LInks

1. Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away Researchers (Mike Ramsey and Douglas Macmillan in WSJ)

2. Deepak Singh in The Atlantic: 'I've Never Thanked My Parents for Anything'. "In America, saying thank you is routine. In India, it can be insulting."

3. Chris Woolston in Nature: Fruit-fly paper has 1,000 authors "Genomics paper with an unusually high number of authors sets researchers buzzing on social media." See also a related story from physics.

4. The Economist: Keeping it on the company campus. "As more firms have set up their own “corporate universities”, they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school."

5. A picture gallery on 150 years of mathematics in the UK in The Guardian

Changing Face of Business Leaders

Jena McGregor at The Washington Post has an interesting story summarizing recent research on the changes over the last 30 years in the composition of top leaders in US firms: The resume that makes for a top executive.

... [T]he majority of these top executives now have undergraduate degrees from state universities, with only a fraction going to college at one of the Ivies. Nearly 11 percent of the top executives are foreign-educated, up from just 2 percent in 1980. And however few women there may be in leadership positions, they actually climbed the corporate ladder faster than men, spending fewer years, on average, in each job and taking a shorter time to get to the top. [...]

Interestingly, the education backgrounds of top corporate leaders are becoming much more equal over time. In 1980, just 32 percent of leaders went to a public university. By 2001 that had grown to 48 percent, and in 2011 the number reached a majority, with 55 percent of corporate leaders going to state colleges. While the percent of Ivy Leaguers has dropped slightly, from 14 percent in 1980 to 10 percent in both 2001 and 2011, those with degrees from private non-Ivies has plummeted, falling from 54 percent in 1980 to just 35 percent in 2011. [...]

That’s not to say elite schools don’t still hold sway among MBA-holders and the very top leaders. If you look at the three most senior executives in each organization (say, the CEO, CFO and chairman), 21 percent have an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League school, compared with 10 percent overall. Additionally, 40 percent of all the executives who hold MBAs got them at one of the top 20 ranked business schools in the country, many of which are at Ivy League universities.

Penguin, The Book Pulper

If you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, ‘My feelings are more hurt than yours’.
-- Monica Ali, quoted in Kenan Malik's op-ed in The Hindu.

* * *

In an utterly abject move, Penguin India has reached an out-of-court agreement with a fringe outfit to "withdraw and pulp all copies" of Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History. There have been many expressions of dismay and outrage at the way the publisher pulper caved in, and quite a few point to the irony in the fact that the same pulper stood solidly behind one of its celebrated novelist who faced a fatwa not too long ago:

Kenan Malik in The Hindu:

Twenty five years ago on February 14, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, for the “blasphemies” of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. It is perhaps disturbingly apposite that this should also be the week in which Penguin, the publishers of The Satanic Verses, should so abjectly surrender to hardline Hindu groups over Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, agreeing to withdraw it from publication in India. The contrast between the attitude of the old Penguin and that of the new Penguin tells us much about how much the Rushdie affair itself has transformed the landscape of free speech.

Arundhati Roy's open letter to Penguin:

Tell us, please, what is it that scared you so? Have you forgotten who you are? You are part of one of the oldest, grandest publishing houses in the world. You existed long before publishing became just another business, and long before books became products like any other perishable product in the market—mosquito repellent or scented soap. You have published some of the greatest writers in history. You have stood by them as publishers should, you have fought for free speech against the most violent and terrifying odds. And now, even though there was no fatwa, no ban, not even a court order, you have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit by signing settlement. Why? You have all the resources anybody could possibly need to fight a legal battle. Had you stood your ground, you would have had the weight of enlightened public opinion behind you, and the support of most—if not all—of your writers. You must tell us what happened. What was it that terrified you? You owe us, your writers an explanation at the very least. [Bold emphasis added]

See also: Wendy Doniger's statment in which she promises a longer article on this issue soon.

Then there's also this telling 'reveal' in this interview of a leader of the fringe outfit; it's an apt illustration of the novelist Monica Ali's quote at the beginning of the post.

Why does it matter so much to you about what someone writes about Hinduism?

If someone makes a cartoon of the prophet Mohammad, Muslims are outraged around the world. So why should anyone write anything against Hinduism and get away with it? [...]

