Metastable

English as the currency of science's practice

Posted on November 29, 2017 by newyesterday

K. VijayRaghavan, the secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology, has written a good piece in Hindustan Times about how India must shed its “intellectual colonialism” to excel at science and tech – particularly by shedding its obsession with the English language. This, as you might notice, parallels a post I wrote recently about how English plays an overbearing role in our lives, and particularly in the lives of scientists, because it remains a language many Indians don’t have to access to get through their days. Having worked closely with the government in drafting and implementing many policies related to the conduct and funding of scientific research in the country, VijayRaghavan is able to take a more fine-grained look at what needs changing and whether that’s possible. Most hearteningly, he says it is – only if we had the will to change. As he writes:

Currently, the bulk of our college education in science and technology is notionally in English whereas the bulk of our high-school education is in the local language. Science courses in college are thus accessible largely to the urban population and even when this happens, education is effectively neither of quality in English nor communicated as translations of quality in the classroom. Starting with the Kendriya Vidyalayas and the Nayodya Vidyalayas as test-arenas, we can ensure the training of teachers so that students in high-school are simultaneously taught in both their native language and in English. This already happens informally, but it needs formalisation. The student should be free to take exams in either language or indeed use a free-flowing mix. This approach should be steadily ramped up and used in all our best educational institutions in college and then scaled to be used more widely. Public and private colleges, in STEM subjects for example, can lead and make bi-lingual professional education attractive and economically viable.

Apart from helping students become more knowledgeable about the world through a language of their choice (for the execution of which many logistical barriers spring to mind, not the least of which is finding teachers), it’s also important to fund academic journals that allow these students to express their research in their language of choice. Without this component, they will be forced to fallback to the use of English, which is bound to be counterproductive to the whole enterprise. This form of change will require material resources as well as a shift in perspective that could be harder to attain. Additionally, as VijayRaghavan mentions, there also need to be good quality translation services for research in one language to be expressed in another so that cross-disciplinary and/or cross-linguistic tie-ups are not hampered.

Featured image credit: skeeze/pixabay.

Science

Why Titan is awesome #10

Posted on November 27, 2017 by newyesterday

Titaaaaan!

How much I’ve missed writing these posts since Cassini passed away. Unsurprisingly, it’s after the probe’s demise that we’ve really begun to realise how much of Cassini’s images and data we were consuming on a daily basis, all of which is gone. There’s no more the steady stream of visuals of Saturn’s rings, bands, storms and panoply of moons – in fact all of which have been replaced by Jupiter’s rings, bands, storms and panoply of moons thanks to Juno. Nonetheless, one entire area of the Solar System has been darkened in my imagination. Until the next full mission to the Saturnian system (although nothing of the kind is in the works), we’ll have to make do with what Cassini data trickles down through NASA’s and ESA’s data-processing sieves.

One such is a new study about the temperature of the air high above Titan’s poles. Before Cassini’s death-dive into Saturn, the probe spent some time studying the moon’s polar atmosphere. Researchers from the University of Bristol who obtained this data noticed something odd: the part of the atmosphere over Titan’s poles began to develop a warm spot over late 2009 but that by 2012, it had become a ‘cold spot’. By 2015, the temperature at about 550 km above had dropped to 120 K (that’s a little below the temperature at which supercooled water turns into a glass).

On Earth, a warm spot forms over the poles because of two principle reasons: how Earth’s wind circulates around the planet and because of the presence of carbon dioxide. During winter, air over the corresponding hemispheric pole sinks down, becomes compressed and heats up. Moreover, the carbon dioxide present in the air also emits the heat it has trapped in its chemical bonds.

In 2012, astronomers using Cassini data had found that Titan also exhibits a wind circulation process that is moon-wide. It can be understood as Titan having two atmospheres, or layers, one on top of the other. In the lower atmosphere, there are three Hadley cells; each cell represents a distinct air circulation system wherein air rises up for 10 km or so from near the equator, moves up/down towards subtropical regions, sinks back down and returns to the equator along the surface. In the second, upper atmosphere, air moves between the two poles directly in a unified, global Hadley cell.

Titan_south polar vortex

Now, remember that Titan’s distance from the Sun means that one Titan-year is 29.5 Earth-years, that each Titanic season lasts over seven Earth-years and that seasonal shifts are much slower on the moon as a result. However, in 2012, scientists studying Cassini data found that the rate at which the air over one of Titan’s poles was sinking into the pole – like the air does on Earth – was happening really quickly: according to Nick Teanby, a researcher at the University of Bristol and also the lead author of the latest study, the rate of subsidence increased from 0.5 mm/s in January 2010 to 1.5 mm/s in June 2010. In other words, it was a shift that, unlike the moon’s seasons, happened rapidly (in just 12 Titanic days).

The same study concluded that Titan’s atmosphere was thicker than previously thought because trace gases like ethane, hydrogen cyanide, acetylene and cyanoacetylene were found to be produced at an altitude of over 500 km over the poles thanks to photochemical reactions induced by ultraviolet radiation and high-energy electrons streaming in from the Sun. These gases would then subside into the lower atmosphere over the polar region – which brings us to the latest study. It says that, unlike what carbon dioxide warming Earth’s atmosphere, the (once) trace gases actually cool the atmosphere, resulting in the dreadfully cold spot over Titan’s poles. They also participate in the upper Hadley cell circulation.

