The Arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

The Interwebs comment on the arrest of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund on charges of sexual assault:

1. Kieran Healy: @kjhealy: "No-one told Dominique Strauss-Kahn that being Director of the IMF doesn't mean you get to do to people what the IMF does to countries."

2. N.S. Ramnath on Google Buzz: "Strauss-Kahn's defense: I mistook her for a country."

3. A commenter on Tyler Cowen's post: "The incentive for an IMF head to be a sex criminal is as you say quite low, but presumably the incentive for a sex criminal to be the head of the IMF is high…." [Hat tip to Christopher Shea's post: Are Rich, Powerful People Less Likely To Be Guilty?

Links ...

1. Over at Babbage, the S&T blog at The Economist: Physics Anniversaries: How Professor Maxwell Changed the World:

   [Maxwell] showed that nature ought not to be taken at face value, and that she can be cajoled into revealing her hidden charms so long as the entreaties are whispered in mathematical verse.

2. Jennifer Rohn in Nature: Give Post-Docs a Career, Not Empty Promises [via e-mail from Pradeepkumar.]

   The scientific enterprise is run on what economists call the 'tournament' model, with practitioners pitted against one another in bitter pursuit of a very rare prize. Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel. I have no doubt that most lab heads want the best for their many apprentices, but at the system level, the practice continues.

3. Jef Akst in The Scientist: I Hate Your Paper -- "Many say the peer review system is broken. Here’s how some journals are trying to fix it." [Via e-mail from Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam.]

   Problem #1
   Reviewers are biased by personal motives

   Solution: Eliminate anonymous peer review ( Biology Direct, BMJ, BMC); run open peer review alongside traditional review (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics); judge a paper based only on scientific soundness, not impact or scope (PLoS ONE).

Errors in JEE-2011

The rate at which JEE has been getting into a mess -- thanks to the wonders of the RTI Act -- makes you wonder how many pre-RTI skeletons are still hidden in IITs' closet. In the latest episode of egg-meets-face, the IITs have admitted that "[the 2001 JEE] question papers ... had errors worth a mammoth 36 marks."

[The ToI report says the errors are worth 30 marks. All I could find at the JEE website is this page which, as a piece of public communication, has FAIL written all over it. The only thing I could glean from it is that every candidate will get 12 marks, because the three math questions were fatally pathological.]

Here's HT's Charu Kasturi on what these numbers mean:

The 28 marks worth errors in math are more than the cut-off in the subject for the past four years - 1, 5, 7 and 11 - revealing the scale of the problem. The cut-offs for physics - where the 2011 JEE had eight marks worth errors - were 4, 0, 8 and 19 for general candidates over the past four years.

Links ...

1. Luis von Ahn's talk at TEDx-CMU: Duolingo -- The Next Chapter in Human Computation.

   [Hat tip to Dilip D'Souza, who has just started a series of columns "[exploring] the joy of mathematics, with occasional forays into other sciences." Here's the first one: Room at the Lodge.]

2. A slideshow of 100 Incredible Views out of Airplane Windows.

Cram School for KG

The WTF story of the day is from the US:

Other tutoring companies like Sylvan have also moved into the prekindergarten market. But Kumon, a Japanese import that calls itself the world’s largest math and reading enrichment program, has pushed most aggressively, admitting students as young as 2. Those young students have become an increasingly important part of its business: Kumon grew by about 12 percent last year, to 250,000 students nationwide; Junior Kumon grew by more than 30 percent. In New York, where the company is colonizing storefronts like so many Starbucks, enrollment in Junior Kumon has tripled since it began opening centers in 2007.

“Age 3 is the sweet spot,” said Joseph Nativo, chief financial officer for Kumon North America. “But if they’re out of a diaper and can sit still with a Kumon instructor for 15 minutes, we will take them.”

I can still think of one thing that's missing in this already-awful story of parental paranoia.

A Jumon that prepares toddlers to get into the Kumon program!

Quote of the Day

It is 1986. You know in your mind you will be here for two years. You will get your degree and go back. You think you will work as a journalist. Maybe even teach. No, you will work as a journalist. Teaching is for people who keep themselves safe from the world. Why return to India if you aren’t going to go out every day to learn about the lives around you? [My emphasis]

That's from Amitava Kumar's essay -- The point of no return -- in which "an Indian-born, US-based author constantly battles that inevitable guilt question: Does he really belong here?"

Fun links

1. The Week in Review at The Onion includes a summary on this story: "Update: Obama Yet Again Refrains From Obliterating Human Race."

2. Bookavore: E-books article drinking game.

3. Blogger Outage During Finals Week Rattles Some Students and Professors. This is actually a serious story, but I'm including it here for its Onion-esque headline.

A Century of Superconductivity

IEEE Spectrum carries a a nice historical overview of superconductivity by Pradeep Haldar and Pier Abetti who focus on this rather baffling fact:

In the 100 years since superconductivity was discovered, only one widespread application has emerged.

A couple of excerpts:

Since [the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911], physicists have sought to understand the quantum-mechanical origins of superconductivity, and engineers have tried to make use of it. While scientific efforts in this area have been rewarded by no fewer than seven Nobel prizes, all commercial applications of superconductivity have pretty much fizzled except one, which came out of the blue: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

* * *

Müller and Bednorz's work triggered a flurry of research around the world. And within a year scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and the University of Houston found a similar ceramic compound that showed superconductivity at temperatures they could attain using liquid nitrogen. Before, all superconductors had required liquid helium—an expensive, hard-to-produce substance—for cooling. Liquid nitrogen, however, can be made from air without that much effort. So the new high-temperature superconductors, in principle, threw the door wide open for all sorts of practical uses, or at least they appeared to.

