Earth Day Call to Action

How to sustain the spirit of Earth Day throughout the year? This is the concern of students at a local College in San Jose, California.

Alvarado feels that Earth Day should be advertised more so people can get educated on what it is about and what kind of things can be done to help. He feels that everyday should be Earth Day. He plans to educate the people around him such as his mother, girlfriend and others about what they can do to help. He is hopeful that some of the actions we take on Earth Day will become everyday habits.

Nancy has learned from her sisters to go green everyday, not just on April 22. Her older sister is an environmentalist and her younger sister is a marine biologist. She avoids using plastic bags and unplugs home appliances like the microwave when not in use. "I have learned that little things make a big difference, so I will instill this idea in my little daughter."

Hameed has planned a family gathering to emphasize the importance of conservation in all aspect of his and his family’s lives. In the long run, he feels that children will educate their parents on how to preserve the earth’s environment.

Yvette is part of the Earth Day committee promoting awareness at O'Connor Hospital where she works. She and her group emphasize recycling and going green every day. She will be giving away reusable shopping bags and other Earth Day tokens. She has made a poster of all the things that the departments are doing, for example, saving two cases of paper for board meetings by going digital. Instead of printing graphs for meetings, she makes PowerPoint presentations. She and her colleagues use scratch paper for notes, always print double-sided and makes sure that there are recycle bins on every floor.

For Garcia, Earth Day is a reminder of how contaminated the earth has become because of all the chemicals and the pesticides and man-made pollutions. “Too many people never bother to recycle. They can begin by taking shorter showers. There are many ways to help this beautiful planet. I recycle all the time. I collect cans, bottles and paper and give them to my mom so she can sell them.”

On Earth Day, Rafael plans to do three things. First, he will email all his friends to remind them to recycle every opportunity they get. Second, he plans to buy a bicycle so that he can reduce his carbon footprint by using his car as little as possible. Third, he will pledge some money to a conservation group to help in their efforts “to save our beautiful planet.”

Sindi helps the environment by carpooling five days a week with two other people from work. This helps with gas and parking fees. She and her friends have been doing this for almost four years now and it has worked out great for all of them.

Jessica likes to think Green everyday. She knows that we are ruining our planet but that it is also up to us to save it. She talks to her son about the environment and the little things he can also do to help. She uses cloth bags, reusable drink bottles and bigger home appliances after 7 P.M. But she feels that she can do more as a mother. With her son, she picks a day to use only the bike. That way they both get exercise and get some quality time together. "We also pick a night when we don't use electricity but only candles. My son loves this because he gets to light the candles."

Josephina is happy that there is a day called Earth Day dedicated to celebrating our planet. “I love to learn new ways to become more earth-friendly and learn more about the issues that can be harmful to the planet and can be particularly hazardous to me or my family, including my future family,” she says. “Currently I have no children but it is nice to know that we are taking steps to help them grow up in a clean environment.” Josephina has started to recycle more. “I used to recycle only cans; now I recycle glass, paper and everything else worth recycling. I have also recently bought a bike and have made the commitment to ride it to school at least once a week, weather permitting. I also try to buy food from local farms and farmers’ markets. I do other little things like turning off lights when not in use and not waste water by leaving it running unnecessarily.”

A Reminder to Practice Humility

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried the city of Pompeii under ash and pumice. The Roman Empire was at its height then but against Nature’s fury, it was defenseless.

Time and again we are reminded of our fragility in this connected world when Nature breaks out of her bounds (as we imagine them to be) and clarifies who is really in charge. A shift in the plates here, a buildup of pressure inside the earth there, and suddenly business as usual comes to a halt. All our technology and ingenuity and scientific advances become irrelevant. We are mere spectators gazing at something terrifying and indescribable. Sure, we can pick up the pieces after the fact to study and investigate and add to our knowledge but then suddenly there’s another cataclysm of one sort or another and we are back to where we began.

The volcano in southern Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier sends ash and silicate into the air. Born of ice and fire, the plume travels across land and ocean and soon the airspace over most of Europe is closed. People enjoying their spring vacations are stranded all over the world. Business deals are delayed. Artists are unable to perform. Crucial meetings are postponed. Home seems farther than it has ever seemed before. Even President Obama has to cancel his trip to attend the Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s funeral. Volcanic ash does not distinguish between an ordinary plane and Air Force One.

