An ideal example for a negative vote when facing a good, a bad and an ugly option

 As I was reflecting on the dilemma facing the uncommitted movement, the current US election seems to be a perfect example for the need for an option to vote against a candidate as well. 

If we are faced with the choice of a good, a bad and an ugly, we can vote for the good candidate, fully expecting him or her to lose. Our negative vote can be against the ugly in case, as we expect, the good candidate is the last one.

 If we do not  have the option for a good candidate, we can ignore our positive vote and still vote only against the ugly. We should not have to choose a lesser evil even if the result of the election would not be any different.

Would the victor of such a system celebrate and brag about his success, when the voting data would clearly  show that it is the ugly candidate who lost?

Goa is a small state. I wish the  election commission would experiment here.

A year on and my brain is perpetually stressed

I have no connection with Palestine or even any Arab. The last Indian news channel I watched was NDTV till it was taken over. I have relied mostly on European news channels, DW, France 24 and, to a lesser extent, BBC, and youtube selectively for Indian news, trying to escape emotional onslaughts on my brain.

It all changed a year ago. My brain just could not reconcile the contrast between the news of from Ukraine with the news from Gaza. I had to switch channels and reached Al Jazeera. I still watch it primarily though I have to turn off the tv as I can't cope with the developments  still going on after a year. It pains me as I liked to believe that we were long past the colonial era and were far more enlightened.

Today the words of the Western leaders in particular may sound nice and comforting while the images stare in bleak contrast. My brain can't cope.

I find solace in Scandinavian crime fiction where even though the criminals may be awful, there is a sense of closure and what is the most significant part, the hero does NOT use violence - from the characters created by   Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Jørn Lier Horst ! 

I focus a lot on the videos of  Robert Sapolsky even though I have never appreciated or understood chemistry or biology and hope that these will help. 

How does one run away or escape from any thing unpleasant?

Who knows, I may even try ChatGPT or Google's version, except that I worry these may make matters even worse.

What Depresses me even more about the state of Indian Education since I left it

 It was bad enough to have a centralised examination system at the University or State level. The logic or even the reasonableness of a person having greater merit just because he or she got a mark extra in an exam is beyond my comprehension. 

Applying that rule to a central entrance exam for jobs or admissions just breaks my heart. Blaming the students and their parents for desperately trying to find an alternate option is even more heart breaking.

The absurdity of the system would not matter if there were enough opportunities, which obviously are just not there in India. 

What is merit any way or its importance? I can't think of any better way than listening to Dr. Michael Sandel explain it. A critical issue is the recognition of luck in our life.

If we accept luck as a critical component of our life, and if we accept that there aren't enough opportunities for all, what would be an appropriate way to select candidates for admission? It is easy to imagine that the current system of admission will cause stress -more likely, severe stress. Here is  very short introduction to what it can do to the human body. If we further accept, as Dr. Sapolsky argues, humans have no free will,  we need to worry as a society about the impact of failing the admission tests by a massive number of candidates.

The fact that the number of seats is limited cannot be avoided. Nor can we avoid selecting a small number of candidates to fill the seats. We need to accept that there is no fair or equitable or perfect way to select the winners. So, why not follow what happens anyway. Use luck.

1. By all means use a test but only to determine competency for the course/job.
2. Optionally, use information which seems appropriate to assign a weighting score to each candidate.
3. Let a system select the candidates randomly using  weighting score as a bias.

Will it be a perfect selection? Obviously not but neither is any other system at present.

Implications:

1. Will  the winner be proud of his meritorious achievement. No. He will realise and accept that he has been lucky. (I for one won't miss the ads by coaching shops advertising the candidates who cleared the exam from 'their' center.)
   
2. Will the loser conclude that he was not good enough or a failure or had been cheated. No. He will accept that he was unlucky and had no control over what happened.
   

I can expect a large number of people who lose the lottery will have well connected parents or relations. Wishful thinking - they may well be motivated into creating additional opportunities for young people within the society instead of what we are convinced happens today.

Revisiting a 20 year old experience - nothing is right with our colleges

 I really had no idea of how to respond to the Vice President's rant about diseased kids dying to go abroad to study!

My personal sympathies are obviously with Ravish Kumar's views. 

However, it brought back my memories of 20 years ago, when I had expected to finally be able to do something which was useful and made me happy. However, I might as well reproduce what I shared then - I may cringe at some of  the tone now but let the old feelings be:

Farewell to Academics

In my personal little universe 3 years ago, the planets and the stars imposed a gravitational field which constrained me. Fortunately, the need to change while remaining in my tiny world also provided an appealing opportunity. I had always wanted to teach – may be after retiring. Now I could start half a dozen years sooner.

The first year of teaching engineering was very exciting. We focussed on improving the labs. We used thin clients, which allowed us to have almost double the number of workstations within the same budget. We introduced Linux, open source databases and various other applications. My objective was not just to save money but a conviction that students must be exposed to a variety of environments so that they can learn and make decisions with more information. The wider range of exposure also prepares them for coping with changes, which are inevitable in the IT area.

After the high, the decay started. Water is there but the horse refuses to drink it! Something did not seem right - students of computer engineering and information technology not particularly enthusiastic about programming. Some may have decided to make a career in management but not such a large majority! Each semester I tried to correct what I thought were the problems but the impact was minimal.

It was clear that I was on the wrong track. I chanced upon a website on connected mathematics (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/cm ). The goal of this project was to help learners at all levels make sense of complex, non-linear phenomena. It was clear that I had not understood the complexity of the issues involved. I was not dealing with individual students but with a collection of students with interactions between them. The behaviour of the students was a consequence of the environment in which they were operating. That is why the same students would become pretty good programmers after joining a company while avoiding it during their studies for a degree.

