Saturday night Nalli blogging

No, I am not into cross dressing (unfortunately ;-). I am here at this ungodly hour to point you to a recent Economic Times profile of the famous store in Chennai, almost synonymous with silk sarees: Nalli. The story covers, very briefly, the founding family and its managing style. Along the way you get some factoids. For example, would you have guessed Nalli's New Delhi store does more business than its Mumbai store? Did you know that there are Nalli stores in Singapore, San Jose, London and Toronto?

Here are links to the Nalli business group, and the Nalli Silks online shop.

Here is an interesting blogpost by Ramnath on their recent advertising slogan "no discounts since 1928".

The IgNobels! The IgNobels!

Oops, I didn't know it would be so soon. These guys are clever; they do it during the Nobel season!

Here is the Guardian story. Check it out, it's hilarious!

I really liked the Literature Prize for "the internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for using email to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters ...", and the Physics Prize for "an experiment that began in the year 1927, in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly dripping through a funnel at a rate of around one drop every nine years". The others are good too.

Here is the IgNobel site.

Hat tip to Ramnath for the alert. He finds the economics prize to Gauri Nanda (for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides) noteworthy.

Nobel Peace Prize ...

... goes to the UN's nuclear watchdog IAEA and its 'CEO' Mohamed ElBaradei. Guardian has a report and an editorial.

Congratulations to IAEA and ElBaradei.

Something tells me that the right wingers are going to insinuate that politics had a hand in the final decision.

Happy Bhutan

Michael Higgins recently asked "What can Finland teach us?" -- the 'us' in his question refers to ethnically diverse countries. One can ask a similar question about many other small countries as well, and Bhutan would certainly qualify to be in that group. This pesky little Himalayan kingdom in our neighbourhood has instituted an interesting set of policies meant for growing its people's Gross National Happiness (GNH). These policies have made the mighty NYtimes sit up and take notice, leading to a long news story (that ties many strands into a nice happy knot), and an editorial a few days later.

We blogged about positive psychology (happiness science! ;-) just a few days ago. This is certainly a pleasant (happy?) follow up. From the NYTimes story:

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.

Now, from the editorial:

An economic cynic may argue that a country with a gross national product as small as Bhutan's can well afford to worry about its gross national happiness, and that the best way to increase G.N.H. is by increasing G.N.P. But that is essentially an untested assertion, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it isn't necessarily true. Our sense of happiness is created by many things that are not easily measured in purely economic terms, including a sense of community and purpose, the amount and content of our leisure and even our sense of the environmental and ecological stability of the world around us.

Indian-made foreign books

Two new undergrad texts in economics (Econ-101) are to be published soon: one by Paul Krugman (with Robin Wells) and the other by Glenn Hubbard (with Anthony O'Brien). Their prices? Just check them at Amazon later, but you can bet that they will be priced near $100. At those prices, I think students in India will wait for their Indian editions.

These two texts will be going up against an established one, written by another heavyweight: Greg Mankiw. Price? A very cool $138.95! Before you come back to the earth, let me push you into the stratosphere again by another factlet: Mankiw reportedly got a 1.4 million dollar advance in 1997 when its first edition was published.

Clearly, textbook prices are going up, and going up fast. In his NYTimes op-ed, Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, discusses why they are outpacing the inflation rate, and what can be done about it. Another issue he discusses is about authors prescribing their own books as texts for their courses; this, clearly, creates a conflict of interest. He discusses a mechanism for dealing with this conflict too.

The first year of our UG program was an interesting exception. For all our basic courses (in mathematics, chemistry, applied mechanics, etc., except physics) the prescribed texts were invariably books by Indian authors (and published by Indian companies). This suited us fine, because we would not have afforded the foreign ones. My point is different, so let me elaborate a bit.

The 'bible' that our mathematics professors at BHU preached from were written by Prannath and Agarwal. Some of my friends from Chennai used to be proud that they used Manickavachagam Pillai (spelling?). The problem was that they were mostly bad! Their only virtue was that they were affordable. They were poorly designed, and wore a rather sickly look, and insisted on just presenting information in a really dry format.

