Monday, October 03, 2005

Jacobs' experiments - Part 2


I think Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs is planning to write a Freakonomics-like book in sociology. After outsourcing his personal life (and liking it!), he ran another 'experiment': he "decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the [Wikipedia] site". From the C-Net story:

The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire's December issue. The original version was preserved for posterity.

Read the rest of the story here.

Link to the C-Net story via Chugs.

Professor's life


Here is a tale from someone whose experiences made her choose to become an ex-professor dump her job. [Update: She continues to be a professor, but at a different place. See her comment below.] Her problems arose not only from students, but also her superiors (HOD, Dean, Director ...). [via Desi Pundit]

Wired has a story about the website RateMyProfessors that is giving a lot of professors a lot of grief and sleepless nights. A typical bad rating is accompanied by this comment: "I learned how to hate a language I already know." After I read it, all I could muster was an "Ouch". [via Chugs'Sunday morning links]

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Amartya Sen on 'hunger in India'


Amartya Sen's Argumentative Indian has some essays which are only indirectly related to the book's main theme -- that India has been home to an argumentative tradition for well over two and a half millennia. Chapter 10 is one such essay : Class in India. The main focus of this essay, based on the Nehru lecture he gave in November 2001 in New Delhi (sorry, I couldn't find it online), is on what he calls 'friendly fire':

Many of the distributional institutions that exist in India and elsewhere are designed to defend the interests of groups with some deprivation (or some vulnerability) but who are not by any means the absolute underdogs of society. There is an understandable rationale for seeing them as 'friendly' institutions in the battle against class divisions. Yet if they also have the effect of worsening the deal that the real underdogs get, at the bottom layers of society, the overall impact may be to strengthen class divisions rather than weaken them. This is the sense in which their effects can be seen as 'friendly fire'.

Sen goes on to present two examples. The first one is on how the food policy adopted by our government(s) have done very little to mitigate the problem of hunger (the second one is on primary education, and on how -- again -- policy has done little to ensure everyone gets it at the right level and right quality). This part of the essay (at least big chunks of it) has also found its way into another essay which, thankfully, is available online. The following extracts are from the online source as well as from the book.

First, a quick description of (the magnitude of) the problem:

[...] Not only are there persistent recurrences of severe hunger in particular regions (the fact that they don't grow into full-fledged famines does not arrest their local brutality), but there is also a gigantic prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India. Indeed, India does much worse in this respect than even Sub-Saharan Africa. Calculations of general undernourishment -- what is sometimes called "protein-energy malnutrition" -- is nearly twice as high in India as in Sub-Saharan Africa. [...] About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished, and more than half of all adult women suffer from anaemia. In maternal undernourishment as well as the incidence of underweight babies, and also in the frequency of cardiovascular diseases in later life (to which adults are particularly prone if nutritionally deprived in the womb), India's record is among the very worst in the world. [source]

Then comes a scathing attack on some popular misconceptions and myths.

[...]it is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in the latter respect. There are, of course, many different ways of shooting oneself in the foot, but smugness based on ignorance is among the most effective. [source]

Sen goes on to look at the friendly fire aspect of this problem. His analysis revolves around the growing dissonance between persistent malnutrition and the amassing of foodgrain stocks -- well beyond (and as much as three times) the 'buffer stock norms. Do you want to know how much the stocks really mean?

To see it in another way, the stocks [in 2001] substantially exceeded one tonne of food grains for every family below poverty line.

Then he adds:

The counterintuitiveness -- not to mention the inequity -- of the history of this development is so gross that it is hard to explain it by the presumption of mere insensitivity -- it looks more and more like insanity. [...] What could explain the simultaneous presence of the worst undernourishment and the largest unused food stocks in the world (with the stocks being constantly augmented at extremely heavy cost)?

The essay goes on to show how the government policy was formulated to help an important section of the poor -- the small farmer. The overall effect of this policy on the true underdogs -- "casual labourers, slum dwellers, poor urban employees, migrant workers, rural artisans, rural non-farm workers, and even farm workers who are paid cash wages" -- has been devastating indeed. In other words, "friendly fire".

