Science and public

Not too long ago, Big Brother decided to continue funding the enormously successful Hubble project. NASA can be justifiably proud of its baby that continues to outperform design expectations. In the next few years, NASA will send a space shuttle to Hubble to give her a new lease of life. Nice read about in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/science/space/07hubb.html

I am simultaneously encouraged and disheartened by the recent turn of events. That Hubble will continue to soar is a source of great joy. The uphill battle that led to that result is discouraging. If convincing the administration about the continued importance of a project whose brilliant performance is impossible to miss, is such an uphill task, surely, it does not augur well for other science and technology projects that may not produce visible results right away.

How should the scientific community engage the administration and the public at large, in its undertaking? This is a question that troubles every group within the scientific community. Clearly, some groups have been more successful in making their case! Look at the dollars that have poured into supercomputing, for instance.

The Monarch Butterfly Migration

The Monarch Butterfly Migration Mystery - Donald G. McNeil Jr. - New York Times
Absolutely fascinating read! I had heard of bird and animal migration over long distances; not about monarch butterflies that cover 4000 miles roundtrip! From Canada, across the US to Mexico and back up north. Who'dve thunk it?!

Can you imagine their less-than-pea sized brains guide them in this amazing endeavor? It's not like they learn from its parents. With a life expectancy of nine months, ma and pa butterflies don't live long enough to take them on this trip even once!

Check out http://www.monarchwatch.org/

A quote from the NYT article:

"But those lifting off anywhere from Montana to Maine must aim themselves carefully to avoid drowning in the Gulf of Mexico or hitting a dead end in Florida. The majority manage to thread a geographical needle, hitting a 50-mile-wide gap of cool river valleys between Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Tex".

Ethics in Science

In a Scientist's Fall, China Feels Robbed of Glory - New York Times

In recent weeks, the scientific community has had to deal with ugly episodes of unethical conduct. There was the case of the South Korean doctor whose claims of breakthrough in cloning was found to be nothing more than a fabrication. Today, the NYT reports that a Chinese computer scientist stole chip designs from a foreign company, and passed them off as products of his own research.

These are examples of irrecoverable falls from grace magnified by the greatness that could-have-been. Sad and tragic episodes, but not surprising given the way the research community functions and interacts with the rest of the society.

For a long time, the phrase 'publish or perish' captured the pressure under which every scientist functions. There is another dimension that may not be immediately obvious. In addition to continually publishing as a testament his scientific credentials, a scientist is expected to bring in the moolah. Writing proposals, presenting results -- I italicize intentionally -- has become as important as doing quality work.

Any person under the appropriate stimuli can be made to do tasks that are otherwise unthinkable. Scientists are not immune to this sociological phenomenon either. I am not trying to condone or justify such actions; but merely explaining them.

It is almost ironic to read this op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (requires subscription). I'll summarize a couple of points.

India is rapidly evolving into Asia's innovation center, leaving China in the dust. Its secret weapon? Intellectual property-rights protection. In recent years, New Delhi has taken big steps to protect these rights, and the results have been dramatic.

It goes on to claim that India's continued adherence to and strengthening of the IPR regime will translate into rich dividends -- as an example, it says, annual revenues from Indian software exports are expected to reach $50billion in the not-too distant future.

Here we are, on the one hand, trying to sanctify intellectual property. On the other, some are abusing the scientific process and manufacturing results!

Parties and seminars

During my undergrad years, parties were a big deal -- even for the teetotalers like me. They offered a momentary sojourn into a place where only simple things like rythm and dance, song and music, friends and cohorts existed. Everything else was a blur. After a long evening of partying, we'd schlep our way back to campus while our heads still resonated with the summer of '69; our lips unconsciously wondered 'who the f*** is Alice?' while someone puked his guts out on NH17. Ah, such was life!

These days I have a very different notion of what consitutes heady partying. (Yes, Mom, I'm still a teetotaler). A thought-provoking seminar. With that confession, I probably jumped one level higher in the land of boring people!

