Saturday, September 30, 2006

First they came ...


When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

I found the Wikipedia   link to this powerful poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller over at reddit. I was wondering why this link had acquired over 390 votes (and counting) in less than a day. I mean, why now?

Could it be because of this?

And this? And this? And, perhaps, this too?

* * *

And, a similar situation from ancient history is explored here [thanks to Swarup for the pointer in the comments].

Montessori way of teaching


Our 5-year old son attends the Montessori section in a school that also offers a regular pre-KG-LKG-UKG program. We chose the Montessori simply because we heard -- and we really didn't know much at that time -- that kids learn stuff by doing stuff, learn from their peers as well as from their teachers, etc. We also heard that Montessori kids get to do a lot of things that regular schools (probably) don't pay attention to; for example, they do specific activities that help develop hand-eye coordination: practice with different kinds of buttons, pouring things -- rice and pulses at first, and water and oil later on -- from one container to another, safe use of scissors, and even cutting vegetables!

When we heard further that (a) our child did not have to carry books, and (b) there would be no homework, we were completely sold on Montessori. Our son's school -- Hymamshu, in Malleswaram -- has lived upto everything that was promised, and his teachers have been absolutely wonderful. We have been very happy -- and sometimes, amazed -- with his progress; needless to say, we whole-heartedly recommend the Montessori program (at least at Hymamshu) to anyone who asks us.

But, still, parents are parents; which is to say, as parents, we are, and will always be, paranoid. We worry if what we chose is the right thing. We worry if Montessori has some (hidden) deficiencies. We worry if Montessori will prepare our child adequately for the next step, which is going to be in a regular school. We worry, ... Well, you get the point.

This morning, I found this Scientific American report about a study done in the US, comparing Montessori kids with those from regular schools. Its contents are quite reassuring; which is to say, it will allow us to worry just a little less!

Friday, September 29, 2006

Joseph Stiglitz on making globalization work


From his Economic Times op-ed:

... I have complained so loudly and vociferously about the problems of globalisation that many have wrongly concluded that I belong to the anti-globalisation movement. But I believe that globalisation has enormous potential - as long as it is properly managed.

Some 70 years ago, during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes formulated his theory of unemployment, which described how government action could help restore full employment. While conservatives vilified him, Keynes actually did more to save the capitalist system than all the pro-market financiers put together. Had the conservatives been followed, the Great Depression would have been even worse and the demand for an alternative to capitalism would have grown stronger.

By the same token, unless we recognise and address the problems of globalisation, it will be difficult to sustain. Globalisation is not inevitable: there have been setbacks before, and there can be setbacks again.

From this interview in the Hindu [via Guru who also seems to be reading tea leaves bags these days]:

The prescription for making globalisation work is what is generally called "the Scandinavian model." That means high levels of investment in education, research, and technology plus a strong safety net. That of course also entails, as in the Scandinavian countries, a highly progressive income tax.

Far from making these countries less competitive, it has made them more so. Though it may seem a contradiction to conservative ideologues who think cutting taxes is the answer to everything, the fact is that people are more willing to take entrepreneurial risks if they can count on a safety net and if they have the training to be innovative.

In Sweden, the social democrats who fashioned this policy have just been turned out of office. But we should not read that as some kind of a rupture in the social consensus. The new, more conservative government will only be about fine-tuning the model.

Since Stiglitz mentions Sweden and the Scandinavian model, here's an interesting analysis of the recent Swedish elections. Among other things, the article shows how the neo-liberal parties in Sweden and Denmark came to love the Welfare State. [Link via Mark Thoma].

In the same interview, this is what Stiglitz says about what the east Asian economies did to benefit from a more globalized world:

The East Asians — first Japan and later countries like Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea and now China — understood that their gap with the advanced world was in knowledge and technology. So they encouraged direct foreign investment, insisting that technology transfer come along with it, and invested massively in education and infrastructure, largely through their own national savings, which are the highest in the world.

