In India, Dow Jones Meets Dharma

Invest According to Religious Beliefs

Here's how the indices work. Even though there are four country-specific indices, Sumeet Nihalani, senior director for Asia Pacific sales at Dow Jones Indexes, says that the appetite for dharma or faith-based investing is "global and from people of different faiths and nationalities." So asset managers can create global or country-specific products using these indices, enabling Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs to invest in stocks that are in sync with their religious beliefs.

In India, Dow Jones Meets Dharma

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Duraflex Flexible Keyboard

Duraflex Flexible Keyboard is the "optimal keyboard", suitable for just about any workplace environment.. Simple to clean from dust, dirt and liquid, it's great for tougher environments within manufacturing industries. Perfect for infection-control-minded healthcare facilities and educational environments, too. This washable keyboard is manufactured in durable silicon enabling it to be rolled into a portable laptop case. The keyboard has soft and comfortable keys that respond exceptionally quickly to finger strokes. Benefits; portable, flexible and durable waterproof keyboard

Duraflex Flexible Keyboard

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Climate Change - The True Cost of Biofuels: Science Snapshot

Major findings of The Nature Conservancy/University of Minnesota study on land clearing and the biofuel “carbon debt” include:

* Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace.

* Converting lowland tropical rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia to palm biodiesel would result in a biofuel carbon dept that would take approximately 86 years to repay.

Climate Change - The True Cost of Biofuels: Science Snapshot

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Some Closure

"The reasons:
1. Behavior driven development (BDD)
2. MVC + J
3. Chaining of actions
4. CSS Selector rocks!
5. No more checks for presence of an element
6. Aids development process"

None of these are reasons I would ever suggest to someone who is choosing a framework. As someone who builds large-scale sites professionally, I view all (except for #6) of these reasons as counter-productive. It is why understanding the gap between professional tools (YUI/Dojo) and hobbyist tools (Prototype/jQuery) is so hard for people on either side of the equation.

Some Closure

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rediff.com: A crorepati who lives in a hut!

He instead started a catering business of his own, inspired by his mother who once sold idlis on the pavements of Chennai, worked as an ayah in an Anganvadi to educate him and his siblings. As a child, he also sold idlis in the slum where he lived. "We talk about India shining and India growing, but we should ensure that people do not die of hunger. We can be a developed country but we should not leave the poor people behind. I am worried for them because I know what hunger is and I still remember the days I was hungry," says Sarathbabu.

In August 2006, Sarathbabu's entrepreneurial dream came true with Foodking. He had no personal ambition but wanted to buy a house and a car for his mother. He has bought a car but is yet to buy a house for his mother. The "foodking" still lives in the same hut in Madipakkam in Chennai. Today, Foodking has six units and 200 employees, and the turnover of the company is Rs.32 lakh a month. But it has not been a bed of roses for Sarathbabu. After struggling and making losses in the first year, he managed a turnaround in 2007.

rediff.com: A crorepati who lives in a hut!

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Taxation of illegal income in the United States

The Supreme Court held that an embezzler was required to include his ill-gotten gains in his "gross income" for Federal income tax purposes.

While embezzlers, thieves, and the like are forced to report their ill-gotten gains as income for tax purposes, they may also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity.

No business deduction is allowed "for any payment made, directly or indirectly, to an official or employee of any government [ . . . ] if the payment constitutes an illegal bribe or kickback

Taxation of illegal income in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Sex Drive: 7 Reasons Your Boss Should Send You to Sex Conferences

When it comes to technology, it's the great unfulfilled needs that matter most. That's where the next fortunes will be made. But if you're in the tech biz, how do you know what users want if you're hanging out with techies all the time?You turn to sex. Here are seven reasons why your tech company should send you to sex conferences like Sex 2.0, Arse Elektronica and Sex in Video Games rather than to mainstream events like this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

2. Tech adapted for sex has applications outside the bedroom.

A tech conference exposes you to ideas people have already had. A sex conference exposes you to people who aren't afraid to ask for what they want, no matter how technically improbable it seems. You can use your tech-savvy brain to adapt these desires for general usage and present them to your boss. Meanwhile, you can create a sex-specific application on the side, knowing you have a willing user base waiting breathlessly for your next release.

