nanopolitan

Thermodynamics is like a parent!

2008-08-08T09:06:00.006+05:30

An old McSweeny's list compared different physical theories to women in a man's life. For example,

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

In a spirited response, Jennifer Oullette offers us -- "in the interests of fair play, the women should have their own version while we're having fun with the battle of the sexes." -- physical theories as men [Thanks to Guru for both the links]. Here's the same Newtonian gravity as a man:

0. Newtonian gravity is that guy you had a crush on in high school. You never really dated, but you spent a lot of time together, and once you even made out in the science lab after school over a partially dissected fetal pig. It didn't go well. Things were kinda awkward after that, but you remained friendly from a distance. Or so you thought. Years later, you find out he told everyone you were a frigid lesbian -- even though he was the one who wouldn't go past second base because he "respected" you too much. To paraphrase Whistler, the helpful demon from Buffy (Season 2): "Newtonian gravity is like dating a nun. You're never gonna get the good stuff." You suspect he may have been gay.

Both the pieces are fun and interesting, and all. But neither of them had anything to say about thermodynamics.

I was glad to see a few comments on Oullette's blog filling this crucial gap:

Tom: Thermodynamics is the guy you're never really into, who helps you move into a new apartment/dorm, even while you're dating Electrodynamics or Special Relativity. By the time Quantum comes along, he realizes it's hopeless.

Matt: Tom is too generous. Thermodynamics is your dad. [see also the Footnote]

Ouch!

* * *

But I think Matt is onto something. Like a good parent, thermo lays down very few laws. They are laws that can never be violated (Even Homer Simpson got it right when he said "In this house, we OBEY the LAWS of THERMODYNAMICS!"). And they are laws that are full of wonderful insights about all kinds of things, and make us see the connections among them.

* * *

Why am I posting this stuff? Well, I start teaching this subject today.

* * *

[Footnote] Here's Lab Lemming on who thermo is really like:

Thermo isn't your dad, it's your daughter.

Links ...

2008-08-03T21:58:00.002+05:30

A mini debate on Prof. M.S. Ananth's views on the need to reform the JEE: For and Against.

Olivia Judson: Feel the Eyes Upon You.

Seth Godin: Advice for Authors.

John Leland: Simulating Age 85, With Lessons on Offering Care.

Men's self esteem, body image, ...

2008-08-03T20:51:00.003+05:30

... and physical attributes. And one of the attributes of interest, unsurprisingly, is penis size! The world needs to know more about the strength of the causal chain running in the reverse direction, and Australian researchers are keen to help. But they need more volunteers, and have a site where volunteers can participate in the sudy: men.andmuchmore.com.

One of the instructions is pretty simple:

If possible, please have a tape measure ready. [Bold emphasis in the original]

Mirror

2008-08-02T19:00:00.004+05:30

Three links. First up, Mission Human Mirror by the great folks at Improv Everywhere.

Next, a great prank.

And finally, an article on the psychology of mirrors by Natalie Angier.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

When we look in the mirror, our relative beauty is not the only thing we misjudge. [...]

I found the first two links over at Crooked Timber.

At a glance: 2008 JEE results

2008-08-01T19:03:00.000+05:30

IIT-Roorkee has released a lot of data on JEE-2008. As we have seen earlier, the IITs use two filters before students are given a rank. The first filter gets rid of students who fall in the bottom quintile in *any* of the three subjects (math, physics, chemistry). The subject-wise cut-off marks are, respectively, 5, 0 and 3. Yes, you read it right: in physics, this cut-off is indeed zero.

The IITs have used a reduced cut-off for reserved categories. This concession is 10 percent for OBC candidates, and 40 percent for SC and ST candidates. Thus, for SC and ST candidates, the subject-wise cut-offs were at 3, 0, 1.8 marks in math, physics and chemistry, respectively.

