Links

1. Susannah Locke in Vox.com: 15 ways to tell if that science news story is hogwash

   The excellent chart ... offers "A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science." It was put together by the blogger [Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher in the UK] behind the chemistry site Compound Interest. It isn't meant to be an exhaustive list — and not all of these flaws are necessarily fatal.

2. A bold initiative in France: Ambition in Paris:

   The creation of the University of Paris-Saclay’s campus will cost €2 billion ($2.17 billion), and a government-funded €2.5 billion ($2.72 billion) extension of the Paris Métro will connect the high-tech hub to the center of the French capital in 35 minutes.

   However, Dominique Vernay, president of Paris-Saclay, has bigger concerns than the infrastructure challenges involved in constructing the university’s 1,300-acre campus over the next few years, namely how to get 19 fiercely independent organizations to pull together and move in the same direction. [...]

   “They were not that keen to work together in the beginning, but they have taken steps over the past seven years to come together -- the commitment was to set up a common organization.”

   To this end, nine of France’s most prestigious grandes écoles, such as the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure, will work with less selective traditional universities, business schools and national research organizations at Paris-Saclay.

   Within 10 years, 12,000 researchers and 70,000 students will be based at the Paris-Saclay campus, with the institution aiming to take its place among the world’s top 10 universities by 2025.

3. Charles Seife in Slate: Science’s Big Scandal. "Even legitimate publishers are faking peer review."

   It can be read alone, but it's even better to read it with Seife's previous article in Scientific American: For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal. "An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities."

4. Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed: New Predatory Publishing in Old Bottles. "... What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue stream that can be both open and closed – earning money through subscriptions and author fees. [...]"

Neurohype

1. This hilarious piece of pop science "news" deserves its place right at the top because it sets the right tone for what comes next: Brain Region Found that Does Absolutely Nothing at Collectively Unconscious.

   Dr. Ahlquist was rather surprised at the finding. “During a pilot study we noticed that this small section of the cortex did not show differential activity in any of our manipulations. Out of curiosity, we wanted to see whether it actually did anything at all. Over the months that followed we tried every we knew, with over 20 different participants. IQ tests, memory tasks, flashing lights, talking, listening, imagining juggling, but there was no response. Nothing. We got more desperate, so we tried pictures of faces, TMS, pictures of cats, pictures of sex, pictures of violence and even sexy violence, but nothing happened! Not even a decrease. No connectivity to anywhere else, not even a voodoo correlation. 46 voxels of wasted space. I know dead salmons that are more responsive. It’s an evolutionary disgrace, that’s what it is.”

   The stuff about "dead salmons that are more responsive" doesn't provide a link, but I guess it's about the work [pdf] that won an IgNobel this year.

2. Gary Marcus in New Yorker: Neuroscience Fiction: What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn't. A good overview of the limitations of fMRI:

   ... [O]ur early-twenty-first-century world truly is filled with brain porn, with sloppy reductionist thinking and an unseemly lust for neuroscientific explanations. But the right solution is not to abandon neuroscience altogether, it’s to better understand what neuroscience can and cannot tell us, and why.

   The first and foremost reason why we shouldn’t simply disown neuroscience altogether is an obvious one: if we want to understand our minds, from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with the brain’s biology. The second is that neuroscience has already told us lot, just not the sort of things we may think it has. What gets play in the daily newspaper is usually a study that shows some modest correlation between a sexy aspect of human behavior, with headlines like “FEMALE BRAIN MAPPED IN 3D DURING ORGASM” and “THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON POKER”

   But a lot of those reports are based on a false premise: that neural tissue that lights up most in the brain is the only tissue involved in some cognitive function. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. [...]

   The sort of short, simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood.

Ready to Return?

Here's the latest hype from Rutgers:

Indian Graduates in U.S. are Ready to Return to India: Faculty shortages at Indian universities could be eased.

The study is based on a survey of nearly 1000 Indian students and post-docs in the US. Let me highlight a couple of points:

1. Survey respondents' attraction towards India is driven by lofty-softy factors like family, giving back to the motherland, help build India's higher ed, and comfort with society/culture. On the other hand, the factors behind keeping folks away from India are hard-nosed things that have a lot to do with job-related conditions: corruption, red tape, academic work environment, research funding, earning potential. [see page 16] Wonder which set of factors are likely to win?

