Reducing the loss of Cellphones using a watch alert

You might have read this news item:

https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news/how-a-lost-iphone-led-to-warren-buffett-investing-billions-in-apple-569497.html

It talks about a friend of Warren Buffet, who lost his iPhone in a taxi and felt very bad.

There is a simple way to reduce such losses. Assume that the owner of an iPhone is also wearing an Apple watch. It should be easy to arrange for the watch to alert the owner when he moves some distance away from the phone. Loss of the Bluetooth signal from the iPhone can trigger this off. ”Setting” can offer the owner the choice of having this alert on, or turning it off. The watch display can show if the tether is on or off. See also my earlier post related to this topic:

https://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/2019/11/using-activity-tracker-as-wireless-key.html

I am glad to see that a form of this technology is in use now. Visit

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6103523?hl=En

Srinivasan Ramani

 

 

Admissions to IITs and the IISc

We, in India, are usually concerned about marks and entrance examinations.  Lakhs of applicants take the JEE (Main) test and those who get a specified minimum in that test take the JEE (Advanced). Finally, the top 10,000 rankers from the JEE (Advanced) get admission to IITs. There must be a few countries where such severe competition exists. Is there a statistical difference between those are in the 9900-10,000 ranks and in the 11900-12000 rank band? I doubt it.

That is not the end of the story. What do the tests measure? I have heard skeptical comments from many academics about how the exam-coaching industry runs circles round the system!

I was worrying about my daughter’s studying for the exams when she was in the 12^th Grade. “Do you want me to get marks, or get an education, Daddy?”, she asked. The professors know the difference. One of them, from the Indian Institute of Science has written a short article on Linked in which is essential reading for all those interested in the field of higher education. Visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-mayank-shrivastava-06439413/

He tells you how bad Entrance Exam top rankers can be.

Srinivasan Ramani

Software to Make Highways Safe

 Suppose that a Jumbo jet crashed every day in India, killing all passengers in it. A similar number of deaths occur due to road accidents every day (377 deaths/day, or approximately 137,605 deaths/year). The country is not able to do much to reduce the number of these accidents.  I believe that our engineering colleges should do R & D to reduce the number of road fatalities. I will offer suggestions in this article. I hope they will trigger thinking and discussions. 

Reduce Speeding on Highways

India has made FASTags mandatory for highway users https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/netc-fastag/product-overview  This automates the recording of vehicle’s license-plate numbers and the time at which they cross any toll gate. In each case, the distance to the next toll road is known. Therefore, any vehicle exceeding the speed limit between two toll gates can be detected easily. All we need is Internet connectivity to each toll gate. This could be through a landline connection or through a cellular connection. Procedure-wise, rules can authorize the police to seize any over-speeding vehicle unless the driver pays a specified fine on the spot. 

An app running on a PC or even on a cell phone can alert the staff at a toll gate. How many lives would this project save?

Highlight Fatality Sites  

A high fraction of vehicles have someone carrying a smartphone equipped with a map application. We can work with the app service provider to maintain and utilize a nationwide database of road fatalities: locations in which one or more lives were lost within the previous 30 days. As any app user approaches a fatality site the app can indicate this in a suitable manner and give details. The text should be written for the purpose of making users aware of the risks in that segment of the road.

Enabling every road user to be a safety warden  

We see dangerous behavior on highways. These include trucks standing on a highway blocking a lane, vehicles doing illegal turns and road crossings, and vehicles not having the required lights on. Vehicles, usually two-wheelers, running against the traffic. Rarely do we report such problems and provide location information. An app can be developed to work with a map app. The map app could display a red disc or some such prominent icon all the time it is being used. The user should be able to use the icon and activate a reporting mechanism. This should automatically report the location. It should also enable the user to take a photograph optionally and add a short written text. The reporting user’s identity should be protected by encryption but should be available to a court if it is considered essential. The app should not require the user to stop at the place where the risk is present. That location should be identified as one where the user activated the reporting mechanism. The app should allow the user to complete the report within a specified time from the moment the reporting mechanism is activated. 