The discovery of high-temperature superconductors sparked tremendous publicity—which in retrospect is easy to see was hype. Newsweek called it a dream come true. The cover of Time magazine showed a futuristic automobile controlled by superconducting circuits. BusinessWeek declared, "Superconductors! More important than the light bulb and the transistor" on its cover. [...]

Yale, Singapore, Academic Freedom

Academic freedom at Yale-NUS College, Yale's proposed joint campus with the National University of Singapore, is the subject of this hard-hitting Chronicle piece by Christopher L. Miller. I'm excerpting here some of the stinging blows:

Sidebar

See also: Elizabeth Redden's Inside Higher Ed piece from October 2010: Habitats for Academic Freedom, and Eric Weinberger's TNR piece from December 2010: Will Academic Freedom Be Protected at Yale's New College in Singapore?.

* * *

Most immediately troubling to me as a gay faculty member, male homosexuality is illegal in Singapore. Section 377A of the legal code bans consensual, private male homosexual activity as "outrages on decency," in effect making it illegal to be gay. Enforcement is not the issue here; this is a question of principle. Yale has no business establishing a campus in a state where some of its own faculty members are subject to arrest because of who they are. By doing so, the university has, in effect, violated its own nondiscrimination clause, which protects sexual orientation. Yale could have stayed away from Singapore until the repeal of Section 377A but chose not to. As a consequence, Singapore's discrimination becomes Yale's.

[...]

As plans for Yale-NUS were being reviewed last year, a 75-year-old British author, Alan Shadrake, was imprisoned and fined in Singapore for writing a book (Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock) that is critical of Singapore's death penalty. Provost Salovey claimed to be "greatly concerned," but he also said he was "not surprised by the result. ... I would have hoped for a different result, but Mr. Shadrake's book openly challenged the country's legal constraints on public criticism of identifiable government officials and institutions." Thus to a prisoner of conscience, Yale says, in effect, "What did you expect?"

[...]

To see these issues in concrete terms, consider the following: I am able to write this essay because I am protected by the United States Constitution and by Yale-New Haven's forceful policy on freedom of expression. Will the professors and students at Yale-NUS have that same freedom?

Shashi Tharoor of Academia

No analogy is perfect, but this one is pretty close -- with over 175,000 Twitter followers, a university "leader" loses the confidence of the people he's supposed to be leading:

John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, may be the only college president to publicly describe his leadership as "in beta," a product rolled out before it's fully tested.

He's tinkered with using social media to connect with constituents on and off campus. He's blogged, posted video messages on YouTube, and tweeted more than any other college president. (He has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.)

He even has a new book due out this month, called Redesigning Leadership (MIT Press), relating scenes from his three years at RISD and samples of his tweets. One example: "When people ask if I've stopped designing I say, 'No. I'm designing how to talk about/with/for our #RISD community.'"

But many professors at the art school do not appreciate being part of Mr. Maeda's high-tech experiment in leadership. In March, more than 80 percent of faculty members voted "no confidence" in his performance. To them, all that tweeting feels more like distraction than engagement.

Krugman Quip

The latest -- from his blog post, VSP Economics -- is about a recent WaPo editorial:

... the WaPo editorial tries to have it both ways. Monetary and fiscal stimulus “kept unemployment from rising out of control” — but somehow doing any more of the same would be disastrous. I guess we’re supposed to believe that there’s some kind of nonlinearity that makes exactly the amount of stimulus we’ve already done a positive, but any slight further stimulus very negative. It would be interesting to think of what kind of model could generate that result.

But I’m joking, of course. There is no model, just the unwisdom of the in-crowd. [My emphasis.]

Links: bin Laden edition

1. Noam Chomsky in Guernica: My reaction to Osama bin Laden's death.

   We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

   ... [And] the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

2. Lawrence Wright in New Yorker: The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan.

3. NYTimes report on Bin Laden's Diminished Life in a Shrunken World.

4. Felix Salmon: The Hermetic and Arrogant New York Times. [He has an awesome picture -- from this analysis -- of the Twitter network that helped spread the news of Osama bin Laden's death.]

L'Affaire zu Guttenberg Nears Closure

Here's Spiegel reporting on the conclusions of the University of Bayreuth committee that looked into his PhD thesis:

When initial accusations emerged in February that then-German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis, he responded that the allegations were "absurd." In the ensuing weeks, as it became increasingly clear that significant passages of his dissertation were exact replications of previously published works, he insisted that it was the result of mere oversight. He never meant to copy, he maintained.

But on Friday, the University of Bayreuth, which awarded Guttenberg his Ph.D. title in 2006, announced its conclusion that [zu Guttenberg] had intentionally plagiarized. Guttenberg, the university said in a statement, "extensively violated academic standards and intentionally cheated."

Biggest News of the Day

Al Qaeda chief Bin Laden was killed by American troops in Abottabad [a couple of hours from Islamabad], Pakistan. [see also Nick Kristof's early reaction]. The Pakistan connection seems to me to be the biggest part of the news.

From President Obama's address:

Over the years, I've repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we've done. But it's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.

Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Amartya Sen on Learning from Others

In his NYRB article on Quality of Life: India vs. China, Prof. Amartya Sen makes the obvious point that the pursuit of GNP and its growth has a larger purpose: increasing people's welfare.

Realizing, probably, that a direct comparison with China would allow his critics to counter him with China's longer experience with economic reforms (and, consequently, its higher GNP), he uses two different lines of argument. The first one is a comparison with Bangladesh, a country with half the per capita GNP as India's:

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPT vaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

A second argument is about some of the bad policy choices made by China, especially in healthcare:

... the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care. [...] The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.

Sen has a more detailed version of this argument in this Lancet article.

* * *

See also Sen's guest editorial in ET in December 2006 urging Indian states to learn from the experience of the other states that have done well on different social indicators.