Links ...

The Economic Times on the faculty shortage in India's B-schools.

Hemali Chhapia reports on IIT-D's proposed restrictions on its student's internet access, similar to those at IIT-B.

Manoj Mitta on the latest episode in the drama surrounding the 2006 JEE cut-offs: This exam's chief organizer is to "appear [today] before the Central Information Commission to account for his failure to explain the basis on which he had arrived at subject-wise cut-off marks."

Vinod at Sepia Mutiny on the strange, twisted case of tale of Priya Venkatesan.

Finally, today's mystery link [via Chris Blattman].

Links ...

Mark Pilgrim: The day music died:

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. ...

Robert Nadeau: Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? Mainstream Economics and the Environmental Crisis. Here's some interesting history:

... The progenitors of neoclassical economics, all of whom were trained as engineers, developed their theories by substituting economic variables derived from classical economics for physical variables in the equations of a soon-to-be outmoded mid–19th century theory in physics. [...]

The strategy used by the creators of neoclassical economics was as simple as it was absurd—the economists copied the physics equations and changed the names of the variables. In the resulting mathematical formalism, utility becomes synonymous with the amorphous field of energy described in the equations taken from the physics, and the sum of utility and expenditure, like the sum of potential and kinetic energy in the physical equations, is conserved. Forces associated with the field of utility (or, in physics, energy) allegedly determine prices, and spatial coordinates correspond with quantities of goods. Because the physical system described in the equations of the theory in physics is closed, the economists were obliged to assume that the market system described in their theory is also closed. And because the sum of energy in the equations that describe the physical system is conserved, the economists were also obliged to assume that the sum of utility in a market system is also conserved.

The Tamil Nadu Board's textbooks for classes I - XII are all available online. [Thanks to U. Veena for the e-mail alert].

Finally, the the mystery link.

Higher Ed links

The UN has a higher education portal that "offers access to on-line information on higher education institutions recognized or otherwise sanctioned by competent authorities in participating countries," which include the big English-speaking countries: the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. While China and Japan are in that list, India, France, Germany, and South Korea are not. Clearly, this portal has a long way to go.

Here's a report on some exciting developments in Tamil Nadu: two new Central Universities, one new IIM, and conversion of several colleges into universities (Presidency, Queen Mary's, PSG-Coimbatore).

Links ...

James Surowiecki: "Calling Toyota an innovative company may, at first glance, seem a bit odd. ... But if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation—cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries—is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful."

Sunil Mukhi: "Let a hundred universities bloom... " This post extends the discussion in Rahul Basu's blog on the state of Indian science.

And, as usual, today's mystery link.

Links ...

Rahul Basu's post with links to two recent articles on the state of Indian science -- both painted a gloomy picture -- has generated quite an interesting discussion featuring, among others, blogger-academics Rahul Siddharthan, Ananthanarayan and Sunil Mukhi. Definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

Dan Ariely on three main lessons of psychology.

Via Tyler Cowen, an Econ Journal Watch Symposium titled Reaching the Top? On Gender Balance in the Economics Profession (pdf).

Ian Chappell on the Magic of Shane: Warne is "the best skipper [I've] seen never to captain Australia" in Test cricket.

Celebrity Blog of the Day: Shubha Mudgal. In particular, check out her post on My Land, My State.

Finally, the mystery link.

Moneyball

In a great post, Vivek asks why IPL's Twenty-20 matches use the kind of statistics that were originally created for Test matches, and modified (only slightly) for One Day Internationals. He goes on to suggest a few metrics that can help assess more meaningfully a player's usefulness in T20 matchs. As I said, it's a great post on an interesting topic that will appeal to the academic, the non-playing captain, and the statistical junky in you. Go read it!

Now, let me use this opportunity to connect Vivek's post with what I have read about Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (of Liar's Polker fame). The book is about how

... a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. [link]

The team in question is the Oakland Athletics which went on to win the top spot in the American League - West in 2002.

The secret of their success? A reliance on (new, unfashionable, or under-utilized) statistical measures of a player's sporting prowess that really matters to the team's performance, and using these measures to evaluate, bid for, and trade players. Clearly this approach places a premium on past performance rather than on potential. As Fabio points out, moneyball tactics are an example of evidence based management!

