The Ultimate Kill Bill - Volume II

Watch this interview of HRD Minister Smriti Irani by Rajdeep Sardesai:

* * *
[Self-plagiarism alert!]

In the (unlikely) event that you haven't seen the two Kill Bill volumes (errr, movies), here's the iconic scene from the first volume.

The Ultimate Kill Bill - Volume 1

Watch this interview of HRD Minister Smriti Irani by Arnab Goswami:

In the (unlikely) event that you haven't seen the two Kill Bill volumes (errr, movies), here's the iconic scene from the first volume.

Links

1. Veenu Sandhu in The Business Standard: Sexual harassment at work: Tell and suffer. "A woman's ordeal only worsens after she protests against sexual harassment at the office."'

2. Cat Ferguson in Retraction Watch: Rolling Stone retracts UVA gang rape story: A view from Retraction Watch. [The only (and, barely) redeeming thing in this disaster is that Rolling Stone got an external review done by Columbia Journalism School, and made the review report public.]

   Ferguson quotes from the NYTimes article on the report's findings:

   It is hardly unusual for journalists to rely on members of advocacy groups for help finding characters, but it is a practice that requires extra vigilance. “You’re in a zone there where you have to be careful,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia and the journalism school’s former dean.

   Mr. Lemann distributes a document called “The Journalistic Method” in one of his classes. It is a play on the term “the scientific method,” but in some respects, investigating a story is not so different from investigating a scientific phenomenon. “It’s all about very rigorous hypothesis testing: What is my hypothesis and how would I disprove it?” he said. “That’s what the journalist didn’t do in this case.”

Authors, translators, and "political publishers"

The English translation of a Tamil novel finds itself in a limbo because the translator and the publisher do not like the political views of the original author, Joe D'Cruz -- specifically, his statement explaining why he wants Narendra Modi to be the next Prime Minister of India. You can read D'Cruz's statement, as well as that from the publisher over at Outlook.

The key sentence in Navayana's press release is this: "However, there cannot be a place for such an author in a political publishing house like Navayana." [Bold emphasis added]

In an opinion piece in Outlook entitled Public Stories, Private Censorship, Gautam Bhatia says this case should disturb liberals as much as did Penguin's handling of Wendy Doniger's book:

... Navyana’s decision is problematic because it merely adds to a public culture where private and public censorship is becoming the norm rather than the exception. For every Salman Rushdie, for every Taslima Nasreen, for every Wendy Doniger, and for every Joe D’Cruz, the foundations of our society’s public commitment to free speech are weakened, and the fragile edifice moves one blow closer to crumbling. Free speech liberals should accept Navyana’s legal right to do what it did, but nonetheless condemn its actions with the same vigour that they condemned the actions of Penguin.

While I agree with the broad thrust of Bhatia's argument, I don't think he has an open-and-shut case here because, in addition to D'Cruz, the author, and Anand, the publisher, there is also V. Geetha, the translator, who has taken a strong stand that "I [Geetha] cannot bring myself to allow my translation to be published."

In the meantime, Anand is said to be reconsidering his earlier stand. Who knows, maybe Geetha will also relent, and let her translation be published.

Susan Watts: Society needs more than wonder to respect science

A very good column in Nature:

There is a fundamental difference between science communication and science journalism. At the science communication end of the spectrum sit the stories that show people how exciting science can be, the discovery of a wonder material, perhaps, or a new subatomic particle. Explaining the significance of sightings of the Higgs boson or of gravitational waves from the early Universe takes real skill.

Science journalism's job is to tell the stories that explore the murky underbelly of science, like the selling of bogus stem-cell cures to vulnerable patients. It is science journalism that will expose the rushed policy-making, the undisclosed profiteering, the conflicts of interest and the vested interests, the bad experiments, or the out-and-out frauds.

For both, you need to be the kind of person who asks “why” a lot. You need to enjoy coaxing sometimes shy, or reluctant, or just plain difficult scientists to tell you about their work — and then to feel enthused enough to want to tell somebody else.

