Author: Pradeep

  • Registering for Wikimania – Waiting for the email

    (Written on 16/3/08 – still stands correct)

    It may probably be Engineering Student’s Fever (ESF – last minute rush to complete assignments, projects etc after lounging around till then) but I waited till the 15th to get myself registered for Wikimania 2008 at Alexandira, Egypt. No amount of waiting got me that confirmation email which would have enabled me to register SEDSWiki for Wikimania. Maybe we could do it next year with a more developed wiki? Who knows?

    For practise runs of the more important conferences, try talking at the local BarCamps, that keep happening in many of the cities around the world. The sidebar on the BarCamp page has a list of the latest happening BarCamps all across the world. If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, you should probably wake up and read this.

  • BarCamp MU 3

    I missed most of the morning show of BarCampMU3 because I had to rush to college to pay the exam fees that would allow me to sit for the exams for my sixth semester.

     The first session post-lunch was on Photovoltaic technology for cost reduction. This was presented by Gaurav Shah, who is about to register a start-up soon called Electrik Solutions, which is hoping to dabble in the photovoltaic (PV) technology markets. He tells us that while manufacturing costs are about to be lowered with the coming of the third generation of PV cells, India is still stuck in the first. So, Electrik will first concentrate on building the second generation PV cells in India. He’s looking for electric engineers who would like to dabble in PV technology.

    Amit Gogna gave the second talk on the first implemented pilot projects of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) programme in India. The Indian Government refused to backup the OLPC programme, when it was offered the deal that was also offered to other governments, thinking it might produce a less than $100 laptop in India. Reliance ADA is the one that is stimulating this pilot study in a village called Khairat, near Mumbai. The best part of the presentation was probably the photo-op session that the laptop got after the presentation. Everyone has heard of the laptop, no one has actually seen it. According to Amit, the laptop, if brought to India today would cost about $205 [≈ Low-end bicycle]. He also called for more help on developing the applications for the laptop based on the Indian scenario.

    The third talk in the afternoon was given by a Swiss travelling to Mumbai for one of his projects, Renaud Richardet. He gave a presentation on the community aspects of open source. He talked a lot about how to select mailing lists and on looking at the reward systems. He’s working on an CMS project called Apache Lenya. 

    The last presentation of the day was given by Rahul Gupta, an IIT-B alumni, working on a start-up – Vakow! The name is inspired from a R D Burman song. It is something you should check out yourself to see how it works. He probably put it best for the people who were around there, when he said – “Vakow is for SMSs what Flickr is for photos”.

    The last major announcement was about the BarCampMumbai and the first BlogCampMumbai being held in the IIT-B campus on 29th March 2008.

  • IdeaMine – Self Sufficient Co-operative Housing Societies

    Like in any other Indian city, Mumbai follows the co-operative housing society model for most residential needs of the middle-class families. The focus of today’s idea is a system that reduces the eco-footprint of this unit of Indian living.

    Let’s begin with electiricity. Although corridor and compound lighting does not consume too much electricity and may contribute only to a small percentile of the society’s consumption, it does make sense in installing solar panels and LED or CFL bulbs in their place to reduce their long term costs. It might also be worth checking out a model of a windmill on top of all those cell phone towers that we see springing on top of every new building today.

    Going up to water. The BMC recently announced on a system of water meter based taxing. Reducing the amount of water used by each housing society may thus come into focus. In a society, water is generally used for cleaning vehicles, compounds, staircases and for water gardens. For the water for this purpose, our eyes should go to the septic tanks for the waste water from the bathrooms, toilets and kitchen and wash basins. The water needs to be seperated out of the solid waste and delivered to a seperate tank. After treating this water appropriately, it might be used for all the above purposes. This may also be used to water balcony gardens.

    The systems needs to be divised in such a way that one person can manage most of the systems. Besides conserving water and electricity consumption of a housing society, it also provides an employment oppertunity for a person and perhaps shelter for a family.

    Commercial farming should be studied and implemented in housing societies, if possible.  This will probably be the income source which can be used to pay person’s salary and be partly used for maintainence and repair cost of the system.

