-- Jen Pahlka, via Tim O'Reilly's blog.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Human interfaces
“Because I believe interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use.”
Friday, October 18, 2013
Sanskrit manuscripts lost with the Titanic
.tiff)
Adheesh Sathaye mentioned today that the terrible sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was also the occasion of the loss of fourteen Sanskrit manuscripts of the Vikramacarita. The MSS were on their way from Bombay to Edgerton in the USA.
Here is Edgerton's account, also kindly supplied by Adheesh.
There's an uncomfortable ambiguity in Edgerton's prose, regarding the predicate of his expression "terrible disaster."
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Kenney on the poor success-rate of editorial conjectures
The point being, be careful with conjectures, and remain sanguine that - if it is ever possible to check - over 95% of your conjectures will be wrong.
-----
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Checklist of things to do on reinstalling Ubuntu
I'm finally moving to 64 bit Linux (since all my machines are fine with that). My disks have my /home and root files in different partitions, so I can erase and reinstall Linux itself without touching any of "my" files. This works flawlessly, and the new installation comes up with all my old desktop settings etc. Since the Ubuntu Software Center's "sync" function still doesn't work properly, here are some installations and customizations that I like:
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
"ucgadkw" and UCL
Dear colleagues,
For about 25 years I had an email account at University College London. It was "ucgadkw@euclid.ucl.ac.uk" from 1988, and then "ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk" with aliases to "wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk" and "d.wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk". After leaving UCL in 2009 I was given honorary status, so the accounts continued, as did access to my filestore, that for many years was the INDOLOGY website.
But that has all now been unplugged and switched off. I was not informed or warned about this, and a UCL computer support person has just told me that it is unlikely that I'll be given access to my old files because apparently they don't belong to me, but to UCL ("work for hire"). I have a backup, but it is slightly out of date.
But that has all now been unplugged and switched off. I was not informed or warned about this, and a UCL computer support person has just told me that it is unlikely that I'll be given access to my old files because apparently they don't belong to me, but to UCL ("work for hire"). I have a backup, but it is slightly out of date.
There's obviously a lesson here: if you care about your work, don't store it exclusively on a university computer. Strange thing to say, but unfortunately true.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Minimal example of XeLaTeX with Velthuis input mapping
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\newfontfamily
\sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Sanskrit 2003}
\begin{document}
\sanskritfont
\noindent\huge
aasiidraajaa nalo naama viirasenasuto balii|\\
upapannairgu.nairi.s.tai ruupavaana"svakovida.h||
\end{document}
Monday, July 08, 2013
Resources for OA book publication
My post "Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research," was self-evidently devoted to journals.
There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books. Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA. To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties. Nevertheless, the field is growing.
Some resources:
There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books. Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA. To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties. Nevertheless, the field is growing.
Some resources:
- Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact." - Knowledge Unlatched
"Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organisation committed to helping global communities share the costs of Open Access publishing so that good books continue to be published and more readers are able to engage with them." - Open Humanities Press
"The basic idea is simple: making peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." ... "After looking at the various efforts underway, we concluded that an editorially-driven international press, focused on building respect through its brand, is what is required to tackle the digital 'credibility' problem. With OHP, we aim to emulate the strengths and flexibility of commercial presses, while avoiding the institutional limitations of the university-based e-presses." - Open Edition
"OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences." - Open Edition Books
"OpenEdition Books est une plateforme de livres en sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de la moitié d'entre eux est en libre accès. Des services complémentaires sont proposés via les bibliothèques et institutions abonnées." - Open Access Publishing European Network
"Online library and publication platform. The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."
Monday, June 24, 2013
Where's that Book? On the physical locations of knowledge
Many years ago, my then wife – whose academic specialism was similar to my own – decided that it would make sense to merge our book collections. When I got home from work, our two libraries had been unified, and arranged alphabetically by author. I experienced this as a negative change, I felt lost, ignorant, almost lobotomized. I took the rearrangement as an act of mild aggression, although I admitted freely that this was not at all my wife's intention. From her point of view, she was making it easier for both of us to access our complementary book collections. She was being tidy, logical, orderly. From my point of view, I had lost the ready mental association of book with spatial location, that was integral to the way I habitually remembered references.