Natural calamities, perhaps more than ecology, teach us in unforgettable ways that we live in an interconnected world.

What we need to nurture in a technology-driven world is a sense of humility. If we put all of humankind’s achievements on one side and nature’s occasional yawn on the other, guess which side will tilt over? Yet we keep acting like masters of the universe, doing as we please, waging war, threatening, killing, pumping carbon into the air, plundering and raping the earth as if there will be no consequence.

Iceland’s Halldor Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955 for his epic “Independent People” and other works, wrote of the tragedy that befalls man when he indulges in hubris. Fly too close to the sun and your wings will melt. We forget this but then in the middle of our party, an earthquake strikes, or a cyclone or a tsunami, and we realize anew how small a corner we occupy in the vast canvas of our existence.

Apple, Mindshare and Passion

It has become almost a cliche to say that Apple has a lock on mindshare unparalleled among technology companies. It is still 48 hours away for customers to buy iPads but the excitement and anticipation is reminiscent of the Harry Potter books. Can any other company equal this?

The iPad may not solve global warming and world hunger but you will be hard-pressed to convince the aficionados. Besides games and entertainment, the iPad is expected to make the health care process smoother and easier and, consequently, less expensive. Looking up patient records and sending data seamlessly to physicians for remote diagnosis are just two of the potential applications that can make the iPad an indispensable tool in hospitals and homes. Coming in the wake of Obama's revolutionary health care reform, the iPad is already poised to make history.

But there is a story behind the iPad story. And that story belongs to Steve Jobs. Nowhere will you find this story more eloquently expressed than in Jobs' commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.

"... it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," said Jobs. " The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life ... Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did."

That is the story in a nutshell. Jobs loved what he did and that's why no setback could set him back. The great physicist Hans Bethe expressed the same sentiment: "Never work on a problem for which you do not have an unfair advantage." Where does the unfair advantage come from? From love for what you do.

Millions of Americans are now without jobs. The long shadow of recessions is unlikely to disappear soon. Yet if you are passionate about something - and you have to have something to be passionate about - nurture it and sooner or later the sun will shine through. As Jobs said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life ... have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

So, no matter how useful the iPad may turn out to be, it will always be secondary to the story of the man who loves what he does and never loses faith in himself.

Firing Bad Teachers and Promoting Good Ones

I teach a statistics class as an adjunct faculty at a college in California. The other day, a student came up to me, almost in tears. He was having a terrible time in his economics class. He wants to major in business. Economics and statistics are two core requirements that he must fulfill before transferring to a university.

“I am getting nothing out of my economics class,” he lamented. “The teacher never explains anything. He just scribbles furiously on the board. The other day he drew many graphs and many equations on demand and supply theory. When a student asked him to explain the theory in simpler terms, he humiliated him in front of the whole class. None of us are learning any economics. Do you have any advice for me?”

“Is he full-time?”

“Yes, and tenured.”

Well, that probably explains it. All I could tell him was to team up with a few like-minded students and see if learning from each other helps. I am a big believer in peer-to-peer learning. I have encouraged this among my own students. When a student has difficulty, for instance, looking up the binomial probability distribution table, I ask another student who has mastered the task to help him. It works beautifully.

But the larger issue is what to do with the rogue teachers who are blind to the needs of their students and fear no consequences. They are untouchable. The underlying “principle” is that the Teachers’ Union will defend them against any threat to their job security. Everyone knows it. The dean of the department knows it. The rogue teacher’s peers know it. Yet nothing happens and students continue to suffer year after year, at a terrible cost to them and to society.

Another student who took an elementary algebra class from me had to sign up for intermediate algebra in the summer from another teacher. She told me about the hell she had to endure from this tenured professor.

Each chapter in the algebra text has about 7-8 sections. I had barely enough time to cover a single section in an hour. This teacher (summer classes are usually 3hours long in this college) bulldozed his way through almost two full chapters per class. That’s about 14-16 sections in one sitting!

“I lost weight,” the student told me. “I was so stressed and exhausted that I became a machine. That’s how I survived. I learned nothing. He never entertained any question. Our homework and tests were graded by the publisher’s online setup. He never checked our homework or tests or quizzes himself. He always seemed angry and gave the impression that we were wasting his time. I never had such a miserable experience in my life.”

