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The deceptive ignominy of being the first to win an award

Posted on by newyesterday

Kamaljit Bawa is the first Indian to receive the Linnaean Medal in the 140-year old history of the Society awarding the medal.

This line is from a press release I received this morning from a PR person at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, where Bawa works. I’ve never heard of a Linnaean Medal but I’m not surprised there’s some kind of famous prize named for Carl Linnaeus.

I’ve also not heard of Bawa or his work but I’m thankful for both of them, and I’m sure they deserve their plaudits. However, my concern is about whether any prestige should also accrue with Bawa because he is “the first Indian recipient” of a 140-year-old prize. By all means, let’s celebrate Bawa for having won the prize but let’s not celebrate that Bawa is “the first”. I say this because there are two aspects of one’s scientific career that must fall in place for one to receive widespread recognition, and both aspects are centred on one characteristic: visibility.

The first aspect is easily illustrated by an example. To win a Nobel Prize, the following conditions must be met on a scientist’s part:

  • Their papers must be published in “premier” journals like Nature, Science, PRL, Cell, etc.
  • (Follow-up) Their papers must be written in English
  • They must be affiliated with a university that is already prestigious
  • They must be located in tier I cities of their respective countries
  • They must have been able to afford international travel to speak and collaborate with scientists abroad

… among others. Each of these conditions acts like a screen, filtering scientists out of consideration for a big prize even if their work deserves to paraded on the world’s stage. At the end of this checklist, a pool of scientists much smaller than it should be is leftover, the pool from which some international awards committee will pick its nominees. And when someone from this pool wins, all the fame and wealth is showered on this person, further aggravating the lack of resources at the bottom of the pyramid. The easiest way to confirm this is the case in reality is to look for winners of prestigious prizes who have bucked the trend vis a vis most of the checklist items at the same time.

The second aspect kicks in from the award committees side. It is not enough that scientists put themselves on display, so to speak; those awarded the prizes must also look in your direction. As a result, a second set of filters comes into play, this one more multi-cultural, and often giving disproportionate importance to factors like gender and race.

When the constituting members of award committees are scientists themselves, then it’s likely that they will be more aware of the accomplishments of those whose work they can access more easily – especially due to institutional or geographical proximity. (We already have empirical proof that this is the case with the editors of scientific journals.) They will also know little, if at all, about how foreign research labs apportion responsibilities as well as credit, among other things.

Effectively, we can see how difficult it is to “make it big”, as they say, as a scientist. A stupendous number of things must fall in line – not the least of which is the lottery of birth: where you’re born and to what kind of parents. In this Age of Reason, or at least an age in which sensible and culturally sensitive reasoning must be applied to all decision-making, it’s possible to see awards as being given to certain people for good work but it’s impossible to conclude that a scientist’s work is not good if it has not received an award.

The sense of humility that this line of thinking brings is what we must hold at heart before we write about Kamaljit Bawa. Kudos to him for winning the Linnaeus Medal (for his work in plant biology) but no kudos to him for being the first to do so. That’s a vacant achievement. Bandying it about – as the ATREE press release seems to do – is to buy into the discrimination and elitism inherent in winning any of these awards.

Those prizes regarded the most prestigious in each field award scientists whose work towers over all of their peers’. For example, the Nobel Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Lasker Award, the Priestley Medal, etc. These same prizes also carry a lot of historical baggage; in fact, much of their prestige is the result of their having been awarded to the most famous scientists of the early 20th century.

I find these prizes easier to put up with than those instituted in the late 20th century because we should have, by the latter period, recognised the futility of instituting international prizes, especially those that reward scientists towards the end of their research career and divert large, unqualified sums of money towards a few individuals. Most of all, these prizes are detrimental because they encourage people to think of laureates as institutions in and of themselves. (One of the more insidious ways in which this happens is when we first hear about these scientists when they win an award, not earlier.)

Even the Nobel Prizes and others like it are guilty of these effects. However, they are harder to dislodge from their pedestals than the others, and so they persist.

Posted in Uncategorized

Reconciling multiple personalities

Posted on by newyesterday

I watched a Tamil film today, Romba Nallavan Da Nee (You’re a Very Good Man; 2015). The story’s antagonist appears to have dissociative identity disorder. This disorder used to be called ‘multiple personality’ disorder (MPD). However, in the film all the “doctors” keep calling it “disolative” identity disorder, and constantly refer to it as a disease and treat the antagonist as a source of harm for others. This is very typical of Tamil cinema, where professional standards are often so low and its bigshots so small-minded that the social values depicted on screen often belong to the 1980s.

But that’s not the point of this post. The actors’ repeated reference to the disorder as “disolative” is what prompted me to Google it, and that’s how I found out the affliction used to be called MPD. Why was the name changed? I found the answer in a WHO document from 1993, which spelled out a new four-part definition of MPD (reproduced below) and classified it under a wider umbrella of dissociative identity disorders:

A. The existence of two or more distinct personalities within the the individual, only one being evident at a time.
B. Each personality has its own memories, preferences and behaviour patterns, and at some time (and recurrently) takes full control of the individuals behaviour.
C. Inability to recall important personal information, too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.
D. Not due to organic mental disorders (e.g. in epileptic disorders) or psychoactive substance-related disorders (e.g. intoxication or withdrawal).

According to Psychology Today, the reason for this move was “to reflect a better understanding of the condition – namely, that it is characterised by a fragmentation … of identity rather than by a proliferation … of separate identities.” This is interesting because, as I was watching Romba Nallavan Da Nee, all I was thinking was that its central conflict was very similar to that in Anniyan (The Outsider), a 2005 Tamil film whose protagonist has three identities: a pedantic lawyer, a swaggering model and a lawless vigilante.

