How clueless is NDTV?

So clueless that they failed to anticipate not just outrage and scorn, but serious professional ridicule; see the posts by Falstaff and Kuffir.

[Update: See also Rahul's fan letter to Ms. Barkha Dutt: "Keep going. ... I am sure you will continue to make more news than you report"].

* * *

Here's another example. Yesterday, Prem Panicker wrote a balanced post; while he emphasized bloggers' right to express their opinion freely, he also pointed out that they cannot play with facts, and when they do, they have to face the consequences. The specific example he cites is Chyetan's use of this quote from Wikipedia's entry on Ms. Barkha Dutt as of 30th November 2008 (pointed out by one of the commenters on Prem's blog):

During the Kargil conflict, Indian Army sources repeatedly complained to her channel that she was giving away locations in her broadcasts, thus causing Indian casualties.

This part of the entry wasn't backed up by a citation, and sure enough, it went away, probably as soon as someone raised this issue. I don't know when the next change took place, but this is what we find now in its place:

Her reporting of the Kargil conflict was criticized by Admiral Sureesh Mehta who insinuated that she may have compromised the security of the troops by giving away locations.[10].

It is essentially the same accusation ("criticism") as the previous one -- but (a) it cites to a newspaper, and (b) it names a high-ranking official who made that 'insinuation'. Click on that link, and you get this:

The competition among news channels to score brownie points reminded him of the “famous shot” during the Kargil War that led to the destruction of an ultra-powerful artillery gun of the Army. Three soldiers died and the Colonel, who yielded to a woman reporter’s entreaty to fire the gun for the camera’s benefit was dismissed from service.

Sure, this paragraph doesn't mention the woman reporter's name explicitly, but how many embedded women reporters in the war zone were involved in the 'famous shot' incident during the Kargil War? The context seems to point to Ms. Dutt as the reporter in question. Is this citation good enough for Wikipedia? It must be, because of the following.

In that entry on Ms. Dutt, the above quote is 'balanced' with the following sentence:

Ms Dutt refuted these charges in her response by citing Gen VP Malik's book that had opined otherwise. [11]

This sentence also has a citation. Clicking through, we find that it's an article by Ms. Dutt herself:

Finally, I would like to point out that the Navy Chief made a factually incorrect and wholly untrue comment on NDTV's coverage during the Kargil conflict of 1999, claiming that NDTV asked for a gun to be triggered for the benefit of the camera. I want to state for the record: no such incident ever took place and we have an official aknowledgment of that, including from then Army Chief, V.P Malik. I would urge Admiral Mehta to read General V.P Malik's book on Kargil for further clarity. General Malik was the Army Chief during the operations and puts to rest any such controversy in his book. In a formal letter, NDTV has also asked for an immediate retraction from the Navy and officially complained that the comments amount to defamation. Several writers have already pointed out how the Navy Chief has got his facts wrong. (DNA, Indian Express, Vir Sanghvi in The Hindustan Times, Sankarshan Thakur in The Telegraph). This, incidentally, was the same press conference where the Admiral threatened literally to "chop the heads off" of two other reporters who aired his interview ahead of schedule.

It's a solid defence by Ms. Dutt. But the fact remains that the Navy Chief has uttered those damaging words, and despite NDTV's letter asking "for an immediate retraction from the Navy" and "officially [complaining] that the comments amount to defamation," no such retraction appears to have been made by the Navy (at least to my knowledge).

It's going to be interesting, watching how Ms. Dutt and NDTV proceed with this stuff. Will they sue the Navy Chief, and extract an apology and a retraction? Will they demand that he display it prominently on his blog?

* * *

The "criticism" section of the Wikipedia entry on Ms. Dutt is only going to swell. What is worse, Chyetan's original observations about Ms. Dutt's live coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks will also be fact-checked, and documented in detail.

Did NDTV anticipate any of this?

Congratulations, NDTV!

For winning the "Clueless Media Company of the Decade" award!

After screwing up big time on your on-air coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks you have just showed us how low you can go in the off-air world.

It is a surreal world indeed when you -- a channel whose very existence depends on the right to free speech -- unleash your legal team to stop a member of "We the People" from exercising that right.

