Nature on the Ayyadurai affair

K.S. Jayaraman has a piece in Nature entitled Report Row Ousts Top Indian Scientist (probably behind a paywall). Leaving aside the bit about "top scientist," let me focus on the new information in Jayaraman's report. In the following, bold emphasis has been added by me:

1. "Ayyadurai says that the report — which was not commissioned by the CSIR — was intended to elicit feedback about the institutional barriers to technology commercialization."

2. "Our interaction with CSIR scientists revealed that they work in a medieval, feudal environment," says Ayyadurai. "Our report said the system required a major overhaul because innovation cannot take place in this environment."

3. [Deepak] Sardana [co-author of the report] [has written] to science minister Prithviraj Chavan on 19 October saying that "it is not possible for me to continue working without your immediate direct intervention" because of the problems triggered by the report.

4. "I am more worried that the incident will dampen the enthusiasm of Indian institutions to hire expatriates in the future," says Valangiman Ramamurthy, the former science secretary of the government's Department of Science and Technology, who recommended Ayyadurai's selection.

Just one quick comment. Ramamurthy may have "recommended Ayyadurai's selection," but he's being silly in suggesting that it'll affect the hiring of expats.

Sure, Ayyadurai is an NRI, but are all NRIs Ayyadurais?

For the record, Jayaraman's piece does salvage the situation by quoting several others -- Gangan Prathap, Rajan Sankaranarayanan, and Samir Brahmachari -- who don't see things the same way as Ramamurthy.

Ayyadurai: "[DG, CSIR] believes he knows it all"

In the 42-page document Shiva and Sardana described Brahmachari as the “director general who believes he knows all even though he has minimal depth of information and domain knowledge.”

The duo accused Brahmachari of “maintaining a close coterie of sycophants, mostly incompetent” and not allowing the opposition views for any debate. [source]

That's from the now infamous Chapter 7 of a report entitled "CSIR-TECH -- Path Forward" by Shiva Ayyadurai and Deepak Sardana. This chapter is about "the multiple challenges to realizing a CSIR-TECH company."

The authors also suggest a possible solution to this "challenge" of having to deal with a DG who "believes he knows it all" and who "maintains a close coterie of [mostly incompetent] sycophants". Here is their suggested solution, in full:

SOLUTION: 21st Century Leadership Training both short and long-term to be repeated until basic elements of leadership are learned. Beyond book learning.

May I request you all to stop laughing, now?

* * *

A couple of quick observations:

1. If Ayyadurai chooses to pull this kind of stunt against the man who hired him (and whose support he needs for setting up CSIR-TECH), I have to wonder why he's protesting his dismissal.

2. Having vitiated the working environment with his report, why would Ayyadurai -- a man with 4 degrees from MIT and with 'rich' experience in starting and running companies -- want his job back? Strange ...

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Superfreakonomics

She opens her scathing review with the Parable of Horseshit, in which a major problem of the late nineteenth century was solved almost overnight by technological innovation -- essentially, motor cars that wiped out the horsecars.

She closes her review with another reference to horseshit:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Ouch!

Patent balance sheet at CSIR

Hidden in the Mint story about Shiva Ayyadurai's travails at CSIR, there is this revealing statistic:

Over the past 10 years, CSIR laboratories have been granted 5,014 patents in India and abroad. The money earned from these was Rs. 36.8 crore, but the cost of filing them was Rs. 228.64 crore, according to official figures obtained by Hindustan Times (HT) through the Right to Information Act.

* * *

BTW, the previous post on Ayyadurai has comments expressing strong views -- both favourable and unfavourable -- about CSIR. Just in case you are interested...

There's nothing new to report on Ayyadurai, but commenters have also pointed to a couple of links that tell us a little bit more about him and his short career as a 'consultant' at CSIR:

1. MIT News (from September 2007): East Meets West: Armed with 4 MIT degrees, Shiva Ayyadurai embarks on new adventure:

   In the 26 years since he first arrived at MIT as a freshman, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has earned four MIT degrees and started two multimillion dollar companies.

   This fall, he will use his most recent degree, a Ph.D. in computational systems biology, and a Fulbright Scholarship to explore one of his lifelong interests: the intersection of Eastern and Western medicine.

   Ayyadurai's upcoming project is the latest in a series of personal ventures that have spanned fields as diverse as electronic communications, animation and molecular biology. His experience shows what is possible with an MIT education, he says.

2. Rediff.com: Scientist vs establishment battle simmers in CSIR:

   According to Ayyadurai, it all started when CSIR Director General Samir Brahmachari gave him a handwritten offer and detailed job description of the STIO's post.

