nanopolitan

Quote of the Day:

2012-01-28T15:55:00.002+05:30

We Hindus may believe in an infinity of lifetimes, but we maximize our welfare in this one, just like everyone else.
-- Jagdish Bhagwati: The Brain Drain Panic Returns.

The article is more about the perceived problem of brain drain from Africa, but this quote is from a paragraph on what our academic parents and grand parents endured in India:

In India in the 1950’s and 1960’s – a time when many professionals were emigrating – working conditions were deplorable. Bureaucrats decided whether we could go abroad for conferences. Heads of departments carried inordinate power. So, no surprise, many of us left. We Hindus may believe in an infinity of lifetimes, but we maximize our welfare in this one, just like everyone else.

Incorrect Answers

2012-01-26T13:37:00.001+05:30

Scott Dalrymple has a Gotcha Test for Aspiring Deans which is a lot of fun -- try it even if you don't have any deanly aspirations.

A sample:

2. As dean, do you plan to maintain an active research agenda?

□ YES -> Incorrect. You know you have to work summers, right? Besides, we need you to keep the trains running, not write about the epistemology of postcolonial fruit flies or whatever.

□ NO -> Incorrect. Have you no intellectual curiosity? How can you possibly oversee research faculty? They'll never respect you.

"Notes from a Dragon Mom"

2012-01-25T22:21:00.000+05:30

A very, very moving piece by Emily Rapp on parenting a child who she knows will likely die before his third birthday.

The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

[...]

I would walk through a tunnel of fire if it would save my son. I would take my chances on a stripped battlefield with a sling and a rock à la David and Goliath if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go.

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. [...]

HHMI International Awards

2012-01-25T17:43:00.001+05:30

Howard Hughes Medical Institute has announced the winners of its International Early Career Awards, meant for (non-US) researchers who "trained in the United States as a graduate student or a postdoctoral fellow and have published important research." And each awardee will "receive $650,000: $100,000 a year for five years plus $150,000 the first year for major equipment purchases and other investments."

HHMI's elite list features one Indian scientist: Sandhya Koushika of the National Centre for Biological Sciences [link via Subhra Priyadarshini].

* * *

This is the first time for these awards. Also, the awards are meant for a special group of people (who have done their doctoral or post-doctoral research in the US). The country-wise break-up of the applicant pool is not known. And, finally, the numbers are small -- we are in the anecdote territory, not the statistical one.

All these factors make it difficult for us to say anything meaningful about the country-wise break-up of the HHMI awardees.

But some comparisons become inevitable: one that stares at us (because our leaders -- including Prime Minister -- seem obsessed about it) is this: China leads the list with seven IECS awards, while India has just one.

The countries with the most IECS awardees are China (7), Portugal (5), and Spain (5), but recipients are also based in nine other countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, India, Italy, Poland, South Africa, and South Korea. Nine of the 28 (32 percent) are women.

One Chinese University Leader's Crusade against Misconduct in Science

2012-01-23T20:30:00.000+05:30

Here's an excerpt from David Cyranoski's article in Nature:

[In his second big case, in mid-2010, the] editor-in-chief of a journal published by Springer contacted Yang to say that plagiarism and fabrication in an article from a ZJU researcher were so egregious that Springer was considering blocking all submissions from the university to its 2,000 science, technology and medicine journals. (Yang declines to name the researcher or editor.) “It put pressure on. We had to convince them that we could handle the case,” says Yang.

This time, Yang was ready. He dismissed the main scientist involved, and cut the salary and PhD-student allocation of the corresponding author. “Springer was satisfied,” says Yang.

Over the past two years, Yang says, he has dealt just as briskly with another 40 or so misconduct cases at the ZJU. More than 20 researchers have been found guilty of wrongdoing after discussion by the university administration. For the ten cases involving recent graduates, more than half lost their degrees. One sued the ZJU to overturn the ruling of plagiarism. She lost. If work done during your training is fraudulent, “your degree should be taken away”, says Yang firmly.

In cases involving faculty members, three had their employment terminated, four faced disciplinary action including a pay cut, and the rest were issued with public or internal warnings. Some have been temporarily forbidden from taking on PhD students.