    Implementing this system should work on reducing the energy and water cost per housing society.Multiply this with the number of housing societies in Mumbai and it might probably eliminate the need for new power and water projects for Mumbai. In the long run, hopefully, the beneficiary will be the citizen of Mumbai.

    Institutes that may research these systems:

    • engineering colleges: windmill + cell tower system, solar cell technologies, water filtration processes
    • management colleges – business models, project implementation, advertising and packaging
    • agricultural colleges – study of possibility of commercial farming in Mumbai

    (This is an idea shared under the Creative Commons License, like all content on this blog)

  • The Move to MySpace

    I had an older account on MySpace which was linked to my extinct Hotmail account. Gmail is just eons ahead of Hotmail and it didn’t make sense to keep the Hotmail account just for the sake of an old MySpace account, that I didn’t even use.

    I accessed my old MySpace account just to see what has changed after watching this tour of MySpace taken by Robert Scoble and was surprised to see that they had a beta Indian version for all its Indian users ergo still based in US and subject to their own laws and conditions.

    Thankfully, you can now delete the Hotmail account. Earlier, I believe it was to expire after a 45 day no-use gap, which didn’t make sense. Kudos to Microsft and the Hotmail team for that feature.

    I delted my old MySpace account and then deleted the linked Hotmail account. Opened a new Gmail based account on MySpace and signalled the end of my shift from Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail to Gmail.

    After my first few days digging around MySpace, I feel its a lot better than both Orkut and Facebook. There’s this sense of migration from one SNS to another but over the next year or so, I think I’ll put more of my heart into MySpace and Facebook than on anything else.

  • Google Books

    Google Books — This is a new Google feature that I found in the drop-down menu on the top of Gmail.

    I love the fact that everything that I might eternally want is under one Google Account – Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, Reader, GTalk and Orkut. These are the Google features I use most. I am getting around to using Google Calendar, Maps and even Picasa to complete the one id shift. I still dont like Blogger account though and prefer my WordPress account over it.

    I read a ton of books every month – both for school and for pleasure. I also listen to a lot of music – mostly over radio and from borrowed CDs from friends. These are two things that I don’t find on Google…yet. As of now, most of my book preferences etc are loaded on LibraryThing and I am beginning to enjoy the music on MySpace.

    LibraryThing has a really cool cataloging system and a really cool way to add books. What it partly fails is when you stumble on rare works by Indian authors but it has a manual add way of going around it. It also has a somewhat dumb interface. What also makes it dumb are its social networking features.

    What would make me switch from LibraryThing to Google Books? First, an equally cool tagging system. Second, a good search feature — knowing Google, it might work on this. Third, a really cool way to share this library with friends.

    I have just given Books the first look over and am looking into the details. More on this soon…

  • The Week of the Results

    I came to know about results yesterday. Posting them for public view was one way of making me feel bad without being able to do anything about. Has been removed now.

    I spent most of last night thinking on latest strategies to tackle the menace but soon realised that this will continue exam after exam, semester after semester. So, immediate reaction systems might tackle the current sentiment of anger but doesn’t really look at the long term disaster/concerns.

    After thinking all that philosophy babble, I’m going to settle down and complete all assignments/write-ups pending this week and won’t be concentrating on ’studying’ this week. Next week is the right time to think of something much more long term.

  • Space and the Wisdom of the Crowds

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com/. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 28, 2008 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I picked up James Surowiecki‘s book The Wisdom of Crowds from my library today. It’s byline reads: Why the many are smarter than the few? It’s basically a management book and the only reason I picked it up was to get a management eye view of why this happens. I’ve seen this work in some cases within SEDS and in some cases even in my class, so I really am biased towards the view that crowds can sometimes make better decisions than the experts of the field given a particular situation.

    The book makes a reference to an event that occurred immediately after the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. The launch was televised, so the news of the incident did spread quite quickly. One of the people who got this news was the Dow Jones, a stock market. Dow Jones did not stop trading for mourning but continued trading.

    Four companies were involved in the Challenger programme: Rockwell International (built the shuttle and the main engine), Lockheed (ground support), Martin Marietta (external fuel tanks) and Morton Thiokol (solid fuel booster rocket). These shares started declining in the market 21 minutes after the disaster. Stocks of the companies involved fell almost immediately. By the end of the day, the stocks of Morton Thiokol fell by 12% while the other companies recovered and had fallen only by about 3%.

