Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about poop in my “community”. Amy had given me a book to read called “The Big Necessity” and I found it really interesting and applicable to what the students at the Tata-Dhan Academy have been studying. I, in turn, lent the book to one of my colleagues, who also seemed to love it. We (faculty and students) have even had mock “role plays” (during lunch, of all times) where we pretended to be villagers who like to poop in the field and students who are trying to convince them to change their behavior. We brainstorm on trying to find different ways to communicate the message of creating an “open defecation free” India.
I was feeling a little bored, so I decided to use the zimmertwins site to give an example of the kinds of charming lunchtime discussions we occasionally have.
The text moves by a bit too quickly, and I couldn’t get better sound. Maybe I’ll get around to uploading a different version with some rockin’ DWAB background music.
I started the day today [note: as with "And when the numbers go against what you have always said....,” this was written around a week ago] with my dictionary. I was trying to remember more precise definitions of things like democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and meritocracy because our topic of discussion for the day was “deepening grassroots democracy”.
Continue reading “Democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, and bratty students” »
Today [note: this was actually written about a week ago, but I just got around to finishing typing it], around 400 DHANites got together to talk about poverty and our motivation to work with the poor. Our “reference” materials were a chapter from a book titled Moving Out of Poverty (one of the authors of this book was Amy’s teacher, by the way), some 35 questions from Vasi, the Executive Director of DHAN Foundation, and, of course, our experiences. One of the points of focus for discussion was a pair of pie-charts. The first was a set of factors which contribute to the poor “moving” out of poverty, and the second was on the factors which cause people to “fall” into poverty.
Continue reading “And when the numbers go against what you have always said….” »
I just came back from my first DHAN Foundation retreat (which I plan to write about later) and I also got two books filled with “retreat reports” from other DHANites. The retreat reports range from extremely dull to pretty fun to almost instructional. By design, they are meant to highlight the best and worst parts of your year, share what’s on your mind about work, introduce yourself to other DHANites, and be something personal. At least that was my understanding.
Some of you may have remembered my retreat report from last year in which I interviewed myself. This year, I decided to (predictably) do something different. And here’s what it was:
Here’s a PDF too….
So, why the title of this post? Well, the people in charge of compiling the retreat report books decided to take away all the pretty pictures, retype the text, and delete at least one important line from my report. I understand that it is not “standard format” but I did keep that in mind when I consciously decided to make it fit nicely onto a single sheet of A4 paper–I figured they could just print it out and insert it at the end of the rest of the reports or something, but I guess that would be asking too much.
Grrrr….
 Slug: Swingers, EPs, and more I don’t actually remember how I got to know about Slug, but I liked their, um, sluggish loud music. I think it had something to do with them using lots of bass guitars, and because “Swingers” was a 10″, and I really liked to collect 10″ records….
Here’s the “Swingers” 10″, a few 7″ singles, and a truly sluggish track called “Crawl” for your enjoyment.
Continue reading “Slug: Swingers, EPs, and more” »
In my last post about sampling (Simple sampling with R) we were doing simple sampling without replacement–that is, each item could only be selected once. However, there are times when you want to simulate sampling with replacement. For example, if you wanted to simulate sampling the results of rolling a dice 50 times, your outcomes each time could be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, but 50 is more than 6, so you need to let the software “replace” the sample before it takes another sample.
This post explains how to do this with R.
Continue reading “Sampling with replacement in R” »
I mentioned in an earlier post (Am I inconsistent?) that I got interested in R because Amy had asked me to help her with some sampling at one point. Since that was my starting point, I thought I would share some of my experiments with you.
In this post:
- Simple random sampling
- Simple random sampling with a seed
- Sorting your sample
Continue reading “Simple sampling with R” »
And, they didn’t do such a great job of transferring the Google Page Creator content to Google Sites. So, I’ve decided to delete the content from Google Page Creator and transfer it here instead. This site has so much random content already; four more random articles shouldn’t make too much of a difference.
Read on to find:
AKA “Irony over the stinky river….”
Sometimes, just when I begin to not have faith that Indians have a sense of humor, I run across something like this:
Near our house, there is an extremely foul river…. actually, it’s hard to even call it a river since it really seems to only flow when the cows go wading through the slush. Needless to say, it’s also a nice mosquito breeding ground too.
Continue reading “Do Indians have a sense of humor?” »
AKA “The sweet smelling ocean spray on Chennai’s shores….”
Aah. Marina Beach. Great to go people watching. Good place to buy little silly plastic touristy stuff. Smell the fresh ocean breeze. Take a dip in the water to cool off.
Or should you?
Continue reading “Marina Beach” »
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