Sayan's BlogWorld
highlighting the future's bizzare as it transforms into the present's mundane
Turning the world upside down
0Farmingsolutions.org website has a touching story of the success of farmers’ self-help group in India. How they overcame all odds to work themselves out of poverty with sustainable agriculture at the same time caused a social revolution.
AfriGadget: Solving everyday problems with African ingenuity
0The website AfriGadget documents precisely what its tagline says. This is the website to check out if you are interested in seeing how people solve real life problems with limited resources. An African version of the Indian HoneyBee network may prove helpful.
High-energy bio fuel
01749 days
ScienceDaily reports on a just invented process to make a high-energy liquid bio-fuel from fructose. This is all fine and good but we need to ask ourselves honestly… do we really need to convert corn into fuel and animal feed when a quarter of the world is underfed?
Hans Rosling’s jaw-dropping demo, on TED.com
01749 days
I am a big fan of TED and it never fails to wow. In this presentation Hans Rosling demonstrates visually a myriad of development indicators and at one point argues that Africa is not a basket case but has made tremendous strides in social development.
Art of Innovation: Guy Kawasaki
01749 days
Guy Kawasaki gives an interesting presentation (video) on Art of Innovation. It is nice not only from the content but also the presentation point of view.
Back from vacation update
0I haven’t posted in a while so I thought it will be nice to write a few lines… I came back from a short 2-week vacation in India and have been pretty busy with work since then.
I spent a week or so in Bangalore, 2 days in Chennai (Madras) and 2 days in Calcutta. This was the first time I flew direct from US to India. The 15 hour flight was not as nerve-wracking as I thought it would be. Weather-wise Bangalore was amazing, in spite of the large scale de-greening it has seen, it is still greener than most cities. Madras was oppressively hot and humid. The 2 days I was in Calcutta, it didn’t stop raining. On my way in and out, I stopped in Delhi for a few hours. It was amazingly hot but it was dry heat so it was bearable. Otherwise, Delhi still has the best roads and Gurgaon is well on its way to becoming a sky-scraper filled megapolis of fashionable housing and malls.
Sticky lizard / gecko feet !!
0Arstechnica has an article here about how scientists first copied the lizard / gecko feet stickiness then improved on it.
BBC had earlier reported here that scientists had finally managed to figure out what really make lizards stick to walls…
So if you want to stick something to your non-stick cookware look no further than your friendly wall lizard / gecko.
$2 school in a box !
1WRI‘s blog (Next Billion) has this post about Spark Group‘s bottom of the pyramid business approach to education.
I remember reading results from a recent survey (probably World Bank…i forget the exact details… ) which said that the families at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder show a preference for paid private schools over free state-funded schools. The teachers at government funded schools often don’t show up, in the private schools the parents are able to ensure at least the teachers come to teach. The parents are able to leverage their purchasing power of the service to get better accountability.
TED Talks | Ashraf Ghani: How to fix broken states
1Amazingly thought-provoking talk at TED2005 by the brilliant Dr. Ashraf Ghani
Very insightful approach to developmental issues…
“The aid system is broken,” says Ashraf Ghani in this powerful, reform-oriented talk. He discusses how to mobilize capital for state-building; why technical assistance fails; and why classic economic theory proved useless in Afghanistan, which is “dominated by the drug economy and a mafia.” He emphasizes the necessity of investment (“A dollar in private investment is equal to 20 dollars of aid”) and design ingenuity to rebuild broken states. And he offers a blueprint: the 10 key functions that a state should perform, from providing infrastructure to enforcing the rule of law.
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