Tag: scientific research

From unboiling eggs to the effects of intense kissing, IgNobel Prizes reward good ol’ curiosity

The year’s IgNobel Awards were held on September 17, and rewarded research that defines a kind of excellence that still impacts society without managing the sobriety of character that often bags the more vaunted Nobel Prizes. The 25th edition, held as usual at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, and as usual presided over by the magazine Improbable Research‘s editor Marc Abrahams, recognised work done in describing pain, diagnosing appendicitis, the effects of intense kissing and more.

Instituted and first awarded in 1991, the prizes were originally designed to identify work that shouldn’t be reproduced, although that snark has diminished in time. On the flipside, they’re known for juxtaposing meticulously conducted research with the banality of their subjects. For example, the citation for the management prize this year read, “… for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters that – for them – had no dire personal consequences.” The awarders’ take has been that “The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”

The 2015 literature prize went to Dutch linguists for discovering that a translation of “huh?” existed in almost every language and for unknown reasons. The biology prize got picked up by a Chilean diad that found “that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.”. The physics prize was claimed by scientists who found using the principles of fluid dynamics early last year that many mammals – across species – often took a uniform 21 seconds to take a leak (give or take 13 seconds). The diagnostic medicine prize awardees could actually have hit upon something more useful than you think: diagnosing appendicitis by having patients drive at a fixed speed over a speed-bump. If they experience a sharp pain in certain areas, it’s surgery time. The physiology and entomology prize was co-bagged by Justin Schmidt for developing a relative pain index and Michael Smith for letting himself be stung in 25 parts of his body to find the places most (nostril, upper lip, penis shaft) and least sensitive (skull, middle toe tip, upper arm) to stinging pain. Brave souls all.

The citations also demonstrated how being persistently curious could someday enable you to do things you wouldn’t have thought scientifically (or mathematically) possible. For example, the chemistry prize went to a team from the USA and Australia that figured out how to partially unboil an egg (kudos to Abrahams & co. for being able to go past the paper’s title: “Shear-stress-mediated refolding of proteins from aggregates and inclusion bodies”). The medicine prize may have actually put too fine a point on what everyone probably already knew: kissing does people a world of good, and intense kissing does good intensely. And there’s no point trying to paraphrase the mathematics-prize-winning work: “for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.”

However, it’s the work winning the 2015 economics prize that doesn’t deserve to be reproduced at all – and it’s probably telling that it didn’t involve scientists but policemen. Specifically, the prize went to Bangkok Metropolitan Police, which offered to bribe its policemen if they didn’t take bribes from others. The BMP needs to be able to take pride in its work’s illustrious company, which includes the 2008 recession, the invention of virtual animal husbandry as well as the find that people would postpone their deaths, indeed, “if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax”.

A “Dear ISRO” moment

I published a quick analysis in The Hindu, republished with permission from Scienceline, about the ISRO Mars Orbiter. Gist (excerpted):

Even if [ISRO] has launched a spacecraft to Mars, the payload limit and the lack of an inclusive scientific agenda still stand in the way of taking full advantage of scientific interest and infrastructure on the ground.

These are some of the replies I received on Twitter in response to the piece.

You probably didn’t read my piece, and you probably don’t know what “one-hit wonder” means either.

Who are “Thomeses”?

I don’t understand why you think I’ve not been courteous. My arguments weren’t barbaric. And I think it’d be wonderful if people considered constructive criticism the utmost courtesy. I know I do.

A friend of mine recently told me he couldn’t criticize my piece for me because he said that’s not what friends do. But that’s what I think friends do do because appreciation that is completely honest is something very hard to come by.

This is a common blight plaguing the perception of scientific research in India. It’s easy to just say “nanosatellites” and then think about it inside your head. However, what’re they for? Who comes up with such ideas? Who builds them? And at the end of the day where would ISRO go with it? Answer them reasonably and then I’ll concede nanosatellites make sense.

