Use Unlicensed WiFi Spectrum in Rural Areas/Small Towns

When it rains on agricultural land, it does a lot of good, but if it rains in an uninhabited area, it often goes waste. Somewhat similar is the story of the electromagnetic spectrum. In rural areas and in small towns, the demand for wireless services is a small fraction of what it is elsewhere. So it goes mostly unused. It is unfair to charge a school student in such an area a hundred rupees a month for access to the Internet. No government can subsidize that kind of expenditure. The typical rural student lives on dal and roti worth less than Rs 200 a month. An interesting solution to the problem of providing inexpensive Internet access in rural areas has been demonstrated in a neighboring country – Nepal. 

Dr Mahabir Pun
is a social entrepreneur working in some rural areas of Nepal. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. His focus is not so much the technology, but on social good; technology is a tool for him. He started using the unlicensed WiFi spectrum a few years ago to connect villages to the Internet and to provide village populations access via WiFi. (Here “unlicensed spectrum” is used in the sense of “spectrum that can be used without a license).  You can find more about him at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mahabir-Pun/43662749774 and at
http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/mahabir-pun 

Visiting students from abroad used to take simple equipment to him to help him build his network. Now, such WiFi equipment is available easily and inexpensively. It costs you less than two thousand US dollars to connect up a village to the Internet. The backbone of his network runs on 5.8 GHz band and local distribution is on the 2.4 GHz band. If you choose a building that is on a relatively high level over the land around, or if you use a tall communication tower, you can cover quite a distance with this technology. Mahabir puts his equipment on hillocks and gets hops up to 50 KMs using directional antennas. For more information on the technology Mahabir uses, please visit http://nepalwireless.net/

Several groups in South Africa have also built WiFi based networks covering rural areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_wireless_community_networks

Bhaskaran Raman and Kameswari Chebrolu at IIT Kanpur had done work using this technology and reported it in 2007. Visit http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/braman/papers/2007-exp-dgp.pdf

Imagine what we can do in India with this technology. There is equipment that connects to the backbone at 5.8 GHz at one end and acts as a 2.4 GHz access point at the other. Some information on such equipment can be found at http://0086cctv.en.alibaba.com/product/718115013-210005803/5_8GHz_2_4GHz_wireless_backbone_transmission_and_wifi_coverage_equipment.html

All we need is for someone to operate a backbone router and a bunch of 5.8 GHz units in every Panchayat Union town. The technology works using mesh network techniques. If a village does not have line of sight to its Panchayat Union, it can link up via another village that does have such a link.

Someone should be paying for Internet access, which costs about 100,000 Rupees per year for a full one megabit per second. Schools can use standard equipment involving a directional antenna and connect up with the back-end and provide 2.4 GHz WiFi access at its user end. Anyone near the village unit would be able to access the Internet with a tablet or smartphone or even a laptop or PC. Mahabir Pun says that he keeps his network running by charging a subscription of Rs 1 per month! There are probably many well-wishers of Mahabir who donate to his cause and thereby provide a subsidy. His project covering 175 villages seems to have been set up with a grant of less than half a million US dollars. His network provides not only simple connectivity, but also runs web servers, proxy servers, etc. Applications involved include tourism to bring employment in rural areas.

Imagine that some unit of the Govt of India takes on itself the job of providing 5.8 MHz access facility and pays for the Internet bandwidth. They could restrict user access to the ac.in and gov.in domains to make misuse difficult, and provide access only to information and services related to education and govt services. Imagine that a professional society like the Computer Society of India says “Many of our members will volunteer to go back to their schools to help them raise money to buy the school-end equipment and set it up”. I have no authority to speak on behalf of any organization, but there is no law against giving suggestions - is there?

What about our engineering colleges? Can some of their students volunteer to spend a few days every month visiting the schools they studied at, and help them acquire Internet connections? These colleges usually have very impressive looking buildings that can be seen from miles around. Can they give a little room on their terrace for hosting the school network’s antennas? Most importantly, can the students offer a few lectures/demos per month and train a few enthusiastic teachers at each school? 

