Now that India is through to the World Cup quarterfinals ...

... against Bangladesh, the "minnow" that sent England packing, here's a fake interview of MCC Chairman. Much fun there, including a magical appearance of Moore's Last Sigh.

The interview appears in Paaji vs. Punter, a cricket blog with a keen eye on not just the game, but also on some of the controversial and fun stuff around the game; a previous post, for example, featured another fake interview with Virat Kohli.

I think it's just a matter of time before someone like Lalit Modi makes his appearance there ...

Umpiring Bias

A neat study by Ian Gregory-Smith, David Paton, Abhinav Sacheti -- Not really cricket: Home bias in officiating -- confirms what many fans "know":

... This column investigates this problem using new data from cricket matches. The authors find that neutral umpires decrease the bias against away teams, making neutral officials very important for a fair contest.

* * *

Merry Good Governance Day, everyone!

More links

1. Dhimant Parekh: Of Rains, Cows and a Picture: "For that moment, we four [three men and a cow] were all in one world, in one picture."

2. G. Lakshmi: Handwriting:

   I hated articles that expounded the relationship between handwriting and character/future/talent/life. According to all these articles, I was a potential criminal, utter failure and possibly not worth living.

3. Anil Kumble's Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Memorial Lecture: Perception and Practice:

   He first led the team at 21, when every other player was senior to him. He must have worked hard at appearing almost casual in his stroke play, as if to suggest that cricket was the easiest game in the world— in fact so easy that he could play the best bowlers with just one good eye. The effect on his team was phenomenal. The perception of ease communicated itself to the many who were inhibited, diffident and under-confident.

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. Vinod Joseph at Winnowed: How I Ran The Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon With My (Almost) Flat Feet And A Bad Back.

2. Pamposh Raina and Heather Timmons at India Ink have a gripping story on how the Aakash tablet computer project became derailed. Full of intrigue. Part I. The Tangled Tale of Aakash, the World’s Cheapest Laptop and Part II. The Aakash Project’s Bitter Finish.

3. Marc Parry in The Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Supersizing' the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2,670 Students. A nice profile of Prof. John Boyer of Virginia Tech.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

... The experience wasn’t simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up.

The experiment I underwent was accelerated marksmanship training on a simulation the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified M4 close-range assault rifle, first without tDCS and then with. Without it I was terrible, and when you’re terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at.

Then this happened: The 20 minutes I spent hitting targets while electricity coursed through my brain were far from transcendent. I only remember feeling like I had just had an excellent cup of coffee, but without the caffeine jitters. I felt clear-headed and like myself, just sharper. Calmer. Without fear and without doubt. From there on, I just spent the time waiting for a problem to appear so that I could solve it.

It was only when they turned off the current that I grasped what had just happened. Relieved of the minefield of self-doubt that constitutes my basic personality, I was a hell of a shot. And I can’t tell you how stunning it was to suddenly understand just how much of a drag that inner cacophony is on my ability to navigate life and basic tasks.

Read all about it (and the new ethical questions it poses) in Sally Adee's post -- Better Living Through Electrochemistry

Things I learned this past week

1. How "India is well-placed to push ahead with its bid to become a scientific powerhouse" [click the link at the bottom to read Richard Stone's story in Science for free]. Highlights the work of quite a few colleagues at IISc!

2. How "a single factor goes a long way in explaining the dearth of women in math-intensive fields" by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci [American Scientist].

3. Just four of the past 50 Oscar best-picture winners are about women -- a video commentary by Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency.

4. Why Journalists Need to Link by Felix Salmon.

5. That "the practice [of Yoga] can fan sexual flames! Choice quote: "Pelvic regions can feel more sensitive and orgasms more intense."

PageRank Algorithm Applied to Cricket Matches

A paper from Satyam Mukherjee of Northwestern University implements this algorithm on cricket matches to arrive at a new scheme for ranking countries and captains [Thanks to Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao for the link].

Quick summary: Australia rulz. [D'uh!]

