← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · londo
Thread ID: 5994 | Posts: 28 | Started: 2003-04-06
2003-04-06 03:42 | User Profile
SCIENTISTS have met to debate India's plans to send an astronaut to the moon, with the chairman of the country's space agency saying the project would "electrify the nation".
The Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, is holding the meeting amid criticism from some scientists that the mission would strain scarce resources without yielding much scientific benefit.
In a project that needs to be approved by the Indian government, the ISRO hopes to send a small unmanned satellite to circle the moon by 2005 and an astronaut by 2015.
The unmanned satellite project would cost $US82.5 million ($137.5 million).
ISRO chairman Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan said the moon mission would "electrify the nation and show to the world that India is capable of taking up complex projects at the cutting edge of space research".
[url=http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6236731%255E401,00.html] Read the rest here[/url]
2003-04-06 03:56 | User Profile
Are they planning on sending a real person or perhaps a reincarnated hindoodoo in the form of a monkey or a rat?
Hmmm, a rat, hey RatBrAiN, here is your 15 minutes of fame! :lol:
2003-04-06 04:00 | User Profile
Indians stand no chance of completing such a complicated project where only whites have proven to possess both the intelligence and mentality to be able to. They can't even fly or maintain older simpler Soviet aircraft. Forget aircraft, they can't make their railroad function without a major accident every year or two :lol:
2003-04-06 05:14 | User Profile
The most advanced Indian automobile:
[img]http://www.keralacars.com/gif/ambassador.jpg[/img]
The Ambassador Diesel , now equipped with a more powerful and a compatible STRIDE engine and a heavy-duty gearbox offers you an enhanced performance, improved driving comfort and unparalleled economy. Comfortable with ergonomically designed bucket seats and powerful enough to support air conditioning, The Ambassador Diesel gives a truly relaxing fatigue free journey making travel a pleasure , no mater whether you are taking a short city drive or a long highway cruise.
Tell me, rbanowitz, have Indians managed to launch a human into space, more than 40 years after the first Russian in space? And no, joyrides on the vehicles of the advanced white civilizations dont' count :(
2003-04-06 05:17 | User Profile
Indians can't even run their railroads:
[url=http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/indi-s24.shtml]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/.../indi-s24.shtml[/url]
The Rediff.com website reported: ââ¬ÅSince 1986, there have been between 200 to 250 accidents, major and minor, across the railways network every year. In that time, 6,000-plus people have died, and many times that number have been injured in rail accidents.ââ¬Â
But hey, what's 6,000 people in a rathole like India? :lol:
2003-04-06 05:31 | User Profile
rbanowitz, have Indians finally designed a domestic automobile? Only a hundred years after much more advanced nations. :(
2003-04-06 19:38 | User Profile
A little bit of reality for rbanowitz:
[url=http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:YfdRed1XQo0C:www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,372515,00.html]http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:YfdRe...,372515,00.html[/url]
Another challenge for his successor is what to do about Telco, the locus of Ratan Tata's magnificent obsession with becoming India's Henry Ford. Tata's equivalent of the Model T is the Indica (an abbreviation for "India's car")--a boxy, 1.4-liter hatchback. Tata hails the Indica as India's first indigenous car because, he says, 95% of its components are made by Indians (albeit designed by Italian draftsmen and assembled in a secondhand Nissan plant transported from Australia). "I wanted to show that such a car was possible in India," Tata says. "We have proved the doubters wrong."
Not yet. The Indica, conceived in 1993 and launched in 1997, is the child the unmarried Ratan Tata never had. Unfortunately, it is a problem child that has brought grief to the company. Telco, which had a near monopoly on the sale of trucks and buses, grew fat on government and military contracts. Its trucks were not highly engineered, but they were tough and easy to repair. ("Tata OK" is the quirky slogan of Indian truckers.) In 1996, the year before the first Indicas rolled off the assembly line, Telco earned a record net profit of $158 million.
:lol:
2003-04-06 19:46 | User Profile
B)
I have a feeling that 'American' car factories will go straight from Mexico to China, bilthely skipping over India in the process.
If the Indians can't even put together a glorified trabbie, designed for them by Europeans, what would they do to a Cadillac? :rolleyes:
2003-04-06 20:09 | User Profile
The only reason hindus try to do codiing is because they have already proved to be worthless in everything else...including flying and maintaining simple Soviet aircraft...and even keeping their railroads from killing thousands.
The Chinese at least managed to reverse-engineer some of the Soviet military imports and start building clones or improve on the older designs.
2003-04-06 20:53 | User Profile
*Madrussian, Maybe rban is from Tulsa? This group of Hindu flotsam will soon make their triumphant return to the slums of Calcutta, courtesy of the INS. It's funny that the wretched conditions at John Pickle Corp. are 1000% better than what this clutch of ratbirds found in India. Where else are we Okies supposed to get oil pipe fabricators at the rate of $1.76 an hour? Jai Hind!
Rban, Twelve dollars on pump three and a pack of Marlboro Lights in a box. Step lively, I'm in kind of a hurry.* :D
Tulsa: The American Dream Turned Nightmare
Indian Workers Allege Abuse By Oklahoma Company
Russell Cobb is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas.
It takes "an effort of the intellect and the will" just to recognize that the poor exist in America, writer Michael Harrington once remarked. Harrington's 1962 book, The Other America, introduced many Americans to the overlooked poverty in their midst. Indeed, the most desperate people in the most affluent society on Earth are often kept out of view, no less now than when The Other America was published.
A recent example comes straight from the American heartland -- Tulsa, Oklahoma -- where 53 Indian men spent months working under conditions that their attorneys have called "virtual slave labor." Their employer was the John Pickle Company, a manufacturer of oil pipelines and pressure vessels on the desolate western limits of town.
Although each worker tells a unique story of broken dreams and humiliation at the Pickle plant, the collective experience of the men goes like this: Lured away from good jobs in India for a chance to work at the Pickle Company, the men were ill fed, packed into a cramped, unsanitary dormitory only yards away from industrial machinery, and forced to work 12- to 16-hour days, six days a week, at wages well below the federal minimum wage. When they complained about conditions within the factory, they were threatened with deportation, locked inside their barracks and patrolled by armed guards.
While the men wait for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to decide their immigration status, many people in Oklahoma are beginning to ask how slave-like conditions could develop right under their noses.
The American Dream Turned Nightmare Toofan Mondal, one of two cooks in the group, had worked for 20 years as a chef in Calcutta, supporting a family and struggling to make ends meet. Then he heard about job openings at the John Pickle Company through an agent with Al-Samit International, a travel agent and employment recruiter based in Bombay. The Indian workers don't know much about the management of Al-Samit, nor do their two American attorneys, or anyone in the United States, including the FBI, which has purportedly been in India investigating the company. Pickle Company documents -- including e-mails and employment contracts -- refer only to a "Mr. Gulam" as company president.
