Hereby, a new metric: Solution cost (SC)
SC = Cost of finding the solution to a particular problem - (Rate at which the applications of the solution become cheaper * t),
t = No. of years across which SC is being tracked.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
Monday, 7 May 2012
The online as offline
The print medium is not the same as the web-based medium, but we still have a tendency to approach the two as if they were the same when it comes to information communication. More specifically, in many newspaper offices in India, the internet and print editions are managed similarly to the point of expecting to reap equal profits from both (at least, that's how the management is modeled). In fact, because the internet does not have space restrictions as stringent as those imposed by a newspaper, and because stories can be uploaded as and when they happen as opposed to having to wait for a day, editors actually believe that such freedoms could only work to the publication's advantage.
Eventually, when the results come in reflecting the newspaper's poor performance on the web, the editors' first reaction is to question the editorial team responsible for managing the internet-desk. If that doesn't work, money is seen to be the problem: the page is redesigned, more funds are pumped in to spruce up the looks and navigation, and the amount of interactive content is increased. All these are fine initiatives, but unfortunately they aren't solutions. They do to the newspaper what taking longevity pills will do to a patient of cancer: he might live longer, but the blight will continue to spread until its death-grip is complete. At this juncture, many people also think that if they took a few steps back, reanalysed the problem, decided to just drop the unlimited space and instant-post assumptions, and rolled out the web edition thereon, things would be fine.
They wouldn't. We forget the effects of mismanagement in the interim period. Misguided decisions introduce their own set of problems into the machine, problems that are more systematic and resilient than the problems caused by assuming there's a lot of space and a lot of time. This mismanagement could manifest in the attitude toward web-based journalism, in the fashion of structuring the editorial team, or in thinking the way the internet-desk communicates with other departments in the newspaper is the way the print-desk does it, too.
Looking at it broadly, the attitude toward web-based journalism and the way the organization is structured become coincidental when those calling the shots are the misguided ones. The web-based medium serves an audience quite different from the one served by the written medium. Knowing that that is so, what sense does it make to have an editor for the internet edition who works as though he's working with the print edition? Because of the limitation on space being absent, for instance, the consequence has been the overloading of web-pages with content - as if it's an online newspaper with a hundred pages.
Very few editors in India decide to leave the sub-standard stories that didn't make the cut to the newspaper alone and instead turn their attention toward enhancing the impression of existing stories. Very few editors use the extra space available to serve every newspaper's original goal: to get the news across. And if ever they fail to do that effectively, it won't matter what else they get right. It's like reducing expenditures by eliminating needs only to buy something that will never be used simply because it comes at a heavily discounted price. If you want to continue to help your cause, use extra space to maximise the benefits arising from good journalism. Don't try to maximise the channels of revenue by exposing readers to the products of sub-standard work.
This matter of benefit-maximisation - while situated in the print framework - matters more on content than on anything else. This is because the most that can be done to a newspaper in terms of its design is to remove it from the way of easy reading as much as is possible. On the web, however, benefits can be maximised by more than just making the reading area less cluttered. There's not only more space but there are also other forms of data-expression. Now, journalists don't just have to choose between using an image or writing some 200 words to convey an idea: they have to pick between interactive infographics, videos, images, and audio clips to convey the message most effectively.
Subsequently, a collateral advantage of publishing on the web is that it gives the publishers an option to capitalise on multi-form content: the more elaborate the news delivery is, the costlier it could become to access it. All such aspects of online publishing have to be managed using a single voice of authority at the helm because their mismanagement is tied in closely with the failure of news-delivery. If the writing, editing, accounts, and web design departments operate autonomously with sizeable communication gaps between them, the reading-the-newspaper-online experience is going to be fragmented and as scatter-brained an affair as the logic behind the divided support driving the initiative.
The internet comes with a host of opportunities and that remains the biggest reason yet for publishers to move to the web to push their content. However, it seems shortsighted and in poor judgment that the people who decide to move online forget that so many opportunities can only come with so many chances for making mistakes. And they make those mistakes frequently and, more worrying, increasingly systematically. The important thing is to not let mismanagement off the hook all that easily - they leave a Yeti-sized footprint behind that must be erased completely before beginning to make way for a new working model.
[caption id="attachment_23041" align="aligncenter" width="529"]
The Times of India is one Indian newspaper that seems to have taken to online publishing well. Their internet publishing mechanism seems well-oiled, and their articles, well-chosen (albeit from the pool of articles they have to choose from). Most importantly, auxiliary systems such as a self-administered payment gateway, smart pagination and a proliferation of their online services that moved at a pace more to their comfort than of the offline edition ensured that users received a an all-round sense of satisfaction when they logged on and off the ToI website.[/caption]
Eventually, when the results come in reflecting the newspaper's poor performance on the web, the editors' first reaction is to question the editorial team responsible for managing the internet-desk. If that doesn't work, money is seen to be the problem: the page is redesigned, more funds are pumped in to spruce up the looks and navigation, and the amount of interactive content is increased. All these are fine initiatives, but unfortunately they aren't solutions. They do to the newspaper what taking longevity pills will do to a patient of cancer: he might live longer, but the blight will continue to spread until its death-grip is complete. At this juncture, many people also think that if they took a few steps back, reanalysed the problem, decided to just drop the unlimited space and instant-post assumptions, and rolled out the web edition thereon, things would be fine.They wouldn't. We forget the effects of mismanagement in the interim period. Misguided decisions introduce their own set of problems into the machine, problems that are more systematic and resilient than the problems caused by assuming there's a lot of space and a lot of time. This mismanagement could manifest in the attitude toward web-based journalism, in the fashion of structuring the editorial team, or in thinking the way the internet-desk communicates with other departments in the newspaper is the way the print-desk does it, too.
Looking at it broadly, the attitude toward web-based journalism and the way the organization is structured become coincidental when those calling the shots are the misguided ones. The web-based medium serves an audience quite different from the one served by the written medium. Knowing that that is so, what sense does it make to have an editor for the internet edition who works as though he's working with the print edition? Because of the limitation on space being absent, for instance, the consequence has been the overloading of web-pages with content - as if it's an online newspaper with a hundred pages.Very few editors in India decide to leave the sub-standard stories that didn't make the cut to the newspaper alone and instead turn their attention toward enhancing the impression of existing stories. Very few editors use the extra space available to serve every newspaper's original goal: to get the news across. And if ever they fail to do that effectively, it won't matter what else they get right. It's like reducing expenditures by eliminating needs only to buy something that will never be used simply because it comes at a heavily discounted price. If you want to continue to help your cause, use extra space to maximise the benefits arising from good journalism. Don't try to maximise the channels of revenue by exposing readers to the products of sub-standard work.
This matter of benefit-maximisation - while situated in the print framework - matters more on content than on anything else. This is because the most that can be done to a newspaper in terms of its design is to remove it from the way of easy reading as much as is possible. On the web, however, benefits can be maximised by more than just making the reading area less cluttered. There's not only more space but there are also other forms of data-expression. Now, journalists don't just have to choose between using an image or writing some 200 words to convey an idea: they have to pick between interactive infographics, videos, images, and audio clips to convey the message most effectively.
Subsequently, a collateral advantage of publishing on the web is that it gives the publishers an option to capitalise on multi-form content: the more elaborate the news delivery is, the costlier it could become to access it. All such aspects of online publishing have to be managed using a single voice of authority at the helm because their mismanagement is tied in closely with the failure of news-delivery. If the writing, editing, accounts, and web design departments operate autonomously with sizeable communication gaps between them, the reading-the-newspaper-online experience is going to be fragmented and as scatter-brained an affair as the logic behind the divided support driving the initiative.
The internet comes with a host of opportunities and that remains the biggest reason yet for publishers to move to the web to push their content. However, it seems shortsighted and in poor judgment that the people who decide to move online forget that so many opportunities can only come with so many chances for making mistakes. And they make those mistakes frequently and, more worrying, increasingly systematically. The important thing is to not let mismanagement off the hook all that easily - they leave a Yeti-sized footprint behind that must be erased completely before beginning to make way for a new working model.
[caption id="attachment_23041" align="aligncenter" width="529"]
The Times of India is one Indian newspaper that seems to have taken to online publishing well. Their internet publishing mechanism seems well-oiled, and their articles, well-chosen (albeit from the pool of articles they have to choose from). Most importantly, auxiliary systems such as a self-administered payment gateway, smart pagination and a proliferation of their online services that moved at a pace more to their comfort than of the offline edition ensured that users received a an all-round sense of satisfaction when they logged on and off the ToI website.[/caption]
Friday, 13 April 2012
Science in India
What really is the attitude toward science in India?
In many of the other countries that do or don't have strong science programmes, the attitude toward science is well known. In China, for example, where the space programme is picking up well, high-speed railway lines are being built, and the annual investment in science has grown at more than 20 per cent annually since 2000 (now in the neighbourhood of $100 billion), there is open support for the cause of science and the role it must play in the country's development. In India, however, investments in R&D are half-hearted in that they don't enjoy or suffer either widespread support or cynicism. Moreover, where in most cases science funding is seen at least as a move toward indigenous military empowerment, India lacks that, too.
In a December 2010 report titled 2011 Global R&D Funding Forecast, going with a study sponsored by R&D Mag, India's share of global R&D spending is 3.0 per cent (0.80% of GDP), measly in comparison with the countries it is seen as competing with: America (34.0%), Japan (12.1%), China (12.9% = 1.44% of GDP), and Europe (23.2%). The immediate solution is definitely not to step up spending but to look at why a country that has used science to rise to where it is now is doing so without any support for it at the basic level, as if it sees science as a mere tool that will be dropped the moment its goals are achieved.
