Corporate waive-offs and illicit fund flows

The first paragraph of Sainath’s piece in Hindu says it all:

In six years from 2005-06, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore — more than twice the 2G fraud — in successive Union budgets. The figure has grown every single year for which data are available. Corporate income tax written off in 2005-06 was Rs.34,618 crore. In the current budget, it is Rs.88,263 crore — an increase of 155 per cent. That is, the nation presently writes off over Rs.240 crore a day on average in corporate income tax. Oddly, that is also the daily average of illicit fund flows from India to foreign banks, according to a report of the Washington-based think tank, Global Financial Integrity.

Take a look!

IT and the demand for highly educated workers

Here is Paul Krugman (via Abi):

I decided to write the piece around a conceit: that information technology would end up reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers, because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing — indeed, replaced more easily than a lot of manual labor. Here’s the piece; …

Coincidentally, a few hours ago I wrote:

… how about engineers? Are they men and women of facts and calculations? If so, in the age of Google and Watson, do we need such a training? If not, what are engineers for?

Krugman does mention Watson in his piece.

Rethinking curriculum: some random thoughts

For the past one week or so, I have been reading Peter Medawar‘s The threat and the glory: reflections on science and scientists. While discussing the philosophy of Karl Popper, Medawar says the following:

No scientist thinks of himself as a man of facts and calculations. Popper puts it thus: “It is not his possession of knowledge that makes the man of science, but his persistent and relentlessly critical search for truth.”

That brings me to the question, namely, how about engineers? Are they men and women of facts and calculations? If so, in the age of Google and Watson, do we need such a training? If not, what are engineers for?

The above questions were also brought home to me by one of the students with whom we were chatting. He told us that his class (in general) thinks that since one can always google and find out, it is not important to remember

• numbers (approximately, what is the melting point of aluminium or steel), or,
• names (what is the instrument that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy in a power station), or,
• sometimes even concepts (why should I know the definition of equilibrium melting point of a pure material? In my job, in future, I might never need to know; however, if I need it badly, I can google, find the relevant page, read it, and in an hour or so, I will know all that I need to know on the question).

If the student attitude is like this, I feel, we have an obligation either to convince them why these things are essential or to change our curriculum in ways in which it will reflect the “real world” scenario outside of the walls of the academia.

Explaining the curriculum

One reason why students have viewpoints like this is because they have never been told the philosophy behind the curriculum. Take an English Literature course; the students might be asked to read a novel, say, The English Teacher of R K Narayan.  Even before they begin reading the novel, the students do know that their reading is different from that of a lay (non-literary) person’s reading of the novel. They also know that reading the novel is not to train them in reading but to train them in other things. Similarly, when students of mathematics are taught proofs, they know that learning the proofs is only one part of their mathematical training. You might know all the proofs and still not be a mathematician.

I feel, that in engineering courses such meta-learning goals (which are sort of obvious in literature and mathematics courses) are not clear to our students. They do not know what is it that they are learning when they learn, say, the equilibrium melting point of a pure material and things of the sort. Thus, I feel that explaining them the meta-learning goals will help them appreciate what they are being taught as well as evaluate by themselves along the way as to how much of the meta-learning is happening.

If we need to explain the meta-learning goal, of course, it means that we know what they are. The prime question is, are we? For example, what is the meta-learning objectives in a materials engineering curriculum where the students are asked to learn structure, thermodynamics, kinetics, transport phenomena, phase transformations, properties (mechanical, electrical, magnetic), and processing? And, how much of these meta-learning goals will be of use to the students even if they decide not to stick to the materials engineering field after their graduation? I think we need to think more along these lines and collectively come up with some answers (which, at the moment at least, seem to be muddled or not known in my mind — one reason why I am writing this post — to get my ideas cleared on the issue).

Knowing names and numbers

Once students know of the importance of learning the concepts, the naming of them and the numbers automatically follow. As Feynman observes in one of his interviews (available on YouTube — I think here, or one of the other parts), just by knowing the name, we may not know anything; however, knowing the name comes very handy for discussions and effective communication. Similarly, even though one might not know the exact number (and, may have to look it up), the orders of magnitudes of quantities is part of the understanding — much like a mathematicians way of learning a proof; they do not memorise it but build it up from first principles every time, and after several such exercises know it by heart). So, our emphasis in our teaching for knowing the names and numbers should be secondary to concepts and their understanding.

