A House report found that Americans fleeing Asia and Europe to beat the president’s travel bans faced few temperature checks or other rigorous screenings to see if they were bringing the virus home.

1 New Taiwan Dollar = 0.1492 Romanian Leu

1 Thai Baht = 0.1391 Romanian Leu

1 Turkish Lira = 0.6282 Romanian Leu

1 Singapore Dollar = 3.1524 Romanian Leu

Formula One's income between January and March plummeted from $246 million in 2019 to just $39 million this year, a drop of 84%, figures released by championship owners Liberty Media revealed on Thursday.

1 Mauritian Rupee = 0.1121 Romanian Leu

1 Nepalese Rupee = 0.0368 Romanian Leu

1 Bangladeshi Taka = 0.0524 Romanian Leu

1 Moldovan Leu = 0.2498 Romanian Leu

Brian Waller questions the lack of political will when it comes to preventable deaths across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, while Tony Haynes reveals how artists can explore attitudes to disease

Neil Singh’s powerful long read (Cholera and coronavirus: why we must not repeat the same mistakes, 1 May) tellingly compares the way in which the world is reacting to Covid-19 with how it has handled cholera, especially in developing countries. He states: “There is no biological or environmental reason why cholera can’t be eradicated … It is not the knowhow that is lacking, but rather the political will.”

Exactly the same conclusion can be reached in respect of the 5 million-plus children under five who are dying every year. According to the World Health Organization, many of these early child deaths are preventable or can be easily treated, but there is nothing remotely like the effort being put into this as in the response to Covid-19. Might the reason for that inaction be that more than 80% of these deaths involve children in central and south Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa?
Brian Waller
Otley, North Yorkshire

1 Colombian Peso = 0.0011 Romanian Leu

When LSU won the title, the spread won, too. How did we get here and what might be next?

1 Uruguayan Peso = 0.1032 Romanian Leu

1 Uzbekistan Som = 0.0004 Romanian Leu

1 Russian Ruble = 0.0607 Romanian Leu

1 Iraqi Dinar = 0.0037 Romanian Leu

1 Cayman Islands Dollar = 5.3427 Romanian Leu

1 Swiss Franc = 4.5865 Romanian Leu

1 CFA Franc BCEAO = 0.0074 Romanian Leu

1 Vietnamese Dong = 0.0002 Romanian Leu

1 Macedonian Denar = 0.0784 Romanian Leu

1 Zambian Kwacha = 0.0009 Romanian Leu

1 South Korean Won = 0.0037 Romanian Leu

1 Jordanian Dinar = 6.2768 Romanian Leu

1 Lebanese Pound = 0.0029 Romanian Leu

1 Bahraini Dinar = 11.7759 Romanian Leu

1 Chilean Peso = 0.0054 Romanian Leu

1 Maldivian Rufiyaa = 0.2872 Romanian Leu

1 Malaysian Ringgit = 1.0275 Romanian Leu

1 Nicaraguan Cordoba Oro = 0.1294 Romanian Leu

Players are working out creatively, but can't replace the intensity of team training.

Jordan Love has come a long way from the 5-foot-6, 130-pound kid who almost gave up football.

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 2.4807 Romanian Leu

1 Estonian Kroon = 0.3122 Romanian Leu

1 Danish Krone = 0.6472 Romanian Leu

1 Fiji Dollar = 1.9766 Romanian Leu

1 New Zealand Dollar = 2.7335 Romanian Leu

1 Croatian Kuna = 0.6418 Romanian Leu

1 Peruvian Nuevo Sol = 1.3102 Romanian Leu

At 10:30 AM PST Dorian and Max will be off running!

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0809 Romanian Leu

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 1.2982 Romanian Leu

1 Brunei Dollar = 3.1512 Romanian Leu

This is the 18th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

The man who gave us our national anthem, Rabindranath Tagore, once wrote that nationalism was “a great menace.” He went on to say, “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.”

Not just India’s, but the world’s: In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945 as Adolf Hitler was defeated, Karl Popper ripped into nationalism, with all its “appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.”

Nationalism is resurgent today, stomping across the globe hand-in-hand with populism. In India, too, it is tearing us apart. But must nationalism always be a bad thing? A provocative new book by the Israeli thinker Yael Tamir argues otherwise.

In her book Why Nationalism, Tamir makes the following arguments. One, nation-states are here to stay. Two, the state needs the nation to be viable. Three, people need nationalism for the sense of community and belonging it gives them. Four, therefore, we need to build a better nationalism, which brings people together instead of driving them apart.

