Columns buckle, beams crack, pillars collapse, cranes topple, but netas go on

The recent tragedy resulting from the collapse of a flyover under construction in Kolkata

http://www.abplive.in/india-news/rush-to-crash-21-crushed-in-kolkata-flyover-collapse-314825

has made many engineers think more about using technology to save lives.

There are tried and tested technologies for monitoring the health of buildings, bridges, and other structures. Visit

http://www.sensorland.com/HowPage131.html

Sensors can easily monitor strain, load, displacement and vibration. They can report this over wires or over wireless signals to monitoring stations. In relation to the cost of the structures involved, they are quite affordable. Higher education is often years ahead of the prevalent practice in the concerned industry. It would be great if electronics departments and structural engineering departments in engineering colleges cooperate to encourage students to carry out projects using sensors to monitor structures. One such project is that designing and implementing an instrument that can be retrofitted to a crane to alert us of risky operating conditions. 

Technology is no use against corruption in departments of state and local governments concerned with approvals and oversight of construction and modifications.  Most building collapses and fires result from failure to inspect and enforce relevant rules. Widespread corruption in concerned departments is the reason why many netas cling to positions giving them control over these departments. One solution to this problem would be for forces fighting corruption to demand resignation of netas who have had control of engineering departments that have visibly failed. It does not matter whether the cause is incompetence or corruption in a given case. The netas have to go either way!

IEEE Computer Society – 70th Anniversary Student Challenge. Deadline: April 1 2016

You have little time to finalize a submission if you did not hear about this challenge earlier, but you will find it useful to read the background document anyway! Visit

https://www.computer.org/web/membership/70th-anniversary-student-challenge

I quote from the IEEE announcement:

“The challenge invites all IEEE Computer Society student members across the globe to create a solution, based on the IEEE Computer Society 2022 Report, that will solve a real-world issue in a smart, fresh way”.

The focus on real-world issues is what makes us engineers!

On Nobody’s Word: Evidence and Modern Science

That was the title of a talk given by Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He is reported to have given the talk at Panjab University at Chandigarh, delivering the Har Gobind Khorana lecture. 

This was reported in Hindustan Times:

Homeopathy is bogus, harmful: Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Bhartesh Singh Thakur, Hindustan Times, Chandigarh
(Updated: Jan 07, 2016)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/homeopathy-astrology-are-bogus-says-nobel-laureate-venkatraman-ramakrishna/story-oNNzWBnosMFiLnrnmfkdxI.html

Dr Ramakrishnan called homeopathy and astrology useless and harmful practices. He talked about the scientific method which allows critical examination and rejection of false beliefs. His comments on modern medicine are also very interesting and relevant to India.

Dr Ramakrishnan is repaying his debt to India (where he had his early education) many times over, by talking against erroneous beliefs prevalent in this country.

Storing rain water in wells

I had recently posted a note about collecting rain water to provide a safe and reliable source of drinking water. Visit

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2016/03/collecting-rainwater-at-family-level.html

However, it may be worth considering an alternative – that of providing about 5000 litres of rain water storage to meet multiple needs of a rural family. The concept of a well as a part of rural house is well understood. The only problem is that ground water levels have gone down so much that most of the traditional wells have gone dry. The alternative that is relevant here is that of using gutters at the edge of sloping roofs to collect run-off rain water and some plumbing to take it to the well. A special feature of such wells designed to store rain water would be the effort to minimize leakage of water. The sides as well as the bottom surface of the well would be cemented to avoid water loss. The following site provides some information on constructing small diameter wells reinforced with pre-cast concrete well-rings, but it is not specifically about wells designed to store rain water.   

www.wateraid.org/~/media/Publications/Hand-dug-wells.pdf

Keeping the roof and the water clean is a challenge; tradition is no use in these matters. A water filtering mechanism, a cover for the top of the well and a hand pump to raise water seem to be relevant items.

Engineers interested in improving the quality of life in rural areas should experiment with different design alternatives. Improving rural water supply should be India’s next big mission after the Swachh Bharat effort.

