Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Links ...


Academic publications edition:

  1. Stefano Allesina in arXiv.org - Computer Science: Accelerating the pace of discovery by changing the peer review algorithm. The paper describes a radically new model for publishing academic papers:

    In the alternative setting (AS, Methods), when an author produces a new manuscript, she will submit it to a first pool of manuscripts (e.g. a preprint archive). However, to be able to submit one manuscript the author must choose three manuscripts already in the pool for review. Therefore, more productive authors are also the more active reviewers. Once a manuscript in the first pool accrues three reviews, it is revised (increase in quality and novelty), and the reviewers are asked for a second evaluation. Then, the manuscript is moved to a second pool (ripe manuscripts). Every month, the editors of the journals evaluate the ripe articles. If an editor wants a manuscript for her journal, she will bid on it. At the end of the month, authors receive all the bids for their manuscripts in the second pool. In the case of more than one journal bidding on her manuscript, the author will choose that with the highest impact. If no journals bid on a manuscript, the author abandons it.

  2. Meredith Salisbury in Genome Technology: Is peer review broken?

  3. Franck Laloƫ and Remy Mosseri in Europhysics News: Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right... not even wrong! [Link via Anant]

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Management wisdom from Harvard President


In this interview, Prof. Drew Gilpin Faust addresses lots of questions on management and leadership. Here's the section where she talks about the importance of communication:

There’s one alum who was an expert in turnarounds, and so I asked him, “What should I do?” He said, “One lesson about change in any organization — communicate, communicate, communicate.” So I still think about that all the time, and the scale of communication from the president’s office is a very much more elaborate one. It’s a bigger scale. You’ve got to communicate in different ways.

I also spent a lot of time talking with people at the business school. Kim Clark, who was the business school dean at that time, was very helpful. The fundamental principle of Kim Clark’s advice, though, could be summed up in, “Invest in people, recognize that you are in the people business and you want to try to support people and make people able to do their best.”

For example, one of the things he was a very big advocate of was Harvard’s shift to promoting from within, not just hiring stars and having a junior faculty that didn’t stay, which had been the custom in an earlier time. Kim said: “You need to have everybody believe in the organization. You need to have everybody think that they’re part of it, and they’re being invested in, as well as being asked of.” So that was one major lesson from Kim that sticks with me.

Links ...


  1. Pallavi Singh in Mint: UGC under fire for too many 'deemed' tags.

  2. Uttara Choudhury in DNA: US universities have eye on India.

  3. IITs set up committee for incentive scheme for faculty

  4. An update on the legal troubles of Magadh University's vice-chancellor [previously].

  5. Video of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's talk at MIT (Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the link).

Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Lecture - 2009


In this year's edition (on 3 December 2009), Prof. M.S. Raghunathan will be speaking about the Queen of the Sciences. Mark your calendar.

Here's the announcement from my friend and colleague, B. Anantanarayan:

Prof. M. S. Raghunathan gives the 18th Meera Memorial Lecture

The 18th Meera Memorial Lecture will be given on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 6 pm at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, by Prof. M. S. Raghunathan of TIFR Mumbai entitled "The queen of sciences: her realm, her influence and her health". The trust web-site is here.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

On IIX faculty jobs


You are probably interested in the first thing that everyone focuses on — the ‘pay package.’ Fortunately, it is also the easiest to address.

Here’s the bottomline: IIXs are among the best in the public sector. They beat private academic institutions handily. With job security, autonomy, sabbaticals and the summer months off, they are competitive with private industry as well. With the option to consult for industry, you’ll have to wonder if a non-IIX job is even worth considering!

That's me arguing why, for the academically oriented folks, IIT faculty jobs are still the best in India. This piece appeared in the latest issue (pdf) of The Scholars' Avenue, IIT-KGP's campus newspaper.

Many thanks to A.V.N. Murthy (and his colleagues on editorial team) for asking me to put together my thoughts on the issue of IIT faculty salaries.

