Srikant Jakilinki's Public Library

By Phil Hazlewood (AFP) – Nov 18, 2009
No one would ever call Radha Jagarya fortunate. The 45-year-old widow and her four children live on the pavement in an upmarket south Mumbai suburb, scraping a living by selling flowers to passing motorists.
But in terms of public toilet provision, the family is well-served compared with other areas, with an adequate communal block a five-minute walk away near the US Consulate and another under a busy road in the opposite direction.
In slum areas, where more than half of Mumbai lives, an average 81 people share a single toilet. In some places it rises to an eye-watering 273. Even the lowest average is still 58, according to local municipal authority figures.

Unsurprisingly, it is still common to see people squatting by roads and railway tracks or along the coast, openly defecating in the city that drives India's economy and where some of the world's richest people live.
The UN estimates that 600 million people or 55 percent of Indians still defecate outside, more than 60 years after the scrupulously clean independence leader Mahatma Gandhi first talked of the responsible disposal of human waste.
Jack Sim takes a very keen interest in such matters. As the founder and president of the World Toilet Organization (WTO), he has made it his mission to improve sanitation across the globe.
For him, India has "a lot of work to do" to improve sanitation, not just because of its impact on health and the spread of diseases like diarrhoea, which UNICEF says kills 1,000 Indian children aged under five every day.
It also tarnishes the image of a country that likes to portray itself as an emerging world economic superpower, the Singapore businessman told AFP on a visit to Mumbai, where he was promoting World Toilet Day on November 19.
In particular, Sim questioned whether the authorities in New Delhi were doing enough to provide adequate public toilet facilities for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, which will draw tens of thousands of foreign visitors.
"If you don't have good toilets to welcome

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The challenge of groups of people working together effectively is fundamental to human endeavor, but the state of the art falls far short of real efficiency. Despite advances like email and wikis, the friction and overhead of communication remain acutely painful to organizations large and small. Group leaders spend an enormous portion of their time trying to keep everyone on the same page, and knowledge workers struggle daily with inadequate, disparate tools to wrangle the information they need to do their jobs.

The technical hurdles to building the right system to address these problems are immense, and the design challenges subtle and complex. The Asana team has thought deeply about these problems for many years, in leadership roles at some of the world's best software companies. We are undertaking an ambitious project to tackle them with a vision that reimagines the way people manage information, to speed up knowledge work and communication by an order of magnitude. This is not another enterprise application suite, nor is it an ajaxification of existing desktop software concepts; it is a new kind of software product, built for the Web from the ground up, with a focus on speed, collaboration, and ease of use.

We are passionate about changing the world through great software, and we're looking for exceptional people to join us. We're taking an unusual approach to building the company: assemble a relatively small, tightly knit collective of extraordinarily talented peers, while pursuing impact and revenue goals typically associated with large hierarchical enterprises. By keeping the company small, communication overhead costs are reduced, individual contributors can have greater ownership and input into decisions than is possible in traditionally-structured corporations, and life is generally more pleasant.

As knowledge workers, we and our loved ones spend most of our time living in programs (email, calendar, document editors, IDEs, etc.) that help us move and manage data. This is your opportunity to make

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Judith Meskill, is the Executive Editor of Change.org and formerly: COO of Crowd Fusion, General Manager / COO of Weblogs, Inc., an AOL company, and Social Media Officer of BabyCenter, LLC., a J&J company.

Judith is often found evangelizing the 'social' power of the internet and has a seemingly endless passion for creating solutions to ensure that 'audience' is woven deeply into the fabric of any project she touches.

While not out meandering through the vast plethora of 'social' services emerging daily, Judith can be found keeping up with friends on facebook, networking on LinkedIn, uploading photos to flickr, sharing music on last.fm, twittering in haiku and lifestreaming her links ...

Judith is a social media maven whose experience includes serving as a strategic advisor for business leaders, online training organizations, and a variety of virtual teams and communities. An avid social networking practitioner, she is constantly investigating "what works" and "what doesn't work" in the evolving world of online social and knowledge networking practices and tools. As a speaker, workshop leader, and team coach she has guided organizations in the creation of internet based businesses and learning systems.

Bringing both depth and breadth of experience to her engagements - Judith's expertise includes: co-founding a number of Internet start-up companies and serving in a variety of primary decision-maker roles in business marketing, public relations, information technology, project management, and service delivery. Judith speaks at conferences and events on the integration of social networking and personal knowledge strategies into effective business practices.

