Aurelie Thiele: The Dark Side of Academia.
Elisabeth Rosenthal in NYTimes: In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars.
Parvathi Menon and S. Bageshree in The Hindu: Caste and electoral choice: the Karnataka case: "The theory that Lingayats and Vokkaligas constitute a ‘vote-bank’ is based on three erroneous assumptions. The first is that they are a numerical majority in certain districts of the State. Secondly, members of these communities vote only for a community candidate. Third, a non-Vokkaliga or non-Lingayat cannot win from a constituency in which one of these groups dominates without getting the community vote."
Yogendra Yadav in The Hindu: The Endgame and What It Portends: "The outcome of this phase is linked to women. This is not merely because three major women leaders are in the fray, but also because of the way women vote, says Yogendra Yadav
D. Karthikeyan in The Hindu: Tamil Nadu's Dalit Vote.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Links ...
You know times are tough ...
... when serious cut-backs are happening ... in PhD Comics.
Check out the follow-up; it's also pretty good.
Economy to 2009 graduates: Consider grad school
Sara Murray in WSJ: The Curse of the Class of 2009: "For college grads lucky enough to get work this year, low wages are likely to haunt them for a decade or more." This grim prediction is based on research in the US that looked at the effects of "the deep 1980s recession":
Economic research shows that the consequences of graduating in a downturn are long-lasting. They include lower earnings, a slower climb up the occupational ladder and a widening gap between the least- and most-successful grads.
In short, luck matters. The damage can linger up to 15 years, says Lisa Kahn, a Yale School of Management economist. She used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government data base, to track wages of white men who graduated before, during and after the deep 1980s recession.
Ms. Kahn found that for each percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, those with the misfortune to graduate during the recession earned 7% to 8% less in their first year out than comparable workers who graduated in better times. The effect persisted over many years, with recession-era grads earning 4% to 5% less by their 12th year out of college, and 2% less by their 18th year out.
For example, a man who graduated in December 1982 when unemployment was at 10.8% made, on average, 23% less his first year out of college and 6.6% less 18 years out than one who graduated in May 1981 when the unemployment rate was 7.5%. For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period.
Perhaps it's a good idea to link to >Dean Dad's "Commencement Address", again.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
University rankings
Asian university rankings by QS. All the IITs, JNU, DU, Calcutta, Pune and Mumbai universities figure in the top 200.
US News' ranking of American graduate programs. In case you are interested, here's the top 10 list for materials.
Monday, May 11, 2009
A great commencement address by Dean Dad ...
... except that he never gave it at a 'real' graduation ceremony. He has posted the transcript:
In boom years, I've seen some folks succeed a bit too easily, and draw some falsely flattering conclusions about themselves. It wouldn't matter, I suppose, if it didn't lead to a certain smugness about the failures of others. I've heard it said that success is a terrible teacher; no less a mind than Aristotle suggested that the opposite of a friend is a flatterer. When circumstances conspire to flatter us, it's easy to lose sight of the breaks we've caught. Yes, we help create our own luck, but we do no more than help. You don't choose your parents, or your genes, or your time and place of birth. As hard as you've worked – and you have – others have worked, too, to make this possible for you. Ignoring that is both inaccurate and rude. Assuming that the chain of responsibility stops with you is arrogant and infantile. I've worked hard, but I was also born to educated parents of dominant ethnicity and culture in a world superpower during the age of antibiotics and abundant food. That gave me possibilities not available for a similarly hard worker in most other times and places in human history.
Among those who've been on the underside for too long, I've sometimes seen a fatalism that can curdle into misplaced rage. If nobody around you catches a break, it's easy to assume that the fix is in, that someone, somewhere, is masterminding a scheme to keep you down. Sometimes it's partly true. But jumping to that too quickly can defeat initiative. It can lead to habits that amount to self-sabotage, and to distrust even of the possibility of something better. Among unsubtle minds, it's a short path from that to rage and violence, usually against whomever is close at hand.
Both of these stories we tell ourselves are wrong. The world is far bigger than our puny efforts, as well as those of anybody else. The fatal flaw in both is the same; the idea that the world is organized around you, whether in the form of 'your oyster' or a conspiracy. It isn't. But our culture acts as if it is.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Wikipedia hoax
John Timmer in Ars Technica: Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists' research:
A sociology student placed a fake quote on Wikipedia, only to see it show up in prominent newspapers, revealing that a lot of the press doesn't go much further than most 'Net users when it comes to researching a story. [...]
