Women in the IITs: MSM catches on

... Back in 1972, of the 342 seats for the BTech course, IIT-Bombay had merely six girl students. In the intervening decades, the proportion remained more or less the same. In fact, even 30 years later, it had not more than 13 girls studying on its Powai campus. The change has come about in the last five years.

That's from Hemali Chhapia's report in the ToI [Hat tip: Confused]. She tries to put a very positive spin on this year's results for women. Where she errs, I think, is in conflating numbers and percentages. There have been years in which women's presence in certain IITs went upto as high as 8 percent [but this percentage never went into double digits], but their absolute numbers were small because their intake itself was small.

Chhapia also informs us that there are two women in the top 100 ranks this year. She has some more info on the topper among women: Ankita Sharma from Anushakti Nagar (BARC's residential complex):

... The 18-year-old had appeared for the JEE last year too, but was placed way down in all-India rankings at 2,366.

A student of BARC Junior College, Ankita then packed her bags and joined a residential coaching class for a year. "My focus and concentration has paid off now," Ankita said.

This is what she told the Indian Express:

“I stayed in Kota (Rajasthan) for eight months with my mother to study at a coaching school. I returned just a month before JEE,” she said.

... and CNN-IBN:

I think more girls should take this exam. In my class, there were 80 boys and five girls who were preparing for it. There are very few girls who took the exam. Otherwise the ranks for girls would have been better.

CNN-IBN's Shreya Dhoundial also remarks on the disconnect between IIT results and the results of board exams (such as the CBSE):

It’s a trend that is completely opposite to the CBSE board results where girls have been out performing the boys for the last 10 years.

But she also makes the mistake of sticking the mike in front of a moron, and compounds it by polluting the airwaves with his views:

“There maybe some part of the brain is not working for the female as it is working for the male. But I am sure the main reason is that they are not doing the application base studies,” says Consultant, Narayana Institute, Kamleshwar Dwivedi.

* * *

On a slightly different note, ToI reports that almost 18 percent of the JEE takers were from the Other Backward Castes. It didn't, however, give the number of OBC candidates who got through JEE.

T.T. Ram Mohan on governance at IITs and IIMs

From his vantage point at IIM-A, Ram Mohan comments on the debate in the ET's "Perspectives" section which we too looked at yesterday. His post deserves to be read in its entirety, but here's a quick snippet:

Mohandas Pai gives us the usual rubbish about government dominance of education affecting quality. He thinks all problems will be solved if government should get off the backs of IITs and IIMs and education in general. Readers of this blog at least should not buy this. I have repeatedly posed this question: out of the hundreds of engineering, medical and management institutions in the private sector, how come none measures up to the IITs, AIIMS and IIMs? Who has stopped private institutions from beating the hell out of the top government ones? The constraint, I daresay, is motivation: where the motive is to maximise profit, you are not going to get great quality of education.

Seasons

In an uncomfortably hot Moscow, Vivek gets a quick lesson about the Russian spring:

Me: So, this is the hottest Summer in Moscow?

Russian Guy: Ye .. er.. no, it is not the hottest Summer. It is the hottest Spring. Summer is yet to start.

2007 IIT-JEE results are out ...

A preliminary report is here (and here, too). Here are the salient details:

Over 240,000 candidates took the exam, and "7,209 (almost 3 percent) are eligible to seek admission to 5,537 seats" in the seven IITs, IT-BHU and ISMU-Dhanbad.

Among the candidates, some 54,000 (about 22 percent) were women. The topper among women is ranked at 55. In all, there are 587 women in the much coveted JEE list this year, 193 more than in 2006. Their fraction in the 2007 cohort works out to 8.1 percent.

[In comparison, the fraction of women was 6.3 percent (321 / 5092) in 2005, and 6.2 percent (394 / 6343) in 2006. So, women have done better this year by a considerable margin.]

The IITs also have some statistics about Dalit (SC) and Tribal (ST) students. Of 20,892 Dalit students wrote the exam, and nearly 594 (2.8 percent) of them qualified. These numbers for tribal students are, respectively, 5,909 and 109 (2 percent).

If you look at these numbers, pass-through rate is roughly the same for Dalit (2.8 percent) and open category students (3 percent). For the tribals (2 percent), it's about a third less. However, the real hit for SC and ST students is on the input side: Dalits form only 8.5 percent of the exam takers, while 15 percent of the seats are reserved for them. Similarly, only 2.5 percent of the exam takers belong to STs, against the 7.5 percent quota meant for them.

