Emeralds for emperors

Telegraph (London) reviews the book The Colour of Paradise by Kris Lane. Interesting details:

Where had those emeralds come from? The Mughals and Persian Shahs had a three-fold classification: the very best were said to be from Egypt, the next category came from ‘old mines’ in Asia and the lowest quality came from ‘new mines’ in the Americas. But this was a fiction. Just 10 years ago, a team of mineralogists analysed the oxygen isotopes in a number of famous Mughal emeralds, and found that almost all of them were from the Americas. To be more precise, they were from the highlands of Colombia; this analysis was in fact able to identify the specific outcrops from which they had been extracted.

The speed with which these jewels had passed along oceanic trade routes and percolated into India and Persia is remarkable. Admittedly, some emeralds had been filtering back into Europe since the 1530s, when conquistadors plundered them from the treasuries of the Amerindian rulers they conquered. More emerged once these rapacious Spaniards understood that in some of these societies, jewels were buried with the dead: graves were opened and skeletons tossed aside in the search for booty.
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The wreck of a treasure galleon from Colombia, which sank off Florida in 1622, has yielded 6,000 emeralds; the surviving copy of the ship’s manifest does not mention them at all.

What held this trade together was a network of families, most of them Portuguese ‘New Christians’ (converted Jews), who had buyers in Colombia and the Caribbean, financiers and gem-cutters in Lisbon, and jewel-sellers in Goa. Some of Lane’s most fascinating pages tell the stories of their lives, with details culled from the Inquisition archives. The Inquisitors suspected, correctly, that many of them had not abandoned Judaism at all; by the mid-17th century it had expelled most of them from Colombia’s main trading centre, with predictable economic effects. Many moved to English or Dutch territory, and the jewel business of the English East India Company would soon be flourishing in the hands of traders with names such as Moses Henriques and Abraham da Fonseca.

Global trade is not a monopoly of the last 50 years.

BRIC in the wall

Reuters gives the full text of the joint statement from BRIC meeting in Brasilia. The operative clause is:

We will strive to achieve an ambitious conclusion to the ongoing and long overdue reforms of the Bretton Woods institutions. The IMF and the World Bank urgently need to address their legitimacy deficits. Reforming these institutions’ governance structures requires first and foremost a substantial shift in voting power in favor of emerging market economies and developing countries to bring their participation in decision making in line with their relative weight in the world economy. We call for the voting power reform of the World Bank to be fulfilled in the upcoming Spring Meetings, and expect the quota reform of the IMF to be concluded by the G-20 Summit in November this year. We do also agree on the need for an open and merit based selection method, irrespective of nationality, for the heading positions of the IMF and the World Bank. Moreover, staff of these institutions needs to better reflect the diversity of their membership. There is a special need to increase participation of developing countries. The international community must deliver a result worthy of the expectations we all share for these institutions within the agreed timeframe or run the risk of seeing them fade into obsolescence.

Volcano weather

The Eyjafjallajoekull eruption spreads an ash cloud

NYT reports:

Unlike huge volcanic blasts like that at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the eruption in southern Iceland began slowly about a month ago, with a series of fissures on the side of the volcano and what vulcanologists call fire fountaining, the spewing of hot magma through vents. [Bill Burton, associate director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s volcano hazards program] said that it was only when the magma found a new route through the volcano earlier this week — shifting to the summit, directly under the glacial ice — that the ash-rich eruption began.

That eruption late Wednesday created a plume of ash that spread out across Northern Europe at high altitudes, forcing aviation authorities to ground flights and close airports because of the risk of damage to aircraft, particularly the engines, from abrasive silicate particles.

Dr. Burton said that when the eruption shifted to the summit, there were indications that the silica content of the ash increased. “Theoretically, the more silica-rich the ash, the more risky or greater threat there is,” he said. But any volcanic plume is dangerous. “The plane is effectively sandblasted,” he said. “Even the windows can become frosted.”