[Shane] Fitzgerald [who's a student at Ireland's University College Dublin] was apparently curious how far his hoax would spread, and expected it to appear on a variety of blogs and similar sites. Instead, to his surprise, a search picked it up in articles that appeared at a variety of newspapers. Fitzgerald eventually removed his own fabricated quote and notified a variety of news outlets that they had been tricked, but not all of them have apparently seen fit to publish corrections or to ensure that their original stories were accurate, even though fixing a webpage shouldn't be a challenging thing.
Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that journalists use Wikipedia as part of their research—especially in this case, as Jarre's entry comes out on top of the heap in a Google search for his name. However, the discovery that so many of the writers apparently failed to find an additional source on that quote comes at a rather awkward time for journalists in traditional media, who are facing a struggle to stay above water as the newspaper industry is sinking and the line between traditional journalism and casual reporting gets ever blurrier.
Among Indian newspapers, the Economic Times has fallen for this hoax; there may be others as well, but my cursory search didn't yield any links.
The Guardian was also a victim of this hoax. In her commentary, its Reader's Editor dwells on how the Wikipedia editors/monitors dealt with the unsourced quote planted by Fitzgerald before it got a chance to stay long enough for lazy obit writers to run with it:
Fitzgerald's fakery was not particularly sophisticated. All he did was add a quote to Jarre's Wikipedia page and he provided nothing to back it up. The absence of a footnote containing a reference for the quote ought to have made obituary writers suspicious.
Wikipedia editors were more sceptical about the unsourced quote. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful - the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Jesse Bering on the "Secrets of the Phallus"
Excerpting even a single paragraph will turn get this blog an NC-17 rating. So, let me just give the article's title: Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
It discusses certain special features of the human male sexual organ based on evolutionary psychological speculations. This is a field that's notorious for just-so stories masquerading as "scientific explanations" with questionable politics -- particularly sexual politics. [see 1 and 2 for parodies, and 3 and 4 for a more serious discussion]. So beware.
[Update: SciCurious has a discussion (with pics!) of the research by Gallup et al. whose work forms the basis of Bering's article].
Shiv Visvanathan to L.K. Advani: "What is the genocidal quotient of your speeches?"
Visvanathan has a lot more to say. Here:
let me address the central issue of Gujarat and the violence of 2002. Let us begin with a simple fact that violence began from your constituency. The dead bodies from the Godhra carnage were paraded here, triggering not a ritual of mourning but an orgy of the most obscene violence our country has witnessed in recent times. Yet you spoke as if a balance of murder is the only sense of justice you have. When you can mourn for Kashmir and what happened to the Pandits there, what prevents you from acknowledging a moral responsibility for what happened in your constituency or are you saying that ethnic cleansing is a permitted and legitimate form of political hygiene? Today, the evidence before the Nanavati Commission and the investigations of the SIT team show that your party has been deeply involved in rioting, violence and genocide. Your attitude seems to suggest that majoritarianism exhausts the democratic imagination, that violence is an acceptable tactic for enforcing majoritarianism. Your close colleague and our current CM seems to suggest that it is part of the logic of development.
Violence negates politics and a party that banalises violence eventually exhausts its own political imagination. One wonders whether the current emptiness of your party is a result of this indifference to the atrocities that so many citizens suffered?...
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Seth Finkelstein on Twitter
... Twitter implements a distilled version of many problematic aspects of blogging. Namely, a one-to-many broadcasting system that serves the needs of high-attention individuals, combined with an appeal to low-attention individuals that the details of one's life matter to an audience.
The "A-list" phenomenon, where a few sources with a large readership dominate the information flow on a topic, was particularly stark. Since the numbers of "following" and "followers" are visible, the usual steep ranking curve was immediately evident. A highly ranked person is free to attack anyone lower down the ranks, as there's no way for the wronged party to effectively reply to the same readers.
Getting a significant followership and thus being socially prominent is also important. Hence, there are major incentives to churn out quick punditry that is pleasing to partisans.
From here. He links to a recent piece reporting that "more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month."
I have tried Twitter. I didn't quite enjoy it, so I don't foresee becoming a regular user there. It's not clear to me what it was about Twitter that bummed me out; but it's certainly not the sociological issues highlighted by Finkelstein -- I really haven't thought much about them until I read his piece.
It's quite possible that I don't enjoy Twitter because I don't "get" it. That's okay; the Web does offer many ways of dealing with the online world, and we get to pick the pathologies we are comfortable with.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Links ...
Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby: "So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species."
Harriet Harman, the UK's Equalities Minister, "[denounces] the City [of London] as a 'breeding ground for discrimination and unfairness', [and] ... has taken action with a new Bill which will oblige companies with more than 250 employees to publish the average hourly pay gap between men and women. Companies have until 2013 to comply, after which an annual 'gender pay audit' will become law.
