Time for Web 2 A

Please refer to my post on the pollution of the Web.  http://obvioustruths.blogspot.com/2021/07/rubbish-on-internet.html

This topic has several dimensions to it. In this post I will talk about the low quality of “information” that is purveyed on the web.

A major contribution to this problem was from the Web 2.0 idea, which deals with content creation by end-users. It emphasizes user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatible with other products, systems, and devices) for end users. It has its uses, but it also allows you to submit unreliable information to an app which millions use. The company that maintains the app can make what you post available to all. They can claim that editing and checking what you submit is their business. You are just one of those creatures out of millions. After all whatever you submit they just dish out to the rest of the millions. Responsibility for thinking about what you say? No, they are not in that business!

They are plenty of examples of customer created content which causes major risks for users, but I will quote relatively less inflammatory content in this article. After all the world will not end if they give you wrong calorie information for what you eat.

I started the day eating some guava. How many calories does guava give you? I saw many replies, and the top two offered an interesting contrast:

Guava                 100 grams 68 calories

Guava Fruit          100 grams  38 calories

I tossed a coin and chose to select Guava Fruit for entering into my record. Amazing how the coin helps in making information on the web more reliable! Then I ate some carrots and looked up my fitness app. It listed carrots, but against Vitamin A content, there was a “-“.

The Journal publication industry has an answer to this problem that is worth trying on the web. There are respected journals who take responsibility for getting your contributions verified by trusted reviewers. Then there are other journals, some of which may even guarantee three “citations” for every article accepted. All you need to do is pay the page-charge. The reader can decide which Journal she would depend upon!

Can we have a Web 2 A in which the “publishers” say that they depend on user generated content, but they get that reviewed by trusted reviewers? They can be allowed to display their trusted status using the presence of a recognizable Trademark of an association. Ideally browsers should be able to verify this trusted trademark.

I know that there have been attempts to create trusted marks. They have not been effective enough; we need a new one. 

Srinivasan Ramani

Rubbish on the Internet

 

I am reminded of life in Kerala, one of the southern states of India. There are many rivers and backwaters there and it is common for people to live on the river; that means mostly that people live on the edge of river bank or the backwater. In addition, some people live on houseboats, at least for short periods. Some have houses on stilts on the river-edge. The river gives them all food (mostly fish), and transportation by boat. They are very hygiene conscious because if they pollute the river or the backwater, they will be ruining their own lives.

We now live by the Internet, and we should be equally careful not to pollute it with fake news, mis-information, unreliable information, etc. Of course, people have the freedom of expression. Going back to the river analogy, do they have the freedom to pollute the river?

I think, and I hope, that rubbish will reduce on the Internet in the coming years. People should have the freedom of expression, but they should not be able to hide behind anonymity. I would hope that every original post and every forwarding would be signed in a manner which would let us identify the person responsible.

Then there is the question of ignorant posting. One may express one's opinion and own responsibility for it. That does not guarantee that it is a contribution for the good of society. You may claim in all sincerity that a certain herbal remedy protects you against Covid-19, but it may be a statement with no reliable evidence behind it whatsoever. It can kill readers who take it to be true. We can probably invent an effective safeguard against ignorant posts, involving a verification rating.

The Internet does not have mechanisms to prevent mischief. It is a dangerous place for the naive user. It keeps millions off the benefits because they hear about frauds and worse crimes, and choose not to seek benefits altogether. Every civilized society has evolved mechanisms to control crimes on the road like banditry. However, we continue to allow viruses, malware, ransomware and so on. We treat phishing as a white-collar crime, but it ought to be treated as dangerous as armed robbery.

Consider an analogy. No one allows you to fly a plane without stringent rules and regulations. Why should we not  follow similar practices for your using the Internet to avoid your causing harm to others?

I also think that the Internet is not robust enough to keep working through natural calamities. We need it all the more during a calamity, but that is when it fails. Cell phone towers run out of fuel, a tornado can take them out and there is not enough redundancy to provide continued working after the loss of a tower in a locality. My apartment building has a diesel generator that kicks in within seconds of a power failure. My table wiring is pretected for those seconds by an UPS that can work for 20 minutes if necessary. However the Internet fails on every power failure, as my Internet service provider does not think that his equipment that gives me a fibre-optic connection deserves a power back-up option!

