What if Facebook was actually called Policebook?

Apparently, a serial murderer and rapist was identified by the police when they used a DNA database (called GEDmatch, which appears to be a site meant for helping people find their relatives) to which he had voluntarily provided his DNA data. Science has an interview with Yaniv Erlich, a Columbia University geneticist, who had alerted to possible uses of a site such as GEDmatch in 2014.

An excerpt where Erlich makes a key point:

Q: There’s a lot of concern about privacy being compromised here, but people voluntarily put their data into GEDmatch.

A: It's not like people fully understand the consequences of putting their DNA into a public database. They think, “So many people use the website, so it’s OK.” Or: “Oh, it’s a website for genealogy.” What if it was called Police Genealogy? People wouldn’t do it. We don’t think about everything. We think about the most likely thing. [Bold emphasis added]

From the Annals of Consumer Complaints: Boring Lectures!

From The Guardian:

Graduate sues Oxford University for £1m over his failure to get a first
Faiz Siddiqui claims ‘appallingly bad’ teaching during degree course prevented him from having a successful career

An Oxford graduate is suing the university for £1m claiming the “appallingly bad” and “boring” teaching cost him a first-class degree and prevented him from having a successful career.

Faiz Siddiqui, who studied modern history at Brasenose College, told the high court he believes he would have had a career as an international commercial lawyer if he had been awarded a first rather than the 2:1 he achieved 16 years ago.

Whistleblowing is Hard (and Dangerous): Theranos Edition

Just drop everything and read this absolutely gripping WSJ story on Tyler Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower (who also happens to be the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was -- and continues to be -- associated with Theranos).

This snippet is from the section where the lawyers appear:

A few weeks later, Mr. [Tyler] Shultz was confronted by his father after arriving for dinner with his parents at their home in Los Gatos, Calif. His grandfather had called to say Theranos suspected he had talked to the Journal reporter. Theranos’s lawyers wanted to meet with him the next day.

He says he called his grandfather and asked if they could meet without lawyers. The elder Mr. Shultz agreed and invited his grandson to his house. The mood was tense but cordial, Tyler Shultz recalls, and he denied talking to any reporters. He says his step-grandmother was present during the conversation.

His grandfather asked if he would sign a one-page confidentiality agreement to give Theranos peace of mind. According to Tyler Shultz, when he said yes, his grandfather revealed that two lawyers were waiting upstairs with the agreement.

The Other Big Verdict

Outlook reports [hat tip to my collegue Atul Chokshi for the e-mail alert]:

Delhi High Court

restrains

IIPM

and its management from using “MBA, BBA, Management Course, Management School, Business School or B-School” ” in relation to the courses / programmes being conducted by them."

The Outlook link also has the pdf of the verdict.

* * *

See also this Mint report: High court censures IIPM, Arindam Chaudhuri for misleading students.

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? [...]

Pardoning Turing

Here's a great post at The Guardian by Ally Fogg on why the pardon is "entirely, profoundly wrong" though it "will be welcomed by many", and is "undoubtedly a gesture of humanity, compassion and progressive values."

In announcing the pardon today, the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, said: "A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man." Turing was certainly an exceptional man but the tribute could not be less fitting. It says that the British state is prepared to forgive historical homosexual acts providing they were performed by a national hero, academic giant or world-changing innovator. This is the polar opposite of the correct message. Turing should be forgiven not because he was a modern legend, but because he did absolutely nothing wrong. The only wrong was the venality of the law. It was wrong when it was used against Oscar Wilde, it was wrong when it was used against Turing and it was wrong when it was used against an estimated 75,000 other men, whether they were famous playwrights and scientists or squaddies, plumbers or office clerks. Each of those men was just as unfairly persecuted, and many suffered similarly awful fates. To single out Turing is to say these men are less deserving of justice because they were somehow less exceptional. That cannot be right. [Bold emphasis added]

[The royal pardon arrived within weeks of the Naz Foundation verdict that it is constitutional (again) to prosecute gays Section 377. See this post by Siddarth Narrain at Kafila unpacking the "unreason" of the Supreme Court judgement. See also the relevant posts (too many to link directly to) at Law and Other Things.]

Sexual Harassment Charges Against a Retired Supreme Court Judge

It all started with a post -- Through My Looking Glass -- by Stella James who alleged that she was harassed by a "recently retired" Supreme Court judge back in December 2012 when she was interning with him. She elaborated a bit more in an interview to Legally India. While a a three member committee set up by the Supreme Court is inquiring into this case, several things have happened:

• Another intern leaves a Facebook comment supporting James' allegations.

