Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Website for new faculty at IISc


An excellent initiative.

The site packs tons of useful stuff that'll make life a lot easier for a new faculty member (or even an old one!). It covers not just the admin stuff, but also the personal / family stuff, with helpful hints and suggestions on life insurance agents, LPG agencies, and even milk and newspaper vendors!

How about 'cultural' matters that are especially relevant to those returning to India after an extended stint in the West? It has them covered too!

Many local culture specific issues that faculty coming back from abroad after a long time may not know.

  1. Address senior faculty (aged above 55, divisional chairmen, associate director, director etc.) as Professor X, unless they tell you otherwise.

  2. Remember no one (faculty or administrative staff) can be fired. Therefore, request people to help you with the purchase, bills etc. Do not tell them it is their duty (it is a sure way for failure).

  3. Some people will ask you personal questions (Why are you not married? You have been in the US but don't drink?). Do not be offended.

  4. Ask senior faculty for advice. Many will be glad to help but will wait till you ask.

Hat tip to my colleague and friend Prof. Giridhar Madras who's one of the faculty volunteers behind the website.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Links ...


  1. Sumedha at Bits of Fluff: 3 Idiots and Education:

    After school, during the mad months of college applications and terrifying decisions, I sat down to talk to my father about which subject I should choose to study for the next four years of my life. The main problem I was facing was that while I knew what I didn't want to study, I had no idea what I did want to study. I knew I didn't want to study Science, but I didn't know enough about History or Economics or Philosophy or Literature to make an even remotely informed choice.

    My dad told me something that made a lot of sense. He said that there are some very lucky people who have a passion in life. They have a direction, they have a purpose. He said that that group of lucky people is a very small group (1% of the population, as he put it). My dad's a professor and a researcher, and he's excellent at what he does. But he got into engineering and science not because that was his passion, but because he didn't know enough to choose anything else. He didn't have a strong inclination towards anything, so he gave JEE, got his Master's and Ph.D. and somehow "ended up as a professor".

  2. Anti-Imperialism in 3-D: a review of Avatar by Nagesh Rao aka LeftyProf.

  3. Ranga at My Cup of Tea: Cat in the Basket [Alternate title: Invention of tradition superstition!]

  4. Poor Brijesh Nair! He seems to have had an uncanny ability to choose only the nasty kind of Desi professors to interact with in the US. He has suffered enough; there's no need to add to his suffering by saying nasty things about his stereotype-filled post.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Prof. Kaushik Basu on his new job


Prof. Basu joined the Indian government recently as its Chief Economic Adviser. At BBC, he tells us what it has been like:

The first week was harrowing.

My in-tray reached for the ceiling till someone pointed out that on my right was an out-tray.

Questions concerning the economy came at rapid fire from parliament and from policy-makers.

I was asked, for example, if allowing futures trading in food created inflationary pressure on the spot market price of food.

This is the kind of question on which I would love to spend some months thinking and reading and then write a paper. Here I had 24 hours to respond.

For all the bewilderment of the first week, there was one pleasant surprise.

I did not expect the level of professionalism and commitment to work that I encountered in my ministry.

It is entirely possible that this is a recent phenomenon and special to Delhi, but the level of individual industry that I have seen in my first weeks is entirely on a par with or even higher than the best private sector firms.

Thanks to Krish for the Twitter-alert.

Links ...


  1. An inspiring lecture at TED India by Dr. Thulasiraj Ravilla on the truly revolutionary Aravind Eye Care System that has used the McDonald's model to provide eye care to millions. This post has a bunch of links about Dr. Venkataswamy, the founder of Aravind.

  2. Year of first mention of Contact Lens in NYTimes: 1930.

  3. NPR story -- Atul Gawande's 'Checklist' For Surgery Success -- on the author's latest book, The Checklist Manfesto (along with excerpts from Chapter 1):

    "Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty," Gawande says. "It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong."

    At the heart of Gawande's idea is the notion that doctors are human, and that their profession is like any other.

    "We miss stuff. We are inconsistent and unreliable because of the complexity of care," he says. So Gawande imported his basic idea from other fields that deal in complex systems.

