Python for Business Managers

Managing a business enterprise is impossible if the manager is not at ease with dealing with data. While soft skills and EQ are important, when push comes to shove it is data on the table that really matters. Data driven decisions are the backbone of any efficient enterprise.

It is said that data is the new oil because of its intrinsic value. This is why the most powerful companies on the planet, like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon owe their immense clout  to the huge amount of data that they have accumulated about people and their behaviour. Gathering, storing, managing these multi-terabytes (or more) of data is loosely referred to as Big Data. But using this data to draw inferences about the past and more importantly making predictions about the future is Data Science.

Managers in the past were not unaware of or indifferent to the importance of data. Many of them have been using spreadsheets like Excel to assist them in their daily work. However the volume of data in the current business ecosystem is so large that spreadsheets are no longer adequate. Spreadsheets is a legacy technology, almost a relic, from an era that businesses have left behind. This technology simply cannot scale-up to handle the kind of Big Data that today's internet based businesses generate on a daily basis.

Data Science uses many next generation tools to handle Big Data and Python is one such tool that is very widely used today. This book will help managers who do not have a background in computer programming to learn Python to the extent that they will be able to use it in their daily work. Readers will also walk through two detailed exercises that will demonstrate how these tools can be used in retail sales and multinational eCommerce scenarios.

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Buy the paperback from the Pothi bookstore.

Strange Coincidence?

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Lockdown lectures - DIGITALICS

In an earlier post, we had introduced the idea of D I G I T A L I C S
Here is a video that explains it further

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The Great Pushback

CBSE to ZBSE - The Innovation Nation

image from MIT Review

When resources are limited it is creativity and its first cousin, innovation, that allows us to get ahead by achieving more with less. In practical terms it translates into the importance of R&D in corporates, or its precursor, research in academia. Which is why publish or perish has been the guiding mantra for those seeking tenure -- or permanent employment -- in US academic institutions. Since the US is the fountainhead of the most innovative ideas in STEM and related disciplines there must be a positive correlation between innovation and publications. This is the logic used in China where it is mandatory for all academicians to be prolific in publishing papers.

This policy has resulted in interesting developments. First, China -- and Chinese researchers embedded in US academia --  lead the world in terms of the sheer number of papers published. Second, a large number of these papers have been found to be of poor quality if not actually fraudulent. Third, and most interestingly, China still needs to employ thousands of hackers to break into and steal industrial and scientific knowledge from US companies and institutions. This weakens the linkage between published research and real innovation. Perhaps China is doing phenomenally well in fundamental research but until we have greater transparency through the Bamboo Curtain, we remain sceptical.

This lack of correlation between publication and innovation is an outcome Goodhart’s Law, first enunciated by the British economist in 1975 : Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.  Marilyn Strathern puts it more succinctly -  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This means that while publications may be a good estimator of innovative thinking, when people are tasked to publish for the sake of employment it ceases to be an estimator of anything at all. Anybody who has been in the vicinity of academic publishing would know that acceptance of a paper for publication depends on (a) choice of an ‘acceptable’ subject (b) the ‘methodology’ of research and ‘style’ of representing it and (c)  the ‘literature review’ and ‘references’ that weave a delicate but readily perceptible network that cycles through a self-sustaining ‘citation index’. The originality of the idea or the elegance of its implementation has little impact on the acceptance of a paper in a scholarly journal. As long as it looks, walks and quacks like a duck -- oops, like an academic paper -- then it must be an academic paper worth publishing. [ Public disclosure - this author has only two papers published in non-Indian academic journals and so could have an issue with sour grapes! ]

This obsession with publications masquerading as research has now infected academia in India as well. So much so that the Director of one IIM, as holy a cow as one may find in Indian academics, has decided that actual teaching should be outsourced to contract teachers while tenured faculty, freed from such mundane distractions, should focus on publishing papers. Which is actually a joke because - at least in the area of management - the ability to architect a complex solution and execute a commercially viable project is a far better evidence of innovation than publishing a paper based on dodgy data collection and p-value based testing of pointless but statistically significant hypotheses. But unfortunately, university ranking mechanisms and  regulators like the UGC and the AICTE have latched on to publications  as measures of excellence. Hence we are back to this concept of publish or perish without any thought to its correlation with genuine innovation.

