Chemistry in Asia

Now that the India-Pakistan game is over, I guess we can get back to normal life. [My heart goes out to Misbah-ul-Haq, though. How can the same shit happen to the same man twice -- last man out against India in the final of the T-20 World Cup in 2007, and now this, the semi-final in this ODI World Cup].

While I'm not a big fan of scientometrics [mainly because their use is inappropriate in 'judging' the contributions of individuals], I do see their value in comparisons as long as (a) they are confined to single subject areas, and (b) they involve larger entities (such as departments, institutions, or even countries). With (a), we can avoid inappropriate comparisons -- e.g., between Courant Institute of Mathematical and Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory -- across fields with different citation practices. And with (b), we will have better and more meaningful statistics due to larger numbers of publications and citations.

Science Watch has a comparative table that meets these two conditions. So, go have a look at the ranking of Asia-Pacific Nations in Chemistry, 2000-2010.

The ranking is in terms of citations per paper; only Singapore (~citations per paper), Australia (12.5) and Japan (~12) do better than the world average (~11). Singapore, the Asia-Pacific topper, is actually ranked 12th in the world. India and China have about 7 citations per paper, and are ranked, respectively, 8th and 9th in Asia, and 38th and 39th in the world; however, China out-publishes India by a factor of nearly 3!

I still have a quibble. This report is a snapshot. I would much prefer an analysis of how the countries have done over the years; for example, the same data -- spanning 11 years, from 2000 to 2010 -- could have been analyzed for five consecutive 6-year periods, starting with 2000-05, all the way up to 2005-10. Such an analysis is better at describing which way each country is headed.

Of course, for policy makers, what would be even better is a sub-field level analysis, which could help identify a country's strong areas as well as weak areas.

Oh well, this is all we have for now.

IT-BHU takes one more step towards becoming an IIT

This is a major milestone:

Lok Sabha Passes Bill to Provide IIT Status to 8 Institutes, BHU

The Lok Sabha today passed a bill to provide status of IIT to eight new institutes and upgrade BHU's institute of technology into IIT with government asserting that steps were being taken to address shortage of faculty and quality of higher education.

[Disclosure: I am an alumnus of IT-BHU.]

There's one more step -- Rajya Sabha's approval -- before the conversion of IT-BHU into an IIT becomes a legal reality.

Philanthropy news of the day

Indian Express: Google mentor’s family to fund entrepreneurial research at IIT:

Nearly two years after Rajeev Motwani was found dead in a pool in the backyard of his Atherton home, his family has come back to his alma mater to foster values and ideas he cherished. His wife, Asha Jadeja Motwani, has pledged $1.5 million to IIT-Kanpur on the occasion of her husband’s 49th birth anniversary. The fund will go towards setting up the Motwani Building at the IIT and a centre for entrepreneurial research.

Also in philanthropy news from India: Buffett and Gates Prod India’s Wealthy to Be More Philanthropic.

Onion reveals the secret

A priceless video news segment from the Onion News Network: CIA's "Facebook" Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs.

Money quote:

CIA calls Facebook "Reason we invented the Internet."

First mention

Every once in a while, NYTimes presents a brief history of key scientific advances, starting with their first appearance in the newspaper itself. This week's First Mention features In Vitro Fertilization, 1974:

When The New York Times first mentioned in vitro fertilization, the paper might have been reporting on a casually uttered lie.

The article appeared on July 16, 1974. A British physician, Dr. Douglas Bevis, gave a presentation on embryo implantation, work that had been going on in animals for some time. After his talk, during a question-and-answer session, he said that three test-tube human babies had already been born, and that he had “learned about the births through exchanges with colleagues in ‘chit-chat.’ ” [...]

... That September The Times Magazine published “The Embryo Sweepstakes,” an article that suggested Dr. Bevis’s claims might be fraudulent; it also described the work of two British doctors, Patrick C. Steptoe and Robert G. Edwards, who did seem close to achieving the feat. Dr. Bevis, who died in 1994, never spoke about the issue again.

National Academic Depository

This major counter-measure against academic cheaters takes another step forward: the Cabinet approval.

The National Academic Depository Bill proposes to create a national-level database of all academic certification and is projected as a major reform step that will cut through layers of attestation and inspection processes and crack down on fake degree rackets. It also means that every student, employer and institute will be able to take a print of a degree and check its veracity online — like a demat account. That apart, the ministry feels the move will help in maintenance of academic records and check problems like spoilage of certificates over time. It will also ease things for those seeking duplicate copies of their degrees.

Cyclotrope

This video is really cool. Nicely done.

Links ...

1. Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed: MIT Again Reviews Status of Women. See also: this NYTimes report.

2. Rajat Gupta steps down from the Chairmanship of ISB Board. He's also counter-suing SEC.

3. Quote of the Day:

   Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
   -- attributed to Mark Twain and a whole lot of others.

Evgeny Morozov on "What Technolgoy Wants" by Kevin Kelly

A scathing review that'll make you go, "Ouch!"

