Friday, September 01, 2006

This post is not about the 100 dollar laptop


WSJ reports:

A few years ago, such programs, which aim to better engage and train students by giving them round-the-clock computer access, were introduced in schools across the country -- often with encouragement from the large computer makers, such as Apple and Dell Inc., that win the contracts. But now, some parents and educators are having second thoughts over higher-than-anticipated costs and the potential for inappropriate use by kids. At the same time, there is a sense that the vaunted benefits of constant computer access remain unproven. ...

[...]

Few comprehensive studies exist on whether these programs live up to their claims to boost achievement, in part because the initiatives are so new. A preliminary study on the impact of laptops in Texas middle schools released by the Texas Center for Educational Research this spring reported that technology immersion improved student attitudes and behaviors but had a neutral impact on student achievement.

Bold emphasis, of course, is mine.

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Link to the WSJ story via Slashdot.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Comfortable with not knowing the answer


Do you call yourself an atheist?

I prefer not to use the term. Although I guess I am an atheist. I just don't believe in God. I've always liked Thomas Huxley's term, "agnostic," by which he meant it's an unknowable, insoluble problem from a scientific point of view. By my personality, I'm comfortable with not having the answer to everything. I'm perfectly happy going through my day, thinking, I really wish I knew the answer to that but I don't. I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity. Most people get cognitively dissonant about having uncertainties and need to close that loop and have an answer.

That's from the Salon interview with Michael Shermer, who writes the 'Skeptic' column in the Scientific American. [Caution: Salon requires that you view an ad before you get to the good stuff. This interview is worth it.]

Here's a bit about his early experiences with religion:

I was in high school when one of my best friends talked me into being born again. So I just went along with it, and it seemed to work for me, although my stepbrothers and -sisters always gave me a hard time about being a Jesus freak.

Still, I felt that if I'm going to take this seriously, I should be proactive about it. That includes challenging people and speaking out. I even went door-to-door in Malibu. Although it was anxiety-producing to walk up to strangers' houses and say, "Hi, I'm here to tell you about Jesus." You were also supposed to tell people that you loved them. I remember telling that to a girl who actually liked me. And she took that the wrong way. I had to correct her. No, I don't mean it that way, I mean it in the agape way, the kind of love that C.S. Lewis talks about, the love for your fellow humans. I can't believe I did that. Although I guess in a way I'm doing the same thing, only now I do it through public lectures and books: "Hi, I'm here to tell you about Darwin."

Reservation


Two links:

First, The Statesman has a good article recounting the history of reservation in Tamil Nadu:

The first standing order on reservation (No 128-2) was passed in the Madras Presidency by the British government in 1854. The collectors were told to divide the subordinate appointments in their districts among the principal castes. Madras Presidency comprised the whole of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, parts of Kerala and Karnataka and a small portion of Orissa. The order was soon mired in protests by the then babudom and was not implemented.

The South Indian Liberal Federation (SILF), popularly known as the Justice Party ~ after the English daily it published called Justice) ~ which came to power towards the end of 1920, passed a new order (GO No 613) in 1921, reserving government jobs for various caste-based social classes. [...]

Next, the Hindu reports on the legal case against Tamil Nadu's 69 percent quota-regime which violates the Supreme Court-mandated upper limit of 50 percent.

The Supreme Court will go into the constitutional validity of the Tamil Nadu Reservation Act providing for 69 per cent quota in educational institutions and employment.

A nine-judge Constitution Bench will also examine the validity of the subsequent law enacted by Parliament to include the Act under the Ninth Schedule for taking away the court's power of judicial review. The Bench will hear a batch of petitions questioning Parliament's powers to enact laws and include them in the Ninth Schedule. It will examine whether an earlier five-judge Bench decision "that all Constitution amendments by which additions were made to the Ninth Schedule on or after April 24, 1973 [when judgment in the Kesavanand Bharti case was delivered] will be valid only if they do not damage or destroy the basic structure of the Constitution" is correct or not.

'How do you want to go out?'


In an admirable move, the Kannada movie icon Raj Kumar had pledged to donate his eyes on his death. When he died a few months ago, his family honoured his pledge. Narayana Nethralaya's chief, Dr. Bhujang Shetty, and his team did the eye-harvesting. [Full disclosure: Padma, my wife, is a consultant at NN.] Among cine stars, I know Kamal Haasan insists that the members of his Fan Club must pledge to donate their eyes.

Well, this is the limit of my imagination about what people might want to do with their 'bodies' after their death: donate their bodies to be used for some medical purpose or the other. To my great surprise, I found the following in Janet Stemwedel's review of Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's book Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death:

... [It] is a book whose author shares her surprise at some of the non-standard ways for dealing with human remains. Want to be mummified? Get in touch with Corky Ra to prepay (and get your $60K ready). If you feel a connection to the sea, you can get your ashes scattered over it (helping a pilot make ends meet in a post-9/11 world), or, you can have your ashes mixed with cement and cast into a "reef ball", then placed in the sea as part of a reef-building program. Want to help protect open space? Arrange to be buried in a "green cemetary" frequented by hikers and protected by developers. (Also, if you want to be good fertilizer for the native plants, opt for whole-body burial -- hold the embalming -- rather than cremation.) A bit of an exhibitionist? Perhaps you'd like to sign up for post-mortem plastination so you can tour with a "Body Worlds" exhibit.