I think a project like this would release a lot of energies. Over 70% of the school students live in small towns and metros. A lot of learning in future would occur online with people surfing the Internet and using services such as online courses. The infrastructure I visualize here is not merely for school students. Every public library should offer WiFi access free to those inside it and on the street outside it! Perhaps every panchayat office should offer one. The equipment can run round the clock unmanned. They can be given backup power from a UPS with large enough batteries to last out common power cuts. They can even be solar powered. This is all possible because the equipment does not demand huge amounts of power. I would like to see users walk up to a nearby school or panchayat office with a tablet or smart phone, sit under a tree nearby, and use their Internet access devices.

Let me come back to one important question. Why volunteers? As you know, you can only help those who help themselves. I have visited far too many schools which have bought fine equipment with Govt grants: server, LAN, terminal rooms, 40 PCs and so on. They are usually impeccably clean, because no one uses them! Many schools will tell you that they got a grant for a purchase, but that after a year there was no money to pay for maintenance of the machines. It is very difficult to retain trained staff. Young people who learn to work with computers go away to bigger cities in search of better paying jobs. There is often nobody in a rural school to worry about anti-virus protection or software updates. If there is any Internet connection available, the viruses eat up quite a bit of the bandwidth! Besides, the schools have much bigger problems to face, like the students wanting to study in English medium but not knowing enough English to understand what the books contain! The problem is not with the machines. It is the absence of people with knowledge, enthusiasm and the desire to make a change. It is the lack of organizations to motivate, train and support volunteers. Government hiring an army of computer technicians cannot solve these problems. Volunteers can, but social entrepreneurs are the key. It is fire in their bellies that will make our citizens learn and earn enough to eat well!

Acknowledgement: I thank my former colleague Mr. M. K. Durai Murugan, Manager (Technical) at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, for his comments and suggestions.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Why Are Indian Buildings Unfriendly to the Physically Challenged?

We voted today. The booths were set up in a big high school. As I crossed the gate, I started to watch for obstacles that would defeat me if I tried to take my 99 year old mother to vote later on. She is wheel chair bound. I know, I cannot ask a poor, harassed Election Commission to worry about everything; but, what about the school? Did it not provide for students on wheel-chairs?  Is it not the duty of officials to ensure access to the classroom for every student, even if only five in a thousand required wheel chairs? And what do you do if a teacher has an accident and ends up requiring a wheel chair? Embarrass him/her into leaving the job and go away?

There was a stretch of loose sand about 25 meters across, from the gate to the school building – I decided that my mother’s wheel chair would not negotiate that. What about ramps? There was one at the end of the stretch of sand.

However, as I went into the building, I saw there was no way to get a wheel chair to the voting booths without physically carrying the wheel chair with my mother in it over three big steps. I gave up. 

Forget the public buildings and the voting! Can my mother visit a wheel chair friendly temple? I have been planning to take her to the Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanam (TTD)  in Malleswaram.

That temple has a lift. Logical, I thought. It is people above sixty that think more about the lord! They think of him even more after they reach seventy! And it is then they find they cannot negotiate dozens of steps! Unfortunately, every time I have enquired, a staff member tells me that the lift is “under repair”.

Sixty seven years of independence are not enough to make our public buildings accessible to the physically challenged; and temples are the most unfriendly buildings to the old.

Srinivasan Ramani 

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

Kris Gopalakrishnan’s gift for the creation of a Centre for Brain Research

Kris Gopalakrishnan’s gift of Rs 225 Crores (say about US$35 million) for the creation of a Centre for Brain Research is an important development in India. Not merely because some of the profits from a technology based industry are made available for advanced research, but also because of the excellent choice of the subject. There are many in this country who can throw money at some field or the other of their choice, but few have the penetrating vision that selects the science whose time has come. Naturally, a philanthropist would be guided by advisors in making such a choice.  If this decision was steered by his advisors, I must congratulate Kris Gopalakrishnan for having chosen obviously excellent advisors. The choice of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as a partner in this effort is also a very good choice. The fact that IISc has already invested in a Centre for Neuroscience is a promising indication of IISc’s interests and capabilities.

