Chennai Autos

I have spent the last 15 days in Chennai. I just cannot believe it............the trip from the place I was staying in to the workplace cost me exactly the same everyday and most auto drivers were very business-like.........no haggling, no rude remarks, no rising blood pressure...............I have never experienced this in Madras in the past three decades. I am beginning to like Chennai! 

Editing

There is this S&T "publishing enabler", for want of a better phrase, who had advertised for Chemistry editors.They do editing, pagination, etc for some international S&T journals. I had been wanting to do a little bit of freelance work after retirement, at least to make enough money to finance my small requirements for the childrens' projects..........magnets, LEDs, toy motors and the like, so I had applied.
They asked me to come for training. I have spent 10 days with kids much younger than my children who do not know whether Tokyo is a country, a city or a state. They are being trained for pre-edit work and have to check fonts for addresses of authors etc among other things.
I found out some truths about myself........I am able to read through  research papers quite easily- and that too in different areas ranging from nano materials to drug design-- a happy surprise! My grammar is worse than I thought it was- sad! 

The ET says that the Indian education market is thriving and likely to be valued at Rs 6,00,000 crores by 2015. They expect more private investment in the sector.
Our education sector is either poor-quality-but-cheap or poor-quality-and expensive. Very few institutions are good-quality-cheap or good-quality-expensive. Private investors seem to have got many things right , but when it comes to education, few seem to know what is required.
In Hyderabad, the crucial 'Junior College' segment is crucial because most, if not all children wish to join the IITs and prepare for it primarily in the 11th and 12th years of education.
There were two major players in in this--a group called Sri Chaitanya and another called Narayana. These made it impossible for other smaller fries to sustain themselves in this sector. Most others sold out to them and last year the two giant businesses merged  to form a giant conglomerate owning almost all the junior colleges in Hyderabad and much of AP. For them it is exactly like poultry farming..........they sort students into those expected to get into IITs, those likely to get 95% marks in the board exam, those expected to get 70-60% and so on. These are placed in different locations and treated differently. No one actually gets educated in the sense of being really exposed to different ideas and thoughts, but that's beside the point.
Now, as businesses, these are extremely successful. They make a lot of money for the promoters and investors. So this is how the 6,00,000 crore industry looks like.....efficiently managed, like the hi-tech poultry businesses with children huddled into caged tenements masquerading as schools.

Auto woes

A few days back, my nephew came to visit us from Chennai. He said that after a PIL filed by a lawyer, all autos in Madras now charge reasonably and go by the meter.........(maybe they have also become polite!!!). I am likely to go to Chennai next month and that would be a cause for celebration. I have forgotten that it was once, decades ago, possible to travel by auto in Madras without my blood pressure shooting up.
But perhaps the malady will now be transferred to Delhi...........The new government in Delhi has decided that auto drivers that fleece passengers cannot be challaned by Delhi Police.....the understaffed Delhi transport authority will take over.  In other words, field day for Delhi auto drivers!

Miracle!!

"Dehydrated Water 
Unlike traditional water bottling facilities who bottle water only from one specific region, we have designed an innovative blending system that harnesses and compresses the benefits of waters ranging from the French Alps to the Rocky Mountains.  Our 27-step process bonds the molecules and rigorously blends the waters together.  It then secretes the water molecules and harvests them for the final stage.  Once ready, the substance is introduced to the environment and the excess vapors are released.  The remaining substance is pure, natural, dehydrated water."

Someone has actually  sold it, bought it and reviewed it.

http://midwaypersonal.blogspot.in/2011/03/amazing-amazonmust-buy.html 

School Science Fair

After a couple of weeks of  very hard work, the science exhibition at the school got done. The 5th class children had done some charts........leaves, flowers and fruits in and around their campus. The 6th and 7th had a little more ambitious projects. Of these, a few worked quite hard while some children expected me to do it all for them and thought they just had to stand there and talk a bit. Of the few good ones was this 5th class boy who did some work for ALL the projects. He helped build the clay mountain with hidden  funnel and tube for the hydel plant, he built the  volcano with a hidden bottle for the soda volcano, he made a car with a cardboard carton for a balloon driven car,  he helped me with the solar oven and with my first unsuccessful biogas plant. I was very impressed with this little boy. There were others who did well too. One project that I did not even have to touch was the "Braino"....made totally by a 6th class  boy.  I just had to explain how the connections were to be made. After a couple of false starts, he got it right.
There was this girl who had heard about chromatography  and insisted on doing it. I tried to discourage it since I did not feel I could explain to them the principle behind it well enough for a 6th class child to understand. Finally, I used a strip of paper kitchen towel and separated green ink using water as mobile phase. The girl who had made a model of a solar oven and the boy who had made a model hydel did an excellent job of explaining what  their model was about.
My saviours in this whole episode were two young women who were studying for their MPharm. They had a break while they were waiting for some company to organise their internship. They helped me with some of the work, specially in view of my miserably inadequate Telugu, they could translate  what I said to make the younger kids understand.

Dropping out of MOOCs

I am the kind of person who works very hard when compelled to - I need deadlines or some such pressure to work hard. But, if someone told me that there was this rewarding work that  I could do if I wished to, it would never get done.
So, when I registered for a couple of Coursera courses, I told myself that I must see these through and prove to myself that I can motivate myself without external pressures. Guess what- I haven't completed the courses. No surprise.
But it is almost everyone- not just me. There is a  90% dropout by one estimate.  
"Some users -- including stay-at-home parents or retirees -- may sign up for the same reason they do a Sunday crossword puzzle, said Yvonne Belanger, the head of assessment and planning for the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University.

“They have nothing more than, ‘This is a good way to spend my free time – it’s better than television,' ” she said.

But I swear my reason for enrolling is not the same as that common to the retirees mentioned here.

I was really interested in the courses, but somehow day to day chores always go up on my list of priorities.

“Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.