Along the way, he also points out that much of the [food] subsidy, in fact, goes to pay for the cost of maintaining a msasively large stock of food grain! He says:

Since the cutting edge of price subsidy is to subsidize farmers to produce more and earn more, rather than to sell existing stocks to consumers at lower prices (that happens too, but only to a limited extent and to restricted groups), the overall effect of the subsidy is more spectacular in transferring money to medium and large farmers with food to sell, than in giving food to the undernourished consumers.

The policy does not seem to have changed since 2001. Neither does the state of malnutrition (particularly among children).

Do read the online essay (Pages 1 and 2, and endnotes).

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Hmm, really? Since when?


Place: just outside the school where our four year old (fyo) is studying.

He and I are on our way out, when he stops to show me what he coloured today in class.

Me: "Hey, that's a nice oval".

Fyo: "Ayyo, Appa, it's not an oval".

Me: "Oops, what *is* it?"

Fyo (proudly): "Don't you know? It's an ellipse!".

Friday, September 30, 2005

Nano laptop?


We are getting more details about Nicholas Negroponte's " $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations". See a related C-Net presentation, that has absolutely gorgeous pictures of this laptop. It's truly wonderful, looks stylish, and has many thoughtful features built into it. At the end of it all, if the laptop does have all those features at such a low price, heck, I want one!

Having said that, I have to pour some cold water here. In all this excitement, we should not -- and I repeat, we should not -- lose sight of the bad aspects of Negroponte's initiative. I have already said why I think the 'laptop-for-poor-kids' meme is a bad one, and expanded on my views in my comments on Charu's post.

Finally, let me quote from the official website for this initiative:

How will these be marketed?

The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of "One Laptop per Child." Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt. Additional countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units (with appropriate financing).

Do you see, now? The idea is to sell millions of them to education ministers. If that's not stomach-churning, I have a soft-copy of 'Friday the 13th -- the 30th of September edition' that I am sure you will greatly enjoy.

Tabloids


'Amazing saga of the half-human Bat-Boy'

'Saddam Hussein’s efforts to clone dinosaurs for use as weapons of mass destruction'

'Two-headed alien babies'

'Miracle Baby: Love Overcomes Incredible Odds for Paralyzed Wife and Her Gentle Giant'

Here I was, reading Scott McLemee's scholarly take on the tabloid press; all the above 'headlines' are taken from this column, which has pointers to conferences and university courses devoted to tabloids. The whole thing was quite amusing in a charming -- or, should I say, academic? -- way, and I wasn't thinking in terms of blogging about it.

Then I found a link in McLemee's column to a tabloid 'news story' that hit close to home, and I thought, "Gee, the world (well, all five of you, anyways) ought to know!"   More importantly, enquiring minds in you would certainly want to know. Even more importantly, there are these dark, nether regions -- a counter culture, if you will -- called academia in which there is too much going on. The public, who fund most of our activities, really need to know. The student community, from whom we recruit the future members of this ashram, must know about these happenings, so that they can make an informed choice.

So, ladies and gentlemen, [can I have the drum roll, please ...] here is a great story that represents the best in tabloid journalism. We need more of such stories so, as a great commander-in-chief put it so eloquently, "bring'em on".

Oh, btw, don't forget to read McLemee's piece. ;-)

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Cool


If you visit a blog that shamelessly calls itself 'nanopolitan', you would expect (at least once in a while ;-) some nano stuff, right? I think meeting (nay, exceeding!) such customer expecations is easy as long as there are sites such as this that I can link to!

Before I forget, I got the link to that gallery from this fine blog. Oh, btw, I got the link to that blog from the Carnival of Tomorrow, the link to which I got from the Dynamist Blog, which I read regularly. Phew, that was some chain-linking!

Whether you visit all these other sites or not, do visit the gallery and get amazed!

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Road signs ...


Charu and Manish have posted some of the interesting road signs they have seen during their recent travels. The most interesting one that I remember is not a real sign at all; I found it in a Ponnappa cartoon in the Bangalore edition of ToI a few (perhaps six?) years ago.

In the cartoon, you see two guys from behind them; one of them is driving a car. Through the windshield, you also see a 'road' sign. It reads:

Caution: Road Ahead!