Noah Smith on the Seven Principles for Arguing with Economists

2012-01-23T18:47:00.001+05:30

A terrific piece, according to Paul Krugman. Some of the principles need not be specific to economics; an example:

Principle 1: Credentials are not an argument.

Example: "You say Theory X is wrong...but don't you know that Theory X is supported by Nobel Prize winners A, B, and C, not to mention famous and distinguished professors D, E, F, G, and H?"

Suggested Retort: Loud, barking laughter.

Alternative Suggested Retort: "Richard Feynman said that 'Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.' And you're not going to argue with HIM, are you?"

Reason You're Right: Credentials? Gimme a break. Nobody accepts received wisdom from sages these days. Show me the argument!

The Hindu interviews IIT-M Director Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi

2012-01-23T18:36:00.001+05:30

In the U.S., an engineer can do a literature course and earn credits. Why can't an Electrical Engineer in IIT do an elective in the humanities department? Is the system here constricting?

That is where we should head towards. Today, we do have a system that has electives. But, it is not the same as in the U.S. The problem is that you can give the freedom to students to do what they want, provided you can then declare what they are in the degree. How to do this is a question that we have been asking ourselves.

Some of the older IITs have for sometime wanted to remove the branch allocation at JEE. The problem is the newer IITs are not ready for that. Actually, giving a branch at that young age is a terrible thing to do. But that's the reality. Besides, the public wants that. Public will prefer if you give the branch in LKG itself. But I think what we'll do is try to loosen up, give some options, and make sure the degrees are branded right. Instead of creating departments that function like silos, we must try and liberalise. We'll probably move towards that in the next few years. [Bold emphasis added]

More here.

What It's Like to Attend IIT ...

2012-01-20T20:04:00.001+05:30

Apparently, that's something that someone at Quora was terribly interested in, and a revealing tell-all happens. Here's a sample:

Academic Life

While the students that enter the IITs may be fairly assumed to be the best produced by the country, the same cannot always be said of the professors. There is a structural reason for this : over the 70s and 80s, all the academically inclined students in the IITs went to the US for PhDs and became professors there. From a lifestyle and financial point of view, there is little reason to come back and work/teach at the IITs. Thus, the professorial ranks at the IITs are often heavily populated with PhDs from the IITs (ie, those who came to IIT for grad school) or less prestigious foreign universities.

As you can expect from young undergrads with enormous chips on their shoulders (having surmounted the JEE), IIT grad students – who enter through another rather less highly regarded exam – are looked upon with derision, even pity. That these very students become TAs and later IIT professors is galling. Thus, in my experience, the relationship between professors and students is always somewhat tense. It is a very transactional relationship – students go to class because they have to (grades are docked for poor attendance), submit routine homework, take exams and move on to the next semester.

But things are not so bad. Here's the next paragraph -- and note the square brackets!

[This is not to say that all professors are second-rate. Some are truly terrific, and a few have been very inspirational to me, personally].

* * *

And here's a bonus mystery link!

James Lang on Metacognition and Student Learning

2012-01-19T20:25:00.000+05:30

In the latest in his series of articles on what psychological research can tell us about student learning, he writes about metacognition with the help of Stephen Chew, a psychologist at Samford University. Along the way, we get links to videos on How to Get the Most out of Studying by Prof. Chew, and to more resources.

Sidebar
See also: Dear Student: I Don't Lie Awake At Night Thinking of Ways to Ruin Your Life by Art Carden.
* * *

An excerpt from Lang's piece:

I asked Chew to give readers a basic definition of metacognition, with some illustrations of the concept both from education and everyday life. "Metacognition," he explained in an e-mail, "is a person's awareness of his or her own level of knowledge and thought processes. In education, it has to do with students' awareness of their actual level of understanding of a topic. Weaker students typically have poor metacognition; they are grossly overconfident in their level of understanding. They think they have a good understanding when they really have a shallow, fragmented understanding that is composed of both accurate information and misconceptions."

That leads weak students, he said, to make poor study decisions: "Once students feel they have mastered material, they will stop studying, usually before they have the depth and breadth of understanding they need to do well. On exams, they will often believe their answers are absolutely correct, only to be shocked when they make a bad grade."

