IIT-M Scientists Scooped on Super Sand?

K.S. Jayaraman in Nature India [free subscription required]:

'Super sand', hailed as a low-cost water purification option for developing countries, recently made headlines across the world after researchers reported its merits. The sand, they said, could be made by coating ordinary sand grains with graphite oxide and could remove mercury and dyes from water. Its uniqueness — five times more filtering capacity than that of sand, which is traditionally used for water filtration.

While US and Australian authors have been given credit in the popular and scientific press for the finding, researchers [led by Prof. T. Pradeep] at the nanoscience lab of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai claim they were two years ahead of the US-Australia group in figuring this out. They say they missed out on the recognition since their scientific paper got delayed in a series of rejections by journal publishers.

Links ...

1. Amitabha Bagchi (IIT-D): Am I A Product Of The Institutions I Attended? Unstructured learning in structured learning environments: A personal view.

2. Dave Johns: Disconnected? "We've heard that obesity and divorce can be passed from one person to another. Critics now wonder how the 'social contagion' studies ever passed peer review."

3. Female Science Professor: The A to Z of Dual Career Couples. "Zero. That is the number of times I was not asked about my husband during interviews for a faculty position."

4. Andrew Marantz: My Summer at an Indian Call Center. "Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you're calling from."

Maria Charles: What Gender is Science?

Two telling excerpts from her article in Contexts, the magazine of the American Sociological Association. The first is about an international comparison of women's participation in engineering:

Engineering is the most strongly and consistently male-typed field of study worldwide, but its gender composition still varies widely across countries. Female representation is generally weaker in advanced industrial societies than in developing ones. In our 2009 article in the American Journal of Sociology, Karen Bradley and I found this pattern using international data from the mid-1990s; it was confirmed by more recent statistics assembled by UNESCO. Between 2005 and 2008, countries with the most male-dominated engineering programs include the world’s leading industrial democracies (Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and the U.S.) along with some of the same oil-rich Middle Eastern countries in which women are so well-represented among science graduates (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates). Although women do not reach the fifty-percent mark in any country, they come very close in Indonesia, where 48 percent of engineering graduates are female (compared to a 49 percent share of all Indonesian college and university graduates). Women comprise about a third of recent engineering graduates in a diverse group of countries including Mongolia, Greece, Serbia, Panama, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Malaysia.

The second one is about how women's participation in science has changed in the US over the decades since late 19th century:

... representations of scientific and technical fields as by nature masculine aren’t well-supported by international data. They’re also difficult to reconcile with historical evidence pointing to long-term historical shifts in the gender-labeling of some STEM fields. In The Science Education of American Girls, Kim Tolley reports that it was girls who were overrepresented among students of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and natural science in 19th century American schools. Middle-class boys dominated the higher-status classical humanities programs thought to require top rational powers and required for university admission. Science education was regarded as excellent preparation for motherhood, social work, and teaching. Sociologist Katharine Donato tells a similar story about the dawn of American computer programming. Considered functionally analogous to clerical work, it was performed mostly by college-educated women with science or math backgrounds. This changed starting in the 1950s, when the occupation became attractive to men as a growing, intellectually demanding, and potentially lucrative field. The sex segregation of American STEM fields—especially engineering, computer science, and the physical sciences—has shown remarkable stability since about 1980.

Oh, No. Not again.

WTF Headline of the Week:

Kakodkar to Review Functioning of 30 NITs.

Links

1. Jeremiah Jenne at Jottings from the Granite Studio: It’s a Mad Mad 90th Anniversary. "I present the Mad Men guide to 90 years of the CCP."

2. By Vanessa Fuhrmans in WSJ: In Search of a New Course -- Germany's once-lauded education system is under fire. But fixing it hasn't been easy.

3. Carl Zimmer in NYTimes: It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right. "As a series of controversies over the past few months have demonstrated, science fixes its mistakes more slowly, more fitfully and with more difficulty than Sagan’s words would suggest."

4. Global University Rankings and Their Impact [pdf] -- a report from the European University Association.

5. David Leonhardt in NYTimes: Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite.

"... For Everyone Else, There's Wikileaks"

Great stuff:

In case of embed fail.

Two new private universities

[There's an update at the end of the post.]

It's worth highlighting these two because they appear to be a result of philanthropic efforts of the founders. Perhaps they will start a new trend for India's rich folks to follow.