What is more interesting (I have only skimmed the results) is the separate, decade-wise ranking. India's best record is for the 2000s (second in tests, and third in ODIs). It was also #2 in the 1970s for test matches; the following remarks give a flavour of what PageRank algorithm does:

Even though the early 1960s were poor periods for England, during the late 60’s England defeated stronger opponents like West Indies and Australia. Hence judging by the quality of wins, according to PageRank during 1961 − 1970 England was the most successful team. A similar effect is also observed during the 1971−1980 era, where India occupies the second position according to PageRank. During the same period India defeated stronger opponents like West Indies and England. [Bold emphasis added].

Linner?

I have no idea how great this Jeremy Lin guy is at basketball, but he has given us some good stuff -- like this one from Jon Stewart's Daily Show.

Watch it here or at the source:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Links

1. Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited: Part 1 Given the big bang summary -- "Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core" -- I can't wait for Part 2!

2. Sunshine has an article in Amreekan Desi: The FOB who became ABCD:

   Her acclimatization experience did not come without some ten dozen embarrassing experiences when she made a fool of herself. But she learned well. She learned that light switches worked differently, bathrooms were restrooms, baths were showers, notes were bills, bills were checks, and checks were also checks. She learned to run hot water without burning herself. She learned not to use the word dicky for car trunks, and learned that a fast food chain was called Dick’s. She learned that it was actually okay to ask for boxes for leftover food, and capsicums, brinjals, and lady’s finger had their own names here.

   She learned to drop the words sir and madam, and address her professor, as old as her grandfather, using his first name. [...]

3. Rahul Siddharthan: An h-index for test cricket batsmen.

   Suppose we modify it as follows: the nh index is that value of h, for a given n, such that on h occasions the batsman has scored nh or more runs. For examples, the 10h index would be: if on 5 occasions I have scored 50 runs or more (and I have not scored 60 runs or more on 6 occasions) I have a 10h index of 5. For n > 1, basically, I am giving more importance to higher-scoring innings, and also benefiting those who played fewer matches (most older players played far fewer games than Tendulkar and can’t remotely approach either his career aggregate, or his h-score).

Slinky Physics

The question is posed in this video, but you don't need to see it to appreciate the ultraslomo demo. Watch:

YouTube link.

The follow-up video is pretty good too. Love it where Prof. Rod Cross says, "We study physics because a lot of unexpected things happen. It's those unexpected things that make physics interesting"

Do Surgeons Need Coaches?

Atul Gawande does it again, with an awesome essay that weaves in keen observations on coaching in sports and music with his novel experiment of having a coach keep a watchful eye while he performs complex surgeries.

Gawande has an an extended section about coaching of teachers:

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes. What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can? I talked to Jim Knight about this. He is the director of the Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas. He teaches coaching—for schoolteachers. For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers. Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores. People like Jim Knight think we should push coaching.

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

Knight experienced it himself. Two decades ago, he was trying to teach writing to students at a community college in Toronto, and floundering. He studied techniques for teaching students how to write coherent sentences and organize their paragraphs. But he didn’t get anywhere until a colleague came into the classroom and coached him through the changes he was trying to make. He won an award for innovation in teaching, and eventually wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Kansas on measures to improve pedagogy. Then he got funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka, and he has been expanding his program ever since. Coaching programs have now spread to hundreds of school districts across the country.

Two Links

1. Anne Murphy Paul in NYTimes: The Trouble With Homework:

   Fortunately, research is available to help parents, teachers and school administrators [make homework smarter]. In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.

2. Matthew Syed at BBC: Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?

Big Picture on World Cup-2011

Lots of nice pics; but the really wonderful ones feature the fans -- fans in slums, fans in shopping malls, fans on tractor trailers, fans with national-color tattoos, and fans who mix politics with sports. Surprising omission: fans who are management types.

Here's a pic (and another) on fans' utter disregard for the doctrine of church-sports separation:

Original at The Atlantic site.

Update: For more such pics, go to the real Big Picture blog at Boston Globe. [Thanks, Arun, for the comment-alert!]

What else can Dhoni do?

Here are some possibilities brought to us from the corporate and B-school jungles by a gutsy team of ET reporters. [Thanks for the comment-alert, Dilip!]