This is similar to a unique phenomenon observed over Saturn’s south pole in 2005.

Changes in trace gas abundances over Titan's south pole. Credit: ESA — Changes in trace gas abundances over Titan’s south pole. Credit: ESA

What a beauty you are, Titan. And I miss you, Cassini, more than I miss many other things in life.

~~I couldn’t find a link to the paper of the latest study; here’s the press release.~~ Update: link to paper.

Links to previous editions:

Featured image: Cassini’s last shot of Titan, taken with the probe’s narrow-angle camera on September 13, 2017. Credit: NASA.

Science

What it takes to wash a strainer: soap, water and some wave optics

Posted on November 19, 2017 by newyesterday

When I stay over at a friend’s place whenever I come to Delhi, I try to help around the house. But more often than not, I just do the dishes – often a lot of dishes. One item I’ve always had trouble cleaning is the strainer, whether a small tea strainer or a large but fine sieve, because I can never tell if the multicoloured sheen I’m seeing on the wires is a patch of oil, liquid soap or something else. The fundamental problem is that these items are susceptible to the quirks of the wave of nature of light, as a result of which their surfaces display an effect called goniochromism, also known as iridescence.

At first (and over 12 years after high school), I suspected the wires on the sieve were acting as a diffraction grating. This is a structure that has a series of fine and closely spaced ridges on the surface. When a wave of light strikes this surface, the ridges scatter different parts of the wave in different directions. When these waves interact with each other on the other side, they interfere with each other constructively or destructively. A constructive interference produces a brighter band of colour; a destructive interference produces a darker band. How the wave becomes scattered is a function of its frequency: the lower the frequency (or redder the colour), the more the wave is bent around a grating.

As a result, white and continuous light appears to breakdown into its constituent colours when passed through a diffraction grating. But it must be noted that a useful diffraction grating used in a visible-light experiment has something like 4,000-6,000 ridges every centimetre. The width of each ridge has to be of comparable size to the wavelength of visible light because only then can it scatter that portion of light. On the other hand, the sieve I was holding appeared to have only 6-8 ridges every centimetre, so the structure itself couldn’t have been what was effecting the sheen.

Goniochromism, or iridescence, is caused when two transparent or semi-transparent films – like liquid soap atop water – reflect the incident light multiple times. In fact, this is one type of iridescence, called thin-film interference. Here, imagine a thin layer of soap on the surface of a thin layer of water, itself sitting on the surface of a vessel you’re cleaning. (With a strainer, the water-soap liquid forms meniscuses between the wires.) When white light strikes the soap layer, some of it is reflected our and some is transmitted. The transmitted portion than strikes the surface of the water layer: some of it is sent through while the rest is reflected back out.

When the light reflected by each of the two layers interact, their respective waves can interfere either constructively or destructively. Depending on the angle at which you’re viewing the vessel, bright and dark bands of light will be visible. Additionally, the thickness of the soap film also decides which frequencies are intensified and which become subdued in this process. The total effect is for you to see rainbow-esque pattern of undulating brightness on the vessel.

So herein lies the rub. Either effect, although the second more than the first, produces what effectively looks like an oily sheen on the strainer in my hand no matter how many times I scrub it with soap and run it under the water. And ultimately, I end up doing a very thorough job of it if there was no oil on the strainer to begin with – or a very bad one if there was oil on it but I’ve let it be assuming it’s soap residue. It’s a toss-up… so I think I’ll just follow my friend C.S.R.S’s words: “Just rub it a few times and leave it.”

Featured image credit: Lumix/pixabay.

Scicomm, Science

Onto drafting the gravitational history of the universe

Posted on November 16, 2017 by newyesterday

It’s finally happening. As the world turns, as our little lives wear on, gravitational wave detectors quietly eavesdrop on secrets whispered by colliding blackholes and neutron stars in distant reaches of the cosmos, no big deal. It’s going to be just another day.

On November 15, the LIGO scientific collaboration confirmed the detection of the fifth set of gravitational waves, made originally on June 8, 2017, but announced only now. These waves were released by two blackholes of 12 and seven solar masses that collided about a billion lightyears away – a.k.a. about a billion years ago. The combined blackhole weighed 18 solar masses, so one solar mass’s worth of energy had been released in the form of gravitational waves.

The announcement was delayed because the LIGO teams had to work on processing two other, more spectacular detections. One of them involved the VIRGO detector in Italy for the first time; the second was the detection of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars.

Even though the June 8 is run o’ the mill by now, it is unique because it stands for the blackholes of lowest mass eavesdropped on thus far by the twin LIGO detectors.

LIGO’s significance as a scientific experiment lies in the fact that it can detect collisions of blackholes with other blackholes. Because these objects don’t let any kind of radiation escape their prodigious gravitational pulls, their collisions don’t release any electromagnetic energy. As a result, conventional telescopes that work by detecting such radiation are blind to them. LIGO, however, detects gravitational waves emitted by the blackholes as they collide. Whereas electromagnetic radiation moves over the surface of the spacetime continuum and are thus susceptible to being trapped in blackholes, gravitational waves are ripples of the continuum itself and can escape from blackholes.

Processes involving blackholes of a lower mass have been detected by conventional telescopes because these processes typically involve a light blackhole (5-20 solar masses) and a second object that is not a blackhole but instead usually a star. Mass emitted by the star is siphoned into the blackhole, and this movement releases X-rays that can be spotted by space telescopes like NASA Chandra.

