Thursday, January 24, 2019

California buttercup: Stanford - Secularization in India, ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy?, Best STEM CC-4 OCW-centric India World University and School - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/India - planned in the Hindu language - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Hindi_language - (and the other 22 official languages), Re-conceiving the BOOK re Google StreetView, https://twitter.com/WUaSPress/status/1086401492578226176 … Visit the Harbin gate


Stanford - Secularization in India


Hi Ajay, (Karen and Thomas)

Nice to meet and talk with you, and thanks for your edifying "Secularization in India" talk -
https://events.stanford.edu/events/819/81934/.  (Nice to see you all too).

Thanks too for your well-structured study in north and south India – and collecting the data on Android devices even – and your clear characterization of Indian secularization for us here at Stanford re your upcoming book project.

I asked:
What role if any might theorizing the Internet play in your studies of the changing nature of secularization (re modernizing) and religion in India ? It seems that this is a fairly new and significant development in these questions (globally).

If you were to move your study online in a developing realistic virtual earth (think Google Streetview / Earth / Tensorflow / Translate with Avatar bots) which was also developing with Stanford Medicine’s / Google’s Project Baseline (physical samples into data, charting pathways to health), where you could develop your study newly online in Bihar and Kerala - to study the relationship between secularization, religiosity and modernity with your focus on health too -  in what ways might you see new opportunities for studying and testing secularization ‘outside the western world?’

Could one begin by just developing your well-structured study in the I.T. 'organizing paradigm' of the Google-ecosystem / Google Streetview+ on Android devices, where enumerators (anthropology and sociology and political science students in the field) could record the responses to your questions, and grow from there?

The Stanford Medicine / Google Project Baseline approach could dovetail with studies of secularization -  and health, re your study - with time.

In developing the new social science method I'm calling ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy (re 'social theory') - I'm interested in facilitating social science researchers in doing this.

Am also interested in following up on questions of 'culture' as 'discourse' re your upcoming book's study, to complement Thomas's questions about identity (re 'culture') and Hindu-ism. (And how would one include related questions into your survey approach with its existing questions, for example?)

Lastly, my actual-virtual field site for ethnographic comparison is Harbin Hot Springs in northern California. ‘Step’ into this realistic virtual world here - http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg - where you can visit the Harbin gate here virtually - and "walk" down the road "4 miles" to Middletown, CA, and "amble" around the streets there (accessible from: https://twitter.com/HarbinBook and http://bit.ly/HarbinBook) ... the beginnings of a realistic virtual Harbin for soaking :) Part of my actual-virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic project, this realistic virtual Harbin - and EARTH - will get better and better with time. Text and survey questions (e.g. in Google forms) could go in the side bar. (Harbin is also 2 New Age churches, as legal entities in the state of California, making it possibly interesting with regard to your focus; some Harbin residents have also learned a lot from India's spiritual traditions).

Let's stay in touch about MIT OCW-centric India World University and School - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/India - planned in the Hindu language - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Hindi_language - (and the other 22 official languages). WUaS would like to build out of the  CC-4 MIT OCW Translated Courses - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/ - as a starting point, and WUaS is also wiki, planning wiki schools for open teaching and learning in all 7097 living languages (each a wiki page to begin) and planned with machine translation. How best too to develop India Law School at WUaS: https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/India_Law_School_at_WUaS ?  (WUaS's main platforms are Wikidata / Wikibase as "back end" in 300 languages, with WUaSMiraheze MediaWiki as "front end," CC-4 MIT OCW in 5 languages, and WUaS is very Google-centric, having Google for Education ... and Google Translate and TensorFlow are very remarkable building blocks as well).

WUaS is also planning online academic / scholarly libraries in each of all 7097 living languages, for example, and free-to-students' online university degrees - Bachelor, Ph.D., Law, Medicine, I.B. high school - in India. So, in some ways, India, or Indian students would get MIT for free.

Am seeking too to re-conceive the idea of the book out of Google Streetview+, and I'd be interested in exploring further communicating further, Ajay, about your proposed book project, as well as re my next upcoming Harbin book project in these regards. Would you be interested in exploring this further together?

Lastly, since it can be a very small world, do you happen to know Pin Mazumdar, one of my best friends from high school (in Pgh PA)? He was born in India, but came to the US when he was around 1 years old (because his parents came to study at / matriculated at Cornell for their Ph.D.s). Partha, his brother, is in the State Department, and now in Sri Lanka.

More later, but looking to communicating further about this first. Thank you again.

Thanks, Scott

~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg ~ https://twitter.com/HarbinBook ~ http://bit.ly/HarbinBook ~

- https://amazon.com/author/scottmacleodworlduniversity
- https://youtube.com/user/WorldUnivandSch




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Karen N Eggleston

Jan 23, 2019, 3:03 PM (21 hours ago)
to meajayv@ucr.eduThomas
Thank you for your interest in the research and for sharing your thoughts with us.

Karen Eggleston 翁笙和
Stanford University and NBER
Director, Asia Health Policy Program 
http://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/asiahealthpolicy/
Deputy Director, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (SAPARC)
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI)  
616 Serra St., Encina Hall C323, Stanford, CA 94305-6055


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Thank you, Karen and Ajay ... 

Here are some Tweets about re-conceiving the book: 


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And I blogged about all of this here - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/01/california-buttercup-stanford.html

Scott








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