However, while the antagonist’s behaviour in Romba Nallavan Da Nee fit the description of a dissociative identity disorder, the protagonist of Anniyan could only be described as having MPD – and that too in its pre-1993 form: possessing three separate identities, not one identity fragmented three ways. I wonder if the film’s production team had thought these labels through or if they just got lucky. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the former; its director, S. Shankar, and the male lead, Vikram, are both known for their meticulous preparations.)

The WHO definition had been carried over into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. In the controversial fifth edition of this manual, published in May 2013, the list of symptoms of dissociative identity disorder was expanded to include “possession-form phenomena and functional neurological symptoms”. Moreover, according to the DSM 5 website, MPD was removed as a dissociative disorder. Now, dissociative disorders are of the following types:

  • Dissociative identity disorder
  • Dissociative amnesia
  • Depersonalisation disorder

What happened to MPD? It’s as if psychiatrists have decided that it’s impossible for personalities to proliferate later in life such that the same body becomes host to more than one of them. Instead, they’ve agreed what’s likelier to happen is that one personality becomes fragmented into multiple parts.

There’s an obviously interesting consideration here – the one of reconciliation. The post-MPD label of ‘dissociative identity disorder’ implies a person with the identities A, B and C has the overall identity signified as A+B+C. On the other hand, the label of MPD implies a person with the identities A, B and C may not be understood as having an overall identity A+B+C. In this framework, the label of ‘dissociative identity disorder’ does seem more realistic – whereas MPD seems more able to accommodate fantastical narratives (also see the syndrome of approximate answers).

If you thought this discussion was interesting, you might like to read this story of how a young woman with multiple personalities worked to develop a sense of self.

Posted in Uncategorized

There is neither truth nor news in Elon Musk's 'Pravda'

Posted on by newyesterday

Elon Musk tweeted this week that he plans to setup an online platform called ‘Pravda’, where people can “rate the core truth of any article and track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor and publication.” This isn’t a joke. Bloomberg reported on May 24, “The California secretary of state’s website shows a Pravda Corp. was registered in October in Delaware. The filing agent and the address listed – 216 Park Road, Burlingame, California – are identical to the name and location used for at least two other Musk entities: brain-computer interface startup Neuralink Corp. and tunnel-digging company Boring Co.”

The products that already exist with Pravda’s premise – and they do – are useless, and which Musk surely knows, and he thinks he can do one better. But he can’t, not for lack of trying but because it will be impossible to keep this product reliable.

Free-for-all forums where some people make decisions for other people are susceptible to being hijacked by polarised communities that can easily bias ratings. For example, search for The Wire on Google Maps and you will see we have a 3.8-star rating. It signifies nothing at all about the kind of journalism The Wire practices. More importantly, most ratings of three stars and below are by people ideologically opposed to The Wire‘s slant. Of course, Musk is welcome to try and build a platform where the numbers are more meaningful than on Google Reviews, but fundamentally, foot-soldiers of the political extrema are bound to gang up and vehemently down-vote publications that publish news they don’t like.

The false conceit in Musk’s declaration is rooted in his belief that journalists who publish stories that suggest he made a mistake are wrong and, more dangerously, the masses are always right.

The bulk of his outrage has been directed against stories on three subjects: investor concerns over the slow production rate and accidents involving his Tesla cars, his pro-Trump line and contracts and subsidies his spaceflight company SpaceX has received from NASA.

A recursive problem

This week, all of it coalesced into one anti-media tirade that he accused “holier-than-thou” journalists of bringing upon themselves, particularly by not speaking in the public interest and by basking in a regulatory blindspot where they received no sanctions for alleged misreporting. Musk also attacked the clicks-per-million (CPM)-driven revenue models of many media organisations and accused journalists of writing just for the eyeballs and ad dollars in light of the fact that Tesla doesn’t advertise while the makers of fossil-fuel-driven cars do.

However, those who want to believe that a journalist or publication is not credible already believe that anyway, and have functional communities on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. It is not as if Musk’s product is what’s missing on the scene, let alone new or revolutionary. Ironically, Musk conducted a poll on Twitter asking if a platform where journalists work to maintain credibility scores was a good idea, and 88% of the 681,097 respondents voted ‘yes’. There is no way to tell if this wasn’t another of those social media mobilisations where individual responses were centrally coordinated and many of the votes were cast via multiple accounts held by a single person and, of course, bots.

The ironies don’t end here.

Incoherent dreams

Musk wants to call this platform ‘Pravda’. The word is Russian for ‘truth’; more notably, Pravda was the name of the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It served the Bolsheviks at the time of the 1917 revolution, and was published continuously until 1991. Until the late 1980s, it published propaganda that furthered the cause of ‘actually existing socialism’ – the official ideology of the erstwhile USSR. While this ‘official organ’ of the Communist Party underwent an ideological transition towards 1990 and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union, Pravda‘s editorial positions on either side of this historic line illustrate the vacancy of Musk’s idea as well as choice of name.

Pravda‘s tagline was “Workers of the world, unite!” However, for most of its existence, especially after the Communist Party overthrew the Tsar and concentrated power in itself, it was an official mouthpiece  printing ministers’ rambling speeches and spinning all news such that the interpretations fell in line with official policy. As a newspaper, Pravda was useless except to those who wanted to know what the party line and power structure were in Moscow and the provinces. Its contents were virtually indistinguishable from those of the government-run newspaper, Izvestia, meaning ‘news’. A popular joke at the time was “There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia“.

