Just in case anybody here needs a reminder ...

The Internets Never Forget.

Never.

Clouds and Silverlinings

Two links.

1. Jessica Hamzelou in New Scientist on the dark side of happiness.

2. Jonah Lehrer in NYTimes on the bright side of depression.

On a related note, Louis Menand has a great article on Can Psychiatry Be A Science. Here's a section on the criticism (from within the profession of psychiatry itself) that a lot of conditions, which arise as a natural expected response to nasty events, are being labelled using scary terms and 'treated':

Greenberg is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different -— a phenomenon that has consequences for the insurance system, the justice system, the administration of social welfare, and the cost of health care.

Jerome Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University, has been calling out the D.S.M. on this issue for a number of years. In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Wakefield and Allan Horwitz, a sociologist at Rutgers, argue that the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness. In the case of a patient who exhibits the required number of symptoms, the D.S.M. specifies only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement. But, Wakefield and Horwitz point out, there are many other life problems for which intense sadness is a natural response—being laid off, for example. There is nothing in the D.S.M. to prevent a physician from labelling someone who is living through one of these problems mentally disordered.

Links ...

1. The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics by Larissa MacFarquhar. In addition to explaining the evolution of the political Krugman, it has a great section on how economics works. Here's a teaser:

   The most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones, and it was completely wrong. In the years before Europe adopted the euro, it was thought that establishing something between floating exchange rates and fixed ones—a “target zone” within which a currency would be allowed to float—might reap some of the advantages of each. He estimates that by the time the paper was officially published, in 1991, some hundred and fifty derivative papers had already appeared. “Empirically, it doesn’t work at all,” Krugman says. “People loved it as an academic thing, but it had some very strong predictions about interest rates inside target zones. Those predictions all turned out to be wrong. But nobody attacked me for that. I was showing that if target zones worked the way that people say they’re supposed to work, then this is how it would play out.”

2. See also this commentary by Thomas Levenson, picking up from MacFarquahar's article on the nature of academic economics:

   The point being that economists, for good reasons, often need to rebuild a structure of known facts and ideas — not because they could not know these things by other means (like a good cartographic historian would) but because for economists to talk to each other, they need to express the objects of their curiosity in a form that their colleagues can understand. So far so good — but such mutual comprehensibility can come, as MacFarquahar documents Krugman discovering, at the expense of insights available for the taking. This is what I mean when I say, as I have on occasion that economics is an aspiring, or simply a young discipline.

   That is: economics as practiced in the academy is in possession, its practitioners believe (and I mostly do too, not that my opinion matters) of a body of methods and a growing number of results that suggest that it is a powerful way of analyzing certain kinds of human behavior, and for making useful predictions about some things. But it is far from as comprehensive in its explanatory power as some of its practitioners — and many more in the economic pundit class — would have one believe.

3. Steven Levy in Wired: How Google's Algorithm Rules The Web. The algorithm gets tweaked hundreds of times a year, using "contextual signals" culled from search queries:

   Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

   But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Unfair tax relief

Under the tax scheme proposed in the budget today, someone with a taxable income of Rs. 800,000 will enjoy a tax relief of nearly 35 percent -- he/she will pay Rs. 96.8 k as opposed to last year's 148.3 k.

For someone with an income of Rs. 500 k, the tax relief works out to 40 percent!

But, but ...

For people earning 160 k to 300 k, the tax relief is a nice round figure of zero percent.

In other words, a vast majority of tax payers (with incomes less than 300 k) will not see a single rupee of tax benefits, while their richer siblings will see pretty fabulous savings -- as much as Rs. 51,500 for those earning 800 k and more!

This would be a cruel thing to do even in a normal year. But this year is one that has seen pretty high inflation rates -- especially for food.

This is too bizarre for a government that claims to work for the Aam Aadhmi!

* * *

Data: See the table in this blog post for the data. The quantum of tax relief rises from zero percent (for incomes up to Rs. 300k) before maxing out at about 40 percent for 500k. From there on, it keeps falling steadily to, for example, about 35 percent at 800 k, and about 25 % at 1 million.

NCHER

The draft legislation for creating NCHER, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research, is here (pdf). When it is created with the Parliament's nod, it'll replace almost all the major higher ed regulators -- UGC, AICTE, etc.

