The Hanging Rules

There was a time when algorithms were considered more important if they did not depend on the nature of data they processed. Take sort algorithms, for instance. They work just the same whether you sort the weights of a set of pigs, or the age of a set of galaxies. I have no quarrel with such algorithms; in some sense they deal with the highest level of abstractions such as numbers.

However, nowadays the challenges are more in dealing with large volumes of data from different application domains. Knowledge related to the domain are basic to success with most of our endeavours. Computations of this type do not necessarily lead to unique solutions to a given problem. However, the solutions they provide could have great value. This value arises from the importance of problems they help us solve.

Why this build up for what is to follow? It is because I wish to discuss a very important problem. It is the problem of shaping pre-poll alliances among political parties. It is clear that the Indian election to be held in 2019 will critically depend upon pre-poll alliances. The recent Karnataka election has high-lighted the significance of alliances. Commentators have pointed out that had there been a pre-poll alliance, the outcome would have been quite different. Pre-poll tie-ups will be important for all parties: those with a high vote share as well as for the smaller parties. When vote shares are added together, the winner may not get the aithmetic sum of the two vote shares. When two parties with vote shares (expressed as percentages of votes cast) A and B have an alliance, the winner does not get the vote share A + B but may get something like A + B/2. The effect on the election results could however be very dramatic. Pre-poll alliances have demonstrated their effectiveness in the past in this regard. Increasing your vote share by B/2 does not just increase your chances of winning by 50%. It may increase it 500%.  

Given this logic, why do parties hesitate to enter into pre-poll alliances? Partly because reliable predictions of possible gains are not available. Secondly, there are no clear procedures which can be used by the parties concerned to decide on how they should share constituencies between them. How many constituencies would each party get? Which constituencies would be assigned to which partner? These are complex questions, even when only two parties participate in a pre-poll alliance. Multi-party computations are more complex, but the generalization form a 2-party to a multi-party situation is not very difficult.

The major difficulties in persuading political parties to consider this problem analyticaly is that solution should be fair to the potential allies and must be seen to be clearly unbiased. The solution should also be easy to communicate and understand. The solution cannot be thrust upon the parties involved and must leave some room for tweaking as per their intuition and perceptions. I will offer a solution here to the two-party problem and leave it to the reader to generalize it to the multi-party situation. I don’t mean to suggest a solution that should be adopted blindly; I only wish to have many people think out their own versions of the solution. Secondly, I want to keep the solution very simple. You can make it more accurate as a predictor of the gains of a pre-poll alliance by making it more complicated, but very few political leaders are computer scientists. It is difficult to persuade them to adopt what sounds like mumbo-jumbo to them!

Lastly, why the funny name? It comes from the saying “If you don’t hang together, you will hang separately”! So, this is a solution that shows how some politicians could hang together!

The solution: 

1. Assume that the vote share received in each constituency in the last election is the best estimate of the vote share that a party would get in the forthcoming election.  
2. If the estimated vote share A of one of the two parties is greater than that of the other B, assign that constituency to the party with the higher estimated vote share.
3. Compute the total A + B/2 where B is the vote share estimated for the other partner. Let C be the highest vote share estimated for the strongest party outside the alliance. If (A+B/2) > C, mark that constituency as a strong seat for the proposed alliance. The underlying assumption is that an alliance does not transfer all votes of from one partnering party to the other. For simplicity, we assume that 50% of the votes can be "transferred". (carry out the above three steps for each constitutency).
4. Make adjustments to the extent of 20% of the seats by negotiation, provided this does not disturb the assignment of any strong constituency. However, the number of seats assigned to partners should be in proportion to the total vote shares each has earned.
5. The above rules are not written in stone. But if the two partners cannot agree to some reasonable modified version of the same, they can hang separately!

          Srinivasan Ramani       

Research related to financial inclusion

                              A socio-economic survey camp, Howrah, West Bengal

                           Report by Devinder Sharma, http://indiatogether.org/poverty-in-rural-india-poverty 
                                          Picture: Wikimedia Commons

There is a desire in India that the country should soon become a “cashless economy”. It is important that researchers in the fields of banking, commerce, management, ethnography, design, computer science should look into the problems that need to be addressed in taking banking to the poor and the illiterate.

The following questions are worth studying in this context:

What are the skills and knowledge required to operate a bank account, to use a debit card, and to use an ATM? Can any literate person manage these tasks? What level of literacy does one require? Can we do surveys to find out if people with low levels of education have (or do not have) useful access to banking? What are the practices for issuing cheque-books, debit cards etc.? Have any studies answering questions like these? Where have they been published? 

These are problems of major interest in India. “India currently has the largest population of illiterate adults in the world with 287 million”, said a 2014 report in “The Hindu” newspaperhttp://www.thehindu.com/news/national/indias-illiterate-population-largest-in-the-world-says-unesco-report/article5631797.ece

“A 2015 Unesco report said that in terms of absolute numbers, India - with 28.7 crore illiterates - was the country with the largest number of adults without basic literacy skills in 2010-11 compared to 2000-01 when it had 30.4 crore illiterates”. Visit http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Literacy-rate-up-but-so-is-illiteracy/articleshow/50749744.cms

A publication by the Indian Banks Association said “Normally no cheque book facility is provided to illiterate persons and blind persons. However, to meet periodic repayment of retail loans, utility bills etc. we will consider issuing of cheque book with safeguards to protect your interest”. Visit http://www.iba.org.in/bcsbi_code.asp and look for the paragraph with the heading “8.1.5 Special Accounts”.

Compare the change mentioned in the Unesco/Times-of-India reference cited above. Illiteracy declined by only 1.7% from 30.4% to 28.7% over the first decade of the 21st century. We hear the phrase “financial inclusion” fairly frequently. Unless the plight of the 28.7 Crore is well understood and documented, it would be difficult to extend the benefit of banks accounts, ATMs and cards to them. We should also find out if all those that are said to be literate do in fact benefit from banking. Are there several crores among them who find banking too intimidating to use in any significant manner?

Killing mosquitos that spread the Zika virus

Mosquitos that cause dengue and chikungunya are prevalent in many parts of India. What is worrisome is that this type of mosquito is also known to spread the Zika virus that causes a mild infection in adults, but often causes serious brain damage to unborn babies. So far, the Zika pandemic seems to have only covered a number of countries in the Americas. Can it spread to India and other Asian countries? Tests had been run in India in 1953 and it was found that many of those tested had immunity to the Zika virus, indicating that they had been exposed to it. This was before the first case of a Zika infection in a human was reported elsewhere! Visit

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35457661?ocid=global_bbccom_email_02022016_top+news+stories+india

A Zika pandemic could have serious consequences if it hits India, where a few hundred million are exposed to mosquito bites every year. A significant fraction of the population could be seriously affected because of inadequate knowledge of health related matters and inability to protect themselves due to poverty. Children with brain damage would be an impossible burden for them to bear.

India should, therefore, investigate all possible methods of combating the spread of the Zika virus. I would like to mention here the drug Ivermectin, which is being given to dogs in the US to protect them against a serious disease spread by mosquitos. Visit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirofilaria_immitis as well as my earlier posting http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2015/11/medical-advances-against-diseases.html

for related information. Research students in disciplines such as pharmacy, medicine, or veterinary medicine should investigate if giving Ivermectin to dogs kills mosquitos that bite them. The only thing that can be done with the current level of knowledge is lab research under the supervision of an ethics committee. One of the questions to be answered by research is whether the drug can be given to dogs in adequate doses for the purpose for several weeks without causing bad side-effects.

