At one to the World Cup

I have been traipsing around my homeland, the land known as Australia. I thought that I had come back for a friend's wedding and to visit friends and family. But I realise now that I had come back for something much more important. I came back to to witness Australia qualify for the World Cup with my fellow Australians.

So on the second night that I came back, still slightly knocked out by jet-lag, I groped for something to do. Nick and Ben, the two guys I was staying with told me that they were going down to the pub to watch the second leg of the final qualifier for the World Cup. This was epic stuff. Australia, being the winner of the Oceania group in FIFA, were obliged to play a knock-off return-leg with Urguary, the fifth placed South American team.

Now four years ago, it was the same situation. Then, the first leg was won 1-0 by Australia courtesy of a penalty. The second leg, in Montevedo, Urguary, involved people spitting on the Australian team at the airport, and coins thrown on the players. Uruaguay thrashed Australia 3-0.

This time it was different, better players, a team of millionaires. The newly appointed coach, Guus Hiddink, had world class pedagory. It was a mature and measured approach compared to the hurly-whirly bluster of yesteryear. So the second leg was played at Olympic park in Sydney, the geographic center of Sydney, way out west in the burbs.

We, Nick and Ben and I, watched the first half at home, eating a Thai takeaway. And when the goal was scored, a beautiful flowing movement involving 6 players, 3 flicks, a cuffed shot, and a predatory rocket finish - we three jumped for joy, and immediately headed down to the pub. The scores at this point was locked 1-0 from the previous game to Uruaguay, and now 0-1 in our favor.

At the pub, we watched a nail biting hour and a half including extra time. And the deadlock was not broken. However, it was with pride watching the Australian team dominate the Uruguays, as the Australian talsiman, Harry Kewell, wove his spells all over the Urguayan defence.

And then we got to the penalty shootout - perhaps the most nailbiting thing ever invented in modern sport. A team game is suddenly reduced to a series of one-v-ones. The Australian keeper produced two remarkable saves. And the moment that John Aloisi scored the goal, Australians all were united through the television erupted in joy as we were accepted into the holy pantheon of 32 nations who had clawed their way into the last 32 of the nations. We jumped and screamed and hugged. It was cathartic and realised there and then that, even though I am now a citizen of the world, I will always be 'straylin.

The Tide has turned...

in the last spate of elections, Democrats all across the United States have swept into the local councils of traditionally Republican strongholds. The Democratic party under Howard Dean has been hard at work rebuilding the base

Dean spends two days a week max at the DNC office here, preferring instead to visit state parties. Recently he had lunch with, as he described them, some "very old influential heavy-hitter lobbyists." They gently suggested that he ought to do more time in Washington.

"I can't," he said. "No votes in Washington."

The America of Martin Luther King and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is starting to wake up from a very deep sleep.

Cutting someone down with a smile

Another assistant professor at M.I.T. has been fired for falsifying data. Whilst scientific fraud happens everywhere, it seems that M.I.T. has had more than it's fair share with the spectacular example of the case involving David Baltimore who was the president at the time.

One of the things that we postdocs pay attention to is the tenure rate of universities. When universities hire young faculty, there is a probation period of 3 to 5 years, at the end of which, tenure is either awarded or the professor is fired. This can be a heart-breaking moment but tenure is a serious committment for a university. But the exact rate of tenure gives an indication of how ruthlessly a university culls the young faculty.

Where I work, the tenure rate is around the 80% mark, a pleasingly high rate for new young faculty. It's likely that a new hire will get tenure, but not so absurdly high that jeckyl-and-hyde personality types automatcially become faculty members. But this is an anomaly amongst top universities. Harvard, Berekeley and MIT have ridiculously low tenure rates, of the order of ~15%. This means that most new-hire faculty will not get tenure. Often these universities will hire young professors with similar qualifications and watch them compete viciously so that they will get tenure.

Whilst at Harvard, this is recognized, and the professors there are known for their cold-blooded competitiveness, MIT seems a little bit schizophrenic. A colleague of mine who had just done the job rounds was really weirded out by the professors at MIT when he gave a job interview there. All the professors at MIT tried really hard to pretend to be nice and jovial and not ruthlessly competitive. But it came across as a charade, as some kind of cognitive dissonance.

The low tenure-rate clearly says otherwise for MIT professors. Because how a university is run structurally flows through into how the staff sees each other. What makes MIT odd is the need for the professors to feel the need to pretend to be collegial when clearly they are not. This schism I think may be one of the reasons why fraud has manifested itself once again at that place.