So LIGO’s June 8 detection is unique because it signals a collision involving two light blackholes, until now the demesne of conventional astronomy alone. This also means that multi-messenger astronomy can join in on the fun should LIGO detect a collision of a star and a blackhole in the future. Multi-messenger astronomy is astronomy that uses up to four ‘messengers’, or channels of information, to study a single event. These channels are electromagnetic, gravitational, neutrino and cosmic rays.

The masses of stellar remnants are measured in many different ways. This graphic shows the masses for black holes detected through electromagnetic observations (purple); the black holes measured by gravitational-wave observations (blue); neutron stars measured with electromagnetic observations (yellow); and the masses of the neutron stars that merged in an event called GW170817, which were detected in gravitational waves (orange). GW170608 is the lowest mass of the LIGO/Virgo black holes shown in blue. The vertical lines represent the error bars on the measured masses. Credit: LIGO-Virgo/Frank Elavsky/Northwestern

The detection also signals that LIGO is sensitive to such low-mass events. The three other sets of gravitational waves LIGO has observed involved black holes of masses ranging from 20-25 solar masses to 60-65 solar masses. The previous record-holder for lowest mass collision was a detection made in December 2015, of two colliding blackholes weighing 14.2 and 7.5 solar masses.

One of the bigger reasons astronomy is fascinating is its ability to reveal so much about a source of radiation trillions of kilometres away using very little information. The same is true of the June 8 detection. According to the LIGO scientific collaboration’s assessment,

When massive stars reach the end of their lives, they lose large amounts of their mass due to stellar winds – flows of gas driven by the pressure of the star’s own radiation. The more ‘heavy’ elements like carbon and nitrogen that a star contains, the more mass it will lose before collapsing to form a black hole. So, the stars which produced GW170608’s [the official designation of the detection] black holes could have contained relatively large amounts of these elements, compared to the stellar progenitors of more massive black holes such as those observed in the GW150914 merger. … The overall amplitude of the signal allows the distance to the black holes to be estimated as 340 megaparsec, or 1.1 billion light years.

The circumstances of the discovery are also interesting. Quoting at length from a LIGO press release:

A month before this detection, LIGO paused its second observation run to open the vacuum systems at both sites and perform maintenance. While researchers at LIGO Livingston, in Louisiana, completed their maintenance and were ready to observe again after about two weeks, LIGO Hanford, in Washington, encountered additional problems that delayed its return to observing.

On the afternoon of June 7 (PDT), LIGO Hanford was finally able to stay online reliably and staff were making final preparations to once again “listen” for incoming gravitational waves. As part of these preparations, the team at Hanford was making routine adjustments to reduce the level of noise in the gravitational-wave data caused by angular motion of the main mirrors. To disentangle how much this angular motion affected the data, scientists shook the mirrors very slightly at specific frequencies. A few minutes into this procedure, GW170608 passed through Hanford’s interferometer, reaching Louisiana about 7 milliseconds later.

LIGO Livingston quickly reported the possible detection, but since Hanford’s detector was being worked on, its automated detection system was not engaged. While the procedure being performed affected LIGO Hanford’s ability to automatically analyse incoming data, it did not prevent LIGO Hanford from detecting gravitational waves. The procedure only affected a narrow frequency range, so LIGO researchers, having learned of the detection in Louisiana, were still able to look for and find the waves in the data after excluding those frequencies.

But what I’m most excited about is the quiet announcement. All of the gravitational wave detection announcements before this were accompanied by an embargo, lots of hype building up, press releases from various groups associated with the data analysis, and of course reporters scrambling under the radar to get their stories ready. There was none of that this time. This time, the LIGO scientific collaboration published their press release with links to the raw data and the preprint paper (submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters) on November 15. I found out about it when I stumbled upon a tweet from Sean Carroll.

And this is how it’s going to be, too. In the near future, the detectors – LIGO, VIRGO, etc. – are going to be gathering data in the background of our lives, like just another telescope doing its job. The detections are going to stop being a big deal: we know LIGO works the way it should. Fortunately for it, some of its more spectacular detections (colliding intermediary-mass blackholes and colliding neutron stars) were also made early in its life. What we can all look forward to now is reports of first-order derivatives from LIGO data.

In other words, we can stop focusing on Einstein’s theories of relativity (long overdue) and move on to what multiple gravitational wave detections can tell us about things we still don’t know. We can mine patterns out of the data, chart their variation across space, time and their sources, and begin the arduous task of drafting the gravitational history of the universe.

Featured image credit: Lovesevenforty/pixabay.

Life notes, Scicomm

The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'

Posted on November 9, 2017 by newyesterday

Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhythm. The paper is utter bullshit. Sample its breathless title: ‘Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm) is On Fiction as There Is No Molecular Mechanisms of Biological Clock Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Circadian Rhythm Is Triggered and Controlled By Divine Mechanism (CCP – Time Mindness (TM) Real Biological Clock) in Life Sciences’.

The use of language here is interesting. Retraction Watch called the paper ‘unreadable’ in the headline of its post because that’s obviously a standout feature of this paper. I’m not sure why Retraction Watch is highlighting nonsense papers on its pages – watched by thousands every day for intriguing retraction reports informed by the reporting of its staff – but I’m going to assume its editors want to help all their readers set up their own bullshit filters. And the best way to do this, as I’ve written before, is to invite readers to participate in understanding why something is bullshit.