3. Social-media platforms are built for sex.

If an application becomes crucial to lovers, they will have no problem coming up with genuine reasons to integrate that tool into their work flow. And once corporate users are on board, the paper millions are just an IPO away.

4. Young people -- your future customers -- do it with tech.

There's money in bridging old-school romance with new media, and the sex-positive community knows how to make that leap better than anyone. When today's youth get out of school, they're going to remake the world the way they want it -- and that means tech will be an essential ingredient in courtship, romance and sex. It's so essential to young people's communication now that they don't even realize they're doing it. And this is at a time when they're still spending most of their time surrounded by their peers. Just wait until they're out of school and in the workforce.

Sex Drive: 7 Reasons Your Boss Should Send You to Sex Conferences

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To pee is to be | Hard News

So what was wrong when a Dutch embassy official said that Delhi looks like a garbage dump? Why did our patriotic instincts get so aroused that we almost condemned this frank, free speech? Delhi is a non-biodegradable, backward capitalist, semi-feudal, patriarchal, uncultured garbage dump, why shy away from that? Not only that, Delhi has turned into a vast, sprawling, ever, macho public urinal, a shit hole, a faceless ghetto, an architect’s black-hole nemesis, an octopus without a soul or belonging or sensitivity or civic sense. So what is so Mera Bharat Mahan about Delhi being a damned garbage dump? Can’t you see it all over the place, from the posh, palatial south zones to the twilight zones of the east and west, with the demolished slums in between? Surely, even tinted windows of swanky cars are transparent, aren’t they? So why hide the gaze?

To pee is to be | Hard News

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Open source on bug patrol

24. Open source on bug patrol

An open source tool is being readied for release this year that its creators say could dramatically speed software development and improve software quality.

Computer scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Texas at Arlington credit the use of "combinatorial testing" for their breakthrough.

The trick is being able to quickly test interactions of up to six variables. The work stemmed from research into what really causes bugs in software. The researchers found that it is more often caused by problematic interactions between a few variables rather than a bunch even if a program, such as an e-commerce application, features hundreds of variables.

Findings of this latest software debugging research are described in several presentations, one by NIST researchers and another by University of Texas researchers

Developers interested in getting your hands on code should contact NIST's Raghu Kacker.

25 leading-edge IT research projects | NetworkWorld.com Community

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25 leading-edge IT research projects | NetworkWorld.com Community

5. The Fluid Project

A handful of universities, including the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, is working to build a software architecture and reusable components that can make Web applications easier to develop and use. The Fluid Project's work focuses on user-centered design practices. Vendors such as Mozilla Foundation, IBM and Sun are also taking part.

The latest news out of the project is that a grant has been awarded to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto from the Mozilla Foundation to promote DHTML accessibility and the adoption of ARIA (the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification).

25 leading-edge IT research projects | NetworkWorld.com Community

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Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times

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An Unpopular Position on Net Neutrality | Stanford Center for Internet and Society

My reasons against--different from those of the broadband providers in many respects--haven't really changed, but let me summarize them before I'm labeled a terrorist:

1. The problem doesn't exist yet - always a bad idea to legislate a future (even if a likely future) breakdown in market forces, especially when the breakdown involves rapidly evolving technologies and, consequently, unstable market dynamics. No provider is currently offering non-neutral pricing, access, or priority.