2. While the report frames the issue as one of faculty shortage in India, (see the recommendations at the end of the report), the survey includes a large number of masters students (interestingly, their fraction in the study is actually less than their actual fraction among Indian students in the US). All said and done, doctoral programs account for less than a sixth of Indian students in the US [see these NSF documents] -- out of some 67,000 grad students, I would estimate less than 10,000 in the doctoral programs (because only about 1300 PhDs were awarded to Indians annually during 2004-2007).

Needless to say, I'm not happy with the framing; nor with the methodology. Like I said, there's just too much hype ...

Indian students in the US deserve a better study!

Of low stakes and academic politics

In the bitter fight over "Oxford University's professorial seat in poetry", for which elections were held recently, do you want to know how low the stakes were? The Economist has the answer [via Aurelie Thiele]:

This year, out of more than 4,000 academic staff and 150,000 graduates, only 477 people bothered to vote.

Price of hype ...

... includes ridicule. Look at the headlines:

1. $10 laptop proves to be a damp squib (Times of India): "... the computing device is 10 inches long and 5 inches wide and has been priced at around $30 at the event. ... it [is] being projected as a laptop when it was not. ... [F]or now at least the $10-laptop turned out to be damp squib. "

2. India's $10 laptop sounds like a bad joke (PC World): "... we’ve yet to see an official photo of the vaporous hardware." [Update: This Hindu story has a picture.]

3. India's $10 Sakshat laptop announcement is a complete bust (NetBooks): "It's some second grader sitting in the back of the bus, convincing his classmates that, really, his dad used to play basketball with Michael Jordan and that, seriously, he's totally hooking up with a seventh grader over at Parkland Middle School."

And the name! "I still can’t get over that name" and "an unfortunate name" are among the polite descriptions I have seen. Our government needs some lessons in product-launching and brand building.

Bengalooru has had it with IT!

That's the message in the latest Outlook cover story. While reading it, it appears to me that people -- even those who should know better -- are attributing to the IT sector what should really be placed at the doorsteps of governance. But, Sugata Srinivasaraju captures the change in the public perception quite well:

Infosys and Wipro are no longer considered gateways to heaven, but more as roads to hell. When Infosys's Narayana Murthy was charged with showing 'disrespect' to the national anthem, there was a glaring absence of sympathy for the IT czar in the public domain, whereas earlier there would have been a tidal wave of support. Likewise for Wipro, when it was charged by a government panel of encroaching upon Bellandur lake to build its guest house. Another time, when the state government proposed to set up an education training and management institute with the Azim Premji Foundation, there was a letter campaign against it. There is now a perceptible change in the way the public in Bangalore looks at Murthy and Premji, the two most revered symbols of its IT industry—that they're no different from other businessmen who merely make profits for their company and their shareholders.

But the really interesting stuff is in the two opinion pieces accompanying the cover story. C.N.R. Rao has used some intemperate language -- "If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT." I am sure these poorly chosen words will come back to haunt him.

Subroto Bagchi, on the other hand, thinks that Bangalore's resentment against the IT sector is like some marital discord caused by a misunderstanding that can be cleared up through better communication. This sounds too silly to buy into when you realize that the IT industry is not some quaint little industry run by a bunch of newbies; it is now a multi-billion dollar industry, whose enormous and extremely media-savvy PR machine ensured that it got a big chunk of the credit for the "India Shining" story.

Bagchi's column also has some irony that's all the more delicious because it was unintended. At the beginning of his piece, we get the now standard story about how the heroes of the IT revolution made it all happen without any government help. [I don't know where the tax holidays stand in this grand picture, but I will let it pass.] But all that heroism vaporizes when he bemoans, just a little later, the government's lack of sympathy for the IT sector when it was hit by the recent surge in the Rupee against the US Dollar.

Nice try, Mr. Bagchi!

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Thanks to Confused for the pointer.

Is the 100 Dollar laptop dead?