However, to what extent do we think unreadability is a bullshit indicator? And from whose perspective?

There’s no exonerating the ‘time mindness’ paper because those who get beyond the language are able to see that it’s simply not even wrong. But if you had judged it only by its language, you would’ve landed yourself in murky waters. In fact, no paper should be judged by how it exercises the grammar of the language its authors have decided to write it in. Two reasons:

1. English is not the first language for most of India. Those who’ve been able to afford an English-centred education growing up or hail from English-fluent families (or both) are fine with the language but I remember most of my college professors preferring Hindi in the classroom. And I assume that’s the picture in most universities, colleges and schools around the country. You only need access to English if you’ve also had the opportunity to afford a certain lifestyle (cosmopolitan, e.g.).

2. There are not enough good journals publishing in vernacular languages in India – at least not that I know of. The ‘best’ is automatically the one in English, among other factors. Even the government thinks so. Earlier this year, the University Grants Commission published a ‘preferred’ list of journals; only papers published herein were to be considered for career advancement evaluations. The list left out most major local-language publications.

Now, imagine the scientific vocabulary of a researcher who prefers Hindi over English, for example, because of her educational upbringing as well as to teach within the classroom. Wouldn’t it be composed of Latin and English jargon suspended from Hindi adjectives and verbs, a web of Hindi-speaking sensibilities straining to sound like a scientist? Oh, that recalls a third issue:

3. Scientific papers are becoming increasingly hard to read, with many scientists choosing to actively include words they wouldn’t use around the dinner table because they like how the ‘sciencese’ sounds. In time, to write like this becomes fashionable – and to not write like this becomes a sign of complacency, disinterest or disingenuousness.

… to the mounting detriment of those who are not familiar with even colloquial English in the first place. To sum up: if a paper shows other, more ‘proper’ signs of bullshit, then it is bullshit no matter how much its author struggled to write it. On the other hand, a paper can’t be suspected of badness if its language is off – nor can it be called bad as such if that’s all is off about it.

This post was composed entirely on a smartphone. Please excuse typos or minor formatting issues.

Life notes

The blog and the social media

Posted on November 8, 2017 by newyesterday

Because The Wire had signed up to be some kind of A-listed publisher with Facebook, The Wire‘s staff was required to create Facebook Pages under each writer/editor’s name. So I created the ‘Vasudevan Mukunth’ page. Then, about 10 days ago, Facebook began to promote my page on the platform, running ads for it that would appear on people’s timelines across the network. The result is that my page now has almost as many likes as The Wire English’s Facebook Page: 320,000+. Apart from sharing my pieces from The Wire, I now use the page to share my blog posts as well. Woot!

Action on Twitter hasn’t far behind either. I’ve had a verified account on the microblogging platform for a few months now. And this morning, Twitter rolled out the expanded tweet character limit (from 140 to 280) to everyone. For someone to whom 140 characters was a liberating experience – a mechanical hurdle imposed on running your mouth and forcing you to think things through (though many choose not to) – the 280-char limit is even more so.

How exactly? An interesting implication discussed in this blog post by Twitter is that allowing people to think 280 characters at a time allowed them to be less anxious about how they were going to compose their tweets. The number of tweets hitting the character limit dropped from 9% during the 140-char era to 1% in the newly begun 280-char era. At the same time, people have continued to tweet within the 140-char most of the time. So fewer tweets were being extensively reworked or abandoned because people no longer composed them with the anxiety of staying within a smaller character limit.

But here’s the problem: most of my blog’s engagement had already been happening on the social media. As soon as I published a post, WordPress’s Jetpack plugin would send an email to 4brane’s 3,600+ subscribers with the full post, post the headline + link on Twitter and the headline + blurb + image + link on Facebook. Readers would reply to the tweet, threading their responses if they had to, and drop comments on Facebook. But on the other hand, the number of emails I’ve been receiving from my subscribers has been dropping drastically, as has the number of comments on posts.

I remember my blogging habit having taken a hit when I’d decided to become more active on Twitter because I no longer bore, fermented and composed my thoughts at length, with nuance. Instead, I dropped them as tweets as and when they arose, often with no filter, building it out through conversations with my followers. The 280-char limit now looks set to ‘scale up’ this disruption by allowing people to be more free and encouraging them to explore more complex ideas, aided by how (and how well, I begrudgingly admit) Twitter displays tweet-threads.

Perhaps – rather hopefully – the anxiety that gripped people when they were composing 140-char tweets will soon grip them as they’re composing 280-char tweets as well. I somehow doubt 420-char tweets will be a thing; that would make the platform non-Twitter-like. And hopefully the other advantages of having a blog, apart from the now-lost ‘let’s have a conversation’ part, such as organising information in different ways unlike Twitter’s sole time-based option, will continue to remain relevant.

Featured image credit: LoboStudioHamburg/pixabay.

Science

Awk CZTI result from Crab pulsar

Posted on November 7, 2017 by newyesterday

An instrument onboard the ISRO Astrosat space-telescope has studied how X-rays being emitted by the Crab pulsar are being polarised, and how such polarisation varies from one pulse to the next. This is very important information for understanding how pulsars create and emit high-energy radiation – information that we haven’t been able to obtain from any other pulsars in the known universe. The underpinning study was published in Nature Astronomy on November 6, 2017.