    "I got a chance to visit Boeing and see how they make things work, and over and over again they fall back on checklists," Gawande says. "The pilot's checklist is a crucial component, not just for how you handle takeoff and landing in normal circumstances, but even how you handle a crisis emergency when you only have a couple of minutes to make a critical decision."

Willpower as a muscle


The implications of this muscle metaphor are vast. For one thing, it suggests that making lots of New Year's resolutions is the wrong way to go about changing our habits. When we ask the brain to suddenly stop eating its favorite foods and focus more at work and pay off the Visa…we're probably asking for too much.

The willpower-as-muscle metaphor should also change the way we think about dieting. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University who has pioneered the muscle metaphor, has demonstrated in several clever studies that the ability to do the right thing requires a well-fed prefrontal cortex.

That's from The Science Behind Failed Resolutions by Jonah Lehrer (the man behind the blog The Frontal Cortex).

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Arguments and Manners ...


  1. From an old post at Brian Leiter's blog (this is just a teaser, Leiter's post has more):

    A young philosopher at a top research university writes: "The thing that always astonishes me is that they [bloggers, journalists etc.] put on this air of pained affront if an academic gets short with them - 'I don't expect this tone from an educator' and all that jazz. Jesus, they should have been in a room with Jerry 'I just have one question; was your paper a joke?' Fodor, or Kim 'but there's no fucking evidence for that!' Sterelny. Or most of the economists I know. Where do so many people get this idea that academic discourse is conducted by people wondering if they could regretfully venture to take issue with distinguished colleagues who are respectfully suggesting an emendation?"

    Where, indeed?

  2. Dr. Isis at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess: How to argue

  3. Drug Monkey at the Drug Monkey blog: How to argue ... and actually accomplish something

  4. Paul Graham: How to disagree.

Now, go check out this funny poster about paranoia at Very Demotivational, a blog that specializes in demotivating posters.

Video link of the day: Krish Ashok gets Hitler to comment on ...


... Chetan Bhagat! Why? Only because Krish Ashok decided to have some fun with Hitler, Chetan Bhagat and 3 Idiots!

Watch (with the captions on):

If the embed doesn't work, watch it on YouTube.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Twitter


Thanks to a nifty web app called Seesmic Web, I have found a way to re-engage with Twitter [here] without blowing up large chunks of time. Ambient Intimacy, baby!

Here are a few links to celebrate my newly acquired digital awareness. Have I mentioned I believe in the power of positive reinforcement?

  1. David Carr in NYTimes: Why Twitter Will Endure. This particular feature is worth excerpting:

    ... And the ethos of Twitter, which is based on self-defining groups, is far more well-mannered than many parts of the Web — more Toastmasters than mosh pit. On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you, so best not to act like a lout and when people want to flame you for something you said, they are responding to their own followers, not yours, so trolls quickly lose interest.

  2. Cory Doctorow in The Guardian: How to say stupid things about social media: "Criticising social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is as pointless as knocking people who discuss the weathe."

  3. Lydia Polgreen in NYTimes: Indian Official [um, Shashi Tharoor] Gets Far On A Few Words.

MIT Technology Review profiles Esther Duflo


A few years ago, economist Esther Duflo, PhD '99, found a problem that threatened to stump her. In the rural villages of Udaipur, a district in northern India with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world, parents were spurning health clinics' offer of free immunizations against deadly diseases such as measles and tuberculosis. Only 2 percent of local children were being immunized by age two.

Duflo, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, specializes in finding unorthodox ways to help the world's poor. So she concocted an experiment with MIT-based collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, along with officials from Seva Mandir, a local nongovernmental organization. In some villages, they offered parents about two pounds of free lentils when they brought their children in for shots. Before long, families started streaming into these clinics. About four in 10 children got immunized where free lentils were available.

According to mainstream economic thinking, the success of the lentil giveaway made no sense.[...]

The profile is by Peter Dizikes. Prof. Duflo is a 2009 MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship winner. Her colleague and collaborator, Prof. Abhijit Banerjee won the Infosys Science Prize for humanities / social sciences.

Venki's talk: Press reports


Some readers asked if the video of yesterday's talk by Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan will be available online. Frankly, I don't know. But I do know that there were video cameras, and that the video feed was sent to the smaller halls in the J.N. Tata Auditorium. (See this post by Shencottah who watched the talk from one of those halls).