1. Shiv Nadar University is a major new initiative from Shiv Nadar (of HCL Group of companies). It "seeks to be a leader in multi-disciplinary, research-led collaboration among faculty and students, and shall have a strong focus on high quality, result-oriented education. When fully operational, the university shall have about 8000 students on its fully residential campus. "

   SNU's academic programs are starting this year itself -- its School of Engineering and School of Natural Sciences are the first off the block. The application form states that the first batch of students will get a waiver of tuition fees -- a pretty steep Rs. 185,000 per year!-- for the entire course.

   Shiv Nadar's earlier educational footprints were in Chennai; his new institution, however, is is in UP -- in a 280+ acre campus near NOIDA.

2. The Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS) has the backing of a group that includes Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani (whose donation of Rs. 500 million to the institution was in the news recently). It's starting its masters program in 2012, with plans to roll out UG programmes soon afterwards. [Here's an interview of Aromar Revi, the founding director of IIHS].

   [Update: According to this report, IIHS plans to charge a tuition fee in the range of Rs. 300,000 to 400,000 for the masters program!]

   [I hope IIHS will soon switch to "ac.in" or "edu.in" from the current "co.in" in its URL.]

Are there other such philanthropic initiatives that are worth highlighting (and keeping an eye on)?

* * *

Update (3 July 2011): Azim Premji University also belongs to this category. [Thanks, Hari, for the comment-alert].

Hans Rosling on Washing Machines

Nine minutes of magic.

Kakodkar Committee Report: Part 7. Our awesome junior faculty will take NITs up the quality ladder. In just 15 days! Satisfaction guaranteed!!

The Kakodkar Committee works within a paradigm of absolute superiority of IITs over almost all other institutions -- including the NITs, the IISERs, the NISER and the IIITs (but excluding the IIMs). So, when it talks about these other places in Chapter 8, every single word in it is dripping wet.

With condescension.

Here's how it all starts:

... While a lot has been done to improve the quality of these institutions, they still need a push to go up the quality ladder. The Ministry of Human Resource Development is willing to provide generous funds; but that alone will not improve the quality. The quality of the faculty needs to improve and the culture of these institutions needs to change.

These institutions need to be nurtured in order to take them to the next level of quality in undergraduate education and research. Only so much can be done from within these institutes. ... [My emphasis throughout]

At this point, I was looking for recommendations that might go like, "the IITs are doing well because of X, Y and Z, so we should create an environment that allows these institutions to get X, Y and Z (in the next 10 years or so)." [where X, Y, Z might be autonomy, generous funding, low student/teacher ratio, etc].

No such luck.

The Committee's is so drunk on its own patronizing tone at this point, that it goes totally berserk.

... There has been some attempt in the past to get IIT faculty associated with NITs, but this has not helped much. The primary reason for this has been the association of established senior faculty of the IITs who have very little time on their hands to nurture these institutions, even if they wanted to. In recent times, the IITs have occasionally attracted some very high quality young faculty. They have the energy and will to change the education system. The proposal is to involve such exceptional faculty in enhancing quality at these identified institutions. Now, even though they are young, they have their goals cut out and hands rather full with building their research groups at the IITs and, maybe, developing relationships with industry. Since they would not ordinarily involve themselves with identified institutes, the proposal has to be different in order to attract them.

It is proposed to identify 5 youngsters (about 35 years in age) for association with each of these identified institutions; the identification will be carried out in consultation with the Director and Chairman of the Board of Governors (BOG) of the identified institute. They will be inducted into the BOG and Senate of the institute and tasked with helping drive excellence in these institutions by leveraging their association with the IITs. One would expect them to:

• Help an NIT Director take the institute to the next level of quality

• Build relationships with the young faculty at NIT, and encourage and guide them to take their institute to a higher level of quality

• [And on. And on. And ...]

[My emphasis throughout]

The Committee expects all this.

From . Newbie . IIT . Faculty.

Who would spend all of 15 days in a year at "their" NIT.

If this doesn't define surreal, I don't know what would ...

Financing College Education: Human Capital Contract

An important part of the recommendations by the Kakodkar Committee is about financing college education -- which we discussed here and here.

In the second post (and in the comments), I expressed my preference for a 'post-paid' model in which students repay the cost of education through a higher tax on their income. I like it especially because of the insurance component -- if you, somehow, end up with a low income, you are not burdened with a hefty repayment obligation.

This is a government-funded program in Australia, and a variant has just been introduced in the UK.

A couple of recent articles in NYTimes by David Bornstein talk about an essentially similar scheme, but implemented by the private sector:(a) Instead of Student Loans, Investing in Futures, and (b)A Way to Pay for College, With Dividends. Here's an excerpt from (b), where this scheme is given a nice name -- Human Capital Contract:

If you were a student looking for financing to pursue a degree in social science, would you accept an offer of $16,000, in exchange for paying 4.5 percent of your income for 10 years after you graduate?

