Wednesday, January 09, 2019
Regaining respect: on Indian Science Congress
Doing away with the inauguration may see reduced political interest in the Indian Science Congress
Reacting to controversial remarks made by Andhra University Vice Chancellor G. Nageswara Rao and Dr. Kannan Krishnan at the recently concluded 106th Indian Science Congress at Jalandhar, Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan said in an email, “The talks need to be vetted by serious committees with the appropriate expertise. If despite the careful vetting, someone begins to spout nonsense, they should be ejected by the chair of the session.”
The Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) has finally decided to do what Professor Ramakrishnan has suggested and bring some respectability to the Congress. In a resolution, it decided to obtain in advance the abstracts of the lectures of all speakers, including those speaking at the Children’s Science Congress. “We will not vet but screen the abstracts, and not allow pseudoscience to be presented. We will also have a person from the Association at every session and remove the speakers from the dais if they go beyond the purview of the submitted abstract,” said Premendu P. Mathur, General Secretary (Scientific Activities), ISCA.
While the standard of the Congress has been in steady decline for several years, since 2015 it has seen questionable comments by speakers glorifying India’s ancient scientific achievements. The stage was set in October 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he cited the examples of Karna and Ganesha to wrongly claim that reproductive genetics and cosmetic surgery existed in India thousands of years ago. At the 2018 Science Congress, Union Minister of Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan claimed that Stephen Hawking once said the Vedas had a theory superior to Albert Einstein’s e=mc2. The credibility of science was also eroded when Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Satyapal Singh claimed last year at an event that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution of man was “scientifically wrong”. It might be more than coincidence that Professor Rao felt emboldened to claim that the Kauravas were test tube babies and that India possessed knowledge about guided missiles centuries ago. On his part, Dr. Krishnan rejected Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newton’s theory of gravity as well as Hawking’s theories on black holes.
The Association must take bold decisions to transform the Congress into a platform for serious scientific discussions. Professor Ramakrishnan, who called the Congress a “circus”, suggested that the meeting be “made smaller and depoliticised”. The most needed reform would be to do away with the inauguration altogether. P. Balaram, a former director of the Indian Institute of Science, said that if the inauguration were to be excluded from the agenda, the event would see reduced political interest and more genuine science. In such a scenario, serious scientists will hopefully flock to the Congress in greater numbers.
The writer is the Science Editor of The Hindu
Source: The Hindu, 9/01/2019
In Biology, what is Extreme Male Brain?
Also known as the empathising-systemising theory, this refers to a theory of autism which states that the condition may be the result of overexposure of foetuses to testosterone from their mothers. Such overexposure to testosterone may cause the brains of people with autism to specifically adapt to analyse and construct systems while severely lacking in the ability to empathise with fellow human beings. The extreme male brain theory was proposed by British clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. It derives its name from the fact that the male brain is typically suited for systemising purposes while the female brain is built for empathising.
Source: The Hindu, 9/01/2019
The feminisation of Indian politics is an exciting phenomenon of our time
Women legislators in India raise economic performance in their constituencies by about 1.8 percentage points per year more than male legislators. When average growth is 7%, this implies that the growth premium associated with female legislators is about 25%
Raising the share of women in India’s state legislative assemblies is not only likely to lead to better representation of women’s and children’s concerns in policymaking, it is also likely to lead to higher economic growth. Research suggests that women favour redistributive politics and, thus, have a tolerance of higher taxes. This makes it plausible that, at least in the short to medium term, women politicians are less effective than men at promoting economic growth. Using comprehensive data for 4,265 state assembly constituencies for 1992-2012, we — T Baskaran, B Min, Y Uppal and I — show that the opposite is the case.
Women legislators in India raise economic performance in their constituencies by about 1.8 percentage points per year more than male legislators. When average growth is 7%, this implies that the growth premium associated with female legislators is about 25%.
To understand the mechanisms underlying this striking finding, we explored differences between male and female legislators in corruption, efficiency and motivation, each of which has been associated with economic growth in developing countries. We found evidence in favour of women in each case.
Male legislators are about three times as likely as female legislators to have criminal charges pending against them when they stand for election, and we estimate that this can explain about one fourth of the difference in growth between male and female-led constituencies. We buttress this result with estimates of actual corruption in office, measured as the rate at which women accumulate assets while in office. We find this is 10 percentage points lower per year than among men. These findings line up with experimental evidence that women are more fair, risk-averse and less likely to engage in criminal and other risky behaviour than men.
Since economic infrastructure is an important input to growth in developing countries, we analysed MLA performance in implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the massive federally-funded village road construction programme. We find that male and female politicians are equally likely to negotiate federal projects for road building in their constituencies. However, women are more likely to oversee completion of these projects. The share of incomplete road projects is 22 percentage points lower in female-led constituencies.
Source: Hindustan Times, 8/01/2019
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