Quick recap: CZTI stands for the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager, a 16-MP X-ray camera and, as The Wire has discussed before, one of the best in its class – in the league of the NASA Fermi and Swift detectors and even better in the 80-250 keV range. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit focused beams of high-energy radiation from two polar locations on their surface. (As it rotates, the beams sweep past Earth like a lighthouse sweeping past ships, giving the impression that it’s blinking, or pulsating). We study them because they’re extreme environments that can help validate theories by pushing them to their limits.

There are two things notable about the current study: how CZTI studied the pulsar and what it found as a result.

1. How – The Crab pulsar, the remnant of a star that went supernova in 1,058 AD, is located 6,500 lightyears away in the direction of the Taurus constellation. Second, pulsars – despite their remarkable radiation output – emit few X-ray photons that can be studied from near Earth. Third, the Crab pulsar has a rotation period of 33 ms (i.e. very fast). For these reasons, CZTI couldn’t just study the pulsar directly and hope to find what it eventually did. Whatever X-ray was collected would’ve had to be precisely calibrated in time. So the CZTI team* partnered up with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in Pune and the Ooty Radio Telescope in Muthorai (Tamil Nadu) for the ephemeris data. In all, there were 21 observations made over (CZTI’s first) 18 months.

2. What – Like a Ferrero Rocher from hell, a pulsar is a rotating neutron star on the inside, wrapped in a very strong magnetic field. Astronomers think charged particles are accelerated by this field and the energy they emit is shot into space, as X-rays + other frequencies of radiation. So studying how these X-rays are polarised could provide more info on how a pulsar produces its famous sweeping pulses. The CZTI data had a surprise: hard X-rays are being emitted by the Crab pulsar in the off-pulse – or the-beam-is-not-pointing-at-us – phase. In other words, the magnetic field isn’t involved in producing these X-rays; the neutron star itself is. Dun dun duuuuuuun!

It’s always nice to get science results that send researchers back to the proverbial drawing board, like the CZTI result has. It’s sweeter still when local researchers are involved – and even sweeter to be reminded that we haven’t been entirely left behind in non-theoretical particle physics research. There’s even more X-ray astronomy in India’s future. After Astrosat, launched in September 2015, ISRO has okayed a proposal from the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, to build an X-ray polarimeter instrument that the org will launch in the future (date not known). Called Polix, it is similar to the NASA GEMS probe that stalled in 2012.

*The CZTI team had scientists from Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai; Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune; IIT Powai; National Centre for Radio Astronomy, Pune; Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram; ISRO, Bengaluru; and RRI.

Featured image: A composite image of the Crab Nebula showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. The size of the X-ray image is smaller because the higher energy X-ray emitting electrons radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower energy optically emitting electrons as they move. Caption and credit: NASA/ESA.

The Wire
November 7, 2017

Op-eds, Scicomm

That astrology workshop at the IISc

Posted on October 29, 2017 by newyesterday

Couple caveats:

I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven’t bothered to change the tense because issuing this caveat at the top seemed simpler.
A highly edited version of this post was published on The Wire on the morning of October 29. It’s about half as long as the post below, so if you’re looking for a TL;DR version, check that out.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me on October 28:

The poster for IIScAA's astrology workshop

I’m sure you can see the story writing itself: “IISc, a bastion of rational thinking and among the last of its kind in India, has capitulated and is set to host a workshop on astrology – a subject Karl Popper considered the prime example of how pseudoscience should be defined – on November 25. The workshop is being organised by the IISc Alumni Association, and will be conducted by M.S. Rameshaiah, who holds a BE in mechanical engineering from IISc and a PG diploma in patents law from NALSAR. He retired as a scientist from the National Aerospace Laboratories.”

But this is an old point. As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, wrote on his blog, an astrology workshop popping up somewhere in the country was only a matter of time, not possibility. What’s more interesting is why there’s a hullabaloo and who’s raising it. As the friend who forwarded the poster said, “Hope you guys carry this or put some pressure.”

Prasad’s conversation with Rameshaiah moves along the line of why this workshop has been organised – and this is the line many of us (including myself) would assume at first. IISc is one of India’s oldest modern research institutions. It wields considerable clout as a research and academic body among students, researchers and policymakers alike, and it has thus far remained relatively free of political interference. Its own faculty members do good science and are communicative with the media.

So all together, people who regularly preach the scientific temper and who grapple with scientific knowledge as if it existed in a vacuum like to do so on the back of socially important institutions like the IISc. It’s an easy way out to establish dignity – like how part-time writers often use quotable quotes as if they carry some authority.

The problem is, they don’t. And in the same way, it’s not entirely fair to use the IISc as a champion of the idea of success-through-rationalism because it’s an academic and research institution engaged in teaching its students about the sciences, and it doesn’t teach them by exclusion. It doesn’t teach them by describing what is not science but by inculcating what is.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is the primary issue with Rameshaiah’s workshop: calling astrology a “scientific tool” from within an institution that teaches students, and the people at large, about what science is. If it had been called just a “tool”, there wouldn’t have been (much of) a problem. By attaching the prefix of “science”, Rameshaiah is misusing the name of the IISc to bring credibility to his personal beliefs. The secondary issue is whether IISc stands to lose any credibility by association: of course it does.