End of an Era: The Maruti 800 Edition

"The 800" was our first car, like it probably was for most Indian car owners. It served us well for nearly 12 years, even while acquiring a few hits and bumps along the way. It was still quite solid when we replaced it with its more spacious and much more expensive cousin, the Swift. A major repair and a fairly attractive buy-back offer helped us in rationalizing our choice to go for a (not entirely necessary) new car. While Swift is doing a fine job ferrying us around and its comforts make us feel pretty good about being ferried around in it, we still have fond memories of that cute little machine that was a part of our lives for such a long time.

So, it is with nostalgia that we note the end of the line for "the 800":

Maruti Suzuki India Ltd’s Gurgaon plant rolled out the country’s last Maruti 800 car last month, ending the hatchback’s three-decade run on Indian roads after a phase-out that began four years ago.

The last of the Maruti 800s rolled off the production lines on 18 January, C.V. Raman, executive director of engineering at Maruti Suzuki, said in Hyderabad on Friday. [...]

More than 2.7 million units of the Maruti 800 have been sold since it was launched in India in 1983.

Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest car maker by sales, has already stopped selling the hatchback in 16 cities, including in all the metros, as it became unviable for the company to upgrade the car to comply with BS IV emission norms. It began to phase out production of the car in 2010.

Maruti 800 today sells “very well” in rural markets, Raman said. [Bold emphasis added]

Links

1. Atul Gawande: Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?

2. Rex at Savage Minds: How to explain anthropology to a physicist.

   Anthropology is the science which studies human behavioral diversity. Because culturally-influenced conduct can take radically different forms in different places, it is foolhardy to use intuitions developed in one culture as a source of hypotheses about another. For this reason, it is reckless practice for natural scientists to stray into the expert territory of our discipline simply because they believe that if they are good at testing hypotheses in one realm they must be good at it in another.

   A good analogy to using the intuitions of one culture to to generate hypotheses about another culture would be to imagine a non-physicist with pre-theoretical intuitions about motion creating hypotheses about life aboard the international space station. Expectations about momentum, weight, and the behavior of fluids will founder in a micro-gravity environment. Because they have not had experience in microgravity, their intuitions will be incorrect.

   Simply because you are very good at shark embryology does not mean that you are ready to speak authoritatively about human societies. And, I am sure you will agree, vice versa.

   Often times specialized language in the life sciences is considered as a sign that those fields are mature and specialized, while specialized language in the human sciences is merely obfuscation or meaningless jargon. There seems to be an assumption that because biologists engage in marriage, commensality, and linguistic interaction they should, in principle, be able to understand all technical writing about these subjects. And yet somehow biologists think it obvious that layman cannot understand the the technical terminology of biochemistry, despite the fact that all laymen have metabolisms.

3. James Surowiecki: E-Book vs. P-Book. Largely about Barnes & Noble's iffy fortunes (and about its dumping its Nook tablet business), the article ends with the following on the continuing relevance of physical books:

   For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete. Barnes & Noble just needs to make sure it isn’t, either.

Sports and C-Suite Women

FT's Gillian Tett has a nice column on a recent study which found that "some 19 out of 20 women who sit in the “C-suite” – holding the title “chief something” – were sporty as a teenager; indeed, seven out of 10 still play sport as a working adult, while six out of 10 played sport at university." Musing on possible causal links that might explain this finding, Tett says:

... Girls who play sport at school learn at a young age that it is acceptable to compete aggressively. They also discover that success does not depend on looking good and that it can be acceptable to take pleasure in winning. That might seem an obvious point, at least to an adult man. But it is not so self-evident to young girls who are exposed to modern Hollywood teen – or tweenie – culture. Indeed, when I look at the cultural messages that kids receive now from films and television, compared with my own childhood, I suspect that girls need sports today more than ever. Being an athlete is one of the few socially accepted ways for teenage girls to compete, without peer criticism.

Links

1. Veenu Sandhu, Indulekha Aravind and Ranjita Ganesan in The Business Standard: Charity bazaar. "Indian businessmen and philanthropy have never walked hand in hand. But change is in the air."

2. Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post: Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says. A grim story involving a paper in Nature, in which one researcher gets fired after raising questions about research in his own group, another commits suicide, and a correction is being issued.