As for examples outside of education, Chew had no trouble pointing them out in a variety of areas, including reality television shows.

"Poor metacognition is a big part of incompetence," he explained. "People who are incompetent typically do not realize how incompetent they are. People who aren't funny at all think they are hilarious. People who are bad drivers think they are especially good. You don't want to fly on a plane with a pilot who has poor metacognition. A lot of reality shows like American Idol highlight people with poor metacognition for entertainment. Everyone knows people who are seldom in doubt but often wrong."

High Tech Cheating

2012-01-16T13:09:00.000+05:30

The scamsters targeted one of India's most high-profile exams: the national entrance exam for admissions to PG programs in medical colleges, and the details are fascinating:

The police say two of the men – recent MBA grads – pretended to be candidates and went in to write the exam with Android cellphones strapped to their forearms, hidden beneath their shirt cuffs. They used the cameras in the phones to scan the exam questions through holes in their coats, and images of the pages were sent automatically and wirelessly to an email address.

In a bedroom a few blocks away, a recent computer science graduate downloaded the images and printed out the exam paper. He handed it over to the scam kingpin, a second-year medical student, who sat surrounded by textbooks and some friends, and solved the problems.

He then sent the answers back to at least six candidates writing the exam; they had Bluetooth devices stitched into their shirt collars that sent the answers to microchip earplugs the men were wearing.

And how did the scam get busted?

It appears that this plot was busted after a disgruntled fellow candidate who knew of the service but couldn’t afford it tipped off police. ...

Dr. Ken Murray on How Doctors Die

2012-01-08T17:29:00.000+05:30

The subtitle -- It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be -- is a little cryptic, but these early paragraphs present a good summary of how doctors choose to live their last days, weeks and months:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

See also: Paula Span's post at The New Old Age blog at NYTimes:

Dr. Murray contends in his post that doctors know too much about the futility of aggressive end-of-life treatment to subject themselves to it. His argument is anecdotal, based on people he has known but lacking statistical underpinnings. “It’s a fair criticism,” he said.

But recently an alert reader e-mailed him a study, published in 2008 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, of more than 800 physicians who graduated from Johns Hopkins University between 1948 and 1964. Most had reached their late 60s and 70s, so questions about end-of-life treatment were not purely hypothetical.

Asked what treatment they would accept if they’d suffered irreversible brain damage that left them unable to speak or recognize people but was not terminal, the doctors overwhelmingly said they’d decline CPR, feeding tubes and a host of other common interventions. “So there is actual evidence about this,” Dr. Murray said, pleased.

Anu Partanen on Finland's School Success

2012-01-08T11:01:00.001+05:30

At The Atlantic:"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

Pico Iyer on the Joy of Quiet

2012-01-08T10:48:00.002+05:30

From here:

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. [...] During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

[... long snip ...]

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

Prime Ministerial Speeches at the Indian Science Congress

2012-01-08T10:11:00.001+05:30

You read one, you've read them all! Amitabh Sinha reports:

... freeing the lab from bureaucratic red tape has been a refrain down the years. In 2002, Vajpayee said that “bureaucratism is an enemy of a result-oriented approach and must be shunned, for it demotivates our scientific talent.” The next year, he echoed this: “We have to ensure that our scientific institutions do not become afflicted with the culture of our Governmental agencies...the main cause leading to frustration among young scientists is seniority displacing merit and talent suppression.”

Singh then struck the same notes in 2005 on the “tyranny of bureaucracy” and the perils of bureaucratic systems in 2009. In 2010, he reiterated the need to “liberate Indian science from the shackles and deadweight of bureaucratism and in-house favouritism.”

MIT's Experiment in Online Higher Ed

2011-12-20T22:19:00.004+05:30

It's called MITx, and it'll be launched soon by MIT.

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace

feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication

allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx

operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

It's the third bullet point that makes this really interesting for students. While MIT has stated clearly that it's not getting into the business of offering course towards an MIT degree [see the FAQs], a certificate of completion awarded by MITx will still be attractive to many, many students worldwide.