A recent cover story in Newsweek (March 15, 2010) boldly claimed that the key to saving American education was startlingly simple: “We must fire bad teachers.” Almost all recent data and educational reports suggest that teacher quality is the most important factor in the success of our education system. A talented teacher can unlock the potential of a student while a bad teacher can stifle it and even doom the student’s future. Parents will happily go along with a class of 40 students taught by a great teacher than a class of 10 taught by a bad one. The influence of an inspiring and demanding teacher can last a lifetime. Unfortunately, so can the influence of a mediocre and unimaginative one.

Charter schools like KIPP and Teach for America use rigorous methods for selecting their teachers and subject them to frequent evaluations. The success of teachers in these schools is entwined with the success of their students. If students do not show improvement, the failing teachers are replaced. But charter schools represent only 3% of America’s public school students. It is not clear that charter schools can scale well.

At the community college level, firing bad teachers often lead to legal battles that can drag on for years. It can also lead to trouble for students who dare to report. Yet I have found in private conversations that many teachers themselves strongly support firing the incompetent ones among them. They also seem to know who they are. These rogue teachers tarnish the image of the teaching profession and bring bad name to entire departments. It is the case of one rotten apple spoiling the whole barrel.

What compounds the problem is that when a budget crisis forces layoffs, and California is now going through its severest budget crisis in decades, it is often the young teachers who are laid off first. Yet they are the ones who are often best able to connect with students because of their facility with technology and current issues and their passion for teaching. In reality, though, the longer a teacher has worked in the school system, the more secure he is, no matter how atrocious he may be as a teacher. This quality-blind law and last-in, first-out model has been a disaster for our schools. Seniority can never be the basis for who gets to shape the minds of our students.

Teachers themselves have suggested three criteria to judge their own effectiveness: classroom management skills, attendance and a rigorous, objective annual performance evaluation rating. The three add up to one final criterion: the performance of students.

The sooner this type of quality-based system is put into practice, the better off we will be as a nation. While such practices are the norm in schools such as KIPP and Teach for America, public schools and colleges are still mired in politics and endless debates about repealing quality-blind laws. But the status quo cannot continue because the future of our nation is at stake.

About my statistics student, I have decided that I will personally take him to my dean and together, we will make a formal protest against the economics professor. If necessary, I will add other students who will be willing to stick their necks out. It is likely that I will be relieved of my teaching duties for being a “troublemaker.” That’s okay. The satisfaction that my students have already given me over the years with their evaluations will last me a lifetime. But perhaps this protest will have a ripple effect and at least a few of the teachers who are no longer passionate about their craft will retire voluntarily, to make room for those with a gift for teaching. If that happens, there is nothing I can think of that will bring me more happiness.

D-Day for Health Care Reform in America

The D-Day (as in “Defining-Day”) for health care reform in America arrives tomorrow, Sunday, March 21, 2010. Barack Obama has staked his young presidency on this bill. He will not become a lame-duck president if the bill fails to pass but there is no doubt that his image and effectiveness, at least in the short-term, will take a major hit.

Even among his die-hard supporters are those who feel that the president’s “obsession” with health care has diverted attention from the foremost problem facing America today: loss and lack of jobs. When Americans worry about having a roof over their heads or putting food on the table, seeing a physician becomes a luxury that can temporarily be dispensed with.

Yet there is also no denying that universal health care coverage is a right, not a privilege. Sure, the cost to the economy will be in hundreds of billions of dollars but can we, as a civilized and humane society, allow money and politics to trump what is fundamentally an ethical and moral issue? What kind of society will ours be if insurance companies continue to deny or revoke with impunity (the case of Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, is one of thousands of such cases) the coverage of Americans when they are afflicted with life-threatening conditions?

The idea underlying insurance companies is: Grab as much premium as possible from the healthy but exclude those who are sick. This macabre 'survival of the fittest' business model is unacceptable in any civilized society.

Obama’s administration has to bear responsibility for the cliffhanger that the health care bill has become. We Americans abhor serpentine language. We believe that if anything is worth fighting or dying for, we should be able to understand it without having to master the language of lawyers. Yet there has been no coherent explanation by the president or the democrats about why and how the heath care bill makes sense economically, socially and politically. Simply evoking the moral principle has played into the hands of Republicans. Their shrill warning that American capitalism, as we have known it for two hundred years, will die if the health care bill were to pass, has resonated with many fence-sitters simply because Democrats have not matched them in the “easy-to-understand” department. This is particularly ironic given the president’s reputation as a wordsmith and his facility in distilling an issue to its essence in words that can capture the imagination of Americans, as we saw repeatedly during his presidential campaign.