In fact, such borrowed measures of academic prowess have their roots - at least in India - in the larger story of the lack of innovation in the economy. Who decides on what is meant to be a good student in India? First, academicians and then, more importantly, corporate executives, mostly engineering and management graduates, who decide on whom to hire and from which colleges. What is common to all such decision makers is not innovative or original thinking but a history of having cracked entrance examination in their student days. That is why they like examination crackers, or people like them. The entire edifice of corporate and academic India is brimming, not with innovators, but with those who have been able to game the entrance examination system.

Entrance examinations like CAT and JEE were once designed as estimators of intellectual ability. But again, in a perverse reaffirmation of Goodhart’s Law, cracking these tests have become the end goal for all students. The JEE rank that was once a good measure has now, after becoming a target, become worthless in evaluation. Kids with original ideas will never be able to game the system with coaching classes and the thought conditioning necessary to reach the colleges that will take them to companies that in turn could come up with original ideas. Hence Flipkart will always be a copy of Amazon (without its cloud technology) and Ola and Oyo will be copies of Uber and Airbnb. Even when wildly successful, there is nothing original in their products and services. Nothing like Skype or WhatsApp, let alone molten-salt nuclear reactors or CRISPR will originate from them.

So is there an alternative? Is there anything else that could seek out people with raw and native talent? Is there a way to eliminate artificially difficult entrance examinations, like JEE, that only the best coached and best prepared can crack? Once upon a time, long long ago Class X and XII marks were good estimators of talent but with state boards competing to give 90% to all, that option has been ruined.

What if the percentile rank, instead of the absolute marks, in the normal  Class XII examination becomes the yardstick of measurement for college entrance? The immediate objection would be that different boards with widely different number of students are not really comparable. The top 5 percentile in a small board like Tripura may not be comparable to the top 5 percentile in a large state like Maharashtra. What if we mandate that everyone should take the one, common national CBSE XII examination?  either in addition to the state board or as an alternative? This may sound good but there is the danger of rigid centralisation and the concomitant spectre of a single point of failure.

What we could do instead is to redefine the country in terms of education zones and create a Zonal Board of Secondary Examination (ZBSE) for each zone. This will be analogous to the Indian Railway network being managed through sixteen railway zones like Western, South Eastern, East Central and so on. Each such education zone will cover more than one state and may even span state boundaries depending on linguistic and cultural similarities. Each ZBSE  will  conduct its own X, XII board examinations based on a syllabus that takes into account both national perspectives and regional diversity and on a schedule that reflects local convenience. State boards would become irrelevant but even if retained, students should be allowed to take ZBSE examinations in their respective zones of domicile irrespective of the schools that they physically attend.

With educational zones in place, the percentile marks in both ZBSE X, XII examinations should be used as the primary selection criteria for admission to all Central Universities and all UGC funded institutions. In addition to the percentile on aggregates, different disciplines like engineering or liberal arts could use the percentiles on specific subjects or groups of subjects. This will free students from the need to sit for any artificially constructed aptitude test for college entrance and instead, focus on a traditional broad based, multi-subject ZBSE school curriculum.

Recruiters from the authors generation have always used Class X, XII marks as an effective measure to discriminate between candidates and having ZBSE marks, that ensure better parity across the country, will reinforce this method. Colleges that look for good placements will now have to run after students with good ZBSE percentiles instead of the other way around. So truly good students will enter good colleges, and then get good jobs or go for research.

Instead of a top-down philosophy of publish or perish, a bottom-up approach using ZBSE X, XII percentiles for college entrance would be a superior mechanism to recognise and reward true talent in the innovation nation.

India’s Tryst with Thorium

Time for India to lead the world with thorium power plants

Global warming is a source of concern because it is believed to be leading to drastic changes in weather patterns.  This could cause serious damage to both the economy and the ecosystem. The burning of carbonaceous fossil fuels, coal and oil, are said to be the most important cause for global warming because they lead to the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this in turn traps solar heat through the greenhouse effect. Hence many activists have argued against the usage of coal and oil, in thermal power plants and internal combustion engines, and demand conversion to electric power. But while the usage of electric power is certainly clean, electricity itself needs to be generated somehow -- it just cannot appear by magic in those two or three holes in the wall.

