Updated 2 May 2009: Received some wisdom from twitterers – @Shogun1947 @priyraju @akumaran

Prolog

On my internal to company blog i had introduced a new idea a few months back – in the prolog section of every blog post, i provide a link to interesting posts i had read that week. To my surprise, this has become very popular. This is somewhat like the FTOTW (fine tastings of the week) series i used to run on this blog. I decided to try the same idea on this blog also.

FTOTW

First, A. Prem, one of Cognizant’s Social CRM experts, blogs regularly about Social CRM on his blog. He has a tremendous grasp of the subject. He writes one of the leading blogs inside the company as well.  Rachel Laudan, one of my food anthropology blog friends, lives and blogs from Mexico. She has some great updates on the Swine Flu epidemic.  Bob Sutton paraphrases Scott Berkun to explain how managers become a**holes. How Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak gets things done.  Saraswathi, a former colleague, who now works in the social sector, had written a brilliant post on relationships a while back. must read.

Science  & Technology Careers in America

As someone who had lived in the USA for 10 years, i feel sad about the fact that American kids don’t take up science & technology careers as much as America needs them to.  The huge skills shortage that America faces is either filled by immigration or by outsourcing to other countries like India and China.

The stats from graduate programs and PhD programs also don’t bode that well. As of 2006, over 51% in grad programs in EE were foreign nationals and 71% in PhD programs were foreign. I don’t know how accurate these stats are. But the general perception in America is that Americans don’t like science & technology careers.

Paradise of Science

During our time in America, we used to wonder about, the kind of resources that are available to an American kid that Indian kids can not even dream. Every small city has a well-stocked library, a science center in the vicinity, several museums.

Even if one is a wee bit scientifically minded, there is plenty of resources to tap into.

By contrast, a city that plays host to over 6 MM people, Chennai, India does not have one well equipped museum or science center or library.

But Indian middle class kids, are taught right from when they are in the womb, that science  & technology careers are the be-all and end-all of living in this world.  Yes, this does create a large stereotypical population. But hey, how does that matter? When we want to find folks for science & technology jobs, we can find them easily without having to import them.

I am trying to find out, why American kids consider science & technology careers boring or geeky or nerdy or whatever?

What can be done to change this attitude of the American kids?

Epilog

If i am lucky, i may get to work in a project to improve American kids’ attitude towards science & technology careers. Please help me with your wisdom.

Updated Dec 26, 2007: Ganesh brilliantly connects this with Gladwell’s Warren Harding Error in his book Blink.

Today we got the latest issue of Economist dubbed as the special christmas double issue. The article with the biblical sounding “To those that have, shall be given” caught my attention.

The first para hooked me completely:

IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the same sex—and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to find attractive. Their CVs are equally good, and they both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, that one is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by their appearance?

The article covers research on whether being beautiful/handsome is correlated with financial success relative to the not-so-beautiful/handsome category. The article presents several pieces of research with the focus mainly on Dr. Hamermesh’s research. He has proved with several studies that beautiful people are economically successful and even goes on to calculate what he calls a beauty premium – the premium beautiful/handsome people can expect to gain and also a penalty if one is ugly. He conducted his research in USA, Canada, UK and China. Before you jump into any conclusions, the researchers looked primarily at professions in which beauty wouldn’t be a requirement. I have plotted the data from the article into a table below for better readability:

Essentially, if you are a beautiful woman in China you can expect a whopping 10% premium! I guess it really pays to be beautiful and at the sametime, ugliness in women can set one back by a even bigger 31% in China.

The article also touches upon previous research that shows that across the animal kingdom (including humans) beauty is essentially a function of how symmetrical your body is which in turn indicates how good a set of genes you have, the health you have and take this – your intelligence level as well.

Do you agree with this research? Think about it and click the continue-reading link below if you want to know what my conclusions are?

After I finished reading the article, i was really bothered by the conclusions because i felt that there were some problems with this research but i could not put my finger on it. I had a few discussions with Priya Raju and she suggested that we look at the Forbes 400 to see if we could find any pattern. Well, a cursory look at the Forbes 400 for 2007 seemed to indicate that most of the rich people don’t seem to be particularly good looking. Could be because many of them are past their primes. So that was a dead-end.

Then i went back to look at the data given in the article again and I started noticing some problems – first of all a major part of the research was done in USA/Canada a region where there is a general premium on looking good. In China, they just covered Shanghai. Given that China’s population is 1.4B people, looking at Shanghai to divine China’s preferences seem to be woefully wrong. Next, the data from the UK reveals that there is only a 1% beauty premium which is next to nothing.

The other part that is incorrect is the tie between intelligence and genes. It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that it is nurture that plays the major role in intelligence and not genes. So to say that beautiful people will mostly turn out to be more intelligent is flawed. Also, it seemed that Dr. Hamermesh’s research was more focused on financial success and we already know that intelligence and financial success are not that well correlated.

Still i was not happy. I did a google search and lo, behold an article in Slate magazine by Tim Harford covering a similar topic came up.

Harford pointed to a great piece of research [PDF] that investigated the connection between beauty and better salary. The researchers devised an artifical labor market in which the workers had to do solve mazes in a 15 minute interval. Success is determined by the number of mazes one can solve in that window. When the candidates were interviewed, they were asked to predict how many mazes they could solve and then after they executed the task, the results were compared. It turns out the beautiful people overestimated their success by a significant margin. It turns that beautiful people tend to be more self-confident which in turn forecasts better success which in turn gets the employers to pay a premium – Now that seems to be the solution to the Beauty Conundrum.

