while being perfectly non-aligned, and running a foreign policy enormously more independent than it ever was when we were exposed as a totally client state so stunningly once every decade: the invasion of Hungary in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60, Cambodia in the ’70s and Afghanistan in the ’80s. Read the whole thing.

During that killing season we rose earlier than usual to eat lots of meat, and we went up to the soccer field at around nine or ten o'clock. The leaders would grumble about latecomers, and we would go off on the attack. Rule number one was to kill. There was no rule number two. It was an organization without complications.

Bono's common sense and down-to-earth approach to development issues is well reflected in the foreword he wrote for Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty and in the many initiatives he has taken to ease the situation of the world's poor. The article, if he reads it, is unlikely to elicit more than a little smile on his part.

Africa's "absorptive capacity", or lack thereof, is one of the oldest arguments brandished by the enemies of all forms of international co-operation and development aid. One wonders what was the absorptive capacity of Europe after the second world war. Against a realistic assessment, the Marshall Plan would have never been launched and Europe would not be where it now is. I knew Prof Paul Rosenstein-Rodan well and can guarantee that he would not have supported Prof Bhagwati's misguided advice.

And, frankly, it is difficult to forgive his invitation to Bono to write the introduction to the book. Describing his experience of campaigning with Mr Sachs, the Irish rock singer recalls, “I would enter the world of acronyms with a man who can make alphabet soup out of them. Soup you'd want to eat. Soup that would, if ingested properly, enable a lot more soup to be eaten by a lot more people.” Sorry, even if it sells more copies of this otherwise outstanding book, publishing such drivel cannot be right.