Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Psychological hot-wiring, subliminal seduction


Or, just priming. Whatever you call it, you will find quite a few examples (some of them spooky) of interesting behaviours that are evoked using cues that do not register consciously at all. Here's a famous one that got quite a bit of play last year:

... In one 2006 study, for instance, researchers had Northwestern University undergraduates recall an unethical deed from their past, like betraying a friend, or a virtuous one, like returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically “cleanse” their consciences.

Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.

Emoticons


NYTimes' Alex Williams uses the widespread use -- some would say indiscriminate and inappropriate use ;-) -- of emoticons to dig a little into their origins:

Though we think of emoticons, or “smileys,” as an Internet-era phenomenon, their earliest ancestors were created on typewriters. In 1912, the writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a new punctuation device called a “snigger point,” a smiling face represented by \__/!, to connote jocularity.

The first commonly acknowledged use of the contemporary emoticon was in 1982. Scott Fahlman, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was linked to an electronic university bulletin board where computer enthusiasts posted opinions on matters as divisive as abortion and mundane as campus parking.

In one thread, a wisecrack about campus elevators was misinterpreted by some as a safety warning, so Dr. Fahlman suggested using :-) as a way to indicate jokes and :-( for remarks to be taken seriously (the latter quickly morphed into a signifier of displeasure).

Here are a few 'extended' emoticons that I learned for the first time. They look okay only with serif fonts, so let me see if I can wing it:

  • This is for Homer Simpson:~(_8^(I)
  • And this one is for Ronald Reagan: 7:^]

Indian users of MIT's Open CourseWare (OCW)


Vijaysree Venkatraman has an op-ed in the Hindu about some of the beneficiaries in India of MIT's Open CourseWare, which "provides those with Internet connectivity free access to some 1600 courses taught at the 142-year-old campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Here's an appreciative comment, attributed to a high school student:

“The day I become a big man I will give MIT a million dollars for this.”

Monday, July 30, 2007

Debunking Kiran Bedi


Kiran Bedi has been in the news ever since she became India's first woman IPS officer (in the seventies?), and she has enjoyed a largely positive coverage. In the past week or so, she has chosen to put up a high-profile fight against not getting Delhi Police's top job (worse, a junior got the job!), and media have been quite supportive in this fight too. Given this background, this column by Pankaj Vohra comes as a surprise:

The myth about her ‘excellent track record’ can be shattered if one follows her performance as a police officer. Bedi must be one of the very few IPS officers in the country who has not been awarded the two medals — the Police Medal of Meritorious Service (after 15 years service) and the Police Medal for Distinguished Service (after 21 years), which everyone gets as a matter of routine. She has had difficulty in completing her tenures anywhere. She has always left her postings under circumstances which would have attracted extreme disciplinary action had Bedi not been a woman and media darling.

For instance, she was in Goa during the CHOGM in the early 1980s and left her post after a disagreement with the Secretary, R&AW and DIB without informing her immediate superior. She was in Mizoram where an agitation erupted because of her and she left for Delhi quietly without informing her boss who discovered to his horror that the operational officer was missing from her post only when he inquired about her the following day. In Delhi, she had a controversial tenure in the West District. As Traffic DCP, she is remembered as “Crane” Bedi, but she had to vacate the position on account of her mishandling of the traffic problem.

Vohra goes on to list a whole lot more of Bedi's mistakes and official 'indiscretions' (as he keeps referring to them) to back up two related claims. The first is that "a male police officer may not even have been part of the IPS with so many indiscretions in his record," and the second is that "gender has always worked in her favour, never against her." Needless to say, these are sharp words indeed.

In private industry, if you are passed over for a promotion, you face essentially two choices: accept the verdict and work with the new boss, or leave the company. You will be laughed at if you go public with grievances such as a junior getting the job you coveted.

In the public sector, however, you can appeal to Administrative Tribunals when you feel you have been treated unfairly, and 'seniority' seems to hold some sanctity. It's possible that Bedi has already taken her case to such a body. If so, I don't quite see the point of her case being discussed in public, since we -- as outsiders -- have very little knowledge not only of how our administrative set up functions, but also of how one specific person's record stacks up against another's.

Bedi herself seems to have set in motion this round of 'trial by media,' and I am sure she's busy preparing a rebuttal to Vohra's column. We'll wait and see how she responds.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Onion News Network is a treasure


Check it out. Most 'news stories' are just a minute or two, and all of them are great fun. For example:

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Breaking the glass ceiling from above


In Norway, since 1988, there must be a minimum of 40% of each gender in publicly appointed committees, boards, and councils, and from January 2008 females will have to make up at least 40% of all shareholder-owned companies' boards of directors. The French Parliament passed legislation in 2001 mandating gender parity in party lists for a variety of elections. In Spain, in 2004, 50% of the newly elected Prime Minister Zapatero's cabinet appointments were women. Furthermore, in March 2007, the Equality Law was passed, imposing gender parity (at least 40% of members of each gender) in all selection committees in the state administration, party lists, public organisations and related firms. Private corporations also received governmental guidelines towards greater participation of women on boards.

