Sunday, June 23, 2013

A Parallel System for Defensive Publication

Many inventors wish to make a public disclosure of their ideas for public benefit. Sometimes the disclosure comes in the form of an academic publication. Sometimes it appears as a “defensive publication”. Companies pay to have selected ideas published in specialized journals to prevent other companies getting patents on them. This way, the company can avoid the cost and effort of obtaining a patent, and still make sure that they can always use the disclosed ideas in their own products. Research Disclosures is a publication that accepts papers written for defensive publication.

What about a simpler, parallel process that a larger number of inventors can contribute to? There are not too many publications that individual inventors can publish in without paying a price-per-page charge. Many such publications focus only on specific areas of work.

I have a specific set of suggestions to create a parallel system:
1)  Inventors should familiarise themselves with what a patent examiner expects of a patent. Some information on this is available in an article on the MIT Website. The disclosure text should describe the invention clearly, indicating some manner of creating an embodiment of the invention, so that a professional in the field can be convinced that the invention could conceivably be implemented.
2)  Then they should create a write-up for publication on the Web, on a well-known site which is regularly covered by search engines. I will use my blog on blogspot.com for this purpose, among others. 
3)  Their disclosures should focus on an invention or a set of closely connected inventions. The write-up should not be too long.
4)  They should attach a standard declaration reading roughly as follows to their write-up:

QUOTE
PublicInventionDisclosure: Any novel ideas discussed here are being consciously published for public benefit.  Patent applications made after this publication cannot claim credit for those ideas.
UNQUOTE

The proposal is that publication of ideas in this form would make it easy for anyone to locate them – other inventors, lawyers, and those who wish to argue against a patent being conferred on someone. For example, a search for
“PublicInventionDisclosure” GPS tractors
would locate any idea disclosed in this manner, relevant to the use of GPS techniques with tractors. Putting the first string in double quotes in the search-string would make searching and reading through the reported results, very fast.

Would this parallel system have any legal standing? Does it need it? We need to listen to patent lawyers on this. I believe that if the system is used by a few thousand inventors, litigating lawyers would make this system very effective. The main advantage of the system is that costs nothing in the way of effort, if the inventor is going to publish his ideas in any case. Adding the declaration at the bottom is all that is required.

I would welcome comments and suggestions from everyone interested.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

More on the massive asteroid 1998 QE2 - it is estimated to weigh about 40 Billion tons


You may be able to see it through a telescope
Friday night, May 31 2013
QE2 is an Amor class asteroid, that is one whose orbit approaches but does not cross the Earth’s orbit, and whose orbit is further from the Sun than Earth's orbit. It goes round the Sun once every 3 years and 9 months. At it’s farthest from the Sun, it goes well beyond the orbit of Mars.
The good news is that “anyone with a telescope” could hope to have some chance of sighting it in the constellation Libra. See my previous posting in this blog for information on a public viewing through a cyber-telescope with commentary.
Srinivasan Ramani

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Massive asteroid 1998 QE2 will make a close pass on May 31 2013


The huge asteroid 1998 QE2 will pass close to the earth on May 31, 2013 (or on June 1, depending on where you live). It will pass the earth at a distance of about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. We should be happy that it will not come any closer. It is big enough to ensure that any collision between QE2 and the earth would be catastrophic for most life on earth. I was unable to locate a mass estimate for the asteroid on the web; but we know it is about 2.7 KM along one dimension. Visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-163  for more information.

Those interested can sign up for a free event over the Web including commentary by staff of the Virtual Telescope Project 2.0 (it will be at about 2 AM on the morning of June 1, 2013 in Bangalore) Visit http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2013/05/18/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-285263-1998-qe2-close-encounter-online-event-31-may-2013/

http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/events/  provides information on the Virtual Telescope Project 2.0

Visibility: I was personally surprised to learn that such a huge rock passing us at a distance of 5.8 million KM will not be visible even to those who use a pair of binoculars. The fact that its surface is covered by some black substance may partly explain this.


Measuring the Asteroid's Mass: Let me ask my friends in physics research: do you think you can rig up a way of measuring the gravitational effect of such a mass passing at that distance? That is, can you measure a change of about ten parts in a million in gravitational acceleration in your lab? What would be the extent of low frequency gravitational noise in your lab?



Srinivasan Ramani



Saturday, March 23, 2013

Find a good Earth Trojan and Build an Observatory on it!