But a journalist also needs to be persistent, and brave enough to find out the things that people don't want the world to know, and who often work hard to stop the world knowing — and to tell those tales too.

Annals of Improbable Careers

We have covered cases of materials engineers (actually, metallurgists -- a word that has gone out of fashion in my tribe) who went on to become an iconic founder of a milk cooperative, a journalist, and a chief minster. Another recent case saw the rise of a mechanical   engineer as Delhi's youngest chief minster.

Now, here's a wonderful essay in Mint by Harikrishna Katragadda on his career in (business) photography after an electrical engineering degree from IIT-M. I'll just have to stop at one extended (but chopped up) quote, but really, the entire essay is worth quoting in full!

I was good at math and physics in school. Which meant that like most good Andhra boys, I was expected to become an “ingineeru”, get a job and get married with a fat dowry. ...

... When I cleared the mother-of-all-engineering-entrance exams, the Indian Institute of Technology-Joint Entrance Exam (IIT-JEE), my parents gave me no option but to join electrical engineering at IIT, Madras. I did not want to be an engineer. I had wanted to study physics at IIT.

I got into photography literally by accident. ...

My move from physics to photography baffled my parents. For them, cameras come out of the closet only during weddings and vacations. My maternal grandmother was inconsolable. A proud woman, she had ruled like the feudal mistress of a large mansion in Vijayawada in her day. She refused to accept photography as a legitimate profession, certainly not after an IIT degree. She had grand visions of how I would become CEO of a company after my IIT, and drive her in a Mercedes car. Much to her horror, I was chasing grumpy CEOs for a photo-op and I drove an old beat-up Ford to work. There was also the predicament of “Which Andhra girl would marry a photographer?” Peace returned to the family home after we agreed on my job description as “someone who takes pictures of Americans and foreigners”.

How to Nail a Diploma Mill

The BBC method involves a dog and its CV:

However, Newsnight found that getting the [American University of London] to provide a qualification without any study at all was easy. [...]

The real "Pete" is a dog living at Battersea Dogs' Home The programme drew up a one-page fake CV for a management consultant Peter Smith, known as Pete, living in South London, which included 15 years of made-up work experience and a fictitious undergraduate degree from a UK university.

The real Pete was actually a dog living in Battersea Dogs' Home.

* * *

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed.

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: Indian Higher Ed Edition

1. Over at Kafila: The Delhi University Four Year Structure -- Myths and Reality.

2. The Telegraph reports from Assam: Pay-cut plan for off-campus doctorates. What in hell is an 'off-campus doctorate'?

3. Saira Kurup in ToI: Jawaharlal Nehru University professor suspended for sexually harassing female student.

4. The Deccan Herald published a news story about the founder of ISI, Pakistan's spy agency; but it used a picture pf Prof. Mahalanobils, the founder of ISI, the Indian Statistical Institute [Hat tip to Kaneenika Sinha, who has a screen-grab of the online version].

   The story has been available online since 4 April, and at least four people have pointed out the horrible error; and the DH has still not corrected the article. WTF, DH?

Links

1. Khushal Khan: A Pakistani Student in India.

2. Christie Aschwanden in Double X Science: The Finkbeiner Test.

   In the spirit of the Bechdel test, a metric that cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel created to measure gender bias in film, I’d like to propose a Finkebeiner test for stories about women in science. The test could apply to profiles of women in other fields, too.

   To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention

   • The fact that she’s a woman
   • Her husband’s job
   • Her child care arrangements
   • How she nurtures her underlings
   • How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
   • How she’s such a role model for other women
   • How she’s the “first woman to…”

   And since I have not linked to the Bechdel test so far, here's the awesome comic strip that explains it: The Rule.

3. Ken Fisher in Ars Technica: To save science, try celebrating “high quality ignorance”. To save science, try celebrating “high quality ignorance” Getting the public excited about science means changing perceptions.

