Catchy Blog Post Title of the Day

When Cleavage is a Bad Thing.

Written by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky over at Cocktail Party Physics, that post discusses a recent Nature Materials report by Demetriou, et alon a tough metallic glass made from an alloy of palladium.

In everyday English, 'strong' and 'tough' may appear to mean the same thing, but in materials engineering, they mean two distinct properties : a material is strong if it resists deformation (denting, bending, or shape change) being hit, poked or pounded; it is tough if it resists fracture (breaking or shattering). Here's Leslie-Pelecky on this difference:

Cleavage [a particularly easy form of fracture] is a good thing for materials you want to break; however, this is not a desireable property if you are trying to build airplanes or buildings. You need a material that is strong which means that it resists changing shape when it is pushed or pulled. You want to be able to put a heavy load on your material without the material denting or bending. You're also looking for toughness, which is a resistance to shattering. If a material is going to give, you'd like it to bend or dent, not shatter.

The study by Demetriou, et al has been making waves -- see here and here -- not only because their palladium-based glass sets a new record for toughness for metallic glasses, but also because it is the first metallic glass that has proven to be "tougher than steel".

Spot the Difference: "Chinese Parenting Style" Edition

Which of these pieces of "parenting advice" is from a real author?

1. Take your children to Chuck E. Cheese's and let them play any game they choose, then make them watch as you burn their tickets.

2. When [your child] turns in a poor practice session on the piano..., [scream]: "If the next time's not perfect, I'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them."

Life imitating The Onion? Or, The Onion making fun of a "Tiger Mother"?

Website of the Day

Women in Science, moderated by Laura Hoopes and hosted by SciTable, an education arm (free!) of Nature.

About once a week, Hoopes describes some event / problem / experience, and follows it up with a question -- for the community to discuss. See, for example, this week's discussion which builds on a key insight -- why science must adapt to women -- in a 2002 interview of Elizabeth Blackburn:

"The argument has been that the pipeline will take care of this," Blackburn says, referring to the idea that if enough women are encouraged to enter science early, the gender gap, over time, will disappear. "But the pipeline has been good for a number of years, and it hasn't taken care of it. In biology it's especially insidious because 50 percent of grad students are female. This has been the case for quite some time. Yet when I was chair of my department, I was the only woman chair in the entire medical school. We are putting a lot of our students off continuing—both men and women, but more women. They vote with their feet."

A (real) assistant professor's pick-up line

Except it's not a line, but an essay. At McSweeney's. Need I say more?

HEY, LADIES: CHECK OUT MY FACULTY ID:

Hey ladies, want a drink? Oh, yeah, that's my university ID. Sure, here, check it out. That's right, I'm part of the faculty.

Oh, I'm no adjunct. I'm an assistant professor. I know things about this university you can't even imagine.

Do you have any idea how big my interlibrary loan privileges are? I didn't think so. I get books longer, faster, and harder.

Memories of Grad School: The Quals

You can blame it on this story in The Chronicle about taking the Comprehensive Exam in a history department.

During my early months at grad school, the PhD qualifying exam -- The Quals -- used to fill us newbies with dread and fear. At our department, we used to call it the 'Valentine's Day Massacre.' In one of the previous Quals, the results were announced on Valentine's Day, and they were really, really bloody; out of a dozen or so who took the exam that year, I think just one or two passed it.

Though the results were not so awful for my cohort, we still stuck to calling the Quals by that colourful name. It gave those of us who passed it an inflated sense of achievement -- surviving The Massacre sounds so much more cool than passing The Quals, no?

[The Quals-as-massacre frame seems quite popular -- a recent play by our students has a hilarious scene that uses precisely this frame.]

After passing the exam, our seniors (who had been there and done that) greeted us by saying we had just reached the peak; from here on, it was all downhill all the way!

In The Chronicle story, a friend tells the author something similar as he was getting ready to face the last of his exams: "This is as smart as you'll ever be."

Different times, different schools, different disciplines.

But The Quals and the grim humor that goes with it are the same ...

Astronomical, Economical and Geological ...

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. -- Richard Feynman (source)

That quote is from an age when huge -- economical! -- numbers looked powerful. But economic(al) phenomena can also negate it all, and drain the big numbers of all power and awedomeness:

At the height of Zimbabwe's economic meltdown in 2008 when Zimbabwe's world record inflation was running into the billions in percent annually and prices were climbing each hour, the 100 trillion bill scarcely bought a cart of groceries.

Teachers reported the printing of bank notes from millions to billions and then trillions skewed their pupils' sense of numeracy, making them fail to grasp the realities of numbers.

On one geography field trip, students scoffed at being told granite rocks swept over Zimbabwe by ancient glaciers were 700 million years old. That time frame seemed insignificant.

Back then in 2008, 700 million Zimbabwe dollars bought a loaf of bread. [source -- via]

Links ...

1. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy: INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture.

2. James Choi at The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Evidence of professional soccer player chokes [A post on a forthcoming paper by Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta entitled Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment].

