Friday, September 07, 2007

ToI covers the IIT-K incident


Akhilesh Kumar Singh of the Times of India covers the callous way in which a boy with a snake-bite was turned away by a doctor at IIT-K's health centre. The basic details are essentially the same as those posted here as well as on Mridula's blog. The only new information we now have is the name of the doctor: Meera Batra.

Singh's report, however, does not cover the second incident in IIT-K in which a contract labourer died due to safety violations at his workplace.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

AID comes to the aid of workers at IIT-K


This is just a quick follow-up on the IIT-K   incidents.

The Association for India's Development (AID) has a bunch of documents, which include a petition to the Director of IIT-K.

The petition seeks, among other things, free health care facility for all labourers and monitoring their working conditions to ensure that they comply with the laws regarding safety, minimum wages, and health and education for the workers' family members.

Over 400 people have signed this petition. Please do consider adding your voice in support of this good cause.

Thank you.

* * *

Thanks to my colleague Prabal Maiti and commenter Ravi for the pointer to the AID-India website.

Abhijit Banerjee on how well we understand the Economic Machine


The problem, in the end, is that we economists and development experts are still thinking in machine mode—we are looking for the right button to push. Education is one such button. Within education, there are more buttons: Economists talk of decentralization, incentives, vouchers, competition. Education experts talk about pedagogy. Government officials seem to swear by teacher training. If only we could do it right, whatever the favored “it” might be, we would be home free.

The reason we like these buttons so much, it seems to me, is that they save us the trouble of stepping into the machine. By assuming that the machine either runs on its own or does not run at all, we avoid having to go looking for where the wheels are getting caught and figuring out what small adjustments it would take to get the machine to run properly. To say that we need to move to a voucher system does not oblige us to figure out how to make it work—how to make sure that parents do not trade in the vouchers for cash (because they do not attach enough value to their children’s education) and that schools do not take parents for a ride (because parents may not know what a good education looks like). And how to get the private schools to be more effective—after all, at least in India, even children who go to private schools are nowhere near grade level. And many other messy details that every real program has to contend with.

This is from Abhijit Banerjee's article full of all kinds of interesting insights. Banerjee, an economist, is at MIT.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Manifestations of income inequality in India


The researchers found that for every three percent widening in a state's income inequality between the most affluent and the most poor, the risk for being underweight increased by 19 percent and the risk for being obese increased by 21 percent.

See this report for more on the study by S. V. Subramanian and coworkers at the Harvard School of Public Health. Here's another key finding:

In an additional finding, higher per capita consumption expenditure at the state-level, which is a marker of economic development, was associated with an increased risk of obesity. Yet, no association was observed between higher state per capita consumption expenditure and reduced risk for undernutrition, suggesting that economic development does not have a guaranteed connection to alleviating disease among the impoverished, noted Subramanian.

* * *

Here's what Amartya Sen had to say about "endemic undernourishment and hunger" in India (go to my old post for more):

... [It] is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in the latter respect. There are, of course, many different ways of shooting oneself in the foot, but smugness based on ignorance is among the most effective.

Industry gets proactive (and a bit pushy)


"Madras University has become the first Indian university to introduce a mandatory course on soft skills for all its post-graduate students." With a strong push (and inputs) from the industry.

A brainchild of CII, the programme has received strong support from the IT and ITeS industry. A consortium of five IT companies — Satyam, Cognizant, TCS, Scope International and US Technologies — have collaborated with the Madras University, which has about 170 colleges affiliated to it, to start the programme. As of now, 135 staff members have undergone the training and 50 are in the process. Soon after the teachers’ training will finish, the course for students will begin by October.

It's a clever move by the industry; this is one great way to reduce the cost of training new recruits in 'soft skills'.

But, what's in it for the Madras University? Are the next targets going to be Anna University, JNTU, Poona Engineering College, NITs, and -- gulp! -- the IITs?

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Two updates on 'Shocking'


Mridula has an update on the IIT-K incident. She also has a second update from which we learn about the death of a construction worker and the effort by the contractor to hush it up.

