nanopolitan

One of the nice things I get out of this blogging gig is to get e-mails from some truly fabulous people either commenting on something they ...

As you all know by now, Delhi University has succumbed to the UGC diktat and agreed to bury FYUP, its "flagship" program [See the ...

Prof. Peter N. Stearns, the soon-to-be-ex Provost of George Mason University, has what I think is one of the best responses to the ranking e...

A sobering way of examining university ranking exercises is to put a price on the goal of getting into the Top-20 (or Top whatever) in a cer...

It's good to see an institutional leader trying to drill some sense into policy-makers who ought to know better than to go blindly by gl...

Today's Chennai edition of Deccan Chronicle features a short take on my science outreach work. Pet-peeve: At least, the titles of th...

The Four-Year Undergraduate Program (FYUP) introduced last year at the Delhi University has run into some serious trouble, triggered in part...

Must read article of the day (it appeared quite a while ago, though). Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker : Multitask Masters on those truly ...

Richard Van Noorden in Nature : Computer model predicts academic success [of biomedical researchers]. The mantra 'publish or perish...

A lovely slide-show of 14 cartoons from the magazine's archives (12 with sons and 2 with daughters). This one is raucous while this i...

Sometime back I had mentioned about my popular science books in Tamil language. Few days back, without much warning, the IIT Madras Muth...

D.D. Guttenplan in NYTimes : Re-evaluating the college ranking game . So who will rank the rankings? That was the inescapable question whe...

On 24 June 2012, Lonesome George -- the last member of his subspecies of giant tortoises of Galapagos island -- died . The last years of hi...

this video (trigger warning: graphic, but stylized, violence) sums it up. Especially the stuff starting at 5:05:

I already posted a link to the working paper, but the authors -- Ajay K. Agrawal, John McHale, Alexander Oett -- have posted a nice summary...