Two cheers for India!

No, this is not a India shining post. Nor is it an Indians' whining post. It's meant to be something in between, and it's inspired by the events of this Budget week, viz. the Railway budget, the Union budget and the event that stole the thunder from both these.

The Railway budget provided fireworks of an expected/unexpected type. It is expected that Mamata Didi would be her eternal and unchanging self. It is unexpected that one of her party colleagues, Dinesh Trivedi, the Railway minister, would stand up to her, and actually do what needed to be done. The hike in rail fares, coming after nine years, was desperately needed if the Indian Railways are required to continue the task they have been carrying out for two centuries, transport the common man and his family, and his friends and relatives, economically and safely across the country. The Railways are short of staff, rolling stock, track and worst of all, safety equipment, and this shortfall cannot be made up without raising funds, with fare rationalisation being an important component. It is interesting to note that five distinct railway unions, which are large and contentious bodies, have supported this budget. Presumably, as insiders, they are in the best positions to judge whether the fund raising measure was really essential. By the way, we don't recall the Minister curtailing their free travel privileges! So three cheers for Dinesh, the Unions, and a minus one cheer for Didi, making two cheers in all.

The Union budget provides a further case for two cheers. The runup to the budget, viz. the economic survey provides a two cheer case. The economy is not doing that well, but it is not doing that badly either, and has weathered the effects of worldwide economic upheaval with commendable resilience. Pranab Mukherjee has again carried out the difficult combination of doing what needs to be done, viz. reduce the deficit in these times of economic slump, without touching subsidies that will lead to a political fallout. Two cheers for the old fox. However, note that the real pain will come in dribs and drabs after this.

The final two cheers are for the biggest event of budget day, viz. Sachin Tendulkar's hundredth hundred! Two cheers as it finally came against Bangla Desh in Bangla Desh instead of coming as the culmination of those crucial knocks in Australia, and took the amount of time that it did, but it's done now, and all of India , especially Sachin, can get back to enjoying the game instead of holding their breath from the eighties onwards; so two cheers for Sachin, and two cheers for India too.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Rahul Basu 04/03/1956-05/03/2011

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!

`Do not stand at my grave', Mary Frye (1932).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao. ~

Faster than light, ha!

Here is the latest on the Opera experiment, the one which claimed to have found neutrinos which moved faster than light, and reached Gran Sasso 60 nanoseconds faster than photons would have. `Sources' claim the discrepancy comes from a bad connection between a fibre optics connection with a GPS receiver which was used for the time of flight measurements. There's also a glitch in the oscillator which times the intervals between which the system is synchronised. Although the two glitches are claimed to work in opposite directions in estimating the apparent speed, it is clear that further work and independent measurements are needed to finally close this issue.

Tailpiece: The neutrino and the photon came face to face.
Photon: So, that Bolt was a false start.
Neutrino: It wasn't my fault, it was the cable's!

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Cricket, anyone?

The cricket season is on with its ups and down, test matches and ODI-s and inflation and deflation of rankings and reputations. Diehard fans, as well as occasional TV watchers wait for Sachin's 100th century, weep for the whitewash in Australia and wonder how things could go so wrong! Let's see what light a bit of quantitative analysis can shed on these events. The ICC rankings, opaque as they are, attempt to quantify the nonquantifiable, the crack of the bat on the ball. A recent paper attempts to do the same, using the techniques of network science, treating the cricket playing nations as a social network. The teams are ranked, depending on their success in test cricket, and one day cricket, for all the years for which the data is available, (1877 onwards, no less), and so are the team captains. The success of a team (or captain) is determined by the ‘quality’ of wins and not on the number of wins alone.

The method consists of forming a weighted network. All competing teams form the nodes of the network. If team A defeats team B, a link is established pointing from B to a A with a thickness (the weight), proportional to the fraction of wins where B wins against A. The importance of the match is assigned via a quantity called the PageRank which uses the normalised weight of the link in a diffusive term which redistributes the credit of a given node to all its neighbours, with maximum credit being transferred to its most successful nemesis. Teams are then ranked by their PageRank, and captains are as successful as their teams.

