The Culture of Research and Learning

Research and Learning:
In today`s world higher, ground breaking research always requires large amounts of funds. Check out any university in the western world and you will see cut throat competition between different research programs for funds. In developing countries like india and pakistan - where many people go without a square meal on many days - the masses WILL treat education as just a tool to better their leaving conditions.

For example, how many posters on this board have done their graduation or post graduation in fields related to pure sciences as apposed to engineering / management / finance related fields? Even in a progressive and relatively better educated state like Maharashtra in India, the number of students on the Engineering waiting list is double the number of seats going vacant in Pure science courses. All this points to one fact: People of subcontinent do not think that a career in higher research is a good career move.

Let me now ask a question: Why is higher research a MUST for a country like, say, India? In todays world, where every new technological breakthrough is available to anyone with an internet connection, why must we waste our national resources in higher research? I believe that our resources will be better spent by acquiring technologies already invented - by fair means or foul, doesnt matter - and adapting them for our use. Remember, Japanese did not invent automobile or transister but Japanese cars and electronic items are respected for their quality world over. It is only in the later part of Japanese technical revolution that they started churning out items ranging from walkmans to electronic gaming machines to pet robots.

So my solution: Do not waste our resources on higher research right now. Instead, concentrate on building a critical mass of skilled technical labor force (engineers, technicians, etc) right now. Once we have such a body of knowledge and skills, the advances in higher research will follow. Untill then, it will be a domain of elites, much like it has been throughout the history of Indian civilization.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Sadna, Ralph, ZahraJ - the ``off-track`` comments on this discussion thread are in the unplugged area, off-the-wall, same heading.

---

MurtazaH, there is little that I can add given that many interactors incl. Malik, HP, ballu, sadna, sridhar, and others have pretty much covered the issues. Briefly, these are my thoughts:

1. Curiosity is not nurtured in our environment. Why not? Ballu`s/HP`s answer explains most of it. I feel that it is the ``Chosen One`` attitude - the feeling that we`re already there - fatalistic notions - that are to blame.
2. But that`s not the only thing. Let me throw in a curve - I also feel that there is a general lack of ``energy`` in people. The lethargic attitude... the will to do nothing, and no will to do anything. Is lifestyle to be blamed?
3. Pandora`s Box: It is amazing where this curiosity-killing comes from as far as Muslims are concerned. Isn`t the every other line in Muslim scriptures an invitation to ``think?`` And to observe? I would recommend that as a charter of any research-driven university!

Life is fairly like a movie with a certain ending, or at least one that is certain to end. Still, we read books through and through, and watch every other predictable movie. Why can`t life be lived as a curious person who pokes around and explores... why does it just slip us away? I am thinking aloud here, though there are many private conclusions that I have reached. More later, duty calls!

All economic conditions kept constant, there is a dire need of research - that includes biz research and theoretical research (which must ultimately lead to tanglible economic benefits). One of the issues that organizations are facing in PK today is the break-down of value chain at many levels... As a manager in a fledgling organization, I, among other PK mngrs, see this issue in the face. Forget about rsrsch, there is hardly any info OR even data to be found. Finally the organization has to resort to do its own rsrch for every little thing, but this goes against the basic economics sense. What a waste of resources!

Here I`d appreciate that the Indians are far ahead ... and there are many insitutes that are mining and shaping the data. Great information resources.

Like MH, we also reached the conclusion that the schools and students need to be enabled and involved. B/c on the other hand, students are crying out for real assignments. There is a lack of a match-making mechanism... a clearing house for demand and supply.... and sadly this ``match-making`` is absent at many levels.

True, that some organizations are still afraid of rsrch; yet by and large the PK mngrs are realizing that self-defeating nature of this attitude. My personal experience has been that if we Ivy-types care enough to sit down and explain to the seth the virtue of rsrch, they do listen, and they do act.

About the culture of rsrch: Some instances

* On an interest-based yahoogroup, an MBA finalist asked ``Hey guys! this is my final semester. Wanna do a paper on advertising, but no idea what to write. Can anybody tell me what topic to do my reasearch on. Thnx.`` Surprised at receiving this msg from Planet Ignorance, I beamed back that it was horrible to be so clueless at this stage of
one`s MBA and to get someone to do the assignment (picking the rsrch ques was part of the assignment). This person must be knowledgeable enough to know what problem may he choose to rsrch on. I would certainly not like to hire him! Surprisingly, it was I who ``got it`` from the group, with only tacit support.

* I met a grad `rsrchr` undertaking a rsrch on media preferences. She asked me to fill a questnre. I pointed out that most of the questions were leading, and the rsrch was completely biased, even nonsensical. (Also, the grammatical mistakes and absence of directions, etc.!) Her reply: ``Oho, doesn`t matter. Mark anything. I`ve already made my
report.`` I balled up the paper and threw it in the bin.