Two clean sources of electricity are solar and wind and activists have long argued that these should be the basis of electricity generation in the future. However anyone who has seen the vagaries of the weather knows that neither sunshine nor winds are predictable or persistent and so it is difficult to run an entire industrial society based on these two resources alone. Though environmental-fundamentalists would argue that it is indeed possible to work with solar and wind alone any pragmatic analysis would show that these are at best good supplements to more stable sources of energy. In fact, solar and wind power system have many problems too -- especially in the huge requirements of land and the maintenance of highly distributed equipment, but that would be another story.

Thermal power plants based on either coal or nuclear energy are, in fact, the only two options that we have for reliable generation of electricity. Frankly coal based thermal power systems are not as bad as they are portrayed to be because all the carbon dioxide is generated at one location and there exists excellent technology to trap and contain this carbon dioxide but somehow the popular consensus is that coal is bad. And if coal is bad then nuclear power is far worse because it leads to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

This negative perception of nuclear power is wrong and is based on outdated knowledge. In an article in the previous issue we have seen that   as far as India is concerned, thorium is a nuclear fuel that (a) is safe, since it can be used with the thermal breeder technology that has a low risk of explosions (b) generates far less radioactive wastes so that  containment and management is much simpler and (c ) is readily and easily available without having to go begging to international regulators of non-proliferation. After all,  2011 USGS estimates put global reserves at 1.91 MT of which 50% or 0.963 MT is in India.

Why is it is that we have not moved on thorium? Is it that our scientists are ignorant or our engineers incompetent? No. Not at all ...

Homi Bhaba, who laid the foundations of atomic energy in India was very much aware of the vast potential of thorium in India but the route to and through thorium is not easy. The primary goal of the global nuclear industry was to build bombs with plutonium, not generate power. So the primary focus of almost all research and development in both the US and in Russia was along the uranium and plutonium route. India alone, under Bhaba’s guidance was interested in thorium because it would lead to cheap and abundant energy from India native resources. But this is a lonely path, that India has had to tread alone, until China realised its importance and has jumped onto the bandwagon.

Then Bhaba died in a plane crash in 1966, shortly after he had made a casual statement that India could build a bomb in 18 months. While it was obviously never proved, journalist Gregory Douglas had quoted a retired CIA officer Robert Crowley who claimed that this accident was a CIA operation to block India’s nuclear aspirations.  This is very similar to the case of Nambi Narayan, the father of India & ISRO’s cryogenic engine who had a number of  false cases registered against him by rogue IPS officers -- Siby Mathews, KK Joshua & S Vijayan -- of the Kerala police at the instance of a Western spy agency. All the cases were eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court but ISRO’s cryogenic engine program along with Mangalyaan and Chandrayaan was set back by over 15 years. That is another tragic story.

Bhaba’s plan envisaged a three stage approach to sustainable nuclear energy based on the availability of both the technology and natural resources. First with uranium, then with plutonium and finally, after the accumulation of adequate fissile plutonium, India would start with its abundant thorium reserves that will last for a very long time. The plan was that by the early years of the 21st century, in the decade of the 2010s, India would be in a position to begin with the thorium technology.

In accordance with this plan, the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AWHR) has been designed to use thorium but before it can be put to use, the entire Atomic Energy Program has to be freed from a slew of politically motivated constraints. Environmental activists with little knowledge of technology but well connected to the media have painted a fearful picture of impending disaster. Politicians and NGOs with the backing and funding of US and European social activists have leveraged this public fear of nuclear power to create political opposition. These agitations obstruct land acquisition and delay the building and commissioning of nuclear plants. The worst example of how foreign funds have been used to thwart India’s national interest is the violent and virulent opposition mounted by Catholic Church backed organisations against the Kalpakkam plant, near Chennai -- the first fully indigenous facility for the full spectrum of nuclear power technology. Similar agitations backed by the Trinamool Congress have sabotaged the proposed nuclear facility at Haripur in West Bengal.