China, especially, has embraced globalisation on its own terms. It was slow to open up its markets for imports and even today does not allow the entry of speculative, short-term capital flows that so easily lead to boom and bust cycles in emerging economies.

But on top of this, China, like the others, has not relied on trickle-down wealth to lift up those at the bottom, but has sought to raising the poorest through government intervention. In the past decade and a half, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of absolute poverty there.

Now that a wealth gap is emerging because of sustained, rapid growth, the Communist Party has put the new policy of "harmony" at the top of its agenda, aiming to stop the gap from growing too large.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

IIESTs: Good news or bad news?


Many of you may be aware that seven engineering colleges, including my alma mater, the Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University, have been in the running for getting the IIT status. Yogesh Upadhyaya, who has been following their progress through various committees, reports today in Rediff that five of them will probably be converted into, not IITs, but IIESTs: Indian Institutes of Engineering Science and Technology (Subrahmanya too has commented on this development).

Two institutions -- the engineering colleges of Aligarh Muslim University and Jadavpur University -- have been dropped from this conversion, primarily because the respective state governments were unwilling to give up control over them.

The IIESTs will also get the status of Institutions of National Importance, which implies that they will have autonomous governance structures similar to those of IITs and be funded directly by the Central Government. This is the good news.

Is there some bad news? I believe so. First, their name is a silly mess: what the hell is an engineering science? But, more seriously, the IIESTs face a grim future right from their inception because of an onerous condition imposed by the government: they are being forced to offer only 5-year integrated masters program in engineering. Not only that, they are also being forced to scrap their existing 4-year bachelors programs. I am surprised by this condition because the IIT experience tells us that the 5-year integrated program is vastly less popular among the students.

Don't get me wrong. These five new IIESTs will, for the next decade or so, attract a good set of students into their 5-year masters programs because of their long track record of quality UG education. In the long run, however, the IIESTs will certainly have to compete with many more institutions offering high quality UG programs (indeed, Upadhyaya reports that three new IITs are likely to be set up in the next few years). By being tied to an utterly idiotic, poorly conceived, and ever un-popular 5-year masters program, the IIESTs risk being shunned by top UG students. This can mean only one thing: a steady decline and oblivion in the long run.

I hope the new IIESTs will fight hard to retain the flexibility to -- whenever it becomes necessary -- scrap the 5-year masters and go back to offering the tried-and-tested 4-year UG programs.

UN's CEO


I knew that Shashi Tharoor is one of the candidtates for the UN's top post, but I didn't know that there are seven of them. This is what I learnt about the process from the NYTimes:

The United Nations selects its next secretary general this fall through a series of straw polls. The third of these — the most decisive to date — will be held today. In the vote, the 15 members of the Security Council “encourage,” “discourage” or venture “no opinion” on each of the candidates. To win, a candidate must have at least nine encouraging votes and no discouragement from any of the five permanent members of the Security Council. The winner is then presented to the General Assembly for ratification.

That link will also take you to articles by five of the candidates (including Tharoor), responding to (at least) two specific questions:

First, we asked them to discuss an avoidable mistake the United Nations had made within the last five years. Second, we asked them what major reform they would undertake as secretary general.

Nobel season is here


With the first of the 2006 Nobel announcements just four days away, the NYTimes leads off with a rambling story about, um, a lot of things: Nobel's career, his (almost) botched will, the setting up of the Prizes (after a bitter fight over his will), the impeccable -- and year-long -- process of choosing a winner, some of the controversial Prizes in medicine, etc. Do check it out:

Large philanthropic gifts to science were rare in Nobel’s day. Moreover, establishing annual international prizes in any field was novel. And controversial. News of Nobel’s plan sent shockwaves through Sweden with the intensity of a dynamite blast.

Bitter members of Nobel’s largely disinherited family fought the will in court. Scorn was heaped on Nobel’s gift, the equivalent of $9.5 million and one of the largest fortunes of his time, by the king of Sweden, Oscar II; newspapers; political leaders; and other Swedes.

