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Tantrik flops on live TV

Found this on boing-boing today. I wish I had seen this live. Would have been great to watch:

India TV, one of India’s major Hindi channels with national outreach, invited Sanal Edamaruku for a discussion on “Tantrik power versus Science”. Pandit Surinder Sharma, who claims to be the tantrik of top politicians and is well known from his TV shows, represented the other side. During the discussion, the tantrik showed a small human shape of wheat flour dough, laid a thread around it like a noose and tightened it. He claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic. Sanal challenged him to try and kill him.

The tantrik tried. He chanted his mantras (magic words): “Om lingalingalinalinga, kilikili….” But his efforts did not show any impact on Sanal – not after three minutes, and not after five. The time was extended and extended again. The original discussion program should have ended here, but the “breaking news” of the ongoing great tantra challenge was overrunning all program schedules.

Now the tantrik changed his technique. He started sprinkling water on Sanal and brandishing a knife in front of him. Sometimes he moved the blade all over his body. Sanal did not flinch. Then he touched Sanal’s head with his hand, rubbing and rumpling up his hair, pressing his forehead, laying his hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers against his temples. When he pressed harder and harder, Sanal reminded him that he was supposed to use black magic only, not forceful attacks to bring him down. The tantrik took a new run: water, knife, fingers, mantras. But Sanal kept looking very healthy and even amused.

After nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik’s failure. The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku. Finally, the disgraced tantrik tried to save his face by claiming that there was a never-failing special black magic for ultimate destruction, which could, however, only been done at night. Bad luck again, he did not get away with this, but was challenged to prove his claim this very night in another “breaking news” live program.

See full article

Student families in school

My kids’ school, Vidya Valley, has just introduced something they are calling “Tutor groups” in school. A tutor group is a group of 15 to 20 students consisting of a few students from each class from 5th to 10th standard (aka grade). Each tutor group is assigned one teacher (”Guardian Tutor”) whose job it is to ensure the full welfare of the children in this group. Here, “full welfare” specifically refers to non-academic issues, like mental and physical welfare (for example to help with bullying, truancy issues, or special medical attention).

Each student stays in the same tutor group for all the 5 years, and the guardian tutor of the group remains the same throughout. Each year, the students of Std. 10 will obviously pass out and leave the group. At this time, new students from Std. 5 will enter the group. This whole set-up creates a sort of a family unit, where the guardian tutor becomes the surrogate parent, and the other students become surrogate siblings.

The tutor group meets every day for a little time - the school time-tables have been adjusted to allow for this. In addition, they meet once every two weeks for a longer period. These meetings have no agenda. Just hang out and bond and behave like a family.

See this pdf for a more detailed description of the guardian tutor system in Vidya Valley.

It sounds like a very interesting idea, and I have not really heard of anything like this being used in Pune schools (but I could be mistaken). In any case, seems like a neat thing to have. They have introduced it just a few months ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out in real life.

Internet for the villages

This is what the internet looks like for a village.

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley’s Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it’s like those “executive assistant” telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).

[...]

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

Found: here. See also the home page of the question box project.

Reducing Teacher absenteeism in rural India

Earlier, I had blogged about the use of cameras to tackle teacher absenteeism in rural India’s schools. One commenter asked for more details, and I went digging for the original research paper and found that it is quite interesting and worth writing about.

This data comes from a paper by Esther Duflo, a professor at MIT. The actual teacher program incentive was run by Seva Mandir an NGO. Duflo and her colleagues analyzed the results and reached some interesting conclusions.

What exactly is the question that we are trying answer?

We ask three main questions: If teachers are given incentives to attend school, will they actually attend school more? If they attend school more, will they teach more? Finally, if teacher absenteeism is reduced, will children learn more?

