Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Did you hear this one?


Via slashdot: John P. A. Ioannidis has an essay with this provocative title: 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False'. The essay seems to be about experimental studies in various fields of medicine (epidemiology, clinical trials, etc). It uses probability arguments to make this bold claim: "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false".

Now that I have made your day with this wonderful news, I wish you all a happy blog day. And, don't forget to visit Desi Pundit, whose tireless bloggers deserve our love and affection.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Economics of tipping


Madman, who runs Shiok, a restaurant specializing in Far-Eastern cuisine, has a nice post on the restaurant business in general, and on the difference in the expectations of Indian and Western guests. Towards the end, he has some general observations about how Indians tip.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has a nice post on tipping in restaurants, prompted by a New York restaurant's decision to replace it with a 20 % service charge. He provides interesting links, too.

Here is one of the hypotheses he puts forward for why a restaurant might move from tipping to a service charge:

2. The balance of power in labor markets is shifting against workers. We therefore see owners trying to capture tipping income. Some of this income will be given back in the form of higher wages, but some of it will be kept by owners. Perhaps this is the most palatable way of rewriting the implicit labor-management contract.

Life, outsourced!


The Esquire article by Jacobs is here, but it has only the teaser. The rest of the article requires a subscription, or can be purchased for $2.95!

It was only a matter of time before it happened. Read this ABC News story [link via Tilotamma] about Esquire magazine's editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs who "began wondering how much of his own life he could send overseas". And, guess what?

... He discovered he could outsource almost everything, from ordering his food to fighting with his wife, and wrote about his experience in this month's issue of Esquire.

"To begin with they were answering my e-mails, making calls for me, ordering groceries, buying movie tickets," Jacobs said. "By the end they were reading my son bedtime stories."

Non-profits and web design


Let's say you run a non-profit organization, and you get an e-mail from someone who says he could re-design your website for free, and sends you a bunch of his work to help you decide. If you needed help in that area, you would jump at such an opportunity (particularly if you liked the work), wouldn't you? Apparently, in the real world, you wouldn't. Not only that; in the real world, you would actually pay a lawyer to draft a 'cease and desist' notice!

Read this post by Chugs. And, if you like his designs, you know what to do!

Monday, August 29, 2005

IQ


Over at the excellent anthropology blog Savage Minds, Kerim has a nice post summarizing the recent blogospheric debate about the book The Bell Curve. The post also has links to other online resources relevant to the debate.

Bottomline: in spite of so much of scholarly debunking ('fisking' seems to be the preferred word these days) over the years, this book seems to have a great staying power in the minds of right wingers, who never fail to get pounced on (as this current episode shows, for the umpteenth time) every time they praise the book in a discussion on IQ.

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Elisabeth Lloyd provokes anger


Elisabeth Lloyd is the author of 'The Case of the Female Orgasm : Bias in the Science of Evolution', published recently.

Many women -- and feminists in particular -- are angry with Prof. Lloyd, who has now responded to her critics in a guest-post in the blog Philosophy of Biology [link via Pharyngula].

Sweden!


Do read this IHT story titled 'In defence of the welfare state'. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries represent a great (optimal ?) middle ground between the "laissez-faire" capitalism vs. "let's plan collectivize it all" communism.

Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's view (through which I got the link to the IHT story), has a nice discussion.

Denver Airport


Let us start with this great opening paragraph:

Denver's new international air port was to be the pride of the Rockies, a wonder of modern engineering. Twice the size of Manhattan, 10 times the breadth of Heathrow, the airport is big enough to land three jets simultaneously-in bad weather. Even more impressive than its girth is the airport's subterranean baggage-handling system. Tearing like intelligent coal-mine cars along 21 miles of steel track, 4,000 independent "telecars" route and deliver luggage between the counters, gates and claim areas of 20 different airlines. A central nervous system of some 100 computers networked to one another and to 5,000 electric eyes, 400 radio receivers and 56 bar-code scanners orchestrates the safe and timely arrival of every valise and ski bag.

That was from an article published in Scientific American in 1994 (archived, thankfully, here). The article then describes how this grand vision was undone by a series of delays in writing the software that would run this great 'system' composed of conveyors and gadgets. This episode is used as an example to show how "the software industry remains years -- perhaps decades -- short of the mature engineering discipline needed to meet the demands of an information-age".

That was 1994, and this, of course, is 2005. Now, NYTimes reports that it's all over. The headline says it all: "Denver Airport Saw the Future. It Didn't Work".

I got the link to the NYTimes report through a discussion in slashdot.

Daniel Dennett on Evolution


Excerpts:

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder ...

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Do check out (before it goes behind the paywall) this great NYTimes op-ed by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. Titled "Show me the science", the op-ed trashes ID in so many different ways, it just amazes you.

I wouldn't be recommending it if it did just that one thing (though trashing ID is a GOOD thing). You get a lot more than that: you get wonderful explanations of how evolution works (without the help of any designer), and how science works, and how science makes progress.

It's a great read, so go grab it now.

More about Daniel Dennett:

Saturday, August 27, 2005

End of homeopathy?


Jacques Benveniste, a French researcher, was awarded the IgNobel prize in Chemistry (you will have to scroll down to the year 1991) "for his persistent discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished".

