Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Thomas Matussek: Das ist Innovation


In his HT column on scientific cooperation and partnership between India and Germany, Thomas Matussek, the German ambassador to India, presents a nice summary of the various funding mechanisms to promote collaboration between scientific groups in the two countries.

Germany is India's second-biggest collaborator world-wide. The prestigious Humboldt fellowships have gone to 1,680 of India's best scientific minds. German and Indian scientists have collaborated successfully on more than 2,000 projects. All this has involved more than 7,000 exchanges of scientists, more than 2,000 joint scientific publications and more than 400 Indo-German workshops and seminars. There are over 170 projects in progress right now and the number is on the rise. [...]

The Max Planck Society, renowned for its excellence in basic research, is very active in India too. Since 2005, it has established some 17 Max Planck Partner Groups here, the newest addition being the Indo-German Max Planck Centre for Computer Science (IMPECS). What is now needed is a 'one-stop shop' that can give assistance on such matters to make life simpler for the prospective researcher. We are now setting up a German House of Science and Innovation in Delhi, which we hope will do exactly that.

Links ...


  1. Paul Krugman: Gradual Trends and Extreme Events

  2. Adam Gopnik in New Yorker: The Information -- How the Internet Gets Inside Us. A great review-essay on books about whether we should be happy or worried about what the internet is doing to us.

  3. Matt Chafkin in Inc.: In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism: "We venture to the very heart of the hell that is Scandinavian socialism—and find out that it’s not so bad. Pricey, yes, but a good place to start and run a company. What exactly does that suggest about the link between taxes and entrepreneurship?

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Post-Doc Culture and Computer Science


Over at Geomblog, Suresh Venkatasubramanian argues strongly against making post-doc experience a requirement for an academic job in Computer Science:

I think that this is a dangerous trend, for the following reasons:

  • Quickly, doing a postdoc will become the norm, rather than an option, when looking for academic jobs. I think this is unnecessary from a training perspective for everyone (though it might be appropriate for some).

  • One of the things that has kept CS viable academically is that people can leave after a Ph.D, go to industry, and still make it back into academia. This no longer seems to be true in places like the natural sciences, with long postdocs. I wouldn't want their career path.

  • Postdocs are glorified free labor for PIs. Salaries are miniscule, and competition is fierce. And again, it's not entirely clear that fresh Ph.Ds are so incompetent that they need 5 year postdocs to be ready for a faculty job.

  • Ph.D training suffers, because "you can fix it in the postdoc". I don't think that's healthy either.

Krugman Links


  1. The Joy of Research:

    A bit of personal meta here: I realized a few hours ago that I was actually having a good weekend, and that made me step back and think about what I actually enjoy in my current role as public intellectual.

    It’s not the hemidemisemicelebrity; I’m actually a bit uneasy about being recognized. It’s not mainly the ability to get my voice heard, either. [...]

  2. Models, Plain and Fancy:

    Karl Smith argues that informal economic arguments — models in the sense of thought experiments, not necessarily backed by equations and/or data-crunching — deserve more respect from the profession. I agree ...

    And there's More on Simple Models

  3. Bonus Link: Sexual Identity in Florida.

Monday, February 07, 2011

More on Jeopardy-Playing Watson


WSJ has an extended excerpt from Stephen Baker's Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.

... Right before the lunch break, one clue read, "The inspiration for this title object in a novel and a 1957 movie actually spanned the Mae Khlung." Now, it would be reasonable for a computer to miss "The Bridge Over the River Kwai," especially since the actual river has a different name. Perhaps Watson had trouble understanding the sentence, which was convoluted, even for humans. But how did the computer land upon its outlandish response, "What is Kafka?" Mr. Ferrucci didn't know. Those things happened, but Watson still won the two morning matches.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Watson Plays Jeopardy


Here's the latest from IBM:

What Is Artificial Intelligence?
By Richard Powers

IN the category “What Do You Know?”, for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest humans a run for their money at their own game.

The question: What is Watson?

I.B.M.’s groundbreaking question-answering system, running on roughly 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second, is playing a pair of “Jeopardy!” matches against the show’s top two living players, to be aired on Feb. 14, 15 and 16. Watson is I.B.M.’s latest self-styled Grand Challenge, a follow-up to the 1997 defeat by its computer Deep Blue of Garry Kasparov, the world’s reigning chess champion. (It’s remarkable how much of the digital revolution has been driven by games and entertainment.) Yes, the match is a grandstanding stunt, baldly calculated to capture the public’s imagination. But barring any humiliating stumble by the machine on national television, it should.

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Annals of Academic Absurdities


How do you deal with a professorial colleague who pisses you off?

Tihomir Petrov, a math professor at California State University, Northridge, found a novel way.

Lekhni: Why Indian women scientists drop out


Over at The Imagined Universe, Lekhni's post on why Indian women scientists drop uut covers two recent studies published in Current Science:

Gender Divide


A bunch of links, all, except one, are from the US:

Louis Menand: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique.”


The persistent characterization of “The Feminine Mystique” as some kind of bolt from the blue is part of a big historical mystery. Why did a women’s movement take so long to develop in the United States after 1945? “Our society is a veritable crazy quilt of contradictory practices and beliefs,” Komarovsky wrote, about gender roles, in 1953, and, as the revisionists have demonstrated, if you pick out the right data you can identify trends in the direction of gender equality in the nineteen-fifties. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men. At some point, presumably, the increasing numbers of women in the educational and vocational pipelines would have produced pressure to get rid of gender discrimination. Coontz concludes that a women’s movement “would have happened with or without Betty Friedan.”

