A Video of The Führer as a Young Student

At TIFR, getting angry at its hostel situation. Along the way, we get stuff like, "Why the hell are all the girls in Biology?"

Watch (it's likely to be taken down soon; get there quick!):

Hat tip to Bela Desai via Buzz.

Links ...

1. The Vipul Bhrigu case: Brendan Maher at Nature Blogs has an update: Lab sabotage deemed research misconduct (with exclusive surveillance video). The video is quite creepy. See also: the ORI Blog.

2. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: Best Rejection Letter Ever.

3. Curtis Brainard at The Observatory has a post on National Geographic Taking the Wheel at Scienceblogs.com. It also has a summary of the early history of Scienceblogs.com, recounted in tweets by Christopher Mims.

4. Finally, Tupper's Self-Referential Formula. Pretty cool! [Thanks to Dilip D'Souza for the e-mail alert].

Great Scientist

Sometime ago, a scientist -- let's call him Prof. X -- was chosen for the directorship of a premier institution. Since he was rather unknown at that time, this announcement generated quite a stir -- especially among those outside his field.

People were itching to know more about Prof. X, his scientific credentials, his claim to fame. They approached a colleague who works in the same field as Prof. X.

"What is Prof. X like?", they asked their colleague. "Tell us, is he a good scientist?"

"I don't know if he is a good scientist," said the colleague. After a short pause, he added, "But he's now a great scientist!"

Links ...

1. Juliana Chan of Asian Scientist interviews Prominent Indian Blogger, IIT Professor Arunn Narasimhan. Arunn offers his opinion on a bunch of things, including healthcare in India and, of course, the IITs.

2. German political elite behaving badly? "The Whiff of Plagiarism Again Hits German Elite," reports the New York Times.

3. The State universities in the US are facing serious cuts in funding. How serious? Check out this report. [I thank Vikram for the e-mail pointer.]

4. Natalia Cecire in Arcade: How Public Like a Frog: On Academic Blogging.

New York Magazine Profiles Krugman

Awesome profile by Benjamin Wallace-Wells: What's Left of the Left: Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade. Here's an excerpt:

Paul Krugman is a lonely man. That he is comfortable in his solitude, that he emphasizes its virtues, that his intelligence gives it a poetic gloss, none of this diminishes the poignancy of his isolation. Krugman grew up an only child and is deeply self-conscious. He will list his shortcomings as though he’d been preparing for the chance: “Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals.” He is married but has no children nor—rare for a Nobelist—many protégés. When I asked him if there were any friends of his I could talk to in order to understand him better, he hesitated, then said, “That’s going to be hard.” One colleague at Princeton, where Krugman has taught since 2000, says the economist will avert his eyes when circumstance places the two of them alone in an elevator, his nose stuck in the corner, so as to avoid conversation. Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, an academic economist herself, was recently reading the Ian McEwan novel Solar, whose protagonist is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has been married five times, and she found the scenario implausible. “You could never win the Nobel Prize with that kind of personal life,” she says. “It’s too distracting.”

For another profile (equally awesome) with a different emphasis, try this one at the New Yorker from a year ago.

Review of "Good Faith Collaboration -- The Culture of Wikipedia"

Current Science carries my review of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle, Jr.

... disputes are typically aired in the ‘Talk’ pages of each article, discussion areas where views are expressed vigorously, and countered equally vigorously. Consider, for example, the article on Indian National Congress. Its Talk page throbs with dissent and debate over many contentious issues, including one about whether today’s Congress party is even the same as the one that existed before Independence! From Babri mosque to the Tata group’s car factory in Singur, West Bengal, Talk pages are full of disagreement over whether the articles conform to NPOV [Neutral Point Of View]. While they may resemble a battleground, Talk pages are surprisingly free of landmines; name-calling is rare, for example. This is because the participants are encouraged to keep their focus firmly on enhancing the quality of the articles they are working on, with the result that discussions rarely become dysfunctional. Much of this happy outcome is attributable to a second set of norms which asks Wikipedians to ‘be polite, assume good faith, avoid personal attacks, and be welcoming’.

NYU at Abu Dhabi

NYTimes has a story on the UAE operations of the New York University at Abu Dhabi. The academic program has started, and it has 150 students and 45 faculty. Operations will move to a new campus in three years, and student strength will grow to about 2200 in ten years. What caught my attention, however, is the financing of NYU's "outpost" in the Middle East -- and this is worth keeping in mind when the business papers peddle stories about how top universities are keen to start a branch campus in India.