Another aspect of this comment is that you’re thinking in terms of gee-whiz stuff, you’re thinking of demonstrating more technology, but ISRO is too important to indulge in things like that over and over again. It’s a national space agency so let’s be respectful of that.

Someone’s made an allegation and you’re batting it away. Do you know something that nobody else does?

Thanks.

Scienceline

I also received the following comments on the same piece as published on Scienceline (you should check the site out, it’s my NYU program’s science portal and has some other amazing pieces as well).

Thanks you for writing such a wonderful article to put the facts straight.Hope we don’t get overconfident as we have put only small payload of 15 kg whereas others have put 64 kg of payload. Hope a new mission to use GSLV-D5 to put more payload gets approved quickly and gets successful.Anyway achieving success on first maiden flight is no small feat and kudos to Indian Space scientists!!! – Ravikanth V

I’m glad you understand my sentiment.

Mr.Vasudevan, I don’t think you are a father. Only if you have become a father you can appreciate the baby’s steps in the beginning and that which ends even as an Olympic champion. But one has to go thru what is called growth. Hope you understood what I meant. – Bindo

Yeah, I get you, but I don’t want ISRO – nor the nation – to think of its interplanetary exploration program as it would of a child.

Dear writer, You crave attention so bad that, on the day of a historical achievement, you have published such a negative aticle. Shame on you. Have you designed any electronics before? And do you know how challenging is it to achieve that with limited budget? Please do not write such articles for ISRO. People of India take pride in this organization. You should have waited for atleast a day. – Kc

Because all my opinions are suddenly okay after 24 hours? And I think it is my duty as someone who does take pride in ISRO that I feel such things need to be said before we ramp up our expectations to heights the agency may never even have plans for.

Now it’s time for us to show our gratitude to the nation. Indians who are draining their brain to foreign countries, come back to our country as soon as possible. Finish ur commitments soon, ur nation has just made a history and waiting for you. – Dilip

I resent that you’re implying that all those who left the country in search of greener fields are/were opportunists. I also resent that you think the proverbial system is working well enough to be able to reject the oodles of talent still present in the country.

Very well articulated article, thank you. The mission is symbolic and demonstrates our ISRO’s scientific capability. I’m hopeful our new govt. will only be supportive of country’s scientific community, encourage with all means available and pragmatic enough to have or build a plan so, in a decade least, we indeed achieve what we want to be – equally a ‘space superpower’. Albeit this is still a proud moment for we the people of India. Congratulations to the ISRO’s scientific community who made this possible. – Guru Dwarakanath

Again, I’m glad you understand what I’m trying to say.

Did Facebook cheat us?

'I don't want to live on this planet anymore' meme. Image: superbwallpapers.com
You might want to rethink that.

No.

There were some good arguments on this topic, swinging between aesthetic rebuttals to logical deconstructions. Here are four I liked:

1. Tal Yarkoni, Director of the Psychoinformatics Lab at University of Texas, Austin, writes on his blog,

“… it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the idea that large corporations might be trying to manipulate your experience and behavior. Everybody you interact with–including every one of your friends, family, and colleagues–is constantly trying to manipulate your behavior in various ways. Your mother wants you to eat more broccoli; your friends want you to come get smashed with them at a bar; your boss wants you to stay at work longer and take fewer breaks. We are always trying to get other people to feel, think, and do certain things that they would not otherwise have felt, thought, or done. So the meaningful question is not whether people are trying to manipulate your experience and behavior, but whether they’re trying to manipulate you in a way that aligns with or contradicts your own best interests. The mere fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon run experiments intended to alter your emotional experience in a revenue-increasing way is not necessarily a bad thing if in the process of making more money off you, those companies also improve your quality of life. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other, mind you, but simply pointing out that without controlled experimentation, the user experience on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. would probably be very, very different–and most likely less pleasant.”

2. Yarkoni’s argument brings us to these tweets.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/483024580554932224

Didn’t get it? Chris Dixon explains.

