Links: Bad sex award and menu vaastu

Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been announced for 2008. Take a look. [Link via Amit Varma]

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The art of Menu Design [via the Nudges blog]:

The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.

Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.

Two links on the financial crisis

First, an editorial from the Scientific American: After the Crash: How Software Models Doomed the Markets:

If Hollywood makes a movie about the worst financial crisis since the Great De­­pres­­sion, a basement room in a government building in Washington will serve as the setting for a key scene. There investment bankers from the largest institutions pleaded successfully with Securities and Ex­­change Commission (SEC) officials during a short meeting in 2004 to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves needed for a rainy day. This decision, a real event described in the New York Times, freed billions to invest in complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives that helped to bring about the financial meltdown in September.

In the script, the next scene will be the one in which number-savvy specialists that Wall Street has come to know as quants consult with their superiors about implementing the regulatory change. These lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos were the ones who both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio. Without the formal requirement to maintain debt ceilings and capital reserves, the commission had freed these firms to police themselves using risk tools crafted by cadres of quants.

The other link is to this great Portfolio article by Michael Lewis, the man who "chronicled [Wall Street] excess" of the eighties in Liar’s Poker:

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Links ...

1. I'm a little late to the party, but I must link to John Baez's post about the scientist who has published over 300 papers in a journal of which he's the chief editor. Don't forget to check out the comments; there are over 125 of them! [Thanks to Anand (e-mail), Jatkesha, Arunn and Philip Davis for the pointer.]

2. Rahul Basu reviews India after Gandhi by Ram Guha.

3. Should Prof. Yash Pal's trial balloon about converting IITs into Real Universities become reality? The Times of India offers a view and a counterview.

4. The mystery link [via BlogBharti].

Search for an Indian Obama

Ram Guha has announced his choice(s): Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. There indeed are many parallels, but it sounds strange to be calling Ambedkar, who passed away over fifty years ago, an Indian Obama. Shouldn't we be calling Obama an American Ambedkar?

Anyway, here's Guha:

Ambedkar was born in a Dalit, working-class household. His father had a small job in the army, and there was no history of education in the family. Obama’s father at least had a college degree, and his mother was white. Both Obama and Ambedkar were, in their birth and social origins, anything but men of privilege — but Ambedkar was even more underprivileged. Like his American successor, the great Indian jurist made his mark by dint of exceptional courage and a still more exceptional intelligence. Like Obama, he owed his degrees, from the best universities in the world, to his brilliance and hard work alone. Like Obama, for his persistence and his achievements, Ambedkar did, in the end and after much struggle, get his rewards. Before Independence, he was a member of the highest decision-making body in British India — the viceroy’s executive council. After Independence, he became law minister in the first cabinet of free India. If we consider that slavery existed in the United States of America for a bare 200 years, while caste has existed in India for two millennia and more, then the fact that a Dalit supervised the drafting of the Indian Constitution must be reckoned to be as significant, as boundary-breaching, as earth-shattering a historical event as that of a half-black man becoming the president of the United States of America. And let us remind ourselves that the Indian, and India, took precedence in this regard — for Ambedkar became law minister sixty years before Obama became president.

Also featured in Guha-the-historian's list of possible Indian Obamas are Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and Nitish Kumar, Bihar's current chief minister.

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Thanks to Pradeepkumar (via e-mail) and Guru for the alert.

Krishnakumar on the pathology of policies for primary schools

The immediate provocation comes from Prof. C.N.R. Rao's outrage at the way six new IITs started academic programs this year. Here's Krishnakumar (Director, NCERT):

As one of the architects of India's science and technology policies, Rao is rightly concerned [about the haste in launching new IITs] and one must respect his candour. What one finds sad and difficult to accept is the manner in which he has argued for better planning for their expansion. He has pointed out that it has taken India 50 years to take IITs where they are today, and then he says, according to newspaper reports: "After all it's not like opening primary schools."

Krishnakumar then gives us a summary of all the ways in which this sort of callous-dismissive attitude has affected policy-making in primary education:

Both these remarks offer us valuable insight into India's failure to provide education of an acceptable quality to all children. The attitude these remarks signify is quite common. No one needs to doubt the genuine validity of Rao's anguish over the importance of maintaining IIT's high standards. But his comparative frame, in which primary schools rank so low as to symbolise a hastily established IIT, deserves critical attention. His remarks have come at a time when public policy seems to be waking up from a century-long sleep. [...]