Interestingly, this is precisely the idea that I first heard from Prof. M.S. Ananth over three years ago in a meeting to discuss the second phase of NPTEL. According to his grand vision, students all over India could use NPTEL course material, register for exams conducted by IITs, receive grades and certificates from the IITs. However, the idea appears to have gone nowhere.

A Meta-university Takes Shape

2011-12-17T11:44:00.000+05:30

Shaswati Das reports in today's Hindustan Times:

Cross-university education will no more remain a dream for students in Delhi. Pursuing two courses simultaneously at Delhi University (DU) and Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) or graduate students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) trying their hands at technical courses offered at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) may soon become a reality.

To make this possible, four city-based institutes — DU, JMI, IIT and JNU — will join hands to tap their best faculties and make cross-discipline education available to students.

These are just early plans; as learn a little later, "Meanwhile, the institutes are awaiting further clarity on the matter to decide the future course of action."

Still, a fascinating development.

Dr. S.R. Valluri on "Instant Excellence and Achievement"

2011-12-11T21:59:00.001+05:30

An Indian 'experiment' from the 1990s is worth recalling for its resemblance to the shenanigans of a few Saudi universities. It is all the more remarkable since the institution that tried the experiment is now one of the top institutions in India.

The scientist who broke this story is Dr. S.R. Valluri, former director of the National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore. In an op-ed in The Hindu (dated 2 November 1995) entitled Whither Ethics in Science, Valluri questioned the ethics of various actions of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore. [I can't provide a direct link since The Hindu archives don't go so far back.] The op-ed criticized JNCASR (and its leadership) on several counts, but here are the parts that are relevant to the issue at hand:

Were it not for the serious nature of the implications, one can only observe with amusement the efforts of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore to project an image of instant excellence and achievement. The centre has been attempting to achieve this image of "making rapid strides" by identifying some scientists from other institutions as its honorary faculty, and including in its annual report (January '95) a list of their publications, without mentioning there itself, their places of full time employment and where the work was actually done, thus making them appear as if they are the centre's own achievements.

It is tantamount to a whole scientific institution being less than truthful in matters of science.[...] [T]his practice violates the very ethics and culture of science. ... By this practice the centre's own credentials have come under a cloud.

... One ... wonders how the scientists concerned could have countenanced the omission, in the listings in the centre's report, of their affiliations with their own parent organizations which have been nurturing them. This denial of the credit by the centre is less than fair.

To give them benefit of the doubt, we have to assume that the scientists concerned acquiesced without examining its implications. Such things are happening as the senior scientific community has not cared to give enough thought to evolving and putting into practice a self-regulating code of ethics for the practice, management and administration of science in India.

[Snip, snip, snip]

The JN Centre deserves all the financial support it needs for its full time staff to work inhouse purposefully. But flaunting borrowed finery and basking in reflected glory has unfortunate implications for the cause of science and even for their own image considering the reputation of the scientists who are associated with the centre. [...]

The op-ed goes into some detail about some of the other actions by JNCASR, which, as I said, need not concern us now. It drew a response from the late Prof. Raja Ramanna; since I have not read that letter, I'm not quite sure why he chose to get involved. But Valluri got a chance to reiterate his points in a follow-up letter (published in The Hindu on 28 November 1995). Here's the relevant part of his rebuttal:

... I stand by what I have said in my article. ... The clarifications given by Dr. Ramanna are extraneous to the points I have raised in my article.

I have specifically raised three questions in my article. One is directly concerned with ethics in science. In instances I am personally aware, the honorary faculty [at JNCASR] did mention their places of full time employment and did indicate their honorary association with the JNCASR, and did acknowledge the financial support that they received from it. the JNCASR, however, deleted all reference to the place of full time affiliation of its honorary faculty, while taking credit for their research by listing their publications in its Jan '95 annual report (pages 38 to 56). It could have been considered accidental and not taken seriously if it happened once or twice. But that it was deliberate is indicated by the fact that about 200 listings or more belong to this category. It even took credit for the work of at least one honorary fellow who did not receive any support and who did his work entirely in some other organization. By such a practice, while the JNCASR takes credit for such research, it implicitly denies the same to the parent institutions which have been really nurturing the honorary faculty, while they may have received some financial support from the JNCASR also. In matters of science, such practices are unethical, as credits in progress of science are built on historical records. If everybody indulges in this practice, chaos will result.