Kelly’s project, by contrast, seeks to deepen the moral void -— and to establish its normative character by claiming that it is propelled by the same forces as evolution. But can evolution really explain the plight of child laborers mining for cobalt—a key ingredient in batteries for mobile phones—in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zambia? (According to a 2007 study by SwedWatch, a Swedish watchdog, there were some fifty thousand workers under the age of eighteen involved in this practice.) Is exploiting minors for cobalt mining something that technology wants, or is it something that certain businesses, here disguised under the innocent label of the “technium,” require? To claim that such processes follow the normal direction of evolution is to let the mining corporations off the hook far too easily.

Alison Gopnik: "Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School"

An excellent column over at Slate:

Sidebar Link

Let Kids Rule The School by Susan Engel.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative?

John Timmer reviews David Goodsteins's "On Fact and Fraud"

Overall, a negative review. I haven't read the book, so I can't argue one way or the other.

Sidebar Links

PDF of the first chapter

David Goodstein's home page

A grim / funny quote from his book, States of Matter

* * *

Two excerpts -- one is on a specific case, and the other is a general point about the organizational structure of science:

... Goodstein revisits the history of Millikan's oil drop experiment, which provided the first accurate measurement of the electron's charge. A subsequent review of Millikan's notebook suggested that the work might have involved some cherry picking, with only a subset of the complete experimental record ending up published.

Goodstein makes a fairly convincing case that the reanalysis was itself a bit selective. The original work involved using a complex experimental device, and some of the discarded data appears to have simply involved the period in which Millikan was figuring out how to get the machinery to work. It also seems to have been sensitive to atmospheric conditions, and some of the other discarded data involved days where the air quality caused the results to suffer.

These are the sorts of informed judgements that go on in research all the time, but to an outsider they can seem baffling and arbitrary.

... and ...

He also praises the reward and authority systems that help keep the scientific community on the straight and narrow. But it's not hard to imagine that these systems might break down when presented with more challenging cases than the ones presented here. It's also hard to forget that this is a system that has treated Goodstein pretty well over the years; you'd expect him to like it. In less well-documented cases of scientific fraud, the fraudster's position of authority kept people from questioning suspicious results.

In case you are interested

Robert Reich: "With Nuclear Reactors, You Get What You Pay For"

With nuclear reactors, you get what you pay for

[... snip ...]

... Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

Links ...

1. Societal benefits of research -- A project of the Association of American Universities. Short, snappy reports on all kinds of cool things made possible by basic research. Example: Google.

   And, oh, AAU can do parody too! It's mildly funny, but quite effective. [Hat tip to Inside Higher Ed

2. Shailaja Neelakantan in CHE: India Prepares a Welcome Mat for Students and Foreign Universities

3. Sarah Lyall in NYTimes: Missing Micrograms Set a Standard on Edge: "No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century. "

Rajat Gupta's smoking gun

Does ISB have a course on business ethics? This tape -- featuring the Chairman of ISB Board -- will be a great educational aid in that course.

Listening to that tape leads WSJ's Evan Newmark to wonder, "How come Gupta hasn’t yet been criminally charged for his shenanigans?" Newmark's commentary highlights the incriminating parts of the conversation. One of them is the part where Gupta reveals Goldman Sachs's plans. I want to excerpt the other part. Here's Newmark:

Oddly, I don’t think Gupta’s misuse of his Goldman board position was the ugliest feature of the call. That distinction goes to the way Gupta blithely accepted Rajarantam’s shady dealings with Anil Kumar, Gupta’s McKinsey protégé.

Here’s part of their exchange:

Raj Rajaratnam: Now, from, for the last three or four, I mean four or five years, I’ve given him a million bucks a year.

Rajat Gupta: Yeah, yeah.

Raj Rajaratnam: After taxes, off shore cash.

Rajat Gupta: Yeah, yeah.

Those Gupta “yeahs” are not “yeah, I’m sort of listening to you, Raj”, those are “yeah, you’re right, Raj. That Anil is an ungrateful leech.”

Please listen to the wiretap of the call yourself. The tone of Gupta’s voice will tell you much more than simply reading a transcript.

Here was the former Managing Partner of McKinsey acknowledging that Rajaratnam is paying offshore cash to a McKinsey partner, violating McKinsey’s internal disclosure and conflict of interest rules, as well as evading U.S. taxes.

A “crime” by Gupta? Probably not. More a sin of omission. But disgraceful? Absolutely.

NYTimes on the zu Guttenberg Affair

Here. It's a nice summary of how the story unfolded -- including protests that involved hanging "shoes on the iron fence outside the Defense Ministry in Berlin in a sly ... allusion ... to the missing footnotes in Mr. Guttenberg’s dissertation."

I can excerpt from many different sections of that story, but I'll go with what Krugman chose (through whom I got the link):

Ms. Merkel, a former academic married to a professor, was being accused of belittling intellectual property theft and, by implication, the value of an advanced degree, which is not a purely academic matter in this country. Many jobs require such degrees in Germany, where, as is not the case in America, calling oneself doctor for having completed a thesis in, say, political science or art history, is not embarrassing but normal, even when filling out Lufthansa’s online booking forms. (The airline generously provides three levels of academic achievement for its overachieving countrymen: doctor, professor and professor doctor, skipping the extremely rare but not unheard-of German mouthful Herr Professor Doctor Doctor).