I have to link to the following blog posts just for their headlines:
The Rational Fool: Gay Ho!
Rahul Siddharthan: Is 377 now 404?
Now that homosexuality has been decriminalized, Nivedita Menon has a suggestion for something that must be criminalized: English news channels!
In a historic judgement, the Delhi High Court on Thursday legalised consensual sex among gays.
The court struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
Read the report here. In a slap on the face of cynical consensus-mongers [sadly, our law and health ministers are among them ], the court had this to say:
"In our view Indian Constitutional Law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconception of who the LGBTs (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) are. It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual," the Bench said in its 105-page judgement. [Bold emphasis added]
...Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull and the outrageous commonplace, rendering horrifying absolutes ambigious and full of gray areas. Wheras most writers grow up dreaming of using their talents to stir up the passions, to inflame and amuse and inspire, Zakaria shoots for the opposite effect, taking controversial and explosive topics and trying to help rattled readers somehow navigate their way through them to yawns, lower heart rates and states of benign unconcern. He’s back at it again with a new piece about the financial crisis called “The Capitalist Manifesto,” which is one of the first serious attempts at restoring the battered image of global capitalism in the mainstream press.
There's a lot more here [BTW, here's Zakaria's piece, The Capitalist Manifesto].
I became a fan of Matt Taibbi when I read his tear down review The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. [Update: Speaking of Friedman, I have to link to two pieces; the first is this McSweeney's classic by Michael Ward: Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Column; the second is about Friedman's metaphors]. I wish I could get more of Taibbi's stuff, but almost all of his writing is about US politics (and there's only so much of it you can follow).
Taibbi's latest article about Goldman Sachs appeared in Rolling Stone; a scan is available here. Here's how the article begins:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. ...
In this episode, Mahesh Sharma of Careers 360 demolishes a new claim by IIPM that its students will receive their BBA and/or MBA degrees from the University of Buckingham, UK.
[While the story has a somewhat muted headline -- "IIPM makes another claim" -- read the URL. It's blunt and to-the-point: "IIPM -- Yet Another Lie"!]
The new claim about the University of Buckingham was made in a recent ad -- an ad that was released after Sharma exposed the bogussitude of IIPM's earlier claims that the BBA / MBA degrees were from IMI, Belgium.
All power to Mahesh Sharma and Careers 360. They are doing a job that is too ducking fifficult for our regulators -- AICTE, in particular -- and some of our stupid magazines that keep including IIPM in their annual rankings of B-schools (Outlook, which dumped it in 2005, is an honorable exception).
* * *
I linked to the first episode of Mahesh Sharma's fact-checking coup . The youth magazine JAM did a fact-check on IIPM in March 2006. You do remember all the great things it led to, don't you?
In the past couple of weeks, three major news outlets issued their rankings: Outlook, India Today and Mint.
Before I proceed further, I urge you to read the 'methodology' section in each of these publications; you'll find quite a lot in there that should tell you to not take these rankings seriously. If you are in the mood for some serious fisking, go read Arunn's and Madhukar Shukla's posts from three years ago!
The rankings are typically for colleges offering programs in engineering, medical, and law; some of them include rankings of programs in hotel management and mass communications -- and Mint even does fashion!
India Today is quite unique in ranking programs in science, arts and commerce.
College rankings are not at all a useful way of thinking about institutions. But the ratings they receive from these magazines have some -- but only some -- value. This is because small differences in ratings may mean big differences in rankings, especially when one gets past the top 10 or the top 20 -- take, for example, the Outlook's list of engineering colleges; a difference of just 10 or 11 percent (767 and 689) separates the college at No. 20 from that at No. 40!
Even the ratings have their own flaws; many of them are based on the so-called 'perceptual' scores -- a fancy term for surveys of faculty, students and / or recruiters; they are susceptible to systematic biases -- selection bias being the major one. And then there is the possibility of "gaming the system" [with Clemson's and University of Florida's efforts being just the most recent examples from the US].
In the absence of a mandatory, unimpeachable accreditation system -- and the one in India fails on both counts! -- all we have are these highly flawed methods employed by news outlets, which outsource this operation to survey organizations whose expertise is not necessarily in higher education.
"Optional," I believe, is the keyword.
Students who wish to apply for Class XI in a school different from where they complete Class X can take the board examination. But those who are to stay on in the same school need not take the examination, under the plan Sibal articulated.
There may be other deeper issues that I'm unaware of, but here is my first reaction.
Right now, all bets are off as far as admissions to Class XI are concerned -- at any school. Unless the government makes it mandatory for schools to announce which of their students will be guaranteed admission to Class XI (and group of subjects allotted to them) well ahead of time, I can't see how this initiative will ever become viable.
Class X performs two useful functions:
Thus, Sibal's plan, even if it becomes a reality, is likely to benefit only a small number of students who get guaranteed seats in Class XI in their current schools. The alleged benefit of removal of exam-related stress is thus available, ironically, only to those who really thrive in the current system of 'stressful exams'.
