The future of transport.
We did a fair amount of car travel lately and one of the things that instantaneously struck me was how inexpensive it works out to be compared to public transport, at least in Britain. After filling up with about 50 GBP of petrol, four people could travel about 350 miles with some fuel still left over. Doing the same journeys in public transport would have been hideously expensive and even inconvenient as we would have had to change trains/busses and still not gone door to door. As a fan of public transport, this fact is slightly disconcerting, but there is not escaping it and it got me thinking about whether my previous unreserved support for public transport was really wise.
Cars, rail and busses all have their strengths and weaknesses, which makes them suitable in different conditions. Rail is extremely well suited for mass transit and are probably the most efficient way to move large numbers of people/goods from point A to point B thanks to its massive carrying capacity, low friction between rail and wheel and possibility of high speeds. The setup cost for rail however is quite large and the flexibility of the infrastructure is almost negligible as only trains can travel on tracks. Naturally, the best utilised train systems can be found in one of the megacities or as a link between two large cities. Connections between small rural towns via rail is probably a bad idea because a lack of passengers may mean that it will simply be carting around a load of air from one place to another, which is a horrible waste of resources.
Cars overcome disadvantages of low carrying capacity and lower speeds by their immense flexibility. They from door to door, do not have scheduled stops or changes, share a common infrastructure with other modes of transport like busses, trucks, pedestrians, cyclists etc. The marginal cost of passengers in addition to the driver is almost zero. In a car, one starts when one wants to start, pauses when one wants to stop and continues when everybody is ready to go again. While this may sound like a utopian transport solution, a single look at the gridlocked roads and parking areas we have in large parts of the world today is enough to illustrate the problem with cars. The problem is that while the individual car may be an efficient way to get around, a collection of cars is not always the optimal solution. Cars clog up massive amounts of road space and it is even worse if people are not car sharing. The second problem with cars is that they cannot(as yet) be folded away and put into one’s pocket and therefore, huge swathes of land have to be sacrificed to build car parks where car simply sit all day and do nothing while their owners go about their business. Yet another minor problem is that throughout the journey, at least one passenger has to dedicate time to control the car, which may not be fun if a travelling group of four people want to play a four person card game.
Busses are a sort of compromise between cars and rail, in that they share infrastructure with other modes of transport and have higher carrying capability, thus lowering costs a bit and boosting flexibility. But they nevertheless suffer from having to stick to timetables and requiring a large number of passengers to reach their optimal operating level.
It is a general consensus nowadays that we cannot continue touting private transport as a solution for all travel requirements and that more public transport is the way to go in the future. The really fantastic thing would be if the transport system of the future will include a new mode of transport that will plug in the gaps and overcome the shortcomings of the current modes of transport. The requirements are stringent. The new mode will have to be cheap, must be available on demand, must go from door to door without stops and must be “public transport” in the sense that the passengers do not have to bother about parking, but can just get out and walk away at the end of the journey. A bit like a taxi without a driver, because the driver I am sure is the most expensive component of the taxi.
An interesting solution may be the technology marketed by Advanced Transport Systems a British company which is deploying a small network at London Heathrow airport and which should be functional from some time this year. A driver-less car running on a guided track, sort of like a personalised train carriage would combine the flexibility, convenience and low personal cost of cars with the share-ability of public transport. This system could possibly be adapted to a nationwide system by building guided paths along a country’s highways so that anyone from anywhere could take one of these taxis on those journeys into those areas not very well served by rail. The guided paths may also be able to run small vehicles during periods of low demand or larger bus like vehicles when demand is higher. By centralising the control of these vehicles it will be easier to react to changes in demand quickly and to ensure that customers get a non-stop journey almost every time they travel. By using the internet or mobile networks to do bookings, it may even be possible to get door to door service.
A combination of such a flexible system with efficient rail links on high traffic routes seems to be a much better solution than the transport system that exists today. Unfortunately, I do not hear too many people in power actively promoting such schemes. For a politician to put forth such an idea would probably be considered “courageous” and that is why no one has suggested it so far. I will however, remain optimistic and hope that such smart and flexible transport solutions will form an integral part of future transport systems.
Separating exams and learning.
The UN has recently launched an online university named University of the people which aims to provide quality education at low (at least not too high) prices to anyone in the world who wishes to study. It is basically a university dealing with long distance education, with the difference being in the use of technology to make the learning completely internet based and more peer-to-peer rather than simply reading material based and completely internet based.