For me, the act of remembering academic matters often goes as a rapid internal dialogue, something like this: “Ah yes! So-and-so said something about this. Now what was it exactly? Hmm.” Then I would turn from my desk towards the shelves, thinking, “With the books on topic X. Top right, at about eye-level.” In my mind's eye, my attention roams to the spot on the wall where the book was located. Then I would get up, fetch the book, and find the passage I was after.
In my spatial memory, the phrase “books on topic X” need not actually refer to a subject location. It could be books of a certain colour, especially if a series were all printed in the same style of binding. Or books of a certain size, or that I bought or was given at a certain time. The arrangement of books on my shelves was – and is again – mostly subject-wise, but there are exceptions. But this doesn't affect my ability to remember spatially where books are. As long as the books are where I put them in the first place, then I can rapidly and efficiently find them again.
The distress I experienced when the books were put into somebody else's logical order was a very real reduction in cognitive power.
I have experienced this several times since then, especially when moving house or office. Physically displacing my personal book collection results in a loss of bibliographical and cognitive control. That control is never quite recovered, in spite of attempts to reproduce the original arrangement of the books. Such a rearrangement is never quite possible. This is partly because the layout of the new storage space does not lend itself to reproducing the original ordering. But also because one's physical resources of energy and time do not allow for a full recovery of the original arrangement.
All this raises the broader question of books, locations, and memory. My own method of relating cognitively to my books is, I suppose, a pale version of the famous medieval European concept of the Theatre of Memory, so eloquently described by Frances Yates. [At this point, I recall that the Yates book is at above head-level on the second column of books in the next room. I fetch it, and write out the bibliographical information for the following footnote.]1
Further points for development:
For me, the act of remembering academic matters often goes as a rapid internal dialogue, something like this: “Ah yes! So-and-so said something about this. Now what was it exactly? Hmm.” Then I would turn from my desk towards the shelves, thinking, “With the books on topic X. Top right, at about eye-level.” In my mind's eye, my attention roams to the spot on the wall where the book was located. Then I would get up, fetch the book, and find the passage I was after.
In my spatial memory, the phrase “books on topic X” need not actually refer to a subject location. It could be books of a certain colour, especially if a series were all printed in the same style of binding. Or books of a certain size, or that I bought or was given at a certain time. The arrangement of books on my shelves was – and is again – mostly subject-wise, but there are exceptions. But this doesn't affect my ability to remember spatially where books are. As long as the books are where I put them in the first place, then I can rapidly and efficiently find them again.
The distress I experienced when the books were put into somebody else's logical order was a very real reduction in cognitive power.
I have experienced this several times since then, especially when moving house or office. Physically displacing my personal book collection results in a loss of bibliographical and cognitive control. That control is never quite recovered, in spite of attempts to reproduce the original arrangement of the books. Such a rearrangement is never quite possible. This is partly because the layout of the new storage space does not lend itself to reproducing the original ordering. But also because one's physical resources of energy and time do not allow for a full recovery of the original arrangement.
All this raises the broader question of books, locations, and memory. My own method of relating cognitively to my books is, I suppose, a pale version of the famous medieval European concept of the Theatre of Memory, so eloquently described by Frances Yates. [At this point, I recall that the Yates book is at above head-level on the second column of books in the next room. I fetch it, and write out the bibliographical information for the following footnote.]1
Further points for development:
- On moving libraries, the Kern Library.
- What is lost, what is gained.
- Open access versus closed access.
1 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, ARK Paperbacks, 1984). First published in 1966.