Nonetheless, Pravda‘s agenda was the government’s agenda – and the government’s agenda was to control, creating an authoritarian ecosystem that brooked no dissent or freedom of speech or entrepreneurship. The system allowed for the rapid accumulation of socialised capital and high growth rates in its initial decades but eventually ran out of steam. In this world, there would have been no free press and there would have been no Elon Musk either. He is welcome to call his platform ‘Pravda’ by all means but the irony of a poster child of free-market capitalism dreaming of Soviet-style gags on the press is too delicious to ignore.

As the party’s hold on Pravda loosened in the late 1980s, its pages began to print opinions that would have been blasphemous before then. In 1987, according to the New York Times, one of them questioned various government moves, including nuclear stockpiling. Another asked why politicos didn’t have to stand in line at stores and restaurants with the proletariat instead of not having to, and deepening social inequalities. But if the original Pravda was rediscovering its socialist roots by the end of its journey, its new avatar will have to contend with Musk’s elitism.

He famously remarked in August 2017 that public transit is “a pain in the ass”. According to the International Association for Public Transport, “In 2015, 243 billion public transport journeys were made in 39 countries around the world. This figure represents an 18% increase compared to 2000.” According to Musk,

I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualised transport, that goes where you want, when you want.

A year later, he checked himself somewhat, tweeting that people without cars would be allowed to travel in bus-like pods, the plans for which he would prioritise over those for the Hyperloop.

Musk is lazy because, instead of trying to build a credibility-rating platform, he could either engage with journalists – especially women, whose credibility is constantly dragged down by faceless trolls assailing them not for their views but for their gender – and the underlying idea of journalism (together with how its purpose continues to be misunderstood). He is lazy because he thinks that by getting the numbers on his side, he can show journalists up for the phonies he thinks they are. Musk is likely to have better success at shaping public opinion if he launched a news publication himself.

The Wire
May 25, 2018

Posted in Uncategorized

Starting over again

Posted on by newyesterday

I read a blog post on Coding Horror this morning, where Jeff Atwood, its author, writes about how he inculcated his blogging habit to the extent that it has come to change his life, net him book deals and speaking opportunities, and makes him some money. While the last bit is not something I usually pay attention to, his overall success struck me. I’ve had a blogging habit for the past decade myself – at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself. I have two active blogs at the moment (excluding this one); one has over 3,000 followers and the other, almost 100. Both together, I’ve published over a thousand posts for collective thousands of views.

However, over the last year or so, I’ve slacked off and haven’t published much. This wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t also for the fact that I’ve not been paying attention to it, instead thinking of myself as a successful blogger still. I’ve started to bask in the glow of my dying habit and haven’t been writing as much as I should be. When I read Atwood’s post, I realised what I was able to do and what I stand on the brink of losing now. I need to shed my pride and work towards getting it back.

Both of my old blogs were mostly about science journalism (my profession) and scientific research. This one on the other hand is going to be about (re)developing my writing habit. But that’s now why I’m not publishing in one of my established blogs. I’m publishing here because of the obscurity it brings. This isn’t me trying to hide from public gaze but me deliberately choosing to labour in obscurity for as long as it takes for my output to be discovered and appreciated organically. I need to be able to acknowledge this blog’s purpose without giving myself the luxury of a pre-existing audience. As Atwood writes, I need to “always be jabbing, always be shipping, always be firing.”

Speaking of shipping, I also got distracted in 2017 by teaching myself to code. While the exercise was partly successful, I didn’t put in enough work and ended up learning a little bit about a lot of some things. This grates at me even more because now I’m left with one habit broken by my callous, overconfident attitude and another habit that’s really not a habit at all. I’m ashamed to admit this. So as a step forward, I’m going to start publishing one post on this blog every day for as long as possible– actually, for a year at least. It’s good to have closed and meaningful deadlines instead of open-ended and flexible ones.

This is the first post for today. I’m not going to let the posts be just a few lines long, commenting about an image or a quote I found on the internet. Each post will be meaningful in that it will present at least one idea in as many words as it takes. I think this is a useful constraint because it requires me to be able to come up with one idea a day, and for which I must read more, talk to people more, and consume more in general. This is fascinating to think about because it shows how only the movement of ideas between people can create more ideas, which in turn will have to be set in motion for even more ideas to be born.

Anyway, here we are… and here we go!

The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash
Posted in Op-eds

'Work from home' is about culture, not economics

Posted on by newyesterday

Working from home (WFH) is not for everyone or for every company. It works mostly when individual employees of an organisation don’t need to work together often, or are embedded in workflows where tasks move quickly from one stage to the next. On a personal level, WFH isn’t feasible if you lack self-discipline and/or need the presence of your colleagues people around you to keep you from feeling isolated from company matters or simply, and more distressingly, lonely.

I’ve been employed with The Wire for 38 months now, and have worked from home for 34 of those. As a higher-up editor in the organisation who almost never works with a local team of reporters, I’m constantly looking for productivity paradigms, and hacks, that will keep me going as well as at the top of my game despite being removed from decision-making at HQ. In this context, I recently stumbled upon a seemingly influential study published in 2014 about how WFH can improve employee productivity by leaps and bounds.

I’ve heard a few arguments over the years from various proponents of WFH who cite studies like this to make their point: that there is empirical evidence from the ‘wild’ to show that WFH doesn’t just work but in fact improves employee performance and company prospects. As much as I want WFH to be a thing among organisations with larger workforces (50+ people) and with HQs located in metropolitan cities or megalopolises, I’ve noted with disappointment that most people eager to forward this paradigm often forget cultural impediments to implementing it.

