Wanted Geography Clerks

A job announcement in the GIS Jobs Clearinghouse:

Wanted Geography Clerk: U.S. Census Bureau, Bothell, WA

DUTIES:
Reviews source material and identifies the features requiring updates. Moves, reshapes, adds, and deletes features, updates line features, and address information. Uses source materials, various program files, and menu selections to effect updates. Sorts, files, or assembles various documents for further use in Geography operations and performs miscellaneous clerical activities, as needed.

It something of a relief to know that one of the world's most technological advanced nations still has need for clerks. Let's face it. Lot's of jobs even in high-tech are clerical in nature but considering the obsession with political correctness in America, one would have thought that the word clerk would be banished by now. How about: Wanted: Data developer and file relocation specialist. But the wheels of government turn exceedingly slowly even in the United States, and so a few clerks do make it now and then in a high tech job list.

GIS Jobs Clearinghouse is a fascinating website. It's a job board but in its style it is very mid 90's, reminiscent of the early days of the Internet. No style sheets, no ASP, no imagery and no gimmicks. Just a list created in plain old HTML. But what a penetrating glimpse into the American economy. GIS stands for geographic information systems, a technology to create, manage, analyze and produce maps of spatial data. GIS is used as a tool for varied applications, ranging from urban planning to demographic studies to epidemiology to forestry to electrical utility management. Traditionally a tool used by government institutes involved in natural resource management, the use of GIS has penetrated deep into the private business sector as well. GIS makes complex spatial patterns easier to understand, something which is critical for business decision making and so the private industry has embraced the technology for varied applications. Here are few example from GIS Jobs Clearinghouse.

GIS Analyst, Ecology and Environment, Inc, Buffalo, New York

GIS Analyst, Children's Environmental Health Initiative, Durham, NC

Demographic & Mapping Analyst, Newspaper Services of America, Downers Grove, IL

GIS Layer Developer, Global Energy Decisions, Boulder, CO

A few years ago in 2005 I gave a talk to the Rotary Club, Pune on GIS. It was a standard spiel on the wonders of GIS but at the end I showed a revealing graphic, a comparison of the GIS job market in the U.S and India. Only the private sector was compared since data on Indian government job vacancies was hard to come by. My interest was not in the size of the market but in what way is the private sector using GIS. This information I could glean from the job announcements, in the expected job duties section. A 3 month snap shot was taken from several online job boards. Take a look below:


In the U.S. besides a great demand for high-end application developers the other main thrust area was analysis of data. It is in this area that science graduates find employment. If you scroll down GIS jobs clearinghouse you will be struck by the number of GIS analyst positions. What's in a name you'll say, but this position announcement is a rough guide to the diverse ways GIS is utilized in the U.S.

As the figure to the left shows (updated to Dec 2007), all sectors make use of the GIS analyst. Geologists, urban planners, ecologists, biologists, image specialists all are employed for projects that utilize their science training along with GIS for solving real world problems. I can say from personal experience that it is a very satisfying and enriching work atmosphere. In India, along with application development the other thrust area was data conversion. This has been powered by the outsourcing revolution whereby hundreds to thousands of college graduates no matter what their background sit and churn out data mostly for foreign clients. Employment for science graduates in jobs that make use of their science training were far and few between.

Three years later I decided to revisit this comparison when I saw the job vacancy for the geography clerk. Maybe things were changing in India. Again only the private sector is compared over a time period from Oct 2007 to early Jan 2008.