As cricket becomes more professionalized, with lots more players and lots more matches, and with the availability of ball-by-ball accounts and videos available in the archives, our ability to slice and dice a player's every move and extract all kinds of statistical measures will only improve. As of now, Twenty-20 is a very young format, with even experienced players having played just a few tens of games. But Vivek's larger point is valid: this format cries out for new, more meaningful statistical yardsticks.

I haven't read Moneyball, but one of the impressions I get from reading about it (Wikipedia, NYTimes review, and Failure Magazine) indicates to me that some of the unfashionable metrics used by the Oakland A's were popular among enthusiastic amateurs. There is no reason why such cricket-loving amateurs cannot come up with new and interesting ways of looking at T20 players' records.

[Aside: In any event, I don't expect IPL franchises to start using serious statistical techniques -- moneyball or otherwise -- simply because they are all too busy counting the dollars that are pouring in. ]

* * *

For what it is worth, here's my early nomination for the IPL Moneyball Team of 2008: Rajasthan Royals!

* * *

In business, I can think of at least one initiative that would qualify for use of Moneyball tactics: Adventnet, the company behind the Zoho suite of products. What is so 'moneyball' about this company? Let me give the mike to Sramana Mitra:

... [In[ India [Adventnet CEO Sridhar] Vembu's operation does not hire engineers with highflying degrees from one of the prestigious India Institutes of Technology, thereby squeezing his cost advantage.

"We hire young professionals whom others disregard," Vembu says. "We don't look at colleges, degrees or grades. Not everyone in India comes from a socio-economic background to get the opportunity to go to a top-ranking engineering school, but many are really smart regardless.

"We even go to poor high schools, and hire those kids who are bright but are not going to college due to pressure to start making money right away," Vembu continues. "They need to support their families. We train them, and in nine months, they produce at the level of college grads. Their resumes are not as marketable, but I tell you, these kids can code just as well as the rest. Often, better."

* * *

Let me round this post out by taking you back to the US. Here's the latest Freakonomics column by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner on how a statistician may have helped Boston Celtics in their turn around from an abysmal record of just 24 NBA wins last year to an impressive record 66 wins this year.

Links ...

Check out Scholars Without Borders, "a bookstore for academic books from India as well as from different parts of the world" [Link via Rahul Basu]. These scholars have a blog too.

Clay Shirky on Gin, Television and Social Surplus. Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody ("a book about organizing without organizations").

Spencer Kelly: BBC exposes facebook flaw (and a text report: Identity 'at risk' on Facebook) [Link via Liz Losh].

On a related note, here's Google's advice on online security [Link via Chetan].

Here's Google co-founder Larry Page on some of the things he has been "working on" and "looking at":

You can be a bit of a detective and ask, What are the industries where things haven't changed much in 50 years? We've been looking a little at geothermal power. And you start thinking about it, and you say, Well, a couple of miles under this spot or almost any other place in the world, it's pretty darn hot. How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole? We've been drilling for a long time, mostly for oil - and oil's expensive. If you want to move heat around, you need bigger holes. The technology just hasn't been developed for extracting heat. I imagine there's pretty good odds that's possible.

Solar thermal's another area we've been working on; the numbers there are just astounding. In Southern California or Nevada, on a day with an average amount of sun, you can generate 800 megawatts on one square mile. And 800 megawatts is actually a lot. A nuclear plant is about 2,000 megawatts.

The amount of land that's required to power the entire U.S. with electricity is something like 100 miles by 100 miles. So you say, "What do I need to do to generate that power?" You could buy solar cells. The problem is, at today's solar prices you'd need trillions of dollars to generate all the electricity in the U.S. Then you say, "Well, how much do mirrors cost?" And it turns out you can buy pieces of glass and a mirror and you can cover those areas for not that much money. Somehow the world is not doing a good job of making this stuff available. As a society, on the larger questions we have, we're not making reasonable progress.

Finally, today's mystery link.

Higher ed links from around the globe

US: Marty Nemko has a hard-hitting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree.

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Such students are not aberrations. Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

US: Elia Powers summarizes a recent study that looked at why college graduates earn more than their peers.

... [F]inancial returns are immediate for college alumni first seeking employment, and that typically doesn’t change with labor market experience.

The authors note that college students are often rewarded right away because their resumes include information on grades, majors, standardized test scores and college attended — all of which allows employers to sort individuals by background.

On the other hand, individual ability is revealed to the job market much more gradually for high school graduates, whose wages are initially “completely unrelated to their own ability,” the report notes. Their financial returns rise steeply with experience, in part because employers at first have limited data on their ability to perform.