I should say a word about seminars to the unfamiliar reader. One of the biggest perks of this research business is a chance to visit labs to share your ideas with them. Being invited to give a talk from a good place is a not-so-small deal, as you can imagine.

Today, Partha Niyogi from the University of Chicago was here to talk about manifold learning. It doesn't take a Sherlock to figure out I liked his talk! After spending an hour and something at the seminar, we -- my labmates and I -- schlepped two floors up while trying to digest a few things we'd just heard. That conversation continued for a little while in one of our rooms. Manifolds and homologies seem to have replaced summer of '69s and 'Alice's. Ah, such is life!

Up, up and away!

NASA's probe is racing away from our earth to keep a date with the icy queen at the edge of the solar system. Pluto will have to wait for more than 9 years before out little friend is within her winking distance. And wink at each other, is all they can do as our man-in-a-hurry scurries past her after a mindnumbingly long interplanetary cruise. A wink and a blink later, he is blowing kisses at Charon, Pluto's moon. Wait, it gets more romantic. After flirting with Pluto and Charon, he disappears into the Kuiper belt as he hunts for a planetary object to take a peek at.

Are we there yet?

Google this!

You know you have arrived when your noun becomes a verb. For example, in Washington people don't take the metro (city's rail transportation) to work; they 'metro in'. I don't search for an article online; I 'google' instead. Bangalore was added to this noun-to-verb lexicon recently to denote the idea of outsourcing. The spelling bee cries, "Can you use it in a sentence, please?"

TI bangalored its chip-design last week. (Well, may be not). Or, Joe Engineer, a resident of Santa Clara, CA was bangalored following the companies large scale downsizing in its US offices.

Why did I bring this up? First the background: Today, the state government in Karnataka (of which Bangalore is the capital) 'lost confidence'. A rough analogy is the recall of California's has-been Governor Gray Davis. Except, in Karnataka's case, the legislators pulled the rug under the sitting Chief Minister (the Parliamentary equivalent of the governor).

The Indian Express proclaims this change in power structure with "Congress Bangalored, Gowda's son walks in BJP arms". Gowda, a former Indian Prime Minister has been a trouble maker for the past few years. Surely, welcome news for BJP, the right wing political party. They haven't had many good days recently - either at the state or national level. For the first time, BJP will have a shot at governing Karnataka, albeit jointly. Let's see how badly they hurt the state.

Reality and reality

America's love with reality shows is hot as ever as the new season of the Amazing Race began on CBS last week. Although not as popular as the channel's other reality show, "Survivor," the Race has found some die-hard followers. The reason I like the Amazing Race is its timeless appeal - going to new places, exploring new lands - something that man has done for ages. The Survivor plays up another old theme - the art and science of survival in all its primal sense. People are cast off on a deserted island and they are forced to do whatever it takes to survive. All too stone-age for me. I prefer the plane-hopping, the bickering and scheming of the Amazing Race!

In another kind of reality, the CIA came out with a report today saying some rather unsurprising things. According to the report, the arms trafficking network led by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan provided Iran's nuclear program with "significant assistance," including the designs for "advanced and efficient" weapons components. Incidentally, this is the same Khan that General Pervez Musharaff, the self-appointed Chief of Pakistan, granted official pardon to. For a long time, Pakistan's sale of nuclear technology was an open secret. And then came the scathing report that forced Musharaff's administration to admit that top officials in his country had been peddling nuclear secrets to countries and entities around the world. Strangely enough, no heads rolled after that. Musharaff wagging his finger side to side said, "bad, bad, Khan!" And that was that.

So when this new CIA report says Pakistan provided nuclear assistance to Iran, all I can say is 'Duh!' As before, you can bet your bottom dollar that President Bush will wag his finger from side to side and say, "Bad, Bad, Mush!" (expecting him to say Musharaff is a bit of a stretch). And that will be that.

Privacy, please!

