I have pleasure in reporting the honor bestowed on the father of computer education in India, Prof V Rajaraman, by the Supercomputer Education and Research Center at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on Oct 31, ‘09.
His contributions as a pioneer in Indian education and research in the computer area, starting with his work on the faculty at IIT Kanpur, followed by his work at the IISc are very well known. We should also remember that he was a member of the Electronic Commission, that he was given the Padma Bhushan award by the Govt of India and that it was the Rajaraman Committee on Manpower that proposed the Master of Computer Applications programmes. He played a key role in the creation of what began as the All India Computer Users Group (AICUG), which was soon renamed as the Computer Society of India.
There was a Symposium in the morning, with technical talks by Prof Siva Ram Murthy of IIT Madras, Dr T S Mohan of Infosys, Prof Jayant Haritsa of IISc, Shri N Suthambara, IISc, Dr Atanu Mohanty, IISc, and Ms Sivagama Sundari, IISc. Prof P Balaram, Director, IISc presided over the function.
In the evening there was a felicitation event followed by a memorable Veena Recital by Vidwan D Balakrishna and dinner.
On behalf of all those who have studied under Prof Rajaraman or worked with him, I offer him our best wishes for the future.
I would like to express a personal opinion here on the Master of Computer Applications programme. The highest form of honor we can give a pioneer is to analyze and benefit fully from his ideas. Creation of the MCA programmes recognized a fundamental fact – that activities and knowledge related to the computer field go far beyond engineering. While MCA graduates in tens of thousands have contributed to the nation’s might in the software and services area, the educational world and the industry have to do a lot more to strengthen MCA programs. We should work for the day when the nation’s best graduates in sciences and humanities do an MCA, and some of best managers come out of that stream. The nation cannot ignore its liberal education.
Srinivasan Ramani,
Past President, CSI
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Doing a Little Teaching during a Holiday
We have returned just this morning from a good holiday in Hampi (http://www.hampi.in/) with a couple of friends - three peaceful days that gave us lots of exercise and good sightseeing. Four of us traveled around in one auto-rickshaw, sometimes using a “big” auto, which is said to take ten people with some compression :=) Memorable was the trip to the Daroji Bear Sanctuary (http://www.karnataka.com/slothbear/), about 25 kilometers away.
We stayed at the Ranjana Guest House, the house of the Doraisamy Dass family offering a few rented rooms. We managed to get two rooms on the first floor, where we could climb a ladder to get to the terrace with a great view of the city. We enjoyed that view almost as much as we enjoyed the good breakfasts :=)
Mr Dass is the publisher of a popular tourist guide booklet on Hampi. His daughter, Kala, teaches forty to fifty young students on the terrace, in the evenings - students ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 10, who attend various schools during the day. The evening classes provide supplementary education.
My wife Usha and I asked Kala if we could spend sometime teaching her students, and were delighted when she agreed. We then spent an hour with ten bright-eyed students, who were in the grades from 6 to 10. They were relaxed and were very attentive and responsive to our questions. Not having learnt the local language Kannada as yet, I could only speak in English. Usha could do better as she knows some Kannada. One student, Rehmoo, was very clear about what he wanted to be when he completed high school – a tourist guide. He wanted to learn some French, German and Spanish. There were girls who wanted to be doctors and software engineers. One boy wanted to be a police officer and another a military officer. Many of them studied in schools that used English as the medium of instruction. However, no one was willing to tell us a story in English. So, we used the time available to engage them in English conversation and to encourage them to be less hesitant to speak in English.
Next morning, we were walking down the street when we heard a cheerful voice greeting us. It was Rehmoo who was selling copies of a tourist guidebook. “What about school?” we asked. He said that he would return home at 9:30 and get ready for school.
Hundreds of tourists come to Hampi every day. Some of them obviously like to do some teaching. This often has led to amusing results – like local boys with a smattering of English speaking in very noticeable foreign accents!
I have always wanted to teach students outside the big cities. This experience showed me how I could combine an interesting holiday with a bit of volunteer work. Usha and I hope to return to Hampi soon, better prepared to do some useful teaching. I should perhaps plan to give them a simple demonstration illustrating a scientific principle, a sky-watching session on the terrace, a session in mathematics and a session in English. A written quiz at the end may not be a bad idea. I must also see if I can buy a portable data projector for use with a laptop computer.
Srinivasan Ramani
December 28, '08
We stayed at the Ranjana Guest House, the house of the Doraisamy Dass family offering a few rented rooms. We managed to get two rooms on the first floor, where we could climb a ladder to get to the terrace with a great view of the city. We enjoyed that view almost as much as we enjoyed the good breakfasts :=)
Mr Dass is the publisher of a popular tourist guide booklet on Hampi. His daughter, Kala, teaches forty to fifty young students on the terrace, in the evenings - students ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 10, who attend various schools during the day. The evening classes provide supplementary education.