In both his original article and in his rebuttal to Ramanna's response, Valluri does not mention the name of the the man at the helm of JNCASR at that time: Prof. C.N.R. Rao. It was clear, however, that Valluri placed the responsibility for the ethical violations on JNCASR's leadership. When Prof. Rao's autobiographical memoirs -- Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry -- were published sometime ago, I was curious to see how he dealt with this dark episode in his career as a top scientific administrator. This is what I found on p. 92:

One or two scientists made personal attacks on me at that time ... Another criticism was that in one of the early reports of the Centre, the Academic Coordinator had also included the publications of some of the honorary professors. No one expects a new centre to become famous from papers of others, but the criticism was that the Centre was using the reputation of others to become famous instantaneously. All this was far from the truth. ... Fortunately for me, all my colleagues including Raja Ramanna came to my defence at that time. I also made sure that subsequent reports of the Centre did not list papers of honorary professors even if their research was supported by JNCASR.

I'll just state that Rao appears to have misread Valluri's critique as a "personal attack." Valluri was careful to point to specific acts of "omission and commission" with a view to forcing a course correction. That his criticism was right -- and stingingly so -- is proven beyond doubt by the fact that Rao "made sure that subsequent reports of the Centre did not list papers of honorary professors."

* * *

All in all, this unholy experiment offers an excellent test to check if an institutional policy / action is right. The leader just has to ask, "Would it survive if Dr. Valluri decides to write an op-ed about it?"

Academic Scam of the Year

2011-12-10T11:49:00.001+05:30

It was only a matter of time, and this should not be surprising at all to those who have been watching JEE toppers being claimed by several different cramschools as their students [link, link]. I heard about the scam from a highly cited researcher from India a while ago, and it's great to see some fabulous reporting by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee of Science on the audacity of it all:

At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU's campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI's) list of highly cited researchers.

“I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU's offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.

Kirshner's colleague is not alone. Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines -— all on ISI's highly cited list -— who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. ... [Bold emphasis added]

The Seth Myth

2011-12-06T22:15:00.001+05:30

Mihir Sharma is turning into a one-man demolition squad. First came his review of India Calling, and what do we have now? The Age of Seth, a most delicious tear-down of Suhel Seth's Get To The Top: The Ten Rules For Social Success.

If you have seen Seth on TV -- and he appears there far too often -- it is very easy to hate the man. Here's Girish Shahane's post that's largely about Seth, the TV commentator. A memorable line: "He makes points forcefully and articulately, but never with any hint of insight."

Links

2011-12-06T21:56:00.001+05:30

Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited: Part 1 Given the big bang summary -- "Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core" -- I can't wait for Part 2!
Sunshine has an article in Amreekan Desi: The FOB who became ABCD:

Her acclimatization experience did not come without some ten dozen embarrassing experiences when she made a fool of herself. But she learned well. She learned that light switches worked differently, bathrooms were restrooms, baths were showers, notes were bills, bills were checks, and checks were also checks. She learned to run hot water without burning herself. She learned not to use the word dicky for car trunks, and learned that a fast food chain was called Dick’s. She learned that it was actually okay to ask for boxes for leftover food, and capsicums, brinjals, and lady’s finger had their own names here.

She learned to drop the words sir and madam, and address her professor, as old as her grandfather, using his first name. [...]
Rahul Siddharthan: An h-index for test cricket batsmen.

Suppose we modify it as follows: the nh index is that value of h, for a given n, such that on h occasions the batsman has scored nh or more runs. For examples, the 10h index would be: if on 5 occasions I have scored 50 runs or more (and I have not scored 60 runs or more on 6 occasions) I have a 10h index of 5. For n > 1, basically, I am giving more importance to higher-scoring innings, and also benefiting those who played fewer matches (most older players played far fewer games than Tendulkar and can’t remotely approach either his career aggregate, or his h-score).