A few of Judith's past international speaker venues include—MIXX, BlogOn, iDate, Internet World, KMWorld, Seybold San Francisco, and SUPERNOVA. She is quoted in books: The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life, by Christian Crumlish, and Stars of the New Order: What They're Telling Business Leaders, by Jerry A

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Indigenous societies today face difficult choices: can they develop, modernize, and advance without endangering their sacred traditions and communal identity? Specifically, can their communities benefit from national education while resisting the tendency of state-imposed programs to undermine their cultural sovereignty, language, and traditions? According to Lois Meyer and Benjamín Maldonado, these are among the core questions being faced by indigenous societies whose comunalidad—or communal way of life—is at odds with the dictates of big business and the social programs of the state.

To explore these issues in depth, Meyer and Maldonado conducted a series of dialogues with Noam Chomsky, and invited numerous organizers and intellectuals from indigenous communities of resistance to comment. In three in-depth conversations, Chomsky offers poignant lessons from his vast knowledge of world history, linguistics, economics, anti-authoritarian philosophy and personal experience, and traces numerous parallels with other peoples who have resisted state power while attempting to modernize, develop, survive, and sustain their unique community identity and tradition. Following the interviews are commentaries from more than a dozen activists and intellectuals from the Americas, who speak from their on-the-ground experiences and work with indigenous communities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Canada. This is Chomsky at his best—lucid, accessible and deeply informative.

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India’s first (established 2003) and very own desi blog awards, the Indibloggies are publicly-chosen awards conferred on bloggers from India and the Indian Diaspora.

Started as a parody clique on the Bloggies. Since then it has gained a lot of credibility and popularity with. The major reason Debashish started it was because looking at the Blogroll of the blogs he read, he felt that he wasn’t able to read so many good blogs just because he never heard of them. So was born the Indibloggies that started in 2003 with a hastily put backyard show with fellow bloggers Anita Bora and Melodrama contributing with their awards.

The 2004 spectacle witnessed a surge in vigor and participation at the event. This was also the time when the concept of “Jurors” crept in, where the nominations from the bloggers had a sort of “peer review”, from a group of bloggers who have been blogging consistently since quite a while. A twelve member Jury Panel consisting of prominent bloggers was appointed. The event also saw a good support from Sponsors; many bloggers also plunged in with their donations and support. It feels good to say that goodies worth more than Rs.25,000/- were distributed as Prizes. For those interested in Trivia: Voting on nominated blogs began 10 January 2005 and concluded on January 22, 2005. The results were declared on January 24, 2005.

With the onset of the 2005 event, Indibloggies moved to its own home, www.indibloggies.org and a brand new blog. We hope in times to come the event will bring more glory to Indian blogs and would serve as an ample platform for highlighting the best of the Indian blogosphere.
The Indibloggies blog runs on Wordpress and the theme was designed exclusively by Chugs who also designed the blog-templates for the 2004 event. The hosting has been provided by Go Hindi. Here is what Chugs had to say about his concept of the 2005 design:
I tried to avoid all cliches (Taj Mahal, the
abused-to-death “Hindi English” font, etc) and incorporated a decorative motif, reminiscent of the moti

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Landmark independent bookstore and publisher that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics.

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark."

In June of 1955, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, launched City Lights Publications with the Pocket Poets Series. The first volume was a collection of his own poems, Pictures of the Gone World, which has since become a classic of beat literature and one of Ferlinghetti's most popular works. Within a year City Lights had published its fourth, its most famous, and still its bestselling title, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, the book that revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness.

Ferlinghetti writes that the function of the independent press is to discover new voices and give them an audience. "From the beginning, the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic. I had rather an international insurgent ferment in mind, and what has proved most fascinating are the continuing crosscurrents and cross-fertilizations between poets and writers widely separated by language or geography, coalescing in a truly supranational voice."

For over fifty years, City Lights has been a champion of progressive thinking, fighting against the forces of conservatism and censorship. We are committed to publishing works of social responsibility, and to maintaining a tradition of bringing renegade literature from other parts of the world into English. In our function of discovery, we will continue to publish cutting-edge contemporary literature and brilliant new non-fiction.

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Initiative to make Chemistry interesting for you. Our TCL Innovation Center is working towards developing innovative technologies to have ‘green chemistry’ protect our environment and diminish the effects of climate change.

Nearly all of you use iodised ‘Tata Salt’ to add taste to your food and keep you healthy. Well, we are the ones who make it. That’s the end of the first story. But there’s more.
Did you know we are the world’s second largest producer of soda ash? Maybe you knew that. But did you know that soda ash is used in the making of a variety of things like glass, soaps & detergents, paper and even helps purify water.
We also manufacture fertilizers that help plants and crops grow well, so that you can eat healthy food. As part of our outreach, we also help farmers in so many ways – getting them to learn new ways of farming and earning more money.

You would be happy to know that we are also working to save the endangered Whale Shark, which is world’s largest fish. That’s not all!
We do so many things that it would be difficult to share it all on one page. But you can ask your parents to visit www.tatachemicals.com and tell you many amazing stories from there.
Keep browsing through the site, and you will know why we love Chemistry so much.