Better understanding of the nature of knowledge and information, and understanding the brain that understands all that, – these are two big challenges in front of humanity today. Investing on these is the privilege of visionaries. The decision will have a significant impact on the scientific and economic future of India.

There is yet another reason why Gopalakrishnan’s contribution is very important; it demonstrates that there are Indians willing to make significantly large donations to promote education and research without looking for a profit. It is a common to see some panelist or other on TV discussions argue for the idea that education should be as open a sector as selling any other commodity or service! There is a profit motive in mind of the companies that sell their products and services, right? Why don’t you let them sell education as well? I think that such an argument is foolish.

I believe that private organizations should be free to provide educational services. However, if they are to confer degrees and qualify for tax-exemption, they should be not-for-profit institutions. I am sure that India has a large enough body of donors, who over the years would endow a thousand universities. They will structure these institutions such that they will administer themselves, and keep out the corrupt and the incompetent. Society should ensure that educational institutions should meet high standards and are managed in academic matters by their own faculties with the cooperation of a small set of eminent persons of high standing. That an institution should have high standards surely does not mean that it should obey every little instruction coming from the Govt. It is possible to create and run accreditation mechanisms that are free of exploitation or micro-management by Govt.

Equally, Society should allow contributions to universities at different stages of development to be deducted from the income tax of the contributor, as long as it is below a certain (say 50%) percentage of the total income tax payable by him that year. 

History shows that private donors have played a great role over the centuries in creating universities of great reputation. India needs to make sure that Indian donors are not turned away from doing great service to society by mindless control of politicians and bureaucrats.

Srinivasan Ramani

Ramani’s Education and the Pedagogy of MOOC Courses

I took a couple MOOC courses during the Fall Semester, 2013. Both were edx.org courses

1. Computational Neurodynamics, Prof Wulfram Gerstner https://www.edx.org/course/epflx/epflx-bio465x-neuronal-dynamics-1024
2. Fundamentals of Neuroscience, Part I, Prof David Cox
   https://www.edx.org/course/harvardx/harvardx-mcb80-1x-fundamentals-925

I thought I did not need an introduction to neurosciences, because I have been interested in neurosciences over the last forty years and have read on and off the subject. This interest has remained platonic as I hesitated to get involved seriously, I will write that story in another blog posting! Now that I am retired, I can spare more time for such involvement and I thought I would feel less like an amateur if I did an edx course in the subject.  To answer your question – yes, I did find that my decision to take the two courses was a wise one. I enjoyed them immensely. You do surely feel a bit more like a serious scholar when you know that it is the inside of the neuron that is negative at rest. To learn about sodium – potassium ion pumps and how they create concentration gradients across the membrane is illuminating.

The other course, on Neurodynamics, was different. “Very European” in its style of teaching, very mathematical and demanding.  A bit more like a graduate course. Not having seen even a mirror image of a page on partial differential   equations in forty years, I had to scramble a bit and slog to catch up. However, I did learn a lot from this course. I got 52% overall in computational Neurodynamics. The results of the final exam on Fundamentals of Neuroscience, Part I, came today (27 Jan 2014): 85.87%

52% isn’t much, but look at it this way – not many guys one third my age would have got even 1/3^rd more than my marks! So, 52% is not a bad performance, considering that anyone my age could be losing 1 cc of neural matter per year.  

I thank EPFL and Harvard, along with Professors Gerstner and Cox for their excellent work.