May be not dead, but close. Here's Fake Steve Jobs [via Wayan Vota's OLPC News] pouring scorn and ridicule on media outlets for hyping the product:

Remember all those big, splashy, gushing, goofy, stupid, incredibly naive stories in all the major publications about the Hundred Dollar Laptop? Remember the cover story in the NY Times Magazine about how this was going to save the world? Remember the insanely stupid 60 Minutes piece? Ever wonder why nobody, and I mean nobody, ever stopped to think about whether the whole thing could actually work? Or even to question how it was going to work? Did you notice that nobody looked at the business realities? Did anyone even consider looking at Negroponte's disastrous track record and his utter lack of experience? Did anyone point out what a ridiculous waste of space the entire MIT Media Lab has been? Of course not. Partly it's because no reporter wanted to pee on Negroponte's shoes and get branded as a meany and a kid-hater and a racist by the noisy freetards who backed this silly project.

If you have been following the decline and fall (and probably the impending demise) of Negroponte's dream project on the excellent OLPC News blog, you are probably aware that the OLPC project has attracted some of the best minds, and led to the development of some nifty technologies. Even if the 100 dollar laptop dies, many of these technologies will find a home in other (hopefully low-cost) products and gadgets. Thus, there is no reason to feel sad about the failure of OLPC.

As someone who opposed the very idea of a 'Third World laptop' pretty much from the time I heard about it (and I had my 15 nanoseconds of fame, too), I'm just glad that India didn't fall for the hype, and boldly said 'no' to this costly mistake.

From whatever I have seen, (here, here and here), laptops don't seem to have any serious educational value for school kids.

Consultants for everything: Personal branding on MySpace

Treating our personalities as products reflects an increasingly competitive society in which the best way to stand out is to develop an engaging--and easily defined--image. Companies and celebrities have been doing it for years. Now it's the average guy's turn. "For a long time, parents discouraged their children from worrying about what others think. They didn't realize how shortsighted and stupid that was," says Mark Leary, a social psychology professor at Duke University who studies impression management. "We need other people to think well of us."

Here's the Link. It comes via Made to Stick.

Great to Not-Even-Good!

Or, "Top 10 delusions of authors who dish out management fiction wisdom".

Check this out:

Of 35 "Excellent" companies studied in In Search of Excellence, 30 declined in profitability over the 5 years after the authors' study ended in 1979, Rosenzweig found. Similarly, of 17 of the 18 "Visionary" companies studied in Built to Last, only 8 outperformed the S&P 500 market average for the 5 years after the authors' study ended in 1990.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

What leads to high business performance? Consultants and journalists have advanced many answers to this question, both in print and from the lectern. But most of those answers are little more than educated guesses. In fact, most of them are probably bunk.

That, in a nutshell, is the message of a provocative new book, The Halo Effect (Free Press, February 2007). Written by Phil Rosenzweig, the book debunks that staple of the best-seller list, the corporate success story. According to Rosenzweig, popular and even academic studies of successful companies are commonly shaped by one or more of nine "delusions," which trump the basics of research and logic

Atanu Dey on PanIIT

Atanu Dey pans the PanIIT meet:

They took the stage for the next hour or so (but seemed interminable) congratulating each other on the “great success the PanIIT 2006” was. Each tried to outdo the other in heaping praise on all and sundry for the great job they have done. It was an orgy of premature congratulations. Their praise for each was only interrupted by references to how great a “brand” IIT was and how they, as the “product” of IITs, were going to “Inspire, Involve, and Transform” the nation, and who knows, perhaps the world, if not the entire universe. They were clearly impressed by their own cleverness in expanding IIT to mean spell the theme of the event.

It was a bit too thick, and I was beginning to feel a little sick. A bunch of self-absorbed inflated egos strutting about the stage sprouting meaningless drivel about how great they and the IITs were soon gets nauseating.

There's a lot more where it came from, and it ain't pretty.

My previous posts on the PanIIT meet are here and here.

PanIIM, meet Mr. Santosh Desai!

Santosh Desai does to the PanIIM folks what President Kalam did to those of PanIIT: prick their balloons. Except that Desai didn't do it live! His analysis is less blunt, but it also extends to a broader set of concerns (read: two Indias).

