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:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/27/wise-finds-the-very-first-earth-trojan-asteroid/

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 

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

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 

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?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279020/Russian-meteorite-Moment-meteorite-exploded-doctors-treat-500-people-injured.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21468116

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

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

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  

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

NASA and Painting Asteroids

In my post  

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2013/02/visit-of-asteroid-2012da14-any-chance.html

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! 

Read more at: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2116526,00.html#ixzz2KIUCHJmD

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

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/painting-asteroids/

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

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

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/asteroidflyby.html

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

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2012/08/probes-to-mars-and-student-projects_6.html

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

http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.in/2013/02/nasa-to-host-asteroid-2012-da14-flyby.html?m=0

http://www.spmn.uji.es/ENG/presentation.html

Srinivasan Ramani

Sandy and Neelam: The need for a Worldwide Tropical Storm index

Sandy and Neelam have been unwelcome visitors in our household in Bangalore. With close family ties to family and friends in Chennai and on the US East Coast, we have been regularly watching TV and the Sandy crisis map put out by Google over the last few days.

The older generation comes to a quick conclusion: cutting of trees all over, and pollution! What else do you expect?

Was the ferocity of Sandy increased by climate change? Visit http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/10/30/science/ap-us-sci-superstorm-climate.html?ref=science for one report. I looked for other information and found that geophysicists have studied the question: is there a steady increase in storm activity over the decades, given that there has been a small rise in the ocean surface temperature? Visit Journal of Geophysical Research for a scholarly study on the trend in Atlantic Hurricane Activity covering 1851-2007. They report a periodic variation with a 60 year period. What are the possible causes of such a periodic variation? The variation in solar radiation reaching the earth? Sunspot activity? Brief searches did not get any answers to these questions. 

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes offers a discussion on global warming and hurricane activity from a Govt Lab. http://www.igu.in/15-2/4uma.pdf reports an Indian study focusing on the North Indian Ocean, where we have cyclones similar to the hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

I feel that we need a worldwide Storm Activity Index (SAI) to be compiled from now on. It would support research on possible effects of global warming. It would in fact do more. Remember the clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that used to warn us about the remaining time to (nuclear) midnight! The SAI will similarly communicate to the lay person a sense of increasing concern, related to global warming. Scholars could look over the last ten or more decades to see what the trend was in the past. Awareness of the dangers of global warming over the whole of the world population is a necessity, and SAI would be a step in this direction. I would vote for the base to be set at 100, representing the level of activity seen during the first decade of the 21^st Century.

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 

A Design to be put on top of the Seattle Space Needle

I received an email recently, inviting me to participate in a contest for creating a design to be put on top of the Seattle Space Needle (read about it in the Wikipedia). Yes, I have a design proposal, but it is not the type that conforms to the template they have given. What they seem be looking for is well-illustrated at http://www.spaceneedle.com/ This site describes the contest and invites everyone to submit a design if they so wish. The deadline is Sept 20, 2012 and the occasion is the 50^thanniversary celebration of the structure. They wish to get the design up on the roof in six months. Let them do it; there will be plenty of room to add the design proposed here at a later date! What follows is a description of the idea that requires able structural designers to convert into a design. I think it will be very exciting for students of structural engineering and architecture to take this up as a project. The use of composites seems to be very necessary for the proposed construction –materials such as carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP). So, there is the associated challenge of using advanced materials in an imaginative manner.

The Concept: Build a prototype of a Space Elevatorto sit atop the Space Needle. It won’t take you to the altitude of geocentric satellites! But it will drive millions of people to think seriously about the concept. Wikipedia mentions Elevator: 2010, a site that describes prizes worth millions of dollars for technological advances in the area. Perhaps some of the readers of this blog posting would come up with ideas to win some of these prizes!

Why Seattle? Seattle is a city with a number of high tech industries including Boeing and Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft is reported to have sponsored the annual Space Elevator Conferences over the last five years (Visit NASA’s Strong tether challenge). Boeing is using advanced materials such as CFRP to build very fuel-efficient planes, such as the 787 Dreamliner. Right next to the Space Needleis the well-known Pacific Science Center. Between them, the Space Needle and the Science Center draw millions of visitors every year.

The Proposal: To design a tower that will weigh a very small fraction of the 9550 ton Space Needle. It would not carry anyone up but will allow an elevator capsule, with its top and bottom shaped like bullet heads, to run up and down to illustrate the idea. And, of course, this tower would not carry any fancy restaurant on top! The capsule would carry multiple video-cameras, images from which would be projected inside a hall resembling an IMAX theatre, at ground level. Visitors to this theatre would experience virtual reality trips into space. A part of the experience would show the panoramic view from the elevator capsule, as it ascends and descends; the rest would be computer graphics and animation. At the top of the tower will be what looks like another elevator capsule. It will be stationary, but onlookers will hopefully get the illusion that it is on its way up!

Questions:

Can we use four or five columns and enclosing circular rings to create the tower? Putting a skin around a tower might increase wind resistance and achieve little, except increased visibility. So, can the tower be built with no skin around it? Can we run the elevator capsule inside the structure? Should it be supported by a cable made of advanced materials, or would it better to have toothed rails supported by which the battery powered elevator could climb? How can we improve the visibility of the structure during day and during night?

How much weight can the roof of the space needle carry? How can a structure be affixed to the space needle, without disturbing its circular symmetry? What would be the weight of the new structure – can it be as light as 10 to 100 tons? How high will it rise above the roof of the space needle? Can we hope for it to be in the range of 400 to 1000 feet? Can it be designed to withstand the 200 mph winds, and the 9.1 magnitude Earthquake that the space needle is said to be designed for? How much would the whole thing cost? What would be a reasonable cap to put on the cost, to reflect financial realities? Would the proposal generate additional revenue for the space needle and the science center? How would the city benefit from the project?

What are the problems the designers have to solve? How would they ensure the safety of the tower and of aircraft, given that Seattle has lots of sea-planes constantly using its lakes?

Finally, why Seattle, and why not another city, forgetting for a moment the value of the space needle as a base? Why not a place thirty miles outside a big city, to draw crowds to a new place where shops and restaurants could be developed, creating jobs?

A couple of answers: Air safety issues are not a distraction. The real space elevator, if and when it is built, will create a massive air safety problem, not to mention the risks created by satellites orbiting at an altitude much lower than the top of the tower! So, why not handle a small-scale air-safety system for starters?

On the issue of making the elevator visually prominent: The trick seems to be in painting the two capsules in a carefully chosen color to contrast against the sky. It would be valuable to have bright lights on the capsules, to ensure their visibility at night. 

I welcome comments and suggestions. I would also welcome an artistically inclined reader contributing an illustration that does not infringe on other peoples’ Copyright. I tried making a collage out of the Wikimedia image of the KCCI tower and the Wikipedia image of the space needle, but gave up because of my limited skills with graphics!

Srinivasan Ramani

Probes to Mars and Student Projects

It is official now – the Indian cabinet has approved the Indian Mars probe to be launched in 2013. It will not attempt a landing on Mars like the NASA Mars Rover named Curiosity. It will presumably orbit the planet, as news items have said that the Indian probe will study the Martian atmosphere, climate and geology.

Incidentally, as I write this, the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html is displaying a count down timer showing that Curiosity is expected to touch down on Mars in twenty minutes! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48493172/ns/technology_and_science-space/ reports the cost of this US mission to be $2.5 billion. In, comparison, the budget for the Indian mission is reported to be $70-90 million. Visit

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-02/news/33001206_1_space-programme-mars-mission-satellite-launch-vehicle  

for more information on the budget estimate.

You need to be very creative when you are in a game where other players are spending over thirty times what you will be spending! A lot of creativity in India will need to be tapped. University research involving students is well-known to unleash a whole lot of creativity. Many great technologies - for instance, a good part of what is Internet technology today - has come out of universities.

I would like to stimulate student projects in electronics, physics, instrumentation, or computer science. There are possibilities for interesting life-science activities as well. I will raise a few questions relevant to all this. 

Would there be any electrical phenomena in the rarefied Martian atmosphere, perhaps resembling thunder and lightning? The atmospheric pressure there is less than one per cent of the atmospheric pressure on the earth. The Martian atmosphere consists mostly of carbon dioxide.  What instrumentation can you propose and or prototype that will help study these electrical phenomena? Is there anything like Aurora Borealis over there, in the absence of any significant magnetic field? How can that be detected?

Can a life-science department build a Martian atmosphere simulator, using a large drum, filled with mostly carbon dioxide at a very small pressure and lit by selected lamps to provide heat and light resembling what is available from the Sun on the Martian surface? Can we grow any form of plant, or microbial, life in this atmosphere? 

Will it be useful to fly even a small (robotic) astronomical  telescope in Martian orbit? What will be its special advantages? I can think of three. One is that this telescope can look at that part of the sky that is unavailable at a given time to observers on the earth, because the Sun is in that direction. Anything interesting happening in that part of the sky would be useful to observe. The second thought is that a telescope in Martian orbit could give us an entirely different way to observe asteroids and comets. These observations would complement earth-based observations, and observations from earth orbit.  The third possibility is that a telescope in Martian orbit could give us a view of the Sun different from what we get from the Earth. This could help us study of sunspots and flares better.

A question that arises is this: why Martian orbit? Is it not sufficient to have instrumentation on a space-craft in any Solar orbit? For some of the purposes discussed above, any Solar orbit would do. But we can think of some advantages like the radiation shielding provided by a body like Mars. A related thought brings us to a big question.

Can a Mars probe land on Phobos or Deimos, one of the Martian moons? Such a landing would be much easier than landing on Mars because of the reduced gravity.

A long-shot question is about the possibilities of a base on Phobos or Deimos for supporting travel to Mars and back. Such a base would provide logistic support and act as a staging station. There has been some talk of frozen ice on Phobos as it seems to be made of porous rock. That has some implications too. Can we detect minute quantities of water evaporating off the surface of Phobos, perhaps by having a Mars probe do a close pass to Phobos? 

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has a program named RESPOND to support sponsored research in its areas of interest, with a budget of Rs 15 Crores per year. Visit

http://www.isro.org/scripts/srrespond.aspx

for more information.

I have no personal experience of working with a project funded by RESPOND, and hope that the program interprets its areas of interest in a flexible manner to encourage creativity. Sometimes a funding agency encourages university groups to think big and come up with novel ideas that they may not have in their plan of work. That is what we should expect out of ISRO. Another point is about the balance between science and engineering. ISRO should support research in engineering and technology as much as in science. The number of engineering students doing project work in India is huge. Let us tap their creativity. Can they build a “lander” that can be dropped from a height of ten meters and land smoothly on the ground, using rockets and an on-board control computer? Can some of them design and prototype a robot that could hop around the surface of Phobos or Deimos and report its observations? Robotics is one of the central technologies for ISRO. It should be identified as a major area of research under RESPOND.  

Everything university research focuses on does not have to be built. Some may result only in the exploration of ideas and study results. Some may yield good publications or impressive demos. They should all be welcome.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Sending Hindi in Devanagari Script over SMS

Efficient communication between the majority of Indians requires the use of Indian languages. It is not currently easy, whether it is over the Internet or over the cellular network. We have to research on and develop easier ways of using Indian languages. One simple approach I describe here deals with only one aspect of the problem. My hope is that this will still stimulate the reader to investigate problems that a user faces when using a browser on the web or text over cell phones. There are a variety of technical problems there. You may wish to start your exploration by visiting

http://tech4society.blogspot.in/2010/12/indian-language-interfaces-on-basic.html

This posting refers to a Nokia manual

http://nds2.nokia.com/files/support/apac/phones/guides/Nokia_1108_APAC_UG_in_hi.pdf

I have not tried communicating with Nokia using @NokiaIndia on Twitter

http://twitter.com/#!/NokiaIndia

or through their blog

http://blogs.nokia.com/

but you may wish to do that.

Can we invent superior interfaces for the Indian language user? I believe that an interesting approach is to use letters of the Roman Script one way or another. I would like to share what I have learnt from my experiments in this direction.

I had begun by asking myself how I could help Indian high school students learning English by giving hints and information in Hindi. I do believe that this is necessary when helping Hindi speaking students over a cell-phone channel.

I found that most cell phones in use in urban areas in India do not support sending and receiving Hindi SMS in any simple manner. I consulted an experienced technical support person in a big shop and was advised to buy a separate cell phone for the purpose. I bought one and found that I could post tweets on my Twitter page, using Hindi words in Devanagari script along with English words. I thought that my students who follow me on Twitter through their cellphones will receive my tweets properly. No, they did not! I discovered that cell-phone service providers filter incoming tweets in such a way that filters out Unicode characters of the Devanagari script.

I am going to consult Twitter in India (visit http://twitter.com/#!/twi/ )

What is the solution? I am now using the Roman Script to write out Hindi words using a simple and informal transliteration scheme (see “Devanagari Transliteration” in Wikipedia). This seems to work quite well.

Srinivasan Ramani  

Great Science Project – detecting diseases using a simple device

Jack Andraka is a 15-year old who has invented a method for detecting some types of cancer using a very simple and inexpensive device. He has won the $75,000 Intel prize. Visit the following site for more information:

http://videosift.com/video/Kickass-15-Yr-Old-Kid-Uses-Nanotubes-To-detect-Cancer?loadcomm=1

This is just the beginning! Like all great inventions, this one opens up a hundred possibilities. There is room for hundreds of student projects taking off from Andraka’s idea! There is room for hundreds of related ideas!

What is the trick? He uses a solution containing carbon nanotubes coated with antibodies for something he wants to detect – a target protein. He dips a piece of filter paper in this solution and hooks it up to a device that measures electrical conductivity. When a suitable solution containing the target protein is applied to the filter paper, there is a detectable reduction in conductivity to indicate the presence of the target protein? Why? The target protein molecules bind to the antibodies. This pushes the nanotubes apart, making space for the protein molecules. You probably know that the bond between an antibody and its target protein is very, very specific. Antibodies don’t bind to any old protein molecules!

The greatest value of Andraka’s technique idea could be in detecting infectious diseases. If you demonstrate how this can be done, you might save thousands of lives, if not millions. Want to read up on some related ideas? Visit

http://www.btci.org/k12/bft/IMM/imm_background.html

Design an anonymous channel for a whistle-blower to give credible tip-offs

(The discussion on this social problem and the need to develop a solution below are copied from another blog I write: www.obvioustruths.blogspot.com

The technical possibilities discussed following the duplicated paragraphs are unique to this blog)

The importance of whistle-blowers

Many instances of corrupt practice and tax evasion occur with hundreds of people knowing about it. But the victims become hostages of the wrong-doer for many reasons and do not squeal. For instance, visualize a college or university charging under-the-table-fees of Rs 15 Lakhs (roughly US $ 30,000) for admitting students who cannot honestly compete with other applicants on merit. This is illegal on two grounds: it is illegal for educational institutions to demand and accept such payments; secondly, it generates wealth on which income tax has been evaded. It becomes the so-called black money. Thousands of students pay such “fees” every year. However, they are too scared to do anything about it before admission which they desire so strongly. After admission, they do not wish to expose their college or university and endanger their own education. Similarly, practically every company or organization which cheats on tax has a number of employees who know about it. But the employees are too scared to blow the whistle. They may even get killed for doing something like that. Under these circumstances, the rare whistle-blower has to be encouraged, protected and supported.
I assume that there are a few vigilance organizations (V. O.) that wish to encourage whistle blowers, and that they themselves are not corrupt! We need to create an Internet based mechanism meeting the following requirements, to enable such an organization to work efficiently.

Desired characteristics of the proposed mechanism

a) Gives the whistle blower privacy – no one should know who he is till he decides to reveal himself
b) Gives the vigilance organization some way of separating credible tip-offs from spurious reports
c) Provides for a mechanism to prove that a claimant is actually the one who had sent a particular set of anonymous messages earlier

The provision in c) is meant to enable a whistle-blower to claim a reward when his tip-off is acted upon and proves to be beneficial to society.

A few technical possibilities for implementing a solution

These items are labeled a), b) and c) to link them to the requirements given above.

a) Encourage the whistle blower to use any anonymizer (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer ) he trusts, to protect his identity.

b) Encourage the whistle-blower to use create a file including his own postal address or something like that, add an irrelevant random text at the bottom of the file, and to compute the message-digest (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function ) of that file using any trusted, publicly available code. He should append the message digest of that file (alone) to every anonymous tip-off he sends, to serve as a masked-identity code. The file itself will be kept on his own PC or laptop. The random text will protect against someone trying out millions of known addresses to see if one of them has that message-digest.
The V.O. would give low credence to a tip-off from unproven sender (known only through his masked-identity code. However, if a few of his tip-offs prove to be useful, the V.O. can increase the credence it gives to tip-offs from that person).

c) The whistle-blower can surface at a time of his choosing to claim any reward that he is entitled to.

Notes:

1) Search for related information on the web. Have others published any solutions? Are you satisfied with them?

2) The mechanism described in b) is not too satisfactory. It will take a year or more for whistle-blower to earn his credibility this way. Can you improve on this?

3) Post your comments and suggestions on this blog. Together a number of us may do a better than any one of us can do individually.

Srinivasan Ramani September 15, 2010

The Problem of Search – what is yet to be done?

The history of search engines has been a most exciting one. The development of effective search techniques will ultimately get ranked with the invention of printed books. These two, along with the development of the Internet, have made it possible for knowledge of human society to be made widely available among its members, but don’t get carried away! We have got a long way to go. The search problem shares something with the halting problem, at least in practical terms. If you spend time on searching for something, a good fraction of the time you come away with the information you wanted, but you never come away saying that the information you searched for is not there! You go away frustrated, feeling that searching is often a never-ending business. At least in terms of a human lifetime!
I had this feeling last week, searching for the information a friend abroad had asked me. He plans to visit India, SriLanka and Nepal on an Indian multiple entry visa. Someone has told him that if you enter India with that kind of visa and go to any other country, say Nepal, you need to stay out of India for at least 60 days before you re-enter India. I helped get a definitive answer to this by searching the Web for relevant information. It seems that the Government had announced this rule in Dec ’09 and later relaxed it in some way. I redoubled my effort to get a definitive answer to my friend. Can I get a reliable source’s final answer to this question? I searched the Web in different ways and then asked a renowned travel agency and sent email to an agency to which the Indian consulate outsources part of its visa application processing. The more I searched the more confused I got with contradictory information.
Why do I write this? I would like you to try and find the answer. You may be lucky in finding an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. Or you may not. Suppose you do find an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. How sure are you going to be about that answer?
Do try this experiment. You may not have a friend with this problem. But you may get good ideas on what more needs to be done to help people searching for information, particularly when they do not have the benefit of a professional in the field who knows where to look for information and what to trust.

Srinivasan Ramani

Unique Identification Number for Indian Residents (Unique ID)

I believe that it is a challenge to every one to think of ways in which Indian residents could get more out of unique IDs to be issued than what the US Social Security number gives US residents. I am not referring here to Social Security payments, which would require a lot of policy-making and financial calculation.

What I refer to is this: Coming at a time the Internet and e-Commerce are so well developed, does the concept of a Unique ID offer new opportunities in cyberspace?

Let your imagination loose!

Srinivasan Ramani

Potential Impact of Cellular Technology in Transportation

I will discuss a possible student project in programming cell phones. We start by observing that the cellular revolution has made a huge difference in enabling better coordination of human activities. You don’t need to wait for someone to arrive without knowing if he would be 10 mts late or two hours late! If he is a considerate person, he should telephone those waiting, irrespective of where he is.

However, there are problems in enabling passengers to know when buses/trains would arrive at a given place. Rudimentary systems have been implemented by the railways, but even their websites seem to have been designed by someone with a grudge against humanity :=) Airline websites are not much better off. The bus transportation industry is in the early stages of exploiting IT.

I believe that cellular technology has great potential to alleviate many problems in the transportation area.

Objectives of the project:

1. Create a solution that works with inexpensive cell phones and is easy to use. This is essential for the system to be relevant to the large majority of cell phone users.
2. Ensure that the whole solution is inexpensive and does not require investment on a large scale to create the necessary infrastructure. It should be possible to start with a relatively low level of investment, for instance to begin with a single bus-route or bus station.
3. Use mass-produced (commodity priced) equipment almost completely, to reduce time to implement the solution and to realize a low cost system.

Assumptions:

1. Bluetooth connectivity is relatively more common than GPS, WiFi etc. in less expensive cell phones.
2. We can limit the solution at this stage to serve those who can create and read simple SMS-like messages using a User Application (UA) downloaded into the phone.

The Basic Concept:

1. Bus stops in a city would have unique number (BSN) painted to be easily visible. This would identify the bus stop to the users.
2. Each bus route would have a unique Route Number (RN). In addition, each individual Bus would have a Vehicle ID (VID) number.
3. There would be multiple Bluetooth beacons (such as the one described in http://www.blipsystems.com/Default.aspx?ID=684 ) placed in selected places at each bus stop, to be detected by every bus that stops at that location.
4. The user would send a short message containing BSN and RN through the UA application, which would add a Base-station IDentifier (BID), and time & date of message transmission. In addition the central station would have the cell phone number from which the message originated.
5. The bus would carry a cell phone with an On-board Application (OA) that detects bus stop beacons and sends one message per bus stop giving the BSN, VID, RN, time and date to the central server.
6. On the server, a Central Tracking Application (CTA) would keep track of which vehicle is where, using the messages it receives. In addition it would collect and keep statistical data about the typical time it takes for a bus to travel from any given BSN to the next one while on a given RN. Using this information, the CTA can predict when the next bus on a given RN would arrive at a given BSN.
7. The user, from wherever he is (bus stop, home, office etc.), can send a message using the UA giving RN and BSN information. The CTA would respond to this automatically, giving the expected time of arrival of the next bus on RN that would stop at that BSN.

Extensions:

A number of enhancements are possible. For instance, the bus driver could enter into the cell phone with OA some specified information about seat availability. This can be shared with those who ask for relevant information. The information handled can be used to improve bus scheduling and for better management of road traffic (locating and dealing with bottlenecks etc.).

Srinivasan Ramani