Well, This is an Interesting Take on the Problems in Indian IT

According to this report by the Indian web site Scroll.in. cheating is so endemic that many of the most prestigious schools in India are unable to do basic coding.

It appears to be the result of a toxic mix of entitlement and credentialism.

This is not to say that all Indian programmers are incompetent, though an Indian IT executive basically gave up on ⅔ of all IT grads in the country, which is a remarkably high failure rate for the elite institutions.

Reports of mass copying during school and college examinations in several states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are common. But a blog post by a computer science professor indicates that students at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, and other engineering colleges, indulge in it too.

Earlier this month, Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi, wrote a blog post on the quality of the country’s information technology engineers, which corporate recruiters also seem to be concerned about.

In the post titled, CS education is poor because of copying, Sanghi referred to a statement by Srinivas Kandula, chief executive of information technology major Capgemeni India, at a business event in Mumbai earlier this month.

At the event, Kandula said: “I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them [IT recruits] are just not trainable.”

………

Speaking to this reporter, Sanghi said: “In many colleges, even in some of the IITs but to a lesser extent, students either copy the code for a programme from the net, or one student writes it, and the others copy. The code is tested in the laboratory. If it runs – and it does – the student is awarded marks even if the lines are not original.” He added that these shortcuts are adopted as early as the first semester.

………

In his blog post, he recounted that he was recently part of a selection committee to recruit programmers for a government department. He found that most applicants he interviewed, including those who had “several years of experience in industry”, could not perform a variety of tasks they ought to have learnt at engineering college. “These [were] all the programmes we ask our first semester students who have never programmed before,” he wrote.

………

But Indian Institutes of Technology have had their fair share of cheating scandals, some of which seem to have resulted in a cover-up.

For instance, in 2011, a computer science professor at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, was suspended for reporting a variety of irregularities at the institution, including mass cheating in examinations. It led to a court case, which is still on. With the next hearing scheduled for Friday, the professor was reluctant to talk to this reporter but his lawyer Pranav Sachdeva said that one of the charges against his client was that “he spoke to the media about it”. Sachdeva added that the IIT had “tried to impose compulsory retirement [on his client] but the Delhi Hight Court put a stop to it”.

………

Even though engineering colleges can easily check copying if they wanted to by failing students who did not submit original programmes, there’s perhaps a valid reason why institutes hold back. “I know of one college which tried this,” wrote Sanghi in his blog. “Every single glass [pane] in all buildings were broken by the angry students.”

Any comments from people who have been through an IT education in India, or those who have experience working with Indian IT professionals would be appreciated.

Silicon Valley in All of Its Glory

We had revelations about a hostile work place at Uber last week, and this week it's Tesla where the "Brogrammer" culture is alleged:

A female engineer at Tesla has accused Elon Musk’s car company of ignoring her complaints of “pervasive harassment”, paying her a lower salary than men doing the same work, promoting less qualified men over her and retaliating against her for raising concerns.

The allegations of AJ Vandermeyden, who still works at the celebrated electric car manufacturer, paint a picture of a hostile work environment dominated by men where inappropriate sexual behavior is tolerated and women face numerous barriers to advance their careers.
………

Vandermeyden began at Tesla in 2013 and was eventually promoted to a manufacturing engineering position in the general assembly department, which consisted mostly of men and where she was paid less than male engineers whose work she directly took over, according to her complaint.

I think that we need to reconsider the adulation that we throw Silicon Valley's way.

There seems to be a surfeit of narcissism in around San Jose that rivals that around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jon Stewart Opens up a Can of Whup-Ass on the Media

He tunnels into Colbert's show, and offers advice to the media.

Specifically, he suggests that Trump just isn't that into them, and that they should take up a hobby ……… Perhaps journalism might fill the void.

Ouch!

