E's flat, ah's flat too

Moved

2010-09-29T20:31:00.002+05:30

Here. My "new home" post (explaining some of the whys) is here, and my first "real" new post is here. I'll try to keep blogging there; if you'd like to keep reading, please update your feedreader. This blog is closed.

The Indus argument continues

2010-09-17T11:57:00.008+05:30

Last year much excitement and noise occurred, including on this blog [1, 2, 3], when a group of scientists (led by Rajesh Rao at the University of Washington, and including my colleague Ronojoy Adhikari) published a brief paper in Science supplying evidence, on statistical grounds, that the Indus symbols constituted a writing system. In their words, they "present evidence for the linguistic hypothesis by showing that the script’s conditional entropy is closer to those of natural languages than various types of nonlinguistic systems."

This rather modest claim outraged Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and (presumably) Michael Witzel (FSW), who had previously "proved" that the Harappan civilization was not literate (the paper was subtitled "The myth of a literate Harappan civilization"). In a series of online screeds, they attacked the work of Rao et al: for reviews, see this previous post, and links and comments therein.

Now Richard Sproat has published his latest attack on Rao et al. in the journal Computational Linguistics. Rao et al have a rejoinder, as do another set of researchers, and Sproat has a further response to both groups (but primarily to Rao et al); all these rejoinders will appear in the December issue of Computational Linguistics.

To summarise quickly, the way I see it: Sproat claims (as he previously did on the internet) that Rao et al.'s use of "conditional entropy" is useless in distinguishing scripts from non-scripts, because one can construct non-scripts with the same conditional entropy, and because their extreme ("type 1" and "type 2") non-linguistic systems are artificial examples. Rao et al. respond that that is a mischaracterisation of what they did, observe that Sproat entirely fails to mention the second figure from the same paper or the more recent "block entropy" results, and repeat (in case it wasn't obvious) that they don't claim to prove anything, only offer evidence. They give inductive and Bayesian arguments for why the mass of evidence, including their own, should increase our belief that the Indus symbols were a script.

In connection with the Bayesian arguments, Rao et al. do me the honour of citing my blog post on the matter, thus giving this humble blog its first scholarly citation. My argument was as follows: Given prior degrees of belief, $P(S)$ for the script hypothesis and $P(NS)$ for the non-script hypothesis, and give "likelihoods" of data given each hypothesis, $P(D|S)$ and $P(D|NS)$, Bayes' theorem tells us how to calculate our posterior degrees of belief in each hypothesis given the data:
$P(S|D) = \frac{P(D|S)P(S)}{P(D|S)P(S) + P(D|NS)P(NS)}$
We can crudely estimate P(D|NS) by looking at the "spread" of the language band of the figure 1A in their Science paper and ask how likely it is that a generic non-language sequence would fall in that band: assuming that it can fall anywhere between the two extreme limits that they plot, we can eyeball it as 0.1 (the band occupies 10% of the total spread) [Update 17/09/2010: See the plot below, which is identical to the one in Science, except for the addition of Fortran (blue squares, to be ignored here).] Let us say a new language is very likely (say 0.9) to fall in the same band. Then $P(D|NS) = 0.1$, $P(D|S) = 0.9$. If we were initially neutrally placed between the hypotheses ($P(NS) = P(S) = 0.5$), then we get $P(S|D) = 0.9$: that is, after seeing these data we should be 90% convinced of the script hypothesis. Even if we started out rather strongly skeptical of the script hypothesis ($P(S) = 0.2$, $P(NS) = 0.8$), the Bayesian formula tells us that, after seeing the data, we would be almost 70% convinced ($P(S|D) = 0.69$).

We can quibble with these numbers, but the general point is that this is how science works: we adjust our degrees of belief in hypotheses based on the data we have and the extent to which the hypotheses explain those data.

Sproat apparently disagrees with this "inductive" approach, and accuses Rao et al of lack of clarity in their goals. On the first page, he clarifies that he was talking only of the Science paper and has not ~~read~~ carefully analysed [correction 17/09/10] the more recent papers by Rao and colleagues; he says those works do not affect questions on the previous paper, writing,

'To give a stark example, if someone should eventually demonstrate rigorously that cottontop tamarins are capable of learning “regular” grammars, that would have no bearing on the questions currently surrounding Marc Hauser’s 2002 publication in Cognition.'

In this way Sproat succeeds in insinuating, without saying it, that the work of Rao et al. may have been fraudulent. (Link to Hauser case coverage)

A little later, on the claim that the arguments of FSW "had been accepted by many archaeologists and linguistics", he offers this belated evidence that such people do exist:

Perhaps they do not exist? But they do: Andrew Lawler, a science reporter who in 2004 interviewed a large number of people on both sides of the debate notes that “many others are convinced that Farmer, Witzel, and Sproat have found a way to move away from sterile discussions of decipherment, and they ﬁnd few ﬂaws in their arguments” (Lawler 2004, page 2029), and quotes the Sanskrit scholar George Thompson and University of Pennsylvania Professor Emeritus of Indian studies Frank Southworth.

Having thus convincingly cited a science reporter to prove that the academic community widely accepts FSW's thesis, he proceeds to the actual claims about the symbols; after a few pages of nitpicks not very different from the above, he addresses a point which he had previously raised in this comment: why does figure 1A in the Science paper not include Fortran? He suspects that Fortran's curve would have overlapped significantly with the languages, "compromising the visual aspect of the plot". I actually find that explanation credible(*), and I was not comfortable with the manner of presentation of the data in the Science paper: but I view this as a problem with the "system" rather than the authors. Enormous prestige is attached to publication in journals like Science. To allow more authors to publish, Science has a one-page "brevia" format (which Rao et al. used) that allows essential conclusions to be presented on that printed page, while the substance of the paper is in supplementary material online. Rao et al. can argue, correctly, that they hid nothing in their full paper (including the supplementary material); but obviously what was shown in the main "brevia" format was selected for maximum instantaneous visual impact. And they are not the only ones to do this. I'd argue that formats like "brevia" are designed to encourage this sort of thing, and the blame goes to journals like Science. It is annoying, but to compare it with the Hauser fraud is odious.

Sproat's response doesn't improve in the subsequent pages. He distinguishes between his preferred "deductive" way of interpreting data and the "inductive" approach preferred by Rao et al; he complains that they did not clarify this in their original paper (though I would have thought the language was clear enough, that they nowhere claimed to be "deducing" anything, only offering "evidence"); he nitpicks (as I would have expected) with the Bayesian arguments. Overall, for all his combativeness, he is notably vaguer in his assertions than previously. He ends on this petulant note:

I end by noting that Rao et al., in particular, might feel grateful that they were given an opportunity to respond in this forum. My colleagues and I were not so lucky: when we wrote a letter to Science outlining our objections to the original paper, the magazine refused to publish our letter, citing “space limitations”. Fortunately Computational Linguistics is still open for the exchange of critical discussion.

The openness of CL is to be applauded, but I can think of some additional explanations for why Computational Linguistics allowed the response while Science did not. One is that the Science paper by Rao et al. was not a vicious personal attack on another set of researchers, and as such, did not merit a "rejoinder" unless it could be shown that the paper was wrong. Another may have been the quality of Rao et al's response on this occasion (Sproat could, if he liked, offer us a basis for comparison by linking his rejected letter to Science) [update 17/09/10: here].

I don't expect this exchange in a scholarly journal to end the argument, but perhaps the participants can take a break now.

(*) UPDATE 17/09/2010: Rajesh Rao writes:

By the way, the reason that Fortran was included in Fig 1B rather than 1A is quite mundane: a reviewer asked us to compare DNA, proteins, and Fortran, and we included these in a separate plot in the revised version of the paper. Just to prove we didn't have any nefarious designs, I have attached a plot that Nisha Yadav created that includes Fortran in the Science Fig 1A plot. The result is what we expect.

The plot is below (click to enlarge); the blue squares are the Fortran symbols.

Rajesh also remarks that the Bayesian posterior probability estimates -- that I derived from the bigram graph in the Science paper -- can probably be sharpened from the newer block entropy results. However, since Sproat makes it clear that he is only addressing the Science paper and is unwilling to let later work influence his perception, I think it's worth pointing out that the data in the Science paper are already rather convincing.

How to distinguish fake coin tosses...

2010-08-17T12:34:00.006+05:30

Dilip posted an interesting problem the other day: if you were a professor teaching probability theory, and asked your students to toss a coin 100 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails that they obtained, and some of them cheated and simply made up a sequence of heads and tails, how could you tell?

It is interesting because, generically, very few sequences are truly random; and the human mind is certainly incapable of randomness. But what signs of non-randomness could you look for? The answer that Dilip, apparently, had in mind is that true random sequences will usually contain long "runs" of heads or tails (say, 6 or more heads, or 6 or more tails, in succession in 100 coin tosses). However, individuals generating random sequences will perceive such short "runs" as non-random and correct for them. But this is not a very reliable answer by itself: the probability of a run of 6 or more (heads or tails) in 100 tosses is about 80%, so a truly random run will fail this test about a fifth of a time, while a smart student will probably throw in such runs. I argued that if one combined this with various other tests, one should be able to tell quite reliably. But at the moment I am unsure whether 100 tosses are enough for this. Certainly nobody could say for sure whether a sequence of 5 tosses was generated by a coin or a human. Meanwhile, I strongly doubt that any human could generate a sequence of 1000 random symbols (coin-tosses, numbers, whatever) that would fool the statistical tests. But can one reliably tell which of the following two is "random" and which isn't?

Sequence 1:

tthhhhhtthhhhtthhthhhtthhhhttththhhtthhhhhhtthhhhh
htthhthhhthhhhthhththtttththtthhtthhhhhttthhththtt

Sequence 2:

hthtthhtthtthhhthtthtttththhthhththhhhthhttttththh
hthhhthtththhhthttththhthhhthththhhhthhthttththhth

Neither of these was generated by tossing a coin. One was made by me, by pressing "h" or "t" "randomly" on a keyboard (ie, I, a human being aware of the usual "pitfalls", was trying to generate a random sequence, fairly rapidly without thinking much about it). The other was made using the pseudorandom number generator in Python, which is based on the Mersenne twister. I would guess that the Mersenne twister is more random than I am: what I would be interested in knowing, from any experts reading this, is whether one of the above sequences can be demonstrated, statistically, to be so non-random that the chances are very high it was generated by me and not by the program. I am, moreover, interested in the method and not the answer (which you have a 50% chance of getting right randomly). If you confidently identify the Mersenne twister-generated sequence, it is safe to say that the problem is with your test and not with the Mersenne twister.

The "bonus question" that came up in Dilip's blog is, what is the probability of observing a run of 6 or more heads or tails (let's call them 6-runs) in 100 coin tosses?

Kovendhan gave an approximate answer which seemed to work well in practice, but it turns out that he made two errors and a corrected calculation does poorly. The probability of a particular choice of 6 tosses (let's call it a 6-mer) being all heads or all tails is (1/2)⁵ (it is (1/2)⁶ for all heads, and the same for all tails). The probability then that it is not all-heads or all-tails is 1-(1/2)⁵. There are 95 ways to choose 6 successive tosses in 100. The probability of none of these 95 is all-heads or all-tails is ( 1-(1/2)⁵)⁹⁵ = about 0.049 approximately. The probability of at least one stretch of 6 identical tosses (all heads or all tails) existing would then seem to be 0.951 -- pretty near certain. The approximation consists of neglecting the fact that adjacent 6-mers here are not independent: eg, if your chain of tosses is HHTHTT, not only does this fail to give a 6-run, but it will also fail to do so on any of the next 3 tosses at least.

Meanwhile, Kovendhan used (1/2)⁶ instead of (1/2)⁵ for the individual 6-run, and 94 for the number of 6-mers, which yields 0.772, but he reported 0.781 -- I'm not sure how he got that. My numerical experiments suggested the true number is a little above 0.8, which is close to Kovendhan's fortuitously incorrect calculation of his approximate method, but quite far from what his approximation should really give.

The moral is, be aware of approximations and, if possible, have an estimate of their effect. Kovendhan's approximation is in fact very similar to Linus Pauling's when he calculated the zero-temperature entropy of ice. In the crystal structure of ice, each oxygen atom has four neighbouring oxygen atom, in a locally tetrahedral arrangement. Along each of these O-O bonds is a hydrogen atom, but not centrally located: two H atoms must be closer to the central O atom, and two must be closer to the neighbouring O atoms. Globally, there are many ways to satisfy this; to count the ways, Pauling essentially assumed that the configurations of the local "tetrahedra" could be counted independently. This is like Kovendhan's assumption about 6-mers; unfortunately, while two tetrahedra in ice share at most one corner, two 6-mers in the toss sequence can share up to 5 tosses, which makes the 6-mers much less independent than the tetrahedra in ice.

I attempted an answer which I give below. A commenter observed that a formula exists for the probability of a run of 6 heads, and the same formula gives the probability of a run of 6 tails. However, the probability of six heads or tails is trickier.

My approach (which will be recognisable by physicists, computer scientists and others) was this: supposing we can calculate the probability P(N) that there are no 6-runs in N tosses, how do we calculate P(N+5), the probability that there are no 6-runs in N+5 tosses? If we can do this, we can start from P(5) = 1 (there are no 6-runs in 5 tosses, obviously) and build it up from there.

Naively, a 6-run can be built up at any of the five tosses between N and N+5: for example, if the previous five tosses up until N were all heads, then tossing heads again will give a 6-run. So we must consider all possibilities for both the five tosses from N-4 to N, and the five tosses for N+1 to N+5: ten tosses in total. There are 2¹⁰ = 1024 possibilities for these 10 tosses, so it looks like a counting problem. The number of possibilities of "successful" runs in these 10 tosses can be enumerated as follows (where "N" stands for "any", and one can replace H with T in all these examples):
HHHHH HNNNN (32 possibilities: 2⁴ for the last 4 tosses, times 2 for replacing H with T)
THHHH HHNNN (16 possibilities)
NTHHH HHHNN (16 possibilities)
NNTHH HHHHN (16 possibilities)
NNNTH HHHHH (16 possibilities)
for a total of 96 possibilities. There are then 1024-96 = 928 cases where there is no run of 6 heads or tails. So the "naive" answer is P(N+5) = P(N)*928/1024. If we want P(100), we can use this to go all the way back to P(5) = 1:
P(100) = P(95)(928/1024) = P(90) (98/1024)² ...
to get
P(100) = P(5) (928/1024)¹⁹ = 0.154 roughly
so the probability of at least one 6-run in 100 tosses is about 0.846.

Unfortunately, this is still not correct, because the 1024 possibilities -- and the 96 possibilities with runs -- are not all equally probable: they are conditional on the premise that there is no 6-run up until the N-5th toss. So, for example, the case "HHHHH TNNNN" should be weighted by the fact that it would be disallowed for half the possible sequences prior to this (the ones that ended with H); the case THHHH HNNNN would disallow far fewer sequences (the ones that end in TTTTT, which is only 1 in 32 sequences).

Therefore, I considered as prior possibilities, the five tosses numbered N-14 to N-10 (that is, the five tosses preceding the current ten-mer). There are the following ten possibilities that should be distinguished:
NNNHT, NNNTH, NNHTT, NNTHH, NHTTT, NTHHH, HTTTT, THHHH, TTTTT, HHHHH
and each of these has a "prior probability" (1/4 for NNNHT, 1/32 for HTTTT, etc), and each disallows a fraction of the 1024 10-mers we are considering, as well as a fraction of the 96 10-mers that contain 6-runs. If you do the calculation separately for each of these 10 prior possibilities, and then weight the average by their prior probabilities, you end up with
P(no 6-run in 100 tosses) = (1481219/1614480)¹⁹ = 0.195 roughly,
and P(at least 1 6-run) = 0.805 roughly.

This, as it turns out, is in excellent agreement with what I had previously obtained numerically.

Final question for anyone who has read this far: is this the exact answer? (I posted on Dilip's blog that I think it is, but don't go by that.) It is, however, "good enough" in my opinion, by two measures: the remaining error is small; and the issues have (I think) been adequately illustrated that the answer can be (laboriously) improved, if need be.

I'd be fascinated, however, if there is an exact answer on the lines of the "run of heads" answer linked above.

Hand over the master keys, or else...

2010-08-06T16:10:00.002+05:30

I find it comical that India's security agencies (now joined by several other countries) are demanding the "encryption keys" to BlackBerry devices. Can our government's security experts be ignorant of basic cryptography?

BlackBerry's encryption methods are not new, not novel, not unique, not even unusual. The technology to encrypt e-mail has existed since the early 1990s, and is called OpenPGP (after PGP or Pretty Good Privacy, the first program to implement it). It is usable on pretty much all e-mail systems and is built into Blackberries. There are no "master keys" here: each user has a public key and a private key, and messages can be encrypted with the public key but decrypted only with the private key. (Conversely, messages can be digitally "signed" with the private key and the signature can be verified with the public key). If A wants to send an encrypted message to B, A encrypts it with B's public key -- which A should have a copy of. The public key is meant to be public, and it is common for people to display it on their personal webpages and elsewhere. But B's private key is needed to decrypt it, and only B has (or should have) that key. Wikipedia has a good description of public key cryptography.

As far as I can tell, BlackBerry's "enterprise security" is a somewhat different system to secure communication between BlackBerry's servers and the customer's device, but it too is key-based cryptography (3DES or AES) that requires a private key for each device. RIM, the makers of BlackBerry, say they do not possess copies of customers' private keys, and indeed it would be alarming if they did. They are not being pioneers here (except, perhaps, in bringing it to wide use among their customers): this is standard practice in cryptography.

The government can ban BlackBerries, but it will have to ban e-mail: all email can be encrypted, using a method that dates back to 1991. And in fact it's easier than that: webmail providers such as Google Mail allow the entire session to be encrypted, and it is trivial to do this by clicking a few checkboxes (even my GMail app on my non-BlackBerry phone does this) -- so no agency can snoop without accessing Google's own servers. Perhaps our security agencies will next demand the root password for Google's data servers.

Alternatively, our government can try addressing our real security problems, and their underlying causes.

Yet more thoughts on Apple

2010-07-30T10:36:00.002+05:30

It's been several months since we got our Mac Mini [1, 2]. Previously my wife used a Linux laptop. It worked well, except when it didn't, and I had to help out.

The Mac is just the same, except that when it works well, it works beautifully. Steve Jobs values aesthetics above everything else. But when it doesn't work...

So a few days ago she calls me to say the computer is not booting. I go over to look. Not only is she quite correct, but there's no way of telling what the problem is: all Apple gives you is a white screen with an Apple logo and an endlessly-spinning counter.

I go online with my laptop, and find that there are ways to boot differently by holding down various key combinations on boot. First I try "safe mode". It boots, and all seems well; but when I try the regular boot it fails again. And now "safe mode" doesn't work too.

Then I try "verbose" boot. This gives a scrolling screen of boot messages, of the kind familiar to Unix/Linux users. I see some messages about the filesystem but I don't understand them. The boot gets stuck at a point that I can't make sense of.

Then I try "single user". This time, I get a boot prompt that helpfully tells me to "fsck -fy". I do so, and after some churning, it tells me "filesystem cannot be repaired." I think, huh? I have seen serious filesystem errors on linux and unix, which can be repaired only at the cost of losing data: but I have never seen a filesystem that could not be repaired.

Googling gives me the dubious advice that repeatedly trying fsck should fix the problem, but it does not. I try the disk repair tool that comes from Apple's install DVD, but that too refuses to repair the filesystem.

Finally, "backup and reinstall" is the only way to go. I get a USB hard drive, use my unix skills to mount it and format it with the HFS+ filesystem in single-user mode, and back up all my wife's data (only a couple of unimportant files failed to get copied, luckily). And I reformat and reinstall, as any good Windows sysadmin would do.

Thoughts:

This has never happened to me on linux, which I've been using on my own computers for 10 years now, and on other computers for even longer. A couple of times the filesystem was sufficiently corrupted that some important system files got lost, but all I had to do was copy them over from another machine or reinstall the affected package.
Linux, like OS X, typically uses a "journalled" filesystem (usually ext3 or ext4 on linux, HFS+ on Mac). This means that, after an "unclean" shutdown, the filesystem need not be thoroughly checked. But even when the shutdown is not unclean, Linux systems are usually set up to check the filesystem automatically once every 30 days, or once every 100 mounts (reboots), or thereabouts. This is just a precaution: hardware and software errors can always count problems. As far as I can tell, Mac is not set up to do this. In fact, as far as we know, the machine was not shut off "uncleanly" at any time recently: what probably happened was that undetected filesystem errors grew until they became unrecoverable. Why does Mac OS X not schedule a periodic filesystem check? Is it because Jobs thinks users will get frustrated at that informationless, spinning progress indicator? If so, why not just tell the user that the filesystem is being checked? I'm sure most users won't mind.
My wife -- and other non-techie users -- could not have recovered the computer on her own. From all accounts, Apple's customer service is good and very likely they'd have done exactly what I did, but they would have taken a few days rather than a few hours.
We should have taken backups, and got away very lightly considering we didn't. After this incident, we bought a new USB hard drive and set up Apple's "Time Machine" on it. This, like all Apple software, is slick and shiny; how well it works remains to be seen, or hopefully will not need to be seen for a while.
I strongly suspect that the "filesystem could not be recovered" message was not the truth, but an example of Apple's control-freakishness. The filesystem could perhaps be recovered only by losing a few files (a common-enough situation). Rather than let the user make that choice, Apple wants you to call customer service at the slightest sign of trouble -- by escalating that trouble, and also by hiding all useful information from the user, making it available only via arcane key combinations at boot time.

So if anyone out there is thinking of buying Apple: it's slick hardware and software, but in times of trouble, it's probably much harder to fix than Windows. And harder than other Unix-like systems, because it hides so much of its Unixness on the grounds of being user-friendly, or something. Still, for many people, the slickness probably makes up for anything else.

Giant steps

2010-07-23T15:25:00.002+05:30

Madhav Chari, jazz pianist, performed with an all-Chennai trio -- consisting of himself, Naveen Kumar (bass) and Jeoraj George (drums) yesterday at the Museum Theatre in Chennai. I have written about Madhav before, when he performed with a French rhythm section [1,2] (who also back him on his recent CD, "Parisian thoroughfares"); and had previewed the concert here. Suffice it to say that it lived up to its prior billing. In an e-mailed announcement Madhav had declared it to be "absolutely the very first international standard jazz group from India since the incpetion of jazz in the country in 1927." It was. He said "We play jazz music: thats what we do." That's what they did. Over half of the programme was of Madhav's own compositions, beginning with "Tales of the south" (a reference, he said, both to New Orleans and to Chennai) and ending with "Blues for Havana". In addition they threw in pieces by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Cole Porter, and Sherwin/Maschwitz's "A nightingale sang in Berkeley square" (which Madhav played unaccompanied). They nailed all of them. Jeoraj took several drum solos, while Naveen played extended bass solos on Madhav's "Rejoice" and "Blues for Havana".

Madhav repeatedly said that the band is still feeling its way and is not really a mature outfit, which is why they chose not to play Ellington. But if there were flubs, I did not notice. The Parker was taken at breakneck speed, Porter's "Love for Sale" and Madhav's "Tango sentimental" were rhythmically very complex, and the chord changes in Coltrane's "Giant Steps" are a challenge for the best musicians. The band sailed through all of them.

But almost equally entertaining was Madhav's patter before the songs. He declared Chennai the most advanced city for percussion in Asia (previously he had said that though Chennai audiences may not understand jazz, they understand music better than anyone). He has a dim view of what has long passed for "jazz" in this country (perpetrated by people like Louis Banks), and took several potshots at the elites of Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi; he challenged anyone from those cities to measure themselves against Naveen and Jeoraj; he conceded that the sizeable audience yesterday (well over 400) may be achievable for jazz in Kolkata, but declared that there is no jazz drummer in that city who can keep time, so Chennai is ahead on that count.

Towards the end, he recounted a lady at a recent party asking him why he blew his own trumpet so much, and asked the audience (to resounding cheers): "Well, if I have the greatest jazz band in the history of India, am I supposed to keep quiet about it?"

Indeed, a few years ago I marvelled that there was a jazz pianist in this "conservative" city who was the equal of the best in New York. Now I find that there is an entire world-class jazz piano trio in this city -- but it now seems exciting rather than surprising. My opinion is that Madhav really does not need to blow his own trumpet. His piano, and his new rhythm section, are eloquent enough.

Should one pray for Hitch? - continued

2010-07-21T17:09:00.002+05:30

Christopher Hitchens' own answer to the question is here, along with much other interesting stuff. In Hitch's words,

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts... I have to say there’s some extremely nice people, including people known to you [interviewer Hugh Hewitt], have said that I’m in their prayers, and I can only say that I’m touched by the thought.

Yesterday I received my copy of his new memoirs, Hitch-22. The immediately striking thing is that he has chosen to be photographed smoking a cigarette for its cover. This was before the cancer diagnosis, and he does like to be considered a contrarian, but if he were superstitious I wonder whether he would now think of it as tempting fate. Hitchens is also known for his prodiguous consumption of alcohol (I am surprised that the book cover does not portray him holding a glass of Scotch); and smoking and drinking are both significant risk factors for oesophageal cancer, especially in combination in large quantities.

If I were religious, I'd pray for him. As it is, I (like millions of other strangers) offer him my best wishes: I hope that he recovers fully and, meanwhile and afterwards, suppresses his contrarian urges sufficiently to obey his doctors when they ask him to stop poisoning his body in this way.

As for the material between the covers of his book: I have only read as far as the beginning of the third chapter (on his father). The "prologue with premonitions" is not his most memorable piece of writing, but that is only because his standards are so high. It is, however, sprinkled (as one would expect) with interesting anecdotes and thoughts. His portrait, in the next chapter, of his mother Yvonne -- her life, her death, his relationship with her, and his thoughts on her after she died -- is stunning and harrowing: if the book maintains that sort of intensity, it would be a life-altering experience for any reader, I would think. I have a large and growing pile of books that are only partially read, but despite the considerable bulk of this book, I will not be surprised if I finish it sooner than many other recent purchases.

Reading comprehension in Open magazine

2010-07-18T10:23:00.003+05:30

Today I read this article in Open magazine, on allegations that Sharad Pawar's daughter, Supriya Sule, is a citizen of Singapore and therefore should have her Indian citizenship revoked. The article unquestioningly quotes Mrunalini Kakade, who lost the election to Sule in 2009.