Or maybe you'd like your ashes to be pressed into diamonds. [...]

Fascinating stuff!

Oscars of Indian Science: 2006


Yes, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Prizes have been announced for the year 2006. Some of my thoughts appear in a post over at nanopolitan 2.0. Comments are welcome there.

The title of the post is a hold-over from last year.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Kerala government says no to Micro$oft


What is it about the word 'communist' that makes certain brains go mushy? Take a look at this NYTimes story conflating two recent decisions by the Kerala government: banning Coke and Pepsi, and promoting the use of Linux and Open Source software in public institutions.

In a new attack on multinational corporations, the Communist government in India’s southern state of Kerala is campaigning to eliminate Microsoft from use in public institutions, just weeks after it imposed a ban on Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

A couple of paragraphs later, the conflation shows up again, in a decidedly alarmist avatar:

The news will further unsettle foreign investors in this state. Also this month, Kerala imposed a sweeping ban on the sale and production of Coke and Pepsi ...

I am willing to admit that a part of the blame must go to the government of Kerala. When some of your decisions -- like banning Coke and Pepsi -- are patently loony, they colour the prism through which the world sees your other decisions. Yet, it shouldn't absolve the reporter -- Amelia Gentleman, in this case -- of the duty to get the essentials of the story right. Interestingly, she did get at least one essential piece right, except that she chose to bury it the most inessential part of the story -- at the very end!

Financial, rather than ideological, reasons may be at the root of the state’s decision to promote free software.

The Education Ministry has an annual budget of 40 million rupees, or $1.86 million, to promote computer technology among the one million students, aged between 5 and 15, currently at school — a sum that will be stretched as Mr. Baby attempts to fulfill his ambition of making all the state’s “schoolchildren computer literate.”

In between, the story also mentions Microsoft's 'concessional' pricing for schools: $25 to $30 for the Window$ operating system; even this price is about 10 to 20 percent of the cost of a low end PC. As an 'enlightened' -- even if Communist! -- consumer, doesn't the Kerala government have the right to choose the less expensive option? Why should alarmist interpretations -- attack on multinational corporations, unsettling of foreign investors, etc. -- override a simpler one?

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Update (31 August): In a post three days ago, Krish castigates the Financial Express for the same offence: leading off with a stupid reference to the cola ban, in spite of knowing the details behind the decision to use linux in public institutions.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Gosh, we are all going to lose our jobs!


Another title: Computational Materials Design: Is this some mega-hype, or are our jobs really in danger?

From the MIT news release:

The same computer methods used by online sales sites to suggest books to customers can help predict the crystal structures of materials, MIT researchers have found.

These structures are key to designing new materials and improving existing ones, which means that everything from batteries to airplane wings could be influenced by the new method. [...]

Using a technique called data mining, the MIT team preloaded the entire body of historical knowledge of crystal structures into a computer algorithm, or program, which they had designed to make correlations among the data based on the underlying rules of physics.

Harnessing this knowledge, the program then delivers a list of possible crystal structures for any mixture of elements whose structure is unknown. The team can then run that list of possibilities through a second algorithm that uses quantum mechanics to calculate precisely which structure is the most stable energetically -- a standard technique in the computer modeling of materials.

The Nature Materials paper from Gerbrand Ceder's group is here [subscription required].

Parenting chronicles


Just a bunch of quick links:

From the BPS Research Digest:

Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills.

Jane E. Brody in the NYTimes:

Refusal to go to school is not an uncommon problem; up to one-quarter of children do it at some point. While you might expect the problem to be severest when a child first enters school, it occurs most often and hits hardest at ages 10 to 13.

Malcolm Gladwell on the loony idea called "zero tolerance" (this is not quite on parenting, but still ...):

Schools, historically, have been home to this kind of discretionary justice. You let the principal or the teacher decide what to do about cheating because you know that every case of cheating is different—and, more to the point, that every cheater is different. Jimmy is incorrigible, and needs the shock of expulsion. But Bobby just needs a talking to, because he’s a decent kid, and Mary and Jane cheated because the teacher foolishly stepped out of the classroom in the middle of the test, and the temptation was simply too much.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Geeky undergarment


Here. Via Reddit.

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On an unrelated note, here's a Seed article/interview that answers this rather technical question:

So why have humans and most other animals evolved this bizarre, slightly dirty quirk of sexual reproduction?

Lies, damn lies, and opinion polls


How questions are phrased can mean wide shifts, even with wholly neutral words. Men respond poorly, for instance, to questions asking if they are “worried” about something, so careful pollsters will ask if they are “concerned.”