The financing of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi is noteworthy. The college is being entirely paid for by Abu Dhabi, the largest and richest of the United Arab Emirates, which has so far provided generously, including financial aid for many students and a promise to build a sprawling campus on nearby Saadiyat Island, where branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums are under construction. [...]

“There is a lot of money sloshing around, and that has helped recruit faculty support,” he says. A faculty member could expect to earn a large bonus — in some cases the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s salary, Mr. Ross says — and “on top of that there are first-class tickets to go over there, your family can go with you, your children can go to private schools for free.”

Officials won’t say what kind of deal they have with the royal family, which gave N.Y.U. $50 million before the project ever got off the ground. Beyond that, Mr. Sexton will say only that a yearly budget is discussed (he says he has never been “disappointed”) and a 10-year plan exists. The new campus is supposed to open in 2014.

PhD Perspectives

1. Saee Keskar: Milestones:

   As a PhD student, you are used to your (evasive) milestones. However, there are a number of philosophical milestones that you need to cross in order to truly deserve your PhD. I am going to list some of those here ...

   Her list of milestones ends with this most appropriate quote from Saint Calvin:

   That's one of the remarkable things about life. It is never so bad that it cannot get worse.

2. Sunshine: Interest and Attitude:

   ... That innovative spark of an idea I got 4 months ago was a brief moment of eureka. But in order to materialize that innovative idea into a tangible research product or publication, I have to go through all these mundane things I just discussed. I need the tools to help me think in the right way, for which I take classes and often piggyback on my advisor’s knowledge base. Sustaining this and still remaining focused has nothing to do with interest. It is all about the attitude to work hard. Ph.D. needs interest as a trigger, as a starting point, as much as that match that lights the fire. But attitude is that oxygen that sustains the fire through years.

3. John Regehr at Embedded in Academia: How Much and What to Read:

   Grad students often aren’t quite sure how much of their work time should be spent reading, and may also have trouble figuring out what to read during that time. (In principle this problem also applies to professors, but it’s not much of an issue in practice since we have almost no time for discretionary reading.) I usually tell people to err on the side of doing too much, as opposed to reading too much. Averaging one day a week on reading is probably about right, but it may be a lot higher or lower than this during certain periods of grad school.

4. DrugMonkey on A Personal View on Qualification for the PhD:

   I have two things I'd like to see a person accomplish in a doctoral program:

   1. Reading so deeply and critically into the literature of sub-sub-topic X that they are not only the world's expert in that topic at this point in time but that they realize that they are the world's expert.

   2. Being able to approach any and all new papers in the literature with the ability to simultaneously maintain the thoughts that "this is all total bullshit" and "this is the awesomez!" with mental citation ticking to justify each position.

   Once you are there, you deserve the PhD.

5. Finally, Bashir has a quick metaphor regarding the dissertation defence: Parole hearing! (You have to go there to read the rest! :-)

Internet Meme of the Day: Algorithmic Pricing

An amusing episode from Michael Eisen: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies [via James Fallows, Chris Blattman, and many others):

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly ... The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

More precisely, the two new books were on offer for $1,730,045.91 and $2,198,177.95. When he checked the next day, Eisen found that the prices had increased further. Intrigued, he kept checking everyday, and found that the two sellers kept hiking the price on a daily basis, until it went all the way up to over 23 million dollars!

As I amusedly watched the price rise every day, I learned that Amazon retailers are increasingly using algorithmic pricing (something Amazon itself does on a large scale), with a number of companies offering pricing algorithms/services to retailers. Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced. But the two retailers were clearly employing different strategies.

Links ...

1. Paul Krugman: Patients Are Not Consumers. How and why health care economics goes beyond demand and supply. On his blog, he says he's channeling Kenneth Arrow's classic work. See also: this precursor blog post which has this memorable line:

   There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

2. Dan Ariely in Scientific American: How Self Control Works. "It's a skill, we are learning, that profoundly shapes lives. How does it work? Where does it come from?"

3. Terry Eagleton in CHE: In Praise of Marx. "The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition."

4. Benedict Carey in NYTimes: The Psychology of Cheating:

   “Cheating is especially easy to justify when you frame situations to cast yourself as a victim of some kind of unfairness,” said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the use of prescription drugs to improve intellectual performance. “Then it becomes a matter of evening the score; you’re not cheating, you’re restoring fairness.”

Nature on the Future of the PhD

Sidebar

The Special Section's launch page has links to all the articles -- most are free, but a couple of them are paywalled.