So there are two distinct issues to be addressed here:

Of an astrology workshop being hosted by the IISc AA, and
Of an astrology workshop in general

The second issue is arguably more interesting because the first issue seems concerned only with chasing an astrology workshop outside the premises of a research institution. And once it is chased out, can we be sure that the same people will be concerned, especially meaningfully, about quelling all astrology workshops everywhere? I’m not so sure.

Of an astrology workshop in general

While the readers of this blog will agree, as I do, that astrology is not a science, can we agree that it is a “tool”? Again, while the readers of this blog will claim that it is a pseudoscience that, in Popper’s (rephrased) words, “destroyed the testability of their theory in order to escape falsification”, it also bears asking why faith in astrology persists in the first place.

Is it because people have not been informed it’s a pseudoscience or is it because there is no record of their religious beliefs – in which one’s faith in astrology is also embedded – having let them down in the last many generations? To put it in Popper’s terms, astrology may not be falsifiable but how many people are concerned with its falsifiability to begin with?

Many people of the community to which I belong believe in astrology. They are Brahmins, quite well to do, ranging in affluence from the upper middle class to the upper class. Many of them have held positions of power and influence, and many of the same people believe that the alignment of the stars in the sky influences their fortunes. Falsifiability is, to them, an intellectual exercise that doesn’t add to their lives. Astrological beliefs and the actions thus inspired, on the other hand, get them through their days and leave them feeling better about themselves.

Where I see Rameshaiah’s workshop inflicting real damage is not among such people, who can afford to lose some of their money and not have to give a damn. Where the problem comes to be is with subaltern communities – from whom astrology has the potential to siphon limited resources and misappropriate their means to ‘status’ mobility (e.g., according to Prasad, Rameshaiah is charging Rs 2,000 per person for the two-day workshop). Additionally, how such beliefs infiltrate these communities is also worth inspecting. For example, astrology is the stranglehold of Brahmins – and to liberate Dalits from the idea that astrology is a valid method of anything is, in a sense, a fight against casteism.

In the Indian socio-economic system, it’s easier to sink to the bottom than to rise to the top. In such a system, rationalism, some principles from the Bhagavad Gita and hope alone won’t cut it if you’re trying to swim upstream simply because of the number of institutional barriers in your way (especially if you’re also of a lower caste). Consider the list of things to which your access is highly limited: education, credit, housing, sanitation, employment, good health, etc. In this scenario, is it any surprise that no one is concerned about falsification as long as it promises a short way out to the upper strata of society?

Ultimately, and in the same vein, what will be more effective in eliminating belief in astrology is not eliminating astrology itself as much as eliminating one’s vulnerability to it. To constantly talk about eradicating beliefs in pseudoscientific ideas from society is to constantly ignore why these ideas take root, to constantly ignore why scientific ideas don’t inspire confidence – or to constantly assume that they do. On the last count, I’m sure many reasons will spring to mind, among them our education, bureaucracy, politics, culture, etc; pseudoscience only exists in their complex overlap.

This is all the more reason to stop fixating on Rameshaiah’s conducting the workshop and divert our attention to who has decided to attend and why. This is not an IISc course; it’s a workshop organised by the institution’s alumni association and as such is not targeted at scientists (in case the question arose as to why would a layperson approach a scientist for astrological advice). In fact, we’re only questioning the presence of an astrology workshop in the midst of a scientific research institution. We’re not questioning why astrology workshops happen in the first place; we must.

Because if you push Rameshaiah down, then someone else like him is going to pop up in a difference place. This is a time when so many of us seem smart enough to ask questions like “What will air filters do when you’re not addressing the source of pollution” or “Why are you blaming women for putting up lists willy-nilly accusing men of sexual harassment when you realise that due process is a myth in many parts of India and reserved for the privileged where it isn’t”. In much the same way, why isn’t it sensible to ask why people believe in astrology instead of going hammer and tongs with falsification?

Featured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Life notes, Op-eds

Some empathy for Treebeard's privilege

Posted on October 25, 2017 by newyesterday

There’s a line from The Two Towers (2002) that’s really stayed with me:

I’m on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side.

It’s spoken by Treebeard, the Ent, to one of Meriadoc/Peregrin when asked whose side he was on: Saruman’s or the Fellowship’s. At first glance, it seems a fair answer because nobody has been bothered about the plight of the Ents since Saruman set up shop at Isengard. On second thought, however, you wonder what good it did to anyone when they didn’t bother to make their voices heard. If you shied away from political participation when it mattered, is it any surprise that you were subsequently excluded from decisions that impact you? And then, on third, it becomes pertinent to ask why the onus is on a community that has been continuously disenfranchised to speak up and make itself count. And so forth.

There are many parallels here to conversations that are had in the news everyday. Neha Sinha’s latest piece for The Wire is founded on almost the same premise: In the film Newton, the forest of Dandakaranya, its being a proxy for ecological democracy practiced by the Gond tribe that inhabits it, and the security forces’ relationship with the flora stands in for Tolkien’s Ents. It is not on the Gond to stand up and be counted.

I digress. As the headline of this post suggests, I’m on Treebeard’s side to the extent that I’m on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side. However, I’m not an Ent in Middle Earth; I’m a privileged upper-caste, upper-class English-speaking male – an acknowledgement that needs to be articulated because, even if I choose to be on nobody’s side and extricate myself from all proceedings, my privilege will get many things done for me. And the ‘proceedings’ I speak of is the news. I don’t have to keep myself abreast of all the political, financial, economic and judicial happenings in the country. As a journalist I might have to but as a citizen, I don’t. My skipping an important political development impacts – rather has impacted – my life as much as my bunking a class in engineering college has: not at all.