The first point needs no elaboration. We are a globalised world, but we are also trapped by geography and circumstance. “Only 3.3 percent of the world’s population,” Tamir points out, “lives outside their country of birth.” Nutopia, the borderless state dreamed up by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, is not happening anytime soon.

If the only thing that citizens of a state have in common is geographical circumstance, it is not enough. If the state is a necessary construct, a nation is its necessary justification. “Political institutions crave to form long-term political bonding,” writes Tamir, “and for that matter they must create a community that is neither momentary nor meaningless.” Nationalism, she says, “endows the state with intimate feelings linking the past, the present, and the future.”

More pertinently, Tamir argues, people need nationalism. I am a humanist with a belief in individual rights, but Tamir says that this is not enough. “The term ‘human’ is a far too thin mode of delineation,” she writes. “Individuals need to rely on ‘thick identities’ to make their lives meaningful.” This involves a shared past, a common culture and distinctive values.

Tamir also points out that there is a “strong correlation between social class and political preferences.” The privileged elites can afford to be globalists, but those less well off are inevitably drawn to other narratives that enrich their lives. “Rather than seeing nationalism as the last refuge of the scoundrel,” writes Tamir, “we should start thinking of nationalism as the last hope of the needy.”

Tamir’s book bases its arguments on the West, but the argument holds in India as well. In a country with so much poverty, is it any wonder that nationalism is on the rise? The cosmopolitan, globe-trotting elites don’t have daily realities to escape, but how are those less fortunate to find meaning in their lives?

I have one question, though. Why is our nationalism so exclusionary when our nation is so inclusive?

In the nationalism that our ruling party promotes, there are some communities who belong here, and others who don’t. (And even among those who ‘belong’, they exploit divisions.) In their us-vs-them vision of the world, some religions are foreign, some values are foreign, even some culinary traditions are foreign – and therefore frowned upon. But the India I know and love is just the opposite of that.

We embrace influences from all over. Our language, our food, our clothes, our music, our cinema have absorbed so many diverse influences that to pretend they come from a single legit source is absurd. (Even the elegant churidar-kurtas our prime minister wears have an Islamic origin.) As an example, take the recent film Gully Boy: its style of music, the clothes its protagonists wear, even the attitudes in the film would have seemed alien to us a few decades ago. And yet, could there be a truer portrait of young India?

This inclusiveness, this joyous khichdi that we are, is what makes our nation a model for the rest of the world. No nation embraces all other nations as ours does. My India celebrates differences, and I do as well. I wear my kurta with jeans, I listen to ghazals, I eat dhansak and kababs, and I dream in the Indian language called English. This is my nationalism.

Those who try to divide us, therefore, are the true anti-nationals. We must reclaim nationalism from them.

© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic

This is the 19th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

A friend of mine was very impressed by the interview Narendra Modi granted last week to Akshay Kumar. ‘Such a charming man, such great work ethic,’ he gushed. ‘He is the kind of uncle I would want my kids to have.’ And then, in the same breath, he asked, ‘How can such a good man be such a bad prime minister?”

I don’t want to be uncharitable and suggest that Modi’s image is entirely manufactured, so let’s take the interview at face value. Let’s also grant Modi his claims about the purity of his neeyat (intentions), and reframe the question this way: when it comes to public policy, why do good intentions often lead to bad outcomes? To attempt an answer, I’ll refer to a story a friend of mine, who knows Modi well, once told me about him. 

Modi was chilling with his friends at home more than a decade ago, and told them an incident from his childhood. His mother was ill once, and the young Narendra was tending to her. The heat was enervating, so the boy went to the switchboard to switch on the fan. But there was no electricity. My friend said that as he told this story, Modi’s eyes filled with tears. Even after all these years, he was moved by the memory.

My friend used this story to make the point that Modi’s vision of the world is experiential. If he experiences something, he understands it. When he became chief minister of Gujarat, he made it his stated mission to get reliable electricity to every part of Gujarat. No doubt this was shaped by the time he flicked a switch as a young boy and the fan did not budge. Similarly, he has given importance to things like roads and cleanliness, since he would have experienced the impact of those as a young man.

My term for him, inspired by Rajat Kapoor’s 2014 film, is ‘the ankhon dekhi prime minister’. At one level, this is a good thing. He sees a problem and works for the rest of his life to solve it. But what of things he cannot experience?

The economy is a complex beast, as is society itself, and beyond a certain level, you need to grasp abstract concepts to understand how the world works. You cannot experience them. For example, spontaneous order, or the idea that society and markets, like language, cannot be centrally directed or planned. Or the positive-sum nature of things, which is the engine of our prosperity: the idea that every transaction is a win-win game, and that for one person to win, another does not have to lose. Or, indeed, respect for individual rights and free speech.

