Make sure your kids get enough sleep

After this and this, some more evidence on the importance of getting adequate sleep; this time, it's the link between sleep and obesity in kids. And it's not what you think!

Every extra hour a third grader spends in bed--regardless of their size--slims the chance of a child being obese as a sixth grader.

To keep trim, third graders should get 9 hours and 45 minutes of sleep a night, according to researchers of a recent study.

Researchers are unable to explain exactly why sleep keeps little waistlines from expanding. But hunger hormones may be to blame.

BTW, have you checked out 60 Second Science the latest blog from the Scientific American?

Cory Doctorow interview at Kottke.org

And the interviewer is Joel Turnipseed, guest editor at Kottke.org. It has quite a few interesting threads; here's one about the ethics of giving books away:

... [T]he ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they're doing it electronically. You know, there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They're copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they're all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that's a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.

The Profiler

...Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits.

In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions. Once, Douglas tells us, he drove down to the local police station and offered his services in the case of an elderly woman who had been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. The detectives working the crime were regular cops, and Douglas was a bureau guy, so you can imagine him perched on the edge of a desk, the others pulling up chairs around him.

That's from the latest demolition job from Malcolm Gladwell. He sets up the article with what sounds like an amazing success story in profiling, where the hero provides police officers vital clues in amazing detail ("When you catch him ... he'll be wearing a double-breasted suit. ... And it will be buttoned.") that allow the latter to nail some nasty psychopaths. He slowly works his way up to a thorough debunking of the entire profiling enterprise (at least, the FBI's version of it). Here's some seriously delicious stuff:

... when [Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,”] broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

Fabulous stuff. Go read all of it.

"The object of torture is torture"

After weighing the evidence, Cosma Shalizi concludes:

The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.

Calling this administration "sadistic" insults thousands of sane, decent, kinky sexual perverts.

The first quoted paragraph is backed up by quite a few links (which I didn't copy -- purposely) over at Cosma's blog. Head over there to read the whole thing.

Where does India stand in industrial R&D spending?

Here's one way to look at it (thanks to Pradeepkumar for the pointer):

The top 10 Indian firms, put together, invested 477 million euro last year for R&D, less than one-tenth of the world's biggest R&D investor Pfizer.

The total R&D spending by top 10 Indian companies is also less than what the lowest ranked company among the world's top-50 spends.

Just after this year's Central Budget was presented, I did an analysis of public spending on R&D in India. My estimate for government support for academic R&D in all our universities was less than half a billion dollars. This figure is exceeded by the R&D budget of each of the top five (and probably many more!) US universities.

Chetan Kunte on social networks

He admits he's in denial about social networks. Still, he scores some key points when he says:

[...]I believe that best functioning communities are those on mailing lists. No shitty scrapbooks, no request for contacts or recommendations, no virtual request for pass-the-baton stuff. And they get work done too. I’d like to know how many active communities—who really get work done—are on Facebook, or Orkut, or on any other social network?

As far as I know, everyone of those GTD communities are on their own mail lists. They dish out solutions before you can compose your next email. Have you seen it happening in these so called web 2.0 social networks? [...]

BS interviews Sukhadeo Thorat

Um, BS would be the Business Standard and, of course, Thorat is Chairman, Universities Grants Commission. Topic: The state of higher education in India.

What about reforms in the university education system, like common entrance tests, semester systems, constant revision of the syllabus and student transferability? What about the autonomy and governance issues? Universities seem to be going slow on the reforms front.

Yes, these are some of the issues raised by the Kothari Commission as well, and we have to look at them seriously. But it is wrong to say that they are not implemented at all. Central universities are going forward with reforms and we have to see that the state universities follow the same model. This can be done in stages.

