The Global Social Network
History of Per Capita GDP of Selected Countries. Source: Angus Maddison |
Here's an Indian Express story on Gurgaon power cuts:
Morning traffic was brought to a standstill on Tuesday by Gurgaon residents protesting acute shortage of power and water.
The city has been battling severe power and water crisis, made worse by the delay in arrival of monsoon and the heatwave.
As per official estimates, the power demand in the city has surpassed previous records and continues to rise.
On June 28, the demand was to the tune of 1,528.33 lakh units (the highest demand for one day), against 1,127.45 lakh units on the same day last year, said Amit Kumar Agrawal, Managing Director of Dakhshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (DHBVN).
To rein in the shortfall, the Nigam has announced that starting Wednesday, all industries will be given just eight hours of power. They will be supplied power from 8 am to 12 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm.
Residents, on the other hand, blame the sharp rise in demand to the mushrooming of small guesthouses in buildings meant for a single family.
“In front of my house there is a 120 sq yard area, which has been turned into living quarters for 20-odd families. The power demand will automatically shoot up,” said Anthony Cruz, a resident of DLF Phase-III.
Residents of both old and new Gurgaon claim outages stretch to as long as 16 hours a day. This, in turn, has affected the water situation in the city.
“The Basai water plant is supplying very little water, while the private water plant is almost dry. Power cuts leads to non-storage of water and residents have to buy water. We shell out Rs 800 for around 5,000 litres of water,” said Cruz.
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DHBVN Superintendent Engineer Sanjiv Chopra told Newsline, “There has been a 20-22 per cent shortfall in power supply in Gurgaon. While the demand is around 200 lakh units, we have been able to supply 150 lakh units. Sometimes the supply went down to 130 lakh units. We are trying to make the situation normal.”
Power officials said supply could dip further as Yamuna Nagar units I and II of 300 MW each and Hisar unit-I of 600 MW are closed. Hisar unit-II of 600 MW and Jharali (Jhajjar) units I and II of 500 MW each had tripped, resulting in sharp reduction in availability of power in the state.
About 150 MW power from Lanco Amarkantak Project is also not available due to non-availability of coal, officials said.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/power-cuts-bring-gurgaon-to-halt/...
Here's a WSJ story on growth challenges for China and India:
India and China are grappling with different issues. China doesn't want to repeat the mistakes—such as triggering a property bubble—that it made in its all-out response to the global financial crisis of 2009. India, meanwhile, is struggling to carry out structural economic reforms it failed to enact during its recent boom years.
China's gross domestic product has grown at an average annualized rate of 10% since 2000, but government officials know they can't sustain that torrid pace. Growth fell to 8.1% year-over-year in the first quarter, the slowest pace since 2009, and is widely expected to fall to about 7.5% in the second quarter. If the euro-zone crisis persists—or China's stimulus is poorly carried out—China's growth may weaken further.
But China is better positioned to handle a shock than it was in 2008. It relies less on trade for growth: In 2008, China's net exports amounted to 7.7% of GDP; in 2011 the share had dropped to 2.6%. Beijing reported on Monday that inflation declined to 2.2% in June, compared with a year ago. With government debt at an estimated 22% of GDP, China has plenty of levers to pull to stimulate its economy in the face of declining demand.
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"China is in a very comfortable position compared to the rest of the world," said Luis Kuijs, project director at the Fung Global Institute, a Hong Kong think tank. "It's more a matter of choice of what policy measures it will take to stimulate the economy, rather than whether it will be able to."
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"India's hands are tied, and because of that it's much more exposed to the global slowdown," said Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economic research for HSBC. "It has no fiscal ammo left to pump-prime the economy, so it has to endure a slowdown and take it on the chin."
India's main challenge is to stimulate business investment, which is drying up amid wariness among both domestic and foreign companies about shifting tax policies and regulations. The country's currency, the rupee, has tumbled against the dollar in the past year, partly due to growing investor concerns about India's high current-account deficit, which is roughly 4% of GDP. The rupee's fall has driven up real import costs for Indian companies and made foreign-currency loans more expensive to service.
The Reserve Bank of India in April cut interest rates for the first time in three years to fuel business lending. But when industry was looking for more last month, the central bank said it couldn't cut rates further with inflation uncomfortably high at 7.6%.
