Unexpected: Magnetic regions in metal blow past speed limit

You’re familiar with magnetism, but do you know what it looks like at the smallest scale? Take a block of iron, for example. It’s ferromagnetic, which means if you place it near a permanent magnet – like a refrigerator magnet – the block will also become magnetic to a large extent, larger than materials that aren’t ferromagnetic.

If you zoom in to the iron atoms, you’ll see a difference between areas that are magnetised and areas that aren’t. Every subatomic particle has four quantum numbers, sort of like its Aadhaar or social security ID. No two electrons in the same system can have the same ID, i.e. one, some or all of these numbers differ from one electron to the next. One of these numbers is the spin quantum number, and it can have one of two values, or states, at any given time. Physicists refer to these states as ‘up’ and ‘down’. In the magnetised portions, in the iron block, you’ll see that electrons in the iron atoms will either all be pointing up or all down. This is a defining feature of magnetism.

Scientists have used it to make hard-disk drives that are used in computers. Each drive stores information by encoding it in electrons’ spins using a magnetic field, where, say, ‘1’ is up and ‘0’ is down, so a series of 1s and 0s become a series of ups and downs.

In the iron block, the parts that are magnetised are called domains. They demarcate regions of uniform electron spin in three dimensions in the block’s bulk. For a long time, scientists believed that the ‘walls’ of a domain – i.e. the imaginary surface between areas of uniform spin and areas of dis-uniform spin – could move at up to around 0.5 km/s. If they moved faster, they could destabilise and collapse, allowing a kind of magnetic chaos to spread within the material. They arrived at this speed limit from their theoretical calculations.

The limit matters because it says how fast the iron block’s magnetism can be manipulated, to store or modify data for example, without losing that data. It also matters for any other application that takes advantage of the properties of ferromagnetic materials.

In 2020, a group of researchers from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Sweden found that if you stacked up a layer of ferromagnets, the domain walls could move much faster – as much as 14 km/s – without collapsing. Things can move fast in the subatomic realm, yet 14 km/s was still astonishing for ferromagnetic materials. So scientists set about testing it.

A group from Italy, Sweden, and the US reported in a paper published in Physical Review Letters on December 19 (preprint here) that they were able to detect domain walls moving in a composite material at a stunning 66 km/s – greater than the predicted speed. Importantly, however, existing theories that explain a material’s magnetism at the subatomic scale don’t predict such a high speed, so now physicists know their theories are missing something.

In their study, the group erected a tiny stack of the following elements, in this order: tantalum, copper, a cobalt-iron compound, nickel, the cobalt-iron compound, copper, and tantalum. Advanced microscopy techniques revealed that the ferromagnetic nickel layer (just a nanometre wide) had developed domains of two shapes: some were like stripes and some formed a labyrinth with curved walls.

The researchers then tested the domain walls using the well-known pump-probe technique: a blast of energy first energises a system, then something probes it to understand how it’s changed. The pump here was an extremely short pulse of infrared radiation and the probe was a similarly short pulse of ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

The key is the delay between the pump and probe pulses: the smaller the delay, the greater the detail that comes to light. (Three people won the physics Nobel Prize this year for finding ways to make this delay as small as possible.) In the study it was 50 femtoseconds, or 500 trillionths of a second.

The UV pulse was diffracted by the electrons in nickel. A detector picked up the diffraction patterns and the scientists ‘read’ them together with computer simulations of the domains to understand how they changed.

How did the domains change? The striped walls were practically unmoved but the curved walls of the labyrinthine pattern did move, by about 17-23 nanometres. The group made multiple measurements. When they finally calculated an average speed (which is equal to distance divided by time), they found it to be 66 km/s, give or take 20 km/s.

An image depicting domains (black) in the nickel layer. The coloured lines show their final positions. Source: Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 256702

The observation of extreme wall speed under far-from-equilibrium conditions is the … most significant result of this study,” they wrote in their paper. This is true: even though the researchers found that the domain-wall speed limit in a multilayer ferromagnetic material is much higher than 0.5 km/s – as the 2020 group predicted – they also found it to be a lot higher than the expected 14 km/s. Of course, it’s also stunning because the curved domain walls moved at more than 10-times the speed of sound in that material – and the more curved a portion was, the faster it seemed to move.

The researchers concluded that “additional mechanisms are required to fully understand these effects” – as well as that they could be “important” to explain “ultrafast phenomena in other systems such as emerging quantum materials”.

This is my second recent post about scientists finding something they didn’t expect to, but in settings more innocuous than in the vast universe or at particle smashers. Read the first one, about the way paint dries, here.

You can do worse than watching paint dry – ask physics

I live in Chennai, a city whose multifaceted identity includes its unrelenting humidity. Its summers are seldom hotter than those in Delhi but they are more unbearable because it leaves people sweaty, dehydrated, and irritated. Delhi’s heat doesn’t have the same effect because when people sweat there, the droplets evaporate into the air, whose low relative humidity allows it to ‘accommodate’ moisture. But in Chennai, the air is almost always humid, more so during the summer, and the sweat on people’s skin doesn’t evaporate. Yet their bodies continue to sweat because it’s one of the few responses they have to the heat.

