Saturday, July 30, 2005

 

Emailnews Issue 07/2005

Higher education should fuse
teaching and research
New set of rules is needed
to enhance standards

By Jayant V.Narlikar

Astrophysicist

A few months ago the finance minister announced a grant of Rs.100 crore to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to help it to raise its standards to the level of Oxford and Camebridge.

To get to where Oxford and Cambridge, we could learn a thing or two from them. Considering the following anecdote:

In the middle of 19th century, two clever students, Parkinson and Thomson were competing for the Camebridge Tripos examination. When the results were out, Parkinson stood first and Thomson second. They were the only two to have solved a very difficult question. The examiner of the paper thought that both had solved the question in the same way, did one copy the other? He called Parkinson to find out how he arrived at the solution. Parkinson explained that he made it a practice to go beyond the syllabi and texts to read research journals and he had encountered the question in a research paper whose author was anonymous. The examiner had taken the question from the very same source; he complimented Parkinson for his preparation. Next he called Thomson. Thomson said “I wrote that paper”! Thomson was none other than famous physicist and is better known as Lord Kelvin.

In my batch there was an undergraduate who wrote a paper in the “Physical Review Letters” pointing out a serious error in an experiment performed in the UK to verify a prediction of Einstein’s theory. The student went on to get a Nobal Prize based on his research work as a graduate student. His name is Brian Josephson.

Good students are attracted by good teachers and researchers. I was fortunate to attend the lectures in the course of my Mathematical Tripos examination at Camebridge.

To learn the subject from those who made important research contributions to it can be very inspiring to a student. These faculty members delivered their lecturing commitments at the university. They were not exempted from lecturing because they were producing good research.

When Hoyle’s proposal to establish a new Institute of Theoretical Astronomy was under consideration at Camebridge, a condition was sought to be imposed by a lobby of faculty that its staff members should not teach the Tripos Students. Hoyle was unhappy with this. He explained that teaching was complimentary to research and that if we did not teach undergraduates we would not attract good students to research. This explains why we are still a long way off from Cambridge.

We have two streams in our education cum research system.

Further we have two types of professors:

Organisers of graduate schools in these institutions will tell you how difficult it is to persuade a faculty member to give even a short course of 15 lectures.

University Grant Commission should have made it a condition that these institutes have some minimal undergraduate or postgraduate teaching programme, before giving them deemed University status.

What is needed for our progress towards Oxbridge is a new set of rules that enable teaching and research to go hand in hand, with no compromise on merit, whether for faculty or for students.

To achieve this, Rs.100 crore is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Times of India Dated July 30th 2005 Page 12

Click http://dli.ernet.in to read invaluable documents at

Digital Library of India (DLI)

Imagine being able to read the legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujam’s theorems in his own hand. You can hear the recitations of old epic of Tamil “shilappadikaram”. If you want to read something in Tamil, but don’t know the language, it translates it into a language you know, say Kannada. This is all part of Digital Library of India (DLI) project.

The idea behind the project is to digitize knowledge so that it is available for ever. Paper and palm leaves may be accessible to select scholars, but digital information is permanently available to every one.

Digital Libraries initiatives as part of the Universal Library Project www.ulib.org spearheaded by Carnegie Melon University (CMU) professor Raja Reddy.

The project was launched by President Abdul Kalam in September 2003.With Indian Institute of Science as the coordination and research centre and Sri N.Balakrishna of IISc as Project coordinator with the support of Ministry of Communication and Information Technology is a million books project involving various countries and international institutions. DLI is having parternership with 21 centers in India, the following are some of the centers involved in DLI:

At present 1.3 lakh books are available on DLI, right now there are 200 scaners which are capable of scanning a million pages a day. Shanmugha Art Science Technology and Research Academy (SASTRA) Tanjavur has had recitations of palm leaves which included in DLI. As part of the project Example Based Machine Translation (EBMT) has been developed which translates the document from one language to another, it is actually available on the site http://bharani.dliernet.in/embt

Regarding copyright issue DLI has been outside the purview of copyrights.

Times of India 3rd August 2005 page -2.


If you wanted to serve in Armed Forces
(Army/ Air Force/Navy)
And to become commissioned officer
apply for admission to NDA

What is NDA?

National Defence Academy popularly called NDA is the cradle of Indian Armed Forces. The academy is one of few defence training institutions in the world offering Joint Service Training i.e. Combined Training in Army, Air Force and Navy.

The Institute situated on the outskirts of Pun established in the year 1949 at Khadakvasla and spreads over an area of 8000 acres with beautiful campus.

· Admission : Admission takes place in January and July.

· Education : Boys with the age group 16 and half to 19 years

· Passed : 10 plus 2 or equivalent examination

· Qualified : In competitive examination conducted by UPSC

· Selection : Service Selection Board (SSB)

· Examination : Medical Examination

More than 1.5 lakh candidates apply for admission to NDA every year. Of the 80000 appear per term for the examination, 10000 qualify. Out of these 300 are chosen. The stringent selection process ensures apt candidate selection and maintains the reputations of the academy.

Education at NDA is a three years training and judicious blend of academics and sports; the training includes service training, adventure sports and hobby clubs. Students as they are called Cadets here can take part of over 37 clubs ranging from trekking, kayaking, rock-climbing, water skiing, photography, parasailing, astronomy, arts, dramatics and ballroom dancing etc.

Here Cadets are allotted individual well furnished rooms, free uniforms, boarding and lodging facilities

The three years training with six semesters offers graduation in science, computer science and social science streams. Three military camps held through the tenure of the NDA to instill the qualities like perseverance, integrity, team sprit, leadership and situational awareness.

Passing out parade of the academy is one of the most celebrated event , which take place twice in the year i.e. May and November marking the end of the graduation of NDA.

Training and Specialisation: After graduating from NDA cadets are to undergo one year training and specialization to their opted services in

On completion of the above, cadets are awarded the presidents commission and inducted as Commissioned Officers in the respective services in the Armed Forces.

For further details: http://www.nda.nic.in

Times of India /Education Times/ Dated 14th July 2005/Page4/


# posted by Visweswara. M. S. email:msv2000@gmail.com @ 11:05 AM 0 comments

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