Collecting rainwater at the family level

There was a time when water cost nothing, but now a large number of families in India pay for the piped water they use. Many of those who do not get piped water pay a lot more for tanker water, which is usually of uncertain quality. Piped water costs as much as Rs 35 per kiloliter in some urban areas. Many families pay as much as a few hundred rupees a month to get water. Under these circumstances, it is logical to think of collecting rainwater for individual families. There is a lot of information on the Web. Visit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vukZHS9xYtQ and

http://www.samsamwater.com/rain/?gclid=CN347K7jq8sCFRUXaAodxlsBwQ

The first one is about water collection from a tiled roof in Mangalore. The second is about water collection in Africa. The following article provides additional information.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/rainwater-harvesting-system-zmaz03aszgoe.aspx

I would like to focus the rest of this post on drinking water. Water borne diseases continue to be a major problem in India and are the cause of avoidably high infant death rate. India receives an average of about 1 meter of rainfall annually. If we had a funnel with a collecting area of about 1 square meter, we could collect a thousand litres of water a year. How much drinking water do we need? The following article refers to an Indian Standard (BIS 1172, reaffirmed in 1998) which is reported to say that the requirement (per person per day) of drinking water is 5 liters per day, in addition to 5 more liters for cooking.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/homes-and-gardens/how-much-water-does-an-urban-citizen-need/article4393634.ece

I can do with a lot less of drinking water per day; I would think of two litres of drinking water per day per person is a reasonable design assumption. Keeping the collecting equipment and the collected water free of dust and other contamination is very important. A few cubic meters of water are what we need to collect and store; doing this at an affordable cost requires a fair amount of trial and error. The challenge is not unsurmountable. A country which has a million students starting engineering college every year can very well meet this challenge. We need to create a good product design leading to local manufacture and to the solution of a vexing problem.

Possible risks in using LED light to monitor your heart rate Post No 2

I had written a post in this blog about possible skin-cancer risk posed by LED radiation used by activity trackers to monitor heart rate. Visit http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2015/12/possible-risks-in-using-led-light-to.html  Today, my wife and I took a photograph of the tanned spot the tracker has created on my wrist. I notice that there is damage to the skin - it is not mere tanning. See the photograph below.

Killing mosquitos that spread the Zika virus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science and Superstition

Many scientists in India don’t comment on irrationality and superstition that is widely prevalent in this country. There are various reasons for this. It is not uncommon for scientists to hold superstitious beliefs themselves. Many belong to very “religious” families, with a parent or spouse deeply committed to such beliefs. Being critical of superstition conflicts with domestic harmony in such cases! Others do not wish to offend friends, colleagues or acquaintances with any criticism of beliefs they may hold. So, it is refreshing to hear Dr V Ramakrishnan speak his mind on superstition. Visit http://www.firstpost.com/india/indian-science-congress-is-a-circus-wont-attend-it-nobel-laureate-v-ramakrishnan-2572268.html

Dr Ramakrishnan, your bold comments on this topic is a great contribution to the advancement of India!
  

The real value of science is that it usually makes its practitioners develop a robust world view – one in which all ideas are open to critical analysis, verification and discussion. This would have been a tragic world if a few men of science had not questioned the belief and faith in the idea of the earth being the center of the universe. It may be the center in a metaphorical sense unless we discover thinking beings elsewhere, but it is certainly not the center around which the Sun revolves! The acceptance of the idea that earth is a planet that goes around the Sun contributed a lot to the advance of mankind. Comparable was the discovery that the heart’s primary function is to pump blood. These revolutionary ideas did not merely make the western world rich; it made its citizens immensely wiser!

A fun clock to build! It will behave as a quantum particle!

Quantum theory states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects reality. It is very difficult to convince anyone about this. Watch out if you are trying to make your girlfriend believe the story. You may quickly discover that she has quantum tunneled her way out of your life!

You may wish to build a device that makes it very easy to illustrate the quantum phenomenon. Don’t give it to your girlfriend though, unless she is a physics major! She would surely want to have nothing to do with a guy who builds such spooky clocks.

Now the specs of the clock: As long as someone observes the clock at least once a day, it displays accurate time; but leave it in a locked apartment for a couple of days and come back – it shows some absurd time. Reset it and ensure that someone looks at it at least once a day, and it will keep correct time! You cannot cheat! Keeping a webcam on to watch the clock does not count as looking at it! You actually have to read the time on the clock and be conscious of its correct working for it to work properly. It is all about consciousness and reality!

What is the arcane science behind this clock? For the present, I would settle for a motion detector coupled to the clock. If you have friend in business school, team up with him or her. You can sell these clocks online for $200 apiece next December! They will make perfect gifts.

