Two Responses to Prime Minister Singh

First, from my friend, Arati Chokshi:

In any democracy, the voice of opposition or dissent – if heard and responded to seriously, strengthens the democratic process and yields solutions that are more representative of people’s needs and concerns. Yet, you have dismissed all opposition to your individual vision for the nation as effectively ‘non-thinking’.

[...]

I ask that you do not resort to potentially slanderous, repressive tactics to gag discussions on nuclear or any other ‘development’ issues using any un-mandated powers of your office, but instead adopt a consultative approach with people of India, to resolve their issues and concerns. While this process may be slow, we must remember that we are not China, as you pointed out in the interview to Science.

The second is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in an Indian Express op-ed: Do Not Disagree.

... Second, the rhetoric, that the world outside, particularly of NGOs, is a conspiracy to hold India back, is second nature to paranoid regimes. The Chinese construct dissent as motivated. Indira Gandhi revelled in it. But in her case, in the backdrop of Allende, global geopolitics, the CIA and the KGB, there was a touch of plausibility. Now these arguments have so much a touch of farce to them. But they are pretexts to increase state control. Third, think of the pattern with this government. Like the Chinese, we have used the power of granting research visas to regulate research. Our visa regime for scholars is a shame for a liberal democracy. So great is our paranoia that in the small print of even PIO cards, you will see a prohibition on doing research. Like the Chinese, films showing India’s human rights record in an unflattering light are hard to release. Censorship, through formal and informal pressures, is legion. [...]

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Invokes the Foreign Hand

Prime Minister Singh plays the patriotism card. Here's the irony of ironies: The New York Times -- a "foreign hand", and an American one at that! -- is mocking the Indian government using the fact that his "foreign hand" insinuation against his government's opponents is behind the paywalls of another "foreign hand" -- the American Association of Advancement of Science which publishes Science.

Here's the part where Singh insinuates that his opponents are puppets following the orders of foreign powers:

Q: Why did your government put a moratorium on the release of Bt brinjal?

M.S.: Biotechnology has enormous potential, and in due course of time we must make use of genetic engineering technologies to increase the productivity of our agriculture. But there are controversies. There are NGOs, often funded from the United States and the Scandinavian countries, which are not fully appreciative of the development challenges that our country faces. But we are a democracy, we are not like China. [Bold-italic emphasis added]

You know, for example, what's happening in Kudankulam [in southern India, where local NGO-led protests have stalled commissioning of two 1000-megawatt nuclear reactors]. The atomic energy program has got into difficulties because these NGOs, mostly I think based in the United States, don't appreciate the need for our country to increase the energy supply.

Q: After the Fukushima disaster in Japan, do you still think that nuclear energy has a role in India?

M.S.: Yes, where India is concerned, yes. The thinking segment of our population certainly is supportive of nuclear energy.

Things I learned this past week

1. How "India is well-placed to push ahead with its bid to become a scientific powerhouse" [click the link at the bottom to read Richard Stone's story in Science for free]. Highlights the work of quite a few colleagues at IISc!

2. How "a single factor goes a long way in explaining the dearth of women in math-intensive fields" by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci [American Scientist].

3. Just four of the past 50 Oscar best-picture winners are about women -- a video commentary by Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency.

4. Why Journalists Need to Link by Felix Salmon.

5. That "the practice [of Yoga] can fan sexual flames! Choice quote: "Pelvic regions can feel more sensitive and orgasms more intense."

Bell Labs

Among the American private sector industrial R&D labs (such as those at GE, Ford, IBM, Xeros, ...), Bell Labs has a such a special status that one finds an article appearing every once in a while telling us what a great place it was, and trying to extract some management wisdom about what made it so great. Here's the latest, from Jon Gertner.

Gertner appears to trace the decline of the Bell Labs to the US industry's decision to move their factories to other parts of the globe:

... Bell Labs was sometimes caricatured as an ivory tower. But it is more aptly described as an ivory tower with a factory downstairs. It was clear to the researchers and engineers there that the ultimate aim of their organization was to transform new knowledge into new things.

