For Second Opinion, Consult a Computer?

 SAN FRANCISCO — The man on stage had his audience of 600 mesmerized. Over the course of 45 minutes, the tension grew. Finally, the moment of truth arrived, and the room was silent with anticipation.

At last he spoke. “Lymphoma with secondary hemophagocytic syndrome,” he said. The crowd erupted in applause.

Professionals in every field revere their superstars, and in medicine the best diagnosticians are held in particularly high esteem. Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal, 39, a self-effacing associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered one of the most skillful clinical diagnosticians in practice today.

The case Dr. Dhaliwal was presented, at a medical  conference last year, began with information that could have described hundreds of diseases: the patient had intermittent fevers, joint pain, and weight and appetite loss.

To observe him at work is like watching Steven Spielberg tackle a script or Rory McIlroy a golf course. He was given new information bit by bit — lab, imaging and biopsy results. Over the course of the session, he drew on an encyclopedic familiarity with thousands of syndromes. He deftly dismissed red herrings while picking up on clues that others might ignore, gradually homing in on the accurate diagnosis.

Just how special is Dr. Dhaliwal’s talent? More to the point, what can he do that a computer cannot? Will a computer ever successfully stand in for a skill that is based not simply on a vast fund of knowledge but also on more intangible factors like intuition?

Read more...

శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2012

 

శ్రీ కౌముది అక్టోబర్ 2012

శ్రీ కౌముది సెప్టెంబర్ 2012

India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012 

During the 1940s, when India won its independence from Britain, the leaders of the newly-formed nation began imagining the Indian Institutes of Technology, otherwise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cultivate some of the world’s top scientists and engineers. And they’d make technology key to the future of India’s economic development.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indian educational system and, like their peer institutions in the US, they’re making a point of putting free courses on the web. Rather quietly, they’ve amassed some 268 courses, giving anyone with an internet connection access to 10,000+ video lectures. As you might expect, the course lineup skews heavily toward science and technology, the stuff that contributes to India’s industrial base – Introduction to Basic Electronics, High Performance Computer Architecture, Space Flight Mechanics, Steel Making, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few contemplative courses to the mix, courses like Contemporary Literature, Quantum Physics, the History of Economic Theory, and Game Theory and Economics.

You can start rummaging through the complete list of IIT courses on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT website, which gives you the ability to download videos straight to your computer. Naturally we’ve added many essential IIT courses to our list of Free Online Courses from Great Universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Related Content:
Yale Introduces Another Seven Free Online Courses, Bringing Total to 42
Harvard Presents Free Courses with the Open Learning Initiative
MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

by Dan Colman

Read other articles at Open Culture

The Birth and Partition of a Nation: India's Independence Told in Photos

Aug 15 2012, 3:05 PM ET

August 15th, 1947, inaugurated one of the cruelest and most enduring ironies of decolonization. India, a British property with over 4,500 years of civilization and a population of 415 million, finally achieved independence. But it was a triumph that opened a social, historical and geographic wound that has yet to fully heal: the new Indian state was partitioned into two. Violent divisions between the subcontinent's Hindu and Muslim communities, and Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah's longstanding campaign for an Indian-Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal, made partition the expedient choice for a weary and overextended post-war British government. On June 3rd, 1947, British Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten announced that, as of August 15, India would be split between separate majority-Hindu and majority-Muslim countries.
The border between the future modern states of India and Pakistan was created under the supervision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister who was given only five weeks to draw the new borders. The resulting armed conflict persists today, from Hindu-ruled yet majority-Muslim Kashmir, to the bifurcation of Pakistan into remote eastern and western haves that later waged war. Millions of Pakistani Bengalis lost access to Kolkata, a regional metropolis that now sits on the Indian side of the border. As political scientist Lucy Chester recounts, the Radcilffe Line was "a failure in terms of boundary-making, but a striking success in terms of providing political cover to all sides."
India was independent, India's Muslim minority had its own independent state, and the British were in a position to leave their troublesome colonies behind. They were incomplete victories: up to 17 million people were eventually displaced, and 1 million killed, in the sectarian violence that followed partition. Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of India's independence movement, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948 over his perceived sympathies toward India's Muslims. A devastating civil war in East Pakistan resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1972. India and Pakistan fought wars over Kashmir in 1947, 1965, and 1999. The Kashmir conflict still serves as an ostensible justification for Pakistan's support of anti-Indian terrorist groups -- as well as for both countries' development of nuclear weapons.
Today, democratic India is a regional power, and Bangladesh is an emerging democracy -- even troubled Pakistan boasts one of the world's top 30 economies. Still, even 65 years later, the full cost of partition has yet to be fully paid. Here is the story of that fateful day, and the days immediately before and after, told in photos.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi in 1944. Gandhi opposed partition, while Jinnah's Muslim League lobbied for some kind of autonomous Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal. He was briefly speaker of Pakistan's National Assembly before his death in 1948. (Wikimedia)

Read rest of article in the Atlantic,  Thursday, August 16, 2012

Captain Lakshmi

Lakshmi Sehgal (“Captain Lakshmi”), doctor and fighter for Indian independence, died on July 23rd, aged 97

Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition

AS SHE moved, pert and bird-like, round her tiny rented clinic in industrial Kanpur in northern India, Lakshmi Sehgal made her patients feel completely safe in her hands. Lightly but firmly, her fingers moved across the swollen bellies of pregnant women, or felt for a pulse, or probed a wound. Her sister said she had always had the technique to reassure. Those same hands, in West Bengal in 1971, had massaged the scrawny limbs of Bangladeshi refugees, and in December 1984 had soothed the burning eyes of victims of the explosion at a chemical factory in Bhopal.