The legislation describes the organizational structure -- NCHER will be headed by a Chairman, and it'll have a Collegium that's so large as to include a representative from each state! The legislation also provides a huge list of things the Commission will do -- leaving the details of how those things will be accomplished to the Commission itself.

So far, so good.

There's one jarring note, however. It's about creating a 'national registry' of academics -- university vice chancellors are expected to be picked from this registry.

This provision is really, really strange. Why can't the government allow NCHER to evolve the norms for selecting university VCs? Why should it tie NCHER's hands on this issue, when the Commission has been given the mandate to do so many other things?

The composition of the Collegium and the concept of national registry have come under sharp attack from the governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

[In a separate development, the employees of UGC have opposed the formation of NCHER.]

In the op-ed pages of The Hindu, Thomas Joseph, Member-Secretary of the Higher Education Council of Kerala, started a debate over NCHER. This is what he says about the national registry:

The Bill provides for the preparation of a national registry of people eligible to be selected as Vice-Chancellors and mandates that Vice-Chancellors of State universities be appointed from a panel of names selected by the commission from the registry. The question is not whether the commission would always act fairly, but whether such an arrangement would be consistent with the principles of autonomy of higher educational institutions, which is touted as the basic objective of the commission. The idea of a registry may not be an objectionable one if States have the option to choose any name from the registry and if the right to appoint a person as Vice-Chancellor from outside the list is not entirely ruled out.

Prof. Madhava Menon, a member of the Task Force that drafted the legislation, has a point-by-point rebuttal. Here's the section dealing with the national registry:

An innovative measure to secure academic autonomy that is proposed in the Bill relates to the selection of Vice-Chancellors. Many ills of higher education, at present, can be traced to corruption and manipulation involved in the appointment of Vice-Chancellors. The Bill empowers the Collegium to prepare a registry of suitable persons with expertise and experience after a worldwide search and to keep it updated from time to time. It is not necessary that only persons who figure in the registry be appointed. Whenever the Central or State governments want to appoint Vice-Chancellors they can ask, if they so like, for a panel of names from the Commission as per their requirements, and the Commission may provide it. This is to facilitate the search and to present available candidates of distinction within and outside the country. There is no infringement of autonomy in the process; rather, it enhances autonomy by removing potential risks to such autonomy. The States' choice of the person and the right to choose one from outside the registry is in no way compromised by the provisions in the Bill.

The Task Force has been holding public hearings on the Draft Bill; it has already had one each in Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram and Chennai.

Links (Very SFW Edition)

1. The Genetics of Full Professors. Link via Rainbow Scientist.

2. Jonah Lehrer in WSJ: Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity [You'll find it very depressing if you are, like I am, on the 'wrong' side of the age spectrum]:

   ... In 1953, when Mr. Watson was only 25, he co-wrote one of the most important scientific papers of all time.

   Scientific revolutions are often led by the youngest scientists. Isaac Newton was 23 when he began inventing calculus; Albert Einstein published several of his most important papers at the tender age of 26; Werner Heisenberg pioneered quantum mechanics in his mid-20s. At the time, these men were all inexperienced and immature, and yet they managed to transform their fields.

3. Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: Good Writing in Political Science: An Undergraduate Student’s Short Illustrated Primer:

   Leo Tolstoy famously observed that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 2 Tolstoy, happily for all of us, was not a teaching political scientist. Had he been, he might have observed that undergraduate political science papers are subject to a different logic. Really good papers are unique – each has its own particular thesis, style of argumentation, body of empirical evidence and set of conclusions. Really bad papers, in contrast, tend toward a dismal uniformity. They draw on the same evidence (garbled versions of what the professor has presented in class), are organized according to similar principles of incoherence, and all wend their eventual ways towards banal conclusions that strenuously avoid making any claims or positive arguments whatsoever.

   This short set of guidelines cannot make you into a really good essayist. For that you need time, practice, and native genius. What it can do, however, is help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls of undergraduate essay writers. You can surely avoid being a very bad essayist, and you can very likely become a better essayist than you are already. What follows is a short set of suggestions, accompanied, where available, with cautionary examples drawn from online essay mills.

4. Gail Hornstein in The Chronicle: Prune That Prose -- Learning to write for readers beyond academe [Link via Subharmonics, Arunn Narasimhan's new blog]:

   Writing for a popular audience ... forces you to figure out what the hell you're trying to say and come right out with it.