An Earth Trojan is an asteroid or minor planet with an orbit very like that of the earth. Most of us heard of one only two years ago. Visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_trojan_asteroid as well as the Wikipedia page on 2010TK7, which is a pretty big baby, about 15 million tons in weight, and about 200 M in “diameter”. Refer: http://smallbodies.ru/en/asteroids/info/general/2010_TK7/

For more information, visit the blog post:

Unfortunately, it does not look as if TK7 will become a popular tourist destination, scientific tourism or otherwise! Its orbit is inclined to the earth’s orbital plane by about 21 degrees. As a result, a manned return trip would require a whole lot of energy. What we really need is a “good” Trojan more or less in our own orbital plane. Manned return trips to such a body would be a lot easier. 

Why do we need a body like that? Because linking observational instruments on such a body with those on the earth and on the moon would create a very powerful radio-telescope! In turn, that could lead to some great discoveries! Perhaps, finding  life elsewhere in the universe. It would be a lot easier to create a more habitable international space station on a big scale on a Trojan. There would be plenty of building material! In comparison to a spaceship, a 200 Meter Trojan would provide excellent shielding against radiation and celestial debris flying around. Spacewalks for maintenance and observation would be a lot easier, though one would need protection against flying off into empty space! Your weight would merely be a few grams. 

Wouldn't you love a weight loss like that!

Srinivasan Ramani 

Friday, March 15, 2013

Web-mining Project: Locate danger spots on a map



I started wondering how difficult it would be to automate the process of collecting information about danger spots on roads and displaying them on a map.  The first step in investigating this was to do a Google search with the query “road accident death Bangalore”. I did get a lot of relevant information, including what appeared to be an NDTV compilation:

I suspected that this compilation is easier for Google to do than for every TV channel.  So, I searched for “topic Google” and found some information about the cool feature named “topics”. (Yes, you can make a topic out of your heart-throb!).
 There was one heart-rending news item about a young neuro-surgeon’s life being snuffed out by a hit-and-run driver:

To make the web “more intelligent”, we will need good techniques to mine its content semantically and present information in a multi-media form. So, I propose a student project which will mine the web daily for information on locations (circular areas on a map, about 100 M in diameter characterized by their latitudes, longitudes and names) where fatal accidents occur. Since news text on the web uses a variety of ways of conveying location information, you will need a variety of techniques to figure out Lat-Long info, necessary for locating the spot on a map satisfactorily. You might need to process multiple sources of information on a single accident and avoid reporting it as multiple accidents. Multiple sources may also make it easier to figure out the location and time of an event more accurately. Forget getting 100% information – there is no such thing in the real world!

Now mark the spots on a map. You might want to remove a spot from the map when a year goes by without another fatal accident there.
Now, figure out how you can make this map available to anyone on the web who wants to see it, without cluttering up something like the Google map for everyone who accesses it. This should be easy.

From a technical point of view this should be fun to work on. Hopefully such a map would be seen once in a while by traffic police officers who might be tempted to visit these spots and report on the map what they intend to do about reducing fatalities at the place visited.

India, unfortunately seems to have a highest number of fatalities on the road (about 140,000 per year) in the world. China has less than half of this; USA has less than 1/4th of Indian fatalities, despite having a lot more vehicles. We would be a stupid lot, if we do not reduce the number of yearly deaths due to accidents by about 50% over the next ten years.

Srinivasan Ramani

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Virtual Cars for Everyone



Imagine a car being available to you practically anywhere at any time. Why not create an app for making this dream a reality not only for yourself but for millions of your customers, assuming that you have the entrepreneurial drive!
Let us visualize what the customer should get. He taps on his app, enters the starting location and destination and gets a car to pick up him up somewhere within 5-30 minutes if he wants. Or he gets the car at a specified time and date of his choice. He gets a confirmation message soon after the booking. Another tap and he should be able to talk to the driver of the assigned car. He gets a frequently updated display showing what the status of the assigned car is and when it will reach him. Cancellation is easy. Prior registration makes personalization easy, recording relevant addresses of the customer, phone numbers, etc. Ideally the system should be able to charge customers’ credit card, without introducing any security risk.