• Mihira Sood writes an opinion piece at Legally India: In one of India’s ‘most sexist professions’, harassment by powerful men is rife.

• Nikhil Kanekal's story at Outlook leaves several clues that help reveal the alleged perpetrator -- see this post at Law and Other Things for further clues.

• Indira Jaising, Additional Solicitor General of India, pens an open letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court demanding greater transparency in the functioning of the inquiry committee. It's filled with scathing remarks about the legal profession, the attitude of the judges, and even the "architecture of the Supreme Court".

• An NGO called Lawyers Collective has asked the Supreme Court to follow its own policy -- called the Vishaka Guidelines -- in dealing with this case.

• In a MInt column, Farah Rahman draws the parallels between this case and the allegations of harassment made by Anita Hill against the Justice Clarence Thomas during his Senate confirmation hearings. Her column ends on a hopeful note:

  One result of Hill’s decision to come forward with the allegations was that it brought the issue of workplace sexual harassment to the fore and the hearings brought the issue live to anyone who had a television and could bear to watch the hearings. The year after the hearings, 1992, saw a record number of women run for office and win. There is no question that Hill’s decision to out the truth was brave, unprecedented and paved the way for women to speak up and take charge. This is also happening now in India.

Talk at IISc about Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This talk will address the history of sexual harassment as an employment concern and the issue in India - leading up to the Vishaka guidelines. More recently, Parliament has enacted a law on Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace.The talk will focus on the new act and duties of employers as well as how complaints can use the Act to have complaints of sexual harassment addressed.

The talk is scheduled for 6:00 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday, 24 October 2013), and the speaker is Aarti Mundkur, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. Here's the speaker bio:

Aarti Mundkur is a founder member of the Alternative Law Forum (ALF), Bangalore. She was with ALF for 11 years mainly for women in distress, domestic violence and sexual harassment. She also served on the Juvenile Justice Board, Bangalore for two years. She has a masters degree in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a degree in law from Bangalore University.

War on Course Packs

ToI has an AFP story on the war course packs unleashed by the Cambridge University Press, the Oxford University Press, and Taylor & Francis:

A cramped, one-room shop tucked away in Delhi University seems an unlikely battleground for a publishing war that, academics warn, threatens quality of and access to education in the world's second most populous nation.

The busy shop, where photocopiers churn out papers for a steady stream of students for a small fee, is at the centre of a court battle brought by three venerable academic presses over the interpretation of India's copyright law.

The lawsuit, filed by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis against Delhi University and the shop threatens production of "course packs" -- de facto "textbooks" made of photocopied portions of various books.

Course packs are common throughout much of the developing world -- where most university students cannot afford to purchase new or even second-hand textbooks -- and are seen as key to the spread of education there.

Many leading academics, including Prof. Amartya Sen, have taken a stand against the lawsuit by the publishing companies. On his Google+ stream, Prof. Tim Gowers of Cambridge posted a petition against the lawsuit, and offered this comment:

... It doesn't sound like a straightforward case to me -- probably CUP and OUP are technically in the right but not necessarily right to enforce that right so vigorously. In any case, I'm happy to give it more publicity, since it raises interesting and important issues.

From the comments on Gowers' post, I got a link to Prof. Shamnad Basheer's op-ed in The Hindu that lays out the arguments against the publishers' moves. The op-ed ends with this call:

In the end, this lawsuit must be seen for what it is: a highly pernicious attempt to fill the coffers of publishers at the expense of students! It must be resisted with all the moral and legal force we have.

Punishment for Inflated Claims in a Press Release

When misconduct in scientific research is proved, the punishment is graded according to the severity of the crime. Fabrication gets you fired (Jan Hendrik Schon, Diederik Stapel, Elizabeth Goodwin, Hwang Woo Suk, ...), while falsification (some minor forms, at least) and plagiarism get you some sanctions (you can't apply for a grant for n years, or your students get reassigned to some other group).

I know of only one case where someone was sent to jail, not quite for research miscondut, but for his use of fabricated data in a grant application. In other words, he was jailed for cheating the government using false information.

Here's a case of someone who was sentenced to house arrest for six months for saying certain things in a press release -- even though everything in the press release is factually correct!

Harkonen’s crime, according to the U.S. government, a federal jury and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was willfully overstating in a press release the evidence for benefit of a drug his company made.

The press release described a clinical trial of interferon gamma-1b (sold as Actimmune) in 330 patients with a rapidly fatal lung disease. What’s unusual is that everyone agrees there weren’t any factual errors in the four-page document. The numbers were right; it’s the interpretation of them that was deemed criminal. Harkonen was found guilty of wire fraud in 2009 for disseminating the press release electronically. [...]

