There appears to have been a great deal of popular support for Hazare’s initiative.  However, there are some who question the idea of using a hunger strike to achieve ends.  For example, this blog says:

Of all the hypocritical actions that Gandhi indulged in publicly, fasting to death is most definitely the most remarkable. … Hazare’s fasting to death and the public support that he has enlisted shows how immature India is as a nation.

I think these comments miss the point entirely.  Anna Hazare merely provided a focal point to people who have already had corruption on their minds for several months now.  A hunger strike is sometimes a form of blackmail, but when it reflects popular sentiment it is more properly seen as merely an expression of a threat to the government that already exists in the minds of the people.  The point of a hunger strike is not simply to blackmail the government.  Others have tried this and failed, for example some of those pressing for Telengana, who were neatly castled by having their demands agreed to simply for the purpose of bringing their fast to an end.  (This might even happen with Hazare, who has shrewdly promised to renew the agitation if the Lokpal bill isn’t passed within a reasonable time frame.)

The point of a hunger strike, I think, is to raise an extreme and very visible protest.  Such a protest could be violent and uncultured (witness the damage to public property and rioting done in Hyderabad by supporters of a separate Telengana state), or take a more serene form, like a hunger strike.  By supporting the hunger strike, even to extent of joining in, I believe the nation has shown great maturity.  We didn’t go about smashing public property — but we made sure the government sat up and took notice.

The effectiveness of Hazare’s action (and Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation) is twofold.  First, that it effectively focuses a widespread public sentiment into a single spearhead that can be used to goad the government, much as a magnifying glass can focus the sun’s rays and ignite things.  And second, handled properly, it is a spearhead without undesirable side-effects like riots and destruction of public property.

Of course, as many other bloggers pointed out (and I’m not including all links here) the agitation as well as the bill are only minor battles in the war against corruption.  We’re all corrupt, a sea of corruption, and these are just a few drops of purity.  Corruption will start to die when, for example, we not only refuse to pay bribes, but refuse to evade paying income tax as well.  (Something I believe 99% of even the most self-righteous 1% of the population do.)  That’s an important but completely different issue.

But what if you have a variable called x, and you want and the value of x in the title?  For example, if the value of x is 3, you want to appear.

I’m sure there’s a simpler solution, but here’s the simplest one I’ve got:

1. First, note that it would suffice to type in plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], ” = “, 3))).  Of course, we want the value of x there, no matter what it is — not just 3.  If we try plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], ” = “, x))), that will result in appearing in the title, not what we want.
2. The solution is to create the string we would have typed if we knew the value of x.  We do this like this: s <- paste(“plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], \” = \”, “, x, “)))”). If we now print the string s, it will show “plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], \” = \”,  3 )))” (if the value of x is 3).
3. Now, we “run the string”: eval(parse(text = s)).

There are some more complicated but flexible solutions, like integrating postscript output from latex into R graphs (using psfrag).

A while ago, I wondered whether New Delhi really needed to spend $3 billion to build a new terminal.  I was in New Delhi a few days ago, so got a chance to see first hand what all the fuss was about.

The good: The new terminal is large, shiny and new.  It features a lot of fairly attractive decor.  Most international airlines have been relocated into the new terminal, as well as several domestic ones, such as Air India and Jet.  This is great because in the past it was always a pain to switch between the international and domestic terminals, especially if you were encumbered with a lot of luggage.  There’s a food court just outside the check-in area that stays open 24 hours.  It’s clean.  It’s got a lot of shops.

The bad: The first bad thing that struck me is the carpet (ha! but yes, that’s what struck me first).  I don’t think it’s generally a good idea to carpet an entire airport, because it will lead to high maintenance costs.  They also chose a chaotic orange, red and brown print that I think is atrociously ugly.  More importantly, I got the impression that they built way too big and didn’t know what to do with all the space.  In departure areas, you walk long distances through corridors and walkways that house absolutely nothing.  You’re not walking past departure gates or anything, just featureless spread out corridors that are so long they needed to add a lot of expensive moving walkways.  Possibly they might add gates to those corridors at some point, but that would involve ugly construction that everyone would have to walk through.

