Web 2.0 tools for the National Knowledge Commission

In my letter to the Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, I just made the simplest of requests: that the Commission publish all its reports on its own website. In terms of technical wizardry, the feature I asked for is, um, so HTML (aka the Old Web or Web 1.0).

It turns out that the Commission has a serious problem. One of the members -- the Vice Chairman, no less! -- has accused the Commission of "keeping him in the dark on several reports submitted to the Prime Minister." To this accusation, the Chairman has responded by saying, "In any case, it does not bother me. In a country of a billion people, I can't make everybody happy and I do not expect all members of my Commission to agree with me".

It is clear that the Commission is badly in need of some serious collaborative tools.

I suggest that they try Zoho Wiki, Social Text, or PBWiki for collaborative report writing -- in wiki style. If they want fancier formatting, they can try Google Docs or the Zoho Writer. For sharing data and other files (if their website runs out of storage space), they can try Box.net.

And, of course, Web 2.0 can also help them feud in public more effectively. They can use YouTube for sharing videos of their angry outbursts.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Swarnajayanti Fellowships -- 2006

The results are out!

Three of my colleagues from IISc figure in the list of Fellows: Giridhar Madras (Chemical Engineering), G.K. Ananthasuresh (Mechanical Engineering), and S.K. Satheesh (Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences); the first two also happen to be our neighbours!

In addition, Balasubramanian Sundaram, a friend from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNC), also figures in that list.

Congratulations to all these special folks!

Last night at 9:45 p.m. ...

The 9:00 p.m. show India This Week on NDTV featured the story on the 100 dollar laptop. Sorry, no links (yet)! Here's the link; but the video requires a subscription!

A member of the design team behind Children's Machine XO said some good things about the machine; then Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-M talked about some of the home grown efforts to address the issue of technology for the masses -- particularly for the rural masses. The story ended with (almost) the last word from me. I'm just grateful that Amulya Gopalakrishnan, the reporter on this story, chose some of my my best lines!

There you have it: twenty seconds in a two-minute story embedded in a 60 minute show. All in all, an interesting experience.

Swaminathan Aiyar: C.N.R. Rao is "dead wrong"!

Brilliant scientists like CNR Rao, scientific advisor to the prime minister, can be dead wrong. They say that Indian science and technology are in crisis. Nonsense, technology has never been in better shape.

Read the whole thing. He says some interesting things. However, he gets back to the tired old stuff towards the end:

Why, then, do some scientists bemoan the decline and fall of science? Some (though not all) have the old Soviet mindset, glorying above all in indigenous technology in nuclear energy, missiles and space. Soviet scientists got unlimited sums for strategic goals, without having to worry about cost-effectiveness.

Aiyar is way off-base here. C.N.R. Rao is asking for more money basic scientific research; he's not -- as far as I can tell -- asking for more support for missile research and nuclear technology. By taking cheap shots at scientists seeking greater research funding, Aiyar is just betraying a lazy mind.

Perhaps Aiyar should read what an Israeli Nobel winner said at this year's Science Congress about the importance of basic research.

CAT results ...

The Economic Times reports:

Girl students may take the lead in class X and class XII board exams, but IIM Bangalore seems to be a male bastion. This year, only 24.7% of those who took the Common Admission Test (CAT) for IIM-B [sic] were women.

Here's something else that's interesting:

Yet again, engineers have taken the lead over shortlisted candidates from other disciplines with 904 out of 1,065 candidates shortlisted for round two.

In sharp contrast, only eight candidates have an arts background. While 31 are from the science stream, 59 have a computer science background and 44 from commerce. Management, law and other categories account for 19 candidates.

There's also some caste-wise information. But it confuses me, because it appears to be in the form of raw scores (in percent); I'm under the impression that CAT scores are percentiles. Can someone clarify this?

Ajit Bhattacharjea celebrates RTI

The year 2006 will go down in history as the year when democracy became an actuality in India, when the equation between governor and the governed altered. It was the year that the innermost defences set up by an entrenched bureaucracy to protect their ultimate source of power — secrecy — were breached. The flag was lowered, surreptitiously and unannounced, towards the end of the year when their remaining missile, an amendment to the Right to Information Act, designed to be fired in the winter session of Parliament, misfired.

From his HT column.

Shashi Tharoor responds ...

About a month ago, Shashi Tharoor's column in the Hindu alerted us about the huge loss to India due to its doctors emigrating and staying on in the US. I used that as the starting point for elaborating on the Australian model of funding university education.

Tharoor uses his latest column to respond to his readers' comments, including mine.

In response to the "Australian model", he says:

The great flaw in this model, however, is that it does nothing to address the problem of doctors emigrating. If repayment is solely through the tax system, how will the government recoup its investment from doctors who, having emigrated, no longer pay Indian taxes?

Needless to say, I don't see this as a "great flaw" at all! It is just a minor problem (see below) that can be fixed easily, if only we apply our minds to it. Let me outline some of my ideas for addressing this "flaw".