What is new about this? Most of the features mentioned above have been made available by different taxi-booking systems. Recently Meru Cabs announced their “app”, but it turned out to be link to their website! I would prefer an app, so that all interactive data entry can be done quickly, irrespective of the quality of mobile data signal the customer gets on his cell. I don’t mind if the cell phone has to take a few minutes to send the information over a poor data channel to the server.  

The key issues, as I see it, are quality of the human computer interaction, the number of useful affordances, and the overall efficiency the user gains by using the tool. I rate simplicity as an important quality of a Human Computer Interface.

Students who want to program an app for a project in this area can do it. Other students who want to set up mobile-optimised websites can also do that.  But both these groups would need to design and implement the back-end that will run on the server. Servlets running on some cloud infrastructure such as the Google App Engine would be a good way to start.

I should not forget the entrepreneurially motivated student who wants to try the business possibilities of this system either in a company or in a start-up. The rest of this posting is designed for students of this third category.
What will you give the customer that an airport taxi-hire service does not give? My answer is: a highly reliable, nation-wide, general purpose system, offering quick response. It will never say “no vehicle available” because you want to do a short trip!

Scale is everything here. You might have to start small, but you must know either you will grow fast to be huge company or will have to sell out sooner or later! Why is size important? Unless the customer believes that you will meet his need practically all the time, he will laugh at the idea of a virtual car. This means to me that system should make a car available to him 95% of the time within 15 minutes, and 99% of the time within 30 minutes. Such reliable response should cover the whole region in which the company operates. Not having such demanding requirements would make it easier and less expensive to build a company, but will keep you out of the big league.
Look at the size of the potential market http://www.siamindia.com/scripts/industrystatistics.aspx

Approximately two million passenger cars were bought in 2012 in India. This suggests that our entrepreneurs should plan for a market of something like ten million regular customers to be built over a ten year period. At estimated revenue of Rs 10,000 per customer, we are talking about a market of Rs 10,000 Crores in the tenth year! On this scale, the company should be able to provide its customers with an experience superior to that of owning a chauffeur-driven vehicle.

I am not going to discuss what should go into a business case at length, but will mention a few key points.

The pleasure of driving one’s own car is very important to many people. Over a course of time, the Indian road environment will improve, along with the country’s legal infrastructure and law-enforcement. There will be logic then in providing for use of self-driven vehicles as an alternative to the chauffeur driven vehicles. The customer could pick-up/drop the vehicle at fixed places, or he might even have the vehicle driven to his door by a company driver. The ability to use either system as required would be a big attraction to the customer. For an example of a system based on self-driving, visit http://www.vrtucar.com/

Secondly, you don’t need to buy a huge fleet of cars to run this operation. The industry has successfully shown that you can work largely with driver-owned vehicles, arranging bank loans for drivers. This franchise model leaves the owners of the parent company essentially running an IT based operation, having the bulk of its employees handling only managerial responsibility. The exercise of planning out a company of the kind visualized above should be interesting to management students.

What is most exciting about the virtual car system?  It has potential for job creation and for improving the quality of life for millions.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Friday, February 15, 2013

Meteorite fall and the close fly-by of Asteroid DA14 - A coincidence?



Visit the following links to read reports of a meteorite fall in Russia on 15 Feb 2013, the same day that Asteroid DA14 will make a clos fly-by.  Are they connected?


The BBC report (the second link above) quotes Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, of the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, as saying that the flyby and the meteorite fall are unlikely to be connected. DA14 is expected to approach us from the South, while the meteorite that hit Russia has hit the Northern Hemisphere of the earth.

Another interesting source of information is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere
This one talks about the fact that an astronaut cannot be in stable orbit around the Space Shuttle – the earth will disturb his orbit and he could end up orbiting the earth instead of orbiting the shuttle. Such considerations are relevant to visualizing material loosely attached to an asteroid doing a close flyby hitting the earth’s atmosphere.  

Srinivasan Ramani

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Pushing an asteroid off its course a little bit to avoid a collision!

In one of my earlier posts I had referred to the idea of painting an asteroid white so that solar radiation would gently push it away from the sun. My main objection to that is - it would require pretty long notice. The technique cannot change the asteroid's orbit fast enough. Asteroid 2012_DA14 was discovered less than 12 months before its nearest approach. There was no time for the paint job to work!