Looking at the status quo from a mediaperson's vantage point, a few habits come immediately to light. The first is a lack of outreach programmes by Indian science institutions. For a country brimming with engineers, there are too few fora that cater to the science-minded. On either sides of the locus charted by science-stream in classes XI and XII, engineering education in either the IITs or the NITs, and then a job with the engineering sector, there is no place to engage with scientists and technicians simply because one might enjoy interacting with them, find out more about what they do and how it is impacting the society at large. The one other place to do all this is from within media circles.
Even in the political sphere, there is abysmal engagement by the politicians with the people and vice versa at the scientific level. Granted, we are only now setting out on a path of getting as many people educated as possible through the means of reservations and constitutionally established compulsions. However, that does not mean there is nothing to look at higher up the pyramid: for becoming the focus of the world for its abundance of engineers and doctors, for launching manned missions to the moon in the near future, and for being at the forefront of nuclear science research, the most politicians are willing to talk about is shutting down crucial nuclear power plants.
[caption id="attachment_22951" align="aligncenter" width="540"]
The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant[/caption]
Apparently, science has already assumed a degenerate form in the country, where it can be sidelined to accrue people-support ahead of the elections. Unfortunately, these are also some of the more easily-kept promises. Science often isn't public opinion, and there is a lot of work required in that direction to mend the people's idea of its importance and the roles it plays in shaping equanimous progress.
Still, where are the broader ambitions that politicians must have about safeguarding the nation's support in the field of cutting-edge physics? Where are the broader ambitions that address the country's role in nuclear non-proliferation (apart from when heads of state come visiting)? Where are the broader ambitions concerned with furthering nanotechnology research in the country in keeping with its growing domination as a centre for medical tourism?
In fact, let us not attend to such broad considerations now: a look at the attitude toward the IT-sector in South India should do. The most successful R&D contribution of J Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, to date has been the setting up of IT parks in and around Chennai (a move borrowed suspiciously from the Hyderabad- and Bangalore-models without too much foresight). As the subsidization of IT products drew in a large volume of software engineers that led to a siphon effect, so also did focus shift away from other non-subsidized industries. Now, the Pallikaranai marshlands on which most of the IT offices are set up have taken a severe beating.
Why? Because we can't seem to understand the importance of a young man's or woman's employment in the same light as the importance of a healthy local ecosystem.
Those within the scientific community are no exception, either. Forget the science outreach programmes—they are only secondary considerations. Instead: where are the science magazines a la Scientific American? Don't Indians possess a tradition of invention and discovery dating back to about 4,000 years? What killed it, then? A couple of days ago, a friend of mine had a tough time locating doctors working on stem cell research in India because university websites were severely outdated! The popular opinion of the sports-and-political-news hegemon is that the paucity of media representation would have driven researchers to speak about their research with quite some zeal, but no. Even contacting a scientist has become a hassle.
[caption id="attachment_22958" align="aligncenter" width="540"]
A good example of a science institution's website that goes nowhere is that of the Department of Biotechnology (affiliated with the Government of India)[/caption]
Moreover, the contactable ones are often tight-lipped when answering questions on studies done by them, and not necessarily on subjects that have debatable ethical concerns attached, such as soil sedimentation, state of plumbing, safety in power plants, metallurgy and materials engineering, greenhouse gas emissions, and renewable energy (quoting from experience). Have their ought-to-be profligate opinions dried up because of the subjects' misguided depiction in the media in the past? How do we fix it?
It is hard to imagine that the answer to these and such questions is colonialism because India's rapid rise to a position of power seems to have caused all the problems. For example, sustained mishandling of the planning, construction and operation of dams alone is sure to have dented rural India's idea of technology. Now, with a disturbing experience of the national government's contumacious attitude toward rural authority, we are obliged to push harder even for all-round legitimate projects. In fact, perspectives have turned so skewed that "all-round legitimacy" has become the rallying point for contention between environmentalists and any kind of developers. Now, you can't say "development" and not be expected to be tossed into a political maelstrom.
Circling back to the first point: what is the attitude toward science in India? The nation has enjoyed a pluralism of cultures, languages, and traditions for centuries now, and is it that science, too, is being granted that privilege? If you think that isn't too bad, think again: the thing about science that it always has one right answer, ergo there is always only one way to use it. Of course, the course of its action can be deftly regulated, but not to a point where many journalists don't or can't understand what science really is up to in the country.
Science is not the Big Dam, the Big Metro Line, the Big Power Plant that displaces thousands of people without sufficient recourse, that robs livelihoods and impregnates men and women with carcinogens, that is the call to arms of the poor against the rich. No!; science is now the helpless instrument in the hands of the short-sighted power-monger, and it must be removed from there. To do so, at least all that I have mentioned in this post must be fixed.
In many of the other countries that do or don't have strong science programmes, the attitude toward science is well known. In China, for example, where the space programme is picking up well, high-speed railway lines are being built, and the annual investment in science has grown at more than 20 per cent annually since 2000 (now in the neighbourhood of $100 billion), there is open support for the cause of science and the role it must play in the country's development. In India, however, investments in R&D are half-hearted in that they don't enjoy or suffer either widespread support or cynicism. Moreover, where in most cases science funding is seen at least as a move toward indigenous military empowerment, India lacks that, too.In a December 2010 report titled 2011 Global R&D Funding Forecast, going with a study sponsored by R&D Mag, India's share of global R&D spending is 3.0 per cent (0.80% of GDP), measly in comparison with the countries it is seen as competing with: America (34.0%), Japan (12.1%), China (12.9% = 1.44% of GDP), and Europe (23.2%). The immediate solution is definitely not to step up spending but to look at why a country that has used science to rise to where it is now is doing so without any support for it at the basic level, as if it sees science as a mere tool that will be dropped the moment its goals are achieved.
Looking at the status quo from a mediaperson's vantage point, a few habits come immediately to light. The first is a lack of outreach programmes by Indian science institutions. For a country brimming with engineers, there are too few fora that cater to the science-minded. On either sides of the locus charted by science-stream in classes XI and XII, engineering education in either the IITs or the NITs, and then a job with the engineering sector, there is no place to engage with scientists and technicians simply because one might enjoy interacting with them, find out more about what they do and how it is impacting the society at large. The one other place to do all this is from within media circles.Even in the political sphere, there is abysmal engagement by the politicians with the people and vice versa at the scientific level. Granted, we are only now setting out on a path of getting as many people educated as possible through the means of reservations and constitutionally established compulsions. However, that does not mean there is nothing to look at higher up the pyramid: for becoming the focus of the world for its abundance of engineers and doctors, for launching manned missions to the moon in the near future, and for being at the forefront of nuclear science research, the most politicians are willing to talk about is shutting down crucial nuclear power plants.
[caption id="attachment_22951" align="aligncenter" width="540"]
The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant[/caption]Apparently, science has already assumed a degenerate form in the country, where it can be sidelined to accrue people-support ahead of the elections. Unfortunately, these are also some of the more easily-kept promises. Science often isn't public opinion, and there is a lot of work required in that direction to mend the people's idea of its importance and the roles it plays in shaping equanimous progress.
Still, where are the broader ambitions that politicians must have about safeguarding the nation's support in the field of cutting-edge physics? Where are the broader ambitions that address the country's role in nuclear non-proliferation (apart from when heads of state come visiting)? Where are the broader ambitions concerned with furthering nanotechnology research in the country in keeping with its growing domination as a centre for medical tourism?
In fact, let us not attend to such broad considerations now: a look at the attitude toward the IT-sector in South India should do. The most successful R&D contribution of J Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, to date has been the setting up of IT parks in and around Chennai (a move borrowed suspiciously from the Hyderabad- and Bangalore-models without too much foresight). As the subsidization of IT products drew in a large volume of software engineers that led to a siphon effect, so also did focus shift away from other non-subsidized industries. Now, the Pallikaranai marshlands on which most of the IT offices are set up have taken a severe beating.Why? Because we can't seem to understand the importance of a young man's or woman's employment in the same light as the importance of a healthy local ecosystem.
Those within the scientific community are no exception, either. Forget the science outreach programmes—they are only secondary considerations. Instead: where are the science magazines a la Scientific American? Don't Indians possess a tradition of invention and discovery dating back to about 4,000 years? What killed it, then? A couple of days ago, a friend of mine had a tough time locating doctors working on stem cell research in India because university websites were severely outdated! The popular opinion of the sports-and-political-news hegemon is that the paucity of media representation would have driven researchers to speak about their research with quite some zeal, but no. Even contacting a scientist has become a hassle.
[caption id="attachment_22958" align="aligncenter" width="540"]
A good example of a science institution's website that goes nowhere is that of the Department of Biotechnology (affiliated with the Government of India)[/caption]Moreover, the contactable ones are often tight-lipped when answering questions on studies done by them, and not necessarily on subjects that have debatable ethical concerns attached, such as soil sedimentation, state of plumbing, safety in power plants, metallurgy and materials engineering, greenhouse gas emissions, and renewable energy (quoting from experience). Have their ought-to-be profligate opinions dried up because of the subjects' misguided depiction in the media in the past? How do we fix it?
It is hard to imagine that the answer to these and such questions is colonialism because India's rapid rise to a position of power seems to have caused all the problems. For example, sustained mishandling of the planning, construction and operation of dams alone is sure to have dented rural India's idea of technology. Now, with a disturbing experience of the national government's contumacious attitude toward rural authority, we are obliged to push harder even for all-round legitimate projects. In fact, perspectives have turned so skewed that "all-round legitimacy" has become the rallying point for contention between environmentalists and any kind of developers. Now, you can't say "development" and not be expected to be tossed into a political maelstrom.Circling back to the first point: what is the attitude toward science in India? The nation has enjoyed a pluralism of cultures, languages, and traditions for centuries now, and is it that science, too, is being granted that privilege? If you think that isn't too bad, think again: the thing about science that it always has one right answer, ergo there is always only one way to use it. Of course, the course of its action can be deftly regulated, but not to a point where many journalists don't or can't understand what science really is up to in the country.