You may have muzzled his voice, but the other members of his tribe have chosen to speak up.

Let's start with this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this.

Those are just from today. They make you go, "Enough is Enough!", don't they?

* * *

The apology you extracted reminds us of re-education programs that totalitarian regimes impose on dissidents. Or of re-induction rituals in third rate gangster movies.

But I think Gaurav has made the most appropriate link between what you did and what another organization did over three years ago.

That organization is IIPM.

You're in some seriously classy company.

Congratulations!

Big news for the IITs

Yesterday, the IIT Council met after nearly five years. Yes, after five years.

It was the first meeting of the Council since the UPA government took over. The immediate provocation for calling this meeting appears to be the Chennai High Court's decision last month invalidating the re-appointment of Prof. M.S. Ananth as the Director of IIT-M, because it was not ratified by the IIT-Council. The Court's decision rattled MHRD, because there are several other IIT Directors whose appointment could also run into legal trouble because of the same procedural lapse.

In the event, the IIT Council has not only ratified the appointment or re-appointment of these directors, it also took several other decisions, including the appointment of directors to six of the eight new IITs. I am very happy to see Prof. M.K. Surappa, a colleague, in this august list:

Directors to six new IITs were also appointed at today’s meeting. U.B. Desai, an electrical engineer from IIT Bombay, will head IIT Hyderabad. M.K. Surappa, who teaches metallurgy at [IIT Delhi IISc, Bangalore], will be the director of IIT Roopnagar (Punjab). IIT Kanpur civil engineer Sudhir Jain will head the IIT in Gandhinagar. Anil Bhowmick, from IIT Kharagpur’s rubber technology centre, will be the director of IIT Patna. IIT Kharagpur deputy director Madhusudan Chakraborty will head IIT Bhubaneswar.

The other big move -- about which I don't want to comment right now, because I don't think it'll get the Parliament's approval -- is to exempt some 47 institutions (including IITs and IIMs) from implementing the official reservation policy of the government. Charu Sudan Kasturi's report in the Telegraph has an excellent overview on this issue.

Dennis Overbye on science and democracy

I think he overstates his case when he says, "Science and democracy have always been twins;" but I really liked the middle part of his article, where he defends science from "cultural and religious critics":

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

Ariviyal.info ...

Great news for Tamil lovers: Ariviyal is a great new blog devoted to science. It has been active for a couple of weeks now, with quite a few posts already on subjects as diverse as radio astronomy, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and the geometry of potato chips.

Great stuff, and I love it!

Congratulations to Arunn, Badri, Venkat and Arul for this wonderful blog.

The first three also blog in English: Arunn, Badri and Venkat.

Temperature effect on poor countries' scientific output

Poor countries produced fewer scientific papers in hot years — a rise of one degree Celsius was associated with a nine per cent drop in the number of papers published.

There's more in this story by Sharon Davis, with some speculations about the underlying mechanisms.

This finding is just a part of a study entitled "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century" by Melissa Dell (MIT), Benjamin Jones (Northwestern and Harvard) and Benjamin Olken (MIT). Here are some of the other effects of climate shock mentioned in their paper:

Our main results show large, negative effects of higher temperatures on growth, but only in poor countries. In poorer countries, we estimate that a 1◦C rise in temperature in a given year reduced economic growth in that year by about 1.1 percentage points. In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernable effect on growth. Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries. [...]

We also find evidence that temperature affects numerous dimensions of poor countries’ economies. While agricultural output contractions appear to be part of the story, we likewise find adverse effects of hot years on industrial output and aggregate investment. Poor countries also produce fewer scientific publications in hot years, which suggests that higher temperatures may impede innovation. Moreover, we show that higher temperatures lead to political instability in poor countries, as evidenced by irregular changes in national leaders. Many of these effects sit outside the primarily agricultural focus of much economic research on climate change and underscore the challenge for approaches that seek to build aggregate estimates of climate impacts from a narrow set of channels. These broader relationships also help explain how temperature might affect growth rates in poor countries, not simply the level of output.