Paint, fortunately, has a different story to tell. Fresh paint on a wall doesn’t dry faster or slower depending on how humid the air is. This is because pain is made of water plus some polymers whose molecules are much larger than those of water. At first, water does begin to escape the paint and evaporate from the surface. This pulls the polymer molecules to the surface in a process called advection. On the surface, the polymer molecules form a dense layer that prevents the water below from interacting directing with the air, or its humidity. So the rate of evaporation slows until it reaches a constant low value. This is why, even in dry weather, paint takes its time to dry.

Scientists have verified that this is the case in a new study, in which they also reported that their findings can be used to understand the behaviour of little respiratory droplets in which viruses travel through the air. (Some studies – like this and this – have suggested that a virus’s viability may depend on the relative humidity and how quickly the droplet dries, among other factors. Since the relative humidity varies by season, a link could explain why some viral outbreaks are more seasonal.)

Generally, the human skin – as the largest outer-organ of the human body – is responsible for making sure the body doesn’t lose too much water through evaporation. Scientists think that it can adjust how much sweat is released on the skin by modifying the mix of lipids (fatty substances) in its outermost layer. If it did, it would be an example of an active process – a dynamic response to environmental and biological conditions. Paint drying, on the other hand, is a non-active process: the rate of evaporation is limited by the polymer molecules at the surface and their properties.

In 2017, a chemical engineer at the University of Bordeaux named Jean-Baptiste Salmon predicted that an active process may not be needed at all to explain humidity-independent evaporation because it arises naturally in solutions like that of paint. The new study tested the prediction of Salmon et al. using a non-active polymer solution, i.e. one that’s incapable of developing an active response to changes in humidity.

They filled a plastic container with polyvinyl alcohol, then drilled a small hole near the bottom and fit a glass tube there with an open end. The liquid could flow through the tube and evaporate from the end. To prevent the liquid from evaporating from its surface, they coated it with an oily substance called 1-octadecene. They placed this container on a sensitive weighing scale and the whole apparatus inside a sealed box with adjustable humidity. The researchers adjusted the humidity from 25% to 90% and each time studied the evaporation rate for more than 16 hours.

They found that Salmon et al. were right: the evaporation rate was higher for around three hours before dropping to a lower value. This was because polymer molecules had accumulated at the layer where the liquid met the air. But in these three hours, the rate of evaporation didn’t drop even when the humidity was increased. In other words, humidity-independent evaporation begins earlier than Salmon et al. predicted.

The researchers also reported another divergence: the evaporation rate wasn’t affected by a relative humidity of up to 80% – but beyond that, the rate fell if the humidity increased further. So what Salmon et al. said was at play but it wasn’t the full picture; some other forces were also affecting the evaporation.

The researchers ended their paper with an idea. They took a closer look at the open end of the tube, where the polyvinyl alcohol evaporated, with a microscope. They found that the polymer layer was overlaid with a stiffer semisolid, or gel-like, layer. Such layers are known to form when there is a compressive stress, and further block evaporation. The researchers found that their equations to predict the evaporation rate roughly matched the observed value when they were modified to account for this stress. They also found that a sufficiently thick gel layer could form within one second – a short time span considering the many hours over which the rate of evaporation evolves.

“These discrepancies motivate the search for extra physics beyond Salmon et al., which may again relate to a gelled polymer skin at the air-solution interface,” they concluded in their paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters on December 15.

A new path to explaining the absence of antimatter

Our universe was believed to have been created with equal quantities of matter and antimatter, only for antimatter to completely disappear over time. We know that matter and antimatter can annihilate each other but we don’t know how matter came to gain an upper hand and survive to this day, creating, stars, planets, and – of course – us.

In the theories that physicists have to explain the universe, they believe that the matter-antimatter asymmetry is the result of two natural symmetries being violated. These are the charge and parity symmetries. The charge (C) symmetry is that the universe would work the same way if we replaced all the positive charges with negative charges and vice versa. The parity (P) symmetry refers to the handedness of a particle. For example, based on which way an electron is spinning, it’s said to be right- or left-handed. All the fundamental forces that act between particles preserve their handedness except the weak nuclear force.

According to most particle physicists, matter won the war against antimatter through some process that violated both C and P symmetries. Proof of CP symmetry violation is one of modern physics’s most important unsolved problems.

In 1964, physicists discovered that the weak nuclear force is capable of violating C and P symmetries together when it acts on a particle called a K meson. In the 2000s, a different group of physicists found more evidence of CP symmetry violation in particles called B mesons. These discoveries proved that CP symmetry violation is actually possible, but they didn’t bring us much closer to understanding why matter dominated antimatter. This is because of particles called quarks.

Quarks are the smallest known constituent of the universe’s matter particles. They combine to form different types of bigger particles. For example, all mesons have two quarks each. All the matter that we’re familiar with are instead made of atoms, which are in turn made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons have three quarks each – they’re baryons. Electrons are not made of quarks; instead, they belong to a group called leptons.

To explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, physicists need to find evidence of CP symmetry violation in baryons, and this hasn’t happened so far.

