Tuesday, May 09, 2006

An honest lab report ...


Here is a lab report (via Pharyngula) that's brutally honest, and very, very funny. Its conclusion about the experiment is:

Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.

Do note that the report is hosted on the website of the CS Department of the University of Wisconsin ...

Monday, May 08, 2006

Why not a 4-year Bachelors program in science?


The two Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) at Pune and Kolkata have already advertised their admissions process for the academic session starting in July 2006. These institutions don't have a website, yet. So, I am not able to comment on their faculty strength, or infrastructure.

The two IISERs are entirely new, autonomous institutions, and they have nothing at all to do with IISc. In particular, they are not 'branches' of IISc!

The USP of IISERs is that that their faculty will do undergraduate teaching and pursue basic scientific research. UG teaching differentiates them from CSIR labs and their academic counterparts (such as TIFR and IISc ;-) that offer only doctoral (and/or masters) programs. Basic research differentiates them from the run-of-the-mill colleges that do UG teaching, but have little research footprint.

In short, IISERs are to the sciences what the IITs are to technical fields.

Well, that's the theory. It turns out that the IISERs will not offer a 'pure' UG course; what they will offer is the 'integrated' masters course leading to the M.Sc. degree in five years. Such a program already exists in several IITs, except, of course, that it is confined to physics, mathematics and chemistry. To my knowledge, IITs don't offer this program in biology.

I believe this is exactly where the IISERs have missed a great opportunity to improve on the current UG programs in the sciences. Specifically, the launch of these institutions could -- and, IMHO, should -- have been used to create a 4-year bachelors program in the sciences. In order to differentiate it with the current B.Sc. degree programs, let me refer to it as the BS program.

What are the advantages of the 4-year BS program? From the point of view of a student who is also a science enthusiast, there are quite a few. The first, of course, is standardization; this would be a step to make all our UG programs be of the same duration: 4 years.

In particular, the 4-year BS program will bring science on par with engineering. At present, science students have to slog for five full years -- and get their M.Sc. degrees -- before they can be admitted into Ph.D. programs -- either in India or abroad. With the 4-year BS program, this difference will go away, and science graduates can 'save' one year.

In the eighties, the engineering curriculum underwent a major revamp, which pruned the B.E. or B.Tech. courses from the then existing five-year programs intothe current four-year version [I belong to the first four-year batch; our batch graduated in 1985 together with the (last 5-year batch) students who entered college one year ahead of us, in 1980.]

The current five year slog for M.Sc. makes it unattractive to a student who's agnostic about choosing science as opposed to engineering; in the present system, I wouldn't be surprised if he/she ends up choosing engineering. You want evidence? Just look at the cut-off ranks for the four-year B.Tech. programs and the five-year 'integrated' M.Tech. programs in the IITs. Even within the same engineering discipline, the five year program is considered to be less desirable! When this is so, a five year M.Sc. program in the sciences is even less desirable.

Granted, over the life span of a scientist (i.e., a 30 to 35 year career), the loss of a year should not be important. But, teens -- and more importantly, their parents -- just don't think that way! From this psychological point alone, a four-year BS program makes enormous sense.

So, IMHO, removing this barrier would do a great deal to make science more attractive. [This is not to deny the importance of taking other measures to make science careers attractive: such careers must pay a lot more than they do now, and our universities have to spruced up with better funding and infrastructure.]

Well, what might be the disadvantages? I can see at least one. And that is from the point of view of those students whose main interest is somewhere else: management, computer applications, Indian civil service, chartered accountancy, or any one of their equivalents. These are students who just need a degree -- any degree! -- to get on with their real goals. For them, a 3-year B.Sc. program is better than a 4-year BS program!

Research departments, as a rule, should cater to those who are going to stay in the field; not those who are planning to bolt! So, science departments at IISER, IITs, and our Central universities (which offer 5-year M.Sc. programs) are better off with the 4-year BS prorams. Simply because it's in the interest of those students who are likely to contribute to their field. Right now, by continuing with their 5-year M.Sc. programs, they are repelling an important group of students: science enthusiasts. And that, I think, is a terrible shame.