Reflections on translation from Sanskrit
The following was written by me in another context, as part of a conversation. I'm reproducing it here in case it is of general interest:
Monday, May 27, 2013
XeLaTeX for Sanskrit: update
In a post on 5 July 2010, I gave an example of how to use XeLaTeX with various fonts and various ways of inputting text. Some time later, the commands in the Fontspec and Polyglossia packages were updated, and my example didn't work as advertised any more. Here is an update that works again.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Changing publication models
With
the growth of good desktop document processing software and the
universality of good, free Unicode fonts, it is now entirely feasible
for an individual to produce excellent camera-ready copy of an academic
book for themselves, with modest effort over a modest period of time.
With services like Lulu and Createspace,
the transition from a PDF on your computer to a hard-bound, published
book sold online and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., is also
very easy and cheap. I mean, less than about $100, total cost. I did a
book with Lulu a couple of years ago (my father's memoirs), and I paid
$60 to cover distribution through Amazon and all other big bookshops and
online services. Everything else was free. The book is large, 650
pages, and costs about $50 for hardback, with free shipping in the USA
(e.g., Amazon, B&N). I also made the PDF downloadable directly from Lulu at $12.
What does all this mean?
What it means is that publishers are no longer necessary for performing the traditional roles of book production and distribution. Authors can now do this satisfactorily for themselves at marginal cost, high quality, and with international distribution.
What remains? What I call "Gatekeeping" services. With today's deluge of free online resources, what we all really do need is someone to take responsibility for guaranteeing high intellectual quality. Trustworthiness.
Traditionally, this was also a role performed by some publishers, especially the university presses. A book on Buddhism from Cambridge University Press *should* be of a different calibre from a book on Buddhism from, say, Harlequin or Mills & Boon. The good academic publishers acted as gatekeepers, offering an implicit guarantee of intellectual quality.
But if you look more closely at this arrangement, the university presses rely heavily on the free services of university staff for refereeing, book acquisition, series curation, and sometimes even content-editing and copy-editing. In-house copy-editing was usual, however, and often of a high standard.
Another service that a big university press provides is prestige. A young scholar with a book published by Princeton is likely to do better at getting a job than another with a book published with a publisher of less prestige. This is because appointment committees are willing to take the implied quality-guarantee of Princeton UP. But again, Princeton only publishes books because unpaid academic referees at universities give the thumbs-up. The process is circular.
What does all this mean?
If
books can be produced and distributed by academics themselves, and
refereed and edited by them too, what is left for publishers? Not much,
I think, unless they dramatically change their business and service
models.
What
we see going on today, I believe, are the last convulsions of a dying
industry. Yes, they're making a lot of money, but only because of the
inertia and uncertainty of academics. What used to be called FUD
("fear, uncertainty and doubt"). The upcoming younger generation of
scholars with different preconceptions will probably not be so smitten
by the prestige of old publishing houses, and will be more adept at
self-publishing.
What remains is the need for gatekeeping, for the guaranteeing of quality. If publishers really took that seriously, and divorced their editorial selections and quality judgements from their need to remain profitable, then they might salvage for themselves a genuine role in the future. I cannot see a way in which genuine academic quality can be guaranteed by an institution that simultaneously has to satisfy criteria of profitability. As long as their are two goals - quality and profit - there will inevitably arise cases of conflict and compromise. In short, gatekeeping is the job of (publicly-funded) university staff, not a (commercial) publisher.
The alternative to this is that university staff take back into their own hands all the processes of the production and distribution of knowledge. In fact, this is the change that the major funding bodies are pressing upon us, with the widespread requirement that publicly-funded academic research be published Open Access. It is also the original idea of the university press.
Here's a hypothetical model for a future academic book series.
- Author on a research grant or university salary writes a book.
- The book is typeset using LibreOffice or TeX. The university department provides some secretarial support to help, or some money from the research grant pays for smart word-processing by an agency.
- The book is sent to an external commercial copy-editing company to tidy up the details. A smart, accurate PDF results.
This is paid for by the university department, or out of the research grant (this is already common). - The
PDF is submitted to a panel of academics somewhere who curate a book
series, judging the intellectual quality of the submissions. The book
is accepted as an important intellectual contribution..