Google's foray into the desktop search arena has raised more than a few eyebrows. As before, people are not comfortable with the possibility of someone snooping around and gathering their deepest, darkest secrets or their credit card numbers! Google, meanwhile is assuring everyone that their search tool is not a spyware (you'd be amazed how many of those are on your machine right now! If you're curious, try spybot to find out!). My gripe with this new search tool? It doesn't search pdf or ps files. It can search word documents, outlook email, etc. Given that I have a handful of doc files on my machine, I could easily search the files manually. I don't use outlook or AOL. Is google (or anyone) listening?!

What do we know?

About a week ago, I was at this year's CVPR (IEEE Intl' conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) that was held in Washington. It is one of the premier conferences in the field and expectedly, there were many good papers in the main conference and in the more-focused workshops. Some of the workshops like the one on GOR(Generic Object Recognition) had some professors sounding a cautious note (case in point: Professor Michael Tarr's talk entitled - "Do we know more than we did 20 years ago?" His answer - "Not really!"). But there were others that were more upbeat. For instance, people were a little more hopeful in the Event Recognition workshop - which is good news for me, since I'm working in that area.

My only peeve about the conference? You see, due to a ban on skyscrapers, many of the buildings in DC - including the conference venue - the Grand Hyatt, has several underground floors. Everyday, descending three levels below the ground to reach the conference venue was like going into a bunker of some kind. Of course, given that we were in the midst of some very smart people from around the world, it might be a good idea!

More technology-related stuff: They are saying BPL could be the new mantra. No, that's not the company that makes TV's in India (or used to, at some point in time). BPL stands for Broadband over Power Lines. I remember during my senior year at REC Surathkal, one of my classmates was working on "Internet over power lines" as his final year project and it was exciting stuff!

Beauty in math

Huffman is a name that's familiar to all Electrical/Electronics/Computer engineers. (If not, looks like you pulled off a perfect Rip Van Winkle through 4 years in college!). Of course, he's familiar for the codes that are named after him and is used in many places - including this page. The jpeg pictures you see around - they are coded using Huffman codes (among other things). Bet you didn't know that Professor Huffman was also into paper folding! The New York Times has a must-read piece on it. I'm sure my mother will be intrigued by this.

If only the algorithms that we cook up and the equations we write were half as elegant and beautiful as Huffman's work!

Craigslist

This is how it should be. Free. Controlled by the people who use it. Uncensored. That is not how it always is, of course. The internet is slowly becoming more chained - maybe it was inevitable all along. Craigslist.org, however, has remained unchained. People control what they want to see - that doesn't mean you'll see formulas to make explosives -no. That's just reductio ad adsurdum. I came across craigslist a couple of years ago when I was bargain-hunting for some furniture. And I never quite realized its humble beginnings until I read about it in today's LA times.

Oh, will they ever learn?!

More fingerprint woes. This man, Sanchez is being wrongly identified as a Leo Rosario, not once, not twice but thrice in the past! That the two differ physically - 12 years in age and 6 inches in height - means little to the people in the law and order business who insist that a fingerprint match is the holy grail.

Fingerprints in all the wrong places

This article in today's Washington Post caught my eye given that I have worked in biometrics - specifically, gait. We have been told time and again that fingerprints are unique signatures that we carry with us. And one would think, after so many years of research, that the science and statistics of fingerprint extraction has matured enough to be used as unquestionable evidence. Apparently, not the case. Consider this: "Fingerprinting, unlike DNA evidence, currently lacks any valid statistical foundation." Another DARPA project in the making, perhaps?

And over at the New York Times, a self-flagellation has begun over the paper's conduct in the run-up and during the Iraq war. The editors have decided, in the spirit of clearing the air, to revaluate their reporting and journalism. Put simply, it is an exercise in finding out why they failed to do the job the press is supposed to do.

Gooogle

First, on a personal note - They got engaged! Congrats, Sowmya and Mahesh!

