If it were a school debate, the subject of the topic would be ‘Sodexo coupons – A boon or a curse. Discuss’.

via Sodexo Coupons – Invalid. A Business Model explained | Kiran Dhanwada.

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Look at the analysis this paper does on recessions in different economies. Analysis and comparisons based on different parameters of current recession and earlier recessions is also very interesting. Also see Appendix A for data by episode.

• On international risk sharing and financial globalization (Eleonora Pierucci and Luigi Ventura)

Look at financial account components to GDP ratio for different countries. Some useful analysis on savings and factor income.

I recently attended a lecture at Madras School of Economics by Professor T.N. Srinivasan (Samuel C. Park, Jr. Professor of Economics, Yale University, Connecticut, United States). It was Third R.Venkataraman Endowment Lecture , in the fond memory of late President of India. President Venkataraman was a renowned economist and a lawyer and was fondly known as ‘RV’. Professor Srinivasan (hereafter TNS) talked about RV’s contributions towards development of India and his achievements in first few minutes of his interaction. the Occasion was also marked by the presence of Professor A. Vaidyanathan
(a member of the Central Board of Directors of the Reserve Bank of India).

The lecture focused on , “RECENT BOUTS OF INFLATION IN INDIA: POLICY PARALYSIS?”. I took notes from his lecture and would make an attempt to jot down main crux of his lecture.

He mentioned that the problem of stagnation of the share of financial savings , is threatened by black economy and high rates of inflation. He then pointed out key issues with the measurement of inflation in India, which are summarised as below.

Measurement Issues

1. RBI’s ultimate objective is sustained growth with financial stability. He says that from consumer’s welfare perspective relevant price index is Consumer Price Index (CPI). Also, Producer Price Index is used in many countries along with aggregate CPI. Neither an aggregate CPI(until recently) nor PPI is published in compiled in India.
2. We measure Inflation as Wholesale Price Index (WPI), the year-on-year of this is also known as Headline Inflation. Also Wholesale prices of food articles is termed as Food Inflation which is misleading.
3. D Subbarao recognizes this problem yet RBI goes for WPI, primarily because CPI data was not available (and only made available in Feb, 2010).
4. Also, Indian WPI is not actually what WPI stands for, because it uses retail prices for some and wholesale prices for some commodities. It does not include services. So TNS hopes that when new data for CPI accumulates, RBI switch to its use.
5. He also proposes that in addition to CPI a new better PPI and cost of living index should be complied. Also In India, we do not have process to include new goods and quality improvements in old goods in price indices, we need it urgently because we see a huge wave of new products and quality enhancements in older ones due to trade liberalization and greater competition.

Keeping all this in mind, we can say that Inflation in India are overstating the true values.

Trends in Inflation

He underscores that time pattern in changes in the price of food articles and not the same as all commodities. In a period of 79 months from April 2005, nominal food prices rose faster in 55 months that other goods nominal prices.

• 53 out of 55 in two long spells.
• 26 out of 29 months from July 2005 to November 2007, and
• 27 out of 29 months from October 2008 to February, 2011

Repo Rates and Inflation

A simple correlation between inflation in all commodities and repo rate yields a coefficient of 0.39, and coefficient of ‐0.47 between inflation in food articles and the repo rate. This is somehow two opposite things happening out here.

Analysis of Inflation

1. He points out that Inflation is about changes in nominal prices over time, thus is a dynamic stochastic process which requires a framework incorporating the stochastic shocks to the economy for its analysis.
2. Any analysis of Inflation , necessarily has to take into account the monetary policy and financial sector behaviour as well. (He quotes Minton Friedman’s statement here.)
3. Effects on real sector integrated with monetary sector should also be considered (consumer welfare, aggregate and sectoral outputs and growth, real investment, employment)
4. He also talks about expectations of future prices, and quotes Keynes arguments of expectations of decision makers of the futures prices.
5. He says, that recent crisis was not foreseen by anyone not even academic economists, and it highlighted issues with macroeconomic and financial models, which gave way to ever-growing literature on ‘ What is wrong with Macroeconomics’. According to him, India specific models on Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) are very few.

Indian Inflation

1. Country’s economic managers have not been able to fully grasp the process underlying the persistent high inflation.
2. Criticizes Kaushik Basu’s papers published in EPW for being less insightful . Goes to an extent of saying that he would have not expected this from the brilliance of Basu.
3. One can refer Basu’s paper: I searched for the paper titles , and found them to be the ones below,     a)”Understanding Inflation and Controlling it”; b)”India’s Foodgrain Policy, An Economic Theory Perspective.”
4. He talks of Mihir Rakshit’s paper that questions the macroeconomic framework of monetary and fiscal policy.

