Writing

Three pieces about the craft of writing that I enjoyed reading.

For college students: How to say nothing in five hundred words by Paul McHenry Roberts. Here's one of the examples for coloured words -- words loaded with associations:

Or consider the word intellectual. This would seem to be a complimentary term, but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality and general dopiness.

And this was written over forty or fifty years ago!

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How to write with style by Kurt Vonnegut.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

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Writing, Typing, Economics by John Kenneth Galbraith.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought. One can understand the resulting anger.[...]

Energy efficiency

Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.

Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.

That's from Joseph Romm at Salon.com [via Olive Ridley]. In a section about efficiency improvements in energy usage, Romm makes the following point (with a pretty amazing example):

Serious energy efficiency is not a one-shot resource, where you pick the low-hanging fruit and you're done. In fact, the fruit grows back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more people.

The best corporate example is Dow Chemical's Louisiana division, consisting of more than 20 plants. In 1982, the division's energy manager, Ken Nelson, began a yearly contest to identify and fund energy-saving projects. ...

The first year of the contest had 27 winners requiring a total capital investment of $1.7 million with an average annual return on investment of 173 percent. Many at Dow felt that there couldn't be others with such high returns. The skeptics were wrong. The 1983 contest had 32 winners requiring a total capital investment of $2.2 million and a 340 percent return -- a savings of $7.5 million in the first year and every year after that. Even as fuel prices declined in the mid-1980s, the savings kept growing. The average return to the 1989 contest was the highest ever, an astounding 470 percent in 1989 -- a payback of 11 weeks that saved the company $37 million a year. [...]

An obligatory post about what I had for lunch today

A simple -- and simply fabulous -- meal at the Iyer Mess. After more than a year.

While the drumstick sambhar was great, the pachchadi and the poriyal were okay; but the rasam -- the Rasam! -- was truly sublime.

That near-religious experience cost me just 22 rupees.

The rise and rise of Obama

Following Ta-Nehisi Coates's strong recommendation, I just finished reading Ryan Lizza's article on Barack Obama's political career during the decade before he became a star on the national stage (with his fantastic Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and his election to the Senate later in the same year).

Lizza's account is rich with events and anecdotes that keep driving it (almost relentlessly) towards these broad conclusions about the candidate:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war. Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Of spherical bastards and asymmetric assholes

Read Julianne Dalcanton's post for the details. I like this definition of spherical bastards:

... they [are] bastards any way you [look] at them.

Faith and pride

This is way too funny:

All six SP rebels voted against the government. Though there were doubts about which way Ateeq Ahmed and Afzal Ansari would vote, SP general secretary Amar Singh was confident that they would toe the Congress line at least. In fact, the two were brought from jail for the vote.

And this too:

Mr. Amar Singh said while BJP workers attacked the homes of their MPs who cross-voted, “the SP had not engaged in such activity although the BJP routinely describes us as a party of goons.”

This just in: there is no gender gap in math among US school students

Update: Here are the press releases from UC-Berkeley and Wisconsin-Madison. Also, check out the Knight Science Journalism Tracker with lots of links to newspaper stories. [Original post follows ...]

First, the big news of the day from the US: A team led by Janet Hyde (psychologist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison) has a paper in Science (likely pay-walled) that examined the latest data on the performance of boys and girls from grades 2 to 11 in standardized math tests.

Their conclusion is summarized in the headline of the accompanying Science news story: Girls = Boys in Math. Here's an excerpt from the paper itself:

Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis (19). There is evidence of slightly greater male variability in scores, although the causes remain unexplained. Gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some STEM fields.

[Here's a recent post by Daisy Grewal on the Gender Similarities Model]

The authors have quite a few other interesting things to say; they are covered in this NYTimes story by Tamar Lewin.

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Over three weeks ago, Slate ran a series of articles by Amanda Schaffer titled The Sex Difference Evangelists: Unpacking the Science of Sex Difference. The entire series is a must read; here's a short extract:

... if history is any guide, today's gender breakdowns are likely to keep changing. What's so magical, after all, about the current numbers? A few decades ago, most biology and math majors were men. So were most doctors. Now math undergraduate majors split close to 50/50. In 1976, only 8 percent of Ph.D.s in biology went to women; by 2004, 44 percent did. Today, half of M.D.s go to women. Even in engineering, physics, chemistry, and math, the number of women receiving doctorates tripled or quadrupled between 1976 and 2001. Why assume that we have just now reached some natural limit?