In conclusion, reduction of risks and fatalities is an essential objective in engineering. Technology can reduce road deaths by at least 25% within the next two years. That is, technology can save over 30,000 lives per year.

Srinivasan Ramani 

This article was originally published in Volume 4 Issue 4 of
Advanced Computing and Communications

 

 

 

Using an Activity Tracker as a Wireless Key

You don’t even need to say Open sesame!

Many of us wear an Activity Tracker (AT) most of the working day, partly because we have thrown our watches away! The ATs communicate with our cell phones by Bluetooth. We usually also carry our cell phone on our person. Women tend to carry purses or small handbags and put their cell phones in them. There is enough technology in the world to create a secure locking mechanism to enable the presence of these two devices to open an electronic lock on our door and to help us login into our computing devices. The cellphone and AT form a fine pair, complementing each other. One can put in special hardware such as a chip containing a private key into the AT. It would be difficult to hack such a system. The cell phone can come from any one of several manufacturers. It can run apps, display an invoice, and verify the user by finger print, face recognition or a PIN.  The cell phone also can use the WLAN and the cellular network.

The proposed system requires careful design if it is to be reasonably secure. Let us anticipate possible problems.

Firstly, the fact that I am inside the house should not open my front door to all and sundry. There must be a distance limiting mechanism which prevents the electronic key working beyond one metre or so. The front door should recognize me only if I am close to it and outside the house. The system should work only if I had identified myself to my cell phone within the previous 24 hours by entering a PIN or by my fingerprint or face recognition. Otherwise it should issue an alert.  If I move away from my Laptop, the system should not log me out, but temporarily lock up my keyboard and shut down the display till I return, when it should turn these on again.

The system should have good enough cryptographic protection to ensure that the chances of my door and laptop being opened by some stranger’s AT should be negligible. Ideally, the system should enable me to share it with my family members. The system should be resistant to hacking.

It would be valuable if a log is maintained on my cell phone or on the cloud showing a record of each time any of my locks was opened by the system. A bonus would be a photo record of every person who entered my home or used my Laptop.

The next step could be to extend the use of this system to make e-payments at POS terminals, and over the Internet. One way would be to equip each AT with a chip that encrypts text strings involved in transactions with my private key. Anyone with my ID string associated with that text string should be able use my public key and decrypt that text string.

The security mechanism should ideally be common to all credit cards and debit cards one uses. One should be able to create a common book-keeping mechanism to build a common account of all expenses incurred through this mechanism.

Widespread use of this mechanism should reduce risks in the payments industry. It should also significantly reduce processing costs, besides opening the doors for new entities to compete with the traditional “card issuers”.

Creating a cryptographically secure mechanism like the one described above for authenticating oneself over the web is essential. With Internet giants such as Google Inc buying AT companies, one can anticipate some developments like this. What would this imply for the world of business? How would it impact the credit card and debit card issuers? What would it mean for banks and their customers?  How can a company prepare itself to be a front-runner in the use of this technology?     

Srinivasan Ramani

Design a Front View Mirror

One of the TV channels showed a harrowing video-clip on the 24^th October 2019, during a news bulletin. I viewed this news bulletin in Bangalore. A three-year old child, wearing a bag and looking as if she was going to her play-school, was walking around a bus parked in the drive way in front of a building. The child was walking one or two feet in front of a standing bus. Just then the bus started moving and knocked the child down and its left front wheel ran over the child. The video had been obviously been recorded by an overhead closed circuit TV camera. The video disturbed me so much that I have been thinking about it frequently the whole day.

I looked up the Web to locate a related news item. This led to another painful experience, showing me shocking reports and photographs of similar “accidents” all over the world.

Buses are often designed such that drivers don’t have near vision in front. Pedestrians and children often pay the price with their lives. A simple solution seems to fix a “front view mirror” to give drivers some near vision in front. This would save lives and also make it easier for bus drivers to avoid pot holes, puppies and kittens on the road. Near vision would also help drivers navigate tight parking areas which force the drivers to take the buses very close to the wall.

