Sunday, January 11, 2009

Sleepmailing?


We have all heard of sleepwalking. But, sleep-e-mailing? You've got to love the way the doctors have described this behavior: “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.”

Here's a sequence of things the patient managed to do while sleepwalking:

... while staying at a relative’s house, she started the computer, used a password to log on to the operating system, loaded software to reach the e-mail service and then used her username and password to access the e-mail system.

And sent (at least) three e-mails! Here's an interesting legal implication:

... it poses a challenge to the accepted notion that sleepwalking is confined to activities involving gross motor movements, with minimal cognitive activity. Until now, we have been able to take comfort in our understanding of our own sleepwalking as an impersonal phenomenon. [...] Legal doctrine is based on this same notion. Sleepwalkers have been acquitted of criminal felony charges by basing their defense on the concept of “noninsane automatism.”

Saturday, January 10, 2009

L.K. Advani has a blog


I have nothing to say, except to speculate how happy he was when he set up his blog to add this at the end of each post:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Oh, one more thought. Given the kind of website he's likely to get if he were to become -- gulp! -- India's prime minister, I think it would be better for him -- for his own good, of course ;-) -- to remain prime-minister-in-waiting forever.

Redundant Verbosity Archives


Here's a headline from Economic Times (catch it before it vanishes / changes):

Pavneet Singh tops CAT, scores 100 percentile.

Friday, January 09, 2009

"There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."


Way to go, London!

Hat tip to Veena for alerting us about this fantastic ad campaign on London buses, sponsored by The British Humanist Association. She links to this BBC video -- watch it till the end!

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Fun links ...


After all that depressing stuff unleashed by Ramalinga Raju, one needs some balance. Here are two links:

1. Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn: Blow Daddy, a father-son conversation.

2. For the academic in you: how to cite "unconventional" sources, such as tattoos, alien conversations, and yes, restroom graffiti (via Kieran Healy)

Satyam scandal claims its first academic victim


ISB appoints new dean, as [Mendu Rammohan] Rao resigns. Under pressure he had earlier resigned from several high-powered committees, as well.

* * *

Other links:

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

A quote that jolts ...


IISc [is] not a substitute for IIT.
-- Prof. U.R. Rao

That's the headline of this story on a recent meeting in which a number of public intellectuals in Karnataka spoke in favour of starting an IIT in the state.

* * *

Last year, the Central Government announced a wide range of initiatives in India's higher ed sector; they included setting up of eight new IITs (six of which have already admitted students), 16 Central Universities, 7 IIMs, 20 IIITs, and 14 'World Class' Universities. Despite a Central and a 'World Class' university coming its way, Karnataka is unhappy with not getting an IIT.

Isn't it sad that people -- and people who (should) know better -- whine about not getting a technical institute when they have an opportunity to create a great university? Particularly since a university can have a huge, positive influence on a far larger number of the state's people. Consider an institution that

  1. is configured to be what I call a 'real' university -- a research university that does undergraduate teaching, covers natural and social sciences, humanities and languages, liberal arts and professions, and promotes exciting research in many interdisciplinary areas.

  2. has the kind of autonomy enjoyed by our INIs -- 'Institutions of National Importance' -- the IITs, IISc, IISERs, IIMs, etc.

  3. gets the kind of government grants that flow to the INIs (about 25 to 40 lakhs per faculty member).

  4. has a governance structure that manages to avoid political interference (which plagues many state universities).

  5. that draws faculty (and a large fraction of its students, too) from all of India.

Aren't these the nutrients that explain the stature of the IITs? Shouldn't our intellectuals be arguing for a flow of these nutrients to all our institutions -- INIs, Central and State universities?

* * *

To the list above, I would also add another key nutrient: scale. A 'real' university that graduates, say, ten of thousand students with UG degrees, and several thousands of PG degrees is far better than a technical institution that, almost by design, would not grow to beyond a few thousands of UG degrees. A large size gets the state more graduates at a lower cost, making this model replicable. Even at the State level!

