Monday, August 06, 2007

Vivek's wise words on anonymity on the web


Just 10 days ago, Vivek wrote Anon 101: An Introduction to Anonymity on the Web. In the section on those who assume two different identities, at least one of which is anonymous, he wrote:

Do not make the mistake of maintaining two blogs/avatars: one with your real identity and the other anonymous. [...] It requires a lot of effort and skill to maintain two identities, if only online. You would require two completely different styles of writing. [...] You would also need to write posts on different topics, or else to use completely different phraseology for your posts. [...] Remember, it just takes a momentary lapse for the manure to hit the fan.

These wise words came alive when I was reading this NYTimes story outing the man behind the fake Steve Jobs blog [Link via Shripriya]. Here's the relevant part in the story:

[Daniel Lyons' forthcoming] book, in part, led to [his] unmasking. Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine. The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point (floatingpoint.wordpress.com).

Sunday, August 05, 2007

QOTD: Albert Einstein on telegraph and radio


You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein

IIM-B shows the way ...


Just two posts ago, I ranted a bit about how IITs have been reluctant to share routine statistical information they collect as a part of their entrance exam process. IIMs have also shared this secretive trait -- until now.

IIM-B has made public (pdf) a lot of key information about the students it admitted this year. Take a look!

A few quick impressions: While engineers form less than half of the IIM aspirants, their fraction among the successful candidates is a whopping 83%. If you add Computer Science, this proportion goes up to 90%. The proportion of women among the aspirants, interviewees and succsessful candidates is 24.7, 17.1 and 21.3 percent, respectively. Curiously, IIM-B prefers people with work experience: their proportion rises quite sharply from 31% among the aspirants to 67% among the successful candidates.

* * *

Thanks to MBA Karma for the pointer.

Sevanti Ninan on blogs


Sevanti Ninan, one of the better commentators on Indian media, has a report in Outlook on Indian blogs and bloggers (referred 'affectionately' as "cyborgs"). From the tone of her article, it's clear that she's not impressed by what she sees in the Indian blogosphere.

Yet, her own report is pretty pedestrian. It trots out the usual statistics about the total number of blogs (she doesn't even bother to estimate the number of Indian blogs or that of blogs in Indian languages), mentions some of the top blogs (Engadget and Boing Boing) according to Technorati, and makes rather dubious claims ("those who read blogs are turning away from mainstream media"). In Ninan's opinion, "the best part of a blog is its name." And she doesn't get the idea behind DesiPundit (Disclosure: I am a contributor to this group blog).

Heck, she even mistakes the websites of Arun Shourie and M.J. Akbar for blogs. The former does not host a blog, and the latter's blog is "edited" by an "official blogger" whose name is not M.J. Abkar. Sigh.

FWIW, here are some extracts.

Desi Pundit offers a daily collection of posts, from what it describes as the best that the Indian blogosphere has to offer. The more hyperactive ones write a post a day, the average frequency of an update is much less. A post could simply be a link to what someone else has written or a piece of soulful prose, or a travelogue. People with personal blogs also blog at group blogs like Caferati run by a group of writers who post poems, book reviews. The list of contributors exceeds 70. One of them describes himself as an investor in start-ups, another is an actor who describes his interests as theatre, literature, poetry, long drives, soulful conversations, outdoor adventures, people. Would a reasonably well-informed person, not looking for someone to tell them what to think, get very much out of a non-specialised blog? The answer is no.

Yet blogs have a charm of their own. Somebody is writing about the birth and death of stars, somebody else about the benefits of coconut oil or Kannada movies. Veiled4Allah brings you "the occasional thoughts of a Muslim woman". And an Indian woman in the UK uses her blog to tell you that it is alright to be a bad mother.

How did the OBC students do in this year's JEE?


In the previous news stories (which we looked at here and here), this piece of information was missing. We now have some data in two related stories by ET's Hemali Chhapia.

Before we proceed with the numbers, let me recall here that there was no reservation for OBC students this year because the Supreme Court has ordered a stay on this scheme.