Rear view mirrors costing about Rs 5,000 can be modified and fixed on a bus in an appropriate position. I hope that students of design and engineering would do projects and develop this idea further. Equally importantly, we must run campaigns to bring this to the attention of authorities who give permits to buses and lorries.

Please also read

43 CHILDREN DIE IN ROAD ACCIDENTS IN INDIA EVERY DAY
https://sites.ndtv.com/roadsafety/43-children-die-road-accidents-india-every-day-2546/

Srinivasan Ramani

We need a School Science Network

Recently, Dr Anand Oak had suggested that there should be a monthly meeting for school students in Bangalore, to be addressed by an eminent scientist chosen for that month. I have tried to put together information on them. It appears to me that there is room for at least a hundred such efforts in every metropolis. The problem is that most of us interested in them do not network properly. So, we are not aware of many of them.  Perhaps we should now put some effort into networking effectively. The focus need not be on a single city or a single region. The network need not be exclusive to India. It should start as a minimal system, growing to meet the expectation of its members over time. In the beginning, it can merely be a website listing the active member institutions and their events, and giving everyone a moderated online forum to exchange ideas and information.  Later, perhaps the network can encourage event organizers to create good quality video recordings to be made available over the Internet.  

I think lectures at different places given in person by eminent scientists would be valuable. They could be occasional lectures, periodic lectures, etc. under the auspices of various institutions, not necessarily members of the School Science Net. Many good things could come out of having a few hundred lectures a year by good scientists. I would hope that they would inspire many students every year to select their careers based on knowledge and go on reach the highest levels of achievement as mathematicians, scientists, or technologists.

Now, I will go on to list a few relevant events and institutions interested in such events. These are mostly Bangalore based, but any reader can add one or more institutions from anywhere in the comments following this blog post. Anyone trying to create the networking website can use the list of all these events/institutions to get the effort going.  

Science Forum at the National Pre-University College https://npucbasavanagudi.com/bangalore-science-forum-r/ 

Kapi with Kuriosity,
https://www.icts.res.in/outreach/kaapi-with-kuriosity
organized by International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR) in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium and other educational institutions in Bengaluru.

Lectures that can be held in one’s apartment block: Organized by National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru,
https://www.thebetterindia.com/137444/bengaluru-apartments-science-lectures-free-right-your-home/

Popular lectures on science organized by Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium,
http://www.taralaya.org/special-lecture.html

Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences Public Lecture Series

https://www.ncbs.res.in/events/apls

India’s multi-venue-mega-science-exhibition
https://dst.gov.in/indias-multi-venue-mega-science-exhibition-vigyan-samagam-bangalore

Science and Beyond: A Lecture Series from the British Council
https://www.britishcouncil.in/programmes/higher-education/ScienceAndBeyond

Popular Science Science Lecture Series
https://tnsfchennai.github.io/  Co-organized by Anna Centenary Library
& Tamilnadu Science Forum

Srinivasan Ramani

Kudos to Kerala on Efficient Handling of the Nipah Virus Outbreak

Visit Nipah virus: Anatomy of an outbreak a report in the Hindu newspaper.

Kozhikode: Kozhikode and Malappuram districts, where 17 people died of Nipah in May, were declared free of the virus by the Kerala government in July 2018. "A decision to declare both districts as Nipah-virus-free was taken by the government as no fresh cases have been reported after June 1," health minister K.K. Shylaja said. 

She was speaking at an event to felicitate medical teams, support staff and volunteers who fought against the spread of the virus.

Sajeesh, husband of 28-year-old nurse Lini Puthuserry who died after contracting the virus while attending to patients at Perumbra Taluk Hospital, was among those honoured.

The Collectors of Kozhikode and Malapurram districts, U.V. Jose and Amit Kumar Meena, and Manipal Virology Institute director G. Arunkumar were also honoured. Dr A.S. Anoop Kumar of the Kozhikode-based Baby Memorial Hospital was presented with a special award for his efforts to identify and prevent the virus outbreak.

