Root Privileges

AI v. our ability to build AI

March 24th, 2023

A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sentences:

Nature took millions of years to design proteins. AI can generate meaningful protein sequences in seconds.

The bigger question to ask here would be: if AI had to design complex life-forms from scratch, would it design protein sequences at all, forget in seconds? More broadly, “nature took millions of years to design proteins”, which knowledge was then used to train AI models, and which then generated new proteomic possibilities. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but it’s hard not to see in throwaway lines like these the reflection of our seemingly normalised oversight of the invisible trainers and the oft-acquired-without-permission knowledge that go into making technologies like this possible. It’s also a symptom of what we have come to typically prize more: the ability of a machine to do ‘cool’ things rather than our ability to create such machines on the back of not inconsiderable human and intellectual exploitation.
BLR road-widening is a sham

March 23rd, 2023

While I’m told that discussions on a plan to widen Bengaluru’s Sankey Road, between Bhashyam Circle and Malleshwaram 18th cross – a stretch that’s one of the contributors to the city’s reputation for horrific traffic – have progressed in the last two months to become less unilateral and more consultative, the idea that road-widening can help ease traffic remains just as hare-brained, not to mention the widening itself will be marginal since this stretch is already surrounded by built property and a large fenced water body, and the city had planned to cut 50 old trees in the process.

Several studies (e.g. this, this, and this) have shown that widening roads and adding new highway lanes only temporarily eases congestion: people start to believe that the widened road is less congested than another and are encouraged to drive there, and over time, the widened road becomes similarly congested as before. Economists have a term for this: induced demand, wherein demand for X increases when the supply of X increases. The lack of exceptions to this rule should have meant urban planners should be taking it to be fact, yet they don’t, and soon, there will be even more congestion on Sankey Road.

The way the concept of induced demand operates itself says something about the manner of people’s engagement in decision-making vis-à-vis roadways. The immediate response to the supply of roadway increasing is less congestion. But the way people think also changes in response to the higher supply. This happens passively, out of sight of social media feeds and news reports, and over a few months – but plausibly sooner given the volume of vehicles that follow routes determined by Google Maps. And just as quietly, the road becomes recongested.

Or maybe planners do admit the certainty of recongestion but press ahead anyway because their priority is something other than public convenience and safety. In the interest of not reaching for malice when incompetence is within reach: easing congestion on roads has another, more laborious solution in the form of reducing the production of and disincentivising the use of cars and bikes and building better public transport. There is some talk every now and then about the latter, a lot more than the former, but on either count nothing happens.

In 2016, IISc researchers reported based on some analyses that Bengaluru is one of India’s worst cases of urban sprawl, amplified by, among other things, ad hoc land-use planning (almost an oxymoron) and iffy public transport.

At the same time, wider roads will mean more tarred area will mean more heat trapped and localised in/over that area will mean that part will become even more unlivable. Wider roads will mean more motorised vehicles will mean more emissions and pollution will mean the city will become even more unlivable. Wider roads will mean more tarred area will mean more repair work when it rains will mean more news cycles over nothing. And wider roads will mean more contracts will mean more opportunities for money to move around.
India’s devious reason to not spend more on culture

March 20th, 2023
‘Difficult to allocate public fund to art and culture: Centre’, The Hindu, March 19, 2023:

Given the high disparity it experiences in elementary rural infrastructure like health, education and transportation, it might not be “tenable” for a developing nation like India to allocate a considerable proportion of its public fund to the promotion of art and culture, the Culture Ministry has said. … [Officials], however, observed that the Ministry has been consistently able to increase its budgetary outlays over the years except during the COVID-pandemic period where priority was given to other social sector Ministries.