On December 7, a group of researchers from China published a paper in the journal Physical Review D in which they proposed one place where physicists could look to find the answer: the decay of a particle called a lambda-b baryon to a D-meson and a neutron.

Quarks come in six types, or flavours. They are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. A lambda-b baryon is the name for a bundle containing one up quark, one down quark, and one strange quark. A D-meson is any meson that contains a charm quark. In the process the researchers have proposed, the D-meson exists in a superposition of two states: a charm quark + an up anti-quark (D0 meson) and a charm anti-quark and an up quark (D0 anti-meson).

The researchers have proposed that the probability of a lambda-b baryon decaying to a D0 meson versus a D0 anti-meson could be significantly different as a result of CP symmetry violation.

The proposal is notable because the researchers have tailored their prediction to an existing experiment that, once it’s upgraded in future, will collect data that can be used to look for just such a discrepancy. This experiment is called the LHCb – ‘LHC’ for Large Hadron Collider and ‘b’ for beauty.

The LHCb is a detector on the LHC, the famous particle-smasher in Europe that slams energetic beams of protons together to pry them open. The detectors then study the particles in the detritus and their properties. LHCb in particular tracks the signatures of different types of quarks. Physicists at CERN are planning to upgrade LHCb to a second avatar that’s expected to begin operating in the mid-2030s. Among other features, it will have a 7.5-times higher peak luminosity – a measure of the number of particles the detector can detect.

If the lambda-b baryon’s decay discrepancy exists in the new LHCb’s observed data, the decay proposed in the new study will be one way to explain it, and pave the way for proof of CP symmetry violation in baryons.

Char Dham will go on

“One of the greatest rescue missions in history” necessitated by a construction project pushed through at high cost, beginning with the safety and well-being of workers. Madam, what are you celebrating aside from such an event having been a matter of time?

“No government agency was left out. Be it the Health Ministry, the Road Ministry or the Railway Board – all brought their expertise on board. The Department of Telecom too ensured a better communications network at the site,” said Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain (retired), a Member of, the National Disaster Management Authority, at a press briefing.

The Indian Air Force, the National Disaster Response Force and the Border Road Organisation, along with State agencies such as the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) and the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and local administration also came together.

“This could happen only when there are clear instructions from the PM and the PMO,” added Mr. Hasnain.

The Hindu, November 28, 2023

The less time it takes to get all the men out, the faster the need for an accident followed by a rescue will leave the news cycle, and the less effort needs to be expended to force work on the Char Dham highway to continue. (It’s not for nothing that Manipur continues to simmer.) Then again, if push comes to shove, they may just blame it on a contractor, fire him, and move on.

“I won’t send him here [Silkyara] ever again, no matter what,” said Romen Narajari, brother of Ram Poshak Narajari who is one among the 41 workers trapped inside the Silkyara tunnel after a collapse that took place on November 12, on the day of Deepavali. After multiple efforts, all the 41 workers were rescued on Tuesday. …

Rajni has not informed her three children about the mishap that took place with their father till Tuesday. “There were days when I felt like life has ended for us. Whenever I spoke to him over phone, he used to cry and ask about children. I am glad that our miseries ended but I will not let him work out of our hometown, ever again,” Rajni added.

The Hindu, November 28, 2023

Good call – but awful that this is how they find out how much risk their family members are at.

Waters and bridges between science journalism and scicomm

On November 24-25, the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) conducted its inaugural conference at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. I attended it as a delegate.

A persistent internal monologue of mine at the event was the lack of an explicit distinction between science communicators and science journalists. One of my peers there said (among other things) that we need to start somewhere, and with that I readily agree. Subhra Priyadarshini, a core member of SJAI and the leader de facto of the team that put the conference together, also said in a different context that SJAI plans to “upskill and upscale science journalism in India”, alluding to the group’s plans to facilitate a gateway into science journalism. But a distinction may be worthwhile because the two groups seem to have different needs, especially in today’s charged political climate.

Think of political or business journalism, where journalists critique politics or business. They don’t generally consider part of their jobs to be improving political or business literacy or engagement with the processes of these enterprise. On the other hand, science journalists are regularly expected – including by many editors, scientists, and political leaders – to improve scientific literacy or to push back on pseudoscience. (For what it’s worth, pseudoscience isn’t a simple topic, especially against the backdrop of its social origins as well as questions about what counts as knowledge, how it’s created, who creates it, etc.).

When science institutions believe that X is science journalism when it’s in fact Y, then whenever they encounter Y, they’re taken aback, if not just offended. We have seen this with many research institutes whose leaders are friendly with the media when the latter is reporting on the former’s work, but become hostile when journalists start to ask questions about any wrongdoing or controversy. (One talking point supported by people insice NCBS, when the Arati Ramesh incident played out in 2021, was whether the publics are entitled to details of the inner workings of a publicly funded institute.) Scientists should know what science journalism really is, lest they believe it’s a new kind of PR, and change their expectations about the terms on which journalists engage with them.

This recalibration is important now when journalists are expected to bend over or not report on some topics, ideas or people. Are communicators expected to bend over also? I’m not so sure. Journalism is communication plus the added responsibility of abiding by the public interest (which transforms the way the communication happens as well), and the latter imposes demands that often give science journalism its thorn-in-the-side quality.