The government had on June 11 lifted the travel advisory it had issued in the wake of the virus and said it was safe to travel to any part of the state.

It is heartening to see how they have managed the crisis efficiently. It is frightening to think of what could have happened if the outbreak had happened in a place where healthcare is not as efficient as it seems to have been in Kerala.

The speed with which Kozhikode’s Baby Memorial Hospital seems to have ruled out alternative hypotheses and suspected Nipah infection is impressive. The availability of a very competent critical care doctor and an equally competent neurologist there to handle the first set of Nipah victims speaks highly of the state of health care in Kerala. 

Credit for the second impressive feat belongs to a private institution in Karnataka – which has been operating the Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR) - and to Dr Arunkumar, Prof and Head of the Department at MCVR. In 2017 MCVR had sent a team to the US Centre for Disease control. One of the actions taken was training some members of the visiting team for testing samples to identify the presence or absence of the Nipah infection. This test can be currently done only at two places in India: National Institute of Virology, Pune and MCVR. 

The Kerala hospital sent samples to MCVR, 300 KM away, for quick identification of the virus involved. MCVR under the Manipal University has also been supported by the Govt of India. This public-private partnership in the critical area of public health shows what can be done in India when dedicated leadership is available.

India as well as the World Health Organization have done the right thing by honouring Lini Puthussery a dedicated healthcare professional who died after taking care of Nipah victims. We need to recognize that the professionals and other staff who work in public health are some of the most valuable people in India. It is necessary to institute annual awards to honour these committed workers.  We must also identify hospitals that maintain readiness to deal with public health emergencies.  

Srinivasan Ramani  

References

1) Nipah virus: Anatomy of an outbreak, Priyanka Pulla, JUNE 02,   
      2018 00:15 IST, UPDATED: JUNE 02, 2018 12:38 IST

2) WHO pays tribute to Kerala nurse who died of Nipah, PTI,
      Jun 05, 2018, 05.12 PM IST

More at: //economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/64465036.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

                                                                      

The Hanging Rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution: 

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

          Srinivasan Ramani       

A Rating for People's Representatives!

Many of us are now used to rating goods and services. The dosa you had in a small restaurant seemed to be the best you have eaten in some time? You write a few lines of review for a site that rates restaurants and give it 4.5 or 5 stars! You thought the driver of the Uber or Ola cab you took to the station could have been more helpful. Ok, give him only three stars!

What about you CM, or your MLA, or your councillor? Why not rate him on a number of dimensions? Voting for/against them once in five years is not good enough. We ought to share our opinions about their deeds and failures almost every month.

The way a leader is to be judged is no doubt very important, but as this is a blog in the field of science and technology, our first priority would be technical issues in designing a rating website. I would suggest the following design objectives:

Credibility: it should be difficult to fool the website and manipulate the data going in

Authentication: The site should ideally work on “one citizen – one vote” principle

Privacy: People who provide ratings may not want some shady company or hackers, to sell a record of their ratings. A good design involves careful consideration of privacy on a site which insists on authentication. One simple design would be to have ratings come in only through SMS messages. No prior registration is required. We can ensure that a cell phone can vote on an issue only once. It can give a rating only to the persons/offices in the state from where it sends a message. I will assume that most users do not care too much about hackers finding out how one’s cell phone voted. After all, in most countries, we are not so scared of the government as to keep our political opinions a secret.       

