Saturday, October 16, 2010

"Inviting a Bull to Gore You"


Isn't that a brilliant metaphor for the academies' report on GM crops?

Apparently, it's a popular Hindi saying, and I found it in this SciDev.Net editorial by T.V. Padma and David Dickson on the role of science academies in developing countries.

Here's the editorial's scathing comment on the science academies' penchant for staying in the sidelines:

... The academies were conspicuously silent when a former science minister introduced astrology as a science course, and they have not made any meaningful contribution to Indian science policy formation, or to parliamentary debates on contentious issues such as the presence in India of foreign universities, or liability for nuclear accidents.

Indeed, the fact that last month's Indian inter-academy report on genetically modified crops — intended to shed more light on the vexed issue of GM brinjal — was the first of its kind in India only underlines how inactive the academies have been in a country that prides itself as growing knowledge economy.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Technology in Higher Education: A New Initiative


The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools.

The new initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenges, focuses on the college years. It is looking for innovative tools that can be developed and shared across networks of colleges. The grants, for $250,000 to $750,000 each, are intended to scale up such efforts, so they become self-sustaining.

The money is for online courses and tools, and any software developed with it must be freely licensed.

That's from Steve Lohr's story in NYTimes: In Higher Education, a Focus on Technology.

Why this focus on higher ed?

Just how effective technology can be in improving education — by making students more effective, more engaged learners — is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.

If technology is well designed, experts say, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student-teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fine-tuning lessons.

The potential benefits of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about fifth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is ludicrous.”

But in higher education, there are several promising projects that have used online technology effectively.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Finding and the recognition of finding


At the cutting edge of science, it is not uncommon to find examples of scientists who had the first glimpse of an important discovery, didn't "see" it, and ended up watching helplessly as another group announced the "real" discovery. In such cases, assigning credit unambiguously is tricky business. For those who end up on the losing side of this business, it must be heart-breaking indeed.

Those thoughts were on my mind while writing the previous post, and I was reminded of a truly gracious article in which Prof. Eiji Osawa looked back at the history of the discovery of buckminsterfullerene — C60. While the 1985 discovery was credited to Kroto et al, there were several previous studies — including one in 1970 by Osawa himself — that hinted at this then novel form of carbon.

Here's an excerpt [I blogged a while ago about Prof. Osawa's article at Materialia Indica, where you'll find several other links as well].

Let us conclude our presentation by a comment on the relative importance between the well-known two steps in the process of discovery: finding and the recognition of finding (Berson 1992). Our inevitable conclusion, after observing such a large number of missed discoveries, is that the latter is much more important and difficult than the former. A finding is usually made by chance, as in the case of the C60 peak in the mass spectrum of laser-vaporized carbon clusters (Kroto et al. 1985). Hence there is not much one can do but to resort to serendipity.

The most crucial moment comes after a finding has been made. The most desirable situation would be that the discoverers themselves recognize the relevance of their finding and explain the relations with the then accepted body of knowledge, using a language that leads others to logically understand the significance of the [discovery]. Here a number of novel qualities are required: the imagination to grasp generality on the basis of a small piece of evidence, the talent to give an appropriate name (Nickon & Silversmith 1987) and the ability to communicate well with other scientists. It is truly gratifying to realize that the authors of the 1985 Nature paper had all these attributes.

Limitless Ladder: Part 4: The Race to the "123" Compound


Let's start with an excerpt from D. Balasubramanian's review:

Not every chapter in [Limitless Ladder] reads positive. His comments on bureaucrats and supplicants read depressing; equally so in science, when he loses priority on discoveries. A compound his lab made over two years ago was suddenly found by someone else to be a superconductor at 90K.

Here's another from P. Rama Rao's review:

In 1986, Rao came close to winning the coveted Nobel Prize. A pair of scientists at IBM’s Swiss lab found a known insulating metal oxide was indeed a high-temperature superconductor. Rao had worked on an identical family of metal oxides a good 15 years earlier. Alas, his work did not concern exactly that aspect the IBM researchers happened to investigate, winning the Nobel in 1987. Rao agonised over this incident but did not let up in his unrelenting pursuit of excellence, going on to make important contributions to high-temperature superconductivity and to several other facets of the new chemistry of materials.