Policy Implications

Good News: Recent Decline in Food Inflation

Bad News: GDP growth rate going down

Montek Singh points out to investment slowdown, but no data bear him out.

Unnecessary stimilus during March 2009.

Forward Looking manner needed.

Lack of consolidation – organised data

TNS expects RBI to come with a report on Impact of European Debt Crisis.

Policy should be proactive rather than reactive.

Lack of coherence in Policy Making

Vaidyanathan’s Inputs

Problems RBI faces: Skewness of Income increased, Enormous increase in Asset Pricing, Informal Financial Sector.

2.     Payment Process, should be clear and straightforward. Most likely you will be paying online you want to be sure that your private information and details are protected. A trusted and reliable seller is one who accepts acceptable and renowned payment options such as PayPal and alert pay.

3.     Reputation, read the seller’s reviews. This will give you an idea of how it is to deal with the seller that you are considering doing shopping with. Stick to the official company websites and renowned websites for all your shopping needs.

4.     Shipping and handling policies, read the refund and return policies and all other legal terms before finally clicking on purchase. In case you cannot find these terms, it is within your right as a buyer to request the seller via telephone or email to guide you on where on their website you can find legal terms of business.

While shopping online is very easy and convenient, it presents risks and only by being an informed buyer can you be guaranteed of a great purchase.

Shopping for a new used car ?  Hertz would like to offer my readers and exclusive discount of $100 OFF the purchase of some of their newly used cars for sale . Hertzrent2buy.com is an innovative way to check out used cars and prices. Be sure to see the wide variety of high quality cars and amazing deals. For $100 off use promo code R2B-CSU.

I went through the BitBucket website and found that you can have multiple online repository to maintain versions of your code effectively.

• Bitbucket is a code hosting site for Mercurial, a distributed version control system (DVCS).
• hg is the command you use to run Mercurial. (‘Hg’ is the chemical symbol for mercury).

One can simply sign in to BitBucket and start using to maintain his code for free.  You can share your repository, share your code . It also works from windows , you have to just install TortoiseHg.  Setting up permissions are also very easy,

The Bitbucket repository permission types are:

• Reader
• Writer
• Administrator
• Owner

Some of the salient features:

• You can Clone, Work in Local Repository, then Push.
• You can fork , pull and branch a repository.
• One of the best things, When you add a repository to Bitbucket, you also get a wiki. The wiki is a simple place to keep documents.
• When you add a repository to Bitbucket, you also get an issue tracker. This is the place to track your project’s feature requests, bug reports and other project management tasks.
• Collaborating with other people is very easy and convenient with a distributed version control system (DVCS) like Mercurial. Bitbucket makes it even easier.

I definitely plan to use BitBucket for all my versioning control and day to day coding thoughts. It is a great tool and I advise all the programmers to use this tool. Get your hand on to this tool very soon,

Till then Have a coffee and Cheers!!

Intern Fights

summer projects – Google Search

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SummerOfCode – The Official Wine Wiki

SoC 2008 – VideoLAN Wiki

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The FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers

FreenetWiki: The Free Network Project Summer Projects 2008

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ActiveXperts Software – Download 30-day trial versions

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Interesting Internships

Kernel System Calls

Programming in C

 

Security for J2EE Applications @ JAVA DEVELOPER’S JOURNAL

Single sign-on is becoming an important issue for corporations and Java developers. Corporations require applications to be secure. Users demand applications to be easy to use. Usually, the more secure an application is, the more difficult it is to use. For example, users are inundated with remembering multiple logins to different systems.

Another Alternative : FileCatalyst.com:
A free, fast file transfer service that is perfect for sending large files such as, videos, audio tracks, drawings, images, and pdf’s. It’s a completely secure service and will be faster then you’d ever anticipate.

Flex Related Bookmarks

Flex Video Player « FX Components

Flex 3 – Adobe Flex 3 Help

iitjobs.in | – interesting jobs for interesting people

iitjobs.in is a site dedicated to provide jobs to students and graduates of IITs and other premiere schools of India. Each job is carefully screened and only the best jobs make it to the site.

XMLandPHP

editing xml with php script form – Google Search

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