Consider the first question. It is not obvious that increased incentives to teachers will result increased attendance:

[...] the incentives could fail to improve attendance for a variety of reasons. First, teachers may be unable to take advantage of the incentives if they must participate in village meetings, training sessions, election or census duty. These pressures may be particularly high on para-teachers, who are often among the few literate individuals in the village. Second, the incentive schemes may crowd out the teacher’s intrinsic motivation to attend school (Benabou and Tirole, 2006). Finally, some teachers, who previously believed that they were required to work every day, may decide to stop working once they have reached their target income for the month (Fehr and Gotte, 2002).

The last two sentences of that paragraph point towards some interesting research showing how well-meaning schemes can actually be counter productive. (I am lazy so I haven’t included the full references here. If you are interested, go to the original paper and find the references at the end of the paper.)

Anyway, even if we manage to get teachers into the classrooms, that might not mean anything:

Even if incentives increase teacher attendance, it is unclear whether child learning levels will actually increase. Teachers may multitask (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991), reducing their efforts along other dimensions. Such schemes may also demoralize teachers, resulting in less effort (Fehr and Schmidt, 2004), or may harm teachers’ intrinsic motivation to teach (Kreps, 1997). On the other hand, incentives can improve learning levels if the main cost of working is the opportunity cost of attending school and, once in school, the marginal cost of teaching is low. In this case, an incentive system that directly rewards presence would stand a good chance of increasing child learning. Thus, whether or not the incentives can improve school quality is ultimately an empirical question.

Again, things are not as simple as one would initially have though. Will all that background out of the way, we get on to the real research:

We study a teacher incentive program run by the NGO Seva Mandir. Seva Mandir runs single teacher NFEs in the rural villages of Rajasthan, India. As in many rural areas, teacher absenteeism is high, despite the threat of dismissal for repeated absence. In our baseline study (August 2003), the absence rate was 44 percent. Faced with such high absenteeism, Seva Mandir implemented an innovative monitoring and incentive program in September 2003. In 57 randomly selected program schools, Seva Mandir gave teachers a camera, along with instructions to have one of the students take a picture of the teacher and the other students at the start and close of each school day. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time functions, allowing for the collection of precise data on teacher attendance that could be used to calculate teachers’ salaries.

Yup, the attendance records were used to determine the salaries of the teachers. So there was a financial (dis)incentive scheme at work:

Each teacher was then paid according to a non-linear function of the number of valid school days for which they were actually present, where a “valid” day was defined as one for which the opening and closing photographs were separated by at least five hours and both photographs showed at least eight children. Specifically, they received Rs 500 if they attended fewer than 10 days in a given month, and Rs 50 for any additional day (up to a maximum of 25 or 26 days depending on the month). In the 56 comparison schools, teachers were paid a fixed rate for the month, and were told (as usual) that they could be dismissed for repeated, unexcused absences.

Well, that is the experiment. Now on to the results:

The program resulted in an immediate and long lasting improvement in teacher attendance rates in treatment schools, as measured through monthly unannounced visits in both treatment and comparison schools. Over the 30 months in which attendance was tracked, teachers at program schools had an absence rate of 21 percent, compared to 44 percent baseline and the 42 percent in the comparison schools. Absence rates stayed low after the end of the proper evaluation phase (the first fourteen months of the program), suggesting that teachers did not change their behavior simply for the evaluation.

Absenteeism halved! And stayed that way.

Now on to another interesting question. How much of the improvement was because of cameras (the monitoring) and how much of the effect was because of the financial incentive scheme? What if the financial incentives were different, or not present at all? That is where the MIT economists broke out their complex math formulae to figure this out:

To answer these questions, we exploit the non-linear nature of the incentive scheme to estimate a dynamic labor supply model using the daily attendance data in the treatment schools. The identification exploits the fact that the incentive for a teacher to attend school on a single day changes as a function of the number of days they attend school in the month, and the number of days left in the month. This is because they have to attend at least 10 days in a month to begin to receive the incentive (by working in the beginning of the month, the teacher builds up the option to work for Rs 50 per day at the end of the month). Indeed, regression discontinuity design estimates show that teachers work significantly more at the beginning of the month than at the end of the previous month, when they had not accumulated at least 10 days of work in that month.