The American most passionate about health care reform was the “Liberal Lion of the Senate,” the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. That his seat is now occupied by a Republican who is against health care reform shows how far the fortune of the Democrats has fallen in a single year.

Yet I believe that tomorrow House Democratic leaders will find 216 votes to make the health care bill the law of the land. Like most Americans, I am a prisoner of hope (especially today, the first day of spring!) and I cannot accept the fact that 216 of our representatives will miss out on this historic milestone that will affirm the right of every American access to health care. It is almost as historic a milestone as the election of an African-American to the highest office in the land, and there will be enough, just enough, votes to see the bill through.

Nicholas Kristof: Citizen of the World

No one has done more to motivate Americans to engage with people from other countries and cultures in the last two decades than Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times columnist is unique among his peers in inspiring us to look beyond America’s border and our own interests to seek justice, promote peace, help entrepreneurs, empower women, save children and build schools to transform not only ourselves but our foreign policy as well.

Kristof won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his reporting on the genocide in Darfur. His graphic description of how the armed Janjaweed militia, backed by the government of Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir, were ‘killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur,' compelled us to act. Thanks in part to his reporting, American schoolchildren raised money for building schools in Darfur and wrote impassioned letters to their congressmen and senators to stop the genocide. It’s from a Kristof column (Dec. 17, 2009) that many of us learned about Valentino Deng, one of Sudan’s “lost boys,” who built a school in his hometown of Marial Bai (www.valentinoachakdeng.org), after suffering unimaginable horrors in his young life.

Kristof has often written about women because of his conviction that unless they have free and easy access to education and entrepreneurship, particularly in developing countries, there will be neither peace nor progress in the world. (In his latest book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” co-written with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, Kristof expands on his argument that developing countries can best fight poverty and promote democracy by helping women achieve personal and financial independence.)

“Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer,” he wrote in a column. “So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women? It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes. It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Quran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.” Kristof concludes that “any person’s human rights should be sacred, and not depend on something as earthly as their genitals.” His story on Mukhtaran Bibi, a Pakistani woman who was gang-raped in her village but who set an example by testifying against her attackers, moved many readers to raise more than $133,000 for her. With the money, Mukhtaran built a school for girls in her tribal village. Her memoir, "In the Name of Honor," became an international best-seller. Although her troubles are far from over, she now has a global audience that the Pakistani government will have to contend with if anything bad happens to her.

His column on “Bead for Life” (http://www.beadforlife.org/) was another inspiring story about the vision and generosity of ordinary Americans. Torkin Wakefield and Devin Hibbard, a mother-daughter team from Colorado, set up the “Bead for Life” organization after stumbling upon a Ugandan woman in the slums of Kampala making beautiful jewelry from garbage. One thing led to another and now the nonprofit recruits hard-working entrepreneurial women from Uganda earning $1 a day or less who get training in “how to cut strips of scrap paper, roll them tightly, glue them and seal them and, presto, a beautiful bead!” The beads are marketed mostly in America through Tupperware-like parties. In 2009 alone, there were 3,000 parties attended by about 100,000 Americans. Annual jewelry sale runs at $4 million. How can you not become curious about Ugandan beaders whose products you are wearing?

I wonder how many Americans were inspired to act by Kristof’s column on the Salwen family of Atlanta but I suspect that there were many. The family discovered “the power of half” by cutting down on everything they owned or consumed (house, car, everything) and channeling the savings (about $800,000) through the Hunger Project (http://www.thp.org/) to sponsor health, micro-financing, food and other programs for about 40 villages in, get this, Ghana.

Since 2007, Kristof has been sponsoring a “win-a-trip” contest for American university students. The winner goes on a reporting trip with him to Africa to cover issues of global poverty and come up with solutions. The number of participating students has been increasing dramatically each year. It goes to show how passionate many young Americans are to do something with their lives that will make a difference in the lives of those for whom everyday is an existential battle.

The columns cited here offer only a glimpse into the global humanitarian work that Nicholas Kristof promotes through his powerful and persuasive pen. Americans ask him for suggestions as to which charities around the world they should contribute to, without worrying about tax breaks. He has written about Greg Mortenson, the Montana native who started from scratch but built hundreds of schools in the remotest areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has written unflinchingly about male domination in Muslim societies and its terrible social, economic and political costs. At the same time, he has also written about how easily and unjustly many Americans stereotype Muslims and attack the religion of Islam. He has written heartbreaking stories about children forced into prostitution and the flesh trade. His writings on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, in its historical context and complexities, have probably been fairer than the writings of any other American journalist.

