Trip to Sentosa.

There is a small island of Singapore called Sentosa that Singapore government has ruined by building artificial theme parks. The most attractive feature of this place is its clean beach. The reason for our going there was Graduate Student Services annual Sentosa party. Here is the pic that we took while departing.

(from left to right: Suresh, Ajay, Prashant and me)

We reached there quite late in evening, so missed going around the place to see the natural beauty. We tried to explore as much as we could, and these pics are the result of that. By the way, Sentosa is the southern most point of the continental Asia and we have pics that will keep reminding us of that:

The theme of the party was to be dressed or painted in colours and design of one’s national flag. Guess what happened, Indians were the most enthusiatic lot about doing rang-de-basanti. See this:

(If you couldn’t recognize, from top to bottom: I, Suresh and Prashant)

(Can you read “Sentosa” in stone, it is cool!)

The full face painting on my and Prashant’s face was an excellent art-work by Suresh.

Well, having not much to do, we just roamed around and chilled out. Here are some pics:

We were promised free flow of drinks and food, but weren’t told that the queue would be so long that you would consider yourself lucky if you got them even once. Somehow, we had something to eat. The seafood didn’t do us good, I guess you can know that from this pic. (what do you say Suresh?

After roaming around a bit and taking some snaps it was time to go home. Well the guy on the extreme right is Laxmi Nayaran. Cool friend and great cook. He feeds all of his friends with a care of their mom.

courtesy to friends back home, we could have some decent food after reaching home.

Some of the readers may not be so impressed by so many pics but so few words. But I promise- it is going to be better. Check back next week.

My micro-eureka moment of today.

Well, make it nano (or pico (or femto)) if you want. I have not discovered a new principle as Archimedes did, but have come to realize a mathematical beauty that exists in the nature’s design.

I have realized that genetic code is a many-to-one function that transforms a sequence of nucleotide into sequence of amino acids. Because this function is many-to-one, it can not be inverted. In terms of genetics it means that – if you know the sequence of nucleic acids in a particular gene, you can always say what protein would it produce; but it is not possible to know the gene that has produced a particular protein (which is a sequence of amino acids).

Sounds foreign? Let me explain.

The right question to ask is: How does a gene control protein manufacture?

Genes are particular sequence of nucleic acids (A,T,G,C) with defined pattern. Every triplet (termed codon) in this sequence encodes an amino acids. Proteins are nothing but a peculiar series of amino acids. When a gene is activated, its sequence is copied to mRNA (messenger RNA). Messenger RNA then carries this genetic information to the place where codons are read and amino acids encoded by them strung togeather. When amino acids are strung togeather, they assume particular chemical and structural properties that in turn govern their functional properties. Proteins are work-horses of cells – they do most of the work.
The code that matches genetic codon with a particular amino acid is uniform, degenerate and unambiguous. What this means is:

• Unifromity: All organisms use the (almost) the same genetic code. (Isn’t it amazing – it really shows we really have grown out of amoeba!)
• Degeneracy: More than one codon can represent any given amino acids (by the way, in humans there are 20 of them)
• Unambiguity: Every codon represents one and only one amino acid.

So if you consider genetic code to be a function (call it ‘g’) maping a set of codons (call it ‘C’) to a set of amino acids (call it ‘A’), we can see that g: C -> A maps every member of the set C to a single but non-unique member of A. Thus, function g is many to one.

Now, it is a mathematical truth that many-to-one function cannot be inverted. Hence, you can never ever get a nucleotide sequence out of protein structure.(edited thanks to Johan’s comment) Hence, eventhough you can infer what nucleic acid sequences may give rise to certain amino acid sequence, you can never be sure which one actually did.