The excerpts from the two reviews hint at a deep sense of disappointment and agony felt by CNR for missing out on something important, ground-breaking, even Nobel-worthy. They hint at high drama. They hint at pathos.

Since I had read these reviews before I read Limitless Ladder, I was primed for CNR's own telling of this momentous story in his life. Here it is:

In December 1986, there was a major revolution in physical sciences. A high-temperature superconductor had been discovered. The material had broken the long-standing 23K barrier and became superconducting at 35K. I did not know much about it until I met Prof. P.W. Anderson ... who was visiting Bangalore for an international conference ... [Soon] after my lecture, Prof. Anderson asked me whether I knew about this new high-temperature superconductor. When I told him that I had no knowledge of it, he mentioned that the material was an oxide with lanthanum (La), copper (Cu), etc. I asked him whether by any chance, it was related to LaCuO4. When he said yes, I told him of the work we had done on this family of oxides many years earlier. My first paper on this family of materials with P. Ganguly had been published in 1971. We immediately went to my laboratory at IISc and spent two hours going through all my papers. We had already shown that La2CuO4 was antiferromagnetic. I started to worry as to how I could contribute to the exciting area of warm superconductors.

I had many sleepless nights, until we discovered two months later, one of the first liquid-nitrogen superconductors, by employing a novel strategy. Till then, all the superconductors required liquid helium. This new compound YBa2Cu3O7 (called 123), characterized independently in Bangalore (at the same time as Bell Labs and Beijing), became superconducting around 90K (above the liquid nitrogen temperature). ...

These paragraphs convey -- in their own understated way -- the excitement of doing important work, CNR's intense competitive streak -- "I had many sleepless nights." -- and a sense of "the race is on.

But, there's nothing here about the work's aftermath.

There's nothing here about who got the credit for the 123 compound (while CNR mentions some unspecified "independent" work at Bell Labs and Beijing, Wikipedia credits two American groups).

There's nothing here about CNR's "agonizing over this incident" nor about the "depressing" story of "[losing] priority over his discoveries."

So, we are left wondering about the reasons for CNR's agony. Was it about losing the race to the 123 compound? Was it about getting into the race late, because he did not know about Bednorz and Müller's work until Anderson told him about it? Was it about not having probed the low-temperature properties of this class of oxides in his earlier work (starting in the 1970s)? If so, was it about not having the right equipment to do this kind of work in the 1970s and the 80s? Or, was it about something else altogether?

We don't know.

And CNR has chosen to not talk about it. While we may respect his choice, I'm not sure if it's the right one, because it makes his autobiography incomplete.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Goodhart's Law and Citation Spam


Alternate Title: How Thomson Reuters's Essential Science Indicators was fooled into naming someone "Rising Star in Computer Science 2008"!

* * *

Here's a version of Goodhart's Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I found this law in this absolutely wonderful article that establishes beyond any doubt how a journal editor, along with a bunch of his colleagues in the editorial board, gamed the system to get his journal -- IJNSNS -- the highest Journal Impact Factor in applied mathematics.

[The article is by Douglas N. Arnold (professor of math) and Kristine K. Fowler (math librarian) of the University of Minnesota. Thanks to Charles Day of Physics Today for the pointer].

In the excerpt below, IJNSNS is being compared to two truly top journals -- SIREV and CPAM -- in applied mathematics. The contrast in the way the three journals got cited cannot be more stunning:

A first step to understanding IJNSNS's high impact factor is to look at how many authors contributed substantially to the counted citations, and who they were. The top-citing author to IJNSNS in 2008 was the journal's Editor-in-Chief, Ji-Huan He, who cited the journal (within the two-year window) 243 times. The second top-citer, D.D. Ganji, with 114 cites, is also a member of the editorial board, as is the third, regional editor Mohamed El Naschie, with 58 cites. Together these three account for 29% of the citations counted towards the impact factor. For comparison, the top three citers to SIREV contributed only 7, 4, and 4 citations, respectively, accounting for less than 12% of the counted citations, and none of these authors is involved in editing the journal. For CPAM the top three citers (9, 8, and 8) contributed about 7% of the citations, and, again, were not on the editorial board.

