Friday, March 21, 2008


Education Push Yields Little for India’s Poor

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

More children in India are attending school than ever, but the quality of education remains poor.

Published: January 17, 2008


The school in Lahtora was crowded and cold, so classes were held outside. More Photos »


LAHTORA, India — With the dew just rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There was no way he could teach.

Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite recall when he had last taught.

“When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. “They’ll say, ‘We came every day and we learned nothing.’ ”

Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder.

The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who cannot afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.

India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.

That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Mr. Ghosh works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for continued growth.

Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school. Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability, and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor children from lower castes.

“Education is a long-term investment,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government’s top policy czar. “We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously long period of time.”

Looking for a Way Up

Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an epic experiment to lift up its schools. Along the way lie many hurdles, and Mr. Ghosh, on his visits to villages like this one, encounters them all.

The aides who were hired to draw more village children into school complain that they have not received money to buy educational materials. Or the school has stopped serving lunch even though sacks of rice are piled in the classroom. Or parents agree to enroll their son in school, but know that they will soon send the child away to work. Or worst of all, from Mr. Ghosh’s perspective, all these stick-thin, bright-eyed children trickle into school every morning and take back so little.

“They’re coming with some hope of getting something,” Mr. Ghosh muttered. “It’s our fault we can’t give them anything.”

Even here, the kind of place from which millions of uneducated men and women have traditionally migrated to cities for work, an appetite for education has begun to set in. An educated person would not only be more likely to find a good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad one. “I want my children to do something, to advance themselves,” is how Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. “To do that they must study.”

Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 percent of Indian men, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the richest 20 percent of Indian men, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent are illiterate.

Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-5, college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for instance, a day laborer makes barely more than $1 a day.

“The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big, changing India is certainly there in everyone’s minds,” said Rukmini Banerji, the research director of Pratham. “The question is: What’s the best way to get there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to figure this out.”

She added, “If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions of children.”

Money From the State

India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes to triple its financial commitment over the next five years. At present, education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for free lunch every day.

Even in a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.

And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated on the ground.

At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new kitchen and $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman’s friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village committee in exchange for building permits.

The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher’s uncle, making the idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Mr. Ghosh that their complaints fell on deaf ears: the teachers were connected to powerful people in the community.

It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of political patronage.

The school’s drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide.

Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom, provisions for the savory rice porridge that is one of the main draws of government schools. Except that Mr. Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch for the last week.

What about the money that comes from the state to buy eggs and other provisions for lunch, Mr. Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Mr. Hassan explained, because there was no rice to serve them with — at least not in his record books.

(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say rice can be a tempting side income for unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the poor in general, though not at this particular village school, is sometimes found diverted and sold on the private market, but one of the brighter findings of the Pratham survey was that free meals were served in over 90 percent of schools.)

Mr. Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. “You have rice. You have money. You prefer that kids don’t eat?” he asked.

Mr. Hassan shook his head. He said he could only cook what rice was in his records, or cook this rice if a senior government officer instructed him to do so. Mr. Ghosh went on to point out that one of the aides had shown up more than an hour late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. Two teachers were altogether absent. Even Mr. Hassan, Mr. Ghosh added, had pulled up a half-hour late.

“You’re the head of this school,” Mr. Ghosh told him. “Only you can improve this school.”

Mr. Hassan fired back: “What are you talking about? For the last 25 years this school wasn’t running at all.”

New Plans, Old Attitudes

Mr. Ghosh could not dispute that. There were times when the school doors did not open. One father, an agricultural laborer, said he had tried a few times to enroll his children but gave up after the former principal demanded money. Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were seen to offer better discipline.

Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.

Mr. Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a small town in neighboring West Bengal state, which is only slightly better off than here. But if he dared skip class, he recalled, he would be thrashed by his father, a public school principal. The children of this village, he knew, would not be so lucky. “When I first started coming here,” Mr. Ghosh recalled, parents “would ask me, ‘What are you going to give me? Your porridge isn’t enough. Because if I send my child to herd a buffalo, at least he’ll make 3 rupees.’ ” Three rupees is less than 10 cents.

One morning Mr. Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch compound of Mohammed Zakir, a migrant laborer who goes to work in Delhi each year. Mr. Zakir’s son, Farooq, about 10 years old, was going to school for the first time this week. And as Mr. Zakir saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the legal age for employment, when he too would have to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in school through their teenage years, the father said flatly, was not a luxury the family could afford.

Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Mr. Ghosh looked utterly worn out. “If I don’t get this child in school,” he said, “then his child in turn won’t go to school.”

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Monday, October 09, 2006

Robots Do 'It' Themselves !

Self-cloning robots are a chip off the old block

  • 11 May 2005
  • Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition.
  • Justin Mullins
The experiment shows reproduction is not unique to biology, the scientists argue


BIRDS and bees do it - now machines can reproduce too. The first scalable robot to have built an exact copy of itself could herald a fundamental rethink of how robots may be used to explore other planets.

Hod Lipson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, built their self-replicating device using small mechanical building blocks that can swivel, and also attach themselves to one another using electromagnets.

Each 10 centimetre cube contains a microprocessor, and they are all equipped with an identical set of instructions that tell the block how to connect and swivel, depending on the way it is linked to other blocks. The instructions are designed to make the blocks work together to self-replicate.

For example, three or four blocks piled on top of each other to form a tower can create an identical tower by swivelling round like a crane to pick up other nearby blocks and pile them on top of each other (Nature, vol 435 p 163). "The instructions aren't complex. In fact, they turn out to be surprisingly simple," Lipson says.

Because the blocks are identical, larger structures can be made by adding more blocks. This scalability is important, Lipson says. Previous work on self-replication has involved only simulations and specially designed machines. "But ours is not a one-off. It proves that there is a whole family of self-replicating machines that can do this." See footage of the process here (Windows Media Video, 5.42MB, courtesy of Hod Lipson, Cornell University).

"It's a neat piece of work. If you could miniaturise these blocks and manufacture them cheaply in large numbers, you could build some interesting structures," says Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath, UK, who specialises in self-replication. Lipson hopes to do just that by reducing the size of his blocks.

Self-replication could have major implications for how robots are used in remote environments where repairing them is difficult. "Self-replication is the ultimate form of repair," Lipson says. "You can imagine robotic systems on Mars or at the ocean bottom repairing themselves using a mechanism like this."

Robotic systems on Mars or at the bottom of the ocean could repair themselves using a mechanism like this

The team has also come up with a new way of thinking about self-replication that could speed up future work. In the past, self-replication has been thought of as a property that a system either has or does not have. But Lipson and his team suggest that it is more useful to allow for intermediate levels of self-replication. Using this approach, they have developed a mathematical measure of self-replication that depends on the amount of information being copied. "For the first time, we can actually measure self-replication and so understand how to improve it," Lipson says.


Saturday, October 07, 2006

Help Others To Read This

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That Time of the Year!

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2006

"for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"
John C. Mather George F. Smoot
Photo: NASA Photo: R. Kaltschmidt/LBNL
John C. Mather George F. Smoot
half 1/2 of the prize half 1/2 of the prize
USA USA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD, USA
University of California
Berkeley, CA, USA
b. 1946 b. 1945
Titles, data and places given above refer to the time of the award.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Sleeping Beauties

Mental Activity Seen in a Brain Gravely Injured

Published: September 8, 2006

A severely brain-damaged woman in an unresponsive, vegetative state showed clear signs on brain imaging tests that she was aware of herself and her surroundings, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have far-reaching consequences for how unconscious patients are cared for and how their conditions are diagnosed.

A severely brain-damaged woman in an unresponsive, vegetative state showed clear signs on brain imaging tests that she was aware of herself and her surroundings, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have far-reaching consequences for how unconscious patients are cared for and how their conditions are diagnosed.

In response to commands, the patient’s brain flared with activity, lighting the same language and movement-planning regions that are active when healthy people hear the commands. Previous studies had found similar activity in partly conscious patients, who occasionally respond to commands, but never before in someone who was totally unresponsive.

Neurologists cautioned that the new report characterized only a single, perhaps unique case and that it did not mean that unresponsive brain-damaged people were more likely to recover or that treatment was possible. The woman in the study could not communicate with the researchers, and there was no way to know whether her subjective experience was anything like what healthy people call consciousness. The woman was injured in a traffic accident in England last year.