    Six months after the explosion, the Presidential Commission on the Challenger held Morton Thiokol liable for the disaster due to the failure of the O-Ring which became less resilient in cold weather and allowed the gases to leak out.

    Surowiecki argues that the collective wisdom of the market crowd had squarely blamed Morton Thiokol for the disaster within a day which was later proved as the correct by the Presidential Commission. Surowiecki points out that a study by finance professors Michael Maloney and J. Harold Mulherin into the stock market reaction discovered no foul play or backstage manipulation leading to the steeper fall of the Thiokol stocks. Surowiecki states that what happened was that a large crowd was asked the question – How much less worth are these four companies worth now that the Challenger has exploded? and the market responded with an objectively correct answer. Thus, Surowiecki says that the average answer of the crowd will be at least as good as or even better than the answer of the smartest member.

    Stock Markets and space? Whoodathunkit? I wonder if similar studies have been made after the Columbia disaster and the Apollo-11 landings.

     

  • IIT-B developing microsatellite

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 19, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I got a great shock today morning reading the newspapers. Got the news that IIT-B is developing a 10-kg micro-satellite.

    This is a growing trend of developing small satellites that I am so happy to see in India. I have been wanting to see something like this happen ever since I saw the CalPoly Cubesat page that was filled with student satellite projects from other countries.

    While the newspaper article quotes only the other satellite developed by Anna University, there are satellites under development at IIA, IISc and VIT besides the one at IIT-B and Anna University. I also hear reports of a college in Hyderabad starting their own small satellite project as well. SEDS-India also has a small satellite project that you will hear from soon.

    It’s a small satellite project in the making and I can name atleast a dozen colleges which can take up the project if there are interested students there. IIT-Kanpur is one of them.  Hopefully, this student satellite space race will lead to something more substantial in the future.

    With so many student satellites in the offing, the Indian rocketry community has a great opportunity in their hands. Anyone listening?

  • Space and Ham Radio

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 15, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I fell in love with ham radios in 2004 when I was an electronics student (as an elective) in my junior college. In the same year, I read Maryam’s blog and saw that ham radios can be used in space arena too. It was only the exams that I had to give to obtain a ham license that made me think twice. At that point, I had written a string of engineering admission tests that was driving me nuts and I couldn’t handle another test.

    At the SEDS International Conference 2007, some of the earlier interest was re-kindled and also an amazing ‘discovery’. ISRO had a ham radio club.

    2 + 2 = 4 !!!

    It would be really great if we could establish a ham radio club in every SEDS chapter in India. Besides performing scientific experiments and performing basic satellite communication operations if needed, it also opened another door – a way of talking to ISRO and literally!

    ISRO has a ham radio club at most of its centres – Thumba Amateur Radio Club (VU2TRC) at VSSC, ISTRAC Amateur Radio Club (VU2FBS) at Bangalore, at the Master Control Facility (VU2MCF) at Hassan and the more famous Upagraha Amateur Radio Club (VU2URC) at Bangalore. This provides a great opportunity to talk to ISRO scientists who are not always phone and email friendly.

    Besides that, we could also talk to SEDS chapters all over the world for free (Internet and telephone still include costs) besides networking in India. Who wants to take the challenge first? This is also an opportunity for all hams who have a space interest!

    For more info, visit www.amsatindia.org.

  • Your meteorites belong to Calcutta Museum

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 15, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I read an article today in the Times of India which runs a column called Tribal Instincts, which talks about unusual groups.This week they covered an astronomy club called Aakash Ganga Centre for Astronomy.

    Bharat Adur from the Centre revealed what for me was a strange piece of information: any object falling from the sky on Indian territory, as per law belongs to the Calcutta Museum. I don’t know if this is a law that is implemented or followed but it seems strange.

    Shouldn’t the collection which can be useful for astronomical, biological and geological research be at a centre that looks at it from all of these view points? Maybe, we need something along the lines of the International Meteor Organisation. Just worth thinking about.