Artists and the internet

Clive Thompson on the fascinating effects of the internet on performing artists:

In the past — way back in the mid-’90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans. If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their blogs, reading their fans’ comments and carefully replying. They check their personal pages on MySpace, that virtual metropolis where unknown bands and comedians and writers can achieve global renown in a matter of days, if not hours, carried along by rolling cascades of popularity. Band members often post a daily MySpace “bulletin” — a memo to their audience explaining what they’re doing right at that moment — and then spend hours more approving “friend requests” from teenagers who want to be put on the artist’s sprawling list of online colleagues. (Indeed, the arms race for “friends” is so intense that some artists illicitly employ software robots that generate hundreds of fake online comrades, artificially boosting their numbers.) The pop group Barenaked Ladies held a video contest, asking fans to play air guitar along to the song “Wind It Up”; the best ones were spliced together as the song’s official music video. Even artists who haven’t got a clue about the Internet are swept along: Arctic Monkeys, a British band, didn’t know what MySpace was, but when fans created a page for them in 2005 — which currently boasts over 65,000 “friends” — it propelled their first single, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” to No. 1 on the British charts.

This trend isn’t limited to musicians; virtually every genre of artistic endeavor is slowly becoming affected, too. [...]

Link via Seth Robert's very interesting post on the artistic and literary analogues of blogs.

Explaining modern capitalism ...

Michael Kinsley on the history of Avis rent-a-car:

Since 1946, Avis has been sold or reorganized 17 or 18 times, depending on how you count. Each time Avis changed hands or structure, there have been fees for bankers and fees for lawyers, bonuses for the top executives and theories about why this was exactly what the company needed.

[...]

Modern capitalism has two parts: there’s business, and there’s finance. Business is renting you a car at the airport. Finance is something else. More and more of the news labeled “business” these days is actually about finance, and much of it is mystifying. Even if you can understand — just barely — how it works, you still wonder what the point is and why people who do it need to get paid so much. And you strongly suspect that the swirl of financial activity around Avis for the past six decades has had little or nothing to do with the business of renting cars.

More on the outrage at MS University

In a must-read post, J Alfred Prufrock deals with this outrage with just the right touch and at just the right level. Brilliant stuff!

Rahul draws a few parallels with other similar incidents, and finds another crass attempt by the RSS to harass Kalakshetra.

One more case of moral policing

This time, it is the Desi Christian edition (via Krish):

... [A] group of students in a church-run college in Kerala have landed in trouble for making a short film on homosexuality.

Four students, including the producer and director of the five-minute film as well those who acted in it, were suspended by the authorities of St Joseph's College of Communication at Changanassery in Kottayam district recently.

In other news, the world got rid of a huge source of toxicity when, on the other side of the globe, Jerry Falwell died. Yeah, it's the same guy who put the blame for 9/11 on gays and feminists and other groups. Brad DeLong and Kieran Healy find the right things to say about this man.

Class XII results from Tamil Nadu

Girls have done better than boys. I'm not surprised. Here's the Hindu's main report:

Led by Chennai students, [girls] had an 84.6 overall pass percentage, compared to 77.4 by boys. The girls' performance this year was better than last year (75.4 per cent), while boys did better by 7.2 percentage points.

The overall pass percentage in the State this year is 81, compared to last year's 72.9 ...

... [A] total of 5,55,965 students (2,66,850 boys and 2,89,115 girls) ... took the March examinations, 3,29,091 scored an aggregate of 60 per cent and above ...

I get the impression that girls have not only done better than boys, they also seem to have taken a large number of top positions (see a few other reports here, here, and here). These reports don't have details such as the boys/girls ratio among the top 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000 and 50,000. It would be wonderful if these details are publicized.

* * *

The scene in Tamil Nadu is worth watching because this year, the state has chosen to get rid of the state-level Common Entrance Test (CET). Thus, the admissions are going to be based purely on Class XII marks. The government has announced that it will normalize the marks of students belonging to different boards. [However, I have no idea about how this normalization is going to be done.]

Going by these reports, it looks like girls are going to storm into the state's top engineering and medical colleges. In huge, unprecedented numbers! Dr. Bruno has been telling me repeatedly that the removal of the entrance exams in Tamil Nadu is going to favour women so much that he wouldn't be surprised if women form 60 or 70 percent of the students in top colleges. He also expects this situation to be 'corrected' soon -- probably through a re-introduction of the entrance exam!

Outrage at MS University: Some links

Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to MG Road to be a part of the protest yesterday. Here's the Hindu's report. Here are a few blog posts about the protest in other cities:

Kochi: Renu Ramanath (pictures and a report).

Mumbai: Amit Varma (picture and a report).

New Delhi: Communalism Watch (a picture).