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On a related note, let me also point you to this article by Mary Hatcher-Skeers on the situation of women in chemistry:

... [W]hen [our women chemistry graduates] go on to graduate school, the reception isn’t always a warm one. Nationally, nearly 50 percent of chemistry undergraduates are women, but it’s nowhere near that percentage when it comes to gender equity in Ph.D. programs or in academic careers. And the reason for the falloff continues to be gender discrimination.

We have had a number of women chemistry majors, from each of our participating colleges (Scripps, Pitzer and Claremont McKenna), go on to graduate school and be quite successful, but they often remark that the transition is difficult. A few years ago, one of my Scripps students enrolled in a Ph.D. program in chemistry but had trouble finding a research lab that would take her. I remember her words when she informed me of her decision to leave with a master’s degree: “You never told me that in science, men assume I’m stupid.”

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Which leads me to FSP's post about "obnoxious questions commonly asked of Female Science Professors" and some of the possible answers to them.

Links ...

Yogesh Upadhyaya: IIT-JEE - The Untold Story. Covers the history of this examination; and has a short quote from yours truly (from this post).

Seema Singh: Scientists' love-hate relationship with media.

Via Chris Blattman, "a Chinese government poster informing citizens people of eight things they should not ask foreigners."

Kieran Healy: Standard Model of Sociophysics.

Female Science Professor: What an insult.

Poaching as a strategy to fight faculty crunch at IITs?

Whenever the topic turns to the creation of new institutions -- be they IITs or Central Universities -- you get people expressing this concern: "But where will they get their faculty from?" The latest to join this grumpy and not-so-gruntled group is Pankaj Jalote. The picture he paints is pretty grim indeed.

... As a PhD is necessary for a faculty position in an IIT, we ... need about 500 fresh PhDs in engineering every year to provide the faculty for the IITs.

Let us look at the supply side. An IIT produces about 100 PhDs a year in engineering, which means a total of about 600 PhDs are being produced by the top institutes every year. More than half of these will join lucrative careers in industry or go overseas (the actual percentage is likely to be higher). Of the remaining, many will not be acceptable to IITs for faculty positions (as not only a PhD is required, the quality of work and past education record also must be good.) So, even after stretching the limits, there will be less than 100 suitable candidates available for these 600 faculty positions!

Clearly, the problem is not solvable by resources within the country. There is, however, a large pool of PhDs in the US (and elsewhere) of Indian origin. According to one report, the number of Indians who got PhDs in the US in computer science (CS) in a year was 275 (out of about 1,000), which, incidentally, is about 10 times the number of PhDs produced in India in CS. The number of PhDs in other disciplines would be of similar order — according to a NSF report about 1,500 Indians were awarded PhD in science and technology in 2006. If we consider the graduates of the last few years, a thousand-strong pool of Indian PhDs exists in the US in each discipline.

It is this pool of resource that is our only visible hope for meeting the faculty crunch — if only we can attract some of them back.

I agree with much of what he says, and I certainly don't want to downplay the challenge that the IITs face. All I want to say here is that the pool of candidates is far larger than fresh PhDs, and it's not clear why Jalote doesn't want to consider the other options in this bigger pool.

Who are these "other options"? Professors at other colleges and researchers in our research labs.

The IITs may want to pluck them from their current places, but why would they want to move to IITs? There are many reasons, but the bootomline is that the IITs are still the best bet in India for folks interested in teaching and research. To begin with, IITs enjoy enormous prestige and respect. They offer a great deal of autonomy. They offer a research environment -- infrastructure, research grants, travel money -- that people at other institutions can only envy from afar. They offer access to some of the best student talent India has to offer. And, salaries are much better at the IITs than at research labs, NITs and universities!

In most disciplines (except perhaps computer science and allied fields), India's vast system of research labs -- CSIR, Defence, Atomic Energy and Space -- employ a huge number of researchers. Similarly, the NITs and university engineering colleges also have a fairly large number of faculty members. Granted, not all of them are going to be of great interest to the IITs (and not all of them may even want to move to the IITs), but given the advantages of moving to the IITs, they should be able to attract some of the more successful professors and researchers from these places.

Are there examples of high-profile institutions that have poached from our research labs and universities? IISERs. I know of a few people who have moved to IISERs from research labs and universities. [If you have some statistics, please share them -- either through comments or by e-mail. ]

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However, there is a cost to this kind of poaching: it will shift the HR challenge to the other institutions and research labs. They will have to find ways of becoming attractive destinations for promising faculty members and researchers. This task, however, is not easy because many of them carry the burden of their past in terms of hierarchical organizational structure (and mindset), poor infrastructure (not applicable for labs belonging to the strategic sectors), and a salary structure that puts them at a disadvantage.

