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Hi,The causes listed by Suchitra Ravi are clear and concise. Congratulations on your academic achievements at NITT as well as Georgia Tech and wishing the best in your career post graduation. My response is too long and hope someone can educate and help me hyperlink such responses to brevity.You and I (among other thousands) are proud alma maters of the same institution (RECT then, or now better as NITT) and so my response to your comment and to the group is with all politeness and humility based on my observations and thanks to all the teachers who have influenced me to stages of success in my career.Your analysis however seems to point to symptomatic and not close to the "root" causes.In order to reduce the impact of a problem in our society (for that matter anywhere in the world), let alone eliminate it, one has to dig to the root level to exhume the same.By physically engaging and visiting multiple institutions in India as well as attending advanced graduate studies in the US, plus coaching students and professionals in at least three continents, here are some observations (and this also includes "guilty me" during my student days in India and abroad): Since thea - Institutions and Corporations operate on a business and commercial mode and so are their senior management thus driving certain specific behaviors.b - Singapore is the only nationality in this aspect where, students are treated as customers and their feedback is taken seriously only because of the consequences to the faculty. I was sitting at the desk of a professor at Singapore National University and politely asked him what the heaping bundle was. He said the content in this heap would determine my fate for the next academic year. This meant he better get a "great" student survey score, lest lose his job at SNU. Since the title is listed as top 3 technical institutes, I will also quote the experience with what is regarded as a top institution in India.c - We should never hold the teachers responsible in such institutions (maybe a few exceptions) as it is almost never the case with them being the root causes for the problems we face.d - In India it is almost impossible to fire a teacher/professor, let alone someone who has been in that institution for a long time. In the US once they become a so-called "full time tenured" faculty, unless it is an integrity issue, they are there permanently and as students we are temporary. Whereas in Singapore, there is no such thing as permanent and students have a huge say in this decision.e - This very policy in itself makes the system if not great, at least a whole lot better, in Singapore.f - With the number of students applying to seek admission to institutions all over the world almost always being greater than seating capacity, attention to student success is not necessarily going to be on the radar screen of the senior management. instead they are going to look at ways to stay competitive and just float the boat as opposed toreally looking at customer centric needs. If one institutions uses the cloud, another would compete and offer the same to imitate the herd mentality, however, not innovate.g - Professors don't have much control on how student needs can be designed and met on a constant basis. There is a university policy as well as time constraint although personal lethargy can kick in. Why do professors not give everyone an "A?" Imagine the need for a distribution. If everyone took the same class and qualified with the pre-requisites to take that class are we saying that the grade variance is primarily due to variance in how student disciplines themselves? Professors are required to form a distribution and so in order to avoid a narrow peak If that is the case), what they do instead is make the exam tough enough that only a skewed few would score high and the class would naturally fall into a nice distribution and look very statistically natural (if there is such a terminology). A student customer walks into a class and the motivation of the professor is already written like a fate script that this class is going to be a distribution come what may and the professor has enough time to figure it out on where he has to tweak to seek that bell curve.h - To me that is customer fatality when I don't understand the needs of the class, nor do I share the history of how previous classes have gone and what were the toot causes for success and failures in the same subject class taken. This allows the student to understand and quantitatively comprehend the right triggers he has to pull in order to seek the grade he wishes or needs. As simple as that. As professors, there is no drive toward this thinking. The student customer has paid his dues and expects the best at the end of the semester, not a "C" grade or a grade letter missed just because he scored a point less. A constant "89" in most US Schools puts the student at grade level "B" although he is only one score less to make an "A" (which is 90%). It is extremely hard to statistically differentiate between an 89 and a 90 to say he deserves a "B" whereas the latter gets an "A." So this is already a great myth that originated in the west and was brutally duplicated in the east.i - Faculty in many institutions publish actively till they seek their PhDs or till they seek their tenure and then it is student dog day publications and they become a default Co-Author there onward. Now this is a sweeping statement and so please treat this with a pinch or more of salt. There are several exceptions to this rule or rhyme. One should go and visit the website of the faculty and look for their publication trend soon after they sought their PhDs or their tenure status.j - In some parts of the world, student