Link between childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism


... Around the age of five, Ayn Rand's] mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

From Wealthcare, an excellent three-part essay (the above quote is in the second part) by Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand and the corrosive movement she created.

The immediate provocation for Chait's review-essay is the publication of two new biographies of Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of Market - Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.

Here are reviews by Adam Kirsch, Janet Maslin and A.C. Grayling.

Here's a memorable line from Maslin's review:

... And both [the books] have gray covers ... Yet Rand ... loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Robert Zimmer: What is Academic Freedom for?


Robert Zimmer is President, The University of Chicago. Here are some excerpts from his talk at a recent conference on What is Academic Freedom for?

I will summarize the principles of the Kalven report, adding a few embellishments for emphasis.

First, the focus on rigorous, intense, and open inquiry carried out by the faculty and students of the University must be accompanied by the greatest possible intellectual freedom, in an environment that supports openness and avoids steps that lead to chilling the environment.

Second, it follows that the University, as an institution, should take no political positions and should remain neutral on such matters (except of necessity those in which it is a direct party), in order to ensure that we have a maximally open environment. Violations of neutrality are a mark against the maintenance of a non-chilling environment.

Third, this University neutrality provides a safe environment for faculty and students to express their own views and take whatever stance they like as individuals. Their views, in turn, never represent the University, which remains neutral.

Fourth, the University needs to protect the academic freedom of faculty and students both by its own neutrality and the protection from internal and external forces that would seek to dampen it.

Fifth, there is recognition of a possible exception. Kalven was a constitutional lawyer, and as such deeply appreciated that a competing interest could trump under unusual circumstances. The exceptions were not spelled out, but rather the emphasis was put on the strong presumption that the above principles would govern. Much of the focus on the Kalven report in recent times is on understanding exactly where the exception clause applies. The report asserts a “heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social values of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values however compelling and appealing they may be.”

Kapil Sibal talks to the US universities


Two reports with news about what HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has been doing in the last couple of days in the US.

The first one is from BU Today, Boston University's newspaper:

“We are looking at institutions of excellence,” says Sibal. “We would like the best in the world to come to India, and it is in that sense that we would welcome Boston University.”

He says that India’s population — vast, young, and eager to learn — presents a great opportunity for U.S. institutions of higher learning.

“India has about 560 million people who are less than 25 years of age,” Sibal says. “The number of children going to school is 220 million, and a substantial percentage of those children will have to graduate. So we need educational institutions, and not all of those institutions can be provided by the government.”

The second is from The Economic Times with some stuff about what he said at a press meet:

Government has promised a level playing field to top US institutions in a bid to encourage foreign investment in the education sector as New Delhi seeks partnerships with global institutions to provide quality education at home.

"With the expansion of the higher education sector and the needs of Indian students, we need not just to allow education providers in India to grow, but we also need to provide for foreign investment in the education sector," India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said at a press conference here Friday.

Sibal, who was here to seek partnership with leading American universities for an Indian initiative to set up 14 innovation universities to push research and development, said he was encouraged by the response, which made the trip "exceptionally satisfying".

Big questions in the science of the brain


An hour-long tour of some of the big questions in brain science discussed by five leading scientists of the day. Watch it on Charlie Rose's show

[If that link opens with some other show, go to the archives and choose 29 October 2009. ]

This is the first of a 12-part series -- the later episodes will go into the details of what we know about each of these questions.

What I found even more fascinating than the questions themselves is the scientists' ability to communicate the big ideas -- and also the excitement of working with and shaping those ideas -- in a language that's accessible to most of us outside the field. Yes, there's some occasional jargon such as "animal models" and "neural correlates of consciousness", but (a) they are not too many, and (b) there's sufficient context around these phrases that gives us some idea about what they mean.

Like I said, the excitement of doing high science shines right through this episode.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Links ...


