Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a noted economist and a brilliant scholar. The tweets being sent out in his name by his media team, however, include typos and other slip-ups. Maybe they do a rush job. He has been on Twitter since Jan 22. Notice anything wrong in these tweets?

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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

It was Auden’s birth anniversary yesterday. He was born  in York on Feb 21, 1907,  and he died in Vienna on Sept 29, 1973. I love many of his poems, and when I saw this picture of a painting which inspired one of his famous poems, I could not resist having it here. So here is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Breughel, with Auden’s poems, Musee des Beaux Arts.

Musee des Beaux Arts
By Wystan Hugh Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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Indian voters are increasingly electing rich people to parliament.  And once elected, they  tend to get even richer.

Of the 543 MPs in the Lok Sabha, the lower House of parliament, 315 are crorepatis or multimillionaires in rupee terms.  One crore is equal to 10 million.  One crore or 10 million rupees amounts to nearly $202,800.

That may not seem all that much, but the pace of wealth creation is phenomenal. The 157 MPs who were re-elected in 2009 nearly tripled their assets in five years. Their assets rose on average from Rs 2.2 crore in 2004 to Rs 6 crore in 2009.

Indian ministers have got richer too. Fifty-nine of the 77 ministers are crorepatis. On an average they have become richer by more than Rs 3 crore in only two years. Their average asset value rose from Rs 7.3 crore in 2009 to Rs 10.6 crore last year.

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) gave these figures based on the affidavits filed by the politicians with the Election Commission.

The picture was somewhat different for the 34 Cabinet ministers. Some reported a drop in assets, but there were big jumps too.  Praful Patel’s assets increased from Rs 42 crore to Rs 122 crore and Kamal Nath’s from Rs 26 crore to Rs 41 crore.

Wealthy politicians seem more likely to win elections. That is clear from this table, taken from the ADR report.

As this map from the ADR report shows, more than half the MPs in most of the Indian states are crorepatis.

Indian map showing states represented by rich MPs

This chart shows their education level. Of the 543 MPs, 151 are graduates, 132 postgraduates, 107 graduates with professional qualifications, 21 are doctorates, 54 have studied up to Class 12, 46 up to Class 10, 9 up to Class 8, 9 up to Class 5, 7 up to some other level, 4 are literate and there is no data about the three others.

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It’s Valentine’s Day. Here are a few poems for the occasion.Click on the player buttons to start the slideshow.

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Guess which US universities host the most international students? Here’s the list of the 25 US universities which had the largest number of international students in 2010-2011.

These 25 universities had a total of 144,359 international students – or 20 per cent of all the international students in America — in 2010-2011. The information is from the Open Doors Data of the Institute of International Education.

The University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, had the largest number of international students: 8,615. Next came the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign (7,991) followed by New York University (7,988), Purdue University at Lafayette (7,562), Columbia University (7,297), University of Calfornia, Los Angeles (6,249), Ohio State University in Columbus (6,082), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (5,995), Michigan State University in East Lansing (5,748), and Harvard University (5,594). These were the 10 universities with the largest number of international students.

Harvard was followed by Indiana University in Bloomington (5,471), Boston University (5,464), University of Florida (5,393), University of Texas, Austin (5,323), Penn State University – University Park (5,207), SUNY University at Buffalo (5,125), University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (5,124), Georgia Institute of Technology (4,943), Arizona State University (4,934 ), Texas A&M University (4,874), University of Pennsylvania (4,752 ), University of Wisconsin (4,647), University of Houston (4,377) and Cornell University (4,357 ).

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The number of international students in the United States rose from 690,923 in 2009-2010 to 723,277 in 2010-2011, a 4.7 per cent increase, according to the Open Doors Data from the Institute of International Education. But what are the subjects they study?

Engineering and business management – these are the most popular fields of study for those from the 26 countries that send the largest number of students to America.

The Open Doors Data online does not mention the popular fields of study for students from other countries. So, unfortunately, we cannot see here the top choices of students from Singapore.  Among students from India, the majority are in engineering (36.9 per cent), maths/computer science (19.8 per cent), business management (15.2 per cent) and life/physical sciences (11.4 per cent).  For students from China, the top choice is business management (27.5 per cent) followed by engineering (19.2 per cent, life/physical sciences (11.5 per cent) and maths/computer science (10.6 per cent).

China sends the largest number of students to America, followed by India.

