The GnuVision Blog

Good morning. The title of this talk is a bit of a mouthful, but what I want to say can be summed up in simpler words: we all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours. I will take as my point of departure the unfolding collapse of the global economy, and discuss what might come next.

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Do not take this as a blog post by yet another doomsday-prophet. It makes some very interesting points. Take this as an example:

Most of us are indeed “factory-farmed” humans - think about it!

And finally, Dmitry has some good advice for all of us:

So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It’s no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren’t funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

Most Free Software projects are very supportive of newbie developers.

The Scribus project is a good example - if you are a student interested in contributing to Free Software, be sure that you check it out!

Scribus has recently offered a fellowship to my student Jain Basil (4th semester CS student at Govt Engineering College, Thrissur).

Want to work with Dr.Prabhu Ramachandran on some exciting free software projects?

Check out: Adoption of Open Source Software in Science and Engineering Education.

These are the accepted proposals from two 4th semester students:

Dhanasree Nellayi Prasad - Better Masterpages for Scribus

Vipin V Johney - Implementing XPS support in Scribus

The results are disappointing … had more students shown a bit of enthusiasm, it would have been much better than this.

That’s what Bob Sutton asks in this essay (don’t skip the comments).

Although some economists will quarrel with this view, most of the models and assumptions they pass on to their students reflect a fundamental belief about human beings: We are hard-wired to be selfish. They assume that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and that humans want and take as much for themselves as possible and to stomp on others along the way. As an example, “agency theory” remains one of the most influential theories among economists and business-school finance professors. Major proponents of agency and transaction cost theory not only assume that human beings pursue their narrow self-interest; they also assume that people do so with guile (”treacherous cunning; skillful deceit”). If you travel through life believing that all human beings behave this way, you will look to screw people at every turn and assume that they will do it to you given the chance. And if you act as if this true of every human interaction, and treat everyone around you as if they too are always looking for only short-term and selfish wins, you will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The problem with social science is that our belief about human nature helps shape human nature itself. this research paper examines the issue in more detail. And here is another blog post by Bob Sutton on the same topic.

The solution to the problem of flexibility lies in free and open source software. India has already adopted open source approaches in administrative systems and education projects. This represents a good policy foundation on which to build a national eHealth system. It could, for a start, leverage the strengths of the large open source software community. The outcome would be a common electronic health platform covering clinical and administrative functions for government as well as private institutions, with full interoperability. What is more, the open source nature of the project is bound to attract software companies and communities of programmers to come up with innovative health applications.

IT for Health

In a previous post, I had mentioned Kishore’s ideas about providing a better educational experience. Kishore’s post generated some discussion - Deepak, a lecturer in Electronics at NITC has penned his thoughts here. And just now, I happened to read a post by another student, Sabu.

Winds of change in the ECED department.

I believe that maybe some of the blame lies with the students and the society itself. We are a big country and ever year there are around a million students who have engineering ambitions. Now, the real problem lies not with the numbers per se. The point is how many of these million students really are interested in technology and how many are motivated by the easy money alone. After the 10th standard all parents want their kids to be either engineers or doctors. There might be a lot of people with really versatile brains who can do reasonably well at almost anything even if its outside their domain of interest. So, they get top ranks and get into an engineering college. Lets take the example of NITC. My guess is that around 50 per cent of our batch is not interested in engineering and an even higher percent is not interested in electronics.

I have been a teacher for more than 10 years - more than “teaching” stuff, I have tried to motivate students to explore things on their own. I was not teaching them commerce or history but computing and technology which I thought were really fascinating. Then why is it that so few of them felt the excitement?

Well, the fact is that as Sabu points out, we are trying to teach electronics or computing to students most of whom have absolutely no taste for any of these things. My experience is that as a teacher you would be lucky if you can motivate maybe 10% of your audience. You can’t really blame the remaining 90% - it so happens that they have no interest in what you teach.

I used to be frustrated by this - the stuff I teach is *exciting* for me - then why the hell is it not exciting for my students - that is simply not right ….

But now I realize that you can do much better by looking at what we can do with the 10%. Our attempts at reform should not be dragged down by the thought that no matter what we do, we may not be able to get the desired response from a majority of the students.

One of the points mentioned by Kishore was doing away with the “lecture” system. That’s a bold step in the right direction. Students and faculty need to interact - but that shouldn’t be through hour after hour of “lectures” where the student sits as a passive “receiver”. Here is the experience of an award winning mathematics lecturer on how he implemented this reform:

Why (and how) I teach without long lectures.

There is a thread about this on the sage-edu mailing list.

If a subject like math can be taught in this way, then I am sure we can do even better for Engineering subjects.

If you think that you know everything about capitalism, socialism and the current recession, check out the writings of Dmitry Orlov for some fresh (and sometimes alarming) perspective!

Read That Bastion of American Socialism as a sample!

We don’t know whether Orlov is a Free Software enthusiast, but he has some nice things to say about Microsoft in the above article:

In spite of these many failures, the US military blunders on undeterred. This immunity to the effects of failure is also a socialist trait: if a company does badly, the government gives it more money and hopes for the best. This trait extends to military contracts.
……
Another example: the greatest threat to the US Navy is not any enemy, foreign or domestic, but Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death, because their heavily computerized systems run on the notoriously crashy Windows NT. The response is to reward Microsoft’s inability to write reliable software with more government contracts.

The great strides made by science and technology have given us this belief that the “growth” which we are used to will continue forever. Dmitry forces us to rethink …. the economic “growth” that we have witnessed so far in developed countries has been based on creating an endless cycle of consumption - what if it reaches some hard resource limits and it becomes impossible to continue?

Why bother … we shall all be dead and gone by that time!

Maybe not … and that makes it somewhat scary!

I am a third year BTech student at the National Institute of Technology Calicut. I am one of many persons who has been disillusioned by bitter academic experiences at college. I couldn’t help noting down some (many, in fact) points which I think the faculty/administration should stop ignoring and start paying attention to, to make undergraduate education a gratifying experience, not just for the students, but for everyone involved.

Towards a better educational experience

Instituitions like the NIT’s are in a much better situation compared to our state Government Engineering colleges because they are autonomous and don’t have to depend on the whims of Universities to implement academic/administrative reforms. Let’s hope somebody listens to what Kishore has to say …..

While most of us in the Free Software community have been discussing the encouraging attitude towards Free Software taken by some political parties in their respective “IT policies”, Atanu says that the best policy is no policy at all.

The best IT policy is a non-existent IT policy because the less any IT policy prescribes the better it is. However, a non-existent IT policy means that there will be no need for a Ministry of IT. Without a ministry, there will be no need for huge multi-billion dollar budgets. Without multi-billion dollar budgets, there will be no profit in being part of the government. That’s unfortunately our destiny. A world with huge government and fat policies.

Atanu is a serious thinker, and I will not make the mistake of equating him with sundry libertarians who proclaim that:

The best XYZ policy is non-existent XYZ policy. Leave everything to the “free” market and things will sort out on their own magically!

But I don’t understand why he makes claims like this:

The major point here is that people who are in the business of education are much better placed to know which tools to use than some government bureaucrat who has little knowledge of what tools are most effective in education

The people who are in the business of education are literally in the “business” of education - they simply know how to make money out of it - and they can use all the wrong “tools” and still merrily make money (eg: use proprietary software instead of vastly better FOSS alternatives). At least, Atanu should have acknowledged the necessity of strong government policy in the context of Free/proprietary software and software patents.