Not all of Kristof’s columns are noteworthy. He has missed his mark on occasions. Some of his pieces are predictable. But what distinguishes him from his peers is his desire to make the world a better place. He does this not by wearing rose-colored glasses but by describing what he sees with clear and direct prose and offering solutions that manage to be both practical and altruistic. It is a tribute to his humanity – and his status as a global citizen - that more Americans ask him, rather than any other journalists, that most telling of questions: “What can I do?”

Oscar Math for Best Picture

A course I am teaching – Mathematics for General Education – at a college in Northern California deals with various voting methods. The students are as excited as any movie buff about the 82nd Annual Academy Awards this year (3/7/2010) but they have an additional reason: they are curious to see how the new voting system for Best Picture plays out. They have been learning about the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) method in my class.

The number of pictures that could nominated for the Best Picture award, from 1946 until last year, was 5. This year the number has been increased to 10 (Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up and Up in the Air.)

Suppose there are 100 voters to pick a winner. If Up in the Air were to win 51 votes, the contest would be over because it had won a majority of the votes. This is as straightforward as it can get. However, it is rare that in a field of 10, one picture will get a majority of votes in the first round.

Let’s consider a more complicated (some would say, pathological) case. Suppose Up in the Air won 11 votes, eight other pictures won 10 votes each and the remaining picture won 9 votes. According to the old system, Up in the Air would still win because it had the most first-place votes (plurality, as opposed to majority), even though it did not reflect the choice of a whopping 89 voters!

How can a picture rejected by 89% of the voters still win the Oscar? It is precisely to remedy such situations that the IRV method is being used. It is fairer than the Plurality method it is replacing and isn’t that complicated either.

In IRV, voters identify not only their first choice, but second, third and fourth choices, all the way down to tenth in this year’s Best Picture category. In other words, a voter whose first choice is Avatar may identify The Hurt Locker as her second choice, Up in the Air the third, An Education the fourth, and so on. (There are around fifty-eight hundred Academy members who will cast their votes for Best Picture among the nominated 10.)

For simplicity, consider 4 pictures and only two choices to illustrate how IRV method works. Suppose this is how the 100 votes are cast:

Number of voters	33	26	23	18
1st choice	Avatar	Hurt Locker	The Blind Side	Up
2nd choice	Up in the Air	District 9	Avatar	Hurt Locker

None of the pictures won a majority of votes. Since Up has the fewest first-place votes in this example, it gets bumped from the list. The second-place Hurt Locker moves up and takes over its 18 votes. The table now looks like this:

Number of voters	33	26+18 = 44	23
1st choice	Avatar	Hurt Locker	The Blind Side
2nd choice	Up in the Air	District 9	Avatar

But Hurt Locker isn’t the winner yet because still there is no majority (at least 51 in this case). In the second round, eliminate The Blind Side because now it has the fewest first-place votes. Avatar moves up and grabs its 23 votes. The table now looks like this:

Number of voters	33 +23 = 56	26+18 = 44
1st choice	Avatar	Hurt Locker
2nd choice	Up in the Air	District 9

Now there’s a majority winner (56 out of 100) and it’s Avatar!

So how did the students cast their “votes” for The Best Picture? Of the 40 students, one chose District 9 as his first choice, another chose The Hurt Locker and the rest, all 38 of them, chose Avatar!

If Community College math students had their say, it would appear that Avatar would win by an overwhelming majority in the very first round. If only life were that simple!

Close!

It came tantalizingly close to being a miracle but in the end, Team USA came up, in the heartbreaking words of MVP goaltender Ryan Miller, "just one shot short" in men's hockey final in the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Ryan kept the Americans in contention throughout the game with his unbelievable saves. When America equalized 2-2 with only 24.4 seconds remaining in regulation time, a miracle beckoned. But it was not to be. Sidney Crosby found a way to beat Miller in sudden-death overtime, redeeming himself and an entire nation that lives and dies by hockey.

