Silence of the Rainmaker

Today I am blogging about two movies I saw this week. Silence of the Lambs and The Rainmaker.

Silence of the Lambs: A heavily recommended movie (by a friend whose recommendation I regard highly). I started the movie a bit sceptical. I do not like movies with blood and gross stuff. It is a very old movie. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. The movie won Oscar(s). The movie is about a psycho serial murderer, who skins the people he kills. And the only person capable of helping the Police is a very talented Psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. But here is the catch, the Psychiatrist is a CANNIBAL. Hannibal, the Cannibal. Anthony Hopkins has portrayed Dr. Lecter with great dignity. To play a decent, well-mannered Cannibal is quite a task. And Jodie Foster as a rookie cop has done well. If I am right, she got an Oscar. The movie has a very tight script.

The only problem I found in the movie was that the psycho happened to be related to Dr. Lecter in some way. This is too much of a coincidence for me. I could not digest this fact. Other than this, the movie has all ingredients for a classic.

And I nearly forgot, as expected the hero Dr. Lecter escapes from the Police. Some rope for a sequel!! I think there are about 4 movies based on this character.

The Rainmaker: I have one word for you, AWESOME. Coppola is a great director and he proves it yet again in this movie. Based on Grisham's novel of the same name, the movie does justice to the novel. Starring Danny DeVito, Matt Damon. Both of them give commendable performances. DeVito is splendid. He is a great actor and always amazes me with his ease of portrayal. He plays a paralawyer, one who has passed the law school, but has not managed to pass the bar exam. Matt is a young graduate from a law school. He joins this shady firm in which DeVito works. The firm head has many cases of money laundering and other things on him. Matt and Devito team up and chase ambulances. Matt has two cases with him, one is a Will and other is against Insurance company.

Danny Ray is a Cancer patient slowly dying. Great Benefit has denied his insurance claims and Danny takes them to court with Matt's help. Matt now has set up a separate firm along with DeVito. Matt and DeVito fight with big law firm defending the insurance company and win the case. They manage to close down the insurance company. This is a truly well-done master-piece.

A must watch in every sense. I could not find any flaw in the movie. I single out Matt's accent in the movie for appreciation.

Will see you all later then!! Rent these two movies for this weekend.

GOD

What is GOD? My question is important. I do not ask 'Who is GOD?,' instead I ask 'What is GOD?.' 'Who is GOD?' is a religious question, while 'What is GOD?' is a spiritual question. Religion is a way of life – not the way of life. Religion is 'getting answers', while Spirituality is 'experiencing answers'. I feel 'What is GOD?' is a more important question than 'Who is GOD?.' So how do we answer this question?

'Sahasra Seersha Purushah' – thus starts the Purusha Suktam. The Purusha Suktam extols the personality of the Supreme Being, the Almighty God. What does the first verse in this Suktam mean? By literal translation, it means 'One with thousand heads'. The Suktam goes on to praise the purusha as one with thousand hands and feet and eyes. Does this mean God has thousand heads, hands, feet and eyes? What is the significance of the number 1000? It is well known that in Hinduism the holy numbers are 18, 108, 1008, or numbers like 11, 51, 101, 1001, etc. Why then 1000? Large numbers are often used to represent uncountable. The meaning of the beginning verses of the Purusha Suktam is, to me, means God is everyone. So, according to me, the Vedas say how people must lead their life ideally. All the traits and powers that are extolled in them refer to the ability of the humans, what humans should strive to achieve.

So coming back to the question, What is GOD? God is the ideal human being, the human being with all the ideal values. So attaining these values is the goal of life. GOD is the want to be ideal, the want to inculcate the ideal values. God is not a power, nor a separate entity. We are GOD, our want to inculcate the ideal values is God.

 

There are two types of religions: Theistic and non-Theistic. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc… are theistic; while Jainism and Buddhism are non-theistic.

Resource-Bounded Belief Change

Belief Change is the study of how an intelligent agent changes its beliefs according to the information it receives. There are three ways of changing one's beliefs, namely: adding a new belief to the body of beliefs, removing an existing belief from it, and adding a new belief while avoiding contradictions. The factors involved in belief change include beliefs of the agent, their relative strengths, their importance, relations between the beliefs. These four in particular jointly constitute the belief state of an agent. A realistic modeling of belief change should take into account two things: the real agents have limited resources and they perform belief changes more than once.

Belief change deals with the interaction of received information and the belief state over time. Most of the traditional approaches for belief change ignore the temporal aspects of belief change. They also ignore the real-world agents that are limited by memory, time to reach a decision or ability to reason. There is a need to develop a belief change theory that works for these resource-bounded agents.

Ideal rational change needs all possible inferences to be made from the given set of beliefs, using as much time as needed. Due to its limitations, an agent in the real world is incapable of performing ideal rational change. Instead, the agent approximates it. A real-world agent often performs successive changes to its belief state. It is necessary to study the effect of approximated belief change when the agent performs successive changes to its belief state. The purpose of my PhD thesis is exactly to do that.