Science is not the Big Dam, the Big Metro Line, the Big Power Plant that displaces thousands of people without sufficient recourse, that robs livelihoods and impregnates men and women with carcinogens, that is the call to arms of the poor against the rich. No!; science is now the helpless instrument in the hands of the short-sighted power-monger, and it must be removed from there. To do so, at least all that I have mentioned in this post must be fixed.
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
The time void
There is a problem. It's hidden beneath a layer of pride that, in my opinion, is misguided and instigative. Nonetheless, it persists and must be noted.
[caption id="attachment_22543" align="alignleft" width="352" caption="QXP 6's user interface"]
[/caption]
I rediscovered it when I was first introduced to QuarkXPress 6.0 around 6 months ago. The software is used to design newspaper pages and other printed entities where content positioning is of some importance, like business cards. Working with it is a cumbersome affair. For one, the interface is outdated and had to have been put together without any awareness of the GUI design philosophies that were around in the early 2000s. For another, there is no sense of structure: where different tools could have been grouped together under one tab for convenience, there are none. All its myriad capabilities are there simply because they can be there; there is no purpose - which lends itself to different users in different forms for different reasons.
All this is forgivable because they are visible problems, problems that we known are there but problems that don't exactly interfere with what the software seems useful for. The issue is that QXP - as it is taught in classrooms in journalism colleges (which is an assumption I freely make because ACJ, where I study, is one of the better places to study journalism in India, and ACJ uses QXP) - consumes valuable time that could have been spent learning either what succeeded it, such as Adobe InDesign, or learning entirely something else.
The reason I say this is because once I graduate and find myself employed (hopefully), QXP is only going to take me so far. After a point, once professional demands are stepped up - an inevitable scenario - I will have to abandon the knowledge I have and spend some more time learning may way around a successor technology.
This is a problem that my friend and I addressed in early 2008, albeit superficially, by understanding its repercussions in the context of a school-goer. The principle bone of contention is that there is a loss of time: where only X hours should be spent in learning how to tackle a problem, at least 2X hours are spent.
Before I proceed, let me introduce, with relevance to this discussion, three phases within which some technology will exist in its lifetime.
(The titles are self-explanatory.)
Suppose a typical industrialist in a developed nation has come up with a new idea which is yet to be implemented productively in the global scene. He will invest his money in hiring scientists, programmers, etc., and in research and development of the product. When he releases the product into the market, it will surface as an emerging technology. Subsequently, the cost of this technology will be very high. There will still be buyers because of the originality of the idea and changes this idea can bring in to their lives.
From the money earned through this venture (profits), the industrialist will begin another project, hiring the intellectual cream of the world and invest the rest (or part of it) in R&D. This cycle is almost perpetual and has many side-effects.
When an industrialist in a developing nation is in the same situation and wants to commence a new project, the path will take be markedly different. Even though he or she may have sufficient funds for the venture, the risks involved in undertaking such a task in a developing scenario are comparatively higher. Also, owing to the inefficient cash flow channels, the money involved in this task will have to be either consumed by the labor force alone, or R&D alone. In such a situation, the industrialist will go for an easier solution: purchasing the product directly from the industrialist in the developed nation.
Now, on acquiring a new piece technology, the user has to get acquainted with its pros and cons and must be able to manipulate it to yield productive results. This process can take quite some time. At the end of this learning session, the user is now able to stand on the concepts of this idea and think of newer ones that surpass the existing level (innovation). In the developing nation, by the time the user has acquired the skills of the product he or she has purchased, newer ideas would have cropped up. This pushes the skills of the user to the old phase. He now has to start all over again just to sustain himself.
[caption id="attachment_22542" align="aligncenter" width="533" caption="On the x-axis, time, and on the y, phases of technology from 'Outdated' at the bottom to 'Emerging' at the top. Moving forward in time, the lines indicate progress. In the section between 'New' and 'Emerging' technologies, the way students and professionals in developed countries function is represented. As for those from developing countries, the representation is between 'Old' and 'New' technologies. Now, the orange line indicates the way a developing country moves forward, the green line the way we ought to move, and the blue line the way developed countries move."]
[/caption]
In any country, the academic curriculum and everything that we perceive is relative to the state of the technology that is in use. Our syllabi at school are framed on the basis of what is known and may be useful for the student. On the completion of education, when the student is emerging as a professional in some field, he will be exposed to the contemporary and practical scenario.
In a developed nation, the vicious circle is firmly established and running. The technological output out of this circle will be in the emerging phase when the individual is studying and will have evolved into the present or new phase when the individual becomes a professional. At this stage, the knowledge of the person will accommodate the concepts held by the present ideas. This way, he can use the present product and utilize it to bring in improvisations, as well as create new ones.
In a developing nation, owing to the vicious circle and economic risks, the students are masked from the news that a new product or idea has emerged elsewhere by their curriculum and syllabus. This way, when they emerge as professionals in their field of choice, they face a dilemma: owing to the emergence of a newer product, the knowledge they now have is shifted back into the old phase. To correct this, they undergo training and workshops before they can work and think productively.
This is a hidden problem and must be corrected as soon as possible.
[caption id="attachment_22543" align="alignleft" width="352" caption="QXP 6's user interface"]
[/caption]I rediscovered it when I was first introduced to QuarkXPress 6.0 around 6 months ago. The software is used to design newspaper pages and other printed entities where content positioning is of some importance, like business cards. Working with it is a cumbersome affair. For one, the interface is outdated and had to have been put together without any awareness of the GUI design philosophies that were around in the early 2000s. For another, there is no sense of structure: where different tools could have been grouped together under one tab for convenience, there are none. All its myriad capabilities are there simply because they can be there; there is no purpose - which lends itself to different users in different forms for different reasons.
All this is forgivable because they are visible problems, problems that we known are there but problems that don't exactly interfere with what the software seems useful for. The issue is that QXP - as it is taught in classrooms in journalism colleges (which is an assumption I freely make because ACJ, where I study, is one of the better places to study journalism in India, and ACJ uses QXP) - consumes valuable time that could have been spent learning either what succeeded it, such as Adobe InDesign, or learning entirely something else.
The reason I say this is because once I graduate and find myself employed (hopefully), QXP is only going to take me so far. After a point, once professional demands are stepped up - an inevitable scenario - I will have to abandon the knowledge I have and spend some more time learning may way around a successor technology.
This is a problem that my friend and I addressed in early 2008, albeit superficially, by understanding its repercussions in the context of a school-goer. The principle bone of contention is that there is a loss of time: where only X hours should be spent in learning how to tackle a problem, at least 2X hours are spent.
Before I proceed, let me introduce, with relevance to this discussion, three phases within which some technology will exist in its lifetime.
- Old
- Present/new
- Emerging
(The titles are self-explanatory.)
Suppose a typical industrialist in a developed nation has come up with a new idea which is yet to be implemented productively in the global scene. He will invest his money in hiring scientists, programmers, etc., and in research and development of the product. When he releases the product into the market, it will surface as an emerging technology. Subsequently, the cost of this technology will be very high. There will still be buyers because of the originality of the idea and changes this idea can bring in to their lives.
From the money earned through this venture (profits), the industrialist will begin another project, hiring the intellectual cream of the world and invest the rest (or part of it) in R&D. This cycle is almost perpetual and has many side-effects.
When an industrialist in a developing nation is in the same situation and wants to commence a new project, the path will take be markedly different. Even though he or she may have sufficient funds for the venture, the risks involved in undertaking such a task in a developing scenario are comparatively higher. Also, owing to the inefficient cash flow channels, the money involved in this task will have to be either consumed by the labor force alone, or R&D alone. In such a situation, the industrialist will go for an easier solution: purchasing the product directly from the industrialist in the developed nation.
Now, on acquiring a new piece technology, the user has to get acquainted with its pros and cons and must be able to manipulate it to yield productive results. This process can take quite some time. At the end of this learning session, the user is now able to stand on the concepts of this idea and think of newer ones that surpass the existing level (innovation). In the developing nation, by the time the user has acquired the skills of the product he or she has purchased, newer ideas would have cropped up. This pushes the skills of the user to the old phase. He now has to start all over again just to sustain himself.
[caption id="attachment_22542" align="aligncenter" width="533" caption="On the x-axis, time, and on the y, phases of technology from 'Outdated' at the bottom to 'Emerging' at the top. Moving forward in time, the lines indicate progress. In the section between 'New' and 'Emerging' technologies, the way students and professionals in developed countries function is represented. As for those from developing countries, the representation is between 'Old' and 'New' technologies. Now, the orange line indicates the way a developing country moves forward, the green line the way we ought to move, and the blue line the way developed countries move."]
[/caption]In any country, the academic curriculum and everything that we perceive is relative to the state of the technology that is in use. Our syllabi at school are framed on the basis of what is known and may be useful for the student. On the completion of education, when the student is emerging as a professional in some field, he will be exposed to the contemporary and practical scenario.
In a developed nation, the vicious circle is firmly established and running. The technological output out of this circle will be in the emerging phase when the individual is studying and will have evolved into the present or new phase when the individual becomes a professional. At this stage, the knowledge of the person will accommodate the concepts held by the present ideas. This way, he can use the present product and utilize it to bring in improvisations, as well as create new ones.
In a developing nation, owing to the vicious circle and economic risks, the students are masked from the news that a new product or idea has emerged elsewhere by their curriculum and syllabus. This way, when they emerge as professionals in their field of choice, they face a dilemma: owing to the emergence of a newer product, the knowledge they now have is shifted back into the old phase. To correct this, they undergo training and workshops before they can work and think productively.
This is a hidden problem and must be corrected as soon as possible.