The second filter simply picks the top N students using just one measure (this year, N=7903): the aggregate (or, the raw total of the marks in the three subjects). When multiple people end up with the same total, some procedure is used for breaking the tie. The details of this procedure does not interest me, so I won't go into it.

The cut-off in the aggregate score is 172. The reserved category students enjoyed a concession in the aggregate score as well; thus, the effective cut-offs for the OBC, SC and ST candidates were, respectively, 172, 104 and 104. The reason for the OBC cut-off being the same as the overall cut-off must be because of technicality, which I am yet to figure out. We will re-visit it later, if needed.

In another disclosure, IIT-R has revealed the aggregate scores for a bunch of uniformly spaced ranks. It has given this data for not only the common pool (for which the cut-off is 172), but also the OBC, SC and ST candidates. Let's see what these data look like; in the following plot, the aggregate score is on the horizontal axis, and the rank (in the respective lists) is on the vertical axis. Here's the plot:

Figure 1

The first thing that strikes you is the steep drop-off in the aggregate as you go up in ranks at the higher end. For example, the first five hundred ranks span a range of 146 (287 to 433), the remaining 7403 ranks span a range of just 107! The latter range works out to almost 70 students for each aggregate score between 172 and 287; In other words, there's a whole lot of tie-breaking the IITs would have indulged in from the 500th rank onwards!

Figure 1 is not particularly useful, because our reservation formula ensures that the x percent of the seats in each class (Institution-Department combination) is reserved for the beneficiaries. This means that the top 10 percent of the OBC students (for example) will be studying in the same classes as the top 10 percent of the common pool (and the next 10 percent in OBC will study with the next 10 percent in the common pool). It makes sense, therefore, to use a scaled rank on the vertical axis; thus, the rank in each category is divided by the total number of ranks in that category, so that each curve will end up at 1 at the top/left. Here's the scaled plot:

Figure 2

The striking thing in this figure is the closeness of the OBC curve with that of the common pool. I have to warn you, however, that the common pool includes the OBC candidates. Thus, the curves for the non-OBC general pool and the OBC pool are likely to be separated a little; I am confident that this difference is small, because both the curves end at an aggregate score of 172 (by definition), a cut-off that was used for both the groups.

Here's a second warning: The OBC students form about 14 percent of the common pool (1134 out of 7903). In the next couple of years, this fraction will have to be ramped up (theoretically, to at least 27 percent). If the full OBC reservation had been implemented this year, the additional OBC students would all have come with an aggregate of less than 172. I don't know what kind of cut-off the IITs would have employed for OBCs, but let's assume that they used a cut-off that selected 2000 OBC students. We can now re-plot the above figure and see what effect of a higher OBC reservation would looks like. Here it is:

Figure 3

[Caution: I need to warn you again that this figure is based on speculations about where the IITs might have drawn the line for the OBCs.]

Now, you can see the effect of reservation, which was absent in the second figure. You have the common pool, followed (to its left) by the OBCs, SCs and STs at a difference of about 30 marks, 80 marks and 80 marks, respecitively.

[Aside: One can perform this sort of an analysis for each subject, but that kind of disaggregated data has not been made public.]

Let's go back to the second figure. If we assume (and this is a BIG assumption) that JEE marks are a good predictor of a student's performance in IIT, some conclusions follow. Since the OBC and general pool curves are so close, an OBC student is not particularly at a disadvantage in choosing one of the 'highest' branches available to him / her. This is because the difference between his / her marks and those of his / her classmates are not likely to be terribly large (at least, this year).

Alas, the same cannot be said about SC and ST students. In particular, life would be extremely difficult for someone with a rank of SC 100 (whose aggregate of 167 is already below the common pool's cut-off) to compete against his / her classmates whose ranks are likely to be near 500 (for which the aggregate is 287). Such a student is better off by choosing a "lower" discipline where the students will have scores closer to his / her own.

To all those who complain ...