* Paper on e-banking, submitted by an MBA finalist. Despite my hours of training spiced with warnings that I will know if there is any copy/paste, fake rsrch job, this is what I got on page 3:
``CityBank also offers this blah-blah online service. For more information, click here.``
- and this came from the ``top business school`` ki student.

Sadna: I may not have exchanged notes with you on Chowk in a long long long while, but I definitely didn`t misunderstand you. There was some pun in my previous post. I am completely in agreement with your previous assertion and I am glad that you took the bull by its horns. The worst thing is that the bull does not know how badly his/her horns are stuck. Do you realize the irony here ? :)

re: Research in Pakistan
THere is no doubt that research in Pakistan is complicated by religous bigotry.
One has to just consider what happened to Abdus Salam, one of the greatest scientists from South Asia and the very best from Pakistan. The only Pakistani and the first muslim scientist to receive a Nobel.
His best efforts to create a research center in Physics in Pakistan met with failure mainly because he was an Ahmadiya.
In this article, Pervez Hoodhbhoy narrates his encounters with the scientist and how Salam`s fight to advance the cause of science in Islamic countries met with failiure.
Url: http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study_res/abdus_salam/encounter.html

``Salam`s epoch-making achievements as a scientist stand in stark contrast with his dismal failure to bring science back to Islam. It was not for lack of trying, but nothing ever really worked. The Islamic Science Foundation, a grand scheme for scientific advancement with an endowment of $1 billion collected from oil-rich countries, came to nought after Salam was banned from ever setting foot in Saudi Arabia. Kuwait and Iran did give some money for supporting their scientists at the ICTP, but the amounts were niggardly. Promises by kings, princes, and emirs remained promises. Salam`s efforts did contribute towards creating at least some of the score or so organizations whose raison d`etre is to accelerate science and technology in Muslim countries. But these organizations provide nothing but cushy jobs for those who sit at their helms, and they are no more than litter on the landscape today. ``

The same Hoodhbhoy, in this article in the Washingtonpost, talks about failure of scientific research in Pakistan. Url: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A37263-2001Dec28¬Found=true
Excerpts:
1. ``You will seldom see a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals, and if you do, the chances are that this person lives in the West. There are a few exceptions: Pakistani Abdus Salam, together with Americans Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979. I got to know Salam reasonably well; we even wrote a book preface together. He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by Pakistan, declared a non-Muslim by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My next-door neighbor, an Ahmadi physicist, was shot in the neck and heart and died in my car as I drove him to the hospital seven years ago. His only fault was to have been born into the wrong sect.)``

2. ``Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of heaven: He maintains it is receding from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse inthe Islamic holy book, which says that worship on the night on whichthe book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of 1,000, which he puts into a formulaof Einstein`s theory of special relativity.``

3. ``A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan`s energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.``

Religion when used as a dogma or for compelling one`s views, goes counter to scientific principles. HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi in India was trying to recreate some past glories (real and imaginary) of Hindu science based on unscientific principles. He has met his end. One would hope for a similar fate to religious zealots in Pakistan.
Sridhar

ZahraJ #58
I definitely did not mean you!

jay #51
Jay you need to take a look at Hindi-belt governments to understand what is disrespect for education, science and research. The funny thing is there the so-called enlightened elites are powerless to change things.

This is for information of hate brigade.

Six months on, ceasefire holds true
Josy Joseph in New Delhi | May 31, 2004 15:41 IST
Last Updated: May 31, 2004 15:42 IST
The ceasefire along the border with Pakistan is six months old and Indian intelligence agencies are taking stock of the situation.
The agencies admit that the ceasefire, which started on November 26, 2003, has proved beneficial.
``It has been a great success by any measure. The gains are immense and we are still trying to figure out how to firm up the ceasefire as a permanent measure,`` says an army general.

The ceasefire came into existence along the 740km Line of Control, the 110km Line of Actual Ground Position in Siachen and the small portion of the International Border in Jammu region after Pakistan made a unilateral offer and India reciprocated.

Omar Sahib,
Chowk is a site to share views and not abusive language. A dignified person always stands tall. That`s the end of communications with you.
cheerios

Skoll is NOT a co-founder of ebay.
Europeans don`t work 24/7. Ive been to france & germany. Everyone quits friday afternoon.

I have a Masters in Statistics. I always wished that I be able to explain main concepts in Probability and Statistics to my mother. She recently died leaving in me the regret that I could not explain her about what I have learned at college.