"The sad thing is that it makes sense in China for it to be slowing down, because it's maturing from a low-income to a middle-income economy," said Rob Subbaraman, Asia economist at Nomura Securities. "In India, growth should be picking up and not slowing down."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304058404577496443063...
Here's a Wall Street Journal Op Ed by Prof Walter Russell Meade on the impact of European economic crisis on geopolitics:
The crisis of the euro zone is a geopolitical as well as an economic event. While Europe may yet find a path out of its economic quagmire, it will turn inward for some time as it reorganizes some of its core institutions. The world will not stand still while this happens.
To begin with, Europe's disorder is a grand opportunity for Russia. It is not all good news in the Kremlin—Russia will hurt economically, as the European Union is its most important trading partner and customer for oil and gas. But geopolitically, Russia will have a lot of new opportunities. Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus will feel less pull from the West and more from the East.
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Elsewhere, the euro crisis has reinforced Turkey's decision to drop its long courtship of Europe and become an independent actor. Europe looks less and less to the Turks like a model to imitate and more and more like a fate to avoid. Turkey in any case would like to replace the EU as a major political and economic force in the Arab world, and it is likely to use this period of European introspection and preoccupation to advance its agenda.
Between Russia's new geopolitical opportunities and Turkey's detachment from Europe, the situation in the Balkans is going to become much more confused and perhaps even dangerous. If Greece ends up leaving the euro or is deeply embittered with Brussels and the EU over the long term, and if Cyprus is similarly affected (likely, given its close economic ties to Greece), we could see Greece and Cyprus tilt toward Russia.
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This is bad news for Americans. An assumption that Europe is in a period of continuing decline is to some degree baked into the cake of American foreign policy. The perception that Europe (and Japan) are no longer the powers they once were has driven the U.S. to look for new partners as it seeks to build a liberal world system in the 21st century.
But Americans expected a slow and gentle decline, with many years in which to make a gradual adjustment to the change. We hoped that the euro and the single market could mitigate or even reverse that decline. We have also taken for granted that the EU would at least be able to manage its own neighborhood, bringing peace, security and integration to the Balkans and drawing countries like Belarus, Ukraine and even Russia toward Western ways. We may now have to adjust to a world in which the EU is retreating faster and farther than anyone expected.
This euro crisis isn't just a banking or a currency issue. It is a serious political crisis that could dramatically alter the geopolitical balance in Europe and Asia.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303640104577440362953...
Here's BBC's Soutik Biswas on massive power failure in India's northern grid:
A massive power cut has caused disruption across northern India, including in the capital, Delhi.
It hit a swathe of the country affecting more than 300 million people in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan states.
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said most of the supply had been restored and the rest would be reinstated soon.
It is unclear why the supply collapsed but reports say some states may have been using more power than authorised.
Mr Shinde said he had appointed a committee to inquire into the causes of the blackout, one of the worst to hit the country in more than a decade. The committee will submit its report within 15 days, he said.
The power cut happened at 02:30 local time on Monday (2100 GMT Sunday) after India's Northern Grid network collapsed.
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Monday morning saw travel chaos engulf the region, with thousands of passengers stranded when train services were disrupted in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.
The Rajdhani train from Jammu to Delhi was more than five hours late.
"The train stopped near Panipat station [in Haryana] at about 02:30. For a long time we had no idea what was holding us up," passenger DK Rajdan said.
"Rajdhani is air-conditioned so it was not uncomfortable. But for six or seven hours we couldn't get anything to eat or drink and people were beginning to get worried," he said.
Delhi Metro railway services were stalled for three hours, although the network later resumed when it received back-up power from Bhutan, one official said.
Traffic lights on the streets of the capital were not functioning as early morning commuters made their way into work, leading to gridlock.
Water treatment plants in the city also had to be shut for a few hours.
Officials said restoring services to hospitals and transport systems were a priority.
Power cuts are a common occurrence in Indian cities because of a fundamental shortage of power and an ageing grid. The chaos caused by such cuts has led to protests and unrest on the streets.
Earlier in July, crowds in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon blocked traffic and clashed with police after blackouts there.
Correspondents say that India urgently needs a huge increase in power production, as hundreds of millions of its people are not even connected to the national grid.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has long said that India must look to nuclear energy to supply power to the people.
Estimates say that nuclear energy contributes only 3% to the country's current power supply. But the construction of some proposed nuclear power stations have been stalled by intense local opposition.