[Update: I wanted to add this, but missed doing it. Women get hit on both the input side and the pass-through side. With 22 percent of the exam-takers, women are poorly represented at this stage itself. They then suffer a second level disadvantage, with just about 1.1 percent of them getting into the JEE list. In other words, men are over three times more likely than women to get through JEE. ]

There is no separate quota for OBCs this year. However, the IITs have not revealed how many of the JEE-qualified candidates belong to the OBCs. They certainly collected the data this year, so I'm sure they know what that number is. I'm surprised this information has not been revealed at the news conference in Mumbai. I would think this is a fit case for invoking the Right to Information Act.

* * *

More when additional details emerge. In the meantime, you might want to look at an analysis of the 2006 JEE results, or our recent discussion of JEE's (plausible) bias against women, recapped here.

CBSE (Class X) results

Restults are summarized here. Some key points:

Over 700,000 students took the exam, and 84.4 percent of them passed. Girls had only a small edge over boys in pass rate (84.7 vs. 84.2).

There are more girls (55 percent) than boys among the 2923 students with 95+ percent.

Boys (50.4 percent) outnumber girls by a small margin among the 28187 students with 90+ percent.

There are 5251 candidates with 100 percent in mathematics; boys have a much larger edge over girls in this category. [link]

Kendriya Vidyalayas (95.6 percent) and Jawahar Navodayas (96.4 percent) are ahead of private schools (91.8 percent) and other government schools (70.3 percent). [link]

The biggest story, apparently, is the huge improvement in the performance of students from non-KV government schools (most of which appear to belong to the Delhi government). The pass rate for the Delhi schools went up some 59 percent last year to 77 percent this year! The Indian Express has a story about this phenomenon. Do take a list of things -- at the end of the story -- the Delhi government did to improve things in its schools.

How should IITs and IIMs be governed?

That's the title of the Perspectives section of today's Economic Times, with contributions from V. Ranganathan (IIM-B), T.V. Mohandas Pai (Infosys) and Pankaj Jalote (IIT-D).

Of the three perspectives, Jalote's is by far the only balanced take on the issue; after discussing a particular model of autonomy that's worth working towards, he concludes on a realistic note:

It is, however, not clear whether the government is willing to give this form of autonomy and, perhaps more importantly, whether these institutes are willing to accept the responsibility that must go with autonomy.

The perspectives from the other two gentlemen, on the other hand, are absolute trash. Take, Ranganathan's for example. After offering a whole bunch of excuses for why the IIMs have not had a stellar research record, he has the audacity to propose the following as a 'solution':

The government can solve this problem by pouring money on the IIMs but keeping their hands off after that! Reputation building takes statesmanship, long-term vision and a Warren Buffetian aloofness.

Perhaps someone should remind him that this is pretty much what the government has done so far.

For his part, Mohandas Pai inserts this boilerplate:

...[P]rivate educational institutions are discouraged from being established because of our perverse belief that education belongs in the public sector.

This is inane, unthinking bullshit. When you look around, you find tons of private colleges, deemed universities, and management institutions. [Even at primary and secondary levels, there are tons of private schools, and their number and the number of children studying in them are increasing.] We are at a stage where most of our engineers and MBAs are from private institutions. Our problem is the poor quality of education in these institutions (and in some of our public ones too). Our problem is our regulatory authorities' poor record of regulating them. Our problem is the shady ethics and corruption in the private colleges -- taking bribes from students, paying a pittance to their teachers, and doing nothing about the poor infrastructure. And our problem is also an inability to dissuade ex-politicians, their ex-thugs and other such shady elements from starting educational institutions.

But our problem is certainly not "our perverse belief that education belongs in the public sector."

As can be expected, the rest of Pai's 'perspective' is filled with more such inanities about financial autonomy in IITs, faculty salaries, etc.

Sigh. Yet another wasted opportunity.

Ranking US universities ...

The Chronicle has a bunch of articles on the annual US News ranking of US universities. I don't know how long they will be available before going behind a paywall, so get them fast.

The US News happens to be the biggest such ranking exercise, even though it has come in for some serious criticism (and ideas for improving this exercise are available). If you look at the criteria used by the magazine, you realize that they are heavily skewed against the public universities. Result? The top public university (UC-Berkeley) in their list is at Rank 21!

I know of at least a couple of other ranking exercises: One of them is from Washington Monthly. Here's a quick excerpt from this page:

We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable.

The other one is in this very interesting site which allows you to get your own personalized ranking of graduate schools in your field based on criteria you choose. We looked at this site a while ago (here).

