Imprint India

The IMPRINT India initiative website has quite a bit of information about its focus domains each of which is subdivided into several sub-themes [Disclosure: I am a part of the team for the Advanced Materials domain, led by Prof. Monica Katiyar and Prof. A.K. Singh of IIT-K]. See also the this brochure.

The Overview is probably where you want to start. The text box on the image says the objective is accelerated research and innovation. Somewhere in the middle of the page, you will find this one-sentence summary of what (this phase of) the initiative is about:

IMPRINT is a first-of-its-kind Pan-IIT and IISc joint initiative to develop a (a) New Education Policy, and (b) Roadmap for Research to solve major engineering and technology challenges in selected domains needed by the country. [source]

The epilogue at the end of the page summarizes the initiative's current phase:

IMPRINT in its first phase is a policy developing initiative covering pedagogy, teaching, curriculum, technology-benchmarking and infrastructure readiness. IMPRINT is not meant only for IITs and IISc; it is a national movement providing an opportunity for the higher echelon institutes in India to integrate with all grass root level institutes, industry and organizations, mutually complement and deliver what the country demands and aspires. Policy is our immediate mandate; technology (products and processes) development and delivery will eventually follow.

Bob Goldstein: The Thrill of Defeat

In Nautilus, he tries very hard, perhaps too hard, to convince us that people whose research gets scooped would always feel bad -- horribly, horribly bad; his article has quite a few sentences like this one: "Months or years of work can become redundant, or worthless." He then goes on to show that the reaction of Francis Crick and Sidney Brenner was totally the opposite of sadness or bitterness. Maybe this is some sort of a narrative ploy to make Crick and Brenner look more noble and almost superhuman (which they probably are!).

The rest of the story is quite good, actually. Along the way, you get some interesting science as well (and some inside dope about how the biochemists and geneticists hated each other).

Anyways, here it is:

Crick would later write that the audience in Moscow had been “electrified” by Nirenberg’s result, changing the word later to “startled.” Crick may have felt both startled and electrified. But disappointment? If Crick felt some disappointment, it wasn’t apparent to Meselson, who characterized Crick’s initial reaction to the news as “joy.” “What else could it be?,” Meselson explained to me by phone, “by god, we’d know the answer in our lifetime!”

Even Meselson, who had his own research program on DNA, had impulsively hugged Nirenberg at the end of his talk. I tried to imagine two men of that era spontaneously hugging in a lecture room at a conference, particularly when one was a geneticist and other a biochemist. Maxine Singer, a biochemist who gave Nirenberg the RNAs he needed for his experiments, told me that the “biochemists and geneticists were suspicious of each other,” something that Brenner echoed to me in person.

Research Focus Areas - 2: How to Make a List

Read first, the earlier post for context.

Let us suppose a list has to be made by an academic department with established research program, spelling out their research focus for the future. How to make the list? Here is a scheme. Can this procedure be bettered in the Indian context?

1) Check the present strength -- core competence -- of the department. Analyse what the existing faculty members have been doing as successful and significant research in the recent past and choose some or all of those topics.

2) Do the analysis in 1), but put all of the topics that have been worked so far, by grouping them together (using band-aid) into impressive phraseology a.k.a the said focus topics

The major difference between 1) and 2) is, the topics of 1) will be a sub-set of those made in 2) thus excluding possibly few faculty members from the 'research focus' of the department.

Research Focus Areas - 1: To Have or Not

1) An academic department should promote diversity in research (as many topics as its faculty strength). 2) An academic department should promote only few focused research areas. Which one do you believe is the 'right way' forward for an Indian academic department that has an established research program?

You may agree that the 'few topics of research focus' is a model adopted in the USA. The topics are decided primarily by the availability of research grants, which is determined largely by entities and policies that may not be connected to the department. So, the 'focus topics' get renewed or transmogrify every few years. This re-sizing of the legs to the available size shoes is accepted as the norm in that model. Of course, growing new legs in place of a numb or phantom one is possible.

The 'unity in diversity' model is more in line with the philosophy of what academia should be. Essentially democratic, housing all possible knowledge, without characterizing them as (only) useful. This model promotes all research topics pursued by the faculty members and likewise distributes its annual funding equally. It does encourage group research in similar topics by teams, but can only expect such groups to seek their additional funding (for some concerted research effort or common resources) from external sources.

So, question: Which one of these models do you think an Indian academic department with an established research program should follow? Any other (better) model for Indian academia?

Some open thoughts to get us discussing:

Theory and Experiment

Experimentalist commands, "Emma, please insert NMR data here!"

Theorist begs, "Do you have any data that will fit my theory?"

And Yogi Berra says, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

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.
   