   In June this year, Ayyadurai was in India on a Fulbright scholarship. "At that time, a scientist whom I know said the director general of CSIR would like to meet me. I met him the next day and he invited me to join the organisation and make it into a centre of excellence," Ayyadurai said.

   In a handwritten note, Brahmachari promised Ayyadurai that he would be the CEO of various companies he spins off and that he would also be eligible to be stake in such companies.

   "I accepted it because in the United States if two CEOs shake hands, the deal is done. In this case, I got a written offer few days later and it was fine," Ayyadurai said, adding, "It was much later on that I realised that according to Indian law, he can't even promise those things."

   Meanwhile, immediately after taking over, Ayyadurai set his sights on creating a structure for CSIR-Tech -- a company that would work with CSIR scientists to spin off their inventions into moneymaking products.

Devesh Kapur on the attitude of Indian business towards education

He is appalled by Indian business leaders' attitude towards higher education (in spite of its importance to their business). His list of complaints is long; here's a sample:

The commitment of Indian business to philanthropy in higher education was strong prior to independence and has dwindled ever since. Pre-independence, business interests not only made the transition from merchant charity to organised professional philanthropy, but did so in a significant way. They created some of India's most enduring trusts, foundations and public institutions, including the Aligarh Muslim University, Banaras Hindu University, Jamia Millia, Annamalai and Indian Institute of Science. Of the 16 largest "non-religious" trusts set up during this period, 14 were major patrons of higher education.

Today, the so-called not-for-profit educational institutions do not engage in philanthropy. Their income comes from fees rather than endowments and investments. [...]

But Indian business has much to explain for a more egregious failing: for the most part, it sees little value in research and even less in building quality institutions that produce good research. This is manifest most starkly in its unwillingness to fund even world-class think tanks, let alone an outstanding university. The reality is that most Indian business elites' children study abroad, not in India. The sad implication is that this reduces their stake in lending a badly needed voice to genuine higher education reform in India.

It is extraordinary how much energy and capital Indian corporate titans are willing to commit to summits, conclaves and the like, where photo opportunities and power-point presentations pass off as the epitome of deep thinking and real insight. Yet, for all the posturing by Indian business elites and their courting of universities in the West (especially in the US), the notion of Indian business coming together to fund research centres that produce knowledge and provide quality education accessible to all sections of society in India does not seem to be on the horizon.

Gladwellian "Insult"

Maureen Tkacik does a great job of dissecting Malcolm Gladwell's brand of pop sociology (with an emphasis on 'pop') in Gladwell for Dummies. Here's a pretty blunt and devastating summary (buried somewhere in the middle of the piece):

In searching for an anecdote or image with which to convey the ultra-absorbency of Gladwell's book as compared with that of his soggier-sentenced peers, I found myself remembering a story Gladwell wrote in 2001 about the technology of diapers. In this story, Gladwell reported that "those in the trade" refer to the waste that diapers are engineered to retain as "the insult," and this image seems to me as useful as any for thinking about Gladwell's success. His masterful maneuver was to engineer a style that artfully conceals "the insult," honing it in his articles before finally unleashing it in book form with The Tipping Point.

If that was about the style, this, from near the end, is about the substance -- more precisely, about the absence of certain crucial kinds of it:

... I wonder if Gladwell sees himself as an office-park missionary dispatched by the church of academe to tour the lecture circuit and convert the leaders of corporate America with "good news" from the ivory tower, its gospel made easy and ecumenical by all those helpful exercises and sticky new terms.

In that case, perhaps Gladwell's intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell's articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector's rigged "star system" as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he's whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

Links ...

1. From Amanda Goodall's Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should be Led by Top Scholars (pdf of Chapter 1):

   The reasons why presidents should be able scholars are fourfold:

   1. Scholars are more credible leaders. A president who is a researcher will gain greater respect from academic colleagues and appear more legitimate. Legitimacy extends a leader’s power and influence.

   2. Being a top scholar provides a leader with a deep understanding or expert knowledge about the core business of universities. This informs a president’s decision-making and strategic priorities.

   3. The president sets the quality threshold in a university, and the bar is raised when an accomplished scholar is hired. Thus, a standard bearer has first set the standard that is to be enforced.

   4. A president who is a researcher sends a signal to the faculty that the leader shares their scholarly values, and that research success in the institution is important. It also transmits an external signal to potential academic hires, donors, alumni, and students.

   Thanks to Diane Spencer's University World News article for the alert.

