Driving in Iran

Interesting video from LiveLeak. (Go there for further comments.)

My reaction was probably not what the posters expected: I thought to myself, how orderly the place looks, and why can't we be like that? There are a few "interesting" moments (mostly involving buses and pedestrians), but on the whole it seems refreshingly disciplined compared to India.

I suppose that's the danger: in India you know damn well to watch out for everybody else while you're driving, but if you expect that most people would follow rules and it turns out that one in a hundred doesn't, that's a problem.

Another article on Indian education

From Gautam Desiraju (University of Hyderabad), who previously wrote this this piece in Nature, comes another excellent article, "Science Education and Research in India", in the current (June 14) issue of EPW. Unfortunately EPW's website is rather weird and I can't provide a direct link; but The PDF is here (thanks km!), and it is on the front page at the moment and will be freely readable for the next four weeks.

I agree with nearly everything he says. Only with regard to the cost of education I have a disagreement. (Based on the rest of his article, and my previous conversations with him, the disagreement may not be major.) He seems to suggest that, in contrast to subsidising everyone heavily as at present, only meritorious students should be subsidised and others asked to pay full fees. I think the concept of "merit" is overvalued, and financial aid should be entirely need-based (see MIT's policies for example). In the "nature vs nurture" debate, I come down on the side of nurture, but I also believe that nurture does not end at a cram-school in Kota. It should be the job of an elite institution to create merit, not just demand it at the entry level.

This also relates to a current debate on Abi's blog on the IIT-JEE rankings. The reason the IIT-JEE test is so savagely difficult is that the IITs want to rank each individual candidate on entry. I think that is an extremely unhealthy practice. But the reason they want to do it is that they want to assign courses and campuses to students at the entry level: a "meritorious" student picks, say, computer science at IIT Kanpur even before ever entering the campus of that institute. It would be far better to give all students the same broad-based education (covering engineering, science and humanities) for two years, and ask them to specialise in the third year onwards; that way, some bright and motivated students, who have seen the atmosphere at several departments first-hand and done hands-on work there, will learn that there are interesting and productive areas beyond the "hot topics" favoured by the media, reducing the competitive pressure to get into the "hot" departments (and departments can effectively compete to attract the better students); and, to the extent that comparison of student merits is required at all, it will be based on their performance over 2 years at the institution itself, not on a 3-hour examination.

The "merit" mania and the mushrooming of cram-schools has poisoned the childhoods and teenage years of a few million Indian schoolchildren by now. It needs to be tackled, and the IITs should take the lead, since they are the major cause of the problem.

The prescient Dave Barry

The following passage has been floating around for years as a fortune cookie; I don't know when it was written.

Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all the suspected pornography trucked to Justice Stevens' house, where he would look it over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an enormous mound of rubberized implements, and the court had to issue a ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the court was going to take a nap.
-Dave Barry, "Pornography"

Once more, life imitates art.

Young Hillary Clinton

Via Donklephant: footage of young Hillary and Barack.

PS: Andrew Sullivan sums up her disgraceful non-concession speech.

Organising my online reading

This time, the title refers not to blogs (where I haven't figured out the answer yet) but to scholarly articles.

Like most scientists I know, I tend to read journals online, accessing their webpages with a browser (usually Mozilla Firefox), reading either the HTML or the PDF on my screen, and only rarely bothering to take a printout. Many trees have probably been saved this way.

Also, like most scientists I know, when writing papers I use bibliography software (in my case BibTeX; Microsoft Word users are likely to use Endnote) to organise my references, and I maintain a database of papers I refer to.

The question is, what happens in between? There are two problems here: I want to save my reading material in a systematic way, so that I will find it again when I want to; and I want to save the citation information for it so that I can easily reference it in my own writing.

Saving things systematically is not my strong point. Ideally, I would save it to a subdirectory named after the topic of interest, and rename the file with an informative name, so that I can locate it with a simple directory listing. If a file belonged to multiple topics, I would make symbolic links to it in all relevant subdirectories. I'm sure it would work well. Instead, what I end up doing is saving everything to a directory named "papers" (or, worse, on my desktop), with the original filename which could be something like "10.1371_journal.pcbi.0020053-L.pdf". Good luck finding that again. Then when I need it again, I end up searching PubMed or Google Scholar for it.

As for citations, an alternative to the extreme tedium of manually entering each BibTeX entry into my database was to search for the paper on sites such as Hubmed (a PubMed front-end that can export to BibTeX format and do other nice things). This, in practice, is not tedium-free either.

Such was my workflow until recently. Now I have a better solution: Zotero.

