HALLUCINATION OF WESTERN SCIENTISTS !!!!

For eons, the conclusion of our 'scientists' (RISHIS') regarding 'Jiva" and the UNIVERSE has transcended any kind of revision or correction or addition to it and even to this day rests on SOLID Foundations. But the assumptions that make-up WESTERN CIVILIZATION are on 'shifting-sands'. A recent example from the arena of 'cutting-edge science and research'.--- And still there is no news about some finite conclusions from the 'data' thrown-up by the Hadron-Collider.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/stephen-hawking-shakes-theory-again-black-holes-are-actually-gray-2D12001605

British physicist Stephen Hawking earned worldwide attention for his surprising claims about black holes, and he's doing it again with a new paper claiming that "there are no black holes."

Actually, Hawking isn't denying the existence of the massive gravitational singularities that lurk at the center of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way. He's just saying the classical view of a black hole as an eternal trap for everything that's inside, even light, is wrong. In his revised view, black holes are ever so slightly gray, with a chaotic and shifting edge rather than a sharply defined event horizon.

"The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking writes in a brief paper submitted to the ArXiv.org preprint database. "There are, however, apparent horizons which persist for a period of time."

Hawking's paper, titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," has kicked off a new round in the long-running debate over black holes and what happens to the stuff that falls into them. Theoretical physicists, including Hawking, have gone back and forth on this issue, known as the information paradox.

Back and forth over black holes
For decades, Hawking contended that the information that disappeared inside a black hole was lost forever. Then, in 2004, he reversed course and said the information would slowly be released as a mangled form of energy. That switch led him to pay off a bet he had made with another physicist about the fate of information in a black hole.

More recently, other physicists have suggested that there was a cosmic firewall dividing the inner region of a black hole's event horizon from the outside, and that anything falling through the event horizon would be burnt to less than a crisp. But that runs counter to the relativistic view of black holes, which holds that there should be no big difference in the laws of physics at the event horizon.

To resolve the seeming paradox, Hawking says that black holes would have "apparent horizons" — chaotic, turbulent regions where matter and energy are turned into a confusing mess. "There would be no event horizons and no firewalls," he says. Everything in a black hole would still be there, but the information would be effectively lost because it gets so scrambled up.

"It will be like weather forecasting on Earth. ... One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance," Hawking writes.

Protests and jests
Hawking's paper wasn't peer-reviewed, but his peers are already weighing in on the accuracy of the black hole weather report.

"It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," Joseph Polchinski, a pro-firewall physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told New Scientist. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing."

"The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls," Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in Nature's online report on Hawking's paper. "But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

If the "no black holes" quote is taken out of context, it makes Hawking's claim sound kind of ridiculous — and Andy Borowitz, a humorist at The New Yorker, has turned that take into anOnion-like jab at members of Congress. "If black holes don't exist, then other things you scientists have been trying to foist on us probably don't either, like climate change and evolution," Borowitz writes in one faux quote.

Fortunately, we're getting to the point where we won't have to take any theorist's word for the existence of black (or gray) holes. Astronomers are preparing to watch a huge cloud of gas fall into the black hole at the center of our galaxy — and over the next decade, they're planning to follow through on the Event Horizon Telescope, a campaign aimed at direct observation of the galactic black hole's edge.

As for Hawking, it just so happens that this is a big month: He turned 72 years old a couple of weeks ago, and he appears to be keeping active despite his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. And this week marks the television premiere of "Hawking,"a PBS documentary about the good doctor's life and work. For still more about the world's best-known physicist, check out his recently published memoir, "My Brief History."

More about Stephen Hawking:

• New app lets you explore the universe with Hawking
• Hawking lays out the case for Big Bang without God
• NBC News archive on Stephen Hawking

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding +Alan Boyle to your Google+ circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Credit/Rewards Given For NEGATIVE KARMA - A change in VALUES and OUTLOOK definitely needed !!!!

Success or Failure !!!??? - Indira Nooyi , CEO of Pepsico

Consider the words of the PepsiCo CEO, Indira Nooyi from Chennai.
"“I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running.
“But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. ” she observed.

Surely, Pepsico's  products DIRECTLY retard the health of many , mainly children and youngsters, in addition to polluting the environment, which Nooyi herself admits . Therefore should she  be given credit  for her becoming the CEO of PepsiCo !!???
It is high-time,society re-consider distribution of  rewards and credits to individuals, whose actions/KARMA must with-stand the test of TIME.