All in all, I have the feeling that the terminal is fairly nice, but it’s too large and it’s going to cost us a lot to maintain it.  I don’t have any idea how much it costs to build airports, but $3 billion seems a high for a single terminal, even a big one with a lot of ugly carpet.

A group of girls bathing at dawn in the Bay of Bengal off Vizag after a night of fasting for Maha Sivaratri.  There’s quite a large turnout, with thousands of people (families, groups of youngsters, and the elderly) enjoying a dawn dip, some spirituality, and a bit of fun.  Dawn, March 03, 2011, Vizag.

Under fire from Baba Ramdev’s supporters, and questioned by his own party, Congress MP from Arunachal Pradesh Ninong Ering began blabbering about his loyalty to the Family.  After getting into trouble for making apparently anti-Indian comments, Ering began talking about how it was all because of his love for Rajiv Gandhi.  See here. That is the best hope for a Congressman nowadays: when in trouble, express love and devotion for the Family.  It might save you.

Watson uses the correctness of previous answers to try to understand what a category means.  For example, in a “Name the Decade” category, Watson wasn’t sure what the category name meant — so it didn’t know that it could restrict its answers to the set {1900, 1910, 1920, …, 1990, 2000}.  When it is unsure in such a manner, Watson uses previous correct answers in that category — possibly by its competitors — to narrow down what the category means.  It was clear on the third day that Watson didn’t understand what certain categories meant, even after observing opponents’ correct responses.  This meant it did poorly on those categories as a whole.

Watson’s natural language processing, I think, is tailored to the task at hand — winning Jeopardy.  Like I said before, it doesn’t understand sentences the same way a human would.  While watching the show, I found that many of the answers were found in the intersections of two or more sets, but Watson didn’t identify all of the sets.

I would classify Watson as a mild sub-Singularity event at this point.  If indeed programs like Watson proliferate the way chess programs have — if Watson clones become much more powerful and lightweight enough to run on the computer as personal assistants, perhaps with some help from the cloud — we will be on our way to real artificial intelligence.  Sequential improvements in such programs will eventually lead to super-human intelligence, much as the Singularity gurus predicted.  Eventually, APIs for NLP and this type of reasoning might become commoditized — unless companies like Google prefer to provide access APIs only, and keep all the computation hidden on their servers.

The question that immediately popped into my head when I heard about this Jeopardy challenge for the first time was “why not Google?”.  IBM has a fantastic record of innovation, of course, but the things Watson does are right up Google’s alley.  Search would be greatly improved if you could ask a question and have it answered in addition to being served a bunch of related pages.  Personally I believe Google has already developed a system like Watson.  So why don’t we know about it?  Two possibilities.

First, Watson needed 2800 processors to answer questions one at a time.  The technology that Google has may or may not be equally advanced, but perhaps doesn’t scale up to allow answers for millions of questions yet.

Second, this is a card in Google’s hand that it doesn’t want to show unless necessary.  If a competitor (mostly Bing at this stage) appears to be making significant inroads into its search space, it can add this feature to jump ahead, so it’s insurance.  Revealing everything would just provide Microsoft with a “copy this!” blueprint.

To some extent, it seems Watson is at an advantage because his pneumatic button-pressing system can react faster than any human possibly could.  This severely affected Ken Jennings, who obviously had some of the answers and showed frustration at never being able to get to the buzzer first, shaking his head on occasion.

Perhaps a more fair way to assess Watson’s intelligence (as opposed to his button pushing prowess) is to adjust Watson’s button presser to be more commensurate with the pressing rate of human nerve systems.

Although Watson is doing great, it is becoming more apparent that Watson doesn’t understand the nuances of language in the clues as well as a human could.  There’s a document here (PDF) detailing some of Watson’s programming.