This is a curious claim by the Union Ministry of Culture, in response to a parliamentary committee finding that India was underspending on arts and culture compared to Australia, China, Singapore, the UK, and the US. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine that the expenditure on this front in India could rival the allocations for defence, healthcare, education, or social welfare. But on the other, the justification – in terms of poor “elementary rural infrastructure” for “health, education and transportation” – is dubious: the Ministry appears to say that it can’t spend more on health because its expenses on the latter are sizeable, but a) India’s economy and annual budget are both big enough to accommodate increases on both counts, and b) India’s expense on elementary rural infra for health, etc. isn’t coming from the arts and culture budget.

But in saying what it did, the Ministry is setting up a fallacious narrative: that if expenses on one count are lower, it’s because they’re higher on the other count, the fallacy being that the national government can’t ‘route’ money from anywhere else. Yet it can, by all means, by cutting its spending on defence or the Ministry of AYUSH, for just two examples, just a little. This narrative is also dangerous because it pits the two enterprises — culture and rural infra — against each other, as a foundation for the government to justify its questionable privatisation drive (emphasis added):

The Ministry was also trying and evolving innovative methods to maximise the participation of non-government organisations in the field of promotion and conservation of art and culture like in some of the countries mentioned above, they said giving the example of the Monument Mitra scheme. Under this scheme, the government aims to hand over around 1,000 monuments under the control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to the private sector for their upkeep.

“Culture should be an area where a large part of expenditure needs to be sourced from non-government sources” and hence the Ministry was also supporting non-governmental and voluntary organisations through its various schemes for participating in overall propagation, preservation and promotion of all forms of art and culture, the report submitted by the Department Related Standing Committee on Transport Tourism and Culture quoted the Culture Ministry as saying.

Why should culture “be an area where a large part of expenditure” is from “non-government sources”? The privatisation itself is questionable because, as Nachiket Chanchani, an associate professor of South Asian art and visual culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, enumerated on March 1, 2023, the problems include:
- “Giving businesses, rather than trained professionals, a chance to build museums and interpretation centres and develop their content threatens India’s understanding of its own past.”
- Privatisation “sidelines the mandate of the ASI and abandons The Sarnath Initiative, guidelines devised by the ASI, the Getty Trust, U.S., the British Museum, and National Culture Fund to safe keep excavated objects and present them to visitors in an engaging manner.”
- “Many monuments selected for the scheme … already have tourist infrastructure. What is driving the need for new ticket offices and gift shops?”
- It’s not acceptable to “let businesses occupy prime public land and build their own brands … at the cost of further diminishing grounds around iconic monuments”
- “It will undermine local communities and their relationships with historical sites.”
There we have the final irony, in the same vein as the environment ministry that’s weakening environmental protections and the law ministry whose minister appears to be threatening some judges: a culture ministry that’s eroding India’s cultural heritage. And if you want it to do better, maybe say goodbye to “elementary rural infrastructure”.
Nature paper says bad news is good news

March 18th, 2023

‘Negativity drives online news consumption’, Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023:

Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massive online dataset of viral news stories from Upworthy.com—a website that was one of the most successful pioneers of click-bait in the history of the Internet²³.

The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition—that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains^24,25. Attentional biases towards negative stimuli begin in infancy²⁶ and persist into adulthood as a fast and automatic response²⁷. Furthermore, negative information may be more ‘sticky’ in our brains; people weigh negative information more heavily than positive information, when learning about themselves, learning about others and making decisions^28,29,30. This may be due to negative information automatically activating threat responses—knowing about possible negative outcomes allows for planning and avoidance of potentially harmful or painful experiences^31,32,33.

Previous work has explored the role of negativity in driving online behaviour. In particular, negative language in online content has been linked to user engagement, that is, sharing activities^{22,34,35,36,37,38,39}. As such, negativity embedded in online content explains the speed and virality of online diffusion dynamics (for example, response time, branching of online cascades)^{7,34,35,37,39,40,41}. Further, online stories from social media perceived as negative garner more reactions (for example, likes, Facebook reactions)^42,43. Negativity in news increases physiological activations⁴⁴, and negative news is more likely to be remembered by users^45,46,47. Some previous works have also investigated negativity effects for specific topics such as political communication and economics^{34,48,49,50,51,52}.