Steven Chu, secretary of the Department of Energy, won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work at Bell Labs in the early 1980s. He once said that working in an environment of applied science like Bell Labs “doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius, it focuses the mind.” At Bell Labs, even for researchers in pursuit of pure scientific understanding, it was obvious that their work could be used.

... Bell Labs’ satellite facilities [were set up] in the phone company’s manufacturing plants, so as to help transfer all these new ideas into things. But the exchange was supposed to go both ways, with the engineers learning from the plant workers, too. As manufacturing has increasingly moved out of the United States in the past half century, it has likewise taken with it a whole ecosystem of industrial knowledge. But in the past, this knowledge tended to push Bell Labs toward new innovations.

Classy

Here's an episode in Prof. Satish Dhawan's years as ISRO chief:

The early days saw many failures. Through all those difficult times, Dhawan never lost faith in ISRO’s capabilities. He took personal responsibility for failure but when success came, he always attributed it to ISRO and his colleagues. Thus, when the first flight of SLV-3 in 1979 failed, Dhawan faced the press. When the second flight succeeded, Dhawan kept himself in the background while Kalam spoke to the press.

That note is from P.V. Manoranjan Rao's tribute to Dhawan on the latter's 89th birth anniversary. This memorable anecdote came up in a couple of conversations yesterday, and it felt good to be reminded of it again.

A longer version appears in R. Ramachandran's obituary in Frontline.

Abdul Kalam has recounted his experiences when he was the project director for the launch of India's first launch vehicle SLV-3. The first experimental launch of SLV-3 took place on August 10, 1979, but it was a failure. Kalam was called by Dhawan to attend a press conference. "Before the press conference, Professor Dhawan told me that he was going to handle the situation and I should be present with many of the senior scientists and technologists," Kalam has said.

At the press conference Dhawan announced "Friends, today we had our first satellite launch vehicle to put a satellite in the orbit, we could not succeed. It is our first mission of proving multiple technologies in satellite and satellite launch vehicles. In many technologies we have succeeded and a few more we have to succeed. Above all, I realise my team members have to be given all the technological support. I am going to do that and the next mission will succeed."

[...]

The next developmental flight, of SLV-3,on July 18, 1980, was a remarkable success. "An important thing happened then," recounts Kalam. "Professor Dhawan asked me to handle the press conference with our team members. Dhawan's management philosophy was that when success comes in after hard work, the leader should give the credit of the success to the team members. When failure comes, the leader should absorb the failures and protect the team members."

Cartoon Links

1. Calvin and Hobbes on Academic Writing [via Chris Blattman]

2. Abstruse Goose: GMail.

3. PHD Comics: The Mountain Top

Wow!

Just. Wucking. Fow!

The links are to two anonymous comments on a post by Rahul, who alerted me in this comment.

Prof. Rao responds to the plagiarism row

And the first response is not encouraging. It starts with this howler:

"This should not be really considered as plagiarism, but an instance of copying of a few sentences in the text," Rao, Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister, said.

And it ends with him disowning his co-authors:

He said the paper was written by Prof Krupanidhi and he did not go through it and had no control on the issue. "I did not directly produce the manuscript which I normally do... The paper seemed perfectly alright except that later we found that in the introduction and in the description of an equation, a few sentences had been taken from a paper published already," he added.

Does this make you too wonder who's getting damaged more by this confession?

Jalote and Balakrishnan think Indian faculty members have it easy!

Pankaj Jalote (Director of IIIT-Delhi) and M. Balakrishnan (Deputy Director, IIT-Delhi) have an op-ed in yesterday's Economic Times: Government’s attitude towards research funding must change for our researchers to compete globally.

Specifically, they talk about (a) allowing faculty members to make a bit of money from their grants and (b) allowing foreign travel. They also talk about incentives for institutions with a liberal overheads regime.