 Link :http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/indra-nooyi-attributes-her-success-to-indian-upbringing/article5616314.ece

The Hindu Jan 25, 2014

Indra Nooyi attributes her success to Indian upbringing

Indra Nooyi during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday.— PHOTO: REUTERS

In the midst of business talks and meetings, India-born Indra Nooyi on Friday recalled how her views underwent a sea change after a visit to her mother in Chennai soon after she became PepsiCo chief in 2006.

While talking about the need for CEOs to engage and bond with the employees at a personal level, Ms. Nooyi said, “When I became CEO in 2006, I went to visit my mother in Chennai. The next morning she asked me to wake up and I said I am on a vacation and want to sleep till noon, but she refused and said people were coming home.”

“When friends and relatives came, they all told my mother that she had got a great daughter. But it is not about me, but about my parents who brought me up so well,” Ms. Nooyi said.

Ms. Nooyi, who is PepsiCo’s Chairman and CEO, is here to participate in the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting.

“So when I came back, I wrote to parents of all my directors thanking them for bringing up their respective children so well that I got them as directors. It was an emotional decision and all of them replied very emotionally,” she said.

Narrating another incident, Ms. Nooyi said there was an individual whom the company was trying to hire but he had another offer. Since the company was very keen on hiring him, Ms. Nooyi said she spoke to the individual’s mother.

“I called her [his mother] and when he went home, he told her he had two offers but he would not join PepsiCo. But his  mother insisted that he join PepsiCo and he had to join us,” she said, sending the audience into peals of laughter. According to the PepsiCo chief, it is bad to see that parents today pay tuition fees for their children, but do not see their report cards. “I have always insisted on getting the report cards,” she said.

Talking about the young population, Ms. Nooyi said she has got “two of them at home and this generation is well-informed.”

“I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running.

“But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. But millennials are really a great lot,” she observed.

Social media

On social media, Ms. Nooyi said it had actually made things worse for people.

“Someone told me that whatever you do, will be in public domain. It is not easy to accept that whenever we go out, we have to be always conscious about what we are talking, what we are doing, what we are wearing.

“It is not easy living in that little glass house. Many people on social media do not have accountability. All of us CEOs are learning to live in this environment, as this is the real life today. It is like a reality show for all of us,” she said. — PTI

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/indra-nooyi-attributes-her-success-to-indian-upbringing/article5616314.ece

---

  “Parents today pay fees, but do not see their children’s report cards”

  With social media, it’s like a reality show for all us, says PepsiCo chief

MACHINERY - THIS BALANCE-SHEET WILL ALWAYS BE MARKED IN RED !!!!

I am not sure about Tamil Speaking  ‘educated’ MBA’s, but thanks to modern Dravidian –ethnic- linguistic- divisive politics, majority  Tamilians  are now conditioned to be  over-sensitive to Tamil language and culture. Some groups exploit ‘this matter of the heart’ to further their own exclusive agendas.  Thus this new found situation is utilized by vested interests,  to place obstacles  in  friendly, diplomatic & strategic relations with our neighbours, within & without.

Now I wonder, whether  those who are neutral as well as sensitive to any kind of perceived insults to their language and culture , are aware that in 1713, the FIRST MACHINERY of its class, set up in the now modern TN , was put to use to depreciate their culture. The Protestant Missionaries who established the  first Tamil Printing Press  at Tharangambadi (now Karaikal) ,for a start  printed and distributed quantities of pamphlets denigrating  Tamil culture. One can make out the extent of the defamation by the title of the pamphlet – “Akkiyanam” , meaning “IGNORANCE”.  I am sure, that this first printing press was not power driven (electricity or steam or IC engine)  but hand-driven.

Adding insult to injury (or vice-versa), the person who was the main agent to  this ignoble act, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg  had been honored by a modern TN Govt.,during  World Classical Tamil Conference.

Wholeistically, machinery does more harm than good.

For the latest report on the First Printing Press in TN  (The Hindu, Literary Review, Sunday, Jan 5, 2014) http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/an-initiative-that-backfired/article5539574.ece

An initiative that backfired

GRAHAM SHAW

GRAHAM SHAW looks at what the first Indian Bible, printed 300 years ago in January 1714, specifically achieved, and the chain of events it unwittingly sparked off.

One sharp pull on the hand-press bar and the Indian Bible was born. Three hundred years ago — on January 3, 1714 — missionaries in the tiny Danish coastal colony of Tharangambadi began printing an edition of the Four Gospels and Acts of the Apostles in Tamil. This was the first Biblical translation ever printed in an Indian language — and a landmark in the history of Indian Christian literature.