"No one seems to know Gulam's last name," one of the Indian men's attorneys, Kent Felty, told me in a telephone interview. "All we know at this point is that he is powerful, rich, Muslim, and a very big man, well-connected with the Indian Consulate in Houston."
FBI Special Agent Gary Johnson would not provide details on the Bureau's investigation of either Al-Samit or the Pickle Company, except to say that "several government agencies," including "the INS and the Department of Labor" were looking into the men's allegations. The Pickle Company denies any wrongdoing.
"What happened at the Pickle Company is starting to happen everywhere -- especially in remote areas of the heartland." But even as the government refrains from commenting, the men's sworn testimonies and the Pickle Company's own documents paint a picture of human trafficking and exploitation that is usually associated with foreign-operated sweatshops in the developing world. People following the new wave of Central American and South Asian immigrants to the American South and Midwest, however, are beginning to note abuses throughout the region.
"What happened at the Pickle Company is starting to happen everywhere -- especially in remote areas of the heartland," says Barbara Moore, Director of the Asian-American Community Service Association in Tulsa. Moore cited the booming big-poultry industry in nearby Arkansas and the migrant farm worker experience throughout the Midwest as areas where labor abuses have become more common in recent years.
Al-Samit began recruiting Indian workers for Pickle two years ago, selecting qualified welders, electricians, and fitters for a so-called "training program." When Toofan Mondal met the Al-Samit agent, she told him that Pickle was expanding his guest worker program and would be taking two cooks with him for the first time. All the workers Al-Samit recruited for Pickle were experienced -- many were over-qualified -- and they were told they would receive H1-B temporary work visas for skilled workers.
For its services as an intermediary, Al-Samit charged each worker roughly $2,500 in fees, which most of the men paid through high-interest loans in India. The men planned to work off their debt to Al-Samit and then begin sending money home to their families.
Upon boarding the plane to the United States, however, it was revealed that they actually had been issued B-1 visas for temporary business visits. Pickle may have preferred this approach because it would give him the option of either returning the workers to India after six months or sending them on to his new plant in Kuwait.
According to social workers and attorneys involved in the case, there was another advantage for Pickle in securing B-1 visas for business visits: doing so allowed Pickle to bypass an important INS prerequisite for the H1-B.
"For Pickle to employ the men, he first would have had to prove to the INS that there was a shortage of welders in Tulsa," said Moore in an interview. Instead, "the men were technically employees of Al-Samit. But there was not a façade of training at the plant -- they were paid Indian wages by an Indian firm."
These wages were far below the federal hourly minimum wage of $5.15 -- the Tulsa World and the Associated Press reported that the welders received between $2.31 and $3.17 an hour. Their actual wages may have been even worse -- according to their offer letter from Al-Samit and the Pickle Company, the welders received a $500 to $550 monthly salary. Since the men report 12- to 16-hour workdays six days a week, that means their hourly wage was more like $1.20 to $1.76 an hour.
The technical trades of welding and vessel fitting in the petroleum industry are well-established in Tulsa and have been ever since the town's halcyon days in the 1920s, when Tulsa was the self-proclaimed "Oil Capital of the World." For Pickle to prove to the INS that there was a shortage of skilled workers in a city and state whose economic lifeline still runs, for better or worse, in black gold, would have been difficult. But by claiming the workers were business visitors in a training program, Pickle had found a way around potential INS roadblocks to cheap labor.
John Pickle was openly proud of his operation until only recently.
According to a letter he wrote to "customers, suppliers and business partners" on February 8, Pickle claimed to have already completed "two cycles of training ... with 25 individuals now successfully on the job at JPME [his Kuwait plant]." After years of struggling to find cheap, reliable labor in Oklahoma, he had found a way to undercut his competitors without closing up shop and moving overseas. In a 1997 interview with the Tulsa World, Pickle admitted his frustration at not being able to attract and keep workers. "I train them [the welders] and then they go somewhere else for the bigger money," he said. Pickle, in other words, believed he was being a good American businessman by keeping costs low. Furthermore, he believed he was doing the local economy a favor. During the oil bust of the 1980's, he claimed, he could have shipped his entire operation to the Middle East, "where most of the oil action is," but he chose to stick it out in Tulsa, where the economy had ground to a halt.
John Pickle's wife seized the men's passports and visas and the first 30 workers were escorted to a makeshift dormitory built for 10 men. While still in Calcutta, Mondal was excited about the opportunity to go to America, and this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Like the other 52 men, Mondal was offered free food, travel, accommodation, and medical insurance. Granted, the pay would be low by American standards -- $900 a month would supposedly be his base salary -- but there would be overtime and frequent raises. There were promised fringe benefits as well: Pickle would provide a car for every four employees, a cell phone for every two employees, and everyone would live in American-style apartments with a swimming pool. Mondal's statements, made in a sworn affidavit, were corroborated in separate interviews I conducted with five other workers. Neither the Pickle Company nor its attorney responded to my requests for comment.
It didn't take long for Mondal's dream to turn into a nightmare.
Upon arriving in Tulsa, John Pickle's wife, Christina, seized the men's passports and visas. The first 30 men to arrive were transported to a makeshift dormitory located between the factory and the office. It had facilities for 10 men, according to Mondal.
Pickle then quickly put the men to work constructing a new dormitory within the factory complex itself, an ominous, bleak compound that covers over 60 acres in a run down area of Tulsa. That dorm would eventually house all 53 workers. According to Mondal's affidavit and my interview with another worker, A.K. Shaji, the new kitchen was constructed dangerously close to industrial equipment and radiation-emitting X-ray machines, which they blame for making many of the men ill. When Mondal complained about having inadequate utensils for cooking, Pickle instructed the men to weld a vat out of stainless steel from the factory.
Negligence and Threats Escalate Pickle took a hands-on approach to every aspect of the men's lives. When one of the welders, Marshall Suares, dropped a 35-pound steel spool on his toe, Pickle and his wife brought him over-the-counter medicines instead of taking him to a hospital to have the toe X-rayed. Suares is still receiving treatment for the injury.
Mondal claims that at one point he became so sick that an American worker at the factory offered to take him to a doctor, but that Pickle stopped them. "You want to go to a doctor?" Mondal says Pickle asked. "I am your doctor."
Meanwhile, the welders and vessel fitters were working long hours for a pittance -- all the while being charged $50 per month for their board. They worked diligently and ahead of schedule. The local workers -- there were anywhere from 15 to 30 at the factory when the Indians arrived, according to Moore and the Indians -- were soon laid off. Yet even as the workers completed their tasks to Pickle's specifications, conditions in the dormitory deteriorated.
