When archaeologists were called to a site in the City of London where an ugly office block and a bar once stood, they were sceptical that it held any secrets.

Yet six months into [...]]]> 8,000 artefacts and rising: City dig pronounced the 'most important ever' in London – Home News – UK – The Independent.

When archaeologists were called to a site in the City of London where an ugly office block and a bar once stood, they were sceptical that it held any secrets.

Yet six months into the dig on Bloomberg Place, a three-acre site close to Mansion House tube station, experts believed they have stumbled across the most important find of Roman London artefacts in recent memory and have dubbed it the “Pompeii of the north”.

http://ras.org.in/randomise_this_on_poor_economics

“Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics.1 The [...]]]> A critical and insightful review of “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty” by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Review of Agrarian Studies.

http://ras.org.in/randomise_this_on_poor_economics

“Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics.1 The book has received prominent international prizes (The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, for example), and been widely read, reviewed, and praised, including by leading economists and philanthropists.”

“It is, perhaps, not too difficult to understand why the prescription of Poor Economics has enjoyed as much circulation as it has, in particular among metropolitan development policy-making elites, although increasingly also elsewhere.10 It appeals to powerful but flawed metropolitan predispositions: a desire to “fix” things with simpleminded mono-causal reasoning, allied with the conviction that technology, through the analysis of data using randomised trials, makes it possible to do so. Its technocratic premises, its naïve view of politics and society, and its unselfconscious do-goodism make for a self-affirming picture of the world.11 It is unfortunate that it does so little to explain it.’

US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world | Noam Chomsky | guardian.co.uk.

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : No sweetening this bitter pill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/business/walmart-bribes-teotihuacan.html?pagewanted=all

The advantage of using UFRaw is that it can read a variety of RAW file formats and you [...]]]> UFRaw (http://ufraw.sourceforge.net) is a free and open source software to “read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras.” UFRaw can be used on its own or as a plug-in for GIMP, a free/open source replacement for photoshop.

The advantage of using UFRaw is that it can read a variety of RAW file formats and you would not need to change your software when you use different cameras.

(via Kishore Bhargava)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/colorado-wildfires

Fritz Theilen, tool maker and anti-Nazi activist: born Cologne 27 September 1927; died Frauwüllesheim 18 April 2012.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/fritz-theilen-member-of-the-edelweiss-pirates-the-children-who-resisted-hitler-7707378.html

“An exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris shows Matisse’s mastery of form, colour and style to stunning effect, says Adrian Hamilton

It would be almost impossible to produce a bad exhibition of Matisse…You enter a room of his works and your eyes are transformed. [...]]]> Matisse: An old master who loved to learn new tricks

“An exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris shows Matisse’s mastery of form, colour and style to stunning effect, says Adrian Hamilton

It would be almost impossible to produce a bad exhibition of Matisse…You enter a room of his works and your eyes are transformed. It’s the colour of course, those reds and deep greens, always fresh and balanced. And then there’s the rhythm, the curved lines of flesh and flower and the soft straight lines of wall and window. But most of all it is something always uplifting in the way that he seeks and communicates the harmony of life.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/matisse-an-old-master-who-loved-to-learn-new-tricks-7688854.html

“I think what worked for us at The Hindu was a methodical approach, an investigative discipline, a way of journalism that was factual, persistent, patient — and fair and just. We relied almost exclusively on documents, more documents, [...]]]> The Hindu : Opinion / Interview : Bofors was a game-changer, both for Indian politics and journalism.

“I think what worked for us at The Hindu was a methodical approach, an investigative discipline, a way of journalism that was factual, persistent, patient — and fair and just. We relied almost exclusively on documents, more documents, hundreds of documents, in fact, all of them laid out across pages and published in facsimile form in The Hindu (in the pre-digital age). We played the devil’s advocate on key story angles, verifying every detail.”

The Hindu : News / National : Half of India’s homes have cellphones, but not toilets.

Some highlights:

“Salman Rushdie’s censoring-out from the ongoing literary festival in Jaipur will be remembered as a milestone that marked the slow motion disintegration of India’s secular state.”

“Our free media, including our largely unfettered press, are a hugely important asset for democratic India. And yet the celebration of the Indian news media can go only so far — and no further. There are at least [...]]]> The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : The glory and the blemishes of the Indian news media.

“Our free media, including our largely unfettered press, are a hugely important asset for democratic India. And yet the celebration of the Indian news media can go only so far — and no further. There are at least two barriers to quality that need to be overcome. The first is some real laxity in professionalism in achieving accuracy. The second is the bias, often implicit, in the choice of what news to cover and what to ignore, and the way this bias relates particularly to class divisions in India.”

Stunning photographs.

Interesting comments on various aspects of life, times and works of Dickens.

We may have glimpsed the Higgs boson, say Cern scientists | Science | The Guardian.

iPhone 4S v pro camera – in pictures | Technology | The Observer.

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix – IEEE Spectrum.

(via A. Mani)

An important piece by Brinda Karat on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

Country of contrasts

Ernesto Che Guevara’s impressions of India, recorded after a visit in 1959.

(via Vijay Prashad)

In Maruti’s Manesar plant, workers struggle to keep up with the relentless demands of the assembly line. Excellent piece by Aman Sethi.

“A survey of 10 favorite dishes for Chinese, conducted by The Commercial Press, found that Hongshaorou tops the list.”

“The red cubes of marbled pork drew the famous and influential. Shortly after Chairman Mao Zedong announced the establishment of New China, he also declared hongshaorou his favorite dish. [...]]]> Don’t be a fool, eat the fat!|Life|chinadaily.com.cn.

“A survey of 10 favorite dishes for Chinese, conducted by The Commercial Press, found that Hongshaorou tops the list.”

“The red cubes of marbled pork drew the famous and influential. Shortly after Chairman Mao Zedong announced the establishment of New China, he also declared hongshaorou his favorite dish. “It is the best food for nourishing the brain, especially the fatty meat,” he decreed with confidence. “The intellectual class should eat it more.”

“If anyone could have turned stewed pork cubes into a trend, it would have been Chairman Mao. His fancy for hongshaorou swept the country and this influence has lasted over generations.”

My mom used to make hongshaorou and warned me not to cut the fat. “Eat it! Do you know why Chairman Mao is so smart? It’s because he ate fatty meat. Do you want to grow up a fool?”

“Mr Ritchie was one of the creators of the hugely influential Unix operating system and the equally pioneering C programming language.”

EFY Times: “Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they [...]]]> BBC News – Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies aged 70.

“Mr Ritchie was one of the creators of the hugely influential Unix operating system and the equally pioneering C programming language.”

EFY Times: “Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday”

“Pretty much everything on the Web uses those two things: C and Unix. The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C. It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00

“ “Hemingway’s Boat” is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It [...]]]> ‘The Finest Life You Ever Saw’ by James Salter | The New York Review of Books.

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
by Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00

“ “Hemingway’s Boat” is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.”