To have a uniform approach in administrative and other matters, the UGC has a proposal to limit the affiliations under one university to 50 colleges. At present, some universities, like Mumbai and Osmania, have a huge number of affiliations. Most of the state universities are also in agreement with the proposal. This can be done by splitting the colleges within the existing universities and by creating new ones. There is also a proposal to have ‘constituent colleges’ which would deliver courses from the undergraduate to Phd levels.

Body scanning, anyone?

Apparently, Heathrow airport is 'testing' this technique. Here's Peter Foster, Telegraph's India correspondent, on his experience -- in a post titled "Butt-naked at Heathrow":

I was directed to remove my shoes and then enter a booth where, at the instruction of the official, I placed my feet on the patches indicated on the floor.

One after the other I struck three rather awkward poses, hands reaching for the sky as if trying save a Beckham free-kick curling its way first into the top right corner, and then the top left corner.

The whole procedure took a minute at most and it was with some curiosity that I skipped round to the back of the booth to where a technician was reviewing my scan behind a small curtain.

Well. There's no polite way of putting this. There I was, on screen, absolutely butt-naked. [...]

Amit Varma reviews Alan Krueger's "What makes a terrorist?"

And it's a pretty positive one:

... Looking into the economic background of terrorists, Krueger cites a study that compares “suicide bombers and other militants” from the West Bank and Gaza strip with the entire male population aged 16 to 50, and find that “suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line.” Krueger gets similar results from studies on Hezbollah and Gush Emunim, an Israeli group.

Krueger cites public opinion surveys across Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey that show that terrorism finds more support among the better educated than among the uneducated. The biographical details of known terrorists bring him to an identical conclusion.

This is a good time to link -- again -- to Alan Krueger's article titled "Five myths about terrorism." The previous time I linked to it, some of the comments were, how do I put it, very interesting...

Discrimination against women ...

...at coffee shops:

... [M]en get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than women. (There is also evidence that black people wait longer than white people, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Perhaps, says the sceptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.

It is also hard to attribute the following finding to a female preference for wet-skinny-soya-machiatto with low carb marshmallows: the delays facing women were longer when the coffee shop staff was all-male, and almost vanished when the serving staff were all-female.

It is not clear whether women were held up by male staff because the men viewed them with contempt, or because male staff flirted furiously. The “contempt” explanation seems more likely, as the extra time that women wait seems to increase when the coffee shop is busy. Who would take extra time out to flirt just when the lines are longer?

Tim Harford's column is here. He has more background information at his blog.

Update: Harford has a follow-up post with a response from the study's lead author [Thanks to Sharath Rao for the link].

Voices, IISc's student magazine, is now online

Update 2 (9 February 2009): Yes, the site is now available to the whole wide world outside IISc. A big thank you to the Voices team; see Rupesh's post.

Update: Oops! Looks like the link works only within our Institute! I have written to the Voices team. I'll post another update when they nail the problem.

* * *

The magazine is called "Voices", and its online version -- e-Voices? -- is here. Congratulations to the entire Voices team for taking this online leap!

Right now, the Voices website has just the October issue, which features articles by three student bloggers from IISc: Natasha Mhatre, Sujit Chakrabarti (whose cartoons are here) and Rupesh (who calls himself bhOndOO). In fact, their articles started their lives as blog posts!

Among the other articles, the one by Sudhira is particularly noteworthy for its plea for setting up a Balawadi (pre-school child care) center to help the families of large numbers of construction workers who live in temporary housing units in our campus [In case you didn't know, IISc is going through a veritable construction boom].

Thanks to the Voices team's efforts, our alumni can now be in touch with the current generation of students and their creative output. I hope the website will also allow them to contribute to Voices. Such alumni participation will have another beneficial side effect: the publication frequency will go up!

All in all, I am very happy to see Voices go online. This is fantastic!

T.T. Ram Mohan has an idea for how to pay for the Pay Commission recommendations

In his latest column in the Economic Times on the rise and rise of stock prices, he says:

First, let us acknowledge that there is something to thank the Left for. When the Left announced its opposition to disinvestment after the UPA government came to power, the Sensex tanked. Critics of the Left yelled highway murder. This is the end of the rise in the Sensex, they said. We know now it was only the beginning.