"Mr. Pickle began to ration the food," Mondal states. "Only one small glass of milk was to be given every three days." In early November, Mondal noted that many men were losing weight and refusing to eat the food, often bought after its expiration date. In every conversation I had with the men, food was a recurring topic.
"We went to the supermarket and I put a bag of rice in the cart and Pickle took it out and said 'that one's too expensive.' He grabbed another one and put it in the cart. It was 50 cents cheaper," Shaji told me. Pickle then refused to buy spices and finally decided that the men would eat only beans. "Indian men were not used to beans. I asked for mutton. Pickle began to curse at me," writes Mondal.
As conditions worsened and the men grew desperate, Pickle began to threaten them with deportation. His temper grew shorter and he began to call frequent meetings between the workers and management. Pickle and other managers shouted at and insulted the men. After some of the men requested permission to leave the factory on their day off to go to church, Pickle became enraged.
"He said, 'you son of a bitch, you go back to India,'" Shaji recalled to me, stuttering to articulate the unfamiliar, shameful words.
Ray Murzello, the Pickle Company's director of international business development, was especially harsh with the men. On December 14, he sent an e-mail to an Al-Samit official in Mumbai in which he proposed that the mysterious Gulam "put pressure on the families" in India.
"Knowing Gulam as well as I do," Murzello continued, "if this fails ... Gulam has further recourse and can file a case quickly against these individuals with the Mumbai police."
In a conference call with Pickle workers, Gulam reportedly threatened to "put them in a dark room and cut off their legs." Murzello was especially worried since two men he had sent to the Tulsa airport accompanied by armed guards to be deported back to India had "absconded" in Atlanta. Murzello seemed particularly worried about the two missing men, whom he was afraid might "be the reason why we sour our relations with the U.S. embassies and INS, so assiduously cultivated over the last several years."
In his e-mail, Murzello laments that "we cannot send them (the men, that is) airfreight or FedEx, which would assure a quick, guaranteed delivery!" The John Pickle Company, Murzello said, would "provide the cuffs" for someone to escort them back to India.
According to Mondal's statements and my interview with Shaji, Gulam then responded to Murzello's requests by making a conference call to some of the Pickle workers at the plant, threatening to "put them in a dark room and cut off their legs" when they were returned.
According to Joe McDoulett, the Indian men's attorney working on the immigration side of their case, the Pickle Company never had the authority to "deport" the men in the first place.
"When you enter the United States as an alien, you're under the control of the INS. You get permission to stay for a period of time. Being outside of the control of the John Pickle Company doesn't make you subject to deportation," McDoulett said in a telephone interview.
McDoulett has filed suit on behalf of the men to change their visa status to a "T visa," which is given to victims of human trafficking and would extend their work permit for a three-year period. According to Mondal's statements, the INS never even questioned the men about their work or place of residence when they arrived in Atlanta from India.
"Mr. Pickle led the way. Mr. Pickle spoke to a tall official who directed us to form two lines. The immigration officer in my line did not ask me anything," Mondal states.
So where was the INS when Pickle was importing his laborers?
"They were looking for people who were coming to blow up buildings," said Kent Felty, the men's attorney who is pursuing a civil case against the company. "The FBI is totally swamped and the INS is even worse."
It is worth noting that Pickle was able to easily transport the 53 men through immigration in Atlanta only weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks without so much as a peep from immigration officials. Ironically, while U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was swiftly rounding up immigrants and suspending their habeas corpus, Pickle was able to restrict his workers' movements -- even locking them in the factory barracks over Thanksgiving and Christmas. He frequently used the terrorist attacks as a pretext, claiming that it was for their own good that they stay in the factory.
"He said we would be shot if we left the grounds," Shaji said.
Still In Limbo The Pickle Company has refused to address its alleged minimum-wage violations, but in a statement issued to the press in February, the company defended the wages by saying they were "commensurate for training programs such as this."
While the case of the Pickle workers may be one of the worst violations of workers' and immigrants' rights in recent memory, it is not the only one. About a year before the Indian workers decided to escape from the Pickle factory, another case of involuntary servitude was coming to light in American Samoa, where approximately 270 mostly Vietnamese garment workers had been held against their will and paid less than the minimum wage by a South Korean factory owner. . . .
2003-04-07 19:12 | User Profile
Jew rban and his Indian bullturds. He goes on and on. No one mentions whites went to the moon almost 35 years ago. If our crooked traitors in DC hadn't sold out to jew money and media pressure, we would have already landed on Mars. And India would be a worse cesspool than it is now, because they woulnd't be siphoning off $$$ through foreign aid and cheap labor.
2003-08-12 15:52 | User Profile
it is true that india is sending a space probe to moon.but it is a unmanned one.it will revolve around the moon and analyse its surface and the atmosphere and conduct some experiments .it is launched by ISRO'S gaint GSLV(geo synchroneous satellite launch vehicle).it is supposed to be launched in 2005 and is codenamed "somyana-1".the canadians and ESA(european space agency) have shown great interest in ISRO's(indian space research organization) project.and by the bye ISRO is also developing reusable space craft(although in initial stages).it is indian version of american space shuttle.
2003-08-12 19:46 | User Profile
Good thing this proposed "mission" is unmanned. Take a look at the stats for planes/pilots when it comes to Indian and Chinese airlines, aircraft, incidents; [url=http://www.airsafe.com/events/regions/asia.htm]http://www.airsafe.com/events/regions/asia.htm[/url] The site is a treasure trove of useful info if you are thinking of world travel.
Our Asian counterparts are, by a huge margin, the worst, most dangerous pilots on the planet. Well, as we in CA know, they are also the world's worst automobile drivers, so more complex craft obviously present far greater danger. Space travel? They'll really need computers to handle the pilot's duties.
2003-08-12 19:48 | User Profile
I wouldn't rely on Indians to program those computers right :lol:
"Good enough" is the attitude the Asians, excluding the Japanese, have. That's why they need whites to build and maintain infrastructure for them.
2003-08-12 20:11 | User Profile
Yeah, they need ol' Whitey for advancement and ideas, but are loathe to admit it of course.
2003-08-19 06:53 | User Profile
hi,i think that is very genralistion statement.through out history man exchanged ideas with one another.it is not one sided.it is multi dimensional.if u gives me something,u except from me another thing.that is human nature.we should not forget that in the past it is the civilisations like india who are the cradles in human history.they were the ones who took lead in diverse areas from philosphy to scientific inventions to political science when the people in the west are wandering in the wild.how can anyone forget that even during fairly modern times the west prospered by litterly taking away the natural resources and manpower of asia and africa to build their economies. thank u.
