Lots of nice pics; but the really wonderful ones feature the fans -- fans in slums, fans in shopping malls, fans on tractor trailers, fans with national-color tattoos, and fans who mix politics with sports. Surprising omission: fans who are management types.
Here's a pic (and another) on fans' utter disregard for the doctrine of church-sports separation:
Update: For more such pics, go to the real Big Picture blog at Boston Globe. [Thanks, Arun, for the comment-alert!]
At YouTube: Bulbous Bouffant.
Link via Joel Shaver's comment on Mark Liberman's post on "words that are fun to say out loud, and when you say them over and over, they get to sound even funnier." Liberman also asked his audience for a possible "word or phrase for this kind of irrational pleasure associated with repeated performance of a particular word," and his commenters respond with some fabulous words: euphornia, lexury and glossalalia.
Awesome.
In his editorial [pdf] in the latest Current Science, Prof. P. Balaram bestows on this Rutgers study an academic respectability it just doesn't deserve (for my comment on that study, see this post).
In addition to demolishing that study's methodology and findings, Balaram makes several other points [with bold emphasis added by me]:
Where did faculty come from when India embarked on the first phase of expansion of scientific and technical institutions in the 1950s and 1960s? A very large number of new recruits in those days were educated in the West, although ironically some of the very best were homegrown. ... Unfortunately, not every institution that sparkled with promise in the first two decades after independence has been able to sustain the enthusiasm and optimism of that era. How will we address the problem of faculty shortages today? The consensus, one that leaves me mildly uneasy, is that we must make vigorous attempts to entice Indian students and academics who are currently overseas, primarily in the United States, to return and build teaching and research careers in India.
There has been an organized hunt [by China] for high profile researchers ... [by offering them] benefits and inducements that might even attract the attention of the best of Western scientists. ... The price tag for winners of ‘prestigious international prizes – including the Nobel prize’ is stated to be ‘150 million yuan ($23 million). ... An earlier program (Qianren Jihua) for ‘recruitment ... of global experts’ launched in 2008 had a goal of hiring ‘up to 2000 experts from abroad over 5 to 10 years’. The program has already notched up 1143 recruitments but the scheme seems to be foundering’. ... In describing Chinese initiatives as ‘a massive waste of resources’ one observer notes ‘that it is better to invest in a whole new generation of talent than to buy reputation’. Mu-Ming Poo, a prominent neuroscientist in Shanghai, is reported to have characterized the Qianren Jihua program as ‘a huge disaster’, arguing that China’s current policy tells ‘the best and brightest to spend most of their productive years abroad’. ... The Chinese experience may be worth studying and there may be much to learn, even as Indian agencies formulate new schemes ...
A growing number of women with Ph D degrees are sometimes unable to spend extended postdoctoral periods overseas. Should there not be a mechanism which allows us to tap this resource and support their research efforts? Strangely, while schemes for attracting overseas talent are enthusiastically administered in the funding agencies, initiatives that promote local talent are invariably run with limited interest and efficiency. Looking outward may be attractive and fashionable. Looking inward may be desirable and essential.
Prof. Balaram's editorial is all suitably academic and understated (e.g., "may be desirable and essential"), but the strength of the underlying sentiments comes through loud and clear.
It's good to see him take a stand.
The latest issue of Current Science carries two responses [pdf] to the letter by my colleagues Prof. Diptiman Sen and Prof. S. Ramasesha on the inappropriate use of scientometric data to evaluate the contributions of individual scientists. Interestingly, both the responses are from IISc colleagues: Prof. Gautam Desireaju and Prof. M. Giridhar; they are worth reading in full , not least because they are friendly to people with a short attention span -- together, they occupy just one printed page.
This bit from Prof. Desiraju's letter is priceless:
At the lowest levels, h-indices are useful as criteria of eligibility and basic competence. They should be used as criteria of elimination and not as criteria of selection. They will always serve a purpose in Indian science, because it was possible, in the days before we had scientometric indicators, for committees of wise men to simply declare an incompetent as an outstanding scientist. This is no longer possible. [Bold emphasis added]
Here are some possibilities brought to us from the corporate and B-school jungles by a gutsy team of ET reporters. [Thanks for the comment-alert, Dilip!]
Highlights:
Dhoni should become a guest lecturer at the IIMs (this idea is from Bringi Dev, an adjunct professor at IIM-B).