- The PDF is uploaded to Lulu.com or Createspace, where it is
turned into a print-on-demand hardback book for sale internationally
through Amazon etc., and in bookshops.
Lulu are the printers and distributors.
The ISBN is provided by the university department, so they are the publishers, not Lulu. - The book is advertised through a prestige university website that promotes the book as an intellectual contribution, contextualizes it as a university-curated product, and made available for sale through a simple click link to PayPal, Amazon, etc. The university's series name is printed in the book, and splashed all over the website.
Please blow holes in what I've said. There must be an elephant in the room that I'm not seeing.
(reproduced from my post to the INDOLOGY discussion list, 15 May 2013)
Saturday, May 11, 2013
emusic.com solution for Linux
Emusic.com is a truly great music service, particularly since they have been non-DRM from their inception.
But - strangely - they have never supported Linux properly.
Many thanks indeed to Matt Woodward for pointing out that all Linux users need to do is install emusicj and then point and click this link:
!
But - strangely - they have never supported Linux properly.
Many thanks indeed to Matt Woodward for pointing out that all Linux users need to do is install emusicj and then point and click this link:
!
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Future philology
A very interesting and enjoyable Skype with Elenea Pierazzo at KCL left me with lots to think about, and links to all sorts of digital projects that I was unaware of or only half-aware of previously, including
- Interedition
- Gregor Middell's work on Juxta etc.
- Tanya Clement's work on Juxta etc.
- Digital Resource for Palaeography
- The various projects at the Huygens Institute in DH (here).
- The work of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (http://ests2012.huygens.knaw.nl/)
- Textualscholarship.nl
- http://www.e-laborate.nl/en/
- Edward Vanhoutte's work
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Converting XeLaTeX into ODT or MS Word
TeX4ht can do a lot of the work of converting from LaTeX to
wordprocessor. But when one adds in the complications of UTF8
characters, multiple scripts, and XeLaTeX, things can get complicated.
C. V. Radhakrishnan today pointed me to this discussion on the TeX4ht mailing list:
For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see
TeX4ht's homepage:
C. V. Radhakrishnan today pointed me to this discussion on the TeX4ht mailing list:
- http://tug.org/pipermail/tex4ht/2013q1/000719.html
(or more neatly, here.)
As far as I understand, TeX4ht won't support fontspec or XeLaTeX
technologies of using system fonts that do not have *.tfm's. In effect, by
adopting TeX4ht, one is likely to loose the features brought in by XeTeX.
However, here is another approach.
1. We translate all the Unicode character representations in the
document to Unicode code points in 7bit ascii which is very much palatable
to TeX4ht. A simple perl script, utf2ent.pl in the attached archive does
the job.
2. We run TeX4ht on the output of step 1.
3. Open the *html in a browser, I believe, we get what you wanted. See
the attached screen shot as it appeared in Firefox in my Linux box.
Here is what I did with your specimen document.
1. commented out lines that related to fontspec package from your
sources named as alex.tex.
2. added four lines of macro code to digest the converted TeX sources
3. ran the command: perl utf2ent.pl alex.tex > alex-ent.tex
4. ran the command: htlatex alex-ent "xhtml,charset=utf-8,fn-in" -utf8
(fn-in option is to keep the footnotes in the same document). I have used a
local bib file, mn.bib as I didn't have your bib database. biber was also
run in the meantime to process the bibliography database.
5. open the output, alex-ent.html in a browser. I got it as you see in
the attached alex.png.
Radhakrishnan's PERL script utf2ent.pl is#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
for my $file ( @ARGV ){
open my $fh, '<:utf8 br="" cannot="" die="" file:="" file="" open="" or=""> while( <$fh> ){
s/([\x7f-\x{ffffff}])/'\\entity{'.ord($1).'}'/ge;
print;
}
}
For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see
TeX4ht's homepage:
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research
And see the India-related list that used to be maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):
Saying that a journal is OA still leaves some critical questions unanswered. E.g.,
- Is there a "going in" fee, or Article Processing Fee (APF)?
