Monday, October 15, 2012

Video of the Day


Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech in the Australian Parliament: "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man [Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Tony Abbott]. Not now, not ever.":

Sunday, October 14, 2012

From the Annals of Gaming the System


This one, however, is about a failed experiment, a loss of two years and 2 million dollars, and lawsuit:

The Chows, who lived in Hong Kong, knew little about the US educational system, but they did know that they wanted an Ivy League education for their sons. And they had money to spend on consultants like Zimny, who, they believed, could help make the dream come true.

What transpired, however, turned out to be a cautionary tale for the thousands of parents who are fueling the growing global admissions-consulting industry.

Links


  1. Samanth Subramanian at India Ink: Happy 80th Birthday, Air India.

  2. Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham at Ideas for India: Why Indian education needs to get back to reality:

    What is the best advice to give an Indian education department official? This column argues that the best thing officials can do is drop the assumptions and stick to reality – otherwise many children will be missed out and left behind.

  3. Confirmation of Marc Hauser's fraud. While there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, Harvard played coy on Hauser's misconduct by not releasing its investigation report; so it's good to have ORI's report in the public domain.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Music Time


From the movie Azhiyadha Kolangal, a personal favourite [Music: Salil Chowdhury; Singers: P. Jayachandran and P. Susheela]. A video is available, but its audio is sad. You can listen to a much better version (click on AB3).

That last link takes you to The World of Salil Chowdhury, a true labour of love by a devoted fan, Gautam Chowdhury. The site has extensive cross-references to other versions of Salil's compositions; among the four variants -- Malayalam (1977), Tamil (1979), Bengali (1980)and Hindi (1989) -- the best is the Hindi version (click on AB3).

Thursday, October 11, 2012

From the Annals of Innovation -- Bag Tags


Yes, the airline baggage tags. In recounting all the wonderful innovations that have led up to the state of the art in tags, the article has some fascinating stuff about the materials that go into these tags:

Let’s look first at how an ABT is made. In the interconnected, automated, all-weather world of modern aviation, tags must be resistant to cold, heat, sunlight, ice, oil, and especially moisture. Tags also can’t tear—and crucially, if they’re nicked, they must not tear further—as the bag lurches through mechanized airport baggage systems. And the tag must be flexible, inexpensive, and disposable. Plain old paper can’t begin to meet all these requirements. The winning combination is what IATA’s spokesperson described as a “complex composite” of silicon and plastic; the only paper in it is in the adhesive backing.

Bag tags must meet another set of contradictory requirements. They must be easy to attach, but impossible to detach—until, that is, the bag arrives safely at its destination and the traveler wants to detach it. Old tags were fastened with a string through a hole, but mechanized baggage systems eat these for breakfast. The current loop tag, a standardized strip of pressure-sensitive adhesive, looped through a handle and pressed to form an adhesive-to-adhesive bond, debuted with the ABT in the early ’90s. And the ABT, unlike string tags and earlier loop-y tag ideas, is easily attached to items that lack handles—boxes, say. Simply remove the entire adhesive backing and the loop tag becomes a very sticky sticker.

Of course while tags must remain rigorously attached, they must also be easy for passengers to remove. Intermec’s spokesperson raves about the adhesive’s “excellent flow properties”—in layman’s terms, simply grab the loop from the inside, with two hands, and gently pull apart to remove the tag. A couple of other clever innovations: Like the tags themselves, the adhesive must be all-weather. Early adhesives couldn’t cope with extreme cold, so snowy tarmacs would end up littered with detached tags (and lost bags). Also, passengers don’t want sticky residue left on their bag’s handles—so the adhesive’s backing is designed to stay in place on the inside of the loop.

My Book


My book "Essentials of Heat and Fluid Flow in Porous Media" has been published a few days back by Ane Books (India) and CRC Press (International).

Start in this page to read more on the salient features, table of content etc. The two forewords [ here and here ] were provided by Prof. Andrew Rees (Uty. of Bath, UK) and Prof. Pradip Dutta (IISc. India). The preface explains the content and the acknowledgements express my gratitude to the academics whose association helped me remain positive.


The Indian paperback (student) edition should be available by next week in your local Tata Book House (I believe most of the IIXs house one) and such stores that sell technical books. The international (hard bound) edition should be distributed from Oct 31st, 2012. You can pre-order at Amazon (link in the above 'details' page).

If you are an instructor of a related course (graduate fluid mechanics or heat transfer) or a researcher from civil, mechanical, chemical and bio-medical engineering, you may find the content useful. If you want to suggest the book to your students and require an evaluation copy or want to suggest copies for your libraries, contact me.

Similarly, if you want to write a review of the book in a related research journal (or in your blog), please contact me and I could arrange a copy of the book for you.

I would love to hear your feedback, comments, suggestions and errata (it seems, 5% typos are expected by the publishers in the first edition).