I would bat for Dhoni as the CFO of a company (from LK Gupta, LG Electronics).
I would make Dhoni an executive director in our company (from Venugopal Dhoot, Videocon)
[Dhoni] would be a perfect fit for the job of Congress president Sonia Gandhi (from Savita Prasad, Sabre Travel Tech).
At this rate, Dhoni's appearance in a Bo Knows type ad is imminent -- maybe with a slogan like "Dhoni Does!"
The latest issue of Nature has a feature on Educating India [thankfully, not paywalled!]. Written by Anjali Nayar, it covers the major points (including the employability issue that Geeta Anand focused on), weaving in sound-bites from Kapil Sibal, C.N.R. Rao, T. Ramasami, and others.
A fairly big part of the article is devoted to discussing the level of corruption in many colleges:
Rahul's parents paid hundreds of thousands of rupees up front to get him into the institute after he scored poorly on entrance exams. He says that about 30% of his peers entered in the same way, and at other colleges the informal 'management quota' can be as high as 40–50%.
This year, tuition at the institute cost 85,000 rupees (US$1,900): more than three times that charged by the IIT system. And the payments at many private colleges don't stop there, says Rahul. "A few days before [exams] you can pay 1,000 rupees for a copy of the paper, and you can pay another couple of thousand rupees if you didn't get the right marks," he says. "Then, if you don't attend classes or labs, you can pay 5,000 rupees to fulfil your attendance quota. Education here is based entirely on money. And to think, my institute is one of the best in the area." [...][Bold emphasis added]
[... snip ...]
Geeta Kingdon ... points to allegations of widespread corruption in how Indian institutes and universities are accredited. "Even those who have got the relevant accreditation only got it because they paid the relevant bribe," she says. Many don't bother. A government crackdown on unaccredited institutions in 2010 left more than 40 universities and thousands of colleges in court.
I'm surprised Nayar didn't get to the scandals at AICTE and MCI. But she does cover the shameful episode at IIT-Kharagpur:
Corruption has even reached the august halls of IIT Kharagpur. Last October, a handful of the institute's top engineering professors were accused of running a fake college called the Institution of Electrical Engineers (India) from the campus. The scheme allegedly involved the use of forged documents bearing the IIT logo to lure in students, who were charged 27,000 rupees for admission, roughly what the IITs charge per year. The IIT Kharagpur has launched an inquiry into the incident.
Yesterday, I linked to Geeta Anand's WSJ story which also had a section on corruption:
Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.
That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.
"I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn't pay the money, I would have failed the exam again," says Mr. Sharma.
BC Nakra, Pro Vice Chancellor of ITM University, where Mr. Sharma studied, said in an interview that there is no cheating at his school, and that if anyone were spotted cheating in this way, he would be "behind bars." He said he had read about a case or two in the newspaper, and in the "rarest of the rare cases, it might happen somewhere, and if you blow [it] out of all proportions, it effects the entire community." The examiner couldn't be located for comment. [Bold emphasis added]
The second link takes a look at Wipro's initiative to train the teachers. But there's nothing new in the first link if you have been following the (lack of progress in) India's higher ed sector -- what is different this time is that the employability issue is being raised not by the IT industry, but by call centers -- yes, call centers. Now, that is a low blow!
Thanks to my colleague Prof. Dipankar Banerjee for the e-mail alert.
In to-day's post, he says:
I wrote yesterday that I lived in fear of management experts wanting to derive mileage from Dhoni's success. Alas, my fears have come true. TOI today carries a story on Management lessons from Dhoni. All of it is just hindsight. Here is a selection:
Adi Godrej: "He sets stretch goals and works determinedly to achieve them by getting the best out of his team." By "stretch goals", Godrej presumably means winning the World Cup. Is he implying that other captains did not have such "stretch goals", that they took part in the World Cup in order to lose?
This and other such gems (and he probably has not even seen this) drive Ram Mohan [who, remember, is a professor at IIM-A] to despair:
What is it about management theory that it reduces so quickly to the level of drivel?
I know his question is purely rhetorical, but I think Management Myth by Matthew Stewart is worth another link! [Bonus link: Johann Hari on a related topic: The management consultancy scam].
* * *
[Thanks to Raj for the Rediff link via this comment].