  1. Featured link: Pankaj Jalote (Director, IIIT-Delhi) in the Economic Times: Who's afraid of foreign universities?

  2. An old article (from 2006) in Business Week by Nandini Lakshman: Will foreign universities come to India?

  3. Sticking to the theme of foreign universities, here's one about Australia's experience with them.

  4. This court battle between a South Korean university and Yale is interesting -- at least for the way Yale is fighting it in public. Consider what its spokesman said: "We think the jury will certainly consider the fact that the chairman of Dongguk’s board was convicted of soliciting and receiving an illegal government subsidy from Ms. Shin’s lover, who was an adviser to the Korean president."

  5. You probably don't need more evidence of how tough things have been for American public universities lately. If you do, here is one for you.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Gaming a Tough Entrance Exam


Let me start with Priscilla Jebaraj's story in The Hindu:

At large coaching centres such as those in Kota, students effectively drop out of the school system in order to prepare for JEE. They can then scrape through their board examinations to meet the 60 per cent minimum criteria, without having actually attended school for two years.

This can result in a skewed education, which shows up once the student gets to IIT. IIT-M director M.S. Ananth tells the story of a student who arrived at IIT without having mastered the concept of integration despite it being part of the higher secondary mathematics curriculum. He had failed to study it since he felt only three marks were allotted to the topic under JEE.

I couldn't believe it when I read that stuff about a student entering an IIT without knowing anything about integral calculus. Within a day, I got this view confirmed by another friend from an IIT who went on to complain about large holes in many students' background -- which were probably due to their strategy of selective preparation.

[BTW, this is not peculiar to JEE; recently, a colleague told us about a couple of students who didn't know any mathematics and still managed good ranks in GATE. And they are in a math-heavy engineering field! ]

Frankly, I hadn't thought about this angle before; after thinking about it a bit, it actually makes sense. By any objective yardstick, JEE is a brutally tough exam -- so tough, in fact, that you could get 30 to 40 percent and still find yourself among the rank-holders (especially if you really do well in one of the subjects).

For some students, then, it is certainly rational to cut down on preparing for stuff that's difficult -- and focus more on things for which they have a flair. It's also possible that coaching schools encourage them to put this strategy into practice.

A Board exam -- conducted, for example, by CBSE -- this would be an absolutely disastrous strategy if you want to be among the among the top-rankers. This is because top-rankers in these exams typically have over 90 percent -- and you can't get 90+ percent by ignoring even 20 or 30 percent of the syllabus.

Put this down as yet another 'unintended consequence' of the design choice by the IITs to go with a 'tough' version of JEE. It's this very 'tough-ness' that allows this particular method of gaming the exam to work.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Links


  1. Raymond Tallis: Does Evolution Explain Our Behaviour?: "Does evolution explain our behaviour? The short answer is: No. And you may well concur with that answer but ‘out there’ there is an increasing constituency of thinkers claiming quite otherwise. [...]

  2. Tom Chivers in The London Telegraph: Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe.

  3. Anne Eisenberg in NYTimes: Plugging Into the Eye, With a New Design.

  4. Doug Lederman in IHE: The Ever-Expanding U. of Phoenix.

  5. Finally, this gem from Arnold (as a friend calls it): Pretty Amazing Stuff.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

When men become a minority in a high-prestige field ...


... it is viewed as A Seriously Bad Thing -- something that should be corrected. For example, by changing admissions requirement to include performance in tests in which men have an advantage. Here's something from Ireland that should sound very, very familiar:

In medical courses, women were three times more likely to earn a spot over male applicants, at least until this year when an aptitude test was introduced for the first time. The test scores were combined with results from the schools' Leaving Certificate examination to select students for entry into one of the country's five undergraduate medical schools.

The use of the aptitude test has proven to be somewhat controversial. The HPAT-Ireland test measures a candidate's logical reasoning and problem-solving skills as well as non-verbal reasoning and the ability to understand the thoughts, behaviour and-or intentions of people. It does not test academic knowledge and candidates do not require special understanding of any academic discipline.

Males did better than females in the test with the result that a higher percentage of males got into medicine this year than in previous years - still not as many as females but an improvement, nevertheless.