2003-08-19 07:12 | User Profile
**how can anyone forget that even during fairly modern times the west prospered by litterly taking away the natural resources and manpower of asia and africa to build their economies. thank u. **
You're absolutely right.
If the West hadn't stolen Opium, Curry, and assorted mandingoes from Africa and Asia, there's no doubt that aeronautics or rocket science would not exist in its current state in the West.
I hear that now that the Peep's Republic of S.A. has been freed from White racism and colonialism, they're all set to ride on India's coattails into the Great Beyond.
Oop. Forgot about that "legacy of racism" thang. Maybe in another few millenia. :rock:
2003-08-19 07:59 | User Profile
**hi,i think that is very genralistion statement.through out history man exchanged ideas with one another.it is not one sided.it is multi dimensional.if u gives me something,u except from me another thing.that is human nature.we should not forget that in the past it is the civilisations like india who are the cradles in human history.they were the ones who took lead in diverse areas from philosphy to scientific inventions to political science when the people in the west are wandering in the wild.how can anyone forget that even during fairly modern times the west prospered by litterly taking away the natural resources and manpower of asia and africa to build their economies. thank u. **
Read and weep arya
Whites have been kicking ass since the Renaissance, so please stop with your trite p.c. bull****
The West and the Rest By Charles Murray Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003
ARTICLES The Public Interest Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left's fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school are likely to know more about Mayan culture than French culture, and why liberal arts students at elite universities can graduate without taking a course that discusses the Renaissance. The assumption that Eurocentrism is a real problem accounts for the reluctance of many to celebrate Western culture-or even defend it.
Part of the Eurocentric critique is based on an open hostility to Western culture. Other cultures, it is claimed, were more in tune with the earth, fostered more nurturing personal relationships, or were more cooperative than the despoiling, competitive Europeans. These are not positions to be refuted by logic and evidence-the West's arbitrary allegiance to "logic" and "evidence" is one of its supposed evils. Another rationale for increasing attention to non-Western cultures is simple historical accuracy and balance. This is the "Eurocentric hypothesis," which might be put as follows: When Westerners set out to survey history, they conveniently find that most of it was made by people like themselves. Sometimes this parochialism is fostered by a prescribed canon of fine art, music, and literature that marginalizes non-Western traditions. Other times it is a function of ignorance, which leads Western historians to slight the scientific and technological achievements of other parts of the world. In either case, the result is a skewed vision that does not reflect real European preeminence, but rather Eurocentric bias.
This argument is plausible. It is easy to mock today's New Age deference to the Mayans, but the great civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world left splendid legacies in the arts and sciences. The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?
Measuring Excellence
The data I collected for a book on human accomplishment left me with a way to explore that question. The data consist of inventories of people and events assembled from major histories and encyclopedic sources, covering the period from 800 BC to 1950. Each inventory was based on a dozen or more sources widely regarded as authoritative, drawn from a mix of countries. For example, the Western visual-arts inventory used 14 sources from the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, ranging in length from single-volume histories such as Janson's History of Art to the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. The methods are described fully in my forthcoming book. Here, I limit myself to a few basics.
The science inventories (subdivided into astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology) were worldwide-that is, Chinese and Arab scientists were part of the same inventory that contained Copernicus and Newton. My working assumption was that historians of science are able to identify important scientific achievements independently of the culture in which they occur.
The arts inventories (subdivided into the visual arts, music, and literature) and the philosophy inventory could not be worldwide. Even though some sources for these topics purported to cover the entire world, the weight given to different artistic traditions involves judgments and preferences in ways that accounts of scientific accomplishment do not. It could not be assumed, for example, that a history of the visual arts written by a German would use the same standards for Chinese or French art as for German art. To avoid the problem of cultural chauvinism within the Western world, I selected sources balanced among the major Western countries (along with other precautions discussed in the book). For non-Western countries, the most direct way to sidestep this problem was to prepare independent inventories. For philosophy, I prepared separate inventories for the West, China, and India. For the visual arts, I made use of distinct inventories for the West, China, and Japan. For literature, I used separate inventories for the West, the Arab world, China, India, and Japan. Music was restricted to the West. Altogether, 4,002 people qualified as "significant figures," defined as those who were mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources, in one or another of the inventories.
As the entry point for exploring the Eurocentric hypothesis, consider the simplest of all questions: If the 4,002 significant figures are divided into three groups consisting of European peoples, people from the rest of the West (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and non-Western peoples, how are they distributed over the period from 800 BC to 1950? Figure 1 below shows the results.
The story line implied by the graph is that little happened from 800 BC until the middle of the fifteenth century, that really intense levels of accomplishment didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all the significant figures make their appearance after 1800), and that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost everything came from Europe. As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entering significant figures were European. Thirteen of the remaining 19 percent were from North America. But if this is the most direct story line, it is also one that leaves open many reasons to suspect that various factors are misleading us. The rest of the discussion works through the major possibilities.
Populations and Prejudices
The bulge in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries shown in figure 1 will prompt many readers to ask whether we are seeing the effects of "epochcentrism" (paying excessive attention to people in the recent past) and a growing population. A detailed answer to these questions consumes the better part of two chapters in my book. The short answer is that these phenomena do have a limited influence on the data, but do not bear importantly on the Eurocentric hypothesis.
The problem of epochcentrism is concentrated in the recent past. Cutting off the inventories at 1950 eliminates most of it, and the rest is concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case, epochcentrism applies equally to the Western and non-Western worlds. You may visualize figure 1 stopping at 1900, or visualize it with the totals for all three groupings somewhat reduced. Neither alternative changes the overall shape of graph.
In the case of population change, it is true that a country of 100 million people tends to produce more significant figures than a country of 10 million people, and the growth in Western significant figures is related to the increase in Western population. But the non-West has always had a larger population than the West, and in raw numbers, population growth in the last three centuries was greater outside the West than within the West. A revised graph that takes population into account would make Western dominance since 1400 greater, not smaller.
Geniuses and Giants
The most obvious objection to the story told by figure 1 is that a head count of significant figures is the wrong way to think about the distribution of accomplishment. The reason for teaching ancient Greek philosophy is not that 32 significant figures in Western philosophy come from ancient Greece, but that 2 of those 32 were Plato and Aristotle. The reason for teaching nineteenth-century European literature is not that it produced 293 significant figures, but that the 293 include writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Hugo, Keats, and Heine.
True enough. But as history has worked out, the ages rich in giants have also been rich in near-giants and the rest of the significant figures who make up the inventory. This point can be made more fully by examining the actual rosters of significant figures, but for the sake of brevity consider what happens when the raw numbers are weighted by the eminence of the people in question. The "eminence scores" I calculated for the significant figures used techniques for measuring eminence-essentially, by measuring the amount of attention given to people-that were originated by polymath Francis Galton in the 1860s and have been refined by succeeding generations of scholars. The specific method I employed produced scores ranging from 1 to 100.
