Sunday, July 31, 2011

Women in Computer Science


Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right?

Wrong.

In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.

Fascinating stuff from Anna Lewis at the Fog Creek blog. [Link via Sociological Images.

John Cage's 4:33


Apparently, you can buy this piece of 'music' for $0.99 at the iTunes store.

Samuel McNerney muses on the reasons why people might actually buy this stuff.

Placebo Effect with a Twist


...Kirsch [found] that the six antidepressants he studied were more effective than placebos, but the difference was very small [...]. Kirsch then speculated that even this small effect might not be real, because patients who received the antidepressant instead of an inert placebo would experience side effects that might enable them to guess that they were receiving an active drug, and therefore might make them more likely to report an improvement in their depression. In support of this hypothesis, Kirsch pointed to a few trials employing placebos that themselves had side effects, where no differences were found between drug and placebo. [...]

That's from Marcia Angell's response to critics of her reviews (Illusions of Psychiatry< The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?) of books on mental illness.

The entire set of articles offer a great primer on the power of Big Pharma in biomedical research and medical practice. Here's another excerpt from the end of her article:

Friedman and Nierenberg refer to the death of Rebecca Riley, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well as ADHD when she was just two years old, as a “tragic anecdote.” While that is true, I believe it should also be seen in the context of the extraordinary epidemic of juvenile bipolar disease that was stimulated largely by the teachings of some of Dr. Nierenberg’s colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Three of them were recently disciplined by the hospital for not having disclosed some of their hefty payments from drug companies.

If readers check the NYR website, they will see that Dr. Nierenberg discloses his external sources of income, which include consulting arrangements with some of the major manufacturers of psychoactive drugs. While I am not in a position to, and will not, comment on Dr. Nierenberg’s consulting work, it seems to me that in general, one of the risks of close collaborations with industry is that even the best of physicians might develop an insufficiently critical attitude toward a company and its products, as well as to pharmacologic treatment generally.

Dr. Friedman seems to agree. In a review of a book by Alison Bass, published in The New England Journal of Medicine (June 26, 2008), he refers to the handsome payments by drug companies to physician researchers who test their drugs, and goes on to say, “Bass’s riveting and well-researched account of these disturbing ties should be widely read by members of the medical profession, many of whom continue to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are immune to the influence of drug companies.”

More on the IV Patent Trolls


This one is from Tim Lee in a post entitled "Nathan Myhrvold's Evil Genius" [this is from 2009; link found in his recent post]:

The fundamental question we should be asking about this business strategy is how it benefits anyone other than Myhrvold and the patent bar. Remember that the standard policy argument for patents is that they incentivize beneficial research and development. Yet IV’s business model is based on the opposite premise: produce no innovative products, spend minimal amounts on research and development, and make a profit by compelling firms that are producing products and investing in R&D to pay up. Not only does this enrich Myhrvold at everyone else’s expense, but it also reduces the incentive to innovate, because anyone who produces an innovative product is forced to share his profits with Intellectual Ventures. Patents are supposed to make innovation more profitable. Myhrvold is using the patent system in a way that does just the opposite. In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.

There are quite a few links in the comments section of Brayden King's post at Orgtheory.net.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Patent Trolls and the Mafia


An awesome investigative piece at NPR on the 'business model' of Intellectual Ventures, and the dysfunctional hell created by developments in the US patents law. Key quote:

... Chris Sacca attended one of those meetings [addressed by Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myrhvold] a few years back.

The pitch he heard was, basically, Intellectual Ventures helps defend against lawsuits. Intellectual Ventures has this horde of 35,000 patents — patents that, for a price, companies can use to defend themselves.

Technology companies pay Intellectual Ventures fees ranging "from tens of thousands to the millions and millions of dollars ... to buy themselves insurance that protects them from being sued by any harmful, malevolent outsiders," Sacca says.

There's an implication in IV's pitch, Sacca says: If you don't join us, who knows what'll happen?

