Today the rest of the media have piled on: the Times of India, DNA, Deccan Herald and others. And the Hindustan Times has editorialised on the matter. Choice quote:

So why is that people who plagiarise are not bothered about the after-effects like bad press and public denouncement? After all, in the first place, they nick something because they want to be seen in a good light, be admired for their wonderful work. Our guess is that those who plagiarise are plain lazy. They are so hopelessly lazy that they don’t even want to give the stolen text some new twists and turns.

This is about four lines of literature review. Does the HT have the slightest evidence that the new results (or “wonderful work”) presented in the paper were plagiarised? And the scientists apologised in print. Has the HT ever apologised for stealing others’ work? And yes, they have done so, many times: see here, and here, for example. This person did, it seems, manage an apology — after weeks of pursuit and bad internet publicity. I’m not sure if Bryan Appleyard ever got an apology from HT, however (though he reports a private apology from the plagiarist editor).

There are several examples involving other major newspapers and other media. Here’s the Times of India. Another TOI example. Another. And another. (Note that this last link is to the HT’s LiveMint.) Even The Hindu is not immune. (In this instance, I believe the offender, film correspondent Gautaman Bhaskaran, was quietly asked to leave, but I’m not aware of any public statement. But The Hindu hasn’t — yet — moralised about the CNR case, so I absolve them of hypocrisy this time.)

One time the HT did apologise, promptly and prominently, was when they stole from the Times of India. Except that they didn’t really. They said it was “based on a mass, press handout”, and the ToI just happened to run it first. And they didn’t even name the ToI — they merely referred to a “rival publication”. If it was a press handout, it is clear that both newspapers ran it verbatim. The Times of India, back in 2003, declared that “PR agencies are no longer an anathema” in providing “news”; other newspapers do just the same, without openly saying so.

In short — physicians, heal thyselves. If the Hindustan Times really wants to draw the right conclusions from the CNR case, the newspaper can start by instituting, and enforcing, a policy of prompt investigation of every allegation of plagiarism, and prompt and prominent apology in every confirmed case.

CNR Rao, the Prime Minister’s top scientific adviser and one of India’s best known scientists, has apologised to an international journal along with three other scientists for plagiarising the work of others, sending shockwaves through the country’s scientific community.

The apology note in question appeared in the December issue of “Advanced Materials” and reads:

The corresponding authors regret the reproduction of text from an article that appeared in Applied Physics Letters (S. Ghosh, B. K. Sarker, A. Chunder, Lei Zhai, S. I. Khondaker, Appl. Phys. Lett.2010, 96, 163109) in their paper.

The corresponding authors sincerely apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors for this oversight and for any miscommunication.

The paper by Chitara et al is here, and the paper by Ghosh et al is here (subscription required). I was alerted about this on Saturday, by an IISc scientist and by a journalist, and had a look at the papers. Four sentences in the second paragraph of the introduction, including citations therein, are undeniably lifted from the first paragraph of the Ghosh et al paper. These are rather generic, “literature review” sentences and have nothing to do with the actual content of either of the paper. It is a very short part of both papers. It is certainly wrong to do it — one of the authors of the paper by Ghosh et al did put some effort into those sentences and into assembling those references, and it is not right to simply lift that work. But it seems to me that the apology has adequately addressed this transgression. Moreover, I am told that it was one of the senior authors of the Chitara et al paper (S. B. Krupanidhi of IISc, Bangalore) who first noticed this duplication, and wrote both to the authors of the Ghosh et al paper, and to the editors of “Advanced Materials”; he offered to retract the paper, but the editors said that an apology is enough. If this is true, it does the authors great credit. [EDIT 21/2/12: According to DNA, it was the journal who contacted the authors. Thanks Abi for pointing this out.]

It seems to me that the editors were right. Punishment must fit the crime, and in this case the copied sentences had no relevance to the findings of the paper. I’d go so far as to say that very little intellectual content was lifted. The language was lifted, but the language described work that was already published and available in the literature. A retraction would be uncalled for.

The Hindustan Times article goes on to say:

Senior scientists at these Bangalore-based research institutions [IISc and JNCASR] pointed to a larger malaise in Indian science.

“These things will repeatedly happen as long as top scientists don’t take responsibility for the actual writing of the research paper,” a head of department at IISc said, requesting anonymity.

I have two things to say to that.

First, why the heck do you need to request anonymity? Say it with your real name, please. Or is it possible that the quote was fabricated? This sort of thing damages journalism. Anonymous quotes are sometimes needed, but not in these cases: you can easily find any number of reputable scientists willing to speak their minds.