“If you applied this rule to scientists, a sizable proportion of them might be in jail today,” said Steven N. Goodman, a pediatrician and biostatistician at Stanford University who submitted a statement supporting Harkonen’s appeal. [Bold emphasis added]

Links

1. Max Nisen in Business Insider: How Winning Awards Changes People. A commentary on the working paper entitled Prizes and Productivity: How Winning the Fields Medal Affects Scientific Output by George J. Borjas and Kirk B. Doran.

2. Pam Belluck in Well, a NYTimes blog: For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov. Commentary on this study (paywalled).

3. Drew Desilver at the Fact Tank: Chart of the Week: The world’s most popular web sites. [via Matt Yglesias]

4. Laura Sydell at NPR's All Things Considered: Record Label Picks Copyright Fight — With The Wrong Guy. The "wrong guy" is Harvard's Lawrence Lessig.

5. Gillian Tett in FT: Geeks can be girls.

Links: Indian Higher Ed

1. The biggest news of the week: the Supreme Court scrapped NEET, the medical entrance examinations for UG and PG admissions. In doing so, it appears to be going against its own earlier views. See also Arun Mohan Sukumar's strong critique of the verdict: A hatchet job, NEETly done.

   Here's another relevant piece of info pointed out by Ramya Kannan in The Hindu:

   Tamil Nadu was among the first few States to oppose the conduct of NEET. Subsequently, as the Central Institutes, AIIMS and PGI, stayed out of NEET, conducting their own entrance examinations and admitting students, the chorus of dissent against NEET grew more vociferous.

   Soon, the National Board of Examinations, which awards the DNB qualification, also conducted its own examinations.

   In effect, then, it turned out that what was not good enough for the Central Institutes was considered good enough for the States. Naturally, the States objected; slowly, their voices grew louder. A number of cases were filed across the country by medical institutions and States objecting to the implementation of NEET. States also reasoned that they would have to have a control on PG admissions if they were to be able to retain professionals in the State's medical services cadre.

2. In an interview Prof. Amartya Sen reveals some of the plans for Nalanda University (including his hope to "advertise the [academic and research] posts this summer, and ... [start] in a small way 2014". Other highlights [bold emphasis added]:

   We hope we will get large sums of money. We have some money initially from the government of India to survive the core plans that we have at the moment. We will start with six faculties, and as and when we have the money, we will expand. We have to make sure the quality of education in those areas is extremely high.

   The six faculties are environment, information technology, economics and management, history, linguistics, and international relations. One of the problems many newly created universities face, especially in India, is this idea that you have to begin with absolutely every department.

   That’s not the way we have to see it. We have to expand faculty by faculty to be financially comfortable. Within the finances we will try to provide curriculum reach and coverage as we can, subject to maintaining the highest quality of experts that the world can offer.

3. Shame on our Central Universities for doing such a shoddy job of their entrance exam this year. Seriously:

   And then were puerile queries, some relating to soap operas that had garnered eyeballs but very little critical acclaim.

   One question sought to test potential students for doctorate degrees to identify which channel ran the “Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’’ serial and which telecast the serial “Mowgli”.

4. UGC to establish chairs on 7 Indian Nobel Laureates; 31 more on 9 ‘illustrious’ persons.

Links

1. Next Chief Justice of India favours reservation in higher judiciary.

2. Unreserved on the rolls: "The merit argument is debunked as many OBCs make it to IITs in general category."

3. Indian government's plans for 'heritage' universities:

   ... It will ... give a special 'heritage status' that are at least a 100 years old as per a Rs 100 crore proposal being finalised by the Union human resource development ministry.

   Making the cut are state universities like Universities of Calcutta , Bombay and Madras set up in 1857, Presidency University (1817), Osmania University (1908) Central Universities Aligarh Muslim University (1875) and Allahabad University (1887) and deemed universities like Indian Veterinary Research Institute (1889), Ramakrishna Mission Vivekanand University (1897) , Jamia Hamdard (1906), Indian Institute of Science (1909) and Bengal Engineering & Science University (1856). Jadavpur University, Forest Research Institute (1906), Indian Agricultural Research Institute (1902) are also being considered for the heritage tag.

Links

1. Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker's cartoon editor, picks ten of his favorites. Delightful stuff -- the set even includes one about Einstein's pillow talk.

   Mankoff's TED talk is pretty great too:

2. What it's like to get a national security letter -- an interview with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive ... and of the Wayback Machine, [... and] one of very few people in the United States who can talk about receiving a national-security letter."