The interesting thing about the IIM discussion was that the enthusiasm of the alumni for the subject was not shared by the directors and senior professors of the IIMs. Their consensus was that the IIMs had a very long way to go before being considered world-class. They pointed out the abysmal salaries that faculty draws in India, spoke frankly about the absence of any research emanating out of these elite institutions and the inability to attract meaningful number of foreign students, given the absence of infrastructure. Add to this the distortions caused by constant governmental interference and the picture looked anything but promising.

Thanks to Madhukar Shukla for the pointer.

The tall, the smart, and bad labour market outcomes

You ought to read Stephen Hall's NYTimes piece presenting a nuanced analysis of the correlation between a person's height and his/her cognitive abilities. Here's a highly quotable sentence:

While understandable, the economist’s focus on income as the key determinant of success reflects a narrow bandwidth of human value; in economic studies of this sort, penniless artists like Vincent Van Gogh or impoverished leaders like Mahatma Gandhi would be examples of bad labor market outcomes.

Bengaluru ...

My own comment on an earlier post in this blog led to my views being sought a while ago on the almost-imminent change in the name of this great city of ours. Now, Ken Moritsugu of USA Today has quoted some of what I said in this story:

T.A. Abinandanan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a transplant from the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, says such concerns are exaggerated. Besides, he adds, Bangalore has a bad image among Americans whose jobs have been outsourced to India.

"When 'getting Bangalored' has acquired a strong negative connotation," he says, "becoming Bengaluru can only be a good thing for this city."

That concludes yet another episode of My 15 nanoseconds of fame. Not just any old type of fame; we're talkin' International Fame!

* * *

Now, for those 15 nano-persons who are still reading this post, here's what I wrote to Ken:

While I'm not enthused by the name change, I don't have any strong reason to oppose it, nor do I find the opponents' arguments persuasive or convincing. So, I guess I 'm with the supporters of the name change !

Sure, the name change is a result of our politicians' desire to gain some short term advantage by claiming to take the city to its (linguistic) roots. However, if it makes the Kannada-speaking people happy without affecting the others -- like me -- much, we can't complain, can we?

Some people see grave dangers (to the city's identity, brand image, etc), but such concerns appear to me to be exaggerated. Quite a few cities in India have gone through such changes without a hitch (and in spite of similar warnings of similarly grave dangers): Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai (where I grew up), Thiruvananthapuram .... I'm sure Bangalore's new name will become the norm within a short time.

I also see another small positive in the name change: when 'getting Bangalored' has acquired a strong negative connotation, becoming Bengaluru can only be a good thing for this city!

Redeeming Shing-Tung Yau's reputation

After Silvia Nasar and David Gruber trashed   Prof. Yau's reputation, Dennis Overbye tries to restore some of it in his article in today's NYTimes. This new effort can at best be described only as a partial success.

[I]n 2003, a Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, sketched a way to jump a roadblock that had stymied Dr. Hamilton and to prove the hallowed theorem as well as a more general one proposed by the Cornell mathematician William Thurston. Dr. Perelman promptly disappeared, leaving his colleagues to connect the dots.

Among those who took up that challenge, at the urging of Dr. Yau, were Huai-Dong Cao of Lehigh University, a former student, and Xi-Ping Zhu of Zhongshan University. Last June, Dr. Yau announced that they had succeeded and that the first complete proof would appear in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, at which he is the chief editor.

In a speech later that month during the string theory conference, Dr. Yau said, “In Perelman’s work, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, but complete details of the proofs are often missing,” adding that the Cao-Zhu paper had filled some of these in with new arguments.

This annoyed many mathematicians, who felt that Dr. Yau had slighted Dr. Perelman. Other teams who were finishing their own connect-the-dots proofs said they had found no gaps in Dr. Perelman’s work. “There was no mystery they suddenly resolved,” said John Morgan of Columbia, who was working with Gang Tian of Princeton on a proof.

This new piece of dirt doesn't help Yau's cause at all:

In a twist, a flaw has been discovered in the Cao-Zhu paper. One of the arguments that the authors used to fill in Dr. Perelman’s proof is identical to one posted on the Internet in June 2003 by Bruce Kleiner, of Yale, and John Lott, of the University of Michigan, who had been trying to explicate Dr. Perelman’s work.

