Indian students shunning America? :-(

Some time ago, I wrote in an opinion piece that America does not seem to have the shine that once attracted thousands of Indian students. I was, and am concerned about it, because more than anything these students going to other countries is our loss.

Guess what the latest report is? Yes, I have more to worry about! Here is an excerpt from the Chronicle:

The economic crisis in the United States has tarnished the American dream for many Indians, who are opting for university studies and career opportunities at home, the Reuters news agency reported. ....

The Educational Testing Service has reported that the number of Indian students taking the Graduate Record Examinations fell from 74,000 in 2007 to 55,000 in 2008. ....

Even students who have passed the examination are abandoning plans to study abroad due to lack of funds, said Rajiv Ganjoo, head of international education at Career Launcher, a test-preparation company in India. “It is a waiting game now,” Mr. Ganjoo said. “Students are looking at the recession, at how the colleges react to it and how the government reacts to it, before taking any steps,” he added.

“The brain drain has already begun to reverse,” said Mr. Wadhwa. “Now there are many magnets pulling the best talent. Before, the U.S. was where everyone wanted to go.”

Obama, basketball, and the madness

I hate the multimillion dollar business that Division I sports have become. I mean, to such an extent that sports team logos of universities don't even include anymore the "U", which stands for "university" in their names. Even here in the state of Oregon: the University of Oregon goes simply with "O", and its rival, Oregon State University matches that with "OS." As my former neighbor jokes, he was surprised to find out that there are real buildings and people associated with the football team! (notice how athletics have their own domain names that has nothing to do with the "edu" of their universities?!)

So, naturally, I didn't care a shit when the President took time off his schedule to participate in the "March Madness"--another term I have come to dislike. On top of everything else, I agree with this excerpt from a report in the Christian Science Monitor:

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan is taking him to task saying that he “absolutely should have acknowledged” the women’s tourney.

“As the father of two athletic daughters, President Obama should know all about the importance of sports for women and girls,” she writes. “Which is why he should have filled out not only a men’s NCAA tournament bracket but also a women’s tournament bracket in his well-publicized appearance on ESPN last week.”

On the air

She also appeared on NPR this morning to discuss the snub.

“Even if one [tournament] completely overshadows the other, wouldn’t it be nice if the president showed some interest in the one that’s a bit smaller?” she asked

“And for those little girls playing basketball in the driveway, maybe say to them I care about your tournament too,” she said.

Adjectives

She’s got one more gripe with him. He didn’t specify that he was filling out the brackets for the “men’s” tournament.

“Those who don’t use that pesky little adjective — and you know who you are — are acting as if there’s no women’s tournament at all, or it’s so beneath them, it’s not worth mentioning. This is rather silly. It is 2009, after all.”

Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, and Economic Geography

Though it seems like eons ago, it was just a couple of months ago that Krugman was awarded the Nobel. The day of the announcement (October 13, 2008), I wrote the following to my department colleagues:

hey, this is exciting.

am all the more excited because most of the courses i teach are either directly or indirectly about economic geography .... and krugman was one of the first neoclassical economists to systematically talk about a "new economic geography"

in his book Geography and Trade, krugman writes, "About a year ago I more or less suddenly realized that I have spent my whole professional life as an international economist thinking and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it"

it will be neat if neoclassical economics alters its course thanks to the 1-2-3 punch from Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman. but, maybe that is asking for too much, eh!

Thus, I was looking forward to the special session on Krugman and economic geography that I noticed in the program for the annual meeting of the premier professional organization for geographers--the Association of American Geographers.
But, the session did not live up to its billing. So, after thinking about it for a day or so, I emailed the following to the session organizer, with a copy to Professor Ron Martin:

Dear Professor Maskell:

I was delighted when I noticed in the program a session devoted to Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize for his work in economic geography.

As a member of the geography department in a teaching university, one of the reasons I look forward to the AAG is for the continuing education benefits from attending sessions. Particularly when the demands of teaching require me to spread my intellectual interests across a range of courses. However, for the most part, the session on Paul Krugman did not advance the discussion more than how the Economist summarized it in 1999--almost exactly to the day of the session, ten years ago.

After my comments, I have copied/pasted the article from the Economist, and the word "geographers" is highlighted throughout because of the keyword search I had employed. I remembered that piece because (a) it came at a time that Krugman was rapidly transitioning into a public role, and (b) I have used that many times over the ten years, including in a book review in Professional Geographer.

I found it equally puzzling that the geographer mentioned in that article, Professor Ron Martin, was not one of the panelists. Well, there could have been any number of logistical reasons behind it. But, puzzling nonetheless. Anyway, my thanks to Professor Martin for his observations towards the end of the session when it was opened up to comments from the floor.