Nobel’s earnings came from his 355 patents and factories in many countries. Swedish leaders vehemently opposed dispersing a Swedish fortune to the rest of the world. Among their reasons: it was immoral, particularly at a time when many Swedes were impoverished.

King Oscar II changed his mind after the Nobel Foundation was established in 1900, in part because he thought publicity about the prizes might benefit Sweden. ...

The NYTimes story by Lawrence Altman also has a section about information from the Nobel Prize archives (released fifty years after the event, and with access restricted to 'qualified' individuals ;-):

Michael Bliss, emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto, was one of the first people to examine the archives, in 1981, for his book “The Discovery of Insulin.”

The records, mainly in Swedish, were “very thorough,” he said in an interview, and “for comic relief, for each year there was a thick box labeled self-nominations,” which are ineligible.

Politics can play a role in selecting prize winners. Professor Bliss said that in his review of the Nobel documents, “you could see how people would carry on campaigns on behalf of certain people, getting others to write supporting letters and so on.”

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Best sentence of the week, so far


Reservation becomes a national issue only when it upsets upper castes.

This sentence appears in Yogendra Yadav's ToI op-ed on the need for sub-dividing the SC quota, so that the benefits are not 'cornered' only by the better off (and better-prepared?) communities among the Dalits.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Department of 'Huh?'


Two days ago, Mr. Kapil Sibal, Minister of Science and Technology, inaugurated the Nanotech lab at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. This is from the Hindu's report:

Mr. Sibal said though India was a late starter in the field of nanotechnology, it had made a beginning to tap the huge potential of nanotechnology, and the products developed under this science should be applied to remove the woes of over 547 million people living below the poverty line. [Bold emphasis added]

Affirmative action for the rich: Part 2


The Economist reviews Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates [link via orgtheory.net]:

The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidates—George Bush and John Kerry—were “C” students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit “legacies” (ie, the children of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has something called a “Z” list—a list of applicants who are given a place after a year's deferment to catch up—that is dominated by the children of rich alumni.

University behaviour is at its worst when it comes to grovelling to celebrities. Duke University's admissions director visited Steven Spielberg's house to interview his stepdaughter. Princeton found a place for Lauren Bush—the president's niece and a top fashion model—despite the fact that she missed the application deadline by a month. Brown University was so keen to admit Michael Ovitz's son that it gave him a place as a “special student”. (He dropped out after a year.)

Most people think of black football and basketball stars when they hear about “sports scholarships”. But there are also sports scholarships for rich white students who play preppie sports such as fencing, squash, sailing, riding, golf and, of course, lacrosse. The University of Virginia even has scholarships for polo-players, relatively few of whom come from the inner cities.

* * *

My previous post on this book is here.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Marie Curie's first Nobel


Some more excerpts from Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. We learn, on page 107, that the first physics Nobel went to Röntgen in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays, and the second to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman for their research into "the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomenon." We also learn that for both those Nobels, Charles Bouchard, "a doctor with lifetime nominating rights", nominated Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. I'm excerpting a key section of the narrative:

... The following year, in a stunning example of what it was to be a woman in science, a vicious sexism ripped away all pretense that Marie Curie might be accepted as an equal.

Four influential scientists collaborated on an official letter nominating Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Madame Curie was not mentioned. The letter contained a distorted account of the discovery of polonium and radium. It asserted that these two men, competing against foreign rivals, had "worked together and separately to procure, with great difficulty, some decigrams of this precious material." This in spite of the fact that Marie Curie's amazing discoveries were known throughout the scientific community and that three of the four men who signed the letter had been involved in her work and knew full well to whom the credit belonged. The most shocking of the four was Gabriel Lippmann, whom Marie had deemed a close friend and advisor. Lippman, however, had regarded Marie as an impoverished young student, not as a potential competitor.