I don’t want to follow the news anymore. The bulk of it is faeces-flinging, from one side of the ideological aisle to the other. The bulk of it is mostly posturing unto the fulfilment of myopic goals, aimed at winning skirmishes but losing all sight of the war. And most of it is self-indulgent populism in that most news publishers print/publish what the people want to read; if this is not true, we’d be reading a lot more of non-mainstream writing (in English at least, the only language I read the news in). As I’ve said multiple times before, it’s important to sell. But on the flipside, I don’t see anyone even thinking about trying to sell something new. For example, as a recent dinner conversation with two friends concluded, where do you go to look for Indian literary journalism?

Of course, some news outlets – like The Wire (where I work) – are trying to move away from this featureset by ensuring that only the journalists at The Wire get to decide what to cover and what not to cover; the only other stakeholder in our enterprise is the reader, so axiomatically there are no business or political interests dictating our agenda. However, my specific ire is directed at a subset of what even The Wire has been trying to do, a subset that represents a perception of the news that no single news outlet can attempt to modify by itself. Specifically, I’m on no journalist’s side because no journalist is on my side – the side that believes that political journalism is not the raison d’être of the fourth estate.

This isn’t a call (muted though it is) to eradicate political journalism. I’m saying that political journalism is a necessary but not sufficient component of the practice of journalism. Granted, the national polity is the ultimate seat of all power in the country, the Well of Eternity from which all life on Azeroth flows. But to prioritise the coverage of it over many other topics is, to me, a quiet surrender. Journalists flock to it because it’s easy to score ‘hits’ with; you draw blood by covering politics, and ‘change the world’ therewith, because the blood flows thick and fast there. But when was the last time news organisations attempted to draw blood from suppressed veins? To put it in less sanguine terms: when was the last time news organisations tried to investigate parts of our reality where power festers but not ostentatiously?

To me, in many ways, this is the physical world and the natural laws that govern it, the world where groups of people called scientists undertake expeditions – intellectually and otherwise – to unravel the foundations of civilisation as well as destiny. Science journalism is only another vantage point, just the way politics and business are vantage points, from which to survey our lives. However, to ignore one in favour of the Others simply because the Others are easier to communicate, easier to resonate with, is a copout. In fact, I believe that the blood flows thick and fast in cis-/peri-science matters as well; many simple don’t know where to look nor are interested.

Some also argue that science by itself won’t suffice to effect change, that it has to be coupled with policy, i.e. with an outside-in gaze. However, this is mostly the view of science from politics’ point of view, whereby political considerations influence our engagement with science. What is lacking is the other way round: where, for example, there is a public debate about why people who clean the toilets in a household can’t also cook in the same household, where a confrontation is encouraged between the chemistry of disinfectants and the socio-cultural beliefs rooted in caste traditions – instead of sidelining scientific knowledge to the margins.

This clause I’ve marked in italics is an indictment of the media, not of anyone else, because the media space is where it is the most lacking. Where activists and their allies on the ground might be going from door to door explaining how disinfectants work to the uninitiated, where educationists and young schoolchildren will be teaching each other about the deleterious effects of burning sulphur-laden firecrackers during Deepavali, most journalists have briefly cited this or that bit of research and moved on to discuss the social, cultural, political, etc. implications. In other words, it’s not that scientific knowledge alone must dictate our public life; that would be disastrous. It’s that, at least in my opinion, science gets less space than it truly deserves in the way we compose, and consume, our news.

Instead, our ideas of ‘newness’ within the context of journalism, at least in India, have become boxed in. ‘New media’ has become limited to the use of unfamiliar mediums to communicate the same thing we were communicating before in new ways. From what I’ve seen, there is a vanishing amount of introspection in most newsrooms about why we cover news the way we do, how the invention of different communication technologies influenced that decision, and what parts of the hitherto sidelined topics do new technologies open up.

If we don’t ask this question more often of ourselves as journalists, I fear political news is going to remain the mainstay of mainstream journalism in India, a traffic-hogging bully that shoves other, possibly more meaningful points of view down.

Featured image: Treebeard in ‘The Two Towers’. Source: YouTube.

Op-eds, Scicomm

Appa Rao Podile made fellow of science academy that published his problem paper – some questions

Posted on October 24, 2017 by newyesterday

Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, has been elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in spite of one of his three papers – which The Wire had identified in April 2016 as containing evidence of plagiarism – having been published by the academy. According to the citation, he “has made important contributions in the field of plant-microbe interactions. His work on chitinases has enabled the development of alternatives to toxic antifungal compounds for plant protection.”

INSA is one of India’s three science academies. The other two are the National Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences. Between them, they’ve formally divvied up an agenda of three portfolios. The National Academy of Sciences handles women in science; the Indian Academy of Sciences handles science education. And INSA, ironically, handles ethics.

The paper Appa Rao had coauthored (and for which he also the lead author) and published by the journal Proceedings of the INSA in 2014 was titled ‘Root Colonisation and Quorum Sensing are the Driving Forces of Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR) for Growth Promotion’. It contained six instances of plagiarism – the most among the three papers. After The Wire had reported on the offence, Appa Rao assumed complete responsibility and apologised for his mistakes. Proceedings of the INSA also issued a clarification accompanying the paper.