Yet the study so drastically contradicted the woman’s diagnosed condition that it exposed the limitations of standard methods of bedside diagnosis. And its findings are bound to raise hopes for tens of thousands of families caring for unresponsive, brain-damaged patients around the world — whether those hopes are justified or not, experts said.

“One always hesitates to make a lot out of a single case, but what this study shows me is that there may be more going on in terms of patients’ self-awareness than we can learn at the bedside,” said Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at the Dartmouth Medical School, who was not involved in the study. “Even though we might assume some patients are not aware, I think we should always talk to them, always explain what’s going on, always make them comfortable, because maybe they are there, inside, aware of everything.”

Dr. Bernat added that brain imaging promised to improve the diagnosis of unconscious states in certain patients, but that the prospect of imaging could also raise false hopes in cases like that of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who was removed from life support and died last year after a bitter national debate over patients’ rights.

Ms. Schiavo suffered far more profound brain damage than the woman in the study and was unresponsive for some 15 years, according to neurologists who examined her.

The journal that published the new paper, Science, promoted the finding in a news release, but added a “special note” citing the Schiavo case and warning that the finding “should not be used to generalize about all other patients in a vegetative state, particularly since each case may involve a different type of injury.”

The brain researchers, led by Adrian Owen at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, performed scans on the patient’s brain five months after her accident. The imaging technique, called functional M.R.I., reveals changes in activity in specific brain regions. When the researchers spoke sentences to the patient, language areas in her brain spiked in the same way healthy volunteers’ did.

When presented with sentences containing ambiguous words, like “The creak came from a beam in the ceiling,” additional language processing areas also became active, as in normal brains. And when the researchers asked the woman to imagine playing tennis or walking through her house, they saw peaks of activity in the premotor cortex and other areas of her brain that mimicked those of healthy volunteers.

“If you put her scans together with the other 12 volunteers tested, you cannot tell which is the patient’s,” Dr. Owen said in an interview. Doctors from the University of Cambridge and the University of Liège in Belgium collaborated on the research.

Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, said that the study provided “knock-down, drag-out” evidence for mental awareness, but that it was not clear “whether we’ll see this in one out of 100 vegetative patients, or one out of 1,000, or ever again.”

In a more recent exam, more than 11 months after her injury, the patient exhibited a sign of responsiveness: she tracked with her eyes a small mirror, as it was moved slowly to her right, and could fixate on objects for more than five seconds, said Dr. Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège and an author of the study. This means by definition that the young woman has transitioned from an unresponsive, vegetative state to a sometimes responsive condition known as a minimally conscious state, Dr. Laureys said in an interview. An estimated 100,000 Americans exist in this state of partial consciousness, and some of them eventually regain full awareness.

The chances that an unresponsive, brain-damaged patient will eventually emerge depend on the type of injury suffered, and on the length of time he or she has been unresponsive. Traumatic injuries to the head, often from car accidents, tend to sever brain cell connections and leave many neurons intact. About 50 percent of people with such injuries recover some awareness in the first year after the injury, studies find; very few do so afterward. By contrast, brains starved of oxygen — like that of Ms. Schiavo, whose heart stopped temporarily — often suffer a massive loss of neurons, leaving virtually nothing unharmed. Only 15 percent of people who suffer brain damage from oxygen deprivation recover some awareness within the first three months. Very few do after that, and a 1994 review of more than 700 vegetative patients found that none had done so after two years.

The imaging techniques used in the new study could help identify which patients are most likely to emerge — once the tests are studied in larger numbers of unconscious people, said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Without this context, Dr. Fins said, the imaging tests could create some confusion, because like any medical tests they may occasionally go wrong, misidentifying patients as exhibiting consciousness or lacking it. “For now I think what this study does is to create another shade of gray in the understanding of gray matter,” he said.


Sunday, August 06, 2006

Planemos...What??

A Planet? Maybe It’s a Star

European Southern Observatory

An artist's rendition of what a twin planemo system might look like.


NY Times
Published: August 4, 2006

A tiny star with a giant planet is further muddling astronomers’ notion of what a planet is. The planet is one of perhaps only two or three planets around other stars to be photographed directly, but it may be more like a star than a planet.

The tiny star, known as Oph1622, is so small that it never lighted up, a failed star known as a brown dwarf. Even among brown dwarfs, it is small, with a mass equal to 14 Jupiters, or about one-seventy-fifth that of the Sun.