One of the items in the list above charges $300. Several of the big houses like Brill, Elsevier and Springer will also publish your article as OA, even in an otherwise non-OA journal, if you pay them enough. Their APF prices are typically $3000 (Springer, Elsevier). I am not interested in including such journals in the list above, as I consider anything above $300-500 to be profiteering. APFs of $300-500 are typical of some even very large OA publishers like Hindawi, proving that this is a valid business model.
Quite apart from my personal view, I do not think APF fees of $3000 meet most people's normal expectation of the meaning of an Open Access journal. As South Asianists, we are interested in access for both readers and authors in countries where scholars are relatively poor. A high APF mutes less wealthy authors. As such, both Gratis OA (also called "Diamond OA") and low or zero APFs are indexes of relevance. - Copyright: being OA means that whoever owns the copyright has given permission for the article to be disseminated at zero cost. But it doesn't say anything about who owns the copyright of the article. Many OA journals allow the authors to retain copyright, but not all.
- Is the journal online-only, or both online and in print?
- The online version is free by definition, but the print issues would usually cost something. How much?
- Is the journal indexed by the main global indexing services?
- Is the journal peer-reviewed? Strongly or weakly?
More distinctions (e.g., Gratis OA (free of price) and Libre OA (free of price and rights restrictions)) and discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 13 Feb 2012). The Sherpa/Romeo website helps with some of this.
I'm putting some indicators in parentheses after the journal title, for those cases where I can find out the information without correspondence.
It is often hard to find out these facts from the journals' websites. This suggests to me that for some of the editors, the various business models of OA publishing are not always well understood.
[2022-11: I keep the above list up to date as I hear of new journals. But some of the work of this blog post has now been superseded by FOASAS.]
---
*APF = Article Processing Fee, a fee that the publisher charges the author or the author's institution for publication in the Open Access journal. See discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 12 Feb 2012).
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
TeX implementations in the Cloud
The more mature products (2014)
- ShareLaTeX
XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX, biber and biblatex.
Based on the most recent TeXLive.- Open-source version of ShareLaTeX for self-installation.
- Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX)
XeLaTeX supported since March 2014.
Based on the most recent TeXlive.
Both the above have collaborative-editing features. Both have free access for limited projects, but require subscription for larger projects or collaborative teams.
Others of varying levels of activity (2014)
FlyLaTeX (self-hosting; free and open-source)- TeXTouch (iTunes, iPhone editor, can compile when online)
- Verbosus (with Android and iOS apps)
- Blue Publications
- LaTeXLab - requires your Google login details :-(
- Pine from Sayahna.orgIn alpha test (a document processing system in the cloud that makes use of MediaWiki and its resources)
- CloudTeX from Sayahna.org
XeLaTeX and LuaTeX supported. Working prototype available to testers. - A different CloudTeX Seems to have gone quiet as of 2013.
SpanDexClosed.
XeLaTeX and LuaTeX available, but limited Unicode fonts.- ScribTeX (phased out as of Feb 2013, in favour of ShareLaTeX, but still exists)
MonkeyTeX (4/2014)
Monday, January 21, 2013
Business models for Open Access journals
It seems to be becoming clear that OA publishing will come to be the dominant model for academic periodical publications. This change is happening rapidly in Science, Technology and Medicine publishing. It can be expected that Humanities journals will eventually follow in even greater numbers than at present.
As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging. See http://peerJ.com, for example. It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal. Quite fascinating.
See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.
Some of my own thoughts
In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan. Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.
I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish. Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.
As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging. See http://peerJ.com, for example. It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal. Quite fascinating.
See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.
Some of my own thoughts
In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan. Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.
I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish. Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.
- An OA journal *must* consider itself free to publish good peer-reviewed research, whether or not there's funding. So there has to be a "let-out" or discretionary waiver clause in any statement about pricing.