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The Nature editorial is blunt: Fix the PhD. After pointing out that the perceived problems with the PhD programs are different in different countries and disciplines, it takes the example of biomedical sciences (presumably in countries like the US and Japan):

... Exceptionally bright science PhD holders from elite academic institutions are slogging through five or ten years of poorly paid postdoctoral studies, slowly becoming disillusioned by the ruthless and often fruitless fight for a permanent academic position. That is because increased government research funding from the US National Institutes of Health and Japan's science and education ministry has driven expansion of doctoral and postdoctoral education — without giving enough thought to how the labour market will accommodate those who emerge. The system is driven by the supply of research funding, not the demand of the job market.

A little later, it gets to the core of the problem: oversupply caused by the wrong kind of incentives at the university level:

Something needs to change — but what? Ideally, the system would produce high-quality PhD holders well matched to the attractive careers on offer. Yet many academics are reluctant to rock the boat as long as they are rewarded with grants (which pay for cheap PhD students) and publications (produced by their cheap PhD students). So are universities, which often receive government subsidies to fill their PhD spots.

The lead article has a section on Japan, where the situation is so absurd that the government offers subsidies to companies that hire (unemployed) PhDs!

Academia doesn't want [the PhD holders]: the number of 18-year-olds entering higher education has been dropping, so universities don't need the staff. Neither does Japanese industry, which has traditionally preferred young, fresh bachelor's graduates who can be trained on the job. The science and education ministry couldn't even sell them off when, in 2009, it started offering companies around ¥4 million (US$47,000) each to take on some of the country's 18,000 unemployed postdoctoral students (one of several initiatives that have been introduced to improve the situation).

This article also has a section on India:

India: PhDs wanted

In 2004, India produced around 5,900 science, technology and engineering PhDs, a figure that has now grown to some 8,900 a year. This is still a fraction of the number from China and the United States, and the country wants many more, to match the explosive growth of its economy and population. The government is making major investments in research and higher education — including a one-third increase in the higher-education budget in 2011–12 — and is trying to attract investment from foreign universities. The hope is that up to 20,000 PhDs will graduate each year by 2020, says Thirumalachari Ramasami, the Indian government's head of science and technology.

Those targets ought to be easy to reach: India's population is young, and undergraduate education is booming (see Nature 472, 24–26; 2011). But there is little incentive to continue into a lengthy PhD programme, and only around 1% of undergraduates currently do so. Most are intent on securing jobs in industry, which require only an undergraduate degree and are much more lucrative than the public-sector academic and research jobs that need postgraduate education. Students "don't think of PhDs now, not even master's — a bachelor's is good enough to get a job", says Amit Patra, an engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.

Even after a PhD, there are few academic opportunities in India, and better-paid industry jobs are the major draw. "There is a shortage of PhDs and we have to compete with industry for that resource — the universities have very little chance of winning that game," says Patra. For many young people intent on postgraduate education, the goal is frequently to go to the United States or Europe. That was the course chosen by Manu Prakash, who went to MIT for his PhD and now runs his own experimental biophysics lab at Stanford University in California. "When I went through the system in India, the platform for doing long-term research I didn't feel was well-supported," he says.

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Thanks for the pointer go to Ravi Prasad Aduri (e-mail) and Ankur Kulkarni (Buzz).

Katie Makkai on "Pretty"

Hat tip: Lisa Wade at Sociological Images.

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If the embed didn't work, here's the YouTube Link.

Journal Editors Behaving Badly

They get guest editors for a special issue. All the papers have been posted on the journal's website. At this stage, can the editors ask (some of) the authors to revise their papers -- without consulting the guest editors? Can they then insert in the print edition a note that undermines the credibility of the papers, their authors, and the guest editors?

All these curious events have led some philosophers to urge their colleagues to boycott Synthese, the journal in question.

Here are some links:

1. Inside Higher Ed has an extended account of this sorry episode.

2. John Wilkins. Update 1. Update 2. Links to other commentary.

3. Brian Leiter. Update.

Unsuck It

Just go check out Unsuck It, a website that "unsucks" corporate jargon -- i.e., translates it into plain English. Examples: boilerplate, At [company X], we take [Y] seriously, or Skull session.

Hat tip to Christopher Shea and Eileen Reynolds.

"Certified Genius" Scott Adams's Secret Online Avatar

Adrian Chen reports [via Scott Lemieux]:

Scott Adams, creator of the great comic strip Dilbert, is sort of a prick. He is a horrible boss, and recently penned a charming misogynist rant comparing women to children begging for candy. Now we learn he likes to bash critics on message boards under a pseudonym.

He now joins Sockpuppetry's Notable public examples.