Missing the Woods for the Trees?

An interesting new study has kicked off in Belfast, Ireland, says this news item. Under the broad aegis of the Queen’s College project called SEMAINE, SAL, the Sensitive Artificial Listener, will be designed to sense the unspoken (ie non-verbal) signals that characterise what most humans use whilst communicating. I haven’t found out just what the longer acronym means yet, but it possibly derives from ‘SEnsory MAchine Interaction Network on Emotion’, since its earlier counterpart HUMAINE, led by the same Belfast researcher, apparently means ‘HUman MAchine Interaction Network on Emotion’.

The news appears in another magazine also, curiously similar, veritably identical in fact. What does that say about human communication, eh?

Less Power, More Power

A Little Energy Goes a Long Way

Somehow the concepts of ‘less is more’ and ’small is beautiful’ do not ring out loud and clear in the community networking environment. Perhaps they are just too obvious: however, I suspect that for urban-focused networks, with their routers and access points dangling from eaves and out of windows, drawing energy from house utility connections, it is really irrelevant.

In the countryside, things are different. Networks stretch across the kilometers, lonely towers in remote spots relaying signals between clusters of homes, over jungle and desert, from hilltop to distant peak and down to the shaded valley below. In this scenario, efficient power solutions mean less money spent on expensive solar power, generated locally and guarded from the depredations of monkeys and men.

Needless to say, the deliverable goes further. In older systems of information delivery, mankind sought to create efficiency by centralising content creation in one place, transmitting across the world with megawatt transmitters, pumping powerful shortwave signals across the world. What price such efficiency, focusing on the packaging till the words became meaningless, the songs capsuled till the music couldn’t be heard.

How many times have I heard techies and engineers shake their heads and mutter, “There has to be a better way“? In the world of information exchange, evolved and transforming the age-old traditions of information dissemination, we find a semantic that neatly divides the e-Generation from its elders and [not-so-?]betters.

Email and Security

Reading over my shoulder?

People who do a lot of email (I don’t do a lot, not by corporate standards, but I’m not exactly an online recluse), are increasingly concerned by the lack of privacy in this area of communication.

Some of us are keen to see the modes of communication used on the Internet become commonplace for all (hence the title of this blog, in case you just landed up here and are still wondering), and now it is necessary to study how best to handle questions of privacy, when setting up email services on wide area intranets.

Intranets are more or less the same thing as local area networks, but the term refers more to the services running on the network, rather than to its physical infrastructure. The terrific advantage of such services is that they can be set up in a manner that avoids centralised control. In fact, they need not have a centralised structure to begin with.

So what can one do with a decentralised network? The sky’s the limit, almost, and new applications and services emerge almost every day.

Radio: broadcasting uber wires

India is such an interesting country, as far as the media is concerned (well, admittedly, for many more reasons, but they don’t really relate to this note). It simply explodes with publications, thousands of them in print, tens of television channels, hundreds of radio channels.Why then, is the situation so parlous as far as community media is concerned? And more to the point, how can we emerge from this morass?

All over the world, there has been a refreshing wave of positive change, as far as the media is concerned. From the 80s, pervasively ‘corporate’ media was the norm, being chronicled in later novels like Jeffrey Archer’s “The Fourth Estate”. From the days of Radio Caroline to the angst of Seattle, there has been a palpable and spontaneous outpouring of desire for media unfettered by hidden agenda.

India is such an interesting country, as far as the media is concerned (well, admittedly, for many more reasons, but they don’t really relate to this note). It simply explodes with publications, thousands of them in print, hundreds of radio and television channels. Yes, hundreds.

Radio is the odd one out, actually. The Indian government was always amazingly open to the print media, conceptually, honouring Gandhiji’s tremendous leadership and tireless writing. Much later, it repeated its proactive attitude to the revolutionary impact of television, which took only a short time to become incredibly pervasive.

While print is widely visible, it has a limited reach, since it demands literacy. Television doesn’t, but the medium is terribly expensive, and that defines its creative quality. Sadly, in a very constricted fashion.

Access 4 All

Broadband and Governance: Empowerment or Illusion?

Proponents of ICT4D, roaming the corridors of power restlessly, find reasoned arguments for the support of the rapid dissemination of broadband connectivity in India seem to bounce endlessly off the walls. In the meantime, the doors of decision makers seem ever more open to the blandishments of commercial technology providers, whose bulging balance sheets reflect their seductive views on where the demand really lies: in the ready pockets of the arrivistes.
Do alternate technologies exist in reality, and can they really provide meaningful leverage for development? Here’s a quick look at the choices for India.

Smart connectivity, a sea change from the analogue technologies ubiquitously deployed in the developed economies of the 20th century, appears to be a powerful argument for the spread of equitable governance. Proponents of these technologies argue persuasively that a “knowledge society” is one armed with more information (and by corollary, better information): better information enables better choices.