Of mistakes and mindsets

As we get older, many of us invest a great deal in being right. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we focus on flagellating ourselves, blaming someone else or covering it up. Or we rationalize it by saying others make even more mistakes.

What we do not want to do, most of the time, is learn from the experience.

Professor Dweck, who wrote a book on the subject called “Mindset” (Random House, 2006), proved this point in another study, this one of college students. They were divided into two camps: those who did readings about how intelligence is fixed, and those who learned that intelligence could grow and develop if you worked at it.

The students then took a very tough test on which most did badly. They were given the option of bolstering their self-esteem in two ways: looking at scores and strategies of those who did worse or those who did better.

Those in the fixed mind-set chose to compare themselves with students who had performed worse, as opposed to those Professor Dweck refers to as in “the growth mind-set,” who more frequently chose to learn by looking at those who had performed better.

Read this piece by Alina Tugend.

Harvard chronicles: Outsourcing of scholarship

Jacob Hale Russell has a pretty damning article about how some Harvard professors outsource the hard work of scholarship to their underlings. Charles Ogletree, Alan Dershowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Roland Fryer are some of the biggies mentioned in the article. Here's Russell's strongest case -- that of Ogletree:

In September 2004, Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, found himself having to admit that his latest book, All Deliberate Speed, contained six paragraphs lifted verbatim from a book by Yale professor Jack Balkin, What “Brown v. Board of Education” Should Have Said. Equally surprising was the fact that Ogletree hadn’t known about the plagiarism, which occurred in a passage about the history of desegregation efforts, until he was told of it by Balkin himself.

“I accept full responsibility for this error,” Ogletree said in a statement. But some readers of that statement might have gotten a different impression: Ogletree attributed the plagiarism to two research assistants: “Material from Professor Jack Balkin’s book … was inserted … by one of my assistants for the purpose of being reviewed, researched, and summarized by another research assistant with proper attribution … Unfortunately, the second assistant, under the pressure of meeting a deadline, inadvertently deleted this attribution and edited the text as though it had been written by me. The second assistant then sent a revised draft to the publisher.”

It was a curious admission. In other words, at least some of Ogletree’s manuscript was sent to his publisher without having been read by the person supposed to have written it. ...

Somewhere in the middle, Harvard's policy on plagiarism is also excepted:

Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, and ordinarily required to withdraw from the College.

Cory Doctorow on Facebook

First, the link. Let's start with some snark:

... Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

What follows then is some serious criticism. Here's one of the points:

If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a benevolent dictatorship this clearly isn't one.

And here's another:

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for [getting back in touch with your old friends from school, etc.]. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

Nature's secrets and curiosity based research ...

... lead to wall-climbing robots! Watch this video of an exciting TED talk by Robert Full of Berkeley's Biology Department.

Diversity at Berkeley

63 percent of the campus’s undergraduate students (excluding international students) were either born outside the United States or have at least one foreign-born parent.

Wow!

Blog headers, cybercafes in Bandra, new ways of ranking batsmen, cricket ads, T-shirts with India-centric slogans

Sujatha has a nice pic for her blog's header.

Charu has a short post on the large scale transformation of cybercafes in Bandra, Mumbai, into gaming parlours. I just noticed that her blog's header also has a nice pic.

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Confused is impressed by Indian Cricket League's "genuinely funny ads."

Talking about cricket, Tim Harford points us to Vani K. Borooah and John Mangan's academic study (pdf) of ranking batsmen based on batting averages that take into account, among other things, the utility of their scores to their teams. Here's the abstract:

Batsmen in cricket are invariably ranked according to their batting average. Such a ranking suffers from two defects. First, it does not take into account the consistency of scores across innings: a batsman might have a high career average but with low scores interspersed with high scores; another might have a lower average but with much less variation in his scores. Second, it pays no attention to the “value” of the player’s runs to the team: arguably, a century, when the total score is 600, has less value compared to a half-century in an innings total of, say, 200. The purpose of this paper is to suggest new ways of computing batting averages which, by addressing these deficiencies, complement the existing method and present a more complete picture of batsmen’s performance. Based on these “new” averages, the paper offers a “new” ranking of the top 50 batsmen in the history of Test Cricket.