In an erratum to run in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, Dr. Cao and Dr. Zhu acknowledge the mistake, saying they had forgotten that they studied and incorporated that material into their notes three years ago.

Gosh, we are all going to lose our jobs!

Another title: Computational Materials Design: Is this some mega-hype, or are our jobs really in danger?

From the MIT news release:

The same computer methods used by online sales sites to suggest books to customers can help predict the crystal structures of materials, MIT researchers have found.

These structures are key to designing new materials and improving existing ones, which means that everything from batteries to airplane wings could be influenced by the new method. [...]

Using a technique called data mining, the MIT team preloaded the entire body of historical knowledge of crystal structures into a computer algorithm, or program, which they had designed to make correlations among the data based on the underlying rules of physics.

Harnessing this knowledge, the program then delivers a list of possible crystal structures for any mixture of elements whose structure is unknown. The team can then run that list of possibilities through a second algorithm that uses quantum mechanics to calculate precisely which structure is the most stable energetically -- a standard technique in the computer modeling of materials.

The Nature Materials paper from Gerbrand Ceder's group is here [subscription required].

Outlook's ranking of engineering and medical colleges

The rankings are just out: top 100 engineering colleges and top 25 medical colleges. The cover story is here, and the methodology is described here. If you read the methodology, you will find good reasons to not take this entire ranking exercise too seriously. So there.

However, there are other interesting stories that accompany the Cover Story. One of them recounts the sad story of how the famed Karnataka model was undermined and destroyed. There are two articles by engineering graduates (and currently employed in IT industry) from private colleges in Tamil Nadu. While both of them (with a not so high grades and entrance marks) are grateful for the opportunity to study engineering, they are quite candid about the problems in the system of private colleges. From T.R. Muralidharan's article:

... Anna University (to which all engineering colleges are affiliated) is still finding it difficult to ensure that infrastructure and facilities at the colleges conform to standards. The quality of education rendered too is often substandard. There is a shortage of good professors in areas like IT and communications where developments happen rapidly.

Here's S. Senthil Kumar, a Dalit student who is now with Infosys:

Private engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu operate like small-scale businesses with disproportionately high turnover. Their marketability is determined by the numbers getting distinctions, the number of students going abroad for higher studies. Most of these colleges come up with bare minimum facilities, just about meeting AICTE requirements. Once revenues go up, more "facilities" are added. My college had a few good lecturers but many mediocre and not-so-good ones.

Business Today's B-School Ranking

Madhukar Shukla gives this year's B-school ranking by Business Today something it deserves: a thorough fisking. Check it out.

When gurukul met cybernetics ...

... the result was this software:

This is the fourth generation knowledge transfer system which combines the gurukul system of education and book-based teaching, Vasanth told PTI adding that it maps the student's mind 18 times per second to work out a strategy.

"After mapping his activities, it tells the student what time of the day he is most attentive and formulates a strategy for preparations," he said.

The software evaluates the student's lack of subject- wise knowledge and its remedial teaching technologies and provides optimal learning from a huge knowledge bank compiled by 60 full-time professors, according to Vasanth.

It does all this; but it can do even more!

On the basis of its evaluation, the software may even advise a student not to take a particular examination.

In case you are wondering, this software is called 'CLEaRS,' acronym for Compuertised Learning, Evaluation and Review System.

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Thanks to Apurva Mathad for the e-mail alert.

What is the biggest lie about blogging?

High-profile bloggers give their answers. Here.

I found two that are worth quoting here. Here's the first:

Oh for sure, it's this: That people care what you say. They don't. They care what they get.
-- Seth Godin.

Here's the second, a comment by Jonathan Kranz:

I don't know what the biggest lie about blogging is, but I think I have a handle on the biggest truth:

What's the most-discussed, most-heated, most-commented-upon subject in the blogosphere? Blogging itself...

Look at the Daily Fix, for example: no other topic generates as many comments or sends as many bloggers, descending like Hitchcock's "Birds," upon this site.

Bloggers are interested in blogging.

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Hat tip: Chugs.