Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The Anna University case: An update


The website of the Linköping University (academic home for two of the victims of this plagiarism carries a news item on this case. Many of the details are known, but this one is new (and it's a direct quote from Sergei Simak, one of the authors of the original paper, and the bold emphasis is added by me):

"Only the title had been changed, and some items in the list of references. There was also an alteration to an illustration; a fictive element, Tp, had been added."

Even in this sordid affair, there is something to laugh about ...

A Swedish newspaper published a report on this case (thanks to Sridhar for the alert). Rahul has posted a translation of this report on his blog. We learn that at least two of the authors have distanced themselves from the plagiarized paper. There's also a curious twist: "One of [the other two] claims in an email to the Swedish researchers that he received a draft from a researcher in Nepal."

As they say, read the whole thing, and Rahul's comments at the end.

* * *

Before closing, I just want to quote the last paragraph from the newspaper report:

According to the Swedish regulation[4] on university colleges[5], it is the duty of the university college since September 1st, 2006 to investigate all reported cases of suspected scientific cheating.

The ball is in Anna University's court; let's see how it plays this one.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Links: Anagrams of IISc and Google trends for astronomy and astrology


Did you know that one of the anagrams of 'Indian Institute of Science' is 'Nicest Infinite Educations'? Apparently, IISc can be reconfigured into many others as well.

* * *

Parseval presents some interesting trends on Google searches for astronomy and astrology from the US, the UK and India.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Plagiarism: Culprits of the month


Rahul catches is tipped off about an Anna University group's paper (published in the Journal of Materials Science) whose abstract is a near-verbatim copy of that of an earlier paper in PNAS from a Swedish group. Here are the first two sentences (Rahul has the full abstract and the links, so go to his post for details):

The PNAS paper

Oxides with the cubic fluorite structure, e.g., ceria (CeO2), are known to be good solid electrolytes when they are doped with cations of lower valence than the host cations. The high ionic conductivity of doped ceria makes it an attractive electrolyte for solid oxide fuel cells, whose prospects as an environmentally friendly power source are very promising. ...

And the JMS paper:

Oxides with the cubic fluorite structure, e.g., ceria (CeO2), are known to be good solid electrolytes when they are doped with cations of lower valence than the host cations. The high ionic conductivity of doped ceria makes it an attractive electrolyte for solid oxide fuel cells, whose prospects as an environmentally friendly power source are very promising. ...

Very blatant, and very, very disturbing. All eyes should now be on Anna University's next move.

What kind of a pay raise can we expect out of the Sixth Pay Commission?


About 35 percent! The Deccan Herald report quotes "sources familiar with the draft recommendations," so this estimate is speculative. But it's also in line with our experience with the previous Pay Commission.

As per a draft recommendation prepared by the Pay Commission, gross salary increases which would be implemented with retrospective effect from January 1, 2006, would be in the range of 30 to 35 per cent of the existing salaries.

According to sources familiar with the draft recommendations already prepared by the Pay Commission, the basic salary of the Cabinet Secretary — the topmost civil servant of the Government of India — is proposed to be Rs 80,000 as against the existing basic pay of Rs 30,000.

Coming back to academic salaries, a fresh recruit at the Assistant Professor level can expect a gross salary (without house rent allowance) of about Rs. 35,000 from the current Rs. 25,000. Clearly, this sort of raise, while it does have its benefits (!), is nothing to write home about. Our premier institutions had better get cracking on some of the other things we talked about just a few days ago, if they want to remain (become ?) attractive destinations for top faculty talent.

IgNobel


Via Pablo (who thinks up a cool title for his post) and Aishwarya: The IgNobel Prizes have been announced. Since that page is poorly organized, you might want to check out this report in the Guardian. My favorite IgNobels this year:

Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung.

12 Years of Outlook


I don't know what is so special about 12, but I'm just glad that the 'anniversary issue' has now become a tradition at Outlook. Any celebration that gives the magazine a chance to look back at some of its best coverage is always welcome. Here's the issue, so you can dip into its goodies.

One of the really great things about Outlook -- aside from its firm resolve to be a pain in the Parivar's butt -- is its editor's light touch. Here's the opening paragraph from 12th anniversary editorial:

If you make a list of the many alleged weaknesses—biased, trivial, anti-BJP, anti-Hindu, cricket-obsessed, etc—of this publication, self-glorification is likely to be missing from the list. A journal which constantly needs to pat itself on the back reminding its readers what a great job it is doing is in a sense admitting that its journalistic virtues are hidden. Whether that is the case with Outlook is not for me to say. I will leave that judgement to those who pay Rs 20 every week. What I can claim, on the basis of the huge mail I get every day, is that the jury is still out.