   For me, that's the hardest part. At first, I couldn't bear to part with any of my ideas, and found it almost physically painful to cut so much. Then I realized it was like growing carrots. Similarities between weeding in the garden and on the page have long been noted, but the focus is usually on the technical process—what to take out, how to clip back sprawling clauses, and so on. But for me, the key similarity is emotional.

   I love carrots, and eating them fresh from my organic garden is especially wonderful. But you have to thin aggressively to get a decent crop. I hate thinning. It seems brutal. I decide who lives and who dies, who becomes a carrot and who ends up just a green top in the stockpot. But forcing myself to thin carrots taught me a lot (although for a long time, I preferred simply to let my partner, a professional editor, do it without a shudder). I got a vivid sense of how too much of a good thing in the first version—in a carrot bed or an article—can result in stunted plants or spindly, overgrown prose.

5. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on Why You Want To Be An Engineer.

Links (NSFW Edition)

In an eternal quest for an NC-17 rating, this blog is proud to present:

1. Mary Roach at TED-2009: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm.

   Here's the web page for her book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

2. Noise to Signal: Relationship Status (cartoon).

3. Careers I didn't even know existed: Lactation Consultant. [Update: Several commenters have objected to this link being characterized as NSFW. I agree; it doesn't belong in this list. Sorry about this sloppiness.]

4. MIT's The Tech: Sex@MIT. Money quote: "Compared to national numbers for college-age students from the Centers for Disease Control, MIT students are having less much sex than their peers — but significantly more than no sex."

Outrage at AMU

Two updates on the outrage at Aligarh Muslim University:

1. A group of 13 academics and teachers have issued a statement. Read it at Kafila or at Hindustan Times:

   The outrage of the university authorities is deeply misdirected. Instead of suspending Dr Siras, they should have taken stern and serious action against those who so blatantly took on the role of playing moral police with no regard whatsoever for Dr Siras’ constitutionally recognised right to privacy and dignity within his home and the university.

2. Interestingly, AMU was also in the news yesterday for something else: its tie-up with the Law School of George Washington University. Here's how the Dean of the high profile American private university outlined their joint research program:

   The major areas of research between the two institutes would include intellectual property law, Islamic law, constitutional law, international and comparative law and environmental law.

   Notably, he didn't specify privacy laws (presumably, it's included in constitutional law ...).

   I wonder if GWU even knew who it was getting into bed with ...

Links ...

1. ReoCities.com: A worthy project that aims to reclaim the GeoCities pages and make them available again. [via Madhukar Shukla]

2. To the folks at Aligarh Muslim University: WTF is wrong with you? Really, W . T . F ? [via Indian Homemaker]

3. Vaughan Bell: From the Printing Press to Facebook -- A history of complaints about information overload.

4. The curious case of a French philosopher "citing a fake philosopher".

Are Scientists Dull?

Bruce Charlton has a provocative paper that argues that they are indeed dull, and identifies the cause: "the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people."

If you think, like I do, that science already has too many psychotics (borderline, or worse!) or that it rewards them with leadership positions, you'll be surprised and upset by the proposed remedy:

... As well as high IQ, revolutionary science requires high creativity. Creativity is probably associated with moderately high levels of Eysenck’s personality trait of ‘Psychoticism’. Psychoticism combines qualities such as selfishness, independence from group norms, impulsivity and sensation-seeking; with a style of cognition that involves fluent, associative and rapid production of many ideas. But modern science selects for high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness; therefore it enforces low Psychoticism and low creativity. Yet my counter-proposal to select elite revolutionary scientists on the basis of high IQ and moderately high Psychoticism may sound like a recipe for disaster, since resembles a formula for choosing gifted charlatans and confidence tricksters. A further vital ingredient is therefore necessary: devotion to the transcendental value of Truth. Elite revolutionary science should therefore be a place that welcomes brilliant, impulsive, inspired, antisocial oddballs – so long as they are also dedicated truth-seekers.

Med Schools at IITs? MCI Says, "No."

Looks like MCI has shot down the idea. For now.

Apparently, the IITs -- with the exception of IIT-KGP -- want to run an MBBS program without running a teaching hospital; they would tie up with a private hospital. MCI, naturally, doesn't like it one bit.

At least, that's the explicitly stated reason for saying 'No' to the proposal. I'm not very clear about whether it is such a big deal; I mean, are there medical colleges that don't run their own teaching hospitals?