Perhaps it was fitting that the game should end this way but what Team USA accomplished is nothing short of miraculous. From now onwards, USA will be considered a legitimate contender for the gold. Ryan Miller, Patrick Kane and others have shown the way and there is no stopping the American momentum. There maybe setbacks on the way to the summit (just ask Canada) but eventually America will get there and remain there before another upstart nation climbs its way to the top.

The curtain comes down on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics tonight. For Canada with the largest haul of gold medals (14), it was a spectacular success. The USA won the most medals ever in any Winter Games (37). It began in tragedy but the euphoria of Olympics soon took over. We saw grace and unfortunately, lack of it as well. The artistry, the persistence, the redemption, the inexplicable blunders and the unexpected victories, the relentless drive, the shattered records and the humble heroes (there were a few) - this is what Olympics is about and we got more than what we had any right to expect.

But I am glad the Winter Olympics is over. For 16 days I absorbed more TV than I did in the the last 16 months. The tube will be silent until July when the World Cup Soccer begins in South Africa. But that requires another mindset, another set of loyalties. Go Brazil!

Another Miracle on Ice?

So it has come down to USA and Canada in the hockey final in the Vancouver Winter Olympics! This is the dream match everyone (in North America at least) was hoping for. That the young Team USA beat Canada 5-3 in their pool match last Sunday is a distant memory. That loss actually gives Team Canada the advantage because the players are motivated to avenge their earlier defeat in front of a delirious home crowd. They have, well, a score to settle.

Certainly in the individual talent department, the Canadians leave their US counterparts in the dust. But one of the major lessons in team sports is that a less-talented team with more cohesion often beats the team with superior talent but less cohesion.

Canada has probably overcome the lack of cohesion by thrashing the mighty Russians and beating Slovakia, although their superstar Sidney Crosby is yet to show his magic. The question is: Can Team USA pull it off again? Because if they do, it will be another Miracle On Ice. It may not have the fire of the 1980 Lake Placid Miracle against the Red Machine in the subtext of the Cold War. Still, it will be big.

The two teams will undoubtedly play their hearts out and fans will talk about it for years to come. My head says Canada will win but my heart is with Team USA. That I am an American has nothing to do with it. It's just that I have a weakness for miracles. And lately there have been far too few miracles to grace our lives. Go USA!

Gold Goes to the Best Figure Skater

Even before he stepped onto the ice, Russia's defending Olympic champion let it be known through his swagger that the gold was his. The rest of the world could compete for the silver. Evgeni Plushenko was that confident.

At least one skater didn't think so. America's Evan Lysacek was confident of his artistry and athletic excellence as well and decided that, instead of verbal jousting with Evgeni, he will let his skates do the talking. And did they ever!

In the short program, Lysacek fell behind Plushenko by a huge margin. Just kidding. It was by a mere 0.55 points, the perfect place for Lysacek to be, since the pressure intensified on Plushenko to deliver.

Then came the long program two nights later. All year long, Plushenko had been chattering about how his quadruple jump would separate him from the boys. The quad would dazzle the judges and beget him the gold for sure.

Lysacek refused Plushenko's bait. There was enough fire and ice in his routine to render the quad irrelevant. He chose not to play by Plushenko's rule. And, as Robert Frost would say, that made all the difference.

Lysacek was flawless in execution. He was imaginative and daring. The poetry just flowed from him and viewers knew they were watching someone special. Plushenko was not as smooth. At times he even seemed to be going through the motions. His did score more with his quad toe loop–triple toe loop combination but all three of Lysacek's spin sequences were rated level 4 - the highest level of difficulty. Only two of Plushenko’s were level 4. Over all three spins, Lysacek outscored Plushenko by 1.26 points. When Plushenko fell 0.9 points farther behind in his step sequences, Lysacek’s overall margin of victory increased to a whopping (relatively speaking) 1.31.

The audience in the Pacific Coliseum agreed with the judges and roared their approval. Not so the prima donna Plushenko. At the award ceremony he was boorish. Clearly he felt that the judges were not perceptive or wise or smart enough to crown him the king.

"I was positive that I won," he said at the post-event press conference. He continued: "But I suppose Evan needs the medal more than I do. Maybe it's because I already have one. I have to share with you -- two silver and one Olympic gold -- that's not too bad."

What a sore and ungracious loser! Perhaps when the Vancouver Winter Olympics comes to be remembered more for Lysacek's stellar performance than any other athlete's, Plushenko will accept reality and redeem himself with some expression of humility.