Monday, January 05, 2009

Geeky blog names


Sean Carroll is urging his non-blogging readers to start blogs of their own. He has even suggested some wonderfully geeky names for them -- The Error Bar sounds really cool, doesn't it?

A long time ago, I noted that academics have the coolest blog names -- from a geeky point of view. I mentioned Uncertain Principles, Preposterous Universe, and the coolest of them all, Moebius Stripper. While the first has moved to the ScienceBlogs empire, the second morphed into Cosmic Variance (another cool name, now a part of the Discover empire), and the last does not exist anymore.

And commenters chimed in with other blogs with geeky names: Not Even Wrong, Marginal Revolution, Zeroeth Order Approximation (not updated since 2005).

Among the academic blogs that came up later (which are on my Google Reader), I can think of two:

  • Tantu-Jaal by TIFR string theorist Sunil Mukhi; aparently tantu-jaal means a web of strings in Hindi.

  • E's flat, ah's flat too by Rahul Siddharthan. I have no clue what it means, but it sounds cool! [Update: Rahul has some details in the comments.]

  • Update: I should have added The Curious Wavefunction by Ashutosh Jogalekar. Also, Unruled Notebook by Arunn Narasimhan.

If you're a materials scientist/engineer, I think Screw Dislocations would be a cool name ...

Here's my bleg: Which other blogs have cool, geeky names (geeky with respect to their subject matter)?

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Shobhana Narasimhan: "Why aren't IITs more women-friendly?"


Credit where credit is due: the PanIIT folks should be commended for putting up the videos of the entire conference (or, most of it).

The Women in Science and Technology program at the PanIIT Global Conference is available here [if that link doesn't work, go to this page and choose the right video].

In a nearly 2-hour long program, the panelists offered many different viewpoints (and statistics to back them up), and argued strongly for women-friendly policy interventions. Their case is made in a calm, composed and competent manner.

But, about 75 minutes into the event, you get fireworks! And the program turns absolutely brilliant.

That change is entirely due to some strong and blunt talk from Prof. Shobhana Narasimhan. I don't want to give anything away, except to say that she spoke on "Why aren't IITs more women-friendly?"

Just watch the video; if you can't watch all of it, download it and go straight to Shobhana's talk!

Financial risk


Joe Nocera has a 10 page piece in NYTimes on a particular risk model popular in finance firms (don't forget to check out the accompanying images on every page!), devoting a significant chunk of it to criticisms of that model from a host of players, including Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Black Swan.

While the entire article is both informative and interesting, I want to highlight here a paragraph that bears a striking resemblance to what Nature argued in the context of assessing research quality using citation metrics alone. First, the paragraph from Nocera:

Two years ago, VaR worked for Goldman Sachs the way it once worked for Dennis Weatherstone — it gave the firm a signal that allowed it to make a judgment about risk. It wasn’t the only signal, but it helped. It wasn’t just the math that helped Goldman sidestep the early decline of mortgage-backed instruments. But it wasn’t just judgment either. It was both. The problem on Wall Street at the end of the housing bubble is that all judgment was cast aside. The math alone was never going to be enough.

Here's what Nature said in its editorial (that linked to yesterday :

But taken alone, publication citations have repeatedly been shown to be a poor measure of research quality. [... long snip ...] Expert review is far from a problem-free method of assessment, but policy-makers have no option but to recognize its indispensable and central role.

Many facets of global higher ed


The Economist has an interesting story on the global market in universities [Hat tip: Eric Beerkens]. A big chunk of it is devoted to strategies adopted by different countries to attract international students. Here's an interesting experiment in Spain:

Meanwhile, some campuses that already flourish in the global market want to go further. Spain’s IE business school ranks among the world’s top ten. It now plans to go into undergraduate education—and, in the words of Santiago Iniguez, rector of IE’s new offshoot—to “re-invent the university”. All courses will have close ties with the hard school of real life. Would-be psychologists will see how organisations work; art students will learn how to run auctions; architects how to deliver on time and on budget. The ethos will be thoroughly global, with teaching in English and up to 80% of students from outside Spain.

