Una verdad simulada

via Kottke, this excellent piece by Amy Wallace in Wired Magazine on the anti-vaccination movement.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis [whooping cough]. […]

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

The article also has a short but apt paragraph on why pseudo-science gains traction:

In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort.

Tags: General by Niket
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Yesterday, I was chatting with a couple of colleagues. I mentioned to them something that my teacher told me as I was finishing my PhD and writing my teaching statement to apply for faculty positions. Prof. Koros told me that one of the important things with respect to student expectations is consistency. It is OK to be too strict or too lenient or to find your own middle ground; so long as people know what to expect, they will not find it difficult to adapt to your requirements (an assumption here is that these requirements are reasonable).

I remember my student days, when we initially disliked a faculty, Prof. Mahajani, who would close the class doors at exactly the right time (e.g., 9:30 am; never at 9:29, never at 9:31). No student will be allowed in the class after that. Attendance requirement was enforced. After our initial inconvenience, it is we who adjusted to his strict requirements. Our class nominated him for the best teacher award.

Tags: General, Personal by Niket
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See these untouched photographs of dead albatross chicks.

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. (original source)

Plastic is a problem on our campus as well. Deer feed on the food waste. Often, we find deer standing near garbage dump, chewing on plastic bags which contained food. I have heard that a couple of kilograms of plastic were found inside some of the deer found dead in the recent past.

Tags: General by Niket
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… the Nobel peace prize committee for awarding the 2009 peace prize to the US President Barack Obama. The citation says that the award is given to Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.

Updates:

• Atanu Dey said the same thing yesterday. Great minds think alike
• Great Bong says that Eric Morley, founder of the Miss World pageant also deserves a Nobel Prize, since ‘noone in the world who has done as much as him in providing a platform for attractive people to spew warm air about “world peace”‘.
• I got an email today from Avaaz.org (where I had, in a moment of weakness, signed some online petition) stating: “let’s flood Obama with worldwide congratulations, urging him to go further and turn hope into change”. Really?
• I think after the Rabin/Perez/Arafat and the Kissinger/Tho awards, this one is the most jaw-dropping in my view. Apparently, Obama was a mere two weeks into his office before the Feb. 1st deadline for peace prize nominations.
• One does hope that Obama’s presidency lives up to the expectations. But as Rahul says, “giving a prize for future achievements requires extraordinary clairvoyance.”

Tags: General by Niket
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A summary of suggestions from Kurt Vonnegut on how to write with style:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Tags: General by Niket
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Here is a balanced summary of the salary issue on Giridhar’s blog.

I think the only thing flawed in the “ruling” is the On Contract Assistant Professor (OCAP) position. I joined IIT-M after a 2.5 year post doc at Delaware. I did a longer post-doc because I had the offer from IIT an year before I actually joined: Often people do 1-2 year in engineering disciplines. This means that I would have to join IIT-M not as a full AP but an OCAP. There is no way I would have returned in 2007. A couple of my friends thinking of returning are not sure (”not sure” = “confused” or “wait-and-watch”, not “won’t return”) any more due to the OCAP.

Having said that, there are ways in which IITs can do to blunt the effect of OCAP. We just need to put our collective heads together and find a way out. Of course, rather than fighting for a marginal pay rise, we could work with the minister to make the wording more flexible… so that we can hire folks as full APs as well.

Tags: General by Niket
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