Monday, February 28, 2011

Use and Misuse of Scientometrics


In a letter in the latest issue of Curent Science, Prof. Ramasesha and Prof. Diptiman Sen (both from IISc), present a strong case against the use of scientometrics in "judging" the scientific contributions of individual scintists.

Scientometry can be helpful in assessing institutions and departments, instead of individuals. This is so because, like statistics, scientometric analysis is helpful when applied to large numbers. It can tell us about the state of activity of groups to make decisions regarding funding and remedial measures to improve a certain institution or department. But, using it to evaluate individual scientists for career advancements and recognitions must be stopped. Henceforth nominations for awards and fellowships, papers for promotion, and application forms for faculty positions should desist from asking for scientometric information of individuals. Assessments must be made solely on the merit of the scientific contributions of the individual concerned.

Ramasesha and Sen are right to demand that application forms "desist from asking for scientometric information of individuals.Here's something that was brought to my attention sometime ago by a commenter: a school of biological sciences at an IIT was proud to display on its website (alas, the URL no longer exists) the h-index expected of its faculty applicants at different levels. The commenter went on to point out that Prof. Venky Ramakrishnan, one of the 2009 Nobel winners in Chemistry, would not be eligible! [Update (10 March 2011): This particular meme is wrong. See this post. See also the comments by Giridhar and Sunil, below. The appearance of this meme here is my mistake, and it doesn't take anything away from Ramasesha and Sen's argument, below, which is a lot more carefully worded.]

Ramasesha and Sen use a similar argument:

Thankfully, for the most prestigious prize in science, it is heartening to see that scientometrics is not the basis of the award. Recent Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scientists who may not rank at the top either on the number of publications or on the h-index. Examples are Venky Ramakrishnan (2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)and Koichi Tanaka (2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). It is indeed well known that in some instances the work for which a Nobel Prize is awarded becomes highly cited only after the award, as the award highlights the importance of the work.

It's a short, punchy letter. Do read all of it.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi is blogging


Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi of the Department of Computer Science at IIT-K has been blogging for a while, but I discovered his blog just yesterday. Here's a quick taste of some of the things he has been blogging about lately.

  1. Are we serious about PhD program? Part I, and Part II.

    One of my colleague once said that we talk about PhD program because it is in fashion to talk about research, and we need to justify not doing research. But we really don't want to admit more PhD students because we are afraid we will have to work harder.

  2. Sexual Harassment Case at IIT-Bombay:

    I was shocked not because such an incident could take place in an IIT, but that such an incident was not swept under the rug and someone was actually being punished.

    I know of another incident in another Institute of National repute, where a faculty member even admitted that he had "touched" the female PhD student against her wishes. That he had sent emails with inappropriate contents, and many more things. And what does the Institute do. Make him the Head of the department.

  3. And this is from October 2010: Does Indian Industry Value Merit?

He has commented on a lot of things on his blog. Do check out his blog and its archives.

Links


  1. Killugudi Jayaraman at The Great Beyond [a Nature.com blog]: Indian government competition for better skin whiteners draws fire. Good to see Nature.com wake up to the controversy two months after it broke. [Thanks to Sharmishta for the pointer].

    BTW, there has been no Challenge of the Month contest since the second one -- cost effective alternatives to silicones to improve feel, shine and tactile properties of surfaces -- ended on 31 Januuary 2011.

  2. Freeman Dyson: How We Know. A review of James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

  3. Kevin Carey in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Dangerous Lure of the Research-University Model.

  4. J.B. Deaton: Do you need ideal conditions to do great work? [Hat tip: Swarup]

  5. Sunday fun link: The Girl Who Loves to Levitate (14 photos).

Abraham Verghese on Watson's role in hospitals


Watson would be a potent and clever companion as we made our rounds.

But the complaints I hear from patients, family and friends are never about the dearth of technology but about its excesses. My own experience as a patient in an emergency room in another city helped me see this. My nurse would come in periodically to visit the computer work station in my cubicle, her back to me while she clicked and scrolled away. Over her shoulder she said, “On a scale of one to five how is your ...?”