While the danger from radioactivity is a reality, media hype has made it into something that is far larger than what it really is. For example, the Fukushima disaster is said to affect “32 million people” but the number of actual deaths would not be more than 500 which is small compared to the 20,000 people who died in the tsunami that actually triggered the accident. Similarly, the total number of deaths caused by the Chernobyl accident has been estimated to be between 4000 and 16000, spread over 30 years. While these numbers are large, these should be seen from the context of the 140,000 people who are killed in road accidents in India every year. Similarly, while the Trinamool Congress was up in arms against acquisition of land for the Haripur nuclear project, there was no similar urgency or frenzy in tackling the silent proliferation of deadly arsenic in the groundwater that is used by over 26 million people in South Bengal.

No technology is perfectly safe and nuclear energy is as good as or better than many other competing technologies. India has both the thorium as well as the technology to use it to generate all the energy that we would ever need without having to beg, or spend, for oil, uranium or even solar panels. It is time for the political leadership to take a hard stand and drive India to its long awaited tryst with thorium technology. For a change, let India lead the world.

Thorium - cleaner, safer & abundant

All discussions on nuclear energy revolve around uranium and plutonium, the stuff with which we can make atom bombs. But not too many outside atomic energy circles would have heard about their close cousin, thorium, which is another natural element that can be used like uranium to generate nuclear energy. In this article, we explore how Thorium can be a cleaner, safer and more abundant alternative.

image from http://gppreview.com/2014/11/06/nuclear-options-explains-u-s-china-cooperation-thorium/

Elements, like hydrogen (H), helium (He), carbon (C), oxygen (O) all the way to uranium (U) that are found in the Earth’s crust are defined in terms of the number of protons in the nucleus (the atomic number) and the number of protons+neutrons (the atomic weight). Chemical properties are determined by the atomic number and elements that share the same atomic number but have different atomic weights are called isotopes of each other. Thus the common Carbon 12 and the relatively rare Carbon 14 are isotopes that both have 6 protons but have 6 or 8 neutrons respectively. The atomic weight determines the nuclear behaviour of atoms.  Under specific circumstances, certain  isotopes of some elements  disintegrate to generate isotopes of other, lighter elements and in the process release energy. This is called nuclear fission. The traditional route to generating nuclear energy involves the collision of a neutron with the nucleus of an isotope of uranium, namely U-235. This results in the fission or break-up of U-235 atom into barium-141 and krypton-92 atoms along with the release of three more neutrons and lots of heat. This heat is used to generate electricity but the three neutrons can  cause fission in three other U-235 atoms. If this happens too fast, we have a ‘military’ nuclear explosion but when carefully controlled, it leads to the steady release of immense amounts ‘civilian’ nuclear power.

Uranium and thorium can both be used to generate nuclear power but there are  fundamental differences in the way these two neighbouring elements in the periodic table can be used. To understand the difference we need to distinguish between elements being fissile and fertile. Atoms of  fissile elements like uranium 235 (U-235) split apart, or experience fission,  to give rise to ‘lighter’ elements and release energy as heat. Atoms of fertile elements like uranium 238 (U-238) can be converted to fissile elements like U235 and only then can be used to build atom bombs or generate nuclear power.

U-235 is the only fissile element that occurs naturally but it forms only 0.7% of uranium that is mined. Hence, the uranium ore, that is 99.3% U-238 needs to be processed to increase the concentration of U-235 to at least 5% before it can be used in nuclear reactors. This is a complex operation that needs sophisticated and expensive centrifuge technology. The U-235  in the enriched fuel undergoes fission, releases energy and neutrons. These neutrons can behave in two ways :  (a) Fast moving neutrons hit and split other U-235 in a chain reaction to continue generating energy, that unless curbed or moderated by eliminating neutrons, can create a nuclear explosion or (b) Slow moving neutrons are absorbed by the fertile U-238, that surrounds the U-235 fule, to create fissile plutonium 239 (Pu-239) plus many other trans-uranic, toxic and radioactive by-products.

Since U-235 is very scarce, the Pu-239 that is generated from abundant U-238 becomes the real nuclear fuel for the subsequent phase of operations.  This fissile Pu-239 can be used to both build atom bombs or generate nuclear power. But this Pu-239 has a problem. On being hit with neutrons, as in the case of  U-235 fission,  only 65%  of the Pu-239 undergoes fission and the other 35% ends up as useless Pu-240 that is highly radioactive and toxic that needs secure and expensive storage facilities.