It has such snippets about the strategies of universities in UK, Japan and Australia -- interestingly, the US universities don't get much attention. Among the 'sending' countries, only China is discussed at some length -- again, India doesn't figure at all in the story.

Of vicious academic debates and low stakes ...


The interesting thing ... about this particular academic feud, however, is that for all its viciousness, the stakes really aren't low at all.

Commenting on an academic debate between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and economics Nobel winner Robert Merton, Felix Salmon sneaks in this gem, a wonderful variation on one of the best known academic quotes: "Academic politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low."

Friday, January 02, 2009

More links ...


  1. T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: India's top science institute must now tackle social needs:

    But excellence in basic sciences needs to go hand in hand with relevance to social needs. In 1927 Mahatma Gandhi visited IISc and remarked: "Unless all the discoveries that you make have the welfare of the poor as the end in view, all your workshops will be really no better than Satan's workshops." His message should not be forgotten.

  2. Nature editorial (probably paywalled): Experts still needed:

    But taken alone, publication citations have repeatedly been shown to be a poor measure of research quality. An example from this journal illustrates the point. Our third most highly cited paper in 2007, with 272 citations at the time of inspection, was of a pilot study in screening for functional elements of the human genome. The importance lay primarily in the technique. In contrast, a paper from the same year revealing key biological insights into the workings of a proton pump, which moves protons across cell membranes, had received 10 citations. There are plenty more examples of such large disparities between papers that may be important for a variety of reasons: technological breakthroughs of immediate use to many, more rarefied achievements of textbook status, critical insights of relevance to small or large communities, 'slow burners' whose impact grows gradually or suddenly after a delay, and so on.

    Such isolated statistics serve to illustrate a point that has been more systematically documented in the bibliometrics literature. Take, for example, an analysis of the correlation between judgements of scientific value using metrics, including citations, and those using peer review, in condensed-matter physics (E. J. Rinia et al. Res. Policy 27, 95–107; 1998). The study found disagreements in judgement between the two methods of evaluation in 25% of the 5,000 papers examined. In roughly half of these cases, the experts found a paper to be of interest when the metrics did not, and in the other half, the opposite was the case. The reasons for the differences are not fully understood.

  3. Farhad Manjoo in Slate: Advice on How to Blog:

    Write casually but clearly. ... [T]he best way to stick to a blogging schedule is to write quickly, and a good way to write quickly is to write as if you're talking to a friend. Marc Ambinder, the political-news maven at the Atlantic, told me, "I've found that I tend to write the way I speak. Short, staccato sentences, lots of parentheticals. That annoys purists, but it's uniquely my own voice, and I think it helps to build a connection with the reader." Also remember that your readers want you to get to the point. "Be clear, not cryptic," Salmon says. [...] Ryan Singel offers a great tip on how to accomplish this:

    Start every post with a good first sentence that describes the story you are going to tell. Assume your reader won't get past the first paragraph. Never start with anything like "Sometimes when I hear about stupid things in the news, I just want to hit the wall," or "I haven't written about this in a long time, but today there was a story ..."

  4. Daniel Lemire: Grabbing attention or building a reputation?

    I do not blog or write research papers merely to grab attention. Instead, I seek to increase my reputation. While attention fluctuates depending on your current actions, reputation builds up over time based on your reliability, your honesty, and your transparency. To build a good reputation, you do not need to do anything extraordinary: you just need to be consistent over a long time.

    Of course, you need to get some attention if you are building a reputation. However, on the long run, the saying build it and they will come, is true. Being present and doing good work is enough. You do not need flashy presentations. Remain lean and mean. Avoid high maintenance operations. Do good quality work.