Two scientists I spoke to said on condition of anonymity that Appa Rao Podile’s election only damaged the credibility of the academy. Om Prasad, a history student at JNU, added, “He cannot be a role model for any aspiring researcher in the sciences or in academia in general” for having handled the Rohith Vemula suicide and protests the way he did (almost completely devoid of dignity) and for his plagiarism in various papers.

This is an issue I’d explored in January this year, when Appa Rao had been awarded the ‘Millennium Plaque of Honour’ by the Indian Science Congress (ISC). The plaque is awarded every year by the congress’s organisers to ’eminent’ scientists. In a time when the ISC’s credibility has been flagging, and considered by many scientists to be a waste of time, it is odd that the award would be given to someone whose administrative and academic credentials are in question. I expected the INSA also would’ve had similar considerations – but no.

I’d asked A.K. Sood (INSA president), Subhash Lakhotia (senior scientist at the academy) and Lahiri Majumdar (plant sciences editor of the Proceedings of the INSA) about these issues. In response, I got a carefully worded statement from Alok K. Moitra, the secretary of fellowships at the academy. I’ve pasted the bulk of it below; only one paragraph has been left out because it discussed a set of emails exchanged between INSA members and me last year.

The question of plagiarism in an article published by him and his colleagues in one of the issues of the Proceedings of the INSA was thoroughly examined by the editorial office of the journal immediately following the allegation made by you in April 2016. The examination revealed that although there were instance of similarities in five-six isolated sentences with some earlier publications, none of them would qualify for typical plagiarism since these did not pertain to someone else’s data. These were general statements, some of which may not need any specific citation as such. Being general in nature, they are also likely to share variable strings of words. Nevertheless, the authors did publish a note of apology in a later issue of our journal for inadvertent identity/similarity of a few isolated sentences in the published paper with those in some other papers.

The INSA Council while discussing the election of Professor Appa Rao Podile to fellow of INSA considered this allegation and decided that the allegation of plagiarism was without merit. His election to the Fellowship of INSA is based on his scholastic research contributions.

Based on these facts, I have a few questions. But before that, a short note (just in case for some idiotic readers who comment on a story without reading it first): I’m not saying at all that we forgive Appa Rao Podile for the way he dealt with the students and faculty at the University of Hyderabad campus (under political pressure to boot) as well as for the way he conducted himself when a police inquiry was initiated against him.

1. Appa Rao admitted to his mistake and issued a correction and an apology (subsequently publicised by the journal). His misconduct wasn’t in the experiment but in the descriptive part of the paper. Prasad argued that none of this exculpates him – but this is quite in opposition to what former UGC chairman Praveen Chaddah had written in 2014: that entire papers shouldn’t be retracted or dumped when misconduct like plagiarism is confined to the paper’s descriptive parts and doesn’t spillover into the data or experiment itself. I don’t know where I myself stand, but I think there’s some introspection to be done here about whether we’re being too strict apropos Appa Rao’s plagiarism infraction because of his role in the University of Hyderabad protests, violence, etc.

2. An obvious follow-up question arises: when we’re felicitating a scientist for his scientific accomplishments and electing him as a fellow of a reputed science academy, are we allowed to pull up the academy for not having considered his non-scientific work as well? (I realise this is a loaded question because it suggests that I’m not going to be happy with the academy until it recants its fellowship offer, but no – I’m actually curious.)

3. Are we paying attention to the academy itself only because it has elected a controversial fellow? I know my answer is ‘yes’. India has three science academies and they rarely ever feature in public conversations about science in India, so it feels somewhat embarrassing to suddenly consider the INSA to be important. And part two: do we expect all the fellows at India’s science academies to be role models? If we’re going after Appa Rao now because he’s not been a model citizen, shouldn’t we be asking such questions of all the fellows of the three academies?

4. Should our consternation at Appa Rao’s election be directed towards Appa Rao or towards INSA? Common sense would dictate that we divert our scrutiny towards INSA. And we immediately realise that as much as Appa Rao had erred in plagiarising in his paper, INSA had also erred in publishing the document without checking it for plagiarism first. We find further that the INSA guidelines for the election of new fellows is insipid, making no room to consider the possibility that some scientists may be great with the science but jerks at other things. There are also no guidelines for what actions it would take against a fellow should he be implicated for some offence in the future (and gradations therein). What happens when the fellow of a science academy commits murder? (Can you imagine anyone rushing to find out what INSA/IAS/NAS is saying?)

Update: I’d had a follow up question for Moitra, to which I received a reply late yesterday.

Q: Apart from Appa Rao’s academic credentials, did INSA consider his administrative track record at the University of Hyderabad? Did it consider the fact that a fact-finding team (of three well-regarded academics) concluded that Appa Rao had acted unethically and in a way damaging to the reputation of the University during his term as VC? Wouldn’t Appa Rao’s election to the academy thus seem as if – as long as a scientist does good science, his other transgressions can be ignored?

A.K.M.: In our earlier response, we did state that the election was based on scholastic achievement. Administrative failures/successes can be subjective impressions depending upon from which angle one looks at it. Election to fellowship is essentially on the basis of scientific contributions. However, only if there are established cases of wrong-doing as judged by the judiciary system of the country, the election would not be made in spite of scholastic achievements.

Featured image: Appa Rao Podile. Credit: YouTube.