Friday, August 31, 2007

IEB: The gift that keeps on giving


Tate a perfectly plausible and (probably) harmless stand or position, for which there may be reasonable arguments. And begin stretching it. To the max. Beyond its breaking point.

In this exalted blogging realm, the Indian Economy Blog has been a consistent outlier [see footnote]. Here's the latest episode in which Dweep Chanana argues that India should refrain from "[demanding] cuts in agricultural subsidies".

There is, of course, the argument that lower subsidies will raise prices and thus raise farmer incomes. But this reasoning is egregious in so many ways, I don’t know where to begin.

First, it ignores the fact that while there are several million farmers in India, there are over 1 billion consumers too. This is the classic problem with farm subsidies in general - they benefit a strong, well organized group of producers, but against the interests of the much larger, but disorganized majority of consumers. Worse, the result will be incentives for farmers to stay in farming - just when they should be encouraged to move into other forms of production. [bold emphasis added by me]

I think Dweep has failed some of his IEB colleagues in not going far enough. Here's how we can stretch this argument even further.

We should get rid of our totally counterproductive anti-dumping laws, and allow Asia's manufacturing biggies to just dump their goods at rock bottom prices: Barbies, GI Joes and Holi water guns, bicycles, motorbikes and cars, computers, mobile phones and MP3 players, ... ! It makes perfect sense because manufacturing accounts for only a small share of our GDP and employs a far smaller workforce than our agricultural does. On the other hand, we have a BILLION consumers who have a gucking-fod-given right to enjoy their cheap toys and low-priced gadgets and dumped cars! Worse, keeping manufacturing alive will only result in perverse incentives for the workers to stay in manufacturing -- just when they should be encouraged to move into our sunrise sector: BPO.

* * *

Footnote: We have encountered IEB insights on incentives for academics (even for those who participate in open source projects), on the role of expectations, and on how quotas may interfere with India's quest for excellence.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Ultra Violet


Have you checked out the new feminist blog -- Ultra Violet? I learnt about it through Anindita Sengupta, who is one of the bloggers at Ultra Violet. Here's an excerpt from the most recent post by Anita Ratnam:

... A nationwide study by Sakshi conducted a decade ago revealed that judges carry leanings, sensitivities, as well as prejudice and bias about women’s identities and roles. Through interviews of judges, lawyers, litigants and witnesses, as well as rigorous analysis of the texts of several judgments from five states (including Karnataka) the extent of judicial gender blindness came to light.

Husbands emerged as protectors and bread winners and wives as home makers in judges’ world views, with 79% of judges attributing this to Indian culture. With regard to domestic violence as well as sexual assault, 64% of judges felt that women must share the blame for violence committed against them with 27% of judges attributing domestic violence to a wife’s provocation (husbands never provoke wives!) and 40% of judges attributing it to alcohol. Only 27% of judges were able to see domestic violence as a result of unequal power relations in the family and 51% of judges felt that a slap to his wife by a husband on one occasion in the course of their marriage, does NOT amount to cruelty.

OLPC News celebrates its first anniversary


Congratulations to Wayan Vota on this fantastic achievement!

Can you believe that your favorite independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child "$100 laptop" is one year old this week?

Was it really just a year ago that we jumped onto the OLPC stage with the news of The Children's Machine 1 name change? Could we have grown from a handful of itinerant readers and three writers to over 1,500 decided daily viewers and a whole crew of contributors?

I am still in shock that OLPC News has propelled me into the blogging big leagues with this humble effort. Did I actually get on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon or 60 Minutes with Leslie Stall?

While we are on single-theme blogs, let me point you to another great one: Peter Suber's Open Access News.

Shocking


A child is taken to the health centre of a premier institution for emergency care and first aid. He is refused treatment, and he dies while being taken to another hospital.

Why was he denied emergency medical assistance? He was just a construction worker's child. In other words, he was not "officially" associated with the institution, so he was not 'entitled' to treatment at the health centre.

The following mail (which I received through an anoymous tip, but Mridula has confirmed the events described in it) is truly devastating, and needs no further commentary. Read on:


A Tragic Death at IIT Kanpur

Students of IIT Kanpur were shocked to receive a mail on Monday forwarded by the President of the Students' Gymkhana. The mail is attached below and a brief description of the later developments are given after the mail.

This is to share an incident which reflects the state of affairs for the disenfranchised in our Institute of excellence. I suspect this incident could not be reported by anybody in authority in the Institute and hence would not reach most of us. In this case too we got to know of it just by chance, as would be evident from the account, which makes us believe that occurrence of such incidents may not be a rarity after all, but that is just not shared with the community. A similar incident happened a month ago and the sequence of events are much similar. This account is to inform the community of this incident, acknowledge a feeling of collective shame that this could occur in an Institute which claims to be the best, and hopefully to evoke some collective action to prevent such occurrences in future. I am sure of the facts, as I got to know of it from a first person account and yet would not name anybody to avoid unnecessary personal vilification. This is the system and not the individuals involved.