These scores have the potential to shift the pattern shown in figure 1 substantially-one Aristotle, with his eminence score of one hundred, counts the same as a hundred Antiphons, and one Shakespeare counts the same as a hundred Dubose Heywards. Because I prepared separate inventories for the non-Western traditions, Eurocentrism cannot deflate the scores of the non-Western giants in the arts-Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Du Fu both have scores of one hundred, for example. However, as one can see in figure 2 below, employing eminence scores in place of a head count does not change the main outlines of the distribution of accomplishment shown in figure 1, either across time or geography.
The second graph shows an increased visibility of non-Western cultures after about 500 AD. However, the main point of Western dominance after 1400 persists, with West meaning Europe until the late nineteenth century.
The effects differ across inventories, but only in the case of the Western philosophy inventory, where the eminence scores drastically raise the importance of ancient Greece, does the balance between pre- and post-1400 visibly shift. Take Western literature as an example. Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are giants of Western literature-but the post-1400 era has its own giants (Shakespeare, Goethe, and Moliere, for example) plus dozens of other near-giants who merit attention, compared with only a handful of near-giants from ancient times. In the end, a student with unlimited time to study Western literature has as much great literature post-1400 as pre-1400 (more, by most estimates), and a vastly larger number of works that are worthy of study. Taking eminence into account does not (again, with the exception of Western philosophy) radically elevate the importance of pre-Renaissance accomplishment.
An examination of significant figures in the sciences shows the same profile, but with even fewer people coming from outside the West. One might object that the role of the non-West is underestimated because of anonymous scientific discoveries, which might be more numerous in China, India, or the Arab world than in the West. Another possibility is that the number of significant figures after the mid-1800s is inflated because, as scientific teams have become more common, more scientists are identified with a single invention or discovery. Both possibilities may be checked by turning to the inventory of "significant events" in the sciences, compiled in the same way as the inventories of significant figures. (Specifically, a significant event refers to one mentioned in at least 50 percent of a large set of chronologies of scientific events.) An inventory of significant events shows the same Western dominance as the inventory of significant figures. Europe and North America together account for 97 percent of both the significant figures and significant events.
The Record in the Sciences
Are these "Eurocentric" numbers? In science as in the arts, we have grown accustomed to hearing the claim that the European contribution is overrated. In his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes quotes a historian of Chinese science, Nathan Sivin, to represent the essence of the new historical perspective:
The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects-from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man's relation to it-existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.
Landes then gives the essence of the countervailing view in his response:
This [Sivin's view] is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.
In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making... Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew) but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.
This may seem to be one of those conflicts between experts that a layman is unable to assess, but it is not. On the contrary, it is easy to reach an independent judgment about allegations of Eurocentrism if one subjects the allegations to close scrutiny. Reread Sivin's passage, and note how effectively his language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is in fact exaggerated. This is standard practice. Two other examples demonstrate how the evocation differs from the evidence actually presented. The first is taken from the publicity copy of the 1998 edition of Arnold Pacey's Technology in World Civilization:
Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view ... portray[ing] the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.
The other is from the publicity copy of the 1999 edition of an introductory college history text, Science and Technology in World History by James McClellan and Harold Dorn:
Without neglecting important figures of Western science such as Newton and Einstein, the authors demonstrate the great achievements of non-Western cultures. They remind us that scientific traditions took root in China, India, and Central and South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires.
Lest we fail to get the point, the publisher adds a blurb from a professor at Stanford, who tells us that
Professors McClellan and Dorn have written a survey that does not present the historical development of science simply as a Western phenomenon but as the result of wide-ranging human curiosity about nature and attempts to harness its powers in order to serve human needs.
But do these two books in fact challenge my assertion that 97 percent of both significant figures and events in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America? Pacey's Technology in World Civilization is a wide-ranging account of the ways in which the recipients of new technology do not apply it passively, but adapt it to their particular situation. With this interaction between technology and culture as his topic, Pacey does indeed spend more time on non-Western civilizations than would a historian describing who invented what, where, and when. For example, he has a chapter on railroad empires, with 18 pages of material on how railroads developed in Russia, Japan, China, and India. But who invented the railroad engine, tracks, trains, and the infrastructure of complex railroads? All this occurred in England.
Similarly, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History presents material on non-Western societies. But McClellan and Dorn, unlike Pacey, are writing a history of science. The 10 scientists with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes-a wholly conventional roster of stars. Of all the scientific figures mentioned in McClellan and Dorn's index, 97 percent come from Europe and the United States-precisely the same percentage yielded by the inventories I compiled.
There is nothing wrong with the historiography of either of these books. Both are consistent with the sources used to compile my science inventories. The contrast between the packaging for the books and the facts within them is emblematic of our times. The packaging illustrates how intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts contained therein reflect the way things really are.
The reason that any responsible history of science and technology will end up with these numbers is that historians of science and technology are all working with the same data which are, for the period we are exploring, reasonably complete. Gaps still exist, but none of them is large enough to do more than tweak the details of the general portrait of historical achievements.
Herein lies a difference between the layman and the specialist. Is the average European or American often unaware of the technological sophistication achieved by non-Western cultures? No doubt about it, and in this sense the charge of Eurocentrism is often appropriate. But what is really at issue is whether historians of science and technology in the last half-century are aware of the non-Western record-and it is clear that they are. Europeans used the works of the great Arab scholar-scientists of a millennium ago as the foundations for European science (which is why so many Arab scholars are known by their Latinized names). The great works of Indian mathematicians have long since been translated and incorporated into the history of mathematics, just as the works of Chinese naturalists and astronomers have been translated and incorporated into the narratives of those fields.
In recognizing how thoroughly non-Western science and technology have been explored, let's also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arab scholars, fighting for recognition against Western indifference, who were responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-Western cultures, but Westerners themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the byproducts of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and American scholars who, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham's seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point. Another is George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, five large volumes published from 1927 to 1948, all of which are devoted to science before the end of the fourteenth century-including meticulous accounts of scientific accomplishment in the Arab world, India, and China.
Of the remaining ways in which one could attenuate the 97-percent proportion I assign to both significant figures and significant events in the sciences, my proposition is that none work. I attach two provisos to that claim: First, attempts to add new events to the non-Western roster must consist of discoveries, inventions, and other forms of "firsts." No fair adding the first Indian suspension bridge to a catalog of Indian technology if suspension bridges were already in use elsewhere.