That may be so, but it’s a counterfactual assertion. ...

From his review of Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

"Technology marches on, but sexism is eternal"


Carol Tavris of The Sunday Times has a great review-essay on the book Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine:

The new neurosexism
Cordelia Fine has produced a witty and meticulously researched exposé of the sloppy studies that pass for scientific evidence in so many of today's bestselling books on sex differences.

Wandering wombs, an anatomically conferred destiny of penis envy and masochism, smaller brains, smaller frontal lobes, larger frontal lobes, right-hemisphere dominance, cross-hemisphere interaction, too much oestrogen, not enough testosterone – all have been invoked to explain why women are intellectually inferior to men, more emotional, less logical, better at asking for directions, worse at map reading, hopeless at maths and science, and ever so much better suited to jobs involving finger dexterity, nappies and dishes. Today we look back with amusement at the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to weigh, cut, split or dissect brains in their pursuit of finding the precise anatomical reason for female inferiority. How much more scientific and unbiased we are today, we think, with our PET scans and fMRIs and sophisticated measurements of hormone levels. Today’s scientists would never commit such a methodological faux pas as failing to have a control group or knowing the sex of the brain they are dissecting – would they? Brain scans don’t lie – do they?

Well, yes, they would and they do. As Cordelia Fine documents in Delusions of Gender, researchers change their focus, technology marches on, but sexism is eternal. ...

Friday, February 04, 2011

Teaching, Research, B-Schools


FT has a scathing op-ed by Freek Vermeulen of London Business School [hat tip: Orgtheory.net]:

Popular fads replace relevant teaching

But business education clearly also suffers [due to the divide between teaching and research]. What is being taught in management courses is usually not based on solid scientific evidence. Instead, it concerns the generalisation of individual business cases or the lessons from popular management books. Such books often are based on the appealing formula that they look at several successful companies, see what they have in common and conclude that other companies should strive to do the same thing.

But how do you know that the advice provided is reasonable, or if it comes from tomorrow’s Enrons, RBSs, Lehmans and WorldComs? How do you know that today’s advice and cases will not later be heralded as the epitome of mismanagement?

See also: Timothy Devinney's response.

Related link: Michael Skapinker on Why business still ignores business schools

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Shane Greenstein: Bing "crosses a line."


Shane Greenstein of Kellogg School of Management asks [hat tip to Mark Thoma]:

... why does Bing’s imitation of Google’s search results seem to cross some sort of ethical line? Why does Microsoft’s conduct leave me shaking my head, wondering why Bing’s management did not put its nerdy foot down and just say “That is shameful. Let’s not go there.”?

Here's the first part of his answer:

There is nothing wrong with one retailer walking through a rival’s shop and getting ideas for what to do. There is renothing wrong with a designer of a piece of electronic equipment buying a rival’s product and studying it in order to get new ideas for a better design.

In the modern Internet, however, there is no longer any privacy for users. Providers want to know as much as they can, and generally the rich suppliers can learn quite a lot about user conduct and preferences.

It also means that rivals can learn a great deal about how users conduct their business, even when they are at a rival’s site. It is as if one retailer had a camera in a rival’s store, or one designer could learn the names of the buyer’s of their rival’s products, and interview them right away.

In the spat between Google and Bing, it boils down to this:

the transaction between supplier and user is between supplier and user, and nobody else should be able to observe it without permission of both supplier and user. The user alone does not have the right or ability to invite another party to observe all aspects of the transaction.

That is what bothers me about Bing’s behavior. [...]

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

"delhipublicschool40 chdjob" = Bing Fail!


"delhipublicschool40 chdjob" was one of the "honeypot" phrases used by Google in its sting operation on its rival Bling [See also Danny Sullivan's scoop and commentary for a very good description of how the sting was implemented.].

Looks like somebody at Google is an alumnus of Delhi Public School. Could it be Amit Singhal -- "a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm" --himself?

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Sexual Harassment: IIT-B Sacks a Professor


Details here.

Going by news reports, IIT-B appears to have handled this case in a professional way. It's good to see that the institution has clear procedures and institutional mechanisms in place to deal with charges of sexual harassment. Also noteworthy is the reiteration by the Institute officials of its policy of "zero tolerance" in dealing with this menace.

The institute had first received a formal complaint by the victim against Prof Gupta in March 2009, said the press release. Before this, the case was informally reported to the Student Counsellor attached to Dean of Student Affair’s office in December 2008. After weeks of verifying and ascertaining facts, a suspension order was issued to Prof SK Gupta, who is a senior professor at the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering.

A panel was formed to probe into case in March 2009. In cases of sexual harassment, the complaint committee of the Women’s Cell initiates an inquiry with just a complaint. “In such cases, the complaint itself is treated as a chargesheet,” the statement reads.

The inquiry was concluded in August 2009 and a report was submitted to the Director of IIT Bombay. A copy of the report was provided to Prof Gupta too.

“We have zero tolerance for such incidents and a probe into the matter was conducted immediately in a systematic way and as per the rules and regulations laid by the institute. During the proceedings of the panel, Prof Gupta was given an opportunity to cross examine the victim and other witnesses. All procedures laid down for the conduct of the inquiry were scrupulously followed,” a senior official from IIT-B said.

Thus, while the investigation itself appears to have been concluded in under five months after the charge was made, there has been a huge delay in getting the guilty verdict ratified by various administrative entities.

In another report yesterday, we find this:

Gupta, however, said norms were violated during the probe. “I was not even given a chargesheet,” he said. The IIT-Bombay administrator said the probe was conducted according to procedures laid down by the institute.