Here's BBC's Soutik Biswas on India's power situation:
As India copes with a massive power breakdown for a second successive day, some interesting facts about the country's power situation to chew on:
India has an installed capacity of more than 170,000 megawatts, up from a mere 1,362 megawatts at the time of Independence in 1947
The majority (around 60%) is generated from coal and lignite, while just under a quarter (about 22%) is hydro-electric
Despite its soaring energy needs, India has one of the lowest per capita rates of consumption of power in the world - 734 units as compared to a world average of 2,429 units. This is nothing compared with say, Canada, (18,347 units) and the US (13,647 units). China's per capita consumption (2,456 units) is more than three times that of India.
The low per capita consumption is despite the fact that the power sector has been growing at more than 7% every year.
Homes and farms are consuming more power today than industries and businesses. Industrial consumption has actually dropped from 61.6% in 1970-71 to 38% in 2008-2009.
India has suffered consistent power shortages since Independence in 1947. Peak demand shortage is more than 10%, whereas the overall energy shortage is more than 7%.
Sixty-five years after Independence, only nine states - Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Goa, Delhi, Haryana, Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu - of 28 have been officially declared totally electrified.
India remains perennially energy starved despite 15% or more of federal funds being allocated to the power sector. Bankrupt state-run electricity boards, an acute shortage of coal, skewed subsidises which end up benefiting rich farmers, power theft, and under-performing private distribution agencies are to blame, say experts. There is no shortage of money, and the problem, as the Planning Commission admits, is more "in the delivery process [than] in the system".
Transmission and distribution losses have leapt from 22% in 1995-96 to about 25.6% in 2009-2010. The states with the worst losses are Indian-administered Kashmir, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. The best performers: Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
India's first power generation company was the private Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC) started in 1899. The first diesel power plant was set up in Delhi in 1905. The first hydro-electric power station was set up in Mysore in 1902. At the time of Independence, about 60% of India's power sector was privately owned. Today, about 80% of the installed capacity is in the hands of the government. Private companies own 12% of the capacity.
Here's a Washington Post piece on India's thirst for energy:
Like China two decades ago and the United States in 1950, India stands on the cusp of transformational economic and social change, a jumping-off point at which the demand for electricity is about to explode.
Its economy and population are among the fastest growing in the world, and it has ambitious and energy-intensive plans to develop its infrastructure and industrial base. But business leaders are crying out for uninterrupted power supplies, and a third of India’s population is not even connected to the national grid.
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Every modern, industrial society in history has gone through a 20-year period “where there was extremely large investment in the power sector, and electricity made the transition from a privilege of an urban elite to something every family would have,” Varro said. “India is right now just at that jump point.”
Whether it succeeds in meeting that demand could be the single most important determinant of India’s economic prospects over the next two decades, one of the main factors that will decide whether the country can continue to pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and realize its ambitions to be a 21st-century economic powerhouse.
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But even if India finds the fuel it needs to power its generators, it is not clear how it will pay for the electricity they produce.
State electricity distribution companies across India are mostly bankrupt, forced by their political masters to give power away — free to farmers to run water pumps to irrigate their land, and at below-cost prices to everyone else. Theft and losses of power amount to 28 to 30 percent of output, further bleeding the distributors of resources.
Nationally, separate ministries for coal, gas, power and renewable energy routinely fail to coordinate.
“Policymaking in the energy sector is rather fragmented, and we really don’t have a forward vision,” said Rajendra Pachauri, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Pachauri forecasts that if India continues on its path of “business as usual,” it will have to import unimaginable, and unfeasible, amounts of coal and oil in two decades.
A failure to invest properly in researching and developing renewable energy also threatens environmental ruin. “India can’t possibly continue on the path we are on,” he said.
Charles Ebinger, director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the difficulties that India faces in meeting its rising energy demand “would pose a serious political challenge for a well-run government — and that certainly isn’t the case here.”
He said the country could struggle to hold its own against other emerging economies, including Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, countries that with India constitute what is known as the BRICS group.
“If I had to bet, I would say there is a greater possibility of India failing to meet the challenge than of meeting it,” Ebinger said. “You will see India slip down, out of the ranks of the fast-growing BRICS emerging markets, and you will see more political disturbances when energy fails.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/satisfying-indias-...
Here's a TOI story of dearth of research in India:
NEW DELHI: At a time when India is being looked at as the next big knowledge superpower, this could come as a shocker. Just 3.5% of global research output in 2010 was actually from India. In most disciplines, India's share in global research output was actually much below this overall average count.
Sample this - India's share of world research output in clinical medicine was a meagre 1.9% in 2010, 0.5% in psychiatry, 1.4% in neurosciences, 1.8% in immunology, 2.1% in molecular biology and just 3.5% in environmental research.
In mathematics, India's share of world output stood at around 2% in 2010 while it was 17% for China. In case of materials sciences, India's share of world research stood at 6.4% in 2010 while China's stood at 26% -- a rise from 5% in 1996.
While India's research on physics stood at 4.6% in 2010, China's stood at 19%.
In 2010, India's largest shares of world research output were in chemistry (6.5%), materials science (6.4%), agricultural sciences (6.2%), pharmacology and toxicology (6.1%), microbiology (4.9%), physics (4.6%) and engineering (4.2%).
India is often referred to as the next big place for computer sciences. But the figures on its research is abysmally low. Only 2.4% of global research on computer sciences was from India in 2010 while the world share moved to three emerging research economies - China 15%, Korea 6.3% and Taiwan 5.7%.
India's global share of research in economics stood at 0.7% in 2010 while in social sciences it was worse - 0.6%.
The biggest declines in volume of research between 1981 and 2010 were in plant and animal sciences (-2.2%) and agricultural sciences (-1.6%). The most significant expansions were in pharmacology and toxicology (+4.2%), microbiology (+3.2%) and materials sciences (+3.1%).
These are the findings of the study on India's research output and collaboration conducted by Thomson Reuters and recently submitted to the department of science and technology.
"India has been the sleeping giant of Asia. Research in the university sector, stagnant for at least two decades, is now accelerating but it will be a long haul to restore India as an Asian knowledge hub. Indian higher education is faced with powerful dilemmas and difficult choices - public/private, access/equity, uncertain regulation, different teaching standards and contested research quality," the report said.
According to it, India's share of world output in engineering fell from 4.3% in 1981 to 2.2% by 1995. India later regained its lost share, increasing to 4.25 by 2010. However, even then, India was overtaken by China (16.4%), Korea (5.4%) and Taiwan (4.4%).
India, where agriculture dominates economic standards, had quite a large share in agricultural sciences which averaged 7.45% over the 1981 to 1995 period, well ahead of other emerging research economies. Its share, however, fell to 6.2% in 2010. Even in the field of plant and animal sciences, the global research output fell from 6.1% in 1981 to 3.9% in 2010.
The report said, "India has a long and distinguished history as a country of knowledge, learning and innovation. In the recent past, however, it has failed to realize its undoubted potential as a home for world class research."
It added, "During the 1980s and 90s, the output of India's research was almost static while other countries grew rapidly, particularly in Asia. China expanded with an intensity and drive that led it rapidly to overtake leading European countries in the volume of its research publications. India is just beginning on this gradient."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-accounts-for-just-3-...
Here's an excerpt of an NPR story on Google Glasses which have been sold to a select few developers this week at $1,500 for a pair:
When the screen is off, it's completely transparent and out of my line of sight. When on, it looks — well, I'll let Steve Lee, who helped create Google Glass, explain it: "Imagine you are sitting on your couch at home and you look across the living room and you look at your TV. That's roughly the size of what the display looks like with Glass."
Glass understands some voice commands, like giving directions and answering questions you'd normally Google. It reads your texts aloud in your ear and lets you respond just by talking.
But, first and foremost, Glass is a camera mounted right above your eye.
"Let's say I'm not very good at cooking and I might need to call ... Mom to get some help," Lee explains. "While I'm in the kitchen with my hands busy preparing the food ... my mom can actually see what I am doing" to coach him through dinner.
Glass does almost everything a smartphone does, hands-free. But Google is not selling it to the public yet. Just 10,000 people have won the right to pay $1,500 for a pair. Most of them earned this privilege by telling Google the creative things they'd like to do with Glass.
Dan McLaughlin, who picked up his set Tuesday, has about 30 or 40 ideas, he says, including creating a personal teleprompter. And Monica Wilkinson says getting Glass feels a little like getting a superpower....
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/17/177557810/See...
Here's a NY Times blog on Google Glass Apps:
SAN FRANCISCO — The allure of the iPhone was not its brushed metal or shiny touch screen, but the apps that turned it into anything from a flute to a flashlight. Now, Google hopes that apps will do the same thing for Glass, its Internet-connected glasses.
On Monday night, Google released extensive guidelines for software developers who want to build apps for Glass. With those guidelines, it is taking a page from Apple’s playbook, by being much more restrictive about the glasses than it has been with other products, particularly its Android operating system for phones, and controlling the type of apps that developers build.
Analysts said that was largely because Google wanted to introduce the technology to the public slowly, to deal with concerns like privacy.
“Developers are crucial to the future of Glass, and we are committed to building a thriving software ecosystem for them and for Glass users,” Jay Nancarrow, a Google spokesman, said in a statement.
To begin, developers cannot sell ads in apps, collect user data for ads, share data with ad companies or distribute apps elsewhere. They cannot charge people to buy apps or virtual goods or services within them.
Many developers said they expected Google to eventually allow them to sell apps and ads. But Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester who studies wearable computing, said Google was smart to limit advertising at first.
“What we find is the more intimate the device, the more intrusive consumers perceive advertising is,” she said. Still, she said many consumers had said they would like to interact with brands on Glass in certain ways, like a bank showing a balance while a user is shopping or a hospital sending test results.
On Tuesday, Google sold its first glasses for $1,500 to developers who had signed up last year.
Some developers said they were disappointed by the limits.
“It gives them a lot of control over the experience,” said Frank Carey, a software developer and computer science graduate student in New Paltz, N.Y. “My hope is they make it as open as possible so that we can really test the limits of what this type of device would look like.”
Mr. Carey built an app at a Google hackathon for taking photos of people you meet at cocktail parties and tagging them with their names and details to discreetely pull up the information when you see them again.
Other developers said it made sense for Google to be more cautious than it was with mobile phones because Glass was always in a user’s field of vision.
“You don’t carry your laptop in the bathroom, but with Glass, you’re wearing it,” said Chad Sahlhoff, a freelance software developer in San Francisco. “That’s a funny issue we haven’t dealt with as software developers.”
Mr. Sahlhoff said he wanted to build apps for carpenters so they could see schematics without lifting their eyes from machines, and for drivers to see the speed limit and points of interest without taking their eyes off the road.
Just as the iPhone ushered in a new wave of computing on mobile phones, Glass could be the beginning of wearable computing becoming mainstream. But the question is whether people are ready to wear computers on their bodies, and to interact with others wearing them.
“Glass could be the next great platform for app development, like the iPhone,” Ms. Epps said. “But the variable is whether consumers will want it or not, and that is a real unknown.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/google-releases-details-ab...
It is true of course true that Trinity College's 32 Nobel Prizes are more than the 10 awarded to Muslims. But what makes this an "intriguing fact" to Dawkins? The fact that Muslim majority societies have been generally poorer than Western ones for centuries is well understood.
When the Nobel Prize was founded in 1901, the vast majority of the world's Muslims lived in countries ruled by foreign powers, and for much of the 20th century Muslims did not have much access to great centers of learning like Cambridge. The ranks of Nobel prize winners have traditionally been dominated by white, Western men – a reflection of both the economic might of the West in the past century, preferential access to education for that class of people and also, it must be added, a wonderful intellectual tradition. But one might as well be intrigued by the fact that Africans have fewer Nobels than Trinity (nine) or that Indians do (four) or that Chinese do (eight). Or perhaps Dawkins is "intrigued" that women have only won 44 Nobel Prizes, compared with 791 for men?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2013/0809/Finally-somet...
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Pakistan is home to a vibrant blogging community that addresses a wide spectrum of interests. From technology to lifestyle, food to education, the country’s blogs showcase creativity, insight, and a commitment to quality content. Whether you’re an avid reader or someone looking for local expertise, here’s an in-depth guide to some of the best blog sites in Pakistan.
ProPakistani is the most popular…
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The outgoing Biden Administration has announced additional new sanctions against Pakistani entities working on the nation's missile program. The latest round of sanctions includes the Islamabad-based National Development Complex (NDC) and three Karachi-based organizations: Akhtar and Sons Private Limited, Affiliates International and Rockside Enterprise. Explaining the decision, US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer accused Islamabad of having developed "increasingly sophisticated…
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