The dem A-team consists of some ghosts in an abandoned Appalachian tavern. pic.twitter.com/PV7dct3HkG

— Blagojevist (@blagojevism) March 1, 2017

This was literally the scene of the Democratic Party response to the Trump speech, because nothing screams "win" like a bunch of old white dudes sitting in a run down diner.

Well, Here is Some Good News to Start the Month

The Supreme Court just remanded the Virginia redistricting case back to a lower court with instructions to apply a more rigorous standard regarding racial bias.

It wasn't a complete victory, but it was a definite win for the good guys:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Virginia Democrats a fresh chance to challenge parts of the legislative map for the state’s House of Delegates.

………

“The upshot of all of this is that not much has changed with these cases,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blog post. “The fight will be over the details and application to particular cases.”

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the challengers in the case, disagreed, calling the decision a “major victory” that will help Democrats.

………

In 2015, a divided three-judge panel of Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., upheld 11 of the challenged districts because, it said, race had not been the primary factor in drawing them. Since the districts could be justified under traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, contiguity, incumbency protection and political considerations, the court said, race could not have been the predominant reason for drawing them.

That was the wrong approach, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The racial predominance inquiry concerns the actual considerations that provided the essential basis for the lines drawn,” he wrote, “not post hoc justifications the legislature in theory could have used but in reality did not.”

………

In assessing those challenges, Justice Kennedy wrote, the trial court identified “no fewer than 11 race neutral redistricting factors.” He called that kind of analysis too malleable.

“By deploying those factors in various combinations and permutations, a state could construct a plethora of potential maps that look consistent with traditional, race-neutral principles,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “But if race for its own sake is the overriding reason for choosing one map over others, race still may predominate.”

Justice Kennedy did not say the challengers would win under his less rigid standard. “The district court,” he wrote, “is best positioned to determine in the first instance the extent to which, under the proper standard, race directed the shape of these 11 districts.”

The Supreme Court affirmed one part of the trial court’s ruling, concerning a single district, which the trial court had upheld even after finding that race played the dominant role in drawing it. The trial court said the district was justified by an attempt to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which forbade the reduction of minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

Redistricting is still a mess, but it is a bit less of a mess, and it appears that racial Gerrymanders have become more difficult.

Quote of the Day

In various times and regions, Jews have belonged to conservative parties like the UK tories or French Gaullist parties, for instance. But they are virtually absent from rightist politics. The reason is clear enough. Anti-semitism is almost inevitably and almost always part of rightist political movements. It is a natural feature. This is not always explicitly so. It is not always that way at first, but eventually it is always there.

—Josh Marshall

The right hearkens back to, and attempts to resurrect, a past that never existed, and this past is largely Judenrein.

Jews, and most other minorities, do not exist as human beings with agency in this idealized vision of the past. 

They are either absent, or meek stereotypes.

Yeah, He's Running for President in 2020

Corey Booker, after getting savaged by the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party for voting with big pharma to ensure that people would be impoverished by their extortion, has signed on to a very similar measure to the one that he voted against:

Pilloried by his party’s left wing for voting in January against a non-binding measure with a similar goal, Sen. Cory Booker is joining Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday to unveil a bill to allow the importation of pharmaceuticals from Canada and other countries.

Booker, who has been mentioned as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, came under fire on social media and liberal blogs as too beholden to special interests after he and 12 Democratic colleagues, including fellow New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, voted against a drug-importation amendment to the 2017 budget resolution.

That amendment, sponsored by Sanders, of Vermont, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was part of a series of votes, all defeated, to amend the budget resolution the Republican majority was using to start the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Sanders reacted angrily after the 46-52 vote, telling USA Today his Democratic colleagues lacked “guts” and he hoped that “in the coming weeks and months you’re going to see many of them develop the courage to stand up to Pharma.”

I am an optimist: I think that our nation might survive 4 years of Donald Trump.

I don't think that it can survive another presidency of an Ivy League educated neoliberal who runs the country primarily for the benefit Ivy League educated neoliberals.

I really have to start looking into aliyah.