Engineering is becoming more science-like

Finally, I feel that there are good reasons to believe that current engineering training lays more emphasis on engineering sciences. Some of our students who come from the industry, have told me a change that has taken place in the shop floor. More and more of routine jobs, which  would have been carried out by an engineer or technician in the past, have been taken over by machines these days. So, the engineer is called only  when there is a hiccup. This means that the engineers job description on the shop floor sounds more and more like that of a scientist in the R&D division. Further, as a discipline, Materials Engineering itself is at that edge where engineering meets science; unlike other engineers, we do not take any property for granted and make our engineering solutions based on them; instead, we generally try to find the means of changing the property itself; this, generally gives a feeling to other engineers that we are not engineers but more science oriented people at best and artisans at worst; on the other hand scientists have difficulty in accepting materials engineers as one among them because of the emphasis that these engineers put on applications than on the basic underlying phenomena; in the end, the net effect of all this is to make the possession of exact knowledge of numbers important only to the extent that it also helps in our understanding the underlying phenomena as far as materials engineering goes — once again making the learning of concepts the primary goal of our engineering curriculum.

Pleasures of plain singing

I am just coming back from the Thyagaraja Aradhana in the campus; sitting next to the lake, as the skies are darkening, listening to the Pancharatna Kritis is a wonderful experience; what heightened the pleasure for me is the fact that this singing was not accompanied by any instrumental support; very few are the times one gets to hear just the singing like this!

Intimidated by the Swedes and Danes

Bharadwaj Rangan:

For the longest time, I was intimidated by Swedes. What kind of people were these that their cinema yielded only the Bergman oeuvre? Even we had art filmmakers, forbiddingly grim craftsmen like Ritwik Ghatak and Mani Kaul, but we had, at the same time, channels of escape in the works of Manmohan Desai and SP Muthuraman. But these Swedes – didn’t they crave mindless escape? Just how formidably intelligent were they? Did they tuck in their children with bedtime readings of Kierkegaard? (Yes, he was Danish, but this entire essay could be reconfigured to accommodate the Danes as well, those glacial cousins of the Swedes, given that the moviegoers of Denmark, to our eyes, appeared to be weaned singularly on Carl Dreyer’s masterworks.) And just how depressed were they? When the phrase “dinner date” translates to meatballs followed by a screening of Persona, did the couple stand a chance for happily-ever-after?

On writing

I am a sucker for essays about writing and reading; so, thanks to this pointer from Jenny, this morning, I have the pleasure of reading this wonderful essay, full of interesting thoughts and ideas (though slightly jumpy at places):

Reading, writing for a reader, and being read, are intimate acts, and there’s something about trying to articulate what you’ve done that can flatten and reduce it, horrifyingly so.Some writers choose the written word because they find it difficult to speak directly; many writers are in love with solitude. Whichever it is, good writing should resist interpretation, summary and the need for applause.

A lot of writers, of course, work as teachers, for money, pleasure and distraction. It has been said that at least two percent of the population is writing a novel; apparently that number is rising. There’s been a gigantic increase in the number of writing courses available, both in universities and other institutions. Many of these students can only become teachers themselves, and I am sceptical of professional creative-writing teachers. The most helpful teachers are usually “real” writers who see working with students as part of their work.

Scarcer is practical and realistic advice for young writers, particularly about how difficult it is to make a consistent living. Any artist has to exist in some functional relation to the real world. Of my students, the film students are the most knowing and pragmatic, since to work in film at all is to be faced continuously with questions of budgets and time. Writers are mad and promiscuous, if they’re lucky; they make people up for a living, give them something to say, enter their minds, toy with them and often ruin their lives. One might like to think of oneself as a realist, but a good proportion of the important world is insubstantial, being made up of dream, fantasy, paranoid projections and the imagination. The only figure which comes close to showing the whole chaotic caboodle is literature.

But if a novel is concerned with numerous voices, and wants to keep them in play until the dispute is done, an essay is a monologue, a form of direct speech, and a whisper at that. The essay is as flexible a form as a story or novel; it is amenable to most forms of content. It can be as intellectual as Roland Barthes, Adam Phillips or Susan Sontag, as informal and casual as Max Beerbohm, or as cool and minimalist as Joan Didion.