Having said that, I have to admit that they were absolutely great for preparing for exams. They were systematic, had tons of example problems and even more practice problems. If you did them all, even if you didn't learn anything from their 'theory' part, you would still emerge with a fairly decent understanding of the theory; and of course, you would ace the exams.

Evidently, the availability of good -- and reasonably inexpensive -- books is important. In India, this was a problem until a few years ago. During our undergraduate days in the early eighties, access to good text books (there were hardly any texts in metallurgy or materials science by Indian authors those days; the situation is not much different even now) was only through the (well stocked) library in our Department in IT-BHU. Remember, there were no xerox machines those days!

The only foreign book we could afford was the great Resnick and Halliday for physics. Even here, there is a twist; the edition that we used was at least one (probably two) edition behind the latest in use elsewhere! Reason: only this older edition (that was re-printed in India) was affordable; the latest edition could be found only in our library.

That was then, and this is now. When I walk into our Institute's bookstore, what hits me is the sheer variety of books on programming. Java, C++, C, C#, Unix, Linux, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, EJB, AJAX, ... You name it, they have a book on it. I think I even saw books on B+, B, B-, C+ ... ;-)

There is a wide choice of texts available in other subjects too, but the choice is the largest for programming.

One of the interesting consequences of this new publishing phenomenon is exemplified by a pretty high level (graduate) text on condensed matter physics by Lubensky and Chaikin. It is a bestseller, in spite of its being addressed to a rather small audience! The last I checked, it was already into its sixth reprint. I bought it several years ago at Rs.275, and it is now at about Rs. 325 or so. I am sure the low price contributed a lot to its bestseller-hood; lots of students who didn't need it still bought it as a reference text, or perhaps to impress their friends. [This reminds me of what a reporter for Science said about Stephen Hawking's A brief history of time: "it's a nice coffee table book." ;-)]

The availability of lots of good textbooks at reasonable prices has been one of the major revolutions in India in the last dozen years or so. Invariably, they are all 'Indian editions' of texts used elsewhere. I like to call them 'Indian-made foreign books! But unlike in the past, they are all quite 'current'; many are published within six months of their appearance in the Western countries.

Many of them are written by American authors, with a clear, easy-to-follow presentation. They are well designed, with lots of white space for esthetics and for writing your notes; they have nice pictures and drawings that our older books lacked (we don't see much colour yet, though the original American versions have colour pages and pictures). All these wonders are available for reasonable prices in the range of Rs. 200 to 500.

The IMFBs have made access to pedagogically oriented texts far more accessible. Another good thing is that they have set the benchmark for Indian authors of textbooks. Students may still buy the far cheaper, poorly written books by their own university professors for other -- er, well known -- reasons, but real learning -- available in IMFB's -- is now accessible.

More importantly, for the publishers, this phenomenon has reduced the need for xeroxing; so, they get at least some money that they would otherwise not have gotten at all.

Bottomline: there indeed is money at the bottom of the pyramid. It may not be much (now), but it will only grow.

If you were to interview a female string theorist ...

... would you pose this question to her?

How do you make string theory as popular as string bikinis…?

Some crazy dude did, on National Public Radio, one of the most respected radio channels. Clifford Johnson of Cosmic Variance is, naturally, annoyed.

Grrrrrrr!

Brutality at Bangalore

Update (6.10.2005): Thanks to an e-mail from a friend, I just learnt that other newspapers have also picked it up: Economic Times and Deccan Herald

A nasty and brutal treatment was meted out to Nimish Adani (an alumnus of IT-BHU and IIM-Lucknow) in Bangalore Railway Station by none other than the Railway Police themselves; he recounted it all in his letter that has been posted on quite a few blogs (e.g., Animesh Pathak, SciAn).

Today, Mr. Yogesh Upadhyaya informs me that it has been reported in the Bangalore edition of ToI. Here is the link.

I sincerely hope Nimish will get justice.

Mr. Upadhaya is trying to take it up with officials at many levels, and alert a few NGOs, including human rights watchdog groups. If any of you can provide pointers, please send a mail to me.