Unexceptionable these ideas may be, but I found the premise of the op-ed, um, strange: our faculty members don't exhibit the kind of mad, aggressive drive -- like the professors in the US do! -- to go after the grants. They need to be incentivised!

... there are too many constraints on research grants here and not enough incentives. As a result, whereas in a country like the US, professors spend a lot of effort getting grants, in India, neither the universities nor faculty members are so driven. And this lack of a strong desire to go after research grants makes research funding a government's most powerful tool for directing research, a rather toothless tiger.

This seems to mis-state the case. In the US, the funding environment is so brutal only because the university research system has grown far too big compared to the available kitty. Whereas in India, we seem to enjoy a rather benign funding environment. If anything, this is a great advertisement that our institutions should use to attract all those harried Indian researchers all over the world!

I would think this is a part of the spiel our academic leaders use at meetings like YIM-Boston and YRM-Stanford.

The Rao Row

John Cage once said, "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it." Well, I have very little to say about this issue (and much of it is derivative, anyway):

1. First, what Rahul said.

2. The apology issued by Prof. C.N.R. Rao (and his co-authors) is a newsworthy event only because of who he is. Otherwise, there's absolutely no news here.

3. G. Mudur's a report in today's Telegraph is about the most measured and least sensationalist you'll find [Disclosure: I am one of the people quoted in it; so is Rahul]. Here's a key section from his report:

   A PhD student at the IISc who is among the paper’s four co-authors had copied the four sentences without realising it was wrong to do so, Krupanidhi told The Telegraph. “It was an oversight, but it should not have happened,” he said.

   “We apologised to the original paper’s authors and offered to withdraw our paper from the journal when we learnt that this had happened. But the journal’s editors decided to retain the paper as the transgression was minor,” Krupanidhi said.

4. Prof. Rohini Muthuswami (School of Life Sciences, JNU) gave a very nice talk at the Workshop on Academic Ethics held last July in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. Her talk was about why students resort to plagiarism in their written work. As I recall, she dealt with two causes at length:

   • Lack of awareness: Many students don't even know what all the fuss is about. They are conditioned by their prior experiences: at school and college, they were rewarded for answers that are verbatim reproduction of material in text books. Similarly, they were encouraged to find data, text, pictures from various sources and pass them off as their own [anyone who has seen students demonstrating some experiment or the other at a science fair would know what I'm talking about].

     When they get to grad school, they have a lot of unlearning to do; to their credit, most of them (especially those in research-active groups) go through this process without too much of a hitch, and manage to learn -- by themselves, through osmosis from their peers, or through a formal training program -- the key ethical principles that rule the scientific enterprise.

   • Lack of language skills: Many students have done their schooling (and in a few cases, their college, too) in their own language, and simply lack the required level of writing skills in English. While a lot of emphasis is given in grad school on oral communication (talks at group meetings, for example), explicit training in writing is not formalized. Prof. Muthuswami suggested remedial English classes (where necessary), and lots of writing assignments in courses to help them develop confidence in their own ability to express themselves in written English.

   I do not want to sound all sour about the students here. As I said, most students in research-active groups do manage the transition rather well. The real trick is in figuring out how to go from "most students" to "all students".

* * *

Update: Added links to the Workshop on Academic Ethics and to the abstract of Prof. Muthuswami's talk.

UPdate 2: For the record, here are the reporters who have written their stories after talking to real persons with real names: Aishhwariya Subramanian (DNA), Kalyan Ray (Deccan Herald), Divya Gandhi (The Hindu), and of course, G. Mudur (The Telegraph)

Notes from the Neighbourhood: The State of Higher Ed in Pakistan

Blunt words from Pervez Hoodbhoy:

Pakistan’s university teachers and researchers have roughly the same ethical standards as its politicians, generals, judges, and shopkeepers. Hiding in the shadows is even easier because it is hard for non-academics to tell the difference between trivial and significant works. So once the PCST and HEC announced cash awards and other perks, almost overnight a research-poor country started producing a bumper crop of “research articles” year after year. The HEC claimed victory but many papers were tired repetitions, contained fake data, were plagiarised, or published in fly-by-night journals. Dr Isa Daudpota, an intrepid academic trouble-shooter has, over the years, documented the academic sleaze. Such stark evidence has, unfortunately, had scant effect upon the HEC.