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Understanding accelerator luminosity
Advanced physics is essentially a study in precision, and the particle accelerators of today that are located at the cutting-edge Intensity and Energy Frontiers work against approximations everyday. The particles they synthesize, track and study are so small, quick and short-lived that they might as well have simply popped in and out of existence and nothing would've changed. However, fortunately, that's not the point of studying these things at all: understanding why the "popping" happens at all is what is key.
[caption id="attachment_21639" align="aligncenter" width="346" caption="Some famous accelerators: (clockwise from top-left) Kō Enerugī Kasokuki Kenkyū Kikō (KEK), Japan; Tevatron at FERMILAB; CERN's Large Hadron Collider; and LINAC at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre."]
[/caption]
At the world's most powerful collider, the LHC at CERN, two proton beams are shot around 27-km long rings. These are not continuous beams but ones intermittently segregated into bunches, like a pulse. Each of these bunches contains 2,808 protons (which are the hadrons in question) and there are 1,000 bunches per beam. It is ensured that the bunches from the rings don't cross each other - "collide" - more than once every 25 nanoseconds. At this rate, 112.32 billion protons - 56.16 billion from each side - meet each other every second. This is what every particle accelerator makes possible: a rendezvous.
Once this is done, the detectors take over, and they are the real measure of an accelerator's performance. The accelerator will have ensured that enough collisions occur so that the detector can record at least one (even though I'm understating the ratio, it is really quite small). Ergo, to measure a detector's performance as either being good or bad, or perhaps even as somewhere in between in the rare case, how much it is capable of seeing is what makes the difference. This is where luminosity comes in.
The generic definition of luminosity is that it is a measure of the quantity of light that passes through an area each second, and so its units are per metre-squared per second. Accelerator physics adopted this definition and modified it a little: accelerator luminosity is a measure of the number of particles that pass through a given area each second multiplied by the opacity of the detector. This final parameter is necessary because it also accounts for the tendency of some particles to escape detection by passing right through the target: if the target's opacity is high, most particles will be "seen", and if it is low, most particles will be invisible to the cameras' eyes.
(Even though the definition of luminosity indicates the number of particles that pass through an area per second, its meaning in the confines of an accelerator changes: it is the number particles that are seen by a detector irrespective of how many particles there are in total.)
Inside the accelerator and in the presence of the detector, the following differential equation dictates the machine's luminosity:
Here, σ is the total cross section of the detector - the area that is exposed to and receives the stream of particles, N the number of particles, L the instantaneous luminosity, and t the duration over which the detector remains in operation. The opacity affects σ. (The 'd' denotes that the value of the parameter is being considered for an infinitesimal period of time, as indicated by the dt in the denominator. If it was dx or dy instead of dt, it would mean the value of N is being considered over a very small distance in the x or y direction.)
If Ω (omega) were the solid angle through which the detector's cross section was exposed, its differential cross section is computed as
This formula gives the luminosity with respect to the angular cross section (as opposed to a planar surface) as the number of particles per degree per second, and from here, the number of particles per volume of space can be easily computed. The formula also shows that the greater the detecting cross section per degree of solid angle, the greater the luminosity per degree of the same angle (or, "particle-seeability"). And for the detector to be useful at all, the instantaneous luminosity has to be high enough to detect particles so small that... well, they're incredibly small. Therefore, the smaller the particle being studied, the larger the detector will be.
There is no better way to illustrate this conclusion than to point, again, to the LHC, where the Higgs boson particle, one of the smallest particles conceivable, a veritable building block of nature, is being hunted by the world's largest detector (which also has a misleading name): the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The CMS, weighing 12,500 tons, has been able to achieve an astounding integrated (as in not instantaneous) luminosity of 1 per femtobarn: 1 barn is one-hundred-billion-billion-billionth of a squared metre; 1 femtobarn is one-million-billionth of that!
[caption id="attachment_21633" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="The total integrated luminosity delivered to and collected by CMS until 17th June, 2011."]
[/caption]
Another detector at the site, the much more prolific A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) weighs 7,000 tons and has a luminosity of 50 per femtobarn. The under-construction iron-calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) in Theni, Tamil Nadu, will weigh 50,000 tons after being completed in 2015 and will be used to track and study neutrinos exclusively. Neutrinos are particles more elusive than the Higgs, and, though the luminosity of ICAL hasn't been disclosed, we can expect the device to be one of the pioneers in detector technology simply because its luminosity must be that low for the project to be a success.
This much and more can be said of accelerator luminosity. While the media goes gaga over the energies at which the beams are being accelerated, there is a silent revolution in detector technology happening in the background, a revolution that is spawning brilliant techniques to spot the fastest, smallest and most volatile particles. These detectors also consume the greater part of accelerator budgets to build and the greater part of total maintenance time. Some of the most advanced detectors in existence include hadronic calorimeters (HCAL), ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors (RICH detectors) and muon spectrometers.
[caption id="attachment_21639" align="aligncenter" width="346" caption="Some famous accelerators: (clockwise from top-left) Kō Enerugī Kasokuki Kenkyū Kikō (KEK), Japan; Tevatron at FERMILAB; CERN's Large Hadron Collider; and LINAC at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre."]
[/caption]At the world's most powerful collider, the LHC at CERN, two proton beams are shot around 27-km long rings. These are not continuous beams but ones intermittently segregated into bunches, like a pulse. Each of these bunches contains 2,808 protons (which are the hadrons in question) and there are 1,000 bunches per beam. It is ensured that the bunches from the rings don't cross each other - "collide" - more than once every 25 nanoseconds. At this rate, 112.32 billion protons - 56.16 billion from each side - meet each other every second. This is what every particle accelerator makes possible: a rendezvous.
Once this is done, the detectors take over, and they are the real measure of an accelerator's performance. The accelerator will have ensured that enough collisions occur so that the detector can record at least one (even though I'm understating the ratio, it is really quite small). Ergo, to measure a detector's performance as either being good or bad, or perhaps even as somewhere in between in the rare case, how much it is capable of seeing is what makes the difference. This is where luminosity comes in.
The generic definition of luminosity is that it is a measure of the quantity of light that passes through an area each second, and so its units are per metre-squared per second. Accelerator physics adopted this definition and modified it a little: accelerator luminosity is a measure of the number of particles that pass through a given area each second multiplied by the opacity of the detector. This final parameter is necessary because it also accounts for the tendency of some particles to escape detection by passing right through the target: if the target's opacity is high, most particles will be "seen", and if it is low, most particles will be invisible to the cameras' eyes.
(Even though the definition of luminosity indicates the number of particles that pass through an area per second, its meaning in the confines of an accelerator changes: it is the number particles that are seen by a detector irrespective of how many particles there are in total.)
Inside the accelerator and in the presence of the detector, the following differential equation dictates the machine's luminosity:
Here, σ is the total cross section of the detector - the area that is exposed to and receives the stream of particles, N the number of particles, L the instantaneous luminosity, and t the duration over which the detector remains in operation. The opacity affects σ. (The 'd' denotes that the value of the parameter is being considered for an infinitesimal period of time, as indicated by the dt in the denominator. If it was dx or dy instead of dt, it would mean the value of N is being considered over a very small distance in the x or y direction.)
If Ω (omega) were the solid angle through which the detector's cross section was exposed, its differential cross section is computed as
This formula gives the luminosity with respect to the angular cross section (as opposed to a planar surface) as the number of particles per degree per second, and from here, the number of particles per volume of space can be easily computed. The formula also shows that the greater the detecting cross section per degree of solid angle, the greater the luminosity per degree of the same angle (or, "particle-seeability"). And for the detector to be useful at all, the instantaneous luminosity has to be high enough to detect particles so small that... well, they're incredibly small. Therefore, the smaller the particle being studied, the larger the detector will be.
There is no better way to illustrate this conclusion than to point, again, to the LHC, where the Higgs boson particle, one of the smallest particles conceivable, a veritable building block of nature, is being hunted by the world's largest detector (which also has a misleading name): the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The CMS, weighing 12,500 tons, has been able to achieve an astounding integrated (as in not instantaneous) luminosity of 1 per femtobarn: 1 barn is one-hundred-billion-billion-billionth of a squared metre; 1 femtobarn is one-million-billionth of that!
[caption id="attachment_21633" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="The total integrated luminosity delivered to and collected by CMS until 17th June, 2011."]
[/caption]Another detector at the site, the much more prolific A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) weighs 7,000 tons and has a luminosity of 50 per femtobarn. The under-construction iron-calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) in Theni, Tamil Nadu, will weigh 50,000 tons after being completed in 2015 and will be used to track and study neutrinos exclusively. Neutrinos are particles more elusive than the Higgs, and, though the luminosity of ICAL hasn't been disclosed, we can expect the device to be one of the pioneers in detector technology simply because its luminosity must be that low for the project to be a success.
This much and more can be said of accelerator luminosity. While the media goes gaga over the energies at which the beams are being accelerated, there is a silent revolution in detector technology happening in the background, a revolution that is spawning brilliant techniques to spot the fastest, smallest and most volatile particles. These detectors also consume the greater part of accelerator budgets to build and the greater part of total maintenance time. Some of the most advanced detectors in existence include hadronic calorimeters (HCAL), ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors (RICH detectors) and muon spectrometers.
Thursday, 2 February 2012
A world of information
Everyday, people invent more and more ways to see the world differently. They create new relationships between various bits of information to invent newer perspectives. Because there's so many different ways to see the world, there will come a point when just reading about it won't do: there will need to be visualization.
In a visualization, data is removed from its static, one-dimensional existence and placed in a space that is many-dimensional and dynamic. In such an environment, the data's virtual position also has meaning, like an electron's position around a nucleus tells us something about its energy.