2. Discriminating may be necessary to optimize network performance - Uses for broadband infrastructure are emerging rapidly, and it isn't entirely clear that discriminating based on content wouldn't be the best way to optimize network performance, whether doing so would add to profits or not for the provider. The cable networks already "discriminate" in favor of programming over Internet traffic for subscribers who get both from the cable company, because the programming needs priority. Content providers are worried that if broadband providers aren't banned from discriminating, they'll someday (soon, perhaps) extract premiums from content providers to get their stuff delivered, or give competitors that option. But some kinds of content should get higher or lower priority as a matter of optimization, and blanket bans on prioritizing may end up making a mess of traffic overall.

3. The federal government is a poor choice for any of this - From defining what is required of a provider to satisfy "neutrality," to developing the rules for enforcement, to operating those rules, the federal government and in particular the FCC are poor choices to solve the problem, assuming the problem exists in the first place. Maybe the Internet has worked so well because neutrality has been a persistent part of the architecture. Maybe it's worked so well because there has been minimal government regulation of its design and operation. Maybe both. More of the latter to shore up the former is a dangerous trade-off.

An Unpopular Position on Net Neutrality | Stanford Center for Internet and Society

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Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming?

Educational methods that revolve around memorization, be it in games or anything else, are usually very ineffecient. Teaching facts is along the lines of giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to do so. Once you learn that fact, it does little to nothing to your overall education in other areas.

The most effective teaching methods involve giving students the tools to be able to learn how to learn. Most learning will be done on a student's own through exploration, even if much of it is passive.

That's where video games come in. Legend of Zelda may not teach you Mayan history, it might not show you, directly, how to do algebra, but it develops problem solving and creative thinking skills in fairly complex ways that will make a student's job in learning those things FAR easier. Zelda isn't even an "education game" but its innate problem solving is more involved that almost any story problem you'll encounter in HS, and kids play Zelda in grade school. The problem is, it's not easilly quantifiable because there are no hard-and-fast facts being learned, but as I said, fact learning is one of the least inefficient educational methods. Sure, facts must be taught, but there should be much less emphasis on fact learning and more emphasis on critical thinking skills.

Meanwhile, over the course of Zelda, or even an adventure FPS, RPG, or most other modern games, you're reading a lot of on-screen text, you're doing mathmatical computation for stats, puzzles, and the like... and all surrounded by various time limits that act as drill. And to top it off, it's fun and doesn't FEEL like work. What more could an educator ask for?

http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/04/09/2039258.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Munchers

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=517212&cid=23018860

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html

The Media Blackout Against Ron Paul

It was OK for the MSM to cover Ron Paul's campaign as long as there was no voting taking place. After all, they have to have SOMETHING to talk and write about, and all the other candidates sing the same old boring tune. But once the voting started there has indeed been a complete MSM blackout.

Economists William Meckling and Michael Jenson, formerly of the University of Rochester, offered an explanation for the extreme statist bias of the media some thirty years ago, and I think it applies to the MSM's current blackout policy. If you are a national news reporter, you must always keep in mind that news must be new. You must cultivate numerous "inside sources" of news, and in today's world those sources are overwhelmingly in govenment. If you report on defense issues, your main sources are Defense Department bureaucrats or political appointees. If you are an environmental reporter, your sources are EPA bureaucrats and political appointees. If you are a crime reporter, you rely on the FBI bureaucracy, etc., etc.

This is why the media are never very critical of government bureaucrats -- unless the bureaucrats are being insufficiently interventionist. They pretend to be critical from time to time, but not really. The regime must be defended at all costs, for it is the regime that is the source of the journalists' human capital. Strip away parts of the regime, as Ron Paul wants to do, and you strip away jobs and careers for "journalists."

It's not Ron Paul who is the target of the blackout, but his ideas of peace, freedom, free enterprise, and limited constitutional government. After all, the MSM never, ever write anything about him without saying, "but of course, he has no chance of winning." They don't believe he could ever win, but his ideas could, which is why they must be hidden from public view at all costs.

It will be interesting to see how much longer it takes the internet to break up this monopolistic political conspiracy.