Fabio Rojas: Is Academia Meritocratic?

Over at OrgTheory.net, he looks at the evidence -- a couple of bullet points each -- for and against prevalence of meritocracy in academia really is (and the post has attracted some fantastic comments). Here's the evidence against:

There is evidence of un-meritocratic components of the academic labor market:

• In many studies, there is a correlation of labor market outcomes and gender, even when controlling for # of articles and other relevant performance measures. It may be the case that there is outright prejudice. It may also be the case that gender is correlated with other behaviors that are judged differently by the labor market. Erin Leahey has a series of papers, for example, arguing that gender is correlated with specialization in research, which is correlated with labor market outcomes. Meritocratic? It’s up for debate.

• Studies like Burris (2004) that show that elite programs dominate the market and people are often judged by status of the PhD program, even when there is evidence of publication.

Trial of Italian Earthquake Scientists

Following the indictment in June 2010, six Italian seismologists (and a couple of bureaucrats) are being tried on charges of manslaughter. Nature has a report on a recent hearing in an Italian court: New twists in Italian seismology trial.

The hearing also included some true scientific debate when Lalliana Mualchin, former chief seismologist for the Department of Transportation in California, testified as an expert witness for the prosecution. In 2010, when news about the indictment broke, Mualchin was among the few experts who openly criticized — and refused to sign — a letter supporting the indicted seismologists signed by about 5,000 international scientists.

[...]

The problem is in part a scientific one, Mualchin said. The Italian scientists based their analysis on the frequency of earthquakes in the area. This is known as the probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA), a method that is state of the art in many countries, but that, in Mualchin’s view, systematically underestimates seismic hazard because it does not consider extreme and rare events.

“Frequency is not important, what really matters is the largest earthquake we can expect, the strongest one that has happened in the past. Risk prevention should be based on that,” he said. This is the philosophy behind deterministic seismic-hazard analysis, a method that Mualchin says has been mostly abandoned by the scientific community, to the point that younger seismologists do not even learn about it.

PageRank Algorithm Applied to Cricket Matches

A paper from Satyam Mukherjee of Northwestern University implements this algorithm on cricket matches to arrive at a new scheme for ranking countries and captains [Thanks to Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao for the link].

Quick summary: Australia rulz. [D'uh!]

What is more interesting (I have only skimmed the results) is the separate, decade-wise ranking. India's best record is for the 2000s (second in tests, and third in ODIs). It was also #2 in the 1970s for test matches; the following remarks give a flavour of what PageRank algorithm does:

Even though the early 1960s were poor periods for England, during the late 60’s England defeated stronger opponents like West Indies and Australia. Hence judging by the quality of wins, according to PageRank during 1961 − 1970 England was the most successful team. A similar effect is also observed during the 1971−1980 era, where India occupies the second position according to PageRank. During the same period India defeated stronger opponents like West Indies and England. [Bold emphasis added].

Assault on Academic Autonomy at AIIMS

G. Mudur in has the scoop in The Telegraph:

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has decided to promote 39 of its faculty members after recommendations by politicians although they had been declared unfit for promotion by the institute’s standing selection committee.

This assault had bipartisan support:

.... [In] the governing body meeting on January 16, ... BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, a member of the governing body, initiated a discussion for a “solution for these unfit 39 faculty” members who have served AIIMS for a considerable period. [...]

... [G]overning body chairperson Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is the Union health minister, and members Moti Lal Vora, and the director general of health services supported Swaraj and the governing body decided to “in principle” promote all 39 faculty to their respective higher grades. [Bold emphasis added]