And now for some related 'gyan', beneath the fold...

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Links


  1. Amrita Ghai in Down To Earth: When Supervisors Cheat. A review of Experiment eleven, dark secrets behind the discovery of a wonder drug by Peter Pringle.

  2. Connor Bamford in The Scientist: Solving Irreproducible Science: "Will the recently launched Reproducibility Initiative succeed in cleaning up research and reducing retractions?"

Innovation-Killing Patents


Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades ... a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

From this NYTimes story by Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr who start with the story of a small speech recognition software firm that was driven out of business by a lawsuit by a bigger rival with patents.

The Rolls Royce of Chalk


Over at Williams College's Mathematics and Statistics Blog, Satyan Devadoss has an old post about one of the most important items in a mathematician's toolkit: chalk. His entire post is a build-up to this all important question:

3. So what is the best chalk out there?

I have wrestled with this question and spent a bit of time pursing this over my sabbatical last year. There have been rumors about a dream chalk, a chalk so powerful that mathematics practically writes itself; a chalk so amazing that no incorrect proof can be written using this chalk. I can finally say, after months of pursuit, that such a chalk indeed exists. It is called the Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk.

For those lucky few who have used it, it can truly be called the Michael Jordan of chalk, the Rolls Royce of chalk. [Bold emphasis added]

Saturday, October 06, 2012

Music Time


A song based on the theme music of Seven Samurai [Direct link]:

A part of that movie's soundtrack is here.

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Evidence-based Presidency


From Michael Lewis' profile of President Obama:

“I want to play that game again,” I [Michael Lewis] said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.”

This was the third time I’d put the question to him, in one form or another. [...]

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.” [Bold emphasis added]

Scientists in Legal Trouble


The lawsuit against the Italian scientists who mis-estimated the odds of a major earthquake in the town of L'Aquila is nearing its end. Edwin Cartlidge reports in Science Insider that the prosecutors are asking for a 4-year jail term for the scientists.

Affirmative Action Goes to Wachington


Even before the US Supreme Court sits down to hear arguments in the latest affirmative action case to land at its doorsteps, it has been getting tons of reading material from various groups. One of them [link, link] makes an interesting case: replace race-based AA programs with one that's based on factors such as parental income and education, wealth of the student's neighbourhood, etc. A class-based AA program, in other words.

The broad idea, I think, is to create something that would achieve the diversity-related goals of institutions (without using race explicitly as a factor), and still be acceptable to the public, the lawmakers, and the courts.

The case itself is scheduled for a hearing in the coming days and weeks, and the SCOTUS verdict will probably arrive early next year. It will be interesting to see how this case is decided, and the arguments used for supporting that decision.

* * *

During the Mandal II debate in 2006-07, Yogendra Yadav and Satish Deshpande argued for a reservation system [see this post for links] that would, in essence, provide additional points to students from disadvantaged backgrounds due to their caste, sex, education and income levels of their parents, etc. In the event, the UPA-I government decided to run with a fixed quota for OBC students; the Supreme Court accepted this scheme with just one modification -- the so-called creamy layer clause that would exclude students from wealthy families from the quota benefit.

Unlike the US, there is an expectation in India that admission policies should be based on completely objective criteria; this explains the emphasis on cut-off marks, entrance exam scores, and the like. It's probably this that led Yadav and Deshpande to propose their "deprivation index" so that admissions officials would still have some objective numbers to base their decisions on.

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Misconduct Accounts for Two out Three Retractions


The big news of the day is the PNAS paper -- Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications -- by Ferric Fang, Arturo Casadevall and Grant Steen who looked into the reasons behind retracted papers in the PubMed database -- all 2047 of them. There is quite a bit of buzz -- see this post at Retraction Watch for some commentary and links to press coverage.

G. Mudur's news story in today's The Telegraph covers the Indian angle and presents some additional details which are only implicit in the paper. A couple of quick comments:

  1. PubMed has less than 200,000 papers by Indian researchers out of over 25 million entries. It's safe to say India accounts for less than 1 % of the papers in PubMed.

    But, India accounts for 3.4 % of fraudulent papers, 10 % of plagiarized papers, and 9 % of duplicate papers. [Look at the graphic in Mudur's story.]

  2. My own study last year had flagged just one Indian paper for fraud (specifically, falsification); but Fang et al appear to have flagged more than 25 papers for fraud.

    My guess is that this difference is probably due to papers that could have been flagged either way. For example, a bunch of PubMed papers (in addition to several tens more that are not in PubMed) from Prof. P. Chiranjeevi's group at Sri Venkateswara University at Tirupati could easily have been flagged for fraud because (a) it was a part of a massive, deliberate scam, and (b) the group also changed names of some of the chemical entities in their plagiarized papers.

    [I flagged them for plagiarism, primarily because that's what those papers really are; moreover, the retraction notices are not entirely clear about the nature of the offence].