Another significant phenomenon is the extent to which citations to IJNSNS are concentrated within the 2-year window used in the impact factor calculation. Our analysis of 2008 citations to articles published since 2000 shows that 16% of the citations to CPAM fell within that 2-year window, and only 8% of those to SIREV did; in contrast, 71.5% of the 2008 citations to IJNSNS fell within the 2-year window.

Right at the beginning of the paper, the authors summarize the arguments against the very concept of JIF, especially for a field like mathematics:

The impact factor for a journal in a given year is calculated by ISI (Thomson Reuters) as the average number of citations in that year to the articles the journal published in the preceding two years. It has been widely criticized on a variety of grounds:

  • A journal’s distribution of citations does not determine its quality.

  • The impact factor is a crude statistic, reporting only one particular item of information from the citation distribution.

  • It is a flawed statistic. For one thing, the distribution of citations among papers is highly skewed, so the mean for the journal tends to be misleading. For another, the impact factor only refers to citations within the first two years after publication (a particularly serious deficiency for mathematics, in which around 90% of citations occur after two years).

  • The underlying database is flawed, containing errors and including a biased selection of journals.

  • Many confounding factors are ignored, for example, article type (editorials, reviews, and letters versus original research articles), multiple authorship, self-citation, language of publication, etc.

Despite these difficulties, the allure of the impact factor as a single, readily available number—not requiring complex judgments or expert input, but purporting to represent journal quality—has proven irresistible to many.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Limitless Ladder: Part 3. Comparing Early Years of IIT-K with Those of the New IITs


CNR joined IIT-K in April 1963 as an associate professor. Here are a few snippets from Limitless Ladder about IIT-K's toddler years:

The campus of IIT Kanpur was still in the making. ...

The Institute itself continued to function in the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute (HBTI) in the city. The HBTI building had primitive facilities and there was no place even to enjoy a cup of tea. ...

When the new academic session of 1963 started, I began giving lectures to the new undergraduates in a make-shift lecture hall. The laboratory classes were held in the workshop ... There were no facilities worthy of mention in the campus, and one had to travel to the city several miles away to buy salt or sugar. ... It was a campus without roads or lights.

... Although there were no amenities, there was hope and idealism. [p. 49-52]

Did you get a sense of nostalgia in these descriptions? Now, let's fast forward 47 years, and see what CNR has to say about the eight new IITs that were created in the last three years:

... I have chaired the standing committee of the Council of IITs for sometime. ... I was taken by surprise when eight new IITs were suddenly announced in 2008 and students were admitted without proper discussion in the standing committee or elsewhere. There was neither a campus nor a director for any of the new IITs, even a year after the students were admitted. [...]

Interesting contrast, isn't it? [I don't want to sound as if I like the haste with which the IITs were set up; I simply take this unseemly haste as a rational response by state governments because they were not sure they would still have the IITs after the elections; what if the next government chose to shift these IITs to some other state -- like it happened with IISERs after the 2004 elections? They had good reason to fear policy uncertainty. CNR doesn't say anything about whether he had a role in the IISER-shifting episode in 2004-05; but he certainly was the Chair of SAC-PM during that time, and it certainly happened under his watch].

While all that was about the disconnect between perceptions about the old and new IITs, I want to point to yet another disconnect. And this one has to do with IISERs for which, I think, CNR would like to claim credit.

I worked closely with the Ministry of Human Resources and Development in 2005-2007. The minister (Mr. Arjun Singh) and the secretary (late Mr. Sudeep Banerjee) were highly cooperative in establishing the new IISERs ... [p.128]

CNR doesn't say anything in Limitless Ladder about the state of these new institutions during their early years, but he has said elsewhere that the IISERs "have been extremely well planned." It turns out that the IISERs' toddler years were not particularly different from those of the new IITs.

Limitless Ladder: Part 2. The Chemistry between CNR and Chemistry


"A Life in Chemistry," is the subtitle of CNR's autobiography. And he makes it amply clear that he would like his book to be largely about his career in science -- a 55-year long love affair with chemistry. Being no chemist, I have no way of approaching it other than through his publication record.