Simplicity: The system should be based on a good trade off – not too complex to drive users away and not so simple that it can be fooled easily

Accessibility: The system should be accessible from a smart phone. This will deny access to a significant fraction of the Indian population, but it would enable you to build a working system easily. The trade off in this dimension could be examined and different choices can be explored by different groups. What is the value of a smart phone when the votes are cast by SMS? The user can use a smart phone to read the web pages which will help the users to select the issue/person they wish to rate. If the web pages support it, they could answer multiple questions giving answers in the form of a numeral in the range 1-5. The system could summarize answers to six questions, for example, as 325-45 meaning that the six questions were answered as follows, giving ratings on a scale of 5, where 5 is excellent and 1 is very poor:

Question 1: Answer 3

Question 2: Answer 2

Question 3: Answer 5

Question 4: Skipped

Question 5: Answer 4

Question 6: Answer 5

The website would also give a unique ID to the person or office rated, for example SRM for Srinivasan Ramani. The user has to send an SMS to a given number reading, for example as

   SRM 325-45

Why send an SMS, and not submit the answers on the Webpage itself? The security mechanism provided by the cellular network identifies the sender’s cell phone number reliably. In my opinion it is reliable enough for the application and is simple enough to implement. It is also worth noting that the cellular network sends with the SMS the sender’s phone number, the time of sending, and the location from which the message is sent. A computer receiving the messages can use all this information to process them suitably.

The answers I have given to some of the design questions above are not binding on you. You may make your choices. A system like this makes sense only when it operates with a large number of users. So, you need to plan for scalability and reliability. The systems should work round the clock, round the year. Lastly, you need to decide on what your business model would be? Who would pay the bills after the system scales up?

Now, we can turn to the nature of comments and ratings we would like to collect. I have some suggestions about what questions we can ask about representatives and service providing offices but again, in your project, you are free to make your own choices. Please treat my questions as examples what you could ask.

Questions about a people's representative

·        Is he a visionary leader?  (Here and in the following, I merely use “he” to refer to the representative. It can obviously be a “she”).

·        Has he been effective in getting a few major problems solved?

·        Is he known for his integrity?

·        Does he have cronies or sons who are not exactly assets to society?

·        Does he communicate his ideas well?

·        Does he do this frequently?

·        Has he kept his electoral promises?

·        Are you likely to vote for him next time?

Questions about specific issues

·        Should your state have prohibition?

·        Should we ban children below ten being given rides on two-wheelers on city roads or highways?

Questions about specific offices that provide a service

·        Is a given bank branch helpful and efficient?

·        Is a given college a good place to send students to?

·        Is there corruption in a given hospital?

As, I see it, each of these questions is a like raw nerve. The pain-signals of our lives travel through these nerves, but do they bother the person who is responsible for the pain? Usually no! The nerve does not run far enough to touch him.  

Making the ratings public, and highlighting them during election time, are important to make the system sit up and take notice. 

Getting people to rate their representatives and their governments is not exactly new. You can see what other websites offer in this area. Visit

https://thevoterssay.com/ and http://gradegov.com/

There is a lot of room for innovation, but the basic idea is simple: public feedback makes the high and mighty accountable. App-based taxicab services are responsive to people's problems. We should demand that people's representatives and government services be equally responsive.

Srinivasan Ramani

Use of dictation software to teach speech and hearing-impaired

There are millions of deaf children in India. Visit Varshney S. Deafness in India. Indian J Otol, 2016; 22:73-6. http://www.indianjotol.org/text.asp?2016/22/2/73/182281

It is generally believed that those who are hearing-impaired need not be speech impaired. They  cannot hear themselves speak and cannot hear spoken responses from others they are talking to; so, they fail to get feedback on their own speech. This absence of feedback is considered the major factor in the hearing-impaired usually not learning to speak. This raises an interesting question: can we encourage students with this problem to speak into a cell phone running a dictation app to get useful feedback on how their speech is perceived by others? A cellphone with a suitable app is not automatically going to solve the problem. A capable teacher, at home or at school, would usually be important to teach the hearing-impaired to use the tool. Further, the learner should have a working knowledge of English.  The ability to learn more will depend upon the level of language skills at that time. So, we must expect that the side-by-side learning of English and use of this tool will be a process that will take months or years of sustained work. Trained teachers will of course speed up this learning a lot. Visit https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/auditory-oral-education-teaching-deaf-1248

Dictation software of pretty good quality is available on devices such as iPhones and Android phones. I believe you can get cell phones costing less than Rs 4000 (less than USD 70), that can run dictation software. It would be valuable to choose a rugged phone which can stand a few drops, as a broken cell phone can often kill the user’s hope and enthusiasm. A display with a diagonal dimension of  4 inches or more would be useful for this application.