Well, even if I did not find the session at a level I initially expected, my thanks to you for organizing this session. I hope that this session will be the beginning of a series of conversations on forging a truly new economic geography that marries the best ideas and methods of economists and geographers.

************
"Knowing your place"
Economist; 03/13/99, Vol. 350 Issue 8110, p92-92, 1p

Economists say they have rediscovered geography. Geographers are interested to hear it. They didn't know they had been away

THE leading light of the "new economic geography" is Paul Krugman, professor of economics at MIT. These days he is widely known for his popular books and magazine columns, where his speciality is to explain economics in straightforward terms while pouring scorn on rival experts such as Lester Thurow and Robert Reich. Mr Krugman is a brilliant writer of economics for non-specialists. Annoyingly, he is at least as good at the real thing. The "new economic geography" has lately been a chief interest, developing as it does from his earlier research in "new trade theory".

It is too soon to say whether this new area of work, like its predecessor, will become a major field of research in its own right. But it is not too early for geographers to be very annoyed that economists are roaming blithely across their land.

In a new paper, Ron Martin, from the geography department at the University of Cambridge, surveys the "new economic geography" with the critical eye of an actual geographer-and makes some interesting points. As will become clear, much of what he has to say applies not just to new economic geography but also to much else of what economic theorists spend their time on these days.

Mr Martin explains that the two main branches of new economic geography-one of them concerned with clusters of activity, the other with regional growth disparities-raise questions that are entirely familiar to geographers.

On clusters, economists start with the idea that centripetal and centrifugal forces are in opposition when firms choose where to locate. The agglomerating forces are "externalities" such as the ability to tap into an established local market for appropriate labour and intermediate goods. The dispersing forces are the costs of congestion, and the bidding-up of prices for land and labour. In models of clustering, transport costs and labour mobility usually have a central role: if transport is cheap and labour is mobile, agglomeration will tend to outweigh dispersal (and the converse).

According to Mr Martin, these and other models "generate a dull sense of deja vu . . . Geographers were busy analysing industrial location in these terms back in the 1960s and 1970s."

Much the same goes for the other sort of models-the kind concerned with convergence (or lack of it) in regional incomes. Again, according to Mr Martin, the economists arrived late for the meeting. Their starting point was the comparatively recent finding that incomes among regions converge more slowly than the standard neoclassical model of growth would predict. (This model embodies diminishing returns, meaning that as you invest more, you get a smaller return-so poor regions should catch up.) New economic geographers are examining the reasons for this slow convergence. Again, Mr Martin observes that their work "merely revives" ideas proposed more than 30 years ago in proper geography.

He goes further. The geographers have not only been there and done that, they have given it up as a fruitless enterprise and moved on. The real problem with new economic geography, they believe, is its obsession with mathematical modelling. The economists sometimes argue that geography came to a halt way back because the mathematical tools of the day were not up to the job. Imperfect competiton features prominently, for instance, and clever maths is needed to deal with it. Now those tools are available-their use in economics pioneered by specialists in industrial organisation and trade-so economists can breathe new vigour back into the lifeless body of geography.

No, not quite, says Mr Martin. It wasn't mathematical backwardness that led geographers away from this approach but the conviction that to rely too heavily on maths was a dead end. Geographers realised that "formal mathematical models impose severe limits on our understanding. Geographers became more interested in real economic landscapes, with all their complex histories and local contexts and particularities . . ."

A specific complaint is that an economist may be happy to use the same model to explain clusters at completely different scales-at the international level, at the scale of core versus periphery within a single economy, among urban concentrations and even within city neighbourhoods. (Yes, that is just like an economist.) Geographers insist that profoundly different processes are at work at different scales. So modern geography is interested in a more "discursive" approach, piling on detail and colour, in "close explication of locally specific and contingent factors", in building models from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Mr Krugman's response is robust. The geographers are often simply anti-model, anti-quantitative, anti-clarity, he has written. The geographical literature uses terms likes post-Fordism-even Derrida gets a look in-and Mr Krugman finds that very off-putting. (So does this column, it must be said.) Mr Krugman's general defence of maths in economics, and his strictures on using it properly, seem right: economic statements are based on models, he has argued, whether you acknowledge their existence or not. Better to know the model you are using, if only to understand its limitations, than to kid yourself you have moved to a deeper, model-free plane. Quite so.

Yet who can deny, as the geographers complain, that at the frontier of research, abstract economic modelling and the real world have moved dispiritingly far apart? A meeting of minds ought to be possible: a middle ground between bottom-up and top-down. One day, maybe, but tempers will have to cool first.

The article by Mr Martin is "The New `Geographical' Turn in Economics", Cambridge Journal of Economics, January 1999. Among Mr Krugman's many writings on the subject are "Development, Geography and Economic Theory" (MIT Press, 1995).

Joke of the day :-)

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class one day.

