General Interest

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

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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

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!

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Search debates, policies, laws, parliamentary questions, and other issues relating to policy, politics law and governance in India. Covers Indian Parliament and State Assemblies For those with an interest in policy issues, following what happens in the parliament and the legislative assemblies can be crucial. All state governments and the Government of India have reasonably information websites these days. But it is a little painful if we have to look for a new education initiative in over 50 websites one by one. On the other hand a generic search in Google or other search engines will give a lot of […]

Indian Parliament & Legislative Assemblies search engine

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This page gives links to websites of State and Union governments in India with detailed information on budgets. Brief descriptions of sites are given. Despite the importance of budgets, very little information is available about them in the Indian context. The Union budget gets a national coverage and information is widely available. Much less is know about state budgets. The good news is that most state governments now have websites, often with extensive information. As a first step, I’ve put together information on all of them in one place.  I updated this page to reflect the websites in February 2011. […]

Union and State budgets, India: Websites, documents, tools

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The last few years have seen some dazzling movies that have boldly departed from the mainstream. A movie historian in Tamil Nadu once said (perhaps Randor Guy) that most movies in the language (and I am sure in Hindi as well) revolved around 8 basic plots. These new movies have a bold new plot – but that’s not all. Many of these have given up a formulaic approach of making commercial movies in India (atleast in Hindi and Tamil): a little glamour, some songs, some dancing, some comedy (even if it’s totally unrelated), a macho hero, sexy heroine, fights (called […]

Moving beyond the formula: Bold new Indian movies

I was looking for a video cutter that could help me make suitable clips for presentations.  Finally, I found Virtual Dub, an AVI editor that delivered.  Virtual Deb is open source and totally free.  It enables me to read a variety of files, including dll files that I was struggling with and make small clips from a longer video file.  I can save the clips as avi or wav file, and both are readable by windows media player – which is crucial if we wish to use these clips in power point presentations. I had to struggle with the options […]

Open-source video cutter for presentations

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A tool to generate conceptually related set of words for content analysis Wordnet is a lexical database maintained by Princeton university.  It is described as: “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser” When we with to do autocoding with NVivo or other qualitative research (or content analysis) software, […]

Using Wordnet lexical database with content analysis software

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NVivo Rating: 4 out of 5 I started using NVivo – a qualitative research and content analysis software – last year when I worked on a content analysis project. NVivo’s purposes are simple – it allows us to assemble different documents (including pictures) and code them. The codes can be arranged in a hierarchy or individually. While most coding is manual, some of it can be automated (see below). The best part of NVivo is that it allows us to review contents carrying a particular code with ease. For example, I was looking at newspaper articles on contracting and wanted […]

NVivo: Useful content analysis tool

Visualising ones ideas is a great way to think through complex issues or arguments. Here are three free utilities to put our ideas into neat pictures Last year I used a mind-mapping software called FreeMind productively. Mind maps start with a simple core from which one can have multiple nodes that lead to multiple nodes and so on. Free mind allows the user to link different nodes, make comments on certain nodes, link them to files, insert a number of images, etc. Last year I did a course on Social Movement Theory. Towards the end of the semester a friend […]

Visualise ideas with Mind Maps, Concept Maps and Diagraming tools

I recently tried using an online utility to find a suitable date for all students in my programme to meet. Normally, this is a hugely time consuming affaire. This time around, I tried an online utility called MeetingWizard.com and it turned out to be fantastic. It’s a simple utility that works like a poll. The organizer can choose an initial list of times and send invitations to chosen people. The invitees just have to click a link and choose merely click on the times that suit them. The site offers a lot of other useful features too. For example, apart […]

Online tool to schedule meetings among many participants

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A rather surprising feature about Google calendar is that it does not have a task manager. I recently changed my time management technique from being ‘calendar based’ to ‘list based’ management. In my search for a task management system, I discovered www.rememberthemilk.com – an incredibly well designed utility. It’s online, capable of creating multiple lists, one can specify due dates, estimated time, associate with multiple tags (that are across lists), specify location, and do an assortment of other things. It’s highly keyboard friendly and has a terrific search facility. Oh, I forgot to mention that one can specify status of […]

Google Calendar integrates with Remember the Milk

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It’s easy to import citations from Google Scholar into Refworks. In order to do this go to “scholar preferences”, a link you will find next to the search box and at the bottom of that page you will find an entry called “Bibliography Manager”. In this, select Refworks (I often end-up choosing a similar sounding thing called “Refman”, take care). Once you save the perferences, you will find a link called “import to refworks” below each search result. The rest is one click away. This though is not entirely trouble free since logging into Refworks should be done only through […]

Using Refworks with Google Scholar

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Refworks Rating: 4 out of 5 Manage citations, create bibliographies quick & easy in any format you want (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) and keep references organised Note: There is an easier way to cite and it’s free.  Check out my note on Zotero citation tool. I have been using Refworks since six months with great satisfaction. It is perhaps one of the most useful and time saving utilities for graduate students working on research papers. The software has two broad components: (1) Database of our references to organise and manage references (2) Utility for easily adding citations to papers that […]

Manage citations and bibliography with Refworks

Planning commission forgets children in its approach paper for the eleventh five-year plan   The approach paper for the eleventh plan released by the Planning Commission has forgotten the children under six.  A dream of development that does not include children is a futile dream.  Childhood is the foundation of physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of people.  The first six years of life is a period of dramatic growth and development.  Apart from rapid physical and mental growth, children do the difficult task of learning languages, an assortment of physical skills, values and other things required to lead a full […]

Screaming for attention

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In this note I have tried to put together some lessons that I learned from the Right to Food Campaign. I have drawn these notes from the activities of the campaign, the discussions we have had, the materials we have prepared for the public interest litigation and for the campaign. The campaign deals with questions that are similar to what we are going to deal with in the seminar viz. ensuring a hunger free India. I have drawn extensively on the materials we have prepared in the campaign, and specially on discussions with the ‘support group’. I would like to […]

Notes from the Right to Food Campaign

I wish to share with you a message of hope in this anniversary issue of Humanscape. As a recent entrant in the world of social action, I have been asking myself whether people’s campaigns are effective at all. Are they capable of bringing the concerns of people into the political centre-stage and affect the way government works? In two short years of my association with such campaigns, I have gained hope that a well-organised and sustained campaign can indeed bring meaningful changes to the lives of poor and marginalized people. I have drawn inspiration from campaigns on several issues; but […]

A Message of Hope

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“God bless mummy, god bless daddy, god bless teacher who will teach us, and make them happy”.  Standing in a perfect circle, at 10 am sharp, children chanted this prayer to start their activities of the day at the anganwadi. In the next five hours they would learn through play, have one nourishing meal, take a noon nap, and return home to their mother, who had the comfort of having her child taken care of for a significant part of her working day. Immediately after the prayer was a round of physical exercises, accompanied by poems created for the purpose. […]

An anganwadi in Tamil Nadu