Let me admit (once again) that the challenge posed by the faculty shortage is a big one. However, my (somewhat) limited point is this: because they can resort to poaching as a part of their faculty development strategy, IITs enjoy a huge advantage over the other institutions in facing (and overcoming) this challenge.

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BTW, poaching is available as a HR strategy to NITs and Central Universities as well; they certainly are better places to work at than are many of our State Universities and Colleges. I'm not so sure about whether they offer any advantage to people in our research labs, though.

When you donate 5 million dollars to your alma mater ...

... you get to be called an "old boy" by ToI and its reporter who, in this case, is Hemali Chhapia.

It's really appalling that they applied this description for someone -- Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, an IIT-B alumnus and founder of the Symphony Group -- who graduated way back in 1969!

And, no, it's not a quote from someone else (if it was, the report should have mentioned it clearly); it's right there in the opening paragraph.

The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) has received one of its largest private donations from an old boy in New York.

At an alumni gathering in the Big Apple, Romesh Wadhwani, founder of the Symphony Group, gifted his alma mater a purse of $5 million (about Rs 22 crore) to set up a research centre in the area of bio-sciences.

"The lab will work in the area of research in bio-sciences and bio-engineering," IIT-B director Ashok Misra t old TOI from New York. Details of the centre's focus areas will be worked out after discussions between Wadhwani and the bio-sciences faculty.

IIT-B deputy director Juzer Vasi said the centre would work closely with the six-year-old bio-sciences school on the campus.

xkcd's version of the Sokal affair

Here. (Here's the Wikipedia entry on the Sokal affair).

While on xkcd, here's a good one on how age affects mathematical ability.

BTW, have you checked out the xkcd cartoons on purity of scientific fields, and Mark Pilgrim's response to it?

Jeffrey Frankel's version of "There are no atheists in foxholes"

He comes up with a good one:

There are no libertarians in financial crises.

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Here's an example from sometime ago.

It's raining IITs

The Cabinet ... approved creation of 30 faculty posts per year in the first three years of establishment of each of the new IITs, besides approving the posts of a director and registrar. A decision was also taken to raise the grade of all existing IIT directors to Rs 26,000 (fixed) from Rs 25,000 now.

It's official! The creation of eight new IITs is a done deal; they are going to be in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Punjab, Orissa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. The first six will start their academic session this year itself, while the last two will start in 2009-10.

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In a much awaited development, the Cabinet also approved the conversion of the Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU) into an IIT. I don't know what the official abbreviation of this IIT is, but Sanjay Dani, an IT-BHU alumnus, created a Facebook group for IIT-Varanasi -- two weeks ago! (And I ended up becoming the second member of this group ;-) It already has over 160 members.

Update: There's quite a bit of celebration over at the ITBHUGlobal.org site. Animesh sounds a "cautiously optimistic" note, though:

Sadly, I have been badly burnt multiple times on this, and would wait for the proverbial cup to get to the proverbial lip :).

Cautiously optimistic ...

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Here's the press release from the Press Information Bureau.

Lots of links ...

University of Chicago economist John List has a short overview of field experiments in economics [it may be behind a paywall]. It has a nice title: Homo experimentalis Evolves.

Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt: Your Brain Lies to You, a fine article on the "the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way."

A great, Onion-worthy piece in the Improbable Research site: The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything [Link via Desi Pundit and this post by one of the authors]. The authors -- Gregory J. Gage, Hirak Parikh, Timothy C. Marzullo of the University of Michigan -- make a bold claim:

We predict that between 2050 and 2100, there will be more cingulate publications than there are cells in the cingulate cortex itself. At this point, we fear that the “Cingularity” will be reached, and the cingulate cortex will become self-aware.

A book to watch out for: The Scholars Without Borders blog alerts us about Reserved! How Parliament debated Reservations 1995-2007, a book by Rajeev Dhawan.

The Spring 2008 issue of The Greater Good magazine has a special section devoted to Play. A lot of good stuff about play and why children need it. There's also lot of other goodies in there, but this special section alone is worth more than a visit to their site.

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Finally, given the recent troubles experienced by this humble, harmless blog, I could relate to the contents of Amit Agarwal's post: Know when your website gets banned or penalized by Google. In a follow-up post he tells us how to abjectly submit to appeal to the Google gods to re-consider their decision.

China fact of the day

Just two Chinese universities -- Tsinghua and Peking -- accounted for over 1000 PhDs awarded in 2006 -- and here's the surprising bit -- by the US universities! These numbers place them at No. 1 and No. 2 in the pecking order, followed by Berkeley, Seoul National, Michigan, and Cornell.