Of course, it’s hard to glean much just watching a TV show, but it seems as if Watson isn’t quite understanding language the way we do.  If a clue indicates the answer is a member of two sets, for example, Watson sometimes seems to ignore the second set.  An example (paraphrased): This word can mean the bend in the elbow and also a thief.  Watson’s best guess was “knee”, which has nothing to do with the second set (words that can mean “thief”) though it does have something to do with the first set (words that can mean the bend in the elbow).  The right answer was “crook”.

Watson seems to do superlatively well when there are unique phrases to be matched, i.e. when the clue contains phrases that are pertinent only to the answer and wouldn’t occur anywhere else.  Perhaps this is not surprising at all.

It’s possible Watson’s thought processes are a bunch of shortcuts completely unlike ours.  It may for example simply be finding a bunch of words and phrases based on associations with keyphrases in the clue and then ranking them.  Rather than searching for words/phrases in the sets that the clue is asking for.

Perhaps the right test is this: is it easy to add a subroutine to Watson that would allow it to rephrase the clue in several simpler English sentences?  I don’t know.  So I’m still unsure whether to call the creation of Watson a Singularity defining moment.

The first is pointed out here:

Pentagram’s Vishal Dadlani exultantly tweeted that the band had a rocking concert in Guwahati and Egypt became “free” on the same night! Then he wrote, “All it took was 18 days, and that the Egyptian people stood up for their rights. Come on India, you can do it!!”

The second one is here:

Even as Indian observers debate the question of why and how Egyptian revolution cannot be replicated in India, the unique characteristics of Egyptian revolution will be of interest to the readers here.

Of course we Indians are interested in what happens in Egypt, some in a general world-news way, some more intellectually.  But these two people (i.e. Vishal Dadlani and V. Venkatesan) are talking about the feasibility of replicating Egypt’s revolution in India.

Wait, what??

How did that idea even enter the mindspace of the Indian public?

Presumably because India has a lot of problems.  A revolution might be an improvement in a country (like Egypt) that has been dictator-controlled for 30 years.  But in a naturally feudal country with an active democracy (like India) that is seeing steady improvements, a revolution is like a roll of a pair of dice — with things getting better if both dice show 6.  Most likely an Indian revolution will lead to a messy neo-feudal society with various warring factions tearing the country apart.

Are these commentators insane?  They have a personal desire for a little excitement, and their way of getting their fix is to encourage revolutions in democracies.

This has been on the horizon for quite a while, ever since Nokia hired long-time Microsoft insider Elop as its CEO, and intensifying with a leaked internal memo Elop supposedly sent to Nokia employees.

This probably will help Nokia in the long run, but it fundamentally changes the company’s character.  This is a sellout by a biased CEO.  I was with Nokia so far, but I’m switching to Android as soon as I can.

EDIT:

I had a conversation yesterday that got me thinking, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Elop was a Microsoft implant into Nokia, sent in for this very purpose.  Elop apparently made some noises about why he picked Windows over Android, but I doubt he ever considered Android.  The deal is hugely helpful for Microsoft, which was struggling to get anyone to show interest in Windows. It also seems vaguely helpful for Nokia, but it’s simply not commensurate.  Microsoft gets Navtec maps, various services, a ready-made phone distribution net, and a huge share of phone profits from Nokia at absolutely no cost to itself!  Nokia gives all this potentially revenue-generating stuff to Microsoft for free!  All Microsoft is doing is providing the already-developed Windows OS — and even that for a share of the profits!

It refers to an event where a computer achieves certain significant feats of intelligence.  Different authors use it slightly differently, or use different terms.  Sometimes the word means achieving “self-awareness” (whatever that is).  Sometimes it means the creation of a computer that is as smart as a human.  Sometimes it means the addition of a technology that results in a massive increase in ability (the new state is usually one of higher-than-human intelligence).  Some authors speak of multiple singularities — computers caught in an ever-rising spiral of super-intelligence.