IMO, a decision about allowing regular WFH options is predominantly cultural, particularly in ways that econometric or parametric tests in general can’t capture. For example, many organisations allow people to work from home in exceptional circumstances not because their management is old school but because it needs to be: a large fraction of the urban Indian workforce is not used to being able to work that way.

One big reason this is the case is that “going to office” is part of the traditional mindset of middle-class and lower-upper-class workers. Outside of entrepreneurial centres like Bangalore and smaller pockets of other Indian tier I cities, it’s hard to find people who even want to do this. For example, in my own home, my folks took over 18 months to believe my job was important for The Wire and that WFH was a legitimate way of doing it. The practice is certainly becoming more common but it’s not that common yet in the country.

(A subset reason is that many, if not most, offices in India are better equipped than their employees’ homes are. It’s sort of like the midday meal scheme but in a corporate context. On a related note, you’ll notice that most stock photos depicting a WFH environment show Macbooks on a clean, white table. Where’s the dust da?)

Second, the participants of the influential study cited above were all call-centre employees. This is important because call centres typically have a unique type of office (if it can be called an ‘office’ at all). Its personnel all work individually, not collaboratively, and prize – as the study’s paper notes – a quieter working environment. So the touted “9.2% minutes more per shift” and the “13% performance increase” are both results of employees moving from louder to quieter environments and so answer phone calls better, faster.

To me, this is not a characteristic feature of working from home at all. The study is simply about the effects of the removal of an impediment for employees of an idiosyncratic sector of employment. I suspect the experiment’s effects can be recreated without instituting WFH and simply making their Shanghai office quieter. As Jerry Useem wrote in The Atlantic:

Don’t send call-center workers home, … encourage them to spend more time together in the break room, where they can swap tricks of the trade.

Of course, one could argue that another factor working in WFH’s favour is that the employees are saved the commute – especially in larger cities where the business/commercial district is located in the centre, where costs of living are absolutely prohibitive, and the more affordable residential district is to be found the farther you move away from that centre. Delhi is an obvious example: The Wire HQ is located five minutes from Connaught Place whereas the bulk of its employees are housed in Mayur Vihar or beyond in the east and Lajpat Nagar or beyond in the south – both areas at least 12 km away.

This would be legit except I personally won’t buy into it because I think it’s a failure of urban planning that people have to commute so much, drawing worse lines between their professional and personal lives as well as segregating their daily lives into distinct, monotonous units with only the pursuit of higher efficiency at its soul. I say “worse” instead of “starker” because the line is disappearing in some places where it shouldn’t, such as in the form of carrying a fragment of your workplace on your smartphone, wherever you go, leading employers to assume employees are always available and employees to assume they ought to be always available.

The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash
The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash

The attitude of Silicon Valley technology towards free time has been tendentiously wolfish, so much that self-discipline has become one of the greater and rarer virtues of our time. Where workplace laws won’t go, “work anywhere” has almost always been interpreted to mean “work everywhere”. So for a WFH policy to be meaningful, you need people in the office ready to understand the difference instead of gleefully rearing for the leap. This is why I think Slack should shutter its mobile apps or, if not, equip them with features that will allow employees to truly disconnect, beyond the recurring question of self-discipline.

(Remember Fiverr’s ‘do more or die trying’ ad campaign extolling the gig economy?)

Moreover, modern cities are almost exclusively designed to be economic engines constantly looking for solutions to problems instead of being oriented towards fostering healthy communities and communitarian aspirations. By going for the urban sprawl and, as Fouad Khan calls it, the consequential suburban alienation, the modern city organically gives rise to gender bias and class discrimination. From Khan’s essay (for Nautilus):

Like the physical boundaries it draws between commercial and residential zones, sprawl enforces the boundaries set by our roles in society. Specific times must be dedicated to specific activities such as picking up kids from school or doing groceries. The organic social interaction that a city is supposed to facilitate goes missing. Even when time is allocated for socialization as a dedicated activity, it takes the character of a chore like everything else on the calendar. When activities are spatially segregated we find our identities splitting among our various roles, never quite able to bring all of ourselves to anything. Alienation rises. Just as physical access is more restricted for women in these cities than men, the role imposition is also stricter.

(And before you know it, ‘meet spaces’ are going to become commoditised: “For $50 an hour, meet random people in a quiet, safe environment at Watr Coolr. Coffee and biscuits extra.”)

Finally, WFH is most effective when the tools necessary to ensure employees lose as little as possible as they shift out of the office and into their personal workspace are efficacious. And such efficacy is a product of excellent UI/UX, lower communication latency, affordability, access to high-quality supporting infrastructure, etc. But most important is the willingness of those within the office to use the same tools to help keep you, and others like you, in the loop.

For example, a supervisor might be okay with Skyping a WFH employee or two WFH employees might be okay with running things on WhatsApp between each other. But that’s not to say other colleagues will. I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to because using Skype is not the same thing as booting Skype. There’s a cognitive cost to booting Skype: you have to stop thinking about whatever you’re thinking about, think about Skype and then decide to use Skype. This cost only escalates the more such tasks you perform.

This is why I imagine few others would use tech when they don’t have to, thus making it harder for communication-that’s-not-about-work to survive, in effect preserving the misguided prioritisation of gainful productivity above all else. On the other hand, as Useem writes,

The power of presence has no simple explanation. It might be a manifestation of the “mere-exposure effect”: We tend to gravitate toward what’s familiar; we like people whose faces we see, even just in passing. Or maybe it’s the specific geometry of such encounters. The cost of getting someone’s attention at the coffee machine is low—you know they’re available, because they’re getting coffee—and if, mid-conversation, you see that the other person has no idea what you’re talking about, you automatically adjust.