The pejorative reference Rao made to primary schools is not just offensive to those of us who serve children in our formal capacities; it also reveals a huge mental block in the mind of India's highest-level development planners. The idea that primary schools can be established and run cheaply has been central to educational planning since independence. The idyllic myth of the village schoolmaster under a tree persisted for several decades after independence.

It was as late as the 1980s when a scheme to equip every primary school with basic minimum amenities and at least two teachers was mooted under the name 'Operation Blackboard' (OB). The modest gains of OB and other initiatives taken in the years following the National Policy on Education (1986) were supposed to get consolidated under the auspices of the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), but the opposite happened and contradictions multiplied.

Enrolment increased, but the status of teachers and the quality of their training declined. During the 1990s the axe of fiscal rationalism fell on India's children and their teachers. State after state recruited para-teachers, and Madhya Pradesh went to the extent of declaring career teachers a 'dying cadre'. Those who objected to such changes were told that insecure, meagrely paid teachers produced better results than qualified career teachers.

One also heard that multi-grade teaching had virtues that one-teacher-per-class policy somehow missed, and so on. The net result was that primary schools lost whatever little right to dignity they had acquired over the first three decades of independence. Thousands of them could be set up without prior planning, exactly as Rao has indicated in his comment.

A plea for comprehensive and sophis-ticated policy for children and their education sounds like asking for the moon these days. We feign ignorance of the complexity of the demands that little children make on the state, and not just on their malnourished mothers. If they are to be nurtured to live and participate in a vibrant democratic order, India will need to pay the same meticulous attention to the needs of a primary school as it does in the case of IITs.

IITs deflate Yash Pal's trial balloon

The IITs have used some strong words in expressing their opposition to Yash Pal's proposal (which I termed a trial balloon) that they be converted into a university, offering a wide variety of programs. [Thanks to Prof. Ranganathan for the link].

Today, at a meeting with the panel in Mumbai, officials from the IITs, however, said [Yash Pal Committee's] proposal ["to convert IITs from mere 'undergraduate factories' to full-fledged universities"] was unnecessary and “retrogressive”.

The IIT system, they argued, was superior to that employed in central universities, the sources said.

Let's see how Prof. Pal handles the push-back from the "little more than undergraduate factories." Those impolitic words, by the way, are a direct quote from Yash Pal, who doesn't seem to be very good at "how to win friends and influence people."

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Coming to the substantive points, the IITs are certainly right to point out that they offer a wider choice of courses to their engineering students and have started new programs in not only in management, but also in humanities and social sciences. IIT-KGP also has a Law School in the works.

Here are some (not completely original) observations:

1. I do think that IITs' progress is in the right direction -- I am a big supporter of Real Universities. But I also think this progress is too slow.

2. IITs are overstating their case about humanities and social sciences; despite their protestations, they continue to remain (primarily) tech schools; H&SS are a sideshow, and they know it.

3. Prof. Pal should seriously consider a strategy for converting our Central Universities into real universities. Right now, they lack a strong undergraduate program (with BHU being an important exception); they are mainly graduate schools, with perhaps a tiny UG program in this or that subject. This should change.

4. Three years ago, Prof. Pankaj Jalote (then at IIT-K, later at IIT-D and now Director of IIIT-D) wrote a nice op-ed about the possible futures for the IITs (or, go to his article). He suggested several models: a large public -- and real! -- university (UC-Berkeley), a large tech university (Georgia Tech) and a small university with a greater focus on graduate research (CalTech).

   Last year, in a different context, Jalote revised his views, and offered the Georgia Tech model as the one that was suitable for the IITs.

   To my knowledge, his article received the coldest possible response: silence.

5. But when someone with a little bit more power -- like Prof. Yash Pal, heading a committee -- comes along and starts thinking aloud about a possible future for the IITs, they come out swinging.

6. IITs don't seem to like participating in public discussions (I'm sure they talk about this sort of stuff among themselves all the time) about their possible futures. They end up reacting when others start a public conversation about them, and their public response ends up looking either smug (to Jalote) or reactionary (to Yash Pal).

7. It certainly doesn't take genius to see where it's going: it's better for the IITs to come out and discuss this sort of stuff in public. If they do that, it will give them a way of shaping the tone and direction of the conversation better.

