"IIT Directors Reject Kakodkar's Model for Financial Autonomy"

Anubhuti Vishnoi has a news story on an apparent display of spinal stiffness and intellectual autonomy:

Arguing that IITs are not just teaching institutes, IIT directors have suggested that the institutes continue to be funded considerably and in fact be treated as "strategic assets of the nation". To be taken up at the IIT council meeting slated for September 16, this view of IIT directors on the Kakodakar Committee's recommendations on governance, autonomy and finances says that "the proposed model is not consistent with the funding pattern of any reputed public research university". "If IITs are to become institutes with an international profile, the expenses are likely to increase significantly compared to the current amounts and this must come from the Government rather than student fees and overheads", the IITs have said.

Since the quotes appear to be from a letter to MHRD, it would be nice to see this document in full. I wonder if it is available in the public domain.

Ramachandra Guha on Current Science

For Guha, it all started with Prof. Balaram's editorials:

I first began subscribing to Current Science for Balaram’s editorials. These sometimes analysed the less salutary aspects of science (as when he wrote about the politics of prizes or the prejudices against women scientists), sometimes noted anniversaries of important or critical discoveries, sometimes explained the origin and spread of new sub-fields, sometimes spoke of the need for scientists to communicate to a wider public. The last injunction he put into practice, for his own editorials were written in an elegant, understated style.

Soon, I found other reasons to read Current Science. For one thing, it carried well-researched essays on climate change and on biodiversity conservation, two areas that I had an interest in. For another, it had really excellent obituaries. [...] This was a journal that cared about the traditions and histories of the men and women of Indian science. The obituaries it carries (averaging one or two an issue) are a model: sketching the scientist’s intellectual development, his or her major contributions, while not forgetting to mention personal landmarks (where born, where died, whether married, how many children, etc).

Links

1. Conversation with a Field Biologist in India -- Vijaysree Venkatraman interviews IISc alumna Swati Diwakar who is now a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Studies, Delhi University.

2. Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity. An in-dept report on HBS's sustained, persistent and on-going experiment in which "Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success."

3. Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers? -- an NBER working paper by David N. Figlio, Morton O. Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter. Their answer to the question: No!

Links

1. Now that the UGC has issued guidelines for foreign universities to set up shop in India on their own (i.e., not necessarily with an Indian partner), a reality check.

2. Japan debates reforms in its system of entrance exams. [Previous posts on Examination Hell: 1, 2].

3. 25 nerdy jokes from many fields. Example: "There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that know binary, and those that don’t."

Now Online: Volume 1 of Feynman Lectures in Physics

A gorgeous new website now hosts this classic! Enjoy.

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The other two volumes will also presumably go online -- but I haven't seen any info on such plans.

Of Cellphone Radiation and Sparrows

[UPDATE: Harmful but not lethal an article from the print edition of today's The Hindu newspaper has some content from the essay below.]

A wave has a wavelength, usually thought of as the length of a successive crest and trough. When continuous and unobstructed, a wave repeats this ‘crest+trough unit’ endlessly. If we stand at a location, how many such crest+trough units pass us in a given time determines the frequency of the wave. Longer the wavelength, shorter the frequency of a wave.

Sea waves and sound waves require medium (matter) to propagate. But electromagnetic (EM) radiation are waves that don’t require a medium to propagate. Sunlight is an example, called the visible radiation. All such EM waves we put to use can be placed in a slot in the electromagnetic spectrum, a continuous band of several wavelengths (and hence, frequencies) as shown in the accompanied graphics.

In photoelectric effect electrons are released from metals subjected to EM radiation bombardment. Importantly, this effect depends on the frequency of the incident radiation and not on its intensity. This was shown in 1905 by Einstein and is a direct proof of the quantized nature of electromagnetic radiation. In 1922, he won his Nobel for this proof. Take home point? Higher the radiation frequency of the EM wave, greater the ‘damage’ caused by that radiation.

Automated Management

I have been avoiding this sort of blogging for some years now, but then...

The body of an unsolicited email I received now reads:

Dear (My name),
This is from the Editorial Board Office of Journal of Management Science and Practice (MSP).
We recently read your paper titled “Thermal management using the bi-disperse porous medium approach ”
Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to extend this paper and publish a new research in our journal.
You are welcomed to submit your papers online at (link)
...
...
Best regards,
Olivia
Editorial Assistant

The concerned paper is about controlling temperatures and overheating of electronics by using metal porous media of two different length scales (small and large pores mixed together). Tempted to say the email invitation reiterates what I have been suspecting (typecasting) for long about 'management' subjects.

This trend of copy/paste invitation of relevance from 'research journals' with a 'business model' is a major hindrance in research publishing and is a contributing factor that galvanizes the myopic equation "Open Access = BAD" even among well-meaning academics in editorial boards.

Links

1. A BBC news story on affirmative action policies in Brazil's federal universities. Almost all the arguments -- for affirmative action and against -- sound so familiar!

2. Mail Online on the extent of faculty crunch in India's "top institutes".

3. Greg Mankiw: A Carbon Tax That America Could Live With.

Mint Photo-essay on CeNSE

It's nice to see the Centre for NanoScience and Engineering (CeNSE) in our Institute being featured in this photo-essay by Aniruddha Chowdhury in today's Mint:

... CeNSE has already trained over 550 researchers from across the country and has currently over 100 PhD students and also researchers who can join through the Indian Nanoelectronics Users Program (a joint hands-on-training programme run by CeNSE and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, for accelerating research and development in nanoelectronics) to do projects here. “We are looking at not only creating an environment for research but also for incubating start-ups and encouraging students to develop lab prototypes which can be adopted by the industry,” says Prof. Rudra. “This will dispel the belief that research doesn’t pay,” he adds.