The research proposed may do some good to the dogs involved. A mosquito borne disease called the heart-worm disease poses a serious risk to dogs, and Ivermectin is used to kill the parasites that cause this disease. This drug, being toxic to invertebrates and relatively harmless to vertebrates, would kill fleas and also de-worm the dogs. The drug’s toxicity to invertebrates is what makes it worthwhile to test it for effectiveness as a mosquito killer.

A related question is whether Ivermectin given to smaller animals such as rats or mice would be effective in killing mosquitos that feed on them. It is known that mosquitos identify animals from a distance and are attracted to bite them.

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:

http://www.ndtv.com/topic/bangalore-accident/news/page-2

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:

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/bangalore-neurosurgeon-dies-in-road-mishap-57178

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 1/4^th 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

Apps that make low-end cell phones valuable

There was a time when young people excited about electronics would build themselves a radio! Now young people excited about computing and the Internet create an app! I will talk about apps that make low-end cellphones valuable. I hope to trigger many student projects with this posting.

As far as I know, it is impossible to get apps to run on most low-end cell-phones. These devices are nevertheless very important in countries like India, where they constitute a large fraction of cell phones in use. They serve millions of users who do not have access to the Internet for various reasons. My focus is on school students in small towns and in rural areas. What I say in this blog does not apply to sophisticated smart phone users. Since 2/3rds of cell phones are in the hands of rural users, my focus is socially very relevant.

An accompanying post on my other blog at http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2012/09/the-reality-of-mobile-value-added.html provides relevant statistics on the way cell-phones are used in India for non-voice services. The key points arising out of the discussion in that post are the following: The average cell phone user in India uses less than Rs 90 of services per month. About 70% of this is for voice calls, leaving only Rs 24 for other services. Mobile apps and games take hardly Rs 5 per month. A major factor that inhibits use of Internet applications on the cell phone is the complexity of the human interface. Most users do not know how to download and install apps and how to use a browser effectively. They do not know how to get information on these topics and learn these skills.

My thesis is that the SMS (or texting) interface is easy to use for a large fraction of the population. I also believe that a whole lot can be achieved using a servlet on the web somewhere. It can serve a large population that is comfortable with the SMS interface. Of course, in parallel it can also serve smart phone users with access to a 2G or 3G service.

http://www.txtweb.com

I was thrilled to discover a few months ago that the site txtweb.com (created and being maintained by Intuit Inc.) offers a painless SMS interface for servlets to deliver services. This site transforms SMS messages into http queries to send to your servlet and maps the servlet’s responses into SMS messages that are sent back to the users. There is no charge for this service. There is a healthy developer community and a forum.

Txtweb.com offers a challenge to every student who can create a servlet. It is not mere programming. The opportunity challenges you to think like an entrepreneur and identify a service that meets the needs of a large number of cell phone users. Creating a service like that is a good project for a team, as it requires talents of different kinds: to visualize a good application, to find necessary resources on the Web, to design and implement the software and to publicize the service.

For an example of a service of the type I have discussed, try the one I have implemented. It supports school students, typically those in the 9^th and 10^th standards in their efforts to learn the English language. It helps any interested user to test his or her own ability to guess a word that fills a blank in a given sentence meaningfully. It is well-known that this a good test of English comprehension.

The site focuses on common English words found in every science textbook. These are not “scientific” words, but words that every English-medium student of science has to know. The idea is that students can take a new test every month and know where they stand. Testing is an important part of teaching, but only a small part. Ideally the student should take the help of a relative or friend to discuss questions. The student should read English language books outside the syllabus – ideally story books that are very interesting. They should learn to use a dictionary well and frequently. 

The following web pages describe how this service can be accessed over SMS from within India 
http://www.hydrusworld.org/Tests over SMS.html

and over Instant Messaging from anywhere on the Web
http://www.hydrusworld.org/Tests over IM.html

I should mention that my Java Servlet is hosted on the Google App Engine cloud for free (visit https://developers.google.com/) for information on this facility.

I hope that readers of this post would go on and create many other services to serve a needy population.

Srinivasan Ramani