So, what are the other options? Visit http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroids-meteors-meteorites/top-10-asteroid-deflection-130130.htm for some light reading about ten methods including the paint job. The most attractive one seems to be to hit the asteroid gently with a rocket weighing say 10 tons and hoping that the asteroid does not break up into pieces. The probability that it does break up into big enough pieces threatening the earth could be low. In that case, we would just  need to use another ten-ton rocket! Perhaps a few!  This might be a lot more practical than solutions like shining a mirror at the asteroid!

We hear on and off about big powers destroying some of their own missiles as one  step towards disarmament. Perhaps, they can modify and set apart a hundred such missiles each to fight common enemies of humanity, in the form of asteroids on possible collision courses with the earth. Such, missiles are available at practically no cost to major powers.

One good thing! The horrible, original, payload fitted to these missiles would not be needed for their new mission.  

Srinivasan Ramani

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Plans for visual observation of Asteroid 2012 DA14


Well! I decided to look up details to get more information to help me do visual observation of the Asteroid DA14's flyby the coming Friday night - Saturday morning. Midnight of Feb 15, 2013 to 5 AM of Feb 16, 2013 is the best time, if you wish to see it reasonably well above the horizon, for locations near Bangalore.  Hindu Business Line gave me some hope of a memorable spectacle, saying
‘Close’ asteroid may miss Earth, but could hit telecom satellites
I know that telecom satellites cost a lot of money, but I don't mind if the asteroid hits an old satellite nearing the end of its design life on its way-in! Interestingly, telecom satellites need fuel to stay at their allocated sites in geosynchronous orbit. So, in something like seven years, most satellites would have exhausted their fuel. One of them might as well give me my spectacle! If it is hit as the asteroid is coming in, the debris from the collision would have a chance of hitting the earth's atmosphere to give us fireworks.

With renewed hope, I did a web search to get myself a sky map showing the line representing the expected path of the asteroid against the backdrop of constellations and stars. One very useful website turned out to be

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/11/asteroid_2012_da14_space_rock_will_miss_the_earth_by_17_000_miles.html

It gave me useful information, and pointed me to the site
http://www.heavens-above.com/

Text under the heading "configuration" on the page mentioned allowed me to enter details of my location, Bangalore, (Latitude 12.98,  Longitude 77.78 and Altitude 920 Meters. You can get your own coordinates: google for latitude longitude YOURCITY). After I entered my location details, it needed just one more click to ask for the map, and I got the following map showing exactly what I wanted.

http://www.heavens-above.com/2012da14.aspx?lat=13&lng=77.6&loc=Bangalore&alt=900&tz=UCTm6

It seems that you will get about 4.5 hours to see it (00:30 Hours to 05:00 Hours) if you are within 300 miles of Bangalore. However, the asteroid could appear pretty dim after 3 AM, since the point of nearest approach is at about 1 AM, Saturday's early morning.

Best of luck. Just make sure that you get to a place with very few artificial lights around. Carry a pair of good binoculars, along with a torch! Carry a sheet to spread on the ground. You would need to be flat on your back if you are not going to sprain your neck! Best wishes for a good sighting. You are unlikely to see DA14 again! Earth's gravity is modifying the asteroid's orbit pretty seriously!

Srinivasan Ramani  

Sunday, February 10, 2013

A Madrasi discovers a Minor Planet!


One of the things I miss most in Bangalore is a clear sky! Light pollution has taken away the sky I thought was my inalienable right! So, I was jealous of the guy in Chennai who discovered what he called a minor planet in his publication. The Madras Observatory from where he discovered this astronomical object is within walking distance of the house I grew up in – it is in Nungambakkam!
Let me now confess a few liberties I have taken with the truth! The incident did not take place Chennai, but in what was then propahly called Madras! I should have said “discovered” rather than “discovers” in my title! Lastly, my Madrasi who lived thirty years in Madras and died in the same city would be called an Englishman by some chauvinists! My hero is Mr N. R. Pogson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._R._Pogson ). He discovered eight asteroids and six variable stars.

I got to know of him today, when I did a web search to see if there are cases of asteroids known which have their own satellites! Sure there are! This makes me hope secretly that 2012_DA14 which is going to whizz by on the night of Feb 15, 2013 will have a few satellites too! See my post http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2013/02/visit-of-asteroid-2012da14-any-chance.html wondering if stuff accompanying DA14 could enter the atmosphere and give us a great fire-works display.