Links: Women in Science edition

1. Vineeta Bal in Nature India: Why women scientists in India need affirmative action [free registration required].

   If couples are looking for jobs, a policy should be in place to encourage their employment in the same institution, or the same city. Potential employers of one spouse should take proactive steps in helping the other spouse find a job, thereby facilitating the woman's entry into the workforce. Provision of campus housing similarly improves the quality of life, and a preference should be given to women scientists for campus accommodation. Provision of good, clean crèches and day-care homes for elderly, preferably in close proximity of the workplace or home, is also a promising proactive step. Providing child-care allowance until the child reaches a certain age is another option. Extra efforts are needed to facilitate a congenial work environment by having frequent gender-sensitisation programmes for men and women. Sexual harassment is a significant but unrecognised problem which needs sensitive and prompt action. Providing security and a women-friendly workplace atmosphere should thus be a responsibility of the head of an institution and specific recommendations have to be in place for achieving it.

2. Cidem Kaitcibai [I'm sorry I'm not able to reproduce the Turkish name correctly here] in Nature: Caution: Men at Work. Interestingly, this article includes a section on the age profile of scientists.

   Developing countries have a great deal to gain from the full participation of women in the knowledge economy. It is encouraging to note that many developing countries enjoy a head start in their efforts to advance this goal, largely due to the comparatively high percentage of professional women found in elite, high-paying fields. The challenges today lie in increasing opportunities for poorer, less-educated women in cities, small villages and rural areas, and in breaking through the 'glass ceiling' so that more women will hold management and leadership positions.

   As for age imbalances, innovative policies must be devised to protect experienced knowledge workers without discouraging the next generation of students from entering science and other fields. For example, older professors could be allowed to remain on the faculty without remuneration and without administrative responsibilities — allowing them to pursue their own research agendas freely and to teach classes. This would allow older faculty to remain active and involved without blocking the career paths of younger researchers. It would also encourage an intergenerational exchange of ideas and research collaborations between young and old. It does, of course, depend on having reasonable pension systems in place, and a willingness to approve and enforce mandatory rules for retirement.

3. Elizabeth Durant: Ellencyclopedia (a profile of MIT's alumna, Ellen Swallow Richards).

   Ellen Swallow Richards is perhaps best known as MIT's first female graduate and instructor, but launching coeducation at the Institute is merely the first in a long list of her pioneering feats. The breadth and depth of her career are astounding; a 1910 tribute in La Follette's Weekly Magazine professed that "when one attempts to tell of the enterprises, apart from her formal teaching, of which Mrs. Richards has been a part or the whole, he is lost in a bewildering maze." Authors and scholars have called her the founder of ecology, the first female environmental engineer, and the founder of home economics. Richards opened the first laboratory for women, created the world's first water purity tables, developed the world standard for evaporation tests on volatile oils, conducted the first consumer-product tests, and discovered a new method to determine the amount of nickel in ore. And that's just the short list of her accomplishments. In a nod to Richards's remarkable knowledge and interests, her sister-in-law called her "Ellencyclopedia."

Higher Ed trial balloons

Two such trial balloons have been floated, and both involve statements by Prof. Yash Pal who heads the MHRD's Committee for Rejuvenation of Higher Education.

Balloon 1: Soon, IITs may be turning out doctors too (a ToI report by Hemali Chhapia):

The IITs may be currently stretched to the limit, but the XIth five-year committee for higher education is working with these centres of excellence to expand their charts. The committee, headed by educationist Yash Pal, that is meeting IIT heads on Friday will discuss how the tech schools can change their character and, like American universities, enlarge their menu.

"Currently, the IITs are premier undergraduate engineering schools doing some postgraduation and research work. Now, we want to give them a bigger role," Yash Pal told TOI. The noted scientist said that he had discussed his suggestions with some IIT directors and that a clearer picture would emerge after this week's meeting.

Balloon 2: Panel on varsity functioning may focus on regulation instead (a MInt report by Pallavi Singh):

A panel set up by the government to review the functioning of the two top regulators of the country’s education sector, which have come under widespread criticism for their restrictive policies and sometimes opaque functioning, may actually not look at the details of how these two entities function and instead suggest ways in which universities can regulate themselves, according to its chairman. [...]

Yash Pal said the panel was looking into larger issues of curriculum changes and academic structures at universities than involving itself with the “nitty-gritty of the functioning of the UGC-AICTE”.

“I would like to give the universities a self-regulatory regime. If we can make the universities autonomous and evolve a process of internal management, they will be largely free from any unnecessary regulation. Freedom means that kind of a freedom,” he said.

IISc Centenary Conference: 21 days to go ...

1. Some more details about the Conference have entered the public domain. Here are a few that are noteworthy:

The centenary conference titled ‘IIS c: 100 years and beyond,’ will be inaugurated with keynote talks by former president APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisor C N R Rao on December 13. [...]

