blog@Yantrajaal

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...

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...

This beautiful terracotta temple lies unknown and uncared for in the village of Sonamukhi, Bankura, West Bengal. If you are in the vicinity, you can check it out

Physics, Economics, Cybernetics, Aesthetics … and now Digitalics. What is digitalics? Just as the  zeitgeist -- the spirit of the times -- captures the changing mood as we move along the arrow of time, digitalics represents the current state of the weltgeist -- the spirit of a new hyper digital world where we find ourselves today. This digital world is the new, happening place that none of us can, or even wish to, escape from in our personal, social and professional lives. Whether it is checking your WhatsApp or Facebook timeline, moving money on NEFT, marketing products on social media, hiring on Linkedin, listening to the voice of the customer on Twitter or cutting e-Waybills for your trucks that move across state borders --  everything happens in the digital world. Or rather where the digital touches the physical in the tangled web of click-and-mortar. That is digitalics at work. Digitalics is different from computer programming, computer science and even from...

How to create a three dimensional framework consisting of a rugged digital marketplace, corporatised vendors and trained managers that will catapult the Indian economy into the big league. image credit clrskills Handicraft Fairs -- or HastaShilpa Melas -- are a regular feature in Kolkata, where artisans from the rural areas come, show and sell their products. The Micro Small Medium Enterprises (MSME) Department of the West Bengal Government has, through the Biswa Bangla initiative, set up a number of permanent, fairly upscale retail outlets to help these people sell their products. Some of these outlets are probably profitable, as is the one in Kolkata Airport, but a majority of them, in district towns and elsewhere, suffer from a lack of footfalls or well heeled buyers. Frankly, this is old wine in new bottles. We have had in the past, Khadi & Gramodyog initiatives under various names in different states, as in Manjusha (West Bengal), Poompuhar (Tamil Nadu), Kairali (Keral...

Truth is out there, but unreachable What is the rate of growth of India’s GDP? Some people will say it is close to 7% while others will claim that it is 4.5% with a 95% confidence interval of 3.5 - 5.5. Some will say that it depends on the base year that is chosen. A common man like me with no access to “real” data, whatever or wherever it may be, will have to believe someone or the other. Picture credit NYTimes How many people were killed in the recent communal conflagration at Sandeshkhali, on the Bangladesh border? Some newspaper reports say 7 or even more, while the others quote the police and say 4. Who were killed? The BJP says that its supporters were murdered by Rohingya intruders while the Trinamul claims that their supporters were killed by Bihari goons. Sitting in Calcutta, or reading this somewhere in India, one would never know what is the truth. You would have to believe someone whom you trust. But can you ever know whom to really trust? Most of us know that ...

This slide deck gives a brief overview of what neural networks are and what kinds of problems can they address. It has links to tutorials and actual codes so that the reader can actually start coding right away. However, this presentation goes beyond what is possible with only machines and explores how man and machine can be hooked together to address bigger and and more interesting challenges.

Five Big Ideas for India in the 21st Century The hurly-burly of the elections is over and a new government is in place in Delhi. Ministers and their officers must be drawing up lists of the many urgent things that need to be done in the next couple of months. But there is a difference between what is urgent and what is important and it is more often than not that the urgent displaces the important from our schedules. In this article we explore five important issues that India needs to address, not just for the immediate gratification of urgent needs but, to set the agenda for the 21st century. From garbage disposal through restructuring of our education infrastructure that will in turn transform India into an artificial intelligence based space faring civilisation that is rooted in our Vedic past, let us explore five new narratives of Panchatantra/21. image credit Charity begins at home. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Before we set out to change...

Maximilien Robespierre might have fired the imagination of the world with his call for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity during the French revolution but the concept has been rather elusive in practice. Equality, in particular, has proved to be a bridge too far. image credit Let us begin with the Internet and the world wide web that was supposed to liberate the individual from the clutches of the powerful media barons. As one of the early pioneers and evangelists for this new technology, this author had created a portal -- Yantrajaal, a Bengali word that he had coined to define a network of devices -- in the same year that Google was born and seven years before Facebook. The general idea was to serve as a platform to share information on technology from an India perspective. In principle it could reach out to every corner of the world -- something that his earlier journalistic efforts in school and college had failed to do. But of course that would never be. Hardly anyone, othe...

In popular perception, skill in cerebral games board, like chess, are assumed to be a proxy for or measure of intelligence. This perception has motivated people to build computer programs that can play these games in an effort to make programs look intelligent or behave intelligently. But the reality is different. The complexity of decision making that a child, or even a dog, demonstrates while crossing a busy road is several orders of magnitude higher than what a grandmaster uses to win a game of chess. But because the act of crossing a road is something that we do every day we feel that it is somewhat trivial when compared to playing chess. Nevertheless  Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has enthusiastically used games as a testbed to try out more and more complex tasks that they would like computers to perform. image credit Programming a computer to play chess has been an obsession with many of the key personalities from the world of theoretical computer science. Nor...