In a paper published yesterday on the Web site of the journal Science, astronomers at the University of Toronto and the European Southern Observatory report that a photograph of Oph1622 also shows a planet about half as large as the star itself, with a mass equal to seven Jupiters.

The two are separated by 22 billion miles, or about six times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. Both are young, about a million years old. Astronomers refer to them both by a recently coined word, planemo (pronounced PLAN-uh-mo), short for planetary mass object — planet-size bodies that may or may not be planets.

“It really stands out as something quite unusual and intriguing,” said Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto and an author of the Science paper. “The Oph1622 pair adds to the rich diversity of worlds that have been discovered recently, a diversity that we couldn’t really have imagined barely a decade ago.”

.....
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In the past decade astronomers have found 200 planets around other stars. Almost all of these have been indirectly detected from a slight shift in the frequency of a star’s light caused by the gravitational pull of a planet.

In 2004, astronomers reported the first direct sighting of a distant planet, with about the mass of five Jupiters, seen next to a brown dwarf known as 2M1207 about 230 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. Astronomers have since seen small, faint companions around a couple other stars, but are uncertain whether those companions are planets or brown dwarfs.

Oph1622, about 400 light-years from Earth, should add to the confusion. Dr. Jayawardhana said its companion had the mass of a planet but was born in the manner of stars.

Star systems form in two steps. First, a cloud of gas collapses under gravity into one, two and sometimes three stars. A disk of leftover gas and dust then coalesces into planets.

...
....

Brown dwarfs, by some definitions, have a mass greater than about 13 Jupiters, the minimum amount for fusion reactions involving a heavy form of hydrogen known as deuterium to begin. (The fusing of ordinary hydrogen requires much higher temperatures and much higher mass, about 75 times that of Jupiter. That is the upper mass limit for brown dwarfs.)

But some astronomers say that many brown dwarfs are embryonic stars that were ejected out of nascent star systems. Others say that brown dwarfs formed just like other stars, but from smaller gas clouds. Astronomers have also observed free-floating planet-size objects not in orbit around a star, and they debate whether these objects formed in the same way as stars or were ejected from other star systems.

.....
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But Oph1622’s planet could not have formed the usual planet way, Dr. Jayawardhana said. Most known planetary disks have only 1 percent to 2 percent as much mass as the parent star, and thus the disk rotating around Oph1622 would have been too small to produce a planet half as large as itself, he said.

......


Saturday, July 15, 2006

Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved ??

Rogue Giants at Sea


Published: July 11, 2006
Karsten Petersen

STORM SURGE The chief engineer of the Stolt Surf took photographs as the tanker met a rogue wave in 1977. The deck, nearly 75 feet above sea level, was submerged.


Karsten Petersen

DLR

LASTING EFFECTS The Wilstar, a Norwegian tanker, suffered structural damage from a rogue wave in 1974. Scientists are focusing on how to make ships less vulnerable.


The storm was nothing special. Its waves rocked the Norwegian Dawn just enough so that bartenders on the cruise ship turned to the usual palliative — free drinks.

Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic.

“The ship was like a cork in a bathtub,” recalled Celestine Mcelhatton, a passenger who, along with 2,000 others, eventually made it back to Pier 88 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. Some vowed never to sail again.

Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity. Over the decades, skeptical oceanographers have doubted their existence and tended to lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters.

But scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects. The goals are to better tally them, understand why they form, explore the possibility of forecasts, and learn how to better protect ships, oil platforms and people.

The stakes are high. In the past two decades, freak waves are suspected of sinking dozens of big ships and taking hundreds of lives. The upshot is that the scientists feel a sense of urgency about the work and growing awe at their subjects....

....


Friday, June 30, 2006

Let there be light...

Lighting the key to energy saving

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature |
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Nuclear power station at Dungeness, UK.  Image: PA
Lighting uses more electricity than is produced by nuclear stations
A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.

Better building regulations would boost uptake of efficient lighting, it says.

"Lighting is a major source of electricity consumption," said Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst with the IEA and one of the report's authors.

"19% of global electricity generation is taken for lighting - that's more than is produced by hydro or nuclear stations, and about the same that's produced from natural gas," he told the BBC News website......

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