Mr Pogson reported the discovery of what he called a minor planet that he named Sylvia, in 1866! Refer
Pogson, N. R. (1866), Minor Planet (87) Sylvia, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 26, p. 311 (June 1866).
Is Sylvia a minor planet or a mere asteroid? I will let you search for and find the answer. Suffice it to say that it is about 286 KM in “diameter”. What attracted my attention was the fact much later, other observers discovered that Sylvia had two moons – which were named Romulus and Remus. The babies are not puny either – each one has a mass of about 10 to the power of 12 tons! The big brother Romulus goes as far as 1356 Km from its parent during its orbit.
Now tell me! Is there a chance we will see some fireworks when DA14 does a fly -past?  

Srinivasan Ramani

Friday, February 08, 2013

NASA and Painting Asteroids



In my post  
I had talked about pushing asteroids off from any collision course they might be on, using asteroid movers (in the sense of earth movers).
Further search found that NASA is planning to send a probe in 2016 to visit an asteroid named 1999 RQ36. An unmanned probe will land on the asteroid, collect a sample and return it to Earth! That would tell us more about the make-up of the rock. Incidentally, RQ36 is quite a baby! It is so heavy that not much of life on earth will survive a collision with it! 
That web page also mentions a phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect — the faint propulsive power produced when an object like an asteroid absorbs sunlight and re-emits it as heat. "At its peak," he says, "when the asteroid is nearest the sun, the Yarkovsky force on 1999 RQ36 is about half an ounce — around the weight of three grapes."
David Hyland of Texas A&M University is quoted in
saying that a paint job is all that is needed to increase the push given by solar radiation and make the asteroid change its course.
I am willing to send a can of paint to NASA if they will paint my name on 1999 RQ36!

Srinivasan Ramani

Thursday, February 07, 2013

Visit of the asteroid 2012_DA14: Any chance of a spectacular display?



It would be rushing off at a speed of over 7 KM/second, less than 28,000 KM overhead. Its closest approach to the earth would be on Feb. 15 at approximately 19:24 UTC. My conversion says this would be approximately at 00:54 Hours on Feb 16 Indian Standard Time. I wonder if I should hunt for more information on where to look, what to expect etc. At a magnitude of 7.4 or so, I would need binoculars, and need to know exactly where to look. It would not be enough to know that it would come above the horizon at a point south east (as seen from Bangalore) and would travel northwest. It is believed to weigh about 130,000 metric tons. For more information, visit


I am undecided as yet about a serious effort to see the flyby; but let me share my thoughts. It would be easier if like-minded people got together and shared information. Amateur Astronomers of Bangalore, please let us know what you are doing!
I would not be struck dumb if a 7.4 magnitude body streaks by at about 8 KM/Sec. 28 KM above my head. Is there a chance of anything more spectacular? NASA refers to the object as if it is a single body. How do they know? Is it possible that it is not a monolith? Is it possible that the temperature variations it undergoes in the extreme cold of outer space cause it to crack, as rotation exposes different parts to the sun? Is there any rubble traveling with it? Is it possible that parts of this rubble are some distance from the center of gravity of DA14? In that case, can we see some kilogram-size objects following slightly different paths and entering the atmosphere?  Boy! Wouldn’t that be great!
A web-search shows that sky surveys for near-earth objects like this are getting better and better. I am sure another asteroid would come along soon enough – perhaps too soon for us to get ready for suitable action; for instance, to push the asteroid off course to avoid a collision. Wikipedia tells us that 2012_DA14 was discovered only on February 23, 2012. Visit

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_DA14
Suppose the wise men who follow up on these discoveries had told us on Feb 25, 2012 that a collision was certain. Would there have been time to do anything effective and safe enough? I think not! It requires little force to push a meteorite like 2012_DA14 off a collision course, as long as you apply the force early enough – that is long before the asteroid comes close to the earth. It would be best to build a few asteroid-movers and have them equally spaced around the earth’s orbit. Once an asteroid is detected on a collision course, we can compute the most efficient solution and command the appropriate asteroid-mover to start its work! We owe it to humanity to plan this project – at least plan! We can then discuss the risk-reward trade-off.  This will not be mere science! Politics is unavoidable. Every nation will want its hands on the steering wheels of the asteroid-movers!
Some experiments, at the other ends, could even be good student-initiated projects. Please visit


In case you wish to hunt out more information on our asteroid DA14, visit the following web addresses:



Srinivasan Ramani