The electronic record of my three-hour stay would have looked perfect, showing close monitoring, even though to me as a patient it lacked a human dimension. I don’t fault the nurse, because in my hospital, despite my best intentions, I too am spending too much time in front of the computer: the story of my patient’s many past admissions, the details of surgeries undergone, every consultant’s opinion, every drug given over every encounter, thousands of blood tests and so many CT scans, M.R.I.’s and ultrasound images reside in there.

This computer record creates what I call an “iPatient” — and this iPatient threatens to become the real focus of our attention, while the real patient in the bed often feels neglected, a mere placeholder for the virtual record.

That's his NYTimes piece. Here's an excerpt from the end of the article:

I find that patients from almost any culture have deep expectations of a ritual when a doctor sees them, and they are quick to perceive when he or she gives those procedures short shrift by, say, placing the stethoscope on top of the gown instead of the skin, doing a cursory prod of the belly and wrapping up in 30 seconds. Rituals are about transformation, the crossing of a threshold, and in the case of the bedside exam, the transformation is the cementing of the doctor-patient relationship, a way of saying: “I will see you though this illness. I will be with you through thick and thin.” It is paramount that doctors not forget the importance of this ritual.

An answer that might have been posed on “Jeopardy!” is, “An emergency treatment that is administered by ear.” I wonder if Watson would have known the question (though he will now, cybertroller that he is), which is, “What are words of comfort?”

Friday, February 25, 2011

Links ...


  1. Must-see: BBC's Audio Slideshow: Beautiful Science [hat tip: Dilip D'Souza].

  2. Must-read: Joshua Foer on Secrets of a Mind Gamer -- How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete [hat tip: Animesh Pathak]:

    Most national memory contests, held in places like Bangkok, Melbourne and Hamburg, bill themselves as mental decathlons. Ten grueling events test the competitors’ memories, each in a slightly different way. Contestants have to memorize an unpublished poem spanning several pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in 15 minutes), lists of binary digits (record: 4,140 in 30 minutes), shuffled decks of playing cards, a list of historical dates and the names and faces of as many strangers as possible. Some disciplines, called speed events, test how much the contestants can memorize in five minutes (record: 480 digits). Two marathon disciplines test how many decks of cards and random digits they can memorize in an hour (records: 2,080 digits and 28 decks). In the most exciting event of the contest, speed cards, competitors race to commit a single pack of playing cards to memory as fast as possible.

Internship request letters


Just a quick note to alert you all to the links posted in the comments section of yesterday's post. This forum thread is a classic -- I had seen it before, but I couldn't locate it yesterday (thanks, Shyam!).

* * *

I haven't kept count, but I think some 15+ undergrad students have done an internship in my group, and that experience has been positive enough for (at least some of) them that they stay in touch with me to this day. At least seven of them have gone on to graduate school.

In the 1990s, I used to select the summer interns from the bunch that wrote to me -- and I can recall only one from this group going to grad school (those were also the times when the IT industry was like a super-sponge, absorbing engineers from all disciplines].

In the naughties, students came to my group almost exclusively through references from their teachers (I have also had a couple of them coming in through JNC's Summer Research Fellowship program). And almost all the summer interns who went to grad school are from this group.

In my experience, I have seen two types of students: some are genuinely keen to develop their research skills by spending some time in a research-intensive environment, and some who want to escape from the requirement of "in plant training" at an industry [in metallurgy / materials engineering, most of the industries are in some of the hottest parts of India!]. If there are other motivations, I have not been able to figure them out from my interactions with the students who came to our group.

In any event, I have enjoyed interacting with them, and as I said, the students also seem to have had a positive experience. I still don't know how important this summer internship business is for the students -- other than that they get to see a research group in action, giving them a chance to assess whether a research career will work for them.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

"After the Revolution"


This and this should be added to this compilation of cartoons about libertarianism.

That's all.

Unfilled faculty positions in India's elite institutions


Altogether, IITs have a sanctioned strength of 4,712 teaching posts, but only 3,148 are filled. The vacacny stands at 1,564 posts. IIMs have a combined faculty strength of 555 teaching posts, but only 455 are filled. There is a vacancy of 100 posts. National Institutes of Technology have 4,632 posts, but there is a vacany for 1,522 slots. Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has 150 vacancies. Out of 518 posts, only 368 are filled.

These details are from the information given to the Lok Sabha by HRD Minister of State D. Purandeswari.