So yeah, WFH works for some people. But it’s not a good idea to expect a company to make a decision about standardising WFH options for all employees based on empirical analyses.

Featured image credit: Ashim D’Silva/Unsplash.

Billiards. Credit: Pexels/Unsplash
Posted in Science

'Weak charge' measurement holds up SM prediction

Posted on by newyesterday

Various dark matter detectors around the world, massive particle accelerators and colliders, powerful telescopes on the ground and in space all have their distinct agendas but ultimately what unites them is humankind’s quest to understand what the hell this universe is on about. There are unanswered questions in every branch of scientific endeavour that will keep us busy for millennia to come.

Among them, physics seems to be sufferingly uniquely, as it stumbles even as we speak through a ‘nightmare scenario’: the most sensitive measurements we have made of the physical reality around us, at the largest and smallest scales, don’t agree with what physicists have been able to work out on paper. Something’s gotta give – but scientists don’t know where or how they will find their answers.

The Qweak experiment at the Jefferson Lab, Virginia, is one of scores of experiments around the world trying to find a way out of the nightmare scenario. And Qweak is doing that by studying how the rate at which electrons scatter off a proton is affected by the electrons’ polarisation (a.k.a. spin polarisation: whether the spin of each electron is “left” or “right”).

Unlike instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, which are very big, operate at much higher energies, are expensive and are used to look for new particles hiding in spacetime, Qweak and others like it make ultra-precise measurements of known values, in effect studying the effects of particles both known and unknown on natural phenomena.

And if these experiments are able to find that these values deviate at some level from that predicted by the theory, physicists will have the break they’re looking for. For example, if Qweak is the one to break new ground, then physicists will have reason to suspect that the two nuclear forces of nature, simply called strong and weak, hold some secrets.

However, Qweak’s latest – and possibly its last – results don’t break new ground. In fact, they assert that the current theory of particle physics is correct, the same theory that physicists are trying to break free of.

Most of us are familiar with protons and electrons: they’re subatomic particles, carry positive and negative charges resp., and are the stuff of one chapter of high-school physics. What students of science find out quite later is that electrons are fundamental particles – they’re not made up of smaller particles – but protons are not. Protons are made up of quarks and gluons.

Interactions between electrons and quarks/gluons is mediated by two fundamental forces: the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear. The electromagnetic force is much stronger than the aptly named weak nuclear force. On the other hand, it is agnostic to the electron’s polarisation while the weak nuclear force is sensitive to it. In fact, the weak nuclear force is known to respond differently to left- and right-handed particles.

When electrons are bombarded at protons, the electrons are scattered off. Scientists at measure how often this happens and at what angle, together with the electrons’ polarisation – and try to find correlations between the two sets of data.

An illustration showing the expected outcomes when left- and right-handed electrons, visualised as mirror-images of each other, scatter off of a proton. Credit: doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0096-0
An illustration showing the expected outcomes when left- and right-handed electrons, visualised as mirror-images of each other, scatter off of a proton. Credit: doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0096-0

At Qweak, the electrons were accelerated to 1.16 GeV and bombarded at a tank of liquid hydrogen. A detector positioned near the tank picked up on electrons scattered at angles between 5.8º and 11.6º. By finely tuning different aspects of this setup, the scientists were able to up the measurement precision to 10 parts per billion.

For example, they were able to achieve a detection rate of 7 billion per second, a target luminosity of 1.7 x 1039 cm-2 s-1 and provide a polarised beam of electrons at 180 µA – all considered high for an experiment of this kind.

The scientists were looking for patterns in the detector data that would tell them something about the proton’s weak charge: the strength with which it interacts with electrons via the weak nuclear force. (Its notation is Qweak, hence the experiment’s name.)

At Qweak, they’re doing this by studying how the electrons are scattered versus their polarisation. The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, the theory that physicists work with to understand the behaviour of elementary particles, predicts that the number of left- and right-handed electrons scattered should differ by one for every 10 million interactions. If this number is found to be bigger or smaller than usual when measured in the wild, then the Standard Model will be in trouble – much to physicists’ delight.

SM’s corresponding value for the proton’s weak charge is 0.0708. At Qweak, the value was measured to be 0.0719 ± 0.0045, i.e. between 0.0674 and 0.0764, completely agreeing with the SM prediction. Something’s gotta give – but it’s not going to be the proton’s weak charge for now.

Paper: Precision measurement of the weak charge of the proton

Featured image credit: Pexels/Unsplash.

Credit: Alice Donovan Rouse/Unsplash
Posted in Op-eds

Sexual harassment, etc.

Posted on by newyesterday

The name of Sadanand Menon had found mention in Raya Sarkar’s list last year. Since then, a journalist and former student of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) had published an article in The News Minute about how a noted scholar and culture critic had sexually harassed her. Though she hadn’t mentioned Menon by name at the time, his identity was revealed recently when the journalist’s complaint to the ICC at the ACJ, where Menon teaches, was dismissed.

Sashi Kumar, the college’s director, had said the accusation couldn’t be examined by college authorities because the alleged incident had happened after the journalist had graduated from ACJ and outside the ACJ campus. However, she, her supporters and many allies of the #metoo movement in India have been urging ACJ to conduct an investigation on moral grounds, saying, among other things, that it’s the college’s responsibility to provide a safe space for its students.

Earlier this week, a group of teachers, artists, activists and other people signed and released a letter in the public domain refuting allegations of moral corruption after theatre artistes had convened in Spaces, a space for non-mainstream artistic and cultural events maintained by Menon in Chennai, to discuss redressal mechanisms after one of their peers had been accused of sexual harassment.