- Would it be feasible for the journal to have a sliding scale of
charges that is directly keyed to the budget of the institution to which
the author belongs? University budgets should be publicly available
somewhere, shouldn't they? It might take a bit of work to track them
down, but it could be done. Or the authors could simply be asked to
provide that information. In any case, if a university has a big
endowment or annual budget, then their staff would be charged more to
publish in the journal, and v.v. Independent scholars would be free (?)
or <$100.
The general idea is that a scholar from Cambridge Univ. or the TIFR, Bombay, could be charged $500 to publish an article in our hypothetical OA journal, on the assumption that his department has a budget for this (an "article processing fee"). Whereas Prof. Shivaramakrishna from a Jnanamatha in Trichy, or a Dr Salvador from Havana Univ., could be permitted to publish at $30.
Or if direct keying is not easy to implement, there could at least be general funding bands: we could find somebody else's ranking, perhaps UNESCO, for national education budgets, or educational funding, and use those as bands for submission charges. - Here's an important tweak. I think this kind of banded charging can be
thought of a bit like Google's AdSense advertising system. Basically,
the university is paying to have its name associated with the research
that is published. So at the top of the article it says,
Dominik Wujastyk
University College London
[university address]
and the University pays the journal $100 (or whatever) for document processing.
However, if I - as an author - choose, I can say instead,
Dominik Wujastyk
Independent Scholar
[home address]
and then there would be no charge for document processing.
It wouldn't matter to the journal whether it was actually true or not that DW was an "independent scholar". The point is, if there's no payment, then the university or research sponsor doesn't get its name mentioned, and is therefore not formally associated with the research. This treats the association of the university's name with the research rather like advertising or product placement.
Most research contracts require the academic to include acknowledgement in his publications of the source of the funding. "This research was carried out under grant 123456789 of the National Science Foundation". So if the NSF is making such a requirement, they have to pay for it to be done. It's quite like advertising.
Copyright changes: updates
Changes may be afoot in the realm of academic copyright. For a note about the situation in the UK and continental Europe, see the note in ALCS News, January 2013.
See also Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, the independent report by Professor Ian Hargreaves (2011). Table of contents:
See also Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, the independent report by Professor Ian Hargreaves (2011). Table of contents:
Foreword by Ian Hargreaves 01
Executive Summary 03
Chapter 1 Intellectual Property and Growth 10
Chapter 2 The Evidence Base 16
Chapter 3 The International Context 21
Chapter 4 Copyright Licensing: a Moment of Opportunity 26
Chapter 5 Copyright: Exceptions for the Digital Age 41
Chapter 6 Patents 53
Chapter 7 Designs 64
Chapter 8 Enforcement and Disputes 67
Chapter 9 SMEs and the IP Framework 86
Chapter 10 An Adaptive IP Framework 91
Chapter 11 Impact 97
Annex A Terms of Reference 101
Annex B Stakeholders Met during Review of IP and Growth 102
Annex C Call for Evidence Submissions 105
Annex D List of Supporting Documents
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
Reservations about Coult
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: TO: vaccination historians FROM: Arthur Boylston
To: John Buder <johnbuder@gmail.com>
Dear John,
Many thanks for attaching the Boylston article.
Boylston says (2012: 4),
Ralph W. Nicholas's book Fruits of Worship: Practical Religion in Bengal, (2003), pp. 172-177, gives a good survey of the early sources, and refers to the European accounts from the 18th century onwards, Coult's (again from Dharampal), Hollwell's, and others.
I would not say that we have historical evidence for inoculation in India before Coult, i.e., early 18th century.
I have a dim memory from the time I was writing "Pious Fraud" that there was some evidence that sounded worth investigating in early VOC accounts in Dutch. But I was not able to follow that up at the time.
I've addressed this to you directly; please circulate it as you see fit.
Best,
Dominik
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: TO: vaccination historians FROM: Arthur Boylston
To: John Buder <johnbuder@gmail.com>
Dear John,
Many thanks for attaching the Boylston article.