... In exchange for the financing they receive, the students commit to repayment schemes along the lines of the one outlined above (the terms vary). After the time period elapses — it’s always 10 years or less — the obligation expires, no matter how much has been repaid. [...]

... [H]uman capital contracts are not a new idea. The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman proposed them in the 1950s. Decades ago, Yale University experimented with a program through which students could postpone tuition and repay it later as a fraction of their income. The idea was abandoned after the introduction of federally subsidized loans. Australia allows students to pay for college through a special tax after they graduate, which operates in a similar fashion. And in 2009, the U.S. government introduced income-based repayment for federal loans, which are available to students whose debt is high relative to their income. What’s common to these programs is that they all try to lessen the financial burden of a college education by shifting from fixed loan obligations to payments that fluctuate based on income.

Links ...

1. Academic Destinations. A collection of articles, pics, personal narratives, infographics on quite a few (non-US) countries. While India merits just a brief sketch, Germany gets a much more extensive coverage.

2. Jane Brody in NYTimes: A good night's sleep isn't luxury -- It's a necessity.

3. Andrew Gelman on The "cushy life" of a University of Illinois (@Chicago) sociology professor

4. Johann Hari in The Independent: It's not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF itself should be on trial: "Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death."

Jairam Ramesh of the Day

Prof. C.N.R. Rao, a couple of days ago:

Referring to the demand for sophisticated equipment for research labs, Professor Rao said in a lighter vein: “Shortage of equipment will make brains work better.” Referring to the premier IISc., he said, “The IISc. is characterised by very mediocre research mainly because they have a lot of facilities.”

This cuts a little too close, so I'll have to restrict myself to just this, rather obvious, point: Coming from someone whose institution boasts some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of equipment (including this beauty, alleged to be among the most expensive phallic symbols in the world), this is a bit, well, rich.

Shashi Tharoor of the Day

Not quite surprisingly, Jairam Ramesh does it again:

Jairam Ramesh, India's minister of environment and forests, suggested the middle-class 'English-speaking women' who usually attended conferences on biodiversity and other green causes were useless compared with tribal women who had waged successful campaigns.

Speaking ahead of an event to mark World Environment Day, Mr Ramesh said educated ladies were "not required anymore."

"Sitting inside Vigyan Bhawan [New Delhi's main conference venue] and listening to well-drafted speeches yields no results. This year we have invited about 100 tribal women from all over the country," he said.

Links ...

With all that stuff about Kakodkar Committee Report, it has been a while since I did one of these. There's a lot to link to, but this will have to do for now:

1. Winners of the Worst PPT Slide Contest

2. A great infographic on Arab Spring [h/t: Chris Blattman]

3. If you use Google, here's some advice from the company on ensuring your information is safe online.

4. The Bilingual Advantage. Claudia Dreifus of NYTimes interviews Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at York University, Toronto [On strong recommendation from Mark Liberman of Language Log].

5. Gary Taubes in NYTimes: Is Sugar Toxic? Scary story about the true badness of sugar (more specifically, fructose, which forms a big part of sugar, and sugary drinks). Caution: will change your behaviour -- just as it did mine -- in the presence of sweet stuff.

Kakodkar Committee Report: Part 6. Forget Ranking, Let's Do Some Re-Ranking

Chapter 2 of the Report has a section entitled "IITs and Global Scene in Engineering Education" in which the Committee considers where the IITs are in the rank list produced by QS World University Rankings. It turns out that IIT-B is the first Indian entry in the list, at No. 187, followed by IIT-D, IIT-K, IIT-M, IIT-KGP, University of Delhi, IIT-R, University of Mumbai, etc.

Now the Committee tries some innovative spin:

[University ranking and the methodologies] need to be used wisely in order to derive benefits. The following simple scenarios bring out certain interesting observations. Many of the top-ranking institutions have a Medical School. QS has classified all IITs to be without a medical school, which is accurate.

You know what they did? In their own words, they "[looked] at institutions that are classified by QS to be focusing on all 5 areas but do not have a medical school." In other words, they just dropped all the universities with a medical school, and re-ranked the universities! And the result is ... [Drum roll, please]

IIT-B is now at No. 21!

Fabulous, isn't it?

The Committee doesn't produce the full list produced by their innovative re-ranking exercise. But, going by its description of what it has done, its "new, improved" list would not include the University of Michigan, UCLA, and UCSD because they have a Medical School. Nor would it include Cambridge, Cornell, or Stanford!

Clueless? Disingenuous?

You decide.