However, nowhere in the article is there evidence that she is a citizen of Singapore: the phrase used, consistently, is "Permanent Resident" which is a status for non-nationals, short of citizenship (Singapore Government web site, Wikipedia; links produced by a few seconds on google). What Open's rather breathless article says is

According to [Kakade's] petition, Supriya Sule holds 'Singapore citizenship'--Permanent Resident Identification Number S 69726251--in addition to her Indian one. This is against domestic rules that do not permit dual citizenship.

The giveaway, as Mrunalini Kakade tells Open, was Supriya Sule’s disclosure that she owns property in Singapore. Under the law of that country, only a permanent resident of Singapore is allowed to purchase property there...

"Besides, she is also the director of Laguna International Pvt Ltd. In this context, her nationality is shown as a 'Singapore Permanent Resident'... "

So, all the evidence that Kakade has supplied, at least as quoted by Open Magazine, suggests that Sule is a "permanent resident" of Singapore -- not a citizen -- just as thousands of Indian citizens are permanent residents of the United States. There is nothing in India's laws that prohibits citizens from permanent residency of another country.

What should we make of a news magazine that writes a 1300+ word on this issue without addressing this point, or asking Kakade to clarify?

Kashmir

2010-07-09T06:41:00.002+05:30

Cross-border terrorism is almost dead. Pakistan is engulfed in its own problems. So why does the Kashmir problem not die too?

Could it be because ordinary people do not like living in a police state? And, when they protest, they do not like being treated as terrorists and fired upon?

The local media is prevented from doing their jobs, and the "national" media (ignorant of Kashmiri, and broadcasting to those who are ignorant of Kashmiri) is free to lie. (Link via Shivam)

We shoot down unarmed protestors. Which incites more protest, and we shoot them down too. (Even unarmed motorcycles are not spared.) We ban the media. We squash civil liberties. And all this is "legalised" by the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (which was originally framed for the north-east, and extended to Kashmir in 1990). Our "law" allows the army to fire on protestors, invade people's homes, search them, take people away without warrant, and be immune from prosecution for all this. That's the law that has ruled the north-east for over 50 years, and Jammu and Kashmir for 20 years.

Now, why do we call ourselves a democracy? Why do we pretend that we have a free press? And why do we expect the people of those states to be grateful for these things?

Should one pray for Hitch? And should he know?

2010-07-06T09:30:00.003+05:30

The question is engaging the religious. Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer. Given his well-known atheism, should a religious-minded well-wisher pray for him?

On the religious side, Rabbi David Wolpe, who has debated Hitchens frequently on religion, puts it very well (as quoted on Goldblog) in my opinion: "I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying helps, to pray. It is in any case an expression of one's deep hopes. So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying that he should be grateful for my prayers."

I wish all religious leaders were so open-minded: too often, religious impositions are accompanied by the implication that one should be grateful for the favour, or the threat that one is condemned if one is not grateful.

A scientist on the Dish goes a bit further in asserting that one should not even inform Hitchens (let alone demand his gratitude) that one is praying for him: to do so would be "malicious". In support, he links this randomized trial on the effect of prayer on patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass graft surgery. The study showed that, on patients who did not know whether or not they were being prayed for, prayer had no effect; but patients who knew with certainty that they were being prayed for did significantly worse (exhibited more complications within 30 days of the procedure).

So there you have it. Pray if you like, but don't tell.

(Actually, I'd be surprised if those results were replicable with other ailments: the only explanation that I can think of is that patients who know they are being prayed for believe that their prognosis is particularly poor, and therefore are under more stress -- which is particularly relevant here since they are heart patients. In particular, patients were told, via messages in envelopes, either that they "may or may not be prayed for" or that they "will be prayed for". Perhaps the latter statement was truly frightening to a lot of the patients. I'm unconvinced that the study was ethical: at the minimum, they could have chosen a different ailment, on which stress would not have such a direct and obvious effect.)

Jazz in Chennai

2010-06-28T20:31:00.002+05:30

Madhav Chari, who is in my opinion easily India's best-ever jazz musician and pretty much the only one of international standards that I have heard, has put together a new trio. The other two members are Naveen Kumar (electric bass) and Jeoraj George (drums).

Though his colleagues in the trio are little-known, Madhav says this trio is of "international standard". And knowing him, if he says that, I believe him. He does not give compliments readily, but he has praised these members to me in the past.

They play a concert on July 22 at the Museum Theatre, and Madhav conducts three workshops in the preceding weeks. The details are below.

WORKSHOPS:

(1) JAZZ AND WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC
JUL 3 SATURDAY 5.00 - 6.30 PM
VENUE: MUSEE MUSICALS

The main emphasis will be on the European roots of jazz music, western classical harmony and its development, jazz harmony-melody-rhythm configurations.

(2) JAZZ, ROCK, GOSPEL AND BLUES MUSIC
JUL 10 SATURDAY 5.00 - 6.30 PM
VENUE: MUSEE MUSICALS

Emphasis on the African cultural roots of jazz music, blues music and gospel music as twin music forms: one sacred the other "profane", blues as the basis for jazz and rock music. Swingin' the blues.

(3) JAZZ, HINDUSTANI AND CARNATIC MUSIC
JUL 17 SATURDAY 5.00 - 6.30 PM
VENUE: MUSEE MUSICAL
THIS WORKSHOP IS A CO-PARTNERSHIP WITH SRUTI MAGAZINE

The art of improvisation: what is necessary: similarities in process between carnatic/hindustani and jazz music. Actual differences between the music forms. Differences in cultural configurations between the west and India (jazz is essentially a western musical idiom even if part of its roots lie in Africa). Fusion and Con-Fusion: Pitfalls in thinking that is endemic to jazz and carnatic collaborations.

CONCERT:

(4) MADHAV CHARI PERFORMANCE WITH A JAZZ TRIO
JUL 22 THURSDAY 7.00 PM
VENUE: MUSEUM THEATER
PRESENTED BY MUSEE MUSICALS
CO-SPONSOR: K. BALAJI

Please be seated at the venue no later than 6.45 PM.

In what sense are we a "socialist" republic?

2010-06-28T11:07:00.003+05:30

In 1976, Indira Gandhi amended the Preamble of the Indian Constitution to insert the words "socialist" and "secular" in the description of the Indian republic. It is not clear to me what she meant by "socialist", but 34 years later, we still don't have a social security system or any kind of safety net for the vast majority of our people. We have a "public distribution system" for essential commodities, that is decrepit and corrupt but is pretty much the only resource for the poor. Our healthcare and education are terrible. We know that Mrs Gandhi, like her father, admired the Soviets, but in what respect, other than autocracy and midnight arrests, did she attempt to emulate them? (Mrs Gandhi made this amendment at the height of the Emergency. She did not choose to remove the word "democratic" from the Preamble, presumably because the Soviet bloc had its own definition of that word, as in "German Democratic Republic" -- the former East Germany. Why change words when you can merely change their meanings?)

The motivation for the above reflections was the recent decontrol of petrol prices. Now, subsidising petrol is the sort of broad-based subsidy that makes no sense to me: it benefits the rich as much as, or more than, the poor. I am all for removing such subsidies. I think we should also be charged more realistic amounts for water, electricity, and other things that we take for granted. I seldom pay more than Rs 5 for parking my car, and usually I pay nothing: our cities could earn huge revenue by just charging parking fees that bear a closer relation to the price of real estate. There is no possible argument for subsidising car owners to this extent.

But the question is, what will we get in return for removing the subsidies? Can the poor be assured of affordable food, good healthcare and education? The government has passed the "Right to Education" act but there is no clarity on how it is to be implemented, and I am worried that the only effect of the act will be to hamstring the existing private schools without providing any alternative. There seems to be zero movement, and indeed zero interest, on any of the other things that an allegedly "socialist" government should be providing to its needy people.

Balancing the budget is all very well, but there is surely no short-term rush for that: if we manage to lift 300 million people out of poverty in the next generation, the government's tax revenues will shoot up too. As George W Bush said, we need to make the pie taller. Besides, there are enough wasteful government schemes that we can trim without hurting millions of people in the process. But I do not for a moment believe that the poor will become magically prosperous via GDP growth alone. Thanks to India's spectacular recent growth, the urban middle class earns ten to fifty times as much as it used to a generation ago; but we remain every bit as stingy in paying servants and workers, haggling for the last rupee. That's not going to change.

Meanwhile, without an education, the poor simply face no better prospects than unskilled labour -- whether in farming, industry, construction or homes -- and no means of fighting exploitation.

So while I am, in theory, happy to pay more for my petrol, I want to know what the government plans to do with my money, other than cut the deficit. Indira Gandhi made "Roti, kapda, makaan" a slogan: a generation or two later, a huge number of Indians lack even those essentials of life. Healthcare and education? Perhaps a century or two from now.

Statement from David Davidar's lawyer

2010-06-21T10:31:00.004+05:30

Nilanjana (among others) posts a statement from David Davidar's lawyer. Below is a comment I just ~~left~~ tried to leave on her site.

This gets bizarre. First, I can understand his lawyer vetting his statement, but why on earth is his lawyer speaking for him? Is it so that he can have a chance of denying it later?

Second, what is one supposed to make of this statement: "Mr. Davidar accepted the situation [that she did not want a secret romance], and their flirtatious relationship continued"? Surely that was a clear signal to him to back off.

And this one: "Mr. Davidar engaged in flirtatious banter with [Samantha Francis] for a short period of time. He did not engage in any conduct toward Ms. Francis that he knew or should have known was unwelcome." So he should not have known that flirtatious banter with a subordinate may be unwelcome?

As for the Frankfurt incident: he says she did not resist, she says she did. She goes into graphic details of how she resisted (climbing onto a window sill, pleading with him, curling into a foetal position, etc). Why does he not come out and say that all those specific statements were lies? What he says is "However, contrary to Ms Rundle’s claim, Mr. Davidar did not bully his way into her room, nor did he force himself upon her. Ms Rundle did not object when they kissed." It is possible he entered the room before she asked him to leave. He does not deny that she asked him to leave, or climbed on the window sill. If she "did not object" when they kissed, perhaps she had given up. In fact, the "foetal position" can be interpreted as not resisting.

It was an unequal relationship and he should have respected that. If she was not always negative -- if she sometimes even seemed to encourage him -- perhaps this widely-circulated anonymous blogpost may explain why.(*)

How he squares it with his wife is between him and his wife -- it is nobody else's business. I don't see why that should enter into his lawyer's statement, either. If he chooses to make a public statement on his wife, surely he can make the statement himself.

(*)Key quote from that post:

I flirted back, when he'd flirt, and I'm ashamed. But I blame him. I blame the way he manipulated us into thinking it was all part of the job, the "culture" of the office...

PS (21/06/10, 22:17): The other striking thing about that statement is the ratio of its length to its content. Huge stretches of it consist merely of "she invited him to tennis", "they had dinner together", "she asked him for a ride", "she sent him good wishes", and variations thereof. In Davidar's and his lawyer's minds, presumably, all this paints a damning portrait. If I had assumed that every woman who invited me to dinner or to a concert had been trying to flirt with me, maybe my life would have been as colourful as Davidar's. Such an attitude must make platonic friendship between the sexes completely impossible (and yes, some do argue that it is impossible).

Spot the difference

2010-06-17T09:41:00.002+05:30

What's the difference between this image from 2001 (here's a relevant article)

and this one from today's Hindu?

Answer: the position of the Indian soldiers.

Question: The 2001 photo caused tremendous outrage in India. Will the 2010 photo create a similar storm of protest?

I'm not hopeful.

The Davidar case

2010-06-16T10:18:00.003+05:30

As everyone knows by now, David Davidar, publishing icon, faces claims of sexual harassment from two women from his time as president of Penguin Canada. Davidar previously worked in Penguin India and several women in the Indian publishing industry have declared their disbelief. For example, four women are quoted here, as follows: "David Davidar is a deeply loved and respected figure in publishing. Naturally, his many friends continue to believe in him, and always will"; "He is one of the most decent persons I know. I refuse to believe these allegations"; "This is the last thing anyone would expect to be levelled against David"; "I find it very difficult to believe these allegations could be true".

Why is that relevant? According to one of his defenders (who, however, acknowledges the gravity of his accuser's charges, the trauma she must be going through, and the necessity of justice if the charges are true): "I know character is no defence, but sometimes a man's character does count." But men (and women) display different characters to different people. If Davidar is guilty of harassing two women (and we should not be judging him based on media reports), the fact that he did not harass several other women is of no importance.

Besides, is that really his character? According to the late Dom Moraes, writing back in 2002, Davidar "drank a lot and liked to fall in love." Moraes relates an illustrative story, which does not sound like harassment, but does not induce much respect either.

I saw the Moraes link on Ashok Banker's blog. Banker refers to Davidar's "dark side", which he saw "quite frequently -- and believe me when I say, I’m not revealing all that I saw because some of it is darker than even I want to talk about publicly." Banker, in an earlier, now deleted post (still cached in google as I write, but I won't link) relates a much more salacious story, which is still not a clear case of harassment but does make one wonder. [Update 17/06/10: Banker has restored that post, with reader comments. He says he took it down because his server couldn't handle the load. The reader comments are interesting: see below.]

Neither Moraes' nor Banker's assessments of Davidar's character are of any more relevance, however, than that of Davidar's numerous defenders. What matters is what he did in Canada. The truth could be that he was an inveterate womaniser who, however, never stepped over the line, and these particular charges are false. It could also be that he was the perfect gentleman in all dealings with women, except in these two cases, where the charges are true. Or it could be anything in between, or anything beyond. We simply don't know, and while it is fun to speculate, it is not very productive to do so.

The sociology of jumping to a man's defence on the grounds of, essentially, "but he never assaulted me" does puzzle me, however. We saw a lot of that in the Anand Jon case, too. Meanwhile, Banker's own posts sound like "kicking a man while he's down", and -- other than the Moraes link, which was interesting because it was unbiased by current events -- rather unsubstantial. And the same can be said of my post here. And of course I'm not alone. In today's world, we all enjoy speculating on celebrity news, and speculating on others' speculations, and so on ad infinitum. But I do agree with Banker that the entirely unbalanced initial reactions from the Indian publishing industry deserved some counterpoint. So, which is better: restraint from all sides, or unrestrained speculation from all sides? The result is the same: nobody is any wiser. Let the case take its course through the Canadian legal system.

UPDATE 17/06/10: As already noted above, it is the comments by Davidar's friends that intrigue me, and the ones on Banker's blog are no different. Yes, Davidar has close friends, who never saw anything in him that would suggest he would be capable of such a thing. Yes, they hope that he can clear his name. But why write hundreds of words that have no bearing on this case, referring to their personal experiences with him as "another side to the story" even though it has nothing whatever to do with the story? I understand feeling the need to speak up when your close friend is accused of unsavoury things, but why not simply say something like: "I know David well and respect him, and would not think him capable of such conduct; I hope he can clear his name, but I recognise the seriousness of these charges and, if proved, want justice to be done" -- and then leave it at that?

Also worth reading: "What it feels like for a girl" -- an anonymous blogger's experiences in the Canadian publishing industry.

Friends that the gay community doesn't need

2010-06-11T12:26:00.005+05:30

What the gay/lesbian community needs, as Andrew Sullivan (among others) points out, is friends in the mainstream. In 1992, only 42% of Americans personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian. Today, 77% do, and they also see that their gay/lesbian friends are completely normal, honest, straightforward people. That in itself accounts for the change in attitudes towards gays in the US (and, earlier, in Europe).

What the community does not need is a self-appointed activist who writes in a national newspaper that "homosexuality may sometimes have a lot to do with paedophilia, and, further, that if it is based on mutual consent, it is no big deal."

I certainly would not want a man who believed this teaching undergraduates. From Abi's blog, I see that this man, Ashley Tellis, has been sacked from his teaching position at IIT Hyderabad. Below is the comment I posted on Abi's blog:

I don't know what went on at IIT, but I agree with chitta. Please read that article by Tellis before making up your mind. This is not about gay rights. It is about paedophilia. When gay rights activists, all over the world, are struggling to remove conservative conceptions that gays are sexual perverts, Mr Tellis says "homosexuality may sometimes have a lot to do with paedophilia, and, further, that if it is based on mutual consent, it is no big deal."

Elsewhere he glories in his own paedophile activities with a Nepali boy: the article used to be here but seems to be gone now.

A man who thinks paedophilia is "no big deal" should not be teaching undergraduates: I wouldn't want my son in his class. A man who has admitted to paedophilia should be in jail. [Update 12/06/10: The article in question is here and he did not quite admit to paedophilia: he leaves it a little ambiguous. See comment 7 below.] And portraying this as a case of victimisation of gays does no service to the gay rights cause, and indeed, could do a great deal of damage by reinforcing negative (and, in the vast majority of cases, false) public stereotypes of gays.

To add to that: in the case of minors, "consent" makes no difference, for a variety of reasons, only a few of which he touches on (dismissively). But this is not, in my opinion, a topic worth arguing about. Paedophila is off-limits. Conflating paedophilia with gay rights is the very last thing that gay activists need at the moment. (Besides, as Tellis himself points out, most paedophiles are heterosexuals: so why make that conflation at all?)

Blockade

2010-06-07T00:45:00.002+05:30

Not the Gaza blockade, of which much has been said. I'm talking about the Manipur blockade.

If you haven't heard of it, I'm sure you're not alone. I first heard of it in a magazine article a couple of weeks ago, and today I read this article on rediff.

The situation is that the main (essentially, only) highway into Manipur has been blocked by Naga rebels for over 50 days now. As a result, the Manipuris are short of petrol, medicines, and other essential supplies.

I can't imagine even a five-day blockade occurred in a "mainland" India state: the government would intervene, by force if need be. But a 50 day blockade of Manipur does not even register on the national consciousness.

Universities and cities

2010-06-06T21:40:00.004+05:30

Via Abi, here's a recent (well, nearly a month old) article by Sanjeev Sanyal arguing for better integration of universities with urban communities in India. Sanyal's argument is that walling off the campus (as the IITs and IIMs do) causes them to have no impact on their surroundings: to benefit the city, the university system must be integrated into it.

I couldn't agree more. But from a purely selfish point of view, Sanyal's other point -- that it is unfair and unrealistic to expect entire families to live in a remote walled-off location, and unproductive to supply schools, medical facilities, etc at that location simply because the city is too far away -- is equally important.

I just spent two days in Cologne. The university is in a pleasant campus-like space with academic buildings separated by green parks; but the "city" is a couple of minutes walk away, the hotel where I stayed was a five or ten minute walk away, and the main railway station was a 20 minute walk from the hotel (I timed it this morning). There is an extensive tram and underground system but I simply didn't need to use it (but my hosts and I used it once, under time pressure).

Previously, I spent my postdoc time in Paris and New York, and it was a hugely positive experience to be living in the middle of the city and not in a walled-off community. The academic part of my university was indeed walled-off, but New Yorkers will know the special atmosphere that the unwalled New York University contributes to its neighbourhood, the Greenwich Village.

And I grew up in Delhi University, which has lots of small walls but no all-encompassing wall; I think the student and faculty community had a positive influence on the area. Certainly it is one of my favourite parts of Delhi (perhaps the only part of the city that I like).

But the mania for walls is not confined to academic campuses in India. The papers are full of new housing developments that are located an insane distance from the city, but come equipped with school, hospital, clubhouse, and whatnot. Of course, those who can afford these will also have air-conditioned chauffeur-driven cars to transport them. But what is the ecological impact of all this?

Why are our Indian cities often somewhat unpleasant to walk around in? My theory is that the common Indian mindset of separating "shopping" from "residential" areas contributes to it. The newspapers in Chennai are full of complaints from residents in "residential" localities (like Besant Nagar) that shops are infringing their space and causing crowds and noise. But what they don't see is that the commercial activity also contributes to safety. In Cologne (at least in the city centre) you feel safe walking on the road at midnight because there are people around. In Indian residential areas you often don't feel safe after dark. Meanwhile, the "commercial" areas are overcrowded, noisy and dirty, and navigating them becomes an unusually unpleasant obstacle course. A better mixture of commercial and residential activity would, I feel, be beneficial all around: shoppers can avoid the madness of T.Nagar, residents can feel a little more secure (at the expense of putting up with a little more noise). Of course, in addition the usual urban requirements like clean sidewalks, cleanliness, sanitation, are necessary.

Gated communities, academic and otherwise, are an escape from the urban chaos, but I think they are based on a false premise -- that such isolation is desirable. It is not, either for the residents or for the rest of the community.

Terrorist weapons

2010-06-03T01:58:00.002+05:30

(Hat tip: Sunil)

It seems the Israel Defence Force found deadly weapons on the Mavi Marmara, which was attacked by IDF commandos resulting in the deaths of many activists.

The IDF's photographs prove beyond doubt that the ship, which according to Wikipedia has a capacity of 1080 passengers, harboured a handful of knives. (I count perhaps 20 or 30, most of which look like kitchen knives, pocket knives or Swiss army knives). It also carried various kinds of plumbing equipment: a prominent wrench, a few spanners, hammers, screwdriver. And there is a stack of CD-ROMs.

The pictures are captioned: "Pictures of the weapons found on the Mavi Marmara ship where today, when IDF soldiers attempted to board the ship and redirect it to the Ashdod Port, the activists on board lynched the soldiers in a planned attack..."

And there you have it. Beware of carrying kitchen or plumbing equipment if you sail your own boat in international waters near Israel. Remember, if Israeli soldiers board your boat and you resist, it means you planned the attack on them, and they have the right to shoot you.

You can't make this stuff up.

Systemic bias against emerging markets?

2010-05-29T21:47:00.002+05:30

Some years ago, at a lunch discussion in Paris, an Israeli-American asked me what were the chances of a military takeover in India.

"Zero", I answered. I was met with incredulity and, I think, sniggers.

"You can't be so sure! How can you be sure?"

I tried to put it another way. I said something like this: "It is less than the chance of a military takeover in France, or Israel, or the United States -- simply because the army has almost no power in India, is entirely under the control of the political establishment, and it has no influence on Indian politics. Unlike in many developed countries."

More incredulity and audible chuckles, and the subject changed.

I got reminded of that exchange today in reading T N Ninan's takedown of the credit ratings issued by Standard and Poor (S&P) to several countries. (Go and read it now, before reading on.)

Ninan points out that while India has a BBB- credit rating, Spain, Portugal and Italy had an A+ or better rating just two months ago, and so did Greece a year ago. Yet none of the economic indicators -- budget deficit, unemployment rate, public debt, GDP growth rate -- suggest that India should be more risky than these countries. "As recently as in March, S&P was 'affirming' Greece's BBB+ status (which, please note, was better than India's)." China's rating, while better than India's, was also till recently lower than these European countries'.

How can the world's premier rating agency get it so wrong? "The rating agencies argue that emerging markets have a higher political risk. Well, tell that to the Greeks, who are rioting in the streets of Athens!"

Ninan suspects "systemic bias against emerging markets" but I think there is another explanation: Euro-zone countries, like AIG, Citigroup and other Wall Street giants, are "too big to fail". If they screw up their economics, they will be bailed out (it's already happening) because the alternative is the disintegration of the euro as a currency, which, apart from the purely economic consequences, would be a blow to European pride too awful to contemplate.

In India we have no such illusions: we are bigger than all the PIGS put together, but not too big to fail. (This may not apply to China, but it is difficult to see who'd have deep enough pockets to bail out China, were it to become necessary). But in a way that is good news for us: there is nobody to bail us out, so we have an incentive to keep our systems functioning.

RIP, Martin Gardner

2010-05-25T06:06:00.003+05:30

The man who "turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children" is no more. James Randi's post here. NYT obit here.

I posted my thoughts on Gardner just a few months ago, when he turned 95.

Ad-hoc statistics

2010-05-05T22:38:00.008+05:30

I am currently reading E T Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", his posthumous textbook published in 2003. Jaynes was a lifelong promoter of Bayesian methods in probability and statistics, the inventor of the "maximum entropy" method of assigning priors, and, for much of his career, at loggerheads with "orthodox" (or "frequentist") statisticians, who dismissed Bayesian ideas of "prior" and "posterior" probabilities except where these could be rigorously justified as limits of large numbers of trials. Jaynes, drawing on previous work of Cox, Polya, Jeffries and others (including himself), argues that probability theory is the unique generalisation of Boolean logic to statements that have varying degrees of plausibility. Specifically, given three reasonable-sounding "desiderata", he shows that the rules of probability theory follow uniquely, with no reference to trials and sample spaces and the usual language. His point, hammered again and again throughout the book, is that prior information is essential and must not be thrown away: "If we humans threw away what we knew yesterday in reasoning about our problems today, we would be below the level of wild animals." Meanwhile, he condemns much orthodox statistics as "ad-hockery", and even when valid, of extremely limited applicability.

The book is full of interesting nuggets, historical insights and examples of misleading statistics. I just came across the following striking example.

According to Jaynes, the data in this example are real but the circumstances have been simplified. In experiment A, patients were given one of two treatments, an old one and a new one, and the number of "failures" (deaths) and "successes" (recoveries) were compared. The results were:

Experiment A
Old: 16519 failures, 4343 successes
(success rate 20.8 +/- 0.28 %)
New: 742 failures, 122 successes
(success rate 14.1 +/- 1.10 %)

Experiment B was the same experiment conducted two years later. The results were

Experiment B
Old: 3876 failures, 14488 successes
(success rate 78.9 +/- 0.30 %)
New: 1233 failures, 3907 successes
(success rate 76.0 +/- 0.60 %)

The results were "discouraging": the new treatment, in both experiments, showed a lower success rate.

Says Jaynes: "But then one of them had a brilliant idea: let us pool the data, simply adding up" the totals over experiments A and B for each method. This "pooled data" yields the results:

Pooled data
Old: 20395 failures, 18831 successes
(success rate 48.0 +/- 0.25 %)
New: 1975 failures, 4029 successes
(success rate 67.1 +/- 0.61 %)

And, lo and behold, the "pooled data" show the new method performing strikingly better. Says Jaynes, "they eagerly publish this gratifying conclusion, presenting only the pooled data; and become (for a short time) famous as great discoverers."

How is it that pooling the data changes the results? The point is that, when pooling in this manner, certain essential facts are being hidden: both methods performed much better in Experiment B; and experiment B contained many more instances of the new method, with somewhat fewer instances of the old method.

Here is another example of dodgy statistics that I came across a while ago: this one is particularly distressing because it was a review, meant to settle a long-running argument.

Peter Duesberg believes that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus, but by drug overuse (in the original San Francisco bay area outbreaks), malnutrition (in Africa), and the antiretroviral drugs themselves (in the HIV+ patients being treated). Today this is seen as a crackpot view, but back in the 1980s it was at least worthy of consideration. By 1994, mainstream HIV researchers were beginning to get fed up of his arguments.

One of Duesberg's arguments was that AIDS-like symptoms were induced by antiretroviral drugs like AZT (the first antiretroviral approved for use). An example of how he and the mainstream researchers could interpret statistical data in opposite ways is found in a review by Jon Cohen, "Reviewing the data - IV: Could Drugs, Rather Than a Virus, Be the Cause of AIDS?" One of the things at issue is how to interpret data from the "Concorde study", which tracked 877 individuals who were treated with AZT soon after entering the study (the "Imm" group), and 872 individuals who were given deferred treatment with AZT or not given AZT at all (the "Def" group). At the end of the three-year study, 96 deaths occurred in the "Imm" group, and 76 in the "Def" group. Duesberg is quoted as saying, in a written response to Science magazine: "The Concorde data exactly prove my point: The mortality of the AZT-treated HIV-positives was 25% higher than that of the placebo group."

But "25% higher" is a meaningless number. If four deaths occurred in the Def group and five in the Imm group, that would be an increase of 25% but nobody would consider that significant. If there were 400 deaths in the Def group and 500 deaths in the Imm group, most people's gut reaction would be that this is a significant increase. How to assess the significance in this case?

First, Cohen quotes experts who note that 22 of these deaths occurred from causes unrelated to AZT or AIDS, such as traffic accidents and suicides. Subtracting those leads to 81 Imm deaths and 69 Def deaths -- a 17% increase, but how significant is that?

Enter the "experts", and I quote:

In addition, say the critics, there is a deeper flaw in Duesberg's analysis: He does not take account of the total number of people in the Imm and Def groups. His reasoning for ignoring the denominator is, as he told Science in an interview, that "it was the same in the two groups." But National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci says this type of analysis means "ignoring an important part of a calculation." Specifically, there were 96 total deaths out of 877 in the Imm group, implying that 10.9% of the people who were immediately treated with AZT died. In the deferred treatment group, there were 76 deaths among 872 people, or 8.7%.

The appropriate conclusion, say the authors of the Concorde study, is that the difference in mortality between Imm and Def groups is not 25% but 10.9% minus 8.7% -- or 2.2%. Subtracting the deaths from causes unrelated to AZT or AIDS, the difference drops to 1.3%. As the Concorde paper notes, neither difference (2.2% or 1.3%) is statistically significant.

So, apparently, the answer to bad statistics is atrocious statistics. (No wonder AIDS deniers are still around today.) What these people seem to be saying is that the corrected difference is 1.3% of the total population and is not statistically significant (why they assert this is unclear). If one person died in the Def group, and thirteen died in the Imm group, that difference would be the same 1.3%: would it still be statistically insignificant?

Actually, using some simple assumptions one can quickly check how significant these numbers really are. Suppose a patient in the Def group has a fixed probability p of dying in the duration of the experiment. (Of course, not all patients are equally fit, but without knowing other prior information, this is the best we can do.) Given the data (uncorrected, for now, for "other" deaths), our best assumption is p = 76/872 = 0.087. The distribution is a binomial distribution, a bell-shaped curve when the numbers are large: for a population size of N=872 (Def group), its mean is 76 and its standard deviation is the square root of Np(1-p), or about 8.3. For the Imm group, the numbers are nearly unchanged. 96 is more than two standard deviations away from 76, so it would seem that Duesberg was right in pronouncing it significant: there is only a 2% probability that one would see such numbers in the absence of any effect from AZT.

But we can improve on this calculation. We assumed that p was equal to its best estimate, but of course any value of p, other than zero or one, could in theory produce these data. What we need to ask is: given that 76 deaths were seen in the Def group, what is the distribution of expected deaths in the Imm group if AZT had no effect, and where does the number 96 lie on that distribution? I won't get into the details here, but if we assume that we have no a priori expectation on the probability p that a person from Def would die, then the distribution of p is proportional to the likelihood of seeing 76 deaths given p. More generally, if there are N individuals in the population and one observes k deaths, the distribution of p is proportional to the probability of seeing k deaths given p; that is, it is proportional to $ \left( N \atop k \right) p^k (1-p)^{N-k}$. The normalisation factor is obtained by integrating from 0 to 1. The probability of seeing $K$ deaths in the Imm trial, if AZT had no effect, is $ \left( N \atop K \right) p^K (1-p)^{N-K}$, averaged over all values of $p$ with the preceding probability distribution for $p$. If we do the math, we get the following distribution for $K$:
$P(K) = (N+1) \left(N \atop K \right) \left(N \atop k \right) \frac{(k+K)! (2N-k-K)!} {(2N+1)!} $
(We have for simplicity assumed the total number of patients to be the same in both groups, since the actual difference is small.)

If we plot this as a function of $K$, we get a bell-shaped curve as follows:

The red line is the number 96 that were observed in the Imm group: it lies well within the "bell", and clearly it is not a significant difference.

What if we correct the numbers? There were evidently 15 unrelated deaths in the Imm group and 7 in the Def group; and 81 relevant deaths out of 862 in Imm, 69 out of 865 in Def. Taking N = 865 and k = 69, the plot is as follows:

The red line marks the observed number 81 in the Imm group, and statistically it is even less significant than earlier.

The statistics I have used dates to the 19th century. What I find worrisome is that, in 1994, the scientific world was doing their best to shut Duesberg up, and marshalled their best statistics and published them in one of the most prestigious journals (Science) -- and this was the best they could do? The quoted extract above, claiming that 1.3% of 877 is "not statistically significant", is so horrifying to me that I have to wonder: what else in the biomedical literature has been "proved" with the effect of such statistics? Just to illustrate the point, here is the hypothetical case where 3 people died in the control group, and 15 died in the Imm group, out of a total of 872:

Clearly, in this case, 1.3% is statistically significant.

The point here is that statistics is not a trivial task. According to Jaynes, the large majority of "orthodox" 20th-century statisticians got things very wrong. But even within orthodox statistics are applicable, it is not a task to be done mechanically or unthinkingly. It is not fair to expect a biological, medical or clinical researcher to be an expert in this field. Biomedical journals routinely ask reviewers whether expert statistical reviews of manuscripts are necessary. Despite that, I wonder how much bad statistics slips through, and how much damage it causes.

Physicists usually do not undergo serious courses in statistics in their education, and don't commonly use orthodox statistical tests. Jaynes observes in his book that this is a good thing: the gut instinct of a physicist is often a better measure of significance than the "ad-hockery" of orthodox statistics. His solution is to start, in all instances, with the basic laws of probability theory and approach hypothesis testing as a Bayesian problem. This is not usually an easy task, but it is necessary.

Congratulations, Simon Singh

2010-04-02T07:45:00.003+05:30

On an important legal victory. Sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, he earned a ruling that his speech was "fair comment", and the judges added that the court was not the place to settle scientific questions.

He faces further court action but this is a significant ruling. However, as he says, "It is extraordinary this action has cost £200,000 to establish the meaning of a few words." The fight to change British libel laws continues.

Obama and the art of compromise

2010-03-31T11:32:00.003+05:30

Drill, baby, drill. Along "vast" stretches of the Atlantic coastline of the US.

From this article:

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

That's how the New York Times defines compromise. Please the oil companies and the politicians in their pockets, anger the residents and environmentalists. Can't please 'em all!

Wrong answers

2010-03-26T12:16:00.002+05:30

Your company introduces a car priced at Rs 1 lakh (US$ 2500) and becomes internationally famous. A few months after production starts, a customer's brand-new car goes up in flames on the way home from the dealer. The family is too traumatised to consider buying another car. How do you react?

"We regret the inconvenience" -- hm, seems a bit inadequate.

"I fell off a bicycle when I was a kid, but later rode it, overcoming my fear" -- not an improvement.

I'm waiting to see where it goes from here. For me, the good name of the Tatas -- and it was a very good name at one time -- has been permanently tarnished by Tata Indicom (I'm a former customer) and Tata Motors (I'm not a customer but never seem to hear good things about their vehicles); and especially by their antics in Singur and Ratan Tata's subsequent cosying up to the butcher of Gujarat.

Odds are, it's wrong

2010-03-18T21:44:00.002+05:30

That's the title of a very interesting article at Science News, arguing that bad statistics is the dirty secret of science. I believe it is.

Though there is an entire field of physics called "statistical mechanics", the statistics there don't go beyond the 19th century. To this day, physics undergraduate and graduate programmes cover statistics minimally, or not at all. Perhaps it seems unimportant to theorists, but it is crucially important in testing hypotheses, which is what experiments claim to do. Or perhaps hypotheses in physics are sufficiently clear-cut, and experimental data sufficiently clean, that sophisticated hypothesis testing is not necessary.

In other fields, hypotheses are murky and plentiful, data are noisy and ambiguous, but the practitioners are still ignorant of statistics. When the field is medicine, and the question is of new drugs or therapies, it is a crucial matter.

Famously, Sir Roy Meadow -- creator of the discredited "Munchhausen syndrome by proxy" hypothesis -- sent several mothers to jail with his expert evidence based on bogus statistics. The consequences of bad statistics may not always be equally bad, but if the medical literature is as riddled with them as recent articles suggest, the cumulative effect may be worse than anything Meadow did.

But bad statistics in the medical literature is just the starting point: there are problems throughout the practice of standard medicine. This is why, though I respect mainstream medicine and regard much "alternative medicine" as fraudulent and the rest as of very limited (and unvalidated) applicability, I was sufficiently annoyed by this post by Orac to leave this comment. (See also other comments there on dubious practices in the health industry.) I think Orac does, in theory, a great service by pointing out peddlers of pseudoscience and exposing their ignorance and, often, fraudulence. In practice, he preaches to the converted and, I suspect, antagonises nearly everyone else.

Airtel wants me to chat with young boys and girls

2010-03-17T15:18:00.005+05:30

I saw this message after sending a text from my Airtel mobile. Words fail me.

In case the text is unreadable, it says: "SMS cost 0.30 INR Bal 452.20 INR. Mobile Chat! Call 543216 & chat with young boys & girls from Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai." It continues, if you scroll down, "Charges at Rs 2/min." The blue dot is the light of my computer's webcam -- the only available device I had to capture the message before it vanished.

Maybe I should give Airtel the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not promoting paedophilia -- but it sounds plenty sleazy regardless. But, just in case they are promoting paedophilia, I'm alerting some activists, as well as putting up this blog post.

A new way to detect magnetic monopoles!

2010-03-16T20:47:00.003+05:30

I have previously posted on monopoles and on homoeopathy, so it is only fitting that I post this gem of a scholarly paper. (Seen on Orac)

From the abstract:

In previous articles by this author and his colleagues in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, it has been shown that physical reality consists of two uniquely different categories of substance, one being electric charge–based while the other appears to be magnetic charge–based. Normally, only the electric atom/molecule type of substance is accessible by our traditional measurement instruments. We label this condition as the uncoupled state of physical reality that is our long-studied, electric atom/molecule level of nature. The second level of physical reality is invisible to traditional measurement instruments when the system is in the uncoupled state but is accessible to these same instruments when the system is in the coupled state of physical reality... Part II of this article (in a forthcoming issue) explores the thermodynamics of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) through five different space–time applications involving coupled state physics to show their relevance to today's medicine: (1) homeopathy; (2) the placebo effect; (3) long-range, room temperature, macroscopic-size-scale, information entanglement; (4) explanation for dark matter/energy plus possible human levitation; and (5) electrodermal diagnostic devices.

Yes, that's exactly what was missing in the physicists' picture: "a coupled state of physical reality." (Needless to say, Maxwell's equations, which suggest that a magnetic monopole -- if it existed -- would be rather easy to detect, must be wrong too.)

On mastery and singlemindedness

2010-02-26T12:21:00.002+05:30

Of late I find myself getting into several discussions on "mastery". One example was here, where the topic under discussion was poetry, and my opinion was this: "To break the rules you need to know the rules. I'd say you need to do more than know the rules: you need to master the rules." (I also promised a longer write-up on my views on the subject, but this is not that write-up: it's more of a trial run.)

I don't claim to be an expert in poetry, but I think this principle applies widely. I heard it from a classical guitarist in Bangalore who had a most unorthodox posture, and would say "I'm sitting like this because, first, I have a physical problem with the standard posture, and second, I know what I am doing. If you are learning the instrument, you had better hold it the standard way. In science, there are many examples of scientists with mastery of the subject breaking rules -- the Dirac delta function being perhaps the best known -- but an average scientist who breaks rules is likely to produce crackpot research.

Here, however, I want to talk about a different question: does mastery of a field imply exclusion of ability, or interest, in other fields? The specific motivation is Sunil Mukhi's post today on mastery. He expresses his skepticism on the current scientific/academic trend favouring "interdisciplinarity" and "being a well-rounded individual" and "all that", and adds that "serious achievement requires concentration, knowledge, technique and depth."

Now, there is absolutely no doubt about that. Achievement in any field requires all of the above. But he cites as his example Sachin Tendulkar, saying that Sachin "single-mindedly focuses on what he does best" and suggesting that he has no interest in any other form of expertise.

But in Sachin's case this is not true. He is a fine bowler. To date he has 154 ODI wickets, 44 Test wickets, but those figures don't reveal his value: he is not called to bowl long spells as specialist bowlers do, but as a change bowler to break up a well-set partnership, and his success rate there is extraordinary. He seems to extract as much turn, sometimes, as Shane Warne or Mutthiah Muralitharan. I am convinced that if he had applied a part of his batting focus to bowling, though he wouldn't have been the greatest batsman in history, he would have been by far the greatest allrounder -- greater than Gary Sobers. Ne is also an outstanding fielder. As for other sports: very few sportsmen -- in Tendulkar's class or not -- attempt more than one sport professionally, but I am sure Tendulkar has an amateur interest in several other sports. In particular, he has been photographed playing table-tennis (with concentration writ large on his face).

I have a big problem with the view, widespread in India, that mastery in one field requires exclusion of interest in other fields. Many Indian parents discourage their children from pursuing any other activity during the dreaded Board exams: anything other than study is viewed as a distraction. I read the complete Sherlock Holmes, cover to cover, and I don't think my results suffered. Nearly all great scientists that I can think of have had strong interests in other fields, and not just in other sciences. Far from distracting them, I think it has strengthened their primary work -- even if they never went fully "interdisciplinary".

Which brings me to Sunil's other example: Srinivasa Ramanujan. Says Sunil:

Recently a colleague, talking about his institution's undergrad admissions process, observed that "with the kind of breadth requirements we have, one wonders if Ramanujan, who only knew mathematics, would even get admission". That's basically my point, and I think Sachin's achievement validates it.

But Ramanujans are very rare and not replicable. I'd like to think that if a Ramanujan showed up at my institute, or Sunil's, his ability would be immediately recognised by the scientists there and we would make every effort to help him bypass the usual educational requirements. But it is terrible advice to a young mind to try and become a Ramanujan. Such a creature comes along once a century, or
even more rarely.

Most of the great Indian scientists I can think of were multidisciplinary. Visveswarayya had an extraordinary range of civil engineering achievements, from irrigation to flood protection to roadways. Jagdish Chandra Bose made significant contributions to plant physiology, membrane biophysics, and other fields, and is now recognised as Marconi's predecessor in wireless communication. C V Raman made contributions in light scattering, acoustics of musical instruments, crystal dynamics and properties. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was famous for switching fields every ten years and achieving mastery of the new field: he wrote classic books on stellar structure, stellar dynamics, radiative transfer, plasma physics, and hydrodynamics. Yet Ramanujan seems to capture the popular imagination much more than these figures. His is a unique and romantic story, but should not be held up as an example to follow. He is not someone who broke the rules after first having mastered the rules: he seems to have never learned the rules, but achieved mastery all the same.

To me, "mastery" does not imply "singlemindedness". Nor does it imply remaining in the same field all one's life. And, in fact, I think Sachin Tendulkar is an excellent example of the former point, and I suspect he will continue to be an important figure in whatever he chooses to do after he retires from cricket.

Sachin Tendulkar is no Ramanujan. He has natural talent, yes, but is the product of a fine coach (Ramakant Achrekar), a school system that has produced many other fine cricketers, and, of course, his own hard work and study. Ramanujan barely knew how he produced his own results (which he largely supplied without proof, keeping mathematicians busy for the following century), and often attributed his insights to the Goddess Namagiri. Tendulkar's achievements are the results of extremely conscious hard work, and he is eminently worthy of emulation.

Bombing the innocent

2010-02-14T00:01:00.002+05:30

A year and a half ago, when bomb blasts occurred in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, I wrote here: "Protecting public, open places is impossible.... unless one puts up entry barriers for the entire city and vets each one of the several million residents of the city. The cost of that -- and I don't mean monetary -- would be unacceptable. This is true not just in India... Terrorism is always a cowardly thing, but I suspect the reason this sort of thing isn't more common is that, even to the terrorists, targetting civilians in public places is too easy, too cowardly."

The news of today's restaurant bombing in Pune makes me stand by that statement. If -- as it appears -- it was a terrorist attack and not an accident, it was a craven and cowardly thing to do. My condolences to the victims. But, paradoxically, this only shows the desperation of the terrorists. If they are reduced to this sort of action, which requires no sort of bravery and earns them only opprobrium from all quarters, it shows how little their support -- whether local or foreign is; and how effective India's anti-terrorism strategy has been, that in this enormous and crowded country this has been the first terrorist attack since the Mumbai attacks over 14 months ago.

In other welcome news, Maharashtra's moviegoers gave an overwhelming thumbs-down to their own home-grown terrorists.

Thought

2010-02-10T22:37:00.002+05:30

(For those who don't know the Monty Python sketch on woody and tinny words, go here.)

Blues is woody. Country/western is tinny.

A tale of two shoes

2010-01-31T15:41:00.002+05:30

When Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw a shoe at US President George W Bush at a press conference in December 2008, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released after nine months in jail.

When Delhi journalist Jarnail Singh threw a shoe at Indian home minister P Chidambaram in April 2009, he was taken to the police station for questioning and released the same day; the release was reportedly on Chidambaram's orders.

Both shoe-throwers were motivated by their deep sense of hurt and pain at the suffering of their community and the way it was being ignored by the world. But in Jarnail Singh's case, I think the government was aware of the depth of feeling on it, and the decision not to press charges was as much a pragmatic one to avoid inflaming an important section of the electorate, as a humanitarian gesture of forgiveness by Chidambaram.

Singh was, of course, motivated by the lack of action on the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, and in particular on the clean chit given to Jagdish Tytler, one of the prime accused in those riots. He has now written a book, "I accuse", detailing those riots and the aftermath. I bought it intending to read it, but find I can't read more than a few paragraphs at a time: it is too stomach-churning. Nearly everyone who matters is guilty of the murder of 3000 Sikhs in 1984. The local Congress party leadership -- H K L Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler, and others -- for leading the violence. The Delhi police, not just for abdicating their responsibility but for actively abetting the rioters and, in many cases (as documented by Singh), actually restraining Sikhs who tried to defend themselves, and even arresting them for murder if they happened to kill a few rioters (from a mob of thousands) in self-defence. The home minister, P V Narasimha Rao, for abdicating his responsibility and not stepping in for two days. The new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, for apparently supporting the violence ("when a tree falls the earth shakes.") The President, Zail Singh, for his utter helplessness. The media for ignoring it all: the state-run TV and Radio switched over to mourning mode, and the newspapers, except for the Indian Express and Jansatta, reported the riots minimally or not at all; the Times of India had an editorial by Girilal Jain declaring that "this is the result of end of patience on the part of the Hindus." (Where else have we heard that recently?)

But one person who was not to blame for those events is Chidambaram (as Khushwant Singh points out in his foreword to the book). And, as Singh documents, the stone-throwing incident seemed to provoke some genuine expressions of contrition, and action, on the part of the ruling Congress party. In particular, Tytler and Sajjan Kumar were made to withdraw their candidatures from the upcoming Parliamentary elections.

Even earlier, after the Congress party returned to power in 2004, both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi had made statements condemning the violence, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said in Parliament that the violence of 1984 was a blot on the forehead of the country, and that he hung his head in shame for it. These and other gestures, belated though they were, had been welcomed by the Sikh community -- in fact, Sonia Gandhi's support for a Sikh Prime Minister was itself a significant gesture; but these seemed to be belied by the renewed patronage of Tytler and Kumar, Tytler's exoneration by the CBI, and suggestions that it was a "closed chapter" and "the wounds have healed".

Jarnail Singh's shoe-throwing incident was to show that the wounds hadn't healed. Chidambaram's instant forgiveness was, I think, an acknowledgement of the still-open wounds. And now Singh's book serves to remind us that, to this day, nobody has been held accountable for the horrific crimes that he details.

What about the open wounds from the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq in 2003? Perhaps that's for people in other countries to worry about.

"No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!"

2010-01-20T19:52:00.002+05:30

A must-read column in the Jamaica Observer, by John Maxwell.

And how utterly repugnant to see the two countries, the USA and France, that are responsible for Haiti's plight, squabble now about the relief efforts.

Haiti

2010-01-18T23:15:00.002+05:30

More obnoxious even than Pat Robertson's attribution of the Haiti earthquake to their alleged devil worship is David Brooks' NYT article arguing, essentially, that Haiti's poverty is its own fault and aid is useless. More obnoxious because Brooks is supposed to be an "intellectual" writing in the pages of a respected newspaper.

Matt Taibbi, in his usual style, gives Brooks the treatment he deserves. But Taibbi, in turn, fails to tell us the real reasons Haiti is poor.

Meanwhile, they need our help...

Many moons

2010-01-15T14:23:00.002+05:30

Eclipse, Jan 15, 2010

Yet more on poetry

2010-01-12T16:40:00.002+05:30

I was going to write a long post on my thoughts on poetry, then I realised I'd done it before (and sparked one of my longest-ever discussions).

The motivation last time was some superficially amusing but ultimately mediocre poetry by a Union minister. This time the motivation was Anindita's reflections on appropriate criticism of work that one doesn't like; and the motivation for that was a particular poem that she didn't like, and her attempts to say so without sounding mean or nasty. (In fact, I quite liked that poem and, it turns out, at least one published poet likes it too. But it would be boring if everyone agreed on everything.)

I have a lot of thoughts on the subject, and also on analogies in science, but I went into some of that in comments to my previous post as well as new comments on Anindita's; I may yet expand on them in a new one.

Anyway, the discussion on Anindita's blog is getting interesting, especially how two different published poets (she and Vivek Narayanan) each see a published poem so differently. (And at least two other poets are commenters there, with interesting thoughts on the criticism process.) Go read it if you're interested in such things.

We have the expressways, but what about the pedestrians?

2010-01-10T23:52:00.004+05:30

I have driven from Chennai to Bangalore and back several times in the past few years, including 3 times in 2009. In my aging car, far from the fastest on the road, the one-way trip takes around 6 hours -- but about a third of that time is spent within the two cities. It takes barely four hours to go from Poonamallee, on the outskirts of Chennai, to Electronic City, on the outskirts of Bangalore, thanks to the new four-lane expressway, part of the "golden quadrilateral" project initiated by former prime minister A B Vajpayee. Some of the cars that pass me on the drive are, I am sure, doing over 150 kmph -- they probably take under 3 hours to travel between the two suburbs.

I called it an expressway, but that is a severe misnomer. At very few points is it elevated: nearly all crossings are on the surface, meaning you had better slow down as you approach them (though very few drivers do) -- and you had better be extremely cautious if you actually want to cross that road. There are several small towns and villages en route, and I wonder what life is like for their residents, especially the elderly and infirm among them. It cannot be fun crossing a 4-lane expressway, with 100+ kmph traffic, on foot when you are over 80 years old. Why couldn't elevated roads have been built across inhabited areas (as it is at Vellore, the largest town on the route)? The cost is certainly more, but what about the human lives saved?

It is the same story near where I work: the road once called "Canal bank road", now called "Rajiv Gandhi Salai", and informally called the "IT corridor", is a 4-lane road that, for an over 2 km stretch between the Madhya Kailash and Tidel Park intersections (well within city limits), does not have a single traffic light. Traffic routinely goes at 80kmph on this stretch, and I am sure some vehicles do well over 100kmph. The powers that be eventually, after much protest, installed some pedestrian overbridges, but it is far too little. Whose bright idea was it to have an "expressway" at surface level in the middle of the city? Worse, an important hospital, the Voluntary Health Services (that caters mainly to the poor and less-affluent sections of society), is situated near the beginning of the road, but on the "wrong" side for people coming from central Chennai -- so they are forced to take a 4km detour, to the end of the road and back, to enter the hospital, adding to their travel costs.

Which brings me to two news items that intrigued me recently. The first is this article on the NICE expressway in Bangalore, and how recent protests from villagers have stalled traffic on it. Says the article,

The NICE peripheral road is turning into an anomaly of sorts as commuters are finding it difficult to traverse through the expressway. For a week now, traffic on the peripheral road stretches linking Mysore Road-Tumkur Road and Mysore Road-Bannerghatta Road have ground to a halt, what with farmers protesting against alleged excess land acquisition resorting to road blockades.

The Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise (NICE), meanwhile, is losing lakhs of rupees in the form of toll fees collected from the vehicles. The aggrieved company has shot off a letter to the state government demanding its intervention to resolve the issue.

Nasty villagers, blocking law-abiding, toll-paying car-owners from using the shiny new expressway in their SUVs and Volkswagen Jettas because "excess land" was acquired. How can an expressway be built without acquiring land? Don't we all know that expressways boost the local economy? What are they complaining about?

Well, deep inside this article (which is about a spat between Deve Gowda and Yeddyurappa, I find a different version of the protest: the villagers are "demanding that NICE build a bridge across the road in the wake of a recent accident involving a school bus".

How about demanding that expressways be built elevated over all villages, and with grade-separaters at all existing intersections? Or else, install a few traffic lights and stop calling it an expressway. This perversion of the word "expressway" is a fraud on the Indian people, and a deadly one. [Update 11/01: Sridhar points out in a comment that an "expressway" is only partially access-controlled and may have a few at-grade intersections, while a "freeway" has no at-grade intersections. But I don't think the term "partial control of access" applies to our expressways. They go right through towns, even medium-sized towns like Ambur on the Chennai-Bangalore road, effectively cutting them in two.]

If the villagers can get hold of a good lawyer, I think this would be PIL material -- by no means restricted to NICE.