The change led to accusations in some quarters that the real purpose of the test was to increase the percentage of males in medicine to miligate against the high numbers of female doctors who will take time off to look after children.

This was denied by the Education Ministry which pushed for the change to end the situation whereby medicine was the sole preserve of students who obtained nearly perfect results in their Leaving Certificate.

Those results are converted into 'points' for college entry and the maximum a student can get is 600 points. Latest figures show that 61% of those who score 450 points or higher in the Leaving Certificate are female. [Bold emphasis added]

Women's dominance in higher ed?


It dawned in the West two or three decades ago -- women outnumber men in universities and colleges there, by as much as (or higher than) 2 to 1.

In some countries, women are a minority only in sciences (especially physical sciences) and engineering -- but the trends appear to favor a female majority soon.

These are the inescapable conclusions from the following set of stories in the latest (online) issue of University World News:

  1. Global: Women No Longer the Second Sex.

  2. South Africa: Gender Divide Breached.

  3. Canada: School the Cause of Male Minority?

  4. Ireland: Engineering -- the Last Male Bastion.

  5. Australia: Male Decline Continues.

  6. USA (from an earlier issue): New Growth in Domestic Graduate Student Enrollment: "Overall, nearly 60% of all graduate students in autumn 2008 were women, and they comprised a larger share of total enrolees at the masters and graduate certification level (61%) as well as at doctoral level (51%)."

Pakistan's reform experiments in higher ed


Sidebar: I'm not sure how many of these links to Nature.com will work for you without subscription; the last two will definitely work from this story at ScieDev.Net -- go to the bottom of that story for the links.

* * *

The Nature opinion piece (by Athar Osama, Adil Najam, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Syed Zulfiqar Gilani & Christopher King) is an eye-opener! It describes (and to some extent, evaluates) the massive efforts by Pakistan since 2002: enormous increase in funding, lots of students sent abroad for doctoral degrees, increase in the number of PhDs from Pakistan's universities, etc.

These efforts have been spearheaded by the Higher Education Commission (which replaced that country's UGC). The current head of HEC, Atta ur Rahman, has a response highlighting what he thinks are the major achievements:

... Because there were not enough suitable PhD supervisors in the universities, we sent some 3,800 students abroad, mainly to the United States and Europe, to study for a PhD, at a total cost of about US$1 billion. [...]

There followed a huge increase in international scientific research publications, from 600 or so in 2001 to more than 4,200 in 2008. About 50 new universities and degree-awarding institutes were established during this period, and enrolment in higher education almost tripled to about 400,000 by the end of 2008, having been just 135,000 in 2003.

A digital library was established to provide free access to 25,000 international journals and 45,000 textbooks for all public-sector university students. In the 2008 Times Higher Education rankings, four Pakistani universities are among the top 600 in the world — an unattainable position before 2003.

In another response to that opinion piece, Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, is blunt in calling HEC's efforts 'a failed experiment':

the former government wasted enormous sums of money on prestige mega-projects. Nine new universities were abandoned after partial construction because of a lack of trained faculty, and expensive imported scientific equipment remains under-utilized many years later. The claimed 400% increase in publications was a result of salary bonuses awarded to professors who published in international journals, largely irrespective of substance and quality. These payments fostered a plagiarism culture that still goes unpunished.

The authors draw attention to a large increase in "relative impact" in some disciplines, based on citation of papers published in 2003–07. But were self-citations (a common ploy) eliminated from this count? I used an option available from Thomson Scientific and found the opposite result after eliminating self-citations.

The authors also praise the Higher Education Commission for increasing university professors' salaries. But this has created social disparities — a full professor now earns 20–30 times more than a school teacher. Professors, bent on removing barriers to their promotions and incomes, take on very large numbers of PhD students. To ensure that these students get their degrees, many professors seek the elimination of international testing, hitherto used as a metric for gauging student performance.

Pakistan's failed experiment provides a counter-example to the conventional wisdom that money is the most crucial element in the reform process. ...