Such internet based universities are good news because they make access to education easier and cheaper, thereby increasing the number of people who can benefit from it. The structure of the university though prompts one to think that it is merely a translation of a bricks-and-mortar university into a virtual world and that maybe they could have done a tad bit more to improve their reach.
Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact of the world that in education, exams are more valued than the actual learning process. Consider a highly reputed university which we will call “A”. A student who gets admitted into university “A”, he really benefits from that attendance only if he manages to pass the exams and get the piece of paper that is his degree. If he had not passed the exams, then he might as well not have got admitted in the first place. For an external observer judging the student’s capabilities, it does not matter whether the student attended classes or completed assignments as long as he cleared the exams necessary for the degree. Therefore the exams are valued more than the learning process.
Similarly, for an external observer, there is no difference between a student who actually attended university “A” and got a degree and another who did not attend university “A” but nevertheless has the ability to pass the exams involved (maybe with a reasonable score). Restricting the exams to only those students admitted to Univ. “A” therefore forces some people to take great pains to attend that university or forces others to forego that opportunity and lose out on a great qualification just because circumstances do not permit them to attend.
That may be OK for traditional universities since their priority is to educate people from a certain country/state/region first and do it well. A university aimed at a global audience, with the aim of making access to education more democratic can benefit from a slightly different game plan, namely that of separating the teaching and the exams.
Consider University “A” again. If the people in charge of University “A” syllabus and exams sit down and think about it, they will probably be able to quantify some skills that each exams will test, such as “the student will be able to add two numbers” or “the student will be able to calculate permitted energy levels in a quantum well”. Suppose they released this information to the world and decided that for a fee, they will allow anyone who thinks they are capable to take the exams for that particular course/degree. The student can choose to attend “A”, or pay for long distance study material from University “A”, or decide to study at their local university and then answer the exams with the knowledge/skills gained.
There are many advantages of decoupling the learning and exams in this way. Firstly the financial commitment is reduced from having to pay for the whole course to just paying for the exams. Secondly, there is no need for anyone to immigrate to a new country/city/region as they can just as well study close to home and maybe travel simply to give the exams. Finally, it allows people to translate non-classroom based knowledge to a qualification which could benefit their careers.
The teaching part can easily be taken care of public/private institutions who will give it all they have to improve the quality of their lessons and exercises because their survival depends on it. The actual university on the other hand will be freed of some of its teaching load which would allow it to focus on designing good quality exams/assignments and syllabi.
This model is not really a new invention and has been running quite successfully in the arena of computer software certifications. The method works, so anybody interested in democratising education should not ignore it.
Indian elections.
India just finished yet another of those gigantic exercises called elections. The logistics are quite impressive, given that there should be facilities for tha gigantic voter pool across such a huge land should be able to vote. The most impressive is the speed with which the counting is done, thanks to the electronic voting machines.
The Congress yet again will form the government and this time it appears that it may have more control over the house by dint of their large haul of seats and the fact that they should not have to form too many complicated coalitions. The best thing that came out of this election is that the communist parties and all the other regional lowlife which preys on caste and region politics took a bit of a beating. Hopefully this signifies that the people are moving away from petty issues that may seem good in the short term, but are most debilitating in the longer term.
I was half expecting the BJP to romp home this time, but in a way I am happy they did not. I am definitely lukewarm towards the BJP because they seem to be a bit too cosy with organisations such as the RSS and VHP, which are currently degenerating into nothing more than bands of thugs. Other weirdos like Varun Gandhi and his inflammatory speeches does nothing to help their cause, neither do those who attack patrons of pubs. Hopefully the BJP will distance itself from these hoodlums and promote a more inclusive image in the next election. I am sure people will be quick to point out that the Congress does not have too clean a record on the communal front, but the Hindutva ideas are too central to BJP’s current image and that aint a good thing.
It remains to be seen what happens in the next five years….
The population bomb.
I am sure the world has always been fraught with problems. Sometimes they are complex problems with no specific textbook fix, such as eliminating poverty or trying to create a framework and secure lasting peace. Others may have more specific solutions, such as eliminating a disease for which a vaccine exists. One thing we can be sure of, is that there have always been problems, there are problems today and there are likely to be problems in the future.
Most people will be familiar with the current batch of global problems, such as global warming, energy security and availability of food and water resources for a burgeoning human population. Most people will probably also be able to rattle off the proposed solutions, such as harnessing renewable energy sources, genetic modified crops, carbon caps for countries etc. What is surprising is that not too many people think of aggressive population control campaigns as part of the solution.