Nobels in Physics and Chemistry

The contests for this year's Nobel for medicine, physics and chemistry are over. New York Times reports on the physics Prize:

A scientist who worked out a theory describing the behavior of light using quantum mechanics and two scientists who used that knowledge to develop a powerful laser technique for identifying atoms and molecules were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

Half of the prize, and half of the $1.3 million in prize money, go to Roy J. Glauber, 80, a professor of physics at Harvard, for calculations that laid the foundation for quantum optics.

John L. Hall, 71, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder and at the University of Colorado, and Theodor W. Hänsch, 63, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and a physics professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, share the other half of the prize, for later work that uses ultrashort laser pulses to make precise measurements.

Inside Higher Ed, in a "breaking news" story states, "the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded Wednesday morning to Yves Chauvin of the Institut Français du Pétrole, Robert H. Grubbs of the California Institute of Technology, and Richard R. Schrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The scholars were honored for their work on the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis."

I will post a link to a detailed story from NYTimes after it appears. As of now, it hasn't appeared. The piece by Kenneth Chang starts with a wonderful paragraph that I am sure everyone (including scientists working in that area) would love:

Three scientists share this year's Nobel Prize Chemistry for developing a chemical reaction that swaps out pieces of molecules in a swing-your-partner-around square dance manner, it was announced today.

The chemical reaction, developed over the last 35 years, enables a more efficient and more environmentally friendly way to manufacture of plastics, drugs and other materials.

The winners are Yves Chauvin, 74, who retired a decade ago from the French Petroleum Institute in Rueil-Malmaison, France; Robert H. Grubbs, 63, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology; and Richard R. Schrock, 60, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each will share one-third of the $1.3 million prize money that accompanies the award bestowed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Congratulations to the winners!

Happiness

See this update about a NYTimes story on happiness research.

Economics is called the 'dismal science'. But, for a long time, psychology too would have qualified: it dealt largely with what is wrong and dismal with the human (mental) condition, and tried to find a cure for it. Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at UPenn, who actually did pretty well in that dismal culture -- he discovered 'learned helplessness' as a mechanism for depression -- turned around and decided that it was time that psychology turned its attention from 'helping people to go from minus five to zero' to 'helping them to go from zero or one to five'. In other words, positive psychology, which has now turned into a pretty formidable science with many researchers, academic courses and conferences and even a World Database of Happiness.

In the last couple of years, I read two key popular books backed by solid psychological research and written by professors of psychology : Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman. Both are excellent, and highly recommended.

I wanted to make this post for a while. What forced the issue was this wonderful (and long) piece by Doroty Wade in the Sunday Times. It recounts the history of psychology, and how a bunch of people decided to re-orient it in a positive direction. It has interviews of some of the key people. It summarises their ideas neatly. All of it is done in a nice, conversational tone. In sum, it's great!

I am sure you are all interested in happiness -- yours and that of those around you. Read Dorothy Wade's article now. [link via slashdot]

And, don't forget the words from a great song from the eighties: "Don't worry, be happy"! :-)

Nobel in medicine

This year, 1000 Women have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Uma informs us that 92 of them are from India.

Here is an Outlook story from July 2003 that asked leading lights of Indian science about which Indians (broadly interpreted to include researchers of Indian origin) are in the reckoning for a Nobel. The story is old, but still interesting. Do read it (free registration is required).

The Outlook story is only about the science Nobels; not surprisingly, it misses Jagdish Bhagwati for the economics Prize.

The Nobel season has begun. This year's Prize for medicine is shared by "Dr. Barry J. Marshall, 54, a gastroenterologist from the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, and Dr. J. Robin Warren, 68, a retired pathologist from the Royal Perth Hospital.", according to this NYTimes report.

The Times story says:

Two Australian scientists who upset medical dogma by discovering a bacterium that causes stomach inflammation, ulcers and cancer won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine yesterday.
[...]
The findings by the Australians in the early 1980's went so against medical thinking, which held that psychological stress caused stomach and duodenal ulcers, that it took many more years for an entrenched medical profession to accept it.

