A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - The Movie

Robert Kanigel’s  book The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan is now being adapted into movie.

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s life is being made into a film with ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ star Dev Patel starring as the legendary mathematician while a Hollywood A-lister is set to play his mentor GH Hardy. “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan” will be adapted by Matthew Brown from Robert Kanigel’s book of the same name.

Ramanujan and I were born in the same town and the similarity ends there !!

Quote of the Day

People tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests, and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

- David Foster Wallace

More "Human" Than Average Human ??

Whatever that means !! That's from the Neanderthal ancestry via 23andme

Quote of the Day

Why might chimpanzees be so adaptable to change? It may have aided the survival of their ancestors–and ours. For example, many primates regularly face drastic seasonal changes in rainfall, temperature, and food availability. Some primates have specialized adaptations that help them survive under harshly changing seasonal conditions. For chimpanzees, a learned knowledge of the fruit tree locations, even during periods of low fruit availability, is critical. Chimpanzees acquire this knowledge over a prolonged period of development, with high reliance on their mothers until full weaning at age 5, followed by juvenile and sub-adulthood learning periods lasting until age 15. A high degree of neural plasticity facilitates this learning ability. In humans, an especially high degree of plasticity may aid our strong reliance on learning. Plasticity may also play a key role in what we call resilience, enabling both humans and our chimpanzee kin to roll with the punches during trying times. For chimpanzees today, this may mean finding a new fruit tree when one due to ripen has been felled, or basking in the sun for the first time after decades inside a laboratory.

- Chimps in Uganda: Resilience

The Morality of China in Africa

Excerpts from the new book The Morality of China in Africa: The Middle Kingdom and the Dark Continent by Stephen Chan:

The da xue (Mandarin: the big study, or the big reading) or dai ho(k) (Cantonese: the big learning) are Chinese terms for a university. In the romance of the "old days", learning was the only way to bypass the class system. China's annual imperial exams allowed even the poorest subject to step outside his poverty and feudal status to become an official. When, later, learning became concentrated in universities, the institutions became prestigious and symbolic. They were the portals of escape.

With this in mind, it is amazing that Chinese aid to Africa has not seized earlier upon the building of universities. The addition of universities was unremarked in the original Chinese proposal for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2008. China pledged a $9bn loan, $3bn of which was to develop mines, over which China entered a 68/32% joint venture involving Sinohydro Corporation and DRC's previously almost defunct Gecamines; and $6bn was for infrastructure, with China Railway Engineering Corporation playing a major role.

The Chinese expected to gain 6.8m tonnes of copper and 620,000 tonnes of cobalt over a 25-year period. However, China would also build huge expanses of road and railway and, along those transport routes, a large number of clinics, schools and universities. It was an unheard-of proposal; it would have transformed development in the south of DRC, with provision for a huge increase in the national pool of trained personnel; and it thoroughly alarmed the west, which saw an exponential increase of Chinese influence in central Africa.

Using the IMF as a battering ram, and insisting upon the priority of its own development assistance programme, the west succeeded in reducing the Chinese package to $6bn. At the time of writing, it is unclear how many elements of infrastructure have been sacrificed in this reduction. But it still means 2,400 miles of road, 2,000 miles of railway, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres and two universities. On this occasion, there was a keen symmetry between Chinese and African aspiration – and this included both the benefits and the prestige of higher education.

Quote of the Day

There were lot of fools at the conference – pompous fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is alright. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

- Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Wisdom Of The Week

After finishing the first AI class taught by Sebastian Thrun; I was convinced the world was unto something very unique and special - I called him the Norman Borlaug of this century. This week Georgia Tech announced their online MS in computer science and  Sebastian was euphoric:

"There are a few moments in my life I will never forget. Like the moment I proposed to my wife, Petra. Or the moment Stanley crossed the finish line in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Today is one of those moments."

No question MOOC will have a huge impact. But I am not convinced that they would replace college because of one single reason - not everyone who teaches these online classes have the zeal and charisma of teaching that comes naturally to Sebastian and the folks at Udacity. To be blunt, the list of classes at Coursera are mind boggling but the classes themselves doesn't capture the student's attention. If spreading education to the masses is the goal then they have already succeeded. But if the goal is to make knowledge and learning a contagion then they haven't even scratched the surface. I wish they learn a thing or two from Salman Khan who mesmerizes his students with just a black screen.

To be fair most of these professors are brilliant introverts sans the global charisma. So why can't they take the directors seat and let the others with gusto have the screen presence? Have they heard of animation and sound effects? Well, if the noble goal of online education is learning then probably they should be open enough to get innovative and adapt from say hollywood and advertisement agencies.

Yes, there will always be smart students all over the world who will learn for joy of learning but to attract those marginal students, one has to advertise that joy of learning. Online eduction has an huge opportunity and obligation to do that. Is it too much to ask for if I expect Georgia Tech MS to be similar to programming a driverless car class ?

The noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Quote of the Day

He did very graciously dedicate the book to me, and it’s an incredibly powerful articulation of this theme on many different levels. I think the question of technological dynamism isn’t often examined, but when you look into it you see many problems, from transportation failures to the space program and the Concorde decommissioning to how the energy failure allows oil price shocks to undo the price improvements of the previous century. Think of the famous 1980 Paul Ehrlich-Julian Simon wager about resource scarcity. Simon may have won the bet a decade later, but since 1993, on a rolling decade basis, Ehrlich has been winning famously. This is something that has not registered with the political class at all.

- Peter Thiel on Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will(Eventually) Feel Better

Has The Future Of College Moved Online?

Against:

“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”

For:

Might it make some things better? Peter K. Bol, a Chinese intellectual historian, started depending on computers as a graduate student at Princeton, in the late nineteen-seventies, because he was a sloppy typist. Today, as the director of Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, he’s a leading exponent of the use of geographic-information-system technology in historical study—like Google Maps, except with a historical record’s worth of information in it.

To him, MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. “The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?” Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. “Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”

Now he thinks he can. This fall, Bol will launch ChinaX, a survey of Chinese cultural history from the neolithic period to the present day. He has also launched a course to let students get involved in preparing that program. Those in “Chinese History 185: Creating ChinaX”—a campus class offered only to Harvard students—have spent this term building Bol’s online course, module by module, in small groups under his direction. Teaching takes place in both a classroom and a computer lab.

- More Here by Nathan Heller

"Simpler" With & Without Sunstien

David Brooks brings a very obvious but important debate to the table about Cass Sunstein's case for Simpler: The Future of Government:

I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier. I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them. They’d take a nudge and expand it into a shove.

And what are we to make of financial regulatory reform and the new health care law? In a culture of unrestraint, will federal regulators use these rule-writing opportunities to expand their reach beyond anything now imagined?

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.