More choice is equated with greater welfare, is this tenable? Too much choice can paradoxically make us be better but feel worse argues the psychologist In many societies today welfare is associated with freedom, and freedom with choice. It is commonly argued that people are better off with more choice. Psycologist Barry Schwarts discusses various experiments by psychologists and behavioural economists that test this claim. The talk lasts about one hour, and is worth every minute of it. Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have […]
Yearly Archives: 2007
India: Development and Participation Rating: 5 out of 5 Author: Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze Year: 2002 Category: Development, Economics, India Publisher: Oxford My favourite book on India’s development issues. Provides a comprehensive overview of many important development issues In my opinion this book is gold standard and is a must read for anyone intersted in development issues. Amartya Sen is distinguished for his ability to incorporate a wide variety of concerns including growth, inequalities, gender issues, power relations, etc. Dreze complements these abilities and also brings in significant field-level experience apart from rigorous research. India: Development and Participation combines […]
Best book on India’s development by Amartya Sen and Dreze
Manhattan IMDB Year: 1979 Writer: Woody Allen Director: Woody Allen Rating: 2 out of 5 The movie starts with a forty something Woody Allan and his seventeen year old date at a dinner with his friend Yale (played by Michael Davis) and his wife. Yale confides to Woody that he is having an extra marrital affaire with a bright Journalist played by Diane Keaton. The movie then takes us through a tangled web of relationships, betrayals, insecurities and a dash of humour now and then. I decided to watch Manhattan after seeing the fantastic rating it had in Rotten Tomatoes. […]
Woody Allan’s Manhattan disappoints me
Children of heaven Year: 1997 Writer: Majid Majidi Director: Majid Majidi Category: Foreign Rating: 5 out of 5 Children of Heaven is a product of Iran’s movie revolution. Ali goes to get his sister’s shoe cobbled and looses it on the way back. He’s too scared to tell this to his parents since they are too poor to buy another pair immediately. He convinces his sister to keep it from the parents and shares his sneakers with her. But this is not easy since his school starts immediately after her school ends and the children run to and from school […]
Majidi’s Children of Heaven: A child’s lost shoe becomes a ...
Bookmarks I created on New York to enjoy the city on a low budget Most things in New York are costly, atleast at the surface of it. But with some hard work one can find a lot of attractions in the city that one can catch up with in a student budget. I found the following online resources on New York useful. This is a small list that I hope to work on. [inline] [script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://righttofoodindia.org/feed2js/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.delicious.com%2Fv2%2Frss%2Fvivekdse%2Fnewyork%3Fcount%3D50&desc=1&date=y&targ=y” type=”text/javascript”][/script] [/inline]
New York sight seeing: Low cost options for students
Though I am an intensive user of various features of Google, I was surprised to find that it has an inbuilt calculator that I had not discovered till today. Normally, I open MS Excel painfully or some other application to do simple calculations. I found that one can do these by using the calculator function in Google by using standard methods that one would in Excel. If one has the browser open, it’s a quicker and easier way to get answers than looking for an application.
Google calculator for quick calculations online
Political parties do things in style, and the TN Budget of 2007-2008 was no exception. Among other things, I found the last line of the budget speech interesting. Along with the date in English (23 March 2007), it had a tamil date as Panguni-9, Thiruvalluvar Aandu 2038. Till I read this I did not realise that there is something called Thiruvalluvar aandu – a good discovery from this year’s budget!