On Sunday morning at about 4.15 am one of the canteen owners of one of the Halls was going back after work when he chanced upon a crowd of migrant workers at the security crossing near the Motor Transport/Air-Strip road. Apparently a boy, whose family had been employed in the construction site of the Environment Engineering building had been bitten by something poisonous (they were not sure whether it was a scorpion or a snake), in his sleep. The workers including the family consisting of the father a brother and a younger sister (his mother is no longer alive) had come to the SIS (institute security service) for help. The boy who was around 12-13 seemed to have been bitten around 3 in the morning and was alive though unconscious. The SIS guards (there were around 20-25 of them there) kept urging the workers to take the boy to the city hospital but refused to extend any help. The group of migrant workers did not know anything about the city, and this is usual because they are brought from far of places like Malda and Chhattisgarh by the contractor and are herded back at the end of their term. The canteen owner requested the SIS to lend their jeep for transporting the boy to the Health Center. The SIS guards refused to ask for their jeep (though several of them had their walkie talkie) and instead told this man that the boy would not be treated in the institute Health Center and hence has to be taken to the city. At this point the Canteen Owner decided to take the boy in his motorcycle, along with another worker to hold the inert form, to the Health Center.

At the Health Center, the person at the desk refused to entertain the case, when he came to know that the boy was not related to an Institute employee and was neither a student. The canteen owner tried to impress upon the person that the case was very serious and the boy may just survive if only the hospital intervened and the formalities and the expenses could be handled later. He also volunteered to get the health card of his father who is an Institute employee, as treating guests is routinely done in the HC. The attendant at the desk refused to comply but conceded to give the phone number of the doctor on duty. He told the canteen owner that he may call up the doctor to check if she would treat the boy, but not to mention that he was calling from the HC, but tell her that he was calling from one of the hostels.

The canteen owner called the doctor, who when she realized that it involved the child of worker, was extremely annoyed and said that this facility was not available to them. When the canteen owner pleaded that the case was serious and may turn fatal she apparently shouted 'which language do you understand?' and slammed the phone down. After that the canteen owner decided to take the child to the city and requested the hospital attendant to provide the services of the ambulance so that he could be taken as soon as possible and anyway it is extremely difficult to negotiate the GT road with an unconscious person. But he was refused even that. The boy was still alive till that point.

The rest of the story in short - the canteen owner took the boy to a nearby nursing home in Kalyanpur (about 2 kilometers from the institute) but that setup was not equipped to handle snake bites. Then he drove with the unconscious boy all the way to the Hallett (medical college) - the doctor on duty was much more prompt and immediately attended to the boy, but unfortunately he had already died. Then this canteen owner drove all the way back to the campus with a dead child in the pillion. As he ended his account 'bilkul kuch achcha nahin lag raha hai tab se - health centre hote hue ek chote se bachche ko marne de sakten hain - kyun ki woh ek mazdoor ka bachcha hai sirf isiliye?'

Students have investigated the reported event and their representatives are in possession of the names of all the people who are involved in this incident. The students arranged a condolence meeting yesterday evening and marched to the Health Center to demand an explanation from the Chief Medical Officer. After a long standoff and hours of deliberations with the authorities the CMO met the students but failed to answer many of the questions students had about the issue. Students are presently planning to get the whole campus community involved in the protest. What saddens the entire student community and me is the reluctance of the institute administration letting the entire campus community know and the tax-payers know about the incident. The reasons they give are beyond any sane argument. Witnessing a few incidents during my stay at IIT Kanpur has led me into thinking that this time too, the incident and related issues shall be buried to bask into what I feel is vacuous feeling of glory.

Open access and its discontents


Dr. Free-Ride demolishes some of the anti-open-access arguments put forward by an organization called PRISM - Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine. I certainly agree with her concluding thought:

... I'd be thrilled if this lobbying group would choose some word other than "Integrity" to fill in the "I" in their acronym. At least in the context of scientific practice, it's not clear that they understand what integrity means.

A science writer (and editor) is frustrated


... [S]cientists seem peculiarly bad at comprehension of the written word (they have many other virtues to compensate)

That's from Philip Ball commenting on a reader's reaction to his recent article on the Large Hadron Collider. Ball is an editor at Nature. His columns appear regularly in several Nature publications (and in other places too!), and he parks some of them on his blog. He has also written quite a few books; check out his website!

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Psychology of blink


NYTimes' Claudia Dreifus interviews Gerd Gigerenzer, German social psychologist known "for his breakthrough studies on the nature of intuitive thinking."

Q: Do you think of yourself as intuitive or rational?

A: Both. In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part. Now, in private life, I rely on instinct. For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she.

Q: Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is about a young man who doesn’t respond to his first best instinct, which is to avenge his father’s murder by killing his uncle. If Hamlet had listened to his gut, how would the play be different?

A: This is not a scientific kind of question. But the play would have been shorter and probably fewer people would have been killed.

Ajay Srichandra


In what appears to be a depressed state, Ajay Srichandra, a student in Biological Sciences at IISc, committed suicide yesterday. From the news reports, we gather that one or two friends and a teacher were beginning to be aware of Ajay's depression but, sadly, he ended his life before psychological help could reach him.