Understanding what journalism really is could improve relationships between scientists and science journalists, let scientists know why a (critical) journalism of science is as important as the communication of science, and the ways in which both institutions – of science and of journalism – are publicly answerable.

[After a few hours] So does that mean the difference between science journalism and science communication is what scientists understand them to be?

I think accounting for the peculiarities of both space (in India) and time (today) could produce a fairer picture of the places and roles of science journalism and communication. Specifically, that science journalism in India is coming of age at this particular time in history is important, especially because it will obviously evolve to respond to the forces that matter today. Most of all, unlike any other time before, today is distinguished by trivial access to the internet, which gives explainers and communicative writing more weight than before for their ability to be used against misinformation and to temper people’s readiness to consume information on the internet with the (editorial and scientific) expertise and wisdom of communicators and journalists.

The distinction of today also births the possibility of defining Indian science journalism separately from Indian science communication using the matter of their labels, expectations, purposes, and problems.

Labels – ‘Journalism’ and ‘communication’ are fundamentally labels used to describe specific kinds of activities. They probably originated in different contexts, to isolate and identify tasks that, in their respective settings, were unlike other tasks, but that wouldn’t have to mean that once they were transplanted to the science communication/journalism enterprise, they couldn’t have a significant – maybe even self-effacing – overlap. So it may be worthwhile to explore the history of these terms, in India, as it pertains to science journalists.

Expectations – The line between journalism and communication is slender. Many products of science-journalism work are texts that are concerned, to a not-insignificant extent, with communicating science first, with explaining a relevant concept, idea, etc. in its proper technical, historical, social, etc. context. Journalism peels away from communication with the added requirement of being in the public interest, but good communication can be in the public interest as well. (Economics seemed to pose a counter-argument but with a self-undermining component: did science communication in India have such a successful ‘scene’ before science journalism in India became a thing? I have my doubts although I’m not exactly well-informed – but a bigger issue is what editors in and product managers of newsrooms considered ‘science journalism’ to be in the first place. If they conflated it with communication, this counter-example is moot.)

Purposes – What is political journalism a journalism of? (To my mind, the answer to this question needs to be some activity that, when it is performed, would sufficiently qualify the performer as a practitioner of political journalism.) Is it a journalism of political processes, political thought, political outcomes or political leaders? Considering politics is a social enterprise, I think it’s a journalism of our political leaders: stories about these people are the stories about everything else that constitutes politics. Similarly, science journalism can be a journalism of the people of science – and it’s ease to see that, this way, it opens doors to everything from clever science to issues of science and society.

Problems – Journalism and communication may also be distinguished by their specific problems. For journalists, for example, quotes from scientists are more crucial than they are for communicators. Indian science journalism is thus complicated differently by the fact that many scientists don’t wish to speak to members of the press, for fear of being misquoted, of antagonising their bosses (who may have political preferences of their own), of lacking incentives to do so (e.g. “my chances of being promoted don’t increase if I speak to reporters”), and/or of falling afoul of the law (which prohibits scientists at government institutes from criticising government policies in the press). By extension, an association like SJAI that pools journalists (and communicators) together should also be expected to help alleviate journalists’ specific needs.

To its credit, SJAI 2023 did to the extent that it could, and I think will continue to do so; the point is that any other (science-)journalistic body in the country should do so as well and also ensure it doesn’t lose sight of the issues specific to each community.

Cognitive ability and voting ‘leave’ on Brexit

In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE on November 22, a pair of researchers from the University of Bath in the UK have reported that “higher cognitive ability” is “linked to higher chance of having voted against Brexit” in the June 2016 referendum. The authors have reported this based on ‘Understanding Society’, a “nationally representative annual longitudinal survey of approximately 40,000 households, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council”, conducted in 12 waves between 2009 and 2020. The researchers assessed people’s cognitive ability as a combination of five tests:

Word recall: “… participants were read a series of 10 words and were then asked to recall (immediately afterwards and then again later in the interview) as many words as possible, in any order. The scores from the immediate and delayed word recall task are then summed together”

Verbal fluency: “… participants were given one minute to name as many animals as possible. The final score on this item is based upon the number of unique correct responses”

Subtraction test: “… participants were asked to give the correct answer to a series of subtraction questions. There is a sequence of five subtractions, which started with the interviewer asking the respondent to subtract 7 from 100. The respondent is then asked to subtract 7 again, and so on. The number of correct responses out of a maximum of five was recorded”

Fluid reasoning: “… participants were asked to write down a number sequence—as read by the interviewer—which consists of several numbers with a blank number in the series. The respondent is asked which number goes in the blank. Participants were given two sets of three number sequences, where performance in the first set dictated the difficulty of the second set. The final score is based on the correct responses from the two sets of questions—whilst accounting for the difficulty level of the second set of problems”

Numerical reasoning: “Participants were asked up to five questions that were graded in complexity.The type of questions asked included: “In a sale, a shop is selling all items at half price. Before the sale, a sofa costs £300. How much will it cost in the sale?” and “Let’s say you have £200 in asavings account. The account earns ten percent interest each year. How much would you havein the account at the end of two years?”. Based on performance on the first three items, partici-pants are then asked either two additional (more difficult) questions or one additional (simpler) question”

On the face of it, the study’s principle finding, rooting the way people decided on ‘Brexit’ in cognitive ability, seems objectionable because it’s a small step away from casting an otherwise legitimate political outcome – i.e. the UK leaving the European Union – as the product of some kind of mental deficiency. Then again, in their paper, the authors have reasoned that this correlation is mediated by individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation, that people with “higher” cognitive ability are better able to cut through mis- or dis-information. This seems plausible, and in fact the objectionability is also mitigated by awareness of the Indian experience, where lynch mobs and troll armies have been set in motion by fake news, with deadly results.