America has found a winner in Lysacek on and off the ice. We can expect another gold from him in the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia. I wonder if Plushenko will be in the audience.

Opening Ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics

The opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics was majestic and moving. It was so because Canada chose to be herself, instead of trying to emulate or outdo other opening ceremonies, particularly Beijing’s 2008 show-of-shows.

For me, the opening ceremony evoked memories of the two years I spent in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the early ‘70s. I had gone to Canada from the newly-independent nation of Bangladesh to study at Dalhousie University on a scholarship. Those were two of the happiest years of my life. So I was particularly thrilled when Sarah McLachlan, Halifax’s own, sang in her lovely lyrical voice words that summed up the Olympic spirit: “When you wake up everyday/Please don’t throw your dreams away.”

Donald Sutherland’s recitation of prose and poetry by Canada’s famous writers provided just the right touch to the story of that vast and varied land. On the stage, aboriginal Canadians (First Nations, Inuit and Métis) and actors enacted how the country was settled, from the Maritime Provinces all the way west to cosmopolitan Vancouver.

Delegations from 82 nations made their colorful entries into the indoor arena. The death of a Georgian luge athlete at a practice run cast a pall of gloom over the ceremony but the Olympic spirit demanded that the show go on. The Georgian delegation received a standing ovation. It was courageous and poignant at the same time.

The most touching moment came for me when eight of Canada’s legends drawn from various fields carried a huge Olympic flag. It included Sutherland, of course, but also Anne Murray. In Halifax, the first Western singer I came to admire was Nova Scotia’s Anne Murray. Her songs (Songbird, Danny’s song) were all the rage in Canada at the time and I listened to them an endless number of times. She had passed the torch to singers like Sarah McLachlan, a continuity memorably captured in the pageantry.

The most thrilling moment for me was when the camera zoomed in on the hockey legend Bobby Orr. He was the reason I became an ardent ice hockey, and Boston Bruins, fan. When I moved to Philadelphia from Halifax to pursue a doctorate degree at Temple University, Orr remained my favorite player. I was probably the only fan in Philadelphia rooting for the Bruins when the Flyers played the team in 1974 in the Stanley Cup finals. When Booby Clarke and the Flyers won the Stanley Cup, I was devastated because I knew how much Orr wanted to win.

Well, after more than three decades, here was Orr, one of the legendary eight, and suddenly I became aware of the passage of time more vividly than ever before in my life. Orr was white-haired. He had put on weight. I am sure his reflexes had slowed. What did I expect? This is what time does to each of us.

It was at this point that the Vancouver Winter Olympics became profoundly human for me. The mishap with the Olympic cauldron only made it more so. Of all the Olympic opening ceremonies – summer and winter – this was the most poignant, intimate, evocative and inspiring that I have ever seen. Thank you, O Canada, and win tons of gold!

Thoughts on Seeing "Three Monkeys"

“Play to your strength” is a golden rule to live by but difficult to embrace. There are many reasons for it. Your parents expect you to be an engineer, and even though your heart is into photography, you spend the most creative years of your life toiling away for an engineering degree. You sense that writing is your calling but everyone tells you that there’s no money there and so you grit your teeth and enroll in medical school. And, of course, how can you go wrong with computer science, the recognized gateway to wealth, and so you follow the herd, even though creating music is your passion.

Doing what others expect you to do instead of following your own heart leads to an unfulfilled life, whether or not you are making lots of money. And there are too many of us who fall into that category! It is what I think Thoreau meant when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

These thoughts came to me as I watched the Hindi movie “Three Idiots.” (I will use “musketeers” in place of “idiots,” because that’s what the three protagonists really are.)

Farhan, Raju and Rancho (Aamir Khan) are three engineering students at one of India’s elite engineering colleges. Rancho is a savant and a visionary.

He is appalled by the rote learning the college promotes and shocked by the autocratic and inflexible attitude of the principal. His challenging questions unsettle the teachers whose only aim is to prepare students to pass exams and land jobs with engineering firms. That they will be no more than cogs in the wheels does not concern anyone. When mediocrity works, why not maintain the status quo?

Rancho rejects this factory approach to learning. He seeks real knowledge, not pseudo-knowledge. He tells the other two musketeers not to chase success but to “make success chase you.” “Don’t beg at the feet of luck,” he admonishes them. Again and again he reminds them not to be afraid of the future. Do what interests you. That way, your job will be like play and you will be happy and professionally fulfilled.