Second, in what sense did these scientists not take responsibility for the writing? “Taking responsibility” is a different thing from “writing every word of the paper”. It is normal, and preferable, for graduate students to write substantial parts of the paper. All authors should read and approve the final manuscript, and the advisors have a responsibility to read it particularly carefully. From everything I have heard of CNR Rao, he does read every word of every manuscript that has his name on it. But it is too much to expect him, or anyone, to spot every minor piece of plagiarism that may have occurred. I made the point to the journalist who spoke to me that our educational system has totally failed in educating students on the seriousness of plagiarism — indeed, school students are encouraged to repeat “model” answers verbatim rather than to use their own words. So lab heads need to educate their students on such issues. At places like IISc and JNCASR, the rarity of such events suggests that students, in general, are aware of such matters. A lapse occurred in this case, though the author responsible hasn’t been named, to my knowledge. It was promptly addressed by the senior authors.

In short, everything happened exactly as it should, and the quick action does credit to the authors of the paper. (I do have a quibble with the word “oversight”: the copying could not have been accidental. But that’s a minor matter.) Unless there are further problems that we don’t know about, I think the event should be treated as closed, and hope that the careers of the junior authors will not suffer in any way, and whoever was responsible for the plagiarism has learned his lesson. An error at this level could occur in any multi-author paper, and any of us, as co-author, could be the victim. What is important is responding promptly and appropriately, and the authors of this paper, including one of the country’s best known living scientists, have shown us how to do that.

Which brings me to my final question: This apology appeared two months ago. Why is it hitting the news now? CNR Rao is a very successful scientist but — for reasons justified and unjustified — not a universally popular one. I very much suspect that the media are being used by someone with a grudge.

Unlike most of those opposing Rushdie’s visit, I have read the Satanic Verses. I downloaded the Kindle version (not a pirated pdf) a few months ago. I am not an Islamic scholar, so can’t say whether it is offensive to Muslims or not. To me it seemed that the dream sequence in question portrayed Mahound (a fictitious character, but obviously modelled on Muhammad) as being tempted by Satan (via the verses in question) to water down his lofty principles, and accepting some of the old goddesses with an inferior status; however, his principles prevail and he does not succumb to temptation. I do not see why a Muslim should be offended by that. Having prevailed, he proceeds to enforce what most readers would regard as the most fundamentalist laws on his society, which are clearly modelled on actual Islamic laws as preached by fundamentalist clerics. But then I don’t see why those same clerics should object to these things, either. Clearly those who rant against the book have not read it. If anyone can point me to an intelligent Muslim criticism of the book, explaining informatively why it would be hurtful to Muslim feelings, I would be very interested.

This dream sequence, and another involving a butterfly-clad girl leading drought-stricken villagers into the sea, are interspersed with the “real” story in the book, the story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha — the former a Bollywood star, the latter a middling Bombay-born London-based actor — and the rise and fall of the former, and the fall and rise of the latter. But that story is a dream sequence too, or reads like one. I am not a fan of Rushdie’s “magic realism”, and would have liked the book much better if he didn’t make his characters fall out of planes and live (or, at least, came up with a convincing explanation of why it happened), grow horns and goat’s feet, develop halos, and so on. Perhaps it’s the rationalist in me, but I prefer the sort of fiction — say the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie (I haven’t seen the sequel), or several Father Brown stories — where what appears to be miraculous and inexplicable turns out to be human after all. When the whole novel is an impossibility, the point of it escapes me. It also undermines Rushdie’s defence that the Mahound episodes were “only” a dream sequence: that would be more convincing if the entire book weren’t a dream sequence.

Such quibbles apart, the book is an entertaining read, extremely funny in places, and does not deserve to be banned. Or, if a ban is deserved, it needs to be justified much better than has been done in the 23+ years since it was published.

To return to current events, Gehlot, the Rajasthan Police, Chidambaram, and everyone else concerned deserve every bit of the opprobrium currently being heaped on them by the liberal media: it is a shameful episode for India. The allegation that Rushdie was made to stay away on false information — that an underworld hit squad was hired to kill him — is particularly ugly.

I am less inclined to blame the Jaipur Literary Festival organisers for their reaction, as many are doing. Their concern is to run a successful festival, and the Rushdie affair has already hijacked the headlines. The last thing they need is legal trouble on account of authors who, without informing the organisers upfront, choose to read from a banned book on stage. These authors, if they dared, could have set up their own tent in the city and read there. To hide behind a literary festival’s skirts — and then blame those organisers for not defending free speech — is craven behaviour.

As for Rushdie himself, he has a right to travel to his country of origin, as he pleases and when he pleases. If there is a perceived threat to him in a public place, the government has a duty to protect him. And if the threats were fabricated, heads should roll. But Rushdie is hardly being silenced. He has tweeted freely before and after the festival, and, I have no doubt, will continue to do so.

I am hoping for further discussion of the Rushdie episode to move to the political and crime pages of the papers, while the coverage of the festival itself focuses on the many excellent writers who are participating. No such luck, I fear: Rushdie is scheduled to address the festival by videolink, and will not disappear from the headlines so easily.