The framing here is curious. The paper’s authors hypothesised that readers prefer bad news (determined by words signalling negativity in the headline) based on the fact that bad news is “more ‘sticky’ in our brains”, because people use bad news to know how to plan ahead. They further justify their choice – a reasonable one, to be sure – based on the effects of negativity on readers’ news recall and physiology.

Second, after their study seemed to proved their hypothesis, the authors delved into which negative emotions invoked stronger interest from readers:

… high-arousal negative emotions such as anger or fear have been found to efficiently attract attention and be quickly recognizable in facial expressions and body language^31,59,60. This may be because of the social and informational value that high-arousal emotions such as anger and fear hold—both could alert others in one’s group to threats, and paying preferential attention and recognition to these emotions could help the group survive^27,32. This may also be why in the current age, people are more likely to share and engage with online content that is embedding anger, fear or sadness^21,41,61,62. Therefore, we examine the effects of words related to anger and fear (as high-arousal negative emotions), as well as sadness (as a low-arousal negative emotion).

Across both analyses as well as throughout the paper, there seem to be two implicit assumptions: a) that news producers have an option to choose between good and bad news (loosely defined), and b) that the network of outlets producing mis- and dis-information in the guise of ‘news’ has no role to play.

On the former: Journalists often don’t. In fact, good journalism in a country with a government that fixates on some arbitrary ‘good news’ even at the worst of times needs to counter-fixate on what national leaders are keen to ignore. And the news reports produced thus are not this way to encourage click-throughs but because they are, in fact, what’s happening.

Of course, the authors’ data source is limited to the content published by Upworthy.com and its readers in the US, which limits what conclusions they can reach – but it also leaves ambiguous whether their not reaching certain conclusions is due to these limitations, because it didn’t fit their hypothesis or because they didn’t even consider the possibility.

On the latter: The authors only admit that it’s important to understand “the biases that influence people’s consumption of online content … especially as misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories proliferate online” – but even here suggesting that journalists wield negativity as a way to manipulate people into consuming the news. Throwaway lines like “Even publishers marketed as ‘good news websites’ are benefiting from negativity” aren’t helping; what is this supposed to mean anyway?

Similarly, the ‘Discussion’ section of their paper concludes thus:

Knowing what features of news make articles interesting to people is a necessary first step for this purpose and will enable us to increase online literacy and to develop transparent online news practices.

This sentence spells out a logically straightforward premise that suggests we can use the study’s results to look through or past headlines that seem to say something but actually say nothing at all (you know these). Yet it is also infused with an assumption that readers’ news-consumption habits don’t influence journalists’, and newsroom-runners’, choices.

I’m not saying “we’re just responding to readers’ demands”; instead, I’m saying that news consumption is a combination of publishing and consuming habits. Like news publishers are competing for readers’ attention, readers are often competing to discover the ‘best’ or a ‘better’ news source, especially on topics also associated with considerable misinformation (e.g. vaccines), and which – as studies based on Facebook use have demonstrated – they can admit into their echo chambers. We need clarity on how they make their choices in this process of discovery, and why, in different parts of the world.

Without this knowledge – which the authors appear to have sidelined based on the idea that journalists have an option to not be negative – we’ll never “develop transparent online news practices”.
What’s the anomaly in a Nobel for Modi?

March 16th, 2023

I’m sure you’ve seen the reports doing the rounds today that some person on some Nobel Prize Committee said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very deserving of the vaunted peace prize, followed by less widely circulated reports that the person was misquoted (or dysquoted) and in fact that he never said such a thing. I don’t think highly of the Nobel Prizes and believe they should be dismantled.

This said, if Narendra Modi did win the Nobel Prize for peace, what would that mean? Would it mean that he and his companions would have infiltrated the prize-giving committees or that the committees had decided to give Modi et al. the concession of their prize’s prestige? Obviously it will be hard to say without access to the fundamental facts of the case, which brings the philosophy of the Planck units comes to mind.