Dr. Burton said the eruption was low on a measure of power called the volcanic explosivity index — certainly nowhere near Pinatubo, which rated a 6 on the 1 to 8 scale, or the 1980 explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, which rated a 5.

Pinatubo spewed so much ash, dust and aerosol particles into the atmosphere that it lowered average air temperatures worldwide for several years, as the particles blocked some sunlight from reaching the Earth. So far the Icelandic eruption has spewed far less material, and its location, in the high latitudes, also reduces its global impact. “The closer to the poles, the less effect it is likely to have,” Dr. Burton said.
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The volcanic plume contains a lot of sulfur, he said, “that can become an aerosol up there that hangs around a long time reflecting sunlight.”

“It’s not enough that it’s probably going to be cooling the whole climate,” he added. But on a regional basis it could create what is called volcano weather, with smoglike conditions.

Emergency measures

AFP reports:

An exclusive private Indian hospital faced closure Wednesday after it allegedly denied emergency treatment to a child who later died, sparking a mini riot.

Hundreds of protesters rampaged through the hospital in eastern Kolkata on Tuesday, causing 225,000 dollars of damage, after it was accused of turning away a seven-year-old girl who had suffered head injuries in a road accident.

The child’s family and bystanders said authorities at Peerless Hospital demanded 50,000 rupees (1,100 dollars) to admit the child — a vast sum for most people in impoverished India.

“If it’s proven that the injured were denied admission because they failed to deposit the required money, the government will cancel the licence of the hospital,” West Bengal state health minister Surya Kanta Mishrahe said.

All hospitals are required to admit patients requiring emergency treatment.

Ueeful piece of fact, that. One hears of cases where hospitals not only asked for money to be deposited before emergency treatment could be started but demanded that the payment be in cash.

Filthy lucre fascinates fans

As the Indian Premier League cricket matches enter their final dreary leg, the real story is elsewhere. HT reports:

With Parliament resuming its budget session on Thursday the IPL war of words escalated to a new high with the Kochi team franchise, its mentor minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor and his friend Sunanda Pushkar defending themselves and going on the offensive in the same breath.
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Lalit Modi called some of the members of our consortium partners (in a face-to face meeting) and asked us to take $50 million, walk out and forget about the team. He said, ‘I’m interested in another team’. We refused.”

“This is what happened,” Satyajit Gaikwad, spokesman for Rendezvous Sports World Private Ltd, the Kochi consortium, told Hindustan Times on Wednesday. Gaekwad is a two- time Congress MP.
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Modi called the $50m allegation “baseless” and “a figment of imagination”. “I met him (the reference in this case was to Shailendra Gaikwad) at the conference and thereafter at the Maurya Sheraton hotel where all owners were present,” he said.

“We also met during the signing ceremony and that is all. I want to know where I met him to make this offer.”

Earlier, Modi had reiterated at a press conference in Mumbai that there were “question marks” over who the owners of the Kochi franchise were.

“The people who presented the bid documents themselves did not know who they (the owners) were. That is why this issue has come up,” Modi said.
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Gaikwad said this was “completely untrue”.

“There has been no free equity at all, only sweat equity of 25 per cent for management services that will be rendered over time. In Mrs. Pushkar’s case, she has been given five per cent sweat equity to look after everything from sponsorship to advertisement to branding and event and media management for the next 10 years. She has handled events for us in the past and is a professional in this field, so I don’t see why she is being subjected to this needless controversy.”

Pushkar issued a statement also angrily denying she was fronting for anyone.

“My own business interests and assets are substantial, and efforts to besmirch Tharoor by presenting me as a proxy for him are personally insulting for me as a woman and as a friend,” she said.
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Gaikwad was insistent that Shashi Tharoor had “no benefit of any kind” from the consortium.

“His role as a mentor was basically because he is a leader from Kerala and a cricketer lover. It made sense.”

Tharoor told NDTV Wednesday evening that he was “very angry”.

“I’ve been vilified by Modi… there are other business interests at play here. In a democratic country like India, cricket or anything else shouldn’t be a closed shop, it should be transparent.”