We use this fact to estimate the teachers’ marginal utility of money. We allow serial correlation in the opportunity cost of attending school and heterogeneity in teachers’ outside option, and we use the method of simulated moments to estimate the parameters. Allowing for serial correlation and heterogeneity considerably complicates the estimation procedure, but we show that these features are very important in this application.

And according to their calculations:

We find that teachers are very responsive to the financial incentives: our preferred estimates suggest that the elasticity of labor supply with respect to the level of the financial bonus is 0.306. Furthermore, decreasing the number of days that workers must work until they are eligible for the incentive by a single day increases the expected number of days worked by about 1.29 percent. An unusual feature of this application is the ability to carry out convincing out-of-sample tests based on the randomized evaluation (as in Todd and Wolpin (2007)). When allowing for serial correlation and heterogeneity, we find that our model accurately predicts the difference in attendance in the treatment and the control group, as well as the number of days worked under a new incentive system initiated by Seva Mandir after the experiment.

I don’t think I really understand the meaning of the numbers in that paragraph, but basically, the financial incentives were very important. i.e. You can’t implement this scheme with just cameras alone. Simple threats “that they could be dismissed for repeated, unexcused absences” are not good enough. You need to be able to control their salaries.

But at the end of all this, the fruits of labor are sweet:

Student attendance when the school was open was similar in both groups, so student in treatment group received more days of instruction. A year into the program, test scores in the treatment schools were 0.17 standard deviations higher than in the comparison schools. Two and a half years into the program, children from the treatment schools were also 10 percentage points (or 62 percent) more likely to transfer to formal primary schools, which requires passing a competency test.

See full paper. More interesting than watching Twenty20 these days…

Market crash caused by bull’s butt

In a response to my post on numerology, Sanal Kumar pointed me towards this wonderful news article:

Indian brokers at the Bombay Stock Exchange are calling on the authorities to bring in religious experts to change the direction of a bronze bull statue.

They say the posterior of the bull, placed at the footsteps of the exchange building, points towards the traders which makes it inauspicious.

I’m sure you thought that last week’s market crash was because of weaknesses in the US economy, or the sub-prime crisis or something silly like that. Well, that is why this blog exists - to clear your muddled head of such misconceptions and steer you towards the right path.

See full article.

Long-distance vs. Local trains in Bombay

Venkat has this lovely description of local trains vs. long distance trains in Bombay:

The first impression is from my first view of Bombay’s Victoria Terminus (VT) railway station in 1993, where I arrived to start college. The image that stuck in my mind was that of the rust-and-ochre local commuter trains juxtaposed against the long-distance express trains a few platforms away. In the bustle of VT, the local trains seem to exude confidence, competence, agility and intelligence, rapidly disgorging hundreds of passengers in minutes and swallowing hundreds more, before dashing back up the few dozens of miles to the terminii at the other end of Bombay’s north-south extent. Next to these trains, the express trains seem weary, lumbering and stupid. Clueless village mice to the local trains’ town mice. If you ride the express trains out of Bombay though, you will notice a subtle change in your impressions as you slowly chug out of the city. As you leave the outermost local stations behind, and the powerful engines start to open up in preparation for crossing the Western Ghat mountains into the hinterland, a sense of awesome power and peace envelops you. It is now the pert, darting little local trains, left behind at the last few dimly-lit stations, that seem somehow forlorn, tragic and doomed to a sad life within the confines of Bombay, forever denied the exhilaration of the open tracks that snake for thousands of miles across India.

The full article is about something else entirely, which is also interesting…

Hello, My name is Navin, and I am a practising numerologist

…while part of me is ashamed of this, the rest is enjoying being cruel to idiots.

