Both via Andrew Gelman (here and here).
First, here's Tom Lehrer's non-video song (getting the words may be a bit difficult at first -- you might want to read the lyrics while listening):
And the second is from the University of Bergen, Norway (you'll need to turn the subtitles on):
By now, you should be familiar with the names of these two journalists who got into trouble, and have received some punishment, for plagiarism (FZ), manufactured quotes (JL) and a bit of self-plagiarism (JL). If not, start with this post at the Atlantic Wire by Alexander Abad-Santos [I thank my friend and colleague Atul Chokshi for the e-mail alert].
There has been quite a bit of commentary on the Lehrer affair which unravelled several weeks ago. Let me point you first to Mark Liberman's posts which shine a spotlight on the practice of "unquotations" which he says is so common in mainstream journalism; after laying out his case with tons of examples in two posts (Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan and Journalistic Unquotations, and More Unquotations from the New Yorker), Liberman provides a recap/summary in which he distinguishes between "journalistic carelessness and journalistic deceit" -- in Approximate Quotations.
Andrew Gelman, on the other hand, highlights the most important difference between the case of Jonah Lehrer and so many other cases involving academics: Lehrer got punished. The title of Gelman's post says it all: Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off.
We start discouraging talent early, but a few bright youngsters manage to come up despite our best efforts. They are the ones who face the greatest resistance from our institutions at the time of selection for vacancies.[...] If there is someone with an unusual background or achievement, you can depend on the selection committee to find a technical ground to reject him or her. [...] Democratic procedures and correctness have become incompatible with respect for quality. [...] Selection committees debate over the finest of technicalities to justify the selection of the average, allowing anyone with sheen to get stuck and lost in the maze of criteria.Read the entire article on how we compare in other issues like teaching, research, libraries.
JEE ranks do not correlate well with the academic performances at IITs. Rarely has the JEE topper finished first in the BTech programme.and
If the primary occupation of the engineer should be creation, design and development of new products, then the very existence of engineering education in this country looks purposeless.Although not offering any solution, Prof. TTN raises several concerns about the current engineering education system. Read more...
Matt Honan in Wired: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Patrick Combs in FT: A man walks into the bank. "Patrick Combs deposits a junk-mail cheque for $95,000 – for a joke. The bank cashes it." And follows it up with a series of foolish actions.
Peter Griffin in Forbes India: The Olympics: Still sexist after all these years.
Nishita Jha in Tehelka: After fairness cream, vaginal tightening cream is here to empower the Indian woman.
The book is not exactly hilarious and no single line is LOL type funny, but throughout its short span (took my slow reading self, less than an hour to complete) holds your smile and attention in place. There are no 'Bond girls', no BMWs (but our man has a Nissan Micra), no gadgets or Walther PPKs (our man favors a Colt), but the plot has enough twists and action. As expected, there aren't any character development or sub-plots, or for that matter an intricate main plot. But it doesn't get as nonsensical and absurd as the 'detective story' from the Nonsense Novels of Stephen Leacock either. This is a story that mocks at spy thrillers and mafioso don-corleone-ish stuff in a stiff upper lip Brit way.
A quick and thrill read that leaves you stirred but not shaken.
How do we judge someone’s worth as a researcher?That is, 'outside expert opinion' through 10 to 15 letters of recommendation from international experts. Perhaps more RTI compliant than the MIT way of assessing tenure-worthiness?
[...]
We do not look into how much funding the candidate has brought to the university in the form of grants. We do not count the number of published papers; we also do not rank publications according to authorship order. We do not use some elaborate algorithm that weighs publications in journals according to the impact factor of the journal. We seldom discuss h-index metrics, which aim to measure the impact of a researcher’s publications. We simply ask outside experts, as well as our tenured faculty members, whether a candidate has significantly changed how we understand chemistry.
Because Arunn started it, and because we were just talking about a deceitful professorial dude wanting to stiff students, I just couldn't resist posting this one:
Achieving tenure is not possible merely by checking off a series of accomplishments; MIT does not have a list of specific, objective criteria for tenure such as a minimum number of publications in designated journals.More here [pdf].
... and narrated by an actor. [Read more about this meme at Total Hilarity: Actors Reading Ridiculous Yelp Reviews].
The idea of making students pay their "full share" for their college education (IIT education in particular) has been around for quite sometime. It gathered some force when the 'original' IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta raised their fees to the stratosphere for their MBA-equivalent programs sometime ago, and declared financial independence from the government. The idea gained a much-needed legitimacy when the Kakodkar Committee (KC) adopted it as a central theme in its report on IITs and their autonomy.
I have blogged about how the KC depended on some bad (and downright deceptive) arguments in its report. I addressed (here and here) the specific stuff about raising the tuition fees to over Rs. 200,000 per year.
Along comes an article from a professor at an IIT peddling this idea, once again.
Using similarly deceptive arguments, once again.
For example, raising tuition fees is touted as a great way to help government save money by ridding itself of the onerous burden of funding the education of spoiled brats with a sense of entitlement IIT students; while this noble goal is presented fairly early in the article, the second half of the article is all about how the student loans can be converted into grants for students who choose careers in allegedly nation-building core sectors (DRDO and CSIR labs, IITs and NITs), and / or repayment of loans may be suspended if they choose to go for higher education. And who foots the bill for all these concessions? The government, of course!
At the root of it all is a simple, crass argument: students flock to us, and most of them are affluent enough to afford expensive cram schools, so let's go out and stiff them for what they can pay; and we might as well have some fun by throwing around erudite terms like "market forces"!
It's revealing, isn't it, that when it comes to making their customers students pay, some IIT professors are no different from the vast number of businesspeople, thugs, crooks, politicians and muttheads who run self-financing colleges.
The only difference is that these IIT professors can cover it all up by talking about "building research infrastructure."
With the announcement of the discovery of Higgs-like boson, my colleagues at the Centre for High Energy Physics at IISc were approached by news organizations to offer their comments. Anant, who is also the Chairman of the Centre, has catalogued on his blog the media apparances (such as this one) by his colleagues and him. He has also written articles on this exciting discovery in Current Science and EPW
His most recent post has Anant in the role of an interviewer, conversing with Prof. Qaisar Shafi of the University of Delaware. A quick excerpt:
A-O:You have been very patient with all these questions. I would like to request you to help us wrap up with conversation with your thoughts for the future.
QS: I would like to end the conversation on an optimistic note: the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC is only the beginning of a new round of exciting discoveries in high energy physics. It would be extremely exciting if supersymmetry is found soon and one or more extra dimensions are discovered, dark matter is identified and the equation of state of dark energy is determined precisely. Furthermore, I very much hope that the Planck satellite would find gravity waves which would have remarkable consequences for the physics underlying the very early universe. It would mean, in particular, that the energy scale during observable inflation was of the order of the grand unified scale of 10^16 GeV. This would be a very beautiful link up between cosmology and high energy physics.
Here's "Tracking the Trackers", a talk by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs [thanks to Dr. R.V. Krishnan for the e-mail alert]:
