Last post of the year ...

Well, these links have been living as tabs in my Firefox browser for quite sometime now. It's time I freed them from their tabbed prisons. Here we go:

• Pascal Zachary in NYTimes: Corporate Labs Disappear. Academia Steps In. On the other hand, there was this Jennifer Washburn article in Discover magazine titled Science's Worst Enemy: Corporate Funding.
• David Dobbs in Scientific American: The Choke Factor: How Stereotypes Affect Performance.
• James Owen in National Geographic: "Skeleton of Giant" Is Internet Photo Hoax.
• Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir in Nature: Professor's Little Helper; Janet Stemwedel's commentary on this piece has a more provocative title: The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.
• Government is Good: An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution, a web project of Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College.

That's all folks. I wish you and yours a very happy new year. See you all in 2008!

Red tape in India's higher ed system

Academicians point out that the only ones getting into the education sector are those who can circumvent archaic rules through political connections or the ones who have enough capital to pay for clearances. [...]

Clearly, the multiplicity of governing agencies at the local, state and central level forces institutions to go through a maze of bureaucratic and time-consuming procedures. In Maharashtra, for instance, to start a B-school, an institute first needs a no-objection certificate from the government. Then it needs to apply to AICTE for recognition and then a local university for affiliation. For funds, the institute needs to send an application to University Grants Commission (UGC) and for accreditation (not mandatory) to NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council). And finally, the college needs to send its approval letters and brochures to the state government's admission committee and fee fixation committee, the Pravesh Niyantran Samiti and Shikshan Shulka Samiti.

That's from this report by Hemali Chhapia of ToI.

Links ...

Ari Melber on how the US government can use social networking sites for surveillance":

... The Bush administration runs massive domestic surveillance of our telephone calls, conducted with extensive assistance by private companies. It has also pressed search engines like Google and Yahoo to provide broad data on users’ search habits to investigate trends in potential domestic crime – not inquires targeting individual users. And as I wrote, Facebook has already been tapped by authorities ranging from campus police to the Secret Service. So even leaving aside any clandestine surveillance that has not been reported in the media, the public record shows that social networking websites are ripe for government surveillance.

I think the fact that the government can deputize websites for national security surveillance and criminal investigations is one more reason to demand that social networking sites ensure that users understand how their information can be used -- and the limits on any notion of privacy “controls” online. ...

* * *

Over at the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres calls a foul on the Education Testing Service (ETS) for using its sloppy analysis to unfairly put the blame on single parent families for their kids' poor performance in standardized tests.

An important victory for Open Access

It's official: The US Congress has made Open Access (with a 12 month delay) mandatory for researchers funded by the NIH. Washington Post reports:

... [A] provision that would give the public free access to the results of federally funded biomedical research represents a sweet victory for a coalition of researchers and activists who lobbied for the language for years.

Under the bill's terms, scientists getting grant money from the National Institutes of Health would now have to submit to the NIH a final copy of their research papers when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. An NIH database would then post those papers, free to the public, within 12 months after publication.

The idea is that taxpayers, who have already paid for the research, should not have to subscribe to expensive scientific journals to read about the results.

Hat tip to Aurelie Thiele, who also has an extended commentary on the future of scientific publishing. She makes an important point: journals also serve as a signaling mechanism -- through metrics such as impact factor, citation index, etc.-- that allows non-scientists (in an admittedly imperfect way) to separate noteworthy, important research from pedestrian stuff. This leads her to worry that:

... [W]hile the end of for-profit publishing might not be a bad thing, its end before another quality-assessment is put in place certainly would be.

My first reaction is that this need not become a major concern. Internet has its own (open and democratic) mechanism for reputation formation. PLoS, for example, has a rating mechanism for all its papers; Nature also tried it for sometime (rather unsuccessfully). In social sciences -- where blogging has taken off among the academics in a big way -- blogs too promote important and high quality research. I am sure other, more robust mechanisms will eventually emerge. The only catch is that this will force folks -- who might otherwise want to hide behind their anonymous-reviewer status -- to come out in the open and participate.

Death of copyrights is just a decade away!

A simple experiment in audience participation reveals to NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue the truth: young people don't give a shit to copyrights. He draws the right conclusions:

I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)

I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?

My guess is that the young people have already given their answer to that question: the world will be a better place.

* * *

Thanks to Bora for the pointer. He titled his post "Information wants to be free."

Subrahmanya catches a case of self-plagiarism

We have seen this sort of stuff before: same figures (and other experimental results) appear in two papers from the same research group. Subrahmanya Katte, who discovered this stuff, has written to the editors at both the journals that published this work. Let us see how they respond.

Free textbooks, with ads

They are available for free downloads from their publisher with an appropriate name: Freeload Press. There are quite a few text books in the humanities and social sciences, along with self-help titles on programming languages, etc. Check out their Book List.

I learned about this from Brad DeLong's post on the new Principles of Economics by Timothy Taylor, described by DeLong as "The Best Intro Econ Teacher I Know."

Proficiency in English and Scientific Achievement

One could use many different metrics for comparing research output in different countries. My own preference is for averages (either in the number of papers or number of citations); a fancier version would perhaps normalize these averages using some relevant measure (GDP, per capita GDP, population, science spending). At the other end of the comparison spectrum, we have studies using the (rather small) number of Nobel winners.

A recent study by Université Catholique de Louvain researchers uses the number of Highly Cited Researchers as a criterion for ranking countries. It comes to some interesting conclusions, including one about the importance of English.

We show that the English proficiency effect is fairly strong. For example, if France were to improve its English proficiency by 10%, thus reaching the level of the Netherlands, the number of French HCRs would increase in the long run by 25%. However, besides their linguistic advantage, former UK colonies also display a higher efficiency in producing HCRs. For example, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US have, ceteris paribus, 76% more HCRs than other countries. In order to match such an advantage, EU countries should more than double their research budget, or more than triplicate their human capital stock, or increase their per capita GDP by around 40%. These numbers give an idea of the strength of the UK legacy or, maybe, of the choice of US-like academic institutions made in those countries. In any case, they suggest that a variable directly related to the quality of the design of academic institutions matters more than the R&D budget, the GDP level and human capital.

Amazing memory

Not the kind that allows its possessor to reel off the New York City phone book, but the autobiographical kind. In this piece, Amy Ellis Nutt talks about a couple of people who possess this sort of memory and about what researchers have learned from them. Here's an extract:

"If you take a random date," Williams said, "I can usually tell you what town I was living in, whether I was in school, what job I was working at, and then I can cross-reference to something else."

McGaugh asked, "So if I say the year is 1987, the month is July and the day is the 15th?"

"Well, I was working at the radio station at La Crosse and I had already been working on a play, backstage, on a production of 'Peter Pan.' But that particular date doesn't bring anything specific to mind."

"You didn't give the day of the week," said McGaugh.

"It was a Wednesday."

"So how did you know it was a Wednesday?"

"The Fourth of July was on a Saturday that year."

"How did you know the Fourth of July was on a Saturday?"

"Because it was two days after 'Peter Pan' closed, which was on a Thursday."

"Physics works!"

According to this NYTimes story, MIT's Walter H.G. Lewin may well be the physics professor with the largest international fan club. Reason? Videos of his   introductory   physics   courses that are available on the Open Courseware website. Here are some of the things he does in his lectures:

In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off. ...

[In another video,] “We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he has created.

The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.

“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.

Like other great performances in the world of sport or art, his 'performance' too requires intense practice:

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

“Clarity is the word,” he said.

Too much committee-work can push you into "learned helplessness" ...

Sometime ago, Animesh had a post about various methods of proving a theorem. I didn't find 'proof by committee' there, but legitimation by committee is a time-honoured technique in management circles. Here's Bob Sutton quoting from a letter:

I feel so used for having [agreed] to be part of the building committee. I haven't felt this way since I came to [the university]. Not one thing I said or argued for the whole time mattered. Not one thing the consulting company who did the early study of our needs for space mattered.....[My wife] warned me when I joined the committee that they would use the faculty committee for legitimation and do what they wanted anyway.

Sutton describes this phenomenon in greater detail, and offers some advice to administrators and committee members about the best way to deal with it. For the unfortunate folks who end up participating in the committee work of a totally pointless kind, he advises some devious means of protecting themselves: For example:

In some organizations, a more socially acceptable strategy is to say you will join the committee, but to miss most meetings, and to arrive late and leave early when you do attend a meeting. I guess this is a safer strategy for anyone who wants to be an effective organizational politician. These latter strategies mirror institutional theory -- you as an individual can engage in "symbolic" membership in the committee, and thus have little or no impact on a committee that, in turn, has little or no impact. That way, you can ingratiate yourself with your superiors by pretending to support the sham, and everyone is happy that you are playing the meaningless game so well (except perhaps for the users whose needs are completely ignored).

These guidelines are, I confess, fairly obnoxious. [...]

What kind of salaries did professors command in the 1920s?

Here's an ad for a professorship at IISc in electrical engineering. It appeared in the 18 August 1922 issue of "The Electrician" (which appears to be a journal of a professional society):

Applications are invited for the Professorship of Electrical Engineering in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Experience in teaching and research work an essential qualification. Salary from Rupees 1500 per mensem, according to experience, with passage and equipment allowance. A house is provided. The agreement will be for five years, and probably for three years thereafter. ...

What would be today's equivalent of Rs. 1500 per month in 1922? The mind boggles!

With its Centenary celebrations just round the corner, our Institute has made a great move in setting up a proper Archives Cell (you might want to read this Current Science editorial by Prof. Balaram on the importance of archives). The Cell has a basic website which I am sure will become better in scope and design in the months to come. It also organized a small exhibition of the Institute's history for the folks here; the recruitment ad at the beginning of this post came from the flier for the exhibition.

* * *

Did I mention that we recently looked at faculty salaries in the US at the beginning of the 20th century?

Selva's daughter

The Selvas have given their daughter a really cool name: Nidhi Nova. Check out his post on why they chose this name.

Of college students and monkeys

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated that monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test.

I am sure you want to know more. Go read all about it here.

PhD: How to cut the time to degree?

Harvard's shows the way. Bottomline: Penalize the faculty for unduly long PhDs.

A series of new policies in the humanities and the social sciences at Harvard University are premised on the idea that professors need the ticking clock, too. For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student. The results were immediate: In numerous departments that had for years had large clusters of Ph.D. students taking eight or more years to finish, professors reached out to students and doctorates were completed.