It all started when I wrote this supposedly humorous article titled ‘Star Numerologist Sanjay B. Jumaani to be awarded the Bharatt Rratnaa’. You would think, that to anybody with an IQ greater than their age, it would be obvious that this is not intented to be taken seriously. You would think that the first few commentors (Full2Faltu and Krish Ashok) would have convinced the doubters that this is all a job.

And you would be wrong. Things started going downhill from the 7th comment onwards. Incredibly, people managed to read past such wise cracks as ‘[Jumaani as predicted that] the astronomic rise of the Sensex in 2008 after it is renamed to Sensekks’ and then at the bottom of the same page, they started asking me for numerological advice. Seriously, what is wrong with these people?!

Anyway, considering the satirical nature of the parent article, I decided to give smart-ass / humorous answers to the questions. To the MBA student wanting to know whether he will get an ‘international placement’ I suggested that he should apply only to companies whose names start with a ‘B’ and he will get an international placement - in Bhutan or Burma.

But I also tried to work in some serious suggestions. To they guy who wanted to succeed as an entrepreneur, I bluntly said

Numbers don’t play an important part in your life. (Fortunately or unfortunately) success in your career will depend upon hard work and smart choices.

To the guy with terrible english facing ‘lost of problem in [...] life’ I suggested:

Based on the limited information you have given, I have the following recommendation: the numbers 8 and 3 are important in your life. Do a 3 month course on English speaking; it should include at least 8 hours per week. And after 8/3/08 your fortunes will improve.

I felt rather proud of having given useful advice in the guise of numerological humor. Apparently however, he was not interested in actually working for success and sent this follow-up: “Plz suggest how i become sucessful with the changing of name” and he ended this paragraph with “because u r the toperson to whom i can trust to take suggestion”.

At this point, I give up. I admit defeat. If you can’t lick them, join them. I have started actually giving numerological advice and making predictions about their life. I can see how writing this satirical article was actually divine intervention which helped me find my true calling in life. If people want my advice who am I to deny it? Young women want to meet me in person. (Seriously. Check it out for yourself. And I know that they are young because I know their birth dates! Ha ha.) This seems like a much better career choice than debugging C programs. So I am going to start using cold-reading techniques to guess their past and then predict their future. I am going to tout “scientific numerology” and design experiments for them to figure out their perfect numbers and colors and days of the week. I want to find out how easy it is to get ’satisfied’ customers through pure bullshit. This is all of course, purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry and the relentless pursuit of knowledge.

And before you condemn my cruelty, remember that these people are asking me for advice on a page where at the top it says “Bollywood news for idiots. Humor for the rest of you…”, and at the bottom it says, “BasKya.com is a satirical website. Which means that all content is meant to be humorous and for entertainment only. It’s not true. If you cannot handle that fact, close your browser, and step away from the computer.” They are asking for advice in the comments of an article which says ridiculous stuff like Sanjay B. Jumaani is being given the ‘Bharatt RRatnaa’ for future contributions like “the complete annihilation of Pakistan in 2011 when he will go undercover as Arabian numerologist Sanj-e-Jumma-i-imaani and will give them bad numerological adivce.” And these are educated people. One is a doctor (who is presumably out there giving medicine to other people), and another is a lecturer (who is shaping the minds of our coming generation). Would you show any pity?!

Some of those reading this and who know me personally might be wondering whether my computer got taken over by my evil twin today. Because, I am a rather nice guy otherwise. My only excuse is that fact that somehow this set of doctors, lecturers and MBAs who are too stupid to be anywhere near the internet and who believe in numerology has just irritated beyond my normal limits. The way I think about it is that these people are such idiots that if I weren’t doing it, someone else would be doing it, and charging them money for it! At least, I am doing it for free.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.

I am sure that after reading this article, some smart alecs are going to post more queries on that page asking for advice with the intention of pulling my leg. Don’t even think about it! I am an all-seeing, all-knowing numerologist and I can see through all the paltry tricks of your small minds.