I didn’t spot these tweets. TechCrunch did, and it brings up the relevant comparison with A/B testing. A/B testing is a technique whereby web-designers optimize user experience engineers by showing different layouts to different user groups, then decide on the best layout depending how which users responded to which layouts. Like Dixon asks, is it okay if it’s done all the time on sites that want to make money by giving you a good time?

You’d argue that we’ve signed up to be manipulated like that, not like this – see #4. Or you’d argue this was different because Facebook was just being Facebook – but the social scientists weren’t being ethical. This is true. To quote from the TechCrunch piece,

A source tells Forbes’ Kashmir Hill it was not submitted for pre-approval by the Institutional Review Board, an independent ethics committee that requires scientific experiments to meet stern safety and consent standards to ensure the welfare of their subjects. I was IRB certified for an experiment I developed in college, and can attest that the study would likely fail to meet many of the pre-requisites.

3. The study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which it appears not many have read. It reports a statistically significant result that emotions are contagious over Facebook. But as Yarkoni demonstrates, its practical significance is minuscule:

… the manipulation had a negligible real-world impact on users’ behavior. To put it in intuitive terms, the effect of condition in the Facebook study is roughly comparable to a hypothetical treatment that increased the average height of the male population in the United States by about one twentieth of an inch (given a standard deviation of ~2.8 inches).

4. Facebook’s Terms of Service – to quote:

We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use. For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you:

… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.

IMO, the problems appear to be:

  1. The social scientists didn’t get informed consent from the subjects of their experiments.
  2. What a scientific experiment is is not clearly defined in Facebook’s ToS – and defining such a thing will prove very difficult and is likely never to be implemented.

To-do: Find out more about the IRB and its opinions on this experiment.

R&D in China and India

“A great deal of the debate over globalization of knowledge economies has focused on China and India. One reason has been their rapid, sustained economic growth. The Chinese economy has averaged a growth rate of 9-10 percent for nearly two decades, and now ranks among the world’s largest economies. India, too, has grown steadily. After years of plodding along at an average annual increase in its gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.5 percent, India has expanded by 6 percent per annum since 1980, and more than 7 percent since 1994 (Wilson and Purushothaman, 2003). Both countries are expected to maintain their dynamism, at least for the near future.”

– Gereffi et al, ‘Getting the Numbers Right: International Engineering Education in the United States, China and India’, Journal of Engineering Education, January 2008

A June 16 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled ‘China’s Rise as a Major Contributor to Science and Technology’, analyses the academic and research environment in China over the last decade or so, and discusses the factors involved in the country’s increasing fecundity in recent years. It concludes that four factors have played an important role in this process:

  1. Large human capital base
  2. A labor market favoring academic meritocracy
  3. A large diaspora of Chinese-origin scientists
  4. A centralized government willing to invest in science

A simple metric they cite to make their point is the publication trends by country. Between 2000 and 2010, for example, the number of science and engineering papers published by China has increased by 470%. The next highest climb was for India, by 234%.

Click on the image for an interactive chart.
Click on the image for an interactive chart.

“The cheaters don’t have to worry they will someday be caught and punished.”

This is a quantitative result. A common criticism of the rising volume of Chinese scientific literature in the last three decades is the quality of research coming out of it. Dramatic increases in research output are often accompanied by a publish-or-perish mindset that fosters a desperation among scientists to get published, leading to padded CVs, falsified data and plagiarism. Moreover, it’s plausible that since R&D funding in China is still controlled by a highly centralized government, flow of money is restricted and access to it is highly competitive. And when it is government officials that are evaluating science, quantitative results are favored over qualitative ones, reliance on misleading performance metrics increases, and funds are often awarded for areas of research that favor political agendas.