H-1B FAQ - Dependents

Special documentation instructions for those on a dependent visa (H-4, L-2, etc) for initial H-1 application

One of the requirements if to show that you have been maintaining valid status. However, your status is contingent on the primary visa holder. So, we need documents to prove the primary visa holder is maintaining status. This requires the following documents of primary visa holder:

• 4 - 6 most recent paystubs
• H-1 approval - I-797
• I-94
• If the primary visa holder just arrived and doesn't have any paystubs, we need copy of visa/passport.

Travel restrictions for H-1 processing
Once you apply for H-1, with change of status, don't go out of the country until H-1 is approved. If you go out of the country, your I-94 would change and the old one with which we applied would no longer be valid. Your change of status would be denied. Sometimes, approval doesn't come through until November/December and travel plans would have to be postponed.

However, you can still come back on the old visa (H-4, etc) and apply for change of status once you are here. A better option is to opt for consular processing.


Consular processing is strongly recommended for dependent visa holders

• Don't have to worry about travel issues. Quite a large number of depends travel back to home country before their H-1 starts and consular processing wouldn't interfere with that.
• Often, it turns out by the time the H-1 approval comes through, dependents are in an expectant state, and can't join the workforce for about 6 months to 1 year. The best option is to be in H-4 (or related dependent) status at that time. Our lawyer has noticed a very high volume of such pregnancy cases recently, where people switched back to H-4 as soon as it is approved.
  
• By the time approval comes through, the market may not be in terrific shape, there is almost no hiring in Nov/Dec and sometimes skills need upgrading. Besides, no one can predict the vagaries of a particular skillset or a market or demand for a skillset in a particular location (dependents would have strict geographic restrictions). Again, the best option is consular processing, which would give flexibility until things are favorable.

Consular processing - change of status

• We can file for change of status being in US. This is done using form I-539. USCIS fee for this is $320. It should be fairly easy to do the documentation ourselves. Attorney said his fee would be same for filing I-539, which would be $830, but I think we can probably persuade him to go with $500 or so or maybe even lesser. Most of the work for filing is done already anyways!
• Get it stamped in Mexico, Canada or India

For $48000 pay, $4000/month

• Employer taxes 12.5% ==> 500

• Withholdings from your paycheck - Total: $951
• Federal Withholding - $506.17
• Social Security - $248.00
• Medicare - $58.00
• New Jersey - $106.92
• SUI/SDI - $37.00

• Total money stolen by Govt per paycheck = $1441

Passport renewal in NY

From Srikanth.

When you go to the Indian Consulate in NY, you will not get the passport on the same day. If you pay for Tatkal service, you might.

If you are planning on going there, try to reach there by 9:15 am and get a token as soon as you get there. The crowd increases enormously as the day passes.

With normal processing, you will receive the passport in 5-6 days.

They will retain your old passport and return it along with the new one.

For me, I reached there at 11:00 AM and my turn came at 2:00 PM. There is a 45-minute lunch break for the consulate from 1:00 pm to 1:45 pm.

Indian Consulate Home Page: http://www.indiacgny.org

For passport services and details use the "consular" link on the left.

Also, it seems you can take a token, roam around and come back. This, if true, would be good. Roam around NYC, take a look at the lady with sambhar bucket and come back, just in time for your turn.

On Cuba (communism) and Iran

The inevitable result of this campaign was to drive Cuba ever-closer to the Soviets. In December 1961, almost three years after his nationalist movement had overthrown Batista, President Castro declared that he was now a Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba was adopting Communism. His ‘conversion’ was less a product of a blinding light on the road to Havana than of the grinding hostility he encountered from Washington. President Kennedy responded to Castro’s announcement in characteristic style, by imposing the economic embargo that has shaped relations between Cuba and the USA ever since.

Background Brief: Iran

In 1979 a popular uprising against the Shah brought Ayatollah Khomeini out of exile in Paris and he became the new leader of, by now, an intensely Islamic-flavoured government in Tehran. By then, its British Empire gone, the UK had lost its clout in international affairs and America took over by massively equipping Saddam Hussein’s army in Iraq and giving him more than a nod and a wink to invade Iran — which he promptly did in 1980.