The AI promises of the 1980s turned out to be too grand and ill-founded to be realistic.  People thought then that they could program intelligence by programming the minutiae of thought.  This turned out to be a vastly bigger task than anticipated.

For a while, it seemed there were things humans could do that computers would never be able to.  One of the biggest, and most visible, blows was Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov.  Today, software (Rybka, Glaurung, Stockfish) running on the ordinary desktop computer will easily defeat the best human chess players.  But Deep Blue and its younger cousins don’t really have intelligence, at least not what we usually mean by it.  They’re “on-rails”, and can do very restricted things on very restricted input sets.

But all this doesn’t mean man-made intelligence is impossible.  Instead of programming intelligence, we can perhaps include techniques like evolving it or learning it.  Is that what Watson has done?

Watson is a massively parallel supercomputer, developed by IBM, that will participate on Jeopardy against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  Watson can understand a variety of language nuances and sift through its massive database to attempt to find answers.  Given the diversity of subject matter as well as question phrasing on Jeopardy, this is quite a feat.  Does this qualify as intelligence?

It’s not clear to me how Watson works, but the bits I’ve gleaned indicate that it is a collection of a number of hand-written subroutines that interact in carefully human-tuned ways.  There’s no automated evolution or search of algorithms to try to make it better.  In that sense, it is still algorithmic, much like Deep Blue.  But Watson’s algorithm is much more complicated and chaotic than Deep Blue’s.  It sounds complex enough that I view it as a limited form of intelligence.

Perhaps we are hitting the first technological singularity, although it’s not the single explosive moment some have imagined.

Watson might have been a good learning experience — the engineers at IBM must have figured out a lot about how to make computers think.  But it still lacks the essential ingredient that sci-fi authors fantasize about.  We still don’t have automated techniques to take a given computer and make it better.  That is, we don’t know how to make computers improve other computers.  That would be the a real Singularity.

I forgot to mention one thing the PM does have to do.  Whenever the opposition brings up an instance of corruption or ineptitude on the part of the government, Dr. Singh makes a public comment.  He says, “The opposition is playing politics with this issue.”  Corruption at the Commonwealth Games?  That’s just the Opposition Playing Politics (OPP).  The 3G spectrum scam?  OPP again.  Black money stashed in Switzerland?  OPP.  That’s his explanation for everything.

(Like Paris Hilton tried to trademark “That’s Hot”, and Trump tried to trademark “You’re Fired!” (did he trademark it?), Manmohan should try to patent “OPP”!  He’d earn royalties from politicians in democracies everywhere.)

So I wonder what his reaction would be to this bit of ridiculous political grandstanding by Rahul Gandhi.  To summarize, Rahul Gandhi used a rape victim to make a surreal attempt at scoring a political point.  He dared Mayawati to visit the victim.  Presumably he believes Mayawati is personally responsible because the crime occurred in the state Mayawati is Chief Minister of.  Perhaps he also thought Mayawati was responsible because the victim was a Dalit, as is Mayawati.  (It doesn’t make any sense to me, but then this is Rahul Gandhi.)

Now where’s Manmohan with his comments about political mileage?

Hayek

The only good thing that came out of that discussion (from my viewpoint) is it prompted me to glance through some pages of Friedrich Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty.  Specifically, I looked at his chapter on Social Justice.  The entirety of my exposure to Hayek’s ideas is that one chapter, so I’m quite happy to be corrected.

It’s not hard to see why Hayek is held in high esteem.  This small chapter covers a wide variety of issues, many of which I think are relevant to the issue of reservations and affirmative action.  I find Hayek’s writing style hard to read, since his passages sound ambiguous to me.  It’s probably true that he had a precise position on the issues, but his book isn’t written that way and feels somewhat open to interpretation.

