A Beacon in a Balloon to Broadcast Alerts after an Aircraft Mishap

An AN 32 aircraft of the Indian Air Force was reported lost over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016. Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_Air_Force_An-32_disappearance 

Incidentally, Wikipedia offers a very interesting article on the aircraft AN 32; it mentions that the “estimated price for a modernized AN-32 version is 15 million US dollars”.

This made me revisit a posting in this blog dated March 22, 2014. Visit http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2014/03/the-need-to-invent-secondary-data.html

I have another possibility to explore in this posting. Is it possible to design and develop a device that, like an ejection seat, would be released after an aircraft mishap to carry information and broadcast it in the short wave band? The device, possibly mounted in an external pod, would monitor data such as the flight path, altitude, attitude and acceleration and store them in a secondary data recorder (SDS). Ideally, it would have its own sensors and operate independently of the aircraft’s instruments. The flight path would be recorded as a series of points in terms of GPS coordinates. The device, after ejection, would inflate a helium balloon and release it. The SDS would constitute one part of the payload of the balloon, along with a short wave transmitter. The alerts would be broadcast using a non-directional shortwave antenna sending out essential information giving GPS coordinates of where the device was ejected as well as the current position of the balloon. If, after a couple of days, the balloon comes down due to leakage of helium, its payload would continue sending wireless signals to enable its recovery. It would float if it lands on water.

Such a solution would present many challenges to a designer. What would be the difficulties in launching a helium balloon from a device ejected from a flying aircraft? What would be the security risks in using such a device with military aircraft? What should be done to make the SDS easily recoverable? Can the balloon drop it with a small parachute on wireless command? What would the transmitter power be, and what antennas would it require?

The proposed solution has several attractive features. The alert could be received at multiple airports within minutes of a mishap, enabling the quick launch of missions to recover any survivors. The system will work over land and sea. Search aircraft and ships would not have to spend weeks searching over tens of thousands of square kilometers. 

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The challenge of small payments

The huge population of India and the tradition of making small payments in cash only has created a problem. It is difficult to get 5 Rupee coins leave alone smaller ones. It is very common for shop keepers and auto rickshaw drivers to tell you they do not have change. I suspect that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) finds it costly to mint coins and to print small denomination notes.

Innovation is called for. Imagine you can “beam up” amounts such as Rupees 57.50! All you should be doing is to enter 57.50 into an app, point your cell phone at a device in the shop and click a button. The amount should be transferred and a receipt in the name of the merchant, giving a transaction reference number, should be saved in your app. The app implementer can choose the mode of signaling, using the LED flash on the cell phone, or using Bluetooth or WiFi. Ideally the app should automatically turn on Bluetooth or WiFi even if the customer has not switched them on. The app can switch them off after the payment.

What about the transaction cost at the Bank’s end? Don’t worry, the banks know various ways of passing this cost on to the merchant! In any case, this cannot be very high; further any such cost will be more than compensated by faster handling of small payments at the merchant end.  

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Research Science Initiative - IIT Madras

The following post by Dr Sasikumar of CDAC would be of value to every young student interested in scientific research.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rsic-amazing-initiative-iit-madras-m-sasikumar?trk=mp-reader-card

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Unfriendly human-machine interfaces

A few days ago, my wife got a text message from an app-based cab company. It told her she had not used their cabs for some time and offered her an incentive. It gave her some code like MYCAB and indicated that if she used it at the time of making her “next” booking she could get Rs 50 off from the bill. This incentive was offered for the next two rides.

I wondered what was wrong. The designer of this scheme must have gone to some extradinary design school! Anyone else would have implemented a mechanism to give her Rs 50 off for the next two rides without a code.

There is a possible reason. Their software provides for special codes to be recognized for giving discounts, but does not provide for marking a set of customers as qualifying for a specified discount for a specified number of times. If this true, we have to blame the software designers and not the company that uses the software.

I should, however, say that the design of the software did some good to the company. My wife did not remember the text message and the code it mentioned, when she booked a cab. Further she discovered that when she did another booking later on, the system did not accept the code. Remember, the message had said your “next” two rides! I don’t know what had happened.  I suspect that the system had invalidated the code on the grounds that she had booked a cab without using the code! So, the later booking did not qualify as the “next” booking! Surely a very smart and endearing practice to enforce using your software!