Why don't climate scientists use Feynman diagrams?

2009-12-30T21:22:00.004+05:30

This paper, purporting to prove that the atmospheric greenhouse effect violates the second law of thermodynamics and therefore cannot exist, was apparently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics -- not the world's leading journal in the field, but hardly a crackpot publication.

Among the gems in the paper (spotted here) is this (pp 59-60 of the arXiv version): Climatological radiation balance diagrams...

1. cannot represent radiation intensities, the most natural interpretation of the arrows depicted in Figure 23, as already explained in Section 2.1.2 and Section 2.1.5;
2. cannot represent sourceless fluxes, i.e. a divergence free vector fields in three dimensions, since a vanishing three-dimensional divergence still allows that a portion of the field goes sidewards;
3. do not fit in the framework of Feynman diagrams, which represent mathematical expressions clearly defined in quantum field theory [159].
4. do not fit in the standard language of system theory or system engineering [160].

I kid you not. So radiation balance diagrams should fit in the framework of Feynman diagrams or system engineering diagrams?

In case you're wondering: section 2.1.2 supplies some basic definitions of radiation intensity and flux. Section 2.1.5 says "In classical radiation theory radiation is not described by a vector field assigning to every space point a corresponding vector..." but in fact mentions that the "modern" (not so modern, actually) description uses the Poynting vector, and also talks of black body radiation and its variation from real spectra. Nowhere do I see any relevance to point 1 here. As for point 2, so what?

Also, in case you are wondering, reference 159 is to the standard text on quantum field theory by Itzykson and Zuber, and reference 160 is to the SysML site. Apparently climate scientists should be specifying their Feynman diagrams in SysML.

More here (that blog takes the credit for spotting the Feynman Diagram thing: I didn't wade through the first 60 pages of it myself!)

The authors apparently submitted this paper in 2007 and it got accepted in 2009. It reads like a prank (after Sokal, I suppose one sees prankery everywhere). But apparently they are serious, and apparently the journal editors didn't care to take a second look at it, despite its bombastic title.

A new international science centre

2009-12-28T23:08:00.004+05:30

I am attending the inaugural conference of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, (ICTS) [update 29/12: fixed expansion], a new centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Though the centre has been in virtual existence since 2007 and has already organised several meetings, its foundation stone was unveiled today by C N R Rao. Prior to that, the centre's director, Spenta Wadia, described the history of the centre and its goals. The evening concluded with a public lecture by David Gross on the nature of theory, the second of three public lectures in the conference.

What is the ICTS? It aims to be, primarily, a facilitator of collaboration and interaction among scientists -- theoretical and experimental, from India and from abroad -- and people from other walks of life, too. To that end, it will assist in organising conferences and meetings (and, eventually, be a venue for those meetings); host visiting scientists, and their students and postdocs, for extended stays; and also have a small core faculty of its own, as well as adjunct faculty from elsewhere. Three existing institutes were specifically named as role models: the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; the Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK; and the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, CA, USA. The goal is to rival those centres in international impact, and Spenta Wadia and the others behind ICTS can certainly do it, with help from the Indian academic community and the government. The Karnataka government has donated 17 acres of land to the institute, near the picturesque village of Hesareghatta (which is also known for Protima Gauri's Nrityagram dance centre). It will be exciting in future years to have an international centre of the calibre of ICTP, KITP or the Newton Institute in our own backyard (if Bangaloreans will excuse this Chennai-ite for that phrase).

Key to this, I think, is implementing what Prof Wadia and others talked about: the importance of diversity in interactions. From that perspective, I find the inaugural conference disappointing already. The conference is titled "Science without boundaries", but out of 20 scheduled talks (not counting the public lectures), 11 are physics, 6 are mathematics, one is computer science, one is physics-dominated chemistry, and one is synthetic biology. [Update 29/11: One physics talk today was replaced by a computational biology talk, because of the snowstorms in the US.] Only 5 of these talks are over, and a few of them were excellent and I am sure some of the remainder will be excellent too, but I find it an extraordinary distribution of topics for a conference that claims to be on "science without boundaries". What makes it worse is that the three non-physics non-math talks, and the sole experimental physics talk, were all crammed into today's session, so that the remaining 3 days will be devoted entirely to theoretical physics and mathematics. Other than a nod to computer science, there is no theoretical talk in the entire schedule that is not physics or mathematics! Meanwhile, of the 11 physics talks, no fewer than four are on string theory -- an interesting theory no doubt, but an entirely unverified one to date -- and only three are on condensed-matter, surely the most exciting (and interdisciplinary) area of physics in recent years. Statistical mechanics, non-linear dynamics, and other areas of physics are entirely unrepresented. If the goal was to demonstrate the diversity and interdisciplinarity of "theoretical sciences", a better attempt could have been made.

(On a related note: of the 11 India-based invited speakers, 6 are from TIFR and affiliated institutes. India has more diversity than that in the "theoretical sciences".)

Be that as it may, the talks so far have largely been good, as have the two public lectures that have taken place (the third is scheduled for Wednesday, December 30). Yesterday Avi Wigderson gave an interesting talk on computational complexity theory, and though I think he was guilty of needless oversimplification as well as needless controversial statements in places, it was a good introduction to the question of whether P=NP. In his defence, also, it should be noted that he was a last-minute replacement for Sir Michael Atiyah, who could not make it because of illness; and he abandoned his holiday in Hampi to deliver this talk.

Today David Gross talked on the nature of theory, and it was an entertaining history of theoretical science, as well as a well-argued presentation of the importance and relevance of theoretical work. He made the point, emphatically, that revolutions in science don't sweep aside previous knowledge, but build on it. (So Newton's theory of gravitation is still useful, even though not quite correct.) Among other interesting points, he raised the possibility that even if a "theory of everything" (a unified theory of the fundamental forces, including gravitation) exists, it may be too sophisticated for human minds to grasp (just as quantum mechanics is too sophisticated for dogs to grasp). But he made it clear that he does not believe that.

I cannot resist quoting a mild dig Prof Gross made at the S in the name ICTS. He related the story of a press conference at Princeton after John Nash won the Nobel. Supposedly, a journalist asked Nash: "You have won the Memorial Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Is economics a science?" He replied: "No, any discipline that requires the word "science" to be added to its name is not one." Social scientists, political scientists and creation scientists, take note.

Wednesday's talk is by Albert Libchaber, on the origin of life. If you're in Bangalore, do attend. Details here.

Purism

2009-12-26T21:24:00.004+05:30

A few days ago, the eminent vocalist T M Krishna wrote an article in The Hindu bemoaning the increasing use in Carnatic music of instruments that are not sufficiently sensitive or flexible to reproduce the fine microtonal modulations ("gamakas", similar to "meends" in Hindustani music) required to fully express a raga.

This is not a new controversy. The western "equally tempered" chromatic scale is an approximation that gets every interval except the octave subtly wrong. For example, the fifth note ("panchama", "pa") is supposed to have exactly one and a half times the frequency of the tonic or "sa", but in the chromatic scale it turns out slightly flat: 2^(7/12) = 1.498 approximately. It has been recognised since Pythagoras (and even earlier, probably) that notes in small-integer frequency ratios sound pleasant when played together, but all intervals on the piano, except the octave, are irrational (being powers of the twelfth root of two). The compromise is necessary in western music to enable modulation to new keys without retuning the instrument. In Indian music, where the tonic is never changed, it is argued that the chromatic scale is unnecessary. While the piano is rarely used, the harmonium has achieved considerable popularity (it continues to be widely used in Hindustani music, though not in Carnatic music) but is detested by some purists for this reason.

Equally important, instruments like the piano cannot "bend" the note: they play a fixed pitch when you press the key. In Indian music, it is common to "slide" from one note to the other and "waver" about certain notes: it is such ornamentation (the "gamakas" and "meends" that I referred to above) that gives ragas their individual character.

So Krishna's tirade against the keyboard and the saxophone is understandable but not new. (He also acknowledges that some imports of Western instruments have been successful, in particular the use of the violin since the 19th century, and the use of the electric mandolin by U. Srinivas.) Nevertheless, I wonder if an excess of such "purism" may not be detrimental to the music itself.

Most of the arguments against keyboard instruments can be, and have been, levelled against the santoor and its first and foremost practitioner in Hindustani music, Shivkumar Sharma. Shivkumar cannot produce genuine "meends" but he achieves the illusion of doing so with rapid sliding tremolos. He also produces several new dimensions to his music by striking notes simultaneously with both hands: his left-hand patterns, while his right hand plays the melody, are a form of harmonic accompaniment to the music -- but done so tastefully that only the rigidest of purists would object.

Krishna names no names but, since he believes no experiment involving the saxophone has worked, he clearly has a poor opinion of Kadri Gopalnath, the best-known saxophone player in Carnatic music. Personally I am not fond of Gopalnath's music myself, without being able to quite define why. But I found the contrast of the following two passages interesting. Krishna:

The saxophone, among other instruments, is today very popular. The artists have made some modifications and changes to try and make it sound Carnatic but that has just not happened. The inherent limitation of the instrument makes the artiste limit his choice of ragas. Is this necessary? This is, to me, ridiculous. Are we willing to limit the bandwidth of a musical idiom to accommodate an instrument?

Gary Giddins, writing on a recent collaboration between Gopalnath and American jazz saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa:

Gopalnath, who generally plays in a yogalike seated position, has perfected something that jazz saxophonists have been attempting for decades: moving beyond the Western chromatic scale into the realm of microtones, a feat harder for wind instruments, whose keys are in fixed positions, than for strings or voice. Jazz players, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, had gone about it by varying intonation, blowing multiphonics (two or more notes at the same time), or squawking in the upper register, where pitches are imprecisely defined. Gopalnath does none of that. Using alternate fingerings and innovative embouchure techniques, he maintains faultless intonation while sliding in and out of the chromatic scale.

Krishna is of course much more knowledgeable on Carnatic music than Giddins, or Mahanthappa, but I wonder if he is not too close to the picture to see it fully.

There are few significant practitioners of the piano in Indian music, but one recent pianist who has attracted much recent attention is Anil Srinivasan, Krishna's cousin. Anil is a trained western classical pianist who has been immersed in and absorbed Carnatic music since childhood. He has been grappling with the hard (many would say, impossible) problem of combining Western harmonies and Carnatic melodies, and -- in collaboration with the vocalist Sikkil Gurucharan, in particular -- has produced some very interesting music. I have no idea whether Krishna was referring to Anil in his article. But Anil is trying to do something very different from Shivkumar Sharma or Kadri Gopalnath. He is not trying to play authentic Indian classical music on an apparently unsuitable instrument. He is trying to use his instrument and his knowledge of harmonic theory to supplement, and expand, the music itself, while relying on collaborators like Gurucharan to supply the "purist" component of the music. He is playing to the strengths of the piano, not to its weaknesses. He is not trying to do things on the piano that are easy on Indian instruments: he is doing things that would be impossible on Indian instruments. Whether those things are desirable is a matter of opinion, but I -- and many others, it seems -- like the result.

It seems that Anil wrote a rejoinder to Krishna, which I haven't seen and can't find online (update 27/12: here), but Krishna's reply accuses Anil of missing the point of Krishna's criticism. The point, stated as narrowly as possible, is that playing Carnatic music on instruments incapable of expressing all nuances of the music, and therefore limiting one's repertoire to "suitable" ragas, diminishes the music rather than enhancing it. Again, I'm not sure whether he is applying this criticism to Anil, who is not (I think) trying to reproduce the intricacies of the music, but to supplement and expand it.

But is Krishna's narrowly-stated criticism justified at all? I can't help thinking of another form of music I am fond of, the blues, which permeates jazz and rock as well as being an art form in its own right. The blues is defined by the "blues scale" and its "blue notes": some notes -- notably the third and seventh, and sometimes also the fifth -- are played slightly "flat", but not quite as flat as their Western "minor scale" counterparts. That sort of flattening cannot be reproduced on the piano. "Bending" and "wobbling" those notes is also integral to blues, and certainly cannot be achieved on the piano (it is achieved on the guitar by bending the string with the left hand). Yet nobody would argue that the piano has no place in blues or jazz. Since the early 20th century pianists have worked around their instrument's limitations in innovative ways, and their experiments have enhanced the music, not diminished it.

Of the artists mentioned above, I usually like listening to Shivkumar, I don't much enjoy Kadri Gopalnath, and I find Anil Srinivasan's approach very promising. This is not a technically informed evaluation of these artists' respective merits. But I think musical quality is not necessarily correlated with technical purity. There are lots of musicians who follow all the rules but are mind-numbingly dull to listen to.

It seems to me, on reading Krishna's first article closely, that he is more worried about the effect of keyboard instruments on music education -- but then there are much graver problems to worry about. A scholarly article on how music should be taught would be welcome. But complaints about unsuitable instruments sound, to me, more reactionary than artistic. T M Krishna is a well-established and widely respected musician, but he is too young to sound like a curmudgeon.

RIP, Asheem

2009-12-26T09:46:00.003+05:30

Asheem Chakravarty of the band Indian Ocean died yesterday of a heart attack. Obituary here (and elsewhere).

Though not formally trained, he and his bandmates defined a new sound that combined elements of Indian folk and classical with Western rock. Asheem played tabla, and sang, often simultaneously. The combination of his tabla, the acoustic guitar of Sushmit Sen, the bass of Rahul Ram and drums of Amit Kilam combined to unique effect. In the early days, the band played largely instrumental music, but as time went on, the somewhat classical-sounding vocal of Asheem and the somewhat more raucous, folk-inspired singing of Rahul Ram dominated their music more and more. After struggling with college-festival gigs for nearly 10 years, the band achieved considerable success with their album Kandisa in 2000, and in recent years have been touring heavily around the world.

Asheem had a heart attack in October, in Doha airport on the way back from a tour of the US. He had been in a poor condition since then. While Indian Ocean have continued to honour their recent concert commitments with fill-in players, it is hard to imagine them without Asheem. I hope the band finds a way to go on. And my condolences to Asheem's family, and to the band: though he was taken away early, he enriched many lives.

More thoughts on Apple

2009-12-21T23:16:00.003+05:30

We've now had the Mac Mini for over a month. It's mostly my wife using it, and finding it very easy to use. But here are some random observations:

Did I hate proprietary software? I thought I did, but I suppose I only hated the Windows world. There is no open-source program that compares to iPhoto, for example. (And do we really care if such programs are not open-source? I increasingly realise that I'm for open standards and interoperability, not necessarily open source as such.)
Is Mac OS X stable and reliable? Yes. No crashes yet. Perhaps recent versions of Windows are equally good, I don't know.
Is the command line still useful? Yes. Example: my wife had over a hundred files in the "Downloads" directory and wanted to move only the JPG photos to the "Photos" directory on the desktop. Pointing and clicking to select them in the graphical file manager was a tedious process. I simply opened a terminal and typed "mv Downloads/*.jpg Desktop/Photos".
But is the graphical interface that hides all the Unix complexity good at what it does? Mostly, yes, but there are slip-ups. Example: the default shortcuts for switching "spaces" ("virtual desktops" on Linux, no equivalent on Windows) were shown as "^ left" and "^ right", and despite some Linux experience, my wife didn't immediately realise that "^" was shorthand for the "Ctrl" key. (I suppose only power users want virtual desktops anyway, but she knew them from Linux and found them convenient.)
Is open source software still useful on the Mac? Yes. Case in point: VLC, the media player. Unlike Windows (last I checked), the Mac plays DVDs out-of-the-box -- but enforces a region code, which may be changed only five times before it is permanently locked. This is strictly a software restriction, at the behest of the movie industry. VLC disregards the region code so we can happily play DVDs from multiple regions. We have also installed The Gimp and Inkscape: the alternatives were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, but those are expensive and the free programs are good enough.
Anything we found we can't do, or not easily? Yes: save a flash video from YouTube into a separate file. (I suppose there would be plugins for Firefox to do it, but first we'd have to install Firefox.) On linux, look in the /tmp directory for a file whose name begins with "Flash", and copy it. Supposedly it used to be a similar mechanism (different location) in earlier versions of OS X, but on Snow Leopard we couldn't find it.
Do I plan to trade in my Linux laptop for a Mac? No.

One white car

2009-12-19T10:15:00.001+05:30

'Twas tee, enn, ten, vee, five, seven, six, two,
One torrential white car in driving rain.
It hit her, but it well could have been you.

A call-taxi halted to let her through.
Her umbrella flapped. And, bull-like insane,
Came Tee, enn, ten, vee, five, seven, six, two.

Muddy puddles trap one's wet feet like glue.
The white car halted, as she tried in vain
To step past them. It well could have been you.

"Hm, why should pesky pedestrians do
Road-crossings in my car's own service-lane?"
thought Tee, enn, ten, vee, five, seven, six, two.

He revved, and bumped her knee (he missed her shoe).
"Don't cross so slow," he said; sped off again.
It's his road. Does your knee belong to you?

No injuries? Not even a bruise or two?
Not dead? Well then, stuff happens. Don't complain.
And Tee, enn, ten, vee, five, seven, six, two
Stays on our roads till he kills me. Or you.

(Any resemblance to real-life incidents is not coincidental)

Sequencing the human genome... again

2009-12-13T13:50:00.004+05:30

The CSIR is back in the news, this time for more pleasant reasons: sequencing the human genome. Several news items appeared on the achievement, by IGIB, Delhi, last week.

But not all the coverage is positive: as Arvind pointed out in a comment on an earlier post, some senior scientists (including Pushpa Bhargava) question the importance of the achievement as well as the ethics of announcing it to the media before it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

I agree on the latter point, and am unsure of the former -- but that is the job of peer-reviewers. It is how science works. The media is not qualified to evaluate new scientific claims. The peer-review system, as it currently exists, has its problems, but replacing qualified reviewers by journalists is hardly the solution (I assume that the work has indeed been or is being submitted to a relevant journal, though).

But there were a few other aspects of the original news report that left me disturbed. The comparison of time frames -- six weeks for this project, 13 years for the original Human Genome Project -- is quite inappropriate. It is always easier to do something for the second time. The original project was developing new sequencing technologies and computational algorithms that took the major part of those 13 years; eventually, the successful method (and one that is widely used today, including, I expect, by the IGIB group) is called the "shotgun" method, where many overlapping fragments are sequenced and then assembled like a jigsaw. These fragments are about 30 nucleotides long, while the human genome has about 4 billion nucleotides in it. Moreover, the genome is highly repetitive, and many of the short fragments would be identical and it would be hard to correctly "assemble" them. Worse, sequencing the short fragments is itself not an error-free method: one or two errors per fragment are expected. So when Celera Genomics came up with the method, they encountered considerable skepticism. Nevertheless, it proved to be the most feasible approach. To alleviate the problem of repetitive regions and sequencing errors, every part of the genome is "covered" 20-30 times by multiple fragments. Even so, completing the assembly for a new organism is a tedious and error-prone process requiring sophisticated software and much human judgement. The point is that these problems are now much better understood than when the Human Genome Project undertook its task, and software is continually getting better. If the IGIB team made significant algorithmic or technical innovations, hopefully they will be described in an upcoming paper.

Even more importantly, the task of sequencing a new human is much easier than that of sequencing a previously unsequenced organism, because a reference genome already exists, and the variation between different humans would be expected to be very small. As I wrote in a comment in reply to Arvind above: one can compare it with assembling a jigsaw with a few billions of pieces, many of which are identical or almost identical, without knowing the "big picture"; versus assembling it with the big picture available to you, knowing that there are only minor differences from the "reference picture". Technologically, there is nothing very hard any more about this. Equipment and software is marketed for the purpose by large biotech companies like Illumina, and is in use all over the world. If the IGIB team has made significant technical innovations, that is of interest, but it has not been mentioned in news items and it should, of course, be peer reviewed before it hits the media.

As for possible medical benefits: similar claims were made in support of the original Human Genome Project, but little benefit is seen so far. But these things should be seen as basic research, with medical benefits a possible and welcome spin-off, but not the primary goal. It is not at all easy to "link" specific genetic variations with specific diseases, and sequencing a handful of new genomes will not, I think, directly aid that problem. So what is the primary scientific accomplishment here? The news items don't say, but then, they should not be the primary medium of communicating this work. I look forward to the peer-reviewed article, when it appears.

Jazzer, drop your sax, it's Jazz Police!

2009-12-10T13:01:00.001+05:30

Did Leonard Cohen foresee this?

Why can't we all just listen to Jug Suraiya?

2009-12-09T11:00:00.002+05:30

Jug Suraiya, the Times of India's self-appointed humorist and contrarian, takes a hatchet to climate science today. He complains that climate change is treated as an irrefutable "fact". He claims that anyone who tries to question climate change is "immediately branded a destroyer of the planet, a dangerous heretic who should be burnt at the stake" and the "warmists" "will not tolerate sceptics any more than did the Spanish Inquisition".

So what evidence does Mr Suraiya offer against the hypothesis of manmade climate change? None whatever! He resorts to citing "dissenters", but names only two, whom he calls "the most notable" -- but neither of them is a climate scientist. The first is a geologist, Ian Plimer: read about him and his error-riddled book here and here. And his response to being challenged on his facts by George Monbiot is here. And Mr Suraiya's second authority is not a scientist at all, but a journalist, Christopher Booker.

Future climate-change deniers will now be able to cite a third authority, the eminent Indian humorist and contrarian, Mr Jug Suraiya. It is a form of proof by mutual reference.

So here are two things to understand, Mr Suraiya. First: man-made climate change is not an "irrefutable fact". It is a hypothesis for which there is, at this point, an enormous amount of evidence compiled by climate scientists around the world. To refute the hypothesis, you need a significant amount of contrary evidence. Plimer's book does not cut it.

Second: you allege that big money -- "huge money", in your words -- is promoting the climate change hypothesis. In fact most climate scientists work at respected universities and government organisations, on public funding. If you want to follow the money, take a look at who is funding the deniers.

Shiva Ayyadurai rumbles on...

2009-12-07T11:54:00.004+05:30

UPDATE 7/12:I notice the folks at the Shiva Ayyadurai Fan Club have linked to my post as alleging a nexus between Nature India and Shiva Ayyadurai. I want to clarify that I am alleging no such thing. I am only saying that they seem to have swallowed one side of the story without asking questions, and given Shiva Ayyadurai (a questionable character) space to vent his spleen on their website without allowing adequate response from CSIR; and they now have some uncomfortable questions to answer.

In my previous post on this subject, I referred to unsubstantiated allegations about Shiva Ayyadurai's unethical behaviour that I had heard. Subsequently, two CSIR scientists, Vinod Scaria and Sridhar Sivasubbu, wrote the same accusations in two Nature Forum posts. Astonishingly, those posts have been removed by the forum administrators: it seems Nature is intent on promoting Shiva Ayyadurai's version of the story and will brook no dissent. However, Scaria's and Sivasubbu's versions are archived here and here respectively -- as of this writing, they look the same to me as the ones that used to be on the Nature forum.

Also, from this post (see comment), it seems that the Nature editors (in London, not India) objected to personal accusations made in those and other posts. I wonder, then, why they agreed not only to publish, but to highlight, accusations made by Shiva Ayyadurai in his article (which continues, as I write, to be frontpaged in the Nature India website) -- accusations which include fraud, financial wrongdoing, and arson to cover up the wrongdoing.

For more entertainment, read the rest of the Shiva Ayyadurai blog.

I think this episode is a disgrace and a blot on Nature's record. (As also the New York Times and others who have given this fraud and sleazeball a pulpit.)

And Nanopolitan has 182 comments and counting. I haven't yet waded through all this.

But, once again, I would like to ask Prof Samir Brahmachari: why was this creature appointed to CSIR-TECH in the first place, and in what capacity was he appointed?

And while CSIR does do some outstanding science and includes some world-class laboratories, there is no doubt that it would benefit greatly from some changes in structure and management, and I hope some well-intentioned, honest, capable and qualified people are already working on it, without seeking their 15 minutes of fame. There are lots of such people in CSIR already (and elsewhere in India). In fact, I think the state of Indian science (including CSIR) is getting better, not worse, and while there is need for further improvement and change, there is no need for panicked reactions.

Infosys Prizes

2009-12-03T07:12:00.003+05:30

I was travelling with my mobile phone's slow GPRS link as my main connection to the outside world. So I seem to have completely missed the announcement of the Infosys Prizes for 2009.

I am familiar with the science names (and also the mathematics name -- that prize is awarded separately this year but will be merged with the others from next year), and they are all obvious and deserving choices. (There are other deserving choices, who, I am sure, will be honoured in future years.) But I am particularly familiar with the winner of the Life Sciences prize, K VijayRaghavan of NCBS. And I liked the concluding line of his citation: "He appears fearless in the incorporation of new methods when needed to tackle new biological questions." I know that for a fact since he was very eager to use my new computational methods when I first returned to India. At the time I was reasonably well known in sections of the physics community, but a total unknown in the biology community. We first met at a seminar on developmental and evolutionary biology where he was speaking and I was attending; we struck up a collaboration that, though certainly not the world's most active and vigorous (the fault is mine), continues to this day. I am perennially astonished at how he finds time for everything. At the same time that he has been doing outstanding science, he has, as director, built up NCBS (admittedly already an excellent place when he inherited it) into easily one of the best and most competitive biology centres in the world. And, on top of all that, he's a great guy personally.

The other scientist winners, Ashoke Sen and T Padmanabhan, are also outstanding and world-renowned figures, though I don't know them personally. Read their citations on the Infosys site for more. The mathematics winner, Manindra Agrawal, has made contributions that shook up the field -- a thing you can say for very few Indian scientists. I am not familiar with the work of the social science winners but, based on the evidence of the other selections, I am sure they are deserving winners too. As Abi points out, it is odd that they found nobody deserving in the engineering sciences this year; but that apart, it is a good start for these prizes.

Inder Verma points out in this article that "in India, seniority often trumps innovation or achievements." This year's winners are senior and deserving, but the list in that category will run out rather quickly, I suspect. Meanwhile, some younger scientists are carrying out truly innovative research today, and publishing in journals (like Cell) that had never seen contributions from India before. So it will be interesting to see the choices in future years, and I hope the prizes won't fall into the trap that Verma bemoans, of rewarding seniority only.

Ayyadurai speaks

2009-12-02T22:32:00.002+05:30

Shiva Ayyadurai, recently the subject of controversy regarding a report he wrote for CSIR (previous post on the subject here), has written an article (free registration required) for Nature's website putting forward his side of the story.