The other proviso is that the rules for inclusion of a person or event must be applied evenly. If one augments the inventory of non-Western accomplishment by going to Joseph Needham's seven-volume account of Chinese science and technology, one must also augment the inventory of Western accomplishment by going to comparably detailed histories dealing with German science (for example)-in other words, no fair using the naked eye to search for Western accomplishments and a microscope to search for non-Western ones.
If one observes these two constraints, the Western dominance of people and events cannot be reduced more than fractionally. For every new non-Western person or event that is added to the list, dozens of new entries qualify for the Western list, and the relative proportions assigned to the West and the non-West do not change. The differential may become even more extreme, because the reservoir of Western scientific accomplishment that did not qualify for the inventories is so immense.
The Record in the Arts
In compiling the inventories for the arts, I assumed that my method precluded direct comparisons of artistic activity in the West and non-West. It did indeed prevent comparisons that would assign specific percentages to the West and non-West of the type presented for the sciences. But nevertheless a few observations are possible.
The Western arts inventories are much larger in total numbers than their non-Western counterparts. In the visual arts, the West produced 479 significant figures, compared to just 111 and 81 for China and Japan respectively. In literature, the West has 834 significant figures, compared to 82, 83, 43, and 85 for the Arab world, China, India, and Japan respectively. Is this a function of different levels of detail in the sources? Not in any readily apparent way. Encyclopedic sources specific to each inventory were used to establish the universe of potential significant figures. The mix of sources for each inventory-encyclopedic sources versus major histories, for example-was comparable across inventories. For whatever reason, references of comparable scope-encyclopedic sources compared with encyclopedic sources, histories compared with histories-of art and literature in non-Western cultures do not contain nearly as many people as sources dealing with the West. As far as I was able to determine, the pattern applies equally to sources written by the native-born of a given culture and sources written by foreigners.
How might the differences in numbers falsely underestimate the contribution of the non-West? No important parts of the world have been left out-the inventories include all of the countries with long-standing traditions of named writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Any alternative conclusion requires that we assume that the distribution of artistic excellence among the significant figures is utterly different in Western versus non-Western cultures, and that the quality of artists in the non-Western traditions is so much higher than in the West that even though their numbers are far fewer, virtually all of them are worthy of extended study, whereas only a small proportion of the significant figures of the West are worthy of study. But this line of argument has neither a rationale nor evidence.
What if we were to discard artists as the unit of analysis, and substitute artistic works for assessing relative contributions? If we limit ourselves to attributed works, the substitution of works for artists will have no effect, or will be in the West's favor. The authors, composers, painters, and sculptors of the post-1400 West were, as a rule, prodigiously productive. Compare the body of work by Shakespeare or Goethe with that of Li Bo or Murasaki; that of Michelangelo or Picasso with that of Sesshu or Zhao Mengfu; and so on down the list from the giants to the merely excellent. At every level, the aggregate number of major works is at least as large for Western as for non-Western artists.
Shall we consider lost works? Some of the most highly regarded Chinese artists have no surviving works at all. But the West similarly has painters such as Zeuxis, Polygnotos, and Apelles, considered by their contemporaries as artistic equals to the sculptor Phidias. None of their paintings survive, nor does any work of their lesser contemporaries. Even in literature, the masterpieces the West retains from ancient days are probably outnumbered by the ones we have lost. We know that Euripides wrote at least 90 plays, for example, and only 18 of them survive. One of the greatest of the surviving Greek dramas, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that took first place. Inserting a correction for lost works will not redress the imbalance between West and non-West.
Adding anonymous works also won't alter the picture. In literature, many non-Western cultures have traditions of authorless folklore, but so does Europe, with separate and rich traditions ranging from ancient Greece through the Norse Sagas and into the Renaissance, with contributions from every European language. In the visual arts, countries such as India and Persia have important bodies of unattributed painting and sculpture, but so do the countries of Europe, embracing virtually all the sculpture, paintings, and mosaics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages.
Expanding the definition of artistic accomplishment to include other forms of art that existed in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America runs into the same problem. Shall we add architecture, a category omitted from the visual-arts inventory? Certain structures in Asia and Central America belong on any list of great architectural accomplishment. But the entire roster of such architectural landmarks from outside Europe will be exceeded by comparable landmarks in medieval and Renaissance Europe alone, before we even look at European architectural accomplishment since then. Shall we introduce the decorative arts and crafts into the inventory of art works? Whatever gems of fine artisanship are introduced from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are going to be matched in quality and outnumbered by orders of magnitude by those originating in Europe. Consider the sheer volume of fine artisanship in stone masonry, stained glass, tapestry, and painted decoration from European churches and cathedrals alone.
Just as in the sciences, whatever mechanism one uses to try to augment the non-Western contribution in the arts will backfire if the same selection rules are applied to the West. It is impossible to be as precise about the relative contributions of West and non-West in the arts as in the sciences, but the generalization seems as valid: A balanced presentation of human accomplishment in the arts will naturally devote the large bulk of its attention to the West, and a large portion of this to Europe from the Renaissance onward.
The End of European Dominance?
I have gone to considerable lengths to document facts about the geographic and chronological distributions of human accomplishment that are controversial mainly because of intellectual fashions, not because the facts themselves can be disputed. Now is the time to introduce some cautions about the interpretation of those distributions.
The first caution is directed to those of us in the United States. Many Americans combine our civilization with that of Europe under the broad banner of "the West," but this is presumptuous. In his landmark Configurations of Culture Growth, written during the 1930s, anthropologist A.L. Kroeber observed that "it is curious how little science of highest quality America has produced"-a startling claim to Americans who have become accustomed to American scientific dominance since 1950. But Kroeber was right. Compared to Europe, the American contribution was still small then. In the arts as well, a large dose of American humility is in order. Much as we may love Twain, Whitman, Whistler, and Gershwin, they are easily lost in the ocean of the European oeuvre. What we Americans are pleased to call Western civilization was overwhelmingly European civilization through 1950.
The second caution is not to place too much weight on the numbers. The number of lost works and forgotten artists in the period before 1400 would, if taken into account, increase the pre-1400 proportion somewhat. Not a lot-even very generous estimates of the bias created by lost works only modify the dominance of modern Europe-but some. It is also important to remember that the period prior to 1400 may have had comparatively few significant figures, but it was rich in giants.
Furthermore, much of that genius came from outside Europe. Aristotle had different insights into the human condition than Confucius and Buddha, but not necessarily more profound ones. Those who are in a position to make such judgments describe the greatest poetry from China as among the greatest poetry ever written. A fine Japanese rock garden or ceremonial tea bowl expresses an aesthetic sensibility as subtle as humans have ever known.
The third caution is to remember that many civilizations arose independently of Europe, and rose to similar technological levels-developing tools and techniques that enabled them to build large structures and road networks, develop complex agricultural practices and distribution mechanisms, conduct commerce, and build thriving cities. Evidence scattered from Angkor Wat to Machu Picchu attests to the ability of human beings throughout the world to achieve amazing technological feats.