[Interestingly, CNR himself doesn't dwell too much on the deep chemical questions that occupied his mind at different stages in his career. The number of publications is mentioned as a shorthand for the kind of productive work he did. For example, here's how he describes his post-doctoral stint at Berkeley: "My research was progressing very well in Berkeley and I had a credible list of publications (totaling around 30)."]

If doing science is important, getting it published is equally important to CNR. As he puts it in the section on his grad school days at Purdue:

Prof. [Herbert C.] Brown used to day, "If it is worth doing, it must be worth publishing." [Michael] Faraday had said much the same many years earlier. In science, we "work, finish, publish." These statements have guided me all through my professional life. [p.30]

And he gets back to this theme -- the importance of publishing -- again on p.184:

Some scientists are conservative about publishing while others are prolific. While there is no simple rule about how much to publish or not to publish, there is no denying the fact that, as Benjamin Franklin as well as Faraday put it, the main activity of scientists is to 'work, finish and publish.' I am not ashamed of publishing. I have known great scientists who have published several hundred papers. Both Raman and Faraday published over 450 papers. I have also known extraordinary men who have published very few papers. I have known theoretitians, like Nevill Mott, who have published consistently and constantly for several decades. [p.184]

* * *

CNR's publication record is truly awesome. Here's a quick summary:

  • ISI Web of Knowledge lists over 1481 of his papers. And this was about a week ago! [Sure enough, the number today is 1482]

  • His papers have been cited over 39,600 times; i.e., over 26 citations per paper.

  • He has 17 papers with more than 200 citations each, 68 papers with more than 100 citations each.

  • His h-index is 88; i.e., 88 papers of his have been cited at least 88 times.

The best part of his record, at least to me, is that his record is just getting better with every passing decade. And this current decade is his best ever!

Figure: Year-wise publication record of CNR [Source: ISI Web of Knowledge]

  • Since the beginning of 2000, he has been publishing over 45 papers a year.

  • Nine of his 17 papers with 200+ citations -- and 23 of his 68 papers with 100+ citations -- were published during this decade.

  • Since 2004, his papers have been accumulting over 2000 citations annually.

CNR's science has led to many, many recognitions. Here's an excerpt from Prof. Rama Rao's review of Limitless Ladder:

[Prof. C.N.R. Rao] is among the world's most decorated scientists: fellowships of all Indian Science Academies, the Royal Society (London), the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Royal Society of Canada as well as French, Spanish, Brazilian, Japan and Pontifical Academies, the first India Science Prize and several other Indian and international prizes. Space does not allow listing of all his accomplishments and honours. He is the premier Indian scientist, the unparalleled doyen of modern Indian science.

And honorary doctorates have been conferred on CNR by over 50 universities worldwide. [BTW, his website has a wealth of details.]

Looking back at his life's work, CNR is moved to express his deep sense of satisfaction. Here's the last paragraph from Limitless Ladder:

I end by recalling how satisfying my life has been. I have had a wonderful profession matched by an equally good family life. I have enjoyed my life as a scientist. I cannot think of a better way to live and I am getting to be happier as I am getting older. I have no regrets and would gladly do it all over again. ... [p.173]

Limitless Ladder: Prof. C.N.R. Rao's Autobiography


Starting today, I hope to have a bunch of posts built around Prof. C.N.R. Rao's autobiography, Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry (IISc Press - World Scientific, 2010). Let's see how far I'm able to go with this series.

* * *

[A note about terminology: I believe Prof. Rao's close associates call him Ram. Those outside this charmed circle refer to him as CNR; I'll go with CNR in these posts.]

* * *

I think it's important to say upfront what I think about the book.

Given Prof. Rao's scientific stature, his enormous influence in policy-making circles, the diversity of his interests and experiences, and his power over Indian science and scientists, the book is unusually slim -- all of 175 pages with some 30+ pages of (reprinted) essays tacked on at the end. Clearly, there's a lot more in Prof. Rao's life than he's willing to cover in his own telling of his life story.

This is disappointing.

Let me be frank: I read CNR's autobiography not only to learn about his scientific accomplishments, but also to learn about his journey to the very top of India's science policy-making machinery. From his perch, he exerts enormous influence on the direction of the country's scientific enterprise. I was naturally looking for for the forces that took him to the top, and the key milestones along his ascent. I found very little in the book that gave me a good sense of how this transformation happened.