The question of whether we can, or should, separate the artist from his art has always bothered me. After witnessing a brief but striking exchange on Twitter between astrophysicist Katie Mack and theoretical physicist Tommaso Dorigo, I was able to decide that the production and consumption of art, or science, enabled misogynist attitudes to survive in creative industries; that good art shouldn’t be an excuse to put up with unprincipled people.

Of course, this places us on a slippery slope. We may have decided to shun the work of people we know are morally corrupt; what about those creators whose work we enjoy but about whose inner lives we know very little? Second: everyone is flawed; does this mean we just don’t consume any art anymore?

§

Xan Brooks in The Guardian, November 2017:

I’d love to follow [Peggy] Drexler’s advice. Keep the art clean and pure, exempt from the actions of its creator. I’m just not convinced it quite works in practice. If we accept that “bad” (subjective moral judgment) people can create “good” (subjective aesthetic judgment) art, then it follows that amoral artists can hold the world to a higher moral standard than they follow themselves. But isn’t art also an extension of the artist’s inner self? How does one begin separating the two? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” as Yeats put it – though ought we still to quote Yeats, what with all that fascist-sympathising? If so, here’s another: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” …

For years I thrilled to the notion of the wild, outlaw artist. I thought of great, personal film-making as something torn from the heart, or a form of self-therapy. It was the process by which flawed, stumbling individuals could harness their demons and spin their basest matter into gold. That sounds wonderfully romantic. It may also be bullshit. Because what if it’s not that at all? How about, instead of harnessing the demons, the artistic process is a means of feeding the demons, of indulging them? Then the film is a fig leaf; even a by-product of abuse.

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Stray thought: It feels so much harder to navigate towards a solution in the non-technical sciences. Can think of three reasons: the lack of a fixed framework in which to ‘solve’ problems, the sheer number of ‘solutions’ that are required according to context, and the possibility that the tendency towards ‘solution’ as such might be unique to the technical sciences. And I think getting used to the last of the three reasons is where the pain lies.

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Of all places, I found on Scott Aaronson’s blog the perfect articulation of some feelings related to my sexual identity, particularly relating to how males privileged by their nerdiness are not entirely without suffering. Specifically, it’s comment #171 below a blog post published in 2014, by Aaronson himself. Excerpt:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how.

You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

Contrary to what many people claimed, I do not mean to suggest here that anti-harassment workshops or reading feminist literature were the sole or even primary cause of my problems. They were certainly factors, but I mentioned them to illustrate a much broader issue, which was the clash between my inborn personality and the social norms of the modern world—norms that require males to make romantic and sexual advances, but then give them no way to do so without running the risk of being ‘bad people.’ Of course these norms will be the more paralyzing, the more one cares about not being a ‘bad person.’

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Of course, such suffering does not legitimise the privilege men like me have because it doesn’t live and die in our teenage years. It’s something we need to know is there, is all; beyond that, there’s still the patriarchy to face down. Laurie Penny spelled it out best in the New Statesman: that nerdy boys get out of their suffering into a world that respects them; nerdy girls get out of their suffering into a world of sexism. Feminism is a stand against every step of this painful journey, not just the one that keeps nerdy boys nervous about what to do next.

Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because whilst we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation for, a craving for of a sexual freedom that our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us for. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only done the one thing they had spent their own formative years been shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

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Yes, a rubric about ‘what to do’ alongside ‘what not to do’ would be fantastic, but I think we need to figure that shit out for ourselves. Simultaneously, everyone needs to keep telling the world stories of what we – men, women and others – did and didn’t do to help it cope.

Featured image credit: Alice Donovan Rouse/Unsplash.

Credit: Free-Photos/pixabay
Posted in Life notes

The technically correct strapline

Posted on by newyesterday

(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye:

Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.

Makes you go “Wow”, doesn’t it? But then you read the article and realise the strap is not entirely right. Lichens are still symbiotic unions of fungi and algae; the new finding is that there are two types of fungi involved, not one. You realise it’s the sort of blurb that only a pedantic biologist might be able to defend, or the sort of blurb most readers could be expected to gloss over because the article’s author is Ed Yong.

I would never have used this strapline to describe the story. Instead, here’s the one we did use for Nandita Jayaraj’s story on the same topic:

Lichens are the most famous and successful examples of symbiosis on Earth, but an unexpected discovery of a third player in this composite organism has given their study a much needed jolt.

As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, says,

… the strapline (or deck) together with the headline makes the sales pitch to the reader for her time. The headline is often the sole bit of metadata that will be most visible on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and is the one that’ll be most commonly shared (my guess). This way, the headline makes the all-important elevator pitch to bring the reader off of her platform and onto our site. Once she’s here, the strapline makes a more extended pitch to get her to start reading the body.

For curiosity gap headlines, the strapline often heightens the curiosity instead of fulfilling it. This is also true in the Ed Yong article: the headline makes you wonder what bit of biology was overturned; the strapline takes over from there, focuses your imagination into the niche, and still keeps you wondering (not necessarily about the same thing). The question here to me is whether it’s okay to be only technically right in the strapline because it’s still part of the inverted pyramid, where you can get away with making generalisations at the top as you funnel the reader’s curiosity into more specific niches below.

As a prolific consumer of science writing both fab and crap, The Atlantic‘s strap is not good enough for me; it’s a letdown. While Yong does a typically good job of dramatising the reveal, it pales in comparison to what the strap seemed to suggest. Such a description would be par for the course on, say, the Times of India, but I would expect much better from The Atlantic. It often feels like the smaller publishers are held to higher standards than the bigger ones, and in this sense The Atlantic certainly towers over The Wire.