Because of Pu-239’s one-in-three absorption problem, the reactor cannot make as much fresh radioactive fuel to replace what is being consumed. The ‘spent’ fuel cannot generate sufficient heat and has to be processed to remove the unusable and useless, but still radioactive parts. So a lot of uranium and plutonium is eventually not used but remains radioactive for thousands of years and leads to significant and dangerous pollution of the environment.

The chances of useful fission of Pu-239, as opposed to conversion to the useless Pu-240 can be increased if we stop slowing down the neutrons and allow them to travel fast -- as in fast breeder reactors. But fast neutrons can lead to run-away chain reactions and subsequent nuclear explosions and so are inherently dangerous. So the choice is between the danger of a nuclear explosion or that associated with generating mountains of toxic radioactive waste. This is why uranium based nuclear power is unpopular.

Fortunately, the use of thorium can remove both these problems.

Thorium 232 (Th-232) like U-238 is fertile but not fissile. However like U-238, Th-232 can absorb neutrons, fast or slow, and gets converted to Th-233 and subsequently to uranium 233 ( U-233) that is fissile, just like Pu-239 and can be used to generate more energy. So both U-233 and Pu-239 can be generated, or bred, in breeder reactors that create more fuel than what they consume. But unlike Pu-239 where only a fraction of Pu-239 undergoes fission and is used, the U-233 route is very efficient because almost all of it can be used. This means that almost all U-233 (more than 95% compared to 65% in Pu-239) is consumed to generate energy and so there is far less radioactive waste left over. Moreover, U-233 does not need fast neutrons for fission and so there is no need for the accident prone fast breeder technology. The far safer thermal breeder technology is good enough.

Th-232 is a replacement for U-238 but not the crucial U-235 that is required to kick start the process of fission of U-235 and generate the initial shower of neutrons that convert fertile Th-232 to fissile U-233. This no different from the enriched U-235 that is required to convert the fertile U-238 to fissile Pu-239. Except that Th-232 is far more abundant U-238.


If we leave aside the uranium found in sea-water, which is very difficult to extract, then the total quantity of thorium found in the earth’s crust is more than three times that of uranium. Even though not all of this is exploitable, this is still a bonanza because, unlike U-238 ( and Pu-239) most of the energy in  thorium (Th-233 / U-233) can be extracted and used. Hence thorium reserves will last much longer than uranium and for us in India, there is a double bonanza, because India has the maximum known reserves of thorium in the world.

Known and exploitable reserves of uranium ore across the globe are estimated to be about 7.6 million tonnes (MT) of which only 0.138 MT  (1.8%) is in India. Thorium has never been explored as intensively as uranium and estimates of reserves differ. 2005 IAEA estimates show global reserves of  2.8 MT out of which a good 21% or 0.519 MT is in India. 2011 USGS estimates put global reserves at 1.91 MT of which 50% or 0.963 MT is in India. The Government of India’s own estimates, as reported by the Prime Ministers Office in 2016 in Parliament state that our coastal areas have 11.935 MT of Monazite sands of which 9-10% ( ~ 1 - 1.1 MT) is thorium dioxide and that too on the easily accessible beaches of the Bay of Bengal. All estimates agree that India has the largest known reserves of thorium.

So as far as India is concerned, thorium is a nuclear fuel that (a) is safe, since it can be used with the thermal breeder technology that has a low risk of explosions (b) generates far less radioactive wastes so that  containment and management is much simpler and (c ) is readily and easily available without having to go begging to international regulators of non-proliferation.

Who could ask for anything more? Strangely enough, one could!

Thorium is also the preferred fuel for a radically different type of nuclear reactor -- the molten salt reactor (MSR) -- that has been proven to be far more safer than anything that we have today. MSRs have many benefits but the key is that if and when things go wrong, as in a power failure, the atomic ‘fire’ in the MSRs shuts down automatically. This is very different from the case of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and  Fukushima where the failure of cooling systems led to an explosion or a meltdown. MSR is a stunning new technology that is inherently safer, but the key point is that MSRs are so thorium friendly that many people confuse one technology for the other even though they represent two completely different aspects of a new generation of safe nuclear technology.

So what is India doing with Thorium? We will explore that in the next article.