Musings on Higher Education - III: Research

Musings - II
Musings - I and disclaimer (please read the disclaimer)

The reasonable man adapts to the world, while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to suit him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-- Bernard Shaw (I think)

For me, higher education without research is a bit of a contradiction. Sure, a large part of higher education is in developing contemporary and specialized skills, but a small and in my opinion, crucial, aspect of higher education is extending our boundaries of knowledge and exploring into the unknown.

By definition, research entails going into uncharted territory. And as nature would have its way, among the most potent primal fears that humans possess is the fear of the unknown. It is the fear of the unknown that has been singularly responsible for the worst forms of totally avoidable savagery, social evils and large-scale warfare throughout civilization. Venturing into the unknown is by no means easy -- the world here is as real as it gets. Perhaps more "real" (jungle like) than the rest of the world who like to say they live in the "real world."

There are essentially two kinds of folks who venture out into the unknown -- researchers (which includes all kinds of explorers) and rank idiots. And it is sometimes very hard to tell the difference -- even about yourself to yourself. There is of course a third variety -- folks who have been forced to explore, out of desperate situations.

In the real world, qualities like self-confidence and attitude matter a lot. But in the real real world, what really matters is competency -- how well you can understand and describe what you are seeing and provide solutions. The only weapon we have here at our disposal is our ability to critically think, imagine, hypothesize, build models and implement solutions.

The reason for this is simple. The ultimate judge for researchers is nature. And nature is very unforgiving. If you mixed two explosive chemicals as part of your research, nature does not care what your intentions were and will not give you the benefit of doubt. Nature also does not follow principles of natural justice when dealing directly with us.

And by definition, exploration is replete with failures. Even the best of minds aren't good enough to "get it right the first time." Failure is an intrinsic part of research and necessary stepping stones. Your survival as a researcher also then depends on how tolerant is the larger society towards failures.

Indian society by and large, is far less tolerant towards failures and far more averse to risk taking than its Western counterpart. We are more comfortable in copying ready-made designs and implementing them at a fraction of the cost. Be it cars, or highways or skyscrapers or going to the moon -- our society does it decades after it has been tried and tested elsewhere. Perhaps our claim to fame is that we get all these things implemented at throwaway prices by world standards.

The main reason for this, in my opinion is this aversion to failure. I can only imagine how several sarcastic journalists and self-styled experts would have been having a field day on all the newspapers and television had the moon mission failed. But then a quick look at the history of space missions elsewhere reveal several failures -- including large catastrophic ones. Be it Challenger or Columbia or the Chinese misadventure where a rocket strayed off and fell on a village killing hundreds of people, failures have happened everywhere.

Learning to tolerate failure is a crucial and extremely hard skill that is necessary for exploration. Perhaps this is where the difference between exploration and rank idiocy becomes most apparent. It is one thing to blindly rush into the unknown with just a philosophy that "failure is the stepping stone to success" and yet another altogether to meticulously model, understand and build safeguards as part of our exploration.

There is one incident that I usually describe in this regard. As a PhD student in Europe, I had once been to a town called Kaprun in Austria for skiing. It was the first time I'd visited a ski resort there and what enamored me more than the beautiful Alpine peaks was the superb engineering. The mountain had a mountain-train that took us from the base to almost three-fourths of the mountain through a tunnel in just 15 minutes. There were also several ropeways, ski lifts, trolleys, etc. The entire system worked so harmoniously that I found myself imagining how such an infrastructure must have been built in that cold weather.

I also learnt about the enormous and rigorous emphasis that was placed on safety. The mountain train for example, had no engine and no fuel tank. It was pulled by cables. There were emergency brakes in case the cables broke. And in the almost impossible event of a fire in the train, the emergency brakes would automatically engage and all the doors will automatically open. The entire length of the track had steps on both sides which people can use for escape.

I was extremely impressed, and rightfully so, at such marvellous engineering. But then, six months after I'd been there, the unthinkable happened. There was a fire disaster in the mountain train in which about 165 people perished. This, despite the rigorous attention to detail.

This disaster is featured on National Geographic (NatGeo investigates), where they explain the freak sequence of events that led to this disaster. The enormous human tragedy was a combination of factors, each of which were singularly next-to-impossible events. A hose containing pneumatic brake liquid develops a leak and drips on an exposed heater coil, which happened to be at the lower end of the train. The emergency brakes work well and the train doors open as designed. But because many people saw smoke coming from below, they make the fatal mistake of moving up the mountain instead of down. All those who made this decision perish. Only 12, who were led by a fireman, go towards the smoke and walk down the mountain and survive.