Nearly 500 pages long, the Tamil edition took nine months to print, until September 25. It was hailed by its creators as “a treasure in India, which surpasses all other Indian treasures”. The translator was Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a German Pietist who had arrived at Tharangambadi in 1706 with his fellow countryman, Heinrich Plütschau. They were the first of many Protestant missionaries to India.

Just two years after beginning to learn Tamil, in October 1708, Ziegenbalg started translating the New Testament. This was a remarkably ambitious initiative for a young man just 26 years old. One month later he had already translated as far as the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. Then came an unwelcome interruption. The Danish Governor imprisoned Ziegenbalg for four months without pen, ink and paper, indicative of the opposition the missionaries faced even from their fellow Europeans. In any case, the work of translation had to be fitted in between other pastoral duties — instructing catechists, running a school for Tamil children, and undertaking preaching tours. Little wonder Ziegenbalg only completed his New Testament translation in March 1711, two and a half years after he had begun.

In the absence of a printing press, Ziegenbalg paid professional Indian scribes to copy out parts of his translation onto palm-leaves with an iron stylus, imitating traditional Indian manuscripts. The resulting texts were used as teaching materials in the mission’s Tamil school and also distributed to the local population at every opportunity. When a Tamil press was set up in 1713, the missionaries started steadily with some smaller works. These included the pamphlet Akkiyânam — “Ignorance” — introducing the anti-Hindu polemic to Indian Christian literature.

But does this anniversary really matter in Indian cultural and historical terms? Is it worth remembering by anyone other than bibliophiles and book historians? Arguably it does in two senses: for what was specifically achieved, and more significantly for the chain of events it unwittingly sparked off.

Tamil and Tamil Nadu have always been at the forefront of Indian printing and publishing history. The first work ever printed in an Indian language in Europe was a Tamil and Portuguese catechism and prayers published at Lisbon in 1554. The Tamil text was printed using Roman letters as no Tamil types had yet been cast. Three decades later, in 1577, a Tamil catechism was issued by Portuguese Jesuits at Goa. This time locally cast Tamil letters were used, making this the first work ever printed in an Indian script. Another century on, in 1679, Antão de Proença’s Vocabulario tamulico was published at Ambalakad near Kochi — the first dictionary of any Indian language to be printed.

Much later, in 1761 Chennai became the first of the British Presidency capitals to acquire the services of printing, well before Mumbai and Kolkata. This was due to a French press, taken as booty by the East India Company at the siege of Puducherry. In 1794 Chennai became the birthplace of Armenian journalism with the appearance of Azdarar — “Herald” — reflecting the Indian Armenian community’s desire for the restoration of an Armenian homeland. Thus the achievement in 1714 of printing the first Biblical translation in an Indian language fits into a long line of innovation, both earlier and later.

To prepare and print Christian literature was not enough. Nothing would be achieved if Bible translations never left the mission’s book depository. Christian literature would only impact society if actively promoted to the people for whom it was intended. As John Murdoch, the ‘godfather’ of Protestant missions in 19th-century India, warned: “As much energy must be devoted to securing a circulation for books in India as is expended in their preparation, or they will lie as lumber on the shelves”. So perhaps we’ve already just missed the more significant anniversary.

In the second half of November 1713, one of the missionaries embarked on a preaching tour down south from Tharangambadi along the coast to Nagapattinam. For the very first time, he took with him copies of printed Christian tracts. His route deliberately took in well-known Hindu religious centres in the vicinity where he would preach and distribute tracts. These included Karaikal and Thirumalairayan Pattinam with its Ayiranlaiamman temple. He also presented tracts to village headmen and Hindu schools along the way. On previous tours, the missionaries had only limited numbers of Christian texts copied on palm-leaves to give away. Now, thanks to printing technology, they could distribute evangelical literature on a large scale.

Tharangambadi had set the precedent. This modest beginning unleashed the enormous industry of Christian tract publication and distribution that characterised the 19th century. The tour also displayed two of the strategies routinely adopted by missionaries later. They ‘plugged into’ the existing network of religious sites and the annual cycle of festivals and pilgrimages to maximise the audience for their literature. They also targeted the impressionable minds of children as potential carriers of the Christian message into whole families, signalling the start of missionary intervention in Indian education beyond their own schools.

Inevitably these aggressive tactics provoked responses from indigenous religions, most notably Hinduism and Islam. Both felt an urgent need to defend their communities against attacks by Christian missionaries and more positively to evangelise on their own behalf. The missionaries now found the very methods they had used turned against them. New educational institutions were established and a whole variety of social reform initiatives undertaken. In this process of turning the tide, print played a vital role. Religious presses were founded; magazines and newspapers published; tract societies set up.