This said, we must still guard against two fallacies. First: correlation isn’t causation. That higher cognitive ability could be correlated with voting ‘remain’ doesn’t mean higher cognitive ability caused people to vote ‘remain’. Second, the fallacy of the inverse: while there is reportedly a correlation between the cognitive abilities of people and their decision in the ‘Brexit’ referendum, it doesn’t mean that pro-Brexit votes couldn’t have been cast for any reason other than cognitive deficiencies. One Q&A from an interview that PLoS conducted with one of the authors, Chris Dawson, and published together with the paper makes a similar note:

Some people might assume that if Remain voters had on average higher cognitive abilities, this implies that voting Remain was the more intelligent decision. Can you explain why your research does not show this, and what misinformation has to do with it?

It is important to understand that our findings are based on average differences: there exists a huge amount of overlap between the distributions of Remain and Leave cognitive abilities. We calculated that approximately 36% of Leave voters had higher cognitive ability than the average (mean) Remain voter. So, for any Remain voters who were planning on boasting and engaging in one-upmanship, our results say very little about what cognitive ability differences may or may not exist between two random Leave and Remain voters. But what our results do imply is that misinformation about the referendum could have complicated decision making, especially for people with low cognitive ability.

The five tests that the researchers used to estimate cognitive ability (at least in a relative sense) are also potentially problematic. I only have an anecdotal counter-example, but I suspect many readers will be able to relate to it: I have an uncle who is well-educated (up to the graduate level) and has had a well-paying job for many years now, and he is a staunch bhakt – i.e. an uncritical supporter of India’s BJP government and its various policies, including (but not limited to) the CAA, the farm laws, anti-minority discrimination, etc. He routinely buys into disinformation and sometimes spreads some of his own, but I don’t see him doing badly on any of the five tests. Instead, his actions and views are better explained by his political ideology, which is equal parts conservative and cynical. There are millions of such uncles in India, and the same thing could be true of the people who voted ‘leave’ in the 2016 referendum: that it wasn’t their cognitive abilities so much as their ideological positions, and those of the people to whom they paid attention, that influenced the vote.

(The reported correlation itself can be explained away by the fact that most of those who voted ‘leave’ were older people, but the study does correct for age-related cognitive decline.)

The two researchers also have a big paragraph at the end where they delineate what they perceive to be the major issues with their work:

Most noticeably, the positive correlation between cognitive ability and voting to Remain in the referendum could, as always, be explained by omitted variable bias. Although we control for political beliefs and alliances, personality traits, a barrage of other socioeconomics factors and in our preferred model, house-hold fixed-effects, the variation of cognitive ability within households could be correlated with other unobservable traits, attitudes and behaviours. The example which comes to mind is an individual’s trust in politicians and government. Then Prime Minister of the UK David Cameron publicly declared his support for remining in the EU, as did the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The UK Treasury published an analysis to warn voters that the UK would be permanently poorer if it left the EU [63]. In addition to this were the 10 Nobel-prize winning economists making the case in the days leading up to the referendum. Whilst cognitive ability has been linked with thinking like an economist [64,65], Carl [51] also finds evidence of a moderate positive correlation between trust in experts and IQ. Moreover, work on political attitudes and the referendum have shown that a lack of trust in politicians and the government is associated with a vote to Leave the EU [56]. Therefore, the positive relationship between cognitive ability and voting Remain could be attributable for those higher in cognitive function to place a greater weight on the opinion of experts. A final note is that our dependent variable is self-reported which may induce bias, for instance, social desirability bias. Against that, the majority (75.6%) of responses were recorded through a self-completion online survey and we do control for interview mode, which produces no statistically significant effects.

It’s important to consider all these alternative possibilities to the fullest before we assume, say, that improving cognitive ability will also lead to some political outcomes over others – or in fact before we entertain ideas about whether people whose cognitive abilities have declined, according to some tests and to below a particular threshold, should be precluded from participating in referendums. If nothing else, problems of discretisation quickly arise: i.e. where do we draw the line? For example, while people with Alzheimer’s disease can be kept from voting, should those who are mathematically illiterate, and would thus probably fail the fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning tests? Similarly, and expanding the remit from referendums to elections (which isn’t without problems), which test should potential voters be expected to pass before voting in different polls – say, from the panchayat to the Lok Sabha elections?