2008-08-01T09:08:00.003+05:30

... about how the eight new IITs have no teachers, no infrastructure and, heck, no campus: here's something that might interest you:

“I applied after seeing a small news item in The Hindu. My uncle recommended that I apply to this new institute rather than the more established CEG [College of Engineering], Guindy. My mother was so angry with him for sending me off to a jungle,” laughs S. Srinivasan.

The jungle was untouched in those days, with no buildings on campus ready for the first batch of students. “Back then, IIT existed in the minds of the planners and its physical presence was discerned in the borrowed classrooms of AC Tech,” said Mallik Putcha, writing in a campus paper a quarter of a century later. Students lived at the old Presidency College women’s hostel in Saidapet. “We used to cycle from there and cross the Adyar river by boat. I remember the ride used to cost us about 25 paise a week,” remembers R. Mahadevan.

Thanks to Yogesh for the e-mail alert.

* * *

Today, the IITs are to release a lot of information about this year's JEE. So there will be quite a few occasions during the rest of the week to comment on my least favorite entrance exam conducted by my favorite institutions.

I believe the stuff will go on display on IIT-R's JEE website (the site is not loading as of this writing). If you find anything of note (on that site or elsewhere), do please share it with us through comments here, or send me an e-mail.

Theses

2008-07-31T21:03:00.003+05:30

PhD Comics' perceptive take on what doctoral degrees are made of.

Link via Animesh.

IIT JEE: Calls for reform from within the system

2008-07-31T09:00:00.003+05:30

Wow. Just wow!

The director and the dean of IIT-Madras have called for radical changes in the JEE, saying that the coaching institutes were enabling many among the less-than-best students to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying.
"You may not be able to do away with the JEE but I am wondering if we should be conducting an examination for 3,00,00 aspirants and selecting just 5,000. Instead, we must evolve a system where only the top 1% of students from different state boards and CBSE are permitted to appear for the JEE," [Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-M] said.
"One of the reasons for the poor intake of girls in the flagship BTech programme is that parents don't send daughters for coaching classes. The best way to increase the intake of girls is to have direct admissions," [Prof. Idichandy, Dean of Student Affairs, IIT-M] said.
[Prof. Ananth] said, by attending the IIT coaching classes, students were learning a wrong lesson that the ends justify the means. "They (students) think there is nothing wrong in missing school to attend coaching. But the student does not realize his real loss."

Bravo! I am so glad to see the some IITs professors finally articulating the need to select students based on their own ideas of what an IIT education should be about, and of what an IIT student should be like. And I certainly applaud Prof. Idichandy for admitting the gross gender inequity that's built into the current JEE system.

Over the years, with their over-reliance on JEE (an exam that coaching centers have mastered how to game), the IITs had ceded control of their most important input to the coaching centers. It is time they took that control back. I hope the ideas from Prof. Ananth and Prof. Idichandy (and other such ideas from other institutions) will be debated vigorously, and I hope it will result in a saner admission process that's consistent with the IITs mandate and goals (as defined by themselves).

* * *

I can't resist throwing in my two-cents: I wish the IITs would go for a policy of using multiple inputs for selecting their students: an entrance exam (whose primary purpose is to standardize the curriculum/knowledge across our diverse education boards), makrs (or percentile scores) in board exams, achievements in State and National Olympiads in Math, Physics and Chemistry Olympiads. [Are there others?]

Ranking is an issue only because of the current fetish with a pecking order, which is used for allocating seats. This can be done away with, if the policy is changed to one in which students are assigned to individual departments at the end of the second (or, even better, third) semester, based on their performance after they get into the IITs.

* * *

At the end of the ToI article, Ashok Misra, Director, IIT-B, expresses his concerns about going for disruptive, big bang changes in admission procedures. If this is a concern, the IITs can try an experiment during the next two or three years in which, entry is guaranteed for all State level Olympiad medal winners, and also for students in the top x percentile (where x is in the range of 0.05 to 0.1) in each Board Exam. This should get about 1000 to 2000 students coming in through the non-JEE route. A rigorous study of these students' relative performance vis-a-vis the JEE entrants should yield metrics that can be used for determining the relative weights to be assigned to different measures of student achievement.