  5. Daniel Little: Philosophy of X?

    ... [H]ow might the philosophy of science be helpful for working scientists? How can the philosophy of biology or economics be helpful to biologists or economists? And, for that matter -- why isn't there a philosophy of plumbing or long-distance bus driving?

  6. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik in Scientific American: Magic and the Brain: How Magicians "Trick" the Mind:

    Thompson’s trick nicely illustrates the essence of stage magic. Magicians are, first and foremost, artists of attention and awareness. They manipulate the focus and intensity of human attention, controlling, at any given instant, what we are aware of and what we are not. They do so in part by employing bewildering combinations of visual illusions (such as afterimages), optical illusions (smoke and mirrors), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, precisely timed lighting controls), sleight of hand, secret devices and mechanical artifacts (“gimmicks”).

    But the most versatile instrument in their bag of tricks may be the ability to create cognitive illusions. Like visual illusions, cognitive illusions mask the perception of physical reality. Yet unlike visual illusions, cognitive illusions are not sensory in nature. Rather they involve high-level functions such as attention, memory and causal inference. With all those tools at their disposal, well-practiced magicians make it virtually impossible to follow the physics of what is actually happening—leaving the impression that the only explanation for the events is magic.

A note about links ...


Just a quick note to point you to the sidebar featuring a list of places where I store my links / bookmarks. For the sake of completeness, here they are: shared links on Google Reader, and bookmarks on del.icio.us.

While I have tried other bookmarking services in the past, I go almost exclusively to these two sites nowadays.

Recently, I started using Friendfeed which is absolutely fantastic. While the service offers much for a power user, it's also perfectly content serving a decidedly non-power user like me: my friendfeed account aggregates my links stored in both Google Reader and del.icio.us.

Needless to say, all these services offer RSS feeds as well. I don't know if this sort of poison appeals to you, but if it does, you have a choice of three feeds to subscribe to...

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Links


Happy new year, folks! Let's start with some links:

  1. This mystery link is worth a quick visit for its cheekiness.

  2. Giridhar: Enhancing research at IISc (his post follows up on some examples used by Jayant Haritsa in his talk on the research crisis at the IITs):

    Many departments in IISc would be shocked if criteria like publications or citations are used to judge students for grades (or even faculty for promotion/awards). In fact, in many departments, both the faculty and student are more likely to be discouraged if a M.E. student publishes in Tier IA journal in the field. (S)he would be advised to work more and publish in a Tier I journal. Naturally, after the student graduates, neither the student or faculty has the time or inclination to work on it. For many departments, small is beautiful. I think these attitudes have to be revised first before any perceivable change can occur in the overall output of IISc/IIT and catapult it to be in the top 100 internationally.

  3. Zuska has a post on how to find good topics for future research, commenting on an article on this topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education (which, sadly, is behind a paywall).

  4. Pallavi Singh at Mint: Anna University outsources all its exams (or, more realistically, many exam-related functions):

    “The system provides complete technology support for online registration of candidates, examination fee management, internal mark uploading, question bank management, question paper generation and even hall ticket generation,” said controller of examinations Vinod Gopalan.

  5. T.T. Ram Mohan: IIT-M director (re)appointment set aside:

    One thing we must applaud is the insistence of the court on the post being advertised widely. There was a huge uproar in the IIM community were the director's post was advertised in 2007. They saw it as a sinister machination to bring in an "outsider" (as thought the appointment of an outsider is a crime). The uproar died down when it was pointed out that a newspaper advertisement was a technical requirement for appointments made the Appointments Committee of the cabinet.

    I am also of the view that fixed-term appointments for institutions such as the IITs and IIMs are a good thing. There is no dearth of talent, so I can't see why one person should continue for more than one term. Two, limiting the term makes for greater accountability- the incumbent knows that his decisions will be reviewed when he steps down after five years. This sort of built-in check on the office of director is required because market-based mechanisms that operate in the US are largely absent in India.

  6. Let me end with a mystery link on Obama's power to inspire.