It is science if

The data and the code are in public domain (via).

Research funding: Matthew Effect

From an interesting article in SEED magazine on some sociology of research funding in US:

Over the last 40 years, the importance of fame in science has increased. The effect has compounded because famous researchers have gathered the smartest and most ambitious graduate students and post-docs around them, so that each notable paper from a high-wattage group bootstraps their collective power. The famous grow more famous, and the younger researchers in their coterie are able to use that fame to their benefit. The effect of this concentration of power has finally trickled down to the level of funding: The average age on first receipt of the most common “starter” grants at the NIH is now almost 42. This means younger researchers without the strength of a fame-based community are cut out of the funding process, and their ideas, separate from an older researcher’s sphere of influence, don’t get pursued. This causes a founder effect in modern science, where the prestigious few dictate the direction of research. It’s not only unfair—it’s also actively dangerous to science’s progress.

It’s time to start rethinking the way we reward and fund science. How can we fund science in a way that is fair?

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Tribute to Mansur

Somak Ghoshal pays his tributes to Mallikarjun Mansur and his rare legacy.

Salinger and Smith

A couple of pieces in the Hindu literary review by Pradeep Sebastian: on Salinger and on Zadie Smith. During my next visit to Crossword, I should remember to look for that book of essays by Zadie Smith.

Capitalism and mathematics

Capitalism and mathematics are intimately related; mathematics functions as the grammar of techno-scientific discourse which every form of capitalism has relied upon and initiated. … feasible, in other words, to see in the realist account of mathematics an ideological formation serving certain (techno-scientific) ends within twentieth-century capitalism.

Brian Rotman, in Towards a semiotics of mathematics (of course, from 18 unconventional essays on the nature of mathematics).

Tributes to S Rajam

Hindu has several pieces on the musician, painter and actor S Rajam who passed away recently:

1. Gowri Ramnarayan
2. Rupa Gopal
3. Randor Guy
4. Vijayalakshmi Subramaniam
5. Lakshmi Venkatraman

Plenty of interesting information and moving tributes in there; take a look!

Remembering Indira Menon

Sriram Venkatkrishnan, in his blog, posts the tribute that he wrote for Sruti remembering Indira Menon, who, I understand, passed away last November.

Onion’s obit to JDS

Titled Bunch of phonies mourn J D Salinger is short and a must-read.

RIP: J D Salinger

From Paper Cuts I learnt the news:

There will no doubt be a lot of tributes and appreciations to Salinger in the coming days — a notion that would surely have driven Salinger himself crazy. Here’s Holden, cranky as ever:

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.

But I’d rather remember Salinger (and Holden Caulfield) with the last words to “Catcher in the Rye,” words that signaled Salinger’s future seclusion even as they allowed for the joy and the pain of human connection:

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

We’ve missed J. D. Salinger for a long time, but now we can bid him farewell and wish him peace.

Interview with Venki

At Current Science (pdf) — Abi, from whom I got the link, has excerpted the following passage, which I am reproducing here because it seems to contain something very interesting and relevant:

Do you see any difference in the way research is done in developing countries and developed countries?

I think, well, if you had asked this question 20 years ago, I would’ve said there’s a big difference because the amount of resources people had were very very different. They were even at different scales. I know that in my father’s department, there was only one spectrophotometer in the entire department, and everybody had to use that. That was a big deal to have a UV spectrophotometer. Whereas in a Western lab, every lab, or maybe surrounding labs, had spectrophotometers. It was a big deal to have a pH meter. But that’s all changed. So I think part of it is psychological. One thing that taught me at the LMB – when I went to LMB, I found that it was not that different in terms of its equipment. In fact, it was very crowded; it almost looked like a rundown place. There are all these centrifuges in the hallways, freezers in the hallways, and so on. It didn’t look like a posh place at all. Of course, it had almost every equipment you would need, but it was shared. It didn’t have hundreds of different kinds of equipment. It’s not that every group owned its own equipment. Expensive equipment is shared throughout the lab. So why did the LMB do so well? Why does it continue to do well? I think it’s a psychological problem. You have to say I’m not going to do boring derivative problems where I’m doing a second or third example of something that’s already been done, and I’m not going to learn that much new from it. I see a lot of that going on in India where something is done in one system and they’ll do it in another system. And I don’t think that’s going to lead to really important breakthroughs. Actually, if people wanted to, they could do particularly Indian problems. They could study specifically Indian plant diseases or even Indian biology. They could look at ecosystems and molecular biology related to it. Or they could compete on worldwide problems where all the molecular biologists are interested in it. They could go either way. And I think the worst thing is to do something where someone has established something in one, say E. coli, and somebody does it in some other bacteria. In general, it’s not going to be helpful.

As you said in your lecture, the first few proteins of the ribosome were published in Nature, the next in lower impact journals . . .

Exactly. Exactly. So that’s an example. You know, I could have made a career just going on doing that. And as long as I kept publishing papers, I would’ve gotten grants. And that’s the kind of mentality that we see more of here. But in good labs in the West, they would see immediately –- okay, this is not getting so interesting. We need to move on. Even with the 30S –- I could keep on doing a bunch of antibiotics. There are dozens of antibiotics, right? We just did six and we stopped. But if I wanted to publish a paper in say JMB or Acta Crystallogr., I could just do one antibiotic, one paper. And I could just make a career out of it. That would be the kind of thing I see more in India. But that’s a psychological problem. It’s not a problem of resources or infrastructure. I think if people had good ideas, at least my colleagues tell me, there’s plenty of funding.

Take a look!