Well, it's hardly a story -- it's a polemic, filled with unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and chicanery, hurled from his safe harbour in Boston; his most extreme allegation is a suggestion that CSIR resorted to arson at their own headquarters to hide financial wrongdoing.

I was recently at a meeting where I met several scientists from CSIR, and several others who know the director-general; and, as a local newspaper reprinted the recent New York Times article that, again, portrayed the Ayyadurai side uncritically, the topic came up for conversation. Now, it is safe to say that this was not a Samir Brahmachari Fan Club. "He does not listen to anyone" was one of the more flattering things said about him. Nevertheless, there was zero sympathy for Ayyadurai, and in fact I heard some rather unsavoury (but also unsubstantiated) things about his behaviour while he was with CSIR. (With enemies like Ayyadurai, who needs friends?)

And, by the way, I don't think it counts as "harassment" to ask someone to vacate their cushy government house in the heart of Delhi when they cease to be an employee. With the standard house-rent allowance (30% of his reportedly substantial salary) Ayyadurai could easily have rented a comfortable house privately: why didn't he? Of course, if he had done that, and been fired, he could not have complained that the government was no longer paying his rent.

It seems to me that, if CSIR really wanted to get nasty, they should sue Ayyadurai for libel based on his Nature article -- in England. English laws permit libel suits by foreigners against foreigners if it can be shown that the material was readable in England; in this case, since Nature is a UK company, this should be easy. And even if Ayyadurai has a case, defending himself would not be a pleasant experience. Just ask Simon Singh. (I'm not recommending that CSIR do this. I am saying that if they did, that, not asking him to vacate government housing, would be nasty and vindictive. But not less so than Ayyadurai's own behaviour.)

But -- to repeat what I asked in my previous blog post on the subject -- I would like Samir Brahmachari to clarify exactly in what capacity Shiva Ayyadurai was hired in the first place, and why. His qualifications are meagre (yes, he has a few MIT degrees, but thousands of people do; and he ran a little-known e-mail company in the Boston area. That's about it, as far as I can tell.) His website is one of the most crudely self-promoting that I have seen. What, Prof Brahmachari, impressed you about him?

And I'd like to know why the media, from the Hindustan Times to the New York Times to Nature, is unquestioningly allowing him a pulpit.

What's wrong with the Indian left?

2009-11-27T21:08:00.002+05:30

Well, this for example. The article is about Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American (ie, a dual citizen of those countries) social scientist who studied in the UK and the US, earning his Ph.D. in Columbia University and has worked with many respected organisations, chose to move back to Iran, and was arrested there and charged with espionage. Reportedly he is likely to be executed. The writer of the above article adds:

Those of us in India who have been consistently anti-imperialist and critical of the US, and who respect Iran’s anti-US imperialist position, have been deeply disturbed by the Iranian regime’s crushing of the pro-democracy protests and its attempts to characterize these massive uprisings as fomented by the US. It’s tragically ironic that the US should be dubbed as “pro-democracy” by the Iranian regime!

I wonder why the writer did not ask herself the obvious question: if Iran is the land of the free and it is ironic to call the US "pro-democracy", why, one may ask, do so many Iranians (and nationals of so many other countries) want to make the homes in the US, and why do so few Americans (or Indians or anyone else) want to immigrate to Iran? Does she think Tajbakhsh (whom she calls an "Iranian patriot") chose to move to Iran because he approved of the Iranian regime, or thought it better than what the US offers (even in the Bush era)? Do Burmese patriots, or North Korean patriots, approve of their rulers too?

Well, at least the writer is disturbed by the recent crackdown -- unlike fellow travellers of the Soviet Union who justified the atrocities there until Stalin's genocidal excesses became impossible to ignore (and, in many cases, even later).

Useless skills

2009-11-23T23:35:00.003+05:30

Long ago, an American and I were counting something (I forget what, probably occurrences of some motif in a sequence or something like that), and when the American looked at my hand, he said "hey, that's a clever way to keep count!" Rather than using fingers individually, I was using the lines that separate the phalanges on the fingers, and the tips of the fingers, to count up to 16 on each hand, or 32 totally. I've always done that, and in India I'm not the only one -- I think it goes back to Vedic times (in particular, I think I was taught some such thing as part of some ritual or the other, when I was a child). So it didn't occur to me that anyone else would be surprised by it.

Can one go higher than 32? I didn't think much about it until I read this User Friendly strip. By representing 1 with a raised finger, and 0 with a lowered finger, and using both hands, one could in principle go up to 1023. There are two catches: one has to be familiar with binary numbers, and the fingers have to move very independently. The second is the bigger problem for me.

But the other day I realised that one can go up to 256 (or 255) very easily, by modifying my phalange technique. Count from zero to 15 (rather than 16) on each hand, but instead of adding the hands, use one hand as a 16's placeholder -- that is, use the hexadecimal system. One still needs to be comfortable with hex, but it is a useful skill for anyone who programs computers.

I haven't actually started counting that way yet, but next time I need to count a number that is likely to be much greater than 32 but less than 256, I'll give it a try.

In theory, with sufficient independence of finger movements, one could do 255 in one hand, as follows: use the phalanges as the lowest-position hex digit, and use the binary readout of the finger positions (raised/lowered, omitting the thumb) for the next position. With 16 inter-phalange lines/fingertips, and 16 possible combinations of raised/lowered fingers, one can do 255 in one hand. And combining the two hands, one could then count up to 65,535. But that is certainly too much for my level of digital dexterity or mental arithmetic. (The latter would have been so much easier if the world had standardised on base 16 to start with. Using base 10 was a huge mistake, but is now one of those suboptimal choices that are frozen and irreversible.)

UPDATE 24/11: Though I linked the Wikipedia article on hex above, I didn't read it. From this section, it seems I'm not the first to think of counting to 255. It doesn't attribute the originator but says counting on phalanges is common "in South Asia and elsewhere". It attributes the idea of counting to 1023 in binary to Arthur C. Clarke.

Macs and developers

2009-11-21T22:51:00.007+05:30

Here are two articles about Apple, both by seasoned software experts ("hackers" in the original, good sense of the term).

The first is an old (2000) article by Jordan Hubbard, one of the founding developers of the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that was once almost as popular as Linux. It evolved from BSD, which was originally a set of enhancements to the original Unix operating system of AT&T, developed at Berkeley; over time BSD became a nearly full-fledged operating system in its own right, and in the early 1990s, gave rise to several operating systems that achieved considerable respect among the cognoscenti. (Among other things, the network protocol that governs the Internet, and several widely used pieces of internet software, came from BSD.) Apple heavily borrowed from FreeBSD (and continue to credit it on their developer page) in creating Mac OS X, which is a fairly traditional Unix system under its shiny hood. Hubbard's article is a review of a beta version of OS X, written from the perspective of a Unix enthusiast and FreeBSD developer. It turned out that he liked OS X so much that, shortly afterwards, he left the FreeBSD project and went to work for Apple (as did several others).

The second is a recent essay by Paul Graham, perhaps best known as an evangelist of the Lisp programming language, but a very influential online essayist. It is prompted more by the iPhone than by Apple's computers, and the way Apple has handled the iPhone "App Store" leads him to claim that they "don't understand software". Moreover, he argues that the loss of goodwill among talented programmers (ie, people like Hubbard, who were attracted to Apple ten years ago by the vision of a solid, Unix-based, user-friendly desktop system) will cost Apple dearly in the future.

My previous post on Linux "just working", compared to the Mac, was titled partly in jest, though the point about the different development models was serious. There is no question that the Mac offers a more user-friendly interface for beginers than the best Linux systems, has a better set of applications included (especially the multimedia stuff), and -- perhaps most crucially -- allows you to install most well-known open-source Linux/Unix applications via third-party efforts like the Fink project.

Macs also have a far better reputation for stability than Windows, and comparable to Linux. Here, however, we have to consider the great advantage Apple has in this respect. Apple builds the hardware, and can ensure that it works optimally with its software. With external peripherals (such as the HP printer/scanner I mentioned in my previous post), things aren't so certain. Linux, and Windows, meanwhile, work fine on the vast majority of PCs out there. Microsoft works closely with every important PC hardware vendor to ensure this. Linux is more volunteer-driven but, these days, several of the major manufacturers -- notably Intel and IBM, but also many others -- fund Linux development, employ individual developers, and make the specifications for their hardware available. Still, testing for every possible combination of hardware devices is impossible. Computer makers will generally test that their machine works with previous releases of Windows, but Microsoft cannot ensure that all existing computers will work with Windows 7. Linux, meanwhile, receives little testing support from manufacturers. So it is remarkable that these systems work as well as they do.

Apple has received brickbats over the years for their proprietorial control of their hardware and their refusal to permit installation of Mac OS X on third-party systems. I personally think the world would have been much worse off if Apple, and not Microsoft, had dominated the personal computer industry. But Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, is a rare example of a hard-headed businessman who also understands the intricacies of software. (Bill Gates is another. But Gates was never interested in the hardware side of things, so MS-DOS and, later, Microsoft Windows drove the widespread availability of cheap, "commodity" hardware, which in turn spurred the growth of Linux and other free operating systems. But I digress.)

Many people these days forget -- or are not even aware -- that Apple went through dark days for nearly a decade from the mid-1980s, after power struggles between founder Steve Jobs and CEO John Sculley (a former Pepsi executive hired by Jobs) resulted in Jobs being ousted from the company. Sculley's tenure was not a resounding success. Jobs was not much more successful commercially with his next venture, NeXT, but it was a highly influential platform in the academic community (among other things, it was the platform used by Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web). After Apple bought out NeXT in 1997, Jobs was restored as CEO of the unified company. The fortunes of Apple have soared wildly since. On the hardware side, he brought out revamped Macintosh computers and laptops, the iPod audio device, and the iPhone; on the internet side, he launched iTunes, the online music store that (together with the iPod) changed the music industry; and on the software side, he decided to entirely scrap the "classic" MacOS and develop a new system, Mac OS X, from scratch. Well, not from scratch: as noted above, it uses FreeBSD (and the Mach microkernel, and much other free/open-source software) at its core; and its graphical interface, and underlying infrastructure, is heavily based on the NeXTstep interface developed by his previous company. Today, OS X powers not only Apple's computers, but also their iPhone and iPod Touch handheld devices.

Two software-side decisions of Jobs are particularly interesting. When choosing an underlying "base" operating system for OS X, he did not go with Linux, which was then (as now) the best-known free version of Unix: he instead picked FreeBSD, which was lesser-known but highly respected by those in the know. And some years later, when Apple decided to develop a web browser, they chose as a base not Mozilla (whose ancestor was Netscape, the dominant browser of the 1990s, and whose Firefox browser is widely used today), but Konqueror, a browser used only by a small subsection of the Linux community. Specifically, they used the HTML and Javascript engines of that browser, on top of which they built their own interface. They also released their modified version of the html engine as the open-source project Webkit, and it is used by several other projects including Google Chrome.

In both cases, the decision to spurn the well-known name in favour of a much lesser name was justified by pointing to the smaller, cleaner, more maintainable source code; and in both cases, the result has been wildly successful. I wonder how many CEOs would have taken such gambles on relatively "unknown" software -- indeed, in the case of OS X, betting the future of the company on it. Google, in contrast, has chosen to use Linux, the "safe" choice, as a base for their operating systems (Android and the Chrome OS); and though they chose Webkit for their Chrome browser, they did so only after it had already been "proven" by Apple.

Small wonder, then, that Apple's share price takes a hit every time worries about Jobs' health surface.

Though the co-founder of Apple, Jobs was never a hacker (that was Steve Wozniak) but he understood software and software hackers. Which is what makes Paul Graham's article above a bit worrying. Has Jobs lost touch with the "hacker ethic"? Or has he lost full control of his company, perhaps due to his still mysterious health issues?

Linux "just works"!

2009-11-18T23:39:00.002+05:30

We just got two new toys: a Mac Mini (the basic model), and a printer/scanner (HP Deskjet). The Mac -- both the tiny little machine and the OS that it runs -- looks spectacular, even though the peripherals are all non-Apple (Dell monitor, Logitech keyboard and mouse).

The printer came with a Mac OS driver CD; we inserted, installed, and... it didn't work. The scanner program quit with an "unknown error", and offered to send a bug report to Apple. We suspect that a newer driver is required: the CD says it is for Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5, but the Mini has 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

So I tried plugging the printer into my Linux laptop. No driver downloads, because the HP-supported linux printer drivers were already installed. I then tried scanning an image: the scanning program (xsane) detected the scanner, and it Just Worked.

I expect the updated Mac drivers will work too. If not, it's over to consumer support. But the interesting thing to me is this: unlike many Linux drivers, which are developed by third parties, the HP drivers are from HP -- as "official" as things ever get on Linux. But the way it is done is very different. HP's Mac (and Windows) drivers are binary "blobs" that are designed for a particular OS and its particular driver model; when the OS is updated, the driver can break. Windows Vista was notorious for malfunctioning peripherals, for this reason; apparently Snow Leopard is not immune. Linux drivers are provided (mostly) as source code, and compiled against the kernel source, which is a constantly evolving object (essentially no two Linux distributions use exactly the same Linux kernel, and the kernels they use are not the "official" kernels released by Linus Torvalds). So the user does not get the HP drivers from HP's website or installation media, but bundled with the OS itself -- and it works.

Linux is sometimes criticised for evolving too rapidly, making it extremely difficult for device manufacturers to supply binary "drivers". The linux developers respond that it is better for the companies to work with the kernel community, open-source their drivers, and, if possible, include them in the "mainline kernel". That way, first, users will not need to download drivers or run "installation CDs" to get their hardware to work; second, the drivers will generally stay working. (Here's a position statement from Linux developers.)

Based on my one data point (I don't use Windows and this is my first experience with a Mac), I'd say the Linux developers have a point.

"The pilot is the weak link"

2009-11-11T14:43:00.005+05:30

According to a new book by William Langewiesche, reviewed here by the NYT, the true hero of the incident earlier this year when a US Airways plane was landed safely on the Hudson river after losing both its engines was not the pilot, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. It was Bernard Ziegler, a Frenchman who perfected the "fly-by-wire" technology used by Airbus. Langewiesche asserts that the Airbus was nearly capable of landing itself, even after losing its engines, and while Sullenberger made the right choice to land in the river, the landing itself required only moderate skill and any decent pilot could have done it.

It is an interesting claim, because the other headline-making air accident this year was the loss of Air France flight 447 on June 1, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. On that occasion, there were several suggestions that fly-by-wire, and the lack of manual pilot overrides on Airbus aircraft (in contrast to Boeing), were responsible.

Langewiesche further claims, credibly, that being an airline pilot is such an incredibly monotonous job that the best and brightest do not want to do it today. (Some pilots may find unusual ways to alleviate that boredom.) Michael Moore says that pilots in the US are so poorly paid today that many of them work second jobs. No wonder so many foreign pilots are now working for Indian carriers, who not only continue to pay well, but Air India pays expat pilots more than Indians. In fact, their annual bonuses (up to $15,000) are comparable to the total annual pay ($17,000) of some pilots for major US airlines, if Moore is correct.

Air India, of course, is in a financial crisis, as -- to a lesser extent -- are all Indian carriers; so such generous pay may not last long. But good pilots are still required, even if Airbus planes require little skill to fly.

Unless Airbus invents a pilotless aircraft (Boeing doesn't seem very impressed with fly-by-wire), I think interesting times are ahead for the airline industry, and for passengers.

CSIR, bitten by the one it fed

2009-11-10T16:15:00.003+05:30

Suppose you are heading the country's largest and most important scientific organisation. You know that, despite some very bright spots, it has been getting creaky and bureaucratic over several decades. Being a dynamic and go-getting scientist, you have several ideas on what is to be done. One of the things you want to do is to set up a new department aimed at streamlining the process of commercialising new technologies, and establishing better links with industry. Would you hire this guy? Would you offer him a job the very first time you met him?

The current director-general of the CSIR apparently did. And there, in my opinion, started the trouble that has since then accounted for much column-space and blog-energy. Good reviews, and links, are on Abi's blog: here and here (some of the comments are interesting too).

V A Shiva, also called Shiva Ayyadurai, seems to have had an interesting career. He is not a career scientist, but has bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, visual studies and theoretical mechanics from MIT; and recently, apparently, he earned a Ph.D. in systems biology from the same institution. In between, he has mainly been in what we like to call the IT sector, primarily running an e-mail provider, EchoMail. Read his biography for more.

The DG of CSIR, Prof S K Brahmachari, is a smarter man than me, and no doubt a better and more experienced judge of others' CVs and abilities. It appeared to me that Shiva Ayyadurai has few notable academic achievements, and his primary commercial undertaking, EchoMail, is not exactly a household name. He seems prone to bombast: for example, he claims to have created "one of the world's first e-mail systems" in 1979, but e-mail has been around since the 1960s. Nevertheless, a thorough interview and review of the man's abilities and accomplishments may have led Prof Brahmachari to conclude that he was the right person to head his pet project, CSIR-Tech. But was that done, or was it an instantaneous decision, as Shiva suggests?

Having been hired, at a generous salary, he was apparently asked to produce a report on the functioning of the CSIR and future improvements. This he did, and that is when all hell broke loose, and the CSIR terminated his appointment (the CSIR claims that he was not employed in a permanent position, only hired on contract, and there are also claims that he was asking for too much money). Shiva went ballistic, complaining to everyone in the media who would listen that he was being victimised for his genuine and well-meaning criticisms of the organisation. He claims also to have written to the Prime Minister. What the PM thinks of it, we don't know.

So what did he say? The Deccan Herald excerpts the report here. I have seen the full report but do not think it is worth "leaking": it seems hastily put together, is unprofessional and often personal in tone, identifies obvious problems that I'm sure are well known to all CSIR scientists, and prescribes remedies that would be within the province of a first-year MBA student. Nevertheless, do read the DH link for its entertainment value, if you like. As Abi asks, if this is Shiva's opinion of the man who hired him, why does he want to keep the job, and having aired such an opinion, why should he expect to keep the job?

As some commenters on Abi's blog suggest, maybe he was already told not to expect to be hired in a permanent position, and his report was his way of venting his grievance at the CSIR DG. Which makes it even more unprofessional. Regardless of the truth or otherwise in his observations, I don't think the report will now be taken seriously, nor should it be.

But that shouldn't detract from two key issues. First, exactly what sort of position was Shiva hired under in the first place, why, and what was his mandate? Second, the need to reform and streamline CSIR remains: what does the DG plan to do in this regard? I suspect the CSIR DG made a mistake (caused by over-eagerness to "get things done") in hiring V A Shiva, and knows it; he should now make amends -- first, by coming clean on exactly what happened; and second, by making sure the need for reforming and modernising CSIR is not sidetracked.

This is it: review from a non-fan

2009-11-09T20:33:00.004+05:30

Two days ago we saw "This is it", the film of the rehearsals for Michael Jackson's planned last concert series that never took place.

I was never much of a MJ fan -- "Thriller" happened when I was under 10, and by the time "Bad" happened he was already being viewed as a bit of a joke, with his skin-bleaching and plastic surgery and oxygen tents and whatnot. By the time I started listening to rock and blues (and, later, jazz), the Michael Jackson brand of pop seemed too tame.

After he died, my view was coloured by articles like this one. Supposedly the guy was skeletal, unable to sing let alone dance, and only being kept alive by insane quantities of medication; if he hadn't died before the scheduled 50-concert series, he would not have survived that ordeal.

So it was a surprise to see Jackson in the movie. Thin he certainly was -- skeletal, it was harder to say. But the rest?

He could sing, and did sing. He wasn't lip-syncing. His voice was a bit different from the old days, still high and child-like but somewhat thicker (an improvement, in my opinion). He talked frequently about needing to "preserve his voice", but it sounded more like hypochondria than a real problem -- no doubt it was a bigger problem than even he knew, but it did not show in the performances. "I just can't stop loving you", in particular, ended in an extraordinary extended bluesy call-and-response sequence between him and a female singer that would not have sounded out-of-place on a 1950s album from Chess Records, and showed some improvisational ability that I had never associated with him.

He could dance. Not like a 20-year-old, but better than most 50-year-olds, and certainly not like someone who only had weeks to live.

He was in control. Directing the choreography, the film-editing, and the musicians with authority -- telling the lighting and video people to "watch his cue", telling them that he would sense the video changes without needing to see them, telling his musicians to prolong a pause and "let it simmer"...

And the musicians were outstanding. If I had expected MJ to lip-sync his performances, I had also expected him to use recorded music, like most other pop singers these days. But no, he had a small, tight band -- two guitars, bass, keyboard, drums -- and while what they did wasn't too different from his recordings, it sounded much punchier and more intimate. The bass was funky -- I'd never noticed a bass in MJ before. The lead guitarist, a young woman called Orianthi Panagaris, ripped it up, not missing a step even when MJ was dancing in her face and all over her guitar. "Black and white" climaxed with a guitar duel between her and another guitarist. I found I could relate to the music: I could hear Motown and the blues in it, which I never did before, perhaps because I never listened to it very much, or perhaps because it was over-produced.

Kenny Ortega chose to put together a raw montage from the rehearsals, consisting of complete or nearly-complete songs, some shots of the team planning the performance, some interviews with the crew, and nothing else. It is obvious that an enormous effort must go into an MJ show -- let alone a 50-night run -- but the sheer scale of it all hadn't really come home to me. Nor had the level of commitment and enthusiasm of all the performers and crew, and their interaction with MJ, who was like a god to most of them. It must have been absolutely shattering for them when Jackson died a week before the concerts. But this movie has brought them to a wider audience than they would have planned for. I expect to hear more of Orianthi Panagaris, in particular.

A truck on a pedestrian bridge

2009-11-02T10:48:00.003+05:30

Chennai has three waterways running through it, one of which is the Buckingham Canal -- once an elegant canal on which barges transported people and goods, now essentially an open sewer. But the canal divides the city, especially the southern parts of the city: there are very few motorable crossings south of the Adyar river. The first major one is at Sardar Patel road, the next at Tidel Park about 2km further south, and the next at Shozhinganallur nearly 10 km beyond that.

In between the first two above, there was a narrow pedestrian bridge, which served as the main route for residents of our institute's hostel and guest house -- and several others in the neighbourhood -- to access the commercial areas of Indira Nagar, Adyar and Besant Nagar on the other side. The bridge was designed for pedestrians and cyclists; motorbikes were always frequent users, but recently auto-rickshaws and even cars have been using it heavily. Whenever police tried to barricade it so that only pedestrians could access it, the barriers were removed.

Early on Sunday morning, a truck laden with bricks tried to use it. This was the result.

Thanks to one truck driver who had no idea what his vehicle weighed, and several inconsiderate souls who kept removing those barricades, residents of this mainly academic neighbourhood will no longer be able to walk across (or cycle across) to the commercial area on the other side. And when I cycle to work, which is fairly often, I will need to use the busy main road and not the quiet inner roads that I earlier favoured.

Business sense

2009-10-29T10:35:00.002+05:30

Even in a land where money is valued and Lakshmi is worshipped, Dilip's experience with online tourism firm ExtendedStay is breathtaking. Go read.

If John Cleese had met Vishwas Tiwari and not Donald Sinclair, he'd have done something much funnier than Fawlty Towers.

(On the other hand, Dilip has nice things to say about Apple Inc and their customer service, as do many of my colleagues.

Magnetic monopoles from classical physics

2009-10-24T00:11:00.005+05:30

Much recent media attention has been showered on a recent paper by Bramwell et al, that observes the motion of "particles" in a solid that behave like carriers of "magnetic charge", or magnetic monopoles. This is an experimental confirmation of a theoretical prediction made by Castelnovo, Moessner and Sondhi nearly two years ago, and other recent experiments have added corroboration. The solid in question is an exotic rare-earth compound called dysprosium titanate.

Magnetic monopoles don't, as far as we know, exist in nature. There is no such thing as a "magnetic charge". An ordinary "bar magnet" behaves much the same way as an "electric dipole", that is, two electric charges placed close together, but if you break an electric dipole you get two electric charges ("monopoles") while if you break a bar magnet you get two bar magnets. This is because magnetism is not produced by static "magnetic charges" but is produced by moving electric charges (that is, currents). In an electromagnet, the the movement is of conducting electrons along a coiled conducting wire; in a bar magnet, the movement is the quantum-mechanical "angular momentum" of electrons, which is not very similar to classical "rotation" but has the same effect. In particular, electrons have an "intrinsic angular momentum" or "spin" that cannot be explained as an analogue of any classical quantity; but this spin, too, contributes to a magnetic dipole moment for each electron. Nuclei, too, can have their own magnetic dipole moments.

The recent experiments have not discovered a new phenomenon of nature -- the laws of physics don't need to be rewritten. What they have found is something that would behave exactly as a collection of magnetic monopoles would behave, if observed at not too fine a scale. The explanation is really quite simple. I myself worked on this system long ago: we published the basic physics of this compound in 1999 and, between then and 2008 (when Castelnovo and colleagues published their prediction), hundreds of papers on the subject have been published. I'm sure lots of those authors are kicking themselves for not having thought of it first.

These systems have a rather exotic geometry that has become widely known as the pyrochlore lattice, after an otherwise unrelated mineral. This is a lattice of tetrahedra (solids with four triangular faces) joined at their corners, such that two tetrahedra share a corner. Here is a picture (click on it for source page).

The dysprosium atoms (which are the main players here) sit at the red dots. Each carries a large magnetic moment arising mainly from electrons in the f shell. In free space, this magnetic moment could point everywhere, but in the presence of electrostatic fields of neighbouring atoms (in particular, the oxygen ions), it turns out that the preferred direction is along the lines joining the centres of the adjoining tetrahedra. Quantum-mechanically, the possible components of the angular momentum along this direction are discrete, and it turns out that the state where the angular momentum is entirely in this direction is about 200 kelvin lower in energy than other states. So at low temperatures (these experiments are performed at temperatures close to liquid helium, that is, less than ten kelvin), the atoms behave like magnets that point along the lines joining adjoining tetrahedral centres, in either direction. And because the angular momenta are relatively large, they can be treated as classical magnets. They interact primarily via the long-ranged "magnetostatic" interaction of two classical dipoles, but their nearest-neighbour interaction is somewhat reduced by a quantum-mechanical "superexchange" effect (but is still the dominant interaction).

And that is the only entry of quantum mechanics into this discussion. The physics henceforth is entirely classical and would have been understood in the 19th century, which is part of what makes it all so remarkable.