India has tax treaties with many countries, and it should be easy to add a clause that mandates subjecting Indian immigrants to a small additional tax in the host country, which can send the extra money thus collected to India. Another way would be to allow the beneficiary to shift his/her loan burden (or tax burden) onto someone else. Yet another (rather blunt and unpleasant) way is to make the beneficiary repay his loan before emigrating.

In any event, the number of people leaving Indian shores is small, and with all kinds of great opportunities opening up right here in India, this number is only going to stay small. But the problem of subsidies for higher education -- with nearly 10 million students pursuing it -- is still a major and live issue. I wrote that post to address the larger issue of enabling access to higher education for a lot of people, without the government taking on all the burden.

As I see it, the problem posed by those who wish to leave India is really about the loss of talent and skill. Money may be the primary motivator for them, but it is not the main thing for us simply because the numbers are small (and, as I said, are likely to stay small). However, this doesn't mean that we should let them off from their responsibility to repay the country's investment in their education. I have just outlined some of the ways above. You may be able to think of better ways of doing it.

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Thanks to Kaps for the pointer to Tharoor's latest column. He also points out that Tharoor has misspelled my name!

Montessori centenary

I have already mentioned that our 5.5 year old son Aadhu goes to a Montessori school, and that we are very happy with his progress. We are also happy with his school: Hymamshu in Malleswaram; their Montessori program is excellent, thanks to their wonderful and committed teachers (their website isn't all that great, though).

A few months into his first year of Montessori, we asked Aadhu what he did at school. "We take the mat from the rack, put it on the floor and sit". "Then?" "We sing songs."

Impatient to get to the really good bits (and totally ignorant about the Montessori terminology), we asked, "Go on. What do you do then? Do you play with toys?"

"Aiyo, no! We don't play. We work."

"Huh, work with what?"

"Materials!".

I don't know about what it did to my wife, but that answer certainly gladdened the materials engineer in me!

Take a look at this page on Montessori materials.

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Sidebar: My previous post on Aadhu's education is here.

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All that preamble is just to let you know that this week marks the centenary of the Montessori system of teaching. Even as I write this, the members of the India Montessori Centre are in a grand conference at the J.N. Tata Auditorium in the IISc campus. Today's Hindu carries an article on the Montessori phenomenon.

JANUARY 6, 1907, The feast of Epiphany: Gathered in a room in a small quarter of San Lorenzo, the hotbed of crime in the city, were dignitaries and the elite of Rome to witness the inauguration of what was to become known as the first House of Children or Casa dei Bambini.

As Medical Officer of Hygiene, Dr. Maria Montessori had been asked to undertake the organisation of infant schools in the model tenements of a building society. Fifty children between the ages of two and six were pulled into the room, frightened and crying miserably.

Dr. Montessori started by reading from the Bible: "... all these are gathered together, they are come to thee; thy sons shall come from afar, and thy daughters shall rise at thy sight. Then shalt thou see, and abound and thy heart shall wonder and be enlarged, when the multitude of the sea shall be converted to thee, the strength of the Gentiles shall come to thee... "

Thirty years later, reflecting on that occasion, she said that she had had a vision and was inspired and felt that the work she was undertaking would one day prove very important.

Maria Montessori provided these children with materials to work with, which we now use today as Sensorial apparatus and tools for the Exercises of Practical Life. In this environment, the children were not imprisoned behind tables and chairs. They were free to move around the classroom and to work with whatever they chose. With these materials they had interesting occupation and no interference from adults. They demonstrated their love of silence, their love of order, their disinterest in rewards and punishments and their love for learning, all of which developed their inner discipline.

The Schön files: Where are they?

... Schon's 2001 Nature paper is listed in WoS as:

Self-assembled monolayer organic field-effect transistors (Retracted article. See vol 422 pg 92 2003)
SCHON JH, MENG H, BAO Z
NATURE 413: 713-716 2001

However, it was cited at least 24 times since retraction was issued by Nature and Science in Spring of 2003. Including 5 citations in 2006 and 5 citations in 2005.

That is from the comment by Incoherent Ponderer on this post by Doug Natelson who is dismayed by the memory hole that the Bell Labs site has become:

[Hendrik Schön] was the focus of arguably the most serious fraud in the physical sciences in the last 50 years while he was working at Bell Labs. ... [T]here was a thorough investigation and the fraud was discovered, though only after hundreds of person-years had been wasted by people around the world trying to replicate work that turned out to have been fabricated in the first place. The results of that investigation had been archived on the Bell Labs website. However, now that Alcatel has taken over Lucent, those links are dead, and a seach of the new Alcatel-Lucent site does not find any trace of Herr Dr. Schon. ...

This is bad. It should be the responsibility of Bell Labs to maintain this information in an accessible way for at least ten years, or some other reasonable period.

Wikipedia entry on Schön is here. I have some related links in this post.

Why clone at all?

The NYTimes editorial asks a good question.

Asking whether cloned meat and milk are safe is not even the right question. The right question is, why clone at all?

A letter to the Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission

Dear Mr. Pitroda,

My name is Abi (T.A. Abinandanan) and I am on the faculty of the Department of Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. I also write a personal blog [which has] higher education in India as a major theme.