The PNAS paper cites the work of Shi-min Fang, a science writer who won the inaugural John Maddox prize in 2012 for exposing scientific fraud in Chinese research circles, for this. In an interview to NewScientist in November of that year, he explains the source of widespread misconduct:

It is the result of interactions between totalitarianism, the lack of freedom of speech, press and academic research, extreme capitalism that tries to commercialise everything including science and education, traditional culture, the lack of scientific spirit, the culture of saving face and so on. It’s also because there is not a credible official channel to report, investigate and punish academic misconduct. The cheaters don’t have to worry they will someday be caught and punished.

At this point, it’s tempting to draw parallels with India. While China has seen increased funding for R&D…

Click on the chart for an interactive view.
Click on the chart for an interactive view.

… India has been less fortunate.

Click on the chart for an interactive view.
Click on the chart for an interactive view.

The issue of funding is slightly different in India, in fact. While Chinese science is obstinately centralized and publicly funded, India is centralized in some parts and decentralized in others, public funding is not high enough because presumably we lack the meritocratic academic environment, and private funding is not as high as it needs to be.

Click on the image for an interactive chart.
Click on the image for an interactive chart.

Even though the PNAS paper’s authors say their breakdown of what has driven scientific output from China could inspire changes in other countries, India is faced with different issues as the charts above have shown. Indeed, the very first chart shows how, despite the number of published papers having double in the last decade, we have only jumped from one small number to another small number.

“Scientific research in India has become the handmaiden of defense technology.”

There is also a definite lack of visibility: when little scientific output of any kind is accessible to 1) the common man, and 2) the world outside. Apart from minimal media coverage, there is a paucity of scientific journals, or they exist but are not well known, accessible or both. This Jamia Milia collection lists a paltry 226 journals – including those in regional languages – but it’s likelier that there are hundreds more, both credible and dubious. A journal serves as an aggregation of reliable scientific knowledge not just for scientists but also for journalists and other reliant decision-makers. It is one place to find the latest developments.

In this context, Current Science appears to be the most favored in the country, not to mention the loneliest. Then again, a couple fingers can be pointed at years of reliance on quantitative performance metrics, which drives many Indian researchers to publish in journals with very high impact factors such as Nature or Science, which are often based outside the country.

In the absence of lists of Indian and Chinese journals, let’s turn to a table used in the PNAS paper showing average number of citations per article compared with the USA, in percent. It shows both India and China close to 40% in 2010-2011.

The poor showing may not be a direct consequence of low quality. For example, a paper may have detailed research conducted to resolve a niche issue in Indian defense technology. In such a case, the quality of the article may be high but the citability of the research itself will be low. Don’t be surprised if this is common in India given our devotion to the space and nuclear sciences. And perhaps this is what a friend of mine referred to when he said “Scientific research in India has become the handmaiden of defense technology”.

To sum up, although India and China both lag the USA and the EU for productivity and value of research (albeit through quantitative metrics), China is facing problems associated with the maturity of a voluminous scientific workforce, whereas India is quite far from that maturity. The PNAS paper is available here. If you’re interested in an analysis of engineering education in the two countries, see this paper (from which the opening lines of this post were borrowed).

Ambivalent promises for S&T in the BJP manifesto

The Copernican
April 7, 2014

Even though they haven’t been in power for the last decade, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) concedes no concrete assurances for science & technology in the country in its manifesto ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. However, these subjects are geared to be utilised for the benefit of other sectors in which specific promises feature aplenty. Indeed, the party’s S&T section of the manifesto reads like a bulleted list of the most popular problems for scientific research in India and the world, although that the party has taken cognizance of this-and-that is heartening.

The BJP makes no mention of increasing India’s spending on S&T while the Indian National Congress promises to do that to 2% of GDP, a long-standing demand. On the upside, however, both parties mention that they would like to promote private sector involvement in certain areas like agriculture, education, transportation and public infrastructure, but only the BJP mentions it in the context of scientific research.

As things stand, private sector involvement in scientific research in India is very low. A DST report from May 2013 claims that it would like to achieve 50-50 investment from public and private participants by 2017, while the global norm stands at 66-34 in favour of private. It is well-documented that higher private sector involvement, together with more interdisciplinary research, reduces the time for commercialization of technologies – which the BJP aspires to in its manifesto. However, the party doesn’t mention the sort of fiscal and policy benefits it will be willing to use to stimulate the private sector.