My wife Usha and I asked Kala if we could spend sometime teaching her students, and were delighted when she agreed. We then spent an hour with ten bright-eyed students, who were in the grades from 6 to 10. They were relaxed and were very attentive and responsive to our questions. Not having learnt the local language Kannada as yet, I could only speak in English. Usha could do better as she knows some Kannada. One student, Rehmoo, was very clear about what he wanted to be when he completed high school – a tourist guide. He wanted to learn some French, German and Spanish. There were girls who wanted to be doctors and software engineers. One boy wanted to be a police officer and another a military officer. Many of them studied in schools that used English as the medium of instruction. However, no one was willing to tell us a story in English. So, we used the time available to engage them in English conversation and to encourage them to be less hesitant to speak in English.
Next morning, we were walking down the street when we heard a cheerful voice greeting us. It was Rehmoo who was selling copies of a tourist guidebook. “What about school?” we asked. He said that he would return home at 9:30 and get ready for school.
Hundreds of tourists come to Hampi every day. Some of them obviously like to do some teaching. This often has led to amusing results – like local boys with a smattering of English speaking in very noticeable foreign accents!
I have always wanted to teach students outside the big cities. This experience showed me how I could combine an interesting holiday with a bit of volunteer work. Usha and I hope to return to Hampi soon, better prepared to do some useful teaching. I should perhaps plan to give them a simple demonstration illustrating a scientific principle, a sky-watching session on the terrace, a session in mathematics and a session in English. A written quiz at the end may not be a bad idea. I must also see if I can buy a portable data projector for use with a laptop computer.
Srinivasan Ramani
December 28, '08
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Grand Challenge – Advance Personalized Learning
Grand Challenge – Advance Personalized Learning
The National Academy of Engineering in the US has selected fourteen grand challenges to focus on http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx
One of these is “Advance Personalized Learning" http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9127.aspx
I posted some comments on the discussion page and I present a copy of my comments below.
1. Improved in education could have as large an impact on societies around the world as abolition of slavery had two centuries ago. It could form the basis of an international initiative, increasing prosperity all over, and reducing human misery.
2. Online learning has so far been a technology without an adequate scientific base. Expanding and strengthening this base will require advanced, multi-disciplinary research.
3. You cannot have systems which help a learner about which you can say "forgive them; they not what they are doing". Representations of knowledge that needs learnt, its links with outside representations (including web pages), representations of a student’s current knowledge, his learning context, links to various learning resources, etc. are all necessary. These will lead to personalized learning on a grand scale. A whole new part of the service sector will emerge, as big as the traditional education sector or the financial services sector, contributing to a worldwide economic boom.
4. There is a hope that significant advances can be made in the near future with a concerted effort.
5. As action points I would suggest
a) creation of a forum and its popularization, for interested researchers to network. Perhaps the National Academy of Engg website http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9127/9736.aspx?notifyComment=1 where this would be posted could be that website
b) Identification of one or two international conferences and/or workshops (or creation of a new series) for specialists addressing this grand challenge to gather and exchange thoughts.
c) use of technology for sharing all kinds of content, including videos, open access tools and software, etc., relevant to this grand challenge.
d) identifying or creating journals to serve specialists working on this grand challenge.
Srinivasan Ramani
May 3, 2008
The National Academy of Engineering in the US has selected fourteen grand challenges to focus on http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx
One of these is “Advance Personalized Learning" http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9127.aspx
I posted some comments on the discussion page and I present a copy of my comments below.
1. Improved in education could have as large an impact on societies around the world as abolition of slavery had two centuries ago. It could form the basis of an international initiative, increasing prosperity all over, and reducing human misery.
2. Online learning has so far been a technology without an adequate scientific base. Expanding and strengthening this base will require advanced, multi-disciplinary research.
3. You cannot have systems which help a learner about which you can say "forgive them; they not what they are doing". Representations of knowledge that needs learnt, its links with outside representations (including web pages), representations of a student’s current knowledge, his learning context, links to various learning resources, etc. are all necessary. These will lead to personalized learning on a grand scale. A whole new part of the service sector will emerge, as big as the traditional education sector or the financial services sector, contributing to a worldwide economic boom.
4. There is a hope that significant advances can be made in the near future with a concerted effort.
5. As action points I would suggest
a) creation of a forum and its popularization, for interested researchers to network. Perhaps the National Academy of Engg website http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9127/9736.aspx?notifyComment=1 where this would be posted could be that website
b) Identification of one or two international conferences and/or workshops (or creation of a new series) for specialists addressing this grand challenge to gather and exchange thoughts.
c) use of technology for sharing all kinds of content, including videos, open access tools and software, etc., relevant to this grand challenge.
d) identifying or creating journals to serve specialists working on this grand challenge.
