When poets met university administrators ...

... and talked to them using PowerPoint ...

Stem cells for repairing eye damage

I find it pretty interesting that this Scientific American report [will it also appear on the print version?] highlighting research at L.V. Prasad Eye Institute happens to be out on the opening day the All India Ophthalmological Conference.

Here's an excerpt:

A new vision research center opening in India today becomes the latest in a handful of facilities dedicated to exploring the potential of adult eye stem cells to repair vision damage. The Champalimaud Center for Translation Eye Research (C-TRACER), part of the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, will continue research begun by LV Prasad scientists, who use eye stem cells from living adults to grow new cells that are then implanted into damaged

The center's goal is to restore vision to some portion of the 65 million people worldwide—about 1 percent of the world population—considered to be legally blind, which the National Federation of the Blind defines as a central visual acuity of 20 / 200 or less in the stronger eye, even when aided by a corrective lens. Especially in developing countries in Africa and Asia, "most of these people are needlessly blind," says D. Balasubramanian, research director for both LV Prasad and the new facility.

From the interweb tubes ...

Recently, Yale made available some of its courses online. All of them with videos. The physics section has just one introductory course, taught by Prof. Ramamurti Shankar.

The philosophy section also has just one course; it's from Prof. Shelly Kagan. Can you guess its title?

Death!

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Over at the Women and Math blog, Sujatha Ramdorai, winner of the Ramanujan Prize in 2006, describes her life as a mathematician in India (while there, check out their statistics page; link via Kuffir at BlogBharti):

I got married before I graduated and then continued to do my Master’s degree in mathematics, by correspondence. I was still unaware that a research career in mathematics was possible, the level of information dissemination was quite abysmal then even in cities! We moved to Bombay and here a few people vaguely mentioned `Tata Institute of fundamental Research’, however knowing little beyond the name! It was a sheer stroke of luck that I chanced upon the advertisement of TIFR calling for admissions to the Ph.D degree… I did my Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor Parimala Raman and have continued to work there after my Ph.D.

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Dhi and his wife are celebrating the news about their alma mater: the Indian School of Business stands at No. 20 in the Financial Times ranking of global business schools. Interestingly, ISB's partner (and mentor?) in the US, Northwestern's Kellogg, is ranked lower, at 24!

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In this post by Feanor about an eccentric professor at IISc (no, there's no excerpt, you will have to click through to find out more about him), there's this thing at the end, listed under "References":

The Gaza Strip was what we called the section of road between the Central Library and the Physics department, which used to be carpet bombed by crows coming in every evening to roost in the lush trees surrounding the area. It was said that if a crow shat on one's head, one was condemned to do a PhD at IISc. I got hit only once - on the shoulder - so I escaped the academic horror of a doctorate from that institution.

From the interweb tubes ...

GrrlScientist: Women, Science, Writing (an excellent post on gender bias in publishing, caused by a pretty innocuous-looking practice: single blind reviewing).

Peggy: Women in Science: The View from 1957.

Sunil Laxman: Book mini-review: Landing a job in academic biology.

Clive Thompson: Is the Tipping Point toast? [via Siva Vaidhyanathan].

Public Offering: Columbia Business School's blog [via Brayden King].

Bruce Schneier: Security vs. Privacy.

"Girl Friday at the University"

Over at Ultra Violet Meena Kandasamy tells us about the tough lessons that young women learn in "the two-hundred-year-old university":

Girl Friday’s Lesson #3:
Your guide is your Crusoe,
Your guide is your crucifix.
Get ready to toil.
Get ready for torture.

Here, she inevitably comes face
to face with the sexual harassment
committee– and its token woman–
that has spent its lifetime bailing out
bald, lecherous supervisors. Here, she
testifies; answers lewd questions;
drives tears back into her petrified eyes.
Here, she carries herself like a bowl
Of milk, ever-ready to shatter, or to spill.

Republic Day Awards: A sharp reaction from a reader

Graded awards like our National Awards -- Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan -- necessarily involve some judgement about the relative worth of awardees' contributions in their respective domains. This evaluation of relative worth can lead to strong disagreements.

Sidebar: Over at Law and Other Things, V. Venkatesan has a great discussion of the Supreme Court's 1995 decision (in the Balaji Raghavan case) that reaffirmed the legality of the National Awards.

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The post on this year's National Day Awards drew a sharp comment from Renu, who decided to follow it up with an e-mail. My own take on awards is one of utter indifference; who gets what is not a matter that's worth spending too much time over, particularly when politicians are involved in the selection process. Renu's letter, reproduced below with permission, has some strong arguments (that you may strongly disagree with!). But, as I said, I maintain my indifference.

Here, then, is Renu's letter (after some minor editiing):

I am still puzzled over this year's honours list. Little in it makes sense. After my rant on your blog here is one more email to tell you how upset I am with our warped sense of appreciation.