Consider also the debates at the time Haryana passed the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act in 2015, which stipulated among other things that to contest in panchayat polls, candidates had to have completed class 10 or its equivalent (plus adjustments if the candidates are from an SC community, women, etc.). Obviously those contesting the polls would be well past their youth and unlikely to return to school, so the Act effectively permanently disqualified them from contesting. As such, while the answers to the questions above may be clearer in less unequal societies like those of the UK, they are not so in India, where cognitively well-equipped people have been criminally selfish and public-spiritedness has been more strongly correlated with good-faith politics than education or literacy.

At the same time, the study and its findings also reiterate the significant role that mis/disinformation has come to play in influencing the way people vote, for example, which makes individuals’ cognitive abilities – and all the factors that influence them – another avenue through which to control, for better or for worse, the opportunities we have for healthy governance.

A stage-managed World Cup

I’m glad the ICC Cricket World Cup ended the way it did, with good cricket on show. I’m disappointed that India lost but, to echo Sunil Gavaskar at the post-match show, I’m glad it was only to a better team. But during the World Cup itself, there were many signs that it was stage-managed in ways that left an off-putting aftertaste, like a mix of jingoism, political interference, and flashiness. The following is a short list of examples.

1. Sundays for India: Sundays were reserved for India versus X games, whereas other teams’ games happened on the other days. The BCCI did this presumably to ensure the stadiums for the India games were full, at the expense of half or mostly empty stadiums for games featuring other teams. This is not a good look. In fact, if the BCCI wanted to maximise revenue, it could have scheduled the India games on weekdays, since people will have been willing to plan around the occasion and come to the stadium anyway, and use the Sunday games to showcase teams that won’t tour India in the foreseeable future, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands. That could have been a win-win.

2. Tickets hard to get: Even before the tournament began, fans were neither able to access nor buy tickets for various matches: the former because of glitches in the booking system, including showing a stadium as being full when it actually wasn’t and outright server crashes, and the latter because the BCCI vouchsafed a significant chunk of tickets at stadiums for “sponsors, commercial partners, guests of both the ICC and the Indian board” and also “requested that states release as many tickets as possible meant otherwise for the member clubs, affiliated units, sponsors, former cricketers, life members, police, local government officials, which usually consumes a significant chunk of tickets for both international and IPL matches,” per ESPN Cricinfo.

3. Police presence: On Twitter, many of those who visited stadiums around the country reported police presence in the seating area, with some personnel taking away posters and placards supporting Pakistan (when the team was playing). Such acts of nationalism pushing the cricket back annulls the principal joy of sport and defeats the purpose of cricket being played in front of such large crowds. The spectating experience was also probably diminished by unreasonable restrictions on what people could take with them (including water bottles).

4. Cauldrons of nationalism: Australia captain Pat Cummins said before the final that he was looking forward to silencing a crowd of 100,000 people – but the adrenaline it invoked slowly but surely settled into shame. Why would a stadium of 100,000 people who claim to be there to watch a game of cricket fall silent? Australia and India are both great ODI teams and their clash could only produce great cricket, which is always worthy of cheer. But the Narendra Modi Stadium did fall silent, as if the spectators were there only to watch India win. There wasn’t a peep when Travis Head reached his century. Such silence befell many other stadiums through the tournament, especially when “jai shree Ram”s weren’t also ringing out.

5. Symbols and glam: The World Cup was, on screens, occupied with glam. The broadcaster’s cameras in all games, but especially during the final, kept focusing on the faces of film stars in the stands when they weren’t trained on the cricketers. It became kind of toxic together with – in this order – the Air Force jets’ fly past (reminiscent of nationalism’s foundational ties with sports as well as military might), the stadium-wide silence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promised presence that turned into an absence around the same time India’s defence started to go downhill, and, beyond the field, many being unaware of knowing how to lose with grace.

So many cynical ads on TV

I wrote about cynical ads airing on Indian cable TV a while ago. Since then I’ve started to notice more such ads and thought it might be useful to maintain a running list.

  1. Rapido – Don’t bother with asking the government to improve public transport, instead race to the bottom with a form of transport that makes using Indian roads feel like a circle of hell.
  2. PhonePe insurance – Easy bike insurance, so easy that you can get it when a cop catches you, so maybe don’t bother until then. [video]
  3. Fogg – Men not wearing perfume is a deal-breaker, for no discernible reason other than a problem with something other than body odour, since that isn’t discussed. [video]
  4. PharmEasy – Don’t leave the house, give the app all your medical info, get deliveries at a discount, and don’t leave the house. [video]
  5. Swiggy Instamart – Order and expect deliveries in minutes, to the detriment of “delivery executives” labouring in terrible weather, traffic, errant motorists, foul air, etc. (One of the first ads Swiggy put out showed a little girl throwing a tantrum and the father appeasing her by ordering whatever she wanted, and having it delivered almost right away. Swiggy subsequently took this ad down from YouTube and cable.)
  6. Voltas AC – Why go to places with greenery or complain about bad air where you are when you can install this AC and get good air right in your living room? [video]
  7. Vimal Elaichi – Four Padma awardees – Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar – and Ranveer Singh in surrogate advertisements for chewing tobacco. Bachchan and Kumar pulled out after criticism. [video]
  8. Sony Ten – Ranbir Kapoor threatens a group of English cricket fans to chant “India jeetega” and BMKJ under pain of death, implied when he slams a giant axe on the table in front of them. [video]
  9. Uber – “#RentalHealthDay” for you to skip the stress of driving because, for an astonishingly small fee, another person will assume that stress for you and undermine their well-being. [video]
  10. Star Sports – While its ads for later matches were more sedate, its ad for the India-Pakistan T20 World Cup match packed macho and some mild emotional blackmail to fan fans’ frenzy [more here].
  11. Manyavar – Ranveer Singh in fancy house smiles and says, “Diwali is coming, you’re expected to be prepared” – for rich brats setting off loud, noxious crackers while the harm we suffer for that being blamed on us not being prepared. [video]
  12. Bose – Amazing noise-cancelling headphones for rich people so they can focus on just the light emitted by the firecrackers they’re (shown in the ad) setting off.