Our senior scientists -- and in particular, the biggest of them all, Prof. C.N.R. Rao, Chairman, Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council (SAC-PM) -- have been bemoaning the lack of interest among our teens in pursuing careers in science. The formation of IISER is a direct result of addressing a keenly felt need: availability of high quality centers of science education, where UG students would be taught by practising scientists. However, by going with the tired old option of the 5-year, integrated M.Sc. program, the IISERs are missing the bus. Again.

* * *

Whatever I have said here is about science education, about which I think I know something. What about courses in humanities? Social sciences? Commerce? Business Administration? Would a 4-year bachelors program be better (than the current 3-year program) for these disciplines, too? Perhaps I can request some of you to comment on this point.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

The central role of failure in engineering?


[Failures] are object lessons in the history and practice and beauty of engineering. "Failure is central to engineering," [Henry Petroski] said in an interview. "Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail."

From this NYTimes profile of Prof. Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke. The introduction to his new book Success through Failure (Princeton University Press) is here.

Here's an interesting sentence from the article:

For Dr. Petroski, acceptance of uncertainty and possible failure — he calls it "coping with the imponderable" — is what separates the "given world" of the scientist from the "built world" of the engineer.

How to become an expert?


"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

From this great NYTimes piece by the Freakonomics duo, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Link via Tyler Cowen, who also points to other resources related to the article: an old, link-filled article in the Economist, a link-filled note on the Freakonomics blog and Ericsson's home page.

The key to becoming an expert (at anything, actually) is the process called 'deliberate practice', which "involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome."

Blog discoveries


I was lucky to have discovered -- in one day! -- three interesting blogs; they are now on my bloglines subscription list.

The first one is Vivek Kumar, an IIT-B alumnus who now works in the government. While he has been writing on many different things, right at this moment, I want to link to his thoughtful post (and comments) on reservation.

The next is the Nomological Net by Tabula Rasa, an (Indian?) academic based in Hong Kong. His recent posts have looked at what is common between class room teaching and seminar talks, and at Morris Holbrook's ideas on the creative process.

Finally, through Tabula Rasa, I found Pankaj Bagri's blog whose sidebar says "you won't be worse off" if you don't get to know him; a good enough reason to want to get to know him! Do check out this post on the 10th birthday of his new life and the next one on the Stockdale paradox.

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Happiness (and pain): The tricks our minds play


Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

From the guest review by Malcolm Gladwell over at the Amazon.com site. The book Stumbling on Happiness is by Daniel Gilbert (whom we've met before).

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, we have links to two articles on Gilbert's research on happiness. From the first piece:

"People are wonderful rationalizers," Gilbert points out. "They will rearrange their view of the world so it doesn't hurt as much." [...]

The same holds true for lovers who break up. Rationalization quickly replaces devastation. "She was never right for me," the spurned lover says. "I recognized that when she threw the ring in my face."

And, from the second piece:

The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our ''affect'' -- to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

You might also be interested in this NYTimes article by Sandra Blakeslee about how anticipation of a painful event makes one want to just 'get it over with ASAP'. What might be the implication of this finding?

The research also sheds light on economic behavior, said George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University. According to standard economic models of human behavior, choosing more pain in the short run is irrational, Dr. Loewenstein said: if you know something bad is going to happen, you should postpone it as long as possible, and if something good is going to happen, you should want it right away.

In real life, people often do the exact opposite, he said. They delay gratification to savor a sweet sense of anticipation, and accelerate punishment just to get it over with. The new study sheds light, he said, on how the act of waiting can be used to describe economic behavior more accurately.

Another voice in support of reservation


... Is merit the ability to mug up scores of unwanted information from the zillion books and CDs that your parents buy and win a trophy trove in quiz contests? Is merit the ability to belt out the cash for the “competitive – exam” coaching centers? Is merit the ability to have parents who enroll you into posh private schools?? Do any one of us stop to think what we are , is what we were born into? I for one wouldn’t be writing this blog, if I were born to tribal parents in Nagaland, or to a poor weaver in kancheepuram, or a flower seller in Chennai. We really dont know how much of our "success" is sheer luck ...

