Exam fraud goes high tech

...[The] accused doctors had scanned the entire question paper with the help of DocuPens.

Though the device is small enough to be easily smuggled in, it is also powerful enough to scan a full page in just four seconds, making it ideal for the task.

The accused then transferred the scanned data to their mobile phones using Bluetooth technology, and sent out the paper to their ‘contacts’ through multimedia messaging.

The contacts, sitting in Pondicherry and Madurai, immediately solved the questions and sent the answers to candidates taking the exam at the Chennai and Delhi centres through SMS.

This happened in the entrance test for admission to post-graduate programs in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India's No.1 institution for medicine.

The report is here. Though the above operation sounds high tech, there is a pretty low tech explanation for how and why it (almost) worked:

Mobile phones were not allowed in the exam hall, but the accused managed to bring them in. Interestingly, the phones also remained unnoticed throughout the examination.

"How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist?"

It should be possible, these days, to collect all knowledge you need from the internet. Problem then is, there is so much junk on the internet. Is it possible to weed out those very rare pages that may really be of use? I know exactly what should be taught to the beginning student. The names and topics of the absolutely necessary lecture courses are easy to list, and this is what I have done below. It is my intention to search on the web where the really useful papers and books are, preferably downloadable as well. This way, the costs of becoming a theoretical physicist should not exceed much the price of a computer with internet connection, a printer, and lots of paper and pens. ...

That's from Gerard't Hooft. Here.

His list of ideas and concepts that one needs to master starts with "Language". This is what he says under this topic:

English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand Englaish, but you don't have to be perfect here. The lousy English used in this text is mine. That's enough. All publications are in English. Note the importance of being able to write in English. Sooner or later you will wish to publish your results. People must be able to read and understand your stuff.

Zillionics and Wiki-science

Wiki-Science

The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished. It becomes a trail of edits and experiments posted in real time — an ever evolving "document." Contributions are not assigned. Tools for tracking credit and contributions will be vital. Responsibilities for errors will be hard to pin down. Wiki-science will often be the first word on a new area. Some researchers will specialize in refining ideas first proposed by wiki-science.

Zillionics

Ubiquitous always-on sensors in bodies and environment will transform medical, environmental, and space sciences. Unrelenting rivers of sensory data will flow day and night from zillions of sources. The exploding number of new, cheap, wireless, and novel sensing tools will require new types of programs to distill, index and archive this ocean of data, as well as to find meaningful signals in it. The field of "zillionics" — - dealing with zillions of data flows — - will be essential in health, natural sciences, and astronomy. This trend will require further innovations in statistics, math, visualizations, and computer science. More is different. Zillionics requires a new scientific perspective in terms of permissible errors, numbers of unknowns, probable causes, repeatability, and significant signals.

Just two of the several interesting (profound? outlandish?) ideas in Kevin Kelly's speech on "Speculations on the future of science" (Kelly restricts 'future' to be the next 50 years). See also Kelly's blog at the Technium.

Amartya Sen's critique of 'Clash of Civilizations'

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.

You can read more in this essay, adapted from Sen's new book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny.

Kaushik Basu on the need for labour reforms

One pervasive myth is that making labour laws flexible will hurt organised sector labour.

What this overlooks is that India has a shockingly small organised private sector less than 10 million workers because of our restrictive labour laws.

Once these are changed, the demand for labour in the organised sector will increase and this is bound to raise wages and mop up part of the unemployment. To make this change politically feasible government needs to spell out the argument in public.

Once ordinary workers realise that the laws need to be changed not to elicit sacrifices from them but in their interest, there will be more support for the change.

From this ToI column by Kaushik Basu, an economics professor at Cornell.

CBSE and the single girl child

Last year, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) imposed a serious burden on all its schools (even private ones which receive no aid from the government) by asking them to provide free education to the single girl children (girls with no siblings). Not surprisingly, this order was challenged in court.

Satya has all the details on the CBSE's order as well as the lawsuit. Essentially, CBSE has changed its stance. While the government-run Kendriya Vidyalaya schools will provide free education to single girl children from their class VI onwards, the private schools have the option of doing so in classes IX to XII.

More importantly,

It [CBSE] has also introduced a new scholarship scheme for single girl children who secure 60% or more marks in their class X Examination for the year 2006 onwards. These children would be given scholarship of Rs. 500/- p.m. for studying in classes XI and XII in schools who charged tuition fee of not more than Rs. 1,000/- p.m. during the academic year 2005-06.

I agree that this order is far better than the one issued earlier. However, it still leaves me with these questions: Why only single girl children? Why not all girls? Why discriminate against girls who have siblings? After all, it's not their fault that they have siblings ...

A new twist on 'Indian made foreign books'

A while ago, I wrote this post about Indian (actually, South Asian) reprints of textbooks originally published in rich countries; the Indian editions are available at prices as low as 5% of that of the originals. Though there is a steep drop in production quality (poor quality paper, black-and-white printing, and so on), what is really important in the Indian context is the low price, which makes these books affordable to our students.