3. Christopher Drew and Jad Mouawad in NYTimes: Initial Tests of Battery by Boeing Fell Short.

4. Two cool cartoons by Dan Piraro (whose comics are posted at the Bizarro Blog).

Browseworthy

1. Nature reports that a Company offers portable peer review: Author-pays service cuts down on redundant reviews.
   

   The concept comes from a company called Rubriq. Charging authors an estimated US$500–700 for its service, the firm plans to offer a standard-format anonymized review, and is currently testing its concept with publishers including Public Library of Science (PLoS), Karger, F1000Research and Wiley, as well as more than 500 reviewers.

   The idea is for authors to pay for a quick independent peer review, as done currently, with the reviews to travel along with the paper when submitted to journals. If it gets rejected in one, the paper goes to the next journal along with the peer reviews already done and so on, saving time for all involved, before the authors find a suitable journal for getting their paper published.
   
2. Journal impact factor is useless and even detrimental. Assessment done based on journal ranking is bad scientific practice. As an academic if you still need convincing on these observations, read the recent salvo by Björn Brembs, Marcus Munafò titled "Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank" posted in the arXiv.
   
   The authors suggest to close down this journal publishing enterprise in toto "[...] in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system".
   
3. The claim that most biomedical research is wrong was first put forward by John Ioannidis at the University of Ioannina in Greece in 2005 [PLoS paper].
   
   This is being challenged in a recent paper posted in arXiv titled "Empirical Estimates Suggest Most Published Medical Research is True". Analysis in this paper suggest that the real number is just 14 per cent.
   
   Read a brief on this Technology Review article.
   
4. In an opinion piece titled Why Business Schools Teach Transparency but Practice Ambiguity Larry Zicklin provides several examples on why business schools should consider doing less research and more teaching. Here is his starting argument
   

   [...] if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost. And all that would be lost would be a succession of what he sees as research papers that are of only marginal interest.

   Read More...
   
5. Dean Keith Simonton, Professor of psychology at UC Davis,has a provocative Scientific genius is extinct comment in Nature. A copious quote from the article:
   

   Our theories and instruments now probe the earliest seconds and farthest reaches of the Universe, and we can investigate the tiniest of life forms and the shortest-lived of subatomic particles. It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline alongside astronomy physics, chemistry and biology. For more than a century, any new discipline has been a hybrid of one of these, such as astrophysics, biochemistry or astrobiology. Future advances are likely to build on what is already known rather than alter the foundations of knowledge. One of the biggest recent scientific accomplishments is the discovery of the Higgs boson – the existence of which was predicted decades ago.
   
   [...]If anything, scientists today might require more raw intelligence to become a first-rate researcher than it took to become a genius during… the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, given how much information and experience researchers must now acquire to become proficient.

   The article would have made me reflect more, if only it had defined properly what (according to the author) is scientific genius.
   

Links

1. Cathy Davidson at HASTAC: If We Profs Don't Reform Higher Ed, We'll Be Re-Formed (and we won't like it).

   If we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be.

2. Joseph Grcar in The American Scientist: Comments and Corrigenda in Scientific Literature -- How self-correcting is the written record of scientific and engineering endeavors?

3. Eduardo Porter in NYTimes: When Public Outperforms Private in Services. A feature story on a recent book The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan:

   "The more we reward those things that we can measure, and not reward the things we care about but don’t measure, the more we will distort behavior,” observed Burton Weisbrod, a professor of economics at Northwestern University ... As Professor Fisman and Mr. Sullivan put it: “If what gets measured is what gets managed, then what gets managed is what gets done.”

   Here's an NPR interview of the authors.

Links

1. Chrostopher Shea in The Atlantic: The Data Vigilante. "Students aren’t the only ones cheating—some professors are, too. Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them." [Via Andrew Gelman]. Simonsohn's statistical sleuthing has already uncovered fraud by two scientists who have resigned their academic jobs. Here's a direct quote from Simonsohn in the article:

   When you have scientific evidence, ... and you put that against your intuition, and you have so little trust in the scientific evidence that you side with your gut—something is broken.