That most (if not all) of our current batch of problems can be solved with a lower population ought to be common sense. After all, if there were only hundred million humans on earth, we could drive between the rooms in our house, probably fly to work in one 747 per person and natures clean up processes would take care of all that we throw at it. The problem is that there are six billion of us aspiring to super rich lifestyles and there simply aren’t enough resources to support that.
The idea of controlling population is certainly not a new one. Prof. Albert Bartlett has spoken on this topic numerous times and there is a new society which calls itself The Optimum Population Trust and which campaigns for the steadying, or even negative growth of population both in the UK and in the world. While it is heartening to see that this movement is organising itself well, my heart sinks a bit when countries like India, already bursting at the seams with 1.1 – 1.2 billion people start getting all in a tizzy about how the large population is no longer a problem.
Fewer people on the earth will mean lower consumption of natural resources, less difficulty in meeting food and energy demands with available resources, a huge reduction in the decimation of the environment and possibly even a reduction in global conflict, since there are less people who have time to spare and get on each other’s nerves. It seems like a simple, elegant and effective solution to a lot of today’s problems, but somehow I don’t think that the UN/G20/whoever will be deciding to aggressively promote the idea of having only one/two children as a policy more beneficial for the long term future of the world.
Maybe having just one child should be added to the list of the current crop of “green” practices. It may be the most effective contribution in the long term…
Free replacements for proprietory software.
Off late I have been part of quite a lot of PC reformatting, partitioning and OS installations. Invariably, one needs software to do stuff like backing up, burning CDs as well as more mundane tasks like playing videos and music etc. This post is simply a record of the free software that I know of which serves as perfectly good replacements for proprietory software and for which one does not have to jump through as many hoops as a circus dog.
So here’s the list…
1. Infra Recorder :A CD/DVD authoring tool which also does things like creating ISO images, ripping music CDs etc. Not too much experience with it but so far it has worked a charm. Only for windows. Note that a plugin for encoding MP3s is not included by default thanks to some legalese, so an extra download may be necessary.
2. FileZilla client/server:Invaluable tools to back up large quantities of data over a network. The server version is only for windows unfortunately, so this cannot be a cross platform solution. However, vsftpd is quite a good FTP server for linux, but thats a subject for another post.
3. AVG antivirus:Though these guys appear to be nudging their users rather aggressively towards the paid version, I think they still have a free version for personal use. Updates are available and I have detected a few not-so-nice-programs with it, so I guess it works. From the looks of the site, only a windows version is available I think.
4. GParted partition editor: The standard GNOME partition editor that very closely resembles partition editor and makes those difficult HDD chores a breeze. It also comes as a live CD, so the question of platforms is irrelevant.
5. VLC media player:Totally kick-ass media player which tears the default windows media player(and quite a few of the linux media players too) to shreds. Plays literally everything and also has some cool features like audio/video streaming which I find quite useful. Available for both windows and linux.
6. Sisoft Sandra: Extremely useful software for getting some in depth knowledge of the target system. The lite version for windows is free, but has enough features for most cases. Windows only.
Thats the list for now, the idea being to add to it till I have a “Doctor’s kit” of software that can be used to get a computer back to speed after a reformat in the shortest time. In case anyone knows of any other tools that could be useful, do let me know.
New age patriotism?
During one of my lunchtime internet trawls, I came across a blog spot which spoke about how NRI’s do a lot of good to India’s development and how being NRI and patriotic is not hypocritical. The post was followed with the customary “Yes, being away from the motherland increases love for it” and “If you are so patriotic, why don’t you come home?” comments. The arguments weren’t too interesting, but it did get me thinking about patriotism.
Patriotism is an effect of boundaries, either physical(lines on a map) or less tangible, such as language, customs, religion etc. The presence of such boundaries causes the groups involved to think in a “us-against-them” way, wherein each person is supposed to show undying loyalty to the group in which he is born, even if one does not agree with the group’s principles or does not like all of it’s facets. It is probably a remnant of our primitive past where we had to stick with our “herd” to survive, irrespective or opinions and faults, or else we would perish.
Sometimes these groups merged and the divisions between them disappeared over time. For each person in the supergroup, irrespective of whether he had personally witnessed the merger or not, it becomes necessary to claim loyalty to the supergroup and not to the individual factions before the merger. A good example would probably be post-independence India. Before the British conquest of India, it must have been quite routine to hear of people willing to lay down their life for the Maratha kingdom or the Mysore or Hyderabad, but once Indians had found a common enemy in the British and then proceeded to emerge from the colonial rule as a single nation, every patriot had to profess his undying love for India as a whole and referring to the bits and pieces that existed earlier was rightly considered regressive.