It's not just the students studying in India who benefit from these low-priced editions. Indian students in the US stock up on them on their visits home; and I am sure the ones who will be leaving our shores in the next few months are also thinking hard about which books they will need, and if their Indian editions are available.

Clearly, this huge price differential is a potential business opportunity; however, one cannot pursue it because buying Indian editions and selling them in the US is illegal (it's a copyright violation). But some 'entrepreneurs' are undeterred by such constraints! Do read this New York Times story.

Interestingly, import of such inexpensive books for one's own use is legal in the US. What is illegal is re-selling them to others. In other words, one cannot get into the book-selling business using the strategy of exploiting this price arbitrage. For example, this is what some enterprising student did in Purdue university:

Tom Frey, the owner of the University Bookstore at Purdue, said he was taken aback when he was approached for advice by a student collecting orders for a shipment of books from India — enough to fill a shipping container.

The student had, in effect, set himself up as a low-cost alternative to Mr. Frey's store.

"He was doing it out of his dorm room," Mr. Frey said.

The underlying cause for this 'business opportunity', of course, is the very high prices of textbooks in the US. The NYTimes story mentions an exorbitant figures of $ 250 each for some engineering texts!

Janmejaya Sinha on higher ed in India

There is a surging demand for the skills an IIT imparts and no supply side response. It cannot be an issue of funding, because if the government is strapped for funds, these institutions could raise funding directly—their alumni alone would be able to provide billions of dollars. India needs 50 IITs, 100 regional engineering colleges (RECs) and many great colleges to support the needs of the growing economy. [...]

Thus, instead of IIMs setting up campuses abroad, we need on a war-footing to increase the number of top quality institutions in India so that we have children from other countries coming to India to study and the education business works to India’s advantage in an increasingly knowledge-based society of the future. The current apathy needs to end.

That's from Janmejaya Sinha, Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group, in an op-ed in the Financial Express.

This news about IISc certainly made me go "huh?"

A group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here has reportedly opposed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the IISc and University of Mysore ... [...]

A spokesman for the dissenting group of Scientists of IISc is reported to have asked if they must waste their precious time and scarce resources when similar tie-up with IIT-Mumbai only remained on paper with nothing happening after the MoU was signed years ago.

Having been created as an institution to focus on research of high quality, should IISc be asked to divert its researchers' energies to pursue other activities such as teaching in a University? the Scientists are reported to have questioned.

Somebody at the Star of Mysore seems to have the inside track on dissent in IISc!

Amartya Sen: Democracy isn't 'Western'

When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.

Amartya Sen's opinion piece. Here.

Porn in the classroom

It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women's studies. Those specialists argue that graphic sexual imagery has become ubiquitous in society, so it's almost irresponsible not to teach young people how to deal with it.

From this story in Time. I really liked this question in the story's subtitle:

Colleges are getting serious about porn studies, but should professors show or just tell?

FICCI summit on higher ed in the private sector

Over at Education in India, Satya has a report on the recent 'Summit' organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) on private sector participation in higher education. In addition to the views of FICCI bigwigs, he presents a nice summary of the speeches made by Larry Summers (President of Harvard), N. R. Madhava Menon (Director, National Judicial Academy, Bhopal) and S. Venkateswaran (Vice-Chancellor, BITS, Pilani).

The post is long, but has lots of interesting ideas on a variety of topics: institution building, role of regulations, a history of poor regulations (and worse, meddling), governance structures, students as clients (customers? consumers?), competitive culture in American institutions, funding patterns, philanthropy, and so on. An absolute must-read for anyone interested in the state of higher ed in India.

Computing and science in 2020

This is a follow-up to my post four days ago.

In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.

The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. [...]

From this page over at Microsoft Research, that hosts the report of this expert group. Nature has a set of articles devoted to 2020 -- Future of Computing, with quite a few articles; all of them are free.

Education in India: Fact of the day

India has thirteen "Institutions of National Importance". Among them, you will find places like the seven IITs (Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Guwahati and Roorkee).

Also among them is Dakshina Bharti Hindi Prachar Sabha, Chennai.

Seriously.

Europe's parenting problem

The problem, of course, is that more and more people choose to not become parents; i.e., birthrate has been in a serious decline. What can governments do to stem the decline? BBC has a series of articles, exploring this topic from women's point of view. I wonder why; I mean, isn't it also important to find out what European men have to say about this problem?

Anyways, start with this story, all the other stories are linked within it. There are two country-specific stories: Norway and Italy. Another story explores how more and more women choose child-free lifestyles.

One of the concerns about the decline in birth rates is about how an aging population can be supported by a dwindling population. Immigration is a potential solution, but looks like Europe is not too keen on it. The BBC story just offers these two lame arguments against it:

Increasing levels of immigration is, in theory, one option for Europe, but most agree it is politically unfeasible in the current climate.

Others stress that it would not in any event solve the problem in the longer term - the migrants would themselves grow old and their own fertility patterns would start to match those of the country which received them.

One can bet that when things become really desperate, immigration will be back on the table as a possible solution to Europe's problem of 'inverse population' bomb.