In India, the data conversion juggernaut still rolls on while the demand for science skills is disappointingly low. Some conversations I had with colleagues in the GIS industry and alumni from GIS training institutes seem to confirm my little data collection spree. Most graduates get offered data conversion jobs, only a few get to do real analytical work. There are many reasons for this. Until recently there has been a lack of awareness in much of the private sector about the power of GIS. The government controls much of the base data on natural resources, urban plans, topography and difficulties in getting hold of data in a timely manner has slowed the use of GIS. Our environmental permitting regime has not been very strict, many would say it has been an eyewash. This has meant that companies traditionally did not take environmental impact assessments seriously enough to use detailed and often expensive GIS methods. And finally the government itself has not leveraged the true potential of GIS. In the U.S. government organizations of all levels, from municipalities, state government agencies to federal agencies all use GIS for various purposes. Such a dependence has lead to a flowering of private companies offering all sorts of specialized services to the government. In India such a synergy with the private sector has not developed to its full potential. It has been very hard in India to set up a profitable GIS company that exclusively offers high end analytical and modeling services. Most companies involved in GIS use a profit making data conversion section to sustain a smaller analysis section or in many cases GIS is just one part of a wider IT offering. To be a little optimistic, in all these areas some major progress is underway. Awareness is growing and sectors such as telecom and infrastructure are leading the way in GIS applications. These are sectors with deep pockets and in the absence of data they have resorted to creating base data from scratch. Government is slowly relinquishing its control on data and making it available through online clearinghouses such as the Environmental Information Centre and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, although the latter online data clearinghouse was not working last time I checked. And environmental impact assessments are now mandatory for clearing any significant development project. This should give impetus to smaller more specialized companies to enter the fray. As the government gets more involved in the use of GIS, there is likely to a parallel growth of the private sector not just as data creators but as suppliers of science backed specialized solutions. The 2008 trend should be seen as an industry in transition. Hopefully by the time of my next survey in a few years, the science graduates will find their skills in demand from the Indian GIS industry.

In the meantime, data conversion jobs will at least for the near to mid term will continue to be the main employer in the GIS business. I was struck by this job announcement

Wanted GIS Executive, New Delhi
Duties: Digitization:- Digitization of Raster Images to produce output in Vector format

Just a routine clerical job. But in this era of India Shining, GIS Executive sounds so much better.

Camera Tricks on Absent Teachers

From Tim Harford's Column in the Financial Times

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

According to UNICEF India, there is a correlation between teacher absenteeism and simply the daily incentives to appear to work. Better teacher attendances are seen in schools closer to paved roads, schools that are inspected regularly and have better infrastructure. Absenteeism in general increases in low-income states. Obviously can't distribute camera's to ten's of thousands of schools across the country. Any ideas on how to improve teacher absenteeism without resorting to tricks like this? Another thought. Maybe if 60 schools that did not get the camera knew such a system is keeping tabs on teachers, would that have acted as an incentive to show up to school so as not to appear worse off in comparison with the schools with the camera? This was a small scale approach in influencing behavior through monitoring, but it does show that holding individuals accountable through some type of monitoring system- something that is never strongly enforced in India - would act as a pretty strong incentive to modify behavior.

The Whale That Walked In Kashmir

From DNAIndia.com this headline:

Whales once walked in Kashmir

Whales evolved from land mammals that did walk. Scientists have found quite a remarkable series of fossils documented through morphological changes this transition from land to sea. The earliest known whale is the 47 million year old Ambulocetus natans, a small otter size creature with short stubby legs. Scientists reckon that whales ultimately evolved from land mammals called artiodactycls, even toed ungulates whose living representatives include camels, pigs and hippos. But before Ambulocetus the fossil record is poor which means we don't know much about the earliest ungulate ancestors of whales and their ecology. Now a new article reports on the discovery of a 48 million year old raccoon size fossil artiodactycl named Indohyus, which would make it one of the earliest known relatives of whales and should throw light on the early environmental conditions in which ancestors of whales lived. This fossil was found in Kashmir by a team of researchers, Sunil Bajpai of IIT Roorkee, B N Tiwari of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun and US-based researcher Carl Buell Hans Thewissen.The article appeared in the journal Nature. Based on isotope analysis of teeth that indicates the type of diet (vegetarian) and morphological characters, Indohyus has been interpreted to have been a creature that spent a lot of time wading through and underwater, munching on aquatic vegetation. Its leg bones are particularly heavy, probably to prevent it from floating up to the surface of water. Similar bone structure can be seen in hippos. Below is an artists reconstruction of Indohyus.