I was also looking for CNR's take on all kinds of stuff related to his life in science and science policy: his formative years at IIT-K, the evolution of his research interests across decades, how he chooses his research problems, a sketch of the chemistry community in India (and the world), insights into institution building, comparison of funding patterns across countries, ideas on other ways of boosting science in India, &c, &c. On each one of these, Limitless Ladder offers precious little by way of description, argument or analysis.

This is disappointing and frustrating.

Even before reading Limitless Ladder, I had read fairly glowing reviews by D. Balasubramanian and P. Rama Rao [alternate link]. Reading the book after those reviews made me go, "OMG, this is surreal. Are we even talking about the same book?" I think I know the reason for this difference in our reactions: Balasubramanian and Rao have known CNR for a long time, and worked and interacted with him as colleagues on committees, delegations, and science academies (Balasubramanian was also CNR's colleague at IIT-K for many years). They probably know a lot about the kind of things I was looking for in the book, and therefore, didn't quite feel so strongly about the absence of a coherent discussion of any of them.

As I said, there's a lot more to CNR than there is in this book.

Having said that, I am sill glad that CNR chose to write this book, which has quite a bit to say about his life, his science, his public service, his heroes, his influences. More importantly, we get it all in CNR's own words.

* * *

What I want to do in this series of posts is to excerpt some interesting stuff from Limitless Ladder and, where possible, offer my own comments.

If you are able to join in with additional details and perspectives, it'll be great. My only request to you is to stick to the issues, and refrain from getting personal. (Yes, I'll be keeping a watchful eye on the comments).

Hindustan Times: "Plagiarism punch knocks out IITs"


See the update at the end.

* * *

According to Charu Sudan Kasturi's story in HT, plagiarism by Ashok Kumar & his students is not an isolated case within the IIT system:

Independent cases of plagiarism have hit three different Indian Institutes of Technology with scientists accused of stealing credit for others’ research, shocking the academic community and raising concerns about scientific ethics.

While you'll have to read the HT story for info on the other two cases, I'll just excerpt the last paragraph because it brings us the first reaction from Prof. Ashok Kumar of IIT-K:

IIT Kanpur’s Kumar accused the editor of Biotechnology Advances of “personal problems” with him for the retraction of the article. “Since the journal insisted, I agreed to a voluntary retraction. But... they have retracted the article unilaterally using inappropriate language in their retraction notice,” Kumar said.

There was a fear (see Rahul's comment in an earlier post) that students would end up getting all the blame in the IIT-K case. It turns out that Prof. Ashok Kumar is directing his ire elsewhere.

* * *

Thanks to Ravisankar for the pointer.

* * *

Update (11 October 2010): The Telegraph's G. Mudur alludes to the possibility of even bigger scandals at the IITs:

... [The] Society for Scientific Values, a 24-year old non-government ethics watchdog for scientists, is investigating complaints of scientific misconduct in two other IITs. [i.e., IIT-M and IIT-B]

He requested that the identities of the two other IITs not be revealed because the investigations into the complaints are still incomplete. One complaint claims researchers fabricated data, while the other claims that the same experimental data was used unjustifiably to generate multiple research papers.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Tenure at MIT: Part 2. How to set junior faculty up for success


One more excerpt from the same article we saw in the previous post -- Unraveling Tenure at MIT -- about that great institution's approach towards its junior faculty, and how that translates into setting them up for success. This is something that our own institutions appear to do grudgingly and sub-optimally; some of you may already know that this is a pet theme of mine -- see here, here, here.

Part of the reason for MIT’s warmth toward tenure candidates is that it is in departments’ interests for them to succeed. For one, the recruitment process requires time and resources, and it’s often costly to support new junior faculty. They require lab space, some need a couple million dollars for lab equipment and help with funding before securing outside grants, and there may also be relocation costs for the faculty and their families. [Bold emphasis added]

“It’s expensive to hire a junior faculty member, amongst anything else, so we want to make sure that the investment in the junior faculty member is repaid, and the repayment is that they stay on as a senior faculty member,” says Sive.

But the departments’ friendliness toward new untenured faculty extend beyond financial reasons. “I tell the junior faculty that they are really the most important faculty at MIT because in twenty years’ time they’re going to be running the Institute... So there is tremendous, tremendous goodwill on the part of the senior faculty to help the junior faculty succeed,” says Sive.