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Articles and videos introducing computer science topics

You have some time free and would like to spend it on learning something interesting? Here are some recommendations. This list was originally put together for use by a few students who are going to engineering school in a couple of months. However, it would be useful to a variety of people, young and old, who are interested in learning some computer science, irrespective of the subject they studied, or are studying, for their degree.

1.       https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mitx-6-00-1x-7
You can audit any EDX course and pay no fees. Video lectures are good. You do not have any commitment to complete the course. You can take online exams and get your mark sheets

2.       Introduction to cellular technology. A very useful introduction. http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/cellulartelecomms/cellular_concepts/mobile-basics-concepts.php  A set of URLs for more information on specific topics is given at the end. They are useful to get additional information.

3.       http://vfu.bg/en/e-Learning/Computer-Networks--Introduction_Computer_Networking.pdf    

4.       http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/cisp/database/manual/node1.html

5.       Linear Algebra http://www.math.northwestern.edu/~len/LinAlg/

The books on Linear Algebra and on Discrete Maths do not have to be completed at a stretch. You can read one or more chapters at a time.

6.       http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~bagchi/courses/discrete-book/fullbook.pdf

For most topics the Wikipedia chapter is usually the best introduction. Books, articles and other forms of text are not the only sources of scholarly information. Selected videos from Ted talks and YouTube are very useful too. I find the videos at  www.edx.org providing serious coverage of a topic most useful for learning from. Ted talks and YouTube videos are shorter and provide introduction, inspiration and overviews. 

In general, I trust sites that are in the .edu domain more than the ones in .com domain. But there are many useful articles on .com sites as well; for example, https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/articles/solar-articles/solar-info.html

You will find the following items interesting.

7.       http://inventionconvention.com/americasinventor/dec97issue/section2.html

8.       http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-turing-test-can-a-computer-pass-for-a-human-alex-gendler

9.       http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-turing-test-can-a-computer-pass-for-a-human-alex-gendler#review

10.   https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die

11.   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF7032F8EB1A4F9E2

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A Computer Vision Challenge

Some people type into some food log a list of items they ate and get an estimate daily calorie intake. Some, find it impractical. My daughter says that she would like her activity tracker look at her plate of food at each meal and update its log! I thought it was crazy to ask for that when I heard it two years ago. I am wiser now, and think this can be achieved by a number of steps of innovation. As a first step, I announce this challenge, named Preethi’s Challenge in honor of the original thinker!

1.   The challenge is to recognize the items and quantities of food from their photographs. I visualize that you would use a tablet to take the picture and run the app on the same device. However, you are free to do it any other way, like using a webcam or a smart phone for picture taking and a laptop to run the app.

2.   If you have bought ready-to-eat food and its container has a bar code to identify it, the app is welcome to scan it and use the info.

3.   The app would use pictures with training information entered into “learning software” that will use machine learning techniques to recognize the food item and estimate its quantity and calorie content.

4.   You will train the app, giving it photographs of named objects annotating them with weight and information like calories/hundred-grams. Don’t worry about the training effort. Training one app would serve millions of users who are going to use copies of that app!

5.   You can use a standard plate of known diameter.

6.   You could also have only one item of food on the plate at a given time (at least at the start of the project).

7.   A good solution is to have the photographs taken by looking down, say at 45 degrees below the horizontal. This would give information about the item of food in X, Y and Z dimensions. The plate’s outline provides information on the scale. If the app finds it difficult to estimate calories from that photograph, it could ask you for a second photograph taken from another angle.

8.   The app should calculate the calorie content to some reasonable accuracy, say 10%.

9.   You can allow the app to ask for additional information when it finds it necessary, for instance, when it sees a plate with vegetables. It could ask, say, if it is boiled potatoes.

10.If you want to cheat, you could use a small plate that sits on a kitchen weighing device showing the total weight in digital form. Your app should recognize the numbers.  It could of course use stored information on the weight of the plate and deduct that.