The predecessor to the Internet, the ARPANET,  was sold to the government on the promise that it would work even after a nuclear attack, but the Internet today needs much less than a nuclear attack to let you down!

The Internet is not safe for young students. It has bullies, criminals, corruptors and drug peddlers on it. We have not made available mechanisms to give vulnerable users a safe haven on the web.

I think we can make progress towards solving all these problems. I am enough of an optimist to believe that we will.

Srinivasan Ramani
26-July-2021

P.S. This article is based on my replies to questions asked by a survey conducted by Pew Research and Elon University. 

Software Engineering

 

How old should you be when you study software engineering? This question came up in an on-the-web event today, 10-July-2021. The event was the book release function for “Overview and Trends in Software Design Architecture and Engineering” by Prof PCP Bhatt.

I do not know who originated this question, but I heard Mr H R Mohan raising the question. Prof CR Muthukrishnan asked me if I would answer it. I did respond, but  would expand my answer here because it is an interesting question. My answer is a point of view that comes out of my personal experience.

I taught a course on software engineering a few times over thirty years ago, as a part of the NCST”s Post-Graduate Diploma in Software Technology program. Exciting things were happening in the creation of systems which could serve a large number of users simultaneously. There was a phase involving client server architecture, in which the clients were front end programs running on user machines. The back-end was a computer serving all the clients through some network. Local area networks (LANS) and wide area networks (WANs) could both be used. The technology has now evolved to the level in which your browser is the user-end interface. Any user-end processing is done by code that is automatically downloaded by the browser. The network is a LAN or more often the Internet.

I would start my software engineering course by noting that, in real life, software developers usually worked as a part of a team and built software that was several times larger than anything one person could build. It was the difference comparable to that between building a model airplane that a hobbyist builds and the 747-like aircraft that companies build. 

So, I would say let us live through an experience that teaches us to think as a part of a team within a bigger team and build something big. One year, we chose to build a demo passenger-reservation system for airline passengers. We had a big class. I don’t remember the exact size – it must have been about 80! NCST colleagues helped me run the course: specially, Anil Garg and Sreekumar.

We divided the class in two: one to handle the front-end which would run on the user PC and one for the server that would run on NCST’s big computer. Each part of the software was then divided into modules that could be built by separate teams of four or five “students”. Very often, nasty troubles surface only during integration. We were aware of this, and emphasized well-defined interfaces and careful unit-testing of each module. I think we had a committee of team leaders to be responsible for integration.

The first job was to structure the organization. In the class, I asked for volunteers. These were relatively early days of software activity in India, and as our course aimed at working professionals, the average “student” was 30 to 40 years old. While choosing two project managers, one for the front-end team and one for the server side, I said I was looking for people with management experience. Their job was to get their teams to achieve rather than focus on one’s own individual contribution. A few people raised their hands. I asked them to introduce themselves one by one. The first speaker mentioned his name and said that in his day-job, 4000[1] people reported to him! He was an Income Tax Commissioner! We also had a very senior railway engineer.

So, I do think that software engineering is quite a different subject as compared to the stuff they teach in programming classes. It requires concerns for reliability, modifiability, documentation, maintenance, budget, time schedules, and expectation management in regard to owners of the project.

I am looking forward to reading PCP Bhatt’s book and relive this all over again!

Srinivasan Ramani

 

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[1] I don’t guarantee this number, but my thirty year-old memory says it was something like 4000.

Dr Mathew Thekkekarottu Joseph (1952-2021)

 

Prof TJ Mathew, beloved teacher of thousands, well-known academic and researcher, and a great collaborator, passed away on Tuesday, 29-June-2021. His passing away is a great loss to the Pillai Group of Institutions, thousands of SNDT University Alumni and to colleagues like me.