Guardian reports:

Homeopathy, favoured medical remedy of the royal family for generations and hugely popular in the UK, has an effect but only in the mind, according to a major study published in a leading medical journal today.

According to this report, this leading journal, Lancet, wrote a hard-hitting editorial against the use of homeopathy.

It is hardly surprising that homeopathy does badly compared with conventional medicine, it [the Lancet editorial] says - it is more surprising that the debate continues after 150 years of unfavourable findings. "The more dilute the evidence for homeopathy becomes, the greater seems its popularity."

Emphasis added by me.

Let me end this post with this memorable quote from David Deutsch:

As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me.

Private sector in higher education


Here are a few key links

Over at Education in India, Satya has a summary of the Supreme Court verdict. His commentary (which was published as an op-ed in Financial Express) is here.

The Economic Times story on the verdict is here, and it wrote several editorials. Narendar Pani's op-ed has some nice arguments. ToI had a commentary by Biswajit Bhattacharyya.

The Hindu has a balanced editorial; it has another one on the judiciary vs. legislature debate that arose from this issue.

The Supreme Court's recent verdict has clarified the role of private sector -- vis a vis that of the government -- in the field of not just professional education, but higher education in general.

First, a little bit of background. Up until this academic year,

  • the government appropriated to itself a certain proportion (typically, 50 %) of the seats in private professional colleges; this 'government quota' had reservation -- or, affirmative action -- for socially deprived sections of society
  • the government also set the tuition fees not just for the students under the government quota, but also for those under the 'management quota'.

The Supreme Court verdict has ended both these practices, offering private colleges new freedoms to fix their fees and select their students. These freedoms now come with some constraints as well: they should not take capitation fees, they are subject to government regulation, and students are to be selected through a transparent, merit-based system.

An immediate upshot of the verdict is that a huge number of seats will now revert back to the college managements (for example, in Tamil Nadu alone, the government stands to lose some 35,000 seats). While this is a good thing for the private colleges, it is a disaster for the government; a cozy, comfortable scheme (for which it did not have to pay) has now been snatched away.

For the politicians, the main issue is, not surprisingly, reservation; they are not particularly worried about the loss of the 'government quota'. However, being politicians, they are looking for a short cut. So, they are considering new legislation to force reservation (and, perhaps, lower fees) down the throats of private colleges. I see at least two problems with this route:

  • an immediate problem is that the industry will oppose it tooth and nail; if private colleges are forced to gulp the 'R' word today, private industry is sure to be hit tomorrow!
  • a medium term problem is that such a legislation is likely to be constituionally suspect. After all, the reasoning behind the recent verdict is that these colleges are 'private', and hence the government has no right to meddle in their functioning.

In spite of these problems, there is something nice -- er, for the politicians -- about the legislation route: they can make a lot of noise about it without doing anything. Any resemblance to the Women's Reservation Bill is not at all coincidental!

Bottomline: I suspect that there will be a lot of hot air, but no firm action. The 2006 admission cycle will proceed according to the (un-amended) Supreme Court verdict.

More science


Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll informs us that arxiv.org, the preprint service that physicists love so much -- and have come to depend so much on -- now allows trackbacks, and therefore has started resembling blogs.

At the same blog, Sean's co-blogger, Clifford Johnson, is running several on 'greatest physics text book', 'greatest popular science book', etc. So, go there if you wish to nominate a book.

At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers did a thorough fisking job on Deepak Chopra. The overwhelming number of visitors he received moved him to muse about science bloggers role.

Science


Over at Notional Slurry, Bill Tozier has a nice post, in which he defines 'science' as 'a way of quickly recovering from stupidity'.

[...] We as scientists expect people to be wrong, including ourselves. The scientific process is not about finding the truth, but rather noticing and recovering from the stupid mistakes we make, faster and better than anybody else can.

Cyberhistory


A discussion item over at Slashdot informs us that 24th of this month (just three days ago) marked the 10th anniversary of the launch of 'Windows 95', and gave a link to this Washington Post story about the launch event.

Those of you interested in slices of history that you lived through might want to check out that WaPo story. Recent posts on cyberhistory are here and here.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Monsoon forecasts


An update to the controversy about DST's decision to ban monsoon forecasts by organizations other than IMD, the 'official' organization.

Professors Sulochana Gadgil and J. Srinivasan, both from the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at IISc, have a guest editorial (PDF) [thanks to reader Guru for the link] about this controversy in a recent issue of the journal Current Science. Towards the end of their balanced editorial, they make this valid point:

... the meteorological predictions are more akin to results of research on impact of various factors (including drugs) on health, than those in mathematics and particle physics in which the preprint culture has thrived.

After discussing the issue of monsoon forecasts from many different points of view, they conclude with this sensible recommendation:

In order to ensure accountability and transparency, it is necessary to stipulate that forecasts from models can be made public, if and only if, information about the performance of the model and the objectively assessed error levels is included. After all, when a company makes a public offering, it is obliged to state the potential risks. Once the responsibility of including such information is accepted, freedom to make the predictions public, irrespective of whether they are generated by an agency of the government or private enterprise, should not be curtailed.