This ability to add more meaning to information based on how we perceive it makes all the difference because this brings numbers closer to reality and lets us engage with them more directly. Instead of requiring mathematics and statistics to mediate between us and what the data mean, visualizations let us use our eyes and eyes to decipher the real meaning.
My search for a good tool with which to create visualizations has led me to discover a lot of options. At the same time, understanding how a visualization has been created tells me something about how its creator was perceiving the data. Sometimes, there are no omnipresent creators: a software need only be built that, in turn, can be used to create other visualizations, and voila! We're suddenly using machines to seek out curious patterns that haven't yet hit upon.
Here's a list of some of the tools I use to visualize the statistical information I access. Mostly, I use them to illustrate a point - in class or in my posts. However good writing is praised, creating dimensionality is tedious with pen and paper. At the cost of discouraging long didactic essays, I'd say use tech. to make your point. After all, each one is centered on good and purposeful communication.
Ngram Viewer is one of the more popular services of Google, at least amongst the ones that weren't widely publicised. An n-gram, in computational linguistics, is a contiguous sequence of 'n' items. For instance, a one-gram is one word, a two-gram is two words that are counted as one phrase, a ten-gram is a set of ten words taken together, and so on. Using the millions of books that Google has parsed through to create its database - or corpus - Ngram Viewer plots the frequency with which an n-gram appears in all books over time. The idea is that the more an n-gram appears in books, the more widely it was spoken about in those years.
Fusion Tables is a service by Google that interpretes numbers in different ways. The user has to upload a database - which might comprise one table or hundreds - and then pick one of many visualization options. For instance, I could upload a table that contains information on where how much pollution is. Next, if I select the option to plot the table on a map, Fusion Tables immediately does so. The service is useful in generating newer perspectives as Ngram Viewer, too, can and also to make a point crisply, efficiently.
Wolfram Mathematica is a computation engine, i.e. it performs a wide variety of computations - mathematical, statistical and logical - and then chooses the best way to display the information. This clear understanding of how many dimensions information has is what makes this possible, and I suspect it's the heartless mathematical treatment at its core that's responsible. WM is not for people who don't know what they're looking for. It's for those who know their way around, but are just looking for the best ways to express what they're saying.
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio
OK, I discovered the visualizing potential of MRDS by accident. Because it uses a visual programming language with flow charts and discrete processes to simulate robotic behaviour, it becomes easier to understand what's going on inside an automaton's programmatic head. Using the same principles, an interactive visualization can be simulated, with the user controlling the robot that's being moved around. It's kinda abstract, I know, but making a higher level of interaction possible, we're only making the visualization more engaging, memorable and understandable.
Visualizations are not always about numbers; they're about spatial geometries, too, and when it comes to them, parameters like distance, time and speed are more perceptible than colours, gradients, and shapes. And what makes MRDS more capable in this context is its ability to simulate, which should be exploited.
Now, d3.js is a real beauty. Before I say anything, I'll say this: when it comes to programming, I'm the type who gets quite excited about it because I love algorithms, but on the downside, I'm not so good with the syntax. That is, I can get what steps a program takes to accomplish something but I can't get how really goes about doing it. On that note: d3.js is really intuitive semantically and demands only a few hours' practice to make sense syntactially, too. And because it's a library focused on linking documents with Document Object Models (DOM), it's the ideal place to begin for people wanting to create their visualization up from scratch.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Plays of the day
One unemployed fellow
This is a tweet by Hindustan Times, an Indian newspaper, that appeared earlier today.
Is the Indian government obliged to secure the livelihood of even the descendants of people who turned a murderer in? Because if the historical context is removed, that's what Nathuram Godse is; moreover, there is no clause in the Indian Constitution that allows the inheritance of historical significance.
However, the article goes on to state that a job was promised by the Maharashtra government for a kin of Sergeant Dev Raj Singh Thakur, the man who caught Godse. This points at a larger story: that the government is not living up to its promises of employment for the kinsmen of those did the nation service. If anything, an article running on Martyrs' Day could have and should have touched upon this.
England judges you!
So, the British government is going to cherry-pick its immigrants, eh? I can think of a lot of reactions to this. First off, if the country is looking for "world-class artists, musicians and intellectuals", then immigrant students shouldn't be hit much because the establishment of their world-classness lies with the universities they will be attending. And if the university is able to justify a student's selection, what more could the ministry want?
Second, this shift in policy is more likely to hit the working population harder. This is because even though there are enough seats available for local and international students, the case is not so for jobs. In fact, since 2008, employers have already been under pressure to justify the hiring of a foreign national, including having to have checked if no other British national was available for the same position.
Third, the Conservatives-led coalition government did promise a reduction in immigrants' numbers in its election manifesto less than two years ago. However, the Conservatives first only stressed on the UK being able to attract the best: that only presaged a development of infrastructure and associated resources, so that the "best" of the lot had incentives to pick the UK out of other destination options.
From an academic point of view, this nationalistic turn of events prompts the question: having better facilities than are there in other parts of the world, will the country now be using a slump in its economy to restrict who gets access to those facilities?
Let me put it this way, and hypothetically. The UK first charted out an inclusive perspective toward growth and then upgraded infrastructure, etc. One of the products of the upgrade was a device called Instrument X that Jack really wanted to work on. Soon, Jack applies to work in the UK on Instrument X. Now, in light of this new policy, the country plans to turn away those who cannot bring back what Britain has lost, and it seems Britain definitely hasn't lost what Instrument X could have brought. On that basis, Jack's application is rejected.
Looking closely, it becomes evident that important academic potential is being redirected to other places just because something else has gone wrong. This consolidation of responsibility is what makes cherry-picking an iffy thing.
Cutting waste =/= saving
The following (promoted) tweet appeared on my feed, and it screamed desperation.
Then, I took a trip to their site and saw this.
They've conserved one billion gallons of water in two years by shifting nozzles that pump water into a poultry farm, in turn reducing water flow. If water was saved by conserving the losses from low pressure transmission, then Walmart by itself hasn't reduced its usage of water: it has only perfected its plumbing system which was sub-par all these years. That's CSR just the way it shouldn't be.
This is a tweet by Hindustan Times, an Indian newspaper, that appeared earlier today.
Is the Indian government obliged to secure the livelihood of even the descendants of people who turned a murderer in? Because if the historical context is removed, that's what Nathuram Godse is; moreover, there is no clause in the Indian Constitution that allows the inheritance of historical significance.
However, the article goes on to state that a job was promised by the Maharashtra government for a kin of Sergeant Dev Raj Singh Thakur, the man who caught Godse. This points at a larger story: that the government is not living up to its promises of employment for the kinsmen of those did the nation service. If anything, an article running on Martyrs' Day could have and should have touched upon this.
England judges you!
So, the British government is going to cherry-pick its immigrants, eh? I can think of a lot of reactions to this. First off, if the country is looking for "world-class artists, musicians and intellectuals", then immigrant students shouldn't be hit much because the establishment of their world-classness lies with the universities they will be attending. And if the university is able to justify a student's selection, what more could the ministry want?
Second, this shift in policy is more likely to hit the working population harder. This is because even though there are enough seats available for local and international students, the case is not so for jobs. In fact, since 2008, employers have already been under pressure to justify the hiring of a foreign national, including having to have checked if no other British national was available for the same position.
Third, the Conservatives-led coalition government did promise a reduction in immigrants' numbers in its election manifesto less than two years ago. However, the Conservatives first only stressed on the UK being able to attract the best: that only presaged a development of infrastructure and associated resources, so that the "best" of the lot had incentives to pick the UK out of other destination options.
From an academic point of view, this nationalistic turn of events prompts the question: having better facilities than are there in other parts of the world, will the country now be using a slump in its economy to restrict who gets access to those facilities?
Let me put it this way, and hypothetically. The UK first charted out an inclusive perspective toward growth and then upgraded infrastructure, etc. One of the products of the upgrade was a device called Instrument X that Jack really wanted to work on. Soon, Jack applies to work in the UK on Instrument X. Now, in light of this new policy, the country plans to turn away those who cannot bring back what Britain has lost, and it seems Britain definitely hasn't lost what Instrument X could have brought. On that basis, Jack's application is rejected.
Looking closely, it becomes evident that important academic potential is being redirected to other places just because something else has gone wrong. This consolidation of responsibility is what makes cherry-picking an iffy thing.
Cutting waste =/= saving
The following (promoted) tweet appeared on my feed, and it screamed desperation.
Then, I took a trip to their site and saw this.
We’ve done it by recommending a change in nozzles, which lower water flow but also increase pressure.
They've conserved one billion gallons of water in two years by shifting nozzles that pump water into a poultry farm, in turn reducing water flow. If water was saved by conserving the losses from low pressure transmission, then Walmart by itself hasn't reduced its usage of water: it has only perfected its plumbing system which was sub-par all these years. That's CSR just the way it shouldn't be.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
LHC: Not one entity but a train of innovations.
Particle physics has jumped leaps and bounds to come to where it is now. Considering particle accelerators pre-1982 were restricted to either advanced linear colliders or colliders that studied particles whose lifetimes were nowhere as low as those of the Higgs boson or the four-quark hadrons, the last 30 years have witnessed an onslaught of exciting new technology focusing on accuracy, precision, speed and connectivity. These four attributes are together extremely important in the study of very-short-lived particles. However, separately, they are significant in a variety of industries, especially metrology, telecommunications, materials engineering, meteorology, cold storage and preservation, and diagnostics.
Let's break down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to see what parts it yields. The 27-km long tunnel is made of concrete and is 3.8 metres wide. Two beam pipes guide the particles around in opposite directions around the pipe at 0.999999991 times the speed of light (299,792,455 m/s), and when they've been sufficiently charged up, the particles can meet at one of four intersections between the pipes. To increase the chances of a head-on collision, 1,232 dipole magnets and 392 quadrupole magnets, arranged above and below the pipes, guide the particles around. The magnets weight a total of 12,500 tonnes, surpassed in size- only by the static ICAL detector's 50,000-ton magnet at India's INO.