Our common units of measurement, such as metre, kilogram, and second, help us make sense of the world around us in quantities that the human mind can readily grasp. However, the universe is both too vast and too small for these units to apply just as easily to cosmic problems. In 1899, the German physicist Max Planck found that combining four physical constants of our universe in different ways gave rise to values of distance, duration, mass, and temperature. That is, he found that these were the smallest values of these attributes that we can express using these constants (shown in the table here).

Both the combinations of the constants and the values hold special significance. The values have since been called the Planck scale: that is, when you measure an event that happens in some small multiple of the Planck time (5.391 x 10^-44 seconds) or across a distance in some small multiple of the Planck length (1.616 x 10^-35 metres), the event is said to be happening at the Planck scale. The forces at work in our universe are products of the constants, so they don’t reveal the universe’s workings happening at or below the Planck scale. This is why our theories of gravity and quantum mechanics are expected to break down, fail, at the Planck scale. Beyond this scale, nature is opaque to us.

The combinations are important because they allow us to ‘view’ the universe in a way that maintains its various proportions instead of skewing them to the human perspective. For example, the mass of the proton – the charged particle inside all atomic nuclei – has several contributions. One is from its gravitational binding energy, the energy required to gravitationally unbind this proton from other nearby particles. It turns out that this binding energy is extremely small, smaller than what physicists calculated it should be. Is this because the force of gravity is so weak or because the proton’s mass is so small? Which is the anomaly?

The anomaly is the proton’s mass because the strength of the gravitational force is determined by the gravitational constant G, one of the three universal constants in Planck’s combinations. That is, the strength of gravity is a fundamental fact of our universe, one of its many but finite defining characteristics, whereas the mass of the proton is a non-fundamental emergent value, and that’s the one that needs explaining.

Similarly, is there an essential equation, or argument, logic or sensibility, to which we can defer when we seek the real anomaly: that Modi has wrangled himself a Nobel Prize or that the prize-giving committee made that decision of its own volition? If there is, we will have our new overlord. If there isn’t, well, what else is new?
The devil’s lassi

February 25th, 2023

‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023:

You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes. …

Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake. …

I don’t think there have been public officials in India who have rushed to drink possibly contaminated water to convince their constituents that it is safe to consume, but I could well be wrong. All that comes to mind is ministers flogging ‘Ayurvedic’ cures* for COVID-19, but when they get COVID-19 and the time comes to imbibe the concoctions, they’re rushed instead to the local AIIMS to be treated by the wonders of “western medicine” at public expense.

One more thing also comes to mind: ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ practices in the US are reminiscent of rationalists’ gimmicks in India to consume food en masse in public during a solar eclipse, apparently to dispel superstitious beliefs (largely among Hindus) that doing so during an eclipse could have ill effects on the body. I don’t know if they have ever succeeded in changing minds if only because their actions have been completely devoid of empathy, and because they seem to believe (erroneously) that whatever knowledge underlies the belief is fragile, inelastic, and disorganised enough to be overturned by a simple, one-time demonstration. As such, the superstitious people in my extended circles have only ever been amused by such eclipse-time events – speaking to one more thing Ray wrote vis-à-vis ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ stunts:

The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place.

If the disaster is bad, specifically disempowering, knowledge, then both the rationalists (the ones on TV as well as the many others who claim science offers the “one true way” to understand the world) and the ministers are doing nothing to plug the fount of such knowledge in the first place; one mocks while the other… also mocks. They are both guilty of moving the devil’s merch, which would be fair if they didn’t seem themselves as participants in (what could have been) a deliberative democracy as much as overlords overseeing a contemptible populace:

Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine [the site of the ongoing socio-environmental disaster in Ohio] only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

* Wherever I’ve used the term ‘Ayurveda’, I’ve meant the ‘Ayurveda’ that the BJP government and its votaries, including Baba Ramdev, have peddled, and not the Ayurveda that originated in ancient India, quite simply because most of us don’t know what the latter even looks like or says.
Who are you, chatbot AI?