Highlights:

1. Dhoni should become a guest lecturer at the IIMs (this idea is from Bringi Dev, an adjunct professor at IIM-B).

2. I would bat for Dhoni as the CFO of a company (from LK Gupta, LG Electronics).

3. I would make Dhoni an executive director in our company (from Venugopal Dhoot, Videocon)

4. [Dhoni] would be a perfect fit for the job of Congress president Sonia Gandhi (from Savita Prasad, Sabre Travel Tech).

At this rate, Dhoni's appearance in a Bo Knows type ad is imminent -- maybe with a slogan like "Dhoni Does!"

Ram Mohan's fears come true!

In to-day's post, he says:

I wrote yesterday that I lived in fear of management experts wanting to derive mileage from Dhoni's success. Alas, my fears have come true. TOI today carries a story on Management lessons from Dhoni. All of it is just hindsight. Here is a selection:

Adi Godrej: "He sets stretch goals and works determinedly to achieve them by getting the best out of his team." By "stretch goals", Godrej presumably means winning the World Cup. Is he implying that other captains did not have such "stretch goals", that they took part in the World Cup in order to lose?

This and other such gems (and he probably has not even seen this) drive Ram Mohan [who, remember, is a professor at IIM-A] to despair:

What is it about management theory that it reduces so quickly to the level of drivel?

I know his question is purely rhetorical, but I think Management Myth by Matthew Stewart is worth another link! [Bonus link: Johann Hari on a related topic: The management consultancy scam].

* * *

[Thanks to Raj for the Rediff link via this comment].

T.T. Ram Mohan is afraid

Very afraid:

The thing I now dread is the management experts jumping in with 'Lessons in leadership from Dhoni'.

Bobby Fischer

NYRB carries a great review essay by Garry Kasparov -- The Bobby Fischer Defense -- on a recent biography of the iconic American prodigy: Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady.

Here's an excerpt on how Fischer transformed chess:

Fischer’s brilliance was enough to make him a star. It was his relentless, even pathological dedication that transformed the sport. Fischer investigated constantly, studying every top-level game for new ideas and improvements. He was obsessed with tracking down books and periodicals, even learning enough Russian to expand his range of sources. He studied each opponent, at least those he considered worthy of preparation. Brady recounts dining with Fischer and hearing a monologue of the teen’s astonishingly deep analysis of David Bronstein’s openings before the two were to meet in the Mar del Plata tournament in 1960. No one had ever prepared this deeply outside of world championship matches. Today, every game of chess ever played, going back centuries, is available at the click of a mouse to any beginner. But in the pre-computer era, Fischer’s obsessive research was a major competitive advantage.

In his play, Fischer was amazingly objective, long before computers stripped away so many of the dogmas and assumptions humans have used to navigate the game for centuries. Positions that had been long considered inferior were revitalized by Fischer’s ability to look at everything afresh. His concrete methods challenged basic precepts, such as the one that the stronger side should keep attacking the forces on the board. Fischer showed that simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained. The great Cuban José Capablanca had played this way half a century earlier, but Fischer’s modern interpretation of “victory through clarity” was a revelation. His fresh dynamism started a revolution; the period from 1972 to 1975, when Fischer was already in self-exile as a player, was more fruitful in chess evolution than the entire preceding decade.

Links ...

1. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy: INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture.

2. James Choi at The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Evidence of professional soccer player chokes [A post on a forthcoming paper by Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta entitled Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment].

3. Eric Schoenberg at Huffington Post: Zombie Economics and Just Deserts: Why the Right Is Winning the Economic Debate

4. Dan Ariely at Predictably Irrational: A gentler and more logical economics

5. Could this really be John Venn's original Venn Diagram? ;-)

Links

1. Brian Palmer in Slate: Why Does the United Kingdom Get To Have Four National Soccer Teams? [Link via Chris Blattman]

2. Mike Lacher in McSweeney's: Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic. Example: 7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism.

   [Via Jason Kottke who also points to another such list with a twist].

3. Here's one for Markets in Everything: Rent a White Guy [this too comes via Kottke].