Remember this post in which I urged you to vote for 'Being Indian' as the Documentary of the Year over at BBC? Thanks in part to our votes, it won the poll, and will be broadcast several times on the last two days of this month.
The program schedule for this documentary is here.
... Chief Minister [H.D. Kumaraswamy] told presspersons that the number of applicants for BPL cards had touched 93 lakh [9.3 million] while the total number of families in Karnataka was 1.02 crore [10.2 million].
I don't think I need to note that "BPL" expands to "Below Poverty Line".
The Chief Minister further warned that "stringent action" will be taken "against those responsible for what has been described as a 'BPL card scandal'."
May be you knew it already, but I just discovered the blog of Anand Giridharadas, the South Asia Correspondent of the International Herald Tribune. He is using his blog in a way quite similar to that of a senior Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan: as a space to park his journalistic writings, with an open comments policy.
Oh, Giridharadas also invites you to send him suggestions and story ideas:
... If you have a neglected story I should tell, or just an opinion about past or future coverage, please send me an e-mail. Your anonymity will be protected.
Rediff is running this wonderful interview of my undergraduate classmate and hotshot nanoscience and nanotechnology researcher P.M. Ajayan. The interviewer, Yogesh Upadhyaya, is a good friend too (I have linked to quite a few of his Rediff articles, and he is also a frequent commenter here).
Here's a nifty quote from early in the interview:
I tend to call nanotechnology 'god's own technology,' reminiscing my own origins from the state of Kerala, which is often called 'god's own country.'
There is also another aspect that makes nano fundamentally exciting and that has to do with change of physical properties in many systems as the size becomes smaller. It does not happen at all sizes, but at some point as we go down in size, there is a transformation of quantity into quality; in other words material behaviour changes from its bulk character to something different.
Typically, ... this size -- where the transition occurs -- fall in the nano scale.
Towards the end, the interview turns to Ajayan's impressions on the nanoscience and nanotech research in India. It's worth quoting his answer in full:
Some of the premier institutions in India (IISC, IITs, National Chemical Laboratory, National Physical Laboratory, etc., to name a few) are already working in this area but the resources available to make the real impact is lacking, in my opinion. We are far behind most countries with serious research endeavours, in nanotech funding.
The infrastructure is important if we want to succeed in this effort and the lack of availability of research infrastructure to the research community at large has hampered the enthusiasm. Moreover a good planning document and long term sustained plans to create the nanotechnology infrastructure in India is missing.
There are quite a few conferences today in India focusing on nanotechnology, but the tangible results from these have been dismal. We need to have concerted efforts from the funding institutions, universities, national labs and industry to identify areas where we can make real impact and utilize resources carefully in those areas. As far as I can see India should exploit nanotech opportunities in the alternate energy and health care sectors.
Education and training of students is equally important. This is easy to do since there exist a remarkable pool of talent in India but there has to be progressive thinking in universities with regard to modernizing curriculum and the educational system. This is not just for nanotech but for science and technology in general.
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It's vacation time for the nanopolitan family, and blogging is unlikely for the next few days. See you all after this short break.
No, it's just a mixture of cornstarch, water, and some nifty science. [Make sure you watch it till the end].
Thanks to Zak Stone at i-Mechanica for the pointer.
When you read the Pinochet obituaries, one thing that strikes you again and again is that he is the man who made 'disappear' a transitive verb.
Via Brad DeLong, we get this first hand account from someone who experienced the repressive regime in Chile in the 1970s. Let me just quote the last paragraph:
I hope dying hurt a whole lot, you rat-faced son of a bitch. I hope you suffered the tortures of the damned. I hope no one wiped your brow or comforted you while you suffered and died. I hope you died alone.
Via DeLong (and through Felix Salmon), we get a link to the London Economist's views on the dead dictator:
...[Pinochet] saw the “Chicago Boys”, a group of free-market economists, as a means to consolidate his personal dictatorship. The radical shrinking of Allende's bloated state was a way to avoid sharing patronage, and thus power, with the armed forces.