The Sensex has risen nearly 300% since June 1, 2004. PSU stocks have outperformed the Sensex, rising by 366% in the same period. The market did not suffer because of the Left’s opposition to disinvestment and the government itself has gained hugely. Secondly, if the government is still around when the Pay Commission recommendations arrive, it can work out a deal with the unions and the Left: let us go with a generous award by all means but please allow disinvestment to proceed at least in PSUs where the government’s shareholding is well above 51%.

Thirty illnesses, sorted according to ...

... whether or not you can eat the victim!

Women at work: "Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t"

In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures (surveying 935 alumni of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland) and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place — in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

Respondents in the United States and England, for instance, listed “inspiring others” as a most important leadership quality, and then rated women as less adept at this than men. In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly inspirational, but it was “delegating” that was of higher value there, and women were not seen as good delegators.

From this NYTimes report by Lisa Belkin.

* * *

In other news, here's some statistics on women in American academia (the linked article has lots more on the status of underrepresented minorities):

... despite the fact that they make up more than 50 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients in fields like chemistry and political science, in those fields they represent, respectively, 13.7 and 26.1 percent of all professors at top 100 departments.

V. Raghunathan warns us about Shelfari's shenanigans

Shelfari appears to be a social networking site for book lovers; and no, I'm not linking to them. It appears to me that after you become a member (I certainly am not!), it lures you into sharing your e-mail account details, uses them to raid your addressbook, and spams people in your addressbook with an invite. Indiscriminately. And, in some cases, repeatedly.

This is evil. Pure evil.

Such evil tactics were used last year by another social networking site Gazzag. This post, which describes some of the seriously bad consequences of those tactics, seems to have had the right effect: the spam that I used to receive from Gazzag stopped immediately.

Now, coming back to Shelfari, Prof. V. Raghunathan (formerly with IIM-A, a regular columnist at several newspapers, and author of Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are) was among those who complained to the Shelfari folks about their shitty practice. He is so upset with their unwillingness to address his concerns (and worse, their inability to honor their own explicitly stated commitments) that he has now written to everyone on his addressbook, stating clearly that all those invites that were purportedly from him were not authorized by him.

Prof. Raghunathan also shared with his correspondents his latest e-mail to Shelfari. With his permission, I am excerpting it here.

I had complained to you that unsolicited emails were sent from my addressbook to hundreds of my contacts on my addressbook by Shelfari some time ago, causing me immense embarassment, simply because I happened to accept somebdoy's invitation to Shelfari (in retrospect a big mistake). You had apologized "for the frustration and confusion [caused to me] and had assured me that you "only send emails on behalf of users who have explicitly authorized you to do so" - a statement patently untrue - testified by yet another unsolicited invitation that has gone on my behalf today (Oct 30, 07), unknown to me, to yet another innocent victim of Shelfari. And this, when as recently as October 27, 07, you had responded to my complaint saying, "If you had contacted us sooner, I would have prevented all the follow-ups from being sent."

I am therefore left with no option but to send out this communciation to all those who happen to be on my my addressbook that none of the invites from Shelfari have ever consciously originated from me. I have never invited anybody consciously to "share my books" or solicited any "friendship" or sent any reminders to anybody. Shelfari is using most unfair means to reach out to as many eyeballs, by means fair or foul, perhaps more of the latter than the former, since it has an "invitation page" designed to suit its own purpose, never mind its nuisance value to the innocent victims.

That your methods are questionable is clear from the fact that you have also stated in your response to me, stating:

For your friends to stop any future invitations from friends on Shelfari, they can enter their names here [URL deleted].

Why should my friends have to do any additional work just because you guys are inflicting yourself upon them uninvited? The default setting should be that you respect others' privacy and not send out unsolicited "invitations", and not the other way round.