Source: BBC News

The DNA article calls Indohyus the ancestors of whales.Yet if you look at the evolutionary relationships of Indohyus with the Cetaceans (the group that includes whales) which scientists have constructed by comparing the morphological characters of Indohyus with living and fossil Cetaceans and other mammals this is what you find:

Source: Nature

Indohyus is not an ancestor of the Cetaceans but a member of a sister group, a close relative. Why does the article refer it as an ancestor? This goes to the very heart of a common misconception of how evolution works. When Indohyus was interpreted to be an ancient even toed ungulate related to whales and sharing some morphological similarities with whales, the report automatically assumed that it must be an ancient ancestor of the whales. This happens because of the long discredited but still popular notion of evolution as a linear process whereby an entire species gets transformed over time into a new species. This view leads to interpreting evolutionary relationships as direct ancestor descendant lineages. But evolution is a branching process. One species can give rise to just one, or two or several new species and continue to coexist with its descendants. Moreover, the rate of morphological change in these different branches may vary. One branch may experience rapid morphological change while a closely related branch may not change too much. The above evolutionary tree also known as a cladogram is basically a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships between the different organisms being studied. Based on this cladogram, Indohyus and Cetaceans shared a common ancestor in the past. This common ancestor gave rise to two daughter species. One species became the founding ancestor of the Raoellidae, the group that includes Indohyus and the other species became the founding ancestor of the Cetaceans. The branch of artiodactycls that evolved into Indohyus retained many morphological characters of its ancestors. The other branch also retained some ancestral traits such as the middle-ear space called the involucrum. But they also evolved many new characters including carnivory, shorter legs and a more hydrodynamic body shape. Eventually the short legs became modified into the Cetacean fins. The Cetacean branch has undergone dramatic morphological changes. At first the founding species of the two branches would have been morphologically very similar. But since morphological evolution in the branch that lead to Indohyus was limited, it resembles the earliest ancestors of the Cetaceans more than living Cetaceans do. This leads to the common misperception when interpreting evolutionary relationships that a creature with more ancestral traits is actually the ancestor. The common remark that we evolved from chimpanzees is based on just such a misunderstanding. We shared a common ancestor with the chimps 6-8 million years ago. The branch that lead to chimps did not change much morphologically as against the changes that took place in the human lineage. So a chimp likely resembles our very early ancestors more than we do. That doesn't make the chimp our ancestor.

The report also says that

three-member team of researchers, including two from India, claim to have found the missing link between whales and land-based mammals.

I doubt if the researchers made any such claim. Indohyus is a close relative of the Cetaceans. Its morphology and the interpreted ecology in which it lived can tell us something about how the ancient even toed ungulates from which the Cetaceans evolved looked like and the environment in which they lived. The term missing link is now outdated. It used to refer to a species with transitional or intermediate form between any two end-member morphologies thought to be forming an ancestor descendant series. Discovery of such forms is always useful since it allows paleontologists to understand just how morphological evolution took place as one form evolved into another, but one missing link cannot be expected to explain all the evolutionary changes between one suite of morphological characters into another. In modern evolutionary thinking a missing link is really a reference to an intermediate morphology and not to any particular fossil species. Because of the branching nature of evolution, the discovered fossil species with an intermediate morphology may be an evolutionary cousin and not a direct ancestor. There is another reason why Indohyus should not be thought of as a missing link or a transitional form. It was not in transition into becoming more aquatic and whale-like. The terms missing link and transitional fossil are retrospective labels. But evolution has no foresight. It did not build Indohyus and related semi-aquatic ungulates as a stop gap measure towards more full fledged aquatic Cetaceans. Evolution is simply change in response to the environment on a generation by generation basis. Indohyus like any other creature evolved characteristics that were well adapted to its environment. It was a representative of its time and place. Modified descendants of this "transitional" morphology of Indohyus are still with us. We call them hippos.

When A Forest Is Not a Forest

A dense growth of trees and underbrush covering a large area - The American Heritage Science Dictionary

A large tract of land covered with trees and underbrush - Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

A large area covered with trees and undergrowth - Oxford dictionary

Judging by these definitions could one call the area shown in below image as a forest?

If the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has its way, then this dense growth of trees and underbrush (Law College land, Pune city) cannot be called a forest and can be exploited by commercial interests without permission from MoEF. The reason is an attempt to define forests in a way that excludes the common sense definitions of forest, three of which I quoted above. According to the new proposed definition, only those areas notified by the government as forests in any Act or recorded in any government documents as forests can be considered a forest. Other dense growths of trees and underbrush not under government control need not apply although the Supreme court has allowed the common sense definition to be considered irrespective of ownership. Only the Indian bureaucracy can come up with such an absurdity. Consider the situation in the image below.