Learners of advanced topics will always be elite group. But when you are so elite that you have to learn in a foreign language and not being able to explain in local language even the most elementary concepts in your field then you are totally alienated from mainstream population. No matter how much money you spend on education programs this problem of alienation will not go away. Popularizing works on advanced topics written in local languages is a must for kindling interest in mainstream population before they take interest in advanced topics and support education. Also a link between science and improvement of life should be palpably obvious to common people. Not like ``woh bahut padhega, umreeka jayega aur bahut dollar kamaayega``. But like ``woh wheat ki production rate badhayega`` etc etc. People do see link between better physicians and surviving diseases, but not in any tangible way the link between mathematics and improvement of life.

Any large scale expansion of higher learning is bound to create large number of learned people who have to employ in jobs beneath their skill level. Like ZahraJ said you have to have enough avenues to utilize your energies after you learned some advanced topic. Recently I met a Math PhD. Her PhD topic was in Graph Theory and Combinatorics. She was looking for a Post-Doc Schol in US. Only because of Govt support such work can be done. It is difficult to see how Graph Theory could be used to improve life of povertized Indian millions. I myself am looking to enter academics again. I am fed up working as a ``code coolie``. Only reason I am considering this is because I might be able to work on and off campus and still maintain my former lifestyle. Could I have done that in India? No. In US and other western countries it is possible. This is made possible by surplus. When you produce more than you spend then only you can have surplus. Otherwise Pakistan also will end up becoming YAI (=yet another India). Why would anyone want to become YAI?

But other theory is trickle down theory. You just educate left and right and as number of graduates increase so will their desire to draw local people into their joy of learning and apply it to practical fields and automatically life improvement and appreciation of learning follows. I think so such theory is not correct. Trickle down does not work. A whole lot of facilitating mechanisms need to be foisted upon society. Educate people. Find them jobs. Have big technological programs funded by state. Build steel mills. Have agricultural universities. Have centers of excellence (funded by state) for improving life, farming etc etc. Have state funded publishing for quality literature both in English as well as local languages. etc etc.

#55: The piety filled sermon had a lot of emphasis on ``thoughtfulness.``
How could you miss that ? :)

One word: patronage.

It`s not a matter of culture. It`s about the establishment of a scientific sub-culture, which has little or nothing to do with the culture of the masses. It is tremendously difficult to get the ball rolling when there has been so much neglect, however it is not a matter of elementary education (which is an absolute joke in the West - real education begins on the first day of University).

Nor is it a matter of theology (hermeneutics is the process of interpretations of an existing body of work...not in the least bit related to any Scientific process I`m familiar with). Very convienent to blame society at large, or aspects of it (particularly those you hate).

With patronage it’s a chicken and egg situation. No one is interested until a scientific community emerges. Yet, such a community can`t appear without the patronage. The solution requires some sort of seeding, however such seeds don`t come cheap.

Insofar as objections from various quarters of societies, blatant nonsense. Although initially the scientific community will receive no support from the community at large, it will by the same token face no barriers. No more excuses, and no more theories proclaiming the intractability of the situation to cop out of a problem with obvious solutions which require non-trivial amounts of effort (what a paki trait!). These have no credibility.

Ijaz_gul #42: Don`t know Fawad Rauf. But would it be Hamdard University?

ballukhan#52:

Good post & Valid Reasonings.

[Why the Cultural Values of the Sub-Continent are mainly respnosible for the lack of successful Scientific Research Programs:]

Personally, I have very little respect for the culture and any traditions it offers therefore I would be the last person to envision the said culture producing any positive results. Period.
Thanks for highlighting the harsh realities and describing the lay of the land. I would add a few things...To me both culture and belief are not the same. They are two completely different animals.

[For a society that has drawn the limits to theory construction by calling free thinking names .................. That is why the brown bum in the sub-continent can never run a successful research program within his society.]

I agree with you that ``innovation`` requires a different mindset and outlook towards life. But I would add that each budding scientist was and is not an atheist. True, often times they are open enough to let ``interpretation`` kick in when needed to. Bother culture and belief are two completely different thought process to me. The former should be discarded without a second thought since that has very little contribution for further development of human mind. The latter should be definitely preserved for ones emotional well being and balancing out the highs and lows. The above are very personal perspectives and cannot be generalized for all and sundry.

[Mere funds do not make or break a genuine scientific research programme. ..That is why mere Funds do not alone make or break a successful scientific program.]

I agree with your gist. As far as filling up the already filled glass is concerned, you are right on the mark!

[Philanthropy again reflects the cultural value- ........... Can they not invest in JUST `Pure Physics`- Can they?]

Excellent Point. No arguments!!!

[So it is not mere Philanthropy that contributes to the scientific program- you need more on the cultural aspect of it.]

I am sure the writer would make a good note of your above argument. Since it adds another dimension to his findings. And, this article ought to entertain other dimensions if it truly believes in what its presenting.

I would come back and reiterate my point that education by itself is nothing. Ironically, Pakistani Society in general does not have the right base for research and learning. They are certainly an excellent base for Sarsoan Kaa Saag and Makai Kii Roti.