Citizen Initiative: Never Forget

Never Forget   has been in the works for 2 months, and it went live this Republic Day -- yesterday. While the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai is the immediate trigger (look at the site's banner), it is only a hook; the site is meant for changing the very way we are governed, by getting the community -- us -- to monitor our politicians by holding them up to their own election promises.

... [I]f WE, the people, who elect them, do not care to evaluate their performance periodically, WHO will be the appraiser of enforcement of promises?

We maintain that, as a collective force, we can work to keep track of what our elected representatives -- whether at the centre, state, city, town, district or village level -- promised us and how far the promises have been fulfilled.

How is this going to be done? Here's the Vision statement:

At the heart of our effort is the idea of promises that can be evaluated. We want to find out whether our elected leaders are implementing what they promised to do in their common minimum program/manifestos , and that can be done by periodically monitoring the progress on each and every one of them. And this data can be used by the electorate to assess performance by way of our ballots.

The other core principle that we base our endeavor on is that of verifiable analysis. Each and every claim made in the course of our effort, without fail, will have to essentially be accompanied by a reference either documentation or factual press release. We believe that this will give our work the credibility that is seen lacking in several current editorials and articles about the state of the nation.

The people behind this initiative are young, tech-savvy, driven and committed. I met one of them -- Animesh Pathak, a fellow BHU alum (he blogs here), and I still remember his energy and enthusiasm while he was describing this project to me.

Go check out Never Forget. More importantly, if you believe in the concept, participate in it.

Quote of the Day

... [M]athematician [is] a device for converting coffee into formulas.
-- attributed to Albert Einstein [see the update below]

The attribution looks suspicious, and I have not been able to confirm it. [Update: This appears to be a variant of Alfréd Rényi's original: "a mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems." Thanks to Rahul for his comment and the link.] In any case, it's a great way to start the morning!

I found the quote in James Fallows's 1994 musings about the goodness of coffee, which I found through his post about recent findings that links coffee to lower risks of developing dementia.

Science 2.0

1. Via Nascent: Scitable (okay, I should perhaps call it Science 1.5):

   Scitable is an online learning tool for students in science. It has three main parts: content, tools, and community. Most of the content has been specially developed for this site by NPG staff editors, supported by an Editorial Board of teaching faculty, leading an author group of faculty, researchers, and science writers. Some of the content comes from various NPG journals, and another segment has been provided by Freeman and Sinauer, two excellent publishers who have partnered with us. All of the content is pitched at the university level. The most interesting tools – yet at an early stage – are intended to personalize learning paths and experiences (utilizing site content) for individual students or classrooms of students, based on their needs and preferences. The community is registered site members – for the most part they are structured within online classroom groups created by their faculty, but we intend to make it easier in time for site members to connect with each other across traditional academic boundaries for purposes of common interest, whether study or dialogue.

   Genetics is all it has right now, but it has plans to expand to other sciences. Will have to check back later.

2. AcaWiki:

   AcaWiki is a "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to collect summaries and long-abstracts of peer-reviewed academic research, and make them available to the general public.

Hell

Two cartoons:

1. Laptop hell.

2. Atheist hell.

Higher Ed links

Hemali Chhapia has a report in which Prof. Damodar Acharya, Director, IIT-Kharagpur, is quoted as saying that JEE is a 'flawed system' of selecting students, and that it "hurts the high school system".

The start of Techfest's 2009 edition was not all fun and games. The controversial issue of scrapping the IIT-JEE came under the spotlight when IIT-Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya pointed out the "flawed system'' of selecting students with an objective type entrance examination. ...

He told TOI, after the discussion, that JEE in a way was hurting the high school system as IIT aspirants focused only on JEE. "I am against JEE and feel it should be eliminated. Why can't we take students on the basis of Std XII marks? Anyway, we take in less than 1% of our top science students after 10+2 and these are very bright children."

In expressing these views, he joins Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-M.

* * *

Shafi Rahman has short piece in India Today about how the National Knowledge Commission, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the University Grants Commission have been fighting over the autonomy levels at the new Central Universities. since this government is in a hurry to set the ball rolling, and since the next session of the Parliament may be too late (the General Elections may be announced anytime soon, and the government may not be able to announce any new policies), it has gone with the ordinance route. This bit in an otherwise bleak report is genuinely good

As a first step, the ministry has decided to do away with the tag of World Class University, an idea which has won it the NKC’s applause . The Act will now be termed the National Universities System Act instead of the World Class University System Act. “We can’t name a child ‘genius’, who is at risk of growing up clueless,” says a ministry official.