Here the entire area in the image (reserved hills of Pune city) is a notified forest regardless of whether it is actually covered with trees or is barren. I have no problems with this. Afforestation can rejuvenate barren lands. With global warming threatening India, such large scale afforestation programs on barren forest land can contribute in mitigating climate change in many ways. So then why not protect already dense growths of trees which happen not to be official forests? If these lands lose protection as they will if this perverse definition is adopted, they will no doubt be stripped of their green cover in no time. According to the Forest Survey of India, around 2.5% of the total land area of India is covered by Trees outside Forests, i.e. woodlands, sacred groves, and other clumps of trees not officially under government control. This comes to around 80,000 sq km, which is an awful lot of greenery with no potential protection from the government.

Governments like blanket rules. So much easier to implement than to let scientists examine case by case whether an area is ecologically sensitive and should be protected regardless of whether it is an official forest or not. Doing that would be giving Indian scientists too much power. Never! Inch by inch, Act by Act, definition by definition the Indian government is abdicating its responsibility to conserve and manage India's forests and biodiversity. Our basic philosophy of forest management has not changed since the days of the British raj. They looked upon Indian forests as a resource to be exploited. Forest management working plans were written with this in mind. The focus has been and still is on timber and mono-culture plantations and not on conservation and biodiversity. Successive Indian governments have been no more enlightened in their thoughts and actions. Do you think the timber and mining industry has any say in the matter of this new "definition". These are worrying times for the environmental health of our country.

The End of Darwinian Evolution?

It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future- American baseball player Yogi Berra, or was it Mark Twain who made this comment? Either way, it’s hard to disagree. Maybe that’s why I chose to study geology. So much easier to figure out what happened in the past! Darwin’s Last Gasp was the provocative title of an editorial in the Times of India a few days ago. Mukul Sharma writes:

With globalization in progress the different races are no longer going to be evolving away from each other. Unlike what happened earlier when humans dispersed to separate regions and developed unique gene pools that made them less alike, the trend now is being reversed with a tendency of merging into a single mixed humanity.

The other reason why Darwinian evolution may finally have to give up on its mechanisms is because natural selection is about to be bypassed altogether by genetic manipulation technology. Ultimately - say in about another 50 years or so - artificial selection using genetic engineering techniques will make evolution forever irrelevant, at least as far as our species is concerned.

The research that prompted this article suggested that human adaptive evolution fueled by the advent of agriculture and a population explosion has accelerated over the last ten thousand years or so. That may well be so says Mukul Sharma, but not anymore. Take his first assertion. Humans are migrating in large numbers and mixing up the gene pool and that’s the end of Darwinian evolution for humans. Is it the end of evolution or the end of evolution through natural selection commonly known as Darwinian evolution and what’s the difference between the two? Most people take evolution to mean adaptive evolution through natural selection i.e. a change over generations to a better adapted state. It is this kind of evolution that the research on accelerated evolution concentrated on. Biologists have a more inclusive definition which is changes in the frequency of alleles in a population from one generation to the next. Evolution is a process that causes heritable changes in the properties of populations over generations. Individuals don’t evolve. Modern population migrations cause great demographic changes especially given the declining fertility rates in many western nations. So, say with Indians immigrating to England in large numbers, northern European genes will decline in frequency relative to south Asian ones. The genetic structure of the population will change over generations i.e. it will evolve. Even without migration, populations can evolve without natural selection taking place. This is by a process known as random genetic drift. Biologists acknowledge that the vast majority of mutations may not be advantageous but neutral or almost neutral, meaning they do not affect reproductive fitness. Natural selection is blind to such neutral changes and the frequency of such genes can fluctuation randomly over generations until just by chance one allele completely replaces the alternate version i.e. the mutation becomes fixed in the population. So mixing of populations won’t stop humans from evolving even in the absence of natural selection. And it certainly has not stopped acting in the poorer countries where enormous differences in mortality rates still exert strong directional selection pressures for change.