Fans of Sachin Tendulkar are unlikely to like the conclusions of this study!

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Blue is trying to monetize her recent four-month long stint in (and tour of) India.

Famous feud ...

This real-life story is about two highly accomplished doctors who recently ended their nearly 40-year old feud. It reads like a bad novel that somehow manages to hold your attention. While you have to read the story for the details, here's something about one of the parties to the feud:

[Dr. Denton A. Cooley] recalled that a lawyer had once asked him during a trial if he considered himself the best heart surgeon in the world.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Don’t you think that’s being rather immodest?” the lawyer asked.

“Perhaps,” Dr. Cooley responded. “But remember I’m under oath.”

The other doctor was the hero of a different story last year: at 97, Dr. Michael DeBakey went through a complex heart surgery that he invented several decades ago.

How to teach meditation to geeks ...

You've got to go check out this cartoon! [Link via Ziked -- see the comments below.]

M.S. Ananth's lecture

The sixteenth Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Lecture was delivered by Prof. M.S. Ananth (Director, IIT-M) yesterday at the Indian Institute of World Culture. He spoke on "The changing environment of higher education and some India-centric concerns."

I have posted the text of his lecture here with his permission. Here's the abstract from the printed version of the lecture:

Indian philosophy emphasizes certain timeless values that have not been integrated into modern education. A brief history of education is followed by some ideas about teaching methodology and the learning process. The importance of education in values, and the catalytic role of a nationalistic spirit, are pointed out. The problems of integrating technical and scientific higher education with an appropriate value system, and conveying the significance of the philosophical principles of our deep thinkers in a modern idiom, are highlighted.

Thanks to my colleague Anant (who is also one of the trustees of the Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Trust) for sending me the soft copy of the lecture.

Alan Krueger on "what makes a terrorist"

Krueger is guest-blogging at TPM Cafe this week. His first post (here), titled "What makes a terrorist", summarizes the key findings from his book with the same title. Towards the end of the post, he talks about the role of education:

Sidebar: Here are the links to Krueger's posts:

What makes a terrorist.

Defining terrorism.

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What makes a terrorist, then, is someone with a fanatical commitment to pursuing a grievance combined with the perception that there are few alternatives for pursuing that grievance – and a terrorist organization or cell willing to deploy a would-be terrorist. Poverty and lack of education play very little role. Indeed, education may have a counterintuitive effect because highly educated people are more likely to become involved politically and to hold strong opinions. Increasing educational attainment does many wonderful things for a country and its people, but reducing terrorism is not one of them.

The following analogy is particularly interesting:

Many people implicitly view terrorism the same way they view crime: those with low opportunity costs and few legitimate opportunities turn to crime. I argue that a better analogy for terrorism is to voting. People who care about issues vote, even though they often have a higher opportunity cost of time than nonvoters. Terrorists and the organizations that dispatch them seek to make political statements. What makes a terrorist thus depends on the political grievances that terrorists and their organizations are pursuing and the alternatives for pursing those grievances.

Is Freud taught in American universities?

Yes, but not (or, not much) in psychology departments! Some excerpts:

Psychoanalysis and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department. ...

[A recent study by the American Psychoanalytic Association] ... is the latest evidence of the field’s existential crisis. For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor’s theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching.

Alice Eagly, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Northwestern University, explained why: Psychoanalysis is “not the mainstream anymore” and so “we give it less weight.”

The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis. ...

Big Pharma: The "finely titrated doses of friendship" edition

Do read this piece by Daniel Carlat (a professor of clinical psychiatry at Tufts) about one of the shadier techniques used by Big Pharma: hiring doctors as glorified sales reps.

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Sidebar

Two related articles cited by Dr. Carlat in his article:

Christopher Lee in the Washington Post: Drugmakers, Doctors Get Cozier.

Adriane Fugh-Berman, Shahram Ahari in PLoS: Following the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors.

* * *

A few weeks later, my wife and I walked through the luxurious lobby of the Millennium Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. At the reception desk, when I gave my name, the attendant keyed it into the computer and said, with a dazzling smile: “Hello, Dr. Carlat, I see that you are with the Wyeth conference. Here are your materials.”

