Una verdad simulada

Atanu Dey makes another quoteworthy post on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Atanu correctly points out that his objective is not to trash SSRS or Art of Living (AoL); his criticism of SSRS/AoL is very specific:

AoL is a personality driven cult. It makes many of its followers zombies who worship SSRS and have abdicated their reason.

[…]

I am all for the promotion of good ideas — and Indian philosophy and religions have an incredible store of that sort of thing. But when the personality becomes the focus, the ideas take a back seat. This is a pity because the ideas are important while the person is merely the instrument.

Touché. Although I might add that the definition of “personality driven cult” and “abdication of reason” is also applicable to religions.

Tags: General by Niket
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By official decree, last Sunday was a Monday and coming Monday is a Sunday. What am I talking about? This:

28th January 2008 (Monday) is declared as holiday for teaching & non-teaching staff and students in lieu of 20th January 2008 (Sunday) which was declared as working as well as instructional day.

and this:

Students may please note that Monday’s time-table will be followed on 20.01.2008 [Sunday].

Update: I had password-protected this post. Made it open after verifying with a few colleagues. As always, the disclaimer that these are my views as an individual and not as an employee of a public institute.

Tags: General by Niket
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RG stand for relative grading. Since the difficulty level can differ from course to course, instuctor to instructor and even semester to semester, the grades are normalized according to the performance of the entire class. The average grade of the class gets B or C grade and the standard deviation is used to decide the other grades.

While this should be what one could expect to get when one applies law of large numbers. As the sample size grows large, the student performance will confirm well to this “distribution” (I use this word is a loose sense).

However, a typical class size is less than 60 students. I have seen enough cases where students would be unfairly penalized just because their peers taking the course performed better. The converse is also true: if the students tend to be a bunch of slackers, why should they “deserve” a grade?

Influenced by my advisor, I have a policy of absolute grading. Although I include a “relative” component in grading by providing extra credit opportunities. More on that later.

Tags: General by Niket
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I am waiting for libertarians to spin this and prove how “real” free markets would have prevented the subprime mortgage finance crisis.

Though I would hasten to add that the government had a role to play, and yes, economic freedom still provides the best chance for US to get out of the current crisis.

Tags: General by Niket
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Today, after visiting the campus SBI for the fourth time, I finally got my Public Provident Fund (PPF) account. The extreme efficiency of the service manager and his minions ought to receive a special mention. If I were ever to be a dictator (currently my students are on the receiving end of such saintly aspirations), my first job will be to remove the words “come tomorrow” from Indian-English dictionary.

Oh, BTW, did you know the new brilliant rule regarding PPF nominations? Well, you need to affix photograph of each nominee and get them to sign the nomination form.

Hey nutjob, what if I don’t want my nominees to know about it? May be I have multiple nominees and they don’t get along. May be I and the nominee are estranged and I don’t want them to know, but I still care about them. Or may be its just too difficult to get the signatures due to the geographic distance. What the heck does SBI need nominee signature and photograph?

Tags: General by Niket
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