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Platform for you to organise and pursue questions of public interest you think should be investigated.

The question might be very simple or more complicated – anything from why your local doctor now has an 0845 number – to What street has the most parking tickets issued.
The site helps you build a team to investigate that – and that team will suggest ‘challenges’ to pursue in getting answers.
Sometimes we will build tools that make getting those answers easier.

This is not a discussion forum, or a news website – although you might have discussions or link to stories elsewhere. It is a community of curious people, and a set of tools to help those people find each other, and get answers.
The site is in its very earliest stages, so it will look a little ugly and work a little clunkily for a while as we see how people use it and how to make it better. The more you use it, the better it will get.

Take a look at the questions already being asked on the site to get some ideas – or better still, join an investigation to see how it works.

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Operate unique publishing platforms - news and political reporting sources that are a hybrid of personalized, professional content and user contributions - delivered through a sophisticated network of expert bloggers, journalists and associated press.

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Authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types — academic and scholarly journals, Open Access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more from around the world. And, it's easy to use!

Ulrich's Serials Analysis System is a powerful tool for library professionals who need to identify, analyze, evaluate, and create reports about the library's print and electronic serials holdings, aggregated journal collections, serials publishers, and much more.

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One platform for access to objective content and powerful tools that let you search, track, measure and collaborate in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
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All-database search: ISI Web of Knowledge is much more than just an aggregation of content and tools. It's a unified platform that integrates all data and search terms together so that you can conduct one search to find all relevant items - no matter what database it originated in.
100% objective journal select

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* Goodness does not consist in greatness but greatness in goodness. - Athenaeus
* In the absences of a decent time machine fiction remains the most sturdy vehicle for visiting other eras.
* It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
* Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain
* A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong. Piet Hein
* Eternity is a mere moment just long enough for a joke.
Post a comment

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Imagine what the world would be like if every time you were inspired to help someone or something, you could - with just a few clicks of a mouse, anywhere online. That’s the mission of Network for Good. We make it as easy to donate and volunteer online as it is to shop online, and we make it simple and affordable for all nonprofits, of any size, to recruit donors and volunteers via the Internet.

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Research and development organisation, working to generate insights and evidence, create new solutions and provide leadership for action to improve health and tackle inequality.

The Centre provides a setting where academics, policy-makers, practitioners and local people can come together to confront the problems facing population health in Glasgow and beyond.

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* Overview: Integeratng Back, History and Bookmarks in Web Browsers
* An Overview and Understanding of the paper titled “The Perfect Search Engine Is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search” by Jaime Teevan, Christine Alvarado, Mark S. Ackerman and David R. Karger
* Overview: Contextual Web History
* An Overview and Understanding of the paper titled ” Searching to Eliminate Personal Information Management (PIM) ” by Edward Cutrell, Susan T. Dumais and Jaime Teevan
* Firefox Addons : Enhanced History tools – Part 2
* Firefox Addons : Enhanced History tools – Part 1
Knowledge, Information and Learning

* Infoaxe and Hooeey have many interesting features. Our ideas on the timeline and pivot are definitely inspired by these add-ons. I think we need both to provide the user with sufficient clues and context. But you are correct that privacy is an issue. Even though Infoaxe is supported by Garcia-Molina from Stanford, I wouldn't trust to send my data over there.
* What occurs to me is that WebMynd and ThumbStrips seem to adopt the same approach for refinding information: they just let you browse a list of pictures of the sites. Intuitive sorting and filtering appears to be quite limited. Obviously you don't want to overload the user with functionality, but a filmpstrip is just not enough. Hope we can do better!
[...] formally proved by the auhors of CWH, it is important to include the visual cues to help user find what they are looking for more [...]
* I completely agree with you gautum that they usually google search it again and this is what was found by the authors of the paper (Contextual Web History, see my next post for details), but then that just defies the purpose of the web history tools.
Also, the bookmark thing you are talking about..I am not sure how often we use that. For longer re-visitation patterns, we usually forget that we even bookmarked it at an earlier time. We use those bookmarks, only if we are using the website on a regular or mid-regular basis.

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Before trying to address the current state of human rights, it is worth considering what is admitted into that sacred canon. The question constantly arises, quite concretely. For example, 10 days ago, on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, when Amnesty International declared that "Poverty is the world's worst human rights crisis." Or two days before that, on World Food Day, when the UN food agency reported that the number of people going hungry rose to over 1 billion, while rich countries sharply cut back food aid because of the priority of bailing out banks, and Oxfam reported that 16,000 children are dying a day from hunger-related causes. And the issues regularly arise even in the richest country in the world, where the question of whether health care is a human right is being hotly debated while some 45,000 people die a year from lack of insurance, unknown numbers from utterly inadequate insurance, in the only industrial society I know of where health care is rationed by wealth, not need. In all these cases, the lives could be saved by a tiny fraction of the GDP of the rich countries, so the question is whether they recognize the right to life as among human rights.