With Chileans cowed, the Chicago Boys could work as if in a laboratory, with no regard for social costs. They made mistakes: a fixed exchange rate and unregulated bank privatisations triggered a massive recession and financial collapse in 1982-83. More pragmatic policies and a renewal of growth followed. But it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty.
Sudhir Venkatesh is the underground sociologist hero in the Freakonomics chapter titled "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?". His latest book, Off the books: the underground economy of the urban poor, is just out. In a review of his Patrick Radden Keefe recounts this little story from the book:
Licit and illicit economies tend to be entwined, and in a closely knit urban neighborhood, this mutual dependence means that public-minded civilians and hardened criminals are regularly forced to negotiate. In the spring of 2000, an entrepreneurial gang leader, Big Cat, was elevating the criminal activity in a local park. Marlene and a preacher, Pastor Wilkins, arranged a tense summit with the kingpin in a church basement. Venkatesh talked his way into the room and watched as Big Cat agreed to stop peddling drugs in the park during after-school hours. For this concession, Pastor Wilkins promised to persuade a nearby store owner to allow Big Cat's gang to deal in his parking lot, and Marlene agreed to ask the cops to leave the dealers unmolested in their new location.
"I can't figure out who's crazier," Big Cat chuckles, once the deal is struck. "Me, or you niggers."
The birth centenary of R.K. Narayan, the man who "put modern Indian writing on the map", is the occasion for a nice profile Jhumpa Lahiri in Boston Review, and a second, absolutely terrific one by Wyatt Mason in the New Yorker.
The 175th birth anniversary of James Clerk, the physicist whose shoulders Einstein chose to stand on, is the reason for a Physics Web profile by Francis Everitt.
Twenty years ago today, Smita Patil, a princess of art movies in the 1970s before she made it big in commercial and art cinema in the 80s, passed away at a horribly young age of 31. Rediff has a profile by Dinesh Raheja, and this short bio.
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The Times of India's editorial today rehashes almost all the usual remedies (faculty salaries, for example) to help revitalize India's R&D enterprise. Towards the end of it, however, we find this:
The present tendency to promote national laboratories at the expense of universities will not help the cause of research. Both have distinct roles which need to be synergised. [bold emphasis added]
Many people don't realize the importance of that statement I emphasized. Let's start with the big picture. The ToI editorial gives a figure of US $6 billion for India's R&D budget; it doesn't cite a source for this figure. In his Science article, R.A. Mashelkar too mentions a figure of $6 billion.
Six billion dollars is both small and big! Let's take small first. It's small in comparison with, for example, the R&D budget of General Motors: $10 billion! University research gets only a small slice of this already small pie. As we saw in this post, most of the pie goes to mission-mode organizations such as Defence, Atomic Energy and Space, and what remains is 'shared' by universities, CSIR labs and agricultural research labs. This lopsided arrangement dates back to the early fifties when CSIR was established; not surprisingly, many people trace the decline of university research to that era.
Let's face it: Six billion dollars is also a large sum for India. It's almost one percent of our GDP! Our demands for increase in research funding must be tempered by this fact. However, I think it's fair to ask the government to make higher education largely self-financing (perhaps using this model), and redirect that money to spruce up research capabilities in our universities.
In the earlier post on laptops in schools, I should have linked to Charles Kenny's post from almost four months ago. In one section of his linky post, we find this:
Take education programs. Computer labs in developing countries carry annual costs of around $78-$104 per student at the level of one computer per twenty students. Compare that to annual discretionary budgets (what is left over after paying for salaries, needed to cover items such as chalk, books and buildings) of $5 per student per year for primary schools in low income countries. Beyond expense, returns don't appear to be dramatic enough to justify diverting resources from alternate, more suitable interventions.
Do read Kenny's post. Among the many things he covers, you will find something interesting about the now famous 'hole in the wall' experiment.
Here. This link is likely to change, so start with this page and keep working your way through the ideas -- all 74 of them!