In Chennai, R. Sivasankara Pandiah was just one of those who adopted these tactics. In 1882, he began teaching young people the fundamentals of Hinduism in his home before raising sufficient funds to open the Hindu Theological High School in 1889. For Pandiah, print was as crucial as education in the modernising process. In 1884, he began publishing The Hindu Excelsior Magazine and, in 1887, set up the Hindu Tract Society that sent its own evangelists all over South India with anti-Christian pamphlets in their thousands. The first in the Hindu Triumph Series was named ‘One hundred and fifty contradictions of the Bible’. Its sub-title declared its defiant purpose: “A Bible hand book for mission school students and inquiring Christians”. This was Hinduism on the counter-offensive.

From cultural and religious revival came a resurgence of national identity and growth of political consciousness. Ultimately, through the rapid production of nationalistic posters and collections of patriotic poems and songs, print proved an essential component of the freedom movement.

The printing press, revered by the missionaries as the great engine of conversion, had become an effective tool of subversion, not only of Christianity but of the colonial power itself. The Indian Bible’s birth — at Tharangambadi in 1714 — had backfired.

The writer was formerly Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, The British Library, London. E-mail:shawgraham3@gmail.com

MACHINERY & Engineers/MANAGERS

Engrs/MBAs /Managers are being fed on lot of ideas, which they accept unhesitatingly and uncritically. One such idea that has gained prominence , is about mechanization  ie use of machines ,in all walks of our life.  Are machinery beneficial to mankind in the long-run? How is it going to affect self, children and other family members and society  ?The widespread use of heavy machinery like JCB’s and tipper lorries have laid to waste large tracts of fertile land in Kerala, S.India. Overnight  hills were erased &  cultivable paddy lands  were turned into real-estate plots. This is one of the conspicuous effect of machinery, acting destructively on our environment.

Consider Paul Krugman’s , who became famous due to winning Nobel Prize in 2008, quote from his OP-ED column  ‘ROBOTS and ROBBER BARONS’ which appeared in The Hindu a year ago. (Dec 11, 2012) . Quote “can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can.”  Link http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?_r=0. Krugman notifies us that , extensive use of machinery leads to concentration of wealth, low wages  for workers and loss of jobs  even for high-skill workers.  The net-effect  of the use of machinery is negative for society and man-kind. Here I am not at all considering other  chain effects of power driven machinery on climate leading to global warming.

Back in  1924, Gandhiji  had cautioned about  man’s slavishness towards machinery . Quote “ Men  go on ‘saving labour’, till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all; I want the concentration of wealth , not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery  merely helps a few to ride on the back of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but  GREED. It is against  this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might”. –Young India, 13-11-24, p.378

Western countries, especially Europe, the pioneer of Industrial Revolution  is experiencing  the baneful effect of machinery  in the 21^st century. Unemployment is  chronic there. And state is unable to support the unemployed. Does Indian Engr’s desire a repetition of such a grim situation for our country  ? Repetition because Manchester mill cloth paved the way for  starvation of our weavers.  All this and our Engineering education makes me think about that Pink Floyid song ‘Another brick in the Wall’.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Robots and Robber Barons

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 9, 2012 1301 Comments

·        

The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

Enlarge This Image

Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought; for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers, either on the gap between more- and less-educated workers or on the soaring incomes of a handful of superstars in finance and other fields. But that may be yesterday’s story.

More specifically, while it’s true that the finance guys are still making out like bandits — in part because, as we now know, some of them actually are bandits — the wage gap between workers with a college education and those without, which grew a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s, hasn’t changed much since then. Indeed, recent college graduates had stagnant incomes even before the financial crisis struck. Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.

Why is this happening? As best as I can tell, there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.

About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology manufacturing has lately been moving back to the United States is that these days the most valuable piece of a computer, the motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no longer a reason to produce them abroad.

In a recent book, “Race Against the Machine,” M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that similar stories are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers.

Still, can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.

What about robber barons? We don’t talk much about monopoly power these days; antitrust enforcement largely collapsed during the Reagan years and has never really recovered. Yet Barry Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation argue, persuasively in my view, that increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.

I don’t know how much of the devaluation of labor either technology or monopoly explains, in part because there has been so little discussion of what’s going on. I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse.

Yet that shift is happening — and it has major implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make it even easier to inherit wealth?

As I said, this is a discussion that has barely begun — but it’s time to get started, before the robots and the robber barons turn our society into something unrecognizable.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 10, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Robots And Robber Barons.