And here's another example of the utterly unstuffy Vinod Mehta:

Spare Me the Parsimony: Among the two or three abusive e-mails I receive daily, there is usually some mention of my being born out of wedlock. You Parsi b****** is how they frequently describe me. India is a free country, so everyone is entitled to his/her opinion, but errors of fact must be corrected. Hate mailwallahs please note I am a Punjabi, not a Parsi.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Dreaming about a free market fundamentalist majority in India


Did you know that a recent survey found that "in urban India, ... 89% are supportive of international trade, 73% are supportive of foreign companies and 75% are supportive of free markets" ? These figures lead Nitin to conclude:

... At least 7 in 10 Indians you’d meet in cities, it turns out, are free market fundamentalists.

Not so fast, Nitin! Here's a tiny byte (aka a bit) of reality for you: In the last decade, there have been several occasions when the Indian government tried to 'free' the price of LPG aka cooking gas. The arguments against gas subsidies are so solid that letting LPG price 'float' to its 'market-clearing price' is unquestionably the right policy -- at least according to economists and government officials. Even at the market price, LPG would continue to be affordable to the middle class, which presumably forms the bulk of the "7 out of 10 Indians ... [who] are free market fundamentalists". Now, just ask yourself: why is it that the government hasn't been able to make even a minor dent in the big, bloated cylinder of LPG subsidies?

A quick summary of that reality byte would read: "Revealed Preferences." In plain English, I believe it would read: "Talk is cheap."

Annals of Game Theory: Rational chimpanzees


In contrast with humans in previous studies, the chimps tended to accept any offer [in the Ultimatum Game] and didn't get upset when they were offered a small amount of raisins or none at all.

Lead author Keith Jensen said the chimps behaved more rationally than people, because "it makes perfect economic sense to accept any nonzero offer and to offer the smallest amount possible while keeping the most for yourself." [Bold emphasis added]

From this story by Denise Gellene in LATimes.

Conferences, sponsors, freebies


This post is only vaguely related to Sunil's post on vendor shows where the main attraction is the freebies.

* * *

Major conferences -- and especially those that happen in convention centers and star hotels (such as this BIG one starting this Monday) -- cost a lot money, and are impossible to organize without support from industry. In materials science conferences, sponsors tend to be makers of experimental equipment -- electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes, nano-indenters, vacuum systems, furnaces, etc. These sponsors get to set up a stall at the conference venue, and display their products and/or brochures. Since most of the stuff they sell are very, very expensive, all that a conference participant can hope for -- by way of freebies -- are glossy, colorful brochures.

My wife, who is an ophthalmologist, attends conferences where the sponsors are makers of expensive diagnostic equipment as well as pharmaceutical companies. Thus, she comes back with brochures and bags full of all kinds of medicines.

Some years ago, she went to a meeting at Salem, Tamil Nadu. For whatever reason, the organizers of this event ended up getting a sponsorship from a major neighborhood company whose product line has nothing to do with ophthalmology.

Result? My wife came back from this meeting with brochures, medicines and severral packets of masala powder (sambhar, rasam, garam masala, ...). And who do you think was this unconventional sponsor of an ophthalmology conference?

Sakthi Masala!

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Is the 100 Dollar laptop dead?


May be not dead, but close. Here's Fake Steve Jobs [via Wayan Vota's OLPC News] pouring scorn and ridicule on media outlets for hyping the product:

Remember all those big, splashy, gushing, goofy, stupid, incredibly naive stories in all the major publications about the Hundred Dollar Laptop? Remember the cover story in the NY Times Magazine about how this was going to save the world? Remember the insanely stupid 60 Minutes piece? Ever wonder why nobody, and I mean nobody, ever stopped to think about whether the whole thing could actually work? Or even to question how it was going to work? Did you notice that nobody looked at the business realities? Did anyone even consider looking at Negroponte's disastrous track record and his utter lack of experience? Did anyone point out what a ridiculous waste of space the entire MIT Media Lab has been? Of course not. Partly it's because no reporter wanted to pee on Negroponte's shoes and get branded as a meany and a kid-hater and a racist by the noisy freetards who backed this silly project.

If you have been following the decline and fall (and probably the impending demise) of Negroponte's dream project on the excellent OLPC News blog, you are probably aware that the OLPC project has attracted some of the best minds, and led to the development of some nifty technologies. Even if the 100 dollar laptop dies, many of these technologies will find a home in other (hopefully low-cost) products and gadgets. Thus, there is no reason to feel sad about the failure of OLPC.