Srinivasan Ramani
May 3, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Education related to Disaster Management
This note is in response to a question by Dave Grey on the Disaster Management Community discussion list (see
http://www.solutionexchange-un.net.in/en/Disaster-Management/introduction.html )
One of the questions posed by Dave Grey was
What are the best methods, tools and technologies available to do so, keeping in mind the rural and remote locations that these children live in? Here is the answer I sent out on that list. This is in no way a complete answer. My intent was only to make a few relevant comments.
Quote from my email
1. Obviously, awareness that disasters can hit any time and its likelihood depends upon a set of variables (like rainfall) is valuable. I have some suggestions in regard to rainfall, particularly in the context of hilly areas in India. Merely educating children in this matter will not do. The country has to create appropriate facilities to disseminate information in a timely manner.
2. Children should be aware of weather news and forecasts coming over the radio, TV, newspapers and the Internet and be encouraged to use this information. Precipitation is a major cause of landfalls. Information of the kind I have mentioned would obviously help anticipate problems, though it would require significant education and training. Such training given to teachers in local schools would help a lot. I give the following two URLs as examples of what information is available. (http://www.weather.nic.in/; http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/INXX0140.html)
3. Why such forecasts are not widely available in Indian languages needs to be examined.
4. A news report in The Hindu newspaper deals with an exciting and simple solution to the problem: Interactive Voice Response systems giving weather forecasts for selected locations in a region, giving a choice of languages. Read here: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/09/stories/2008020957070300.htm. With hundreds of millions of cell phones in India, this technique is very attractive.
5. Cell phone coverage in hilly areas does get to be very poor. There is a Universal Services Obligation Fund of the Govt of India to subsidize telecom facilities in relatively remote and sparse population areas. Some of these funds should be utilized to provide dependable connectivity to areas where disaster risks are known to be high. Items 3 to 5 need to be taken up by state governments. Paucity of resources is a not a valid excuse any more.
Thanks
Srinivasan Ramani
http://www.solutionexchange-un.net.in/en/Disaster-Management/introduction.html )
One of the questions posed by Dave Grey was
What are the best methods, tools and technologies available to do so, keeping in mind the rural and remote locations that these children live in? Here is the answer I sent out on that list. This is in no way a complete answer. My intent was only to make a few relevant comments.
Quote from my email
1. Obviously, awareness that disasters can hit any time and its likelihood depends upon a set of variables (like rainfall) is valuable. I have some suggestions in regard to rainfall, particularly in the context of hilly areas in India. Merely educating children in this matter will not do. The country has to create appropriate facilities to disseminate information in a timely manner.
2. Children should be aware of weather news and forecasts coming over the radio, TV, newspapers and the Internet and be encouraged to use this information. Precipitation is a major cause of landfalls. Information of the kind I have mentioned would obviously help anticipate problems, though it would require significant education and training. Such training given to teachers in local schools would help a lot. I give the following two URLs as examples of what information is available. (http://www.weather.nic.in/; http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/INXX0140.html)
3. Why such forecasts are not widely available in Indian languages needs to be examined.
4. A news report in The Hindu newspaper deals with an exciting and simple solution to the problem: Interactive Voice Response systems giving weather forecasts for selected locations in a region, giving a choice of languages. Read here: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/09/stories/2008020957070300.htm. With hundreds of millions of cell phones in India, this technique is very attractive.
5. Cell phone coverage in hilly areas does get to be very poor. There is a Universal Services Obligation Fund of the Govt of India to subsidize telecom facilities in relatively remote and sparse population areas. Some of these funds should be utilized to provide dependable connectivity to areas where disaster risks are known to be high. Items 3 to 5 need to be taken up by state governments. Paucity of resources is a not a valid excuse any more.
Thanks
Srinivasan Ramani
Monday, April 14, 2008
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Schools
There has been an interesting discussion on policy recommendations that are to be made to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. This discussion has been happening on the discussion list named Solution Exchange on ICT in Development (see http://www.solutionexchange-un.net.in/ictd/cr/res28030801.doc for the discussion on ICT in Schools.) This posting brings you a copy of what I contributed to the discussion. The questions posed by the initiator of the discussion are shown to provide the context to my remarks.