I don’t claim to understand Hayek’s theories very well, but some things jumped out at me.  Hayek says that we have the right to set rules, but to expect that once the rules are set and the market is set in motion, it is pointless to speak of the justice of the outcomes of the market (as long as everyone follows the rules).

This is an interesting idea, and curiously it parallels Krishna’s “Karmanyeva adhikaraste…“!  We have the right to decide the rules of action, but not to decide the outcomes, which are subject to much randomness!  It is widely accepted that attempts to make sure everyone has what they need is socialism; indeed, that is often treated as the definition of socialism.  Hayek says that attempts to make sure everyone gets exactly what they deserve is still socialist.  He calls this social justice (or rather, says this is what others mean by social justice).  But Hayek goes a step further in thinking about this, and makes two apparently contradictory statements.

Predictability

First, Hayek seems to agree that laws should not be predictably biased towards or against a segment of the society.  This I think is fascinating and in fact a crucial consideration while framing laws.  At the time we frame a law, it should not be predictably unjust.

Elucidating what “predictable” means here is an interesting exercise in itself.  My interpretation is the following.  A predictable set of people is at time t is a set that is determined by events occurring up to time t, and not after.  Thus “Dalits in 2010″ is a predictable set in 2010, but “millionaires in 2020″ is not very predictable in 2010.  However, “millionaires in 2010″ is of course predictable in 2010. As with all social things, a certain level of fuzziness in defining sets is probably convenient.  The set “billionaires in 2015″ is probably predictable with 99% accuracy in 2010, although the set “millionaires in 2015″ is much less predictable.  Allowing for this slight fuzziness, “Dalits in 2050″ is a predictable set in 2010. (People can and do “change their caste”, often through birth certificate fraud, but so few do it that the set is almost determined in 2010.)  Have I defined predictability precisely?  Not mathematically.  But it seems precise enough for society, law and justice.

When we pass a law that increases the relative advantage or disadvantage of a predictable set of people to its complement, we are doing something wrong.  Thus, if we pass a law in 2010 that will widen the advantage gap between, say, the 40-th and 60-th wealth percentile of the population in 2020, the principle of predictability does not prohibit this (since these percentiles are not very predictable sets).  On the other hand, if we pass a law that will widen the advantage gap between the blind and the not-blind in 2015 (a moderately predictable set in 2010), there is something wrong with that law.  Similarly, if we pass a law in 2010 that increases the advantage gap between Dalits and non-Dalits in 2050 (a highly predictable set), there’s something wrong with that law.  This is the gist of my application of Hayek’s predictability criterion to the affirmative action case.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that.  It’s not enough to say widening the gap is bad and narrowing it is good — we should also worry about whether things are getting better for everybody.  If we pass a law that predictably reduces everyone to abject poverty, this might reduce the gap — but it’s not what we want.  On the other hand, passing a law that predictably makes Dalits remain poor while increasing most non-Dalits’ wealth is also obviously wrong — even though it is true that some people have gained, and no one has been harmed (relative to where they started off).  Also, most outcomes will invariably be biased if a short enough time-frame is chosen.  For example, it’s certainly true that, no matter what anyone does, those who are poor on Jan 1, 2010 will overwhelmingly remain poor on Jan 2, 2010 — or for that matter on Jan 1, 2011.  Since ALL laws are biased, should we refrain from passing any laws?  A reasonable time frame has to be attached to the term “bias”.

Thus, this is a very loose principle — laws will need to balance fairness, considerations of where people start off, practicality, enforceability, acceptability in society, timeframe and a number of other factors.  Indeed, I think it’s not possible to state a succinct, simple principle that can be the sole guiding principle behind all laws, or even identify all the factors that need to be considered.

Equality of Opportunity

Now, it seems as if equality of opportunity is a natural consequence of this concept of no predictable bias.  After all, if there’s no predictable set of people that is better off than another, isn’t this the same as saying that the law is equally unbiased towards everybody?  It seems any principle for framing laws should lead to laws that give everyone the same opportunities, even though various random events would likely lead to differences in final outcomes.