They also knew how to fire a revolver and prime a grenade, change the magazine on a Tommy gun and wield a sword. They were as skilled and ruthless as any man’s, for Dr Lakshmi had been trained beside the men to become a killing machine. From 1943 to 1945, in the jungles of Singapore and what was then Burma, she commanded a brand-new unit of the Indian National Army in the hope of overthrowing the British Raj. The Rani of Jhansi regiment, set up by the independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose (left of her, above), was for women only, the first in Asia. It was named after a heroine of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny against the British, a widowed child bride who cut her saris into trousers to ride into battle. For Dr Lakshmi, another rich tomboy who had married too young, a rider of horses and driver of cars who had eagerly thrown her foreign-made dresses on a nationalist bonfire, the rani made an irresistible model.

Bose, too, was irresistible. She had first seen “Netaji” at 14, in 1928, when she was taken to Calcutta to the assembly of the Congress party by her activist mother. He strode in uniform at the head of his party volunteers, bravely rebellious, his owlish glasses glinting in the sunrise. Fifteen years later, when she had fled to Singapore with a new lover to set up a free clinic for Indian migrant workers, they met again. Bose persuaded her to recruit Indian women from the diaspora in Malaya and Singapore to fight for the cause: to link up with the Japanese, invade India through Burma, and seize the capital. He made her a colonel, although she was always “Captain”. A fine singer, she had already recorded the army song: Chalo Dilli, “On to Delhi!”

Read the full article of Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition, The Economist

శ్రీ కౌముది ఆగస్ట్ 2012

JFK's Overshadowed Crisis

IN APRIL, India launched a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear bomb deep into the Indian Ocean. The successful Agni missile test fulfilled India’s fifty-year quest to achieve the means of dispatching a nuclear weapon to Beijing. Just about fifty years ago, in October 1962, India fought a brief war against China in the Himalaya Mountains. India lost that war—and vowed it would acquire the capacity to deter Chinese aggression.

The Sino-Indian war also posed a crisis for America’s young president, John F. Kennedy, who had entered office determined to build a strong U.S. relationship with India. But his attention that fateful autumn was diverted to a more ominous crisis—the one involving Soviet efforts to place nuclear missiles in Cuba—that unleashed a dangerous nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union. Thus, Kennedy confronted two simultaneous crises, one far overshadowed by the other at the time and also later in history.

But Kennedy’s handling of the 1962 war—in the midst of a far graver national challenge—offers lessons today for those interested in the ongoing diplomatic conundrum posed by India and its mutually hostile neighbor, Pakistan.

 Read full article by Bruce Riedel from July-Aug 2012 Issue of The National Interest

శ్రీ కౌముది జూలై 2012

Think Again: India's Rise

Unfortunately, the fascination with India's growing economic clout and foreign-policy overtures has glossed over its institutional limits, the many quirks of its political culture, and the significant economic and social challenges it faces. To cite but one example, at least 30 percent of Indian agricultural produce spoils because the country has failed to develop a viable supply chain. Foreign investors could alleviate, if not solve, that problem. But thanks to the intransigence of a small number of political parties and organized interest groups, India has refused to open its markets to outsiders. Until India can meet basic challenges like this, its greatness will remain a matter of rhetoric, not fact.

Read full article by Sumit Ganguly .....

Rashtrapati, Rashtrapita

This major political reform will have several beneficial effects on our democracy. Firstly, it will broadbase the presidential election, by adding nearly three million more electors to the existing electoral college of 4,896 MPs and MLAs. There being no whip in this election, this will reduce the scope of politics of manipulation, inducements and blackmail that the Congress party routinely resorts to. Look how, by misusing the CBI stick, it’s got both the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in UP to back its candidate. Secondly, this will encourage members of PRIs and ULBs to outgrow their localism and develop a national perspective. Thirdly, the President too will feel Constitutionally obliged to speak up for the legitimate needs and rights of these long-neglected grassroots institutions of democracy. Fourthly, this will compel political parties to start taking them more seriously. Lastly, giving PRIs and ULBs a right to vote in the presidential election will also force the centre and state governments to take them seriously. Today, even two decades after the 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments, neither the centre nor the state governments have taken all the necessary steps to decentralise powers to the PRIs and ULBs in terms of funds, functions and functionaries. India’s inclusive development without effective decentralisation of powers is a pipedream.

