Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States! This is part of a growing trend of how technology removes / erodes people’s privacy. The creators of the system argue that they are doing nothing wrong, and that this information was always available anyway. “We are just trying to provide what’s already out there in an easier fashion, for free,” Mr. Lane said. “We think it’s pretty helpful to families.” However the potential for misuse is huge. Read the rest of this entry »

My research and scholarship has mostly been in the area of educational technology - i.e. how to improve / facilitate learning through the use of technologies. David Brooks in his latest op-ed (The biggest issue) in the NYTimes flips this around somewhat. Citing research by Goldin and Katz he argues that over the past century there has been a “race between technology and education.”
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… but what if real people die?

Excellent article by William Saletan on Slate about a new breed of war-toys that blur the line between video games and real war. As the article says, “if looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people.” As it turns out, the company that designed these new tools, Raytheon actually hired game developers to design how these weapons would work. The result is “a user-friendly array of throttles, switches, and thumb controls.”
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Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie…
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In the context of my previous posting, here is an article that provides “a brief historical summary of the research into forms of coercive persuasion, primarily sensory deprivation, conducted 35 to 50 years ago, in which psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists worked for the CIA and the Pentagon to understand these techniques.” See pdf of Psychology and Research into Coercive Interrogation by Dr. Jeffrey Kaye.

Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists alive today. As his wikipedia page says, “He is well known for his work on the idea of “learned helplessness”, and more recently, for his contributions to leadership in the field of Positive Psychology.” He has served as the president of the American Psychological Association (the most significant psychological association in the country) and has written numerous bestsellers in the area of positive psychology (a field he helped establish).

I was therefore saddened to learn that his name was mentioned in Jane Mayer’s recent book “The dark side: The inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals.” as being involved with the administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques [Full disclosure: I have not read Mayer’s book, and base this posting on reviews and other web based resources.] Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov’s website (see this posting about Nikita’s new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama is the democratic nominee for the president of the United States!!! Read the rest of this entry »

There is an barely interesting article on today’s NYTimes.com site by Steven Heller on campaign souvenirs being sold by the three presidential candidates through their websites (read: From Mousepads to Piggy Banks). I thought his earlier columns on the graphic design of the elections (blogged here and here) were more interesting by far. However, while skimming it I came across the following statement: Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here’s another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Read the rest of this entry »

I had been invited to the Second Annual Internationalizing Michigan Education Conference: Building Bridges from Michigan to the World to speak about India. The title of my presentation was Learning about India, the world’s largest democracy. Read the rest of this entry »

As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.

I discovered a blog on academia called Lumpenprofessoriat. It links to some cool videos made by supporters of Barack Obama, but more importantly it has some thought-provoking postings and links to other blogs around the issue of academic tenure. Read the rest of this entry »

Leigh Graves Wolf forwarded to me a link to an NPR story about fonts and the presidential campaign. As the USA network slogan goes, “Characters welcome.” Read the rest of this entry »

An update to my previous posting regarding Harvard adopting a open access requirement to all it faculty. It seems that the proposal has been approved. See this news story on the Chronicle.com website.

Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote in a news release that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”

It appears that the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard are considering publishing all their scholarship freely online. Here is a NYTimes story titled At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web. This is truly wonderful news and long overdue. I have been doing this, at a personal level, through my website, for a long time - but have always felt a bit concerned about my legal standing. My solution has been to not make a big song and dance about it… though I have always faced questions about this at the Survive and Thrive sessions I have done for junior faculty. And I have never really had a very good answer.

I guess now I do.
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I picked up Jacob Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy from the library and finished reading it over the past day and a half. I have never been a fan of Bush, mainly because I was troubled, from the very beginning, by his lack of curiosity, and his unwillingness to learn. Weisberg has been a somewhat moderate fan of Bush, though he is now quite disappointed with what has happened in the past seven years. This book is his attempt to understand what went wrong and why. Read the rest of this entry »

Jon Krosnick, a professor at Stanford, argues that Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary (contrary to what was being predicted in the pre-election surveys) could be simply due to the design of the ballot! Read the rest of this entry »

An essay by Mohsin Hamid (titled My reluctant fundamentalist) about the process of writing his novel “The reluctant fundamentalist.” What stands out in this piece is an excellent description of the extended and often painful act of creation Read the rest of this entry »