Topic 1: ICT Infrastructure in Schools
1. What are some of the key challenges faced using ICT in school education with regard to ICT infrastructure?
a. Uncontrolled access to the Internet for all students is very expensive
b. Satisfactory Internet access for the students in a school is difficult to provide in most areas of the country outside the big cities
c. The Internet in schools poses problems of misuse (like visiting educationally useless and undesirable sites)
d. Attempts to use ICT in education are relatively ineffective unless the student gets content in his/her own language and content relevant to the curriculum. Suitable and adequate content should be planned for when the physical infrastructure is planned. Educational TV offers the raw material for computer based video and multi-media instruction in Indian languages.
Local Area Networks (LANs) are very important for educational institutions, particularly because Internet access is a problem. If content is available for hosting on the LAN, it would play a valuable role. Ideally a good part of the content should be in the video form. Interactive multi-media material would also be valuable. We should make such resources available over every school LAN, instead of trying to make them accessible over the Internet. The bandwidth required for these is quite high, and the LAN is the cost-effective solution to provide this bandwidth. This will overcome many of the problems listed above.
I have a few other suggestions in relation to infrastructure. India has excellent satellite TV infrastructure and has invested significantly in educational TV. Due to technical advances, a school can now spend only Rs 2500 on DTH equipment once to get a 1.5 Mbps digital link (that is what satellite TV uses), which in turn brings video content for free. Some Indian educational channels are planning to switch to DTH soon, and it is very practical for them to do this. Due to the rapid fall in the cost of servers and storage, it is entirely possible to record in digital form into a server thousands of hours of TV programs, and make it available on demand from every PC on the LAN. It is easy to make a specified program available over the LAN according to a schedule to as many classrooms and PCs as are required. We can simultaneously provide for any set of Classrooms/PCs to access programs that are required individually, without depending on a time schedule. A digital library on a server on the LAN would be a valuable asset, as it will store all types of digital content.
ICT is perceived as expensive. It need not be so, if a PC and a projector are used for a class as a whole. Such a facility should ideally be available in every classroom. The classroom PC-cum-projector facility can be used even to administer quizzes and tests. Objective type questions can be displayed on the screen and students can be asked to write down the answers. Alternatively, the teacher can call out students at random to answer a given question for the benefit of the class. The teacher can correct wrong answers, explaining why that answer was not the correct one.
4. Can you offer advice on ways in which school ICT Infrastructure can be used as community learning centres after the school hours? I believe that the most useful way would be to have a trained person there after office hours to offer training on the use of the PCs and any available Internet connection to interested people in the local community. We need to train several million people at that level, and trainers working out of school facilities can easily run a sustainable training program. People will pay a lot more for training and education than for mere access to hardware and software. We will need several hundred thousand trainers to do this work. Therefore a big project in this direction will create a large number of valuable job opportunities for teachers and others. These opportunities will arise wherever there are schools in India.
Topic 2: Capacity Building for Use of ICT in Schools
1. What are some of the key capacity gaps facing ICT in school education? Are there any good examples where these capacity gaps have been addressed?
A key issue is the scarcity of effective teachers who can handle ICT infrastructure and utilize it for educational purposes. Any training we give such teachers is lost within a couple of years as many of these teachers move out of educational institutions and go to business and industry. We could modify an idea of the SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai and use it to solve this problem. SNDT offers a Master of Educational Technology (Computer Applications) (http://www.sndt.ac.in/det/METCA%20Prospectus%202007-08.pdf ). IGNOU could offer a “Diploma/Degree for ICT Teachers in Schools” to start with, for the benefit of teachers working in schools. This would be a part time course spread over two or three years, giving significant credit for effective performance as a teacher using ICT. Practical work specified to the participants could be teaching assignments, which could be graded by local senior teachers or other administrators. In addition, the participants would be learning in the distance education mode and taking examinations. Those enrolled would serve the school during their education, and get the greatest reward – getting better educated. If they leave the school system after qualifying for a Diploma/Degree, that would be fine. The economy needs such people too.
2. Can you suggest creative ideas and innovations for building capacity for ICT in school education?
We could announce an award of Rs One Lakh per author for a hundred authors a year for creating educational content in the form of e-books in Indian languages. This may be any one, not necessarily a teacher; for instance it could be a college teacher writing for school students. Those whose books are selected for the award should put the e-book in the public domain, so that any one can use it. This would be a method of providing inexpensive content for digital libraries at schools. If 50,000 schools use an e-book and it has a notional value of Rs 50 per copy, the value created by the proposed “Indian Language e-Book Award Scheme” would be Rs 25 Lakhs. Public libraries should also be able to use public domain content in Indian languages, thereby doubling the utilization of e-books created. The scheme should not exclude books in English.
MHRD’s National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has created thousands of hours of video lectures, covering a lot of the four-year curriculum in four disciplines of engineering at the university level. The valuable experience gained in this project can be used to create video content to cover school curricula in all Indian languages. School-teachers can be trained and invited to create video content in their areas of expertise, and in their own language. The best teachers can provide inspirational lectures and model lectures. This content can also be packaged as short video clips which a local teacher can use in the class, offering his/her own lecture livened and enriched by the video-clips.