3. Eric Schoenberg at Huffington Post: Zombie Economics and Just Deserts: Why the Right Is Winning the Economic Debate

4. Dan Ariely at Predictably Irrational: A gentler and more logical economics

5. Could this really be John Venn's original Venn Diagram? ;-)

UG Program @ IISc: Admissions Process has Started

IISc will welcome its first batch of UG students this August, and the admission process has been kicked off with the official launch of the online application portal which went live on the 1st of January. During December 2010, the Institute mailed the UG program poster to over 10,000 schools and PU Colleges, and placed quite a few ads in various newspapers -- including Indian language news outlets.

Here's the most interesting bit about the admission process: selection is going to be based on not just one exam, but a bunch of them: KVPY (SA, SB, and SX streams), JEE, AIEEE, and AIPMT.

UG Program @ IISc

Hindustan Times' Rahat Bano interviews someone at our Institute about the 4-year BS program which will welcome its first students in less than 8 months. HT plays it rather coy by leaving the name of the interviewee out altogether -- with the result that the 'interview' reads more like an FAQ!

Here's an excerpt:

How will it be different from a BSc and a BE or BTech?

These are several aspects that make the BS programme different from the currently available BSc, BE and BTech programmes. The unique features of this programme include: Interdisciplinary character: Students specialising in a particular discipline will be encouraged to broaden their knowledge and skills by taking about 30% of the courses from other disciplines.

Substantial component of engineering: Students will take five-six courses in engineering, including three compulsory courses on engineering essentials (computation, data analysis and electronic instrumentation).

Exposure to humanities and social sciences: Students will be required to take three lecture courses and several seminar courses in humanities and social sciences.

Experience in contemporary research: In the fourth year of the programme, students will carry out a one-year research project with a member of the faculty.

Interview for IIT Directors

Well, the previous post on the UK style faculty recruitment reminded me of the interview process used by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to select IIT directors.

There is no larger point here -- just a (tenuous) link between two selection/recruitment processes.

Faculty Recruitment: The Contrast between the US and the UK

Samuel Wren in The Chronicle:

Rule Britannia

Britain really is another country. It can produce a sensation of irreducible foreignness. For me, that feeling did not hit until I was in an anteroom waiting to be called in for my interview. [...]

[...] It was there that I realized that this academic search was completely different from any American one—for seated with me in the anteroom were the other three candidates for the job.

All four of us, in turn, had given presentations to the faculty that morning. Thankfully, we didn't have to sit through one another's talks. Our presentations were to last no more than 15 minutes, leaving another 10 minutes for questions. In the afternoon, when each of us was to be interviewed in succession by the hiring committee, we waited together in that anteroom.

In an American search, of course, you never see the other candidates. You don't even know how many there are.

Nor does any search take merely one day. A candidate on an American campus visit must have conversations with countless potential colleagues, tour the library and grounds, meet with benefits staff members, converse at dinners, lunches, and breakfasts, meet students at the undergraduate and graduate level, give talks or teaching demos in sessions that often last more than an hour, and otherwise endure a surreal and draining 36 hours, more or less, of social contact lasting from flight to flight. Every gesture is scrutinized, and still American academics complain that they are not able to really get to "know" a person in the "brief time" accorded their campus visit.

Then job candidates in an American search wait for a month or two or three as all of the other candidates are brought in and the committee, department, dean, and provost deliberate. If you are lucky, an offer comes at the end. If less lucky, you hear news that confirms what your sinking heart thought all along: that another candidate, unnamed, better suited the needs of the university.

In British searches, every candidate is assessed in a single day, between 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. Not only that, but every candidate meets every other candidate. The process is as transparent as glass.

Ed Glaeser on Ethics Code for Economists

Quick summary: The American Economic Association (AEA) doesn't have a hold on economists, so it makes no sense for it to to issue an ethics code. But AEA controls a lot of prestigious journals; it makes a lot of sense for them to make disclosures of potential conflicts of interest mandatory for all the authors.

Links ...

1. Lawrence Krause in WSJ: The Lies Of Science Writing

2. Claudio Vita-Finzi in TLS: Galileo's explosive life and legacy

3. Pallavi Singh in Mint: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurship

4. Let's end this list with a golden oldie from The Onion: 'I Am Under 18' Button Clicked For First Time In History Of Internet

Classics from The Onion

Short-n-sweet snippets from the Tech section:

1. November 2000: Employee Worries Coworker's Computer Screen May Be Larger

2. April 2008: Computer Being Stupid

3. September 2008: Internet Explorer Makes Desperate Overture To Become Default Browser

4. November 2009: Report: Fiber Optics Not A Real Thing

5. Undated: New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears (video)

Setting the tone for 2011

Here's a report on a recent conference called Boring 2010.

For seven hours on that Saturday, 20 speakers held forth on a range of seemingly dreary diversions, from "The Intangible Beauty of Car Park Roofs" and "Personal Reflections on the English Breakfast," to "The Draw in Test Match Cricket" and "My Relationship With Bus Routes." Meanwhile, some of the 200 audience members ... tried not to nod off.

Not many did, surprisingly. "It is quintessentially English to look at something dull as ditchwater and find it interesting," said Hamish Thompson [...]

Here's wishing you all an interesting 2011.