Apart from this, there are other vague aspirations, too. Sample the following.

  • Promotion of innovation by creating a comprehensive national system of innovation
  • Set [up] an institute of Big data and Analytics for studying the impact of big data across sectors for predictive science
  • Establish an Intellectual Property Rights Regime

Climate change

There is also mention of tackling climate change, with a bias toward the Himalayan region. Under the S&T section, there’s a point about establishing a “Central University dedicated to Himalayan technology”. With respect to conservation efforts, BJP proposes to “launch ‘National Mission on Himalayas’ as a unique programme of inter-governmental partnership, in coordinated policy making and capacity building across states and sectors”, not to mention promote tourism as well.

The BJP also says it would like to make the point of tackling climate change a part of its foreign policy. However, its proposed power generation strategy does also include coal, natural gas and oil, apart from wanting to maximise the potential of renewable energy sources. Moreover, it also promotes the use of carbon credits, which is an iffy idea as this is a very malleable system susceptible to abuse, especially by richer agents operating across borders.

“Take steps to increase the domestic coal exploration and production, to bridge the demand and supply gap. Oil and gas explorations would also be expedited in the country. This will also help to reduce the import bill.”

Until here, not much is different from what the Congress is already promising, albeit with different names.

The BJP appears to be very pro-nuclear. Under its ‘Cultural Heritage’ section, the manifesto mentions Ram Setu in the context of its vast thorium deposits. How this is part of our cultural heritage, I’m not sure. The party also proposes to build “world class, regional centres of excellence of scientific research” for nanotechnology, material sciences, “thorium technology” and brain research. Sure, India has thorium reserves, but the design for a thorium-based nuclear power plant came out only in February 2014, and an operational system is only likely to be ready by the end of this decade.

Troubling stuff

If spending doesn’t increase, these promises are meaningless. Moreover, there are also some pending Bills in the Lok Sabha concerning the setting up of new universities, as well as a materials science initiative named ISMER pending from 2011. With no concrete promises, will those initiatives set forth by the INC but not really followed through see the light of day?

In fact, two things trouble me.

  1. A no-mention of scientific research that is not aimed at improving the quality of life in a direct way, i.e. our space program, supercomputing capabilities, fundamental research, etc.
  2. How the private sector is likely to be motivated to invest in government-propelled R&D, to what extent, and if it will be allowed to enter sensitive areas like power generation.

Clearly, the manifesto is a crowd-pleaser, and to that end it has endeavoured to bend science to its will. In fact, there is nothing more troubling in the entire document than the BJP’s intention to “set up institutions and launch a vigorous program to standardize and validate the Ayurvedic medicine”. I get that they’re trying to preserve our historical traditions, etc., but this sounds like an agenda of the Minitrue to me.

And before this line comes the punchline: “We will start integrated courses for Indian System of Medicine (ISM) and modern science and Ayurgenomics.”

Predatory publishing, vulnerable prey

On December 29, the International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering, Science and Technology (ICRIEST) is kicked off in Pune. It’s not a very well-known conference, but might as well have been for all the wrong reasons.

On December 16 and 20, Navin Kabra, from Pune, submitted two papers to ICRIEST. Both were accepted and, following a notification from the conference’s organizers, Mr. Kabra was told he could present the papers on December 29 if he registered himself at a cost of Rs. 5,000.

Herein lies the rub. The papers that Mr. Kabra submitted are meaningless. They claim to be about computer science, but were created entirely by the SCIGen fake-paper generator available here. The first one, titled “Impact of Symmetries on Cryptoanalysis”, is rife with tautological statements, and could not possibly have cleared peer-review. However, in the acceptance letter that Mr. Kabra received by email, paper is claimed to have been accepted after being subjected to some process of scrutiny, scoring 60, 70, 80 and 90.75 among some reviewers.