This is where Hayek seems to make a contradictory statement.  Hayek says that equality of opportunity is also a socialist ideal — not a-priori, but in its implications:

To achieve this government would have to control the whole physical and human environment of all persons, and have to endeavour to provide at least equivalent chances for each; and the more government succeeded in these endeavours, the stronger would become the legitimate demand that, on the same principle, any still remaining handicaps must be removed-or compensated for by putting extra burden on the still relatively favoured. This would have to go on until government literally controlled every circumstance which could affect any person’s well-being.

This sounds correct — it is obviously impractical to demand that the government provide perfect equality of opportunity to every single individual.  But Hayek himself says that

So far as [equality of opportunity] refers to such facilities and opportunities as are of necessity affected by governmental decisions (such as appointments to public office and the like), the demand was indeed one of the central points of classical liberalism, usually expressed by the French phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. There is also much to be said in favour of the government providing on an equal basis the means for the schooling of minors who are not yet fully responsible citizens…

It seems that equality of opportunity is perhaps not inevitably socialist or classical liberal, but rather a mixture of the two tempered by the extent to which it is practical.  That is, government should endeavour to provide equality of opportunity up to the point where it has to start taking socialist actions like controlling people’s lives.  The line between providing equality of opportunity and socialism is blurred — so blurred that it’s silly to pretend there’s a line (my thoughts, not Hayek’s).

Affirmative Action

How does all this tie in with affirmative action?  The principle that laws should not be predictably biased would seem to indicate that affirmative action is necessary.  The current system is extremely harmful for Dalits and certain other backward classes.  Indeed, the state completely failed them for several decades, a situation that is only now starting to be rectified. Under current laws, and under any law that completely denies all forms of affirmative action, Dalits will predictably be disadvantaged and continue to be punished by the system for several decades.

It is important to note that this reasoning does not apply to every group that is disadvantaged.  If a Muslim and a Brahmin are equally smart and study in the same class in the same school (I’m establishing ceteris paribus here), I think the Brahmin has no advantage compared to the Muslim.  They are equally likely, or almost equally likely, to find good jobs.  In addition, opportunities available to Muslim and Brahmin kids are the same modulo their own beliefs.  That is, if a community of Muslims chose to reach out and accept the available opportunities, they would be no worse off than a community of Brahmins.  The same is not true for Dalits.  There are active as well as passive forces arrayed against the Dalits.

Thus, Hayek’s own notion of not predictably harming someone via legislation seems to support the idea of affirmative action for Dalits.

The important question whether this can be classified as actively harming non-Dalits.  I don’t believe so.  Increasing opportunity for Dalits in this way certainly decreases opportunity for non-Dalits, but opportunity was lop-sided to begin with, and the lop-sidedness continues to be maintained using marginally legal methods.  With affirmative action, entrance into various lucrative positions becomes tougher for non-Dalits, but still not as tough as it is for Dalits.

My Position on Affirmative Action

For the record, my own position is a guarded support for certain forms of affirmative action in the short term.

I think it’s important to base affirmative action not only on caste, but on as many major sources of predictable variability as practical.  This is the topic of the MIRAA score discussed in my other post.

I also believe affirmative action is nothing but a temporary pressure valve measure to quickly correct certain imbalances.  It is no substitute for free, high quality universal education.  Education, not affirmative action, should be the method of choice for ensuring equality of opportunity.  Education is the only useful very-long-term sustainable means for equality of opportunity.  The only reason for affirmative action is that it seems impossible to equalize “predictable opportunity” using education alone in the next 30 years.

There’s nothing interesting about the politician in question or the backtracking he’s doing; what’s interesting is just how scared this 82-year old veteran is.  Scared of repercussions after he criticized Sonia, he said he’d touch Sonia’s feet if she agreed to splitting Telengana.  The abjectness of his situation, and the culture within the Congress, come through pretty clearly.  Numerous Congress leaders, including his own son, jumped to denounce his statements.