Suicides are always tough to deal with, and all I can do now is to repeat the rather un-original message I posted back in December 2005 (following the suicide of an IIT-K student): depression is treatable. There's a lot of very helpful (and academically validated) information available at the American Psychological Association on both depression and its opposite, emotional health. See, for example, this overview on depression. Another recent article talks about prevention strategies such as teaching school kids anti-depressive thinking.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Anthology of Dalit Poetry


Over at Blogbharti, Kuffir has posted a letter from Dr. K. Purushotham (Associate Professor of English, Kakatiya University), who's working on an anthology of Dalit poetry. Specifically, Purushotham's looking for help with translating these poems from Indian languages into English, and with editing them.

See Kuffir's post for more details about how you (or anyone you know) can contribute to this project.

The field where women enjoy a 4:1 majority


In American universities, women outnumber men by a margin of about 3:2. Since their representation is low in science and engineering (in general), their numerical advantage in humanities and social sciences is better than 3:2. Thus, this news about a scientific field being "predominantly female" came as a big surprise:

While men still outnumber women in scientific fields such as computer science and engineering, the field of veterinary medicine is well on its way to becoming predominantly female, The Boston Globe reports.

The reporter, Sarah Schweitzer, notes that 79 percent of the students at the 28 veterinary schools in the United States are female. The ratios are even more skewed at some schools “such as Tufts, where last year 89 percent of its first-year class were women; at Michigan State and University of California-Davis, 88 percent and 81 percent, respectively, of the incoming classes are women,” she adds.

The Boston Globe report is here. Thanks to Arun for the e-mail alert.

Out of body experiences


They can be induced using some cool gadgets and clever illusions. Do they cease to be spooky now, or have they become spookier?

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies. [...]

[Usually, ... ] sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Washington Monthly's ranking of US universities


Washington Monthly has been ranking US universities based on its own methodology (which favours indicators related to social mobility, service and research -- as measured by the number of PhDs), which produces results that are dramatically different from those of the US News. For example, the top twenty in the WM list is studded with state schools while the USN list has none. And four University of California campuses (LA, Berkeley, San Diego and Davis) figure in the top ten!

FWIW, here's the rank list (pdf) You can read the accompanying article and their methodology for further details.

Annals of Absurdity: China's new regulations on reincarnation


In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

Do read the story for a better understanding of the underlying motives for China's regulatory overreach.

Thanks to Dhimanth for the pointer.

Are bloggers like real journalists?


Not all bloggers, for sure. But there are quite a few whose work would qualify as journalism -- in the sense of reporting -- of both news and investigative kinds. Want some examples? Take a look at journalism professor Jay Rosen's stinging response to a clueless op-ed in LATimes. Among the examples, this is my favourite:

2003 to present. Groklaw becomes the go-to source for coverage of SCO vs. IBM. Law blog -- one obsessive blogger, plus readers -- takes on saturation coverage of key lawsuit involving open-source software, becomes an authoritative source of knowledge for the case's participants, who have never seen anything like it.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

All academics in India belong to the top 4 percent of the population


Arjun Sengupta, Chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, writes about the staggering number and the sorry status of the aam aadmi in India:

... [The] total number of people in India belonging to the poor and vulnerable group having a daily per capita consumption of less than Rs 20 in 2004-05 was 836 million, constituting about 77 per cent of our population. By all means, they constitute our aam aadmi.

You really ought to read that column for an articulation of what our government can -- and should -- do for the aam aadmi.

* * *

I want to take Sengupta's column in a different direction. When you read his column, do keep an eye on the definitions of the six classes (income groups) of people. The middle income group is defined as one with a per capita consumption of around Rs. 37 per day; some 210 million people (19.3 percent) are in this group.

The high income group (which has 43 million people, forming 4 percent of the population) is defined as one with a consumption of over Rs.93 per day. Let's look at this definition: on an annual basis, the per capita consumption comes to about Rs.34,000, or equivalently, Rs. 136,000 for a family of four.

Thus, a monthly consumption of about Rs.12,000 for a family of four makes that family a part of the 'high income group', and puts it in the top four percent of the population. In the government sector, who are the people who earn Rs. 12,000 per month and above?

In India's elite institutions (IITs, IIMs, TIFR, IISc, IISERs, ...), a freshly recruited assistant professor (typical age: under 35, with a Ph.D. and some post-doc experience) starts at a basic salary of Rs. 12,000 per month; the gross salary, with house rent allowance in a metro city, would be between Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 25,000 per month.

If you take lecturers, who are just a step below Assistant Professors (typically about 25-30 years of age, with a masters and above), their salary of about Rs. 15,000 per month would also put them in the 'high income' category. Lecturers are the entry-level employees in all the colleges in India.

Thus, all academics with a regular job (by which I mean a job that pays UGC-approved salaries) belong to the top 4 percent of the population.

Can you think of a developed country where junior faculty members find themselves -- automatically -- in the top 5 percent of the population by income? How do academics fare in, say, China?

* * *

Here are my earlier posts about faculty salaries in India.