We have to recognise two advances: improvements in the performance of dictation software and wide availability of cell phones to run such software. Also significant is the availability of apps such as WhatsApp that take spoken text messages and send them off to other cell phone users. We empower the hearing-impaired when we give them the ability to send easily created text messages through their cell phones. This enables them to communicate with friends and family irrespective of distance, and without struggling to make a voice call.

The technology discussed above works equally well in enabling people to communicate to the hearing-impaired. The speaker can dictate into any cell phone what they want to say and show the text to the “listener”.

It is worth noting that the cost of the hardware involved is significantly less than that of a good-quality hearing aid, or the cost of a cochlear implant. This is not to argue against hearing aids which have their own value. We should visualise hearing-impaired students using hearing aids as well as cell phones equipped with speech recognition apps. They will complement each other, and together they would enable the users to cope with a whole variety of situations. It is worth noting that hearing aids do not completely solve the problem of poor hearing. Very often hearing-impaired students use affordable hearing aids which do not provide the necessary high quality of user experience. Complementing them with speech recognition apps on cell phones is a good way to to reduce the problems faced by the students, and to speed up their learning.

Can we use an Indian language in this context? I have only focused on English in this article, but Google Docs is able to cope with 40 different languages (as of March 2018), irrespective of your using it on a computer or on (an Android)  cell phone. The one Indian language included in this list of 40 is Hindi. However, I have not tried voice typing in Hindi with Google Docs. Any user interested in this should expect to spend some time learning relevant information and skills. Postings on the Web say that your Google Doc app should be up-to-date and that you should go to settings, then languages, and add Hindi. I am sure that good dictation software will become available in all major Indian languages over the years.  

Lastly, the most wide-spread use of dictation software in India would be among users with normal hearing who wish to improve the way they speak English.

Srinivasan Ramani

The search drone problem

Imagine that a search drone is on the look-out for a submarine that is careful to avoid detection. The controllers of the drone have been given a convex polygonal area on the surface of the sea and told that the drone should search the area inside that polygon. Assume that the drone flies at 150 KM per hour and the polygonal space covers roughly an area of 60,000 Sq. KM. Further assume that the drone flies at a height of 1 KM above the sea and its sensors can detect the submarine if it is inside a circle, 1 KM diameter, with its centre directly beneath the drone.  

Your task is to program a flight pattern for the drone. You can assume the availability of a function in(X, Y) in the control computer, that returns 1 if the drone’s current position (X, Y) is inside the polygon and 0 otherwise.

It is desirable that the drone’s path be relatively unpredictable, and that all places inside the polygon have equal chances of being visited to the extent possible.

Can you write a program that would plot the scan pattern showing how it would fly the drone over the given area? Use any graphical display software to provide a dynamic display.

Assume that the maximum underwater speed of the submarine is 10 KM per hour when it is trying to evade detection. What would be a good strategy for the submarine to avoid detection under these circumstances? Assume that the submarine gets to sense where the drone is, if it gets within 4 KM of horizontal distance. Try programming this strategy and show the path of the submarine on the display in a different color. 

Srinivasan Ramani

An app to manage greetings over the Internet

We have been hearing about air pollution in New Delhi, with the Diwali crackers being the last straw. Most of us suffer from an online phenomenon that is a comparable nuisance.

Someone starts with a list of about a hundred colleagues and sends them all a common greeting the day before the New Year, Diwali, or something like that. The hundred of us blindly “reply to all” in the list sending our own greetings to everyone on the list. Then every one of us spends the festive occasion deleting the greetings received. Ten thousand minutes wasted. The emails serve one purpose – it tells the recipients that the sender is alive and is fit to use email.