What could the causes be?  There are two potential reasons that I can see.

• The first possibility is that the quality of teaching has declined — that is, the previously existing teachers have lowered their standards for some reason.
• The other possibility is that the existing teachers have maintained their quality, but the new capacity required to handle the increased enrollment hasn’t materialized.

In the first case, the children are worse off than they were a few years ago.  In the second, every child is better off than before, even though the indicator has decreased.

This latter case more likely applies to another measure in the ASER report:

the proportion of Std I children who can recognize numbers (1-9) has declined from 69.3% in 2009 to 65.8% in 2010.

This is perhaps attributable to the newer enrollees, some of whom might have been enrolled in class 1 directly without completing kindergarten.

I’m quite undecided on whether wikileaks is good or not.  I don’t think disclosing all information just because it’s there to be disclosed is good.  On the other hand, we occasionally get a neutral, unsanitized (because it’s not expected to be public) opinion on our country’s politics.

I don’t know why anyone should be surprised.  It’s like being surprised that a baboo in an official position in government is taking bribes.  Everybody does it, and everybody knowns that everybody does it, even if no evidence has actually emerged.  I’d guess there are two paths you take to get exclusive interviews with prominent people.

The first path is to dedicate your life to quality journalism until your reputation is so well-established that people want to talk to you.  I think Dan Rather fell into this category — his demise came about because he hadn’t checked the quality of his sources.  His integrity was never in doubt.  But this path takes a long time.

The second path is where you do people favours in return for interviews and inside scoops.  I’m sure the majority of Indian journos don’t do this, but I’m equally sure a lot of them do.  So when this big expose on Barkha and co. came around, I was surprised — not that they were doing it, but that something like this saw the light of day.

But it’s still not easy to find.  The tapes themselves are available online for all to listen to, but the story isn’t getting much prominence.  I hate to agree with anything Arundhati Roy says, but one thing she did get right:

Much of the mainstream media has been captured by a small clique of columnists, editors and TV anchors, an incestuous little coterie with shows on each others’ channels and interviews in each others’ newspapers.

The responses Barkha and her higher-ups have provided are pretty standard: they liberally tossed in phrases like “smear campaign”, “misrepresentation” and “caricature” into boilerplate denials.

In the comments on the inverse search post, B. Slade suggested the procedure at http://www.bleedingmind.com/index.php/2010/06/17/synctex-on-linux-and-mac-os-x-with-emacs for forward search.  However, the instructions there require installation of AuCTeX version 11.86, while the latest version in the Ubuntu 10.04 repositories have is 11.85.

I managed to kludge a solution for the AuCTeX shipping with Ubuntu 10.04 by slightly modifying some emacs code I found here: http://www.mail-archive.com/okular-devel@kde.org/msg04913.html. Most of the work was already done by Mark Altern and earlier authors; the only change was to tell it to use the .pdf instead of the .dvi.

A note of caution.  Forward search with okular is not very convenient.  This is because okular redisplays the PDF document every time you do a forward search — with a side “contents” pane and also repositioning the PDF.  So if you’ve removed the space-hogging contents pane (by pressing F7 twice) and zoomed and positioned the PDF to your liking, doing a forward search will undo all of that.  You’ll have to remove the contents pane again and re-zoom and re-position.  This severely limits the usefulness of forward search.  There doesn’t seem to be a way around this for now.

Anyway, here are the steps.

1. Follow instructions here to set up inverse search.
2. Source for okular-search.el is at the end of this post.  Copy it and put it in a file called okular-search.el.
3. In your .emacs file, add the following code:

   
   (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/okular-search.el")
   (require 'okular-search)
   (add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key "\C-x\C-j" 'okular-jump-to-line)))
   (add-hook 'tex-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key "\C-x\C-j" 'okular-jump-to-line)))
   

That’s it. Press C-x C-j to open a new okular viewing window. Subsequent presses of C-x C-j will reposition the PDF in that okular window to correspond to whatever’s at point in emacs.