This was one of the longest wars in history — 1980-1988. Also, considering Iran’s modest population, this was one of the highest-fatality wars in history with up to one million Iranian deaths on the battlefield — at least 100,000 dying from chemical weapons long outlawed by international conventions. The chemicals for these weapons were supplied from America via — yes, you’ve guessed — Donald Rumsfeld, the late unlamented US Secretary of Defense under the present President.

Health Care, Health Industry, etc

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-health-first-look.html

U.S. Health Care Spending to Double by 2017, Report Predicts
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/26/AR2008022601380.html

Shortage of surgeons pinches U.S. hospitals
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-26-doctor-shortage_N.htm

Health care information matters
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html

Putting health into the patient's hands
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/putting-health-into-patients-hands.html

http://adambosworth.net/2007/11/26/health-and-the-aspen-institute/

Adam Bosworth left google. I wonder why.

OpenMRS

UML: The Positive Spin

Finding a use for UML

Obviously the UML will not be useful to any software developer. Could it perhaps be useful to someone else? Project managers, perhaps? Company executives? The companies themselves? Of course not. Indeed the documents make no pretense of such usefulness, and for good reason. It is hard to imagine what benefit a business could get from pages of cryptic diagrams about hazy properties of a poorly understood system.

A friend who was at an object-oriented conference recently told me of all the UML jokes that O-O experts -- some of the most respected people in the field -- were trading during the breaks and in the back of the rooms. He couldn't believe the contrast between the public hype and the private disparagement. But CEOs and other decision makers only hear the hype; they are told that UML is object-oriented, or more often that object-oriented means UML. When it fails to help their software development, UML will give a bad name to the whole O-O field. Given the marketing blitz around it, UML, by not delivering on its promises, has the potential of delaying the progress of object technology by ten years.

The reason I did not discover it earlier is that it only appears in the conclusion. A strange place to describe what one was trying to write about all along, but better than no place at all. Of course what I found is not a technical goal (UML, as I said already, serves no software-related purpose whatsoever, and that's fine with me -- some people have better things to do with their lives than trying to improve software technology). It is not a managerial goal, at least not for people managing software projects. It is not a business goal, at least not for any business using UML. But it is a goal.

When I finally discovered that goal, I was almost driven to tears by the authors' noble and generous spirit. It would be unfair to say that the piles of UML documentation are empty of any substance, when in fact they contain one genuine idea. I found it in the very last paragraph of the very last report describing the 0.91 revision [2]. There it was in all its openness, explaining everything I had theretofore misunderstood in my youthful naiveté. How could I criticize the method for not helping software developers or managers, when it does not care about software development at all, but only about developing a market for consultants and trainers? Everything started to make sense: the complexity and bizarreness of the notation, which I had foolishly taken for a deficiency, are in fact among its most attractive qualities, since they make for endless business opportunities, for Rational and perhaps even for others as well; so does its lukewarm adoption of object-oriented ideas, since it means a consultant does not even have to like or understand object technology to profit from UML.

My long search had not been in vain. It had led me to a full appreciation of the UML, this admirable self-feeding machine, devoted from A to Z to the creation of a new market, free of any of the difficulties associated with the unpleasant business of software development: UML books! UML courses! Courses on the books! Books on the courses! Books on the books! Introductory courses to prepare for the advanced courses! Courses for those who teach the courses! Revisions! UML journals! Conferences! Workshops! Tutorials! Standards! Committees! T-shirts! The more you think about the possibilities, the more dazzling they look. And for any reader brave or bored enough to read the documents to the end, the grand scheme is all there, laid out in the final paragraph.

Reminds me of Amway, Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Slashdot | Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them

Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them

Slashdot | Plants Use Twitter to Tell You to Water Them

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