If the nearest-neighbour interaction were all, the "ground state" of these systems -- the lowest-energy state -- would be any state where each tetrahedron had two "magnets" (which we will call spins) pointing in and two pointing out. There is a macroscopic number of such states, leading to a non-zero entropy in the ground state (which is what we observed in 1999, and there is a remarkable analogy with the entropy of ice, which led to these systems being called "spin ice" -- but that is another story). Remarkably, the addition of long-ranged interactions does not seem to affect this picture much. Strictly speaking, the true ground state in the presence of long-ranged interactions is a fully-ordered state, unique apart from rotations. But experimental probes have only shown small signs of this form of ordering.

Since the three-dimensional lattice is hard to visualise, at this point let us consider instead a two-dimensional "square lattice", as shown below.

The constraint is that each shaded square must have two spins pointing in and two pointing out. This leads to results very much analogous to the pyrochlore case (in fact, this lattice, with all pairwise interactions within the shaded squares being of equal strength, is often called the "square pyrochlore" lattice). An example ground state satisfying this constraint is shown. Again, there is a large (macroscopic) number of such states.

Now how do we visualise excitations? The simplest excitation is a "spin flip" -- reversing the direction of a single arrow. This upsets the balance of arrows: one square has three arrows pointing in (with a net "north charge") and another has three arrows pointing out (with a net "south charge"). It is like placing a little magnet locally in an otherwise magnetically-neutral material.

But the key point is that the "north charge" and "south charge" can now migrate and separate, via a series of spin flips. Click on the above figure for an animation.

Viewed on a coarse scale, what this looks like is two magnetic "monopoles" that can move around freely. Castelnovo et al. examined the dynamics of this process theoretically, and now Bramwell et al. have measured it in the laboratory.

It is a simple idea, and a remarkable experimental observation. Whether it is just a curiosity or has further scientific or technological importance, only time will tell.

It should once again be emphasised that these "monopoles" are not elementary particles. People familiar with semiconductors will think of an analogy with "particle-hole excitations", where a electron gets excited and leaves behind a positively-charged "hole" that behaves like a particle in its own right. But that is a quantum-mechanical phenomenon which cannot be understood classically. The magnetic "monopoles" here, however, are purely a phenomenon of classical physics. If you could build a model with wires, springs and magnets, designed to mimic the geometry of the system and enforce the constraints of the allowed magnet directions, it should behave in exactly the same way. That in itself is of interest: I'm not aware of any other examples of "quasiparticles" or "particle-hole excitations" that can be described purely classically.

Happy birthday, Martin Gardner

2009-10-20T23:12:00.002+05:30

Martin Gardner is 95, and the New York Times has a great article about the man and his new book.

For those who don't know the name, Gardner wrote the column "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American for a quarter of a century. The following quote from the NYT article summarises the impact of those columns perfectly: "Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children."

I am not a mathematician, but perhaps close enough to be counted. I first read him as a child -- it was my mother's yellowing copy of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions, a collection of Scientific American columns that began with the "Hexaflexagons" column mentioned in the NYT article above -- and was hooked. I collected several more of those volumes over the years.

Almost equally delightful has been his debunking, over the years, of various forms of pseudoscience. I say "almost" because I think he sometimes went a bit overboard, to the detriment of his argument. But perhaps I will leave that to another blog post.

And then there are gems like "The Annotated Alice" and "The Annotated Snark", which will teach you more about the hidden layers in the Lewis Carroll books than you ever believed existed...

Fouad al-Rabiah, Obama and peace

2009-10-12T07:33:00.004+05:30

I linked the case of Fouad al-Rabiah in my last post, but didn't provide any details. I think it is worth talking about more. First, here is Andy Worthington's original article on the subject. It is a long and disturbing read. If you want a shorter and equally disturbing one, here is a new article by Andrew Sullivan in The Times.

From Sullivan's article:

We know that an American interrogator, operating under the authority of the US government, said the following words to a detainee: “There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent."

This man had worked at Kuwait Airways for 20 years; he was also a humanitarian volunteer in Afghanistan, who got caught up in the war and found his entry route (via Iran) blocked for exit. Trying to leave via Pakistan, he was caught by US troops and sent to Guantanamo. But even after initial interrogators concluded he was innocent, he was kept there and tortured -- because he couldn't be allowed to leave Guantanamo.

This happened mostly under the Bush administration, but the Obama administration continued to pursue the case despite knowing he was innocent. Says Sullivan (who was, and in some ways still is, one of Obama's strongest supporters):

Shockingly, although Barack Obama’s justice department knew the details of this case, it persisted with the Bush administration’s attempt to prosecute him. Last week, the Obama administration also backed a legal provision to withhold permanently all unreleased photographic evidence of torture in sites and prisons far away from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And some of us believed we were voting for change.

And a President who defends the torture of a man known to be innocent is rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. Tom Lehrer once said that satire died when Henry Kissinger won the peace prize. But was it necessary to stab the dead body again?

Nobel thoughts

2009-10-09T20:08:00.004+05:30

As I type this, the winners of the five original Nobel prizes have been named for this year; only the winner of the Bank of Sweden (Nobel memorial) prize in economics remains to be announced. It is usually the case that the science awards are noncontroversial, while the literature, peace and economics awards attract much discussion.

The Physiology and Medicine and the Chemistry awards are richly deserved this year. The Chemistry award has of course attracted lots of interest in India because of the origins of one of its recipients. But I found another point interesting: while there was originally no Nobel prize in "biology", these days there are, in practice, two in molecular biology: the Physiology and Medicine prize, and the Chemistry prize. This year's chemistry prize was awarded for improved understanding of the structure and functioning of the ribosome. Last year, it was awarded for discovering the green fluorescent protein and developing it as an important tool. In 2006, it was awarded for a better understanding of the transcription process; in 2004, for ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; in 2003, for determining the structure of ion channels.

The Physics prize this year went not to fundamental discoveries, but to inventions: fibre optics and CCDs. But there is a spot of controversy in the award for Charles Kao: the "father of fibre optics" is widely held to be Narinder Singh Kapany, whose work preceded Kao's by over a decade. Kapany's work focussed on imaging, while Kao's Nobel award was specifically for developing fibres that could carry signals over 100 kilometres; both innovations were extremely significant, and both were technological rather than fundamental.

The literature prize went to Herta Mueller, whom I hadn't heard of. But this must be the hardest prize to give: there are more deserving candidates than prizes available, and unlike in the sciences, it doesn't make sense to share it among multiple candidates. I had never heard of Wisława Szymborska, the 1996 winner, until two weeks ago (well, I suppose I'd heard her name in 1996, but it did not stick in my memory); having been introduced to her poetry, I find it extremely interesting.

That leaves the peace prize, announced today. I personally think it is a laughable idea giving it to Barack Obama at this stage of his career, when he has absolutely no concrete achievements, has backtracked from many of his earlier promises, has had his Justice Department defend the torture of innocent people by the previous administration, is prolonging the war in Afghanistan, and is achieving little success in his domestic agenda.

Perhaps the future will vindicate this prize; but giving a prize for future achievements requires extraordinary clairvoyance.

It remains to be seen what surprises are sprung by the award committee for the Economics prize. We will know soon.

Non-Bollywood cinema from Maharashtra

2009-10-06T08:36:00.002+05:30

Apparently not everything is song and dance. The Beeb has a feature on Marathi-language films that deal with the gritty issues of rural hardship and farmer suicides in Maharashtra, especially the Vidarbha region. Apparently locally-themed films, in local languages, exposing local problems, do have a market. We have all been reading about Vidarbha's problems (and similar problems in Andhra Pradesh and many other places) for a while now, though few of us have actually seen it for ourselves. Hopefully such films will raise awareness.

(I know, these days, suggesting that it is a good idea to support the local language wins you accusations from eminent scientist bloggers of being a Shiv Sena fellow-traveller. So be it.)

Dizzy and Louis

2009-10-04T14:25:00.002+05:30

Here are two of the three most influential jazz trumpeters ever: Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong.

I don't know who the pianist and others are, what the year is (certainly post-1953 since Dizzy's trumpet is bent) and whether these two made any other recordings together. But this pairing is particularly interesting since Dizzy, with Charlie Parker, was the founder of bebop, and Louis never embraced that style of jazz, with its "weird" chords and complicated melodies and rhythms. By 1953, however, the debate was over: bebop was mainstream jazz and Louis had become more a popular entertainer than a cutting-edge jazz musician. This song is popular entertainment, and good fun.

The third great jazz trumpeter was, of course, Miles Davis. Miles played with Dizzy in his early days, but I don't know whether he ever played with Louis.

Famous people who support a child-rapist

2009-10-01T22:44:00.002+05:30

So Bernard-Henri Levy, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Mike Nichols, Isabelle Adjani, William Shawcross, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, Harvey Weinstein, Tilda Swinton, Monica Bellucci and dozens of other celebrities have attached their names to petitions deploring the recent arrest of director Roman Polanski in Switzerland. Polanski was arrested because he plied a 13-year-old with alcohol and a drug (Quaalone), made her strip, and raped her. He did this in 1977, pled guilty to a lesser charge (sex with a minor), and before he could be sentenced, fled the USA in 1978, never to return.

I knew little about Polanski before recent events: I had seen one film (Chinatown) which was brilliant, and disturbing; and I knew his wife had been murdered by the Manson cult. I now know that he escaped the Nazis at seven, and his mother died in Auschwitz. He had claimed that the encounter with the 13-year-old was consensual. Though that doesn't excuse it, I had not thought much about it one way or another, even when he was in the news in 2005 for winning an Oscar.

So when news of the arrest broke, my reaction was roughly: "What he did was wrong and criminal, but it was 30 years ago, and he'd had a very disturbed life, from fleeing the Nazis as a 7-year-old to the murder of his pregnant wife by the Manson cult... Perhaps we should be asking why the French didn't extradite him back in 1978 when his crime was fresh. They had no treaty obligations but they could certainly decide on a case-by-case basis." (In fact that's what I posted in a comment on a facebook thread.)

Since then, despite the victim's wishes, the details of the incident have become widely known and her testimony to the jury is available on the internet. It is indeed stomach-churning. It was not "statutory rape". It was rape, committed on a girl who had been drugged and fed alcohol but was still capable of repeatedly asking him to stop, and even feigning asthma in an attempt to make him stop and let her leave. If she had been over 18, it would still have been rape. But the "statutory rape" charge was easier to prove: there was evidence of sexual contact, and there was no doubt about her age. So Polanski got away with a plea bargain. Then when he had doubts about the judge's intentions of honouring the bargain, he skipped.

Was he remorseful? Not in 1979: take a look at this excerpt of an interview that year with Martin Amis. I don't know of any expression of remorse since. He seems not only to think he had done nothing wrong, but to have persuaded many well-known people that he was the victim in the matter.

So my opinion has hardened now. Let him stay in jail -- Swiss or American -- for life.

The bulk of the US-based opinion that I have been reading seems to agree on that. In fact I have seen no coherent defence of letting Polanski go. It seems to come down to his tragic past, the length of elapsed time since the crime, and the victim's views. But none of these should be relevant. Millions of people suffer personal tragedies without becoming child rapists. He was free for 30 years because he was a fugitive, not because law enforcement was lax. And violent crimes are prosecuted regardless of the victim's wishes (in many cases, though probably not in this one, the victim is too scared to talk).

Even in France, according to the NYT, the public is not favourably disposed to Polanski, and the elite are having second thoughts about supporting him.

But I wonder about all those eminent signatories of petitions. Many of them knew Polanski and surely knew something about the case before they signed; but if they didn't when they signed, they certainly would have since. Do they still support letting someone who drugged and raped a child go free?

Theoidiocy and other matters

2009-09-27T21:59:00.003+05:30

"How religion poisons everything" was the subtitle of a recent Christopher Hitchens book on God. He could equally have said: "How religion turns everyone into idiots." Case in point: Andrew Sullivan, who is otherwise one of the most intelligent and lucid commentators on the blogosphere (and the MSM) today.

It seems to have started here. It continues here, here and here. Click only if you're a masochist -- or if the following excerpt (from here) makes any sense to you:

Yes, resilience is obviously built into our genetics, but my point was the unique ability to transcend suffering, not just endure it. That requires a mind that renders humans uniquely self-conscious, which has led to inquiries into ultimate meaning that, so far as we can tell, no animal experiences in the same way. Many survive suffering - most, in fact. The question is whether it is overcome, rather than endured. For that, something beyond mere physical processes are necessary. Which is where religion has its place.

On a related note, here's an entertaining guide to homoeopathy (thanks to Sunil). Homoeopathy has much in common with religion: rational arguments don't work with true believers, and in particular, it is impossible to answer the claim "but it worked for me!"

There are two caveats I would put, however. First, homoeopathy (and religion) may actually work if you're a believer. The best explanation of homoeopathy I've heard is the following (I previously posted it as a comment here): A colleague of mine claims the following is, roughly, an actual conversation he had with an actual practising (and believing) homoeopath. My friend expressed his skepticism on scientific grounds -- the dilution is so extreme that hardly a molecule or two would be expected to remain, if that. The homoeopath said, "Have you been to a homeopathic doctor?" My friend said yes. "What happened?" "The doctor asked lots of questions and then prescribed me a medicine." "How long did the questioning take?" "It took about 20 minutes and was very detailed." And, according to the homoeopath: "It is the 20 minutes of questioning that is the therapeutic part of homoeopathy. The pill is a placebo. It is just a sugar pill."

Now, placebos can have real effects (Skepdic has a good discussion), so it would not surprise me that homoeopathy (or praying) could help you with some conditions, if you believed in the first place that it could.

The second caveat is that not everything that passes for homoeopathy need actually be homoeopathic (that is, diluted according to Hahnemann's prescriptions). This is especially true in India, but there was also a recent case of a "homeopathic" cold medicine in the US that turned out to contain non-homoeopathic quantities of zinc, with a detrimental effect on the patients' sense of smell. "Alternative" therapies are poorly regulated, all over the world. Caveat emptor.

Why I dislike the BBC's reporting

2009-09-25T15:24:00.003+05:30

Nearly every article that the BBC has written about Chandrayaan I that I have seen so far ends with these lines:

But the Indian government's space efforts have not been welcomed by all.
Some critics regard the space programme as a waste of resources in a country where millions still lack basic services.

For example: this article today, and this one, this one and this one earlier.

It is not just that they are repeating the same sentiment again and again: it is precisely the same text, inserted as boilerplate at the end of everything they have ever written about Chandrayaan -- going back to at least October 2008 (when the mission was launched), and perhaps earlier!

And precisely what is the point of such text? Of course "some critics" regard it as a waste of money. "Some critics" think the Apollo landings were faked. "Some critics" believe the earth is flat. In a country of a billion people, and a world of eight billion people, you will always find "some critics" to say anything. Who are those critics? Why not name them, just to let the reader judge their credibility?

Even that should not be too hard: I am sure there are some very respectable people who think Chandrayaan is a waste of money, and will be willing to be quoted as saying so. But the BBC cannot be bothered to go out and look for them. Much easier to just stick this boilerplate at the end of every damn article they write on the subject.

No doubt they think it makes them look "balanced".

How not to run an online bookstore

2009-09-24T11:28:00.001+05:30

The point having been made, and belatedly responded to, this post and its comments are deleted. I wish the bookstore well.

Mercy droppeth from heaven

2009-08-21T08:01:00.002+05:30

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1985 and in a Scottish jail since 2001, was released by Scotland yesterday on compassionate grounds: he is dying of cancer and has three months to live. Megrahi himself has always claimed to be innocent.

The relatives of US victims, as quoted in the media, are all furious. The relatives of the UK victims, on the other hand, are mostly supportive of the release, and several in fact remain unconvinced of Megrahi's guild.

The reaction of the US establishment has been equally furious, from the President down, but they were powerless.

Sample quote: "There is simply no justification for releasing this convicted terrorist whose actions took the lives of 270 individuals." (US attorney general Eric Holder)

Well, what about another terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, against whom there is considerably stronger evidence that he masterminded the bombing of Cubana flight 455 in 1976, as well as numerous other terror attacks? Oh, but he was fighting the Castro regime in Cuba. He must be one of the good guys.

Prevention and cure

2009-08-17T12:57:00.003+05:30

I'll keep this one brief. The message is "prevention is better than cure".

First: Everyone is scared of "swine flu". It may be impossible to prevent if you live and work in crowded places, but one can greatly minimise the risks by washing hands frequently (or using hand sanitiser gels, which one can carry in one's pocket) and not touching one's face with one's hands. And that way, you reduce the risk of a lot of other illnesses. On the other hand, if you do have suspected swine flu, this is what Tamiflu could do to you or your kids. Not pretty.

Second: a truly thought-provoking article on healthcare in the US, and why the focus is on cure rather than prevention, even inside hospitals -- even inside emergency rooms known for transmitting hospital-borne infections!

How much could society benefit if we spent a fraction as much on prevention (and education on prevention) as on cure?

Update: BMJ blog post on antiviral recommendations. And Sunil Mukhi, who starts with the best headline yet and doesn't let up from there. He makes a point that I had forgotten: what about spitting? Can we now start locking up spitters, Singapore-style?

Ghostwritten medical literature

2009-08-07T09:55:00.004+05:30

How does one believe that a doctor's prescriptions are in your best interests? In India, the really good doctors are going by long experience with patients. The bad ones go by the marketing materials of pharmaceutical companies. Very few doctors read the medical literature actively. Yet, as a scientist, I would like to believe that the peer-reviewed medical literature should be the first resource for a good doctor in trying out new treatments.

And then one comes across stories like this New York Times article:

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.....

The court documents were unveiled after a request from the NYT and the journal PLoS Medicine, which has a blog post on the topic.

This is probably the tip of the iceberg. It is not the first time I have worried about the reliability of medical advice. But I don't think the utter corruption and depravity -- I wish I could think of stronger words -- of medical research has been so clearly exposed before.

When Jan-Hendrik Schön falsifies his research, other researchers end up wasting their time and money and the field is set back by a few years. When doctors lend their names to the publicity material of pharmaceutical companies, ordinary people suffer and possibly die. Wyeth now faces about 8400 lawsuits about the consequences of their "hormone replacement therapy", but no amount of money can compensate the victims. And what of the doctors who agreed, and continue to agree, to be a part of this sordid game? We can boycott individuals like Dr Gloria Bachmann, named in the article (I wonder how many will do so, though), but how do we find a doctor we can trust? Luckily we do have a very sound paediatrician, of whom I may write more later. But we have also had bad experiences with other doctors (I gave one example here, but it was not the only one).

The medical industry is constantly worried, with good reason, that people are going for "alternative" treatments that may range from good-but-of-limited-scope (ayurveda, naturopathy) to ineffective but probably harmless (homeopathy, the genuine kind) to possibly dangerous (additives in many so-called "herbal" or "homeopathic" medicines) to totally crackpot (chiropractic). It is indeed very worrying. But the people who go for these therapies have decided that the medical community is in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, and are looking out only for the industry's interests and not the patient's. This is unfair to the majority of medical practitioners, but I increasingly feel, accurate about the most high-profile and headline-hogging doctors, in this country and elsewhere. The medical profession has to find a way to tackle this, if patients aren't to be driven to cranks and quackery.

Bubbles at the speed of light

2009-07-29T20:46:00.002+05:30

A friend of mine, trained in physics, once told me that he never expected to be in a profession where the speed of light was a limiting factor. That profession was finance, and this article by Paul Wilmott explains why (and also explains why the author is worried): computerised stock-market transactions now take place at speeds limited only by computer hardware and communication systems. But I was particularly struck by the closing paragraph:

Buying stocks used to be about long-term value, doing your research and finding the company that you thought had good prospects. Maybe it had a product that you liked the look of, or perhaps a solid management team. Increasingly such real value is becoming irrelevant. The contest is now between the machines — and they’re playing games with real businesses and real people.

I wrote something extremely similar in the last paragraph of a blog post some time ago:

Once upon a time, you decided whether or not to buy a stock by comparing its price with the earnings of the company, estimating the dividends you would get, and comparing with other investment options. Somewhere along the way, the goal of investment changed into something rather different: buy a stock in the hope that its price will rise, and sell it. It doesn't matter if it is ridiculously overvalued: if the market is going up, buy. What exactly was wrong with the old model, and how many mutual fund managers actually looked into the strengths of the companies in their portfolios before putting their customers' money into them?

Wilmott doesn't talk about mutual funds, but to date his is the only article I have read that raises the question of investing for long-term sustainability. His NYT article talks about how bubbles grow and burst. It seems clear to me that most mutual fund managers feed (and feed on) bubbles, rather than look at the long term. It is not clear to me that, even today, investing with a long-term perspective in a sound company is a bad thing to do.

Fiat: the service is the thing

2009-07-07T06:02:00.007+05:30

In 2004 I bought my first car, a 1999 Fiat Uno that had done about 25000 km. I bought it for 1 lakh rupees, about half the price I'd have paid for a comparable used model from Hyundai or Maruti. I've more than doubled its mileage since then and it has served me well. If Tata's "Rs 1 lakh" car serves its customers equally well for five years, they should be happy. [sentence corrected - originally said Maruti's]

But the people who should take credit for its smooth running are not Fiat, but a garage near my house called Kittu Auto Works. I first went to them more or less randomly, but stayed for a while. The service was fast and excellent, which cannot be said of the official Fiat channels. The reason for the low price I originally paid was, in fact, precisely Fiat's terrible reputation for after-sales service (plus the fact that the Uno was no longer being manufactured.) At that time, it was Sundaram motors who were tied up with Fiat for sales and service; based on their reputation, I did not even venture to try them.

As the years went by, Fiat started turning itself around internationally, based on some extremely successful launches like the Fiat 500 and the Grande Punto, and on some aggressive costcutting and optimisation by a new CEO. In India, Fiat continued to struggle, but made changes too, notably scrapping their agreement with Sundaram and tieing up instead with Tata Motors (who were interested in Fiat's technology and overseas reach).

So I tried giving the new official Fiat service centre, Concorde Motors, a try. No luck. The guy told me frankly that the waiting time for Uno parts is typically 3 weeks. I said that my mechanic gets all parts the same day so far. He said "local guys can get it locally, but we have to go through the official channels." Given how many Unos are still on the road (I'd guess that, at least in Chennai, it's the most common car not still in production), I find it inexcusable.

So I stuck with Kittu. But I was growing a bit dissatisfied: the car, as it gets older, was showing more severe problems and it seemed like he was band-aiding them rather than fixing them. Also, every time he returned the car, it seemed a new problem would crop up.

Finally, after a repeated failed attempt to fix a radiator leak (he had fitted a new pipe, but placed it too close to the radiator body, and a sharp edge had cut into the pipe), I lost patience and decided to explore another mechanic. This was a new shop called Ignite, run by a young, articulate man called Raghav who had quit his software-industry job to pursue his first love, fixing cars. After a stint with Hyundai he had decided to set out on his own.

So far I am entirely satisfied with Ignite (and recommend them to anyone in Chennai who may be reading this). I find Raghav responsive, quick to understand the problem, and thorough in fixing it. Two examples: a persistent gearbox oil leak, that Kittu kept claiming was due to the driveshaft seal, was identified by Raghav as coming from deeper inside, and he fixed it. And a cold start problem, that had been around since the time I got the car but had been getting worse, was identified as a carburettor problem; he replaced the idle jet and the car has been as good as new since. He was also upfront in telling me what he did not fix and why not (basically, difficulty in getting parts plus lack of immediate severity of the problem); if it gets worse, he would do it, fabricating parts if necessary.

Thanks first to Kittu and then to Ignite/Raghav, I have been happy with my Uno. As for Fiat India, I am grateful to them for building good cars, but also, in a way, for their horrendous after-sales service that enabled me to buy a used car at a great price.

[UPDATE 05/02/2010: I really must update the above. A little after I wrote all that, the car developed a persistent problem in the ignition system that Raghav, after changing the spark plugs, wires, ignition coil, distributor cap and rotor, and much else -- all of which needed changing, except the ignition coil -- decided he did not know how to fix. I returned to Kittu, who immediately identified the problem as the distributor -- not the cap or rotor, but the timing mechanism -- and fixed it. Moreover, a couple of parts replaced by Raghav developed problems within a few months and had to be replaced again by Kittu. So I am back to Kittu, for the lifetime of this car. The guy knows his stuff and I highly recommend him to anyone who lives in or near Kottivakkam, Chennai. He has a tendency to minimise costs, but usually that's not a bad thing. I notice he even gets lots of Hyundai cars to repair, even though there is an official repair shop about 300 metres away. As for Raghav/Ignite, he's probably good too, but hasn't seen thousands of cars yet: he'll probably get there...]

Though I am not on the market for a new car, I have been following Fiat India's recent doings with interest. They have launched three cars this year. First, the Fiat 500 (Cinquecento), a super-small car (comparable with the Volkswagen Beetle), which is exorbitantly priced partly because, as a fully-imported car, it attracts 100% import duties. I believe sales have been in the low single digits. Second, the Fiat Linea, a very nice looking sedan whose sales have reportedly been very encouraging. I see quite a few of those on the road now. Third and most recently, the Fiat Grande Punto, a hatchback meant to compete with the likes of the Maruti Swift or Ritz, or the Hyundai Getz or i20.

The Linea and the Punto have been very competitively priced, and both are visually outstanding -- the best-looking in their category on the market, in my opinion. Reviews for both have been excellent, too. But looks and build quality have never been Fiat's problem: it's their after-sales service.

Yesterday I saw a Punto, clearly a demo vehicle, parked in front of my car as I was returning to it from a shop. Seeing my interest, the lady inside smiled at me; I asked if she worked for Fiat, and she said yes.

"Very nice car", I said.

"Thanks," she said.

"But the problem with Fiat is not the car quality: I have a Fiat Uno, parked behind [gesturing], and am happy with it. The problem is the service."

"Yes sir, for Uno and Palio there is problem with parts, but for Linea and Punto there will be no problem".

I had been preparing to argue that it was not nice to dump Uno customers after ceasing manufacture of the Uno, but this took me aback.

"Wait a minute -- the Palio is a current car! Are you saying there are problems with parts for it?"

"For petrol Palio there are problems sir, but no problems for diesel Palio."

"But then why should customers believe that servicing for the Punto is good? Maybe you have it in place now, but will you dump your Punto customers after a few years?"

"No sir, for Punto and Linea there will be no problem."

"See, the problem for Fiat has not been the cars, it has been the after-sales service. If you can't even service the Palio you have a problem. You need to make sure the service set-up for the Punto and Linea are good."

