Is a computer failure better than a hydraulic failure on an aircraft?

The media reported today that an Air India Airbus 319 made an emergency landing in Pakistan. Visit

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cheat-sheet/relieved-air-india-passengers-back-in-delhi-after-emergency-landing-in-pak-top-10-facts-240992

The first reports said that three hydraulic systems had failed simultaneously. Later reports said that actually wrong information had been given by the computers to the pilot; the hydraulic systems were OK, but the pilot got a misleading warning. He had no choice but to make an emergency landing. How can such a thing happen? Computer systems on modern aircraft are supposed to be protected against failure by redundancy. Multiple computers built by different manufactures and running different software systems are installed on each aircraft. This is supposed to prevent a problem being created by a failure in a single computer. The probability of multiple, independent computers making the same mistake simultaneously is calculated to be negligible. Some information on this topic can be found in the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320_family

The references in the article cited above give more information. 

Coming back to India, a speedy investigation should be carried out by the Government of India and the findings made public. There is hope that this will take place; there is a site describing in some detail aircraft accidents over the years in India:

http://dgca.nic.in/accident/content.htm

I would feel happier if complete documents revealing the findings of such investigations are made available over the Web.

In any case, best of luck to you and to me when we take the next flight! I would be taking one soon! 

Srinivasan Ramani 

Are there any rules about ministers receiving gifts?

There have been several Disproportionate Assets (DA) cases against ministers and ex-ministers in India. A recent court ruling in regard to a DA case against Ms. Mayawati has attracted a lot of attention. Visit 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/SC-scraps-assets-case-against-Mayawati/articleshow/14724722.cms

In the past in many (DA) cases, the accused have argued that the millions of rupees they have amassed have come from donations by members of their party. I am not concerned about individual cases – the courts will deal with them; my concern is with the law. Are there any laws regarding acceptance of gifts by ministers, similar to the Conduct Rules for Government employees?

The US Senate rules are quite clear in this regard. Visit http://www.ethics.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/gifts

I quote from the same:
“No Member, officer, or employee shall knowingly accept a gift except as provided by the Gifts Rule.

A Member, officer, or employee may accept a gift, other than cash or cash equivalent, having a value of less than $50, provided that the source of the gift is not a registered lobbyist, foreign agent, or private entity that retains or employs such individuals. The cumulative value of gifts that may be accepted from any one source in a calendar year must be less than $100. Generally, gifts having a value of less than $10 do not count toward the annual limit”.

There is no exception for gifts from party members. This makes sense, because anyone can find a party member who can be used as a conduit to pay a minister. Indian legislatures should consider enacting effective conduct rules for their members, in the interests of their own credibility. A minister is as much a public servant as any government officer. Why can’t ministers be covered by the same conduct rules as government employees? In fact, ministers have a lot more authority than government employees and should, therefore, be well above suspicion. Large amounts received as gifts by a minister should be presumed to be illegal gratification irrespective of where they come from, even if they come as small amounts aggregating to a disproportionate amount.

What about party funds, particularly because they are exempted from Income Tax? That is another matter requiring serious discussion. Why should they not be audited by auditors appointed by the Election Commission and the audit reports published? The anti-corruption movement (http://www.indiaagainstcorruption.org/index1.html ) should consider and comment on these issues.

Srinivasan Ramani

Modern techniques to verify documents communicated online

The question of verifying a handwritten signature has become the subject of a national debate in India. Visit

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/pranab-mukherjees-letter-quitting-kolkata-institute-fabricated-bjp/articleshow/14653088.cms  and

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_congress-calls-bjp-s-letter-charge-against-pranab-mukherjee-scandalous_1710631

The question concerns a resignation letter sent by Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, a candidate for election as President of India, to the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata. The resignation is from the post of Chairman, ISI. Under Indian law, a candidate for the President’s position should not be holding such a post on the day of nomination. The leading opposition party, BJP, and another candidate Mr. P A Sangma, have questioned if the signature on the resignation letter is a genuine one.

On reading this, my thoughts went back to my blog posting dated Saturday, March 11, 2006, titled “Is handwriting really accurate in identifying people”? This had appeared in my blog http://www.newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/

Let us go beyond the signature that has received a lot of media attention now. Ensuring the verifiability of signatures and their time and date is of great importance to any economy. We cannot burden courts by having them spend days on end listening to arguments on such questions.

Handwritten signatures are no solution to this problem except credible witnesses testify to the signing and handing over of the document to the recipient. (Of course, you cannot ask that this procedure should be adopted for resignation letters!) My blog post mentioned above discussed the unreliability of handwriting recognition. It quoted a judgment of the US Supreme Court which referred to a paper authored by an expert, which gives the results of a study showing experts make errors in approximately 7% of their judgments and non-experts err approximately thirty eight percent of the time!