The Story of Vitreous Circulation

Several months back my father noticed black spots in his vision in the right eye. After a thorough check-up at a premier eye hospital in Chennai, he was diagnosed with a 'retinal tear'. Read more in wikipedia, under retinal detachment. Why does this happen? Remedy? What has this got to do with the title story of vitreous circulation?

The human eye is an imperfect sphere, about 24 mm (just about an inch) thick in the major axis, from the cornea on the front side to the retina on the back side. In between we have the lens supported on the front side by two tubular 'hooks' containing the aqueous humor fluid. As the name implies, this fluid is aqueous and can even circulate within the tubular 'hooks'. The retina, on which the lens focuses the images of what we see, is separated from the lens by a vitreous humor. This vitreous humour, by default, is not aqueous; it is jelly-like, what is known technically as a Non-Newtonian fluid. It maintains the shape of the eye, keeping the distance between the lens and the retina. As we age, the vitreous gel loses its aqueous nature and hardens. Unfortunately, as it hardens and contracts, confined between the retina and the lens, it 'pulls' on the walls. In effect, for some of us as we age, the retina is pulled in -- a retinal 'tear'.

The remedy is to stick the retina, figuratively, back in its place. For this, first we need to slice open the eye behind the lens and scoop off the jelly-like vitreous humour. Then, the retina is stuck back in its place by cauterizing it with targeted laser heating. Then the eye is stitched in place and closed. Within few weeks, bodily fluids ooze into the region between the retina and lens to replace the original hardened vitreous humour that was scooped off. Hopefully, when the eye patch is taken off, the vision should be minus those black spots and become normal. These things went on fine and let us say my father regained his normal vision.

But all of this is only background information for a short story that took off in between, which (obviously?) involves me and my research.

IITM Research Highlights

In an inspired move, IIT Madras website now carries a separate section on their research highlights. This is an idea proposed by Prof. S. K. Das, our current Dean - Academic Research; and was executed by Dr. Phanikumar and his team.

The main page would show a catchy image that leads to a short write-up about the research intended for the general reader. A separate link can be provided there for more technical details. Each 'research highlight' would stay on the main page for about two weeks, before going into an archive, subsequently ready for recycle in a future time.

Now for the shameless plug part (you saw it coming miles ahead, didn't you?): One of my recent research project happens to hog the main page for these two weeks.

Check it out.

Rejection improves impact?

Research papers, rejected first-time elsewhere, when eventually get published, get cited more than others in that journal.

According to the recent Nature report by Philip Ball, based on the submission histories of 80,748 scientific articles published among 923 bioscience journals between 2006 and 2008 and related information provided by the papers’ authors (via emails), Vincent Calcagno, an ecologist at the French Institute for Agricultural Research in Sophia-Antipolis, and his colleagues

[...] found that 3–6 years after publication, papers published on their second try are more highly cited on average than first-time papers in the same journal — regardless of whether the resubmissions moved to journals with higher or lower impact.

Related article: Calcagno, V. et al. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1227833 (2012).

To paraphrase Calvin's father, Rejection builds character!

From my limited rejection experience in engineering research, I haven't observed this 'citation trend' for my publications. But then, I may be way out of field and league.

(read the Nature report for contrasting observations from another study).

My Book

My book "Essentials of Heat and Fluid Flow in Porous Media" has been published a few days back by Ane Books (India) and CRC Press (International).

Start in this page to read more on the salient features, table of content etc. The two forewords [ here and here ] were provided by Prof. Andrew Rees (Uty. of Bath, UK) and Prof. Pradip Dutta (IISc. India). The preface explains the content and the acknowledgements express my gratitude to the academics whose association helped me remain positive.

The Indian paperback (student) edition should be available by next week in your local Tata Book House (I believe most of the IIXs house one) and such stores that sell technical books. The international (hard bound) edition should be distributed from Oct 31st, 2012. You can pre-order at Amazon (link in the above 'details' page).

If you are an instructor of a related course (graduate fluid mechanics or heat transfer) or a researcher from civil, mechanical, chemical and bio-medical engineering, you may find the content useful. If you want to suggest the book to your students and require an evaluation copy or want to suggest copies for your libraries, contact me.

Similarly, if you want to write a review of the book in a related research journal (or in your blog), please contact me and I could arrange a copy of the book for you.

I would love to hear your feedback, comments, suggestions and errata (it seems, 5% typos are expected by the publishers in the first edition).

And now for some related 'gyan', beneath the fold...

IgNobel 2012

The 2012 IgNobel prizes have been announced. Two that deserve my awe are

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

Related research Reference 1 [pdf] and Reference 2 published in Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5.

and

LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

Related Reference: "Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies," US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012.

Check here for the rest.