Prof. C.N.R. Rao's Valentine's Day Message

National research professor and renowned scientist C.N.R. Rao on Sunday expressed concern over lack of innovation in Indian science and said rapid commercialisation and particularly, the information technology industry, contributed to this decline.

“IT has destroyed Indian science as much as it has contributed to its economy,” he told presspersons on the sidelines of a ... conference ... at the National Institute of Technology-Karnataka, Surathkal. The IT sector might have contributed to the country’s GDP, but it had done little for its development, he said.

He said that there was a growing trend of “internal brain drain” in the country, where students succumbed to temptations and took up jobs that had nothing to do with scientific innovation. “Why does one need to study engineering if the ultimate aim is to do an MBA and sell soap?”

Here's the source.

Higher Ed Links ...

1. Kounteya Sinha in Economic Times: Doctors from IITs? Govt to Brainstorm Today:

   Some IITs, like Kharagpur and Hyderabad, are working on starting medical schools in about three years. Ministry officials said IIT Kharagpur has supposedly signed an MoU with University of California, San Diego, to set up a hospital which will offer graduate , PG and research programmes in medicine and bio-medical engineering.

   IIT Hyderabad has been expressing its interest to offer MD degrees in three years. In recent meetings with IIT directors, HRD minister Kapil Sibal had asked them to expand their courses.

2. Ding Jie in SciDev.Net: Science Paper Trade Booms in China:

   He defined five questionable paper-publishing practices in China: charging exorbitant publication fees, where instead of a peer review systems authors pay hundreds or thousands of yuan for publication in a journal; the establishment of illegitimate journals; ghostwriting of papers; paper brokering, where authors pay agencies to get their papers published in particular journals; and the fabrication of awards by illegitimate journals.

   This trade is a product of the way Chinese universities and research institutions use rates of publication as a measure of performance and eligibility for promotion or graduation, wrote Shen. Many institutions, for example, stipulate that doctoral candidates cannot gain their PhD unless they have published one paper before graduation.

   As a result, researchers and academics — particularly those in lesser universities or institutes — plagiarise or buy papers.

Illegitimate MBA degrees that may even be dangerous!

As some of you may have guessed, this is an IIPM alert!.

[All the text enhancements in this post are "inspired" by the institution's print ads]

Careers 360 has the goods on the real value of the BBA and MBA 'degrees' that IIPM students are eligible for.

Since a recent IIPM ad mentioned that these degrees are "from IMI, Europe!", Careers 360 wrote to the higher ed regulator in Belgium to get the inside scoop. And they've got it.

The essence of the letter [the Belgian regulator's response] is as follows:

1. The MBA/BBA degree given by IMI, Belgium is not recognised and hence not legitimate even in its country of origin, Belgium.

2. Students in Belgium using the title ‘Master’ or ‘Bachelor’ can even be prosecuted, if it is based on a degree given by IMI.

3. Using those titles (given by IMI, Belgium) without holding a legitimate degree is illegal in Belgium.

The gullibility of some MBA aspirants in India is truly shocking.

Webcast of a lecture by Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell in Bangalore

The lecture is on The How and Why of the World's Lowest Temperatures, and it's scheduled for 10:00 a.m. tomorrow (Feb 16, 2010). See this page for more info, and this page for signing up.

Here's an excerpt from the note I received from Simon Frantz, Senior Editor at NobelPrize.org:

... [W]e are involved with a regular series of lecture events in India that I hope you will be interested in. We have an educational partnership between Nobelprize.org and Honeywell, called the Honeywell-Nobel Initiative, which six times a year brings Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry to universities worldwide, where they interact with students through lectures, question and answer sessions and lab visits.

Two of these six events involve a Nobel Laureate visiting a university in India, and on the 16 and 17 February, the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Professor Eric Cornell, will visit the MSRIT campus at Visvesvaraya Technology University, Bangalore. A live webcast of Professor Cornell's lecture, entitled “The How and Why of the World's Lowest Temperatures,” will be broadcast on the event's dedicated website www.honeywellscience.com on 16 Feb at 10am.

We are keen that savvy online people with an interest in this area are aware of this lecture webcast, as any online viewer can submit a question directly to Professor Cornell in the Question and Answer session following his lecture (by emailing questions to question@honeywellscience.com or by posting them to the Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s orkut, facebook and twitter pages).