From this great post by The Soliloquist, who has put together quite a few different arguments for reservation. The sensitive, straight-from-the-heart quality of her writing is impressive. A must-read.

Feynman interview


The Prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, observing the other people use it. These are the real things. The honours are unreal ... to me. I don't believe in honours. Honours bother me.

From this wonderful video of the interview of Richard Feynman. This snippet is from about 25 minutes into the video.

I remember this video doing the rounds in various blogs a while ago, but I couldn't watch it at that time (either because it was in some incompatible format or it wasn't available for download in India; I am not sure). Thanks to Krish, I got this working link -- at Google Video (finally!).

If you can't devote some 50 minutes of your time, I would suggest that you check out at least the first 15 minutes, in which he talks about his father: how he taught him the difference between knowing something and knowing its name; and, how he taught him disrespect for 'position' (he gives the example of people bowing to the Pope or to a General). At some level, his father is one of the unifying themes in the interview; for example, Feynman refers to his father immediately after the above quote ("My Papa brought me up this way!").

The last couple of minutes of the video is also priceless. He talks about the value of doubt ("doubting is a fundamental part of my soul!"), about how doubt and not knowing stuff are better than having absolutely certain -- but wrong -- answers.

Talking truth to power


Many of you probably have read this first post by Swaroop Srinath. If you haven't, I suggest that you just drop everything, and go read it now.

In the post, Swaroop recounts his brave encounter with a reasonably high-ranking police officer (an Assistant Commissioner of Police!) sitting in a traffic patrol car that blew a red light. He actually chased the vehicle down, caught up with him, took his his name and the vehicle number, and posted on his blog all that information, together with his version of the events.

Even if Swaroop had not specifically requested that his post be given publicity (through blogs, e-mail forwards, etc), I would still have done it anyway. It's the least one can do for a gutsy person, who chose to talk truth to power. May his tribe grow!

Having said this, I have to add that the rate at which his post is making its way into the world is just too slow; in the last couple of days since the post was up, it has been read by just over 2000 people. While this kind of traffic is great for run of the mill blogs and blogposts (like here!), it's just too slow. I just hope some mainstream media outlets pick up this story.

When good science meets bad politics ...


... what you get is a wrongness singularity. It's rare to find things like Pauli exclusion principle, Fermi degeneracy, and Chandrasekhar limit applied to political arguments of the 'wrong' sort; but when they are, they show a blog that "collapses in on itself", at which point, it's not clear "whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon".

What a fun way to start one's morning!

Friday, May 05, 2006

Lok Paritran


Lok Paritran is a new political party floated by a bunch of IIT graduates; it has fielded seven candidates in the upcoming elections for the State Legislative Assembly in Tamil Nadu. I don't think the candidates have any chance of winning enough votes to get their deposits back; and I believe the mainstream media have come to a similar conclusion. It's not surprising, therefore, that there has not been much coverage of the party or its candidates in the media.

However, IITs are a 'strange attractor' when it comes to the blogosphere. Several people have taken the trouble to check out the party's website to figure out for themselves if it is any good/different. The bloggers' are not at all impressed!

First, we have Badri, who caught this piece of jem from LP's website:

Reality is a continuum. Knowledge system, in shortest, is fragmentation imposed upon the continuum of reality. Fragmentation is always a necessity for understanding of the unknown. Every fragment in the knowledge system becomes a construct or an entity that is defined in the knowledge system. This very fact shows that different knowledge systems can be build on the same reality based on different possibilities and patterns of fragmentation.

Made you go 'Huh?', didn't it?

Next, we have Dhoomketu who analyzes LP's e-mail flyer and election manifesto, and comes to some harsh conclusions.

Finally (and this one is in Tamil), RosaVasanth has a hard-hitting post in which he pulls no punches whatsoever. In particular, he is (rightly) upset and irritated by the mere suggestion that educated people -- and, in particular, those with engineering and management education -- with very little record of public life/service are such a superior breed that they will bring salvation to this country through their participation in politics.