The awesome profile, by Decca Aitkenhead, follows the publication of The Good Book: A Secular Bible which, according to Grayling, is "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Halfway through the profile, Grayling gets a chance to respond to the charge that "the atheist movement has been ... by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby.":
"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.
"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."
The thing I now dread is the management experts jumping in with 'Lessons in leadership from Dhoni'.
Here's the launch page. Here's the report itself [pdf]. I have only skimmed the report, and I'm parking it here for future reference -- it has tons of data, and more importantly, it has citations to other studies and primary sources of data. It has fancy pictures -- especially in Chapter 2 (but none of those pics comes close to this beauty).
I was surprised to learn this:
Over a third of all articles published in international journals are internationally collaborative, up from a quarter 15 years ago.
The Royal Society has this interactive infographic on the level of collaboration by scientists in many countries. Watching the points on the scatter plot move with time is pretty mesmerizing!
Do play with the graphic -- it gives you many ways of seeing the data. [While it's not quite in the class of Hans Rosling, but it's almost there!] Take a look at the line plot (click on it to see a bigger version):
In the figure, the US is right at the top, followed by the UK, Germany and France. While the long-term trend is positive for all the countries, we can also see a steady dip over a 3-year period (1999-2001) followed by a huge, ~50% increase in just one year (2002-03).
Are these short term swings real, or are they a result of some quirk in the Scopus data? If they are real, what might have happened during 1999-2003 that could explain them?
Marie Myung-Ok Lee writes about her teachers who saw her aptitude for literature and nurtured it. Her broader point is political (which is specific to the US), but the way she connects it with the personal is wonderful. An excerpt:
Thirty years ago, in Hibbing, a town in northern Minnesota that is home to the world’s largest open-pit iron mine, I entered high school as a bookish introvert made all the more shy because I was the school’s only nonwhite student. I always felt in danger of being swept away by a sea of statuesque blond athletes. By 10th grade, I’d developed a Quasimodo-like posture and crabwise walk, hoping to escape being teased as a “brain” or a “chink,” and then finding being ignored almost equally painful. I spent a lot of time alone, reading and scribbling stories.
Ms. Leibfried taught American literature and composition grammar, which involved the usual — memorizing vocabulary and diagramming sentences — but also, thrillingly, reading novels.
Thrilling to me, that is. Many of my classmates expressed disdain for novels because they were “not real.” For once, I didn’t care what they thought. Ms. Leibfried seemed to notice my interest in both reading and writing, and she took the time to draw me out; she even offered reading suggestions, like one of her favorite novels, “The Bell Jar.”
"What product has come out of IISc?" This is the only question that ToI reporter G.N. Prashant keeps asking in so many different ways.
Looks like Prof. Balaram didn't blow up on the monomaniacal reporter, who compliments him by saying, "[He] fields questions with calm confidence."
Over at 3 Quarks Daily, he has a great article on several key theories of distributive justice. Here's how he sets up the what he discusses in the rest of his essay:
I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?
The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to the IIT, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time.
After reading the previous post, my colleague Prof. U. Ramamurty sent me the link to this Science Watch listing of field-wise comparison of India's performance against the world average. It has quite a few surprises.
First, the unsurprising bit: India's average for citations per paper is smaller than the world average in all the fields.
The surprise is in the fields that come closest to the world average: Engineering (a deficit of 16 percent), Computer Science (20%) Materials Science (22%), Physics (22%) and Psychiatry / Psychology (33%) are at the top. We see a lot of biology-related fields (agriculture, medicine, biochemistry, microbiology) among those where India's average is less than half the world average.
Once again, this table represents a snapshot; it has no timelines and trends. The accompanying report has some (but only some) info that points to a positive trend in India's share in publications and citations:
... [S]ince 2000 [India's] output has increased from some 16,000 papers to 40,000, world share has risen from 2.2% to 3.4%, and citation impact has improved from 40% to nearly 60% of the world average. While that means that Indian research still underperforms in per-paper influence compared with other nations, the gains represented by these statistics are noteworthy.
For the 11-year period from 2000 to 2010, India accounted for 2.8% of all the scientific publications. What are the fields in which India "held the highest world share"?
... agricultural sciences (5.8%), chemistry (5.4%), materials science (4.8%), pharmacology (4.4%), plant and animal sciences (3.7%), physics (3.6%), engineering (3.3%), and geosciences (3.2%) – all higher than India’s overall 2.8% share.