Here are the key numbers. OBC students constituted 18.75% of the exam takers and 14% of the JEE-qualified, indicating that they do suffer a disadvantage in terms of JEE-preparedness. Of the 990 students who qualified, 876 showed up for seat allotment, and only 590 enrolled. Without comparable numbers for the other categories, it is impossible to make any comment on why 286 students chose not to go to the IITs. But we can guess: the JEE list this year included some 1600 extra students -- 7209 candidates made it to the list, but IITs had only 5537 seats! Thus, it's possible that a large fraction of OBC students weren't willing to 'settle for' institutions and fields of study that didn't attract them.

Another interesting number is that out of the 990 OBC students who got through JEE-2007, fully a third of them -- 329 -- were from the Chennai region, which includes the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Pondycherry and Tamil Nadu. This indicates clearly the higher level of preparedness among the OBC students from this region (though a stronger inference will have to wait for detailed data on the numbers of candidates from different regions). The Mumbai region had the the second largest number of OBC students among the JEE-qualified.

Hemali Chhapia's story has only one quote from an IIT student, who also happens to belong to an OBC:

‘‘When there are so many OBC students who are doing well naturally, why set aside seats for them and demoralise them?’’ asked an OBC student who joined IIT Bombay.

The bit about 'demoralization' shows -- sadly -- that this student has bought into the rhetoric of the anti-reservation lobby. Leaving that aside, is it really true that "OBCs ... are doing well naturally"? Consider: the data show that the OBC share among the exam-takers is low, and it's even lower among the JEE-qualified. Given this fact, I would bet that their representation keeps dropping as one moves up the rank-list (say, the top 1000 or the top 200). If this is true, then the top branches -- say, Electronics Engineering or Computer Science -- would have a far smaller representation of OBCs. It's this disparity -- particularly at the top -- that a reservation policy is meant to address: OBCs and other disadvantaged sections must have opportunities in top colleges and most sought after fields of study -- not just some College X or in some Field Y.

A final comment about the IITs' penchant for hoarding information: instead of releasing data in selective trickles, it would have been great if the IITs made detailed statistics -- on all aspects they deem important enough to ask for in the application form -- available on their website. For example, I am interested in gender-wise and category-wise (i.e., OBC, SC, ST and General) details on the percentage of first and second timers among the JEE-takers, JEE-qualified, admission offers and acceptances. I am also interested in data on the economic status and background (urban or rural) of the students. I don't see any reason why the IITs should wait until someone files an application under RTI to reveal this kind of basic statistical information to the public.

Friday, August 03, 2007

More links ...


Jason Overdorf has a bunch of thoughts about affirmative action in the (Indian) private sector, and the kinds of governmental intervention that can make it more effective.

Vivek points us to an article on race and sporting prowess.

Arun Thiruvengadam points us to an op-ed by Sandeep Pandey explaining "the significant practical achievements of the Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Generation Act." On a related note, Jean Drèze and Sowmya Kidambi analyze the results of a social audit of the functioning of NREGA in the Villupuram district in Tamil Nadu.

Public-mindedness (prosociality) is not an inherited trait


The 'Homo Economicus' assumption ... fails rather consistently in laboratory experiments. Notions of trust and public-minded-ness turn out to be much more common in human behaviour than they are in the theory. Economic outcomes such as growth, economic development, international trade, and labour market behaviour have been shown to depend upon such values. Recent advances in experimental economics are developing a set of results that should help economic theorists develop models that are better able to explain real-world economic behaviour in a variety of settings.

... [We] describe an experiment that tests whether public-minded-ness, or pro-sociality are transmitted from parents to children.

The experiment itself is interesting, so go read the VoxEU post by Marco Cipriani, Paola Giuliano and Olivier Jeanne.

Plagiarizing from a plagiarizer


S. Seethalakshmi and S Nandagopal of ToI have the story:

A research guide in Bangalore University copies from student, little realising that the student himself had lifted material from books.