Both the updates are quite harrowing; they don't need any further commentary. Go read them on Mridula's blog.

Investigating scientific misconduct: Divya Gandhi on the Kundu case


MSM takes a closer look at curious case of Gopal Kundu, with Divya Gandhi's column in The Hindu examining several different issues surrounding this case. Her column uses this case to explore some other questions as well, but I want to stick to the Kundu case here.

Here's the key point:

In an unusually public mark of dissent, the generally discreet Indian scientific community has voiced its concern over what could be the latest case of science gone astray. [...]

The unprecedented attention this case has received, however, has to do with more than the alleged malpractice. The disquiet in science circles comes instead from what is seen as the failure of institutional mechanisms in dealing rigorously and impartially with such cases — and also from the frustration at the absence of a central authority to bring closure to the growing incidence of misconduct. [bold emphasis added]

Given Rahul's analysis of the available evidence (using online documents at the Society for Scientific Values -- SSV), we are led to a pretty inescapable conclusion: identical figures -- in seven sets! -- have been passed off as arising from different experiments. Thus, there has been some closure in the minds of people who have taken a look Rahul's analysis.

However, it is also true that this case has not seen an 'official' closure. And that's because of two conflicting conclusions: one from an official body and the other from an 'almost official' body (the journal that published Kundu's papers). Specifically,

  • The official committee, headed by Prof. G. Padmanaban, an ex-Director of IISc, exonerated Gopal Kundu and his coworkers of any wrongdoing. This happened in August 2006.
  • However, in February 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) withdrew one of Kundu's papers. On being queried by SSV (and also a Science reporter), the journal has admitted that the withdrawal of the paper followed the adverse conclusions of its own committee that went into the allegations against Kundu. More damaging was its admission that it was aware of the Padmanaban Committee's exoneration of Kundu.

JBC's withdrawal of the paper is clearly a slap in the face of the official investigative team, and it is this slap that's keeping this case alive (even though it has also been the subject of some sharp criticism in a Current Science editorial). Unless the Padmanaban Committee -- or NCCS, Kundu's employer, or the Department of Biotechnology, NCCS's official boss that the Padmanaban Committee also reports to -- gets the paper reinstated, the needle of suspicion will keep pointing at Kundu (and indirectly, at the investigative team as well).

Gandhi does a good job of highlighting the disconnect between the Padmanaban Committee's findings and what many others (including JBC) believe:

... Baffled by this verdict [of the Padmanaban Committee] and anxious for a resolution, many scientists have felt compelled to examine the papers for themselves. The two sets of photo-strips of the little protein bands have since been scrutinised keenly — as many as seven times — formally and voluntarily, by committees, individuals, and institutions, and have been discussed in the public domain.

The spotlight has shifted decisively from the authors of the contested paper ... to the Padmanabhan committee. Formed to bring an authoritative closure to the case, the committee has instead been embarrassingly contradicted by the JBC, which withdrew the paper, and finds itself increasingly isolated within the Indian scientific community, with its motives and investigation methodology brought under the scanner.

Here, then, is the current status of the Kundu case:

And so the NCCS saga continues. The Department of Biotechnology recently called for another report from the Padmanabhan committee, a vindication of sorts for SSV’s position. But the committee’s new report of 120 pages upholds its previous findings. The DBT will hand this one over to a set of three scientists for yet another review. The verdict of this eighth (and, with some luck, final) inquiry will signal more than the fate of this specific case. [bold emphasis added]

Clearly, there's something deeply wrong if a simple question -- Are two figures (bearing different labels) identical? -- needs an eighth inquiry (and more than a year) for a closure.

* * *

One final note. Gandhi quotes Satyajit Mayor (of the National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore):

... [Others] in the scientific community are concerned that such cases could dent India’s credibility in the international sphere. Satyajit Mayor, a biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, observes: “We need laws to protect the country from what happened to Korean science after the stem cell debacle. Now nothing they say is taken seriously, even though important research is being done.”