Featured image credit: Free-Photos/pixabay.

Featured image: The Lich King from World of Warcraft. Source: YouTube
Posted in Life notes

Reminiscing about 'World of Warcraft'

Posted on by newyesterday

I got into fantasy because my reality growing up was no good. The first videogame I played and really enjoyed, almost to the point of obsessing over it every available second, was Command & Conquer’s Red Alert 2. I believe many players of the game will agree it was one of the best games of its genre – 2.5D military strategy – ever made, even to this day, over 20 years after it was first released. In fact, _Red Alert_ 3, which features better graphics and more detailed gameplay, is widely considered to have missed the allure of its king-sized predecessor.

However, RA2 is not the game I continue to obsess about in 2018, over a decade after having first played it. That (dubious) distinction belongs to Warcraft, especially World of Warcraft (the MMORPG). I’ve played a good bit of WoW (but not so much of Defence of the Ancients, the multiplayer arena), and what keeps drawing me to it is the expansive lore underlying the game’s structure, gameplay and expansion since it was first released in 2004. I wouldn’t be so foolish to claim I’m the greatest fan of the world of Azeroth, where the game’s story is set, if only because this world has so many fans.

To the uninitiated: There are three main factions at play through the entire series – the Horde, the Alliance and the Burning Legion. The Horde and the Alliance are two factions that are native to Azeroth and are frequently fighting with each other. The Burning Legion is an army of demons led by Sargeras, a fallen titan, and a mantle of dreadlords; it wants to extinguish all life in the universe. When the Legion comes to Azeroth, the Horde and the Alliance must put aside their conflicts and protect their world from the demonic forces.

This very simple and emimently trope-filled story has been shaped quite smartly in the last two and half decades, although Blizzard, the game’s maker, has occasionally taken its audience for granted. For those who want to know more about the lore, the WoW Wiki is a fantastic resource. There’s no one way to enter its network of stories and motivations because it has become so labyrinthine over the years. Even the chronological order won’t do because there is a lot of back and forth between multiple plotlines. On the plus side, you can start anywhere and just keep jumping from page to page.

Fortunately for newcomers, the cinematic trailers Blizzard has produced to introduce each expansion of the game to players can serve like a table of contents. After WoW was first released, there have been seven expansions for a total of eight trailers. The production quality on each of these trailers is very high. The animation is slick, the storytelling is tight but, most of all, each trailer does a stellar job of setting the mood for what’s to come. (Gamers may or may not internalise this mood but as an aspiring lore-master, I certainly do.)

The trailers are:

1. World of Warcraft Introduces the basic races and the world of Azeroth

2. Burning Crusade Introduction to Illidan Stormrage, one of the more interesting actors in the lore, fitting the “misunderstood pseudo-bad guy willing to do anything to protect the good guys” trope. This is also the first time WoW fans hear his famous line, “You are not prepared!”

3. Wrath of the Lich King [My favourite trailer] Shows Arthas Menethil merging with the Lich King as the former awakens from the Frozen Throne, the power of his sword Frostmourne, and suggests his soon-to-begin quest to be king of Lordaeron (where Arthas was earlier a lawful-good prince).

Aside: Illidan and Arthas have similar stories: both of them loved their homes dearly and went to great lengths to protect it, ultimately sacrificing themselves. However, this expansion depicted Arthas as being more powerful than Illidan, an idea I could never get behind because Illidan had a more mature vision of the future and his role in it, always seemed to be more aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and was always fighting for a greater goal.

4. Cataclysm This is when Blizzard was going nowhere with the plot and fans were growing frustrated. So the makers drastically reshaped Azeroth by having an ancient and powerful dragon break free from its prison deep in the world, flying to the world on the surface and setting the skies on fire.

5. Mists of Pandaria [My least favourite trailer] An orc and a human warrior are shipwrecked on a seemingly unexplored island. As they begin to fight each other, they are interrupted by a mysterious, quick-footed, mist-cloaked fighter wielding a long bamboo stick. As he bests them both and pushes them back every time they engage, the human and the orc team up against what is soon revealed to be… a panda. All this time, the panda – rather, pandaren – has been talking in the voiceover in a Chinese accent about how their goal is to “preserve balance and bring harmony”. *retch*

6. Warlords of Draenor Jumps back 35 years to reveal how the dreadlords’ scheme to enslave the orcs came undone. This section was not very well-received because it was an alternative timeline that changed the story of Gul’dan, one of the primary orcish antagonists of the series, in ways that made him seem less complicated as a villain than he was in the Warcraft (the video game, not the MMORPG) timeline. His arc also continued into the next expansion, Legion.

7. Legion Varian Wrynn and Sylvanas Windrunner fight together against the Burning Legion, which is now trying to open the Tomb of Sargeras and bring its supreme leader into the world. The trailer has some funny scenes (such as Varian striking a heroic pose as he jumps out of the water and takes on fel-beasts while the viewer realises the water had to have been only about two feet deep there). It also doesn’t spell out the expansion’s full story, which has many twists.

8. Battle for Azeroth Like Star Wars, WoW comes a full circle with this expansion, taking a break from the inventive turns of its predecessors and reintroducing an old conflict in an attempt to put the franchise on familiar, stable ground: the Alliance and the Horde are at each other’s throats again. Sylvanas and Varian’s son Anduin are seen fighting on opposite sides.