I still can't believe this really happened.

Folks, this is the kind of challenge to be faced when trying to do something new. When nature is the customer, challenges are somewhat bigger than loss of prestige or social inacceptance. And no, you can't make nature change its mind by creating a lobby, taking it to dinner, offering a bribe or threatening to sue.

How times change..

The other day, we were watching this Kannada movie called Bettada Hoovu (Mountain flower) starring Puneet Rajkumar as a child actor. I remember that the movie was released when I was about 11 years old. It had been one of my favourites (alongwith Gulzar's Masoom), and it continues to be so.

The child star Puneet had won a national award for the best child actor, and I think he richly deserved it for his role.

The movie is set in a remote village inside the Malnad forests. The protagonist Ramu, is a bright kid, eager to learn, but whose family live in abject poverty. Things turn so bad that the family does not have money to eat and the father is forced to go looking for work in the nearby town. The responsibility of his mother and two siblings now falls on Ramu's shoulders.

Even though Ramu cherishes going to school and reading, he is forced to find work. Being a bright little kid, he finds several opportunities for himself by being enterprising. He starts by being a coolie at the bus stand. Later on, he finds it more lucrative to cut grass. His prize catch however is to bring flowers to an American lady who is living in the guest house. She cherishes having a bunch of orchids (or the "mountain flower") that are found only deep inside the forest. Ramu takes on this adventure and ventures deep into the forest by himself and returns with two different varieties of orchids.

The lady is so impressed, that she gives him 20 rupees along with some cake. All these while, Ramu has been chreshing a dream of buying a book on Ramayana that he sees being hosted in the windows of the neighbourhood store. The store owner is friendly and encouraging. He keeps telling Ramu that the book is meant to be bought by him and one day he will earn enough to buy the book.

For every rupee Ramu earns, his mother gives him back 10 paise and Ramu is diligently collecting them to one day afford the 10 rupees that the book costs. When he suddenly finds 20 rupees in his hands after bringing back the orchid, Ramu is overcome by a little bit of greed and lies to his mother and gives her only 5 rupees.

The next day he runs to the bookshop to buy the book; but suddenly realizes what he's done. He is reminded of the dire nature of his family's finances when he spots a beggar. He realizes that his mother and two little siblings do not even have a warm blanket for the night. He then trashes his idea of buying the book and buys a blanket instead.

The store owner empathizes with Ramu and says that he is going to preserve the book for him. Everyone praises Ramu for his responsible outlook towards his family. In the night however, Ramu is spotted alone outside his home silently crying and dreaming about the book.

The story and the performances in the movie are just superb. I had liked the movie very much then and it had touched a chord in me.

This time however, I felt a little disappointed. I was thinking, when Ramu was so enterprising, why did he want to own the book? Why did he not think of other options? Why for instance, did he not strike a deal with the store owner (paying 2 rupees for example, instead of the 10 rupees) so that the owner would let Ramu read the book in the store itself, over the next several days? The value of the book does not diminish when someone has read it. Why didn't the store owner himself not think of this, instead of making sympathetic sounds at Ramu's plight?

Given that I'm not exactly known for my enterprising skills, I guess this is an indication of the winds of change blowing over our society. Today maybe such Ramus eventually go on to own their own bookshops, or get into the publishing business and soon go in for an IPO? That is, before losing millions in the next stock-market crash or an email scam..

Musings on Higher Education - II: Exams, benchmarking and mechanism design

Earlier posts: Musings - I and disclaimer (please read the disclaimer)

Q. Our engineers were constructing a bridge across a river and suddenly there was a flash flood. What did they do?

A. They protested saying that it was an out-of-syllabus question..

Hilarious and sad -- something that sums up education today. Real-life does not have a syllabus. No point in blaming the students or teachers or anyone in particular. The way our systems are designed, we seem to emphasize more on rote learning and question-answering than on problem solving.

It has become quite routine these days to read about a couple of student suicides during exam season every year -- lone and frustrated folks who think it is better to stop living than bear the pressure and expectations of exams. If we still think there is no problem with our education system, we are deluding ourselves big time.

Ours is perhaps the only country in the world today, where grades, certificates and affiliations are given so much emphasis, and any attempt to focus on underlying first-principles and skills like problem-solving are actually frowned upon. Ours is also perhaps the only country where coaching schools are so popular and actually are a hugely profitable business, when the university for whose exams they are coaching for, may itself be struggling to make its ends meet.