South Korea is third and Japan seventh.  Other Asian nations on the list of 26 countries sending the largest number of students to America are Vietnam (eighth), Nepal (11^th), Thailand (15^th), Hong Kong (16^th), Indonesia (19^th), Malaysia (20^th) and Pakistan 24^th. Russia is 26^th on the list.

Business management is the top choice of students from Hong Kong, 31.2 per cent of the students from the territory taking management lessons.

The Malaysian students’ top choices are engineering (29.1 per cent) and business management (19.8 per cent).

The Indonesians’ top choices are business management (30.2 per cent ) and engineering (18 per cent).

The Thais’ top choice is also business management (24.2 per cent) followed by engineering (17.6 per cent).

The majority of Taiwanese are in business management (23.4 per cent), engineering (14.7 per cent), fine/applied arts (11.5 per cent) and life/physical sciences (10 per cent).

For South Koreans, the top choices are business management (17 per cent), fine/applied arts (12.2 per cent ), engineering (10.8 per cent) and social sciences (10.1 per cent).

The Japanese’ top choices are business management (19.8 per cent), Intensive English (10.8 per cent) and fine/applied arts (8.6 per cent).

The Nepalese’ top choices are business management (23.5 per cent ), engineering (16.9 per cent) and math/computer science (12.1 per cent).

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The United Kingdom continues to attract the largest number of students from the United States, according to the Open Doors Data from the Institute of International Education. The number of American students abroad went up by 3.9 per cent from 260,300 in 2008-2009 to 270,600 in 2009-2010. The number of American students in the UK went up from 31,300 to 32,600. In Asia Pacific, the largest number of American students were in China, up from 13,600 to 13,900. The number of American students in Australia fell from 11,100 to 9,900 though it was the second most popular destination for American students in the region.  Japan was the third most popular destination in the region with the number of American students in the country going up from 5,700 to 6,100. India was fourth with the number of American students in the country rising from nearly 2,700 to more than 3,800.

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The number of students from Singapore went up from 4,051 in 2009-2010 to 4,356 in 2010-2011, but Singapore is not on the list of 25 countries that send the most number of students to the United States, as we saw in the previous post.

Singapore has more undergraduate than graduate students in the US. In this, Singapore is unlike India, China and Taiwan, which have more graduate than undergraduate students in America. 

Singapore, however, is like most other Asia-Pacific countries. Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea and Japan also have more undergraduate than graduate students in America.

The number of undergraduate students in America from Singapore rose from 1,971 in 2009-2010 to 2,136 in 2010-2011 while the number of graduate students went up from 1,455 to 1,519 during the same period. The number of non-degree students increased from 282 to 304 and the number of students on OPT from 343 to 357.

All this information is from the Open Doors Data provided by the Institute of International Education.

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The largest number of international students in the United States is from China, and they are a growing band.  Their number went up from over 127,800 in 2009-2010 to more than 157,500 in 2010-2011, an increase of more than 23 per cent, according to the Open Doors Data from the Institute of International Education.  The second largest contingent comes from India, but their number went down from over 104,800 in 2009-2010 to nearly 103,900 in 2010-2011.

The number of students from Singapore went up from 4,051 in 2009-2010 to 4,356 in 2010-2011, but Singapore is not on the list of 25 countries that send the most number of students to the US.

South Korea is third on the list, followed by Canada (4^th), Taiwan (5^th), Saudi Arabia (6^th), Japan (7^th), Vietnam (8^th), Mexico (9^th), Turkey (10^th), Nepal (11^th), Germany (12^th), United Kingdom (13^th), Brazil (14^th), Thailand (15^th), Hongkong (16^th),France (17^th), Nigeria (18^th), Indonesia (19^th), Malaysia (20^th), Colombia (21^st), Iran (22^nd), Venezuela (23^rd), Pakistan (24^th) and Kenya (25^th). The number of Kenyan students in the US fell from over 5,300 in 2009-2010 to 4,666 in 2010-2011. That’s just 300 more than the number of students from Singapore.

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Facebook has almost caught up with Google while Twitter still lags behind Wikipedia and Blogger remains the most popular blogging platform. Tumblr blogs get as many daily page views as WordPress.com blogs but the latter attract twice as many daily visitors as the former. Self-hosted WordPress sites using WordPress.org trail far behind.

All this information is from Wolfram Alpha. I typed Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Blogspot, WordPress.com, WordPress.org and Twitter into the Wolfram Alpha search box and it came up with the data. The information is based on Alexa estimates, it added.

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