This is from this post at VoxEU, that goes on to explain the rationale behind such quotas and looks at the available evidence for their efficacy.

* * *

An earlier post at the same blog explored the role of technological progress (medical advances, in particular) on enhanced participation of women in the labor market. This study leads to some interesting conclusions indeed:

One important lesson from this analysis is that gender equality in the labour market is intimately linked to equality in the household division of labour. Policies aimed at reducing gender disparities in earning opportunities are likely to fail if they do not include provisions to reduce women's contribution to home production relative to men.

Many countries are discussing the introduction of more generous maternal leave policies to help women reconcile their maternal and professional roles and reduce their disadvantage with respect to men. Our analysis suggests that such policies may well be counter productive. Generous maternal leave policies reinforce the division of labour that underlies the mechanism by which women are offered lower wages. This is likely to further depress women's professional advancement. Sweden seems to have moved in the right direction with the introduction of a father's month requirement that compels fathers to take at least 30 days of parental leave. By directly reducing the gender asymmetries in the allocation of parental responsibilities, this policy decreases the potential for statistical discrimination that leads to gender inequalities in wages.

Thanks to Mark Thoma (here and here) for the pointers.

Wall art of the wild sort


Check out these beauties. The pics are by Natasha Mhatre, IISc's ace wildlife photographer. There's a a lot more of her work at other sites.

Have I mentioned that she's working on a coffee table book on biodiversity at IISc?

Anatomy of expectations ...


Kuffir cuts open these curious things called 'expectations':

you think so little of me- that is the problem. you think so little of me that you feel i don't even deserve political freedom (because 'poor, illiterate people cannot meaningfully use their political freedom'- don't you mean 'sufficiently poor' people like me?). political freedom that would help me influence the way people like you look at people like me, no matter how you think of me. am i wrong if i say you make me think of other, more famous, worthies who had very similar ideas about who deserved political freedom and who did not?

i repeat, the problem is not that you expect less of me but that you think less of me. and as long as you carry this contempt, much like you carry your cherished surname, across centuries and continents and careers, you'd always have low expectations of me.

IIM-B's "trade secret" is out


Sharath Rao points us to yet another RTI success story. Following an order from the Central Information Commission, IIM-B has now coughed up the ingredients of its secret formula for selecting students for its MBA program:

... [It's] your Class X and Class XII results that account for more — 25% of the final score; your Bachelor’s degree 15%. The factor with the maximum weightage is your performance in group discussion (GD), GD summary and personal interview — 35%. The balance 5% depends on work experience and whether you have taken a “professional course”.

And if you thought a B.Tech from IIT gives you an extra advantage, sorry. Only a Chartered Accountancy course qualifies as a “professional course.”

When it comes to work experience, three years will get you the maximum score depending on the quality and relevance of your job, anything more than three years means a lower score: you get zero points if you have slogged for 12 years.

IIM-B has the details of its selection process in this document (pdf). It would be interesting to see if the other IIMs respond by revealing their formulas too.

* * *

In its coverage of the same story, ToI reports that IIM-B had earlier stated that "its admission process was a 'trade secret'."

* * *

While we are on the topic of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, does anyone have an update on the Central Information Commission's order to IIT-KGP to reveal the details of its admission process?

Friday, July 27, 2007

Evolutionary significance of grandmothers


From this Scientific American article:

The evolutionary biologist [Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield] has also used this historical data set to ponder the conundrum of grandmothers. That is, why human women often live long after they are able to reproduce (on average around the age of 50), unlike almost all other animals. "If your ultimate purpose in life was to create as many offspring as possible or pass off as many genes," Lummaa says, "it's kind of strange that human women stop halfway."

One possible explanation is that having a grandmother around somehow improves the reproductive potential of her grandchildren. In fact, that is exactly what the researchers found when they reviewed stats on 537 Finnish women who had a combined total of 6,002 grandchildren. Adding in data from more than 3,000 French Canadians (who had a modest 100,074 grandchildren) confirmed that having grandma around to help enabled younger women to have more children sooner and with improved chances of surviving into adulthood. "That suggests that perhaps one reason why women do carry on living is because they are able to help," Lummaa says.

How about grandfathers?

