Prize proliferation

Here's the description of research interests of Prof. X:

[Prof. X's] research focuses on deviance and social problems. His current research concerns awards, prizes, and honors in American culture.

That juicy quote is from the web page of Prof. Joel Best whose recent paper is entitled: Prize Proliferation: A Social Worlds Perspective. This paper addresses this issue: "Prize proliferation is a common theme within contemporary culture. How can we account for this pattern?"

The paper is fun, and not too long. If you want an even shorter version, go read SocProf's summary.

From Best's article filled with all kinds of interesting insights, I learned a new phrase: symbolic inflation. This is how it's defined by Orrin Klapp:

Inflation occurs when the supply of tokens in a social market place outstrips the supply of values for which tokens stand. . . . if an army wished to give out more medals as an incentive to heroism, and the material from which medals were made was cheap, it would be easy to greatly increase the supply of tokens. But since heroism is a rare thing, and calls for extraordinary courage, the supply of that value is inelastic, so increasing the number of medals given out will not “purchase” more heroism but only cheapen the medals, . . . that is, inflate them.

Trillion dollar blog

Welcome to my first blog post at the Office of Management and Budget.

In this blog, I want to open up OMB even more to the public and share with you what we’re doing to address the many challenges that we face as a nation. I know that, for many people, blogs are the easiest way of receiving information – so this blog may prove to be useful even if it simply provides a convenient way of keeping up with information from OMB that is already available in other formats. President Obama is committed to ensuring a direct link between citizens and our federal government. Especially in light of our difficult economic times, I am committed to ensuring that OMB’s work is accessible. Although OMB is extensively discussed in the media and elsewhere, the blog will allow me to communicate and explain our work directly.

That's from the first post by Peter Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration.

The Supreme Court's apocalyptic judgement that would end blogging as we know it

You can read it here.

'-)

Nisha Susan on the Pink Chaddi campaign

Susan, one of the women behind the Pink Chaddi campaign, has a column in Tehelka: Valentine's Warriors: Why it began and how [Hat tip: Mekie]. Here's a short extract:

Did we anticipate the response we got? No. Within a day of starting the campaign we had 500 odd members. In a week we hit 40,000. From Puerto Rico to Singapore, from Chennai to Ahmedabad, from Guwahati to Amritsar, people wrote to us, how do I send my chaddis? But by then the campaign had gone offline. Elderly men and women, schoolchildren, middle-aged housewives, gravelly-voiced big men from Bihar who did not quite want to say the word chaddi aloud called us. The Sene called us on the numbers we had helpfully left online demanding, “Who is your leader?” How satisfying it was to say that we had none. How satisfying that young people offered their homes as collection points, bravely allowing their addresses to be published online. How satisfying that the crazies and conspiracy theorists were outnumbered ten to one by hilarious stories. Were you the one who told us that a famous Bollywood lyricist had written a song for the gulabi chaddi? Or were you the one who sent us the Amul ads featuring the pink chaddi? Or were you one of the Mumbai housewives gravely posing with underwear? Or the biker who created a miniature pink chaddi to tie on your handlebars?

Established: SERB

R. Ramachandran has a great Frontline story on the politics behind the recent establishment of the Science and Engineering Research Board.

First, the good news:

For the SERB’s 2009-10 budget, Ramasami proposes to double the amount that was disbursed by the SERC for projects during 2008-09, which means the Board will have an initial budget of about Rs.600 crore for 2009-10.

Now, the politics. SERB will be managed by a committee whose composition speaks for itself:

The approved SERB structure will have up to a maximum of 16 members and will include the Secretaries of the DST (who will also be the Board chairperson), the DBT, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the Department of Health Research (DHR) and the Department of Expenditure in the Ministry of Finance (or his/her nominee), the Member-Secretary of the Planning Commission, and up to three members each to be appointed by the government from academic institutions, government research laboratories and other socio-economic sectors including industry. The Board, in consultation with the government, will also appoint an eminent scientist as its Secretary.