Business awards


Since we just talked about awards, here is another set of awards: the Economic Times Awards for corporate excellence.

What I want to highlight is that the Business Woman of the Year award went to ICICI Bank's trio of Lalita Gupte, Kalpana Morparia and Chanda Kochhar. This organization is probably unique among India's corporates in having three women in its top management team. If you included ICICI Ventures (headed by Renuka Ramnath), you have four big hitters in the ICICI team!

Oscars of Indian science


In the sciences, and at the international level, Nobel is the most prestigeous of all prizes and awards, because (a) it is a recognition from peers, (b) it is rare (just one award per year in each field), and (c) it comes with a big pot of money. India instituted last year its version of the Nobel -- the India Science Prize that comes with 2.5 million ruppes. This prize went to Prof. C.N.R. Rao in 2005.

Many awards retain a very high level of prestige even if they offer little or no money. To the winners of these awards, peer recognition and rarity count for much more than the money. In the Oscars, for example, money -- if there is any -- is completely irrelevant.

What are the equivalent of the Oscars in India in the fields of science and engineering? The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes, awarded by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to scientists under 45. These prizes do come with some money; but, at about a hundred thousand rupees, it is not much (but nice!).

The SSB Prize winners for 2004 and 2005 received their awards in a New Delhi function today. Many of you probably saw the huge CSIR ads in today's newspapers, with photographs of all the Prize winners. Congratulations to them all!

The list of those who received their SSB Prizes today includes two colleagues from IISc:   Prof. S. Umapathy (2004) and Prof. S. Ramakrishnan (2005) in the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry. The 2004 list also features a friend, Prof. Madan Rao from the Raman Research Institute, just a kilometer from IISc. Special contratulations to them!

Read this Current Science editorial (from 1998?) on awards for Indian scientists (particularly the young ones).

Next in the ladder of prestige would be the Fellowship of the science academies; but there are more per year in a given field (after all, there are three science academies!) than the Bhatnagars, and they are of a different character -- they are meant more as lifetime achievement awards.

There is one other set of awards that the media go gaga over: the 'Padma' awards. In spite of their rarity (every year, just a handful of scientists/engineers get it), they command a much lower level of prestige than the Fellowships or the Bhatnagar Prizes. This is because of two reasons: (a) politicians' involvement, and (b) some controversy or the other that erupts every year (usually in the fields of arts and sports).

Back to the Bhatnagar Prizes. In spite of the high prestige they carry with the scientists and engineers, it is a pity that the mainstream media missed covering the CSIR announcement of this year's awards a few weeks ago. Sigh! When I tried Google news this morning, I found only one site: Chennai Online. Now that the Prime Minister participated in the awards ceremony this morning, I am sure all the newspapers will carry it tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Jigsaw puzzles ...


... in aid of explaining what science is and how scientists do it. does.

Nice.   Very, very nice.

Monday, September 26, 2005

A controversial academic


Okay, let's see how best to approach this sensitive topic.

There is this US university with a School of Public Health that houses the Department of Exercise Science (you've got to love that name ... ;-) offering a very popular course taught by an adjunct professor to an enthusiastic and appreciative audience of undergraduate students for 17 years. At the beginning of this semester, he finds that his contract has not been renewed.

Apparent reason? His course was deemed a little too, um..., detailed by some (two?) students last year. The course he has been teaching all these years is on human sexuality.

Read a dry recounting -- in the best traditions of academia! -- of this episode in this Inside Higher Ed news story.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

A New Yorker cartoon


[...] this one, seemed to us, to perfectly capture the irony inherent in a communications phenomenon that permits so many to say so little about so much. [...]

So says Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker. If you want to know what he is talking about, go to BusinessWeek's blog blogspotting, where I found this quote; the post also has two absolutely wonderful New Yorker cartoons.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Parenting


Let's face it: parenting is tough. Start with the arrival of an utterly helpless child that would turn even the strongest of hearts into jelly. Add to it the decline of joint family as an institution, and the rise of nuclear and two-income family as a modern-day reality for an ever-increasing number of couples. Throw in the guilt you feel because the child spends lots of time in others' care (creche, day-care centres, baby-sitters). Garnish it with an ever-decreasing family size -- when you choose to have only one child, you also get only one shot at parenting, so you'd better get it right. It makes your stomach churn, doesn't it?

