Indian Versus Western Universities

Prof. Krishna Kumar delivers a devastating indictment of Indian Universities:

1) Faculty recruitment is not meritocratic.
2) Our concept of what constitutes teaching and learning is mechanical, based on criteria like number of hours taught and percentage attendance by students.
3) Teachers are restricted to narrowly defined syllabi and don't have the freedom to innovate- "Teaching goes on following the grooves of preset syllabi, like the needle boring into an old gramophone record" ... What a line!
4) Our Libraries suck.

He goes on:

These four critical differences are, of course, symptomatic of deeper problems entrenched in structures that govern higher education in India. Those who perceive all problems in financial terms miss the barren landscape of our campuses. Inadequacy of funds is, of course, worrisome, but it cannot explain the extent to which malice, jealousy and cussedness define the fabric of academic life in our country. There is a vast chasm that separates the Indian academia from society. Let alone the masses, even the urban middle class cares little for what goes on inside classrooms and laboratories.

There are off course centers of excellence. But the vast majority of Indian graduates pass through the dystopian lands that Prof. Krishna Kumar describes.

My Rather Tenuous Connection With The Mars Rover Project Scientist

I have no connection with the Mars Rover program :)...but this @geosociety tweet a few days ago caught my eye:

@geosociety Fellow John Grotzinger, JPL geologist on Mars Curiosity rover mission, in LA Times. http://lat.ms/QzG81W  MT @earthmagazine

John Grotzinger was profiled in an article in the LA Times. He is project scientist for the Mars mission and in charge of directing the earth science effort to glean information about the geology of Mars. Here is what the article says about his work-

For much of his post-PhD career, the geologist kept his feet planted firmly on Earth. He combed ancient sedimentary rocks for signs of early life. He took trips around the globe, family in tow, to collect 550-million-year old specimens in Namibia and Oman.

What it left out was that Prof. Grotzinger is a carbonate sedimentologist. So.. I guess I can claim that I share an academic kinship with him :)

I am quite familiar with his work in carbonates. When I was working on my PhD in the mid 1990's he was already a faculty at MIT. His PhD research on Proterozoic carbonates of the Northwest Territories in Canada was directed by J. Fred Read at Virginia Polytechnic. During several GSA meetings I did get an opportunity to listen to his presentation on various aspects of Proterozoic carbonate platform evolution. He later moved to Cal Tech and JPL in Pasadena, California.

For long, carbonate sedimentologists gave much more attention to Phanerozoic carbonates and less attention to Proterozoic carbonate deposits. There was an economic incentive in that. Many Phanerozoic carbonate basins host prolific oil and gas deposits. The origin, growth and architecture of Phanerozoic carbonate sedimentary platforms,  a term for depositional basins in which hundreds to thousands of feet of calcium carbonate sediments accumulate, was studied quite intensely and we gained a very detailed understanding of these systems. All this work ultimately helps exploration geologists make reasonable predictions on the location and thicknesses of strata best suited to be oil reservoirs.

5 Years And I Am Still Blogging!

Just realized that its been 5 years to the day that I started blogging!

Here is my very first post, an essay on early human evolution and the topology of the evolutionary process  - The Trunk-Less Tree Of Life

Yeah.. I still feel pretty enthused about the whole blogging experience, so expect a fairly regular supply of posts!

And I got some recognition from Indian Top Blogs, who after a survey of the Indian blogosphere placed my blog in their platinum category, which is in their top 50 list.

And I am now tweeting @rapiduplift... so do follow this space as well as my Twitter feed.

Thanks for all your support over the years!

Richard Muller On Reconfirmation Of Temperature Data

NPR Science Friday hosts Berkeley professor Richard Muller whose Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project investigated whether measured temperature data collected and reported by climate scientists was flawed. His conclusion is that the previously measured data faithfully records that the earth has been warming and that humans are primarily responsible for the temperature increase:

FLATOW: So tell us about your change of mind and heart about this issue.

MULLER: Well, if you had asked me a year ago, I might have said I didn't know whether there was global warming at all. But we had begun a major study, scientific reinvestigation. We were addressing what I consider to be legitimate criticisms of many of the skeptics.

But about nine months ago, we reached a conclusion that global warming was indeed taking place, that all of the effects that the skeptics raised could be addressed, and to my surprise, actually, the global warming was approximately what people had previously said.

It came as a bigger surprise over the last three to six months when our young scientist, Robert Rhode, was able to adopt really excellent statistical methods and push the record back to 1753. With such a long record, we could then separate out the signatures of solar variability, of volcanic eruptions, of El Nino and so on. And actually, to my surprise, the clear signature that really matched the rise in the data was human carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It just matched so much better than anything else. I was just stunned.

Prof. Muller also talks about the urgent need for a policy that provides incentives and financial assistance to switch to natural gas thus cutting down on the need to burn coal. Clean fracking is his rallying point!

Also the Guardian has a long article on Richard Muller and his work.

Hyperspectral Mapping Of The Geology Of Afghanistan

This post submitted to the Accretionary Wedge # 48 hosted by Earth-like Planet. The theme is "Geoscience and Technology" and this post is on the use of multi and hyperspectral remote sensing for geological mapping.

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Landsat series of remote sensing satellites, two maps of the surface distribution of several distinctive minerals covering a large portion of Afghanistan has been released by the USGS.

 Source: USGS Pub A

These maps have been prepared by processing the reflectance properties of surface materials captured by sensors aboard a plane. Conventional satellite mapping like that prepared from Landsat data does the same thing but it generally captures less information. For example, most conventional commercial satellites will capture reflected energy in the visible and the near infra red portion of the spectrum in 4 - 7 bands.

This type of remote sensing of the reflected and emitted energy from surface material is termed multispectral sensing. Recently, new satellites have started capturing hyperspectral data. Here, the energy from the visible to infrared spectrum is collected at very narrow intervals or channels. For example, NASA's Hyperion sensor aboard the EO-1 satellite is capable of collecting spectral information in 220 spectral bands from between the 0.4 to 2.5 µm (micrometer) bandwidth with a 30-meter ground resolution.