My daughter suggests a different quantum mechanical clock; one that keeps perfect time as long as no one is watching it. If anyone takes a look, she will see only some random time. What is the principle behind its operation? You will need to sign a contract on royalty payments to get that information.  

x x x x x x x

The Internet and Rabies

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization for Animal Health held a conference in Dec 2015 and started a worldwide discussion on ending the medieval horror known as rabies. Visit  http://www.oie.int/eng/RABIES2015/index.html. The Lancet carried a blog post 

http://globalhealth.thelancet.com/2015/12/09/ending-canine-mediated-human-rabies-time-now  and an editorial on the subject (its Vol. 386, Number 10012, Dec 19, 2015). The Lancet Editorial says that 70,000 people die every year because of this disease.  There is an excellent article in Quartz on the topic of rabies in India http://qz.com/487441/best-friend-turns-deadly-foe-indias-rabid-street-dogs-are-killing-thousands-every-year/

WHO says that 20,000 people die from rabies in India every year. Elsewhere, I have read that in the last ten years India has not shown any reduction in rabies deaths per year. Bangladesh, in comparison, has reduced rabies deaths by 50% in the last three years. Immunizing a dog against rabies seems to cost less than Rs 100. Why can’t India commit itself to a vast reduction in the incidence of rabies over the next three years?   

What has all this to do with the Internet, you may wonder! Please hold on for a moment and I will share my thoughts on this topic.

New ideas need to be welcomed even to fight battles we have fighting over the centuries. The following article refers to a good example of a new idea in the field: oral vaccine for animals to immunize them against rabies.  

http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/yourallekiskivalleymore/9420586-74/rabies-allegheny-county#axzz3vl8GiRRi

Next to the Internet! There is so much about rabies in India on the Worldwide Web. Can a few computer science students figure out a way to get actionable information out of all this? For instance, can we identify locations where there is a new cluster of rabies cases?

If this is not possible, can we use social networking to have volunteers report the location of new cases of suspected rabies? In this case, we should be able to automate the collating of received information to alert authorities and media about hotspots of rabies as they develop. It is one thing to vaccinate millions of stray dogs against rabies. It is another to vaccinate a few hundred dogs in a reported hotspot. The smart phone, with accurate location reporting, is one type of tools that can help identify hotspots to focus on.

I would suggest the person reporting a rabies case or dog bite should be free to use a variety of ways of sending information: online forms, a text message over SMS or an Internet based message system, email, an app on a smartphone, etc. A simple notation illustrated below should be enough.

report rabies case

hospital zenith hospital

name ganeshsubramanian

dateofadmission 1-1-2016

locality Jayanagar block 1

city  Bangalore

pincode 560011

(other possible types of information: town XXX, village XXX, district XXX, dateofbirth XXX, dog stray, dog pet, patient male, reportby ramani, dateofbite XXX, patient 98xxx77123; reporter should be free to send whatever information is available)

Design issues: How can we avoid treating multiple reports of a case as multiple cases? Is there a way to use multiple reports from one location to increase our confidence in the report? How can we acknowledge a reporter for his service?

  

Possible risks in using LED light to monitor your heart rate?

I had been wearing an activity tracker on my wrist to measure the number of steps I walk daily, for over a year. It has surely given me an incentive to walk more. More recently, I upgraded myself to wear the next version, which also measures my heart rate and displays it when asked to do so. I was aware that I was exposing myself to round-the-clock LED light over a few square millimeters of my skin. After a couple of months of this exposure, I noticed that the area exposed to the LEDs had developed a tan. I was surprised; having dark brown skin, I had not expected it. I looked up information given out by the manufacturer, and it said that the energy put out by the LEDs was so small it was harmless, but I was the one who had his skin in this game, literally! I wanted to be more careful.

I do not know the exact amount of energy used; suppose it is 20 milliwatts and that it is spread over two square millimeters. The energy density would then be about 10 milliwatts per square millimeter. Compare it with 140 Watts of Sunlight spread over a square foot; that is about 1.56 milliwatts/square millimeter. Besides that, I am unlikely to sit in the Sun giving me 140 Watts/square foot of radiation round-the-clock! Governments have advised people to be careful in sunbathing, to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. Visit The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent Skin Cancer. In many countries, where the weather encourages frequent sunbathing, deaths due to skin cancer exceed the number of traffic deaths.