MSU Diary has been collecting opinion pieces from old media. Jagat from Montreal has published a letter from a friend urging people to register their protest with the Indian embassies.

This opinion piece in the Indian Express by Peter Ronald DeSouza (of CSDS) lays out the issues, and concludes with the following:

The governor, as visitor of the university, must, in the strongest possible terms, reprimand and censure the vice chancellor and pro-vice chancellor. The governor must summon the director general of police and seek from him an explanation for the police action. The Supreme Court must do what it did in the case of the non-implementation of the ICDS scheme, and summon suo moto all the directors general of police, of all the states, and instruct them to curb such vandalism that is growing across the country. It is from the new frontiers which the artist scales that new ideas come. The artist must be protected. The artist must be honoured. We must do it for our own sake.

Rekha Rodwittiya, an alumna of the Faculty of Fine Arts at MSU, has another opinion piece in the Indian Express. Here's the concluding paragraph which echoes this famous poem:

Be forewarned, when civil liberties are so blatantly trampled upon and the ranting of fundamentalists becomes the rule of law, then none of us are safe any more. Freedom is not a seven-letter word in a game of scrabble. It is a constitutional right that is and must be held sacred within a democratic nation and be upheld as the birthright of every citizen. We are fast heading towards a system where all the voices of dissent will be stifled. It is happening to someone else today. It may be your turn tomorrow.

Bleg: What are the ingredients of good video lectures?

I'm interested specifically in lectures in a classroom setting, and even more specifically in lectures that cover an entire course.

I can easily imagine the goodness of seminar talks carrying over to the video medium. I'm not able to put my finger on the exact reason for it, but I think the density of information may have something to do with it. Many TED talks are very good on video, probably because they are short, snappy and highly focused.

But, how about lectures in a classroom setting? Clearly, they cannot be delivered at the same pace and with the same information density as seminar talks. Would these lectures -- irrespective of how great the lecturer is -- retain their freshness and intimacy in the video format? Would it be better if the video is recorded in a studio in which the lecturer 'talks to' the cameras rather than students?

The reason I'm asking is because of a proposal to create video lectures of undergraduate level courses, with IITs, IISc and several other institutions getting the mandate. I am peripherally involved in this project, and I'm trying to learn as much as possible about the video medium for pedagogical purposes. [And, no, I'm not contemplating signing up for acting lessons!]

Any pointers -- intro stuff, HOW-TOs, FAQs, scholarly articles -- will be greatly appreciated.

Even better, if you know of examples of excellent classroom lectures on video (covering science or engineering subjects) please let me know. I should be able to use them to get an idea about what makes for a good lecture-on-video.

Many thanks in advance.

Phrase of the day: Affective Forecasting

Wikipedia defines it as "the forecasting of one's affect (emotional state) in the future." It turns out that, because our thinking has all kinds of blind spots, we humans are pretty poor at it. In other words, it's "The Big Wombassa", in the memorable words of a hotshot Hollywood actor, as quoted by John Brockman in the Edge article on Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (whose Stumbling on Happiness is something I hope to be able to get soon -- it's just out in paperback).

The Smithsonian Magazine has a short interview with Gilbert, in which he explains the concept:

Human resilience is really quite astonishing. People are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be. People who suffer real tragedy and trauma typically recover more quickly than they expect to and often return to their original level of happiness, or something close to it. That's the good news—we are a hardy species, even though we don't know this about ourselves. The bad news is that the good things that happen to us don't feel as good or last as long as we think they will. So all that wonderful stuff we're aiming for—winning the lottery, getting promoted, whatever we think will change our lives—probably won't do it after all. We're resilient in both directions. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy.

Golf quote

Following up on this post, here is another from the Quote of the Day feature of iGoogle:

Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.
- - Jimmy Demaret

A previous post has a couple of quotes drawing a parallel between sex and other things.

Protest against the outrage at M.S. University, Baroda

I'm sure you have heard about the outrage perpetrated by the chauvinistic goons in the Fine Arts Faculty at M.S. University, Baroda. This outrage has been compounded by an even bigger one in which art student Chandra Mohan has been arrested (and has been held without bail for over four days now), and Dean Shivaji Panikker of Fine Arts Faculty, who spoke up against the arrest and the censorship it represents, has been placed under suspension. The Fine Arts Faculty Blog has updates on these horrible events.

Peter Griffin has post about the "simultaneous all-India protest against the arrest of an art student and suspension of the dean of M S University." It is scheduled for today (14.5.2007) at 6:00 p.m.

In Bangalore, the protest is going to be on M.G. Road, opposite the Gandhi Statue. Go to Peter's post for the details about your city/town.