Why is the conference refusing to reject such a paper, then? Is it subsisting on the incompetence of secretarial staff? Or is it so desperate for papers that rejection rates are absurdly low?

Mr. Kabra’s second paper, “Use of cloud-computing and social media to determine box office performance”, might say otherwise. This one is even more brazen, containing these lines in its introduction:

As is clear from the title of this paper, this paper deals with the entertainment industry. So, we do provide entertainment in this paper. So, if you are reading this paper for entertainment, we suggest a heuristic that will allow you to read this paper efficiently. You should read any paragraph that starts with the first 4 words in bold and italics – those have been written by the author in painstaking detail. However, if a paragraph does not start with bold and italics, feel free to skip it because it is gibberish auto-generated by the good folks at SCIGen.

If this paragraph went through, then the administrators of ICRIEST are likely to possess no semblance of interest in academic research. In fact, they could be running the conference as a front to make some quick bucks.

Mr. Kabra professes an immediate reason for his perpetrating this scheme. “Lots of students are falling prey to such scams, and I want to raise awareness amongst students,” he wrote in an email.

He tells me that for the last three years, students pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering in a college affiliated with the University of Pune have been required to submit their final project to a conference, “a ridiculous requirement” thinks Mr. Kabra. As usual, not all colleges are enforcing this rule; those that are, on the other hand, are pushing students. Beyond falsifying data and plagiarizing reports to get them past evaluators, the next best thing to secure a good grade is to sneak it into some conference.

Research standards in the university are likely not helping, either. Such successful submissions as hoped for by teachers at Indian institutions will never happen for as long as the quality of research in the institution itself is low. Enough scientometric data exists from the last decade to support this, although I don’t know how if it breaks down to graduate and undergraduate research.

(While it may be argued that scientific output is not the only way to measure the quality of scientific research at an institution, you should know something’s afoot when the quantity of output is either very high or very low relative to, say, the corresponding number of citations and the country’s R&D expenditure.)

Another reason to think neither the university nor the students’ ‘mentors’ are helping is someone who spoke on behalf of the University to Mr. Kabra had no idea about ICRIEST. To quote from the Mid-Day article that’s covered this incident,

“I don’t know of any research organisation named IRAJ. I am sorry, I am just not aware about any such conference happening in the city,” said Dr Gajanan Kharate, dean of engineering in the University of Pune.

Does the U-of-Pune care if students have submitted paper to bogus journals? Do they check contents of the research themselves or do they rely on whether students’ ‘papers’ are accepted or not? No matter; what will change hence? I’m not sure. I won’t be surprised if nothing changes at all. However, there is a place to start.

Prof. Jeffrey Beall is the Scholarly Initiatives Librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, and he maintains an exhaustive list of questionable journals and publishers. This list is well-referenced, constantly updated, and commonly referred to to check for dubious characters that might have approached research scholars.

On the list is the Institute for Research and Journals (IRAJ), which is organizing ICRIEST. In an article in The Hindu on September 26, 2012, Prof. Beall says, “They want others to work for free, and they want to make money off the good reputations of honest researchers.”

Mr. Kabra told me he had registered himself for the presentation—and not before he was able to bargain with them, “like … with a vegetable vendor”, and avail a 50 per cent discount on the fees. As silly as it sounds, this is not the mark of a reputable institution but a telltale sign of a publisher incapable of understanding the indignity of such bargains.

Another publisher on Prof. Beall’s list, Asian Journal of Mathematical Sciences, is sly enough to offer a 50 per cent fee-waiver because they “do not want fees to prevent the publication of worthy work”. Yet another journal, Academy Publish, is just honest: “We currently offer a 75 per cent discount to all invitees.”

Other signs, of course, are the use of words with incorrect spellings, as in “Dear Sir/Mam”.