Then comes greetings from your bank, the shop where you bought lettuce, some miscellaneous jeweler, and hundred others sending you greetings on the occasion. Many of them send you birthday greetings! Very touching to get a birthday greeting from your bank! The same bank that, when asked for a form, tells you that your request would be attended to in three working days!

There can be many ways of tackling this near-spam enterprise. The best would be for email software to identify pure greeting messages and put them in a separate folder. The software can make a consolidated list of senders available for inspection. You should be able to click on a sender’s name and send a message prepared by you in advance – one designed to be sent to all those who greet you. An email generated by a click should be going only to a single person, unless you indicate that it should be otherwise.

The solution could also be in the form of a well-designed app which people could use for sending greetings, in place of email. Would users be interested in one more app? Can we make it attractive enough to find a big clientele?

There are many possibilities. The app could possibly be branded in the name of a sponsor like Red Cross, UNICEF or other NGO and be popularized by them sending URLs through email. The apps could be linked to an e-wallet like PayTM by the user who downloads it. Every time the users send greetings, the app could transfer a pre-set sum of money, like say Rs 5 or 10, to the NGO. The app’s development and operations cost could be paid by an e-commerce site like “Favorites of my city”, and the app could offer a feature for the users to send gift packets through the e-commerce site when they send a greeting.

The app could be enhanced in many other ways. For instance, there could be a provision for the user to send a canned short message, such as the following:

“The kids are growing up well. Rama choreographed a dance item for the Diwali event at her school. She also fooled her grandma by making a phone call, in a voice resembling that of an uncle. Vinay is busy building his model planes.”

The app could also allow the user to type in a few lines of a customized message to selected recipients.

Srinivasan Ramani

Putting STOP signs on the Google Map

Can we put up traffic signs on something like Google maps using a suitable app to display them to drivers of vehicles at the appropriate time? You might wish to experiment, starting with 

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/start

The other day my wife and I saw a distressing scene at a street corner; three girls who were sharing a scooter had been in a traffic accident. A car running along an intersecting street had hit them and one girl had a bleeding injury on her face. There was crowd around them offering help. The car involved was there on the side of the street and a young man who seemed to be the one who had driven that car was involved in helping the unhappy girls.

It is often pointed out that traffic is chaotic in India. Part of this is due to the absence of any enforcement of traffic discipline. Part of this due to the absence of essential traffic signs such as a STOP sign to show that traffic on the intersecting street have the right of way. Millions of vehicles rush through intersections free of any discipline. Any aggressive driver gets his way, till the day he crosses the path of an even more aggressive one!

Many drivers have a navigational aid mounted on their dashboard or windshield. The map app will use stored data to identify when your vehicle is reaching an intersection and if you have the right of way there. If not, it would flash a stop sign. You would bring your vehicle to a complete stop for a moment and then cross the intersection carefully. The app could warn of speed breakers, prohibited turns, one way streets, your exceeding the speed limit etc.

Do virtual street signs absolve the local government of their responsibility to display real-world signs? No, all they can do is to increase your chances of being alive as and when they fulfil their responsibilities!

Joking apart, there is a necessity for the government to get involved. They should participate in any project in this area to put relevant information on maps. They should ensure that there is a standard for encoding this information. The basic information should be made available in the public domain. What about the app developer? Why should he spend a lot of effort to build this national infrastructure? Well, we will give him the rights to display "paying" signs in addition to traffic signs - like the following:

What about liabilities of the app developer? That is no problem; they will show you a link named Terms and Conditions. As usual, you would ignore it and click on "I accept". The 5000-word T & C would include a line absolving the app developer of all and any responsibilities! (Warning! It may not be as simple as that! But you can worry about it when you have a prototype to show the lawyer!)

Lastly, what are the limits to this technology? Will one day even traffic signals will be run off cyber space? Data from users of navigation devices gives statistical information to servers as to how many vehicles cross which intersections and in which direction. Can one use such data from these servers to drive real-world traffic signals in a highly adaptive manner? 

xxxxx

Adarsha’s Star

Please refer to my previous blog post at http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2017/02/what-are-we-hurtling-towards.html

I believe I have given enough time to readers to examine AJ's answer and to discuss it. Over a hundred people have visited the post above. So, it is time now for me to comment on the answer.