He says it reminds him of "a mafia-style shakedown, where someone comes in the front door of your building and says, 'It would be a shame if this place burnt down. I know the neighborhood really well and I can make sure that doesn't happen.' "

Sacca continues: "Here's what's funny: When I've seen Nathan speak publicly about this and when I've seen spokespeople from IV they constantly remind us that they themselves don't bring lawsuits, that they themselves aren't litigators, that they are a defensive player. But the truth is the threat of their patent arsenal can't actually be realized, it can't be taken seriously, unless they have that offensive posture, unless they're willing to assert those patents. And so it's this very delicate balancing act that is quite reminiscent of scenes you see in movies when the mafia comes and visits your butcher shop and they say, 'Hey, It would be a real shame if they came and sued you. Tell you what: pay us an exorbitant membership fee into our collective and we'll keep you protected that way.' A protection scheme isn't credible if some butcher shops don't burn down now and then."

Derek Sivers: "Why You Need to Fail"


I like this video because it distills a lot of literature (and popular articles) on becoming an expert (deliberate practice, the 10,000 hours rule, "talent is overrated," the growth mindset, etc.), and presents it all in under 10 minutes.

ACS Nano Editorial: "Fraud, the h-index and Pasternak"


The editorial (pdf) by Nicholas Kotov, an associate editor at the journal, appeared in 2010. A quick excerpt:

... if we look deeper, we can also see that this evaluation system established by officials of science and education ministries (China is only one of them) has simply formalized many aspects of the evaluation process of academic researchers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Indeed, the primary component of the degree, tenure, and promotion processes of scientists and engineers at research universities in the U.S. are the number of published articles and the ranking of the journals in which they were published. Now the question becomes, who is promoting evaluation based on simple numbers?

In this respect, as scientists, we ought to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what we have done. It is not any academic bureaucracy that forced us to evaluate our peers based on specific numerical metrics of ranking creativity and intellect, but rather the scientific community itself that generated and is perpetrating the “simple number approach”. [...]

Ken Auletta: "A Woman's Place"


New Yorker has a great profile of Sheryl Sandberg with the subtitle: "Can Sheryl Sandberg upend Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture?" Here's an excerpt about how male-dominated it really is:

Among the hottest new companies— Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Foursquare—none, as Kara Swisher reported in the blog All Things Digital, has a female director on its board. PayPal has no women on its five-member board; Apple has one of seven; Amazon one of eight; Google two of nine. When I asked Mark Zuckerberg why his five-member board has no women, his voice, which is normally loud, lowered to a whisper: “We have a very small board.” He went on, “I’m going to find people who are helpful, and I don’t particularly care what gender they are or what company they are. I’m not filling the board with check boxes.” (He recently added a sixth member: another man.) The venture-capital firms that support new companies have even sharper imbalances; Sequoia Partners lists eighteen partners on its Web site, none of them women.

One reason there are few female executives in Silicon Valley is that few women become engineers. In the United States, less than twenty per cent of engineering and computer-science majors are women. Girls are said to think that software and video games and computer programming are for guys. “Growing up,” Mark Zuckerberg’s older sister Randi told me, “my brother got video games and I got dolls.” For girls, there is a stigma attached to engineering, Marissa Mayer, who is now a vice-president at Google, says. “They don’t want to become the stereotype of all-night coders, hackers with pasty skin.” Michelle Hutton, who is the president of the international Computer Science Teachers Association, says, “Computer science is seen as a very masculine thing”—just “as girls don’t want to be garbage collectors because that’s seen as a boys’ thing.”

Saturday, July 23, 2011

N.R. Narayana Murthy on the Ancient Glory of the IITs


First, you should all go read what Arunn said.

* * *

NRN's diatribe speech included this bit:

In 1967, at the electrical engineering department of IIT-Kanpur there were about 60 to 70 students registered for PhD. But today, at the same department if there are five PhD students joining in a year, that would be fantastic.

Arunn has posted some data on the number of PhD graduates from IIT-M in recent years -- which should dispel some quaint notions NRN seems to have about the IITs of the sixties. [Update: Giridhar has also posted some data on the state of CS research in China and the US, and, more importantly, the number of research students in the EE department at IIT-K].