In the past, the boundaries that gave rise to patriotism were held in place by huge obstacles to transfer of ideas, cultures and languages. If someone wanted to go from south Asia to Europe, they would have had to spend many perilous weeks at sea. Migrant populations were too small for their culture to be visible and ideas probably had to wait till at least two perilous sea journeys were made before they got transferred to a new land. Lower mobility of people meant that they remained within the boundary of their nation, dealt with their own problems and basically lived their own lives happily or unhappily.
While we still maintains the physical boundaries between countries (though it is disappearing in some cases), on most other attributes, today’s world is a world without boundaries. Communicating between countries is as easy as calling next door, travelling across the world is a matter of hours, or a few days at most. A lot more people are immigrating to new countries, causing populations of nations to homogenise. Major cities in the world have started to resemble each other so much, that save for the languages, we may never be able to tell them apart. A huge chunk of the world wears the same sort of clothes, drive the same kind of cars, own the same kind of material possessions and do the same things to keep themselves entertained.
There is also the growing awareness that the major problems of today are global problems. Terrorism, global warming, poverty and disease do not affect just a certain country, they threaten the whole world, or a chunk of it nevertheless. As the problems transcend national boundaries, it is important for any potential solution and the thought that goes into it to do the same. It therefore appears, that the old style boundaries are becoming less relevant by the day.
In this ever shrinking and increasingly boundary-less world, is the old definition of patriotism as love and loyalty towards the country one is born in still applicable? Does one base one’s priorities on his family’s origin, his own place of birth, his place of residence or the place of work, as it may not be too difficult for each of these to be different countries. Each of the countries have a very strong claim to the person’s loyalties. Having divided loyalties does not fit very well with the old ideas of patriotism and therefore in all fairness, it is important to change the old definitions. In my opinion, patriotism today should mean a love and loyalty towards the whole world and not just one country. It is true that we do not have any choice in terms of the planets on which we can live, but it is possible to think and act in a way that causes global good. The increasingly close knit world is bound to one day get rid of a majority(if not all) boundaries, so the quicker we start thinking about it in this light the better.
Rent-a-everything
Its funny how our busy lives lead to weird and funny businesses popping up. A prime example being the “rent-a-X” services in Japan, where “X” could be anything you like, from a cat or dog to husband, mother etc etc.
The kind of contract that will exist for the rent-a-relative services intrigues me and makes me want to try them out at least once. Mainly because normal relatives, not being a business proposition, do not come with any rigid guidelines for behaviour. A parent’s duty, for instance, is defined that he should take care of his children, including something pleasurable like making kiddish sounds or taking a walk as well the less desirable aspects like changing nappies, cleaning up spilt food and wiping the floor when the child throws up. All this when the baby is healthy, lets not talk about when they get ill. If new parents are never warned by their elders, they would probably not have the foggiest clue about what all work they can expect from their children. But they roll with the punches, move on and very often land up doing a fine job of it.
A rented mother website on the other hand would probably have something like the following.
1. Basic mothering package – £40/session*
1 hour of walks, 1.5 hours of “goo-goo” sounds, 2 nappy changes per session 500gms/session of spilt food cleaning up and 2 hours of trying to stop child from crying. Well suited to the average baby.
2. High poo-ers package – £50/session*
Same as basic mothering package but with 4 nappy changes included. Excellent value for those high-pooers or if your baby has an upset stomach.
3. High-work packages – £60/session*
1 hour of walks, 1.5 hours of “goo-goo” sounds, 4 nappy changes per session 1500gms/session of spilt food cleaning up and 2 hours of trying to stop child from crying. Good for hyperactive kids who cause a mess!
4. Bonanza package – £80/session*
2 hour of walks, 3 hours of “goo-goo” sounds, 4 nappy changes per session 1500gms/session of spilt food cleaning up and 3 hours of trying to stop child from crying. A fantastic way to pamper your tiny tot.
Extra charges
1. Extra Nappy Change – £10/change
2. Extra Walks – £5/hour
3. Extra “Goo-goo” sounds – £5/hour
4. Extra spilt food cleaning – £2/100gms
5. Extra time to stop crying – £5/hour
*Session lasts for 9am-5pm on weekdays and 10am-5pm on weekends. Inclusion of any religious activities in the session must be specified at time of booking. Nappies, food and cutlery charges not included in price. Illnesses charges extra. Terms and conditions apply.
