This is your brain on internet

Wired has excerpts from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, the man behind the very viral "Is Google making us stupid?" meme.

I'm a great admirer of people who can come up with vivid analogies to explain stuff. In this particular case, the 'stuff' is not all that difficult, but still, Carr has a pretty neat analogy to explain the feeding of long-term memory, and how the intertubes derail that process:

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom.

On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. [...]

Links

1. Ten Days in a Carry-On: A slide-show of a demonstration by Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, of "how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on".

2. Anthony Grafton in NYRB: Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.

3. Jennifer Hunt in VoxEU: Why Do Women Leave Science and Engineering?

   American women leave science and engineering at a higher frequency than men. This column suggests that the gender gap is explained by women’s relative dissatisfaction with pay and promotion opportunities. This gap is correlated with a high share of men in the industry. Remedies should therefore focus on such fields with a high share of male workers.

4. Robert Gottlieb in NYRB: Who Was Charles Dickens?

JEE-2010: How well did the OBCs do?

Not very well, seems to be the verdict. Even though 2,357 of them qualified, that number is 210 short of 2,567 seats (27% of 9,509 seats overall) reserved for them. Thus, those extra seats will now go to the general category.

This year marks the third and final stage of OBC reservation -- bringing the total to the full 27%. The quota policy at IITs doesn't work like it does in other institutions: IITs use a cut-off for the reserved categories: for OBC candidates, it's 10% less than the general category cut-off, and for SC and ST, it's 50%.

It turns out that 11.3% (or, 1,489) of the students in the Common Merit List are from OBC -- these are the students who did not need the relaxation in the cut-off. This figure was close to 14 % (~1400) last year.

The share of OBCs among the JEE-qualified candidates (13,104) stands at just under 18%, less than the 2009 figure of 19%.

This is roughly in line with what I said last year:

Out of 1930 students who make it to the OBC list, about 1400 would have made it to the common list without needing a relaxed cut-off. In other words, 14% of the available seats would have gone to the OBC students anyway; this figure was the same last year [2008] too. Thus, a relaxation of 10% in the cut-off marks (both at the subject level and in the aggregate) gets OBCs only an additional 500 seats (or, 5% additional seats).

And here's the thing: the IITs will probably keep this relaxation in cut-off marks at 10%. If the ratio (10% relaxation to 5% additional OBC seats) holds, this would imply that OBCs' share of IIT seats will settle at about 19-20%, and that this share can go up only if the OBCs get into the common pool in greater numbers. [Bold emphasis added].

In the event, OBCs have a smaller share of the common pool this year; as a consequence, they have been unable to fill the seats reserved for them.

JEE-2010

Some quick comments. First, some groups that have done extremely well to reach major milestones:

1. SC Students have managed to fill all the seats (and then some) reserved for them. For the first time.

2. Andhra Pradesh: First and second rankers are from AP, which is also the home of seven among the top ten. The state has scored in other ways too:

   Students from the state also scored well in the reserved category. In the OBC category , AP bagged seven out of the top 15 ranks. Among all reserved categories, including SC, ST, OBC and Physically Handicapped (PH), the state secured over 50 ranks in the top 200.

   Officials from IIT-Madras said that students from AP already account for 21 per cent of the total strength in IITs.

   [Be careful with that ToI report, though: it has howlers like, "An estimated 30 per cent of the 50,000 students who wrote the exam from the state cleared the test this year." If these numbers are correct, AP alone would account for 15,000 of the 13,104 ranks!]

3. Hindi speakers: The number of JEE rankers who took the exam in Hindi tripled to 554 from 184 last year -- despite the problems that plagued the Hindi paper this year. [See items 2 and 3 in the corrective steps taken by the IITs].

Some other interesting bits:

1. JEE-2010 was taken by 4,55,571 students, up 18% from JEE-2009's 3,84,977.

2. The number of JEE-qualified candidates has gone up 30% to 13,104 from 10,048.

   [Not all of them can demand a seat at an IIT (or JEE affiliates), however. The number of IIT seats is only 9,509 this year.]

3. This year, 1476 girls have qualified, an increase of over 40 percent over last year's 1048. Girls' share in the exam takers also increased 15% from 98,028 to 1,13,127, and Their success rate went up from 1.06% to 1.3 %. So, this is a clear gain for girls.

4. Akansha Sarda is the topper among girls -- with a rank of 18. She's not joining an IIT, however; she's going to MIT.

5. Sahal Kaushik of Delhi at No. 33 is just 14 years old, and home-schooled. And, what does he want to study? "I want to study pure science, physics or mathematics, not engineering. ... I took the JEE because I could also get science courses through it."

6. Anand Kumar's Super 30 achieves 100% success -- for the third time in a row. [An ally-turned-rival has raised some questions about this institution's record, however.]

Links ...

1. Nishith Prakash at VoxEU: It pays to speak English: English skills raise wages for some, not all, in India.

2. Jonah Lehrer in The Guardian: Why We Travel, on the cognitive benefits of travel.

3. Mark Abrahams in The Guardian: Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om [via Ludwig]

4. Suvrat Kher at Rapid Uplift: Computers And Sexism In 1920's Harvard.

HRD Minister Kapil Sibal is planning a US visit

During the visit he will try to convince American universities to come to India and lure IIT professors into betraying their country.