Meanwhile, asked why the IT department was reportedly probing the consortium, Gaikwad said if it was, and he was unaware of that, it was “because of the confusion caused by Modi”.

“There is no question of there being any questions about where the funding came from. The money invested by the consortium is all tax-paid.”

So why did Rendezvous Sports, a management consultancy based out of Sholapur in Maharashtra, bid for Kochi? “How does it matter where a company is registered, the world is like a village now,” countered Gaikwad.

Telegraph reports:

The opponents of cricket czar Lalit Modi today raised questions about the stake of his relatives in at least two IPL teams and his connections with the BJP which made him a “super-chief minister” in Rajasthan when the party was in power.

Sanjay Dixit, an IAS officer who famously defeated Modi as president of the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) last year, is now using the same tool — Twitter — to strike at his adversary that the IPL boss has used to devastating effect against junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor.

From Monday to Tuesday, Dixit, through a series of tweets addressed to Modi, hurled posers about the stake-holdings of his relatives in Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab.

“Lalit, please also disclose the details of the shareholdings of your relatives in Jaipur IPL and GCV Mauritius.”

“Please tell me how the franchise contract was signed by Jaipur IPL when the bid was by Emerging Media? Who is Mohit Burman and how is he an investor in Kings XI Punjab, sorry what I meant was Gaurav Burman, your step son-in-law?”

ET reports:

A meeting of the Indian Premier League’s governing council, possibly in ten days, is likely to clip IPL commissioner Lalit Modi’s wings, said two members of the T20 cricket tournament’s key decision-making body.
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Besides Mr Modi and Mr Bindra, the 14-member governing council has former cricketers Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi as well as politicians and BCCI office bearers such as Arun Jaitley, Rajiv Shukla, Farooq Abdullah, Shashank Manohar, Niranjan Shah, MP Pandove, Chirayu Amin, Sanjay Jagdale and Niranjan Shah.

From the number of politicians named here, it seems that cricket lovers are more likely to be politicians than any other class of Indians. Now why would that be so?

Finally the ponderous Congress party has spotted healthy greens. Here’s what Business Week has to say:

Income tax investigators began probing the accounts of the Indian cricket board and the Indian Premier League on Thursday.

IPL commissioner Lalat Modi confirmed the investigators were at the cricket board and IPL offices at Wankhede Stadium.

“It is only an enquiry, not a raid,” Modi said. “We will extend all possible cooperation to them.”

Press Trust of India reported that Modi rushed to the cricket board headquarters after after income tax officials came to check the accounts.

Severe storm strikes eastern states

CNN-IBN reports:

A severe nor’wester packed with a wind speed of 125 kmph left 120 people dead, hundreds injured and a swathe of destruction in seven districts of Bihar, West Bengal and Assam.

Bihar accounted for the highest number of 77 deaths in five districts, followed by West Bengal with 39 in one district and Assam where four persons perished in one district in the storm that struck at midnight last night.

The fatalities in Bihar occurred in Purnia (33), Araria (33), Katihar (7), Supaul (2) and Kishenganj (2) districts.

In West Bengal, all 39 deaths were reported from in North Dinajpur district while in Assam four died in Dhubri district. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar announced an ex-gratia payment of Rs 1.50 lakh to next of kin of each of the deceased, besides ordering construction of pucca houses under the Indira Awas Yojana and foodgrains.

HT adds:

A severe cyclonic storm ripped through 11 districts of Bihar, West Bengal and Assam at 125 km per hour, killing at least 96 people, injuring hundreds and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless after destroying more than 50,000 huts in a span of 40 minutes before midnight on Tuesday.

Officials said most of the people who died were women and children who were crushed to death when their huts caved. The storm was accompanied by hail and rain.

In Patna, meteorological department officer S.I. Laskar said the storm was an entirely local phenomenon due to excessive heat and humidity, … adding that chances of a recurrence were remote.

Ill fares the land

NYRB publishes the first chapter of a book by Tony Judd which starts:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
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Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the US population: 120 million people.

Connect the dots time: which districts in India have the maximum difference in incomes between rich and poor?