In the meantime, you can watch Venki's interview aired several days ago on NDTV; you can also read the interview here. It was recorded in the open area just in front of our Institute's Main Building.

Trust me, listening to Venki is a far better experience than getting his views filtered through our media (or even blogs, if I may say so myself).

* * *

Here's a sample of the newspaper headlines this morning:

  1. Deepa Kurup in The Hindu: I’m not a prophet, I only know about ribosomes: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. See also this story: Fame rests lightly on him.

  2. T.A. Johnson in Indian Express: ‘Don’t pursue science to win a Nobel’.

  3. Finally, The New Indian Express and The Economic Times led with variations of this:

    Venkataraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2009 but decades ago he failed to clear entrance tests for both the IITs and a reputed medical college.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan's scientific journey


This evening, Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan, India's latest Nobel sensation, gave a talk on Baroda to Cambridge: A Life in Science to a 'not-even standing room' audience of over 1000 people.

Update

Seema Singh, Mint's science reporter, has a blog post on Venki's lecture. She has remembered something Venki said right at the beginning of his talk: "I am going to start with some autobiographical details … because if the Indian press doesn’t know things about me, it doesn’t hesitate in making them up."

[End Update]

While his lecture had a semi-autobiographical flavour, it was a strictly professional affair: there was nothing at all about his family except for a stray quip -- probably intended as a joke -- about how the young Venki was 'repelled' by science because his parents were scientists.

While he acknowledged the early influence of Mr. T.C. Patel, an exceptionally gifted math teacher at school, he attributed his deep interest in basic science to Prof. S.K. Shah, Prof. H.S. Desai and Prof. Pandya, all in the physics department of M.S. University, Baroda. He praised them for modernizing the physics curriculum and for their enthusiastic teaching.

Venki clearly enjoys telling the story of how he ended up studying physics in college. It starts with the IIT entrance exam -- which he took without any coaching, and did not clear. It then moves to the CMC (Vellore) entrance exam, which he did not clear (he said CMC took very few men those days). A mini climax is reached when he reveals that he got into the Baroda Medical College, but only because he was among the the top 10 students in Pre-University exam. He then adds, "If there was an entrance exam for doing medicine at Baroda University, I would have flunked that too!" But the real climax is yet to come ...

In the meantime, thanks to his mother's encouragement, he had taken the National Science Talent Scholarship exam. He didn't mention it today, but he said somewhere else that he had a bet with his father (who wanted him to study medicine): if he won the NST Scholarship, he could dump medicine to pursue his passion in the sciences.

Conveniently, the letter announcing his NTS Scholarship arrived when his father was away! He used that opportunity to go to the University and seek a transfer to the physics department. This request prompted the clerk there to ask all his colleagues to come and take a look at this strange man who wanted to shift out of medicine and into physics...

This episode marks the first of several landmarks in Venki's scientific journey when he forced a decisive change in its direction. Another such landmark would be his decision to dump physics -- "In my third or fourth year of grad school, I realized that I could, at best, be a second- or third-rate physicist." He chose to become a biologist -- "Molecular biology was such a young field; breakthroughs were being reported almost every other week." He was so clear about this choice that he was even willing to go back to graduate school to study biology!

Within a couple of years, his career got the first major break in his new field -- a post-doc offer from Yale to work on ribosomes. His efforts to land a faculty position after his post-doc failed; after a short, frustrating stint at Oak Ridge (because it denied him a shot at doing independent research), he joined the Brookhaven National Lab for what would turn out to be the longest tenure (1983-95) of his career at one place.

When he came up for tenure, he was asked what he would do if he had tenure. His response was that he would go on a sabbatical. Which is exactly what he did; he spent a year at MRC in Cambridge, a place that he would return to in 1999 after a 4-year period as a professor at the University of Utah.

* * *

The second part of the talk was about his work on ribosome itself. While the technical details were beyond me, it was absolutely captivating to watch a great mind conveying complicated ideas using simple explanations. For example, we (normally) don't think of imaging and diffraction as the same thing: images live in 'real' space while diffraction patterns live in 'reciprocal' space. Venki, however, used a neat sleight of hand that implied that the diffraction pattern is essentially an image. Except that the image is obtained from the pattern using a computer whose role is 'essentially' that of a lens in direct imaging.