Or, just check out the ones that I found interesting:
Cohabitation is bad for women
The diplomat parking-violation corruption index
The eyes of honesty
Homophily: Check out the neat twist at the end!
Lady Macbeth effect
Negativity friendships
Psychological neoteny
Publication probity (Journal of negative results!)
And, here's an idea that features an Indian scientist.
In a NYTimes column, Ariel Dorfman writes:
And yet, in spite of all these signs of General Pinochet’s continuing dominance from beyond death, I feel that something has in fact changed quite categorically with his demise. What convinced me were the thousands upon thousands of Chileans who spontaneously poured into the streets here to celebrate the news of his extinction. I tend to be wary of any attempt to turn the death of anyone, no matter how despicable, into an occasion for joy, but I realized that in this case it was not one man’s death that was being welcomed but rather the birth of a new nation.
Dancing under the mountains of Santiago there was one word they repeated over and over and it was the word shadow. “La sombra de Pinochet se fue,” one woman said, his shadow is gone, we have come out from under the general’s shadow. As if the demons of a thousand plagues had been washed from this land, as if we were never again to be afraid, never again the helicopter in the night, never again the air polluted by sorrow and violence.
And, this is from the Hindu editorial:
... By succumbing finally to sickness and old age on Sunday, Pinochet managed to escape the judgment of the courts. Rather than closing the file, however, the Chilean authorities must press ahead with the demand for truth and justice. The hangman is no more but those who supplied him the rope and gallows need to be exposed and held accountable to humanity.
The Hindu has more on the Chilean economic 'miracle' under Pinochet (a topic that led Rahul to write this short rant):
After ravaging the political opposition, Pinochet soon turned his sights on the economy. Here too his regime brought disaster. He set about dismantling the public health and education systems and introduced other `reforms' that hit his people's livelihood savagely. During the period of his dictatorship, the percentage of Chileans below the poverty line grew from 20 to 40. While the economy saw bouts of growth, Chile's per capita output in 1989, the year Pinochet was replaced by a civilian president, was barely at the 1970 level. ...
Fabulous stuff:
Would you recommend any others? I'm keen on those from South India.
Two op-eds raise interesting points about the Supreme Court verdict that suggested excluding the 'creamy layer' from SC/ST quotas.
A former Secretary to the Government of India (whose name doesn't appear in the online version), in ToI, looks at the legal/constitutional issues:
It is necessary to protect SCs and STs from future onslaughts by those who have not cared to understand the social and historical background of the caste system with specific reference to SCs and STs.
Rekha Pappu, M. Madhava Prasad, K. Satyanarayana & Susie Tharu, writing in the Hindu, examine the sociological aspects (their article reads like an academic paper!):
... The elaboration provided by the Constitution Bench on questions of discrimination, backwardness, affirmative action, and "creamy layer" is of critical importance. Among the many reasons why this is so, three are worth mentioning here. One, the ruling explicitly recognises and addresses itself to the polarisation of caste interests within our society rather than reiterating the worn-out slogan of a homogenous society. Two, it draws upon a terminology that currently dominates discussions not only in the courts but also among policy-makers, academics, and mediapersons. Three, it more clearly than ever before legitimises the grievances of the "upper castes" even as it seeks to checkmate the pro-backward caste moves of Parliament.
In his Hindu column yesterday about Indian doctors staying on in the US, Shashi Tharoor says:
[But the case of doctors is different]. Mainly for two reasons: they possess knowledge and training that is still in short supply in our country; and the Government of India, through its generous subsidies for higher education, has spent a large sum of money helping them to acquire the skills they are taking abroad.
He concludes by asking "But must the Indian taxpayer subsidise [Indian doctors] for seven years to [work in the US than in India]?"