Vice-President Hamid Ansari will release two special stamps to commemorate the centenary year on December 14. Two Nobel laureates, Sydney Brenner (Medicine, 2001) and Eric S Maskin (Economic Sciences, 2007) will deliver keynote talks on December 15 and 16 respectively.

... On December 16, the last day of the conference, all living former directors, CNR Rao, G Padbhanabhan, Goverdhan Mehta, including the present director P Balaram will share the stage during a special event, IISc: Past, Present and Future.

While all events during the conference will be open only to delegates, the inaugural ceremony will be a public function. IIS c will take up live webcasting of the events during the conference, Y Narahari, convenor of the core organising committee said.

2. The IISc Alumni Association will organize the IISc Centenary Science and Technology Run on Sunday, the 7th of December (less than a week before the Conference). [Link via Rupesh].

Kaaledge

I discovered Kaaledge through an e-mail alert from Rahul Thathoo, one of its founders. First I thought Kaaledge is a play on college, but apparently, it's kaalEDGE (whatever *that* means). Here's the blurb from its About page:

... Currently we offer a blog and a forum for you to take benefit of, read and ask questions that you may have regarding your dream of applying to universities in the US and/or Europe.

We are a bunch of highly motivated graduate students in the US who have been through the process and are willing to help you out where ever we can. We hope you benefit from interacting with us. And oh by the way, keep a look out on the new products and services we come out with in the very near future!

The site has all kinds of stuff targeted at (mainly, Indian) students looking to do grad school in the US. So, the potential audience is pretty big!

Now, I have seen quite a few specialized websites and blogs devoted to JEE and CAT, but almost all of them have been bad: their poorly designed pages have meager and useless info mixed in with tons of sad-looking ads. Kaaledge is refreshingly different: it appears to have been put together by people who are genuinely enthusiastic about the project, and I haven't seen any ads (so far). If at all the Kaaledge folks are promoting something, it seems to be their own stuff ("... look out on the new products and services we come out with in the very near future!"); for example, its GRE prep help -- via SMS (no, I haven't tried it!).

The site has a mix of department profiles, interviews of people who have been through US grad schools, sample statements of purpose, and higher-ed related news. I don't know how useful this sort of stuff is for potential grad students, but that's what you get there. Also, I found it a little too CS/EE centric, but that may be because of the background of its current set of people.

An interesting project, and I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Blogging blogging

A whole bunch of links that I have accumulated over time. Here they are:

1. Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic: Why I blog.

2. Daniel Drezner: Public Intellectual 2.0.

3. Dan Cohen: Professors, Start Your Blogs.

4. Jessica Wapner in Scientific American: Blogging -- It's Good for YOu.

5. Steve Yegge: You should write blogs.

6. Janet Stemwedel: Why would anybody want to blog under a pseudonym?

7. Not specifically on blogging, but still: Michael Nielsen on Five problems with doing research in the open.

8. Shelley A. Batts, Nicholas J. Anthis, and Tara C. Smith: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.

9. Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell: Power and Politics of Blogs. [See also: Dan Drezner: So, You Want to Blog ...]

10. Simon Owens in MediaShift: Econ Bloggers Gain Clout in Financial Crisis

94,563

That's the number of Indians studying in US universities during 2007-08, up nearly 13 percent from 83,833 in 2006-07. India is now No.1 in the list, with Indians forming 15.2 percent of the foreign student population in the US.

Over seven in ten Indian students are in graduate programs, with undergraduate students forming just 14.4 percent.

The press release from Open Doors is here. The country fact sheets are here (and some more data can be found here). Take a look at the report for India doc).

Here are the other highlights in the press release:

India is the leading place of origin for international students in the United States with 94,563 in 2007/08 (an increase of 13% from the previous year), followed by #2 China (81,127, up 20%) #3 South Korea (69,124, up 11%), #4 Japan (33,974, down 4%), #5 Canada (29,051, up 3%), #6 Taiwan (29,001, down less than 1%), #7 Mexico (14,837, up 7%), #8 Turkey (12,030, up 5%), #9 Saudi Arabia (9,873, up 25%), #10 Thailand (9,004, up 1%), [...]

The top ten most popular fields of study for international students in the United States in 2007/08 were Business and Management (20% of total), Engineering (17%) and Physical and Life Sciences (9%), Social Sciences (9%), Mathematics and Computer Science (8%), Fine & Applied Arts (6%), Health Professions (5%), Intensive English Language (5%), Education (3%), Humanities (3%), and Agriculture (2%). Undeclared majors are excluded from the rankings of top fields of study.