success is not academic success, instead job seeking success. By this I mean for example in India (at least with the batch of students graduating since the early 90's) based on industry trends in the IT world, getting a job in the IT sector was a success parameter as salaries were much higher and so the placement institutions were rating themselves based on student placement as opposed to student major area of specialization and the relevance to the employer. For example why would a chemical engineer work for an IT company coding IT programs? So the training and placement record meant nothing to the faculty or the institution itself so long as the student gets the job.k - Globally students lack critical thinking (UG and PG levels). Again this is a sweeping statement based on each student and the faculty they associated with. I found in my classes of process excellence almost none of them (including myself prior to my class in process excellence) had no clue on what standard deviation meant and how to use it? The concept of variance is itself a foreign term and rarely even discussed. We all know the formula on how to calculate it, however, never knew how to apply it. I also see that in the current institutions in the US and other regions of the world, papers are published and math models claimed without the quantification of variance. Minimum sample size, power value, alpha and beta risk are all totally foreign terms to these students at MS and PhD levels. If one visits the research gate website and looks at the questions discussed, one would understand the enormity of what I am referring to.l - Faculty not honoring questions - this is pure ego and the same outside the US as well. Classes are designed to be completed in a fixed time and so asking questions for intellectual thinking is not a luxury the students nor faculty can exercise. In a recent healthcare industry deployment I engaged in, my pointing out that the control chart used was inappropriate was met with resistance that they needed to finish by the hour and didn't have the time. Looks like just focus on speed as opposed to doing it right.m - Even at a so-called top institution where I had offered my program in a classroom setting, their presentation skills lacked a basic global view as well as a sensitivity to basic statistics. The students didn't understand how a thesis differs from a project report. A professor was also complaining about poor attendance at his math modeling class and raised the query if my program would make a difference in such aspects.So now what can be done to make NITT top 3 or even better includes a sea change, however, piloted in short steps where success can be achieved in stages and the scale of economy increased gradually to an exponential level.1 - Select a pilot group of students to conduct a study on how their physical, mental, virtual, and other types of habits can be changed to help them achieve their goals at a breakthrough level. determine the pain points for the employers who have hired students in the past. Focus on academic as well as professional goals and objectives.2 - Faculty needs to adopt the same methodology to their teaching as well.3 - Fortunately 1 and 2 can be done in < 1 semester to realize breakthrough results.4 - Move to pilot stage 2 by increasing the student and faculty size.5 - Scale to administrative and management scope of pilot study.6 - Now with the results published scale it to the entire institution.7 - Leverage the findings to implement an institutionalized policy.8 - Sustain change and report results as frequently as possible.9 - Find factors and variables to increase success of sustainability.10 - Observe impact on industry on how such students fare better than the rest.Validate the new model and offer it other institutions to adopt while letting the high schools from where students come often of this finding and determine ways to inculcate this thinking early on in their high school days.Please share your thoughts and comments.Good luck.Cheers,Dr. Shree Nanguneri

“Is it true that the F-35 military aircraft is not designed to be a dogfighter”The F-35 isn’t designed to be a dogfighter, not like how the F-16 originally was, or how other previous fighters were, but, it is still designed to dogfight.The F-35 won’t have the exact same or superior turn rates as jets like the F-22 or some Sukhois, but F-35 pilots who have been surveyed prefer the F-35A over their prior F-15s or F-16s for most dogfighting situations, partly due to its greater controllability (more advanced fly-by-wire and nose-pointing ability), better situational awareness (it’s not always easy to maintain knowledge of where the enemy is in a dogfight) and its ability to accelerate and decelerate (pilots have said it’s similar to a clean F-16 or F-22 in subsonic acceleration, and can decelerate like it has a handbrake).The other factor here is that pilot skill matters much, much more than raw aircraft performance; Norwegian F-16 air combat instructors for example will perform a demonstration with fresh F-16 student pilots - they’ll go out and engage the students in a BFM dogfight, but the instructors will refrain fromusing their afterburner; effectively halving their thrust-to-weight ratio. Even with such a massive advantage, the students still don’t always win.is the US military making a mistake by not pursuing a next generation of dogfighters?It’s very unlikely. The main reason the US and allies didn’t pursue things like thrust vectoring and low lift-loading on the F-35 was because it would have to come at either a financial cost (like how the F-22 is twice as expensive as an F-35A), or at the expense of other capabilities, such as range (fuel volume), internal payload (fuselage volume / mass) or