Scientific Misconduct and Measures against the same.

Introduction

'No group of humans is completely honest: dishonest window-cleaners steal DVD-players; dishonest scientists invent data. Both—if not caught—profit from their dishonesty'. Science is the tool which gives answers to the 'how', 'why', and 'when' questions about the world we live in and researchers are those who interpret these answers for us. Researchers play an important role; every breakthrough that happens in a lab, affects the living world over. There is an extra pressure on the researchers to get their facts and results right.

Mistake or misconduct in science has become more frequent. In a survey conducted on scientists based in United States nearly 33% of the respondents said that they engaged in at least on instance of misconduct (Martinson, Anderson and de Vries 2005). Misconduct in Science includes intentionally making up or omitting data or results, manipulating research materials or processes, appropriating another person's ideas, processes, results or words, without giving credit.

Schön

Jan Hendrik Schön was a German scientist who galloped to the spotlight in 2000 and was banished to obscurity in 2002. Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997 he was hired by Bell Labs. Within a period of two years, Schön published around 90 articles, mostly in leading journals (Wikipedia n.d.). In 2001, he was listed as an author on an average of one research paper every eight days.

The Allegations and Repercussions

Other research groups were unable to replicate Schön's ground-breaking results. On reading his work carefully, some inconsistencies and duplications were found in Schön's results. Allegations of research misconduct were made on 25 papers of Schön. There were a total of 20 co-authors in all these works (Wikipedia n.d.).

In May 2002, the management of Bell Labs formed a committee to investigate "the possibility of scientific misconduct, the validity of the data and whether or not proper scientific methodology was used in papers by Hendrik Schön, et al., that are being challenged in the scientific community". The allegations were grouped in three basic categories: 1. Data Substitution, 2. Unrealistic Precision and 3. Contradictory physics (Bell Labs September 2002). The committee found Schön guilty of the above allegations. The committee also found Schön guilty of inappropriate storage and documentation of primary data. The committee found Schön as the only perpetrator and exonerated all the co-authors. Bell Labs fired Schön immediately after receiving the committee report. 21 of Schön's papers were withdrawn by the respective journals.

Sanctions on Schön

DFG, German Research Foundation, suspended his active right to vote in DFG elections and his right to serve on DFG committees for an eight-year period (DFG 2004). During this time, Schön will not be able to serve as a peer reviewer. In addition, Schön was barred from applying for DFG funding for eight years. The University of Konstanz revoked Schön's PhD degree.

Preventive measures

After reviewing Schön's case, it appears that the following measures could prevent further fraud of similar nature.

1. Supervision: It is evident from Schön's case that there was a lack of supervision of his work (NPR Science Friday Report 2002). Most of his disputed work was conducted in Germany while his supervisor, Batlogg, was in US. The duty of the supervisor is to oversee the experimentation process, including checking the data and results.
   
2. Storing experimental data: One of the most glaring aspects of Schön's episode was his inability to present his lab records to the committee. To avoid such excuses, institutions should have central storage system. All the researchers should be made to store their lab records in this central storage. This would also enable the co-authors and supervisors to access the data if and when they require.
   
3. Publishing experimental data: Submitting experimental data to the journals should be made mandatory. This would help if the reviewer wants to check the data. This would deter duplicating or fabricating data. Once published the journals could also make these data available on the web for other researchers.
   

Conclusion

World over the law-enforcers try to come up with ways to prevent crime. But they haven't been successful because preventing crime is like building a huge dam while committing a crime is like finding a hole in the dam. This applies to the scientific community too. There could be many factors that force a scientist to commit fraud. These are excuses, not justifications. The researchers should be educated about their responsibility towards the institution and the society. Only this could prevent scientific misconduct.

 

PS:: This is an adaptation of my assignment, which also includes all the references. I haven't included the references in this blog.

The Rhythm of Silence

Hi,
Karthik, Adarsh and myself have started a joint blog "The Rhythm of Silence",
where we will be discussing a range of topics, from spirituality to practicality, religion to politics, and what not.

Make sure to book mark "The Rhythm of Silence" and visit everyday to have a look at what we have to say. It will be great.

The three of us have different positives. Karthik is good in writing, he has a good vocabulary,
Adarsh is good in philosophy and spirituality and I am good at joking around.
So, do come and have a look.

Expecting to see you there!!

Raghav.

I forgot.

I totally forgot about my blog account. I have been busy with my uni work. Had so many submissions and meetings. I finally getting my research on its legs.
Feels good when i write 2 lines every day after giving much thought to different things, but always the chain of thoughts start with my research topic.
I guess that is normal.
Hopefully this will not become a disturbing trend and i will be back blogging regularly.

Ciao,
Raghav.