Unlike academic writing, the essay is usually written for the general or “common” reader rather than for experts or students; for someone in a deck chair rather than at a desk. There should neither be footnotes nor much information in an essay; as a form, it is a meditation rather than an act of persuasion – though Robert Louis Stevenson’s fine essay “An Apology for Idlers” has encouraged me, as it should, towards a greater indolence: “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

Do read all of it; nice one!

Response to N Ram

ArunN has written a response to N Ram following Ram’s speeches and writings about the thin-skinned-ness of Carnatic musicians; I loved this part, especially:

The ploy employed by N. Ram, looking together his earlier speech and the above response to TMK, goes like this: First, you provoke someone by proclaiming in public something like “that guy is not nice you know; he will get provoked for any silly thing I say about him” and when that guy comes out “hey, that is a silly thing you are saying about me”, you get back at him by looking at the crowd and hollering, “see, see, I told you so, right?”.

In any case, my respect for Hindu as a newspaper and Ram as a journalist have been going down; this is just yet another point on the curve.

Conscientious TAs

Yes; they do exist; and it is a pleasure to work with them; and, I have/had the honour of working with a few. I was reminded of them when I read this post of ZapperZ about his own TA-ing experience and what it taught him:

After that semester, I TA’ed only for one more semester before I received a research assistantship and didn’t have to do any more teaching work. Still, I think I learned quite a bit in executing that responsibility. I certainly sharpened my skill as an instructor quite a bit, and learned what worked and what didn’t. But most importantly, I realized that students will try to get away with as much as they can if you let them.

Of course, needless to say, TAs who try to get away with as little as they can are also plenty!

Make ‘em Share ‘em

That is the way to progress; the seed article talks about how bio-engineering benefits from tool making and sharing; it is true for scientific software too, by the way:

We do not know how to make biology easy to engineer (think playing with Legos or coding software with Java). However, technical inventions prototyped over the past six years point the way to a future in which biology is much easier to engineer relative to today. For example, in the summer of 2009, a team of undergraduates at the University of Cambridge won the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition by engineering seven strains of E. coli, each capable of synthesizing a different pigment visible to the naked eye. The resulting set, collectively known as E. chromi, required rerouting the metabolism of the bacteria so that natural precursor chemicals are converted across a palette of seven colors, from red to purple; such genetic color generators can be used to program microbes to change color in response to otherwise invisible environmental pollutants or health conditions. A few years ago such a project would have required several PhD-level experts in biology and metabolic engineering and would have likely taken a few years. Today, undergraduates can perform such work in months. This change in reality is due to two advances—tools and sharing—both of which are ready for their own revolutions.

Take a look!

Compilation errors of humans–while reading

Computers are notorious for interpreting language in an overly literal fashion; a single misplaced parenthesis in an otherwise flawless piece of software code can cause a computer to halt in utter incomprehension halfway through the compilation of that code.

Humans, when reading natural language, tend to be far more robust at this; once one is fluent in, say, English, one can usually deal with a reasonable number of spelling or grammatical errors in a text, particularly when the writing style is clear and organised, and the themes of the text are familiar to the reader.

However, when, as a graduate student, one encounters the task of reading a technical mathematical paper for the first time, it is often the case that one loses much of one’s higher reading skills, reverting instead to a more formal and tedious line-by-line interpretation of the text. As a consequence, a single typo or undefined term in the paper can cause one’s comprehension of the paper to grind to a complete halt, in much the same way that it would to a computer.

In many cases, such “compilation errors” can be resolved simply by reading ahead in the paper. In some cases, just reading the next one or two lines can shed a lot of light on the mysterious term that was just introduced, or the unexplained step in the logic. In other cases, one has to read a fair bit further ahead; if, for instance, the conclusion of Lemma 15 was difficult to understand, one can read ahead to the end of the proof of that Lemma (in which, presumably, the conclusion is obtained), or search ahead to, say, Proposition 23, in which Lemma 15 is invoked, to get more clues as to what Lemma 15 is trying to say. (The use of search functions in, say, a PDF reader, is particularly useful in this regard.)

It is also good to keep in mind that no author is infallible, and that in some cases, the simplest explanation for incomprehension is that there is a typo in the text.

That is Terence Tao, here.