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A team of Indian astronomers has calculated the amount of hydrogen gas that contributed to star formation in the universe 10 billion years ago. It has also concluded that there is just enough hydrogen gas available to support star formation for another two billion years.
Hydrogen gas in galaxies condenses to form stars. Earlier studies had shown that the rate of star formation in the universe was at its peak between eight and 10 billion years ago, a period known as the ‘epoch of galaxy assembly’, but fell sharply thereafter. To understand why, scientists from Pune-based TIFR-National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) and Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, used the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) in Junnar to study the rate of star formation in 8,000 galaxies based on the available hydrogen gas.
“This is for the first time we know why the rate of star formation started declining eight billion years ago. Hydrogen signal observations emerging from distant 8,000 galaxies were stacked. They reveal that the availability of hydrogen gas has shrunk dramatically, thereby slowing down the speed of star formation,” said Aditya Chowdhury, doctoral student at NCRA and the lead author of the study, published in Nature on Wednesday.
With the supply of hydrogen gas inside these galaxies now depleting, Nissim Kanekar, also the co-author of the study, remarked, “The mass of the remnant hydrogen in the galaxies suggest that star formation would not go beyond another one or two billion years from now.”
Taking full advantage of the uGMRT offering improved sensitivity and frequency ranges, the Indian team scanned five locations in the sky for 100 hours.
Unlike stars that can be detected in optical wavelengths, atomic hydrogen signals are captured only using highly sensitive radio telescopes when tuned to 21 cm wavelengths.
On uGMRT, another co-author of the study, Jayaram Chengalur, said, “Earlier, the field of view of the sky was much smaller and making such detections were not feasible.”
KS Dwarakanath from RRI explained the limitations faced during previous attempts to study hydrogen gas inside galaxies. “The narrow bandwidth of earlier GMRT allowed us to cover only 850 galaxies,” he said. It is the uGMRT which made the study of such a large number of galaxies possible, said Chengalur.
When galaxies completely run out of hydrogen gas, then the rate of star formation will further decline and eventually cease, Chowdhury said.
Source: Indian Express, 14/10/20
Eminent Indian-origin academician Srikant Datar has been named as Dean of Harvard Business School, succeeding Nitin Nohria and becoming the second consecutive dean hailing from India to lead the prestigious 112-year-old institution.
Datar, an alumnus of the University of Bombay and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration and the senior associate dean for University Affairs at Harvard Business School (HBS).
He will assume charge as the school’s next dean on January 1, President Larry Bacow said.Bacow described Datar as an innovative educator, a distinguished scholar, and a deeply experienced academic leader. He is a leading thinker about the future of business education, and he has recently played an essential role in HBS’s creative response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. He has served with distinction in a range of leadership positions over his nearly 25 years at HBS, while also forging novel collaborations with other Harvard Schools, Bacow said.
Datar said he is in equal measures humbled and honoured to take on the new role.Harvard Business School is an institution with a remarkable legacy of impact in research, education, and practice. Yet the events of the past year have hastened our passage to an unforeseen future, he said, adding that he looks forward to working with colleagues and friends of the school to realise our mission in what undoubtedly will be an exciting new era.
Datar will become the 11th dean in the business school history. He will succeed Nohria, who last November announced his plans to conclude his deanship at the end of June 2020, after 10 years of service.
Nohria had agreed to continue through this December in view of the pandemic, a statement posted on the Harvard Gazette website said.Datar received his bachelor’s degree, with distinction, from the University of Bombay in 1973. A chartered accountant, he went on to receive a postgraduate diploma in business management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, before completing master’s degrees in statistics and economics and a Ph.D. in business from Stanford University.
From 1984 to 1989, he was an assistant professor and then associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration, where he was honoured with the George Leland Bach Teaching Award.
From 1989 to 1996, he served on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he rose to become the Littlefield Professor of Accounting and Management and was recognised with the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
The statement added that as a native of India who has travelled widely on the HBS’s behalf, Datar brings a broad international perspective to his work.He has presented his research to audiences of academics and executives in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
He has led discussions and workshops on management education on several continents, has written numerous papers and cases focused on enterprises based abroad, and is faculty co-chair of the HBS Senior Executive Program Africa, which was launched in 2016 and has since offered programs for executives in South Africa, Rwanda, Ghana, and Mauritius.
He also serves on the governing body of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
The statement said that since joining the HBS faculty in 1996, Datar has held a series of key positions, as the school’s senior associate dean responsible for faculty recruiting, for faculty development, for executive education, for research, and currently for University affairs.
He has served since 2015 as faculty chair of the Harvard Innovation Labs, or i-lab. Most recently, he has been intensively engaged in envisioning and implementing the innovative hybrid teaching and learning model that HBS has adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the statement said.
Bacow added that Datar will come to the deanship with a broad international perspective, decades of close engagement with business practice, and a strong commitment to building an increasingly diverse and inclusive HBS community.
He is also a warm, generous, and thoughtful colleague and mentor someone whose leadership experience, intimate knowledge of HBS, deep devotion to the institution, and talent for catalysing constructive change all promise to serve the School and the University well, at a pivotal moment for business education.
Nohria said Datar is an outstanding choice as Harvard Business School’s next dean and he has thought deeply about the challenges and opportunities facing management education, and has a proven record of collaboration, innovation, and leadership not only within HBS, but across Harvard and at other organisations.Co-author of several books, Datar played a key role in launching both the M.S.-M.B.A. in biotechnology and life sciences (with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School) and the M.S.-M.B.A. in engineering sciences (with the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) joint degree programs.