In the nick of time, Rancho manages to save a girl about to be married off to a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Of course, the girl turns out to be … who else but the principal’s daughter! The typical Hindi melodrama notwithstanding, the movie does not veer away from its focus, which is to show a) how schools can become prisons and stifle the creativity of anyone who submits to rote knowledge, and b) how to break free from the walls of ignorance and appearance we build around ourselves by playing to our strength, no matter how daunting the obstacles may be.

Rancho is thrown out of classes by teachers because he is disobedient, his questions threaten the hierarchy, and his answers do not mimic the formal and dense textbooks. So he wanders to other classes to soak up whatever knowledge he can.

Watching this reminded me of something Steve Jobs, the Apple chairman and CEO, said in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. Jobs attended an expensive community college but “after six months, I couldn't see the value in it … So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting … Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating … None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

What Jobs is saying is that if you trust your guts, sooner or later you will find what animates you, and then you will find your life’s calling. But you have to take that risk, “trust that it would all work out OK.”

Jobs went on to say that “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I also remembered a story about the late great physicist Richard Feynman who had the following advice for a younger physicist:

“Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom. Don’t just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means.”
“Okay.”
“And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?”
“Does it make my heart flutter?”
“Yes or no. It’s a yes or no question. No equations allowed.”
“All right, I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t be dense. I don’t need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it’s not the answer that counts. It’s what you do with the information.”

This is what Rancho is saying too: Find something that makes your heart flutter and then do something about it. If you do, the sky is the limit.

“Three Idiots” transcends the inevitable song-and-dance routines of the typical Hindi movie (which it has in plenty) and teaches something powerful in an entertaining way. If you nurture the sweet dream of self-employment or if you need a nudge to do what your heart tells you to do, you may find this movie inspiring. And remember, it is never too late to do what you always wanted to do.

Tiger Woods's Unexpected Opportunity

Americans give celebrities a wide berth.

No celebrity got a wider berth in recent years than Tiger Woods. His preternatural golfing ability trumped everything: his disdain, bordering on contempt, for spectators, his lack of humility, his arrogance, his obsession with privacy.

His infidelities, and the blatant and reckless way he went about them, were his way of telling the world that he was above norms of civilized behavior. He was untouchable. We should simply exult in the fact that he deigns to share this earth with us, the unwashed masses in swooning awe every time he picks up a club. Whenever he lost, he rarely congratulated the winner, going on about how he made unexpected mistakes that cost him the game. If only he played a little better, it would have been a no-contest.

I am sure many golfers were ticked off by Tiger’s boorish behavior on and off the course but were afraid of making waves. After all, Woods was the most prized athlete in the world. Who dares to take on an icon?

One who has spoken candidly (finally!) is Tom Watson, a golf great himself. “Tiger’s actions have been bad for our game,” he said. "His golf is really secondary at this point. From his standpoint and his family's standpoint, it's something he needs to get control of ... and make some amends and show some humility to the public when he comes back."

Watson also criticized Woods’ swearing, foul language and club-throwing. “That's not part of what we want to project as far as the professional golf tour is concerned."

"I'll let the cat out of the bag," Watson continued. "Tiger has to take ownership of what he has done. He must get his personal life in order. I think that's what he's trying to do. And when he comes back, he has to show some humility to the public.

"I would come out and I would do an interview with somebody and say, 'You know what? I screwed up. And I admit it. I am going to try to change. I am trying to change. I want my wife and family back.'"

"I feel that he has not carried the same stature that other great players that have come along like Jack (Nicklaus), Arnold (Palmer), Byron Nelson, the Hogans, in the sense that there was language and club throwing on the golf course," Watson said. "You can grant that of a young person that has not been out here for a while. But I think he needs to clean up his act and show the respect for the game that other people before him have shown."

These are bracing words, words that Woods urgently needs to heed. There are reports that Woods has left the sex rehab in Mississippi and is now with his wife and two children to work on his marriage.

Here’s hoping that Woods succeeds. The golfer must recognize that fate has presented him with a monumental teachable moment. If he can redeem himself through fidelity and humility, chances are that his game will return too. A Tiger Woods who is devoted and loyal to his family, who appreciates the adulation of his fans, and who is humble and grateful for the gift he has been blessed with, can positively influence millions of impressionable minds and change the world for the better.