Sunday, November 12, 2006

Two stories


They are from the interweb, they are short, and they are good. One offers deep wisdom (I think) and the other is very funny.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Philosophia Naturalis


Philosophia Naturalis is a blog carnival -- very much like the now-defunct Bharteeya Blog Mela -- "focused on physical sciences and technology". It has already had three editions: the first was at Science and Reason, the second at our very own Arunn's Nonoscience, and the third (and the latest) at Geek Counterpoint.

The fourth edition of PN will be hosted at Down to Earth. There's even a helpful page on How to suggest an article for PN. So, do hurry!

Pittsburgh Pirates


In an earlier post, I linked to Matthew Price's review of biographies of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. I had titled that post Pittsburgh Powerhouses after a phrase used by Price. A better title, used for headlining Richard Parker's review in NYTimes, is "Pittsburgh Pirates".

The word "Pirate" used to bring violent and horrific images to mind; after its appropriation by Pittsburgh's baseball team, it now brings to mind (to the American mind, at least) a bunch of people indulging in acts no more violent than throwing, hitting and chasing a ball. (I'm specifically ignoring the comic faux fights that break out every once in a while in baseball games!). The word's past and present reputations parallel, roughly, those of the two Andrews of Pittsburgh. The lives of Carnegie and Mellon had many episodes of atrocious public behaviour (corruption, union busting of a horribly violent sort, tax evasion, the works); and yet, their present reputation is in far better shape, thanks largely to their philanthropic acts that include the founding of many public libraries (Carnegie) and the National Gallery of Art (Mellon).

The biographies seem forbidding: both reviews emphasize their size (together, they add up to a formidable 1700 pages). The reviewers also point to Carnegie as a far more interesting character, and to his biography by David Nasaw as the better of the two. I will certainly be looking out for this book when it becomes available in India (preferably under the crucial 10 dollar price barrier).

Friday, November 10, 2006

QOTD


Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
-- Evan Esar

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Welfare measures for our children


I can go on giving tons of possible reasons why a society should do everything it can to take care of its young children. You know, things like nutrition, good education, and freedom from having to work to earn a living. And the mother's welfare too, during the first few months of the child's life.

I will still not have made as strong a case for welfare measures as Annie has done in just one post. No excerpts will do it justice; so just hop over there and read her post in full.

* * *

A few days ago, I commented on Tim Harford's article on how businesses will love it if women were to delay pregnancy and child-birth to, um, after their retirement. Vivek too commented on that article. One of Annie's recent posts is also on a similar topic: economics of motherhood.

Discoveries that changed human history ...


... and yet, are underappreciated. What might they be? Listen to Thomas Hager:

I am very interested in Big Discoveries —- not theoretical insights, but major hands -- on discoveries that have a direct impact on human lives every day. Many of them are little-known. One was sulfa. Another is the subject of the book I'm finishing now, the discovery of the Haber-Bosch system for nitrogen fixation. In case you've overlooked that one, it's the discovery that's responsible for keeping alive two or three billion people on Earth today; also the source of half the nitrogen in your body. Another in this league, I think, might be the discoveries involved in the long-distance transmission of electricity. All of these changed human life and human history enormously, yet are -— like sulfa and the antibiotic revolution —- simply incorporated into daily life in such fundamental ways that they are ignored.

Here's Thomas Hager's website. His book on the discovery of sulfa drugs sounds quite interesting. In the Seed interview (from which I took the above quote) he says this about what he found interesting in that story:

I stumbled across this story entirely by accident, while I was researching something else. I think what first caught my eye was a researcher who won the Nobel Prize for finding the greatest medicine the world had ever seen, but instead of being honored by his government -— this was in Nazi Germany -— he was tossed in jail. That got my attention. The more I researched [Domagk's] life, the more I saw that his discovery is really a central story of our time. Science is at the core of our culture in so many ways, most of them pretty much unappreciated by most people. And I think this is a core story of twentieth century science, showing not only how science changes lives, but also how politics, money, personal agendas, and luck change science.

* * *

Thanks to Guru for the links.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

An attack ad we can all enjoy!


American voters are going to the polls today to elect a new Congress (all of the House, and a third of the Senate), and I'm sure they are all sick of the attack ads deployed by candidates in elections at all levels -- local, state and federal. But, here's one attack ad that we can all enjoy; this news comes via the good folks at Inside HigherEd:

The University of Chicago Press this spring published In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. John G. Geer, the author, is a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, and he argues that “positive ads” tend to focus on personality, while “negative ads” serve a purpose because they are more likely to focus on policy questions.

When Jeremy D. Mayer, an associate professor of public policy at George Mason University, was asked to appear on a panel about Geer’s book, Mayer couldn’t help himself: He prepared an attack ad about Geer. The ad — now featured on the blog of the Chicago press — criticized Geer as a “flip flopper,” questioned whether his CV omits secret details, and cited RateMyProfessors.com ratings as questioning his teaching ability. The charges — all false — allegedly come from “Academic Veterans for the Truth.”

Geer said in an e-mail Monday that he found Mayer’s ad funny: “If one defends negativity, one must be willing to be ‘attacked.’ “

Ashis Nandy on Bengalooru


Much of Ashis Nandy's ToI op-ed is a celebration of the many-sided splendours of cities. Towards the end, he gets back to the point:

like the recognition given to Bengalooru. It corrects and compen-sates for the sanitised, 'de-vernacularised' image that Bangalore has always projected first as a city of retired bureaucrats and army officers, then as the capital of Indian science, and now as a citadel of information technology.