Submitted by
Srinivasan Ramani
Topic 1: ICT Infrastructure in Schools
1. What are some of the key challenges faced using ICT in school education with regard to ICT infrastructure?
a. Uncontrolled access to the Internet for all students is very expensive
b. Satisfactory Internet access for the students in a school is difficult to provide in most areas of the country outside the big cities
c. The Internet in schools poses problems of misuse (like visiting educationally useless and undesirable sites)
d. Attempts to use ICT in education are relatively ineffective unless the student gets content in his/her own language and content relevant to the curriculum. Suitable and adequate content should be planned for when the physical infrastructure is planned. Educational TV offers the raw material for computer based video and multi-media instruction in Indian languages.
Local Area Networks (LANs) are very important for educational institutions, particularly because Internet access is a problem. If content is available for hosting on the LAN, it would play a valuable role. Ideally a good part of the content should be in the video form. Interactive multi-media material would also be valuable. We should make such resources available over every school LAN, instead of trying to make them accessible over the Internet. The bandwidth required for these is quite high, and the LAN is the cost-effective solution to provide this bandwidth. This will overcome many of the problems listed above.
I have a few other suggestions in relation to infrastructure. India has excellent satellite TV infrastructure and has invested significantly in educational TV. Due to technical advances, a school can now spend only Rs 2500 on DTH equipment once to get a 1.5 Mbps digital link (that is what satellite TV uses), which in turn brings video content for free. Some Indian educational channels are planning to switch to DTH soon, and it is very practical for them to do this. Due to the rapid fall in the cost of servers and storage, it is entirely possible to record in digital form into a server thousands of hours of TV programs, and make it available on demand from every PC on the LAN. It is easy to make a specified program available over the LAN according to a schedule to as many classrooms and PCs as are required. We can simultaneously provide for any set of Classrooms/PCs to access programs that are required individually, without depending on a time schedule. A digital library on a server on the LAN would be a valuable asset, as it will store all types of digital content.
ICT is perceived as expensive. It need not be so, if a PC and a projector are used for a class as a whole. Such a facility should ideally be available in every classroom. The classroom PC-cum-projector facility can be used even to administer quizzes and tests. Objective type questions can be displayed on the screen and students can be asked to write down the answers. Alternatively, the teacher can call out students at random to answer a given question for the benefit of the class. The teacher can correct wrong answers, explaining why that answer was not the correct one.
4. Can you offer advice on ways in which school ICT Infrastructure can be used as community learning centres after the school hours? I believe that the most useful way would be to have a trained person there after office hours to offer training on the use of the PCs and any available Internet connection to interested people in the local community. We need to train several million people at that level, and trainers working out of school facilities can easily run a sustainable training program. People will pay a lot more for training and education than for mere access to hardware and software. We will need several hundred thousand trainers to do this work. Therefore a big project in this direction will create a large number of valuable job opportunities for teachers and others. These opportunities will arise wherever there are schools in India.
Topic 2: Capacity Building for Use of ICT in Schools
1. What are some of the key capacity gaps facing ICT in school education? Are there any good examples where these capacity gaps have been addressed?
A key issue is the scarcity of effective teachers who can handle ICT infrastructure and utilize it for educational purposes. Any training we give such teachers is lost within a couple of years as many of these teachers move out of educational institutions and go to business and industry. We could modify an idea of the SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai and use it to solve this problem. SNDT offers a Master of Educational Technology (Computer Applications) (http://www.sndt.ac.in/det/METCA%20Prospectus%202007-08.pdf ). IGNOU could offer a “Diploma/Degree for ICT Teachers in Schools” to start with, for the benefit of teachers working in schools. This would be a part time course spread over two or three years, giving significant credit for effective performance as a teacher using ICT. Practical work specified to the participants could be teaching assignments, which could be graded by local senior teachers or other administrators. In addition, the participants would be learning in the distance education mode and taking examinations. Those enrolled would serve the school during their education, and get the greatest reward – getting better educated. If they leave the school system after qualifying for a Diploma/Degree, that would be fine. The economy needs such people too.
2. Can you suggest creative ideas and innovations for building capacity for ICT in school education?
We could announce an award of Rs One Lakh per author for a hundred authors a year for creating educational content in the form of e-books in Indian languages. This may be any one, not necessarily a teacher; for instance it could be a college teacher writing for school students. Those whose books are selected for the award should put the e-book in the public domain, so that any one can use it. This would be a method of providing inexpensive content for digital libraries at schools. If 50,000 schools use an e-book and it has a notional value of Rs 50 per copy, the value created by the proposed “Indian Language e-Book Award Scheme” would be Rs 25 Lakhs. Public libraries should also be able to use public domain content in Indian languages, thereby doubling the utilization of e-books created. The scheme should not exclude books in English.