The Board will have an Oversight Committee of Experts (OCE), with quite a few scientists in it. But Ramachandran points out that while the OCE has the scientists, "it is only the Board [SERB] that has the powers to take decisions."

Here's another piece of the politics:

“The scientific community is not homogeneous,” pointed out a DST official. “There are camps and lobby groups and even sycophancy. After all, the Secretaries of the scientific departments are also scientists of calibre in their own right,” he added. Apparently, some scientists have pointed out that at least in the SERC there was a level playing field but in the SERB, funding might become vulnerable to the pressures from the Oversight Committee. “It would have been even worse if it had been left entirely to the scientists,” the official, who did not wish to be named, remarked.

There's a lot more in there for students of politics and sociology of science. Go read all of it.

Is Bangalore safe for women?

After the Mangaluru pub attack, it appears to be Bengaluru's turn, with several reported attacks -- at least two of them in broad daylight -- in public spaces and in the presence of quite a few witnesses / bystanders.

In what appears to be inspired by the pub attack in Mangalore, three women have been attacked in the city over the past week. All three in their 20s and in “western clothing” were subject to varying degrees of violence....

This is how brazen the attackers in one incident were:

“When I said I would call the police, one of them offered me his mobile phone and told me to go right ahead."

Here's a first person account of another victim. [Hat tip to the Pink Chaddi campaign for all the links].

The title of this post may appear a little over the top, but let me just give a short extract from Prem Panicker's post:

No, seriously: what has the police and the state done to those involved in the Mangalore pub attacks? Arrested them for show, and let them loose again when your back was turned. What do you expect the Bangalore police to do about this latest atrocity? The same. It is not in a political party’s interests to restrain goons who nominally owe it allegiance, even if it disagrees with their actions [And while on that, have you heard of any major political party or leader coming forward to condemn these attacks?]

Now go read Prem's post. All of it.

Links: Gender difference edition

Amrita Rajan on Hollywood movie villainy:

Male villains get cool names, all the chicks they can bang, and fly around the world like the billionaires they frequently are; female villains are typically the mom or the wife from hell, nobody loves them much less wants to bang them, and all their plotting and planning usually leaves them with a wrinkly face.

Chee. Who’d want to be a female villain?

Wray Herbert: Stigma: His and Hers: gender differences in stereotyping of mental illness:

[The psychologists] had a group of volunteers, mostly in their 40s, read a case history of a person with mental illness. Some read about Brian, who was a stereotypical alcoholic, while others read about Karen, who showed all the classical symptoms of major depression. Still others read switched-around versions of these cases, so that Karen was the one abusing alcohol and Brian was depressed. The idea was to see if the typicality of Brian and Karen’s symptoms (or lack of it) shaped the volunteers’ reactions and judgments.

And it did, without question. As reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers expressed more anger and disgust—and less sympathy—toward Brian the alcoholic than toward Karen the alcoholic, and vice versa for depression. They were also more willing to help Brian and Karen when they suffered from an atypical disorder. Most striking of all, the volunteers were much more likely to view the Brain’s depression (and Karen’s alcoholism) as genuine biological disorders—rather than character defects or matters of personal irresponsibility. What this suggests is that stigma-busting campaigns might profit by putting a different face on these mental disorders—and perhaps others as well.

Finally, gender differences in sinning (or, at the least, confessions of sins), as unearthed by the Vatican:

According to a new Vatican study, Roman Catholic men and women sin differently.

The study was based on confessions taken by Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit scholar. The results were supported by the Catholic Church.

Father Jim Martin, an associate editor for America Magazine, ...says that the most common sin among women was pride, while lust topped the list for men — or at least, that's what churchgoers actually owned up to.

"You read the survey, and you could also interpret it as those are the sins they confess more," Martin says. "Which may not mean that they're actually sinning in that way, but those are the sins they confess most often to confessors."

Let me try again ...

Caution: this is about the same editorial in Mint that I ranted about in the previous post. You have been warned.

There were some things in that editorial -- its faux-sympathy for women's issues, its dismissive, mocking tone at the end, and other things (see below) -- which made me sense an anti-women bias in it. Here's my attempt to explain what those things are.

