Boosting Innovation: Murthy’s Idea Of Funding Indian PhDs In US Is A Non-Starter

Murthy’s idea will cost Indian Government in the tune of $25 bn over five years, an investment that can be better used to set up several top-notch universities and research institutions where Indians currently working abroad can be lured back.

NR Narayana Murthy suggested that India should spend an annual $5 billion to create 10,000 PhDs in American universities with the explicit proviso that none of them will be employed in the US. They have to return home to work on innovative projects and products right here.

While prima facie this seems like a bold idea to unleash thousands of innovators in India, giving a quantum jump the creation of intellectual property, a closer examination shows that this is actually a defeatist solution. Among other things, it concludes that India cannot produce world class PhDs, that the ones produced in the US will become innovative in India merely because they did their stuff under western masters, and that all this expense is worth it for ensuring high quality PhDs.

This is a typical Indian non-solution that essentially says India can’t be reformed, and that we need ideas that bypass our institutional limitations rather than improve them. This is the kind of thinking that got us a Right to Education Act, which essentially forces the 10 percent of reasonably competent privately-run schools to provide education to the underprivileged, instead of focusing on the real issue: how to make state schools deliver by making them accountable.

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The ‘8 Is’ of design thinking for startups

From ‘lean’ methods and ‘agile’ innovation to design thinking and customer development, a number of useful tools are emerging for startups and innovators. Design thinking is a human-centered approach towards problem solving and product generation which is driven by creativity, customer empathy and iterative learning.

Based on research, case studies and workshops conducted in this field, here is my framework of the ‘8 Is’ of design thinking for startups: intent, insights, immersion, interaction, ideation, integration, iteration and intensification.

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Best practices for software license management

Software license management is the process that ensures that the legal agreements that come with procured software licenses are adhered to.In a basic sense, it ensures that only legally procured licenses are deployed on systems.

Organizations spend a fortune on licenses every year, and a lack of management around it can result in heavy fines. In some cases, CIOs of certain organizations have been taken into custody for violating norms.

This article, provides the basic concept of how software license management works along with a process map.

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IT's 9 Biggest Security Threats

Years ago the typical hacking scenario involved a lone attacker and maybe some buddies working late at night on Mountain Dew, looking for public-facing IP addresses. When they found one, they enumerated the advertising services (Web server, SQL server, and so on), broke in using a multitude of vulnerabilities, then explored the compromised company to their heart's content. Often their intent was exploratory. If they did something illegal, it was typically a spur-of-the-moment crime of opportunity.

My, how times have changed.

When describing a typical hacking scenario, these days you must begin well before the hack or even the hacker, with the organization behind the attack. Today, hacking is all crime, all the time, complete with bidding markets for malware, crime syndicates, botnets for hire, and cyber warfare gone amok.

Here are the nine biggest threats facing today's IT security pros as outlined by Roger A. Grimes.

Threat No. 1: Cyber crime syndicates
Threat No. 2: Small-time cons -- and the money mules and launders supporting them
Threat No. 3: Hacktivists
Threat No. 4: Intellectual property theft and corporate espionage
Threat No. 5: Malware mercenaries
Threat No. 6: Botnets as a service
Threat No. 7: All-in-one malware
Threat No. 8: The increasingly compromised Web
Threat No. 9: Cyber warfare

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Code of best practices in fair use for academic and research libraries

This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself.

It identifies eight situations (listed below) that represent the library community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials and describes a carefully derived consensus within the library community about how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations. These are the issues around which a clear consensus emerged over more than a year of discussions. The groups also talked about other issues; on some, there seemed not to be a consensus, and group members found others to be less urgent. The community may wish to revisit this process in the future to deliberate on emerging and evolving issues and uses.

SUPPORTING TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH ACCESS TO LIBRARY MATERIALS VIA DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

USING SELECTIONS FROM COLLECTION MATERIALS TO PUBLICIZE A LIBRARY’S ACTIVITIES, OR TO CREATE PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS

DIGITIZING TO PRESERVE AT-RISK ITEMS

CREATING DIGITAL COLLECTIONS OF ARCHIVAL AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS MATERIALS

REPRODUCING MATERIAL FOR USE BY DISABLED STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, AND OTHER APPROPRIATE USERS

MAINTAINING THE INTEGRITY OF WORKS DEPOSITED IN INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES

CREATING DATABASES TO FACILITATE NON CONSUMPTIVE RESEARCH USES (INCLUDING SEARCH)

COLLECTING MATERIAL POSTED ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB AND MAKING IT AVAILABLE

Read this 32 pages document from Association of Research Libraries.