India Schools

Building off of my colleague Sushmita’s (who is a research associate on the Spandana study) thoughtful blog on microfinance networks’ response to the impact evaluations of last year, and David Roodman and Rich Rosenberg’s related commentary, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way impact evaluation research results are presented to microfinance stakeholders and what we can learn from their responses. This examination is fairly personal for me, as for the last 20 months I’ve been part of the Knowledge Management and Dissemination Unit at the Centre for Micro Finance.

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Between the Ivory Tower, the Hype and the Grassroots: How to talk about Microfinance Research?

Look Back Look Forward: HfG Ulm and design education in India, a brief report on the one day event at the Taj West End in Bengaluru on 6th March 2010. Prof M P Ranjan The one day conference at Bengaluru will be remembered for a long time by the participants, all teachers and design professionals interested in design education coming from several leading design schools in India. So much passion was released in the 24 round table discussions, only a small fraction of which can be captured here in the links and resources that we have been able to collect and create

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Look Back Look Forward: The Bengaluru event

This is the first good news on the college hiring front that we’ve been able to report in a long time. The National Association of Colleges and Employers now says that employers are planning to hire 5.3% more college graduates from the class of 2009-10 than they did from the class of 2008-09

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Hiring Outlook for New College Graduates Turns Positive

Check it out, this is absolutely crazy what these big government unions have been doing! How about we get rid of both the unions and Department of Education? That would solve a ton of the problems that we see. We spend on average $10,000 per year on every student, yet the results are worse than ever

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Rubbing out the Rubber Rooms

The Office of Instructional and Information Technology (OIIT) invited educators to share their Laptops for Learning (L4L) stories. We received over 50 submissions and we were impressed to find out what BPS educators are doing with the laptops to improve teaching and learning

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Congratulations Laptops for Learning (L4L) Story Raffle Winners!

(This is in continuation of Abhishek Tripathi’s previous post , and it examines the regulation of ULIPs in the backdrop of the reasoning adopted by courts in the Commonwealth) Insurance Act regulates companies engaged in any class of insurance business, and requires such companies to register themselves with the IRDA prior to commencing any insurance business. ‘ Life insurance business ’ has been defined under the Insurance Act to mean ‘ the business of effecting the contracts of insurance upon human life, including any contracts whereby the payment of money is assured on death (except death by accident only), or the happening of any contingency depending on human life, and any contract which is subject to payment of premium for a term dependent on human life….. ’

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SEBI’s Order on ULIPs: A Misfired Shot? – Part II

(The ULIP controversy has stirred an intense debate on the nature of instrument that it represents and consequently as to which regulator has purview over it. Jayant Thakur has previously analyzed the outcome of SEBI’s order in detail ( here and here )

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SEBI’s Order on ULIPs: A Misfired Shot? – Part I

As we had discussed in December 2009, the Government had proposed a draft master press note to consolidate the regime relating to foreign direct investment (FDI). The consolidation exercise has now fructified with the issue of the Consolidated FDI Policy (Circular 1 of 2010), which takes effect from April 1, 2010. The policy document itself contains evidence of the complexity that has afflicted the regime thus far: 1.1.4 The Legal basis : Foreign Direct Investment by non-resident in resident entities through transfer or issue of security to person resident outside India is a ‘Capital account transaction’ and Government of India and Reserve Bank of India regulate this under the FEMA, 1999 and its various regulations.

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Consolidated FDI Regime Operational

I’ve always believed that the best way to learn about a topic is by understanding the topic as a fight between two opposing teams. And that’s how we’re going to learn about the Washington D.C. school system in this balanced post at the libertarian magazine Reason.(Not the usual conservative stuff I post 100% of the time) Here’s the situation: D.C.

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Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s fight against the Washington, D.C. teacher unions

The process of learning any modern language today can be improved and quickened by using certain modern technologies. Students of the English language likely have more modern tools available for language study than students of any other language. Here is an introduction to some useful technology for language students.