* * *

Thanks to Yogesh Upadhyaya for the e-mail alert.

WTF: The ASSOCHAM edition

2008-07-30T22:13:00.005+05:30

Enrollment of young girl’s in engineering institutions underwent a hefty rise in last 6 years, going to 125% in 2008 from 22% in 2002 as a new era of Knowledge Economy emerged in the period which motivated a larger number of female’s, having more inclination to acquiring engineering skills to survive and thrive in the era, according to the ASSOCHAM survey.

What? Women's enrollment in engineering colleges is 125 % now? 125 percent of what?

That's the opening paragraph of this press release from ASSOCHAM, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. Here's the Economic Times story.

Here's the bottomline: If you read the entire press release, you would find that the whole thing is as badly written as the quote above. Every bloody paragraph of it. If you want another example, take a look at this gem, right there in the second sentence:

The survey carried out under ages of the ASSOCHAM Social Development Foundation ... [Bold emphasis added]

Shame on you, ASSOCHAM! Can't you hire people to write a decent report / press release for you? Was your survey too as shabbily done as this press release clearly is?

Diploma mills in the US

2008-07-30T13:41:00.000+05:30

Four people bought seven degrees or certificates; 10 bought six degrees or certifcates; 22 bought five degrees or certificates; and 76 bought four.
Of the 9,612 purchasers, 826 bought at least one Ph.D. and 41 bought two doctorates.
Some of those doctorates were awarded in health-related fields, including at least two naturopathic doctorates, two doctorates in naturopathic medicine, one Ph.D. in medicine and one "medical" Ph.D. An Australian bought a Ph.D. in natural and nutritional sciences. A customer without a listed address bought a Ph.D. in molecular medicine. Another customer, also without an address listed in the database, bought a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine and epidemiology, and a Master of Science in veterinary clinical medicine.

More shocking details, including the names of some of the people who bought their degrees, are here.

Here's an India-China comparison: In the complete list of diploma buyers, six are from China. In contrast, I found over seventy five people from India (their real number, however, is likely smaller, because quite a few appear to have used different variations of their names).

Dark Knight

2008-07-29T17:58:00.003+05:30

Harini says it's "more than a Batman movie. It is cinema."

A Psychologist's View.

This film is really about the Joker. We're lured in to his world, where we learn what he's capable of and what he cares about—what motivates him. Learning more about him is like watching a car accident unfold, but worse and more frightening, because it feels like you might be hit next. Nolan's incarnation of the Joker, and Batman's reactions to him, seem so real that The Dark Knight doesn't feel like a superhero movie, but like a documentary on the emergence of a terrorist-cum-serial killer.

A Feminist's View.

Men are talking. They are making decisions, they are explaining the motivations of the characters, they are illuminating the world they live in by describing it. And this is because the world the men of The Dark Knight or Iron Man live in, far more than the one we live in, is a man's world, where all the important actors are men.

I do sooo look forward to seeing this movie...

Firefox tab-clearing time ...

2008-07-29T17:37:00.003+05:30

Links that have been living for a while in my browser tabs (or as starred posts in Google Reader):

Gulzar Natarajan: The case against lowering direct taxes in India.
Guru: How to read scientific papers; linked there is a post on cience schmience: How to make sense of a published study.
Kenneth Chang: The nature of glass remains anything but clear.
Fabio Rojas: Six questions to economists on rationality.
Kathy G: The Opt-Out Myth.
Google Blog: Googley Advice to Students: Major in Learning.
Shripriya: First women students at the Harvard Business School.

William Deresiewicz: The disadvantages of an elite education

2008-07-28T22:19:00.006+05:30

Here [Thanks to Prof. S. Arunachalam for the e-mail alert]. I didn't quite like the broad-brush generalizations (and I'm sure many Ivy League alumni are busy preparing a critique of this article), but some points do hit home. Here's one:

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.