11.You can make a second version of the app, which should take in more complex photographs, say with multiple food items, to make the app easier to use.

One last word: Use every trick you can think of to make this an easy-to-use app. Technology alone may not provide the best solution!

Why can't we tell consumers the truth about alcohol?

Reuters reported on May 3, 2016 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnson-johnson-talc-verdict-idUSKCN0XT20L a legal case in which Johnson and Johnson has been ordered to pay $55 million in compensatory and punitive damages for not warning customers on the risks of using of talcum powder. The company had been told to pay $72 million earlier, in a similar case. In the context of this, I look for clarity on labeling the health risks caused by alcoholic drinks.

The intention behind writing this post is to stimulate research towards quantifying risks consumers are exposed to, and discussions about adequate warnings to consumers. Is society lax in demanding warnings about the risks of alcohol consumption? If so, why?  Are consumers being fooled by statements that seem to imply that “moderate” alcohol consumption poses no cancer risk?

It is worth considering categories of risk posed by different substances, as listed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is an intergovernmental agency forming part of the World Health Organization of the United Nations. The top few categories are:

Group 1: carcinogenic to humans: There is enough evidence to conclude that it can cause cancer in humans.

Group 2A: probably carcinogenic to humans: There is strong evidence that it can cause cancer in humans, but at present it is not conclusive.

Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic to humans: There is some evidence that it can cause cancer in humans but at present it is far from conclusive. 

Alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking have been labelled carcinogenic to humans (Group 1) by IARC in Press Release No 196 of 2009. Visit https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1333 to see the very tough law that requires every cigarette packet to say that cigarettes are addictive, cause fatal lung disease, cancer, strokes and heart disease and that smoking can kill you. I have not given a full list, but you can read them in the reference given. 

Compare this with the warning specified by the Alcoholic Beverages Act, USA:

(1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects.

(2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.

Also, compare this with the warning on my bottle of an Indian beer bottle: 

  ALCOHOL CONTENTS LESS THAN 5%V/V

  DRINKING IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH

The World Health Organization says about cancers that "Around one third of cancer deaths are due to the 5 leading behavioural and dietary risks: high body mass index, low fruit and vegetable intake, lack of physical activity, tobacco use, alcohol use".

WHO reports that tobacco kills around 6 million people each year. More than 5 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while more than 600 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

Now consider the connection between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. Visit Alcohol and Cancer Risk put out by the (US) National Cancer Institute. It lists many types of cancer that have been shown to be linked with alcohol consumption. 

WHO says about alcohol that “in 2012, about 3.3 million net deaths, or 5.9% of all global deaths, were attributable to alcohol consumption”.

Examine all this in the light of what is reported about risks from talcum powder usage. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc says that “Suspicions have been raised that its use contributes to certain types of disease, mainly cancers of the ovaries and lungs. It is classified in the same 2B category in the IARC listing as mobile phones and coffee”. It also says that “The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers talc (magnesium silicate) to be generally recognized as safe (GRAS) for use as an anti-caking agent in table salt in concentrations smaller than 2%.”

I am not saying that using talcum powder is harmless. My case is that considering the far higher risk posed by alcohol, the warnings provided to customers are inadequate. The data given above shows that cancer deaths due to tobacco smoking worldwide were approximately 1.6 million. I believe that adequate attention has been given to this and effective warnings have been made legally necessary. On the other hand, the data given above shows that “3.3 million net deaths” worldwide in 2012 were attributable to alcohol consumption. To merely warn me that “drinking is injurious to health” is gross injustice.

There is another form injustice in labeling alcoholic beverages. Visit Alcohol calorie calculator This NIH publication says that “Alcohol beverages supply calories but few nutrients and may contribute to unwanted weight gain. If you need to lose weight, looking at your drinking may be a good place to start”. If you buy lemon drop candy for a child, the nutrition information tells you that it provides 18 calories per piece, but my bottle containing a pint of beer that provides 180 calories is not required to carry any label about that.

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City Location Codes (CLCs)

Mammals, particularly carnivores like tigers, have evolved rather simple ways of marking trees to show that they form part of the boundary of their territory. Forget any imagery you associate with that statement! We will go on to discuss more civilized forms of marking up places in a city or town for vehicles ordered through apps to meet you!