Boylston says (2012: 4),
Conclusions
There are two unequivocal accounts of inoculation in the middle of the 16th century, one Chinese and one Indian, and each gives a specific place and name to the initial inoculators. Whether it was in use before about 1550 is entirely speculative.
The
account of Coult isn't "unequivocal" I'm afraid. Coult says that he
has been told that inoculation has been known in Bengal for 150 years,
"as near as I can learn." This is vague.
Then he says that Brahmana records give
the first Indian inoculator as "Dununtary."
This is a version of the Sanskrit name that is scientifically
transliterated as "Dhanvantari" or in Devanagari as "धन्वन्तरि". This
is the name of a mythological progenitor of the science of medicine.
This assertion is equivalent to claiming, say, that Aesclepius did
inoculation. It cannot be taken at face value as historical evidence, and should be treated as
an appeal to a mythological past age by someone who assumed that the ancient sages knew all of medical science.
Coult, writing in Calcutta, placed Dununtary in Champanagar: "a
physician of Champanager, a small town by the side of the Ganges about
half way to Cossimbazar." This can't be a place in Bihar. It has to be
somewhere north of Calcutta. Cossimbazar is in the northern outskirts of modern Berhampur. So
we're looking for a place that used to be called Champanagar, and is
somewhere round about Ranaghat, Santipur, Nabadwip or Plassey (as in,
"battle of"). Wherever this Champanagar is, if it's between Calcutta and Cossimbazar, it's in Bengal.
The trouble is, Campanagar (Campā, Campānagara, Campāpura, etc) is
normally a reference to the well-known place in Bihar, as Boylston
assumes. I think it's most likely that Coult is wrong about something.
Either he's wrong about the name "Champanagar" or he's wrong in
locating it between Calcutta and Cossimbazar. But the whole thing's
moot, really, since Dhanvantari is a mythical character.
With Robert Coult, in 1731, we apparently have a real witness, and a fairly
early one. But before relying on Coult's report, which we get through
Dharampal, I would feel more comfortable having eyes-on confirmation of
the Coult document. Years ago, I tried to follow Dharampal's references to
the Coult document,
Ralph W. Nicholas's book Fruits of Worship: Practical Religion in Bengal, (2003), pp. 172-177, gives a good survey of the early sources, and refers to the European accounts from the 18th century onwards, Coult's (again from Dharampal), Hollwell's, and others.
I would not say that we have historical evidence for inoculation in India before Coult, i.e., early 18th century.
I have a dim memory from the time I was writing "Pious Fraud" that there was some evidence that sounded worth investigating in early VOC accounts in Dutch. But I was not able to follow that up at the time.
I've addressed this to you directly; please circulate it as you see fit.
Best,
Dominik
Friday, November 02, 2012
Aśoka: guilt and leadership?
I heard a report on the BBC World Service a couple of days ago of a recent publication by Rebecca Schaumberg et al. in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It seems that individuals who feel guilt strongly make better leaders, showing significantly more consideration for the welfare of the people they manage. The citation and abstract are below.
It struck me that this fitted the case of King Aśoka pretty well. Two personal features are particularly prominent in his inscriptions: his guilt following the war in Kalinga, and his paternal concern for the welfare of his subjects.
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Citation and Abstract
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown: The link between guilt proneness and leadership.
Schaumberg, Rebecca L.; Flynn, Francis J.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 103(2), Aug 2012, 327-342.
doi:
10.1037/a0028127
- We propose that guilt proneness is a critical characteristic of leaders and find support for this hypothesis across 3 studies. Participants in the first study rated a set of guilt-prone behaviors as more indicative of leadership potential than a set of less guilt-prone behaviors. In a follow-up study, guilt-prone participants in a leaderless group task engaged in more leadership behaviors than did less guilt-prone participants. In a third, and final, study, we move to the field and analyze 360° feedback from a group of young managers working in a range of industries. The results indicate that highly guilt-prone individuals were rated as more capable leaders than less guilt-prone individuals and that a sense of responsibility for others underlies the positive relationship between guilt proneness and leadership evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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