Potato Chips, Class and the Language of Food

2011-12-06T18:35:00.001+05:30

A good one from Improbable Research: A research paper that analyzes the blurb on packages of potato chips:

“Authenticity in America: Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising,” Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky [pictured here], Gastronomica, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 46-54. The authors explain:

“Our study uses the language of food to examine the representation of socioeconomic class identity in contemporary America by comparing the advertising language on expensive bags of potato chips with that on inexpensive chips. We find that the language on expensive chip bags indeed emphasizes factors that are more representative of higher socioeconomic status, such as more complex language and more claims about health. We also find support for Pierre Bourdieu’s hypothesis that taste is fundamentally negative: descriptions on expensive chips, unlike on inexpensive chips, are full of comparison (“less fat,” “finest potatoes”) and negation (“not,” “never”’), suggesting a goal of distancing the upper classes from the tastes of lower socioeconomic classes. Finally, our results expand the relationship between authenticity and socioeconomic status. Previous scholars suggest that the desire for authenticity is solely linked with upper-class identity; we find, however, two distinct modes of authenticity. For the upper classes, authentic food is natural: not processed or artificial. For the working class, by contrast, authentic food is traditional: rooted in family recipes and located in the American landscape. Thus, the authentic experience is linguistically relevant for both classes—an example of the rich meanings hidden in the language of food.”

Human Piano

2011-12-06T18:14:00.001+05:30

A great performance / demo from 2009 by Bobby McFerrin (the same guy who gave us #kolaveri of the 1980s):

* * *

Thanks to The Kid Should See This for the reminder.

N-dimensional Spheres in N-dimensional Boxes

2011-12-04T22:35:00.001+05:30

In an imaginary world of high dimensionality there would be an automatic and perpetual potato famine, for the skin of the potato would occupy essentially its entire volume.
-- Herbert Callen, Thermodynamics and Introduction to Thermostatistics [1985].

Things do get weird in higher dimensions. Brian Hayes has an awesome essay in American Scientist on another one of those weird things -- the volume of an n-dimensional sphere is a vanishingly insignificant fraction of the volume of its bounding cube:

... Both the n-ball and the n-cube grow along with n, but the cube expands faster. In fact, the curse is far more damning: At the same time the cube inflates exponentially, the ball shrinks to insignificance. In a space of 100 dimensions, the fraction of the cubic volume filled by the ball has declined to 1.8×10–70. This is far smaller than the volume of an atom in relation to the volume of the Earth. The ball in the box has all but vanished. If you were to select a trillion points at random from the interior of the cube, you’d have almost no chance of landing on even one point that is also inside the ball.

What makes this disappearing act so extraordinary is that the ball in question is still the largest one that could possibly be stuffed into the cube. We are not talking about a pea rattling around loose inside a refrigerator carton. The ball’s diameter is still equal to the side length of the cube. The surface of the ball touches every face of the cube. (A face of an n-cube is an (n–1)-cube.) The fit is snug; if the ball were made even a smidgen larger, it would bulge out of the cube on all sides. Nevertheless, in terms of volume measure, the ball is nearly crushed out of existence, like a black hole collapsing under its own mass.

How can we make sense of this seeming paradox?

Kevin Carey on the Best Kind of Student Loans

2011-12-04T21:59:00.001+05:30

The US Should Adopt Income-Based Loans Now:

Under an income-contingent loan system, like those in Australia and Britain, students pay a fixed percentage of their income toward their loans. Payments are automatically deducted from their paychecks by the IRS, just like income-tax withholding. Self-employed workers pay in quarterly installments, just as they do with their taxes. If borrowers earn a lot, their payments rise accordingly, and their loans are retired quickly. If their income falls below a certain level—say, the poverty line—they pay nothing. After an extended time period of 20 or 30 years, any remaining debt is forgiven.

In other words, nobody ever defaults on a federal student loan again. The whole concept of "default" is expunged from the system. No more collection agencies hounding people with 10 phone calls a night. No more ruined credit and dashed hopes of home-ownership. People who want to enter virtuous but lower-paid professions like social work and teaching won't be deterred by unmanageable debt. [...]

The concept has been proven to work—Australia and Britain have used it for years—and both liberals and conservatives have reason to get on board. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman proposed the idea all the way back in 1955.

Indeed, income-contingent loans are such a good idea, one might wonder why they don't exist already. [...]