The same stand was elaborated by Paula Dobriansky, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs under Bush II, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Human Affairs in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. In the latter capacity, she took pains to dispel what she called "myths" about human rights, the most salient being the myth that so-called "`economic and social rights' constitute human rights." She denounced the efforts to obfuscate human rights discourse by introducing these spurious rights -- which are entrenched in the UD, formulated at US initiative, but explicitly rejected by Washington, not alone of course.
Such contrasts lead to situations that are highly revealing about the prospects for human rights. Right now, the two American political parties are competing to see which can uphold more fervently its ded

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Welcome to the Blogging 101 Wikibook. This book (which anybody can edit) is a collection of resources about blogs and blogging. It is divided into several categories. Please add whatever links you think would be useful to people under the appropriate headings. (Off-topic & inappropriate material will of course be edited out.)

A weblog, or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Such a Web site would typically be accessible to any Internet user. Part of the reason "blog" was coined and commonly accepted into use is the fact that in saying "blog," confusion with server log is avoided.
Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations, and from one occasional author to having large communities of writers. The totality of weblogs or blog-related webs is usually called the blogosphere.
The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped, with the newest post at the top of the page. Because links are so important to weblogs, most blogs have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for individual entries; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are offered in weblogs in the RSS XML-format, to be read with a RSS feedreader.

For a detailed breakdown of blog tool features see: Blog Software Breakdown
A similar German-language version is here.
Here is another good post on comparing blogging tools like Blogger vs TypePad vs Movable Type vs blosxom vs b2evolution vs Wordpress
Feature by feature comparison of the two most popular hosted blog solutions, TypePad vs Blogger
Weblogs Compendium has good and long list of a variety of blog tools.
Globe of Blogs is an excellent list of blog tools, hosting & design services, etc.
For an excellent blogging guide with Tips and Tutori

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If pictures speak a thousand words, a cartoon by RK Laxman of the ‘You Said It’ fame and the likes speak volumes. Most agree but none know the next Common Man might bloom out of a tech pen. Taking a break from the monotonous world of coding and decoding, IT professionals have begun using the stroke of the pen to tickle the funny bone of many.
Srikant Jakilinki, a computer engineer who uses cartoony imagery for social commentary on http://cworks.blogspot.com the sketching bug began in their childhood. “I got gripped by this passion when I stumbled upon a book ‘Kontebommala Bapu’ as a child and was mesmerised at the bandwidth of images which are nothing but simple strokes of ink. Fascinations of childhood linger for a lifetime and that knowledge (cartoons) is quite tricky in the sense that the more one acquires it, the more one wants it,” says Srikant.

An IT professional sketching or making cartoons is often unheard of because it contradicts the stereotype image of a computer geek. But these techie artists think the two talents complement each other. Srikant, who vents his emotions, thoughts, ideas and observations of society through his toons, says: “The cartoon escapism keeps me occupied beyond ‘office’ hours, releases me from the humdrum conformity of a typical IT worker.”
What is it that ensures that these creative juices keep on flowing? For Srikant, people inspire him — coffee talk with colleagues to family dinner conversations to chats with mates over drinks and the media. About 20% of his work comes from ideas of other people directly or indirectly. He believes in soliciting suggestions from readers wholeheartedly. His good observation and articulation transform an ordinary pen and paper into magical works. He feels the rest — drawing and sketching talents — are merely incidental.

But not many techies go ahead with building on these incidentals. Lack of time and the daily hustle-bustle at work force them to lock up the canvas in their bags. But Srikant opted to pursue this passion despite the odds. “The

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Citizen journalism…is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”… Wikipedia.
Journalism is the art and practice of providing people with the information they need to be free. But in our world much of professional journalism has become industrialized, trivialized, and monetized -- far more concerned with ratings, circulation and return on investment, than the stuff of freedom.

Citizen journalism is the art and practice of sharing information with each other. Citizen journalists are artisans who work in the unshaped clay of events before perception has been hardened, glazed and fired in the kilns of public discourse.

At Broowaha we have editors who screen stories so that vulgar or offensive do not get published and correct or amend the writing, but our editors don't have control over where stories end up on the front page or back section. That is determined by the Community. Join and become a member – as a writer, reader or both.

Info for Creative Authors. We invite original submissions of humor, essay, memoir, short story, and poetry with a maximum of 1,000 words. This length restriction is somewhat limiting when it comes to short story in particular. But the types of stories we are looking for should be along the lines of vignettes, character sketches, and succinctly drawn slices of life.

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