For the seventh year in a row, the University of Southern California is the leading host institution with 7,189 international students. New York University hosts the second highest number of foreign students (6,404). Other campuses in the top 10 are: Columbia University (6,297), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (5,933), Purdue University (5,772), University of Michigan – Ann Arbor (5,748), University of California – Los Angeles (5,557), University of Texas – Austin (5,550), Harvard University (4,948), Boston University (4,789), and University of Pennsylvania (4,610).

California remains the leading host state for international students (84,800, up 9%), followed by New York (69,844, up 6%), Texas (51,824, up 6%), Massachusetts (31,817, up 11%), Illinois (28,804, up 12.5%), Florida (26,739, down 0.5%), Pennsylvania (26,090, up 12.5%), Michigan (22,857, up 8%), Ohio (19,343, up 4%), and Indiana (15,548, up 8%). 17 of the top 20 leading host states experienced increases in total international students, with Washington (21.5%) and Virginia (13%) showing the largest percentage increases. (For breakdowns by state, including leading host institutions and leading fields of study and places of origin for foreign students studying in each state, go to the Open Doors website and click on "State Sheets").

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Here's the post about last year's Open Doors report.

Promising research areas in physics

Sidebar

In an opinion piece in Nature Reza Mansouri argues that developing countries should strengthen their base in physics research, "not only because of its fundamental contributions to all science, but also because national capacity in physics correlates strongly with economic performance."

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The Education Plus section of today's Hindu carried a short piece about research areas in physics that are "brimming with promise," and it featured Prof. Gautam Menon and Prof. R. Shankar of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai [Caution: the Hindu mixed up the names and pics of the two scientists].

One of the areas mentioned in the article is 'emergent behaviour' in complex systems:

“To study a system, we isolate phenomena and study them independently,” says Dr. Menon. But, what do you do when you want to study the stock market? It is a complex system with a large number of independent agents interacting with each other. “There is a behaviour that emerges from this interaction. This ‘emergent behaviour’ can be studied.”

“Physics of complex systems has been made possible by computational power. There is a lot of promise,” says Dr. Shankar. As everything, from how diseases propagate to telecom networks are examples of complex systems, their study is of everyday importance. “Physicists try to find general laws that govern these systems. It is still at a nascent stage.”

It should not be surprising to learn that blogs are possibly the best forum for this sort of discussions. For example, Chad Orzel had a recent post on "What's interesting about atomic, molecular and optical physics." He followed it up with a question: "What's so interesting about condensed matter physics?. Doug Natelson provided an answer to that question here. I'm sure there are similar posts on what's interesting about other areas of physics.

* * *

Blogs are good not only for broad discussions such as these, but also for detailed expositions on interesting new ideas. For example, just the other day, Bee at Backreaction discussed a recent paper by Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Alvaro Perales, and Michael Nielsen entitled More Really is Different. Here's the abstract:

In 1972, P.W.Anderson suggested that `More is Different', meaning that complex physical systems may exhibit behavior that cannot be understood only in terms of the laws governing their microscopic constituents. We strengthen this claim by proving that many macroscopic observable properties of a simple class of physical systems (the infinite periodic Ising lattice) cannot in general be derived from a microscopic description. This provides evidence that emergent behavior occurs in such systems, and indicates that even if a `theory of everything' governing all microscopic interactions were discovered, the understanding of macroscopic order is likely to require additional insights.

IISc Centenary Conference: 25 days to go...

IISc's students, teachers and staff members gathered in the Gymkhana's cricket ground yesterday for a fun event: they formed a huge IISc logo. [I could not participate in this fantastic event, unfortunately]. Here are a couple of news reports. Rupesh has a scanned pdf of the DH report that carried a picture.

And, here are some pics: the first one is a composite, with a lot of unnecessary stuff edited out, and the others are from trial runs.

The credit for organizing this major community-building event goes to IISc Student Council, Voices, (IISc students' newsletter), and the publications committee of the Centenary Conference. The pics are credited to the company "SaimaNaina-Creating Dreams."

Many thanks to Prof. Ananthasuresh for sharing the pics.

Chandrayaan

A proud day for ISRO, and yes, India. The Hindu's headline appears understated: "India Leaves Its Footprints on Moon."

ISRO's press release on this achievement puts it better : "Indian Tricolour Placed on the Moon on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s Birthday."

ISRO has also released a few images from Chandrayaan. Here're a couple of them: