Probably the world's worst kept secret

It's fairly straight forward: if you put some info about yourself online, potential employers -- or admission officers at universities, and even your current employers -- will probably look it up; and you really have no control over what they do with what they find.

Now there's some confirmation. :

... a significant number of colleges are reviewing some applicants’ social network pages, but that institutions do not appear to have adopted a routine of checking online personalities in this way.

... a significant number of colleges are reviewing some applicants’ social network pages, but that institutions do not appear to have adopted a routine of checking online personalities in this way.

colleges are using these Web sources of information “to verify information,” particularly on “candidates for scholarships or entry into high demand programs with limited spaces.” The common view, according to the report, is this: “No school wants to announce the winner of a prestigious scholarship only to have compromising pictures turn up on the Internet the next day.”

Some admissions officials think like organizers of Ms. Universe pageants.

Just sayin' ...

"Every talented player understands the importance of a strong referee"

That's the subtitle of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller's WSJ column, Good Government and Animal Spirits:

... [Government's] role is not to harness animal spirits but really to set them free, to allow them to be maximally creative. A brilliant player wants a referee, for only when the game has appropriate rules can he really show his talents. While the sports of baseball and football haven't changed much in the last century, the economy has -- and American financial regulation hasn't had an overhaul in 70 years. The challenge for the Obama administration, along with the U.S. Congress and our SROs, is to invent a new and better American version of the capitalist game.

Porn and computer science research

It's not likely to be on his business card, but David A. Forsyth is an expert in web pornography, having served on the NRC committee for this topic. It is evident from his web page that he has a sense of humour, which explains the superbly descriptive title for his 1996 paper, Finding Naked People. Forsyth was one of the first researchers to study the problem of identifying objectionable content.

From Steve Honov's post: Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science.

On the other hand, Carnegie Mellon's CS professor Luis von Ahn suggests a website called Porn or Not dot com:

Here’s an idea I’ve had for many years but have not been brave enough to launch. (a) Computers cannot perfectly tell whether an image is pornographic or not; (b) sites such as image search engines need to block pornography; (c) many people like looking at porn. Everything aligns perfectly: Why not let people who like looking at porn tell us which images are pornographic? As a reward, the more accurate they are, the better pornography they see.

Obama goes to the National Academy of Sciences

... gives a rousing speech, presents a grand vision for American science and technology, and announces bold new programs -- including ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.

You can find summaries in Inside HigherEd and NYTimes. Here's an excerpt from the speech itself:

I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It's our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. So I'm here today to set this goal: We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development. We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science. (Applause.)

This represents the largest commitment to scientific research and innovation in American history.

Just think what this will allow us to accomplish: solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us. We can do this.

The pursuit of discovery half a century ago fueled our prosperity and our success as a nation in the half century that followed. The commitment I am making today will fuel our success for another 50 years. That's how we will ensure that our children and their children will look back on this generation's work as that which defined the progress and delivered the prosperity of the 21st century.

Aakar Patel on L.K. Advani and Manmohan Singh

Here's his one sentence summary of Advani, his career, his politics, his outlook:

He offers nothing creative, even to Hindus, only resentment.

As for Singh, he introduces him as a "brutally tough man in politics"; the rest of his article is so glowingly positive that it'll make even this tough man blush!

Cow, Coconut Tree, and Ram Guha

Here's the story about the cow and the coconut tree (I have heard it in several other variations as well, but this will do for the moment):

... in a lower primary school students were asked to prepare essays on subjects like "coconut tree" and "the cow." They were lazy students and they wanted to know which among the two may appear for the examination. They influenced the attender of the school, and he leaked out the question which he thought to be the correct one and said that it is about the coconut tree that you will be asked to write ten sentences. All of them learnt thoroughly ten sentences to be written about the coconut tree. But as they sat for the examination to their great dismay the only question appeared was to write 10 sentences about a cow. Some of the students found it difficult even to start and they left the examination hall. Some other smart students wrote "in Kerala cows are usually tethered on coconut tree and then wrote 10 sentences on "coconut tree" and completed the subject.

Now, go read Ram Guha's latest fluff on IISc.

* * *

Guha's thesis -- that IISc should "establish and make active a proper centre of humanistic studies" -- is eminently worth supporting; and it certainly has my support.