Trip to Little India and tips on Shopping

As any Indian looking forward to coming to Singapore would know, we have a small region on this island that looks like India (Tamilnadu to be more precise.) We (7 Gillman Residents) had a great time at Little India on Satureday (12 Aug, 2006). If you get bored from normal calm of Singapore’s other regions, visit Little India and treat your senses to motley collection of sights, sounds, saliva-inducers and shops. Little India is a good place for shopping – especially if you are looking forward to Indian food, Indian spices and exchanging money. The right place to shop for all things Indian and exchange money is Mustafa Centre (close to Farrer Park MRT). There are few stores around Gillman Heights (home to new single graduate students of NUS). Mustafa is not the right place to buy furniture or utensils, especially if you are looking for reasonably priced ones that international students usually want. The right place for that is IKEA store. You should visit Fairprice and Cold Storage if you want to buy veggies and groceries. Take help of someone around to spot these stores.

There are plenty of places of worship in Little India, so they can be of help when you feel homesick. Here are some of the pics that I had taken during the trip.

I am Wired!

These days, I am participating in an amazing research carried out by Psychology department of NUS.
They wish to relate the responses given to stress (physical and psychological) by certain populations with their genetic makeup. I am all instrumented these days. I had started writing out the theme, but just towards the end; I realized that I may be violating non-disclosure terms by divulging their method of research.
So for time being, I have just uploaded a pic of me with wires all around.

IITs vs NUS: Who educates better?

Following are my very personal views on quality of education at IITs. So please don’t create flames.

If you feel the same or otherwise, I will be glad to hear from you and learn from your experiences. This discussion was trigerred by my friend Prajit, and I am providing the whole conversation without any edits (I have not removed typos or grammatical errors), to capture the conversation’s real tone.

Prajit Wrote:
—————————————————————————————–
Dear Shalin
Yesterday I was going through the website of NUS…
I found something interesting…

University Ranking of 2005……….

In the university ranking IISC was missing.. but in the Technology Institutes category IIT’s were ranked number 3 .. ahead of NUS….
You were in IIT Mumbai… and now in NUS..

What do u feel? Where the difference? Is IIT’s superior to NUS?

Waiting for you reply..

——————————————————————————————
I wrote:

Dear Prajit,

If you consider undergraduate education, yes… IITs are much-much better than NUS. Because IITs infuse lot of rigour and basic training in their curriculum. NUS undergrads are no match to Indian brain. IIT undergrad would be very good at basics and ready to take on many branches of study, but NUS undergrad would have rather superficial knowledge but will be very well exposed to cutting-edge research areas and technologies.

But when I compare graduate research, I think IITs need to do a lot. If you create a professionalism and research activitiy continuum…. DRDO comes last, IIT ahead them, NUS ahead them, MIT/Stanford etc. first…Research here is very organized and also offers choice to students what they wish to do. It is multidisciplinary and is more oriented towards real-life problems.

Of course, there are exceptions in every system. I know a B.Tech. of IITM who did M.E. in NUS and went back to IISc for PhD. His M.E. experience was not at all good here. For two months he didn’t get anything to work. He was in chemistry deptt.

If I consider my case, I feel I am at the best place possible for me. I am supposed to do two state-of-the-art experiments in two labs in different areas over one year.. then I should select my research problem. Even in IISc, I would not get such an opportunity of really trying out two areas. So it is my scholarship and programme that are putting me in good position, but the IITM guy was just unfortunate to land up at the wrong place!!!
One of the guy has joined PhD in NUS after doing Master’s in Fraunhofer, Germany. He just hated Europe because of its weather, language problem and social culture. But he was OK with research rigour and facilities there. So he opted for Singapore.
Singapore is much close to our Indian culture and on top of that it is a developed country offering peaceful life.

So it seems that the right place for us is the place where we see opportunities for our professional and personal goal.

And rankings are biased by parameters that they use. And your parameters may not be the same as ranking parameters. Over time, I have felt that Ranking is the place to find the universities that may be of interest to you. For PhD, rankings dont matter at all… it is all about getting a good deal. In highly ranked uni.. there are higher chances of getting good deal, but that is all… there is only a chance, no surity…