2. Hannah Seligson in NYTimes: Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T.. A profile of Prof. Robert Langer and his lab.

3. James Surowiecki: Warren's Way -- a conversation over lunch with Warren Buffett, whose recent op-ed argues for a minimum tax on the wealthy.

4. And, finally, the latest non-news from the OLPC world: OLPC cancels XO-3 tablet, downplays need for new hardware.

Links

1. Samanth Subramanian at India Ink: Happy 80th Birthday, Air India.

2. Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham at Ideas for India: Why Indian education needs to get back to reality:

   What is the best advice to give an Indian education department official? This column argues that the best thing officials can do is drop the assumptions and stick to reality – otherwise many children will be missed out and left behind.

3. Confirmation of Marc Hauser's fraud. While there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, Harvard played coy on Hauser's misconduct by not releasing its investigation report; so it's good to have ORI's report in the public domain.

Links

1. Matt Honan in Wired: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

2. Patrick Combs in FT: A man walks into the bank. "Patrick Combs deposits a junk-mail cheque for $95,000 – for a joke. The bank cashes it." And follows it up with a series of foolish actions.

3. Peter Griffin in Forbes India: The Olympics: Still sexist after all these years.

4. Nishita Jha in Tehelka: After fairness cream, vaginal tightening cream is here to empower the Indian woman.

Links

1. Mohit Chandra, a partner at KPMG, pens an open letter to India's graduating classes. He talks about "five key attributes employers typically seek," adding immediately that "... these are often lacking in you and your colleagues." Topping his list of key attributes is this: "1.You speak and write English fluently."

2. Mitch Smith on Intellectual Ventures: Patent Protector or Pest? The question is relevant to India since quite a few top Indian academic institutions (including IIT-B, whose former director left that position to join IV) have a tie-up with the company which many see as a patent troll [see this NPR report, for example].

3. Nick Hanauer: Who are the job creators? This was a talk he presented at a TED event; but it "was deemed 'too politically controversial to post on their web site'."

Links

1. Tony Cookson: How similar are the markets for textbooks and drugs?

2. Charlie Stross: What Amazon's E-Book Strategy Means.

3. Mihir Sharma: Our Creamy Layer.

   India is the most elitist, exclusive, unequal and stratified country in the world, and we don’t even know it. The Indian elite – which smugly calls itself the “middle class”, since it alone benchmarks itself globally – has constructed walls of privilege for itself that are all the more powerful for being invisible to many eyes. And if not invisible, then concealed behind other words — “culture” and “merit”, for example.

4. Data on suicides in IITs, IIMs and NITs for the years 2009-12 [via Satyanarayan's tweet].

Links

1. B. Aravind Kumar: A Question of Ratings. "As many as 44 universities were bracketed under ‘C'. [... It is likely that many of the 44 deemed-to-be universities could be reverted to college status again."

2. Christopher Shea: Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Social Psychology. "Even legitimate researchers cut corners, some admit."

3. Emily Ramshaw and Ryan Murphy: Payments to Doctors by Pharmaceutical Companies Raise Issues of Conflicts. "Dr. Stanley Self, a part-time psychiatrist at Texas’ state-run Rusk psychiatric hospital, earns $166,000 a year from the state. He also earned at least $145,000 from drug companies in 2009-10, largely for speaking engagements. ..."

4. Noah Smith: Niall Ferguson does not know what "Western Civilization" means. "... By "Western," Niall Ferguson is not referring to a geographic region, a political system, an economic system, or a religion. He is not even referring to a specific set of countries. He is referring to a set of people; people who have pale pinkish skin, fine wavy hair, and prominent eye ridges. By "Western," Niall Ferguson means "white people." Asian Americans may have American passports, Ferguson thinks, but civilizationally speaking they are permanent foreigners. ..."

5. Andrew Hill: Inside McKinsey. "The world’s most prestigious consultancy prides itself on its intellectual prowess and ethical standards. But this year, an insider trading scandal surrounding former McKinsey luminaries has left staff and alumni reeling"

Westinghoused!