To be continued…

India has a right to noise

Excerpt from ‘More light, less sound: On firecrackers and a festival of light’, an editorial in The Hindu on November 7, 2023:

The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 stipulate that firecrackers cannot be burst in ‘silence zones’, designated by State governments, and anywhere after 10 p.m. From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. (i.e., ‘daytime’) and in industrial areas, firecracker noise cannot exceed 75 dB(A) Leq. The thresholds in commercial and residential areas are 65 dB(A) Leq and 55 dB(A) Leq, respectively. … Traffic noise has burgeoned in cities where haphazard development has forced motorists to overuse horns. Many religious occasions have become synonymous with noisy celebrations irrespective of the hour. … If, say, people burst firecrackers at 90 dB for 10 seconds and the ambient noise is 50 dB for 50 seconds, and this pattern continues for four hours followed by 12 hours of 50 dB noise, the 16-hour Leq is 74.5 dB – which merits a complaint in residential areas but not in commercial ones, yet the noise is already harmful. Different loudness zones are also seldom publicly demarcated while some places are both residential and commercial.

India has a big noise pollution problem, and firecrackers add to it in a bad way because the Noise Pollution Rules 2000 and improper urban zoning have together created a regulatory sieve through which firecracker noise can pass through without any consequences – except damage to human (and animal) health.

To the issues highlighted in the editorial, I’d like to add one that complicates both enforcement and judicial disputes: the argument that asking people to not combust firecrackers violates their right to religion. The national and state governments in India have kept the door open to this assertion by refusing to ban loud firecrackers altogether, instead creating allegedly ‘green’ alternatives that also produce less noise: around 120 dB instead of around 150 dB, which is laughable because the healthy threshold is somewhere around 40 dB!

On November 3, Justice Amit Rawal of the Kerala high court directed authorities to seize “illegally stored” firecrackers in temples across the state and ensure temples didn’t combust firecrackers at “odd time”. He added: “prima facie there is no commandment in any of the holy books to burst crackers for pleasing the god”. But today, November 7, a division bench set aside a part of the order to effectively reassert the terms set out in the Noise Pollution Rules 2000.

Before this, the state government had submitted, according to On Manorama, “that there are several religious festivals in the State wherein display of fireworks is an essential part of religions, which have been carried out since time immemorial”.

It’s unfortunate that we wield the right to religion maximally, to the expense of all other rights, and stop only when it’s confronted by an apparently implicit order of rights in the Indian Constitution. For example, by refusing to ban (noise) polluting firecrackers altogether, and by making the Rules so complicated, neither collecting nor easing public access to noise data, and slipshod urban planning (an oxymoron, really), India’s governments often leave the right to religion in conflict with the right to life. In the Constitution, however, the latter takes precedence.

In early 2021, for example, the Madras high court was hearing a case about allowing the Srirangam Temple authorities to conduct their rituals in full rather than in an abridged form due to limitations imposed by the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The court observed that the right to religion was superseded by the right to life, so if the rituals had to be abridged for the sake of public health, they wouldn’t violate the right to religion. 

The Telegraph also reported that the court “alluded to the Calcutta High Court’s earlier order to regulate crowds during Durga Puja for the same reason. It may be recalled here that the Supreme Court had ordered restrictions for Ratha Yatra in Odisha too.” I think courts have made similar observations vis-à-vis Deepavali firecrackers as well as the winter-time pollution in North India.

The right to life is predicated on threats to individuals’ well-being, which in turn is rooted in – among other things – where scientists are able to draw the line between good health and ill-health. For example, India’s permissible thresholds are higher than those of the WHO for different atmospheric pollutants. Biologically, people can (and often do) fall ill when the limits cross the WHO’s thresholds – but legally, we must wait for them to cross thresholds encoded in the relevant Act before we can claim injustice.

Similarly, loud noises are harmful beyond 50 dB itself (depending on the level and mode of exposure), but the Rules’ thresholds are even higher. In fact, they may well be out of reach: India also has too few noise monitors for its size, which means even after scientists draw the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ noise levels, we may not know whether the place we’re located in has crossed over.

And so we go, round and round…

On Somanath withdrawing his autobiography

Excerpt from The Hindu, November 4, 2023:

S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that he’s withdrawing the publication of his memoir, Nilavu Kudicha Simhangal, penned in Malayalam. The decision followed a report in the Malayala Manorama on Saturday that quoted excerpts from the book suggesting K. Sivan, former ISRO chairman and Mr. Somanath’s immediate predecessor, may have hindered key promotions that Mr. Somanath thought were due.