The underlying principles behind standardized syllabi and examinations, stem from the factory paradigm of the industrial revolution times. To its credit, factories have been the single-most influential factor that have made industrial revolution possible and more importantly, lifted the then European society out of the dark ages.

The main characteristics of a factory are: mass production and standardization. Our education and examination system today almost perfectly mirrors this paradigm.

There are several virtues of standardization and mass production. Interoperability increases vastly because of standardization and mass production causes economies of scale to set in, where enormous value can be added based on pretty small incremental costs.

So make no mistake -- this post certainly is not arguing against standardization or "mass production" (if you would call it that) of educated folks.

There is however, a subtelity that we generally miss when viewing education from the factory paradigm: human beings are not machines. One might argue that engineers had better be machines (dispassionate and objective) and not wallow in things like "feelings" and other human factors.

But that is not what I mean. If you insist on equating engineers with machines, I would say, they are at best "meta-machines" -- machines that build other machines. Machines are designed for a particular operational purpose. A car for example, is designed to be driven on roads. It cannot work over uneven terrain or over water. Machines are built to solve a specific problem and solve it well. On the other hand, engineers do not have their problems cut out for them. Every situation is different and unexpected challenges may crop up at any time. Engineers are expected to think through the situation and provide solutions.

Given this, I don't see what will be achieved by standardized syllabi, anonymous exams and grading systems. In order to maintain objectivity in such systems, the questions that are asked should be those that have very precise answers and leave no room for interpretation and alternatives. This has the unintended consequence that our engineers become more like "databases" or "information retrieval" engines rather than problem solvers.

If anything, standardization and mass production has to happen at a "meta" level. Rather than defining syllabi and exam patterns in great detail, there needs to be a specification of the kinds of skills that an engineer ought to possess and design self-evaluation mechanisms that any group of committed people can use it to benchmark themselves.

This idea of meta-standardization is not exactly a new one. In game theory it is called mechanism design.

Consider the following problem: Mom has to cut a piece of cake among two of her kids without any kid feeling that it has got a raw deal. One way is to measure and cut the cake exactly in half. But then, there may be several nuances to the composition of the cake and to the preferences of the kids. The cake may have some nuts embedded, it may have chocolate frosting, cream, a cherry or any such added accessories. Similarly, the kids' preferences may be just as arbitrary -- one kid may prefer chocolate over cream, one may prefer cream over cherry and be agnostic to chocolate, etc. How should Mom cut the cake?

The hard way to do it is to specify in great detail how Mom should model her kids' preferences and how much to favour each kid, etc. -- and generally get Mom to lose her sanity.

The better way to solve this problem is to let the kids solve it for themselves. Create a mechanism such that there is no incentive for any kid to cheat on the other and there is an incentive for both kids to behave rationally. For this problem, there is a very simple meta-solution called the ultimatum game. It goes like this:

1. One of the kids chosen in random proposes a cut for the cake.
2. The other kid accepts or rejects the cut. If the cut is accepted, the cake is divided according to the proposal and shared; else no one gets anything and go back to step 1 for a new try.

It can be proven that the above algorithm is fair provided both kids are thinking and acting rationally. When such a mechanism is standardized and practiced, there is also an incentive for the kids to act rationally. Acting rationally gets them the best payoff and preserves fairness as well.

It is not very difficult to think of such mechanism design approaches for examinations. In fact, last year, I did try to implement a mechanism for self-evaluation. It would be too detailed to explain the mechanism here though. It worked fairly well, but unfortunately, only at the end of the semester I realized that we had failed to gather few more crucial data points to show how well the mechanism worked. Maybe I should try it again -- but then it means I'll need to train a new set of teaching assistants on this, for which I am not too inclined at the moment.

The point anyway is that, we need to be solving the problem of benchmarking at the meta level. Standardized syllabi and exams based on question-answering are not the way to go -- certainly not for engineering studies.

Musings on Higher Education - I : The role of higher education in civilized societies

Starting here, I would like to post a series of musings on higher education -- something that's been my passion. But first, please read the disclaimer. I'll link to this disclaimer from every post in this series.

Disclaimer: All opinions stated in this series of posts are mine and not necessarily of my employer. Nobody is paying me to write this. If you don't know who I am or where I work, well, good. If not, please note the above. Also, opinions posted in this series are presented as dispassionate observations, with the sole intention of adding a bit of value to the system. No sense of judgment is implied in these musings, nor are these observations aimed at any specific personality. I expect and welcome dissent, but any inflammatory comment or those indulging in personal attacks will be moderated away. Musings in this series are mostly on higher education, that too mostly in engineering sciences, based on my somewhat non-trivial experience in this field. Opinions expressed here may not hold for education as a whole.