The INU program is something that's worth highlighting -- through this major outreach activity, researchers all across India gain access to the excellent experimental facilities at CeNSE.

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On a lighter note: During its toddler years, CeNSE made a big splash all across the campus with colorful notices for its seminars. One of those notices certainly got, well, noticed.

Ananthalakshmi Sadagopan

Ananthalakshmi Sadagopan is one of the renowned Carnatic music singers considered on par with the female legends who made their concert entry in the 1940s like M. S. Subbulakshmi, D. K. Pattammal and N. C. Vasanthakokilam. Ananthalakshmi was the first to cut a full length Tamil LP for HMV company. She passed away on May 15, 2013.

TTN and I could share our thoughts in the August 2013 issue of Sruti, the magazine for performing arts. Here is the pdf version of the article for download.

Check also the more detailed Tamil language tribute I wrote for Solvanam, a web magazine. 

The real nano-emoticon

Yesterday, Arunn posted a schematic diagram that used emoticons to explain something in the paper.

But a real nano-emoticon was made and imaged way back in 20006 2006 by Paul W. K. Rothemund; here's the the paper [pdf]. It was featured on the cover of Nature:

As gimmicks go, it was way more cool than the corporate logo produced in 1990 by lining up individual atoms ("Artists have almost always needed the support of patrons (scientists too!)."). Twenty-two years later, researchers from the same firm produced this gem: A Boy and His Atom:

Quote of the Day

Ballmer’s reign has done more to defang Microsoft than the Justice Department could ever have hoped to do.
-- Nicholas Thompson in the New Yorker: Why Steve Ballmer Failed.

Note the key word: "defang."

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

The book by Robin Sloan is a wild ride of a crass-free, violence-free, coitus-free, murder-less, humorous, 'unputdownable' treasure hunt mystery set in modern San Francisco and New York and old world "Griffo Gerritszoon serif". The new clerk at a bookstore, a recently jobless art-school graduate and amateur web-designer cum programmer, wonders why the regular customers borrow not the popular titles but only from a 'wayback list' of titles stacked in the back, books with content that make no apparent sense or meaning. The linear quest picks up pace and intrigue involving secret societies, fantasy games, computer geekery (with Ruby programming), more mysterious bookstores with unreadable old books, dungeons with well-lit tables and clamped books, art-world props, prime numbers, pages of description about Googleplex and stenography since the times of Aldus Manutius -- the earliest publisher from Venice. It all ends in a satisfactory if not scholarly whimper, a la the climax of The Name of the Rose (of Eco).

Along the way, we get to meet colorful characters with groovy names like Ajax Penumbra and Maurice Corvina, with bookstore owners who are averse to computers and telephones (leave alone iPhones), sinister overseers professing no harm greater than the burning of books written by authors they need to chastise, with friends (Neel Shah) who became millionaires by perfecting the art of making digital boobs and girlfriends who are geek-programmers working for Google and yearning immortality. The mystery is solved by the ingenuity of an individual brain and not by the servers of Google, who not long ago wanted to digitize all the old world knowledge. A not too subtle message that I don't mind sucking up to.

Nanostructured Emoticons

From the graphics of "Core-Shell Nanostructured Catalysts" a recent paper published in Accounts of Chemical Research.

Not sure if this would constitute a "chart duck" (a.k.a. decorative clutter) according to Edward Tufte, but could be a first for smileys to appear in research journal graphics.

[hat tip: Lakshmi]

High Level Hires from Abroad

The non-resident Indian scientist [Shreemanta Parida], appointed two years ago as chief executive officer of a government vaccine research programme, resigned last month and returned home to Berlin, saying India’s science bureaucracy had prevented him from working.

Scientists familiar with Parida’s plight say his 25-month stay in India is a tale of how an entrenched science bureaucracy stonewalled a newcomer, senior administrators failed to curb the harassment, and good intentions deteriorated into bitter acrimony.

There's a lot more on this train-wreck in G. Mudur's report in The Telegraph.

* * *

Some observations:

1. Mudur's report reminded me of another very high-profile train wreck: the disastrous tenure of Nobel Prize winner Robert Laughlin at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. WSJ carried a detailed analysis of that episode by Nicholas Zamiska in May 2007 [linked in this post].

2. Way back in 2002, Prof. Shobo Bhattacharya, who was then a scientist at NEC Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, was chosen to head the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. While Prof. Bhattacharya completed his full term with no untoward incident, his appointment was used by some bigwigs of Indian science establishment to tut-tut about the lack of home-grown science leaders in the next generation. Do read the article in Science [requires subscription, though]; it has some truly juicy quotes!

   The article in Science, and the worthies behind those juicy quotes, received a stinging rebuke from Prof. P. Balaram through an editorial in Current Science.

3. Just a few days from now, Prof. Ashish Nanda of Harvard will take charge as Director of IIM-A [see his early views on his new job here and here.

   Let's wish him luck!

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One final thought. Any resemblance between the contents of this post and these famous first lines in a textbook is purely coincidental!

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the same work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
-- David Goodstein, in States of Matter