3. Hmmm, extending the progression towards grimness, here are a couple of links: How not to die by Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic, and How do physicians and non-physicians want to die? by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images. We also linked to an earlier article by Ken Murray making similar arguments.

Links

1. Roland Fryar's experiments in tech-enabled motivation:

   A groundbreaking experiment that bombarded US high school students with inspiring text messages was found to be a success on all counts except one: it made no difference to how the students performed in school.

2. Vikram Garg: Behind Middle India’s Celebration of the Meritorious Marginalized.

3. Fabio Rojas: How do graduate students actually choose their advisers?.

4. Science Insider: U.S. Supreme Court Strikes Down Human Gene Patents

5. Abstruse Goose: Alone in my room.

"They'll flip the switch. ... It'll be turnkey tyranny"

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower, speaks to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald about PRISM. Watch the video here; a report, along with a brief profile of the man, is here.

* * *

Update: Two more links: What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know by Bruce Schneier, and On whistleblowers and government threats of investigation by Glenn Greenwald.

ToI threatens a law student for her blog post

And the result is absolutely, awesomely, entertainingly stunning: it receives a scathing response [this post has all the relevant links], and gets mocked by media   watchers as well as by a rival newspaper.

* * *

A not-entirely-unrelated link: I was struck by lightning yesterday -- and boy am I sore .

Links

1. Tarun Jain (Indian School of Business) at Ideas for India: Should Bribe Givers Be Let Off?

   In 2011, Economist Kaushik Basu argued that for a class of bribes, the law should not punish the bribe-giver. This column presents results of experiments conducted to test this idea and provides insights for anti-corruption efforts.

2. Dirk Matten in Globe and Mail: India’s generics drug ruling will help, not hinder, innovation. He reiterates what I consider to be central to the Supreme Court verdict; Indian news outlets that I have seen seem to miss this point, though:

   The crucial point here is whether the version of Glivec for which Novartis was claiming patent protection is actually a ‘ new ‘ drug. What the Indian supreme court in fact ruled was not that Novartis should not enjoy patent protection on their new drugs; it mainly concluded that the new edition of Glivec, for which the company applied for protection, was in fact not sufficiently ‘new’ – not different enough from the old version of Glivec, for which the patent had expired.

   This points to a well know strategy of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than fighting generic companies, ‘originator’ companies such as Novartis just marginally change the chemical formula of an existing drug whose patent is about to expire and then pretend to having come up with an entirely new one, for which of course they should enjoy full patent protection.

3. Brad Plumer at the Wonk Blog: Expensive batteries are holding back electric cars. Can that change? A part of the argument hinges on the lack of a Morre's Law in energy storage technology!

Links

1. T.V. Padma in Scientific American: India Court Ruling Upholds Access to Cheaper, Generic Drugs. It's about yesterday's landmark Supreme Court verdict that denied Novartis a patent for its evergreened version of its anti-cancer drug.

2. Henry R. Bourne (UC-San Francisco) in eLife: The Writing on the Wall. Here's the abstract:

   The biomedical research enterprise in the US has become unsustainable and urgent action is needed to address a variety of problems, including a lack of innovation, an over-reliance on soft money for faculty salaries, the use of graduate students as a source of cheap labour, and a ‘holding tank’ full of talented postdocs with limited career opportunities.

3. Kristina Lerman in ACM SIGMOD Blog: Stop Publishing So Much Already!

4. Rebecca Skloot in NYTimes: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel:

   The Lackses’ experiences over the last 60 years foretold nearly every major ethical issue raised by research on human tissues and genetic material. Now they’re raising a new round of ethical questions for science: though their consent is not (yet) required for publishing private genetic information from HeLa, should it be? Should we require consent before anyone’s genome is sequenced and published? And what control should gene-sharing family members have?

5. SMBC has a "mathy" variant of "Talk dirty to me" -- with probably the first ever appearance of the Frobenius method in a comic strip.

Links

1. Via Rahul Siddharthan, we have a link to the blog of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), with posts by Prof. K. VijayRaghavan and other officials at DBT.

2. Rahul's post talks about institutional leaders who blog, and includes a link to the blog of Prof. Ram Ramaswamy, Vice Chancellor, University of Hyderabad. I would like to add links to the blogs of Prof. Pankaj Jalote (Director, IIIT-Delhi) and Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi (former Director, LNMIIT, Jaipur, and currently Dean-Academic Affairs at IIT-K).

3. Librarian shares his opinion on books coming out of an academic publisher, and the publisher sues him for libel. See the coverage at IHE and CHE.

4. Finally, PHD Comics has a two-minute video on Gino Putrino's PhD thesis research: How to Build an Artificial Nose.