After thinking all this out, I read the documentation again and found I could turn heart-rate monitoring on and off as I liked. Now, I keep it switched off most of the day and turn it on only during exercise sessions. I have also given up wearing the gadget during sleeping hours. You think I am paranoid? Give me a few reliable studies by credible and independent medical researchers, concluding there is no risk. I will forget my worries!

Subject to standard ethical safeguards, it may be worth doing a small-scale animal experiment exposing rats to the same HR monitor that I have been exposed to. The rats might be smarter and bite the strap off before it is too late! The experimenters might have to take some precautions.

It may be necessary to have the rats’ exposed skin examined by pathology labs to identify any possible risks from the exposure.

I would also suggest that students interested in doing the experiment to send their proposals to the manufacturers of the devices asking for a grant of 60 devices for use in the experiment. You can assure them that you will acknowledge their contributions when you publish your findings. The results might be interesting!

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Get Rid of Your Car – project ideas for students of management

For background information, you might want to read an old post of mine:

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/2013/03/virtual-cars-for-everyone.html

Let me touch upon the key points from the above-mentioned blogpost, before I move on to discuss ideas for a small student project. We should each have a chauffeur driven virtual car. It should be available anywhere, anytime. Tap an app on the cell phone and optionally enter a destination and time of departure; you should have the driver calling you and turning up in a few minutes to take you where you wish to go.  This is already there, is it not? We should recognize that companies like Uber and Ola have made a significant impact on our lives in India. 

Let us look at what is not there. No one has got rid of his car! Customers have not accepted that owning cars is irrelevant as long as they can use cars whenever they want to. Society has not recognized the ongoing revolution as one that needs to be promoted through the right incentives. Lumpy “real” cars waste parking space in houses and apartment buildings, and in the places that people visit. We have not recognized the virtual car as one of the major solutions to traffic problems and atmospheric pollution. We have not visualized that it can create employment in significant numbers. We have only grudgingly accepted “taxi aggregators” as yet another enterprise and have done nothing to promote them. The issue is not one of administrative decisions; it is about the right visions for the transportation systems of the future.  

Unless society recognizes that information technology has made it unnecessary to have personal vehicles in most cases and creates the right policies to have them replaced by virtual cars, we will continue to have a moribund system of transportation. What are required are tax incentives to promote the use of shared vehicles, encouraging investments in companies providing shared vehicles, and support to employment generation for a large number of drivers. The use of shared vehicles will reduce wasteful investment in vehicles, because shared vehicles are far more productive. It will also eliminate waste of drivers’ time - private car drivers wasting their time waiting for car owners to come and occupy their cars.

Now to a student project on virtual cars:  some ideas discussed below  may be more relevant to countries where potential drivers are plentiful, but money to buy cars is relatively scarce; however, there are challenges to innovation in every country in regard to this new industry. I will offer a set of questions to trigger ideas for projects in this area:

a)   What incentives will persuade customers to give up “their own cars” in favour of virtual cars? If I am self-employed, the cost of owning and operating a car can be charged to my business expenses, saving me tax. Can we offer the same benefit to the self-employed for using virtual cars?

b)   Even employed persons can borrow money to buy cars and get tax benefits on the loan interest they pay. Can we allow customers of virtual car companies to invest in these companies to the extent of the cost of a car and get some tax benefits for that? For instance, if the virtual car operator gives them a discount of some X% because they have invested in the company, can the government treat the discount as tax-free income?

c)   How can a virtual car company deploy the investments it receives from customers to promote their own business? Can they, for instance, command a business loyalty from the customers through discounts in fares?

d)   Can the virtual car companies expand their business by offering car loans to their drivers? What role can banks pay in this regard?

e)   Can we prepare presentations to stimulate thinking in selected companies in this field?

f)    What would be right agencies to argue for suitable legislation to promote this socially relevant concept?

g)   What regulatory safeguards do we need to ensure that monopolies do not run away with the business and to protect other customer interests?

h)  What should manufacturers of electric cars do? Will the virtual car companies create and operate shared infrastructure for supporting electric cars under their control? What can the car manufacturers do to promote this? What should the government do to promote this?  

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Medical advances against diseases caused by parasites; need for follow-up

India should be grateful to scientists and medical doctors who have improved our abilities to control common diseases that are caused by parasites. This is the country in which the cause of malaria was discovered in 1897, leading to an early Nobel Prize being given to Ronald Ross (see http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/ross.html ). This year, three researchers have been honoured with the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their work on diseases caused by parasites.