This quote (and it is possible that Mayor is being misquoted or quoted out of context) gives one the impression that Korean science was let down by their laws (or lack thereof). This impression cannot be more wrong. In the Korean case, when the allegations (which were doing the rounds in mailing lists and online forums for quite a while before they) finally broke through to the news media, the official investigation did its job impeccably well. And its conclusions and credibility have not been questioned! Acting on the conclusions of that inquiry, the papers with fabricated data were promptly withdrawn by the university. If at all any lesson needs to be learnt from the Korean episode, it is on how to act swiftly, impartially, dispassionately, and fairly.

Monday, September 03, 2007

An elemental glass


It's a good day indeed when you see two of your friends featured in a news story on a recent discovery that was reported in Nature. The two friends are Srikanth Sastry (at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore) who is among the authors of that paper, and U. Ramamurty (Ram, my colleague whose office is just next door to mine) who has commented on its findings.

As The Telegraph's T.V. Jayan puts it, a myth was indeed shattered when a pure substance -- germanium in this case -- was coaxed into a glassy form for the first time. The story focuses on Srikanth, whose theoretical and computational work provided vital clues for achieving this feat. Jayan also has quotes Ram on the importance and implications of this research.

* * *

What good are metallic glasses? It turns out that they are fantastic in one key property: springiness (resilience), which should make some of them suitable for things such as golf clubs. In fact, the opening paragraph in the Telegraph story features Tiger Woods, Maria Sharapova and Srikanth Sastry!

[Take a look at this video for a neat demonstration of a high-resilience material in comparison with normal materials such as a stainless steel.]

* * *

Alloys with two or more elements have been prepared in a glassy or amorphous state in which the atoms are not arranged in a regular three dimensional grid like they normally are in a crystalline state [Check out this Discover article or this Wikipedia entry]. The first metallic glasses were prepared using ultrafast cooling of molten liquid alloys; the cooling needed to be fast enough to suppress crystallization. Techniques based on fast cooling could produce glasses only in the form of thin sheets with thicknesses less than half a millimeter.

Subsequent research led to techniques for making metallic glasses in thicker blocks which can be used in a wider variety of applications. Centimeter-wide samples can now be made; they are called bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), and they enable a more precise and detailed study of their properties. Ram is an expert in the mechanical behaviour of these BMGs (and many other classes of materials, too).

Let me just end with a curious thing about the field of BMGs: it is unique in elevating 'Confusion' to the status of a 'Principle'! Since suppression of crystallization is important for coaxing an alloy into a glassy form, one of the strategies that scientists have hit upon is called the Confusion Principle according to which, very crudely, liquids with many elements -- with many different sizes and chemical properties -- are easier to turn into glass because the atoms in such a liquid are 'too confused' to form a regular crystalline arrangement on cooling.

Exit tax on emigrating graduates


This idea is gaining momentum. It was in the news sometime ago (and Rohit linked to it), but now within two days, it's on Outlook and Economic Times. Here are the opening lines from the Outlook story by Anuradha Raman:

Will taxing students from institutes of "higher learning" (read IITs and IIMs) who catch the first flight abroad after they complete their degrees stem the brain drain? Members of the parliamentary standing committee on HRD believe that a penalty—or "exit tax"—could act as a deterrent and keep students back in the country.

Picking up on this, Ram Mohan (a professor of finance at IIM-A) has commented on this proposal: he covers a lot of different angles, right from implementation difficulties to philosophical issues. Here are his questions on the implementation:

... At what point is the tax to be collected? Is a candidate expected to make a declaration to the Income tax department that he or she is an IIT/IIM product and leaving the country and, therefore, wishes to have a clearance certificate? What if the compensation is understated? Is the passport supposed to carry a stamp saying the candidate is from IIT/IIM? In the case of fresh graduates leaving immediately after graduation, they may not have the resources to pay the tax. So, are they expected to raise a loan? Will banks provide loans to departing individuals? And what about graduates who return after a few years' experience? Are they eligible for a tax refund? And why only IIT/IIM products?