Evidently, these other methods have not entered the public consciousness in the US the same way the US News's has.

Before I finish, I just want to point to Brayden King's discussion of how universities (organizations, in general) deal with rankings in which they don't fare well.

Taking care of the tiniest of babies ...

NYTimes's Christine Hauser has a very interesting article about the latest developments in neonatal care for babies born well before they are ready to face the world. [The article also taught me a new phrase and a beautiful concept: "kangaroo care".]

This is how it used to be (and how it is, probably, in India):

In the six months that Mrs. Johnson sat by Ellie’s isolette, she began to understand firsthand the jarring discrepancy between the aquatic nest that her daughter had left too early and the new environment into which she had been thrust and was now expected to grow.

Parents of other babies stopped and gawked. Alarms went off at adjacent isolettes. Monitors beeped, instruments clattered and lights glared. Sometimes, a wail of grief from parents learning of the death of their fragile baby added to the cacophony.

And this is the direction in which it's going:

... [P]rivate rooms in neonatal intensive care units, or NICUs, ... strive to replicate the qualities of the womb: its darkness, relative quiet and full entanglement with the mother’s biological rhythms.

The spaces, called “womb rooms” by some researchers, are predicated on the obvious notion that the best place for a premature baby would be the exquisitely complex environment where, in the last three months of gestation, the neural connections in the baby’s brain grow exponentially as it curls up in amniotic fluid, listening to the mother’s heartbeat, breathing, intestinal gurgling and pitch of her voice.

In premature births, however, the second-best place is one where the infant develops in a cocoonlike environment that mimics as many of the womb’s qualities as possible, with uninterrupted sleep, indirect light, skin-to-skin contact and the assuring sound of parents’ voices.

“We are trying to approximate to decrease the discrepancy of the natural womb environment in the intensive care unit,” said Dr. Heidelise Als, the director of neurobehavioral infant and child studies at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Hospitals are overhauling their neonatal intensive care units to transform open wards into private spaces that, in essence, restore the intimate relationship between the mother and child and allow the fragile infants to develop.

Thumbs up to RTI: The AP Chief Minister knew what he was doing

Here's one more example of the effectiveness of RTI (in its un-diluted version that demands that 'file notings' are also an integral part of the 'file' and all the 'information' therein):

File notings obtained through a Right to Information application have revealed that Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy and Chief Secretary J. Harinarayana have indeed approved and signed the draft GO 938 of February 20, the controversial media-related order that kicked up a row three months ago.

It marked a drive to launch defamation cases against newspapers and their editors, but was immediately withdrawn by the Government.

Contrary to the impression created at that time that the Chief Minister and the top officers were unaware of the contents of the GO, the file notings clearly show the final GO was issued after the normal circulation of the file for four months from October 19, after it was thoroughly vetted and endorsed by all of them.

S.R. Valluri's letter to the editor of Outlook

Remember the Outlook story (linked to here) about various cases of scientific misconduct that were being investigated by the Society for Scientific Values? The magazine has published a couple of letters in response to that story. Here's a blunt one from Dr. S.R. Valluri (it's short, so I'm reproducing it here):

Developed countries tend to act decisively against practices of research misconduct (Wise Words, But Another’s, May 14). For example, when Bill Clinton was president, he had issued this finding, "Research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research results." His Office of Science and Technology had been authorised to establish facts in instances of research misconduct, and ordered that when such misconduct is established by a preponderance of evidence, the scientist concerned and his institution be denied federal funding. The contrast in our country is striking. Mashelkar wasn’t the only one; many scientists in senior positions of responsibility too have been known to recklessly indulge in research misconduct. Asking them to protect the cause of science is like asking a goat to guard a cabbage. The Society for Scientific Values must be given statutory authority, with the principal scientific advisor to the government of India as the appellate authority in such matters. It is also time that ethics in the practice and management of science is taught at the pre-university level itself.

Some inside dope on Bhargava's ouster from NKC

Outlook's gossip page says this:

In the end, it was a letter that did him in. That's the inside story on why P.M. Bhargava, now ex-deputy chairman of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), was shown the door. Sources say a particularly critical missive he shot off to a senior PMO official is what finally sealed his case. In it, Bhargava took exception to the presence of Americans (read friends of chairman Sam Pitroda) at meetings of the Commission relating to education and health. The note was seen as the proverbial last straw. Ever since the PM set up the Commission two years ago, it has had a dissension-ridden run. Bhargava himself has been in the news—if it wasn't his anti-US posturing, then it was his open criticism of the NKC's functioning. For the record, the PMO says its hands are clean. After all, it was a Planning Commission note which said the NKC was being reconstituted. How could it be blamed if Bhargava's name didn't figure in the new members' list? Friends of Bhargava though insist the PMO cleared the whistle-blower's exit.