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English Learning Tools

T he benefits of improving financial access are widely discussed in conferences, round-tables, and forums around the developing world. Despite attending several of these, I find that nothing is comparable to field experiences that teach me these very lessons. In India , the Business Correspondents (BC) model, mobile banking, and no-frills accounts are common concepts associated with improving financial access.

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Consequences of lacking financial access: A different route

In an interesting column in the Indian Express, Mihir Sharma ponders over ‘The Four Rights that millennial India has promised its people — to information, to food, to education, and to (rural) employment’ and notes that they ‘aren’t just remarkably ambitious for a state that has never impressed with its efficiency.

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Legislating Rights: Parliament, Courts and Separation of Powers

See my immediately preceding post on SEBI’s order prohibiting specified insurance companies essentially from (i) starting new ULIP schemes and raising monies thereon and (ii) accepting further monies from existing ULIP schemes (and of course from doing incidental acts like issuing offer documents, etc.). Readers, I am sure, are too well aware of the heated debate thereafter. It was reported that on the intervention of the Finance Minister, SEBI agreed to withdraw its order and SEBI/IRDA were to solve the jurisdiction issue through reference to appropriate “forum”.

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SEBI suspends its ULIPs order – BUT ONLY PARTLY!

(The following post has been contributed by Ravichandra S. Hegde of J. Sagar Associates) The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in February 2010 has amended Rule 201 of the SHO Regulations [1] framed under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Act”) restricting abusive short sale in the falling scrip thereby retaining investor confidence

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SEC’s Restrictions on Short Selling in Melting Scrip

Today was a great weather day in the Flint Hills and I traveled with my students from Beaumont to:  Cassoday Matfield Green Cottonwood Falls Chase County Lake Clements Stone Arch Bridge Diamond Creek Stone Arch Bridge Cottonwood Falls (again) and back to Beaumont It was a lot of driving and a lot of photography and we all had a great time.   Keep an eye out from some photos to be posted later, probably will post them at http://www.facebook.com/jeffcowell   Watch for the next boot camp at http://photobootcamp.eventbrite.com © 2010 Jeff Cowell, jeffcowell.com

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Boot Camp Day Three – Done and successful

To b-school students it may sometimes seem as if nobody has it quite as bad as they do: jobs are scarce, salaries are flat, and to critics at least the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is all their fault. But if it’s any consolation, they’re not alone. Their teachers are having a pretty tough year, too.

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Faculty See Smallest Salary Increase In 50 Years

It’s been a long time coming and I’m more than happy to announce that The Animation Academy finally has a new site. http://theanimationacademy.com/ Thanks a thousand times over to Adrian Foster for all of the work he’s put into it as the site’s webmaster, and to Snakebite for the design. We’re showcasing the artwork and galleries that were there from before

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The Academy has a new website

On Thursday April 8th I held class at my studio for my NESOP Fine Art Black and White Majors.  We spent the day scrounging for whatever we could to mount photographs onto and then under my instruction experimented with gluing-mounting-staining-painting-covering and coating.  Here are some documents of the day.

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IN MY STUDIO with my NESOP fine art black and white majors

This post may be quite a bit off topic, but in the spirit of providing a blog about excellence in education I have decided to post this article here. In an era of electronic entertainment, the term “home library” increasingly has the word “video” in the middle

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Books and reading are important

Shameless plug for an upcoming event: IFMR, CDF and CSO Partners welcome Dr Wayne Visser of CSR International for a seminar: “New Directions in Corporate Social Responsibility” About the Event Dr Visser will discuss how the current dynamics of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have failed us globally. He will describe a new approach we need: CSR 2.0, ‘corporate sustainability and responsibility.’ He will illustrate each of the five principles of CSR 2.0 (creativity, scalability, responsiveness, ‘glocality’ and circularity) with practical case examples

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Corporate social responsibility, or corporate sustainability and responsibility? Upcoming seminar in Chennai