The strongest reason for broadbasing the electoral college for the Rashtrapati election is that this is in keeping with the thinking of India’s Rashtrapita (Father of the Nation). Mahatma Gandhi, who had envisioned Gram Swaraj or the Republic of India as a natural and national collective of largely self-governing and mutually cooperating village-town republics, had prophetically cautioned: “The larger a democracy grows, the less it becomes the rule of the people and the smaller is the say of individuals and localised groups in dealing with their own destinies.” He has been proved right by India’s highly centralised structure of (mis)governance.

Read the full article:  Sudheendra Kulkarni : Sun Jun 24 2012, 03:23 hrs

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2012

Noor Inayat Khan was a wartime British secret agent

thevelvetundergrounds:

Noor Inayat Khan was a wartime British secret agent of Indian descent who was the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She was arrested and eventually executed by the Gestapo. (x) 
Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was the eldest of four children. Her father Hazrat Inayat Khan came from a princely Indian Muslim family. (He was a great-grandson of Tipu Sultan, the famous 18th century ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore.) He lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism. Her mother, Ora Meena Ray Baker, was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico who met Inayat Khan during his travels in the United States.
In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the family left Russia for London and lived in Bloomsbury. Noor attended nursery at Notting Hill. In 1920, they moved to France, settling in Suresnes near Paris, in a house that was a gift from a benefactor of the Sufi movement. After the death of her father in 1927, Noor took on the responsibility for her grief-stricken mother and her younger siblings. The young girl, described as quiet, shy, sensitive, and dreamy, studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at the Paris Conservatory under the famous Nadia Boulanger, composing for harp and piano. She started a career of writing poetry and children’s stories and became a regular contributor to children’s magazines and French radio. In 1939 her book, Twenty Jataka Tales, inspired by the Jātaka tales of Buddhist tradition, was published in London.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, when France was overrun by German troops, the family fled from Paris to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England, landing in Falmouth, Cornwall on 22 June 1940. Although, Noor Inayat Khan was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father, she and her brother Vilayat decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny: “I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.”In England she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and trained as a wireless operator. After being interviewed at the War Office she agreed to become a British special agent. Her superiors held mixed opinions on her suitability for secret warfare, and her training was incomplete. Nevertheless, her fluent French and her competency in wireless operation—coupled with a shortage of experienced agents—made her a desirable candidate for service in Nazi-occupied France.She traveled to Paris, and joined the Physician network led by Francis Suttill, code named Prosper. In spite of the danger, Noor rejected an offer to return to Britain. She continued to transmit as the last essential link between London and Paris. Moving from place to place, she managed to escape capture while maintaining wireless communication with London. ”She refused to abandon what had become the most important and dangerous post in France and did excellent work.” (x) 

thevelvetundergrounds:

Noor Inayat Khan was a wartime British secret agent of Indian descent who was the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She was arrested and eventually executed by the Gestapo. (x) 
Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was the eldest of four children. Her father Hazrat Inayat Khan came from a princely Indian Muslim family. (He was a great-grandson of Tipu Sultan, the famous 18th century ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore.) He lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism. Her mother, Ora Meena Ray Baker, was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico who met Inayat Khan during his travels in the United States.
In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the family left Russia for London and lived in Bloomsbury. Noor attended nursery at Notting Hill. In 1920, they moved to France, settling in Suresnes near Paris, in a house that was a gift from a benefactor of the Sufi movement. After the death of her father in 1927, Noor took on the responsibility for her grief-stricken mother and her younger siblings. The young girl, described as quiet, shy, sensitive, and dreamy, studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at the Paris Conservatory under the famous Nadia Boulanger, composing for harp and piano. She started a career of writing poetry and children’s stories and became a regular contributor to children’s magazines and French radio. In 1939 her book, Twenty Jataka Tales, inspired by the Jātaka tales of Buddhist tradition, was published in London.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, when France was overrun by German troops, the family fled from Paris to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England, landing in Falmouth, Cornwall on 22 June 1940. Although, Noor Inayat Khan was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father, she and her brother Vilayat decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny: “I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.”In England she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and trained as a wireless operator. After being interviewed at the War Office she agreed to become a British special agent. Her superiors held mixed opinions on her suitability for secret warfare, and her training was incomplete. Nevertheless, her fluent French and her competency in wireless operation—coupled with a shortage of experienced agents—made her a desirable candidate for service in Nazi-occupied France.She traveled to Paris, and joined the Physician network led by Francis Suttill, code named Prosper. In spite of the danger, Noor rejected an offer to return to Britain. She continued to transmit as the last essential link between London and Paris. Moving from place to place, she managed to escape capture while maintaining wireless communication with London. ”She refused to abandon what had become the most important and dangerous post in France and did excellent work.” (x) 

శ్రీ కౌముది మే 2012