Google's yet-to-be-widely-released email service, gmail has got everyone talking. People seem to have a love-hate with no middle ground -relationship with it. On the one hand, gmail is passing out disk space like candies - 1 GB compared to Yahoo's 4MB (or thereabouts), Hotmail's measly 1 or 2 MB, Yahoo premium's 100MB - and establishing a clear, convincing lead over is competitors. It supposedly has cool sorting, searching (duh!), better spam filtering and a lot many more features. Of course, most of the subscribers won't use all those useful features. That's besides the point. All the surrounding hype has sparked off websites like gmailswap where the havenots are trying to win an account from the haves. (Here are some samples - "In exchange for gmail...": "a lovely and talented soprano (i've heard her!) will sing for you" , "9000 ladybugs" , "borrow car for a week", "a smile and heartfelt thanks", "a slide rule (with instructions)" ...). On the other hand, there is the anti-gmail lobby. Their complaints range from "I don't want google reading my emails" to "protect privacy" to "don't ad-spam me" etc. One such anti-gmail website is gmail-is-too-creepy. (catchy name though!).

Talking about the google ads, I was reading an article about Independence air in the Post a couple of days ago. Its the new low-cost airline starting operations from Dulles International Airport after breaking away from United Airlines. Obviously, now it is a rival to United. And the ad that google threw up on the page? You guessed it - fly United!

Indian elections

For a few days now, I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog. I suppose its mostly out of a bloated sense of self-importance! At any rate, the recent Indian elections seemed like a good excuse to web-ify my rants from time to time. So here goes ...

The dance of democracy in India has certainly thrown up more than its fair share of surprises. Firstly, the defeat of the BJP-led coalition shocked and surprised most political pundits. The I-told-you-so'ers like Swaminathan Aiyar in the Times of India were a minority. Whether people had an issue with BJP's policies or not, everybody was sad to see Mr. Vajpayee leave. His holding out the olive branch to Pakistan, in spite of Musharaf's backstabbing etc., will probably be his crowning achievement in the history books to come. Jim Hoagland, in his column in the Washington Post thinks the increasing closeness of Vajpayee administration with the US cost the incumbents dearly. Likening Brajesh Mishra, the national security advisor, to Star Wars' Yoda, Hoagland bemoans the defeat of the NDA government.

Congress, under Sonia Gandhi seems to have gone the Madonna way - by reinventing itself. Rather, it has gone back to its time-tested campaign tactics - the dynasty and food, water, power slogan. In one of her speeches, Ms. Gandhi says it was time "to do something for the poor". How wonderfully vague! What's more, it seems to satisfy the Indian voter! It was certain that Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin would become an issue now that she had a real shot at the top job.

The communist parties (yup, they're still around!) were suddenly thrust into the national limelight. With the support of the Left a necessity for minority Congress to survive in the Parliament, people had to take notice of what the Left parties had to say. And boy, they fired some serious shots at the business community. Demolish the privatization ministry, they said. The issue Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin and now the left parties' shenanigans. This one-two punch was too much for the markets and the indices tumbled. Brokers must've been saying, 'gravity sucks!' And then began a day or two of "will she? won't she?" suspense. Will Sonia Gandhi lead the next Indian government? Many of the major newspaper editorials pooh-poohing BJP's criticism's of the foreign issue used big words like inclusiveness, plural ethos etc. in supporting Ms. Gandhi's bid. Some like the Pioneer didn't share those sentiments. Finally, following her "inner voice," she declined the PM post. The die-hard Congress loyalists were aghast. Many others breathed a collective sigh of relief. And a few like Mike Marqusee in the Guardian cannot resist using the "R" word. He thinks Indian Hindus are racists. Hmm.. I wonder black men and women Britain or the United States has elected to serve in the highest offices?! That might be too much to ask for, given that in America's centuries old democratic traditions, the first Catholic President was JFK!

As the dust settles down, Dr. Manmohan Singh, best known for starting the economic reforms in '91, is set to take over as the Prime Minister. Like Mr. Vajpayee, Dr. Singh is well-respected man both in India and abroad. Congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister!

On a related note, in the Andhra Pradesh (AP) assembly elections, the cyber savvy Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu was voted out of office. George Manbiot, in his column in the Guardian has an interesting note about it. According to him, Naidu's defeat amounts to Tony Blair's defeat since all those programs that were so doggedly pursued in AP were planned out by the US consultancy agency, McKinsey and financed partly by Blair's government.