Why is there no talk of deploying Sonobuoys to locate the blackboxes of Malaysian Airlines MH 370?

This a follow up to a comment at the end of one of my previous postings:

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2014/03/the-need-to-invent-secondary-data.html

There is a well-known technology of deploying underwater acoustic sensors from aircraft to listen to sounds below the ocean. Visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobuoy

The military forces of about a dozen nations are involved in the search for  the blackboxes of Malaysian Airlines MH 370. Why is no one talking about deploying some sonobuoys, before it is too late?

Srinivasan Ramani

Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons

I had written in this blog in November 2013 about mirror neurons. My wife and I had played with our new born granddaughter and found she could imitate simple finger and hand movements within a few weeks of her birth.

http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2013_11_01_archive.html

I got so excited documenting this phenomenon that I threw the baby out with the bath water – figuratively that is! There is a lot more to mirror neurons than learning finger and hand movements by imitation. There is some evidence to suggest that mirror neurons can explain one of the most essential features of being human. You see someone in pain, and you wish to help. You give someone something, say a toy. You see it makes them happy and you are pleased. Humans relate to each other and understand innately that they are like one another – with similar thoughts, similar emotions, similar beliefs and desires. No one teaches us all this in any detail, but we all understand this. Psychologists refer to this understanding we have of each other as the “theory of mind”. Visit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Where would we be without a theory of mind? Cannibals or worse? Would a human society be possible in the absence of this phenomenon?

This suggests that one can play games with babies and children to see how they respond to human emotions, real and simulated. Do they tend to be happier with someone who seems to be happy? Do they show signs of being depressed if the care giver appears to be depressed? Psychologists invent games of this kind all the time. The Wikipedia article referred above describes a fascinating game (the Sally-Anne game) for relatively older children, not babies. The article also reports that children with autism perform poorly in this game, which tests for the child having a theory of mind. However, children with Down’s syndrome do well in this test, as is to be expected by anyone who has known children with Down’s syndrome.

Another thought was triggered by the following:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2013/aug/23/mirror-neurons

It seems that the phenomenon of “adaptation” sets in when a child watches you do something a lot of times. I understand this as follows: if you want a baby to imitate you, don’t demonstrate the action many times before expecting imitation. Imitation comes early on in the experiment. Once the child imitates you, adaptation will still occur (the child will stop imitating you!), but it will take a bit longer to take place. It appears, in other words, that imitated actions seem to be better remembered.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Online democracy

The cell phone is probably the most potent instrument available to a leader serving his people, but there are few leaders who use the cell phone to its full potential. The Corporator of Ward 153 (Jayanagar, Bangalore), Gangambika, http://www.ichangemycity.com/corporators/gangambika
is one of the few exceptions I know of. In addition to her own time and effort, her well-equipped office helps citizens get their problems attended to. Her assistant is available practically whole day to take complaints over the cell phone. Street lights have not come up, call Arun!  Drinking water pipe is leaking and flooding the road? Call Arun! Whatever Arun can fix, he does fix very quickly. This practice is so good that I hope all Corporators will adopt it. I am sure that Arun is a very smart person and knows who to call for handling which complaint. And when he calls, they seem to listen to him and get the problem sorted out fast.

How do you find if there is an Arun supporting your Corporator? Look up the following URL to get a phone number of your Corporator and ask if he/she has an assistant who you can talk to when you have a routine complaint. You can also directly login complaints on this site. 

http://www.ichangemycity.com/corporators?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Bangalore-Corporators&gclid=CLXDxK2e9rwCFYyu4god3jgAwg

What else can one do to make people’s problems more visible to government? The UK website here will give you many ideas:

http://www.ukcod.org.uk/UK_Citizens_Online_Democracy

Another site worth visiting for ideas ishttp://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/information/feedback-complaints

Last weekend, I heard Amir Khan telling us in his weekly program Satyameva Jayate that police often refuse to register first information reports (FIRs), even though the law does make it obligatory for them to register people’s FIRs. I would love to see a media house set up an independent website to register Citizen’s First Reports (CFR). The site can authenticate the person by asking him/her for his/her cell phone number and sending a one-time password to enable log in. It may ask for a postal address for the record. The person registering the complaint would get a copy over email and by post, and the report would be forwarded to an address on which the government agrees to receive them. The complainant may be given the option of releasing the complaint to be made visible over the web, hiding the address and name of the complainant if necessary.

Would such a web-based facility exclude the vast majority who do not access the Internet? No, it need not. NGO’s and political parties can provide facilities to citizens to file CFRs. In addition to a PC and connectivity to the Internet, their volunteers can play a significant role in helping the weaker sections claim their rights for police protection from goondas by reporting crimes effectively and in time.
  

Srinivasan Ramani