And yet the underlying reality is that Europe since 1400 has overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in both the arts and sciences. The estimates of the European contribution are robust. I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist by the end of this century. Perhaps this is an especially appropriate time to stand back in admiration. What the human species can claim to its credit in the arts and sciences is owed in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just a half-dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.
Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI.
Source Notes: This essay is adapted from the author's forthcoming book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.
AEI Print Index No. 15487
2003-08-20 03:52 | User Profile
The next time one of your friendly local H1-Bs suggests that your career prospects might be enhanced by devoting valuable intellectual cycles to a study of Hindi or Mandarin, draw their attention to the following table:
Countries with 5 or more Nobel prize winners in the "hard" (*) categories:
USA 231
UK 77
Germany 65
France 30
Sweden 16
Netherlands 15
Switzerland 13
Canada 12
Russia 10
Italy 9
Denmark 8
Austria 7
Japan 5
(*) hard categories include the physical sciences and economics. Excluded are the Peace and Literature prizes that are, respectively, purely political and a round-robin goodie for third-world nations such as Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, worthy earlier recipients such as W.S. Churchill notwithstanding.
But what about forward-thinking, genetically superior, technologically savvy societies like India, China and Israel, I hear you ask. Sad to report they are all in the underperforming section, with 2, 0, and 0 'hard' prizes respectively.
2003-08-21 00:13 | User Profile
[img]http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/TECH/biztech/08/11/training.replacements.ap/story.programmer.ap.jpg[/img] ** Kevin Sherman trained Indian workers to build and maintain databases, but quit his job when he was then assigned to fix their broken PC's.** Hey, I thought they were all geniuses!
[url=http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/08/11/training.replacements.ap/index.html]http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/08/11...s.ap/index.html[/url]
U.S. tech workers training their replacements
Monday, August 11, 2003 Posted: 9:40 AM EDT (1340 GMT)
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Scott Kirwin clung to his job at a large investment bank through several rounds of layoffs last year. Friends marveled at the computer programmer's ability to dodge pink slips during the worst technology downturn in a decade.
But it was tough for Kirwin, 36, to relish his final assignment: training a group of programmers from India who would replace him within a year.
"They called it 'knowledge acquisition,"' the Wilmington, Delaware, resident said. "We got paid our normal salaries to train people to do our jobs. The market was so bad we couldn't really do anything about it, so we taught our replacements."
Finally laid off in April, Kirwin sent out 225 resumes before landing a temporary position without benefits at a smaller bank -- and swallowing a 20 percent pay cut.
Kirwin is among what appears to be a growing number of American technology workers training their foreign replacements -- a humiliating assignment many say they assume unwittingly or reluctantly, simply to stay on the job longer or secure a meager severance package.
Their plight can be seen as an unintended consequence of the nation's non-immigrant visa program -- particularly the L-1 classification. The L-1 allows companies to transfer workers from overseas offices to the United States for up to seven years -- ostensibly to familiarize them with corporate culture or to import workers with "specialized knowledge."
**It also lets companies continue paying workers their home country wage. Indian workers receive roughly one-sixth the hourly wage of the average American programmer, who makes about $60 per hour in wages and benefits. **
Large technology companies say the L-1 helps them staff offices in less-developed companies with workers who understand the needs of a global corporation. And some labor experts say out-of-work programmers should stop complaining, and focus on their own re-training, just like the Rust Belt assembly line workers whose factory jobs migrated to Mexico and Asia in the 1980s.
But unemployed tech workers contend that so many good jobs are going to places like Bombay, Bangalore and Beijing that honing their technical skills is futile. According to the research firm Gartner Inc., one out of 10 technology jobs in the United States will move overseas by the end of next year.
L-1 classification
"Once I figured out what was going on, I was disgusted," said Kevin Sherman, a 47-year-old programmer and technical author from Worthington, Ohio, who was working for Manifest Corp., an information systems consulting firm in Upper Arlington, Ohio.
Sherman held onto his $62,000-per-year contract job while he taught several dozen Indian workers how to build and maintain computer databases in 1999 and 2000. He quit rather than take on his next assignment: fixing the newly trained foreigners' broken PCs. He's been unemployed for two years.
Nancy Matijasich, Manifest president and CEO, said she no longer employs L-1 workers like those Sherman trained, because the Y2K threat has passed and the company has less need for programmers.
"There was a shortage of skills in the '90s," Matijasich said. "But we haven't processed visas in a long time."
The State Department issued 28,098 L-1 visas from October to March, the first half of fiscal 2003. That's an increase of nearly 7 percent from the same period in 2002.
But the number of L-1 workers in the United States is likely much higher, said Charlie Oppenheim, the State Department's chief of immigrant visa control. Each L-1 lets a worker enter the United States multiple times over several years....
Of course, the rest is nothing we haven't read or seen already. But maybe it's true, and the land of the world's worst pilots is working toward spaceflight. :)
[url=http://www.itpaa.org/]http://www.itpaa.org/[/url] [url=http://www.hannatroup.com:81/]http://www.hannatroup.com:81/[/url]
2003-08-21 00:23 | User Profile
[url=http://www.reason.com/links/links073003.shtml]http://www.reason.com/links/links073003.shtml[/url]
**Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?" **
July 30, 2003
Offshore Lore Myths and facts of white-collar out-sourcing Jeff Taylor
Last week in a story one-part Pentagon Papers and three-parts Fucked Company, The New York Times jumped into a debate that has been simmering for several years in tech circlesââ¬âthe off-loading of jobs to places like India. You can bet that more stories and plenty of political interest will follow.
Relying on smuggled-out tape of a con-call between top IBM managers, the Times gets credit for taking the story beyond bulletin boards, happy hours, and places like Fucked's sister site, InternalMemos. The Times also wrangled some absolutely jaw-dropping quotes that indicate corporate honchos expect to be able to bluff their way past questions about moving high-paying jobs offshore without anyone calling them on it. It is a dangerous gambit which could produce the worst of all possible worlds: some sort of government hurdle requiring companies to demonstrate a "need" to out-source.
Take this howler from IBM spokeswoman, Kendra R. Collins, "It's not about one shore or another shore. It's about investing around the world, including the United States, to build capability and deliver value as defined by our customers."
No, it's about working the cost side of balance sheet in search of profits; revenues have been flat for two years and show little sign of improving. This is what good managers do, and there is no reason to be ashamed of it if you truly think you are going to make the company stronger.