To quote from the website http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2015/

QUOTE

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites" and the other half to Youyou Tu "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria".

UNQUOTE

Early work (1978) at the  Kitasato Institute and later work at the Merck Sharp and Dohme Research Laboratories has led to the discovery of the Avermectin family of drugs. The story of the Chinese work against Malaria needs a separate story of its own.

For those of us living in developing countries, the Avermectin family of drugs coming out of the work by Campbell and Omura might turn to be very valuable. Their discovery is a big step forward in our fight against disease. These drugs kill invertebrates even in small concentrations, but are basically non-poisonous to vertebrates like us. Therefore, when you take the medicine to kill off worms in your digestive tract, mosquitoes that bite you could be killed by the small amount of drug in the blood they drink from your body! Visit  http://www.malariajournal.com/content/12/1/153 and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin 

I have also read speculation that such medicines might kill the mosquitoes that spread Dengue; (Dengue is not caused by a parasite, but by viruses spread by Aedes mosquitoes). Drugs like Ivermectin might even kill bed bugs and lice as well! I remember a documentary in which the German submariners during the II World War fight the lice menace very hard! Typhus was a big threat to them!

Many manufacturers in India sell Ivermectin in retail, for something like Rs 10 per dose.

Going forward, there is need to carry out research to investigate many possibilities. I would guess that cattle must be getting poorer quality drinking water as compared to people! Anti-parasite drugs might be useful in protecting them against disease causing worms ( http://www.farmanimalhealth.co.uk/cattle-worms ). Another possibility is that we could develop relatively safer pesticides out of the Avermectin family of drugs. These would be useful in controlling common pests such as flies and cockroaches.

Sometimes, new drugs have significant social impact. The discovery of antibiotics, starting with the work of Alexander Fleming, contributed in a significant way to coping with the widow remarriage problem caused by social prejudices. Antibiotics reduced untimely deaths in India, thereby vastly reducing the number of young women losing their husbands; widow remarriage was no longer such a major problem! The victory of medical research against diseases caused by parasites and mosquitoes could have a similar effect. It could add a few years to life expectancy in developing countries; in any case, it would reduce a lot of suffering.

New tools are now becoming available to reduce the very high incidence of malnutrition among young children in India. WHO believes that de-worming can help children suffering from malnutrition. Newspapers frequently report that a high percentage of Indian children are underweight. India has taken a major initiative to free millions of children from parasitic worms. Visit http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b72d6a64-b038-11e4-a2cc-00144feab7de.html#axzz3rCnUC0WK

I will end this blog post with a question. India has an impressive number of national laboratories to carry out scientific research, but there has been no national laboratory so far for carrying out research on “tropical diseases”. Why? Is it because the millions who suffer most from them are the voiceless poor? If you are poor and lack good medical care, Dengue could pose a big risk to you; even filariasis or scabies can make your life miserable.  

A search shows that as of February 2015, the proposal to set up such a lab was awaiting the Union Health Ministry's nod! Visit

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Tropical-Disease-Research-Centre-to-be-opened-soon/articleshow/46328206.cms  It is not clear if the proposed Centre will have the resources of a national lab as and when it gets the nod.

Two other institutes are relevant in this context, even if they are small:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ronald_Ross_Institute_of_Parasitology and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ronald_Ross_Institute_of_Tropical_and_Communicable_Diseases

Ross was in Secunderabad at the time he succeeded in identifying the malaria parasite in a mosquito; it is appropriate that these two institutions are fairly close to Secunderabad.

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Technology for Election-related Polling

There is some statistics behind the design of exit polls; but the state of the art is rather poor. Exit polls are giving contradictory predictions about the outcome of Bihar polls, 2015. They failed to predict the landslide in favour of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections earlier.

I will offer a suggestion here for a new way of conducting exit polls. Any market research organization could easily try them out. My hope is that small experiments by students learning software technology or management would lead the way and lead to publishable R & D.