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I’m not fond of the trailers apart from the one for the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ because they seem to display many of the stereotypes of our reality, and which fantasy is usually expected to defy. For example, though Azeroth’s technology may indicate its society is similar to that in medieval England, there’s no reason the humans – rather the Alliance – should eventually be led by a white man (Anduin Wrynn) carrying a sword that draws its authority from the heavens. In fact, a significant portion of the non-white races in WoW are cast as evil or misguided.

For another example, almost all the violence in the game – and the consequent disruption of natural order, whether of history or of place – is led by male fighters. The sole major exception to this was Queen Azshara’s betrayal that first invited the Burning Legion to Azeroth. On the flip-side, the restoration of order meant the restoration of a monarchy, typically led by a king (not queen). Again, the sole major exception was Sylvanas’s anointment as warchief of the Horde by Vol’jin, that too only because the spirits had asked him to. Azeroth may be an imperfect world but it didn’t have to be so in ways so closely mirroring reality.

I never got into playing WoW as much as I did reading about it. My two roommates in senior year of college would play it almost 24/7, getting up only to go to the bathroom. I played a little bit after college but couldn’t take to it. The gameplay is rich, complex, offering each player multiple ways to accrue resources, assimilate them and develop their characters. Although teamwork is mandatory to complete WoW’s bigger in-game tasks, players have been able to find a formulaic way of doing things after running through each task repeatedly, perfecting their sequence of actions until they’ve found perfection.

I miss those days from time to time, when Warcraft lore was all that passed as conversation between friends.

Featured image: The Lich King from World of Warcraft. Source: YouTube.

Credit: Andrew Stutesman/Unsplash
Posted in Scicomm

Something worse than a flat-Earth society

Posted on by newyesterday

Read two interesting articles this morning:

1. An editorial in the Indian Express about how India is the “land of the gullible”, where even the “mere trappings of science suffice to tantalise” people into believing BS and coughing up fortunes for snake oil.

2. An article in The Conversation about where flat-Earthers draw their sense of purpose from: the separation of science from scientific institutions. It’s a fascinating analysis of the ‘knowledge is power’ social paradigm, how 21st century ICT is destabilising it and unto what consequences.

The typical Indian experience (of public scientific temperament) relates to both texts. In a country where two people can borrow Rs 1.43 crore to build a machine that purportedly generates electricity from thunderbolts in space (and which for some reason is called a “rice puller”), it’s a sign that laypeople’s idea of what constitutes science has already been separated from that practised at scientific institutions.

The non-admission of traditional knowledge into the modern scientific method has meant that many Indians have – by way of traditional practices and rituals – already constructed a parallel scientific tradition that accrued power in time, just the way the Baconian tradition has. These ‘alternatives’ are both credible – like environmentalism*, yoga, philosophy*, etc. – and incredible – such as astrology*, ayurveda, unani, etc.

However, because many of us have become “used” to the idea that science needn’t be the exclusive preserve of scientists, we’re also not surprised when we encounter it outside of scientific institutions. To most people who believe in the curative power of these alternatives, for example, science rests with scientists as much as with those who are well-versed in the body of knowledge that birthed the alternatives. And it’s important to single out the Indian experience because, in a manner of speaking, we’ve currently got it worse than flat-Earth societies.

Now, some people will pipe up and say “not all of us are irrational” but that would miss the point entirely – just the way ‘not all men’ is no credible defence against feminists’ generalisation of male behaviour. It’s not individual complicity that matters but society’s inculcation of opportunities for many of us to get away with whatever we’ve done that does.

The modern scientific method delegitimised a lot of traditional knowledge, especially sidelining astrology and homeopathy and exiling those who were authorities in those fields to the fringe – just the way flat-Earthers of yore had been disenfranchised by 20th century institutions powered by political distrust, war and espionage. Now, with rising internet penetration and access to the social media, flat-Earthers are interrogating what scientists have claimed is the truth.

But in India, especially among Hindutva ‘scholars’, we’ve been witnessing the opposite: ex-masters not interrogating the methods of knowledge production that threaten their authority but simply trying to undermine them. (E.g. “the Vedas already knew this 3,000 years ago so you’re dumb”.) This to me is eminently worse than what flat-Earthers are trying to do; their industry at least suggests an attempt at disceptation, as opposed to an impulse to completely shut out the opposite side. As Harry Dyer, the author of the article, writes,

… four flat earthers debated three physics PhD students [at the convention Dyer was attending]. A particular point of contention occurred when one of the physicists pleaded with the audience to avoid trusting YouTube and bloggers. The audience and the panel of flat earthers took exception to this, noting that “now we’ve got the internet and mass communication … we’re not reliant on what the mainstream are telling us in newspapers, we can decide for ourselves”.

… Flat earthers were encouraged to trust “poetry, freedom, passion, vividness, creativity, and yearning” over the more clinical regurgitation of established theories and facts. Attendees were told that “hope changes everything”, and warned against blindly trusting what they were told.

On the other hand, ‘blindly trusting what we’re told’ rings a bell on our side of the world, or at least that yet more charlatans lie in the wait to dupe us. As the Indian Express editorial finishes,

Remember [Ramar Pillai,] who cooked up hydrocarbons from herbal messes by the simple expedient of secreting some fuel in the stirrer? He had a bull run with the press, and even some scientists were prepared to look seriously at a man who was claiming to violate all the laws of thermodynamics. Fortunately, the “rice puller” has been stopped in its tracks before it could become a craze. But we won’t have to wait too long before the spirit of Ramar Pillai rises again.

I’m sure there’s more to be said on this subject, will continue in future posts…

*Indian traditions of it, specifically.

Featured image credit: Andrew Stutesman/Unsplash.