2. Jeff Bleich in LATimes: California's Higher Education Debacle:

   My story is not unique. It is the story of California's rise from the 1960s to the 1990s. Millions of people stayed here and succeeded because of their California education. We benefited from the foresight of an earlier generation that recognized it had a duty to pay it forward.

   That was the bargain California made with us when it established the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960. By making California the state where every qualified and committed person can receive a low-cost and high-quality education, all of us benefit. Attracting and retaining the leaders of the future helps the state grow bigger and stronger. Economists found that for every dollar the state invests in a CSU student, it receives $4.41 in return.

   So as someone who has lived the California dream, there is nothing more painful to me than to see this dream dying. It is being starved to death by a public that thinks any government service -- even public education -- is not worth paying for. And by political leaders who do not lead but instead give in to our worst, shortsighted instincts.

3. Hannah Smith in NYTimes on why "the majority of the schools [universities] I would apply to would be [all-women] colleges":

   My dream has always been a career in politics, and never before in history have women held as many powerful positions as they do today. But because politics is still a predominantly male field, I know that coming from an all-women’s college, or even just a school where the female population is significantly higher than the male one, can give me an edge. At all-women’s colleges there is no fear of your intellect seeming unattractive. In fact, at these institutions women aren’t afraid that voicing their opinions may poorly represent their gender.

   ... [W]hen it comes to the time in my life when the education I receive will dictate how the rest of things will turn out for me, I don’t want the distraction of boys, and I don’t want to compete with them. In my high school experience, the majority of my teachers have tended to pick boys’ raised hands over those of the girls in class discussions. I’ve even had to endure one teacher tell this joke: “Why couldn’t Helen Keller play basketball?” The answer? “Because she was a woman.”

The Curious Case of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

Ankita Anika Gupta of Mint has the scoop.

Here's a basic outline of the plot: Ayyadurai, a 45 year-old NRI scientist / technocrat, was parachuted into the CSIR system at a plum salary (by Indian public sector standards -- Band Pay of Rs. 60,000 + Grade Pay of 12,000).

It's not clear to me what exactly his mandate or job description was, but he ended up producing a report that was critical of the leadership at CSIR.

Result: he has been fired!

Here is a summary of where the two parties -- Ayyadurai and CSIR leadership -- stand:

“(CSIR) is attempting to remove me (in) reaction to my addressing well-known, intrinsic leadership issues during the course of my professional duties to serve the cause of Indian science and innovation,” said Shiva Ayyadurai in a 30 October letter, a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times. [...]

Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR, said Ayyadurai’s services were terminated because he was a “financial mismatch”. “He was demanding too much salary,” said Brahmachari. “Everyone told me I was pampering him because he came from abroad.”

With so much of he-said-(s)he-said in Gupta's version of the story, I still don't have enough to be able to offer a comment.

Do read that story, though. It'll give you a sense of -- and an opportunity, perhaps, to bask in some schadenfreude on -- the kinds of troubles that our institutions (and their leadership) are capable of inviting.

Ezra Klein on Superfreakonomics

He has a review in the Barnes and Noble Review. He does have a large section about that infamous chapter [see this post for links] on global warming, but here's his take on another claim:

Much attention has accrued to global warming section of the book, and we'll get to that. But for my money, the book's worst tendencies are on display in its beginning pages. There, the Freakonomists begin with an analysis meant to encapsulate the general Freakonomics take on life. But the topic here isn't cutesy or trivial, it is literally life and death. According to Levitt and Dubner, all those teary warnings about driving drunk have obscured the greater danger: walking drunk. That's quite a finding, if true. But is it true?

The Freakonomists arrive at this conclusion in a fairly unorthodox manner. They begin with surveys showing that one out of every 140 miles driven is driven by someone who's blood alcohol is above the legal limit. "The average American walks about a half-mile per day outside the home or workplace. There are some 237 million Americans sixteen and older," they continue, "all told, that's 43 billion miles walked each year by people of driving age. If we assume that 1 out of every 140 of those miles are walked drunk -- the same proportion of miles that are driven drunk -- then 307 million miles are walked drunk each year." Match those numbers against each other and drunk walking proves eight times more dangerous than drunk driving. "Friends don't let friends walk drunk," the Freakonomists conclude.

But that's not a data set. That's an assumption. And a few seconds of consideration will reveal its flaws. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they are going to drink that evening, suggesting that no basic equivalence can be drawn. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they are very drunk. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they live in an urban area, and walking is a viable possibility. In other words, there's not only reason to believe that a higher percentage of miles walked are miles walked drunk, but that the levels of drunkenness are not the same, and the environment is not the same. In other words, this is not enough data to prove anything close to equivalence.