sensor systems (mass).Now as for why they’ve pursued sensors, range, etc rather than extra agility - here’s a chart that shows air-to-air kills made since 1965:SourceAs you can see, air-to-air kills have shown a steady trend away from using guns and towards using missiles. Today, all modern missiles are capable of locking and engaging targets from all aspects; meaning that you don’t have to get behind an enemy to lock on to their exhaust.If you combine those missiles (with their sensors and ability to pull >50Gs) with helmet-mounted cueing and high off-bore sight targeting, it means that many jets today can lock on to and fire missiles at targets well off to the side of their nose - more and more today can even fire missiles behind them at targets chasing them:To put it another way - look at the air-to-air kills from the 1980s; now consider that all of the purple, green and red kills could be accomplished today without having to perform any aggressive manoeuvring, let alone dogfighting.So if you have to make trade-offs to make your aircraft affordable; do you focus your effort on making it agile for dogfights, or do you focus on giving it unfair advantages in a missile-fight (with stealth, superior sensors, etc)?In Red Flag 17–1 (the first Red Flag of 2017 and the toughest in Red Flag history), military officials tallied up a kill-to-loss ratio of the F-35As that participated - the F-35s that were there were running interim Block 3i software that limited them to only 2x AMRAAMs, no gun, no Sidewinders, and a manoeuvring G-limit of +7Gs rather than the jet’s full +9G capability. Despite those limitations, they shot down 145 F-16Cs and F-15Cs, whilst suffering 7 losses of their own, with every F-35 loss happening within visual range, and with at last one loss occurring due to an unrealistic aspect of the exercise (where enemy jets can respawn with no visual or auditory warning - they just have to fly back to an invisible bit of airspace).Ideally you’d have them achieving 145 (or more) kills for zero losses, but that 20:1 ratio is still more than enough to win a war and it’ll certainly improve as the pilots get more exposure to these exercises and as the jets receive their full combat capabilities later this year.

I've enjoyed studyingOrder of Magnitude Physicssee an example at Physics 101At Caltech, this course covered estimation methods, materials, fluids, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, but really it was just a playground for the professors teaching it to attack all manner of interesting problems to first order. I took it with Sterl Phinney, who did things like drop tennis balls and baseballs off Millikan library to see how high they bounce or drop a magnet through a copper tube and work out an estimate of how long it should take to fall through. The most fun formal course I took.Note: this course can be tricky to implement. The only text is Sanjoy Mahajan's, and it's just an incomplete draft. I TA'd a pilot OOM course at Johns Hopkins. It was not as successful as its progenitor and hasn't been repeated yet; I think we had difficulty matching the load to the students, many of whom weren't physics majors.Quantum Computationsee PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since DemocritusIf you've taken a first pass at quantum mechanics that mostly involved solving the Schrodinger equation for a bunch of different potentials and then a bit of angular momentum at the end, a class on quantum computation can help you develop some appreciation for why superposition and interference are so interesting. I haven't taken Aaronson's course, but his book is fantastic (and covers lots of interesting stuff beyond quantum mechanics). There is a MOOC from Umesh Vazirani online as well.Biological Physicssee APh 161 - Winter 2013I took this course from Rob Phillips and was fascinated. It was two concurrent courses - one lecture course and one lab course. Seeing physics applied to a different context lets you practice your physics skills while learning a new domain. This course emphasized the idea of modeling a very complex system with a simple toy model and seeing how far it takes you.I also TA'd a course on biophysics at Hopkins based on Philip Nelson's textbook that went very well. Nelson's text is well-written and less advanced than Phillips'.Applications of Classical Physicssee Ph 136 Applications of Classical PhysicsThis is partially redundant with some of the other answers. I took this from Kip Thorne, and it was difficult material, but a good challenge that complements order-of-magnitude physics. There's an awful lot of stuff out there where someone could describe the problem to you, and you think, "okay, well I know Newton's laws and basic statmech, so I should be able to solve this; it's just some details..." But it's a lot of details. This course covers many of them. Solitons, turbulence, optics, fluctuation-dissipation relations, shocks, plasmas, lots of good stuff to hold your interest while building the geometric tools Jay alluded to.Some others I'd consider:EconophysicsMy goal studying this would mostly be to see how a physicist approaches problems in a completely new domainPhilosophy of PhysicsThis a broad field; it could be a survey course or a deeper study of a particular topic, like quantum mechanics or time.NetworksI'm not sure the best name for this course. You'd study some graph theory, random processes, scale invariance, just interesting stuff that isn't exactly physics, but a lively research area that appeals to physicists.Physics ClubThis isn't a class, but the best time I had doing physics as an undergrad was at Gil Rafael's physics club, where we brought in fun problems and group-solved them under his guidance. They have a website at Caltech Physics League