The ugly face of AIIMS: An update

In my previous post, I pointed to this Telegraph story about the Thorat Committee Report "confirming" its own findings. I was not able to locate that earlier report when I wrote that post.

Now, thanks to Pratik Ray and Madhukar Shukla (see their comments), we have a link to that report from July 5, 2006. In addition, Pratik points us to this Telegraph story from March 9, 2007, and Madhukar points us to this column by Manoj Mitta in today's ToI (which also refers to an earlier report from September 12, 2006). If you have time to read just one report, I would recommend Mitta's hard-hitting article.

[The Telegraph story from 9.3.2007 refers to yet another report from 'last June', which we have not found.]

The picture presented by this diversity of evidence from old media tells us that there is something truly rotten in the land of AIIMS. Now, given this evidence, what has the government done with it? Manoj Mitta doesn't hide his anger:

when the much-awaited findings came, Ramadoss, unfortunately, seemed more interested in settling his personal scores with Venugopal. After tabling the report in a meeting of the governing body of AIIMS, all that the government could think of announcing was its decision to serve a show-cause notice on faculty members for condemning the Thorat findings.

Instead of pinning them down on specific instances of caste discrimination, Ramadoss did Venugopal's camp a favour with his clumsy attempt to muzzle their voices. Sure enough, they accused him of being autocratic and the committee of doing his bidding. By allowing them to reclaim the moral high ground on the autonomy of AIIMS, Ramadoss has helped the faculty and administration escape the odium of accounting for their errors of omission and commission.

Your name on Google

With a rather rare name with an even rarer spelling (thanks to Tamilization, what would have been Abhinandan became something with a missing 'h' and an added 'an' at the end!), I'm pretty sure googling me yields results most of which are really about me. Even then, I remember googling to ensure that this blog's name was unique too.

On the other hand, if you have a common name -- say, Ajay Gupta or Ramakrishna -- Google may dump you into its 184-th page! Unless, of course, you happen to be the most noteworthy Ajay Gupta or Ramakrishna in the eyes of Google.

In this online world, you are what Google says you are, and if you are not easily findable on Google, ..., well, it could pose some problems. What kind of problems? Check out this WSJ story:

... About 7% of all searches are for a person's name, estimates search engine Ask.com. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch ...

The article also talks about someone choosing her child's name carefully enough to ensure his name appears on the first page on Google. By an interesting coincidence, I just learnt that Amit Agarwal -- India's first and most prominent pro blogger -- has chosen a curiously common name for his child: Google!

Chief Minister Mayawati

The Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections have produced a clear and unambiguous verdict for the first time in many, many years. As a result, Bahujan Samaj Party is in an enviable position of not having to seek others' support, and Ms. Mayawati, its leader, now has a chance to run that state for a full five-year term. The Hindu gets it right when it says:

The feisty BSP supremo achieved for her party what Bhim Rao Ambedkar could only dream of and what her mentor Kanshi Ram envisioned but could not realise in his own life time.

Mayawati's amazing achievement became possible because she pushed her party -- remember, it's a party that started its life as a vehicle to promote the interests of Dalits -- to convert itself into an umbrella that can accommodate many other groups and interests. [This is a task that the bigger and more 'national' Congress has failed to achieve in UP or, for that matter, in many other parts of India.] Here's the Hindu:

... the BSP scored in an attempt to bridge the social divide: the party's emphasis through its campaign was on sarvajan samaj. Established citadels crumbled as Mayawati's elephant marched across the State, penetrating social blocks previously outside its reach.

[...]

Ms. Mayawati's party worked silently and assiduously on the ground, wooing previously adversarial social groups through a series of bhaichara (caste amity) campaigns. The breakthrough came with the success of its Brahmin jodo abhiyan (`take the Brahmins along' project). To get a sense of this socio-political achievement, consider the traditional hostility between Brahmins and the BSP. If Brahmins held the BSP in contempt, the latter ceaselessly targeted `manuwadis,' reserving its choicest epithets for them. ... That sections of the same forward castes have now shown a willingness to cohabit with the BSP is an irony too large to miss. However, it was not only Brahmins that the BSP co-opted as it went about enlarging its base. The Bahujan party reached out to all sections through a network of committed zonal commanders, each on a mission to integrate one social group or another. Preliminary findings suggest that Ms. Mayawati's party secured a large share of OBC votes besides the votes of Muslims.

The broad support for Mayawati-- cutting across caste and religious lines, which our media keep telling us are unbreachable -- is possibly the single most heartening message in these elections. There will be many occasions to examine whether Mayawati deserves this kind of broad support, or if this coming together of many disparate groups and interests can be sustained across space and time. But, for the moment, her victory calls for a huge celebration.