Harman is confident that the onus will now be on to companies to show they are being fair to female staff, rather than vice versa. The Bill also tackles discrimination over age and class and outlaws secrecy clauses for pay.
Pratiksha Baxi in Law and Other Things: A Critique of Tabloidization of Law.
SocProf: In Praise of Strong Social(ist) Policy.
Tara Parker-Pope: What Are Friends For? A Longer Life.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Links
Russell Shorto: Going Dutch: How I learned to love the European welfare state.
Ethics-free Elsevier: a fake medical journal, and other shenanigans.
Lidija Davis: Anthropology: The art of building a successful social site.
Academic Evolution: Scholar or public intellectual?
How to compete when you are weaker than your opponents
David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.
That's the message from Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece in the New Yorker. As usual, you should read it for the vivid stories -- both fictional and real life -- that illustrate his thesis.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
State of Computer Science in the US and Canada
Ph.D. production [in computer science] continues to climb. A total of 1,775 new Ph.D.s were awarded between July 2006 and June 2007 (Table 1). This represents an increase of 18% over last year, and follows last year’s 26% increase over the previous year. This year’s production of more than 1,700 was predicted last year, and for the second straight year tracks the departments’ own estimates reasonably well. The “optimism ratio,” defined as the actual number divided by the predicted number, was 0.95, similar to last year’s 0.94. If this year’s optimism ratio holds again next year, there will be approximately 1,900 new Ph.D.s produced in 2007-2008.
From the Computing Research Association's 2006-07 Taulbee survey of of Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) in the United States and Canada. There's a lot of interesting data in there -- right from bachelor's programs all the way up to the professoriat.
Here's something about women in computer science:
For the second straight year, the proportion of women among new Ph.D.s rose to 19.1% in 2007 from 18.1% the previous year.
[...]
Perhaps even more alarming is the drop in the fraction of Bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, from 14.2% last year to 11.8% this year (Table 9). The fraction of new female students is reported now to be less than 10% in many Bachelor’s programs.
[...]
The fraction of women hired into tenure-track positions rose from 19.5% last year to 23.9% this year. This is a higher fraction than the 19.1% of female Ph.D.s produced (Table 2).
Scientific cooperation
John Tierney describes an interesting experiment in scientific cooperation in the NYTimes:
Dr. Cutler, an assistant professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside, knew that the rush to be first in this area had previously led to some dubious publications (including papers that were subsequently retracted). So he took the unusual approach of identifying his rivals (by determining which researchers had ordered the same genetic strains from a public source) and then contacting them. He told me:
Instead of competing with my competitors, I invited them to contribute data to my paper so that no one got scooped. I figured out who might have data relating to my work (and who could get scooped) using public resources and then sent them an email. Now that I have done this, I am thinking: Why the hell isn’t everyone doing this? Why do we waste taxpayer money on ego battles between rival scientists? Usually in science you get first place or you get nothing, but that is a really inefficient model when you think about it, especially in terms of the consequences for people’s careers and training, which the public pays for.
Homework for 5 year olds?
Instead of digging in sandboxes, today’s kindergartners prepare for a life of multiple-choice boxes by plowing through standardized tests with cuddly names like Dibels (pronounced “dibbles”), a series of early-literacy measures administered to millions of kids; or toiling over reading curricula like Open Court — which features assessments every six weeks.
According to “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” a report recently released by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, all that testing is wasted: it neither predicts nor improves young children’s educational outcomes. More disturbing, along with other academic demands, like assigning homework to 5-year-olds, it is crowding out the one thing that truly is vital to their future success: play.
A survey of 254 teachers in New York and Los Angeles the group commissioned found that kindergartners spent two to three hours a day being instructed and tested in reading and math. They spent less than 30 minutes playing. “Play at age 5 is of great importance not just to intellectual but emotional, psychological social and spiritual development,” says Edward Miller, the report’s co-author. Play — especially the let’s-pretend, dramatic sort — is how kids develop higher-level thinking, hone their language and social skills, cultivate empathy. It also reduces stress, and that’s a word that should not have to be used in the same sentence as “kindergartner” in the first place.
That's from Peggy Orenstein in NYTimes.
Our son Aadhu went to a Montessori for three years (age 3 to 5) before he started Class I. He never had any homework. He did quite a bit of work, though: alphabets (and later, words and sentences), a bit of arithmetic, drawing, colouring, etc, but all that happened in the school, which also retained his notebooks through the academic year. The no-homework policy made him happy, and that made his parents even happier!
Now he's in Class III in the Kendriya Vidyalaya in the IISc campus. He gets some homework: about a half-hour's work everyday -- already too much, I think.. Our only consolation is that it's not as much as what kids in some of the other schools get.