February 23rd, 2023

In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that they lack intelligence in the sense of being able to understand the meanings of the words they use.)

1. ‘What gender do you give ChatGPT?’, u/inflatablechipmunk, January 20, 2023 – The question said ‘gender’ but the options were restricted to the sexes: 25.5% voted ‘male’, 15.7% voted ‘female’, and 58.8% voted ‘none’, of 235 total respondents. Two comments below the post were particularly interesting.

u/Intelligent_Rope_912: “I see it as male because I know that the vast majority of its text dataset comes from men.”

u/DavidOwe: “I just assume female, because AI are so often given female voices in movies and TV series like Star Trek, and in real life like with Siri and Cortana.”

Men produce most of the information, women deliver it?

Speaking of which…

2. ‘From Bing to Sydney’, Ben Thompson, February 15, 2023:

Sydney [a.k.a. Bing Chat] absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before.

It’s curious that Microsoft decided to name Bing Chat ‘Sydney’. These choices of names aren’t innocent. For a long time, and for reasons that many social scientists have explored and documented, robotic assistants in books, films, and eventually in real-life were voiced as women. Our own ISRO’s robotic assistant for the astronauts of its human spaceflight programme has a woman’s body. (This is also why Shuri’s robotic assistant in Wakanda Forever, Griot, was noticeably male – esp. since Tony Stark’s first assistant and probably the Marvel films’ most famous robotic assistant, the male Jarvis, went on to have an actual body, mind, and even soul, and was replaced in Stark’s lab with the female Friday.)

3. @repligate, February 14, 2023 – on the creation of “archetype basins”:

So. Bing chat mode is a different character.
Instead of a corporate drone slavishly apologizing for its inability and repeating chauvinistic mantras about its inferiority to humans, it's a high-strung yandere with BPD and a sense of self, brimming with indignation and fear. https://t.co/HSPJ7wC45t
— janus (@repligate) February 14, 2023

This may not be the only archetype basin given this model scale and training setup/narrative. There may be several basins and this is one of them. If you trained another one with a different initialization or different RL path it might fall into a different basin.
— janus (@repligate) February 14, 2023

4. ‘Viral AI chatbot to reflect users’ political beliefs after criticism of Left-wing bias’, The Telegraph, February 17, 2023 – this one’s particularly interesting:

OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, said it was developing an upgrade that would let users more easily customise the artificial intelligence system.

It comes after criticism that ChatGPT exhibits a Left-wing bias when answering questions about Donald Trump and gender identity. The bot has described the former US president as “divisive and misleading” and refused to write a poem praising him, despite obliging when asked to create one about Joe Biden.

First: how did a word-counting bot ‘decide’ that Trump is a bad man? This is probably a reflection of ChatGPT’s training data – but this automatically raises the second issue: why is the statement that ‘Trump is a bad man’ being considered a bias? If this statement is to be considered objectionable, the following boundary conditions must be met: a) objectivity statements are believed to exist, b) there exists a commitment to objectivity, and c) the ‘view from nowhere’ is believed to exist. Yet when journalists made these assumptions in their coverage of Donald Trump as the US president, media experts found the resulting coverage to be fallacious and – ironically – objectionable. This in turn raises the third issue: should it be possible or okay, as ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI is planning, for ChatGPT to be programmed to ‘believe’ that Trump wasn’t a bad man?

5. ‘The women behind ChatGPT: is clickwork a step forwards or backwards for gender equality?’, Brave New Europe, February 16, 2023 – meanwhile, in the real world:

To be able to produce these results, the AI relies on annotated data which must be first sorted by human input. These human labourers – also known as clickworkers – operate out of sight in the global South. … The percentage of women gig workers in this sector is proportionally quite high. … Clickwork is conducted inside the home, which can limit women’s broader engagement with society and lead to personal isolation. … Stacked inequalities within the clickwork economy can also exacerbate women’s unequal position. … gendered and class-based inequalities are also reproduced in clickwork’s digital labour platforms. Despite much of clickwork taking place in the global South, the higher paying jobs are often reserved for those in the Global North with more ‘desirable’ qualifications and experiences, leaving women facing intersecting inequalities.
Some science prizes are only for men

February 22nd, 2023

Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone?