In its citation, the Nobel committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said that Dr. Marshall and Dr. Warren "made an irrefutable case that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori" causes ulcers and other diseases.

Congratulations! Since the prize-winners are from Australia, I guess the celebrations would already have begun there.

An elitist dream?

A recent issue of The Week had a cover story on the red carpets rolled out by foreign universities to woo Indian students to their campuses. Since foreign students pay a full fee while the natives pay only a partial fee, the former are, naturally, very attractive. On the supply side, more Indian students can afford expensive education today than ever before.

The numbers reported by the Week are truly staggering. There are at least 120,000 students studying abroad, most of them in English-speaking countries. Expenses? Including tuition, they come to anywhere between a low of Rs. 0.5 million and a high of Rs. 1.2 million per year.

Even if you assume (liberally) that some 75% of them have access to financial assistance -- I am sure it is a gross overestimate -- it still leaves some 30,000 students who pay their way through (with money raised by their parents or through bank loans). This is still a very large number and it represents an opportunity that India itself should be tapping.

Sure, some of the students wish to study abroad for the experience, and there is a lot to be said about it. But I am also sure there is a large number of students who go abroad because they don't find many good colleges and universities offering high quality education right here in India. Here is a quote from one of the people interviewed for the Week's story:

"I'll be taking the CAT exam in November. If I get through, I'll remain in India. But the competition is very tough. So, I've also applied for an MBA course at the University of Technology, Sydney, which I am likely to get."

We all know why Narayanamurthy sent his son to Corness, don't we? Here is what CBS said: "Murthy's own son, who wanted to do computer science at IIT, couldn't get in. He went to Cornell, instead. Imagine a kid from India using an Ivy League university as a safety school."

There is clearly a demand for high quality education in a good university even if it is very expensive by Indian standards.

Bottomline: a university that is similar in spirit to the Indian School of Business (ISB) could be a phenomenal success.

In an earlier post, I estimated what a fully student-funded research university would cost. That estimate was for a bare-bones university, made with the intention of finding out what the lowest cost would be. It turned out to be about Rs.100,000 per student per year. It supports 1 faculty and 2 or 3 graduate students (who all share in the teaching) for 40 students.

Just imagine what wonders one can do with Rs.200,000 or 300,000 per student! The educational experience would not be just bare-bones, it could have all bells and whistles. The students could be taught by some of the most brilliant minds money can buy (!) and could have world-class infrastructure.

When such a university is set up, who knows, it may even attract lots of foreign students (and some foreign faculty too!), offering everyone an international flavour and experience right here in India.

I am sure I am not the only one to think along these lines. After all, ISB and GLIM have been established on a similar principle. However, this hasn't happened, not just for a 'real' university with multiple disciplines, but even for stand-alone institutions in such 'lucrative' subjects such as engineering, medicine and law. To me, this fact implies either regulatory obstacles or market failure. What could it be?

Or, I am perhaps in some seriously elitist dream. Somebody please pinch me!

Jacobs' experiments - Part 2

I think Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs is planning to write a Freakonomics-like book in sociology. After outsourcing his personal life (and liking it!), he ran another 'experiment': he "decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the [Wikipedia] site". From the C-Net story:

The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire's December issue. The original version was preserved for posterity.

Read the rest of the story here.

Link to the C-Net story via Chugs.

Professor's life

Here is a tale from someone whose experiences made her choose to become an ex-professor dump her job. [Update: She continues to be a professor, but at a different place. See her comment below.] Her problems arose not only from students, but also her superiors (HOD, Dean, Director ...). [via Desi Pundit]

Wired has a story about the website RateMyProfessors that is giving a lot of professors a lot of grief and sleepless nights. A typical bad rating is accompanied by this comment: "I learned how to hate a language I already know." After I read it, all I could muster was an "Ouch". [via Chugs'Sunday morning links]

Amartya Sen on 'hunger in India'