At the end of the day, Mr. Kabra was unable to go ahead with the presentation because he said he was depressed by the sight of Masters students at ICRIEST—some who’d come there, on the west coast, from the eastern-coast state of Odisha. That’s the journey they’re willing to make when pushed by the lure for grades from one side and the existence of conferences like ICRIEST on the other.

CNR Rao, a faceted gem

Inquisitions are sure to follow if you’ve won India’s highest civilian honor on the back of a little-known career. At the same time, if that career’s been forged on scientific research, then blame all that’s little-known on media apathy, flick away what fleeting specks of guilt persist, and congratulate the winner for years of “great work” (which of course you didn’t hear about till news portals “broke” the news – even to the point of getting things, as usual, terribly wrong).

Yesterday, it was announced Prof. C.N.R. Rao of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), a chemist, was being awarded the Bharat Ratna for his prolific research and, presumably, his contributions to science education in India. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Rao helped set up the JNCASR and was pivotal in establishing the five IISERs (Kolkata, Pune, Mohali, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram). In between, he was the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council for four Indian Prime Ministers: Rajiv Gandhi, Deve Gowda, I.K. Gujral and Manmohan Singh.

As a researcher, Rao works in solid-state and structural chemistry and superconductivity, with more than 1,500 published papers and an h-index of 90. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, received the Hughes Medal in 2000; the Indian Science Award in 2004; and the French Legion of Honour in 2005. He’s received various other awards, too, and has honorary PhDs from over 50 universities the world over. All these distinctions, and more, have been covered by journalists in their reports published, and continuing to be published, hours after the PMO announced that he’d be conferred India’s highest civilian award.

What was conspicuously missing from the coverage was Rao’s involvement in a series of plagiarism charges levelled against him for papers of his published through 2011 and 2012. Both of India’s two most widely-read English dailies didn’t include it in their reports, while a third, smaller publication had a mention in its last line (I didn’t bother to check other publications – but imagine, between the two biggies, some 9.8 million readers in the country haven’t been reminded about what Rao was engaged in). Why would news-channels choose to leave it out? Some reasons could be…

  1. Rao didn’t engage in plagiarism, just that one of his co-authors, a student tasked with writing the introductory elements of the paper, did.
  2. Rao has published over 1,500 papers; even in the papers where plagiarised content was found, the experiments and results were original. These charges are, thus, freak occurrences.
  3. It’s a tiny blip on an illustrious career, and with a Bharat Ratna in the picture, minor charges of plagiarism can be left out because they don’t contribute to the “effect” of the man.

This is where I’d remind you about a smart Op-ed by IMS researcher Rahul Siddharthan that appeared in The Hindu on March 9, 2012. Here’s a line from the paper that points to the concerns I have with Rao:

Unfortunately, the senior authors (Rao, who was the last author, and S.B. Krupanidhi of IISc, Bangalore) did three other things. They both publicly blamed the first author, a graduate student of Krupanidhi. They both denied that it was plagiarism. And Rao declared that he had had little personal involvement with this paper.

If any of the three excuses listed above are being cited by journalists, Siddharthan’s piece defeats them, instead drawing forth a caricature of Rao and his character that seem disagreeable. I would like to think that Rao was simply absent-minded, but I’m unable to. Siddharthan’s words make Rao sound as if he was disgruntled with an unexpected outcome, that it was as a result of simply neglecting to supervise work that he wanted to end up taking credit for – no matter that the experiments and results presented in the paper were original.

To wit, here’s another paragraph from Siddharthan’s piece:

Rao and his colleagues were undoubtedly aware of the previous paper, since they plagiarised from it; yet they cite it only once, briefly and without discussion, in the introduction. Not only do they fail to compare their results with a very relevant prior publication: they nowhere even hint to the reader that such work exists.

To be clear, my grouse isn’t with C.N.R. Rao winning the Bharat Ratna but the lightness with which newspapers have chosen to suppress the fact that Rao, in some way, was unaware (or, equally bad, aware) about plagiarised content in his work.