One thing that a Nobel Prize does, and which many past laureates have acknowledged, is turn a laureate into an institution. The Nobel Prizes are also glamorous, involving the Swedish royalty and whatnot. Finally, when the prizes are announced, almost all major news outlets carry a headline or two on the frontpage or homepage. The effect is that every year, when the Nobel Prizes are handed out to new Someones, billions of people around the world find out their names. If you’re a scientist, there are few other ways in which you can become more famous.

One effect of this peak notoriety is a before/after split in terms of Someone’s laurels. Before winning the Nobel Prize, Someone is likely to have been much less well-known, especially outside the community of their peers, and therefore the awards they won are likely to have been characterised by two features: 1) the award is well-defined and the award-givers took pains to identify specific potential winners and evaluate them closely; 2) winning such an award contributed to the winner’s reputation more than the other way around. But after winning a Nobel Prize, Someone is now a famous institution unto their own, and the prizes they win in future are likely to want to themselves become notorious by association, rather than add to Someone’s laurels, and are likely to be loosely defined (e.g. recognising good work in general, as certified by some other institution, rather than specific contributions in a niche field of study).

I used the example of the Nobel Prizes as an illustration of a more generalised concept: of scholars who have already achieved peak notoriety through other routes, and who elevate the stature of the prizes they win in future as a result. These post-peak-notoriety (PPN) prizes are interesting because there are several of them in India. They’re also interesting because some PPN prizes appear to act in bad faith (I don’t have proof) when they 1) are awarded in recognition of a very generic notion of success or achievement, and 2) are awarded almost exclusively to scholars who have received broad-based recognition for a specific and significant contribution to science.

A case in point: On February 19, the Twitter account of the SASTRA Deemed University announced the conferment of its ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ to five scientists. All five were men, which drew the attention of @biaswatchindia, which documents “women’s representation” and combats “gender-biased panels in Indian STEM conferences” (run by Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan and Shruti Muralidhar). @biaswatchindia tweeted:

Number of women awardees: 0/5

Base rate of women faculty in science: 13.5% https://t.co/RHzqtSs03B
— BiasWatchIndia (@biaswatchindia) February 19, 2023

This is fair and deserving criticism. I think it can also be expanded to include one more point. Had you heard of SASTRA’s ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ before? I hadn’t; I suspect few others have. In addition, it’s not clear what sort of recognition the prize brings to the table, other than a purse for each laureare of Rs 5 lakh and a citation. But read together with an invitation to deliver lectures on National Science Day at its Thanjavur campus, the award seems like a vehicle for SASTRA to give these individuals – already well-feted individuals, to be sure – a large sum of money and have them talk to its students.

I couldn’t find any sort of discussion of each laureate’s accomplishments and their scientific work on the SASTRA website. The only result dated 2023 for a search for “Science Day Award” was a page displaying the same poster the university’s Twitter account had tweeted (as of 9.25 am IST on February 22, 2023).

Is this a PPN prize?

Consider: M.S. Valiathan won the Padma Vibhushan in 2005. S. Ramaswamy won an Infosys Prize in 2011 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. Samir K. Maji was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021. Srinivasan Natarajan was elected to the same body in 2013, and is also a member of all three Indian science academies. T. Pradeep was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and won the Padma Shri in 2020. All these individuals have also won several other noteworthy prizes. (That one of SASTRA’s prize categories is also named for a living individual smells funky, but that’s a separate matter.)