I am sure The Economist does not read this blog, but if you do, please Economist, consider counter-arguments and alternative viewpoints when you present provocative research as a fait accompli. I rest my case.

Notes:

After moving back to India, we were really starving for quality international news because we don’t get the New York Times or International Herald Tribune. Fortunately, we managed to convince our newspaper vendor to get us the Economist – we think it is one of the best magazines for covering international news across the globe in a pretty objective manner. Although it is quite expensive by Indian standards, it is well worth the price.

I just covered how words have power over our behavior. Came across a f***ing brilliant article on why we swear [Caution: article Not Safe for Work - NSFW], written recently by Steven Pinker, the man who has made a name for himself by writing insightful tomes about the power of language.

It is a long article that explores the usage of swear words and the hows and whys of it. Per Pinker, the crux of why swear words seem to have such emotional power seems to boil down to how speech cognition occurs in the brain. He says that swear words have both denotations and connotations and these are interpreted by different parts of the brain:

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.

There in lies the power of the swear word, its ability to provoke an limbic reaction. I was discussing this article with my wife Priya Raju and she made a brilliant point -

She said, it appears that swear words – f***, c**t, s**t etc seems to sound very animal like. Swear words never sound sweet but instead sound very harsh. She pointed to Vilayanur Ramachandran’s Buba/Kiki effect that he describes in his brilliant book – The Emerging Mind.

I was doing some more research on Priya’s point and I landed on this Wired magazine article about Steven Pinker’s latest book – The Stuff of Thought and the article says things confirming Priya’s point:

The experimental psychologist also takes a fresh look at the “poo-poo theory,” which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. “Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain,” Pinker says, “it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.”

Isn’t it amazing how deep a significance some routine thing like swearing has?

Going back to my article, it must be pretty clear, that the term “Contractor”, due to the elaborate rituals surrounding the term, had a lot of negative connotations, there by producing a limbic reaction with a deleterious effect on performance. On the contrary, the term “Partner” had a lot of positive connotations producing a positive limbic reaction with the attendant benefits.

References:

1. Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s The Emerging Mind available as a series of lectures both transcript and audio form available at the BBC Site. He uses the Buba/Kike example in this lecture to postulate how language might have originated in contrast to Steven Pinker’s theories.

2. I have added Pinker’s latest book The Stuff of Thought to my to-do list. If any of you have read it, would appreciate a comment.

3. Stroop Effect – a popular psychology phenomenon that demonstrates how color impedes reading cognition.

I recently came across an article in the Times of India newspaper featuring Verghese Kurien, the father of India’s white revolution.

He says in that article:

When noted dairyman and director of dairy research in New Zealand Professor William Riddet visited Anand, he told me that he was happy to know that I had made a significant name in the dairy industry at such a young age. Then he asked me: “But, why are you such a bloody fool? Why are you working on a project that is bound to fail?” I told him that I would make it. He asked me if there was anything on earth that could dissuade me from embarking on a project that was bound to fail and I replied “nothing.”

I started wondering about why converting Buffalo Milk into powder is so important. It turns out that India has amongst the world’s largest populations of Buffalos – we have close to 50% of the total population of buffalos.

By extension, we also produce a lot of buffalo milk whereas most other countries mainly produce cow’s milk. During the lean months, when milk supply is not high, it is common practice to mix in milk reconstituted from milk powder to supplement the supply. Because, we could not convert Buffalo Milk into powder, we faced a serious issue of over supply in peak months and under supply in lean months. If the White Revolution had to take off, we absolutely needed to figure out a way to convert Buffalo Milk into powder.

This is what drove Verghese Kurien and H.M. Dalaya to figure out a way to do the impossible. Here is an article that was written when Dalaya passed away in the Hindu Business Line.

IF there is one technological breakthrough that truly revolutionised India’s organised dairy industry, it is the making of milk powder out of buffalo milk. And the man who made this possible defying prevailing technical wisdom — Mr H.M. Dalaya — passed away in Pune on Sunday, aged 83.

It is not clear why the scientists thought that buffalo milk could not be converted into milk powder. After reading several articles, it appears it is due to the fact that Buffalo Milk has amongst the highest fat content. Perhaps, the high fat content somehow interferes with the spray drying process used for producing milk powder.

If there is some dairy expert out there, please let us know the real reason.

The White Revolution or Operation Flood has been so successful that India was transformed into the world’s largest milk producer in 1997 and has retained its leadership since – one of the few areas in which we are ahead of China.

We have to thank Amul for playing the key role in this epochal accomplishment under the leadership of Dr. Verghese Kurien.

By their pioneering efforts, Kurien and Dalaya proved an old Arabic proverb – “the difficult is done at once; the impossible takes a little longer.”

Have you ever wondered how a dosa become crisp or how a bread toast is made brown and crisp? Of course, to do any of the above no knowledge of chemistry is required. But a man named Louis-Camille Maillard in the early 20th century decided to investigate. What he discovered is so fascinating that the complex chemical reaction is now called the Maillard Reaction. In normal english, it is called browning. Heat is the key to producing the Maillard Reaction and the resultant torrent of appetizing flavors and aromas. Through this reaction hundreds of new flovor compounds are produced which give the distinctive brown color and taste of the toasts, dosas, roasted meat etc. You can read the Wikipedia page on Maillard Reaction to see how complex it is. The reason I got interested is because I read somewhere that Microwave ovens can’t produce the Maillard Reaction. These days Corning does sell a browner/crisper aid for the microwave. I have tried using this aid and it does do a reasonably good job but not as good as a gas stove. But why is it that something as modern as the microwave oven can’t produce something a common fire or a gas stove or a electric stove can produce? If someone knows the answer please comment.