Here's my problem with Guha's piece. Among the many arguments to support his thesis, he has chosen one that betrays a certain disrespect to the existing scholarship. From B.V. Subbarayappa's history of IISc, one can learn quite a bit about the real efforts (summarized here) to get humanities included in the Institute's mandate. Many of these efforts were led by Burjorji Padshah -- the one person who put his very soul into seeing the IISc project through.

Does Guha acknowledge any these efforts? No.

What he does instead is to go on and on about virtual efforts by Patrick Geddes, who wrote five letters to Sister Nivedita about the kinds of things that IISc should do. In doing so, he connects these two figures -- Geddes and the good Sister -- to IISc in a way that is not quite justifiable. They were, at best, peripheral players in IISc's prehistory. As Guha himself admits, "One does not know whether Geddes’s [letters to Sister Nivedita] reached" Jamsetji Tata, so he's not even sure if Geddes's ideas had legs.

If Guha wants to bring them centrestage, that's fine; but he needs a lot more than "hey, look what I found in the National Library of Scotland."

* * *

Just because someone finds a bunch of letters between, say, a professor of Jyotir Vigyan and Sushma Swaraj about an auspicious launch time, does it mean that the two deserve a chapter in the history of the Chandrayaan mission?

* * *

Also check out this comment by my colleague Prof. S. Ranganathan about Guha's previous article about the IISc that waxes eloquent about Vivekananda's role in IISc's prehistory:

History is too important to be left to historians and industrious scholars! It is no doubt romantic to think that Swami Vivekanda inspired J N Tata to start an Indian Institute. This received further authority from Dr A P J Kalam's view of the beginnings of IISc. But there is little evidence for this viewpoint, as a noted historian B V Subbaryappa has pointed out in his reservations about the inclusion of Swami Vivekananda in the IISc Centenary commemorative stamp.Long before Tata met Swamiji the vision of a higher educational institution had taken shape in Tata's writings. No doubt the meeting on the voyage from Japan to the USA had some influence on Tata. That was in 1893. After five years he wrote a letter requesting his help in a missionary mode. To construe it as an offer of the directorship of IISc is stretched. [...] Readers may want to see my presentation on The Foundation of IISc, A Presentation by Professor S. Ranganathan, Department of Materials Engineering, IISc. [edited to embed the link]

Shubashree's review of Lilavati's Daughters

Read it at The New Indian Express or at her blog. Some excerpts:

All the chapters in Lilavati's Daughters: The Women Scientists of India are available from the Indian Academy of Sciences website.

Some poisonous prejudices against women are that they are not as productive as men; they show stereotypical behaviour; they are unwilling to relocate and face challenges, and so on. All these myths are shattered by reading even within the first nine stories in this anthology: Janaki Ammal, from Kerala, was the first woman Oriental Barbour Scholar and D.Sc (1934), a botanist and a pioneer! Then is the story of B Vijayalakshmi’s heroic struggle against cancer of her stomach and abdomen, to carry out research in high-energy physics. Another pioneer is Asima Chatterjee, the first woman to receive a D.Sc. from any Indian University (Calcutta). Her work on ayurvedic drugs is the story of untiring and path-breaking research which led to the development of the anti-epilepsy drug, Ayush-56, which is patented and sold even today. Anandibai Joshi’s, Mumbai of 1865, is a story of struggle against the confusing marital complex- being educated and discouraged by the same person, her reformist-husband. Who can say that women fear controversy, if only you read the story of Iravati Karve, who was the pioneer in advocating statistical studies based on caste divisions – a theory that is controversial even now. Bearing testimony to the stolid undeterred labour of women, Anna Mani is a beacon of a physicist from CV Raman’s lab. Her thesis did not get her a degree in physics for some bureaucratic reason, causing her to shift her field to meteorology subsequently becoming Deputy Director General of the Indian Meteorological Department.

Anonymous donations to US universities

The contributions -- nearly 70 million dollars! -- have several things in common: (a) the beneficiary universities are headed by women, (b) the bulk of the contributions is meant for scholarships for women and minorities, and (c) all except one are public universities.

Fascinating:

The call typically comes from a banker, bringing word of a fairy godmother. This is followed quickly by a check arriving in the mail — or two checks, the larger earmarked for scholarships for women and minority students, the smaller to be spent at the recipient’s discretion.

The only catch, for at least a dozen colleges and universities that have benefited from the surprise largess over the past two months, is that the donor must remain anonymous. ...