Bengalooru, unrecognised by the rest of the world, has always been a living criticism of Bangalore and, outside our range of vision, powered and added colour to Bangalore's rise to eminence. The Bengalooru that has lovingly nurtured Kannada and protected vernacular literature, art, theatre and cinema must be granted its dignity.

For too long it has survived as the underside of Bangalore. But the answer to that is not to turn the situation upside down and pay homage to the new officialese.

The time has come for us to recognise Bengalooru's counter-self in the Bangalore that is being superseded. Now that Bengalooru is official, let us learn to celebrate the charisma of Bangalore.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

WTF: Women in business


From Tim Harford's latest Undercover Economist column:

Women may have already overtaken men at US schools and universities, but perhaps they will not do so in the boardroom until they can reliably delay pregnancy into their fifties and sixties. Then employers might start to dismiss as remote the risk that a valued employee will take time off to have a family. Indeed, having one might become something you do once you’ve made it to the top and retired.

Tim Harford is too smart to put down in black and white all the implications. It's weird to suggest that women wait until changes in their reproductive function -- aided by advances in medicine -- deliver to them boardroom berths and top jobs. And, why should the employers' concerns be paramount? Are they right, for example, in seeing a woman employee as a risk because she "will take time off to have a family"? Isn't it better for business (an institution) to change, rather than for women (real people!) to make different -- expensive, unnatural and possibly risky -- reproductive choices? Wouldn't women -- and men -- be right in fighting to change the attitude of busness?

And, shouldn't Harford lend his voice in support of this fight? That would have been far better than saying lame things like if the reproductive breakthrough materializes, "then employers might start to dismiss as remote the risk that a valued employee will take time off to have a family".

WTF: Wealth of nations


Tyler Cowen's column in the NYTimes::

Economists typically explain the wealth of a nation by pointing to good policies and the quality of a country’s institutions. But why do these differences exist in the first place?

In “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World”, ... Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, identifies the quality of labor as the fundamental factor behind economic growth. Poor labor quality discourages capital from flowing into a country, which means that poverty persists. Good institutions never have a chance to develop.

It's not clear from the article how this "quality of labor" thingy is defined; it seems to be some combination of education, skill level, work ethic and so on. It's also not clear how it differs from human capital. In any event, one finds, a little later in the article, this:

The poorer countries remain stuck at the bottom as growing populations mean fewer resources for everyone else. Paradoxically, advances in sanitation and medical care, by saving lives, have driven down well-being for the average person. The population is rising in most of sub-Saharan Africa, but living standards have fallen below hunter-gatherer times and 40 percent below the average British living standard just before the Industrial Revolution. The upshot is this: The problem with foreign aid is not so much corruption but rather that the aid brings some real benefits and enables higher populations. [bold emphasis added]

Did it make you go WTF? In case it was not clear enough, Tyler says it explicitly in his blog post:

Clark also argues that sub-Saharan Africa is poorer than ever before, and that foreign aid worsens a zero-sum Malthusian trap. He makes the startling claim that gains in health are the worst thing we can bring to modern Africa. ... [again, bold emphasis added]

Surprisingly, not many commented on this observation; among the few that did, AdamSmithee has managed just the right tone in his comment [there's more on his blog]:

Thank God for AIDS, then. Surely the best thing to happen for Africa's growth prospects since Mr Mosquito met Mr Falciparum. Although strange that that one didn't seem to help much. Clearly we need Diseases That Try Harder [...]

Exactly.

* * *

Update: Don't miss Mark Thoma's commentary (and the comments thereon) on Tyler's WTF-inducing pronouncement about poor countries and foreign aid.

On the internet ...


... nobody knows you are a dog, according to a rather prescient cartoon in New Yorker (it was published in 1993).

Also, it turns out, nobody knows you are a man, either. Listen to the man behind the woman (woman's blog, actually):

Vishnupriya Roychoudhury is entirely a figment of a very colourful imagination. She was brought to electronic life by a slightly diseased mind with a tiny bit of a god complex.

Mine.

She was created as a prank. In order to make the prank work better, she was fleshed out. She had a personality, a history, friends and a family. She had interests and opinions. Most importantly, she had three things:

a) an email id
b) an Orkut account
c) a blog

Thanks to a 'man' who calls 'himself' Vivek for the link. [Who knows? One can never be too careful, so it's better to use those 'scare-quotes' ...]

Sankarshan Thakur on Kherlanji


In this Tehelka editorial [link via Shivam]:

The roused conscience of the nation should ask itself why [nobody heeded the horror of the Bhotmanges of Kherlanji]. Because Kherlanji is a remote location? But it’s only a mobile call away from everywhere on earth. Because the Bhotmanges were dalits? Because this was not a People-Like-Us crime? That roused conscience of the nation should ask itself those questions. Does it operate beyond city limits? Is its cry for justice a cry for justice for all?

Friday, November 03, 2006

Atrocity in Kherlanji


This is what happened to one Dalit family in Kherlanji five weeks ago.

Be prepared to cry before you click on that link.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

The purpose of studying economics


The purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by other economists.
-- Joan Robinson

I found this gem in this essay, written by an admirably moderate economist. The whole essay is devoted to a strong argument against "economic fundamentalism".

Resveratrol and lifespan


Exciting new reserach on resveratrol, an ingredient in red wines:

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all, red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.