This doesn't stop the Freakonomists, though, who conclude that "friends don't let friends walk drunk." In an interview I conducted with them for C-SPAN's Book TV, Levitt emphasized that "if someone holds a gun to your head," you should definitely drive drunk rather than walk drunk.

Links ...

Academic publications edition:

1. Stefano Allesina in arXiv.org - Computer Science: Accelerating the pace of discovery by changing the peer review algorithm. The paper describes a radically new model for publishing academic papers:

   In the alternative setting (AS, Methods), when an author produces a new manuscript, she will submit it to a first pool of manuscripts (e.g. a preprint archive). However, to be able to submit one manuscript the author must choose three manuscripts already in the pool for review. Therefore, more productive authors are also the more active reviewers. Once a manuscript in the first pool accrues three reviews, it is revised (increase in quality and novelty), and the reviewers are asked for a second evaluation. Then, the manuscript is moved to a second pool (ripe manuscripts). Every month, the editors of the journals evaluate the ripe articles. If an editor wants a manuscript for her journal, she will bid on it. At the end of the month, authors receive all the bids for their manuscripts in the second pool. In the case of more than one journal bidding on her manuscript, the author will choose that with the highest impact. If no journals bid on a manuscript, the author abandons it.

2. Meredith Salisbury in Genome Technology: Is peer review broken?

3. Franck Laloë and Remy Mosseri in Europhysics News: Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right... not even wrong! [Link via Anant]

Management wisdom from Harvard President

In this interview, Prof. Drew Gilpin Faust addresses lots of questions on management and leadership. Here's the section where she talks about the importance of communication:

There’s one alum who was an expert in turnarounds, and so I asked him, “What should I do?” He said, “One lesson about change in any organization — communicate, communicate, communicate.” So I still think about that all the time, and the scale of communication from the president’s office is a very much more elaborate one. It’s a bigger scale. You’ve got to communicate in different ways.

I also spent a lot of time talking with people at the business school. Kim Clark, who was the business school dean at that time, was very helpful. The fundamental principle of Kim Clark’s advice, though, could be summed up in, “Invest in people, recognize that you are in the people business and you want to try to support people and make people able to do their best.”

For example, one of the things he was a very big advocate of was Harvard’s shift to promoting from within, not just hiring stars and having a junior faculty that didn’t stay, which had been the custom in an earlier time. Kim said: “You need to have everybody believe in the organization. You need to have everybody think that they’re part of it, and they’re being invested in, as well as being asked of.” So that was one major lesson from Kim that sticks with me.

Links ...

1. Pallavi Singh in Mint: UGC under fire for too many 'deemed' tags.

2. Uttara Choudhury in DNA: US universities have eye on India.

3. IITs set up committee for incentive scheme for faculty

4. An update on the legal troubles of Magadh University's vice-chancellor [previously].

5. Video of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's talk at MIT (Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the link).

Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Lecture - 2009

In this year's edition (on 3 December 2009), Prof. M.S. Raghunathan will be speaking about the Queen of the Sciences. Mark your calendar.

Here's the announcement from my friend and colleague, B. Anantanarayan:

Prof. M. S. Raghunathan gives the 18th Meera Memorial Lecture

The 18th Meera Memorial Lecture will be given on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 6 pm at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, by Prof. M. S. Raghunathan of TIFR Mumbai entitled "The queen of sciences: her realm, her influence and her health". The trust web-site is here.

On IIX faculty jobs

You are probably interested in the first thing that everyone focuses on — the ‘pay package.’ Fortunately, it is also the easiest to address.

Here’s the bottomline: IIXs are among the best in the public sector. They beat private academic institutions handily. With job security, autonomy, sabbaticals and the summer months off, they are competitive with private industry as well. With the option to consult for industry, you’ll have to wonder if a non-IIX job is even worth considering!

That's me arguing why, for the academically oriented folks, IIT faculty jobs are still the best in India. This piece appeared in the latest issue (pdf) of The Scholars' Avenue, IIT-KGP's campus newspaper.

Many thanks to A.V.N. Murthy (and his colleagues on editorial team) for asking me to put together my thoughts on the issue of IIT faculty salaries.

Link between childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism

... Around the age of five, Ayn Rand's] mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

From Wealthcare, an excellent three-part essay (the above quote is in the second part) by Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand and the corrosive movement she created.

The immediate provocation for Chait's review-essay is the publication of two new biographies of Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of Market - Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.

Here are reviews by Adam Kirsch, Janet Maslin and A.C. Grayling.

Here's a memorable line from Maslin's review:

... And both [the books] have gray covers ... Yet Rand ... loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.