I'm sure I'm late to the party and lots of people are using it already, but here's a description for the uninitiated. Zotero is a Firefox extension: when installed, you get a "zotero" button at the bottom right of the Firefox window, which when pressed, pops up the Zotero interface (or pops it down again). What it does is, it captures bibliographic information about the page you are currently viewing, and saves it to a database. Capturing is as easy as clicking an icon that shows up in your URL bar. (It's not restricted to scholarly journals: it works with news articles from the New York Times, or BBC News, for example.) Each item in that database has numerous fields: the usual bibliographic ones (title, author, journal name, etc), but also web links, notes, attachments, tags. It automatically extracts tags from some articles (via their "keywords" or equivalent section), but you can specify your own. You can search your articles, filter them by tag, and do various other neat things, most of which I haven't explored. Most importantly, you can export citations in BibTeX format (and also Endnote and various other formats).

Zotero works with Firefox 2, and the latest version also works well, in my experience, with Firefox 3 RC1, but has glitches with the previous release (beta 5) of Firefox 3. If you are overwhelmed by scholarly reading matter, give it a try.

Hillary and mendacity

I've been following the Democratic primaries in the US with interest. It is all over now, except in the opinion of Hillary Clinton. 48 states, plus Puerto Rico, have voted; two more will vote on Tuesday, but they are too small to make a difference. Barack Obama is far ahead in delegate count, and is likely to end on top after the "superdelegates" are counted too.

So why is Hillary pressing on? She claims that she has won the "popular vote" (received more individual votes than Obama) and therefore is more likely to win the general election.

The problem is, that claim is bogus, like so much else about the Clintons.

First, it counts Michigan and Florida in full, though those states were disenfranchised for moving their primaries without permission and neither candidate campaigned there. (Hillary had no problem with the disenfranchisement until she fell behind in the other states.) Enfranchising them now means ignoring the votes of those who stayed home assuming their votes wouldn't count. (The states have been reinstated but each delegate will now have half a vote.)

Second, it does not count a single popular vote for Obama in Michigan. That's because Obama (like Edwards and most other candidates) withdrew himself from the ballot in that state, because of the sanction. Hillary was the only serious candidate; nevertheless, 45% of the electorate voted "uncommitted", and nearly all of them would have voted either Obama or Edwards (who has endorsed Obama). Hillary doesn't want those votes to count.

Third, she doesn't count many of the caucus states which did not release popular vote tallies. And even the caucus states that did release vote tallies would weigh much lower, because an order of magnitude fewer people vote in caucuses.

Fourth, she counts Puerto Rico, which does not vote in the general election.

If Hillary wanted to stay honest about even one of the above points, she could not claim the popular vote lead. But as it stands, she is turning into a parody of Saturday Night Live's savage portrayal of her a few weeks ago.

Which brings me to the last SNL point about Hillary: "I have no ethical standards... Obama has been reluctant to play the race card, but I would be happy to play the gender card." Indeed, she has been complaining of sexism and belittled the racism exhibited against her opponent. (Seriously. Would anyone, at the height of "Freedom Fries" days, have predicted that a black man with a surname one letter away from "Osama" and a middle name shared with Iraq's former dictator would be a serious presidential candidate? But despite his progress, channels like Fox continue their Obama-Osama confusion.)

My take on that issue is: in the developed world, lots of women have reached the top spot: Margaret Thatcher and Mary Robinson in the past, Angela Merkel today. But nobody from an ethnic minority, that I can recall, has ever been elected president or prime minister. There is no doubt to me whose victory would be more historic, and who has faced hurdles in his path. And let's not forget that Hillary's path has been smoothed (though also roughened) by her husband.

Faced with clamours to quit, she protested recently that primaries can go on till June, as Bill's did, and doesn't anyone remember that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June? (She then pretended that she didn't see the implications of that statement.) As for Bill, he remembered it differently in his autobiography.

People have been asking her to bow out gracefully. But grace is not a defining characteristic of the couple who left the White House armed with valuable gifts, having pardoned wealthy fugitives like Marc Rich on their way out.

The Aarushi case

There are enough outrageous things going on in every corner in India that one should be sensitised to these things, but the case of Aarushi Talwar's and the servant's murder sets new lows. (Google if you're unfamiliar with the case.)

First, the NOIDA police arrest the father on circumstantial evidence that seems laughable at best. Then, they claim that not only was the father having an affair that his daughter didn't approve of, but the daughter was having an affair with the murdered servant. Now they leak emails and messages sent by Aarushi, for purposes that are not clear at all.

The Times of India has an impassioned editorial appeal, available online here, calling on readers to protest this invasion of a dead girl's privacy and the smearing of her character.

Which is very creditable, but the same TOI has frontpaged one of the leaked e-mails, in full, in their Chennai edition. What about the privacy issue there?