[caption id="attachment_21265" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector in the LHC"]
[/caption]
These 1,624 magnets are electromagnetic, and as their magnetic properties are turned on and off a little more than 22,000 times per second, they heat up. They can't be allowed to do that, however, and to cool them down, 96 tonnes of liquid helium is used to maintain the chunks of niobium-titanium at 1.9 K. In all, the magnets store 10 giga-joules of energy while generating a magnetic field of up to 8.3 tesla (about 332,000 times stronger than the Earth's) as 323 trillion protons gear up at near-light speeds for what can only be called the bloodiest civil war.
This (cooling business) makes the LHC the largest cryogenic storage facility of all-time, a VLSI exemplar we can work with as we move into a future in which the storage and transportation of hydrogen for fuel cells is an increasingly difficult problem - and not just because we haven't given it enough thought yet. You see, hydrogen is extremely explosive in the presence of oxygen, and readily reacts to form steam and a large quantity of heat. Therefore, hydrogen has to be stored in leak-proof containers that are capable of withstanding big shocks. It also has to be stored in its liquid state because gaseous hydrogen has an extremely low density and a very low mass can occupy a large volume.
[caption id="attachment_21266" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="The cross-section of a cryopump"]
[/caption]
At the LHC, the liquid helium is stored in copper-jacketed cryostats that maintain its temperature at 1.9 K, which is circulated by means of special pumps called cryopumps. These pumps are maintained at the very low temperatures they require to remain functional by the compressed helium itself. However, in case of hydrogen, a smaller cryocooler can be attached to the cryopump (alongside a sorption pump - but that's not important now) so it remains cold and damp, and it can be made readily available for use using a regenerative evaporation process.
Also, if you didn't know, the entire working principle of the LHC is encapsulated by cyclotrons that work with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computerized Tomography (CT) scanners in medical diagnostics. Basically, these scanners detect the decay of radioactive isotope with a very short half-life (usually from 20 minutes to 110 minutes) within the human body through a series of beta decays and electron-positron annihilation events. They have a cyclotron in close proximity that generates these isotopes to be traced, and a cyclotron works on the same principle as the LHC: takes a charged particle, sets it on a curved path by exposing it to a magnetic field, continuously switches the direction of the magnetic field using two different sets of magnets that go on and off alternatively until the particle has sped up, and then releases it.
[caption id="attachment_21267" align="aligncenter" width="532" caption="A classical Lawrence cyclotron"]
[/caption]
Because the LHC's detectors have to detect high-energy collisions precisely, i.e. determine the particles' charge, mass and other quantum properties to within 99.99%, they have to have a high luminosity. Further, each detector is not just a place that receives signals and immediately interprets. Instead, the detector comprises of everything from the detection mechanism to the millions of read-out channels that transmit the data to supercomputing grids. This in-built capacity to work at various energies and with unpredictable scenarios gives the diagnostics and instrumentation industries a lot to work with when it comes to the fabrication of scanners.
As of now, the image reconstruction by the scanners is the most difficult task in the entire process. However, the technology has improved so much so that the different tracer isotopes and their biochemical reactions with tissues can be visualized even for previously sensitive sections of the body. In neuropsychiatry, for instance, a substance called a radioligand is used to label the dopamine, serotonin and opioid receptors in the brain. Then, using a suitable scanner like a PET, the levels and neurological pathways of these receptors are monitored over a period of time. Because the receptors' involvement in disorders like schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, substance abuse and mood disorders is significant, advancements in selecting the perfect radioligands, determining where what happens, and the ability to identify various kinds of reactions and reconstruct it in 3D can go a long way in finding suitable cures.
[caption id="attachment_21268" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="In a PET scanner, an electron and an injected positron annihilate each other within the human body to produce two gamma rays. When these rays reach the scanner, they are recorded as a burst of light. The image of the brain from a PET scan, shown above, is reconstructed by orienting the scanner in various directions."]
[/caption]
The supercomputing grid mentioned earlier is an array of monstrously powerful computers assembled at the CERN capable of processing tens of gigabytes of data per second, churning out the results, ordering them, and then looking for patterns. At the same time, there is a Europe-wide project in place that allows volunteers to log in to the CERN server and permit the use of their computers' idle time for added computing power: LHC@home. Given that the CERN supercomputers are ahead in terms of computing complexity by orders of magnitude, I don't know how much computing power the initiative contributes that makes a difference. However, that such a concept exists is more important - especially considering we're in the era of cloud computing.
Another field of physics that requires such massive computing power is meteorology. The second-by-second reconstruction of weather patterns, cyclones, hurricanes, cloud movements, winds, rains, and ocean waves across a swath of oddly varying topographies with high unpredictability makes weather forecasting a superbitch. As of now, it is a task taken on only by national governments and prolific academic institutions. In this context, what if a computing grid existed that drew on volunteers' idle PC time to assist with the calculation and simulation of climactic patterns? This would reduce the load on existing computing infrastructure and release computation time for other calculations, making forecasting quicker. Or, interpreted another way, more timely.
Such tightly-coupled distributed programs, called clusters, work with advancements in running a synchronized algorithm in essentially asynchronized systems, and determination of event-sequences and logical cause-effects ("what happened when/what's next"). Clusters also have to address a host of other issues, and understanding how the CERN is dealing with them everyday will provide invaluable insight into setting up such systems in other industries, too. These issues include achievement of overall system reliability in the presence of some faulty processes, keeping the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio down at all points by self-stabilization to reduce the amount of error, and the Two Generals' Problem.
[caption id="attachment_21269" align="aligncenter" width="438" caption="In the Two Generals' Problem, two generals await with their armies on either sides of a valley. The people they wait to conquer are in the valley, and the invasion will be successful only if both generals attack at the same time. Since sending a messenger through the valley could result in his being "flipped" or lost, a potentially infinite number of messengers will be required to confirm a time of action."]
[/caption]
These are only some of the innovations that the CERN has pioneered. In the 1980s, nobody could have foreseen the onset of such a spur of improvements because, then, the LHC was just a particle accelerator. As the years went by and the demands of the physics community grew, the countries came together to exercise their strengths and contribute to this project an idea, a component or some other service, anything that each country was at the forefront of. Moreover, the LHC also pushed regional and associated industries to toughen up, encourage research in niche areas, and think of better ways to make any idea reality quickly. And when the internet came up and opened the world up more than globalization had, one country's contributions proved to be another country's solutions, and the communications gap that had existed between them for all those years was broken by the experiment.
I'm sure there's a lot more to the collider, but the purpose of this endeavour was to illustrate that the LHC is not just a physics thing. Its contribution to mankind long surpassed the hunt for the Higgs boson: today, collider technology is everywhere from baby diapers and cereal boxes to X-ray spectroscopy, Bose-Einstein statistics and superconductors.
Let's break down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to see what parts it yields. The 27-km long tunnel is made of concrete and is 3.8 metres wide. Two beam pipes guide the particles around in opposite directions around the pipe at 0.999999991 times the speed of light (299,792,455 m/s), and when they've been sufficiently charged up, the particles can meet at one of four intersections between the pipes. To increase the chances of a head-on collision, 1,232 dipole magnets and 392 quadrupole magnets, arranged above and below the pipes, guide the particles around. The magnets weight a total of 12,500 tonnes, surpassed in size- only by the static ICAL detector's 50,000-ton magnet at India's INO.
[caption id="attachment_21265" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector in the LHC"]
[/caption]These 1,624 magnets are electromagnetic, and as their magnetic properties are turned on and off a little more than 22,000 times per second, they heat up. They can't be allowed to do that, however, and to cool them down, 96 tonnes of liquid helium is used to maintain the chunks of niobium-titanium at 1.9 K. In all, the magnets store 10 giga-joules of energy while generating a magnetic field of up to 8.3 tesla (about 332,000 times stronger than the Earth's) as 323 trillion protons gear up at near-light speeds for what can only be called the bloodiest civil war.
This (cooling business) makes the LHC the largest cryogenic storage facility of all-time, a VLSI exemplar we can work with as we move into a future in which the storage and transportation of hydrogen for fuel cells is an increasingly difficult problem - and not just because we haven't given it enough thought yet. You see, hydrogen is extremely explosive in the presence of oxygen, and readily reacts to form steam and a large quantity of heat. Therefore, hydrogen has to be stored in leak-proof containers that are capable of withstanding big shocks. It also has to be stored in its liquid state because gaseous hydrogen has an extremely low density and a very low mass can occupy a large volume.
[caption id="attachment_21266" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="The cross-section of a cryopump"]
[/caption]At the LHC, the liquid helium is stored in copper-jacketed cryostats that maintain its temperature at 1.9 K, which is circulated by means of special pumps called cryopumps. These pumps are maintained at the very low temperatures they require to remain functional by the compressed helium itself. However, in case of hydrogen, a smaller cryocooler can be attached to the cryopump (alongside a sorption pump - but that's not important now) so it remains cold and damp, and it can be made readily available for use using a regenerative evaporation process.
Also, if you didn't know, the entire working principle of the LHC is encapsulated by cyclotrons that work with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computerized Tomography (CT) scanners in medical diagnostics. Basically, these scanners detect the decay of radioactive isotope with a very short half-life (usually from 20 minutes to 110 minutes) within the human body through a series of beta decays and electron-positron annihilation events. They have a cyclotron in close proximity that generates these isotopes to be traced, and a cyclotron works on the same principle as the LHC: takes a charged particle, sets it on a curved path by exposing it to a magnetic field, continuously switches the direction of the magnetic field using two different sets of magnets that go on and off alternatively until the particle has sped up, and then releases it.