As someone who opposed the very idea of a 'Third World laptop' pretty much from the time I heard about it (and I had my 15 nanoseconds of fame, too), I'm just glad that India didn't fall for the hype, and boldly said 'no' to this costly mistake.

From whatever I have seen, (here, here and here), laptops don't seem to have any serious educational value for school kids.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

How to attract new faculty in large numbers: Offer them a high probability of success


A bright young man -- let's call him Prakash -- visited us sometime ago. Armed with a newly minted PhD from a top US university, excellent publications and expertise in a hot field, he was looking for a faculty position at several Indian institutions (as well as at several universities in the West). He told us that while low faculty salaries in India are a bummer, he was confident -- because of his field's high hotness coefficient -- that he would be able to earn more through consultancy.

"I am interested," he said, "in knowing more about the other things." Since his field is resource intensive (requiring fancy equipment, gadgets, materials), he started with the start-up grant. He was aghast when he learned that his budget -- several tens of millions of rupees -- was way beyond what is common in almost all the institutions in India. [IIT-B, for example, announced -- just yesterday! -- an increase in start-up grant from Rs. 300,000 to Rs. 1000,000]

"I'm not in this game to play in the little league," he retorted. "My field is extremely competitive, and I want to play in the Big League."

* * *

If you you are a Big Leaguer (who isn't? ;-) in the market for a faculty position, many people assume that you would not choose to join an Indian institution because of low faculty salaries. They cite the acute faculty shortage even in our premier institutions such as the IITs [Again, the report about IIT-B's new initiative also informs us that they need 900 new faculty members!]. They look at the grand plans unveiled by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to create many new IITs, IISERs and central universities, and they go, "Tsk, tsk, where are they going to find people to fill their faculty?"

That this pessimism is widely shared is an understatement. But, can something be done to get rid of this pessimism?

Move beyond salaries

An obsession with low salaries is pointless and counterproductive. Let's face the fact that salaries are not under an individual institution's control; since faculty salaries are mixed up with those of other Central government employees, no institution can hope to create a salary structure that benefits its employees exclusively. Bottomline: we have to (learn to) live with what we have in India: government-funded institutions with government-imposed constraints [1]. (What about private institutions? Yeah, what about them?)

As of now, institutions can do certain -- admittedly limited -- things: (a) point out that salaries will be revised upwards by the Sixth Pay Commission in the next year or so, (b) play up the fact that faculty salaries can be augmented through consulting for industry.

In addition, I have also argued for a reform that would allow faculty to earn a salary component in research grants (currently, grants from industry allow this, but those from the government don't). To the extent that our academic institutions have any clout, they should use it to get this feature implemented by our funding agencies.

Who are the real competitors?

Many people -- in particular, our business press -- appear to insinuate that the private sector industry is the main competitor for faculty talent, and they urge our academic institutions to 'do something' about faculty salaries. I don't even agree with this assessment. First, getting into a pissing match with private sector on salaries is a game that government-funded academic institutions can never win, and therefore, should not even get into. Second, while private sector salaries may be great, private sector jobs are not -- specifically for academically oriented folks. This is true not only in India, but pretty much everywhere: academics everywhere forego fat salaries in industry when they choose university jobs.

Thus, in the war for talent, the real competition for Indian academic institutions is from research and academic jobs abroad (primarily, the West).

When you talk to those who emigrate to the West, most would insist that it is not just the money (though it is nice!), but the opportunities that make them choose to leave. So, the key question boils down to this: How can Indian institutions create an environment that offers lots of opportunities for their faculty to thrive professionally?

I can think of several steps.

  1. Start-up grant. I have a long rant, but here's a blunt summary: A low start-up grant in this era of institutional affluence is scandalous, and betrays how seriously misdirected our institutions' priorities are. By offering sub-optimal -- if not downright abysmal -- start-up grants, they are setting up a significant fraction of their junior faculty for a mediocre career at best, or a disastrous one at worst.

    This situation must change. Our top institutions must be able to promise every faculty recruit that he/she will get everything he/she needs for the first three years: lab, equipment, students, post-docs, lab assistants, supplies, the works. Even if it requires half a million dollars (Rs. 10 millions or more) per faculty, I would say, "So be it. Give it to your hot young recruits, and set them up for success!"