Amartya Sen's Argumentative Indian has some essays which are only indirectly related to the book's main theme -- that India has been home to an argumentative tradition for well over two and a half millennia. Chapter 10 is one such essay : Class in India. The main focus of this essay, based on the Nehru lecture he gave in November 2001 in New Delhi (sorry, I couldn't find it online), is on what he calls 'friendly fire':

Many of the distributional institutions that exist in India and elsewhere are designed to defend the interests of groups with some deprivation (or some vulnerability) but who are not by any means the absolute underdogs of society. There is an understandable rationale for seeing them as 'friendly' institutions in the battle against class divisions. Yet if they also have the effect of worsening the deal that the real underdogs get, at the bottom layers of society, the overall impact may be to strengthen class divisions rather than weaken them. This is the sense in which their effects can be seen as 'friendly fire'.

Sen goes on to present two examples. The first one is on how the food policy adopted by our government(s) have done very little to mitigate the problem of hunger (the second one is on primary education, and on how -- again -- policy has done little to ensure everyone gets it at the right level and right quality). This part of the essay (at least big chunks of it) has also found its way into another essay which, thankfully, is available online. The following extracts are from the online source as well as from the book.

First, a quick description of (the magnitude of) the problem:

[...] Not only are there persistent recurrences of severe hunger in particular regions (the fact that they don't grow into full-fledged famines does not arrest their local brutality), but there is also a gigantic prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India. Indeed, India does much worse in this respect than even Sub-Saharan Africa. Calculations of general undernourishment -- what is sometimes called "protein-energy malnutrition" -- is nearly twice as high in India as in Sub-Saharan Africa. [...] About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished, and more than half of all adult women suffer from anaemia. In maternal undernourishment as well as the incidence of underweight babies, and also in the frequency of cardiovascular diseases in later life (to which adults are particularly prone if nutritionally deprived in the womb), India's record is among the very worst in the world. [source]

Then comes a scathing attack on some popular misconceptions and myths.

[...]it is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in the latter respect. There are, of course, many different ways of shooting oneself in the foot, but smugness based on ignorance is among the most effective. [source]

Sen goes on to look at the friendly fire aspect of this problem. His analysis revolves around the growing dissonance between persistent malnutrition and the amassing of foodgrain stocks -- well beyond (and as much as three times) the 'buffer stock norms. Do you want to know how much the stocks really mean?

To see it in another way, the stocks [in 2001] substantially exceeded one tonne of food grains for every family below poverty line.

Then he adds:

The counterintuitiveness -- not to mention the inequity -- of the history of this development is so gross that it is hard to explain it by the presumption of mere insensitivity -- it looks more and more like insanity. [...] What could explain the simultaneous presence of the worst undernourishment and the largest unused food stocks in the world (with the stocks being constantly augmented at extremely heavy cost)?

The essay goes on to show how the government policy was formulated to help an important section of the poor -- the small farmer. The overall effect of this policy on the true underdogs -- "casual labourers, slum dwellers, poor urban employees, migrant workers, rural artisans, rural non-farm workers, and even farm workers who are paid cash wages" -- has been devastating indeed. In other words, "friendly fire".

Along the way, he also points out that much of the [food] subsidy, in fact, goes to pay for the cost of maintaining a msasively large stock of food grain! He says:

Since the cutting edge of price subsidy is to subsidize farmers to produce more and earn more, rather than to sell existing stocks to consumers at lower prices (that happens too, but only to a limited extent and to restricted groups), the overall effect of the subsidy is more spectacular in transferring money to medium and large farmers with food to sell, than in giving food to the undernourished consumers.

The policy does not seem to have changed since 2001. Neither does the state of malnutrition (particularly among children).

Do read the online essay (Pages 1 and 2, and endnotes).

Hmm, really? Since when?

Place: just outside the school where our four year old (fyo) is studying.

He and I are on our way out, when he stops to show me what he coloured today in class.

Me: "Hey, that's a nice oval".

Fyo: "Ayyo, Appa, it's not an oval".

Me: "Oops, what *is* it?"

Fyo (proudly): "Don't you know? It's an ellipse!".