MHRD’s National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has created thousands of hours of video lectures, covering a lot of the four-year curriculum in four disciplines of engineering at the university level. The valuable experience gained in this project can be used to create video content to cover school curricula in all Indian languages. School-teachers can be trained and invited to create video content in their areas of expertise, and in their own language. The best teachers can provide inspirational lectures and model lectures. This content can also be packaged as short video clips which a local teacher can use in the class, offering his/her own lecture livened and enriched by the video-clips.
Submitted by
Srinivasan Ramani
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Research to avert economic collapse and climate change
There are looming threats to human life on earth, including
Global warming
Ever increasing pollution of the atmosphere
Exhaustion of petroleum resources
A news item at
http://www.nhne.org/news/NewsArticlesArchive/tabid/400/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3781/Default.aspx
quotes Dr James Lovelock F. R. S. as saying that the world's population would decline from 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million by the year 2100 due to global warming. There does not seem to be any consensus about the impending calamity being of such a magnitude. But, this report does indicate the kind of problem we are talking about. Even if the death toll due to global warming were to be only 10% of what Lovelock estimates, it would snuff out 600 million human lives.
Only The Bubonic Plague or "Black Death" of the 14th century seems to have been a human catastrophe of this magnitude. The Wikipedia says “this plague may have reduced the world's population from 450 million to between 350 to 375 million. China, where it originated, lost around half of its population (from around 123 million to around 65 million), Europe around 1/3 of its population (from about 75 million to about 50 million) and Africa approximately 1/8th of its population (from around 80 million to 70 million)”. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague
My main concern in this article is about the exhaustion of economically recoverable oil reserves, which is also contributing to global warming through the build up of green–house gases. There may be considerable petroleum on earth in some form even in 2100 AD, but our economies would have been shattered well before that due to enormous disruption caused by unaffordable costs of petroleum products. One does not have to take food off the market to starve people; raising the cost to unaffordable levels will have the same effect. Nuclear power stations cannot save us using current technology. Making up for petroleum depletion through such power stations will require commercially viable new technology such as hydrogen-powered vehicles to be developed soon enough.
I do believe that a major economic crisis is a very probable development unless we take concerted action to prevent it on an emergency basis. What can we do and how fast can we do it? Can R & D create commercially viable technologies, say, in 30 years? Will this happen at the current level of R & D effort addressing this problem – that of reducing our dependence on petroleum resources?
What would be the damage done to our economies in these three decades? Is there an indication of how big an R & D effort we should mount to have a high enough probability of success? Who is going to rally the world to mount this effort?
Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have done a very good job of attracting world attention to the climate change problem. We need the continued efforts of champions like them to persuade the world to initiate a big enough R & D effort to prevent depleting oil reserves ruining us. We have to hope that we can succeed in three decades in averting disaster. Otherwise, it may be too late.
Rapid use of non-renewable resources we have discussed is closely related to another problem I have listed above – the rapidly rising pollution of the atmosphere. Creating suitable technologies to enable us to cope with depleting oil reserves can, therefore, partially answer all three concerns.
Leave alone badly needed big inventions to improve fuel cells and solar power generators. There are a number of simple steps that can be, and should be, quickly taken. Thomas L. Friedman has proposed a gasoline tax of a dollar per gallon to motivate the adoption of fuel-efficient technology. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14friedman.html
Every responsible government should consider taking this step seriously. All countries should give tax breaks to manufacturers of hybrid and electric cars. Improving train speeds should be a national priority everywhere. R & D related to surface transportation should be given considerable importance. Information Technology should be used more extensively to make road travel more efficient. There ought be an international effort to encourage all countries to adopt synchronized traffic signals for city traffic in all major cities.
But taking these small steps alone will not suffice. We need a big R & D effort if human life as we know it is to survive on earth.
Srinivasan Ramani
Global warming
Ever increasing pollution of the atmosphere
Exhaustion of petroleum resources
A news item at
http://www.nhne.org/news/NewsArticlesArchive/tabid/400/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3781/Default.aspx
quotes Dr James Lovelock F. R. S. as saying that the world's population would decline from 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million by the year 2100 due to global warming. There does not seem to be any consensus about the impending calamity being of such a magnitude. But, this report does indicate the kind of problem we are talking about. Even if the death toll due to global warming were to be only 10% of what Lovelock estimates, it would snuff out 600 million human lives.
