Links ...

1. Academic Destinations. A collection of articles, pics, personal narratives, infographics on quite a few (non-US) countries. While India merits just a brief sketch, Germany gets a much more extensive coverage.

2. Jane Brody in NYTimes: A good night's sleep isn't luxury -- It's a necessity.

3. Andrew Gelman on The "cushy life" of a University of Illinois (@Chicago) sociology professor

4. Johann Hari in The Independent: It's not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF itself should be on trial: "Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death."

Visiting IIT-Kanpur

I'll be at IIT-Kanpur again this week after 17+ years. This time, it's for this event (my talk is in Tuesday's program) organized by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as part of IIT-K's Golden Jubilee.

I'll be traveling again after I return from Kanpur on Wednesday, so blogging is going to be iffy for the rest of the month.

But right now, I'm excited about the IIT-K visit ...

Links

1. Ten Days in a Carry-On: A slide-show of a demonstration by Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, of "how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on".

2. Anthony Grafton in NYRB: Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.

3. Jennifer Hunt in VoxEU: Why Do Women Leave Science and Engineering?

   American women leave science and engineering at a higher frequency than men. This column suggests that the gender gap is explained by women’s relative dissatisfaction with pay and promotion opportunities. This gap is correlated with a high share of men in the industry. Remedies should therefore focus on such fields with a high share of male workers.

4. Robert Gottlieb in NYRB: Who Was Charles Dickens?

Links ...

1. Nishith Prakash at VoxEU: It pays to speak English: English skills raise wages for some, not all, in India.

2. Jonah Lehrer in The Guardian: Why We Travel, on the cognitive benefits of travel.

3. Mark Abrahams in The Guardian: Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om [via Ludwig]

4. Suvrat Kher at Rapid Uplift: Computers And Sexism In 1920's Harvard.

In search of power at airports

A fun read: Empowered by Susan Orlean.

... You may have a phone in your hand that can stream live video of the Large Hadron Collider accelerating particles in Switzerland, but if your little battery icon dips into red, you won’t even be able to dial out for pizza.

This link is dedicated to my physicist colleagues who, according to certain unnamed sources, have an unbeatable RMS velocity in spite of spending so much of their time at the airports.

Cool site of the week

The Indian Railways Fan Club.

Lovingly put together by train travel's true fans, the site has trip reports, locomotive sightings and many other goodies.

And there are the picture galleries, wonderfully organized into thematic albums. Just look at these steamy beauties!

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There's even an IRFCA Convention going on even as I'm writing this post, and someone is liveblogging it and posting pictures.

* * *

Should have posted this link earlier; I learned about IRFCA from Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi of IIT-K (currently Director of the Lakshmi N. Mittal Institute of Information Technology, LNMIIT, Jaipur) when he was at IISc last month. And, yes, he's a card-carrying IRFCA member, and was among those who organized IRFCA's second third convention in Kanpur [See Prof. Sanghi's comment below].