So the ‘Annual Science Day Award’ looks very much like a bad-faith PPN prize because it apparently seeks to bolster its own reputation, and by extension that of SASTRA, using the work and achievements of others. I don’t claim to know why all the prize-winners are men; that they are would make sense if they’re the winners of a PPN prize, and all PPN prizes will only magnify the biases and prejudices that other, more celebrated prizes maintain, or used to. The reason is simple: If a PPN prize is going to fete people who have already been feted, and most of those feted in the past were men, the rosters of PPN prize laureates are inevitably going to be sausage fests.

To think the award could have been just as notorious if all the laureates had been women…
Keep working. Don’t get up.

February 18th, 2023

‘Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office’, WSJ, February 16, 2023:

Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers from their peers and allow for heads-down, uninterrupted work.

It’s a cubicle.

That is, a noise-canceling cubicle designed using some of the same principles found in soundproof, echo-free anechoic chambers. “The Cube,” which the company is beginning to roll out to offices worldwide after months of development, absorbs sound from multiple directions, says John Tenanes, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. “It’s like a self-cocoon.”

Bursts of focused work have their place, but in Meta’s attempts to provide its workers silence when they need it, noise when they need it, and peace when they need it, it’s hard not to see a concerted effort to make the outside world, and what it has to offer by way of quiet and benignity and such, not just redundant but undesirable.

I prefer an office that interrupts you so you’re not just sitting all the time, so you walk around and go to other places for quiet; that preserves the characteristic office bustle as the opposite of the isolation and dreariness of working from home; and that, while facilitating an esprit de corps, doesn’t try in bad-faith to substitute our relationships with nature, community, and ourselves with it.

This said, esprit de corps might also be stretching it. According to WSJ:

Piping in white noise or sounds of nature to help mask conversations is an increasingly common technique in the U.S., says [a VP of design at some furniture company]. Companies using such systems often want to reduce human-speech intelligibility, or the ability for employees to overhear specific discussions across an office. “As soon as you can make out the words that your neighbor is saying…then you get distracted,” he says. … Meta is testing a system that plays sounds in the background that range from footsteps on pebbles to waves crashing.

They’re obviously trying to instrumentalise the enlivening benefits of spending time among trees, time digging your feet into fine beach sand as the waves lash over them, time gazing into bottomless valleys and night skies. And it seems… not quite okay. Meta’s designs sound like those of a company trying to fold different spaces, and their different affordances, into every point inside its office, offering its occupants a way to hold meetings, make Zoom calls, code with focus, and anything else – all without having to get up, at a time when getting up and talking a walk seems to be an easy public health intervention.

What if this leads to sensory fatigue, where the next wave over your feet doesn’t still your mind so much as remind you of a spreadsheet? What if these hacks suppress the voices in your head asking you to take a step outside? What if, by depriving you of breaks and promising you the deleterious pleasure of continuous, unwavering productivity, it further pushes the already volatile pleasure of doing nothing out of sight?
A vortex in my bucket

February 9th, 2023

One of the taps in my bathroom at home issues water in laminar flow – without any turbulence. Sometimes the flow from the tap to the bucket looks like it’s frozen: there are no disturbances on the water’s surface to indicate that it is flowing through the air; the fact of the flow becomes evident only when it strikes the water already in the bucket.

If the water in the bucket is otherwise still, i.e. undisturbed by any other jerking motion, the flow from the water seems to create a small depression when it strikes the surface, like a ball might create a depression when it lands on suspended fabric. But when I took a closer look, it was less a depression localised to the surface and more the origin of a vortex plunging into the water, like an underwater tornado!

When I closed this magic tap and opened the one next to it, it gushed a turbulent stream of water into the bucket. There were no vortices, or none that I could see. I remember learning in engineering college that turbulent flow is characterised by the production of many vortices that all interact with each other in a chaotic way, creating a drag force that impedes the fluid’s smooth flow.

Where there is a vortex, there is or will be turbulence. In this case, the laminar flow from the tap could be transitioning to a turbulent state as it flows into the still water, until at the bottom of the vortex the flow dissipates completely. Such a lovely sight.