TN Budget trivia
Tamil Nadu has many significan policy success stories – in part due to getting the budgetary priorities right We are living in a time when positive media coverage of budget is restricted either to tax cuts or for reducing fiscal deficits. Despite the fact that enormous proportion of India’s GDP is spent by the government, media hardly discusses what governments spend on, and how. State government budgets are crucial to national development given that states are in charge of important areas such as education, health, water, etc. Given my interests, I have closely followed education, health, child care and a few […]
A chirpy note on TN budget 2007-08
Map wy word creates a graphical output of various meanings of a word and enables us to find related words with a click Note: This feature has been disabled in Google Personalize, and visual thesaurus is not a free product anymore I often struggle for words when I am writing long pieces. Beyond a point it becomes boring to use the same word again and again across pages and I desperately start looking for new words to express my ideas. I then started using Wordnet of Princeton University. Wordnet lets me navigate to related words (going beyond synonmys). Apart from […]
Map my word dictionary in Google Personalize
Cyril invited me to do a small part in the SJC annual play, a valuable source of “free attendance” I was pleasantly surprised when Cyril invited me to play a small part in the Tamil Play for the annual day of St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchy. I was to be a muscle man who beats up Cyril with a few others towards the end of the play. Since I had no dialogues, I started skipping away to the library and other activities after two rounds of practice. I got together next only for the grand rehearsal. These are normally held only […]
Playing the muscleman in the SJC annual play
The Tamil Nadu State budget 2007-2008 was presented on 23 March 2007 by Finance Minister Prof. K. Anbazhagan. This page has automatically generated news and analysis on the budget The budget related documents can be found in the website of Tamil Nadu government here. The budget papers for this year have not been updated as yet in this site, but the budget speech can be read here. The webcast of the speech is available here. The speech is conveiniently divided by sections, so incase you are interested in just one section (e.g. Tax, education, social welwafe, etc.), you can easily […]
Tamil Nadu state budget 2007-08: News & Analysis
With some great new improvements Google Personalize is finally something to take seriously The last time I used Google Personalize, it was not a greatly attractive thing. But in a span of few months some new features have been added that make Google Personalize a great online utility that one could use on a day to day basis. To start with, instead of going to google for search, I can set it to go to Google personalize. In that page, I can have snippets of news from selected sources, local weather, my custom search engines, and an assortment of other […]
News, weather, fun with Google Personalize
The finest online task manager can easily be integrated with Google personal home page Google personalize has improved by leaps and bounds in the last year. Apart from a sleek Ajax page where we can drag and drop (and rearrange) various items of our interest, they have now added a “tab system”. Most importantly, it now permits us to “add stuff” that includes an assortment of Google widgets including, remember the milk. To add your tasks from rememberthemilk.com into my Google personalize home page all I have to do is to click on “add stuff” on the top right, and […]
Remember the milk task manager in Google personalize homepage
This is an experimental feature to collect 10 news items on budget in each state I have been trying to various socio-econoimic policy issues across states regularly. The problem with regular news search is that they often throw up the same states. To search state by state using the state names is cumbersome. I am working on a system to automate the process. For example, I gave the keyword “budget” here. My Yahoo pipes system automatically generates four queries: “Tamil nadu budget”, “Kerala budget”, “Karnataka Budget” and “Ahdnra budget” (without quotes), gets the top 10 results for each, puts them […]
News on Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra, Tamil Nadu Budgets 2007-08
The following are automatically generated news on state budgets covering many states To check out budget news from South Indian states, click here.
News & Analysis of State budgets 2007-08
I was excited at the prospect of adding Google CSE to my website – but it does not fit my 3 column site I have always wanted to customise search engines and was thrilled when Google campe up wtih it’s CSE. I quickly created a few. Though they offer the codes to display the search in my site, I was not able to implement it in my wordpress site due to Javascripts. This problem was solved by the an ingenuine idea at easywordpress. Using the suggested method, I successfully got the CSE on my site and the results were displaying. […]
Google custom search engine: frame size problem
The finance minister of Karnataka – Yediyurappa just presented the state budget highlighting the ban of arrack and lottery. For news and analysis on the budget, read on. Also, see my post on why there is curiously high interest in Karnataka budget. The following are automatically generated from Google News by carefully selected search terms. Most of these should be relevant, but there is a chance that some are not. For 2007-08 Budget click here. Also available is the medium term fiscal plan.
Karnataka budget 2007-08: News and Analysis
Ganga Jal IMDB Link Year: 2003 Writer: Prakash Jha Director: Prakash Jha Length: 150 Category: Drama Rating: 4 out of 5 Though it is based on an age old plot of a police officer fighting against crime, Gangajal takes it to a new height in how it is executed I wish this move were not as violent as it is – baring that, it is close to a perfect movie. In this movie inspired by the Bhagalpur Blindings, Ajay Devgan plays an IPS officer who takes on the local gangster – Sadhu Baba, and expectedly, wins. In this he is […]
Gangajal Hindi Movie with Ajay Devagan:Old plot, new refinement
Add RSS content from delicious, etc. within your post. Great possibilities to customise I had been looking for some way to add my del.icio.us links into my posts and this was proving to be impossible. I finally found the perfect solution using a combination of Adsense Delux plugin and feed2js RSS reader. Using Feed2js to get RSS feeds Feed2js is a simple to use application through which we can publish rss feeds in our webpages. Doing this is also very simple. One just has to give feed2js the url of the rss feed. It allows for many customisation including whether […]
RSS Feeds within post in wordpress – Horray!
Getting and organising good references is the key to creating good bibliographies for academic papers. This is a time consuming and effort-intensive process. This post discusses some tips and tricks to make this process easier and more productive With the dramatic growth of information technology and the internet in particular, information in the hands of researchers has increased dramatically. We now have an opportunity to collect information at rates unthinkable one generation before us. But getting the best out of this information glut requires careful strategies for collecting, organizing and retrieving information. This article reviews a few tools and practices. […]
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