I could go on, but I am sure you get the idea. Normal relationships have such a large tacit component that trying to put all of it in a contract for someone who is out to make as much money as possible would be an interesting exercise. To support this system we will then have computer applications to track the number of nappy changes and amout of spilt food your baby is responsible for and comparison websites in which the parent can input the desired parameters and find the best deal for his baby. At the end of it all, the industry will probably employ 10000 people who will be happy to have jobs.
My favourite was the one where women about to get married hired a husband to “get used to married life”. Ignoring the somewhat sidey male-prostitute kind of suspicion such a description evokes, my guess is the hired “husband” will have to spend his whole day being obnoxious, sitting in front of the TV without helping his wife, farting and burping all over the place and in general being a slob. This would prepare the soon to be bride for the very worst behaviour possible, ensuring that she will be able to handle her marital life with ease. Acting like the laziest guy alive on planet and getting paid to do it? Now won’t that be an attractive job?
The LHC computer system.
One of the most well publicised events in the scientific community in the recent past has been the opening of the Large Hadron Collider. The world reacted with great incredulity and amazement when they heard of the 27km tunnel built across the borders of two nations, the collaboration of 10000 scientists, the bunch of detectors all hoping to find the “Higgs boson” and of course, the idea that went around suggesting that the LHC would create a black hole that will swallow up the earth. The project cost around 4-6 billion euros, a figure which some people thought would have been better spent on solving more relevant issues. After all, knowing which particle the universe originated from is not so important as solving the global warming crisis right?
While the LHC was getting so much attention and the odd bit of controversy, there were huge technical developments in the computing systems which have received no mention at all, but are quite ground breaking in their own right. Not surprising, since the computers were not the focus of the project, but it is interesting to realise that the computing infrastructure would have created a new paradigm out of one of the “secondary” requirements of the project.
The LHC is expected to produce about 5-6 gigabytes of data every second, all of which has to be filtered, processed and stored. The computer infrastructure to accomplish this is a multi-tiered structure of different locations connected by fibre optic links. This distributed structure, along with the algorithms etc. formed the basis for what is now known as high throughput computing, which has a slightly different focus compared to high performance computing and could probably be used for some of the heavy number crunching applications that turn up in the future (climate modelling?). Details of the computing infrastructure can be found in the link, so I will not dwell upon it. What I want to point out is that this is not the first time CERN has innovated in the field of computer science. Way back in 1990, their computer science division tried out something called the HTTP protocol, designed to make it easier for researchers to share their results. The protocol went on to form the foundation of the world wide web and the rest, as is often said, is history.
This goes to underline some of the indirect benefits of pure research to the more “useful” technical fields. I initially used to feel that research should be all about something that has a tangible benefit to society and something esoteric like finding the Higgs boson or colliding neutrons is a waste of resources. I have now come to realise that while the main focus of any high cost pure research project (low cost projects are easy to handle anyway) may not have an obvious tangible benefit, there will always be other practical difficulties which need to be solved and which may/will produce innovative solutions. Scientists working on these problems are also a funny bunch, probably the paragon of the breed that does things purely for the fun of it and not for monetary gain. Forcing these people to work on applied problems may be as horrifying to them as licking stamps for customers in the local post office and will probably make them give up their aspirations and settle down in a routine job and study their fields of interest as a hobby. It is probably better to allow them pursue their dreams, develop the technologies for the pursuit and then have another bunch of people more interested in the applied side of things to try and apply the offshoots of their work to other worldly issues. Unless the research organisation desires to make money from it, it does not even have to employ a large staff to do such work. Just having someone who is knowledgeable enough to document the results well will do the job.
In other words, it is important not to judge research only by the perceived utility of its focus. The evaluation should also include the secondary aims, something that ties in nicely with my earlier post on science being about the journey and not the destination
Changes changes all around…
If you have been reading this blog regularly, you would probably notice a change in it’s look. This is a momentous occasion as such cosmetic changes do not take place often, and probably will not take place for many a year from today. So if you have witnessed the change, you have witnessed something truly rare indeed 
The change was the result of having free time on a saturday night and suddenly realising that the old theme allocated a large section of the screen to empty space, which is quite a shame. This also made some of the long posts appear even longer thanks to more scrolling needed to read the whole thing.
I like the look of this newspaper like theme…makes me feel important 
Keep visiting!