Dr Mathew was born in Moozhoor, a small village in Kottayam Taluk in Kerala, in a Roman Catholic Family. It is a farming family. He has two brothers and four sisters. One of the brothers works in Pune. The others are in the native place. Moozhoor is big enough to have a Pin code  686503, but not an entry in the list of Kerala villages. It is about 95 KM south of the Kochi Airport. The road passes through Pala, a well-maintained small town 14 KM north of Moozhoor. The whole area has benefitted tremendously from the educational efforts of the churches, along with the Kerala tradition of respecting literacy and education. For instance, Pala has a literacy rate of 98.5%, and female literacy is 97.8%.  No wonder that the region has produced leading educationists as well.

Mathew had an MSc in applied mathematics when I had met him in the early eighties. He was working at the SNDT University Computer Center. All his life, he lived for the institutions he worked for. He had tremendous empathy for students and gave them lots of time and attention. No wonder that every Vice Chancellor he worked with at SNDT saw his potential. Ms. Parvati Rajan was another colleague at SNDT, who worked a lot for the development of computer science and technology activities at SNDT. I was at the National Centre for Software technology (NCST) which had acquired a small campus in Juhu in 1984-85, near the SNDT University Campus. There was mutual interest in cooperation and we started working together. Dr Jyothi Trivedi, the then Vice-Chancellor, clearly defined her priority - faculty development. NCST welcomed Parvati Rajan and TJ Mathew to work towards their PhDs, sharing our work environment and research interests. I had the privilege of being the thesis advisor for them. Parvati worked in educational technology and Mathew in computational complexity.

Mathew had found time and energy in the middle of all this to study for a Master’s degree in Financial Management at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS).

Over the years, SNDT decided to create a Computer Science Department and recruit students. I was invited to be on the Senate at some stage. Meanwhile, another faculty member at SNDT, Dr Vasudha Kamat, was serving as the head of another activity which was growing fast – educational technology. She came up with the idea of an MCA in educational technology. I was very happy to support this initiative in the Senate. Prof. Kamalini Bhansali was the successor to Dr Trivedi as VC. She was followed by Dr Suma Chitnis and later by Dr Mariamma Varghese. I and my colleagues at NCST continued to work with SNDT on areas of mutual interest. Dr SP Mudur co-authored a number of papers with faculty colleagues from SNDT.

Over the years, Dr Mathew had carried major responsibilities:

      He served as the Head of the Department, Computer Science, at SNDT during     1985 to 2001.

  Later, he served as Director and Professor at the Jankidevi Bajaj Institute of   
  Management Studies (JDBIMS) during 2001 – 2017. 

  He also found the time and energy to serve as Principal of the Usha Mittal
  Institute of Technology at SNDT during 2002-2007.

      Overall, Dr Mathew had served SNDT University for 32 years.

On retiring from SNDT, Dr Mathew was not ready to hang up his shingles. The Pillai Group of Institutions, founded by Dr KM Vasudevan Pillai, welcomed him. Dr Mathew moved to Panvel and served as Prof of Computer Engineering and later as Principal of the Pillai HOC College of Engineering Technology at Rasayani, Maharashtra.

Dr Mathew never complained he was short of time. If something was worth doing, he would find the time for it. For instance, he worked on an IT solution for teaching people to write in a script they were learning. Perhaps he did not want even 1.5% of the people in Pala to be illiterate! He was a son of Kerala, a great teacher in Maharashtra and a true Indian in his life.

Once, when I visited him at the JDBIMS he showed me around a small patch of herbal garden he was cultivating in front of the institute.

Another cause close to his heart was the annual Mumbai Marathon, which raised funds for child welfare activities through Childline. He has been running the race every year since 2009. He ran the half marathon in later years. The event held in Jan 2020 gave him some disappointment as he could not complete it. He is not, however, one to give up. This year’s race was to have been run in April 2021, but had to be postponed indefinitely due to Covid. His website is up-to-date and ready for it, mentioning Covid Relief this year. Visit TMM 2021 - Fundraiser Page - Dr. Mathew T.J (unitedwaymumbai.org)

Run the race in his memory, if you can!    

 

Srinivasan Ramani