Graduation

1. Gwen at Sociological Images: Sex, College Degrees, and Campus Equity.

2. Lisa at Sociological Images: Matt Groening on Graduate School.

3. A YouTube video: Dr. Sheldon Cooper gives an "inspiring" speech to graduate students at a physics department.

4. John Wilkins's advice on Accepting/Rejecting a Job Offer [Hat tip: Ross McKenzie].

Onion's take on NYTimes's take on the latest in social networking

Hilarious:

New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It
Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit

NEW YORK—While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

[Snip, snip, snip]

Here's the fucking link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/technology/internet/19foursquare.html?_r=1.

If you are a well paid professional in an Indian IT firm ...

If you’re a well-paid professional in an Indian IT services firm, your freedom is limited.

• You clock-in and clock-out.

• You’re searched on your way in and out.

• You need your boss’s permission to leave.

• You work on what you’ve been told to work on.

• You cannot be trusted to freely access the Internet.

That's from S. Anand's You Are In Prison.

Mental Health Break: The Case of Disappearing Teaspoons

This paper in the British Medical Journal.

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute

Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom.

Design Longitudinal cohort study.

Setting Research institute employing about 140 people.

Subjects 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months.

Main outcome measures Incidence of teaspoon loss per 100 teaspoon years and teaspoon half life.

Results 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days). The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons' value. The incidence of teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years. At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons.

Conclusions The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened.

Hat tip: Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber.

Kapil Sibal's test for patriotism

In a speech at an "education conference", he "sought to dispel fears about IIT faculties joining foreign institutes after they set shop here." This is what he said:

I know my faculty is patriotic and passionate about India and I know my faculty will not sell their conscience for a little bit of money. [Source].

This is sick. Horribly, totally sick.

That's all.

One Year of UPA-II: Kapil Sibal's Record

Pramath Raj Sinha in Mint: UPA's Man On A Mission To Transform Education:

The most far-reaching reforms are being attempted in higher education. Sibal envisions that India’s abysmal 12% gross enrolment ratio may be taken to a respectable 30% by 2020. Some 1,500 universities will be required for the task, and for its own part, the Centre is planning to start 16 Central universities, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology and seven new Indian Institutes of Management while 14 innovation universities have been proposed. And to catalyse this rapid growth and encourage well-meaning private players, he is also attempting a bold regulatory regime.

The proposed National Council for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) will do away with the current University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education. Reports suggest that both legal and medical higher education will be brought under NCHER, removing them from the aegis of the Bar Council of India and the Medical Council of India. Complementing NCHER, there will be a National Accreditation Regulatory Authority for higher educational institutions—the associated Bill was just tabled in Parliament.

Once enacted, it will mandate institutions of higher education to obtain accreditation from an approved agency, potentially ensuring a pan-India global standard. Presently, accreditation is voluntary. As a result, fewer than one-fifth of colleges and fewer than one-third of universities apply. In addition, the ministry of human resource development is also looking at creating an Education Finance Corporation, with a corpus of Rs20,000 crore, to provide aid to projects and loans to students.

Links

1. Great T-Shirt! [Via Aaron Cohen]

2. Martha Nussbaum's Commencement Address at Colgate University: Not For Profit: Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship

3. David Glenn in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Carol Dweck's Attitude: It's not about how smart you are.

Links

1. Let's start with a cartoon about an insomniac programmer (Abstruse Goose).

2. IIM-K becomes the first IIM to breach the 30 percent barrier for women in an MBA class. Its class of 2012 has 100 women and 200 men.

3. T. Vasu Babu: One Night @IISc. Spooky!

4. Delhi University enters the 21st century -- but only selectively -- by introducing the semester system for its science courses.

5. In a move similar to the one it took when scandal and fraud hit Satyam, the Government of India has effectively taken over the Medical Council of India.

6. Let's end with a cartoon on successful blogging (xkcd).

Sweeteners

Using information unearthed under the RTI Act, The Telegraph's Charu Sudan Kasturi has been digging into IIMs' choice of Prometric for conducting the glitches-galore CAT-2009:

1. Immunity clause for IIM test provider

2. Out: IIM doubts on inexperienced Prometric

3. Sweetener in IIM pact

The picture that emerges is not pretty. I just want to highlight this from the third article:

Global testing service provider Prometric sweetened its bid proposal to the IIMs for the contract to computerise CAT with an offer to support a research chair — a matter unrelated to the examination.

The firm, which won the contract to conduct the computerised CAT for five years, made the offer in its final proposal to the IIMs, which swung the deal for Prometric and away from three other contenders.

The research chair at the IIMs would be named after Prometric and its parent firm, the US-based Educational Testing Services, says the firm’s proposal, accessed by The Telegraph from the B-schools through the Right to Information Act.

On the topic of sweeteners, here's a post about those offered by a textbook publisher to an American professor teaching a large class.