What is even more bizarre is the way this seemingly straight-forward stuff was handled before the Governor of Karnataka -- who is also the Chancellor of the Bangalore University -- was forced to step in:

This is how the sordid saga unfolded. In 2002, Venkataramanappa did his Ph.D on 'Grameena Karnatakada Sanna Raitharu: Ondu Samaja Shashtriya Adhyayana' under the guidance of Mylarappa from the department of sociology.

Following complaints of plagiarism, ISEC was asked to examine the thesis and submit a report to the university. Though ISEC found the thesis was plagiarised and ghost-written, BU chose to ignore the report.

It referred the issue to Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, a deemed university in Pune, to conduct another probe. Curiously, some members of the inquiry committee did not even know how to read or write Kannada. This inquiry was rather vague in its findings but BU’s syndicate accepted the report and gave a clean chit to Mylarappa and Venkataramanappa. Sensing there was something wrong, the chancellor ordered a fresh probe which revealed the fraud. [Bold emphasis added]

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Thanks to my colleague Jayant Haritsa for the alert.

Hwang Woo Suk had a breakthrough!


In all the excitement about faking a different result, he didn't realize he actually had a scientific 'first'. Nicholas Wade has the story:

Dr. Hwang said he had derived embryonic stem cells from the adult cells of a patient, but the claim was discredited after parts of his research were found to have been faked. A team of Boston scientists has now re-examined stocks of Dr. Hwang’s purported embryonic stem cells and arrived at a surprising conclusion: His embryonic stem cells were the product of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, meaning they were derived from an unfertilized egg. [...]

Other researchers have since developed embryonic stem cells from parthenogenetic eggs, but Dr. Hwang’s team would have been the first to do so had its members recognized what they had done.

Links


Raj is puzzled by the first days of the rest of his life.

Confused finds it a sacrilege that Harvard has students who actually say no to sex. Did I mention that people have cited 237 reasons for saying yes to sex?.

Guru reads a paper that inspires him to do a version of the experiment described in the paper: it just needs a kitchen sink and a plastic sheet.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

It's raining IITs and IIMs


And IIESTs and IIITs and NITs and IISERs and Central Universities and ...

ToI reports that the real rain will happen over the next seven years.:

In a major rollout for high and technical education, Planning Commission has proposed a seven-year special plan (2007-14) which includes setting up eight new IITs, seven new IIMs, 20 NITs, 20 IIITs and 50 centres for training and research in frontier areas.

Thanks to Yogesh Upadhyaya for the pointer.

HigherEd links ...


The business plan for "getting [the University of Kentucky] into the top 20 among public research universities by 2020":

The first step for Dr. Todd and his team was to devise their own system for rating state universities. It involves measuring indicators like graduation rates; the academic quality of entering students; the number of Ph.D.’s being produced; the scholarly citations and awards amassed by the faculty members; and the dollar value of federal research grants awarded to the faculty members. Then, they designated benchmarks by which the university’s progress could be measured over the years.

[...]

There are already signs of momentum. The university, which had 45 endowed professorships a decade ago, now has 235. It won $300 million in federal research grants this year, compared with $100 million in 1997.

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Bonus link to a picture slideshow: What do unofficial slogans on T-shirts tell us about a college / university?

Psychology links


Scientific American: The New Psychology of Leadership, and Is Greed Good?.

LATimes: This is Your Brain on Love: did you know "romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs"?

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Indian Express editorial from August 19, 1942


In which the newspaper's founder "indicated unambiguously that the newspaper was on the side of Gandhi’s nationalists, even if this meant that it had to shut down operations in defiance of the gag orders." Pretty stirring stuff. Read it here.

As the country celebrates the sixtieth anniversary as an independent entity, the Indian Express is highlighting some of its proud moments. The blank editorial on June 28, 1975 -- three days after Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency -- marks a major milestone in Indian journalism. Check out the image on this page.

Ramon Magsaysay Award for P. Sainath


The announcement is here. Link via Uma.

Kuffir managed to shock me with his unique way of announcing the award for Sainath.