"Yes, sir, I agree. Thank you."

I will watch with interest. Apart from anything else, there seems to be a conflict of interest with Tata: the Palio and Punto compete directly with Tata's Indica, and the Linea competes with Tata's Indigo. One hopes that this does not affect their sales network.

The point is, parts are available even now for the Uno -- just not with Fiat. Due to high localisation, most parts are not actually made by Fiat, and even if Fiat doesn't warehouse them, others do. As the localisation levels of the Linea and Punto increase, I expect that the same will be true of those models too. Even if Fiat leaves customers of those cars in the lurch, third parties will step in.

I don't expect to buy a new Fiat car (or a new car of any sort) any time in the near future. But if they don't improve their after-sales service, a used Fiat could continue to be a very cheap and tempting option.

Is 377 now 404?

2009-07-03T13:21:00.003+05:30

I've been going slow on blogging for a while. Yesterday's news of the Delhi High Court's ruling on Section 377 of the IPC is the biggest civil-rights news in India that I can remember: perhaps the biggest since untouchability was abolished. Just like untouchability, homophobia will persist in our society, but apparently it is no longer blessed by the law. But given the complexity of the situation, I wanted to spend some time absorbing the news before blogging. It is now over 24 hours and I'm not sure I'm much the wiser.

There is no ambiguity in the Delhi High Court's ruling: it is clear, and it is common sense. Outlawing consensual homosexual acts among adults is clearly discriminatory and violative of fundamental rights. (One should note that 377 does not outlaw gay sex specifically, but "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", which could be interpreted to mean anything. For example, it could outlaw any form of sex other than penile-vaginal penetration; on the other hand, given that homosexual behaviour is widespread in the natural world, one could argue that gay sex is not "against the order of nature" and not outlawed. But any interpretation of article 377 as outlawing consensual adult gay sex has been struck down, rightly, by the court.)

What I was wondering was, is this the end of the story? First of all, does the Delhi High Court's writ run across India? I am not a lawyer, but from what I gather on the net, the answer is yes -- unless the Supreme Court overrules it, which they would consider doing only if the Union Government challenges the HC ruling. But what if another High Court upholds 377? One assumes that the SC will then have to step in.

And what if the SC does step in? I am not pessimistic: after the Delhi High Court originally dismissed the Naz Foundation's petition in 2004, on the grounds that it was not of public interest, it was the Supreme Court that asked the HC to reconsider the case. I think it is not likely that the SC will rule differently, if asked to do so. Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution, cited by the High Court, surely overrule any colonial-era laws that have lingered on in our books.

Our religious leaders are, predictably, having fits -- this is one issue that unites all religions and religious leaders. Some, like the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, are relatively temperate in their response, saying they are "not opposed to" decriminalising homosexuality. One must be grateful for small mercies.

What is most amusing is this harping on "Indian culture" (a phrase used by nearly all religious leaders): our epics feature such stories as Vishnu turning himself into a woman to seduce Shiva, while the law in question is a legacy of the British and represents Victorian English culture (the same culture that imprisoned Oscar Wilde), not Indian culture at all.

Huge news from Iran, thanks to The Hindu

2009-06-25T14:36:00.005+05:30

I refer to this article (hat-tip: Rahul Basu).

In response, I just sent the following e-mail to the Readers' Editor at The Hindu:

Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:34:41 +0530
From: Rahul Siddharthan
To: readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
Subject: The Hindu: information that nobody else carries

Dear Sir,

Old-timers in Chennai have always counted on The Hindu for information and enlightenment, and this morning you did not disappoint. I was amazed to know, thanks to your editorial pages and specifically to our former foreign minister, K. Natwar Singh, that the former Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are in fact one and the same person, whom Mr Singh refers to (twice) as "Ayatollah Ali Khomeini" (and also as "supreme leader", "great man" and numerous other flattering epithets).

So Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did not die in 1989, as widely reported, but merely changed the spelling of his name and continues in power to this day. (One assumes that a person as eminent as Mr Singh, and a newspaper as prestigious as The Hindu, will not misinform the public on such grave matters.)

I believe this news is significant in today's context and should be more widely known: it could have grave international implications. I request you to carry it prominently on your front page, and disseminate it as widely as possible.

With best regards,

Rahul Siddharthan

UPDATE: The Hindu has a correction/clarification today, and I sent the following in response.

Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:50:20 +0530
From: Rahul Siddharthan
To: readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
Subject: Today's correction Re: The Hindu: information that nobody else
carries

Dear Sir,

(Ref: my mail yesterday, quoted below)

I am disappointed that the conflation of the two "supreme leaders" in Mr Natwar Singh's article yesterday was a simple error. However, the explanation that he was referring only to Ayatollah Khomeini and not to Ayatollah Khamenei is rather puzzling.

Mr Natwar Singh, as you observe, uses present tense throughout for Ayatollah Khomeini; and this is not a general habit with him in referring to deceased people, for he uses the past tense in referring to Mr Rajiv Gandhi. ("Ayatollah Ali Khomeini has a magnetic personality. If one is eye to eye, you blink first... Rajiv Gandhi too had uncommon charisma.")

Later, he writes:

"The Ayatollah is still the supreme leader. The West and Israel would be unwise to take him on.

"I have related this memorable episode to highlight the fact that the Iranian leader is no run-of-the-mill leader...."

But Ayatollah Khomeini is not still the supreme leader. The memorable episode, according to your clarification, features a man who died in 1989 and it is not relevant today whether or not he was a run-of-the-mill leader. This is similar arguing for caution in dealing with Gordon Brown because Margaret Thatcher was no
run-of-the-mill leader.

Here is the alternative explanation that I had thought of before your clarification: today, international conferences are attended by Iran's President, not the Supreme Leader. So the person whom Mr Natwar Singh met at the NAM summit was probably the President, who at the time was Ali Khamenei. Perhaps his 1982 anecdote also refers to Ayatollah Khamenei (who was the president throughout the 1980s). He was not the supreme leader then, but he was an important man; and if Mr Natwar Singh was referring throughout to Ayatollah Khamenei and not to Ayatollah Khomeini, and the error was due to his own mistyping or due to sub-editing errors, his article makes much more sense. (It is still doubtful whether there is any useful content in the article, and whether it is worthy on its merits of being published, but this is a separate topic.)

But your clarification, I'm afraid, raises more questions than it answers. If what you say is true, on what basis was this article published? Perhaps Mr Natwar Singh's advanced years are to blame in what he sent you, and one should not be too harsh on him, but how could such flagrant errors pass your editorial desk?

Sorry if I seem to be belabouring the point, but I think this case is symptomatic of a large number of problems I see in The Hindu lately.

With best regards,

Rahul Siddharthan

The long route to Microsoft

2009-06-19T10:32:00.002+05:30

Sometimes I surprise myself. I have no Microsoft software installed on my office computer. I have Microsoft Windows Vista on my laptop, because it was pre-installed, but it is in a separate small partition that I almost ever use. I detest Windows, and have detested it since it was a separate program that one used by typing "win" on an MS-DOS computer. (Actually, I have rarely used it since those days.)

But a couple of days ago, I set the default search engine on my Firefox search box to Microsoft Bing.

I've been going back-and-forth between Bing and Google for a while, and not only does Bing look nicer and show up a useful mouse-over preview of search results, but the results look mostly more relevant. Most of my searches are academic-related. I still have the Google toolbar installed, with its own search box, so I can easily go back and forth. When searching for scholarly articles, I use either Google Scholar or PubMed -- so far there seems to be no Microsoft equivalent of those, but I won't be surprised if it's on its way.

I used to be a free software idealist, but the question is somewhat moot with online services. Besides, I have figured out now that what I really want is customisability. (This is also the reason I was never very tempted by Apple.)

Linux is almost infinitely customisable, but the days when I would build my own kernel and compile much of my software from source are long over. Nowadays it's just a question of selecting from the options in Ubuntu's software repository -- and, in rare cases, enabling an external repository.

Now, suppose my next computer is pre-installed with Windows 7, and it turns out that I can configure it to a unix/X-like interface with my own key bindings and can install most of my favourite open-source software, pre-built, with a few clicks (as I can in Ubuntu): would I consider going with it, and not repartitioning and installing some form of Linux? Till recently, I would have laughed at the idea of Microsoft becoming so open-source friendly: but the world is becoming a strange place now.

What if I can't look angry anymore?

2009-06-12T12:14:00.004+05:30

I've had a problem with psoriasis on my foot for years. Recently it became rather bad, and I visited a well-known dermatologist in Kilpauk (who also practices at one of Chennai's best-known hospitals).

I have a mistrust of new doctors, so I cross-checked all items on the prescription. They all looked standard stuff for psoriasis; the ointment, in particular, was similar to something I've been prescribed once before (a different preparation of betamethasone, a corticosteroid). So I went ahead with the treatment and the problem cleared up within a week, as it had before.

I then told the doctor that the problem tends to recur after I stop the treatment (even if I keep the area moisturised). She said there is another tablet that she would consider prescribing, but wanted some blood tests done first to be sure it is safe to take it.

Today I went there, blood tests in hand. And while I was waiting, two people got up to the reception to speak. One guy introduced himself as from the company that makes Botox, and he said the young woman next to him will be sitting in the doctor's clinic assisting her; meanwhile they wanted to inform and educate us about this treatment.

I promptly announced that I am cancelling my appointment, scratched my name, wrote the doctor a brief note, and walked out.

I had already been disturbed, on my first visit, at the sight of Botox advertisements in the doctor's clinic, telling patients how they could keep the wrinkles away and stay looking young; but I ignored it because I had strong recommendations to this doctor. (And, for all I know, she is indeed very good.)

There was a time when doctors would not prescribe medicines that were advertised to the public. For example, if you needed an aspirin, they would prescribe not Aspro (advertised in the glossies of the time, and on TV) but Disprin (not advertised). I know times have changed, and I have even seen a few Disprin ads. I can also understand a doctor prescribing Botox for someone who needs it (I first heard of it, years ago, in the context of treating writer's cramp).

But cosmetic Botox is another matter. And direct-selling it to patients, in a doctor's clinic? I find that utterly unconscionable. I mean -- the thing is a neurotoxin, derived from bacteria that cause a deadly form of food poisoning (botulism). Its therapeutic use is in paralysing muscles -- which is sometimes good (alleviating writers cramp), but sometimes surely unnecessary (paralysing facial muscles, which allegedly cause wrinkles not to form). At best, it should be suggested by a doctor after carefully explaining the pros and cons of the treatment -- not direct-marketed by a pharma company on her premises!

And if the doctor indulges in this sort of practice, how can I be sure that the pill that she was going to prescribe me was in my interest and not in the interest of some pharma company or the other?

I've heard it said that the reason for the wooden appearance of several Hollywood celebrities (think Nicole Kidman) is their excessive use of Botox; one quote that sticks in my mind (I forget where I saw it) is, "few actresses are able to look angry any more". [UPDATE: found it.] Well, sometimes I do want to look angry. For example, right now.

Good news

2009-05-25T12:20:00.003+05:30

Dr Binayak Sen has been granted bail. About time.

The story is not over yet. I'm sure the state government will do what it can to get him behind bars.

The (relatively) good guys won

2009-05-16T23:51:00.003+05:30

A recent US president said of the opposition: "They misunderestimated me." Manmohan Singh could well have said the same, only in correct English.

In 1991, this soft-spoken gentleman, who had been both an academic and a bureaucrat, was invited by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to be finance minister in his cabinet. He embarked on a programme of economic liberalisation that sparked a boom, which continued through several administrations until the global meltdown of the past year. Nonetheless, liberalisation was not politically popular; Rao lost the next election, in 1996.

In 2004, he was sprung on the public at the last minute, after Sonia Gandhi declined prime ministership despite having led the Congress-led coalition to an unexpected victory. She did not want to court controversy over her citizenship; she believed Singh to be a capable leader; and, very likely, she thought he would be the better prime minister.

In 2009, he was promoted from the start of the Congress campaign as their candidate for prime minister. The public was asked, effectively, to choose between him and L. K. Advani. This is no longer 1996. The public chose Singh, overwhelmingly.

Because of his soft-spoken nature he has attracted charges of being weak, a puppet of Sonia Gandhi, and a temporary substitute for Rahul Gandhi. L K Advani attacked him viciously during the 2009 campaign, but it seems to have backfired. In fact, during his tenure, Singh pushed through the Right to Information Act, which he saw as one of the most important ways to improve transparency; he broke ranks with the Left to push through the nuclear cooperation deal with the US, and personally intervened with other parties (including some quite unsavoury politicians) to ensure that his government continued to have the support to last its full term; and, meanwhile, he let the Gandhis, Sonia and Rahul, focus on rebuilding the Congress party from the grassroots.

Here's a recent article by his former media advisor Sanjaya Baru, who reveals how often Manmohan Singh quietly got his way and how rarely he took credit for it: even in the case of the nuclear deal, he was willing to let the Left take credit for amendments if they supported it! As things turned out, Prakash Karat was obdurate and Singh (with the party's support) decided that the Left's support was dispensable.

The strategy of letting Singh govern the country and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi govern the party has paid off handsomely. Rahul's go-it-alone strategy has revitalised the Congress party in the north; troublesome allies and opponents have been marginalised, the Left is in tatters, and the BJP is on the back foot and unsure of what ideology to present the public. A new youthful generation of Congress leaders seems to be emerging to take over from the next election. And the public has marked their approval of the Congress's governance over the past five years.

Now that the ruling coalition has earned this "political capital", as the Americans call it, they must spend it wisely. Much needs to be reformed, in our economy, our bureaucracy, our educational system, and especially our judiciary. I don't expect miracles but I do expect an effort, especially now that the obstructionist Left are sidelined. And the rewards, for the Congress, could well be an even greater mandate in 2014.

Worrying about vaccines

2009-05-15T15:15:00.001+05:30

Being the parent of a toddler means, among other things, giving the kid immunisation shots against various diseases at regular intervals. Understandably, this is not something kids enjoy. Moreover, some vaccines cause temporary reactions, that in rare cases can be quite severe. And while some vaccines are universally administered, others are very much at the discretion of paediatrician (and, in theory, the parents). So one tries to keep well informed.

So I read with interest a recent blog post where Dan Summers, a paediatrician, takes apart the anti-vaccine crowd, and in particular, this article by Jim Carrey.

The anti-vaccine movement is primarily driven by claims that vaccines are linked with childhood autism-spectrum disorders. There are at least two versions of this claim: first, that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) combined vaccine is linked with autism (a claim that caused particular scare in the UK); second, that thimerosal, a now-discontinued mercury-based preservative, is linked to autism (a continuing source of scare in the US). Both these are supported, at best, by anecdotal evidence. There are also claims that combined vaccines increase the shock to an immature immune system, leading to possibly undesirable side-effects.

Lots of peer-reviewed studies have, supposedly, refuted links between either MMR or thimerosal, and autism. This article reviews the situation. And only a few fringe loonies would argue that we would be better off without vaccines. It is wonderful to be in a world without smallpox, and to look forward to one without polio. Various once-common childhood killer diseases have now become rarities. Dr Summers says he has never even seen a single case of measles, still a common (if rarely fatal) disease in India. What's not to like about vaccines?

Dr Summers also exposes the bogus nature of Jim Carrey's "supporting" links. Like most conspiracy theorists, Carrey does not link to actual scientific literature, only to paranoid-sounding sites like "Generation Rescue".

Here's the problem though: I find Dr Summers unconvincing not for the things he refutes and exposes, but for the things he ignores in Carrey's article. And if I, a strong skeptic on most "alternative medicine" views, am unconvinced, I am sure millions of others will be even less persuaded.

First of all, Dr Summers says, "Indeed, I have never seen a single case of smallpox, polio, tetanus, measles or a handful of other once-common childhood illnesses..." But Carrey entirely agrees with the need to vaccinate against "the most serious threats including measles and polio"; I'm sure he would agree that tetanus is more serious than measles, and nobody vaccinates against smallpox anymore. So this is a strawman at the outset.

Dr Summers says "the advent of vaccinations has been as close to an unalloyed good as is likely ever to occur." If he merely refers to the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio, and the success against several other serious diseases, few should argue. But his article suggests something stronger: every approved vaccine is close to an unalloyed good. I think few doctors would agree with that (and he himself does not quite say it, only implies it).

Carrey says that there are 36 vaccines in the current US immunisation schedule; the version I saw only included 15 (as I discuss below), but perhaps he includes optional approved vaccines. He continues that there have been "no tests for cumulative effect or vaccine interaction" of all these vaccines, let alone the 100 or so in development. If there is such a test, Dr Summers doesn't supply a link to one.

Carrey claims that "American children are being given twice as many vaccines on average, compared to the top 30 first world countries". I don't know the true numbers, but Dr Summers doesn't refute this. I will return to this topic below.

Carrey says that "Paul Offit, the vaccine advocate and profiteer, who helped invent a Rotavirus vaccine is said to have paved the way for his own multi-million dollar windfall while serving on the very council that eventually voted his Rotavirus vaccine onto our children's schedule", and quotes strong words on this topic from a Congressional committee. Dr Summers does not address this.

Carrey says that "Veterinarians found out years ago that in many cases they were over-immunizing our pets, a syndrome they call Vaccinosis. It overwhelmed the immune system of the animals, causing myriad physical and neurological disorders." He also says veterinarians removed thimerosal from animal vaccines in 1992, and wonders why human vaccines lagged behind. Summers does not address this (or refute these claims).

Carrey admits that vaccines are good and bad, but says "One thing is certain. We don't know enough to announce that all vaccines are safe!" Summers, and the CDC in the US, seem to be announcing precisely that.

Now, here's the main bothersome issue that Summers entirely ignores: if vaccines were such an "unalloyed good", why do US children reportedly receive twice as many vaccines as children in other developed countries?

In my developing country, India, the National Immunisation Schedule lists the following vaccines up until 6 years: BCG (tuberculosis), OPV (polio), DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), Hepatitis B, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae B), Measles, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), and various boosters for these. That's seven vaccines for ten diseases. (Source: IAP Guidebook on Immunisation, 2009, available here.)

The US schedule that I can find for children below 6, here, lists vaccines for a total of 15 diseases: in addition to the above, there are rotavirus, pneumococcal, influenza, varicella, hepatitis A, and meningococcal (while BCG is missing). The UK schedule lacks several of the US vaccines: namely, rotavirus, influenza, varicella, hepatitis A and B are missing.

Many children in India receive more vaccines than the immunisation schedule recommends, and the same may be true in the developed world. The Indian Academy of Paediatrics recommends typhoid in addition to the ones in the immunisation schedule, and also suggests that pneumococcal, rotaviral, Hepatitis-A and Varicella "can be given after discussion with parents". Needless to say, such discussion rarely occurs.

But why does no country include all 36 vaccines in its schedule, and why are other countries omitting so many vaccines included in the US schedule? Are other countries being perverse and regressive in ignoring the "unalloyed good" provided by all those US vaccines? Or are there other factors to consider?

What are the possible drawbacks of vaccines? One is obvious: cost. This is relevant not only in India but very much also in the US, whose health coverage leaves much to be desired. It is the reason DTaP (the newer form of DPT, with an acellular pertussis vaccine that has milder side-effects) is not yet officially favoured in India. (Vaccines in India's National Immunisation Schedule are delivered free of cost via the public health system.)

Another is side-effects. Most vaccines have side effects; for the smallpox vaccine, one in a thousand have severe rashes, and about one in a hundred thousand had more severe, life-threatening complications. The risk was acceptable compared to the dangers of contracting smallpox when it was widespread. But as smallpox got effectively eradicated, the risk was judged unacceptable and the vaccine is no longer administered.

A third is an unknown and controversial factor: the effect of administering many vaccines simultaneously. More and more frequently, vaccines are "bundled" with five or more often administered in a single shot. Skeptics argue that the effects of this sort of "shock" on an immature and developing immune system are at best questionable. Defenders think there is little danger and an infant, of whatever age, is exposed to many more antigens and possible pathogens every day than what are administered in a vaccine. But few doctors or immunologists, I think would assert that there is no danger whatever.

Unfortunately medical science is not an exact science: despite the most exhaustive clinical trials, certain side-effects, interactions and allergic reactions from drugs can take years or decades to discover.

Unfortunately, also, patient mistrust of doctors and medicine seems to be rising all over the world, and not only are "alternative medicine" therapies of various levels of dubiousness rising, but proven medical therapies and treatments are being ignored by patients who read scare-mongering half-truths. Vaccines are an example: today's young parents have never encountered smallpox, polio, diphtheria, tetanus or many other dangerous diseases, but do encounter the reactions to the vaccines and read frightening but unsubstantiated stories on the internet; therefore many reject vaccines.

But how to tackle this? I think Dr Summers' approach is not the answer.

I know many committed, sincere doctors who are concerned with nothing except the welfare of the patient. I believe this is true of the majority of doctors, around the world (though perhaps not the majority of high-profile, headline-grabbing doctors.) They are aware of the limitations of medical science, are willing to prescribe alternative methods (ayurveda, yoga, acupuncture) when appropriate, but prescribe powerful drugs when required. It is a pity when patients do not trust such advice, and assume that all antibiotics must be bad regardless of circumstance -- or that vaccines for certain diseases are not required because you don't run into those diseases any more.

But patient mistrust is not limited to the doctors: it extends to the pharmaceutical companies. And, here, I think the mistrust is merited.

Carrey cited the example of the rotavirus vaccine, included -- allegedly under the pressure of the developer -- in the US schedule but not in most other countries. But this is only one of their many crimes.

Pharmaceutical firms are routinely accused of focussing their efforts on "lifestyle drugs" that are directly marketed to the public, with minimal consideration of side-effects. See, for example, this article in Nature Medicine.

Infant formula makers used to claim that their products are superior to breastfeeding; when such advertising was banned in most countries, they resorted to more indirect claims that planted the same impression in the minds of the public. (See this article by George Monbiot, for example.)

Dr Summers talks about the importance of peer-reviewed research, and challenges skeptics on vaccines to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies have done their best to pervert the scientific peer-review process too. It is mandatory for scientists to disclose sources of funding and potential conflicts of interest in their manuscripts, but this is not always kept above board. In a recent spectacular case of fraud, an anaesthesiologist who had built a significant international reputation turned out to have faked his clinical trials for over 10 years; his research was funded by pharmaceutical companies who produce many of the drugs that his papers promoted. And even more egregiously, Elsevier Science -- publisher of many leading journals in every discipline -- was found to have published fake journals, at the behest of pharmaceutical companies (in particular, Merck), that had every appearance of containing peer-reviewed research but in fact contained in-house research from the pharma giant presented in academic form.

I think this sort of thing hurts medicine and public health much more than a few conspiracy theorists ever do, because it undermines confidence in the entire medical system, and indeed, the scientific peer-review system.

Dr Summers writes that "Carrey wrote his post and appears as a spokesperson for Generation Rescue while affecting the posture of an informed and enlightened ambassador for truth." But when large swathes of peer-reviewed research is guilty of precisely the same crime, why should Carrey seem less credible? How are we to trust published research when it is so easily perverted by big money?

I tend to believe the published "basic research" that I read, because it is unlikely that the authors have hidden agendas. But in order to verify the claims that there is no statistical link between autism and MMR or thimerosal, I will not only have to read those papers, but verify that none of those authors had a conflict of interest in writing those papers. This is rather hard to do sitting at my desktop on the other side of the world. (I may also have to verify the statistics used: see this article on hypothesis-testing in the medical literature.)

So while I do not believe vaccines are bad, I am suspicious of mercury-based preservatives in vaccines, unwilling to believe disclaimers from the CDC, and unwilling to accept that every vaccine included in the US schedule (or being pushed on my son by a corporate hospital in Chennai despite its absence from the Indian schedule) is being considered on its merits alone. Take the hepatitis A vaccine: the WHO's recommendations say that large-scale childhood vaccinations should be "considered" only in regions of intermediate endemicity; but it is included in the US schedule (a low-endemicity country) and was recommended by our paediatrician in India (a high-endemicity country).

And I would like to see a lot more research on vaccine interactions, before administering five or more bundled vaccines in one shot to an infant.

And industry-funded research is unlikely to persuade me that my worries are unfounded.

RIP

2009-05-05T23:21:00.003+05:30

Dr N S Murali, a well-known surgeon, a key figure in the Voluntary Health Services hospital in Chennai, the founder of the Seethapathy Clinic and Hospital in Chennai, and my uncle, died suddenly while on a break in Coventry today. He was 73. His wife had died, equally unexpectedly, a month ago.

The phrase "a towering figure" is over-used, but he was one. The shock is palpable. But his work will survive: both directly (his son and daughter both work in his hospital) and indirectly (he influenced many, many people in the city, and probably outside too). RIP.

[UPDATE 06/05/09: Obituary in The Hindu.]

Indus: What did Rao et al. really do?

2009-04-27T23:56:00.005+05:30

My last post was on the Indus script paper by Rao et al., just published online in Science. Several reactions have appeared. A significant fraction of those following the story would have seen the tantrum by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, that I will discuss further below. I haven't spent much time surfing the blogosphere, but two more skeptical comments (thanks to JK, commenting on my previous post) are here (Mark Liberman) and here (Fernando Pereira). The most insightful comment that I have seen is Liberman's "This is a topic that traditionally generates more heat than light".

Before understanding the reactions it is important to understand the background and the work of Rao et al. The background is that, for over a century now, it had been assumed that the tablets containing seals found in the Indus valley archaeological sites contained writing in an unknown, pictographic script; and much effort has been devoted to deciphering the script. Then Farmer, Sproat and Witzel (authors of the above screed, and long-time researchers in the field) published a paper in 2004 arguing that the scripts do not encode language but are some form of non-linguistic symbolic writing. (Actually, they don't so much argue it as assert it. More on that below.) That paper is 39 pages long, containing 29 pages of text followed by many references, and is in fact a useful read in summarising the existing state of the art, even if one disagrees with its conclusions.

Rao et al. disagree with its conclusions, in their paper in Science that contains one page of text, a couple of figures, and about 15 pages of supporting data that mainly describes their methodology. The methodology is, to my astonishment, apparently new in this field, although certainly not in computational linguistics.

Basically, the method is to model language as a Markov chain. A Markov chain is a sequence of "things" (words, letters, events) with the following property: the probability of any individual event depends on its predecessor only, not on the entire previous sequence. For example, if a DNA sequence were generated by a Markov process and you saw "ACAGTGAC", the next nucleotide would be determined (probabilistically) only by the final nucleotide in this sequence, C, and not by the others. In a generalised (n-order) Markov chain, each event depends on its n immediate predecessors, where n is 1 or more but usually not very large.