AJ (Adarsha Joisa) is right on both counts - the main answer as well as the answer to the sub-question. I had referred to a list of 92 stars brighter than magnitude 2.49. One of these can be said to be “nearest” to Adarsha’s Direction, defined as the intersection of the local meridian and the ecliptic at 6 AM that day. But the star may not be very close to the direction, and may even be more than ten degrees away. 

So, let us change the way we define Adarsha’s Star: On a given day, it will be the star closest to Adarsha’s Direction provided it is in the list of the 170 brightest stars (Visit http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/bright.html ). The dimmest stars in this list are of apparent magnitude 3.0.

The direction of the earth’s orbital velocity around the Sun changes even during the day. So, what is Adarsha’s Star on a given day at 6 AM in Tokyo may not be the one that is Adarsha’s Star at local time 6 AM in Los Angeles on the same day. I am not going to worry about refining the designation of Adarsha’s Star any further now, particularly when none of the 170 brightest stars may be within 5 degrees of Adarsha’s Direction at a given moment.

Let us ask what the purpose of this exercise is. We want to be able to point in a direction in the sky and say that it is the direction of earth’s orbital velocity. Ten degrees of accuracy is good enough for this purpose.

What about planets? The five planets visible to the unaided eye are useful in visualizing what we are hurtling towards at a given time. They have high visibility and are always close to the ecliptic.

Let us look at the sub-question. Many of the 92 stars above magnitude 2.49 are well away from the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic is fairly stable with respect to the stellar background, many of them have no chance in my lifetime, or yours, of being Adarsha’s Star!

What is Adarsha’s Direction today? At Bangalore, the Local Sidereal Time (LST)at 6 AM today (March 9, 2017) was 16 h 53 minutes, as per https://www.iiap.res.in/personnel/reks/software/javascript/calclst.php

(All points in the sky having Right Ascension = LST are on the local meridian, by definition). I looked up a sky map to find a point on the ecliptic which had the right ascension of 16 H 53 Minutes approximately.  I found that this point is within five degrees of the bright star Antares in the constellation Scorpius. That much accuracy will do for me. I am now very happy to know I am hurtling at 110,000 kilometers per hour, roughly towards Antares!

I hope that any policeman who stops me for speeding would have a sense of proportion, and not bother about an extra twenty kilometers per hour or so!    

What are we hurtling towards?

Outline of Virgo Author: AugPi at en.wikipedia, 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

This is not a project idea, but an interesting question. It will help you exercise your reasoning and visualizing skills.
 

At any moment, the earth, as a whole, has a velocity in relation to the solar system due to its orbital motion around the Sun. Consider the stars as providing a frame of reference. If you represent earth’s velocity as a vector, it is pointing roughly in the direction of some star. Given that there are 92 relatively bright stars in the sky (the Wikipedia lists 92 stars brighter than magnitude 2.49), it would be nice to find a way of mapping the earth’s orbital velocity on any given night to one of these 92 stars. Then we can tell anyone interested that the earth is hurtling that night roughly in the direction of that star.  What a simple way to do this mapping? 

The first satisfactory answer posted as a comment on this blog will earn the author an honor. If the first name of the author is, say Herman, we will name star concerned as “Herman’s Star”. (Don’t make a mistake; “Herman” is used only to give an example. The star is going to be named after you!) A second clarification: Herman’s Star is not one particular star. At any given moment, there is one star which qualifies to be called thus. Over a period of time, different stars would qualify to be called Herman’s Star, one after another. To use another example, on any given date there is one Mayor in a given city, but the Mayor is replaced periodically.

A sub-question: Can every one of the 92 stars mentioned above be a Herman’s Star during your lifetime?

Let me not say more, I do not want to give you too many hints!