If grandmothers improve survival odds, what do elderly males contribute? "If anything there's a negative effect," she says. This could be because of the cultural tradition of catering to men, particularly old men. "Maybe if you had an old grandpa, he was eating your food," she speculates. Or it could be that because men can continue to reproduce, they are less vested in anyone other than their own children. Another possible reason is that women can be sure that a grandchild is their genetic descendant, but it is more difficult for grandfathers. This may also have spurred them to seek second and even third wives rather than focusing on their children. "We are comparing men who married once in their lifetime[s] with men who are married several times," Lummaa says.

WTF: Canadian immigration edition


CBC News has obtained a copy of a letter sent from the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi to Singh's family stating that "the names Kaur and Singh do not qualify for the purpose of immigration to Canada."

From this story.

I found the link to this story in a very interesting discussion at Crooked Timber on Japan's strict rules about people's names. Specifically, husband and wife cannot keep their separate surnames; this rule forces Japanese couples to invent bizarre ways of getting around it -- including "registering their divorce".

I received some flak for the previous post ...


A quick note about the previous post. I'm getting flak from a couple of people for taking that quote out of context (more on this later). Nitin went on to ask me if I had any substantive criticism.

No, I offered no substantive criticism, because I didn't think the rest of Atanu's post deserved any. That expectations matter is a no-brainer, but a long-winded post (with the usual gratuitous lectures about George Akerlof's Nobel-winning research and Game Theory) that tries to imply that expectations are Very Very Important (if not All-Important) is to overstate the case. I mean, what about incentives that economists seem to love so much? Aren't they important, too? What about intrinsic motivation? What about institutions that could counteract the corrosive effects of low expectations? What, indeed, about ways in which people have overcome great adversities in spite of low expectations imposed on them?

Blaming expectations for the poor status of a group (particularly if the expectations come from within) is a profoundly -- and conveniently -- conservative idea; it affords us the luxury of not having to think about interventions that could help overcome the nasty effects of low expectations.

Heck, if Atanu wants to overstate his case, well, I have very little to say about it (except what I said above -- under duress!). But I can certainly highlight the quality of supporting evidence he has chosen to use. For example, if one wanted to cite some evidence for how expectations affect outcomes, one could have chosen examples of great teachers who transformed their students through a clear articulation of high expectations [Herbert Kohl is an example cited by many]. One could also cite other kinds of interventions that teach kids to change their perceptions about their own 'improvability' and lead them to perform at a higher level [see for example, the work by Carol Dweck].

Instead of references to such people or their work (there's tons of this stuff for anyone who cares to look), what we get is some boilerplate about how Jewish Americans and African Americans are predisposed to different life outcomes because they face different expectations. This 'evidence' comes to us with no ifs, buts or other qualifiers. This 'evidence' is presented to us as if the different expectations are the most important -- if not the only -- difference between these two groups.

A final comment about the accusation that I used the quote without providing any context. The context is what the link takes you to, and let me just point out that that adding that context makes Atanu's position more problematic. If African Americans are under negative expectations, and if expectations are Very Very Important (as Atanu's post claims), it leads to conclusions that are decidedly ugly -- particularly when they are not accompanied by qualifiers and disclaimers. I will just leave it at that.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

WTF: Atanu Dey edition


In the US, I noticed that Americans of African descent do much worse than Americans of Jewish descent in most spheres. Jews are expected to be good at whatever they do, whether scholarship or the arts, while blacks are expected to generally drop out of school, engage in crime and end up in jail. ...

These WTF-inducing words are from this blog ostensibly devoted to Indian economy.

* * *

If you feel like going WTF all over again, check out Vivek's catch.

Gender discrimination in academia


...[A series of studies] provided respondents with a portfolio, a job application, an individual essay, or other information that was attributed to a male or a female. Whether the task is to admit someone to a graduate program, to select someone for tenure, or to assign a grade to an essay, the studies demonstrate that documents associated with a male name consistently get a higher rating than the same documents associated with a female name. For example, Elizabeth Spelke and Ariel Grace report on a study of a tenure decision for a candidate with an average record. When the dossier was associated with a male name, 70% of the reviewers recommended tenure; when it was attributed to a female name, only 45% recommended tenure.

From this review by Marcia C. Linn Why Aren't More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence .

Thanks to Peggy (at the excellent Women in Science blog) for the pointer. Peggy also offers longer excerpts with a commentary.

Over 90,000 schools in India don't have blackboards!


The news report is here. Some highlights:

Nearly 90,000 elementary schools [about 8 percent] across the country do not have a blackboard, says a new government survey.

[...]

Of the schools without blackboards, 21,699 also did not have teachers, the study revealed. [...]

Besides blackboards, thousands of the schools also did not have buildings, drinking water facilities, toilets, boundary walls and playgrounds. [...]