Wind Power Sails Ahead

(Based on an email posting by Ralph – figment at boone stop com – following an inspiration from Dr Win Wenger: design and development by Ralph, including linked drawings. Thanks to Prem Saran for the link)

…A design for a wind-powered energy system that can tap at least 60 times as much energy as the United States Renewable Energy Laboratories states is available in a square meter of wind. The system does this not by some magical process (it is extremely mundane) but apparently by tapping into very large volumes of moving air, as seen in the sails of large sailing ships. With it, you should be able to easily reach single-digits megawatt/hours of power in windspeeds as low as 10 statute-miles- per-hour, or drive a pump with thousands of horsepower of kinetic energy in those same winds.

Primative Communication

For quite a while, many years, I would say, I have assumed speech to be a pretty level playing field factor for HCI (vis-a-vis human computer interface design), and much of the work Arun and I have done, even the “name” we used to do this work (Radiophony), implied “speech” as a deliverable.

Two interesting snippets makes me feel a rethink is worthwhile. As primates, the evolution of our collection of species is exceedingly communication-centric, and no species on earth has developed communication more complexly and richly than humans.

Private? uh uh

A couple of mornings ago, I read in a local newspaper that the police somewhere had caught a robber who stole a gold chain off a little girl’s neck. Unfortunately, the intrepid fellow had apparently swallowed the chain, thus neatly concealing all evidence. Not to be left clueless, the police ordered an X-ray examination of his abdomen, and the evidence was unearthed in plain black and white. And in other colours, to be revealed when the forcibly administered laxatives got to work.

I searched for the news item online, so as to post it here. I didn’t find it, but a strikingly similar theft apparently happened in Mexico two months ago. Is this copy-catting or what? According to a mail I got recently, ‘pagerism’ is a journalist using someone else’s beeper, but I suspect this isn’t quite as innocent.

Anyway, this isn’t really about missing evidential chains, but about the kind of thinking that pervades the thinking of some people in authority, that the badge of office confers the inalienable right to invade other people’s space, including subjecting them forcibly to potentially cancer causing radiation for non-medical reasons.

Money doesn’t Grow on Trees

“One could make this argument [with TRAI]“, says my friend Dr Arun Mehta, “that the people who need it most are being denied mobile phone value added services.” We have been discussing, on the India-GII mail list, the enabling of money transfers through mobile devices.

But TRAI cannot act in this matter, unfortunately, and that’s to do with the implementation of the capital system (not political, I mean the nuts and bolts of the system). This blogpost looks at why, but (since it is difficult to shut me up once I have got started) it goes further, to chalking out a scenario where virtual cash rules.

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.