China: China curbs rapid enlargement of doctoral programs:

The Ministry of Education has decided to curb rapid expansion of doctoral programs at universities as China sees more doctoral degree holders being churned out annually than the United States. [...] China produced about 50,000 doctors in 2006, a similar figure with the United States. [...] The national expenditure on research and development, however, was roughly one ninth of the U.S. federal R&D spending in the same year, according to statistics. [...] Yang said the ministry is going to keep the doctoral program admission growth rate under two percent each year [...]

China sees soaring numbers of doctoral degree holders. In 1983 the country for the first time produced 19 doctors. Too rapid expansion of doctoral programs in recent years resulted in mass production with its quality being questioned. It's not rare to see one professor advises more than two dozens of doctoral candidates in research institutes or universities.

A profile of Prof. H.N. Ramachandra Rao

Deccan Herald's K. Jayalakshmi has penned a this profile of Prof. H.N. Ramachandra Rao who has a 75 year long association with IISc, starting here as a student and retiring as a professor. Some excerpts:

[IISc] began working with a modest three departments, that stressed on applied work. The success of Government Dichromate Factory, Government Porcelain Factory (now BHEL) or the Sandal Oil Factory was directly traceable to research work at IISc. The electro technics department that later became electrical engineering, was responsible for setting up of shortwave radio stations at Delhi, Bombay and Madras.

Whether it was helping the Government Acetone Factory with technique for production of acetone from alcohol using javari, controlling spike disease in sandalwood, or investigation of potable water and sewage facilities at Bangalore, Ahmedabad or Jamshedpur, IISc was at the forefront. [...]

Under the first Indian director C V Raman, he remembers an interesting issue not known by many, perhaps. “Raman wanted to convert the institute into an institute of physics! He would often ignore the governing council committee suggestions and even change them. Council members Meghnad Saha, Chandavarkar and N S Subba Rao met the viceroy urging that Raman be removed. It was Lord Rutherford, who then advised that Raman be made a professor of physics and allowed to continue at the institute if he accepted. He agreed! And Ghosh became director.” [...]

The number of students in the departments were few and the teacher student ratio was 1:3. The students were mostly top rank holders from various universities. “They represented the cultural mix of India. In fact we had so many messes then, one for Parsi food, another for Bengali, and so on. The decision to merge them all saw an agitation!”

Students had full freedom to work. There was no attendance or strict working hours. “During day time they would be at MG Road or Brigade Road and work late into the night at the department. It was wonderful.”

* * *

On a totally unrelated note, let me point you all to Divya Gandhi's short report on how the OBC quota will be implemented at IISc.

Links ...

Badri: Why there should be more IITs.

Phrase of the day: Occupational Asthma.

Justin Wolfers: How does the effective tax rate of Warren Buffett compare with that of his secretary?

And finally, today's mystery link.

Implicit bias

Siri Carpenter has longish article in the Scientific American on implicit bias or, as the title puts it, the Bigot in your Brain. As the following examples illustrate, implicit bias is a pretty insidious stuff:

Implicit biases can infect more deliberate decisions, too. In a 2007 study Rutgers University psychologists Laurie A. Rudman and Richard D. Ashmore found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a variety of discriminatory acts in their everyday lives. These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.

In a second study reported in the same paper, Rudman and Ashmore set up a laboratory scenario to further examine the link between implicit bias against Jews, Asians and blacks and discriminatory behavior toward each of those groups. They asked research participants to examine a budget proposal ostensibly under consideration at their university and to make recommendations for ­allocating funding to student orga­nizations. Students who exhibited greater implicit bias toward a given minority group tended to suggest budgets that discriminated more against organizations devoted to that group’s interests.

Implicit bias may sway hiring decisions. In a recent unpublished field experiment economist Dan-Olof Rooth of the University of Kalmar in Sweden sent corporate employers identical job applications on behalf of fictional male candidates—under either Arab-Muslim or Swedish names. Next he tracked down the 193 human resources professionals who had evaluated the applications and measured their implicit biases concerning Arab-Muslim men. Rooth discovered that the greater the employer’s bias, the less likely he or she was to call an applicant with a name such as Mohammed or Reza for an interview. Employers’ explicit attitudes toward Muslims did not correspond to their decision to interview (or fail to consider) someone with a Muslim name, possibly because many recruiters were reluctant to reveal those attitudes.