Sophisticated technology is in use in India by the Income Tax Dept and all banks for online verification. When a bank pays you interest on a term deposit, it has to meet a legal requirement – to deduct a specified percentage of the amount due to you and pay it to the account of the Income Tax Dept, registering the payment with the National Securities Depository (NSDL) Ltd. NSDL is an information technology service provider with a specialization in security for online transactions.

Yesterday I went to my bank to ask for a certificate stating the amount deducted from me and transferred to the Income Tax Dept. The bank officer who handled this request explained to me that they can no longer issue such a certificate themselves. Instead, they have to download the statement form NSDL, which keeps track of all income tax payments registered with it.

Technically, NSDL could introduce in future a system to address the problems of registering and time-stamping documents. Anyone sending an online communication through this system to someone else could have the transmission registered online with NSDL. The sending party would identify himself to NSDL through one or more passwords or a digital signature. The recipient would be identified by the email address given to NSDL to forward the communication. All NSDL would need to do is to send both the sender and recipient a copy of the communication digitally signed by itself. This would serve as an authentication of the message to the recipient and as a receipt to the sender. It is a trivial matter to verify a digital signature with the right software at any time, now or in the future. NSDL does not need to store the communication for future verification at all, as the technology verifies the document if either of the transacting parties produces a machine-readable copy.

I hope that the current high profile dispute would trigger an implementation of a national communication registry. It would contribute an improvement to the velocity of business in India, earn its own costs and turn in a handsome profit!

Srinivasan Ramani 

Healthcare Legislation is Relevant to the Whole World

The decision of the US Supreme Court to uphold Affordable Healthcare Legislation is of great interest to the whole world, not merely to the US. Visit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-to-rule-thursday-on-health-care-law/2012/06/28/gJQAarRm8V_story.html

Insurance is a good idea for evening out the burden of unpredictable health costs. Life strikes some people very hard and insurance, in principle, can spread the burden over the whole adult population and make life bearable for the poor souls who get hit by diseases that necessitate major expenses. But how does one ensure that the health insurance industry is properly regulated? How does one prevent excesses in healthcare costs being imposed by hospitals and doctors? Can one do all this without excessive bureaucracy?

I hope that leading university departments of public health around the world give these questions adequate attention. Such departments in the US will no doubt have their primary focus on the US context. However, some researchers should suggest answers to these questions at a more global level; they should, at the least, stimulate a worldwide debate on this topic. It is not clear if a UN body such as the WHO can do anything about these questions.  Let us ask http://twitter.com/#!/who

People in many countries live on per capita GDPs at the level of a small fraction of the US per capita GDP. Giving them satisfactory healthcare is not easy. Neither the individual nor the state can bear the huge costs of modern healthcare. Researchers have to investigate this immense challenge and provide some answers. Ultimately we can do only what we can do! No more! We have to apply our mind to the issue of what we can do if we come up with the best possible ideas.

Srinivasan Ramani

R. E. Bedford, Professor Emeritus, IIT Bombay

Professor Bedford made a big impact on my life, because he had those qualities that great teachers have. He was a professor and a gentleman! From him I learnt that a teacher is one who does not merely impart some knowledge and skills; a real teacher goes beyond that, serving as a role model inspiring his students.

I had specialized in heavy current engineering for my university degree in electrical engineering. Over the next fifty years, a lot of work on alternative sources of energy would be done by people with such a background; it is an exciting area for research.

However, when I applied for admission as an M Tech student at IIT Bombay, my heart was in computers. I turned up for the admission test, but a stern official would not let me take the paper meant for the candidates applying for work in electronics. So, I took the one meant for heavy current engineers and managed to get to the selection committee for an interview. Prof Bedford was, I think, the Chairman of the Committee. He greeted me with his characteristic good humour, saying "We hear that you don't want to work with us!" I described the ruling the official had given. "So, what do you want us to do?" he asked. I said that I would like to be interviewed in the area of interest to the Committee. Subsequently, if they thought I merited some consideration, they could perhaps pass me on to the other Committee with a recommendation. Luckily, I passed the hurdle of the first interview. Prof Bedford personally took me to the other Committee and said something like "This chap doesn't want to work with us! See if you want him to work with you". Despite the light-hearted remark, he had somehow conveyed that I deserved a second interview in his opinion.