Oh, before I end this post, I must confess that I haven't been able to access LP's website. It keeps giving me an error message to my (Firefox) browser on my (Linux) machine!

Alloyed (and plagiarized) entertainment


In his comment on my previous post on the plagiarism scandal surrounding How Opal Mehta got kissed, got wild, and got a life, Patrix asked:

Will this Kaavya incident expose the inner workings of the publishing industry? I hope it does; seems to be lot in there.

I too hoped it would, and was on the look out for more info. My curiosity was piqued when it was revealed that 17th Street Productions, the 'packaging' company now owned by Alloy Entertainment, was involved in the 'production' of Opal.

I found two great articles in Slate from a week ago. The first one, by John Barlow, recounts his own experience with 17th Street Productions when he was hired to 'produce' a novel with the help of a committee.

[Just] how do you write a novel by committee? Answer: with a great deal of pleasure. We would gather on the phone, me in Europe, they in New York, and chew the fat for hours about development, character, plot digressions, key moments. ... I imagined this was how prime-time TV gets written: lots of witty, divergent opinions slowly converging on a highly predictable and uninspiring concept. Still, planning a crazy fantasy kids' novel with a bunch of smart people is fun. It really is a whole lot of fun. During these calls I would make notes, then type them up, edit and expand them, and mail them back. Some time later I'd get responses from New York, agreeing with some things but disagreeing with others, often things that the boys had themselves suggested.

The process was a form of reiterative madness in which only I felt mad; unlike me, these people were involved in many similar projects simultaneously. Can you imagine trying to develop plots for a dozen novels at once? ...

The second article, by Ann Hulbert, is more about the specifics of the packaging of Opal.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Interesting stuff on Galbraith


In a wonderful article on Galbraith, Scott McLemee takes a long, appreciative look at the book The McLandress Dimension written by Galbraith under the pseudonym of Mark Epernay in 1963 while he was serving as the US Ambassador to India.

The exact means of calculating [the McLandress Coefficient] involved psychometric techniques rather too arcane for a reporter to discuss. But a rough estimate could be made based on how long any given person talked without using the first-person singular pronoun. This could be determined “by means of a recording stopwatch carried unobtrusively in the researcher’s jacket pocket.”

A low coefficient — anything under, say, one minute — “implies a close and diligent concern by the individual for matters pertaining to his own personality.” Not surprisingly, people in show business tended to fall into this range.

Writers had a somewhat higher score, though not by a lot. Epernay noted that Gore Vidal had a rating of 12.5 minutes. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Vidal responded, ““I find this ... one finds this odd.”

What drew the most attention were the coefficients for various political figures. Nikita Khrushchev had the same coefficient as Elizabeth Taylor – three minutes. Martin Luther King clocked in at four hours. Charles de Gaulle was found to have the very impressive rating of 7 hours, 30 minutes. (Further studies revealed this figure to be somewhat misleading, because the general did not make any distinction between France and himself.) At the other extreme was Richard Nixon, whose thoughts never directed beyond himself for more than three seconds.

McLemee doesn't stop here; he has other interesting stuff about a later event (in 1967) which was intellectual, goofy and bizarre at the same time. Do read the whole piece; it's great!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Galbraith quotes


John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) has been credited with many, many quotable quotes. Here is one about conservatives:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Here is another about two Great Political Systems:

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

And, finally, here is the Galbraith's Law of Resignation:

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.

Of course, you can read many, many more here.

The NYTimes obituary provides another interesting quote, this time from Amartya Sen:

Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society," was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.

"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.

Gratitude


In which I thank my good fortune to be living in Bangalore when there exist in this great country of ours other places (such as Chennai and Pondicherry) that have lovely people but lousy weather (40+ degrees Celsius or 104+ degrees Fahrenheit, and 80+ percent humidity).

It's good to be back from places where you need at least three cold showers a day to keep you sane.