Hudson felt the wholehearted support of the Physics Department. “The department is really amazingly friendly,” he says. “For some reason I think there’s this perception from the outside that because it’s hard to get tenure here that it’s somehow mean, and it is not at all like that.”

The generosity of his senior colleagues went beyond any of his expectations. When Hudson first arrived at MIT, he was assigned lab space in Building 24, but because of construction, there was no room for him to work for the time being. So, a couple of professors offered up their own facilities to him.

“That would never happen anywhere else,” said Hudson brightly. “They gave up their lab to me for like six months! That was like, ‘Welcome to MIT’!”

Tenure at MIT


If you ever wondered about what it takes to get tenure at MIT, this should interest you: Unraveling Tenure, a report at The Tech that "[reveals] one of the most subtle and misunderstood processes at MIT, and [explains how one professor, despite his popular teaching, lost because of it" [Thanks to Incoherent Ponderer for the pointer].

A couple of highlights from the article:

  1. So how are the recommenders chosen? According to [Prof. Patrick H.] Winston, the candidate and his or her mentor make a list of people whom the candidate would like as recommenders, as well as a list of people the candidate would not like. But it is up to the committee appointed to research the candidate to choose who to request a recommendation from, and the committee may choose people from both lists. The candidate never finds out who the committee chooses. [Bold emphasis added]

  2. How to build an international reputation is the tricky part. Winston acknowledges that tenure decisions are based on “short-term reputations,” and he recommends junior professors to tackle “the sorts of things that can end up producing results in a small number of years,” rather than large problems that require “ten years” before a paper can be produced.

    “Tenure is never about promise,” he stated. “It’s about accomplishment.” [Bold emphasis added]

Post-doc Gone Wild: Sabotaging a Colleague's Experiments


Do read this gripping story from Brendan Maher in Nature -- Research Integrity: Sabotage!.

It's about a post-doc who, by his own confession, "just got jealous of others moving ahead and I wanted to slow them down," and ended up sabotaging their work:

Postdoc Vipul Bhrigu destroyed the experiments of a colleague in order to get ahead. It took a hidden camera to expose a surreptitious and malicious side of science.

Maher also highlights a few other "malicious offences" which "seem quite widespread in science," and yet manage to stay under the misconduct radar:

Misbehaviour in science is nothing new — but its frequency is difficult to measure. Daniele Fanelli at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who studies research misconduct, says that overtly malicious offences such as Bhrigu's are probably infrequent, but other forms of indecency and sabotage are likely to be more common. "A lot more would be the kind of thing you couldn't capture on camera," he says. Vindictive peer review, dishonest reference letters and withholding key aspects of protocols from colleagues or competitors can do just as much to derail a career or a research project as vandalizing experiments. These are just a few of the questionable practices that seem quite widespread in science, but are not technically considered misconduct. In a meta-analysis of misconduct surveys, published last year (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009), Fanelli found that up to one-third of scientists admit to offences that fall into this grey area, and up to 70% say that they have observed them.

Saturday, October 09, 2010

A quick housekeeping note


I have activated an "email notification" feature which sends you a daily update on new posts on this blog. See the "Info" section at the top of the side bar. [I use Google Reader to keep up with the blogs I follow, so I never felt the need for an e-mail alert system until a friend asked me for it.]

If you wish to subscribe via e-mail, follow these three steps:

  1. Enter your e-mail address in the text box.

  2. This opens a new browser window / tab, where you verify you are a human.

  3. An e-mail is now sent to the address you just provided; click on the link in that e-mail. That's it.

The e-mails themselves will be sent by FeedBurner (see the FAQs), a service that I have been using for several years for "burning" this blog's RSS feed.

That's all.

QoTD: Otto Neurath on How Knowledge Works


We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismount it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.
-- Otto Neurath (Wikipedia has a slightly longer version)

Found that quote in this article that starts off with an implausible story about the Titanic, and keeps you hooked all the way to the end.

I also found this Joseph Conrad quote that appeals to the materials engineer in me:

But all this has its moral. ... Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from-which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.
-- Joseph Conrad, Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic (1912).