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Great story with many details, including technical details. As a summary, * The migration involved 100 employees at 14 different offices at the state of Kerala. * At the same time there was a migration from legacy text encodings to Unicode. They used a GUI program to convert text in legacy encoding to Unicode (language: Malayalam). * It is a full software migration to free software, including the operating system. *…
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The Kerala model is indeed awesome, and Communist did great things there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
Very true. Most developed state in India
https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/14/technology/india-cochin-sol...
As a Malayalee/Indian American, I was not familiar with Janayugom but had a sneaking suspicion that it was a Malayalee paper — this tiny Indian state has several newspapers with circulations that rival that of Japanese and European papers. Awesome article.
Great story with many details, including technical details. As a summary, * The migration involved 100 employees at 14 different offices at the state of Kerala. * At the same time there was a migration from legacy text encodings to Unicode. They used a GUI program to convert text in legacy encoding to Unicode (language: Malayalam). * It is a full software migration to free software, including the operating system. *…
"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
Some of the encodings were so esoteric we resorted to OCR instead to extract the embedded text. It was quite frustrating to know that somebody - somewhere - knew what each octet represented, but it wasn't remotely Google-able (in English, at any rate).
(Tamil was also problematic, and still is, even with Unicode, as I understand it)
Great story with many details, including technical details. As a summary, * The migration involved 100 employees at 14 different offices at the state of Kerala. * At the same time there was a migration from legacy text encodings to Unicode. They used a GUI program to convert text in legacy encoding to Unicode (language: Malayalam). * It is a full software migration to free software, including the operating system. *…
"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
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One of the longest serving democratically elected Communist parties leading the state as well.
The Kerala model is indeed awesome, and Communist did great things there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
It's an interesting point. Political activism has been noted before as a plausible contributor to high social capital (especially as traditional social-capital-providing arrangements tend to recede in modern societies), which in turn is a significant contributor to high quality-of-life.
Of course things are not that great if that very same political activism leads to misguided policies which keep you stuck in the middle-income trap, as we see in so many places in South America. But it seems that a legacy of substantial educational achievement (which is lacking elsewhere) has helped Kerala escape that trap.
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"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
Back in the 90s I assembled a binder of all the (not yet) legacy encodings then in use sourcing from ECMA and elsewhere. It was four inches thick double-sided. Unicode had just seen its initial release and it wasn't clear if that would be the universal text encoding or if it would be ISO-10646 which attempted to maintain a semblance of backwards compatibility with the morass of non-Latin/extended Latin text encodings…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Kerala model is indeed awesome, and Communist did great things there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
"High levels of political participation and activism among ordinary people along with substantial numbers of dedicated leaders at all levels" It's an interesting point. Political activism has been noted before as a plausible contributor to high social capital (especially as traditional social-capital-providing arrangements tend to recede in modern societies), which in turn is a significant contributor to high quality…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the longest serving democratically elected Communist parties leading the state as well.
The Kerala model is indeed awesome, and Communist did great things there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
Kerala's unusual socioeconomic and demographic situation was summarized by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben:[26]
Kerala, a state in India, is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations, a place that offers real hope for the future of the Third World. Though not much larger than Maryland, Kerala has a population as big as California's and a per capita annual income of less than $300. But its infant mortality rate is very low, its literacy rate among the highest on Earth, and its birthrate below America's and falling faster. Kerala's residents live nearly as long as Americans or Europeans. Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out as the Mount Everest of social development; there's truly no place like it.[26]