Let me come to serious comment now. What do I want to share with you about my MOOC experience? One expectation I had started with was to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of MOOC courses. Given my badly interrupted interest in neurosciences, I had no trouble with motivation at all. I was having a great time. My retired state made its own contribution – I had all the time that was needed. A few sundry degrees I had earned a long time ago, including a Ph. D, had their own utility – I don’t run away when someone says “phase plane analysis”. Did I get what I wanted? Yes, what I got was precisely what I had wanted – knowledge learnt with the confidence that a Guru had overseen my learning and had formally tested me!

What else did I learn? Well, the courses followed the “hydraulic model” of knowledge transfer – there were buckets of it in the videos and other course material. It did flow smoothly into my head. But many of us believe that the essence of modern education is to inspire – to show what is great about subject, how stupid we had been in knowing so little about it 50 years ago and the speed at which we are learning now. Education has to demonstrate the addictive qualities of new knowledge. Some of us say that a good teacher has to be a proselytizer. We all know a few of them. For instance, they take god-fearing mechanical engineers and make them into cosmologists or something like that! I would not accuse either one of my two fall courses of having converted me or anyone else I know. The course on Neuroscience came with its bonus points though. It took us through videos into the world of museums, aquariums and the like. Very interesting and enjoyable, but a little too civilized and restrained; not much of proselytizing.  I will throw in two examples of their week-end videos and a lab-session video. Separated by the safety of a hundred or more years, we could see the skull of man who had a crowbar (or tamping rod, or whatever) fly into an eye and fly out through his skull taking out a good part of his frontal cortex with it. Read more at https://www.countway.harvard.edu/menuNavigation/chom/warren/exhibits.html

The man lived on for fourteen years more, earning a living. This story clearly said something about the nature of the brain, did it not?

I also learnt how to choose a Fugu restaurant and what I should be prepared for, if I go to such a restaurant!

The lab-session video showed how you could feed signals to a cockroach leg (they had anesthetized the insect before cutting out the leg). The instructor said that they will save the insect and that it will regrow its leg! The noise (or music) from an iPhone was carried through an earphone cable cut in the middle to feed it to the severed leg. The young lady who had lent her iPhone for the experiment played Shakira's waka waka song on it and the insect leg performed suitably!  More than the neural science involved, I hope that the students participating in the demo were stimulated to think about and debate the world view science creates in our minds.  When I was asked to write a summary off what I had learnt in six words, I found myself writing something like "our brains are bio-chemical computers". Not false, perhaps, but is that the whole truth? 

Coming back to MOOC courses in general, one thing was clear to me. This type of courses are fantastic for graduate students in developing countries like India – good with English, highly motivated and hungry for the knowledge.

However, we need to look for other models of MOOC pedagogy for a much bigger population of Indian learners. Students in high schools who need excellent supplementary education. They are a younger lot who need to enjoy their supplementary education and get the kind of inspiration only very good teachers can provide. Those who create videos for this group of students should be experts in pedagogy in addition to being subject experts. They should know how to attract student attention and hold it. Mohan Agashe, well-known Indian actor and Film Director, has said something like this:

“As a doctor, I learnt that anesthesia is essential in surgery. Now, while making educational videos, it is abundantly clear to me that you cannot provide education without something like an anesthetic – entertainment”.     

I would surely hate to see kids being educated without the anesthetic of entertainment! It is almost not worth it!

There is also another way to look at pedagogy for technology enabled education for school students. Many teachers deal purely with cognition and problem solving. They forget the heart! A class hour is long remembered if there is a human element in it. For instance, take the story about the young fellow who lived with his family in a logger’s hut outside the city limits of the nearby small town. There was a library in that town which served the residents. Every Saturday, the boy would accompany his parents to the town and visit the library, while they picked up the weeks groceries.  The librarian bent the rules enough to lend the boy a book or two at a time.  The boy grew up to become a scientist and earned a Nobel Prize at a young age. (Guess who? Test your web-search skills to locate the name)!

How can we proselytize successfully if we don’t attend to matters of the heart?

Srinivasan Ramani