While Tharoor poses this question only in the context of Indian medicos, it's valid for everyone -- non-medicos or medicos, irrespective of whether they work in India or elsewhere. Let me start with two statements:
If you, like me, believe that these statements are largely true, then you would probably conclude that it is unfair to subsidize it. But subsidy is the name of the game in higher education in India. Tuition at government colleges is a pittance [I recall paying about Rs.200/- per semester during 1981-85; even our monthly living expenses -- about Rs. 250 -- were higher! ]. What is worse, tuition at private, unaided institutions is also controlled tightly by our government [That they circumvent it through fees for libraries, computers, etc. is another matter]. Such low fees do not allow our colleges and universities to upgrade their infrastructure and hire high quality faculty. Clearly, this situation is untenable.
On the other hand, making every college student pay -- up front -- the true cost of higher education may render it inaccessible to the deserving among the poor.
There are several ways of addressing this issue with a view to finding a middle ground. Let me say right away that merit-based and need-based scholarships cannot be this middle ground. Why? If the beneficiary chooses to emigrate, it's a money sink twice over! [India has programs such as the National Talent Search, KVPY, etc. They are meant for rewarding excellence, and their number is small: 1000 per year under NTS and about 250 per year under KVPY.]
Another alternative is educational loans; in rare cases, however, the student may not be able to repay it because he/she doesn't finish college, or his/her future earnings turn out to be too low. Thus, educational loans are a good idea, they are hard on those who don't make it in life.
To me at least, it seems clear that the middle path we seek would not only work like a loan, but it would also have a certain built-in safety net to protect those who fall on hard times. Such a middle path does exist -- in Australia!
Essentially, in the Australian model, every student who is eligible for college gets to go to college with the help of a loan from the government. The repayment of this loan is through an interesting tax mechanism: when the student enters the workforce, he/she pays taxes at a higher tax rate (say, 32 percent instead of 30 percent) until the loan is repaid. Prepayment is possible at a premium. More importantly, this additional tax kicks in only when the income exceeds a certain minimum which, I believe, is the median income in that country.
This model has a lot going for it. First of all, it's fair for everyone; nobody is ripping anyone else off! It ensures that the government's higher education kitty keeps getting replenished by the ex-students and present-day employees. It protects those individuals who fall on hard times from loan repayment, because the 'repayment tax' kicks in only beyond a minimum income.
There are other advantages as well. If, for example, the society (er, the government) wishes to favour certain professions -- because of their 'innate goodness' or, more likely, important national needs -- it can do so by converting the loans into scholarships for those studying those courses. For example, in 2005, Australia designated education and nursing as 'National Priorities'; tuition is free for students in these courses. Similarly, this program has the flexibility to allow colleges to charge differential tuition in different fields.
In this model, the students retain their freedom too! They can go to public or private colleges. Since tuition costs at public institutions is typically lower (because it gets additional funding from the government) than at private colleges, and since the government-financed loans are capped, students in private colleges would have to dip into their personal finances (or, assume additional commercial loans).
I see quite a few other collateral benefits flowing from this middle path. It would promote healthy competition among institutions to attract bright students. All colleges would use their endowments to fund a vigorous scholarship program to attract bright students, thus bringing philanthropy money into the higher ed system. [Right now, lack of transparency in our private colleges leads me to suspect that much of what is sloshing around there is not-so-clean money.]
This system would also force our universities to strive for efficiency, because their income stream would depend on the number of students they teach. In the present system in India, for example, the share of tuition in the total revenues of our public universities is minuscule. Not surprisingly, universities do not have an incentive to increase their intake. For example, M.A. Pai chides the IITs for their student : teacher ratio of about 10:1, while it's as high as 20:1 in many US public universities. This sort of a jump in student numbers will also require other efficiency-enhancing measures -- use of online resources, reliance on teaching assistants, and so on.
Finally, our large mainstream universities, which have been perfectly content to 'outsource' undergraduate (UG) teaching to their affiliated colleges, may be forced to do a re-think, if their income is tied, explicitly, to the number of students they teach. To me, this is also desirable, since it would bring researchers and UG students together -- perhaps for the first time in more than a century!