  2. Our institutions should do every possible thing to attract first rate graduate students in greater numbers. I just talked about this a few days ago; take a look at the comments on that post where people have offered other suggestions. Many of the ideas there do not require a great deal of money, but they do require a change in mindset.
  3. Travel grants. During the initial years when there's very little external funding, it's important for an institution to ensure the visibility of its prize catch in international conferences -- at least once a year, and preferably more. [Currently, different institutions offer different levels of support. IISc, for example, offers travel support for one international conference abroad every three years. I am told that the IITs are a bit more liberal.]
  4. A reduced teaching load during the initial years. This was pointed out by Tabula Rasa in his comment on my post on start-up funds.
  5. A strong institutional support for taking care of things that are routine elsewhere. Getting lab repairs done (or purchasing equipment and supplies), for example, can be a painful exercise in most of our institutions. Many faculty members complain bitterly about administrative sloth, inefficiency and delays. Reforming this part requires a strong and sustained commitment from the top management.
  6. Fellowships for junior faculty [2] that can top up their salaries during their first three years. They can figure out, during the tenure of the fellowship, ways of earning an extra income (consultancy, industry-oriented research, etc) when they go back to their normal salary. [IIT-B's signing bonus is a limited version of the three-year fellowship idea].

Clearly, all these steps will require money, but this money (as opposed to money for salaries) is far easier to get now than in the previous decades. While our government may not be able to offer fat salaries, it is very happy to enhance science funding (much of which goes towards equipment). And our leading institutions are in an excellent position to attract philanthropic contributions from their alumni (IIT-B's initiative for its new faculty is a good example).

* * *

Secret weapons

All these things belong to the academic/professional realm. Professional success also depends on certain pre-conditions on the personal side, and in this (non-academic) realm, our government-funded institutions have at least three very powerful secret weapons: (a) excellent on-campus housing, (b) a clean, green and serene campus, (c) a good school (such as the Kendriya Vidyalaya) on campus. With urban sprawl, traffic, and pollution levels becoming worse by the day, the value of these secret weapons should not be underestimated.

* * *

What do you think?

* * *

[1] For my take on faculty salaries, go to these two posts. Here's a quick summary: in India, faculty salaries are not that low (compared to per capita GDP, and faculty positions come with valuable other benefits (campus housing, schools, etc).

[2] IIT-Kanpur has created quite a few fellowships for its senior faculty (or so I am led to believe). When some of us were talking the other day about this "incentive scheme" at IIT-K, someone quipped: "What? Have we come to a stage where our senior guys need an incentive to teach?"

An IIT in Himachal Pradesh?


Yes. And a Central University, too!

Himachal Pradesh is the fourth in the queue for new IITs, after Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar.

Monday, October 01, 2007

An innovative plan at IIT-B for attracting new faculty


Jeetha D'Silva reports in the Hindustan Times:

Facing a talent crunch that is familiar to many companies, the elite Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay) is offering all new faculty members a signing bonus of Rs 3 lakh.

Significantly, the bonuses are being raised by donations from the IIT alumni, generally a high-achieving bunch, who in recent years, have become more active, organised and sophisticated in giving back to their alma mater.

“This is a first for any of the IITs,” says Deepak B Phatak, professor at IIT’s Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology.

As a retention measure, IIT Bombay has significantly increased seed research grants to Rs 10 lakh to new faculty members this year. Until last year, such grants were only about Rs 3 lakh.

Onion says American physicists want a 40 billion dollar 'science thing'


And they took their case to the US Congress:

"While expense is something to consider, I think it's very important that we have this kind of scientific apparatus, because, in the end, I have always said that science is more important than it is unimportant," Committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN) said. "And it's essential we stay ahead of China, Japan, and Germany in science. We are ahead in space, with the NASA rockets going to other planets, so we should be ahead in science too."

And hear this:

"Now, I'm no science major, but if I'm being told by a group of people that the protons, neutrons, and electrons need unifying, then I think we owe it to the American people to go in and unify them," Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) said. "After all, isn't a message of unity what we want to send to our children?"

Blogger Taxonomy: Part Deux


After Thennavan's pioneering work over two years ago, Krish Ashok revisits the land of Homo desiblogiens, and discovers quite a few subspecies. One example: Sitemeterpsychotic!

Bloggers who use 745 stats and analytics plugins to analyze their 500 hits a day in every possible dimension. Top posts, Top posts per tag. Top posts per latitude and longitude degree. Pingbacks. Trackbacks. And so on.

This one caught my attention because it made me feel so ... um ... behind the analytics curve. Now, which one of the other 633 analytics plugins can get me "top posts per latitude and longitude degree"? I absolutely, desperately need to know ...