Indeed, why only IIT/IIM products? Why only those who go abroad?

An across-the-board graduation tax is a good idea, and I am impressed by the Australian model. In this model, the government's higher education subsidy is treated as a loan in the hands of the student; when (and only when) he/she starts earning an income beyond a certain threshold, he/she pays a slightly higher income tax until the loan is repaid. Such a tax can help reduce government expenditure (subsidies) on higher education without sacrificing equity. It is easy to implement. It is easy to use this tax to signal to the students what our nation's priorities are. Even during the repayment stage, the tax is relatively painless, since it just means the ex-student and current tax-payer's marginal tax rate is higher just by a percent or two. I don't know how the Australians treat those who emigrate, but we can think of suitable mechanisms to get them to pay (either a lumpsum payment before they leave, or a transfer of their loan to someone else who would then be responsible for repaying it in installments).

Interestingly, the Economic Times report (which is by Urmi Goswami and someone else whose name I don't recall right now -- the print version mentions them by name) alludes to the Australian model:

... the Australians have worked out a scheme that could be considered for the Indian context. This would fit in with the finance minister’s plans for a simpler tax system. In Australia, higher education is considerably subsidised.

On graduation, students who seek to work outside the national priority areas have to pay back the subsidy, as the nation has not benefited from the investment. This ensures that tax structures are not meddled with and it incentivises working in priority areas through a subsidised cost of education.

I hope the idea of an across-the-board graduation tax also gains traction. It deserves to be considered seriously.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Whining about faculty salaries


Summing up his total expenditures for these nine years, and in like manner his salary for the same period, [this author, a university professor] finds his expenditures have been to his salary in the ratio of 2.1 to 1.

His average annual expenditure has been [2.1 times X].

His average salary has been [X].

For the privilege of teaching he has paid the difference, of [1.1 times X] annually, from private means.

Even the unbusinesslike professor must pause before such a state of affairs, and try to fathom the reason for this discrepancy, when his firm belief is that he is living on as low a scale of economy as is possible for him in his position.

It's an American professor writing (under the pseudonym G.H.M.) about the low salaries at the turn of -- get this -- the previous century! Read Brad DeLong's fascinating post for GHM's article as well as a commentary on the economic well being of the Americans during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Youngest fan of our National Anthem?


And he even has the most appropriate name!

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Sujai Karampuri on ToI's 'Lead India' reality TV show


Times of India has been running Lead India, a campaign that's currently in the first phase when people send in their applications. It has an elaborate process of filtering people out, with city-level and region-level contests. What can the survivors expect? A chance to participate in a reality TV show!

The contest even features a web page devoted to those who look like celebrities leaders. Well, this totally sleazy exercise is crying out to be mocked, ridiculed and criticized! And Sujai has stepped up to this task and done a thorough demolition job.

Start with Quality of a Leader, and work your way up through Leadership, RDB style to the most recent ToI: Lead India Campaign.

Emotions


... I now know its possible to be immensely happy and equally sad at the same time in a way that does not add up to zero (indifference).

That's Sharath Rao bidding farewell to Carnegie Mellon.

Some facets of IISc ...


... viewed through cartoons by Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti. I have seen some of his cartoons in our Institute's student-run magazine Voices (which, surprisingly for one meant for an audience of geeks, is not available online). I learnt today that Sujit also has a blog, where some of his cartoons are archived along with some commentary on the background or on readers' reactions.

In particular, check out one of the perils of being at IISc. And also the Tea Board scene; I love the way computer science types fight!

Halls of shame


SciAm blog's Christopher Mims compiles a list of "duplicitous PR flacks who have run afoul of the science blog mob." It includes a PR frontman for Stuart Pivar, the guy who sued P.Z. Myers (the lawsuit has now been withdrawn). It also includes a political appointee at NASA whose 'real' credentials were outed by science blogger.

While on the topic of credentials, NYTimes reports that South Korea has been rocked by a series of scandalous exposés of high-fliers and celebrities (including a Buddhist monk) who have made inflated or false claims of academic credentials.