There are other things to celebrate too, and the Hindu's editorial does a good job of highlighting them:

[The Bharatiya Janata Party's strategists] attempted to raise the communal temperature through recourse to inflammatory campaign material, including the poisonous compact disc currently under the scanner of the Election Commission of India. The BJP leaders made sectarian speeches, focussing on issues — terrorism, Mohammad Afzal's hanging, the Sachar committee report, and so forth — that they thought would polarise votes on communal lines. The strategy backfired. Hindus and Muslims alike refused to swallow the bait.

... A final word on the Election Commission of India's sterling contribution to the democratic process. Its strategic planning, hard work, impartiality, far-sightedness, and no-nonsense supervision ensured that not one life was lost to violence and not one polling booth was seized by toughs. For the people of Uttar Pradesh, the ECI is as much a hero as their Chief Minister-in-waiting.

More on the origin of 'technical inaccuracies' in the Mashelkar Panel report

Another instance of someone taking the trouble to file a request under the Right to Information Act. Great stuff. There is a lot else there, but here's the relevant part:

According to reports, Mashelkar has expressed the opinion that the ‘technical inaccuracy’ could have happened when the report was being ‘drafted by a sub-group’. However, in a reply to a RTI filed, the Ministry said, "There was no drafting sub-committee, which drafted the report." "Mashelkar claims that a sub-group drafted the report. Where is this mysterious sub-group and why have the names of the members of this sub-group not yet been revealed?" questions Kajal Bhardwaj, Head-Technical and Policy Unit, Lawyers Collective.

Yet another inexplicable point is regarding the record of meetings of the TEG. "A basic tenet of the functioning of any groups or commissions is that minutes are maintained of these meetings. For this group, no such records were kept by the Chairman and informal records are available only for the second, third and fourth meetings of the group," explains Bhardwaj. In a reply to a RTI filed, the Ministry states, "As regards copies of the minutes of all the meetings, it is informed that no formal record of discussion duly approved by Chairman and members of the group was kept by this department."

Cute-o-nomics

I finally got a chance to read Noam Scheiber's sharp tear-down of Freaknomics-style research -- tackling all kinds of fun problems that don't have much to do with deep questions in in economics. Steven Levitt and Scheiber have had at least one round of back and forth.

While I have to ask you to read those pieces, I will point to a couple of juicy quotes Scheiber managed to get from some of the other hotshots in economics:

Raj Chetty (Berkeley): "People think about the question less than the method. ... They're not thinking: What important question should I answer?' So you get weird papers, like sanitation facilities in Native American reservations."

David Card (Berkeley): "It is exactly like postmodernism in the humanities. [...] What is there to say about Beethoven anymore? ... Every moron can't understand technical orchestration, doesn't know the history of music. So you write about him having a gay affair with his nephew."

Finally, it's worth highlighting an Asian angle in this cute-o-nomics story: Amartya Sen's thesis about 100 million "missing women", mostly in Asia. Here's Scheiber:

Perhaps the most infamous example is a paper written by a recent Harvard Ph.D. named Emily Oster. While still an undergraduate, Oster had become fascinated by the so-called "missing women" problem--the hypothesis, attributed to Amartya Sen, that gender discrimination in Asia has created a vast shortage of women. In some cases parents abort daughters, in some cases they commit infanticide, in some cases they simply don't care for their daughters as diligently as they should. Whatever the cause, Sen has suggested there could be as many as 100 million "missing women" in countries like China, India, and Pakistan.

Years later, while wrapping up her Ph.D., Oster stumbled onto a seemingly unrelated fact: a small medical literature suggesting that women with hepatitis B were far more likely to give birth to boys. What followed was a series of sophisticated natural experiments, the upshot of which was to demonstrate that 100 million women hadn't gone missing after all. Instead, unusually high rates of hepatitis B had arranged it so that Asian mothers were producing far more boys than nature's track record would suggest.

It was a fabulously compelling result, one that partially absolved whole societies of lurid crimes against their children. [...]

I recall linking to a news story about Oster's paper two years ago (I'm not able to locate that post) when it made a splash. It turns out that a later piece of research has essentially negated Oster's findings. Here's Scheiber again:

... Levitt complains ... that I got "all the facts wrong" in my discussion of Emily Oster's paper on "missing women"--that is, the gap between the number of women we should observe in countries like China, India, and Pakistan and the number of women we actually observe. Unfortunately for Oster (and for Levitt, who published the paper as co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy), subsequent work by a Berkeley graduate student and two Taiwanese researchers has more or less overturned her result. If Levitt knows of a way to reconcile Oster's findings with these two seemingly devastating papers, I'd be curious to hear it. (In fact, I sent him an e-mail to this effect before publishing my piece. He never responded.) But simply asserting that Oster is right and her critics are wrong leaves much to be desired as a style of argumentation.