Gains from higher education: Private and Public, Market and Non-Market

There are personal benefits to those who have the good fortune to get some college education. For example, those with college education earn more than those without any college education: in the US, this benefit has been estimated to be $9,967 in annual earnings for each year of college!

But are there other -- non-market -- benefits that college graduates enjoy, but do not translate directly into dollars and cents? In addition, are there benefits to the society at large? If there are, how big are they? Can these benefits all be quantified?

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has a really fascinating interview of Walter W. McMahon, author of Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education . There are many interesting things in that interview, so you really ought to read all of it.

Here's excerpt on the societal benefits, that would make a strong case for (at least partial) public funding of college education:

Most social benefits beyond earnings occur as human capital formed during college is used by the graduate in the community throughout his or her life cycle in ways that improve the community. These include larger contributions than high school graduates at each income level of their time and money to sustaining democratic and human rights institutions such as civic and charitable agencies. More college graduates also contributes to political stability, reduced crime, lower public welfare costs, greater social capital, an increased flow of new ideas, and an improved quality of the environment for all. These are benefits to "others" that go beyond the private satisfactions received by the graduate because firms can be more productive when there is a good environment and because ‘others’ include future generations.

There is research that measures each of these benefits. But it requires a thoughtful and balanced look. Some of the earnings that graduates enjoy, for example, are partly the result of the education of prior generations. So graduates receive spill over benefits from the education of ‘others’ in prior generations, but they also give some of each benefit listed above to ‘others’ in future generations.

Ram Puniyani: RSS-BJP -- Father, Son, and Unholy Mission

See also his article from 2005: Is RSS a terrorist organization?

His website has more. Lots more.

From his Tehelka column:

Mr. Advani has been calling Manmohan Singh as the weakest Prime Minister for quite some time. Recently Manmohan Singh, decided to hit back and he reminded the nation about the role of Advani in Kandhar episode, Babri demolition and Gujarat violence. Sonia Gandhi’s response to Advani’s barbs was at deeper level as she called Advani and most of BJP leadership as ‘slave of RSS’ (Bidar, Karnataka 15th April) This jolted the BJP leadership which gave some weakly mumbled response. BJP-RSS relationship was once again brought to the public attention. It became clear that it is really the RSS which through various mechanisms, ideological and organizational, controls the second largest party in the country.

[...]

... [A]t Sindi (Wardha, Maharahtra) in 1954 from March 9 to March 16 a political training camp was organized for 300 pracharaks. The camp was aimed to train national RSS leadership for running the affairs of the country through Jana Sangh. RSS sarsangh chalak (supreme dictator) M.S. Golwalkar in his speech (March 16) elaborated his vision for Jana Sangh, "If we say that we are part of the organization and accept its discipline then selectiveness has no place in life. Do what is told. If told to play kabaddi, play kabaddi; told to hold meeting then meeting…For instance some of our friends were told to go and work for politics that does not mean that they have great interest or inspiration for it… If they are told to withdraw from politics then also there is no objection. Their discretion is just not required."

[...]

One will beg to differ with Sonia Gandhi on one count; slaves normally are just obeying the orders of the masters. Here the BJP, its leadership not only obeys the RSS orders, it has internalized the RSS agenda and its job is to devise different strategies and moves to ensure that RSS agenda of Hindu nation becomes strong. When in power BJP makes ground for infiltration of its siblings (other RSS progeny) to infiltrate in the state apparatus, social work, education and other possible conduits for transforming the state and society in the image of RSS.

Links ...

1. Mukul Kesavan takes on the silly notion that "the current Lok Sabha elections are best seen as the aggregate of two dozen and more provincial elections." A parochial election?:

   If the turnout of voters doesn’t drop in Maoist areas, that can be counted as a victory for electoral democracy. If state-sponsored vigilantism in the shape of the Salwa Judum, invented by the Congress and embraced by the BJP, finds endorsement in these elections and encourages these parties to fight insurgencies elsewhere with paid vigilantes, the idea of the rule of law will have suffered a massive defeat. If Telangana votes for politicians committed to the separation of that region from Andhra Pradesh, we might learn something about the validity of language as the basis of political identity.

   To imagine that these are local or provincial issues is silly. ...

2. Prithviraj Datta, a doctoral candidate in political theory at Harvard, argues against allowing expat Indians to vote in Indian elections.