[caption id="attachment_21267" align="aligncenter" width="532" caption="A classical Lawrence cyclotron"]
[/caption]Because the LHC's detectors have to detect high-energy collisions precisely, i.e. determine the particles' charge, mass and other quantum properties to within 99.99%, they have to have a high luminosity. Further, each detector is not just a place that receives signals and immediately interprets. Instead, the detector comprises of everything from the detection mechanism to the millions of read-out channels that transmit the data to supercomputing grids. This in-built capacity to work at various energies and with unpredictable scenarios gives the diagnostics and instrumentation industries a lot to work with when it comes to the fabrication of scanners.
As of now, the image reconstruction by the scanners is the most difficult task in the entire process. However, the technology has improved so much so that the different tracer isotopes and their biochemical reactions with tissues can be visualized even for previously sensitive sections of the body. In neuropsychiatry, for instance, a substance called a radioligand is used to label the dopamine, serotonin and opioid receptors in the brain. Then, using a suitable scanner like a PET, the levels and neurological pathways of these receptors are monitored over a period of time. Because the receptors' involvement in disorders like schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, substance abuse and mood disorders is significant, advancements in selecting the perfect radioligands, determining where what happens, and the ability to identify various kinds of reactions and reconstruct it in 3D can go a long way in finding suitable cures.
[caption id="attachment_21268" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="In a PET scanner, an electron and an injected positron annihilate each other within the human body to produce two gamma rays. When these rays reach the scanner, they are recorded as a burst of light. The image of the brain from a PET scan, shown above, is reconstructed by orienting the scanner in various directions."]
[/caption]The supercomputing grid mentioned earlier is an array of monstrously powerful computers assembled at the CERN capable of processing tens of gigabytes of data per second, churning out the results, ordering them, and then looking for patterns. At the same time, there is a Europe-wide project in place that allows volunteers to log in to the CERN server and permit the use of their computers' idle time for added computing power: LHC@home. Given that the CERN supercomputers are ahead in terms of computing complexity by orders of magnitude, I don't know how much computing power the initiative contributes that makes a difference. However, that such a concept exists is more important - especially considering we're in the era of cloud computing.
Another field of physics that requires such massive computing power is meteorology. The second-by-second reconstruction of weather patterns, cyclones, hurricanes, cloud movements, winds, rains, and ocean waves across a swath of oddly varying topographies with high unpredictability makes weather forecasting a superbitch. As of now, it is a task taken on only by national governments and prolific academic institutions. In this context, what if a computing grid existed that drew on volunteers' idle PC time to assist with the calculation and simulation of climactic patterns? This would reduce the load on existing computing infrastructure and release computation time for other calculations, making forecasting quicker. Or, interpreted another way, more timely.
Such tightly-coupled distributed programs, called clusters, work with advancements in running a synchronized algorithm in essentially asynchronized systems, and determination of event-sequences and logical cause-effects ("what happened when/what's next"). Clusters also have to address a host of other issues, and understanding how the CERN is dealing with them everyday will provide invaluable insight into setting up such systems in other industries, too. These issues include achievement of overall system reliability in the presence of some faulty processes, keeping the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio down at all points by self-stabilization to reduce the amount of error, and the Two Generals' Problem.
[caption id="attachment_21269" align="aligncenter" width="438" caption="In the Two Generals' Problem, two generals await with their armies on either sides of a valley. The people they wait to conquer are in the valley, and the invasion will be successful only if both generals attack at the same time. Since sending a messenger through the valley could result in his being "flipped" or lost, a potentially infinite number of messengers will be required to confirm a time of action."]
[/caption]These are only some of the innovations that the CERN has pioneered. In the 1980s, nobody could have foreseen the onset of such a spur of improvements because, then, the LHC was just a particle accelerator. As the years went by and the demands of the physics community grew, the countries came together to exercise their strengths and contribute to this project an idea, a component or some other service, anything that each country was at the forefront of. Moreover, the LHC also pushed regional and associated industries to toughen up, encourage research in niche areas, and think of better ways to make any idea reality quickly. And when the internet came up and opened the world up more than globalization had, one country's contributions proved to be another country's solutions, and the communications gap that had existed between them for all those years was broken by the experiment.
I'm sure there's a lot more to the collider, but the purpose of this endeavour was to illustrate that the LHC is not just a physics thing. Its contribution to mankind long surpassed the hunt for the Higgs boson: today, collider technology is everywhere from baby diapers and cereal boxes to X-ray spectroscopy, Bose-Einstein statistics and superconductors.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
The non-option of going back in time
The recent, and ongoing, debates on the merits of nuclear power, and whether we need it at all of it's just a motivated laziness in looking for alternate sources of energy (ASEs), has prompted me to evaluate the necessity of technology in life as we know it. In fact, to take the discussion further, I want to know if life as we know it is just an epochal assessment or if life as we know it has become a template for future generations to base their functions on.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The match-cut from '2001: A Space Odyssey' spanning four million years: we're somewhere in between and wondering."]
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The match-cut from '2001: A Space Odyssey' spanning four million years: we're somewhere in between and wondering."]
The penetration of technology is indubitable and has, in many ways, become irredeemable. While many suggest that owing to the amount of environmental degradation the time has come for us to slow down, reevaluate our needs and, if possible, turn back from here to a time when life seemed more sustainable, I believe that in the 20th century, we definitely hit a point of no return. There's no turning back from here. That means we no longer do technology any justice by referring to it as something that has penetrated into our lives, we do it no justice by referring to it as a tool. We ARE what technology is. Even if it wasn't nuclear power that merited this reflection, it would've been something else. Life as we know it, more than anything else, is not sustainable. It never was; it probably never will be.
Probably.
If we rewinded to a time before the internet, before the computer and the transistors, before engines and hydraulics and electromagnetism, before astronomy, geology, meteorology, exploration and trade, before literature, production and communication, we arrive at a point where there was nothing behind us, a point of "zero history". It is when we move back to this point that we truly see where some of us aspire to return to. There was nothing before us to aid us in our future quests except the human body, the then-indecipherable forces of nature, and the human mind: a vast reserve of questions, extremely limited resources, and a helluva lot of time.
[/caption]
When we started asking those questions, when we started to explore farther into the fog of war, we hit the future. Since then, we haven't turned back because there was nothing to go back to. Everything was an improvement, everything that contributed something to the human condition and alleviated the pains of not-knowing. Do you think it would be better for us if we moved toward a tribal way of life? No way. Sure, we could make love to the environment and not be afraid of nature turning against us in unimaginable ways, but at some point, our basic instincts will take over. They always have, and they always will, too.
The tribes that we observe living in forests and valleys today seem to present a solution to us because we've hit a wall with our energy resources and don't know where to go to from that point on. But without us, without the restrictions and the hindrances we pose to the sustenance of their livelihood, tribes would've become quite something else by now. Even they would've evolved technologically, and invented their own methods of acquiring more knowledge and using it to their benefit. They live in a controlled environment, fighting to remain what they've remained as for the past six millennia. If we all retrogressed to that stage, we'd have gone back a few thousand years back in time, but we'd begin again.
The reason we look to such "reduced" ways of life—reduced by the various techniques at our disposal today—is because we are panicking. We are finally realizing that we, as humans, are unsustainable, and we're ready to take desperate measures to assuage that thought. We are looking at what is not us and joining the dots to give absolute freedom and sustainability. However, in effect, we are bound to give ourselves only the curse of changelessness. All that we have done as humans, all that we have explored and reared and produced, will then lie as waste. Let me tell you, it is easy to join the dots, but that doesn't mean the image will then come to life. There is a lot that we're missing out, perhaps because we're taking them for granted.
Yes, our energy needs are growing. For six thousand years, we've been asking questions and answering them, and this is the point we've come to. I'm not advocating that in that pursuit, we lay to waste all that crosses our paths; no. I'm only saying the answer to our energy needs isn't regression, isn't the reevaluation of everything that came before us. If anything, the notion of future has made us understand that anything is possible, and if something doesn't seem to work out, then we haven't looked hard enough. Simply because our options are significantly unviable ASEs, nuclear energy, thermal power plants and regression doesn't mean we pick regression: we pick what will sustain us in the short-run so that it can power the ideas that will be necessary for the long-run. If we're working to prolong something that wasn't born with the universe, we will take a hit. Let's last it out, not back down. There's a difference.
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Star of the Orient
India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.
Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.
Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.
With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.
The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.
Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.
The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.
The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.
There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.
These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.
However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.
Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.
Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.
With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.
The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.
Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.
The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.
The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.
There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.
These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.
However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.
Star of the Orient
India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.
Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.
Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.
With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.
The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.
Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.
The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.
The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.
There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.
These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.
However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.
Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.
Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.
With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.
The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.
Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.
The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.
The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.
There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.
These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.
However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Taking tech. to the common man the Gandhian way
A lot has been said about technology shrinking the world, bringing its peoples closer and making all information more accessible. However, there are two problems concerning the deployment of technology.
- Devices that use technological innovation are often functionally inaccessible to certain groups of users. Also, it is often that these are the users who need it the most. For example, when it comes to making life easier, the elderly become the most eager consumers of developments. At the same time, those developments are rendered meaningless if they aren’t user-friendly. This is the “Type 1” problem.
- Often, the services born of technology come at a price that is unaffordable for those whose productivity can be increased by using them. Tools like computers, the internet, progressive communication systems and mobile telephony can boost our farmers’ crop output as well as keep them up-to-date on the latest developments in the agricultural sciences and government schemes. This is the “Type 2” problem.
On that note, it is heartening to know about the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s (MSSRF) Village Development Program (VDP) that currently covers over 300 villages, mostly in Puducherry and some in Maharashtra. The foundation, by employing a community-ownership model that increases villagers’ participation, has set up an information distribution network together with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and other partners, such as Microsoft and Intel, who also provide some of the funds.
