Can we expect anything less than outright violence (which isn’t new, by the way) when governments and universities see international students as expendable cash cows? What’s the difference between universities/governments and scam artists except for legislation which makes one form of exploitation legal and the other not?

She Who Stumbles pins the blame on the the academic-industrial-complex that treat students like outsider-consumers and shares a bunch of links on police inaction, official denial of racism, and condition of international students that Australian authorities continue to ignore. [hat tip: Pass the Roti].

This post is supposed to be a guide to students who are looking to the schools in the USA for PhD. My only authority on the subject matter is that I am currently doing a PhD myself, and in the six years I have spent in the program and the system, and talked to several people in academia, I have learnt a lot, and I wish I knew all this when I started applying to grad schools. My hope is that my experience and understanding will be of good use to aspiring grad students.

[Source: Applying for a PhD: Looking for the right US school] Semantic Overload offers advice for aspiring doctoral students who wish to enter the murky waters of academia. Although he is a Comp. Sci major, his advice is generic enough to be applicable to any field.

The 16 year old girl selling me my Airtel recharge coupon told me that she would happily make a rain water harvesting project for my children. The price? Five hundred rupees, including all materials. (She’d do the balance of their holiday homework for another 500 rupees). Apparently most ninth standard students in Delhi are assigned a rainwater harvesting project at some point during the year, and this girl knew an opportunity when she saw one; business was good, she said.

Hari writes about some of the things that are wrong with our schools and why environmentalists should care.

Hat Tip Gautam

Vig lays out his plans for the future if and when he owns his own private engineering college based on the current popular trends.

A recent thread on twitter and in the blogosphere, started by Andrew Maynard at 2020Science, with a follow-up by Steven Hill at Testing hypotheses… about how they were inspired to become scientists, has got me reminiscing again about my own sources of inspiration that led to this life in science.

Madhu at Reconciliation Ecology lists the reasons and inspiration on why he chose to be a scientist.

A long time back a fan from the U.S gave Richard Dawkins a printed T-shirt titled

Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth The Only Game in Town. I don’t know if that inspired the title of his latest book – The…

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Dreamer writes about the time he spent at Sri Ramana Maharishi Academy of Blind.

And as our classes got over I walked out fresh… The three hours of non-stop noise by JAWS software seemed to be music now. And as I started walking out, Chetan ran out through the zigzag corridor dodging the walls, straight into the playground. I stopped… this couldnot have been for real. I closed my eyes and started walking only to crashed over a stone. I had hurt myself. The shock was still on. As I walked outside the school premises, I took deep breath.

By Amodini Sharma
INDIA IS A populous country, and I’m pretty sure the citizens of India have something to do with it. I don’t think the storks are delivering all those babies, or that they are gifts of the Gods a…

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Sometime back Brian at Clastic Detritus expressed his unwillingness for contributing geology articles to Wikipedia. He was concerned of getting trapped in endless edit wars where materials written by genuine experts are edited by people with no real expertise in…

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This [Super 30] initiative provides free coaching, boarding and lodging to 30 talented students from financially weak backgrounds. These students are handpicked by Anand and his team and trained for the IIT JEE entrance exam. This initiative is funded by the money he earns from his coaching institute where he teaches up to 500 students in a single batch, thrice a week for two and a half hours each. He teaches upto 4 such batches at a time and charges these students a very reasonable 4000 rupees for the 11-month course. This money is channeled into the Super 30 initiative.

Utkarsh Joshi writes on the effort of “one man who has made it his life’s mission to identify and nurture talent that has the potential but not the financial means to make it to the IITs.”