Indian undergrads' internship request e-mails


They are written poorly. They get the recipient's fields and sub-fields wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. They contain boilerplate in a peculiarly quaint English. They read eerily like the Nigerian scam mails -- except for the promise of a couple of million dollars.

Many professors think they are being spammed -- so they delete these mails without even bothering to read them.

Here's Paul Goldberg:

IIT student seeks internship at your esteemed institute
A question: has anyone taken on one of these prospective interns? (And if so, how was it?) Most of them would clearly be hopeless, but there are some that look like they might be OK. The trouble is, there's some kind of economic principle at work here, that says that in a market that's flooded with bad eggs, the good eggs cannot be sold. In this case, what happens in that we end up deleting all these emails without reading them.

Goldberg also points to an earlier discussion in another professor's blog.

While these posts are about internship requests from IIT students, there's also a large number of non-IIT students who have got into this habit of sending a form e-mail to hundreds of professors.

I am in materials engineering, a field that produces perhaps 1000 Indian graduates a year, and I work right here in India. And I feel I'm getting too many of these requests. I can only imagine the frustration of professors -- especially those in the US or the UK -- in computer science and mechanical engineering where the numbers are quite easily 50 - 200 times larger than in my field.

Thanks to Raghu for the pointer.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Watson vs. The Champs: Post-Match Commentary from the (Ex-) Champs


  1. Ken Jennings in Slate: My Puny Human Brain.

  2. Brad Rutter at WSJ Blogs: Ideas Market: Why I Lost to Watson.

The da Vinci Resume


Here.

Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go “boom”.

And, like you, he had to put together a resume to get his next gig. So in 1482, at the age of 30, he wrote out a letter and a list of his capabilities and sent it off to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.

Well, we at TheLadders.com have tracked down that resume

Plagiarism in PhD thesis taints a popular German minister


It all started less than a week ago, when a German newspaper outed a bunch of instances of plagiarism in the PhD thesis of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a popular minister in the German government; here's a Spiegel Online story from 16 February.

After trying several   evasive   maneuvers, the minister finally retracted his PhD thesis, and gave up his doctoral titlefor good. He has managed to retain his boss' political support -- for now:

Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted on Monday that she is standing by her defence minister, who is seen as something of a rising star in her conservative coalition.

"I appointed Guttenberg as minister of defence," she told reporters. "I did not appoint him as an academic assistant or doctor. What is important to me is his work as minister of defence and he carries out these duties perfectly."

Crisis in Rare Earth Elements


For scarce elements it may also mean to better manage their consumption. Crucial is to reuse and recycle where possible. The use of rare earths in electronic gadgets has risen so much that their concentration in computers is actually higher than that in mines. It pays to recycle. [Emphasis added]

From the editorial in Nature Materials [you'll probably need a subscription to read the article, though].

Monday, February 21, 2011

Example Indian


It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young Indian-American in possession of some years’ experience of India must be in want of a book contract.

Uh-oh, who's it this time? I haven't read Anand Giridharadas's recent book (nor am I likely to), but Mihir Sharma's review manages a snark score of 0.2 taibbi (in honor of Matt Taibbi).

Here's an excerpt:

The man [Example Indian], blissfully unaware of the burden of representation he is about to be asked to carry, will share his story. Giridharadas listens, his formidable New York Times- and McKinsey-trained interpretive skills clicking into high gear. The man will explain to Giridharadas why he turned to Maoism, or why he is divorcing his wife. Giridharadas reports the man’s words, and then explains to us why he is turning to Maoism (because Nehruvianism failed an idealistic generation) or why he is divorcing his wife (because Indians are ill-prepared for the work that comes with freedom). The Example Indian is finally summarised (“India’s complicated relationship with modernity and money cut through his own soul”) and — I am serious about this next bit — frequently compared, disparagingly, with a suitably upright or inspiring member of Giridharadas’ own family.

Hat tip to Smoke Screen.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

A "security" firm gets a lesson about what the word means


This is a fascinating account -- no, make that a riveting account -- of how a 'security firm' had "its servers broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced" -- through run-of-the-mill exploits the company was well aware of, but didn't protect itself against.

And, oh, the exploits were by the group that calls itself "Anonymous".

Great, racy story. Do read all of it.

Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
By Peter Bright

It has been an embarrassing week for security firm HBGary and its HBGary Federal offshoot. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.

When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.