[caption id="attachment_20444" align="aligncenter" width="355" caption="The partners of MSSRF for the VDP"]
[/caption]The MSSRF offices in Taramani, Chennai, function as a node for a national level hub that connects various technical, agricultural and veterinary universities across India, apart from NGOs and government offices in the vicinity of the villages. The knowledge these universities wish to share is uploaded into the hub’s content management system, which in turn is monitored by the foundation. The next step is to use the ISRO’s uplinking and downlinking capabilities, provided with the help of some of their satellites, which facilitate data-transfer to and from the node.
The final tier can be divided into two:
- VRC – The Village Resource Centre (VRC) operates at the mandal level and usually addresses the distribution of information into a cluster of villages. The VRC is operated by local communities. Because of the encouragement of community-ownership, members of the community are involved in maintaining the centre while the partners of the programme provide the infrastructure.
- VKC – The Village Knowledge Centre (VKC) operates just like the VRC except in that it addresses the needs of one village at a time. In other words, it functions as a sub-node that disseminates local, specific and demand-driven information. The communication between the VRC and the VKC happens through a local area network (LAN).
[caption id="attachment_20445" align="alignleft" width="148" caption="At Thankachimadam"]
[/caption]Using this three-tier system (node-VKC-VRC) and by actively engaging with the villagers, the program conclusively addresses the Type 1 and Type 2 problems. By maintaining and running the nodes and data centres, the villagers are acclimatized to technology and technological innovation in a way that directly impacts their livelihood. By teaming up with partners eager to bring technology to the common man, MSSRF has brought the best in the world to the villages of Puducherry and Maharashtra, apart from freeing up their knowledge pool to be accessed by those who need it the most. This goes to demonstrate the importance of efficient and effective deployment of technology in order to make it useful.
The content generated by the universities, agencies and government offices can become overwhelming. Therefore, the effectiveness of the VDP is determined by how quickly and efficiently it is able to get that content to the right people. It must be noted that there is also a content generation process in place at a much more local, and more significant, level. Frequent debates between experts and the farming/fishing/animal-rearing communities are organized, and the questions and answers raised therein are integrated with the existing databases.
Also, apart from the VRCs, a mobile network is in place that delivers five relevant audio messages daily to subscribers of certain networks, including Airtel, Qualcomm and Tata. The advantage of employing mobile telephony is the ability to gather feedback statistics such as usage rates, response rates, etc., which can be used to improve the quality of the services provided. A help-desk has been set up at MSSRF’s Chennai office to address complaints that any users of the mobile communication networks might have.
What about inter-village communication? That has been addressed, and quite thoroughly to note, by a public announcement system (PAS) that incorporates both loudspeaker arrangements as well as a web-based notice-boarding system. In order to facilitate audio-conferencing, a multiple closed-user groups have been created such that calls to other people within the same group are free of cost. Finally, an INCOIS public display board has been installed that can be used with a GPRS device.
At the heart of all of this lies the need-assessment system, a single glance at which summarizes the entire VDP, its principal participants and its goals. While the VRCs are demand-driven and therefore reflective of the villagers’ needs, the villagers do have to be trained and made aware enough to know their rights, what they can and can’t demand, and what their options are. In order to empower them, the MSSRF enables them to interact with stakeholders of the entire program and familiarizes them with the principal tools. At the same time, a farmers’ database is compiled that is shared responsibly with government agencies, local banks and NGOs that have products and services of value on offer.
Essentially, the VDP is a stellar example that neither bargains with nor purchases profits at the cost of technology but engages with it directly to remove socio-economic barriers. It is clear that India’s sustainable development is uniquely tied in with the prosperity of its farmers, at least for now, and these farmers continue to face such barriers. By bringing the farming, fishing and animal-rearing communities together, the foundation has only spotlighted how much we stand to lose if we don’t divert our technologies away from gain.
Taking tech. to the common man the Gandhian way
A lot has been said about technology shrinking the world, bringing its peoples closer and making all information more accessible. However, there are two problems concerning the deployment of technology.
- Devices that use technological innovation are often functionally inaccessible to certain groups of users. Also, it is often that these are the users who need it the most. For example, when it comes to making life easier, the elderly become the most eager consumers of developments. At the same time, those developments are rendered meaningless if they aren’t user-friendly. This is the “Type 1” problem.
- Often, the services born of technology come at a price that is unaffordable for those whose productivity can be increased by using them. Tools like computers, the internet, progressive communication systems and mobile telephony can boost our farmers’ crop output as well as keep them up-to-date on the latest developments in the agricultural sciences and government schemes. This is the “Type 2” problem.
On that note, it is heartening to know about the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s (MSSRF) Village Development Program (VDP) that currently covers over 300 villages, mostly in Puducherry and some in Maharashtra. The foundation, by employing a community-ownership model that increases villagers’ participation, has set up an information distribution network together with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and other partners, such as Microsoft and Intel, who also provide some of the funds.
[caption id="attachment_20444" align="aligncenter" width="355" caption="The partners of MSSRF for the VDP"]
[/caption]The MSSRF offices in Taramani, Chennai, function as a node for a national level hub that connects various technical, agricultural and veterinary universities across India, apart from NGOs and government offices in the vicinity of the villages. The knowledge these universities wish to share is uploaded into the hub’s content management system, which in turn is monitored by the foundation. The next step is to use the ISRO’s uplinking and downlinking capabilities, provided with the help of some of their satellites, which facilitate data-transfer to and from the node.
The final tier can be divided into two:
- VRC – The Village Resource Centre (VRC) operates at the mandal level and usually addresses the distribution of information into a cluster of villages. The VRC is operated by local communities. Because of the encouragement of community-ownership, members of the community are involved in maintaining the centre while the partners of the programme provide the infrastructure.
- VKC – The Village Knowledge Centre (VKC) operates just like the VRC except in that it addresses the needs of one village at a time. In other words, it functions as a sub-node that disseminates local, specific and demand-driven information. The communication between the VRC and the VKC happens through a local area network (LAN).
[caption id="attachment_20445" align="alignleft" width="148" caption="At Thankachimadam"]
[/caption]Using this three-tier system (node-VKC-VRC) and by actively engaging with the villagers, the program conclusively addresses the Type 1 and Type 2 problems. By maintaining and running the nodes and data centres, the villagers are acclimatized to technology and technological innovation in a way that directly impacts their livelihood. By teaming up with partners eager to bring technology to the common man, MSSRF has brought the best in the world to the villages of Puducherry and Maharashtra, apart from freeing up their knowledge pool to be accessed by those who need it the most. This goes to demonstrate the importance of efficient and effective deployment of technology in order to make it useful.
The content generated by the universities, agencies and government offices can become overwhelming. Therefore, the effectiveness of the VDP is determined by how quickly and efficiently it is able to get that content to the right people. It must be noted that there is also a content generation process in place at a much more local, and more significant, level. Frequent debates between experts and the farming/fishing/animal-rearing communities are organized, and the questions and answers raised therein are integrated with the existing databases.
Also, apart from the VRCs, a mobile network is in place that delivers five relevant audio messages daily to subscribers of certain networks, including Airtel, Qualcomm and Tata. The advantage of employing mobile telephony is the ability to gather feedback statistics such as usage rates, response rates, etc., which can be used to improve the quality of the services provided. A help-desk has been set up at MSSRF’s Chennai office to address complaints that any users of the mobile communication networks might have.
What about inter-village communication? That has been addressed, and quite thoroughly to note, by a public announcement system (PAS) that incorporates both loudspeaker arrangements as well as a web-based notice-boarding system. In order to facilitate audio-conferencing, a multiple closed-user groups have been created such that calls to other people within the same group are free of cost. Finally, an INCOIS public display board has been installed that can be used with a GPRS device.
At the heart of all of this lies the need-assessment system, a single glance at which summarizes the entire VDP, its principal participants and its goals. While the VRCs are demand-driven and therefore reflective of the villagers’ needs, the villagers do have to be trained and made aware enough to know their rights, what they can and can’t demand, and what their options are. In order to empower them, the MSSRF enables them to interact with stakeholders of the entire program and familiarizes them with the principal tools. At the same time, a farmers’ database is compiled that is shared responsibly with government agencies, local banks and NGOs that have products and services of value on offer.
Essentially, the VDP is a stellar example that neither bargains with nor purchases profits at the cost of technology but engages with it directly to remove socio-economic barriers. It is clear that India’s sustainable development is uniquely tied in with the prosperity of its farmers, at least for now, and these farmers continue to face such barriers. By bringing the farming, fishing and animal-rearing communities together, the foundation has only spotlighted how much we stand to lose if we don’t divert our technologies away from gain.
Monday, 3 October 2011
Clear and present danger
“Revolutions in information and communication technologies have always been based on small findings in solid state physics” quips Dr. G. Baskaran, firmly establishing both the place and scope of technology. Affiliated with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, Dr. Baskaran is a renowned theoretical physicist. He recently delivered a short lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, speaking on everything from the role of science and the ongoing battle to explain super-luminary neutrinos to the future of science.
His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.
With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.
Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.
Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.
Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.
Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.
(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)
A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.
Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?
We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.
So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.
His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.
With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.
Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.
Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.
Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.
Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.
(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)
A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.
Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?
We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.
So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.
Clear and present danger
“Revolutions in information and communication technologies have always been based on small findings in solid state physics” quips Dr. G. Baskaran, firmly establishing both the place and scope of technology. Affiliated with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, Dr. Baskaran is a renowned theoretical physicist. He recently delivered a short lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, speaking on everything from the role of science and the ongoing battle to explain super-luminary neutrinos to the future of science.
His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.
With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.
Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.
Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.
Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.
Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.
(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)
A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.
Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?
We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.
So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.
His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.
With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.
Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.
Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.
Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.
Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.
(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)
A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.
Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?
We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.
So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.
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