Datar currently serves on the boards of companies such as Novartis and T-Mobile US.
Founded in 1908, the Business School is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 200 offer full-time programs leading to the M.B.A. and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 70 open-enrollment executive-education programs and 55 custom programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the digital-learning platform.
Source: Indian Express, 10/10/20
As the Delhi University announced the cut-off lists for college admission, we began to realise the absurdity of the entire process. No, if for “branded” colleges, 100 per cent is the cut-off for disciplines like Economics and Psychology, there is no reason to believe that it demonstrates the high quality of our school education. Instead, it shows the vicious cycle of rote learning and inflated marks, it indicates the poverty of pedagogic imagination and shows a highly mechanised process of entering the realm of higher education. In other words, it indicates the damage the system does to young minds.
Ours is a society that worships “success” and adores the “toppers”. And this is precisely why it ought to realise that there is no necessary correlation between one’s intellectual ability or academic excellence and one’s performance in board examinations. It is quite possible, as any keen observer of the prevalent system of education would accept, to score 100 per cent in English without having any curiosity to enter the fascinating world of poetry, short stories and novels. Or, for that matter, the “topper” in Physics need not necessarily have a scientific temper or the keen urge to understand the laws of nature.
The experience of wonder, the joy of learning and unlearning, or the spirit of enquiry — nothing matters as the prevalent system believes in the fetish of quantification. And, ironically, this craze for “marks” transforms a learner into a smart consumer; the only skill she/he is required to master is the ability to consume knowledge capsules (“facts”, information, theorems) abstracted from textbooks, and memorise associated bullet points as emphasised by exam-oriented teachers and coaching centre gurus. With a series of mock tests, endless drilling and chronic obsession with ranking (schools sell the “toppers” as perfect “products” for enhancing their market value), a young learner is eventually reduced into a parrot — repeating what is filled in her mind, say, two pieces of information about Raja Ram Mohan Roy, six facts about Gandhi, or a physics theorem to solve a numerical.
In a world of this kind, there is no poetic wonder, no criticality of social science, and no enquiring spirit of science. One is only an exam warrior. Moreover, as the “fact-centric”/“objective”/short questions become the new normal, and the power of memorisation is the key to success, it becomes exceedingly difficult not to get at least 80 per cent in the board examination. And those who get even 95 per cent tend to suffer from depression. This is nothing but violence — the pathology of “success” causing the stigma of “failure”.
At this juncture, it is also important to realise that many of these young students hardly find any guidance as they choose their subjects and enter colleges. There are two reasons for this. First, as academic disciplines are hierarchised through the pragmatism of market rationality, young students — often pressured by the anxiety-ridden parents, and driven by the peer culture — tend to prefer “prestigious” subjects like Physics, Economics, Commerce, English literature and Psychology, even if they are not intrinsically inclined to these subjects. And second, in the age of “ranking” colleges and universities are hierarchised.
Hence, to take an illustration, St Stephen’s or Lady Shri Ram College is often consumed as a fancy “brand”: It is not impossible to find students who, because of the “brand consciousness”, prefer the “prestigious” college rather than the subject of their liking. The subject — Sanskrit or Education — doesn’t matter; Miranda House, or Hindu College at any cost! This mass psychology of consumption further complicates the politics of the cut-off point. Not solely that. It destroys human possibilities. One who could have contributed immensely to the study of Hindi literature ends up pursuing Economics or, for that matter, one who carries the burden of St Stephen’s Economics might have found real satisfaction in pursuing History in a not so “reputed” institution like Deshbandhu College. Yes, the craving for “status” triumphs — education suffers. In fact, the system functions like a soulless machine. It is more interested in eliminating people (you don’t have 99 per cent in the board exam and hence, you cannot do Sociology at LSR). It is not for finding or arousing one’s real aptitude and inclination. What an irony! Just one examination and we decide one’s fate.
Imagine the intensity of mental agony these youngsters pass through. As social Darwinism is normalised and hyper-competitiveness becomes the philosophy of the age, schools become highly-oppressive institutions. Tight bodies, heavily-loaded school bags, weekly tests, never-ending home assignments, constant performance anxiety, parental pressure and the urge to be a “topper”: The world they inhabit has no rainbow, no sunset, no music; it only breeds psychic anxiety and some sort of sadomasochism. Even though the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti felt the pain of this neurosis, the system remains as it is. And no matter how much we value these “toppers”, or feel proud of these “top-ranking” colleges, the society we are creating is bound to be toxic and violent. Yes, depression, loneliness and schizophrenia are bound to characterise the restless generation. In the coming years, newspapers, it seems, would start writing editorials about students’ suicides.
Is there a way out? An answer to this question is possible only if we acquire the courage to accept that one’s curiosity, aptitude and awakened intelligence cannot be measured through a pattern of examination that compels one to be a robotic performer rather than a creative wanderer.
This article first appeared in the print edition on October 16, 2020 under the title ‘World of exam warriors’. The writer is professor of Sociology at JNU.
Source: Indian Express, 16/10/20
“Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.”
‐ Hyman Rickover
“अच्छे विचारों को स्वतः ही नहीं अपनाया जाता है। उन्हें पराक्रमयुक्त धैर्य के साथ व्यवहार में लाया जाना चाहिए।”
‐ हायमैन रिकओवर
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