Here's something about how uneven grade inflation has been in US universities:

There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

Writing

2008-07-28T21:38:00.004+05:30

Three pieces about the craft of writing that I enjoyed reading.

For college students: How to say nothing in five hundred words by Paul McHenry Roberts. Here's one of the examples for coloured words -- words loaded with associations:

Or consider the word intellectual. This would seem to be a complimentary term, but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality and general dopiness.

And this was written over forty or fifty years ago!

* * *

How to write with style by Kurt Vonnegut.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

* * *

Writing, Typing, Economics by John Kenneth Galbraith.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought. One can understand the resulting anger.[...]

Energy efficiency

2008-07-28T17:50:00.003+05:30

Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.

Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.

That's from Joseph Romm at Salon.com [via Olive Ridley]. In a section about efficiency improvements in energy usage, Romm makes the following point (with a pretty amazing example):

Serious energy efficiency is not a one-shot resource, where you pick the low-hanging fruit and you're done. In fact, the fruit grows back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more people.

The best corporate example is Dow Chemical's Louisiana division, consisting of more than 20 plants. In 1982, the division's energy manager, Ken Nelson, began a yearly contest to identify and fund energy-saving projects. ...

The first year of the contest had 27 winners requiring a total capital investment of $1.7 million with an average annual return on investment of 173 percent. Many at Dow felt that there couldn't be others with such high returns. The skeptics were wrong. The 1983 contest had 32 winners requiring a total capital investment of $2.2 million and a 340 percent return -- a savings of $7.5 million in the first year and every year after that. Even as fuel prices declined in the mid-1980s, the savings kept growing. The average return to the 1989 contest was the highest ever, an astounding 470 percent in 1989 -- a payback of 11 weeks that saved the company $37 million a year. [...]

An obligatory post about what I had for lunch today

2008-07-28T17:33:00.003+05:30

A simple -- and simply fabulous -- meal at the Iyer Mess. After more than a year.

While the drumstick sambhar was great, the pachchadi and the poriyal were okay; but the rasam -- the Rasam! -- was truly sublime.

That near-religious experience cost me just 22 rupees.

The rise and rise of Obama

2008-07-27T19:11:00.007+05:30

Following Ta-Nehisi Coates's strong recommendation, I just finished reading Ryan Lizza's article on Barack Obama's political career during the decade before he became a star on the national stage (with his fantastic Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and his election to the Senate later in the same year).

Lizza's account is rich with events and anecdotes that keep driving it (almost relentlessly) towards these broad conclusions about the candidate:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war. Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Of spherical bastards and asymmetric assholes

2008-07-26T13:33:00.003+05:30

Read Julianne Dalcanton's post for the details. I like this definition of spherical bastards:

... they [are] bastards any way you [look] at them.

Faith and pride

2008-07-26T10:21:00.003+05:30

This is way too funny:

All six SP rebels voted against the government. Though there were doubts about which way Ateeq Ahmed and Afzal Ansari would vote, SP general secretary Amar Singh was confident that they would toe the Congress line at least. In fact, the two were brought from jail for the vote.

And this too:

Mr. Amar Singh said while BJP workers attacked the homes of their MPs who cross-voted, “the SP had not engaged in such activity although the BJP routinely describes us as a party of goons.”

This just in: there is no gender gap in math among US school students

2008-07-25T13:43:00.001+05:30

Update: Here are the press releases from UC-Berkeley and Wisconsin-Madison. Also, check out the Knight Science Journalism Tracker with lots of links to newspaper stories. [Original post follows ...]

First, the big news of the day from the US: A team led by Janet Hyde (psychologist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison) has a paper in Science (likely pay-walled) that examined the latest data on the performance of boys and girls from grades 2 to 11 in standardized math tests.

Their conclusion is summarized in the headline of the accompanying Science news story: Girls = Boys in Math. Here's an excerpt from the paper itself:

Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis (19). There is evidence of slightly greater male variability in scores, although the causes remain unexplained. Gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some STEM fields.