A second, more lethal, source of pressure arises from the parents' fear of failure. You absolutely, certainly detest failure -- or, god forbid, being branded as a failure -- in the parenting department. The cost of failure can be pretty steep, indeed. The internet keeps reminding you (like it is going to do just now ;-) all the bad things that people say about parents in general, or about specific parents. You don't want your child to say or write nasty things about you; and, you certainly don't want some jerk to say awful things about you in the all too likely event that your child grows up to become a biography-worthy celebrity.

Given such an onerous and risky task, who do you turn to for guidance and advice? Parents, relatives, friends, books (written, of course, by experts), and, even strangers at toy shops.

There is just one small problem, though. Much of the advice you get conflicts with much else. Apparently, Joan Robinson once said to Amartya Sen, "whenever you make any generalization about India, the opposite is equally true". Any advice about parenting, it appears, is as valid as any other, including its opposite.

In the midst of conflicting advice, however, there is one constant view peddled by almost everyone: Parents have a strong influence on how the child turns out. But, do they?

In their wildly successful book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have a chapter on what makes a perfect parent. They discuss a whole lot of research in the area of what really matters in a child's academic performance, and they conclude that the parents' influence is largely through what they already are when the child is born (their genes and their life situation); more importantly, what the parents do after the child is born counts for very little. To paraphrase Levitt and Dubner, by the time you buy that first book (or, start browsing through the one that came as a gift), it is too late!

Surprising? Yes. But, I also find it tremendously liberating.

A caveat is needed here; Levitt and Dubner's argument is restricted to the child's academics; here is a critique. Gladwell's article, on the other hand, seems to cover all of a child's personality.

IMHO, this chapter alone is worth the book's pretty steep price of about Rs. 500 (BTW, the book's other chapters are also terrific). However, the end-notes in Freakonomics include some references to online resources, including this wonderful 1998 New Yorker profile of Judith Rich Harris by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of two recent bestsellers Tipping Point and Blink.

Gladwell quotes the first few sentences in Harris's book The Nurture Assumption:

This book has two purposes: first, to dissuade you of the notion that a child's personality--what used to be called 'character'--is shaped or modified by the child's parents; and second, to give you an alternative view of how the child's personality is shaped.

What is the alternative view? Do read Gladwell's piece. [Like, right now!] You can pretty much feel many of your parenting-related neuroses evaporate into thin air even while you read his article.

Update: This post was mangled by blogger probably due to some mistake I made; while I fixed things, I also made some slight modifications to the original write up.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Physics and stuff ...


Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a post on how even (even !) Einstein had trouble getting one of his papers accepted for publication by the great physics journal Physical Review. This episode is recounted in an article in a recent issue of Physics Today.

John Tate, the journal's editor, sent Einstein the comments made by an anonymous referee. A pretty routine procedure, but one that so upset Einstein that he sent this letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,

We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

Respectfully [...]

Read the Physics Today article to figure out who was on the right side of things in this dispute.

While we are on physics, Clifford Johnson, Sean's co-blogger at Cosmic Variance, has a post about a book on physics and comics (titled, appropriately, Physics and Superheroes) written by James Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota; a longer article about the book is here. Do read Caolionn O'Connell's earlier post in which Kakalios says in his comments:

The sneaky aspect is that there's not a single inclined plane or pulley in sight. Rather, ALL the examples come from comic books, and in particular, those cases where they get their physics right.

Talk about sneaky and inclined planes! Just this afternoon, we were talking about all those horrendously complicated physics problems one encounters in the Joint Entrance Examination conducted by the IITs. You know, ... , the kind of problems wherein you are supposed to use a magnetic cylinder rolling down an inclined plane to calculate the age of the universe ... or something like that.

While still on physics, and all the hardships it imposed on us during our adolescent years, I think it is about time we indulged in a bit of shaudenfreude? Read this NYTimes article on how two groups are fighting over bragging rights to the discovery of the tenth planet in the Solar system.