The classic “double negative” example came in July 1992, when a Roper poll asked, “Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?” The finding: one of every five Americans seemed to doubt that there was a Holocaust. How much did that startling finding result from the confusing question? In a follow-up survey, Roper asked a clearer question, and the number of doubters plunged from the original 22 percent to 1 percent.

From this helpful note from NYTimes' Public Editor to help readers "know something about polls — at least enough to sniff out good polls from bad."

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Grigory Perelman is a great hero


My friend Anant says in his comment on this post:

... I think Perelman is one of the great heroes of all time. We need more such. [...]

I entirely agree. The fight for academic credit, encouraged by metrics such as citations, can get ugly sometimes. Unfunnily enough, it seems to get uglier when the stakes are lower. When the rest of the world seems to choose ugliness, Perelman has the good sense -- and the guts -- to choose otherwise. We should applaud him for this choice.

George Johnson has some more on this theme in his NYTimes piece:

... It was not so much a medal that he was rejecting but the idea that in the search for nature’s secrets the discoverer is more important than the discovery.

“I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest,” he told a London newspaper, The Telegraph, instantly making himself more interesting. “I know that self-promotion happens a lot and if people want to do that, good luck to them, but I do not regard it as a positive thing.”

Saturday, August 26, 2006

The politics behind the Poincaré conjecture


Do read this excellent New Yorker article on "a legendary problem and the battle over who solved it". The article is by Sylvia Nasar (author of A beautiful mind, a biography of mathematician and economics Nobel winner John Nash) and David Gruber.

Here are two highly quotable quotes from the article:

Grigory Perelman: “It [the Fields Medal] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof [of the Poincaré conjecture] is correct then no other recognition is needed.”

Yuri Burago (Perelman's Ph.D. advisor): "He [Perelman] was not fast. Speed means nothing. Math doesn’t depend on speed. It is about deep.

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Thanks to Swarup for the pointer -- through his comment on an earlier post.

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw on the status of women in Indian companies


Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CEO of Biocon and India's richest woman, was interviewed by ToI on the occasion of Women's Equality Day. She says the right things for almost all of the interview, but drops this bombshell right at the beginning:

Can you think of financial incentives that government can provide women?

In the corporate world, women in the workplace may be encouraged by:

Extending additional subsidy for new industrial enterprises that employ more than, say, 30 per cent women in their workforce; offering special financial incentives for women entrepreneurs, particularly those from economically poorer sections of society; and offering subsidised vocational training for women from disadvantaged sections seeking self-employment.

The other suggestions are unexceptionable, all right. But, with all due respect to Ms. Mazumdar Shaw, her first suggestion is utter nonsense: "Extending additional subsidy for new industrial enterprises that employ more than, say, 30 per cent women in their workforce".

This suggestion frames the 'problem' in a totally counterproductive way. It takes the current practices (which are atrocious; see below) as a given, and assumes that 'incentives' will somehow get firms to do the right thing.

What we need is for the government to define the norms for fair and non-discriminatory employment practices, and punish the violators. In other words, we expect firms to do the right thing, and punish them for wrong-doing. Just as we punish them, for example, for polluting our rivers, or groundwater, or air. Discriminatory and unfair employment practices are no less corrosive than pollutants in our rivers.

Just how bad are the current corporate practices? In the same interview, Mazumdar Shaw says:

Women find it harder to get jobs than men, even if they are equally or better qualified. And when they manage to find one, they constantly have to contend with sexual discrimination and innuendoes at the workplace. In the organised sector, they are often overlooked for promotions.

In many companies, the glass ceiling is in evidence. [...]

Given the serious nature of these problems, what we need are regulations that (a) give exemplary punishment to companies (and their promoters) for practising discrimination, and (b) mandate disclosure of information such as:

  • number of men and women at different levels of the organization
  • number of complaints of discrimination and harassment filed by the employees in a given year, and how many of these complaints have been resolved.

As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

A lot of HR management theory tells you that, for changing a person's behaviour, reinforcing good behaviour is better than punishing bad behavour. As a five-year old's father, I can tell you that this is sound advice. However, firms are not persons! They -- and their managers -- need clear rules for good, normal, acceptable corporate conduct, and well-defined punishment for violations. This is the way affirmative action is implemented in the US: you are expected to be an equal opportunity employer, and if your employment practices are unfair and discriminatory, well, you don't deserve federal contracts! [See this site.]

Is there any role for incentives in altering firms' behaviour? Sure, there is. Use a rating mechanism to give gold and silver stars to firms that aim for -- and reach -- excellence in fair employment practices. Or, give awards to those firms that keep doing this consistently. Such awards, and gold and silver stars will give the good firms a chance to brag in their advertisements and on their websites. This is the way to go; not some shady bribes in the form of 'financial incentives'.

Good bye, OLPC. Hello, CM1!


The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), aka the 100 dollar laptop (actually, the current price is about $140), has a new name: Children's Machine (CM1) [via OLPC News]. Ars Technica has an update (with quite a few links) on the status of the project.

Ranking the world's universities


I have put down some of my thoughts on this topic, triggered by the latest ranking from the Shanghai group, over at nanopolitan 2.0.