From Edison vs. Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry at Smithsonian [with a guest appearance by Nikola Tesla]:

The concern at Edison [that their DC technology could be wiped out by AC technology from Westinghouse] was palpable, as sales agents around the country were demoralized by Westinghouse’s reach into rural and suburban areas. But Thomas Edison had an idea. Surely Westinghouse’s system must be more dangerous, what with all that voltage passing through the wires. “Just as certain as death,” Edison predicted, “Westinghouse will kill a customer within 6 months after he puts in a system of any size.” [...]

When New York State sentenced convicted murderer William Kemmler to death, he was slated to become the first man to be executed in an electric chair. Killing criminals with electricity “is a good idea,” Edison said at the time. “It will be so quick that the criminal can’t suffer much.” He even introduced a new word to the American public, which was becoming more and more concerned by the dangers of electricity. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”

SEC's War on Insider Trading

In Roger Lowenstein's NYTimes story, you'll find several familiar people, including Raj Rajaratnam and Mark Cuban, at the receiving end of SEC's recent assault. Here's an excerpt from this gripping essay:

Then, in August 2006, the S.E.C. got a tip about a New York hedge fund, Sedna Capital Management. [Sanjay] Wadhwa [a lawyer in SEC's Manhattan bureau] was assigned to this case, too. Sedna was a small fund, but its manager, Rengan Rajaratnam, was the younger brother of Raj Rajaratnam, the head of Galleon Group, a $7 billion fund. Born in Sri Lanka and educated at Wharton, the elder Rajaratnam kept an extensive network of business associates, many of whom were also South Asians. Since 2000, his fund outperformed its peers by a stunning eight percentage points a year. Wadhwa’s focus began to shift to Raj, a gregarious, daring trader who reminded him of Plotkin.

... [T]he S.E.C. began an examination of Galleon, issuing subpoenas for its trading, telephone and bank records, its appointment calendars and e-mail. Wadhwa’s interest was piqued by the cryptic tone of Rajaratnam’s instant messages with Roomy Khan, a former Intel employee with extensive contacts in Silicon Valley. One, from Khan to Rajaratnam, urged the hedge fund magnate not to buy Polycom stock until she got “guidance.” Sensing the potential for a criminal case, the agency briefed lawyers at the Southern District, who agreed the case looked promising. Then, in March 2007, the S.E.C. received an anonymous letter on plain white paper claiming that Galleon traded tips in exchange for prostitution and “other forms of illegal entertainment.” The author hurled a taunting challenge at the regulators: “It hurts my heart to see how these guys make monkeys out of individual investors, S.E.C. insider trading regulations and the attorney general’s office.”

The S.E.C. could not identify the letter’s author, nor did prostitution figure in the eventual charges. But that June, Rajaratnam trooped downtown to the S.E.C. for a formal deposition. The agency’s lawyers asked about insider trading — which he denied. Less than a month later, Hilton Hotels revealed that it was being acquired; Finra promptly notified the S.E.C. that Galleon had invested in Hilton before the news broke. Wadhwa was stunned by Rajaratnam’s brass.

Two weeks later, Rajaratnam did it again: Galleon sold Google just before it announced disappointing earnings. In November, an F.B.I. agent visited Khan and asked if she would be willing to talk about Rajaratnam. Khan replied, “What took you so long?” [...]

Just in case you are feeling good about your work life ...

... here's a remedy: El Empleo / The Employment by Santiago Grasso [Link via Marc Bousquet and CommonDreams.Org]:

And just in case that wasn't enough ...

You're welcome!

Evolution and Darwinism

This boss knows the difference.

Patents: What's wrong with the current regime?

Nilay Patel has a good primer (possibly triggered by this recent NPR story on Intellectual Ventures and other such patent trolls):

... Patents publicly disclose some of the most advanced work ever done by some of the most creative and resourceful people in history, and it’ll all be free for the taking in several years. Stop offering patent protection and there’s no more required disclosure — all this stuff stays locked up as trade secrets as long as it offers a competitive advantage, after which point it may well be forgotten.

Western civilization has dealt with fiercely secretive industries going to insane lengths to protect their proprietary advantages in the absence of patents before: craft guilds like the Masons maintained an air of mystery and prohibited teaching outsiders their trades, and medieval Venetian glassblowers were assassinated if they tried to leave the city to set up shop elsewhere. And you think Facebook and Google are going to extremes trying to prevent employee defections now.