* * *

First, here's Mint's "critique" of the Pink Chaddi campaign:

1. The pink-bloomer war against the moral police managed a victory of sorts, but failed to raise the issue that gender injustice in India goes beyond pub-going and Valentine’s Day. [This is followed by several paragraphs with statistics about women's status in Indian society, without referring once to the Pink Chaddi campaign].

2. [The atrocious last paragraph which doesn't deserve to be elevated to the status of a "critique"; it betrays a certain callous attitude towards crimes against women.]

3. [At the end of the article, the editorial poses this question, and seeks readers' response] Did the women-in-pubs controversy grab headlines at the cost of more pressing gender issues?

Well, here's my case -- or, six different versions of my case:

1. The business case: By any yardstick, getting 50,000+ people to support a movement in less than 10 days is an amazing feat. That the Pink Chaddi campaign used its ideas, people, technology and resources so well to beat back -- using chaddis as their non-violent weapon -- a bunch of violent street thugs is a huge achievement. A clear victory for peaceful protest. For innovative thinking. For the mobilizing ability of those who put this campaign together. For women. And also for men who are not Muthalik, SRS goons or their supporters.

   Mint cannot even bring itself to recognize this achievement. It calls it, grudgingly, "a victory of sorts." Why?

2. The business newspaper case: Business newspapers thrive on dissecting a success story, extracting the key takeaways (lessons in management!), and peddling them to unsuspecting management types readers.

   Mint, on the other hand, does something strange with the success of the Pink Chaddi campaign: it frames it as a failure! This alleged failure is interesting: it's not a failure to achieve the stated goals, but a failure to do other things -- specifically, a failure "to raise the issue that gender injustice in India goes beyond pub-going and Valentine’s Day." It doesn't matter to Mint that this was a 10-day old campaign aimed at solving a short term problem.

   Why does Mint, a business newspaper, dive into this success story looking for failure?

3. The Updike rule case: John Updike's first rule for reviewing a book is this: "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." [In the academic world of peer review, this rule is restated as follows: "don't write the paper for the authors."]

   Mint fails the Updike test when it complains that the 10-day long Pink Chaddi campaign failed to raise the centuries-old issue of gender injustice. Why should such a huge burden be placed on a group that's fighting against a gang that threatened women with imminent violence?

   [BTW, this is a critique of the internal logic of the Mint editorial. In other words, its conclusion is invalid even if its premise is valid. But I don't think the premise -- that the Pink Chaddi campaign and the issues of gender justice are two separate things -- is valid. See below.]

4. The freedom case: The Pink Chaddi movement is about women's freedom to pursue their interests and hobbies -- including pub-going.

   Mint misrepresents the campaign by painting it as exclusively about pub-going; in fact, Mint accuses the campaign of not going "beyond pub-going and Valentine’s Day."

   Why?

5. The management case: It doesn't take much to see the relationship between achieving gender justice and the Pink Chaddi campaign. If the former is the mission, the latter is a tactic.

   Mint talks about them as if they are distinct; it asks its readers, "Did the women-in-pubs controversy grab headlines at the cost of more pressing gender issues?"

   Why does Mint try to create the impression ("at the cost of" is the key phrase here) that the two things are mutually exclusive?

   [Consider the Tylenol recall. When the executives took various actions to deal with the crisis, would a Mint editorial scream at them? "But all your efforts are taking the attention away from the company's long-term mission!"].

6. The jumping-to-conclusion case: Many women who enthusiastically supported this campaign have been long time activists fighting for gender justice -- some of them blog here. They are in this for the long haul; and they can be expected to use the success of the Pink Chaddi campaign for mobilizing new supporters for their cause.

   Mint insinuates that the women's groups will declare victory and go home -- or, rather, go back to the pub and get drunk, because it thinks that this campaign is just about pub-going.

   Why does Mint try so hard to portray the campaign as a frivolous effort by non-serious people whose sole interest is in getting drunk in pubs?