Anyway, the police apparently claim that the email reproduced by TOI reveals tensions between Aarushi and her father. To me, at least, that email reveals nothing of the sort. It is about some argument Aarushi had with her parents about what a teen is permitted to do, and reveals a great deal of understanding on Aarushi's part of her parents' point of view. I see no acrimony there. So TOI was probably right to reproduce that mail, despite the privacy issue -- it rips the police's case, but worse, it exposes them as incompetent morons who have no idea about the lives of teenagers but are happy to smear them when they are dead.

The CBI has now apparently begun a probe into this case but it is not clear that the NOIDA police have been taken off the case. Is there any prospect of the police officials concerned being punished for this sort of loose talk about a dead teenager? And what if the father is exonerated: who will compensate him for the additional trauma and slander, at a time that was already traumatic enough for him? The police's job was to keep the neighbourhood safe. Having failed at that job, they were under pressure to "solve" the case, and seem to be taking the easy route.

An old joke in Delhi went like this: Police teams from all over the world participated in a lion-capturing competition. At the end of the day, all the police teams had returned -- some successful, some not -- except the Delhi Police. So the organisers went to look for them, and found them with a bear that they had captured, thrashing the animal mercilessly and shouting, "बोल, तू शेर है!" ("Admit it, you're a lion!")

Prince vs Radiohead

I'd previously posted about The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and his habit of sending DMCA takedown notices to YouTube for videos that harmlessly and peripherally reference his work.

Now here comes this story on HuffPo. Prince covered Radiohead's "Creep", some fans shot video at the concert and posted it on YouTube, and DMCA notices were promptly sent for it to be taken down -- so not even Radiohead could view the performance.

From the article:

In a recent interview, Thom Yorke said he heard about Prince's performance from a text message and thought it was "hilarious." Yorke laughed when his bandmate, guitarist Ed O'Brien, said the blocking had prevented him from seeing Prince's version of their song.

"Really? He's blocked it?" asked Yorke, who figured it was their song to block or not. "Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment."

Yorke added: "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song."

Goodbye greenbacks?

The US currency could be in for more trouble, of quite another kind.

The US is pretty much the only country whose currency bills all have exactly the same shape, size and colour, regardless of denomination -- from $1 to $100.

Actually, in recent years it's almost the same colour. Many were upset a few years ago when delicate pastel shades of other colours were introduced atop the green $20 notes (and, more recently, other notes), but you have to strain to make out the other colours: the visually impaired wouldn't be able to. Indeed, the blind or nearly-blind can't distinguish the notes in any way. (The 2004 biopic of Ray Charles, "Ray", portrayed the blind singer in his younger days demanding to be paid in $1 notes, since he wouldn't be able to count them otherwise.)

Now, in response to a lawsuit launched by the American Council of the Blind, a US appeals court has declared the near-identical nature of the notes to be discriminatory against the blind.

What happens next will be very interesting... I wonder whether, rather than resize or recolour the notes, the US Treasury will choose to emboss the denomination in Braille? Will that be possible or practical?

On apologising

Recently I posted on how Americans can "never accept" the Iraqi wish to have an apology for wrongful deaths, instead of mere monetary compensation. In response to a comment from Sunil, I wrote: "... an apology is an implied admission of wrongdoing, which in America will lead to enormous claims of damages. So let's not even think of going there."

So this story in the NYT was quite interesting to read. Apparently some medical centres in that country are experimenting with apologising for errors, and are seeing legal claims against them, and legal costs, come down sharply. From the story:

For decades, malpractice lawyers and insurers have counseled doctors and hospitals to “deny and defend.” Many still warn clients that any admission of fault, or even expression of regret, is likely to invite litigation and imperil careers.

But with providers choking on malpractice costs and consumers demanding action against medical errors, a handful of prominent academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins and Stanford, are trying a disarming approach.

By promptly disclosing medical errors and offering earnest apologies and fair compensation, they hope to restore integrity to dealings with patients, make it easier to learn from mistakes and dilute anger that often fuels lawsuits.

Malpractice lawyers say that what often transforms a reasonable patient into an indignant plaintiff is less an error than its concealment, and the victim’s concern that it will happen again.

Despite some projections that disclosure would prompt a flood of lawsuits, hospitals are reporting decreases in their caseloads and savings in legal costs...

Somehow I'm not surprised, but it is very welcome news. It is also interesting that the lead "apologetic" doctor in that story is of Indian origin. Though I suppose he had his institution's backing to apologise.

In India most doctors of my acquaintance are very approachable, but I have no idea what happens in case of severe error. And if the doctor is not apologetic (and the patient is not convinced that it was a genuine and rare error), there is little legal recourse.

Also one should note that, in the NYT story, the patients who were apologised to did get compensation -- substantially less than what a court may have awarded, but still sizeable. I don't know whether that happens in India at all.