Here’s the code for okular-search.el:

;;; (X)Emacs frontend to forward search with kdvi. See the section on
;;; FORWARD SEARCH in the kdvi manual for more information on forward
;;; search, and for an explanation how to use this script. This script
;;; is a modified version of the script "xdvi-search.el" by Stefan
;;; Ulrich, version 2000/03/13. The
;;; modifications were performed by Stefan Kebekus
;;; . Tested with Emacs 20.7.1 and Xemacs 21.4.
;;;
;;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
;;; modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
;;; published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
;;; License, or (at your option) any later version.
;;;
;;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
;;; General Public License for more details.
;;;
;;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;;; along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
;;; Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
;;; 02110-1301, USA.
;;;
;;; Please report bugs or improvements, etc. via the "Report bug"-Menu
;;; of okular.
;;;

(defvar okular-script "okular"
  "*Name of start script for okular.")

(defun okular-jump-to-line ()
  "Call okular-script to perform a `forward search' for current file and line number.
See contents of okular-script for details.
If AucTeX is used, the value of TeX-master-file is used as filename
for the master .dvi file; else, the return value of okular-master-file-name
is used (which see)."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (save-restriction
      (widen)
      (beginning-of-line 1)
      (let* (;;; current line in file, as found in the documentation
	     ;;; of emacs. Slightly non-intuitive.
	     (current-line (format "%d" (+ 1 (count-lines (point-min) (point)))))
	     ;;; name of the `main' .tex file, which is also used as .dvi basename:
	     (master-file (expand-file-name (if (fboundp 'TeX-master-file)
					     (TeX-master-file t)
					   (okular-get-masterfile (okular-master-file-name)))))
	     ;;; .dvi file name:
	     (pdf-file (concat (file-name-sans-extension master-file) ".pdf"))
	     ;;; current source file name.
	     (filename (expand-file-name (buffer-file-name))))
	(start-process "okular"
		       "okular-output" "okular" ;;; src-args
		      ;;; args for -sourceposition:
		       "--unique" (concat "file:" pdf-file "#src:" current-line filename)
		       )))))

(defun okular-get-masterfile (file)
  "Small helper function for AucTeX compatibility.
Converts the special value t that TeX-master might be set to
into a real file name."
  (if (eq file t)
      (buffer-file-name)
    file))

(defun okular-master-file-name ()
  "Emulate AucTeX's TeX-master-file function.
Partly copied from tex.el's TeX-master-file and TeX-add-local-master."
  (if (boundp 'TeX-master)
      TeX-master
    (let ((master-file (read-file-name "Master file (default this file): ")))
      (if (y-or-n-p "Save info as local variable? ")
	  (progn
	    (goto-char (point-max))
	    (if (re-search-backward "^\\([^\n]+\\)Local Variables:" nil t)
		(let* ((prefix (if (match-beginning 1)
				   (buffer-substring (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1))
				 ""))
		      (start (point)))
		  (re-search-forward (regexp-quote (concat prefix "End:")) nil t)
		  (if (re-search-backward (regexp-quote (concat prefix "TeX-master")) start t)
		      ;;; if TeX-master line exists already, replace it
		      (progn
			(beginning-of-line 1)
			(kill-line 1))
		    (beginning-of-line 1))
		  (insert prefix "TeX-master: " (prin1-to-string master-file) "\n"))
	      (insert "\n%%% Local Variables: "
;;; mode is of little use without AucTeX ...
;;;		      "\n%%% mode: " (substring (symbol-name major-mode) 0 -5)
		      "\n%%% TeX-master: " (prin1-to-string master-file)
		      "\n%%% End: \n"))
	    (save-buffer)
	    (message "(local variables written.)"))
	(message "(nothing written.)"))
      (set (make-local-variable 'TeX-master) master-file))))

(provide 'okular-search)