The problem I discuss here may be relatively more significant to people like me living in a fast-growing, crowded city using multiple languages.  GPS, I find is not enough to guide a cab driver trying to find me in a crowded area. I am one of 300 people he finds in a place where his GPS says I am. If I make the mistake standing at an intersection of two roads, he does not know which one of the four corners I am in. On a straight road, it is difficult to convey on which side of the road I am waiting. I don’t know from which direction he is coming towards me. He calls me on the phone sometimes, but we do not always find a common language. Even if that is no problem, I am often unable to describe where I stand. Street names are kept a state secret here! In any case, there are so many streets, and so many streets with popular names different from official names, nobody seems to use street names anymore. Landmarks are fine, but they are usually not where I stand!

I would like to suggest a solution, not entirely original. Cities like Singapore have numbers painted at prominent places where cabs pick up passengers. I will suggest that we use a code of the form BL 959,574. If you are a resident of Bangalore and you are using an app, “BL” could be pre-filled. If you insist, we can add a country code and say INBL instead of BL, to make it clear we refer to Bangalore, India. Suppose you are at a cab pickup place displaying a prominent dark green colored sign board, with BL 959,574 painted on it in white. All you need to do is to enter BL 959,574 into the app to say where you are. The cab driver can locate you very easily. Incidentally, in this code BL 959,574 stands for Tipu Sultan’s Palace in Bangalore.

The proposal is that a two-letter code should identify a city; I would suspect about 300 cities/towns could find easily a two-letter code each that identifies them uniquely. For smaller towns, I would suggest three letter codes.

How do you assign a numeric code? Take the latitude and longitude of a given location, each written as a decimal number rounded off to three significant places after the decimal point. Leave out the integer part. For instance, Tipu Sultan’s palace is at a place close to the point (12.959 N, 77.574 E). For our purpose, we simplify this as (959, 574) and write it as BL 959,574. Small errors do not matter as long the sign saying BL 959,574 is close enough to the place indicated and is very visible to people looking for it. If your city fits in a 100 KM x 100 KM square, this system is enough to give you unique codes for locations in the city. Any shopkeeper could mention such a code in advertisements to say where the shop is. You can give a code to your visitor to say where your home is. However, I hope that the pickup points with display signs would be regulated so that it is at a place suitable for at least 30 people to wait, protected from rain/sun, with space on the street for five vehicles to stand at a time.

Search engines such as Google could easily incorporate these codes into their city maps. Users can specify “from” and “to” addresses succinctly and accurately to apps used for ordering cabs. It is worth stating that the proposal primarily aims to make GPS location information easy to use by humans. Google API offers facilities for finding Latitude/Longitude information of a given place. It also supports mapping a point identified by such geocoding information onto a map. Students should experiment with such facilities to implement user-friendly interfaces using CLCs.

There is an interesting idea relevant to those who design apps to use CLCs. Consider CH 202,271. It is easy to find that this is the CLC of Edayanchavadi, Chennai, if you know its GPS coordinates: 13.202 N, 77.271 E. But there are places south of Latitude 13.000 N in Chennai. So, how does an app determine that the given CLC corresponds to Longitude 13.202 N and not to 12.202N? This requires that the app have access to information in some form indicating CH CLCs are to be mapped to the Latitude range 12.845:13.262 and the Longitude range 80.080:80.329. (The latitude and longitude ranges given are only indicative. App implementers should double check these ranges).

A question that may arise in the reader’s mind is this: Do you expect the common man to use a location indicator like 959,574? Yes, after all the common man does use ten-digit mobile phone numbers! The simplest way to get such location indicators is through search engines, audio search engines, contact information stored on phones, etc. Don’t under-estimate the common man! He learns quite a bit, when necessary.

I have another suggestion to simplify urban life. App based transport companies such as Uber and Ola should sell caps of distinct colors for their users to wear. Then drivers would know who is likely to be the customer that called them.  Their vehicles could sport a flag with the chosen color for the users to identify their cab.

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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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