One understands abstract concepts by reading about them, understanding them, applying them to the real world. Modi is not known to be a reader, and this is not his fault. Given his background, it is a near-miracle that he has made it this far. He wasn’t born into a home with a reading culture, and did not have either the resources or the time when he was young to devote to reading. The only way he could learn about the world, thus, was by experiencing it.

There are two lessons here, one for Modi himself and others in his position, and another for everyone.

The lesson in this for Modi is a lesson for anyone who rises to such an important position, even if he is the smartest person in the world. That lesson is to have humility about the bounds of your knowledge, and to surround yourself with experts who can advise you well. Be driven by values and not confidence in your own knowledge. Gather intellectual giants around you, and stand on their shoulders.

Modi did not do this in the case of demonetisation, which he carried out against the advice of every expert he consulted. We all know the damage it caused to the economy.

The other learning from this is for all of us. How do we make sense of the world? By connecting dots. An ankhon-dekhi approach will get us very few dots, and our view of the world will be blurred and incomplete. The best way to gather more dots is reading. The more we read, the better we understand the world, and the better the decisions we take. When we can experience a thousand lives through books, why restrict ourselves to one?

A good man with noble intentions can make bad decisions with horrible consequences. The only way to hedge against this is by staying humble and reading more. So when you finish reading this piece, think of an unread book that you’d like to read today – and read it!

© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic

One reason for attending the upcoming Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015) is to learn about challenges other engineers have faced, and hear about their solutions. And the best place to do that is the Cadence Theater, located at the Cadence booth (#3515). The Theater will host continuous half-hour customer and partner presentations from 10:00 am Monday, June 8, to 5:30 pm Wednesday June 4.

As of this writing, 43 presentations are scheduled. This includes 17 customer presentations, 23 partner presentations, and 3 Cadence presentations, The presentations are open to all DAC attendees and no reservations are required.

Cadence customers who will be speaking include engineers from AMD, ams, Allegro Micro, Broadcom, IBM, Netspeed, NVidia, Renesas, Socionet, and STMicroelectronics. Partner presentations will be provided by ARM, Cliosoft, Dini Group, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Methodics, Methods2Business, National Instruments, Samsung, TowerJazz, TSMC, and X-Fab.

These informal presentations are given in an interactive setting with an opportunity for questions and answers. Audio recordings with slides will be available at the Cadence web site after DAC. To access recordings of the 2014 DAC Theater presentations, click here.

This Cadence DAC Theater presentation drew a large audience at DAC 2015

Here’s a listing of the currently scheduled Cadence DAC Theater presentations. The latest schedule is available at the Cadence DAC 2015 site.

Monday, June 8

Tuesday, June 9

Wednesday, June 10

In a Wednesday session (June 10, 10:00 am) at the theater, the Cadence Academic Network will sponsor three talks on academic/industry collaboration models. Speakers are Dr. Zhou Li, architect, Cadence; Prof. Xin Li, Carnegie-Mellon University; and Prof. Laleh Behjat, University of Calgary.

As shown above, there will be a giveaways for a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, an iPad Mini, and a GoPro Hero3 video camera.

See the Cadence Theater schedule for further details. And be sure to view our Multimedia Site for live blogging and photos and videos from DAC. For a complete overview of Cadence activities at DAC, see our DAC microsite.

Richard Goering

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DAC 2015: Tackling Tough Design Problems Head On

Hi,

I have a test session object that I am getting like this:

maeTstSession=maeGetTestSession(test ?session session)

Is it possible to get the test name from this object? I am asking because this object passed to several levels of functions and I don't want to pass an additional argument with the test name

Hi there,

I'm running a transient simulation, and I want to get all instances with model implementation hisim_hv because after that I want to process the data and to adjust some parameters for this kind of devices before dumping the values.

What is the easiest/fastest way to get those instances in skill/ocean?

What I did until now: 

- save the final OP of the simulation and then in skill

openResults()
selectResults('tranOp)
report(?type "hisim_hv" ?param "vgs")

Output seems to be promising, and looks like I can redirect it to a file and after that I have to parse the file.

Is there other simple way? I mean to not save data to file and to parse it.

Eventually having an instance name, is it possible to get the model implementation (hsim_hv, bsim4, etc..)? 

Best Regards,

Marcel

A little bit of everything in the blog today: PSS is All Over As someone that was involved with UVM and PSS, both becoming Accellera standards, it is exciting to see both growing independently and together. With PSS we had a massive amount of papers ...(read more)