Let me add some more data about IIT-K -- which is presumably the IIT of 1967 NRN was talking about. The following data, available for select years, are from Table 9.1 in E.C. Subbarao's An Eye for Excellence: Fifty Innovative Years of IIT Kanpur:

YearNo. PhD Degrees
1965 6
1972 39
1979 105
1986 44
1989 44
1996 50
1997 66
1998 35
2000 58
2001 31
2003 39
2004 45
2005 61
2006 42
2007 86
2008 101

Subbarao also states (p. 295) that "the faculty strength in 1972 was 272 and remained stagnant at 290 (plus or minus ten) till recently."

IIT-B director Devang Khakhar's response is worth highlighting:

“He might have impression of his own time (seventies) when actually IIT’s were not doing any research. We are doing very good research now. IIT-B is publishing more than 1,000 papers in international journals every year."

Friday, July 22, 2011

Marilyn Monroe Statue


Here are some pics. The one with (mobile/camera)-wielding dudes is priceless.

Links ...


  1. PhD Comics: an animated conversation (which appears to have taken place in a cafeteria) on Dark Matter(s).

  2. If you still think it's difficult to run a fake school in the US, well, think again.

  3. A Chinese scientist is arrested for financial misdemeanours. What caught my attention is this:

    ... He was a postdoc and later a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego, before returning to China in 2004. Duan's wife and son remained in the United States.

    Three weeks ago, Duan's wife opened a blog on a popular Chinese Web site and began airing misdeeds she claims her husband committed, including the misuse of grant money. [...]

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Prof. P. Balaram: Blogs, Google and Cognitive Decline


History has just been made by Current Science: The words 'blog' and 'blogger' make their first second appearance in its editorial pages! [Update: Thanks to Richa forsetting the record straight. She adds, "25 July editorial might be the first to have "blogs" in the title :)".]

... A few days ago, another departing student gave me a book with an eye catching title, ‘blog!’. The absence of capital letters and the exclamation mark in the title were all signs of a new age. While presenting me with the book my student added, for good measure, that it was time that I learnt to blog. Her message was simple and direct; the student attempting to educate the professor. Anyone with pretensions to writing for a general readership, she felt, would be well advised to blog, in the hope of attracting the increasing number of people who seem to flit from site to site on the internet. [...]

Monday, July 18, 2011

Is Canada the New Australia ...


... for Indian students?

Canada, which has long promoted its eagerness to attract foreigners, is experiencing a surge in the number of Indian students heading there for higher education.

Besides the country’s positive attitude toward outsiders, the chief attractions for Indian students are the lower costs for both tuition and living expenses, in addition to its lenient visa requirements, according to students and consultants who advise them about overseas study options.

The number of Canadian student visas issued in India jumped to more than 12,000 in 2010, from 3,152 in 2008.

While applications have increased at all levels, growth has been greatest at community colleges, which typically offer career-focused certificate and diploma programs

The Pope on Twitter


Paul Rudnick of New Yorker offers us a possible preview of his tweets. A couple of samples:

I loved that best-seller about the boy who momentarily died and went to Heaven, but all I wanted to ask was, “Did He say anything about me?”

I counsel couples who are about to marry, “If it feels good, stop.”

IIT-M Scientists Scooped on Super Sand?


K.S. Jayaraman in Nature India [free subscription required]:

'Super sand', hailed as a low-cost water purification option for developing countries, recently made headlines across the world after researchers reported its merits. The sand, they said, could be made by coating ordinary sand grains with graphite oxide and could remove mercury and dyes from water. Its uniqueness — five times more filtering capacity than that of sand, which is traditionally used for water filtration.

While US and Australian authors have been given credit in the popular and scientific press for the finding, researchers [led by Prof. T. Pradeep] at the nanoscience lab of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai claim they were two years ahead of the US-Australia group in figuring this out. They say they missed out on the recognition since their scientific paper got delayed in a series of rejections by journal publishers.