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A Kuhnian gap between research publishing and academic success
There is a gap in research publishing and how it relates to academic success. On the one hand, there are scientists complaining of low funds, being short-staffed, low-quality or absent equipment, disoptimal employment/tenure terms, bureaucratic incompetence and political interference. On the other, there are scientists who describe their success within academia in terms of being […]
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Bruno Latour (1947-2022) and critiquing science
The French philosopher Bruno Latour passed away on October 9, at the age of 75. I don’t know if many people in India have noticed but people abroad, especially in Europe, have. His passing leaves a considerable vacuum in the field of science and technology studies, but I’d like to memorialise his passing here for […]
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A question about India’s new science prizes
really deserving candidates In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country […]
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Assorted comments: MOM, IIT Mandi, scientists’ wishes
These are some remarks that have been fermenting in my mind and for which I don’t have the time or the inclination to supply a beginning-middle-end structure to publish as individual posts. I’m just packing them into this one post so I can say what I’d like to say, clear some headspace and move on. […]
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The passive voice is political
Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh won an Ig Nobel Prize for literature this year for their work on what makes legal documents so hard to read. Ironically, the abstract of their paper, published in July 2022, is also very hard to read, […]
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The Frida Kahlo NFT
Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity. fridanft.org In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order to liberate it from its physical shackles and unto its “eternal” existence henceforth as an NFT that he is selling for $4,000 apiece. He has […]
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The Merge
Earlier this month, a major event happened in the cryptocurrency space called the ‘Merge’. In this event, the ethereum blockchain changed the way it achieves consensus – from using a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake mechanism. A blockchain is a spreadsheet that maintains a record of all the transactions between users using the same blockchain. […]
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Ramanujan, Nash, Turing, Mirzakhani
From a short review of a new documentary about the life and work of the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, September 9, 2022: While there are other movies about real-life mathematicians such as Nash, Ramanujan and Turing, the special abilities of these individuals are often depicted as making them eccentric in their private lives. In contrast, Mirzakhani lived […]
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A physics story of infinities, goats and colours
When I was writing in August about physicist Sheldon Glashow’s objection to Abdus Salam being awarded a share of the 1979 physics Nobel Prize, I learnt that it was because Salam had derived a theory that Glashow had derived as well, taking a different route, but ultimately the final product was non-renormalisable. A year or so later, […]