* * *

I have to wonder how much of what Mint has written is because the Pink Chaddi campaign was conceived, designed, implemented and marketed by women.

Just consider the novelty of it all, the savvy use of social networks, and the very viral marketing. Throw in the right kind of mid-course corrections -- for example, the campaign changed the blog's header image because its organizer had "no interest in annoying people or upsetting people's religious beliefs." These are all examples of great organization and management.

But the Mint editorialists are grudging in their praise -- "a victory of sorts". Worse, they locate the source of the campaign's successful "spill into the real world" elsewhere -- "the speed of the internet" -- rather than in the tech-savviness and organizational abilities of the campaign's leaders.

Instead, the Mint folks are overly keen to frame the campaigners as one-shot wonders and frivolous pub-goers. They are unwilling to wait to see how the movement proceeded after the Valentine's Day, because they seem to have concluded that the campaigners are a bunch of non-serious hobbyists who don't care about the 'serious' issues of gender equity, and that their only interest is in pub-going! They place the short-term, highly focused campaign within a frame of failure using the "failure to work towards gender justice" trope. [And don't even get me started on that last paragraph ...].

* * *

Does the editorial, then, represent?

A one-off mis-speak at Mint?

Anti-women bias at the business broadsheet?

Misogyny at Mint?

Someone is wrong on the internet ...

... and that someone is the editorial team at Mint.

Mint carried an editorial today on the Pink Chaddi campaign to name and shame the bunch of thugs who issued a threat to women's safety. Remember, the threat was a credible one, as it was made immediately after a violent crime in Mangalore. The Pink Chaddi campaign was successful in shining a bright spotlight on those violent thugs. I think it can take some of the credit when they called a halt to their 'plans' for the Valentine's Day -- at least in some parts of the state.

The rest of this post is a addressed directly to the editors.

* * *

WTF, Mint Editors? I really, really mean it. WTF?

In the first of your two accusations, you say that the Pink Chaddi campaign has "failed to raise the issue that gender injustice in India goes beyond pub-going and Valentine's Day."

Tell me, how does fighting a clear and imminent threat to women's safety somehow preclude a battle for broader gender justice? Why should it? By the same token, why should the longer term battle against entrenched inequity come in the way of a short term protest aimed at thwarting a mob that issued a specific threat -- in the here and now?

I'm sure you'll agree that the long term battle against gender inequity needs all the help it needs, and therefore, it'll benefit from a diversity of approaches and tactics. Doesn't it then follow that this hugely successful campaign has opened up an important new way of fighting that battle? Is it so difficult to see that this success can be translated to other situations? Also, isn't it valuable that it has probably brought a certain awareness about gender issues to a lot of people?

An implicit assumption in your editorial is that the Pink Chaddi campaign is a one shot deal. That the groups behind it, having achieved some measure of success, will just go to a life of pub-going comfort, and forget the larger battle. Is there any evidence to support this assumption? On the contrary, the main group behind that campaign has already issued a call for its next action: This is Indian Culture.

Towards the end of your editorial, you offer your second 'critique':

The speed of the internet let [the Pink Chaddi campaign] spill into the real world. It's a pity that nobody thought of such measures when a management student in the National capital region was gangraped a few months ago. How about having a "Consortium of Rape-revolting, Angry and Ambitious Women" that would twitter through the year against gender injustices rather than just support sporadic sentiments?

Shame on you!

Shame on you for exploiting a horrible crime for your silly purpose of belittling a successful campaign. Shame on you for conflating this crime (with an identifiable victim) with the threat issued by a powerful mob to endanger the safety and dignity of a large number women.

And shameonyou, shameonyou, shameonyou for using a crime to beat up on women's groups, when your newspaper has not even bothered to report on that very crime.

[Yes, I checked. Again. And again. And yes, your pathetic little sermon set me off on this morbid search.]

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Oscar zeitgeist

Washington Post's Amy Argetsinger:

... Spanish actress Penélope Cruz ... delivered the first of the night's many heavily accented acceptance speeches.