The basic premise is that a high percentage of voters have a cell phone. This is not entirely true, but we will return to that question later. Assume that the polling organization (call it pollster) offers during a national election handsome prizes like a hundred airline tickets to a holiday destination, a thousand gift coupons, and ten thousand brand-name pens. To qualify for a prize, you need to send an SMS within five hours of a poll closing, from the constituency concerned, using a cell phone registered in that constituency, giving the constituency name and the party you predict will win there. The polling computer will allow each cell phone to cast only one vote. Now comes the second premise: that you will most likely predict that the party you voted for will win. We assume that you did not waste your vote for a party you expected to lose. You reflect your own belief as well as those of the people who influence you by their conversations. We assume that political parties will not waste much effort in falsifying an exit poll as that confers no real benefits on them.

That is the basic idea. What would be cost-effectiveness of the idea, how can it be improved, can it be modified to serve other information collecting functions, etc., are good questions for students (and others) to examine. We also need to examine privacy issues involved and whether cell phone companies analyze the text messages they carry.

I would like to add another idea, to encourage voters to participate in the exit polls. The computer could randomly select a specified small fraction of the participants within a few minutes of receiving their text messages and send them a message like this: “You have been selected to receive a ----- if the party you have indicated wins in the constituency you have named. Prize winners are selected by a computer which uses random numbers to make fair selections”. This will increase the confidence of the participants that fair practices are in use.  

Finally, a word on my basic premise. Will the people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid really have proper representation in a technology-based poll? No. This is a matter worth considering.  

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Using solar power through an UPS

(This is a small project, but one that should be carried out with responsibility. Do the work only under the supervision of Electrical Engg Department Staff in your college/university Lab).

  

Solar panel prices are coming down but if you include the cost of batteries and solar panels, they are expensive. Products are available in India from a few vendors, but they are not priced like commodity items.  On the other hand, common UPS units are available at commodity prices. They incorporate a battery and inverter and come with power cables, plugs & sockets, all ready for use. The project suggested here is one of connecting a solar panel (SP) providing about twenty or thirty watts of power for a few hours a day to an UPS of the type used with a PC. The schematic below illustrates the idea.

 

A solar panel with a nominal rating of 30 W seems ideal for charging a UPS of the type discussed above. The SP needs only to provide a DC output at the voltage of the UPS battery, which is usually 12 V.  The charge controller has to prevent reverse flow of current and prevent over-charging.  The typical UPS used with PCs has a 600 VA rating and has capacity of about seven Ampere hours (Ah). That provides for a nominal 84 Watt hour (Wh) energy storage. Assuming that we do not want to utilize more than 50% of the nominal capacity before recharging, such a device can deliver 40 Wh per day, enough to power a 5W LED lamp for 6 hours a day and to provide a few Watt hours to charge one or two cell phones. In fact, some UPS vendors offer models with built-in USB sockets that will charge most cell phones. 

The Solar Panel

Those interested in understanding sizing calculations would find the website http://www.batterystuff.com/  quite useful.  The site http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solar-information/charge-controller-article gives some information on the working of a charge controller. ICs for use in building a charge controller are available from vendors such as Texas Instruments.  I would urge students interested in this project to read about the risks of continuing to draw current from a battery when its voltage has fallen below a specified safe level, such as 11.6 V in case of 12 V batteries. Precautions should be taken to avoid under-voltage operation. One way of ensuring this is to build the system around an UPS that provides protection against under-voltage operation.

Social and Economic implications

The LED revolution has made small size solar installations attractive. Five hours lighting per day through a 5 W LED and a cell phone charger working round the clock would be a boon to most rural households. A solar UPS can provide this even without traditional electrification, but benefits from it if available. It makes it easier to live with power-cuts. Lighting based on a solar UPS confers significant advantages to small shops. Remote locations can use solar UPS units to provide some street lighting. Rural hospitals would find reliable lighting very valuable.  This article has had a focus on systems providing power in the range of 5 to 10 W; however, the future will see surging demand for units with higher capacities. At a macro-level, the UPS market in India is already worth several thousand crores of rupees per year; but it largely serves urban customers. Hybrid UPS units that can use traditional electrical supply as well as solar energy are practically absent in rural areas. The technology for putting them together exists and is relatively easy to master. This segment alone is likely to grow into a few thousand crores per year business within a few years. In the early stages, pioneering engineers will put together their own products and provide services. Within a few years, we can expect that small hybrid units will roll off big production lines and be available at commodity prices. The pioneers will see their business continuing to grow despite such mass manufacture, as long as they are present in rural locations to handle retail sales and to provide services.

Apart from providing reliable lighting, this industry will create several hundred thousand jobs all over the country.

Srinivasan Ramani