“There has been some misinterpretation. At no point have I said that Dr. Sivan tried to prevent me from becoming the chairman. All I said was that being made a member of the Space Commission is generally seen as a stepping stone to (ISRO’s chairmanship). However a director from another (ISRO centre) was placed, so naturally that trimmed my chances (at chairmanship),” he told The Hindu, “Secondly the book isn’t officially released. My publisher may have released a few copies … but after all this controversy I have decided to withhold publication.”

I haven’t yet read this book nor do I know more than what’s already been reported about this new controversy. It has been simmering all evening but I assumed that it would simply blow over, as these things usually do, and that the book would be released with the customary pomp. But the book has indeed been withdrawn, which was less surprising than it should have been.

Earlier today, I was reading a paper uploaded on the Current Science website about Gold OA publishing. It was run-of-the-mill in many ways, but one of my peers sent me a strongly worded email decrying the fact that the paper wasn’t explicitly opposed to Gold OA. When I read the paper, I found that the authors’ statements earlier in the paper were quite tepid, seemingly unconcerned about Gold OA’s deleterious effects on the research publishing ecosystem, but later on, the paper threw up many of the more familiar lines, that Gold OA is expensive, discriminatory, etc.

Both Somanath’s withdrawn book and this paper have one thing in common: (potentially) literary laziness, which often speaks to a sense that one is entitled to the benefit of the doubt rather than being compelled to earn it.

Somanath told The Hindu and some other outlets that he didn’t intend to criticise Sivan, his predecessor as ISRO chairman, but that he was withholding the book’s release because some news outlets had interpreted the book in a way that his statements did come across as criticism.

Some important background: Since 2014, ISRO’s character has changed. Earlier journalists used to be able to more easily access various ISRO officials and visit sites of historic importance. These are no longer possible. The national government has also tried to stage-manage ISRO missions in the public domain, especially the more prominent ones like Chandrayaan-2 and -3, the Mars Orbiter Mission, and the South Asia Satellite.

Similarly, there have been signs that both Sivan and Somanath had and have the government’s favour on grounds that go beyond their qualifications and experiences. With Somanath, of course, we have seen that with his pronouncements about the feats of ancient India, etc., and now we have that with Sivan as well, as Somanath says that ISRO knew the Chandrayaan-2 lander had suffered a software glitch ahead of its crash, and didn’t simply lose contact with the ground as Sivan had said at the time. Recall that in 2019, when the mishap occurred, ISRO also stopped sharing non-trivial information about the incident and even refused to confirm that the lander had crashed until a week later.

In this milieu, Sivan and Somanath are two peas in a pod, and it seems quite unlikely to me that Somanath set out to criticise Sivan in public. The fact that he would much rather withhold the book than take his chances is another sign that criticising Sivan wasn’t his goal. Yet as my colleague Jacob Koshy reported for The Hindu:

Excerpts from the book, that The Hindu has viewed, do bring out Mr. Somanath’s discomfort with the “Chairman (Dr. Sivan’s)” decision to not be explicit about the reasons for the failure of the Chandrayaan 2 mission (which was expected to land a rover). The issue was a software glitch but was publicly communicated as an ‘inability to communicate with the lander.’

There is a third possibility: that Somanath did wish to criticise Sivan but underestimated how much of an issue it would become in the media.

Conveying something in writing has always been a tricky thing. Conveying something while simultaneously downplaying its asperity and accentuating its substance or its spirit is something else, requiring quite a bit of practice, a capacity for words, and of course clarity of thought. Without these things, writing can easily miscommunicate. (This is why reading is crucial to writing better: others’ work can alert you to meaning-making possibilities that you yourself may never have considered.) The Current Science paper is similar, with its awkward placement of important statements at the end and banal statements at the beginning, and neither worded to drive home a specific feeling.

(In case you haven’t, please read Edward Tufte’s analysis of the Challenger disaster and the failure of written communication that preceded it. Many of the principles he sets out would apply for a lot of non-fiction writing.)

Somanath wrote his book in Malayalam, his native tongue, rather than in English, with which, going by media interviews of him, he is not fluent. So he may have sidestepped the pitfalls of writing in an unfamiliar language, yet his being unable to avoid being misinterpreted – or so he says – still suggests that he didn’t pay too much attention to what he was putting down. In the same vein, I’m also surprised that his editors at the publisher, Lipi Books in Kozhikode, didn’t pick up on these issues earlier.

Understanding this is important because Somanath writing something and then complaining that it was taken in a way it wasn’t supposed to be taken lends itself to another inference that I still suspect the ruling party’s supporters will reach for: that the press twisted his words in its relentless quest to stoke tensions and that Somanath was as clear as he needed to be. As I said, I haven’t yet read the book, but as an editor (see Q3) – and also as someone for whom checking for incompetence before malfeasance has paid rich dividends – I would look for an intention-skill mismatch first.

Featured image: ISRO chairman S. Somanath in 2019. Credit: NASA.