One of the articles is by my colleague Ronojoy Adhikari and myself, on one of our favourite topics, Bayesian statistics.

Ian Ayres, a professor of law at Yale, and Aaron S. Edlin, a professor of law and of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, have written an article titled “Don’t tax the rich. Tax inequality itself”. They observe that, in 2006, the average income of the top 1% earners in the United States was 36 times greater than that of the median household, and, reasonably enough, declare that this is the limit. Literally. They write

We believe that we have reached the Brandeis tipping point. It would be bad for our democracy if 1-percenters started making 40 or 50 times as much as the median American.

How to stop this relentless climb? Easy, they say:

Enough is enough. Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income…

Here’s how the tax would work. Once a year, the Internal Revenue Service would calculate the Brandeis ratio of the previous year. If the average 1-percenter made more than 36 times the income of the median American household, then the I.R.S. would create a new tax bracket for the highest 1 percent of income and calculate a marginal income tax rate for that bracket sufficient to reduce the after-tax Brandeis ratio to 36.

One can think of several objections, but the primary one is: what about the next 1%? If the people in the top 1% earn 50 times the median, it seems possible that the people in the next 1% earn 40 times the median. Will you fail to tax them, then? Would it be fair to tax the top earners to the extent that their income falls below the next 1%?

Here’s another objection: the top 1% likely don’t all earn the same amount: the top 1% of the top 1% (the top 1 in 10,000) earn disproportionately more. If you fix a tax rate in such a way that the “average 1-percenter” earns no more than 36 times the median household, will you not be penalising the bottom of the top 1% and not the top?

No reputable scholarly journal would let the authors get away without answering such questions. And if they did answer them, I’m pretty sure their method would evolve into the usual kind of progressive taxation system, with higher rates for higher income brackets.

But I suppose that’s why the New York Times exists.

(Image from this tumblr, which I assume will stop updating now)

Vanity Fair announcement here. NYT obit here.

UPDATE 17/12/2011: Ian McEwan has a must-read piece on his recent time with Hitchens at the Houston hospital where Hitchens spent his last days.

Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago, and has written a few articles contemplating his mortality, but this is his most harrowing yet. And yet he manages his usual erudition, wit and turn of phrase.

Ostensibly the essay is a rebuttal of Nietzsche’s “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. He contrasts the proton therapy that he has received:

This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory. It’s also impossible to warn against. If my proton doctors had tried to tell me up front, they might perhaps have spoken of “grave discomfort” or perhaps of a burning sensation. I only know that nothing at all could have readied or steadied me for this thing that seemed to scorn painkillers and to attack me in my core. I now seem to have run out of radiation options in those spots (35 straight days being considered as much as anyone can take), and while this isn’t in any way good news, it spares me from having to wonder if I would willingly endure the same course of treatment again.

But mercifully, too, I now can’t summon the memory of how I felt during those lacerating days and nights. And I’ve since had some intervals of relative robustness. So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal.

Whatever doesn’t kill you keeps you alive. I’m grateful that the Hitch is still alive, and still writing almost as actively as he ever has.

I’m not usually big on conspiracy theories, but sometimes it’s just too in-your-face.

A facebook friend posted an article attributed to Andy Rooney. It is bogus (as the comments on his link say), and I tried linking to the debunking page on the internet’s most important debunking site, snopes.com. And facebook rejected the comment, saying links to snopes are not allowed.

I tried posting that as a status message, but was again rejected, until I replaced “snopes.com” with “snopes dot com”.

Conspire away, facebookers. Gore claimed to have invented the internet, Obama is a Muslim terrorist born in Kenya, and don’t let snopes.com tell you anything different.

Basically, the definition of the h-index is: it is the maximum number h such that the scientist has published h papers, each with at least h citations. That is, if I have published 10 papers that have each been cited 10 or more times, but have not published 11 papers which have each been cited 11 or more times, my h-index is 10.

Based on a facebook wisecrack by a friend (on the occasion of Sachin falling short of his 100th international 100), the thought occurred to me: how about ranking batsmen in cricket by an analogous score? That is, a batsman has an index h if, on h occasions, he has scored h or more runs. (As before, we take the maximum possible h.)

It turns out that the top five in this list (for Test cricket only) are basically the top five rungetters, in the same order: Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, Brian Lara. The top 20 or so almost all appear in the top 20 list for rungetters. So it’s not very interesting — yet. Tendulkar’s h-score is 76 — that is, on 76 occasions he has scored 76 or more. There is a big gap between him and Dravid (69) but the others follow closely behind.