The notion that natural selection has stopped working on human populations is mainly related to advances in medical technology and the overall improvements in standards of living. This undoubtedly has led to a relaxation of mortality selection, the most familiar form of natural selection. People who used to die before reproducing due to disease and poor health linked to bad genes now don’t die in the same numbers. Such faulty genes therefore don’t get eliminated from the gene pool. For example the frequency of genetically determined red-green color blindness is about 5-10% higher in western urban males than in traditional hunter gatherer or non-industrialized farming societies living today. This is an indication that selection has been relaxed in western populations. But natural selection works on humans (and other organisms) in several other ways at various stages of our life cycle, and these have not been affected by medical advances so far. These other forms of natural selection are 1) selection at the gamete stage, 2) selection at the embryo stage and 3) sexual selection at the reproductive stage. There is some evidence that selection can weed out defective sperm mostly based on the extreme gymnastic contortions sperm cell have to perform within the female reproductive system. It is possible this is selection for the quality of sperm. And there is also some evidence that there are more mutations in early-stage cells than in the final fertilized egg, suggesting that mutations are being weeded in the female gamete as well. Out of several hundreds of million sperm cells, only a few taste success, and out of 5-7 million oocycts only a few hundred or so become eggs, so selection most probably is playing a role eliminating faulty cells at this stage. How would selection work at an embryonic stage? About 60% of our genes are expressed at this stage, ones involved in basic cellular physiological functions and those involved in development. Again bad genes which are expressed at an early stage in the embryo will cause faulty development of the embryo and likely death. The estimate is that about 80% of conceptions that are lost before birth are likely the result of natural selection. Finally there is sexual selection. If individuals have the ability to screen potential mates for bad genes, then such choice may lead to elimination of these genes as bearers of these genes remain without a partner. Do humans have such abilities? As usual Darwin got there first by referring to a French and Scottish study which showed that single men had twice the natural death rate as married men at years 20 to 30. Similar patterns exist in Asia, Europe and America and being single is apparently one the biggest risk factors for human beings. This may off course mean that marriage improves health, but the other explanation that health improves your chances of marriage is also highly probable. It is likely we make conscious choices or get unconsciously influenced regarding the genetic quality of potential mates.These forms of natural selection will continue to affect us humans even during demographic changes, population mixing and the current medical technologies.

Mukul Sharma’s second assertion is that “artificial selection using genetic engineering techniques will make evolution forever irrelevant, at least as far as our species is concerned”. In making this assertion he misses the altogether important point that artificial selection is also a mechanism of Darwinian evolution and contrary to making evolution irrelevant it has the potential of transforming it into an even more potent force. Darwin himself began his one long argument using artificial selection carried out by pigeon breeders and domestication of cattle to ram home the point that populations can change very rapidly through such means. Darwin thought of natural selection as acting through the differential survival and reproduction of individuals. Artificial selection if society goes in for it will change human populations not by eliminating individuals or banning some from reproducing but by preferential representation of certain genes by making changes at the early gamete stage of the life cycle. Initially such selection will focus on disease genes but there could be other types of changes possible. Recently I read an article about the super rich in Newsweek magazine. The tendency is to form exclusive clubs and networks and isolate oneself socially and culturally from the rest of the plebeian population. If this trend of cultural isolation continues then how long until certain groups opt for genetic isolation through artificial selection? Will we see evolution of enhanced features or abilities in certain groups? All this is speculation. Most predictions about the future including the ones I am making will be wrong. Humans may decide to regulate the use of genetic engineering for certain medical applications only, or it may go the other way, where cultures may decide to isolate themselves from other groups and go in for strong directional evolution in many traits through artificial means. An as yet undiscovered pathogen may evolve to which our medical knowledge have no answer to, restoring strong mortality selection.

Is there a possibility of even more fundamental changes to our genome? Evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley has speculated that our current level of biological complexity is limited by mutational load mainly through copying errors when our DNA gets replicated. Nearly 2 billion years ago repair enzymes evolved that reduced copying errors from about 1 in 10,000 to about 1 in 10,000 million. This enabled an increase in biological complexity. There is a hint that our mutation rates are very high. For humans it takes on average about five estrus cycles for a fertile male and a fertile female to produce a baby. This indicates, although is not proof, that the four unsuccessful attempts are related to genetic errors mostly copying errors. Could we fashion an even more efficient repair enzyme, one that reduces the error rate even further multi-fold fueling evolution of humans towards even greater complexity? The only certainty is change. I would wager (to be settled by my potential descendants :-) ) that 5,000 years from now our descendants will be as different from us as we are from our ancestors who lived 10-15,000 years ago.