Worse, in an article by K.S. Jayaraman in Nature in February 2012, Rao speaks about the importance of good language skills among students, and the need for an institutional mechanism to enforce it. In an interview published in Current Science in May 2011, he talks about the importance of grooming youngsters and providing the supportive environment he thinks mandatory for them to succeed. Is this Rao leading by example, then, to show the dire need for such mechanisms and environments?

*

While an exalted picture of him persists into Day 2 in the Indian mainstream media, I remember that at the moment of announcement, many of my scientist- and science-writing-friends expressed mild confusion over the choice. First thought: Surely there were others? A few minutes later: But why? An hour later: Is he in the league of Raman or Kalam? These giants of Indian science and technology commanded a public perception that transcended their work.

Then again, are all these questions being raised simply in the wake of years of media apathy toward Rao’s work in the public sphere?

The travails of science communication

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I’ve noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research traction worldwide but is quite tricky to explain in simple terms to the layman.

Earlier this year, one such concept was the Higgs mechanism. Between December 13, 2011, when the first spotting of the Higgs boson was announced, and July 4, 2012, when the spotting was confirmed as being the piquingly-named “God particle”, the use of the phrase “cosmic molasses” was prevalent enough to prompt an annoyed (and struggling-to-make-sense) Daniel Sarewitz to hit back on Nature. While the article had a lot to say, and a lot more waiting there to just to be rebutted, it did include this remark:

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

Sarewitz is not wrong in remarking of the problem as such, but in attempting to use it to define the case of religion’s existence. Anyway: In bridging the gap between advanced physics, which is well-poised to “unlock the future”, and public understanding, which is well-poised to fund the future, there is good journalism. But does it have to come with the twisting and turning of complex theory, maintaining only a tenuous relationship between what the metaphor implies and what reality is?

The notion of a “cosmic molasses” isn’t that bad; it does get close to the original idea of a pervading field of energy whose forces are encapsulated under certain circumstances to impart mass to trespassing particles in the form of the Higgs boson. Even this is a “corruption”, I’m sure. But what I choose to include or leave out makes all the difference.

The significance of experimental physicists having probably found the Higgs boson is best conveyed in terms of what it means to the layman in terms of his daily life and such activities more so than trying continuously to get him interested in the Large Hadron Collider. Common, underlying curiosities will suffice to to get one thinking about the nature of God, or the origins of the universe, and where the mass came from that bounced off Sir Isaac’s head. Shrouding it in a cloud of unrelated concepts is only bound to make the physicists themselves sound defensive, as if they’re struggling to explain something that only they will ever understand.

In the process, if the communicator has left out things such as electroweak symmetry-breaking and Nambu-Goldstone bosons, it’s OK. They’re not part of what makes the find significant for the layman. If, however, you feel that you need to explain everything, then change the question that your post is answering, or merge it with your original idea, etc. Do not indulge in the subject, and make sure to explain your concepts as a proper fiction-story: Your knowledge of the plot shouldn’t interfere with the reader’s process of discovery.

Another complex theory that’s doing the rounds these days is that of quantum entanglement. Those publications that cover news in the field regularly, such as R&D mag, don’t even do as much justice as did SciAm to the Higgs mechanism (through the “cosmic molasses” metaphor). Consider, for instance, this explanation from a story that appeared on November 16.

Electrons have a property called “spin”: Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

The causal link has been omitted! If the story has set out to explain an application of quantum entanglement, which I think it has, then it has done a fairly good job. But what about entanglement-the-concept itself? Yes, it does stand to lose a lot because many communicators seem to be divesting of its intricacies and spending more time explaining why it’s increasing in relevance in modern electronics and computation. If relevance is to mean anything, then debate has to exist – even if it seems antithetical to the deployment of the technology as in the case of nuclear power.

Without understanding what entanglement means, there can be no informed recognition of its wonderful capabilities, there can be no public dialog as to its optimum use to further public interests. When when scientific research stops contributing to the latter, it will definitely face collapse, and that’s the function, rather the purpose, that sensible science communication serves.