   This post is worth just for a short summary of metaphors (and other kinds of explanations) used for describing what scientists do:

   Today, three new scientific papers are published every minute. What do scientists do with all of this? They strategically ignore it. The “point of science is not knowing a lot of stuff,” Firestein said. “Knowledge is a big subject, but ignorance is a bigger one.”

   Scientists, Firestein continued, are not putting puzzles together. That implies there's actually going to be a final puzzle fitting together perfectly. They’re also not peeling an onion of knowledge, working toward some core truth hidden by layers of undiscovered reality. Scientists aren't even examining the tip of the iceberg, believing some massive truth lies below. All of those models are wrong, he said, because they assume scientists are primarily concerned with amassing a body of facts.

   Firestein said George Bernard Shaw was delightfully right when he noted that “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” And Firestein said this was a good thing: “We use knowledge to create high quality ignorance.” [...]

Boxed out nano seconds of fame

Today's Education Plus supplement of The Hindu daily carries an article Virtual learning spaces. It has some of my views on blogs as a boxed item (only) in the print edition. My thanks to the article author.

Ironical that the boxed item on 'online resources' doesn't appear in the online version of the article. Perhaps, in line with the purport of the article, it is meant to inspire only the off-line readers to go online.

I remember speaking to the article author about three months back on this over the telephone. What has appeared is, understandably, a heavily condensed version of it. Where it reads "...the blog... deals with nanoscience," understand it as the author's original writing.

Death of a Scientist in Singapore

Raymond Bonner and Christine Spolar have a hugely damning FT story about the death of Shane Todd, an American scientist, in Singapore where he worked at the Institute of Microelectronics.

On June 24 last year, the body of a young US electronics engineer, Shane Todd, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment. Police said it was suicide, but the Todd family believe he was murdered. Shane had feared that a project he was working on was compromising US national security. His parents want to know if that project sent him to his grave.

Very, very grim stuff.

IIPM

I'm sure you have already figured this out, but here it is anyway: If anyone needed a one-stop shop for all the goods on the bads of IIPM, MediaNama has it. I think it's worth spreading the word.

For this fantastic resource, we must thank the PR geniuses at IIPM.

Now, if we can get the DoT block order withdrawn ...

When internet laws strike: Nanopolitan posts you cannot see

If you are in India, you (probably) won't be able to see the posts entitled Breaking news: IIPM faculty pages have not been changed!, and Breaking news: the IIPM faculty pages have not been changed, yet.

I guess I should be proud that these two posts are featured in a list of URLs that our Department of Telecommunications has put a block on. Take a look -- the list even includes a notification from UGC!

That link takes you to a MediaNama story, an update to which says DoT's move was probably prompted by a court order.

Let us wait for the details. [Update: As of now (8:30 pm), these posts are still available, unblocked. There really is no reason to panic, though the MediaNama story is disturbing.]

In the meantime, let me just say this to IIPM's PR folks: You suck!

* * *

Thanks to Akilan for alert on Google+.

Blacklisting Foreign Scientists

G. Mudur (The Telegraph) and R. Ramachandran (The Hindu) have reported today about American seismologist Prof. Roger Bilham's discovery that he now figures in a blacklist of "unwanted foreigners". His "crime" appears to be a paper -- written with an Indian collaborator, and published in Current Science, India's premier science journal -- on the seismic risk to the Jaitapur nuclear power plant. [See K.S. Jayaraman's summary of the scientific controversy triggered by that paper.]

There doesn't seem to be anything in these stories that the Indian government can claim as a net positive for itself.

India loses its moral high ground when Indian scientists face travel-related hassles in other countries [remember this   from   2006?], and a relatively unknown scientific controversy about the safety of the government's flagship nuclear power plant has escaped from scientific journals into mass media.

Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer

By now, you should be familiar with the names of these two journalists who got into trouble, and have received some punishment, for plagiarism (FZ), manufactured quotes (JL) and a bit of self-plagiarism (JL). If not, start with this post at the Atlantic Wire by Alexander Abad-Santos [I thank my friend and colleague Atul Chokshi for the e-mail alert].