Only The Bubonic Plague or "Black Death" of the 14th century seems to have been a human catastrophe of this magnitude. The Wikipedia says “this plague may have reduced the world's population from 450 million to between 350 to 375 million. China, where it originated, lost around half of its population (from around 123 million to around 65 million), Europe around 1/3 of its population (from about 75 million to about 50 million) and Africa approximately 1/8th of its population (from around 80 million to 70 million)”. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague
My main concern in this article is about the exhaustion of economically recoverable oil reserves, which is also contributing to global warming through the build up of green–house gases. There may be considerable petroleum on earth in some form even in 2100 AD, but our economies would have been shattered well before that due to enormous disruption caused by unaffordable costs of petroleum products. One does not have to take food off the market to starve people; raising the cost to unaffordable levels will have the same effect. Nuclear power stations cannot save us using current technology. Making up for petroleum depletion through such power stations will require commercially viable new technology such as hydrogen-powered vehicles to be developed soon enough.
I do believe that a major economic crisis is a very probable development unless we take concerted action to prevent it on an emergency basis. What can we do and how fast can we do it? Can R & D create commercially viable technologies, say, in 30 years? Will this happen at the current level of R & D effort addressing this problem – that of reducing our dependence on petroleum resources?
What would be the damage done to our economies in these three decades? Is there an indication of how big an R & D effort we should mount to have a high enough probability of success? Who is going to rally the world to mount this effort?
Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have done a very good job of attracting world attention to the climate change problem. We need the continued efforts of champions like them to persuade the world to initiate a big enough R & D effort to prevent depleting oil reserves ruining us. We have to hope that we can succeed in three decades in averting disaster. Otherwise, it may be too late.
Rapid use of non-renewable resources we have discussed is closely related to another problem I have listed above – the rapidly rising pollution of the atmosphere. Creating suitable technologies to enable us to cope with depleting oil reserves can, therefore, partially answer all three concerns.
Leave alone badly needed big inventions to improve fuel cells and solar power generators. There are a number of simple steps that can be, and should be, quickly taken. Thomas L. Friedman has proposed a gasoline tax of a dollar per gallon to motivate the adoption of fuel-efficient technology. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14friedman.html
Every responsible government should consider taking this step seriously. All countries should give tax breaks to manufacturers of hybrid and electric cars. Improving train speeds should be a national priority everywhere. R & D related to surface transportation should be given considerable importance. Information Technology should be used more extensively to make road travel more efficient. There ought be an international effort to encourage all countries to adopt synchronized traffic signals for city traffic in all major cities.
But taking these small steps alone will not suffice. We need a big R & D effort if human life as we know it is to survive on earth.
Srinivasan Ramani
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
A Note on Prof R Narasimhan
Dipti Agarwal of EE Times (i. e. Electronic Engineering Times) had contacted me in Oct 07 for information and comments for an article she wanted to write on Prof R Narasimhan. The material below is what I sent her.
What had inspired Prof Narasimhan
Clearly, Homi Bhabha must have played a major role in persuading Narasimhan to return to India and to think big. Dr Bhabha was the Director, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), when he recruited Prof R Narasimhan (RN). RN would have been deeply interested in digital computers much before he returned to India in the late fifties. He had the right mix of electronics and mathematics backgrounds to realize the tremendous potential of this field.
RN met what I think must have been the full expectations of Dr Bhabha. The award of a “Padma Shri” to RN decades later signified national recognition of his contributions.
His works and achievements
A small number of engineers in every generation stand out because their interest and knowledge goes well beyond their own discipline. RN was deeply interested in pattern recognition, cognitive psychology, language behavior, hardware and software at a time when the word "software" was essentially unheard of. Apart from being the architect of one of world's earliest electronic digital computers, RN made several other contributions.
He was a pioneer in pattern recognition, dealing with visual perception; his paper on syntactic pattern recognition was a seminal one, showing how the regularities of structure that show up in the visual world could be used to create visual perception in a computer.
He was a pioneer not only in building a computer; he was a good observer of international developments and brought first class technology from the more advanced countries to India at a very early stage of India's entry into the computer world. Two major computers he imported served not only TIFR, but were used by scientists from over 200 institutions of higher learning and research from all over India. As a planner and administrator, he ran a project assisted by the United Nations Development Programme in an exemplary manner. This project, named the National Center for Software Development and Computing Techniques (NCSDCT), was aimed at serving the country in a variety of ways and was not limited to computer use for pure research. The project shared its know-how and resources with all groups in the country who were in the field, set an example of how national resources ought to be utilized.
He was the founding Chairman of the CMC Ltd, which he and Dr PP Gupta, the founding MD, developed into the finest technology company in the public sector. He was very much interested in national development and had a vision of what scientific Labs could do for it. He contributed to national policy making as an informal advisor to Prof MGK Menon who was the Chairman of the Electronics Commission at that time.