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Here is a quote that I have coined for myself: Academics is a lifestyle, not a profession.

It has to be. Else, it is simply not rational to be facing this kind of work pressure, unwarranted and terribly misguided judgments from all directions, a daily struggle to make ends meet, and still be expected to "inspire," "motivate" and "entertain" new batches of students year in and year out.

If we value our profession in terms of returns on investment (of our time and effort), academics perhaps fares way down in the list. We are sometimes told that the lack of "worldly perks" (read, money) is made up for in the goodwill we get from students, the social prestige we hold and the respect we command.

Cow dung! (A euphemism that I've learnt for BS :-). I don't think social prestige will help me if me or my family members fall ill and have to be hospitalized -- the hospital will want money. I've already learnt this the hard way. And I don't think we really command respect. We are just faceless exam-posting-degree-giving machines to most students. If there is some way we are remembered, ridicule is perhaps more closer. And in any case, prestige and reputation are the easiest to lose. It is extremely easy for anyone to slander against you and plant seeds of doubt in the minds of others. And that is the end of your prestige rule.

Having any kind of these "rational" arguments will not work. I think that passionate academicians aren't in academics looking for a livelihood. They are there because they are terribly dissatisfied and simply cannot acquiesce and accept status quo for an answer. They want to understand the world and something inside them isn't quite satisfied. It is not like they have a romantic attachment to academic environs. It is more like, they like universities because they are going to be terribly pained in a corporate environment with its structures, processes and emphasis on money. They are inherently uncomfortable folks, generally dissatisfied, and really thirsting for that piece of knowledge that can make them understand everything.

Should society support such knowledge-seekers at all? There is no immediate rational sense for society to support academicians. Academicians spend money on research that gives no immediate benefit. Worse, if an company supports a research project, the research scholars who have worked on the project may be picked up by the competitor company.

Should then governments support higher education? Or should it spend money on more immediate problems like primary and professional education that can provide trained work force, health care, infrastructure, etc.?

There are no simple answers for these. However, I think on the whole, civilized societies need higher education -- if for nothing else, to just sustain themselves. Societies (economies, cultures, governance, etc.) go through two primary processes: growth and saturation.

When we say that times are good, the economy is looking up, the culture is vibrant, etc. what it actually means is that some core set of activities are not only sustaining, but growing and expanding. The 1990s are termed as good for the IT industry because the industry grew by at least 30% annually on average. The 1960s are termed as the golden era of the Kannada movie industry, because of the growth in the number of creative thinkers entering the industry and churning out quality movies.

What this means is, when times are good -- something is expanding. And nothing can expand forever. Some time or the other, resources saturate, processes become bureaucratic and there is a general slowdown. In these times, much of the population simply start hitting at the problem harder -- working in the same mental model.

Saturation is much harder to detect than scarcity. Strategies to overcome saturation are even more elusive. They cannot be created overnight with a brainstorming session. Society evolves out of saturation based on ideas that have been carefully studied for years. We cannot for instance, think of what to do for transportation once fossil fuels exhaust. We should have thought about it decades in advance.

As Einstein (or whoever it was, how does it matter?) said: Today's problems cannot be solved with yesterday's thinking -- that is what created today's problems in the first place.

(And boy, do I know one big yesterday's thought that is still going strong today? You got it. The "Are you a capitalist or are you a communist?" false dilemma.)

That is where higher education really matters. I like to look at institutions of higher education as catalysts of change in society. (This term is not mine, I heard it from a former Director of the National Law School of India University.) The mantra I typically use is -- higher education should produce professionals who expand the pie and not merely compete for a share of it.

Day in and day out, I see innumerable number of problems faced by society around me. There are all kinds of feudal structures, administrative lapses and plain inability to cope with natural challenges. As an academic, I feel totally powerless to go right in and implement a solution. I neither have the clout nor the money nor the thick skin required for implementing solutions. But then there have been cases where just giving the right ideas (even involuntarily, without realizing it) have made a significant difference in the status quo.

I've often compared society to a huge beanbag of sorts. If you try to lift it from below, it will be too heavy and it will probably fall off your hands within no time. It has to be lifted from the top. Create a vaccum by "expanding the pie" and open up new opportunities and society will find a way to expand into this space by itself. And no, this does not mean that society is unintelligent by itself or that the pie-expander is a great soul who needs to be worshipped, thankyouverymuch. :-)

So I think society does need institutions of higher education, despite it being loss-making in the short term. After all, we know that it was ignorance that killed the cat while curiosity was framed...