   ... the political needs of the resident are very distinct from those of the expat. Residents, quite obviously, are subject entirely to the demands and the authority of the Indian State. Their political grievances can only be redressed by the Indian State, through its various forms and agencies. To them, therefore, the vote is an essential means of ensuring that their views are heard, their interests represented.

   This is not true of expats, however. Their daily lives are not mediated to the same degree by the Indian State. The sources of their most immediate political grievances are likely not to lie within the Indian State, but rather in the countries in which they reside as foreign nationals. To allow expats to vote as members of the constituencies to which they belonged while they were in India thus does violence to the notion of local representation.

3. 3 Quarks Daily features a Meena Kandasamy poem, "Reverence: Nuisance"

4. George Scialabba: Justice: A Syllabus.

5. Now that we live in the age of Google Profile Results, how can you manage your reputation online? I like one of the suggested methods: "Ms. Allison also changed her last name, which is another way to clean your Web footprint as is using a middle initial." [Link via Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam]

6. Miracle at Louisville: PhD degree in one semester.

IPL and its effect on families

A US study has found that "cities with Major League baseball teams have a lower divorce rate." I don't know about divorce rates, but in a similar study in India, cities with IPL teams will probably score high on father-son bonding -- and also in couch-potato-hood and grogginess during the IPL season.

In these tough times ...

Accepting rejection: "High-flying Harvard students get tips on how to rebound from the inevitable 'thanks but no thanks'." (There's also an accompanying piece with "tips for successful failing.") Here's an excerpt from the main article:

The dirty secret is out. Harvard students fail sometimes. They are denied jobs, fellowships, A's they think they deserve. They are passed over for publication, graduate school, and research grants. And when that finally happens, it hurts. Big time.

To help students cope, Harvard's Office of Career Services hosted a new seminar last week on handling rejection, a fear job-seekers are feeling acutely in the plummeting economy. The advice from panelists could have come from a caring, patient parent. No rejection is the end of the world, they said, even though it might feel that way at the time.

[...]

Hard as it is for some to believe, there are candidates more worthy than Harvard students, Professor Meng quipped, in language befitting his field. "Statistically you are rejected, and probablistically it is fair."

Candidates with criminal records and how to combat them

Here's Abhijit Banerjee et al describing the results of a study:

During last year’s Delhi elections, SNS, an NGO, filed a series of Right to Information cases in order to extract information about the performance of the sitting MLAs. This included how they had spent their annual Rs 2 crore development funds, as well as how often they had participated in the committees where they are supposed to represent their constituents. Hindustan combined this information with data from the mandatory disclosures by all candidates regarding criminal history, education, and personal assets, and printed the same in a concise format for a set of ten constituencies, in the week before the election.

A group of eight NGOs then distributed free copies of these newspapers in 200 polling stations, chosen by lottery to ensure that they were comparable to all the others where the newspapers were not distributed. While candidates with serious criminal records got about 9 per cent more votes in general, the newspaper distribution appears to have effectively cut the electorate’s preference for criminals in half. However, one could make the case that this effect is the result of priming: it is conceivable that the newspaper campaign simply made people more sensitive to this issue.

The piece also discuss some other findings about the role of caste in UP politics -- especially in the perceived rise of criminalization since the 1980s. Here's the abstract of the academic study behind these findings:

This paper examines how increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. If politics is characterized by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicization reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority party with the opposite true for the minority party. The effect increases with greater numerical dominance of the majority (and so social homogeneity). Empirical evidence from a survey on politician corruption that we conducted in North India is remarkably consistent with our theoretical predictions.

Word of the Day: Hindutwit

That would be Hindutva + twit, going by the way Ashok V. Desai uses it repeatedly in his article:

Only the trade mispricing method shows an illicit capital outflow — of $22 billion a year in 2002-2006. That is 3.5 per cent of India’s gross domestic product at current prices, 14.5 per cent of international trade in goods, and 9.3 per cent of international trade in goods and services. These are significant figures, but nowhere close to the billions and trillions that Hindutwits dream of.

That is why the Hindutwit believers have studiously ignored the GFIP estimates.

I don't foresee great popularity for this word, though: it's too close to (Hindu + twit), and in no time at all, it'll become unacceptable in public discourse. So, enjoy it while it lasts.

For context and more links, check out this post at the Outlook blog. You could also go back to Ashok Desai's original article that elicited nasty responses from Hindutwits.