The results conform to common intuition, which the ICC rankings don't always do. Needless to say, Australia emerges as the strongest test playing nation, followed by South Africa, despite their twenty one year absence from test cricket (1970-1991), England, West Indies, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. Since this is an average from 1877, it is unsurprising that this is more or less the order in which the teams started playing test cricket, except for South Africa. For ODI-s, the order is the same, except for Sri Lanka and New Zealand exchanging places. The most successful test captain is Australia's Steve Waugh, followed by South Africa's Graeme Smith, and Australia's Ricky Ponting. From the subcontinent, only M. S. Dhoni and Sourav Ganguly make it to the top 20 list. For ODI-s, Ricky Ponting leads the table, followed by Graeme Smith and Imran Khan of Pakistan. M.S. Dhoni, Kapil Dev, Saurav Ganguly, Mohammed Azharuddin, Rahul Dravid, Javed Miandad, and Wasim Akram also make it to the top 20 list, perhaps indicating that the subcontinent is better at the shorter version of the game. PageRanks computed over successive decades pick up the domainance of the successful teams of those decades, such as the West Indies dominance of both tests and ODI-s from 1981-1990, India's success against strong teams between 1971-1980 (not reflected in the IIC rankings), and the rise and fall of teams like England, Pakistan and Australia in the pecking order. The author (Satyam Mukherjee at Northwestern University, formerly at IIT Madras), modestly says that this scheme cannot replace the ICC ranking, but suggests a novel approach to refine the existing ranking scheme. We hope this scheme will find its way to the cricket commentaries.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The original paper can be found here .

Now where were those keys?

This week sees the news of an important breakthrough in the study of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.While it has been known that the diseases spread due to the spread of a distorted protein, (the tau protein for Alzheimer's ), outward from an area where memories are made and stored, the mechanism of spread was not clear. There were two possible mechanisms proposed for the spread. One, that the spread could take place from neuron to neuron, along neuronal pathways, and the other that there were neighbourhoods that were susceptible to the bad protein, and others that could resist it. It is now established that the spread takes place along neuronal pathways.

The experiments that establish this mechanism are ingenious, and involve genetically engineered mice that can create the human tau protein in a localised area called the entorhinal cortex. Cells in the entorhinal cortex of the mice started dying due to the tau protein. In due course, the disease spread to other areas via the neuronal network. Since other cells could not make the tau protein themselves, the only way the tau could show up in other areas was via transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell. It may then be possible to halt the diseases by preventing cell to cell transmission, e.g. by blocking the tau with an antibody. This might provide the key to the prevention of degenerative nerve diseases (and help find those elusive keys!).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Presidency University

The high point of last week was a visit to the oldest college in India. Presidency college, Kolkata, started life as Hindu college and was founded by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1817. In 1855, it was renamed as Presidency college, and has metamorphosed into what might be the youngest university in India, Presidency University, in 2010. Before this, the college was affiliated to the University of Calcutta, since 1857. The college shifted premises several times until it came to rest at its present location on College street in 1874, across the road from Calcutta University. The chemistry department conducted its first batch of practicals here in the next year, starting the venerable tradition of science departments, which train what turn out to be the best science students in the country, year after year, right upto now. Here is a picture of what the "new building" looked like last week.

You can see from the banners and the bunting in the photos that the college is presently conducting student elections, as well as the 41st reunion of the geophysical society. Over its life span, the college has boasted of a veritable galaxy of stellar teachers, J.C. Bose, and P.C. Ray being among the most notable. Here is a picture of the statue of J.C. Bose, sitting in the marble corridor outside the J.C. Bose auditorium, looking a trifle bad tempered. That's probably the black granite!

The college has now to negotiate the tricky path which will take it from its position as one of the most renowned colleges in India, to graduating to a full fledged university. It has a host of distinguished ex-students who will perhaps be only too happy to help along their alma mater in this endeavour, to say nothing of the good wishes of all of us, who have been sufficiently fortunate to have acquired numerous friends, and all our best students, from its alumni.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The new year

When the new year
came out of nowhere
and peeped into rooms
it was so flattered to find
all the tv's drinking its health
praising its innocent appearance
it responded with its warm
dark smile and went round
filling peoples dry hearts with joy

Rg Gregory, `When the new year', Young World, The Hindu, 03/01/12.

This blog post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.