Publishing science

Nature (subscription required) has an interesting article on social organization of big science:

Collective authorship opens up questions about the construction of knowledge in particle physics, says Peter Galison, a historian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In February, the CMS collaboration published its first paper based on an analysis of LHC data that showed that a larger than expected number of exotic particles, known as mesons, were produced during the first collisions (CMS Collaboration J. High Energy Phys. doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2010)041; 2010). The paper includes 15 pages of author names, totalling between 2,200 and 2,300 people (the collaboration leaders are unsure of the exact number). “Can it be said that any one person truly understands all the knowledge that it contains?” says Galison. And who, he asks, can externally review the papers produced? “You reach a stage where the only people qualified to truly review the work are within the collaboration,” Galison says.

De Roeck says that the size of particle-physics collaborations does inevitably affect peer review. The CMS paper went through months of rigorous checks and revisions during its internal review process; by contrast, it passed through external peer review by the Journal of High Energy Physics in just four days. “External peer review for publication in journals is becoming less important because it is far less stringent than our internal peer-review process,” he says.

Although the collaboration’s strength comes from stressing the communal good, recent developments may strain the system. A rising number of particle physicists are turning to the individualistic pursuit of blogging. Although most posts are not controversial, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, has had to deal with cases in which physicists broke ranks and leaked information before their collaborations were ready to release it. James Gillies, CERN spokesman, says that the European laboratory has no desire to censor blogs, but it does provide strict guidelines about when it is appropriate to discuss results.

Even with these guidelines in place, the blogging phenomenon at CERN — and its possible tension with official lines of communication — is something that will be closely followed by Borrelli as part of a team of more than 20 historians, philosophers and sociologists — “a huge collaboration in the humanities,” Borrelli jokes — that will begin investigating the LHC this year, with funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Ian McEwan’s new novel has a physics setting which seems so 19th century in comparison.

The future strikes back

Cnet reported 9 days ago:

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

Kit-Kats for everyone! That is a hellhole indeed.

Cyber shadow boxing

TOI reports:

Chinese hackers have pilfered classified documents from the India’s security, defense, and diplomatic establishment, including assessments of the Maoist and Naxalite movements, the security situation in the country’s North East, and New Delhi’s ties with Russia and the Middle East, U.S and Canadian researchers who tracked the cyber-espionage have said.

In a report titled ”Shadows in the Cloud” issued on Monday, researchers based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto said an India-focused spy operation seemingly based out of China’s Sichuan province hacked into computers across India and in Indian missions abroad, stealing sensitive data, including information on Indian missile systems gathered from independent analysts. They also obtained a year’s worth of Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages.
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The report comes in the middle of External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna’s four-day visit to China to mark 60 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries. In Beijing yesterday, Krishna said China and India should shun a competitive approach and sought China’s support for India’s bid for a UN Security Council seat in an effort to warm up ties the increasingly frosty ties between the Himalayan neighbors.

A press release from the University of Toronto reports as part of the summary of the findings:

Theft of classified and sensitive documents – Recovery and analysis of exfiltrated data, including one document that appears to be encrypted diplomatic correspondence, two documents marked “SECRET”, six as “RESTRICTED”, and five as “CONFIDENTIAL”. These documents are identified as belonging to the Indian government. However, we do not have direct evidence that they were stolen from Indian government computers and they may have been compromised as a result of being copied by Indian officials onto personal computers. The recovered documents also include 1,500 letters sent from the Dalai Lama’s office between January and November 2009. The profile of documents recovered suggests that the attackers targeted specific systems and profiles of users.
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Command-and-control infrastructure that leverages cloud-based social media services – Documentation of a complex and tiered command and control infrastructure, designed to maintain persistence. The infrastructure made use of freely available social media systems that include Twitter, Google Groups, Blogspot, Baidu Blogs, blog.com and Yahoo! Mail. This top layer directed compromised computers to accounts on free web hosting services, and as the free hosting servers were disabled, to a stable core of command and control servers located in the PRC.