There has been quite a bit of commentary on the Lehrer affair which unravelled several weeks ago. Let me point you first to Mark Liberman's posts which shine a spotlight on the practice of "unquotations" which he says is so common in mainstream journalism; after laying out his case with tons of examples in two posts (Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan and Journalistic Unquotations, and More Unquotations from the New Yorker), Liberman provides a recap/summary in which he distinguishes between "journalistic carelessness and journalistic deceit" -- in Approximate Quotations.

Andrew Gelman, on the other hand, highlights the most important difference between the case of Jonah Lehrer and so many other cases involving academics: Lehrer got punished. The title of Gelman's post says it all: Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off.

Aamir Khan's "Satyameva Jayate"

The first episode of the show was devoted to selective abortion of female foetuses. Two bloggers I respect recommend it highly. Here is Indian Home Maker:

Amir explains that the father’s Y chromosome decided the gender of the baby. He also simplifies why ignoring the issue is not really an option, because nobody is going to remain unaffected by it. He explained what baby girl killing actually means for the society, how it means more trafficking of women to be sold as ‘wives’, less respect for wives and women since they can be bought and sold and then resold. (Remember, Baby Falak’s mother had been sold to a man in Rajasthan as his ‘wife’). How 914 women for a 1000 men translates to millions of missing women and millions of men who are not able to find partners. He recommended solutions – what works he said would be action against the perpetrators. (The same thing works for all crimes, including for sexual crimes against women)

It was good to see single mothers – women who had walked out of their marriages to save and to raise their daughters, being applauded. Don’t you think this would encourage other women in similar situation to take bolder stands too?

Harini Calamur:

Today’s episodes was on the desire for a male child and the accepted, though illegal, practise of female foeticide. It is one thing knowing the data. It is quite another hearing a woman talk about her in-laws who forced her to abort 6 foetuses because they were female. It is one thing to know about a woman being hit, it is quite another to see the scarred face in extreme close up as well as pictures that showed the face when it was all stitched up. The woman’s crime – giving birth to a girl. The show also took head on the myth that female foeticide is rife in villages. It is not. It is practised just as much amongst my neighbours as yours. Statistics show that the richer localities have fewer daughters than the poorer ones. A clip during the show revealed the prevalence of an organised cartel in Rajasthan that provided end to end service in female foeticide. But it was not just about the doom and gloom – it talked about how one DC of Navashehar in Punjab reversed the trend. Solutions are important. Problems are known but is it all beyond hope? no. and that is what is refreshing about this show.

My broken Hindi doesn't allow me to appreciate the show fully; I'm hoping an English-subtitled version will appear soon [Update (9 May 2012): It's here]. This show has done a couple of smart things to expand its reach to all of India by (a) dubbing it into other Indian languages, and (b) getting it broadcast on DD.

You can watch it on YouTube as well; here's the direct link, just in case the embed doesn't work:

Tirupur's War on the Affluent

ToI is there to cover it.

Links: bin Laden edition

1. Noam Chomsky in Guernica: My reaction to Osama bin Laden's death.

   We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

   ... [And] the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

2. Lawrence Wright in New Yorker: The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan.

3. NYTimes report on Bin Laden's Diminished Life in a Shrunken World.

4. Felix Salmon: The Hermetic and Arrogant New York Times. [He has an awesome picture -- from this analysis -- of the Twitter network that helped spread the news of Osama bin Laden's death.]

The Hindu on the Proposed Blogger Control Act

The blocking of a blogging website, even if only for a short period, raises the disturbing question of curbs imposed on free speech in India through executive fiat. There is a clear pattern of Internet censorship that is inconsistent with constitutional guarantees on freedom of expression. It is also at odds with citizen aspirations in the age of new media. [...]

You can read the rest of the editorial here.

* * *

The Hindu has indeed come a long way since it published this cartoon to publicly rebuke its Deputy Editor With A Blog.