Padma Awards

Here's the list for this year. And here are the winners in Science and Engineering:

Padma Vibhushan:

1. Anil Kakodkar (Atomic Energy)
2. Madhavan Nair (Space)

Padma Bhushan:

1. Bhakta B. Rath (Materials Science)
2. Conjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri (Mathematics)
3. Gurdip Singh Randhawa (Horticulture)
4. Sam Pitroda (Telecom)
5. Sarvagya Singh Katiyar (Chemistry)
6. Thomas Kailath (Electrical Engineering)

Padma Shri:

1. Pramod Tandon (Biotechnology)
2. Syed Iqbal Hasnain (Geology)
3. Goriparthi Narasimha Raju Yadav (Agriculture)

The list of award winners includes academics such as Iravatham Mahadevan (Padma Shri), C.K. Prahlad, Ramachandra Guha, Isher Judge Ahluwalia (Padma Bhushan) and D.P. Chattopadhyaya (Padma Vibhushan).

* * *

Previous Republic Day Award posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Now available online: All the essays in Lilavati's Daughters

This time, it's *not* a false alert. I have checked it myself. This page has the links to all the essays; each link first takes you to a short profile of the scientist's career, and clicking on the title gives you access to her essay -- in pdf.

Now I can link directly to the essay by Prof. Rama Govindarajan and that about Dr. Anandibai Joshi by Pooja Thakar.

I thank Prof. Rohini Godbole, a colleague and one of the editors of Lilavati's Daughters, for getting these essays online, giving them a wider reach that they deserve. Here's her own contribution: It has been an interesting journey.

Now available online: Videos of the IISc Centenary Conference

Go straight to the Conference Program, and they are all there.

[Update: Oops! The page has this statement:

These videos can be downloaded and watched within the campus LAN only. Access from outside campus will be made available ... after the [copyrights] are put in...."

Sorry for the false alert. Will post the links -- again -- when the videos are *really* available to the world outside. In the meantime, the following links work only within the campus.

And thanks to the anonymous commenter for pointing out this problem.]

Two strong recommendations from me:

1. Prof. Subra Suresh's keynote (hi-res version if you are on our campus). After a longish introduction, Suresh's talk starts at about 8 minutes; he spends the first part on what engineering is about, and how its mission is getting redefined, and hence, how engineering education must be re-oriented. Bottomline: an awareness of and a concern for the environmental and cultural effects of all that they engineer, and therefore, an interdisciplinary focus that includes not just the physical sciences, but life sciences, social sciences and humanities as well.

   He illustrates these trends with a couple of examples. This part relies quite heavily on slides (animations, videos, etc); since the video, sadly, missed the slides, this part does not come out all that well. Just so you know.

2. Prof. Sidney Brenner's keynote (hi-res). You can safely skip the long introduction and go straight to the 20th minute -- yes, the intro was *that* long!

   Before he gets to his main theme -- how to read the genome -- Brenner does two things: he starts with a great story that takes a dig at the lengthy intro, and he trashes a couple of sub-fields: systems biology and synthetic biology. It's not just that he points out the major limitations of these enterprises, but just plain trashes them -- for example, he calls them "low input, high throughput, no output" sciences. Ouch!

   If you enjoy strong views that are backed up by strong arguments and a willingness to wage verbal war -- and if you are not a systems or synthetic biologist -- you'll greatly enjoy this part of the talk.

   The other part is very good too. It's an excellent illustration of a great public lecture: presenting some of the key ideas of a field to an audience that includes a lot of 'outsiders'. Don't miss it!

   Here's a great quote from the talk:

   Someone said that sequencing the human genome is like sending a man to the moon. They were absolutely right. [pause] Because sending a man to the moon is easy; [it is] getting him back which is the problem.

Is there anything that Obama can't do?

Yet another interesting finding, but it will still have to be verified and replicated:

... [R]esearchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”