He was also the founding Chairman of the Computer Society of India. He was always willing to travel to be a Ph D examiner at institutes/universities and to encourage the computer scientists there in their research.
The machine he and his team built - TIFRAC
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Computer (TIFRAC) was a digital computer using 2,700 vacuum tubes, mostly double triodes. It also used 1,700 “crystal” diodes! It provided for a working memory of 1024 locations, equivalent to what we now call 5 Kilobytes, and used 5-hole punched paper tape for I/O and a Teletype for printing. The power consumption was 18 Kilo Watts. It had a ferrite core working memory, which was very much a state-of-the-art memory in those early days of the technology. This memory was designed and built by hand at the TIFR. Prof PVS Rao who was doing a Ph D at that time, developing a CRT based terminal as an interactive device, was a member in the team that designed a fast adder. RN’s team later added India's first computer programmer, Kamlakar Kane, who designed and implemented an assembler that allowed programmers to use double operand instructions. This shows how the value of software was appreciated at such an early period.
His influence on my work
I came on the scene only in 1964 as a student of PVS Rao, when RN was abroad on a sabbatical at the University of Illinois. He returned in 1965 and it was very easy to identify a common interest with him – the possibility of natural language understanding and “intelligent” problem solving by computers. RN guided my work for a Ph D. Then I went to the Carnegie-Mellon University for two years, where I caught the computer network bug! The next fifteen years of my life went mostly into what I recognized as a valuable technology for India, computer networks. With colleagues like Sadanandan, Kesav Nori, Mudur and (Ms) Joglekar, I started working to create what was probably India’s first Post-Graduate Diploma Course in Software Technology. This was a big success, as twenty bright people competed for every seat we could offer. Later, with Narasimhan’s guidance, I worked with Sadanandan and Mudur to set up the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) that became a reality in 1984/85. I was the founding director. The most satisfying work at NCST I did was to lead an effort to create an academic (computer) network for India. This project, named ERNET, brought Internet technology into India. NCST’s team, working with similar teams at the IITs and IISc, became the first ISP in 1988.
Opportunities and Challenges
Doing applied research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was a very challenging experience for RN, and of course, for me. We realized the great practical value of the technology we were dealing with. We were also highly stimulated and excited by the atmosphere of fundamental research at the institute. It was a rare learning experience that lasted two and a half decades for me, and the whole of his professional life for Narasimhan. There are only a few places on earth that give such a heady mixture of experiences. However, life was a bit complicated as we were “outsiders” to some extent in an institute that was primarily a fundamental research institute.
Changes in the Indian economy impacting our work
The years at TIFR I had seen (1964-1985) were years in which country was very short of foreign exchange, and self-reliance was a necessity. Import of computers was tightly controlled.
RN saw some of the inevitable changes coming, much before many others. He was the first person I know of who talked about the significance of the post-industrial revolution for a developing country like India. He gave a computer society talk, starting with a reference to Daniel Bell’s book on the post-industrial revolution, and went on to predict the rapid rise of the service sector in India. There was no sign of the explosive growth of the service sector in India at that time; this growth came in the decades that followed his talk. His vision was that of a growing service sector meeting the needs of the Indian domestic economy.
National policies started changing after 1985. The first impact on us was the tremendous demand for well-educated software professionals from the public and private sectors. This made our part-time post-graduate course a very highly valued one.
Later, imports became much easier, and nation-wide enterprises like financial institutions and petroleum companies needed computer networks designed and created for them. I was a consultant to many of them. We recognized the fact scientific progress does not alone grow an electronic or computer industry. It is the widespread use of a new technology all over the economy that enables the meteoric rise of a technology, by unleashing economic forces driving R & D and the use of the technology in industry and in the service sector.
RN was a very private person
RN seems to have been acutely embarrassed once by his pioneering team. On some occasion - it might have been one of his birthdays - the team had festooned the whole working area with colored paper streamers and balloons. Unfortunately, I was not there to watch it, but the team members chuckled over it for at least a decade. He seems to have systematically removed every bit of the stuff personally!
His other interests
Wide reading on a variety of subjects and mentoring people were what he enjoyed doing the most. In the sixties I had heard that he enjoyed Jazz music, but never heard of anything else. I have seen him enjoying carnatic music concerts that he organized during our international workshops/seminars.
His monastery
He was not religious; nor am I. Once I shared a thought with him, wondering why there should not be ashrams for scientifically minded people. We have as much a right to a good ashram as any religious person! He asked me “Don’t you think that Labs like this are our monasteries?” I was touched; he was so right.
Srinivasan Ramani Oct 24, 2007
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