[Here's a recent post by Daisy Grewal on the Gender Similarities Model]

The authors have quite a few other interesting things to say; they are covered in this NYTimes story by Tamar Lewin.

* * *

Over three weeks ago, Slate ran a series of articles by Amanda Schaffer titled The Sex Difference Evangelists: Unpacking the Science of Sex Difference. The entire series is a must read; here's a short extract:

... if history is any guide, today's gender breakdowns are likely to keep changing. What's so magical, after all, about the current numbers? A few decades ago, most biology and math majors were men. So were most doctors. Now math undergraduate majors split close to 50/50. In 1976, only 8 percent of Ph.D.s in biology went to women; by 2004, 44 percent did. Today, half of M.D.s go to women. Even in engineering, physics, chemistry, and math, the number of women receiving doctorates tripled or quadrupled between 1976 and 2001. Why assume that we have just now reached some natural limit?

* * *

On a related note, let me also point you to this article by Mary Hatcher-Skeers on the situation of women in chemistry:

... [W]hen [our women chemistry graduates] go on to graduate school, the reception isn’t always a warm one. Nationally, nearly 50 percent of chemistry undergraduates are women, but it’s nowhere near that percentage when it comes to gender equity in Ph.D. programs or in academic careers. And the reason for the falloff continues to be gender discrimination.

We have had a number of women chemistry majors, from each of our participating colleges (Scripps, Pitzer and Claremont McKenna), go on to graduate school and be quite successful, but they often remark that the transition is difficult. A few years ago, one of my Scripps students enrolled in a Ph.D. program in chemistry but had trouble finding a research lab that would take her. I remember her words when she informed me of her decision to leave with a master’s degree: “You never told me that in science, men assume I’m stupid.”

* * *

Which leads me to FSP's post about "obnoxious questions commonly asked of Female Science Professors" and some of the possible answers to them.

Links ...

2008-07-24T21:34:00.002+05:30

Yogesh Upadhyaya: IIT-JEE - The Untold Story. Covers the history of this examination; and has a short quote from yours truly (from this post).

Seema Singh: Scientists' love-hate relationship with media.

Via Chris Blattman, "a Chinese government poster informing citizens people of eight things they should not ask foreigners."

Kieran Healy: Standard Model of Sociophysics.

Female Science Professor: What an insult.

Poaching as a strategy to fight faculty crunch at IITs?

2008-07-23T21:02:00.006+05:30

Whenever the topic turns to the creation of new institutions -- be they IITs or Central Universities -- you get people expressing this concern: "But where will they get their faculty from?" The latest to join this grumpy and not-so-gruntled group is Pankaj Jalote. The picture he paints is pretty grim indeed.

... As a PhD is necessary for a faculty position in an IIT, we ... need about 500 fresh PhDs in engineering every year to provide the faculty for the IITs.

Let us look at the supply side. An IIT produces about 100 PhDs a year in engineering, which means a total of about 600 PhDs are being produced by the top institutes every year. More than half of these will join lucrative careers in industry or go overseas (the actual percentage is likely to be higher). Of the remaining, many will not be acceptable to IITs for faculty positions (as not only a PhD is required, the quality of work and past education record also must be good.) So, even after stretching the limits, there will be less than 100 suitable candidates available for these 600 faculty positions!

Clearly, the problem is not solvable by resources within the country. There is, however, a large pool of PhDs in the US (and elsewhere) of Indian origin. According to one report, the number of Indians who got PhDs in the US in computer science (CS) in a year was 275 (out of about 1,000), which, incidentally, is about 10 times the number of PhDs produced in India in CS. The number of PhDs in other disciplines would be of similar order — according to a NSF report about 1,500 Indians were awarded PhD in science and technology in 2006. If we consider the graduates of the last few years, a thousand-strong pool of Indian PhDs exists in the US in each discipline.