Imagine you had never seen writing in English before, and were confronted with it for the first time. (Imagine, also, that you had figured out that uppercase and lowercase letters represent the same thing.) You may quickly find that some letters (e) occur more frequently than others (z). But if you generate random text with frequencies that agree with what one sees in English, the result would look nothing like English.

Looking more closely, you may observe some anomalies: if you see a "q", the following letter is almost always a "u". If you see "i" and "e" together, the "i" comes before the "e" except when after a "c" (as in "receive"). You may even note some weird exceptions. Though "a" is a common letter (the third most common, after "e" and "t", by many counts), "aa" is a very rare combination in English, though "ee" and "tt" are quite common. Similarly, "ae" is much rarer than "ea". None of these observations can be accounted for by letter frequencies alone. But most of them can be fully encompassed in a first-order Markov model (the "i before e except after c" rule is more complicated.)

In general, if two letters (say A and B) appear with frequencies P_A and P_B, a random sequence would contain each of "AB" and "BA" in the frequency P_AP_B. If you do not observe this (and, in English and all other languages, we do not), we can assume that the sequence is not random. The first order Markov model is the next simplest assumption, and is often adequate.

Shannon, in his classic 1948 paper on information theory, actually uses Markov models of English to construct pseudo-English sentences (using 26 letters and a space as his 27 symbols). A completely random string, with all symbols equally probable, looks like
"XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGHYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD."
A string maintaining actual frequencies of symbols, but with no correlations, looks like
"OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL."
A first-order Markov model yields
"ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE."
A second-order Markov model yields
"IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE."
The point is not whether these make sense but how much they look like English at first glance. A first-order Markov model is clearly a dramatic improvement on random models, and a second order Markov model is even better. Shannon goes on to Markov models that use words rather than letters as individual symbols, and in this case a first-order Markov model already gives something that looks grammatically correct over short distances:
"THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OF THIS POINT IS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN UNEXPECTED."

My colleague Ronojoy Adhikari, who is a co-author of the Rao et al. paper, points out to me that Shannon was not the first to try such exercises: Markov himself preceded Shannon by about 30 years.

What Rao et al did was, essentially, to assume that the Indus scripts are generated by a first-order Markov process. In the light of what we know about languages, this may seem a rather obvious thing to do. They use a measure called "conditional entropy" (that, again, stems from Shannon's work) to measure the extent of first-order correlations; and a "relative conditional entropy" that compares the conditional entropy to that of a random sequence with the same frequencies of individual symbols. A more correlated sequence has lower conditional entropy, so the relative conditional entropy must be between 1 and 0.

What they find is that the conditional entropy for an Indus script is very similar to that of known languages, and very different from non-linguistic symbol systems.

What are the criticisms? Let us look first at the rant from Farmer et al. In comments to my previous post, Ronojoy refuses to dignify it with a response; but lay readers may be interested in my point of view anyway.

Farmer and colleagues do have one genuine criticism (which, in my opinion, is not a serious problem with the paper). But they bury it under so much misleading and simply ad hominem rubbish that it is better to clear that refuse heap first.

First, they say:

"It is important to realize that all their demonstration shows is that the Indus sign system has some kind of rough structure, which has been known since the 1920s. Similar results could be expected if they compared their artificial sign sets to any man-made symbol system, linguistic or nonlinguistic. Our paper in fact made much of this point and also gave examples of striking statistical overlaps between real-world (not invented) nonlinguistic and linguistic systems and argued that it is not possible to distinguish the two using statistical measures alone."

In fact, the "rough structure" that they discuss in their paper, that has been "known since the 1920s", is only the fact that some symbols occur more often than others! Correlations among successive symbols are completely ignored. The last sentence quoted above refers, I think, to their "Figure 2" which deals only with frequencies of individual signs, not with any kind of correlated structure. Yes, some Indus symbols are more frequent, and some heraldic blazons are more frequent, than others. It is also true that some road signs are more common than others (credit). Of course that does not tell us anything about whether a sequence of road signs constitutes a language. This is not at all the claim that Rao et al. are making, and it staggers me that the point is being missed so widely.

Another charge that Farmer et al level at Rao et al is that of Dravidian nationalism. Reading the surnames of the authors (only one seems to be of Dravidian origin), it is a comical accusation.

There's more along the same lines. But one accusation is true: Rao et al are misleading in their main text on what non-linguistic systems, exactly, they are comparing the Indus script with. They plot a "type 1 system" and a "type 2 system" in the first part of their figure; only on reading the supporting text does one learn that these are not actual corpuses of non-linguistic symbol systems, but synthetically generated corpuses. (The second half of that figure does contain some genuine actual non-linguistic symbol systems.)

Ronojoy responds in a comment:

The non-linguistic Type1 and Type2 are controls; the comparision in Fig.2 is with real world data sets which are like the controls - DNA with lot of variability and high entropy, Fortran code with fairly rigid order and low entropy. The controls are limiting cases of the real world data : Type1 has no correlation, while Type2 is maximally correlated. In Fig 2, they represent the two extremes. Our conclusion would still be valid if we deleted the controls. Comparing more datasets is part of ongoing work.

This could have been made clearer in the main text -- but it is made clear enough in the supporting data. I would have liked to see the real world data in figure 1 too (which is the more striking figure). And that's my only disappointment with the paper. But I expect that it will be rectified in future work by these authors.

Was this work trivial? The reaction of Liberman seems to be: "Huh, they only counted digrams?" Yes, to anyone familiar with Markov processes (that includes huge swaths of modern science) it is trivial. But apparently nobody had done it before! To me, that is the value of interdisciplinary research: what is obvious to one community may be new to another, and the results may be far-reaching.

[Update 28/04/09: small typo corrected. Also, see comments below from Mark Liberman and myself.]

[Update 01/05/09: comments closed.]

The Indus Valley script

2009-04-25T21:34:00.003+05:30

A paper just published online in Science magazine (subscription required for full text) makes a significant contribution to the debate about whether the Indus Valley "script" was really a script for a language, or was a mere nonlinguistic symbol system. They consider the statistical properties of texts in known languages and non-languages (in particular, the conditional entropy) and compare with a large corpus of Indus Valley text. The conclusion is that the Indus Valley symbols indeed encode a language. It looks extremely convincing. Now the task remains to decode the thing.

I'm a bit slow to blog on this because I wanted to read the paper first: it turns out it's very short (barely a page plus references and figures in the ScienceExpress format, and no doubt the final published version will be even more compact.) One of the authors is my colleague Ronojoy Adhikari and I had a brief lunch-room summary from him which pretty much covers the paper. (A longer summary from Ronojoy is here, courtesy Rahul Basu.) It has attracted a fair bit of media attention (km has a nice summary and a couple of links).

A couple of points are striking: first, of the languages compared, the conditional entropy for the Indus scripts seems closest to Old Tamil, which is suggestive given the belief that the Indus Valley residents may have been Dravidians and thus the ancestors of the ancient Tamil people. (Rig Vedic Sanskrit is plotted in only one of the two sub-figures, unfortunately -- the one on relative conditional entropy. Given its geographic, though probably not temporal, proximity to the Indus Valley civilisation, it would have been nice to see it in the other plot too.) Second, when comparing with non-linguistic systems, the difference is extremely stark. And convincing. One could imagine a primitive linguistic system falling somewhere between the "real languages" and Fortran, or between the "real languages" and Vinca. But in this case, the Indus script curve is bang on top of the other "real language" curves, and well separated from everything else.

I'm one of those who believes that "interdisciplinary research" will tell us more and more in the future, and this is an example of computer scientists, physicists and linguists succeeding in putting together a few simple ideas that tell us a great deal. (It is not Ronojoy's only recent interdisciplinary foray; primarily a "soft condensed matter" physicist, he also recently published an article [free arxiv preprint] on the harmonics produced by loading the membrane in Indian drums. The topic is of interest to me -- I did a project on it long ago as an undergraduate -- but will perhaps talk about it some other time.)

The Binayak Sen case drags on

2009-04-23T15:28:00.002+05:30

I last posted on Dr Binayak Sen nearly a year ago, when Tehelka featured him on their cover. Nothing much has happened in a year except that his health is suffering and the vindictive Chattisgarh administration is denying him a doctor of his choice.

This is a few days late, but former Supreme Court judge V R Krishna Iyer has written an excellent letter to our Prime Minister on the case. The thing is, Manmohan Singh is an intelligent, well-informed and (reputedly) upright man, so I don't believe that he is unaware of the case or ignorant of its implications. So why hasn't he said anything yet? He has spoken repeatedly on the dangers of the Naxalite movement. But does he believe that imprisoning social workers and human rights activists, while giving tickets to the likes of Jagdish Tytler, is the way to improve democracy and quell Naxalite violence?

Tortured evidence

2009-04-22T22:52:00.002+05:30

So why did the Bush administration authorise -- and try to find legal cover for -- the use of techniques on detainees that have been regarded as torture when practised anywhere else in the world? Here's one answer:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime...

As several people have remarked recently, historically torture has been used not to elicit information, but to elicit false confessions. It seems the Bushies were no different.

There's an old joke that I mentioned before about the Delhi Police going to capture a lion. But the punchline seems to apply perfectly to the CIA under the Bushies.

Meta-news

2009-04-21T14:49:00.002+05:30

Being a regular reader of the online comic xkcd, I'm not sure which aspect of this news item interests me more: xkcd gets a printed book, or xkcd gets a New York Times article about it.

Are geeks taking over the world? Or merely the mainstream media?

Torture

2009-04-17T21:32:00.003+05:30

Ajmal Kasab, the gunman in the Mumbai terror attacks who was photographed stalking CST station with a machine gun and was later caught alive, is appearing in court and has already retracted his confession, stating that it was "coerced". He was photographed and then caught, wasn't he? What is there to confess? Well, one assumes, all the details about the planners and the journey from Karachi and the local accomplices (two of whom are also being tried). This "confession" was sent to Pakistan; other evidence that included identical DNA reports for two different individuals, Kasab and Abu Ismail, which according to Chidambaram was a "minor clerical error".

If by "coercion" Kasab means torture, can we believe his confession? Plenty of evidence says that we cannot (links 1, 2). In fact, eliciting false confessions is often the aim of torture, by totalitarian regimes the world over. I am not sure what "coercion" refers to in Kasab's case, but I really, really hope that it was not torture: if it was, all evidence obtained from him is useless. (And my hopes are not high: we know how Indian police treat common criminals and suspects.) Also, making a mess of this trial -- the only recent case of a terrorist being caught alive, anywhere in the world -- would be a disgrace to our police and investigatory system.

Elsewhere in the world, Barack Obama authorised the release of four memos detailing "justifications" for torture under the Bush administration. The memos make it clear that the authors knew they were endorsing the very methods that they routinely condemn when practised by foreign governments. Several responses are out on the internet; Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan are worth reading. Obama has said he is not in favour of prosecuting the CIA operatives who tortured (though that doesn't close the door on independent prosecutors); however, he did not say anything -- one way or the other -- on those who wrote the memos or those in the administration who authorised the torture. Recently, the Red Cross released its own report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Both the report and the memos make gruesome reading. Both have spurred international discussion. I wonder if anyone in power in India is talking about the use of torture by our agencies. The media routinely turns up individual cases, but nobody seems to be talking about the issue as a matter of policy.

The real Dubai

2009-04-08T16:57:00.001+05:30

A must-read article by Johann Hari.

"Rejoice, damn you"

2009-03-27T22:33:00.001+05:30

The Economist does not supply bylines, but it is safe to say that this article was not written by N. Ram.

A flatpack car?

2009-03-25T20:13:00.002+05:30

While everyone is talking about the Tata Nano, it seems there may be some quite unexpected automobile news elsewhere in the world...

It appears that Swedish furniture firm Ikea, known for cheap flatpack furniture that you assemble at home, is shortly launching a car in France, with the support of the WWF. There is a link to that site from Ikea's official French site, so it seems to be genuine. (Both links in French.)

No, I don't imagine it really will be flatpack, but -- given that it's Ikea -- I would be disappointed if there aren't any revolutionary ideas.

(Spotted on HuffPo, where there a few more details in English.)

How Wall Street has got the US government by the ****s

2009-03-22T20:00:00.003+05:30

I'm yet to read an article by Matt Taibbi where he doesn't drop the F-bomb somewhere -- but when it's the sixth word in the article, you know he's upset.

And with good reason. He goes into gory details of what happened at AIG and how a AAA-rated company let itself be submerged by toxic instruments, how those instruments were enabled by laws passed by people like Phil Gramm (by the way, lets stop blaming the Bush administration over this crisis: many of the crucial legislative and regulatory changes occurred on Clinton's watch), how much influence firms like Goldman Sachs have over policy (a large number of Fed and Treasury officials have been their alumni), and most of all, how Wall Street is using the crisis to line its own pockets. Go read it.

(I had no major expectations of Obama, but I must say I'm pretty disappointed so far. He seems to have no coherent vision of what to do about all this, and the recent 90% tax on bonuses must count as the rankest and most useless form of populism.)

Question for any economists reading this: Once upon a time, you decided whether or not to buy a stock by comparing its price with the earnings of the company, estimating the dividends you would get, and comparing with other investment options. Somewhere along the way, the goal of investment changed into something rather different: buy a stock in the hope that its price will rise, and sell it. It doesn't matter if it is ridiculously overvalued: if the market is going up, buy. What exactly was wrong with the old model, and how many mutual fund managers actually looked into the strengths of the companies in their portfolios before putting their customers' money into them? I can see that, in boom times, such a cautious strategy would "underperform" -- that is, Rediff Money would not list your mutual fund among the top ten that "outperformed" the Sensex by vast amounts that year. But does nobody think of the long term? (And I'm not even getting into derivatives, futures, hedge funds, and so on.)

Bad laws return to bite you

2009-03-20T21:27:00.002+05:30

Most people in India don't know or care about DVD region codes because most players sold here are "region-free". Most people in the US don't care because the rest of the world doesn't exist -- however, holidaymakers routinely return home to find that the DVDs they bought in Europe don't work. But DVDs have an annoying technology built into them, on the insistence of the Motion Picture Association of America, called region control. DVDS are meant to be played only in their region of sale: the US and Canada fall in region 1, most of Europe is region 2, India is region 5. The intention was that players sold in a region can only play DVDs sold in that region. This intention is legally enforced in the US and UK. But in many countries, including India, region-free DVD players are freely available and the norm. When I lived in Paris, the Virgin Megastore had an entire shelf of Region-1 (US) DVDs on sale (I don't know the situation today).

So it gives me great pleasure to see that it is not only the lay public that gets tripped up by these laws. When Barack Obama gifted Gordon Brown a set of DVDs, neither Obama, nor his advisors and technical team, nor Brown, realised that they wouldn't work in the UK.

Will this lead to a change in the law? I wouldn't count on it.

Bad news for the US?

2009-03-17T00:27:00.002+05:30

As I type this, the Washington Post, like many other news sites, has Pakistan news on its main page, linking to this article. But here's the blurb on the main page:

Pakistan Reinstates Judges
After street protests, move reflects the weakening grip of President Zardari, a key U.S. ally.

Ooh, our key ally Musharraf, er, sorry, Zardari, is in trouble! His undemocratic maneuverings failed and the people won! What do we do?

And that comes from one of the two or three most respected newspapers in the US. And then they wonder why the world doubts their intentions.

Giving "credit" where it is not due

2009-03-13T23:18:00.003+05:30

The NYT reports (link via Abi) on possibly one of the longest-running and most significant scientific frauds ever: an anaesthesiologist, Dr Scott Reuben from the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, has admitted falsifying his data since 1996 -- faking data for clinical trials that were never conducted. Unlike many other cases of scientific fraud, this case directly affects "ordinary people" in that it could have affected their treatment. Significantly, many of his questionable papers are on the efficacy of specific pain-relieving drugs, specifically Cerebrex and Lyrica from Pfizer. Pfizer "underwrote much of [his] research" from 2002 to 2007.

But I found a perhaps comparatively harmless piece of fraud on the bad doctor's part equally remarkable: he apparently included other researchers' names as co-authors without their permission and without any contribution on their part. Why would anyone do that? Usually, to gain credibility from the other "authors'" reputations. Why would the other authors not object or notice? Evan Ekman says his name appears on at least two of the retracted papers despite his having no hand in that work; he calls the inclusion of his names forgeries. According to PubMed, Ekman and Reuben have co-authored four papers between 2005 and 2007; surely Ekman would have noticed earlier that he was being wrongly given authorship?

In the recent case of a paper whose lead author was from Anna University being a near-verbatim reproduction of another paper by another group in another journal, two authors distanced themselves from the work. On the other hand, most of us in science know of cases where senior figures are given authorship merely in recognition of their position or funding, without regard to any actual contribution to the work. When it turns out that some of their "co-authored" works are fraudulent, how much responsibility should they bear?

I know of two older papers where one author, famously, was not a contributor to the paper. The first is this one, regarded as a classic; the authors were George Gamow and his student Ralph Alpher, and Gamow included Hans Bethe, who had no connection with this work, purely so that the author list would read "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow." (If that joke is Greek to you, never mind.) I can't remember whether Bethe was "in" on it, but he did not protest, at least not publicly.

The second is this one, which was also quite well-received. The author was J W Hetherington. After his manuscript was written and ready to go, he was told that Physical Review Letters objected to single authors referring to themselves as "we"; and rather than be forced to rewrite the paper, he included his pet cat, Willard, as a co-author. As I remember, the initials "FDC" stand for "Felis domesticus Chester", Chester being the cat's sire. Willard, too, did not protest (as far as we know) and even "autographed" some reprints with his ink-stained paws. [UPDATE March 15: I got the names mixed up. Chester was Hetherington's cat, and Willard was the sire.]

These examples are regarded as amusing, but I wonder if people would play such jokes today.

Our new CEC

2009-03-04T18:56:00.002+05:30

Rediff reports that Navin Chawla will be our next CEC, despite our current CEC's well-publicised objections.

A little earlier, Rediff had a story (thanks to Shivam Vij for his fb link) on exactly what Navin Chawla did during the Emergency, as documented by the Shah Commission and validated by the L P Singh committee, of which the author was a member. Meet the new boss.

My thoughts on the rosy undergarments

2009-03-01T12:17:00.005+05:30

I have seen and heard lots of the criticism of the "Pink Chaddi" campaign, some of it intelligent, some not. I'm myself not very sure what to think, so here are some questions and answers.

Q. Is drinking wrong?
A. Medically speaking, moderate drinking is fine and may even be beneficial. The recommended limit in the UK is 2-3 units a day for women and 3-4 for men. Few Indians drink to that extent. Where alcohol health warnings on bottles in the West say something like "alcohol abuse is dangerous: consume in moderation", in India it is a flat "alcohol is injurious to health", in type too small to read. However, it is not fine to be teetotal for 6 days and then consume 20-30 units during the weekend.

Q. No, I mean is it morally wrong?
A. Ask your religious leader. But don't impose that advice on others in an extra-legal way. If you disapprove of any form of alcohol consumption, campaign for prohibition and let a law be passed.

Q. Was it right to beat up girls in a Mangalore pub for the crime of drinking?
A. Of course not. Apparently even L. K. Advani agrees. And it is not a crime to drink in Mangalore. If it is a crime in your state, or if you believe the bar was not licensed, call the police.

Q. But what if it was a moral crime, against Indian society and culture?
A. First, see above answer: if you feel so strongly, campaign to make it a legal crime, and then deal with it within the law. Second, why pick on the women alone?

Q. But is this "pub culture" healthy?
A. I don't know. Binge-drinking is not healthy but you can't make everything that is unhealthy illegal. The only pub I've been to in years is Pecos in Bangalore, and that too not recently. I saw nothing unhealthy there, except the tobacco smoke, which legally should be a thing of the past now (if not, complain!) My companions and I did not binge-drink. But perhaps some people do.

Q. I don't mean Pecos. Have you seen what goes on in these night clubs and discos?
A. No. What goes on?

Q. Skimpy dresses, kissing, things that should only be in the bedroom.
A. If that offends you, why are you looking?

Q. What's with the Pink Chaddi Campaign?
A. Apparently several people (not only women) decided to retaliate against the leader of the group responsible for the Mangalore attacks, by sending him pink female underwear. 50,000 pieces were collected, I believe, and duly dispatched.

Q. Isn't that a tacky thing to do?
A. It got headlines and publicity, and has contributed to keeping the issue alive and under discussion.

Q. But for how long?
A. Not for very long.

Q. What practical impact will it have?
A. In terms of direct impact, none at all. It may even have had some short-term negative impact by turning off some large, prudish sections of society from an issue that they would otherwise agree with. But it has demonstrated the numbers of people who are upset by this.

Q. Is the right of women to go to pubs the most important thing that Indian women are being denied?
A. No, but to many urban women, it is a symbol of everything that is going wrong. The Mangalore incident was a trigger, a call to action. And also the proximity to St Valentine's Day helped.

Q. That reminds me. What's with the "Pub Bharo Andolan"?
A. I don't know. Maybe it was secretly planned by Vijay Mallya.

Q. So what to do next?
A. First, as Prem Panicker points out, the hoodlums responsible for the Mangalore attacks (and other recent attacks in Bangalore and elsewhere in Karnataka) are protected by politicians. It is the politicians that must be targeted. If you can mobilise 50,000 pink chaddis, can you mobilise 10,000 people to sit on a dharna in front of the Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore every day, until the chief minister is compelled to take action?

Second, there is the larger issue of society, and I am very much afraid that very large sections of society would agree with the Sri Ram Sene that girls shouldn't go to pubs -- even if they may not agree with the Sene's means of tackling the issue. But this is just one symptom of many, many things society finds acceptable and normal in terms of treatment of women, from unequal pay at work to groping on public transport to dowry harassment. Protecting the rights of pub-goers is starting from the top, and it can be done only by heavy policing. (I remember how jarred I felt in England, where outside every pub I saw hefty bouncers standing at its doors. It certainly did not make me feel comfortable.) But you can't police every street, every workplace, every bus, every household. (And do we really want a society where only the very rich have their rights protected?) If we want a society where women can move freely, work freely and socialise freely in places of their choosing, on equal terms with men, without a policeman or security officer watching a few metres away from them, we need to change things from the roots.

Take another example: the girl (again, in the Mangalore region) who was harassed by Hindu-fascist goons for meeting a Muslim boy, and committed suicide the next day. Her parents duly filed a police complaint the next day -- against the Muslim boy!

This is the sort of society we live in, and if we want change, I'm afraid pink chaddis won't achieve it.

But it's a start. Will it now lead somewhere?

Conservative dishonesty

2009-02-27T23:19:00.002+05:30

For sheer chutzpah it is hard to beat American conservative columnists. I used to regard William Safire as intellectually honest, in that his views may be off the wall but he would not hesitate to attack the Bush administration if they trampled on civil liberties. But he ceased his NYT column and they are yet to find a successful replacement: their last attempt, Bill Kristol, was a disaster. George Will, at the Washington Post, till recently seemed somewhat principled, but two recent columns on climate change make a mockery of both words I used above: "intellectual" and "honesty".

On February 15, Will wrote a column on climate change that attracted rebuttals from around the web. George Monbiot's, on The Guardian, is here. James Hyrnyshyn's, on scienceblogs, is here.

Today Will rebuts those rebuttals. Except that he doesn't. He ignores nearly all of the rebutters to focus solely on Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. He claims that "[his previous] column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken." Apparently challenges by well-known columnists and activists like Monbiot don't count.

What is this "mistaken" challenge? It is to the claim, in Will's previous article, that

"Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began."

to which his rebuttal is... actually, he doesn't rebut it (and Monbiot reports that he can find no evidence for this claim). What he rebuts is a separate factual challenge, to his previous claim (which he does not quote here) that

"According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

To this, Monbiot (and others, including, apparently, Revkin) quote the ACRC's response:

"No, it is not correct. I don't know where they are getting that. As of today, there are 1.43m km sq less Arctic sea ice than this same date in 1979. (Roughly the size of two Texas-sized states)."

Inadvertently partially defending himself on this point, Will links to this document. But Will seems to think the document defends himself against his claim that "since September the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979". Nowhere does the document suggest this.

What it does say is that reduction in northern hemisphere ice (about 1 million sq km) is partially offset by an increase in southern hemisphere ice (about 0.5 million sq km), thus leaving a much less visible change in global ice levels; but it makes it clear that the southern hemisphere increase is expected and temporary, and that the surface cover is only one of several worrying indicators. Perhaps Will hoped that nobody would click and read that link. Or that if they did, they would be incapable of understanding simple English, since it is apparently beyond his comprehension.

The article that Will links to suggests (if one simply subtracts the estimates for the two hemispheres) that global ice levels have in fact fallen by 0.5 million sq km since 1979. He reports that the Illinois centre said the difference since 1980 is "less than three percent", which is about consistent with this number.

He then triumphantly ends his column with the news item, that from early January 2009 until February 18 2009, faulty measurement had underestimated the Arctic ice area by 193,000 square miles (about 0.5 million sq km). Why the jubilant tone, I wonder? Did he fail to comprehend that (a) this faulty measurement does not affect the previous data, reported in 2008 and clarified in a document dated January 1 this year? Or that (b) though the number is coincidentally close to the reported global drop in ice since 1979, it is dwarfed by the Arctic drop, so even if it were relevant, it wouldn't affect the conclusions?

It seems to me that, when political columnists turn their attention to science, they do themselves a serious disservice. After watching George Will's ability in reading comprehension and basic scientific, mathematical and geographical literacy in action over two recent columns, how are we to react to his political pronouncements?

But perhaps these people do serve a purpose. Whenever I get annoyed by the Indian punditocracy I head over to new world. Will, Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, to name just three, can make anyone in the world look good by comparison.

Slumdog and real life

2009-02-27T21:37:00.003+05:30

What do you do when you are a slum dweller and your kid gets in all the papers because he was in an Oscar-winning movie?

If you happen to be Ismail, father of Azharuddin Mohammed, you get your own name in the papers by slapping your kid in the presence of photographers. Why the slap? Because the kid was tired and did not want to parade in front of the press any more.

The cringe-making images are here.

Early start

2009-02-26T20:58:00.002+05:30

I wonder if it is a sign of things to come that our 2-year-old's first ever complete sentence in English was "Give me money."

(He was asking for a 50p coin that we were playing with. He has previously said similar 2-word sentences in Tamil.)