I looked at my laundry list of the problems and realised that I could address none of them. Each item in the list may not have meant much but collectively, the impact was overwhelming. So, why get frustrated, especially when the gravitational fields had weakened considerably.

My (partial) laundry list of the environmental issues follows:

1. A class size of 60 or more is too large. We are no longer dealing with a group of individuals but with a crowd. “We have unanimously decided to mass bunk.”

2. Compulsory attendance. It is the wrong solution to solving the problem of disinterested students or tuition classes.

3. Teachers are allowed to teach but are not qualified as examiners. That is clearly putting the cart before the horse.

4. Every college in a university has the same syllabus. “You can choose any colour as long as it is black.” A teacher cannot innovate.

5. A common final exam. The examiner, in order to ensure fairness to all colleges, is constrained to set a question paper which follows a well understood pattern. Our question papers invariably become a test of memory. Anything else would risk a front page coverage, “Out of syllabus paper”.

6. The governments impose a ridiculous amount of paperwork and inflexible rules on colleges in order to tackle the problem of some unethical teaching institutions. We wind up penalising the honest institutions. A small headline in a paper, “Fed up with corruption, NRI donates college to the University.”

I do not know about my students but I learnt a lot in the last three years, including ridding myself of a 30 year itch to teach.

About me

PhD in physics but working in the software industry for 25 years.

A Light Comment almost 50 years ago and it still troubles - Butterfly Effect?

It was almost  50 years ago. We were having a chat about my stay for a year in Europe. I had loved the stay. I have no recollection of it except for a side comment I made and this was long before Nokia made the world conscious of the existence of Finland.

 If I had a say in where I was born, I would have chosen Finland.

Even today, long after my parents have passed away, I can still feel the unhappiness of my father. He did not understand my statement. Perhaps no-one did. 

I did not  wish to be a migrant - or worse, a refugee. However, that does not prevent me from a desire to have been born and brought up in a society which is egalitarian, caring, trusting and, I cannot explain, the feeling of being made comfortable and welcome even to a stranger like me. 

The trigger today was a forward I did not see, which said that we would not have known about it if "a CCTV camera had not been installed by my  brother".

I do not want to live my life worrying about a stranger robbing or killing me. That risk is negligible compared to each trip I take on the road -  whether driving or walking!

An Embarrassing Failure of Saving and Recycling Water - What not to do to save the planet

 I have long been bothered by using fresh water in a flush. I finally got a chance to  do  something about it when we decided to build an independent house.

I had a hard time convincing the contractor and the plumber of  what I wanted. The plumber was a little more emphatic that it won't work though he did not explain - unfortunately. 

I got them to separate the waste bath water and save it in two tanks - first one with a filter and second one to store it. The tank and pipes to the WC tanks were separate.  There was a separate pump to lift water from the grey water tank to the overhead tank meant for WC's only.

I moved in and the troubles started.

The waste water from the bathrooms wasn't much! Just the two  of us. Fortunately, especially with the water saving toilets, even the water requirement for the WC tanks was not much, despite 2 senior citizens needing to use the flush more often than they would have preferred.

So, the first lesson was that the cost of the additional expenditure did not match  the gain.

Worse was to follow.

I had searched a lot for filtering  grey water. There were the treatment plants which made no  sense at all for our needs and volumes. The rest were for rain water harvesting. Reminding me of the old crow and water pitcher tale. Bath water and washing machine water seemed quite clean. So, filtering with stones, sand and  charcoal powder seemed fine.

After a few days, there was a strange smell in bathrooms. We just couldn't figure it out. We called the plumber and he said that he had told us that it wouldn't work. The smell was the grey water smell and it will get worse. He  then said that he had made a provision to fill the WC tank with fresh water,  knowing that we will have to abandon the experiment. Shall he do so. And of course, I agreed.

I still had grey water. So, I got an additional small pump to use the grey water for gardening. 

Given the rains, I haven't used a drop of it for over 3 months now. Plus, even when it is bright and sunny, we consume enough to water a small part of the lawn.

I try to cheer myself up by trying to believe that every little bit helps even though my logic tells me - of course not. The upfront costs exceed the savings. I have made the planet a little worse.

I decided to share my learning experience in the hope that it may save someone from making the same stupid mistake and spending sleepless nights thinking about how could I have been so illogical and had refused to think through the implications.

" Tamil Nadu CM Stalin Wants Education Shifted from Concurrent to State List"  triggered the old memory of "question out of syllabus" experience. 

It is now over 20 years since the complaint of a faculty member Mr. X and students of another college that the Vice Chancellor had called a meeting and agreed with Mr. X. The VC said that we raise the marks of the students. This was done without even looking at the results. 

Mr. X had a  problem as raising the marks increase some students' marks to over 100%. He somehow managed. In my view, the process was unfair to students who had understood the concepts. But why does this incident still pain me like a simmering wound, a permanent damage with no hope of healing?

The real cause of pain comes down to the implicit and explicit remarks that I had told our faculty member to teach these examples in our college. The thought had never even crossed my mind that anyone could interpret it as such. Or the belief that "The correct answer must be written in the text book" ; hence, I must have cheated.

Making education a state only subject does not guarantee improvement. However, it does give me hope that may be one of  the states may do better. At least there is a possibility that somewhere over the horizon,  learning may become a focus point for the future generations.