It is this pool of resource that is our only visible hope for meeting the faculty crunch — if only we can attract some of them back.

I agree with much of what he says, and I certainly don't want to downplay the challenge that the IITs face. All I want to say here is that the pool of candidates is far larger than fresh PhDs, and it's not clear why Jalote doesn't want to consider the other options in this bigger pool.

Who are these "other options"? Professors at other colleges and researchers in our research labs.

The IITs may want to pluck them from their current places, but why would they want to move to IITs? There are many reasons, but the bootomline is that the IITs are still the best bet in India for folks interested in teaching and research. To begin with, IITs enjoy enormous prestige and respect. They offer a great deal of autonomy. They offer a research environment -- infrastructure, research grants, travel money -- that people at other institutions can only envy from afar. They offer access to some of the best student talent India has to offer. And, salaries are much better at the IITs than at research labs, NITs and universities!

In most disciplines (except perhaps computer science and allied fields), India's vast system of research labs -- CSIR, Defence, Atomic Energy and Space -- employ a huge number of researchers. Similarly, the NITs and university engineering colleges also have a fairly large number of faculty members. Granted, not all of them are going to be of great interest to the IITs (and not all of them may even want to move to the IITs), but given the advantages of moving to the IITs, they should be able to attract some of the more successful professors and researchers from these places.

Are there examples of high-profile institutions that have poached from our research labs and universities? IISERs. I know of a few people who have moved to IISERs from research labs and universities. [If you have some statistics, please share them -- either through comments or by e-mail. ]

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However, there is a cost to this kind of poaching: it will shift the HR challenge to the other institutions and research labs. They will have to find ways of becoming attractive destinations for promising faculty members and researchers. This task, however, is not easy because many of them carry the burden of their past in terms of hierarchical organizational structure (and mindset), poor infrastructure (not applicable for labs belonging to the strategic sectors), and a salary structure that puts them at a disadvantage.

Let me admit (once again) that the challenge posed by the faculty shortage is a big one. However, my (somewhat) limited point is this: because they can resort to poaching as a part of their faculty development strategy, IITs enjoy a huge advantage over the other institutions in facing (and overcoming) this challenge.

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BTW, poaching is available as a HR strategy to NITs and Central Universities as well; they certainly are better places to work at than are many of our State Universities and Colleges. I'm not so sure about whether they offer any advantage to people in our research labs, though.

When you donate 5 million dollars to your alma mater ...

2008-07-20T12:14:00.004+05:30

... you get to be called an "old boy" by ToI and its reporter who, in this case, is Hemali Chhapia.

It's really appalling that they applied this description for someone -- Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, an IIT-B alumnus and founder of the Symphony Group -- who graduated way back in 1969!

And, no, it's not a quote from someone else (if it was, the report should have mentioned it clearly); it's right there in the opening paragraph.

The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) has received one of its largest private donations from an old boy in New York.

At an alumni gathering in the Big Apple, Romesh Wadhwani, founder of the Symphony Group, gifted his alma mater a purse of $5 million (about Rs 22 crore) to set up a research centre in the area of bio-sciences.

"The lab will work in the area of research in bio-sciences and bio-engineering," IIT-B director Ashok Misra t old TOI from New York. Details of the centre's focus areas will be worked out after discussions between Wadhwani and the bio-sciences faculty.

IIT-B deputy director Juzer Vasi said the centre would work closely with the six-year-old bio-sciences school on the campus.

xkcd's version of the Sokal affair

2008-07-19T09:28:00.003+05:30

Here. (Here's the Wikipedia entry on the Sokal affair).

While on xkcd, here's a good one on how age affects mathematical ability.

BTW, have you checked out the xkcd cartoons on purity of scientific fields, and Mark Pilgrim's response to it?

Jeffrey Frankel's version of "There are no atheists in foxholes"

2008-07-18T13:37:00.001+05:30

He comes up with a good one:

There are no libertarians in financial crises.

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Here's an example from sometime ago.