Sachin Tendulkar has done what exactly to merit the Padma Vibhushan? I am certain, deluded as we are, and Ajit Wadekar is, we will never find the nerve to award him the Bharat Ratna. Even then has he done more than Mihir Sen (who for many years was the only man to have swum five high seas straits in one year) or Rajyavardhan Rathore who narrowly missed a shoting gold at Athens, or Bula Chowdhury and Bhaichung Bhutia? Is cricket such a profound field of endeavour?

But there seems to be some sense of proportion among our netas and babus. I was outraged that Dr. Varadhan, this year, merited only a Padma Bhushan compared to Sachin's Padma Vibhushan, till I looked up Dr. CNR Rao's bio and found that the great chemist too has only gone the distance to the Padma Bhushan [Note: this is incorrect; A Padma Vibhushan went to Prof. Rao in 1985].

It was bad enough of Vajpayee to award his surgeon a Padma Shri for a routine knee replacement, and Lata Mangeshkar, a mediocre gramaphone on a string, the Bharat Ratna. But the MMS/Sonia dispensation has decided to steal a march over the previous government by honouring Asha Bhonsle with the Padma Vibhushan and Ustad Fahimuddin Rahimuddin Dagar the Padma Bhushan. The good Ustad should deliver a thappad in the face of the government, and like the late great Hemant Kumar, decline this measly token of recognition. The Ustad is one of the guardians of a dying art, Dhrupad, that dates back millennia. Legend has it that the Ustad's ancestors learnt it by meditating on the primeval Aum of Paramasivan himself. Dhrupad predates today's the popular variants of today's Hindustani sangeet - its khayals and thumris. Dhrupad's practitioners will tell you that their art was already a hoary one by the time of Amir Khusro and Tansen.

So if we lack the head to appreciate the sciences, we lack a heart to appreciate our arts as well.

And surely we have no soul either. Neither does Vidyakar or Udavm Karangal, nor Dr. Bundeshwari Pathak of Sulabh Sauchalaya, nor Baba Amte, that peerless pioneer of rehabilitation services find any mention in this year's honours list. It is said that Gandhi lost nothing for having been looked over for the Nobel Peace Prize. Similarly in ignoring Baba Amte for the Bharat Ratna and the Nobel, it is these systems of recognition that are poorer and mired in mediocrity.

Ghosts

Sergio Sismondo in PLoS Medicine: Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry?

... This article enlarges the focus from ghost writing to the more general ghost management of medical research and publishing: when pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles. Such articles are “ghostly” because signs of their actual production are largely invisible—academic authors whose names appear at the tops of ghost-managed articles give corporate research a veneer of independence and credibility. They are “managed” because those companies shape the eventual message conveyed by the article or by a suite of articles. As discussed below, a substantial percentage of medical journal articles (in addition to meeting presentations and other forms of publication, which are not the focus here) are ghost managed, allowing the pharmaceutical industry considerable influence on medical research, and making that research a vehicle for marketing.

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While we are on the topic of ghosts, check out Gina Barreca' take on the gender differences among ghosts:

I noticed that most ghost stories written by women have, as their leads, female ghosts; I also noticed that it seems to be female ghosts haunting those b&bs and old hotels. Why is there such a difference between how women and men are haunted by a sense of the past, not to mention the differences between how boy ghosts and girl ghosts actually do the haunting?

Blogs

Sarah Boxer has a great article in NY Review of Books with a simple title: Blogs. The article asks -- and attempts to answer -- these basic questions:

Are [blogs] a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora called this piece "obligatory reading of the day." I agree with him. Go read it now recommends Laelaps' response to Sarah Boxer's piece (see his comment below).

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On a not entirely unrelated note, check out this little presentation about the future of media. Here's its hook: "In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estates fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?"

Link via Siva Vaidhyanathan's project The Googlization of Everything.

All about power

The Winter-2007 issue of Greater Good is all about Power, and has at least two articles that are a must-read. The first one, Are You a Jerk at Work? by Bob Sutton, can be thought of as a summary of his recent book No Asshole Rule (which I'm reading now). Here's an excerpt from the section on how to deal with assholes:

My first tip is in a class by itself: Escape if you can. The best thing to do if you are stuck under the thumb of an asshole (or a bunch of them) is to get out as fast as possible. Not only are you at great emotional risk; you're also at risk of emulating the behavior of the jerks around you, catching it like a disease—what I call "asshole poisoning."

Indeed, experiments by psychologists Leigh Thompson and Cameron Anderson have shown that even when compassionate people join a group with a leader who is "high-energy, aggressive, mean, the classic bully type," they are "temporarily transformed into carbon copies of the alpha dog." Despite the risk of asshole poisoning, escape isn't always possible. As one woman wrote me in response to this advice, "I have to feed my family and pay my mortgage, and there aren't a lot of jobs that pay well enough to do that around here."

In those cases where a victim can't escape (at least for now), I suggest starting with polite confrontation. Some people really don't mean to be jerks. They might be surprised if you gently let them know that they are leaving you feeling belittled and demeaned. Other jerks are demeaning on purpose, but may stop if you stand up to them in a civil but firm manner. For example, an office worker wrote me that her boss was "a major jerk," but she found that he left her alone after she gave him "a hard stare" and told him his behavior was "absolutely unacceptable and I simply won't tolerate it."