Unconscious racial bias may also infect critical medical decisions. In a 2007 study Banaji and her Harvard colleagues presented 287 internal medicine and emergency care physicians with a photograph and brief clinical vignette describing a middle-aged patient—in some cases black and in others white—who came to the hospital complaining of chest pain. Most physicians did not acknowledge racial bias, but on average they showed (on an implicit bias test) a moderate to large implicit antiblack bias. And the greater a physician’s racial bias, the less likely he or she was to give a black patient clot-busting thrombolytic drugs.

A grim view of India's science institutions

The prototypical Indian science institution looks drab and is dingy, with sanitary facilities that rival those in our railway stations. Small wonder then that its inhabitants typically see themselves as disempowered and undeserving. Diversity of research or personality is often frowned upon, those who don't match stereotypes or work on subjects that have been hammered to death are labelled 'too independent'. In the still predominantly male corridors of science departments, one can still hear statements like "It's no good hiring girls, all they do is prepare to get married" or, "Of course no one listens to a woman's seminar - all she needs is to look good".

Hierarchy is alive and well in science institutes, and sycophancy acts as a good lubricant in career advancement. It is rare to find research teams where juniors can freely contradict their seniors in ways that are essential to the scientific temper; dissent is, after all, the beginning of discovery. This leads to individual, rather than collective, successes by Indian scientists, and a consequent lack of real impact on global platforms.

Another paradox concerns international contacts: on the one hand, independent foreign collaborations are often frowned upon, and those who are part of such projects are accused of "seeking out white skin", and are occasionally denied leave and funding by envious science managers. On the other hand - and not surprisingly - the latter often preside over scientific call centres, where armies of students and postdocs do the number-crunching for international projects, without having the least idea of their overall scientific design. Little wonder, then, that apolitical, productive and independent scientists feel powerless and invisible in such a system.

That's from this ToI op-ed by Anita Mehta, a condensed matter physicist at S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata.

Thanks to my colleague Anant for the e-mail pointer.

Greg Anrig on the school voucher program

Even in the land of opportunity and conservative think-tanks, the voucher program -- also framed as the school choice program -- has not been a success that it was theoretically meant to be. Greg Anrig has a great piece titled An idea whose time is gone that not only summarizes the most recent research on the voucher experiments in the US, but also explains the politics behind this program. Bottomline: The voucher program is unpopular, even in conservative states. In a referendum in Utah last November, "it lost by 62 percent to 38 percent—the eighth decisive loss for a statewide voucher ballot initiative. There have not been any victories."

There is a lot of stuff there in Anrig's article which you really ought to read, but I want to highlight a broad finding that goes beyond the voucher program, and which says something about the ability of a society -- even one as rich as that of the US -- to educate its poor children:

... as the sociologist James S. Coleman found in the 1960s, a student's family's income and the collective social and economic background of his classmates are by far the most important influences on his academic future. Not only do lower-income students tend to score relatively poorly, children of any background who attend high-poverty schools are far more likely to produce worse test results than they would in schools with primarily middle-class students.

Management as a general skill

Here's Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies :

I think that actually, there probably is “a general skill called management which works in any and all domains”, and, ... I’ll also defend the proposition that this skill is pretty closely related to what they teach on MBA courses.

Here's the first part of the argument:

... the kernel of my argument for the existence of a general skill of management is that it is pretty obvious that there is a general deficit or “negative skill” of mismanagement, which equally obviously appears to work in roughly the same way in a variety of fields, and that therefore an opening stab at a definition of the general skill of management would be that it’s the absence of this deficit. Someone like Larry Summers had a particular form of this deficit in spades. It was widely known, throughout the economics profession and beyond, that Summers was not good at handling people. The job of President of Harvard is a management job, the vast majority of which involves being good at handling people. Nevertheless, Summers was given the job by fellow academics who respected his intellect, energy and ideas and who either rationalised to themselves or never even considered the fact that they were giving an important job to somebody who very clearly didn’t have the necessary skills for it.

Money and self-sufficiency

Psyblog has a post on psychology of money, a round-up of recent research on money and X, where X = shopping, gambling, sex, happiness, ... Here's the abstract of what this post describes as "saddest study of all" by Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, Miranda R. Goode:

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance. [link; the text and commentary may require subscription]

Thanks to The Situationist for the pointer.