Guardian's Catherine Shoard:

Brits also did well in other categories. [...]

The Hindu:

The Mozart of Madras, A.R. Rahman bagged two of the coveted statuettes for Original Score and Best Song for Jai Ho ... Slumdog [Millionaire] also won ... [bold emphasis added]

And, yes, all these quotes have been taken out of context. '-)

Links ...

1. Law and Other Things: Another instance of the pathology of caste, a guest post by Chandan Gowda, National Law School, Bangalore.
2. Kafila: Caste/Gender in a Poem by Varavara Rao
3. Zuska: When Women Get Together Outside The Kitchen, It Must Be To Plot Against Men
4. Jaya Jha: Why do I have to feel apologetic that I did not like Slumdog Millionaire :)
5. Clive Crook's review of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller

Stephen Quake: The Absurdly Artificial Divide Between Pure and Applied Research

Another nice guest post at The Wild Side. He illustrates a key point using an example from his own career:

practical problems can be equally compelling as fundamental ones, and often lead in turn to the discovery of new fundamental science. In particular, there is an intimate connection between the invention of new technology and its application to scientific discovery. My own research has certainly benefited from this interplay. Although I was trained to do pure physics (my doctorate is in theoretical physics) at a certain point I became interested in developing new measurement technology.

I began developing microfluidic chips, which is the technical name for what I like to call small plumbing. Eventually my collaborators and I figured out how to make small chips that had thousands of miniature valves on them — and I realized that we had invented the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit. Instead of a silicon chip with wires and transistors, we built rubber chips with channels and valves. This seemed like a universal tool with which we could automate and expand biology, just as the integrated circuit automated and expanded computation and mathematics.

After a serendipitous meeting with the structural biologist James Berger, I decided to focus on protein crystallization as an application — it seemed like a logical choice and there would be substantial engineering economies of scale that one could achieve. What we eventually stumbled on was in fact a rich playground of very basic problems surrounding the physics of crystallization, some of which continues to occupy me to this day.

American government supports RSS

In fact, it demands RSS ... feeds!

I know it's past its use-by date, but still, I couldn't resist this one. Sorry!

Quote of the day

It's ironic that we have progressive stone works, but they're taking us back to a Stone Age
-- Radhika Prakash

More outrage here.

Infosys India Prize

This is really, really big.

Simply because of the prize money. At 5 million rupees, each prize is worth twice as much as the highest award for scientists in India: the India Science Prize [see footnote].

And also because of its coverage -- there's a prize in each of five different areas: mathematical, physical, biological, engineering and social sciences.

Here's the company's press release:

Infosys Technologies Ltd. (Infosys) today announced that it has set up "Infosys Science Foundation", a not-for-profit trust to promote research in sciences in India. Under the aegis of the foundation, Infosys will honor outstanding contributions and achievements by Indians across various sciences. The annual award for each category is Rs. 50 lakh.

The Infosys Science Foundation will be funded by a corpus of Rs. 21.5 crore contributed by Infosys executive board members and an annual grant from Infosys Technologies Ltd.

The “Infosys India Prize” categories include:

• Physical Sciences – Physics and Chemistry

• Mathematical Sciences – Mathematics and Statistics

• Engineering Sciences – All branches of Engineering

• Life Sciences – Biology and Medicine

• Social Sciences and Economics – Economics, History, Sociology, Political Sciences and other Social Sciences

The jury panel for each area will consist of eminent international personalities in each area selected by the trustees of the foundation.

Announcing the award, Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chief Mentor and Chairman of the Board, Infosys Technologies Ltd. said, “India needs bright minds across all areas of academics, government, business and society to strive for global excellence. We need to encourage research in India to address our developmental problems. This award will honor outstanding researchers who will make a difference to India’s future.”

All in all, a great move for Infosys. It'll now be associated with the most prestigious award in the country.

Now, how long is it going to take before someone institutes the Indian version of the Genius award, aka the MacArthur Fellowship?

* * *

Footnote: The India Science Prize has been awarded only once in its five year history -- to Prof. C.N.R. Rao.