Links

1. Zakaria's commentary on "the Rediscovery of India"

One fact that stuck with me.

Most of India’s wealth is generated from its cities and towns. Urban India accounts for almost 70 percent of the country’s GDP. But almost 70 percent of its people still live in rural India. “As a consequence,” writes Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University, “for politicians, the city has primarily become a site of extraction, and the countryside is predominantly a site of legitimacy and power. The countryside is where the vote is; the city is where the money is.”

2. A python library for interactive visualization called Bokeh (via Nathan Yau)

3. Sal Khan of Khan Academy at Google discussing his new book (with Eric Schmidt) "The One World Schoolhouse".

While I think there is a lot of hype around the idea of online education, I seriously think there are quite a few insights in this talk. For example, I never questioned (*) why school is arranged according to age?, (*) why we have scheduled holiday vacations?, (*) the role of exams and mastery.