This mail is to strongly urge you to ensure that the National Knowledge Commission makes available all its reports and notes on that important knowledge resource -- [the] internet. It would also be wonderful if NKC [shares] with the public the proceedings of [its] conferences and Commission hearings.

This will give the public -- and in particular, that part of the public that wishes to engage with the Commission -- direct access to the Commission's thinking, reasoning, and finally, policy recommendations. In the absence of such free access to NKC's reports, news reports (which are often poorly written and / or ideologically coloured) are the only means by which the we in the public get to know about NKC's views.

For example, there has been a flurry of news reports about the National Knowledge Commission's recent 'note' to the Prime Minister with a set of (presumably interim) recommendations on re-imagining our higher ed system. However, reporters and newspapers tend to colour their news reports using their preferred ideology and politics. Also, by their very nature, short news reports focus on just one or two ideas in your reports, without bothering to go into the reasoning behind them or to present a broader perspective on your recommendations. I am sure you would agree that this is not the best way of communicating with the people the Commission is meant to serve.

As it stands right now, the information on the NKC website is so outdated as to be almost useless. I strongly urge the Commission to revamp its website to re-establish a direct and meaningful conversation with the public. This gesture will go a long way in renewing the Commission's commitment to knowledge, modernity and democracy.

I thank you for your patient hearing. In the interest of openness, I will also post this mail on my blog.

Sincerely,
Abi.
--
T. A. Abinandanan
http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com

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This is a slightly edited version of the e-mail I sent this morning to Mr. Sam Pitroda, Chairman, National Knowledge Commission; I also cc-ed it to the other Commissioners. The NKC website is here. You can contact the Commissioers directly using their e-mail addresses listed on this page.

National Knowledge Commission recommends "real" universities

Urmi Goswami reports:

Even as the National Knowledge Commission suggests a five-fold expansion of the higher education system, it has argued for creating ‘completely new institutions that operate unconstrained by the current institutional and regulatory framework’. The Commission has recommended setting up of 50 national universities that can provide education of the highest standard.

As examplars for the rest of the nation, these universities shall train students in a variety of disciplines. The Commission has suggested setting up 10 national universities over the next three years.

Not all 50 of the proposed national universities need be new universities. Some of the exisiting universities could be converted into national universities after a rigorous process of selection “to act as examplars”.

I hope this great recommendation will get our government to dump the totally hyped up -- and ultimately, unsustainable -- IIT model (which has been aped slavishly for creating IISERs), and to start thinking seriously about our crying need for some real universities that combine research and UG teaching in a number of disciplines (as opposed to "just" technology or science).

I do have a grouse, though. Would it be too much for the NKC to host these interim reports (or notes -- such as this one) on its website? Such free access will give us NKC's views without being being coloured by the kind of framing used by reporters (for example, Goswami's story starts with statements -- quoted above -- that are intended to provoke the Left and the status-quoists). More importantly, it will also allow us to better appreciate the reasons behind its recommendations.

Distance education in physiotherapy?

“We are prima facie of the opinion that professional cources must impart practical training. Therefore professional courses should not be allowed to be imparted through distance education,” said a division bench comprising chief justice MK Sharma and justice Hima Kohli.

The court was hearing a PIL filed by the Indian Association of Physiotherapists’s seeking recognition of those institutes, which are offering correspondence courses in psysiotherapy.

More here.

Keep the focus on schools

...[A] national report on the status of elementary education, prepared by NGO Pratham, has shown that enrolment figures of children, between 6 and 14 years of age (this corresponds to Class I - Class VIII), have not improved.

In fact, these have dipped — with 6.8 per cent of these children not in school in 2006 as compared to 6.5% the previous year.

From Shubhajit Roy's report in the Indian Express. The horror is masked by that sterile figure of 6.8 percent (of the 6-14 age cohort); it translates to about 11 to 13 million kids!

Pratham's website is here. Their 2006 survey results will be released today. Pratham's report of their large scale survey in 2005 is available here. My post with links to some of the media stories on that report is here.

Sandeep Pandey on student politicians

Sandeep Pandey, Ramon Magsaysay award winner and fellow-alumnus of the Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU), says:

As a Banaras Hindu University student with a rosy picture of politics as an instrument of social change, I had run for the post of representative of the university’s Institute of Technology in 1985. It was a shocking experience: the candidates for the posts of president, vice-president and general-secretary asked me to align with them on the basis of a common caste, and they offered me access to any movie in town — and also liquor, if needed, for students who could pledge their votes. Having won the election, I attended the first few meetings of the union. They left me disillusioned for life about Indian electoral politics.

Students who won or ran for the top three posts did very well in their subsequent political careers. Rajesh Mishra, who was vice-president of the union, is the Congress MP from Varanasi now; O.P. Singh, who was general secretary, became a minister in the last BJP government in UP. Manoj Sinha, a former president of the union, became the BJP MP from Ghazipur, and Satya Prakash Sonkar, who ran for a post in the 1985 university election but did not win, became an MLA later.

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Update: In the comments section, Sahodaran offers the link to this informative article on the conclusions of a Committee (headed by the former Chief Election Commissioner James Lyngdoh) which went into the question of whether the presence of political parties in university and college campuses is desirable.