Prof Isaac and Prof Pradhan were in this other Committee. After another interview, they selected me. I had come out of old-fashioned educational institutions where rigid hierarchy prevailed. That an IIT could be flexible enough to admit for an M Tech in electronics a bloke who had taken only one paper in that subject was amazing to me. Inter-disciplinary barriers had been worse than caste barriers, but they did not exist in the mind of IIT professors; at least in the minds of some of them! I suddenly saw how IIT's differed from the institutions left over from the Jurassic period!

Bedford and Isaac belonged to the new breed of academics, who treated students as humans and interpreted rules without forcing narrow minded interpretations into them. This modern approach to academic decision-making went a lot further. Later, I graduated from the IIT Bombay and went on to work at a reputed research institute pioneering in the computer field. What about working for a PhD? IITs had no rules to enable even researchers working in the same city to enrol for a PhD. Should institutional barriers be water tight and exclude collaboration and sharing of ideas beyond the walls of the institution? Bedford and Isaac worked with other like-minded professors to get the senate to approve "external registration". I became a student at IITB again and completed my PhD work under the joint supervision of Prof R Narasimhan and Prof Isaac.

I have served as a professor later in life, and hope that I have given my students in some small measure the same support and encouragement I had received from Prof Bedford. His passing away on Monday, June 25, was a major blow to all of us whose lives had been influenced by him.

Srinivasan Ramani
June 28, 2012

More on the bore-well that killed a baby girl in Manesar

India Today has commented on the case I had discussed on this blog on June 24, 2012, and has also commented on the need to be prepared to meet mass-scale disasters such as earth-quakes. Visit

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/draw-the-right-lessons-from-mahi-tragic-death/1/202448.html

This item also reports on the role of Sohrab Khan, a local well-digger, who eventually got her body out of the well. This does not in any way detract from the credit that should go to the army personnel who worked night and day to dig an 80 foot parallel well to enable access to the bore-well.

The question about preparedness to cope with mass disasters is this: with whom does the responsibility lie? I would vote for the Chief Secretary of the State and the Secretary to Govt who supervises the fire department. They are well-educated, trained government officers who ought to be trained in disaster-management as well. Every mass disaster should be reviewed by a judicial commission, and if unpreparedness or incompetence is established, the officers concerned should have their jobs terminated.

A soft state is one which does not assign clear responsibilities and does not punish negligence and incompetence.

Srinivasan Ramani

Sakunthala did not know what they did to her

Sakunthala (name changed) works as a housemaid, cleaning vessels and sweeping floors in three or four homes. She has a husband who drinks frequently and beats her, and a teen age daughter. She had to go to a big hospital recently for pain in the abdomen. They told her that an operation was necessary. From what she told us, we could guess that there was going to be the removal of a fibroid. We visited her in the hospital a few days after the operation and were happy to hear that she was recovering well. We asked her if the doctors had removed her uterus, as they often do when they remove fibroids in women nearing the end of the child-bearing age. She did not know, and was surprised to her that such things were done. Her daughter was near her, and we asked the girl if she could ask the ward nurse to give her the case sheet so we could find out. Then we realized with a jolt that we were asking for things beyond patients’ rights in a hospital that provided free treatment to those not able to pay for it.

The staff nurse came charging down the aisle and told us that case sheets are not for patients to read! We were sufficiently humble, and said that all we wanted to know was if there had been the total removal of the uterus, and if there had been a test for any possible cancer. The nurse did not know, but had a quick method of finding out. She asked the daughter if “they” had given a plastic bag to be carried to a building which she pointed out, to be deposited there. This had not happened. The nurse declared that if there had been any need for testing for cancer they would surely have given a plastic bag to the patient’s relatives to be carried to the other building. Removal of the uterus? Yes, of course! She was sure that would have been done.

We were disturbed by this during the following days. Why did they treat patients the way veterinary doctors treat animals? No need to talk to them and tell them about what was being done to them? If we had seen the case sheet or other information sheet meant for the patient’s information, would it have been in a form readable by the patient? Would it have been in the local language Sakunthala could read, or in English which she cannot read, or in squiggles?

Ours is a city in which the street names cannot be read by a high percentage of the people because the local government considers it politically unwise to display street names in any language other than the state’s official language. But when it comes to giving information to the patient? If you can’t read English and do not recognize medical abbreviations, you are treated like the veterinary doctor’s patients!

I guess that we ought to be happy that India gives some form of medical care to every one, whether they can pay for it or not, irrespective of what the care is worth! There are well developed economies in the world that do not wish to provide universal health care. Our citizens are better off, in a manner of speaking! But can we improve our practices? Can hospitals treat patients not as a burden but as their customers? After all, it is the people’s money that the hospital runs on, not on anyone’s inheritance! Shouldn’t hospitals have a patient’s charter and enforce it?

S. Ramani