CSIR: headless for five months!

A while ago, Nature did a story on how CSIR -- India's largest science and technology research organization with some 40 odd labs and nearly 19000 scientists -- has not had a Director General since Dr. R.A. Mashelkar retired at the end of December 2006. Unfortunately, that story was behind a paywall, so I didn't bother to link to it. The Daily News and Analysis (DNA) did a story yesterday, covering many of the angles in the Nature story (and interviewing some of the same people).

While you will have to read the story to get the details, I want to point to a couple of things in it. The first is this sentiment:

The other reason is that truly competent scientists now have opportunities outside the government system without having to worry about the administration.

This is patently absurd. First: as one moves up in an organization -- public or private -- there is certainly more and more of administration. The rare scientist who stays clear of administrative responsibilities does so with the full knowledge about the price of his/her choice: foregoing the chance to shape the course of science in the country, and the accompanying lack of influence among his/her peers. Second, top administrative positions are so rare (by definition!), and there are always a number of capable people willing to take them up.

Sure, leadership at CSIR comes with some difficulties (covered in the DNA story), but it also comes with a great opportunity to show off one's capabilities in the administrative realm. It also comes with enormous influence. It's difficult to imagine that there are very few capable people queuing up for this position. That people are even mouthing inanities -- such as DG-CSIR is unattractive compared to private sector jobs -- is quite amazing.

The other thing I want to point to is this statement attributed to S.K. Joshi, Mashelkar's immediate predecessor the Director General of CSIR:

Real talent from within the CSIR system is scarce because, "except one or two, most of the CSIR labs failed to create a second line of scientists who will take care of CSIR once the older scientists retire".

Coming from an ex-DG of CSIR, this is a bit rich, isn't it? During whose tenure as DG did CSIR fail "to create a second line of scientists" for leadership positions? As a smug, self-congratulatory ex-bureaucrat making self-serving statements, S.K. Joshi is, alas, following certain very illustrious people. As Yogi Berra put it, it's déjà vu all over again!

Butterfly effect of outsourcing?

I spent the whole day inside our big, beautiful tree-ful campus, so I haven't had a chance to venture out into the big, bad, traffic-jammed city of Bengalooru today. But if you did, and if you felt that the traffic was a bit light today, you may be wondering why.

Neelakantan thinks it might be due to the "Butterfly effect of outsourcing".

Fact-checking Michael Moore

According to NYTimes' Anthony DePalma, Michael Moore's latest offering, "Sicko", makes some audacious claims:

“Sicko,” the talk of the Cannes Film Festival last week, savages the American health care system — and along the way extols Cuba’s system as the neatest thing since the white linen guayabera.

Is there any truth -- I mean, really, ANY truth at all -- to this claim? No spoilers here, find out for yourself!

Supreme Court's war on street food

Vir Sanghvi is angry. In his latest column, he argues strongly against the Supreme Court's recent ban on the "cooking of food items on Delhi pavements." Here's his sixth line of attack on the ban:

Six: And finally for the so-called hygiene argument. I am angry enough now to be blunt.

Of all the arguments advanced to justify the ban, this is easily the stupidest.

Only a fool believes that it is hygienic to ban the means by which street food is heated in front of you to temperatures at which no bacteria can survive. Anybody who eats on the streets knows the basic rule: be careful of food that has not been freshly cooked; try and ensure that the vendor heats it before your eyes.

The stupidity of this ban lies in the failure of those who propound it to grasp this basic fact. Years ago, when I was editor of Bombay magazine, we conducted a survey of street food and hygiene. Our lab told us that the chutney used for bhel puri was often too full of bacteria for human consumption (though this is an arbitrary distinction because most Indians have acquired the ability to survive high levels of bacteria), but the report made it clear that anything that was heated to high temperatures was much safer because most of the bacteria had been destroyed in the cooking process.

And yet, the Delhi ban turns this basic truth on its head. A roadside vendor can still sell you a samosa or a kachori. You have no way of knowing where the kachori was made or what went into the samosa. For all you know, the samosa could have been made near a dung heap four days ago — long enough for it to be contaminated by bacteria. Because the vendor will no longer be allowed to reheat it or crush it on his hot tawa, the bacteria will flourish and multiply.

And the Municipal Corporation will encourage this bacterial multiplication — all in the name of hygiene.