She handed me a folder containing the schedule of talks, an invitation to various dinners and receptions and two tickets to a Broadway musical. “Enjoy your stay, doctor.” I had no doubt that I would, though I felt a gnawing at the edge of my conscience. This seemed like a lot of money to lavish on me just so that I could provide some education to primary-care doctors in a small town north of Boston.

Along the way, we learn about how the American Medical Association allows data leak on who prescribes what:

The American Medical Association is also a key player in prescription data-mining. Pharmacies typically will not release doctors’ names to the data-mining companies, but they will release their Drug Enforcement Agency numbers. The A.M.A. licenses its file of U.S. physicians, allowing the data-mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The A.M.A. makes millions in information-leasing money.

Once drug companies have identified the doctors, they must woo them. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown teamed up with Ahari (the former drug rep) to describe the myriad techniques drug reps use to establish relationships with physicians, including inviting them to a speaker’s meeting. These can serve to cement a positive a relationship between the rep and the doctor. This relationship is crucial, they say, since “drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”

Links: E-friends, Shock Doctrine, Creative Commons, Neuroeconomics

E-friends by Tabula Rasa.

In These Times: The New Road to Serfdom (review of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) by Chris Hayes.

Locus Online: Creative Commons by Cory Doctorow.

Eureka Alerts: Money motivates -- especially when your colleague gets less [via Mark Thoma].

Reason: Theory of Moral Neuroscience by Ronald Bailey.

Do you need to go undercover to check air quality?

The answer appears to be 'yes' when it's a cigar show where you are checking for air quality. I still can't figure out why the researchers were afraid of hostile treatment at the cigar show, but anyways, here are the results [you'll have to go to the article for the fun bits]:

Under Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, air with fewer than 15 micrograms per cubic meter is considered good quality; air with more than 251 micrograms per cubic meter is hazardous.

Mr. Kennedy’s preliminary findings showed that the average level of particulate matter in the hotel [the venue for the cigar show] the day before the event was 8 micrograms per cubic meter, 40 micrograms where he was waiting to get in line for the event and 1,193 micrograms inside the ballroom.

Thanks to Olive Ridley for the pointer.

Big Pharma: The anti-depressant edition

[David] Healy doesn't deny that SSRIs can be effective against mood disorders, and he has prescribed them to his own patients. As a psychopharmacologist, however, he saw from the outset that the drug firms were pushing a simplistic "biobabble" myth whereby depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established, and the proposal is no more reasonable than claiming that headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.... But by insistently urging this idea upon physicians and the public, Big Pharma widened its net for recruiting patients, who could be counted upon to reason as follows: "I feel bad; I must lack serotonin in my brain; these serotonin-boosting pills will surely do the trick." ... Thus millions of people who might have needed only counseling were exposed to incompletely explained risks.

There's more in this book review by Frederick C. Crews. The stuff about the effect of anti-depressant medication in normal (or, mildly depressed) people is truly scary:

Those risks, Healy perceived, included horrific withdrawal symptoms, such as dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation, that were frightening some users out of ever terminating their regimen—an especially bitter outcome in view of the manufacturers' promise of enhancing self-sufficiency and peace of mind. The key proclaimed advantage of the new serotonin drugs over the early tranquilizers, freedom from dependency, was simply false. ...

As for the frequently rocky initial weeks of treatment, a troubling record not just of "suicidality" but of actual suicides and homicides was accumulating in the early 1990s. The drug firms, Healy saw, were distancing themselves from such tragedies by blaming depression itself for major side effects. ...

The most gripping portions of Let Them Eat Prozac narrate courtroom battles in which Big Pharma's lawyers, parrying negligence suits by the bereaved, took this line of doubletalk to its limit by explaining SSRI-induced stabbings, shootings, and self-hangings by formerly peaceable individuals as manifestations of not-yet-subdued depression. As an expert witness for plaintiffs against SSRI makers in cases involving violent behavior, Healy emphasized that depressives don't commit mayhem.