Right at the end, Venki turned to advice on what is needed to be able to do great science. He used Max Perutz's four Gs of success: "Geld (money), Geschick (skill), Geduld (patience) and Glück (luck)." He pointedly added that the four Gs didn't include 'genius'!

* * *

The Q&A drew out several refreshingly blunt candid responses from Venki: to a question about whether he had plans to return to India, he said, "The short answer is, NO!" To another question about his message to Class XII students about pursuing science, he said, "I don't have any message. I may have solved the ribosome structure, but it doesn't mean that I can advise people on this or that. I'm not a prophet!" To the person who asked him about his value system that sustained him and his scientific endeavours, Venki responded by saying he was first and foremost a scientist -- which means his science was guided by a pragmatic quest for solving specific scientific problems. Philosophy or value systems don't come into this picture.

* * *

I was intrigued by Venki choice to frame his scientific journey -- he kept referring (not just in his speech, but also in his slides) to 'wandering' into this and that.

When you listen to his story, however, it's clear that it's anything but a 'wandering.' Sure, there was luck, serendipity, being at the right place at the right time, generous people who were willing to give him a chance, etc. He did emphasize the role of 'Glück" at the end.

But running through this story of lucky breaks is his agency, his conscious, willful effort to steer his professional life. Several events in his life jump right at you: his choice to dump medicine to study physics at Baroda, his choice to dump physics after a PhD to go back to grad school to study biology, and finally, his choice to leave Utah for Cambridge, even though it meant an over 50% effective pay cut!

* * *

Let me end with his answer to someone's question about whether there was serious competition in his professional life. In response, he said he doesn't recall sleeping well during 1999-2000!

Monday, January 04, 2010

Links ...


  1. After one Rao (CNR, in 2005), it's time for another: C.R. Rao Bags India Science Award.

  2. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech at the 2010 Indian Science Congress at Thiruvananthapuram. You are better off reading a summary in The Hindu or The Telegraph (by T.V. Jayan).

  3. Citara Paul in The Telegraph: Call for First Caste Census:

    India may next year witness its first census since Independence that refers to caste, if the Centre accepts a social justice ministry recommendation that could be politically controversial.

    Officials said the ministry had asked for caste to be included as one of the criteria in the 2011 census, and recommended a differential headcount of the Other Backward Classes and reassessment of their conditions that could lead to changes in the OBC list.

    Here's my view from 2007 supporting the caste census.

  4. This 2007 post has relevant links to the academic debate on caste census.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

If economists economize, what do chemists do?


A couple of links.

  1. First, this WSJ article calling economists 'cheapskates' [via Paul Krugman].

    Children of economists recall how tightfisted their parents were. Lauren Weber, author of a recent book titled, "In Cheap We Trust," says her economist father kept the thermostat so low that her mother threatened at one point to take the family to a motel. "My father gave in because it would have been more expensive," she says.

  2. Next up, we have Professional Verbs by Mark Liberman at Language Log, who cites this great slogan for a beer::

    "Brewed by brewers, not chemistered by chemists".

    Liberman uses this to launch a nice discussion of verbs to describe what different professionals profess ....

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Links ...


  1. Must-read link of the day: Night by Tony Judt in NYRB:

    I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig's disease. Motor neuron disorders are far from rare: Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and a variety of lesser diseases all come under that heading. What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one's own deterioration.

  2. Age-relevant link of the day: How to Train the Aging Brain by Barbara Strauch in NYTimes.

    “There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

    Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.

  3. Stephanie Zvan at Quiche Moraine: Readings in IQ and Intelligence. Lots of great stuff -- with links to many articles available online.

  4. Greg Laden's Blog: The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence.

A quote from the ICTS Inaugural Event


I wish you all a very happy 2010! Let's start the new year with a quote:

Cut, Paste, Copy.

With (short pieces of) DNA, you can do pretty much everything you can do with Microsoft Word.

That's from the talk by Prof. Yamuna Krishnan, NCBS, at the ICTS Inaugural Event.

Some of the cool things -- 'unusual architectures' -- made by her group are described here (paywalled) and here (free subscription required).