"In English", he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A loud voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Pretty cool, eh! From The Telegraph, via aldaily.com

Kafka Airport, and Dostoevsky Hotel the world's worst!

Again and again I am just amazed at how the people at The Onion continue to generate awesome pieces like this one. I almost spilt the coffee, thanks to a LOL moment, when the "newswoman" reported that guests at the hotel killed another guest.
And throughout the video, the references to "kafkaesque" images and words. Simply awesome.
It would have been a fantastic experience to have been fellow students when these Onion people were in college. Wait, maybe there are this good because they did not go to college? As Twain put it, they did not allow college to stand in the way of their education? :-)

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

The life that was :-(

Longer school year not a panacea

Like most people in these United States, I believe that our public school system, and our higher education system as well, needs continuous overhauls to ensure that our youth will have fantastic futures.

Therefore, I followed with immense interest President Obama’s recent speech on education; I liked many aspects of it. However, I am not quite in agreement with the president’s observation that one way to get our children ready for a productive and engaged life is by lengthening the school year.

Obama compared our academic calendar with South Korea’s, noting, “Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea — every year. That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy.”

A longer school year is not a necessary condition for success in the 21st century. It was not even a good model for the 20th century, which is when I was a student in a school system that has some of the longest school years.

As I look back at my childhood, it seems as though I was always in school. In the southern part of India, where I grew up, the academic year began in early June, and we had classes six days a week. It was a huge reward when we had the second Saturday of every month off — and, boy, did we look forward to that two-day weekend!

School ended in mid-April, in time for the peak summer heat, when we kids then spent our time climbing the mango and tamarind trees and playing cricket and football, darkening our already naturally tanned complexions.

Yes, the school system graduated quite a few successful students. But then, in a country with a population of more than a billion now, even a small percentage translates to hundreds of thousands of successes.

Later in life, as a parent here in America, I was excited by the educational system that my daughter went through — in a public school. I would have way preferred to be a student here than in India. And it was not at all because of the five-day school week or because of the long vacations.

I was blown away by a number of wonderful aspects of schooling here: from “learning by doing” to physical education to arts and music to student government. In contrast, I went through a system that emphasized learning by rote, not learning by doing. Music and the arts had only token representation in the curriculum, and we certainly did not learn civic responsibility through student government.

What ultimately mattered to me as a parent was not the length of the school year, but what went on when school was in session. Equally important, on weekends and during summers, kids are able to be kids — although like many parents, I sometimes preferred it when the kids were in school, because they can be stress agents at home!

Thus, having experienced two strikingly different systems, the question for me is a deceptively simple one: What is the purpose of education?

The more we begin to explore this question, the more it becomes intensely controversial, because of the profound differences in opinions. We might disagree because of the different weights we attribute to science, social science and language courses. Or how much we think the arts ought to be emphasized in schools.

These immensely controversial issues are precisely the ones we ought to focus on. What if the subjects that were taught in the 20th century will not have any “value” at all in the 21st century? Or what if the way in which we taught a subject in the 20th century will not work in the 21st century?

Furthermore, a child entering the first grade in September 2009 will graduate high school in 2021. I am willing to bet that none of us has any realistic idea of what might be the important issues in this country and the world 12 years down the road.

So, if we are trying to figure out how to prepare this kid to be constructively and productively engaged from 2021 until retirement in 2071, well, let us be honest here: We are all involved in a guessing game about the future.

I don’t have the answers. All I know is that Yogi Berra was, as always, on the mark: “The future ain’t what it used to be!”

I am convinced, however, that longer school years are no panacea for the complexity and uncertainty about the future economy and polity. Merely retaining students in classrooms for a lot more days of the year will not necessarily guarantee that they will graduate as young adults with the ability to successfully negotiate the economic and civic challenges they will face for the rest of their lives.

For The Register-Guard
Posted to Web: Sunday, Mar 22, 2009 11:47PM
Appeared in print: Monday, Mar 23, 2009, page A7

Schooling, creativity, and .... plagiarism?

I was absolutely intrigued by the caption of a column in The Hindu--Creativity and Education: Contradictory Impulses? So, I started reading it, given my own interests in this topic.

Well, the overall tone there seemed to be less original, and more of a convenient paraphrasing of Sir Ken Robinson's much viewed and discussed 20-minute Ted.com talk. (I have embedded it at the end of this post.)

The only "new" idea in Rajivan's column is right at the beginning about cows and amoebae.

When I reached the end, I was simply taken aback that Rajivan would outrightly use Sir Ken's anecdote about a child drawing a picture of god, without attributing the source!

I wonder if the author thought this was kosher; not in the definitions of plagiarism that I tell my students.

The author fails outrightly in trying to convey the argument about creativity and education, and instead comes across as having no original idea--perhaps an example of a lack of creativity on the author's part, on top of the plagiarism ....