But the catch is that out-sourcing is being embraced without much sign that it will actually make high-tech firms, particularly software companies, more effective. Highly collaborative, imaginative work might suffer in the hands of technically adept but inexperienced programmers. [color=blue] (The writer is bending over backward to avoid the well known lack of creativity and inventiveness among most East Asians, Indians, etc....) [/color] :)
The Times also passes along some dubious information on the actual cost of Indian outsourcing which makes the pay gulf between the U.S. and elsewhere seem impossibly wide. Stephanie Moore, vice president for outsourcing at Forrester Research, claims that "crackerjack" Indian programmers can be had for $5,000 a year. That might be close to what the programmers see, but it doesn't represent the cost to a U.S. company to outsource.
According to people who actually negotiate outsourcing contracts for a living, your costs are more like $22 an hour for each warm body once all the third-party finders' fees are paid. An experienced programmer's take in India would be around $11,000 out of total cost of over $40,000. That's still quite a gap from the $60,000 an American might demand but once the all-important question of productivity is factored in, it may not be much of a bargain.
**Simply put, once you leave the U.S. you are leaving behind the world's best, most proven pool of programmers. That's is not to say that there aren't excellent programmers in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But large-scale, world-changing software development ain't easy. The Net bubble devalued just how hard it is to build neat technology. Shawn Fanning is the exception that proves the rule. **
Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?"
Another veteran software developer thinks corporate planners across the industry are delusional and that the matter is somewhat self-correcting. "Your dealing with people who are too smart to just sit back and train their replacements," he tells me. Still, he thinks we are in for a period of flux as out-sourcing plays out as the latest management fad, like TQM or worshipping Jack Welch.
2003-08-22 16:00 | User Profile
guys u got me wrong.human history did not begin with renaisence.its much more.western dominance of the world is only from 15th century[u cannot add greeks and romans since their influence is confined to only meditterean lands]and is still continuing but also slowely declining.on the other hand civilisations like india china egypt etc existed much much long ago.the point is not to lessen western achivements[as many people in this form understood]but to say that there r other civilisations which also has good achivements at some other point of time.if some nations r poor that does not mean they r like that through out their history.as far as nobel prize is concerned it is essentially a western concept,camaflauged but generally accepted as universal prize.as commentator oliver frank has said that nobel prize depends on 60% political influence of respective countries and 40% achivement.even people like henry kissenger who was indicted for war crimes in cambodia and vietnam got noble prize that to for promoting peace.it is wrong to say that a nations acchivements is equal to number of nobels they get.we should not forget that american nobel prizes also consists of jews,europeans,asians etc who setteled in america. as far as IT is concerned americans r teaching to asians because its pure economics.asians come cheap and work more and there by give more profits to corperates.its nothing to do with anything. to friedrich braun,im here not to weep.im here to learn,to share ideas.i will accept the truth what ever it is even if im wrong initially.if u do not agree with me then give ur view.let me know what my faults are.but dont use foul language.it only shows ur upbringing.
2003-08-22 16:36 | User Profile
Arya - here is some more Western technology you can try:
When composing your message in Word, click on Tools > Options > Spelling and Grammar, then check both the 'Check spelling as you type' and the 'Check grammar as you type' boxes.
u'll find it works a treat.
2003-08-22 16:42 | User Profile
arya:[color=red]...commentator oliver frank has said that nobel prize depends on 60% political influence of respective countries and 40% achivement ...[/color]
Yes, arya, that's generally been true of some jewish winners of Nobel Prizes, although sometimes it's been $$$ influence or media influence instead of "respective countries" when it comes to jewish winners. Other non-Whites have benefitted not from their country's political influence, but from their ... ethnicity. Despite all the bending over backward, backstabbing, etc. going on, most winners are still White. But the Lords of PC and friends will figure out some way to remedy that. For awhile, anyway.
2003-08-22 17:17 | User Profile
Since I brought up the matter of Nobel winners, allow me to expand on an earlier point.
I specifically excluded the Peace and Literature prizes from the table for the very reason that these are highly susceptible to political cronyism and PC-driven agendas.
However, given that India, China, and Israel have all been independent states for over 50 years, and therefore immune to Whitey's baneful influence, what is the explanation for their miserable non-performance? Perhaps the cream of their creative talent is engaged on developing nuclear weapons to menace and bully their neighbors?
More likely, in my view, is that the genetic material present in all three societies relegates them to the ranks of receptor rather donor culture. The propensity is to steal and copy to turn a rupee or a shekel rather than to strive to discover new frontiers in human knowledge. The latter seems to be purely a trait found in the nations founded from European stock, the so-called donor cultures. All others are receptors.
2003-08-22 19:13 | User Profile
**here is some more Western technology you can try:
When composing your message in Word, click on Tools > Options > Spelling and Grammar, then check both the 'Check spelling as you type' and the 'Check grammar as you type' boxes.
u'll find it works a treat. **
All this time I thought Arya was posting from a mobile phone. :shock:
2003-08-22 22:16 | User Profile
**Since I brought up the matter of Nobel winners, allow me to expand on an earlier point.
I specifically excluded the Peace and Literature prizes from the table for the very reason that these are highly susceptible to political cronyism and PC-driven agendas.
However, given that India, China, and Israel have all been independent states for over 50 years, and therefore immune to Whitey's baneful influence, what is the explanation for their miserable non-performance? Perhaps the cream of their creative talent is engaged on developing nuclear weapons to menace and bully their neighbors?
More likely, in my view, is that the genetic material present in all three societies relegates them to the ranks of receptor rather donor culture. The propensity is to steal and copy to turn a rupee or a shekel rather than to strive to discover new frontiers in human knowledge. The latter seems to be purely a trait found in the nations founded from European stock, the so-called donor cultures. All others are receptors. **
Good points, Dan, I've mentioned much the same in other threads. In point of fact, some psychometricians wonder if it is the "structure" of White's intelligence that is one of the keys to the inventiveness and creativity displayed by Whites. Asians tend to have an "imbalance" with their best "area" or skills being visuospatial (good for certain areas of math and memorization) but low verbal and the jews with their best area being highly skewed toward certain areas of "verbal" intelligence - but low visuospatial. Both groups have high average IQ's (narrow SD's as compared to Whites) and both groups seem more able to learn and synthesize than actually gain insight, invent, or make some of the startlingly vast leaps in logic that lead to major breakthroughs as have Whites over the last few centuries. Whites seem to have a balance, and outscore both groups on certain "analytical" tests. Obviously, there are areas of cognitive abiltity that cannot be tested - or mentioned by most - in the mainstream. Yet.
2003-08-23 06:40 | User Profile
hi guys.i think this forum is going on and on and on.so its better to stop it here.i respect ur views but cannot agree with it.there r many mistakes in my writing because english is not my language.to be frank i am also not interested in learning it.i am happy if people get to know what im thinking even though my language is not perfect. thank u.