Suppose we modify it as follows: the nh index is that value of h, for a given n, such that on h occasions the batsman has scored nh or more runs. For examples, the 10h index would be: if on 5 occasions I have scored 50 runs or more (and I have not scored 60 runs or more on 6 occasions) I have a 10h index of 5. For n > 1, basically, I am giving more importance to higher-scoring innings, and also benefiting those who played fewer matches (most older players played far fewer games than Tendulkar and can’t remotely approach either his career aggregate, or his h-score).

What is the 10h ranking of batsmen, then? It turns out to be substantially different. The top 6 batsmen are now DG Bradman, Lara, Tendulkar, V Sehwag, KS Sangakkara and DPMD Jayawardene. Bradman scored 180 or more on 18 occasions; Lara’s 10h score is 17, Tendulkar’s is 16, and the other three get 15 each. Also in the top 10 (well, tied for 10) is Gary Sobers, who ranks quite far below both in career aggregate and in h-index. Immediately after him is Wally Hammond, who drops off today’s lists in the aggregrate as well as the above h-index.

Specifically, the top-20 list goes like this:

As you may expect, a 5h ranking sort of interpolates these: Tendulkar now tops again, with Bradman and Lara tied next (and close behind). Sobers and Hammond continue to rank high.

While it is always difficult to rank batsmen from different eras, it seems to me that any list of all-time-great batsmen must put Bradman at or near the top, and must include Sobers, Hammond, Sunil Gavaskar, Vivian Richards, Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad and other past greats in the top 20. The nh-index seems to do this, for suitable choices of n. But what is the optimal choice?

(This is based on raw batting data downloaded from cricinfo.)

UPDATE 07 Dec 2011: Gangan Prathap points, in the comments, to this 2010 paper, by him, where he proposes a “mock h index” (different from my nh-index above); his scheme ranks Bradman above four top Indian batsmen, but does not consider other international greats.

I think the attraction of Apple is something like that.

Andy Hertzfeld (quoting fellow-Apple-employee Bud Tribble) documented the “reality distortion field” of Steve Jobs back in 1981. He was talking of the temporary effect that Jobs had on employees: Jobs had a way of persuading people even when every rational instinct would convince them that it made no sense.

Today, Jobs’ reality distortion field has taken over the world. He convinced all of us that a phone doesn’t need a keypad, and a computer doesn’t need a keyboard: a touchscreen would do for both. He was probably the only person ever to out-Onion The Onion, who imagined a keyboard-less Mac some years ago, but didn’t quite take it to the logical conclusion.

Am I a victim? No and yes. No, I’m hanging to my Nokia E63 with its trusty keypad, and my Dell computer running Linux. Yes, I did buy a (non-Apple) keyboardless computer. And I just got my wife a (non-Apple) keypadless phone. And she already has a Mac Mini and likes it.

The point is it doesn’t matter whether I’m typing this on an Apple device, or you’re reading it on an Apple device, or not. We’re all in Jobs’ reality distortion field: every competitor is imitating Apple, and nobody is really thinking different. I’m using Linux to type this, but Ubuntu has thrust a Mac-style “global taskbar” on the top of the screen, and a Mac-style “dock” on the left — and I’ve accepted both. I’m using Google Chrome to type this — the browser is not only inspired by Apple’s Safari, but actually uses the same core engine, Apple’s Webkit (which has its roots, one should say, in khtml from the Linux/Unix KDE project.)

The most striking example of Jobs’ reality distortion field, it seems to me, is his adoption of open-source technologies like Webkit/kthml — and, indeed, in BSD Unix itself. (To this day, Apple makes the Unix core of Mac OS X available under an open-source license, under the name Darwin.) Everyone in the mid-1990s understood that Unix, which dates to the early 1970s and split over the years into multiple flavours, was an extraordinarily stable, robust, and well-tested operating system for servers. Nobody except Steve Jobs would have thought of pushing it on to millions of desktops worldwide — and nobody else would have succeeded.

And, even here, he had a knack of picking a counter-intuitive, but arguably better, technology. He picked the open-source BSD Unix, though Linux had by far more mindshare at that point. Today Linux is as stable and reliable as any Unix-like system in history, but in the late 1990s this was debatable. Similarly, for webkit he picked the raw khtml over Mozilla’s much more stable and open-source gecko engine, on the grounds that the source code was cleaner; today, thanks to Safari and Google Chrome, webkit has overtaken Mozilla and is not too far behind Internet Explorer.

But why did it all work? Jobs (and, of course, the other capable people at Apple) may have chosen these technologies on technical grounds. But they did something else with those technologies. They made them sexy. Like the French language.

I read a definition somewhere long ago: “Beautiful = you want to look at it. Sexy = you want to touch it.” That accounts for the iPhone and the iPad.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. You had the courage to make the right choices. Or you had the force of will to make your choices turn out right. Or you had the good taste to seduce millions around the world. It all comes to the same thing. You changed the world.