Can we ‘redistribute’ prestige?

Pudding.cool has a good visual essay on the yard-sale model of economics, which shows that wealth has a tendency to accumulate more in the hands of people who are already wealthier. This is because a richer person has more opportunities to regain lost wealth than a poorer person. The wheels of the model turn every …

Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense

We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books used in India will continue to be studied. They will be subjected to new methods of analyses, will be commented upon, …

A question about India’s new science prizes

really deserving candidates In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country …

The cycle

Is it just me or does everyone see a self-fulfilling prophecy here? https://twitter.com/nature/status/1192129029924634625 For a long time, and assisted ably by the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, researchers sought to have their papers published in high-impact-factor journals – a.k.a. prestige journals – like Nature. Such journals in turn, assisted ably by parasitic strategies, made these papers highly visible …

Why are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?

Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all but one of whom were white and none were women. Before the announcements began, Göran Hansson, the Swede-in-chief of these prizes, …