The second must-read article -- titled The Power Paradox -- is by Dacher Keltner, and it is devoted to busting a bunch of myths about power that date back to Machiavelli's work. Here's an extract about what this power paradox is about:

... Years of research suggests that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror.

This research debunks longstanding myths about what constitutes true power, how people obtain it, and how they should use it. But studies also show that once people assume positions of power, they're likely to act more selfishly, impulsively, and aggressively, and they have a harder time seeing the world from other people's points of view. This presents us with the paradox of power: The skills most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the very skills that deteriorate once we have power.

Alpha

In reality, there are only a few sources of alpha for investment managers. One of them comes from having truly special abilities in identifying undervalued financial assets. Warren Buffett, the US billionaire investor, certainly has it, yet this special ability is, by definition, rare.

A second source of alpha is from what one might call activism. This means using financial resources to create, or obtain control over, real assets and to use that control to change the payout obtained on the financial investment. A venture capitalist who transforms an inventor, a garage and an idea into a fully fledged, profitable and professionally managed corporation creates alpha.

A third source of alpha is financial entrepreneurship or engineering – creating securities or cash flow streams that appeal to particular investors or tastes. As long as the investment manager does not create securities that exploit investor weaknesses or ignorance (and there is unfortunately too much of that), this sort of alpha is also beneficial, but it requires constant innovation.

That's from Raghuram Rajan's article arguing for a different system of incentive pay for investment bankers.

Is Derren Brown psychic?

Find out for yourself (8 minute video).

Caution: It may transform you. Permanently.

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The video has been around for over six months; I saw it only today, thanks to Parseval's pointer.

From the interweb tubes ...

Here's a ranking of countries based on their h-index (based on publications during 1996-2006). As expected, the US leads with 793, and the UK (465), Germany (408), France (375) and Japan (372) fill the remaining slots in the Top Five. India is ranked at 25 with an h-index of 146. Yes, China is ahead at Rank 21 with a score of 161. [Thanks to Exon and John Hunter for the pointer].

Should a man convicted of murder be allowed to become a doctor? That's the question that a Swedish institution faced. How did it resolve it? NYTimes reports.

Natasha on the time-saving strategies of aphids:

The truly large time saving comes from a crazy trick called the telescoping of generations. Female aphids give birth to parthenogenetically produced female aphids who are already pregnant with the next generation. That amounts to a larger reduction of reproduction time. And it's what allows them to infest a plant in your garden in the short span of a few days. It's also what might allow them to develop quick resistance to the pesticides gardeners and farmers use. A granddaughter and daughter is exposed to everything a female aphid is exposed to and selective pressures needn't work independently on each generation, which I think should speed up the process of developing resistance.

Aurelie Thiele on the use of technology in education:

Some teachers have begun to use blogs as course webpages and link to course wikis so that the students can contribute too, i.e., take exams, post assignments. Of course that one course - if you follow the links above - is on web design to begin with, but borrows topics from history and literature, and TeacherTube and VoiceThread provide many tech-driven resources on non-tech courses. [...] One Dan Meyer even records his lectures when he has to be replaced by a temp, in quite an amazing way.

Republic Day Awards

The full list is in this press release.

Here are the awards under the Science and Technology category:

Padma Vibhushan

Dr. E. Sreedharan
Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri

Padma Bhushan

Prof. Asis Datta
Prof. Sukh Dev
Mrs. Sunita Williams (USA)
Dr. Vasant Gowarikar

Padma Shri

Shri Bhavarlal Hiralal Jain
Dr. Joseph H. Hulse (Canada)
Prof. Kasturi Lal Chopra
Dr. Sant Singh Virmani (USA)

Among the other names, I could recognize a few academics: Prof. Kaushik Basu (Cornell economist), Prof. Padma Desai (Columbia economist), and Prof. Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan (NYU mathematician) have a Padma Bhushan each, while Prof. Sukhdeo Thorat (UGC Chairman) has a Padma Shri.

Previous posts on the Republic Day Awards: 2007 and 2006.

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Happy Republic Day, folks!

IIT-M courses on YouTube

Here.

There are over a dozen courses as of now. IIT-M's Mangala Sundar Krishnan promises over 100 courses by this March.

From my feed reader ...

Niket: "If I were ever to be a dictator ..., my first job will be to remove the words “come tomorrow” from Indian-English dictionary."

Tabula Rasa: "[Snow] carries the deceptive facade of shimmering innocence but it is evil."

Gawker: "Now that I have a home, I am beginning to get a good understanding of how a home owner's life is different from, say, an apartment renter's."

Suvrat Kher points us to an interview of Sunita Narain by Karan Thapar; they discuss India's disastrous policies that encourage car ownership, and discourage public transport. For a change, Thapar lets his guest talk.

Aishwarya finds some fantastic gems in the Wikipedia entry for Anil Kumble.

And finally, check out this most awesome art illusion.