John McCarthy, Guru of Artificial Intelligence - Read about him in Resonance

Everyone in computer science knows a lot about John McCarthy and his contributions.  LISP was the first programming language I fell in love with. His contributions to AI and computer science are well-known, but I confess that I have never read his biography so far, but I caught up a bit recently when Professor V Rajaraman wrote a very interesting article about John McCarthy in the March 2014 issue of Resonance, which is available online. Visit

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/php/toc.php?vol=19&issue=03

I downloaded the PDF version of the article and read it. As a bonus, there is another article in that issue by Dr Raman Chandrasekar on the famous AI system named “Jeopardy!” which competes in TV quiz programs:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!

Let me offer a few tidbits to give you a feel for Rajaraman’s article. He mentions McCarthy’s visit to IIT Kanpur and says it inspired a number of students to take up computer science and that one of them was Narayana Murthy! He also mentions that the parents of McCarthy had been immigrants to the US, one from Ireland and one from Lithuania. Both had been members of the American Communist Party.

McCarthy had done seminal work in Artificial Intelligence, brought researchers together in the beginning of work in the field; no wonder Rajaraman calls him Father of Artificial Intelligence. McCarthy spent three years serving as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Stanford University, but was not given tenure! I got reminded of young colleagues in India who are very interested in inter-disciplinary research of potentially great significance, but are scared that promotion committees may not do them justice if they “stray” beyond the mainstream!  

I do not wish to say any more about McCarthy’s ideas and work in this blog post. I only wanted to attract a few more readers to enjoy Prof Rajaraman article and to benefit from it.  He has done a great job of elucidating the important ideas that McCarthy had worked on.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Building a WiFi “Satellite”

This post is really a companion to my recent post http://www.obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2014/04/use-unlicensed-wifi-spectrum-in-rural.html Please read that if possible, before reading the following. It will give you the context in which I write. 

Here, I really mean by “satellite” a device or a system that is remotely located, and performs a communications relay role. It should be designed to withstand pretty harsh environmental conditions and run unattended. It should be self-sustaining in terms of power, depending on solar panels. It does not have to be in earth orbit! It would be sufficient if it is on some tall peak like Doddabetta in Ooty, Mullaiahnagiri in Chikmagalur, Anamudi near Munnar, Perumalmalai peak in Kodaikanal (just to name a few peaks in South India). If there is a tall building visible for miles around, it may even be on top of that building. The harsh environmental conditions that have to be withstood would be rain, lightning, wind force, heat and cold. 

Actually the system does not have to be on the tallest peak or building in the area, but on a well-chosen place that provides effective line of sight with suitable user groups like schools/colleges. The altitude at which it is located should help it to command a large area around. I expect that it would be easy to find many places in India, where one such device would cover a thousand square kilometers within WiFi range! The “satellite” should, of course, be mounted on a tower or something like that to prevent theft!

The system would include a router, several 5.8 GHz radios and directional antennas. It would have maintenance-free storage batteries and solar panels. Designing such a device is an inter-disciplinary engineering activity and I hope students from different disciplines would volunteer to look into the different aspects. Many design issues arise – like should we decide in advance what the user groups should be and fix the directional antennas appropriately? What is the ideal trade-off between simplicity and sophistication? I will leave to readers to find such issues and discuss them.

Srinivasan Ramani 

April 30, 2014

Prof R Narasimhan's Birthday (April 16)

It is Professor Narasimhan’s birthday today (April 16). If he had lived on, he would have been eighty eight today. There is one simple way many of us can further a goal he worked for - running high quality conferences in the computer field in India. His family has made available to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Institute where he spent his working life, a handsome endowment for an annual memorial award to bring a world-class invited speaker to international conference in the computer field in India. We should spread this information among program committee members of such conferences. For details, please visit
http://www.tifr.res.in/~endowment/index.php/endowment-awards/prof-r-narasimhan-lecture-award

I will quote a few lines from this site:

2. One award will be given annually in the field Computer Science and Technology and will recognize advances in hardware, software, theoretical aspects of computing, or applications of computing.
3. The award will recognize the achievement of younger professionals only and hence will be restricted to professionals up to the age of 40.
4. Recipients of the award should hold a degree from an Indian University, excluding honorary degrees.
5. The award will be in the form of a scroll, with a trophy or plaque (rather than in monetary form), and an invitation to give a public talk titled the "Professor R. Narasimhan Memorial Lecture" on the topic for which the recipient is being recognized. In cases wherein the recipient cannot attend the conference in person, arrangements will be made for the recipient to present the lecture through video conference.
6. The award will cover the expenses of the recipient to travel to the chosen conference in India and present the talk.
I wish to share a few thoughts here:

Obviously, only established international conferences with high standards will qualify for these awards. Peer reviewing and published proceedings are essential.

Prof R K Shyamasundar, TIFR, or I can offer any clarifications required.

Srinivasan Ramani

The need to invent Secondary Data Recorders for Aircraft

The tragic incident of the Malaysian Airlines MH370 has triggered a worldwide question. Why don't we have better data and cockpit voice recorders? Rep. David Price, D-N.C., is reported to have said that the 9/11 Commission recommended after the terrorist hijackings in 2001 that planes carry ejectable "black boxes" to make them easier to find. Visit
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/12/ejectable-recorders-plane-crash-data-voice-black-boxes/6338397/

It is not very easy to design an electable data recorder. I wish to stimulate a number of student inventors/designers to think about this challenge with this blog post, by discussing a number of issues involved.

The first question is about the conditions that should trigger ejection of the recorder. In a military aircraft, this could be when the pilot bails out using an ejection seat. Not in a civilian aircraft. Actual impact, particularly over water, might be too late a moment for the data recorder to eject; it might sucked deep into the water with the falling structures and get trapped under water.  A moment of high deceleration might indicate breaking up of the aircraft in mid-air. An impact will also cause a high level of deceleration.

Innovation requires trying out a variety of designs, without incurring a prohibitive cost. Integration of the device with the aircraft's systems will make these trials process very expensive. So, it might be worth trying out an externally mounted device not integrated with the avionics of the aircraft.  If this prevents cockpit voice recording, one can perhaps do without it to start with. Alternatively, one could try and have the cockpit voice signal sent to the recorder securely over an encrypted WiFi like transmission.

A possible option is that of a device that clings to the external surface of a plane and can fall off after ejecting, to float if it falls into a water body, and sends wireless signals irrespective of where it lands.

How would a device cling to the exterior of a plane when it has air flowing over it at a high speed? One option would be to use the power of the air rushing past the shell of the device to make the device cling tighter to the aircraft. A pitot tube mechanism could create a low pressure area inside the shell, making it cling tightly to the aircraft's surface. Plastic bolts or a magnetic device could provide for the primary attachment to the aircraft, with the partial vacuum created by the moving air providing an additional mechanism to bind the device to the aircraft. Ejecting the device would involve opening a valve that depletes the vacuum. It might also require a mechanical device that cuts or breaks the plastic bolt when necessary.

An external device can easily measure altitude as indicated by air pressure, as well as airspeed. Electronic accelerometers could add data about acceleration in three dimensions, and GPS coordinates as a function of time.

To save battery life, the ejected device may send wireless signals relatively infrequently. It could be designed to respond to polling signals sent by search aircraft or ships, like a transponder. The device might also have built-in solar cells to keep sending signals over weeks or months.

Given all the above-mentioned possibilities, it seems the time is ripe to launch several design projects. A design competition, with an attractive price, may be a good idea.

Having an aircraft sending data more or less continuously is not a bad solution. However, constant search for alternative solutions is necessary till all aircraft are fitted with affordable data recording devices.

Lastly, automobiles can also benefit from data recorders, even if they are not ejectable. Perhaps insurance companies should drive their use by offering lower insurance costs to cars fitted with working and regularly monitored data recorders. Automobile data recorders would have a moderating effect on drivers and make them less risk-prone.

Srinivasan Ramani

Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship

IEEE Computer Society is offering $40,000 in student scholarships from $1,000 and up to recognize and reward active student volunteer leaders in student branches or chapters who show promise in their academic and professional efforts. For additional information, visit

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/studentactivities/merwin?lf1=417765105e920816014288d18427682

Deadline for application is April 30, 2014.

Srinivasan Ramani

Aids for the Visually Handicapped

IEEE Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference 2014 (R10 HTC) is to be held during August 2014, in Chennai, India. http://www.ieeer10htc.org This offers students an opportunity to carry out innovative projects which could have a social impact. The conference has a broad focus, but I will discuss one specific sub-area here, as I have explored this area to some extent.

Technology for the visually challenged

Look at a very simple device that sells for 30 British Pounds. Visit http://www.britishpathe.com/video/ultrasonic-torch   It seems to have been publicized from 1968. It must have benefitted millions of users. I looked for research on user experience and found a very nice paper from the same era, brimming with ideas. Visit http://www.rehab.research.va.gov/jour/68/5/1/91.pdf

This ultrasonic torch shows how valuable a simple device can be. In addition to giving an idea of obstacles in one’s path, it can even give some indication of the nature of the surface ahead.

Of course, there are a number of researchers working in this area, as illustrated by a couple of relatively recent papers: 
http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJDRBC/vol2/1.pdf

http://froese.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/froese-et-al-12-the-enactive-torch-a-new-tool-for-the-science-of-perception.pdf

This area is rich for technical exploration and invention. You could use auto-focus mechanisms exploiting infra-red light, which work in broad daylight. Considering the large volume of production, I would expect necessary components to be commercially available at reasonable prices.

Cell phones have a lot of the infrastructure required to create an ultra-sound beam, to pick up the reflections and process them. Suitable additions to a phone can make implementation easy.

Signal processing techniques enable you to vary the frequency of the signal carried by the beam. This can enable sophisticated probing of the obstacles ahead of a visually challenged person.

It is not pure technology

A lot of technologists learnt a good deal from Steve Jobs work! He made it painfully clear to them that they will fail in the absence of respect for good design ideas and concern for the user experience. He taught that we should not make a device a mere tool, but something that it is a delight to own and use. This point of view is particularly important when we design anything for a visually challenged person.

It is also a matter of business

Innovation cannot stop with ideas, patents and publication.

The Wikipedia says that “Term of every patent in India is 20 years from the date of filing of patent application, irrespective of whether it is filed with provisional or complete specification”. Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Patent_Office

The patent system provides a limited time to the inventor to “work” his invention and get a benefit; in return it compels him to disclose his invention for public good. 

Do we have entrepreneurs carefully watching for patents that expire? Do they consider manufacture and sale of devices covered by such patents? Do potential entrepreneurs among students look for these opportunities? No one stops an entrepreneur from innovating and inventing. One can always patent a new invention which vastly improves an old device covered by an expired patent. This gives a double strength – a tried and tested idea no longer covered by a patent and a new idea of one’s own covered by a new patent.

A Challenge

Let me conclude by proposing a challenge that may attract some of you. Can we manufacture and sell a device to help the visually challenged at the price of a reasonably good low-end cell-phone? I have in mind something that would cost about 2,500 Indian rupees (say 40 US dollars).

 

Srinivasan Ramani

Cellular Technology cannot help Disaster Victims Outside a Cell Phone Tower’s Reach

  

It is amazing that a terrorist can buy a satellite phone. He can even rent it in certain countries. I understand that a week’s rental is about a thousand US dollars. However, a peaceful citizen caught in an accident can die because he or she cannot call for help. A fisherman caught in hurricane's aftermath can drift for days on the high seas without being able to seek help. A village facing a disaster can suffer for a week because its communication channels are cut. Such a problem did occur last year when floods hit Himachal Pradesh. 

I would like engineering students to ask themselves this technical question: Can we find out a way to ensure that affordable cell phones can send an SMS to some disaster management agency from anywhere in India?  Of course this may require addition of some hardware and software to the cell phone itself. It may require legal and operational safeguards to ensure that some idiot does not send an SMS as a practical joke, making people run around for nothing. At the moment let us just focus on technology. The practical problems mentioned can be solved.

A satellite which can pick up a weak signal and deliver it in a readable form to a ground station could be part of the solution. Telecom guys ought to ask what it takes to receive a 160 Byte signal from a handheld battery operated device and send it down. The principle of complexity inversion says that it may be cost effective to put the sophistication into the satellite or into the ground station rather than into millions of cell phones. The trick is to be able add no more than a couple of thousand rupees to the cost of the cell phone itself, even if it means that we put millions of rupees worth of equipment into the satellite or into each ground station.

I don’t think we ought to limit ourselves to 1 or 1.5 W transmissions from a cell phone. We could use well known techniques to use only a cell phone battery and still spend 10 W for 100 milliseconds. The signal does not have to be sent once only; we can have the phone repeat it a hundred times in a day.  

You can be sure that the “authorities” would not want you to escape their surveillance. No problem, they can tap the ground station for all they want.

Cell phone operators will want their pound of flesh. No problem – we can let them set up the ground stations and charge us a hundred times the standard rate for delivering an emergency SMS.

Are there solutions that do not involve satellites? Is there some part of the wireless spectrum in which a MHz channel be set apart for some form of transmission that will travel hundred kilometers well enough? Short wave? VHF with meteor trail reflection? Artificial ion trails created by simple rockets being fired periodically, say every hour on the hour?

Does the radiation of an emergency signal from a cell phone have to be omni-directional? Can’t we have some indication from the cell phone as to where we should point it so that a signal being sent out in a cone of (say) 60 degrees beam-width has a chance hitting the receiver or the relevant reflecting surface? If there is an ion trail involved, can the cell phone get a signal through it to create an audible alert?   

I am sure that we are smart enough to create a system that a human cry for help can be made to reach us, irrespective of where it originates! It can also give us the location code to tell us its origin. It is the job of engineers to find out how to do all this!

Srinivasan Ramani 

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 

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

Visit  <http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/geekquinox/massive-asteroid-makes-closest-pass-earth-next-200-184345588.html>

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.

Also visit http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2013/05/18/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-285263-1998-qe2-close-encounter-online-event-31-may-2013/

Srinivasan Ramani

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

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