Gangan Prathap (National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, New Delhi) is the author of this preliminary study (pdf) ranking Indian universities based on papers listed in the Web of Science database. In order to do a fair comparison so that universities are compared only with similar institutions, he has wisely left out the institutions of national importance [Grrr, I hate this description --it implies universities are not of any "national importance"].
Here's the list of the top 20 research universities in India (based on their publications in the year 2008):
1. Delhi
2. Banaras Hindu
3. Jadavpur
4. Anna
5. Panjab
6. Annamalai
7. Madras
8. Aligarh Muslim
9. Calcutta
10. CMC, Vellore
11. Hyderabad
12. Jawaharlal Nehru
13. Poona
14. CUSAT
15. Allahabad
16. Rajasthan
17. Sri Venkateswara
18. Guru Nanak Dev
19. Mysore
20. Mangalore
One of the things he notes is the year-to-year variability in the rank order. For example, Mangalore University, with an overall University ranking of 20 in 2008, has an All India Rank of 23 in 2007 and 86 in 2004! This is clearly because the ranking is based on just one factor which, for any university, has a pretty large year-to-year variability.
Another observation from Pratap's data: the number of papers from the top 20 universities has registered a near 100 percent increase -- from 4034 to 8005 -- during the five year period of 2004-08.
The presence of CMC (Vellore) so high in that list (as opposed to better known, and better funded medical institutions such as AIIMS or PGI, Chandigarh) is also noteworthy. I think. [Update: As pointed out by Pratik in his comment, both AIIMS and PGI come under institutions of national importance, and therefore are left out by Pratap in this exercise.]
As Pratap points out, this is only the first such exercise, and it uses quantity -- the number of papers -- as its yardstick. He indicates that this effort may be expanded to include quality indicators such as citation counts.
[Speaking of which, I should link to this Current Science editorial by Prof. P. Balaram saying some nasty things about scientometrics.]
Anyways, if you want to know how the Indian Institutes of Technology (and IISc as well) have done in terms of publications during these last five years, check out Giridhar's post! [Update: Giridhar informs us In the comments section, Giridhar informs us that he has compiled a list (pdf) of top 40 Indian universities based not just on their publications, but also on citations and the h-index. See this post for the context.]
Ila Patnaik in The Indian Express: Set the Campus Free:
The paper finds that the first element that pulls down the rank of a university is the process of budgetary approval from the government. The average European university that sets its own budget has a rank of 200 while the average European university that needs approval from the government has a rank of 316. In other words, giving a university autonomy to set its own budget on average yields an improvement of 116 ranks. The message for India: in order to obtain high-quality universities, we need to give universities autonomy.
The paper that Patnaik refers to is entitled The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the U.S., and it's by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell, André Sapir. (The paper is summarized in this NBER Digest article by Linda Gorman). Here's the abstract:
We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university autonomy and competition are positively correlated with university output, both among European countries and among U.S. public universities. We then identity a (political) source of exogenous shocks to funding of U.S. universities. We demonstrate that, when a state's universities receive a positive funding shock, they produce more patents if they are more autonomous and face more competition from private research universities. Finally, we show that during periods when merit-based competitions for federal research funding have been most prominent, universities produce more patents when they receive an exogenous funding shock, suggesting that routine participation in such competitions hones research skill.
Charu Sudan Kasturi in The (Kolkata) Telegraph: India’s higher education regulators have accused the Yash Pal panel on reforms of exceeding its terms of reference in recommending their termination as independent entities.
Hemali Chhapia in The Times of India: Every second student in India enrols in private college.
Deepa Kurup in The Hindu: Aiming for New-Look Universities.
Aarti Dhar in The Hindu: Kapil Sibal says Yash Pal Committee report will be implemented in 100 days.
At Coding Horror Jeff Atwood revisits the Monty Hall problem; he also has some links to several other pieces on this very interesting puzzle that even mathematicians are known to have fumbled on.
One of the links is to the original article by Marilyn vos Savant, published in 1991 [Update: Check out Rahul's comment, below, about a version of this problem discussed by Martin Gardner in 1959 !] . If you click through [to von Savant's site], don't forget to browse through the adverse comments on her (correct) solution that came from so many academics!
A Mystery link (cartoon).
Interdisciplinary wars: the economics vs. sociology edition: Bryan Caplan, Fabio Rojas, Henry Farrell.
Michael Nielsen: How to read mathematics and physics.
Just when you thought Elsevier can't stoop any lower, you get this: Elsevier offered to pay reviewers for posting good reviews -- 5 stars -- on Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.
An interesting research finding on open access publications: Is freely available literature better disseminated?
Empirically, we find that articles that received good evaluations on F1000 biology (a website where experts post evaluations of recently published papers in biology) were more likely to be in open access.
Totally pointless-but-fun links:
The Onion: Roger Federer Shows Up On Court With Wii Controller.
The Onion: Search for Self Called off After 38 Years:
"Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I'll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else."
"Fuck it," he added.
The (Kolkata) Telegraph: Google Finds Boy.
My name is Abi, and this is my personal blog. Just to be sure there's no misunderstanding, please read this disclaimer.
I also blog at:
Materialia Indica
DesiPundit (My picks)
I used to blog at:
nanopolitan 2.0
How the Other Half Lives
