oh india

i am a volunteer at the local Asha for education chapter. i joined it in the first year out of curiosity/boredom on that particular weekend and have been actively involved in various fund raising events ever since. beyond that i dont know why i joined. i notice that many indian students in the united states are part of such organizations (Asha, AID, etc.) Interesting given that very few of us did any social volunteering while in india. not that i or others did not have time while in india. anyone saying that would be bsing through their mouths. is it some kind of guilt complex? i dont know.
anyway....Asha was rated as the top charity organisation by a neutral body called charity navigator. so in case you have a chapter around you...join it. or at least give your money (-:

one thing that struck me while reading the charity navigator website was the fact that two indian charities are in the top 5. both are entirely volunteer run and have no paid employees. and both have extremely high standards and excellent "returns on investment". they both have budgets of around a million (roughly). the american charities listed there have ceos, excellent quality and budgets of 100s of millions of dollars!

so, despite all this progress , or is it talk of progress?, india is still a few orders of mangitude lower in development indices. heres one that shocked me when i first heard it. the number of domestic airline tickets sold from march 2004 to march 2005 in india grew 10 odd percent over the prior fiscal to 16 million tickets. thats the number of tickets sold in the united states in 5 days!!

obit

Jack Kilby, university of illinois, ECE, 1947, inventor of ICs died this week. His Ge based device was the model for future Si based devices.
Charles Keeling, University of Illinois 1948, first person to point out global warming died yesterday. He was a legend in experimental circles for his anal behavior and resulting accuracy of his data. Even the Bushies and industry hacks could never dispute his data or methodology.

the race that wasnt

a few snaps from the indy trip and my new used car.











less said the better about the race itself

monkey business

Do read this week's new york times sunday magazine. its about money, economics and monkeys. A group of researchers at yale trained monkeys to use money to buy food. the money was silver colored discs and they could exchange it for jellos and other sweet foods. within some time of getting trained to use money, the monkeys did two things normally associated with humans: a bank heist and prostitution!! stealing is something to be expected from monkeys, but the actual use of an inedible thing to get sex disturbed the researchers. to prevent turning the lab into a brothel, they have modified the experiment (-: another stunning find was that the monkeys are optimists. they are ready to take risks and believe that they can make a good gamble. the actual statistics of the monkeys taking optimisitic gambles matched that of stock market humans.

all you classical music fans

check this out. this promises to be some fun
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/beethoven/downloads.shtml