The background score of Tare Zameen Par

This is an (old) blog post by Aamir Khan about the process they followed for recording the background score of Tare Zameen Par which I found very interesting:

The work on the TZP background score is going rather well I think. We went surprisingly fast too. And interestingly we ended up recording live! Which hasn’t been done in films for around… what…15 years or more.

Let me explain. When we score for a film we look at a scene/sequence, decide at which point in the scene we want the music to start, were it should end, and were we want any changeovers in between etc. Now once all this is decided, and the creative is clear, the recording begins. Which now days can be quite a technical process. All keyboards are connected to a computer on which the picture is dumped. On that the start point is marked, a grid created, tempo tweaked around to fit the length of the music, etc, basically this means that a lot is done mathematically. All this as a result of the advent of computers. Not a very organic way to work in my opinion but definitely more controlled and practical. This is generally called sequencing/programming. So you sequence/programme a piece and then dump it in sync with the picture.

Going ‘live’ means that the musicians playing the instruments don’t peer and jab at a computer, instead they look at the screen as they play the instrument, with a conductor guiding them for cues and timing and intensity of playing. So they play live in sync with the picture. They don’t follow a grid, they follow the scene and the feel of what the characters are going through. Anything goes wrong you try it again. If the take doesn’t have the right ‘feel’ then you go again. Each take is different. Now this is how background scores used to be recorded 15-20 years ago.

In fact we went one step further, we were working without visual aides of cross marks on the scene to give ‘in’ points and ‘change over’ points. So the ‘in’ point was ‘felt’ rather than pre-marked and counted in. Not only that, the music was not written and never locked in, so when Loy or Ehsan or Shankar or Tubby (one of their musicians) were playing, they often were also improvising from take to take!!! At one point we decided we wanted a harmonica for one of the pieces. Not a synth harmonica sound but a real harmonica. Not a problem if you are in Bombay where a harmonica and a player are a phone call away. But we were in of course were in Panchgani. So Loy sends Sachin (my help) to the Panchgani market to look for a harmonica… which Sachin miraculously finds! Then Loy, who I discovers plays the harmonica rather well, goes on to breath life into that 8inch piece of metal and we’re cruising! Mind you all this is happening in a house not in a studio.

Actually since I’m doing this for the first time for myself (I’ve worked on background recordings when I was an assistant director some 18 years ago) I found this the most natural way to work. But Shankar, Ehsan and Loy were freaked out as they haven’t worked this way for ages, probably never. At first I suspect they thought I was mad, then they began really enjoying themselves jamming away.

Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India

Update: After writing this post, I looked at the original research paper and wrote a much more detailed post on this topic which is worth reading.

Interesting idea:

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

Found: here.

Babajobs: Linked-in for maids and drivers

Webyantra reports on babajob a site that you can use to find domestic help in your area:

Many urban families are looking for good, trustworthy maids, drivers, chauffeurs and crib they don’t get one, whereas many unskilled laborers are desperately looking for some job. He decided to bridge this digital divide with Babajob, a rural version of LinkedIn. Conceptually all of this looks pretty simple, but operationally, it’s a challenge to bring internet to the local Laxmi or Latha, who can’t even read vernacular, let alone reading English or using computers.

How are they tackling this problem? They pay (INR 200/-) anyone who registers the potential worker; may it be a net café owner, or an NGO, or another employer of the maid. The fees for posting a job is 500/-, but again there is a smart caveat here. They first charge 800/- from you, and only when you inform them whom you hired, they return 300/- out of it, so that they can pay 200/- to the mentor. Moreover the site is also available in Hindi and Kannada, and will be available in other languages as they expand to other cities. As expected, there are a few glitches with font and linguistics there, but they should clear up after a few releases. They have also thrown in a neat Google Maps integration to find maids in your specific area.

Found: here. See this International Herald Tribune article for a fuller treatment.