Delhi: What was the LG office was blocking all this time

Video: Delhi provides a ray of hope, 26 Aug 2017

Shows significant education and healthcare reforms taking place in Delhi under AAP government.

Link to the embedded video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh6_4LvYxs8

So THAT''s what they were fighting about? Now we know what all the LG office was BLOCKING from happening during all those over-publicized standoffs. The media says AAP is continuously quarrelling with Centre and has nothing positive to do, but repeatedly fails to mention exactly WHAT they were fighting for : For getting vital education, healthcare and other reforms approved for their citizens (which is something positive, duh!). If there are some things in life worth fighting for, then THIS certainly qualifies. Why ridicule a valid fight? Shouldn't the media have been ridiculing the LG's office and their direct boss the Centre for continuously stonewalling and cancelling these vital reforms, for repeatedly transferring key IAS personnel implementing these reforms to places like Andamans without advance notice or explanation?

And then comes the obvious question : Why was is (they're still at it! See bottom of the post for latest) Central govt BLOCKING all these nice things from happening? Instead, having all the other Union Territories under their full control, why hasn't Modi Sarkar already delivered DOUBLE over there of whatever AAP is achieving in Delhi? No AAP-controlled or Congress-controlled LG offices to fight over there. Its been over three years. Are we seeing ANY of these vital reforms happening in the remaining Union Territories of India, or the other BJP ruled states where they came to power on Modi's wave? Granted that it may take time, but there are always clear starting steps that can be proven, like executive orders, budget allocations etc. Is there any evidence of drastic reforms underway? Shouldn't the Centre be making at least the other UT's as examples of good governance for the States to follow? Why is an embattled and "perennially in crisis" state government, having ZERO control over police, land and several vital sectors, having to do the Centre's job for them?

Reference: from an year ago:

http://nikhilsheth.blogspot.in/2016/10/examining-media-bias-press-conference.html

Shows the glaring differences between what actually happened at a press conference vs what the media said. The man is politely and coherently requesting for approval for reforms like teacher salary increase which directly has to do with the outcomes in the video you saw at the top of this post; requesting for more co-operation from the LG office in matters like transfer of key IAS officers. And the media said he is "infuriated at", "slamming", "not co-operating", "abrasive", "negative" etc. This wasn't convenient misreporting, it was outright lying by the media.

This and dozens of incidents like this have cumulatively formed a FAKE image of an aggressive and quarrelsome and negative AAP govt, while all the time the fights and the negativity were being started by the Centre. Who should we be more wary of : the folks starting the fights or the folks the fights are being foisted upon? If they say something to defend a legitimate reform then why do we immediately attack them? Would we prefer it if the Delhi govt had just bent over and cancelled all these vital reforms from happening? Would you prefer it if the public schools were still rotting in filth the way they had been in the years preceding rather than having proper infrastructure, if the children kept failing their exams and failing at reading, if summer camps for govt school kids never happened, if the common person couldn't get vital healthcare services for free or low cost at private sector standards? If not, then why do we so enthusiastically attack someone trying to make it happen? Might this be part of the slave mentality or the crabs-in-the-barrel mentality : na khud aagey badhengey, na kissi aur ko badhne dengey? From what all I've seen in the past 3 years, this definitely seems to be the LG office's mentality.

Addendum : The LG Office is blocking the creation of more Mohalla Clinics right NOW (As of Aug 2017), by scurrying a file to and fro and neither forwarding nor rejecting it (stalling : a repeated tactic we've seen all along which again usually never gets covered by the media). While citizen surveys have overwhelmingly given thumbs-up to Mohalla Clinics, LG is paying more heed to opposition politicians' thumbs-down. See : http://aamaadmiparty.org/why-is-l-g-anil-baijal-blocking-opening-of-new-mohalla-clinics/

Another link:
https://www.facebook.com/tarakg/posts/10155434645906413

QGIS Georeferencer : recommendation for transformation type

Just making a note on a geo-referencing task I was doing with QGIS.

I had an outer boundary shape of a village, and had to geo-reference a PDF map of that village which has some internal data that I wanted. (won't go into more details here, but see this and this to get your shape and map.)

I looked up the QGIS documentation : http://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_georeferencer.html#available-transformation-algorithms

And chose the "Polynomial 2" tranformation type.

My georeferencing points (GCP) were points along the outer boundary of the village only : nothing from inside / center.

Ran the georeferencer : it got done instantly, and lo and behold, the image/raster map appeared perfectly on my shapefile map. It's a perfect fit, and the original map doesn't have any major distortions.. it has a slight rotation.

The output .TIF file is also much smaller than what I've had earlier : only 6.5MB compared to 405MB for an earlier run.

Previously based on some other article I had been using the setting "thin plate spline". It was extremely slow and created very distorted outputs and much larger .tif's . So for my kind of task (outer boundaries pinning), the "Polynomial 2" transformation has proved to be much better on all accounts.

Interesting Links for July 2017

Interesting Links for July 2017

Was copying some new links into this note and just realized that dude, we're in August now and I haven't published the July'17 links yet! So here, and apologies for some of the last links being from 'the future' :P

There's something new : I'm finally able to properly share the videos from independent media that I've been seeing! I made a script where I'm able to draw out a youtube link's title, publisher and date. You can use it to "make-human-friendly" your youtube links too : https://answerquest.github.io/youtube-info-extractor.html