There was speculation that Becquerel had influenced the letter in order to cast more credit on himself. One member of the Nobel science committee, Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a famous mathematician and chief editor of Acta Mathematica, believed that women in science were unappreciated and deplored Madame Curie's omission from the nominating letter. To test the waters, he wrote privately to Pierre apprising him of the situation. Pierre responded that if this nomination was serious, he could not accept the prize unless the Nobel committee included Madame Curie. Armed with Pierre's reply, Mittag-Leffler exerted his considerable influence to urge that Marie Curie's name be added to the letter of nomination. Certain adversarial committee members claimed this was impossible since the nomination letter had already been filed. It was then that Charles Bouchard reminded the committee that this was not strictly true since he had included Marie in his nomination for the Nobel Prize both in 1901 and 1902. By now the politics of the committee had grown so fraught that at last they added Madame Curie's name to the award. By this technical fluke, she was credited with "opening up a new area of physics research" and for her part in the most magnificent methodical and persistent investigations." ...

One half of the 1903 physics Nobel went to Becquerel and the other half was shared by Marie and Pierre Curie. The Curies, however, could not make the trip to Sweden for the award ceremony due to Marie's poor health. They did make the trip eventually (in April of 1905) to accept the award, and make the Award Presentation. Here too, there was a twist: "Pierre alone was asked to speak. He was seated on the dais, she was in the audience." Barbara Goldsmith adds:

This insult turned out to Marie's advantage since her husband, from the podium, could then give her full credit for her discoveries. In his speech "Radioactive Substances, Especially Radium", he mentioned Madame Curie's accomplishments again and again. ... Pierre pointed out that Marie alone had discovered radioactivity of these elements ...

Radium!


From Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie:

Minute dilutions of radium were added to tea, health tonics, ice creams, lipsticks, bath salts, costumes that glowed in the dark, and so forth. La Crème Activa, purported to contain radium was guaranteed to keep skin looking young. Curie Hair Tonic guaranteed no loss of hair. A bag containing radium worn near the scrotum was said to restore virility; a Cosmos Bag was strapped to the waist for arthritis. Radium toothpaste was said to preserve and whiten teeth, a radium inhaler to increase the vigor and enrich the blood. A doctor calling himself "Alfred Curie" marketed Crème Tho-Radia. His advertisement showed a beautiful blonde woman with flawless skin bathed in blue light. [...]

One could buy a Revigorator -- a flask lined with radium to be filled with water each night to drink the following morning. Radithor, a drink containing one part radium salts to 60,000 parts zinc sulfide, was said to cure stomach cancer, mental illness, and restore sexual vigor and vitality. An American industrialist, Eben Byers, drank a bottle each day for four years, at the end of which he died in excruciating pain from cancer of the jaw as his facial bones disintegrated. The famous American Follies Bergère dancer Loie Fuller became infatuated with Marie and her discovery and wrote requesting some radium to create a costume. When Marie refused, Loie came to the Curies' house and performed a dance, her body lit by electric lights colored by blue cellophane filters -- the nearest she could come to a radium effect. Soon, in Paris, New York and San Francisco, theater and nightclub reviews featured women invisible but for the glowing radium paint on their costumes.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Money quotes on science


Albert Einstein:

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

Ernest Rutherford:

We don't have the money, so we have to think.

I found both these quotes in Barbara Goldsmith's excellent biography of Marie Curie: Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. [You can read the reviews of this book in the Guardian, and the American Scientist.] I plan post some excerpts from this book in the next day or two.

Faculty salaries ...


When it comes to the perception that faculty salaries are too low, China seems to be no different.

Link via Mark Thoma, a reputed pre-processor for economic news.

Google's quote of the day


Mark Twain:

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Sweden: Commentary on election results


The New Economist has a round-up of MSM commentary on the meaning of the Social Democrats's loss to the New Moderates in the recent Swedish elections. While the closeness of the NM victory (48.1 % of the popular vote against 46.2 % for SD) lends itself to a variety of interpretations, it also rules out a sharp rightward turn in Sweden's economic policies. I don't think the Welfare State in Sweden is in any danger of being dismantled.