Posts related to: Personal

River run photos

Here are some photographs from the Capital City River Run half-marathon I completed this past Sunday (as reported here: Hurting but Happy). Here's one More here, here, here, here, here & here. Apologies for the copyright marks.

Obama at MSU

Soham and Shreya make it to the Lansing State Journal's website photo gallery... Smita and I pulled the kids out of school today to go see Obama at Michigan State. Leigh Wolf joined us... and frankly it was a long and tiring day: reaching campus at 9:30, standing in...

Deck chairs on the Titanic

I just got back from a faculty meeting where we discussed what would be some possible new hires in the area of Educational Technology & Educational Psychology. At the same time (as we were discussing this) the House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion plan to...

Hurting but happy!

This morning I participated in (and completed) the Capital City River Run Half Marathon. The emphasis is of course on "completed" - I wasn't into breaking any records here. I got a pace of 10:15 per-mile (which was approximately what I had last year as well). The...

Incredible !ndia

Patrick Dickson sent me this link to an article on Boston.com titled Scenes from India. As the article says: India is home to over 1.2 billion people of wildly varying religions, cultures and levels of wealth.... Though there's no possible way for these images to be...

Surprise gift, mystery solved

The surprise gift I received a couple of days ago was from Nidhi Seth, founder director and CEO of Global Academic Zone, someone I had met at Bangalore at the Quest Alliance Educational Technology Conference. I just received an email from her.. and got a chance to...

Glass half full?

Just discovered a great riddle/puzzle site: [wu:riddles]. As the site says: The riddles are organized by difficulty ... easy, medium, and hard. Then there is the microsoft section, consisting of weird, open-ended consulting-style questions. The cs and putnam sections...

A surprise gift

I just received a gift in the mail. It was a box and in the box was One of those cool push pin toys... How cool is that! In the box was a short note that went: Hi Dr. Punya! It was a pleasure to meet you during the Quest Alliance Seminar in Bangalore. I really enjoyed...

An IQ test for color

If there is an IQ test for everything, why not one for color. This is Howard Gardner multiple intelligences run rampant. Check out the Color IQ test. BTW, my score was 27 (where 0 is a perfect score and 99 is as bad as you can get!). Irrespective of what you think of...

Fortunate

I had discovered the amazing poet Szymborska (on this very blog a while ago). And then today in my mailbox was another poem by her, sent in by a friend. We're extremely fortunate A poem by Wislawa Szymborska We're extremely fortunate not to know percisely the kind of...

Orissa Folklore

Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don't know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it's Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Mahendra He...

Creepy

How do you react to this flash animation? I don't know about you but it completely creeped me out. My reaction is almost visceral in its intensity... It is one thing to read an an article speaking to our fear of snakes and spiders that "Certainly there are certain...

Dreams of our futures

I started this blog on the 1st of January 2008. Barely 4 days later I a posted a video and asked the question, Is this a defining moment of our time? See it here Almost exactly six months later my question was partially answered, and I blogged about it here. Today,...

Dewey, back from the dead

I just got this email from the Cognitive Science program at MSU inviting me for their weekly cognitive forum. Turns out the speaker this week is someone called John Dewey! For a moment I thought Dewey was back with us 🙂 The title of his talk is "How do we know when...

Feeling ignored by Warner Bros.

Amol just sent me this BBC story titled: Warner 'sues over Puttar movie.' That makes me so angry! How come Warner Bros is not suing me... As the BBC story says Harry Potter maker Warner Bros is suing an Indian film company over the title of upcoming film Hari Puttar -...

Back from India…

Got back yesterday from a short, hectic but sweet trip to India. I had a wonderful time and still have a lot to do to just document all that happened and connect with all the people I met (hopefully over the next few weeks)... but now it is time to get back to fall...

India’s Silicon Valley

I arrived at Bangalore (now known as Bangaluru) this afternoon. Bangaluru is known as India's Silicon valley and this my first time here. I am here for a conference (as described here). Incidentally, Bangalore is also on its way to becoming a word in the English...