Weather prediction

(work in progress)
Weather is the only corporation that has absolute monopoly on earth.

Goal: Can we predict weather three months ahead ?

Difficulty Level: Extremely high.

Initial Thoughts:
The balloon stuff may be globally co-ordinated. But 75% of earth is water. Do we have enough monitoring in the high seas and oceans ?


Trivia: Hollywood movie Battleship (2012) 

End of Anonymity

Problem: Anyone can buy a domain name and set up a website resembling a publication house (media outlet). And add social media share buttons to create havoc.

The fix for such nuisance has been taken care by a new legislation in India. If anyone wishes to buy a domain, one has to apply for a GSTIN registration.

This will go a long way in fixing the spread of fake news sites.

Caricature

(disclaimer: I am a novice on this subject; this article is because of the Feynman technique)

Most of us think that caricature is making fun of someone. This is totally nonsense because of those headstrong people who cannot take a joke on what they represent or do.

Caricature is the skills of observation expressed as an art of exaggeration.  

Our faces are unique, but at a micro level there are very minor difference among the different facial features. For e.g. my nose may be few millimeters wider than someone or I may have slightly wider jaw, etc. These small differences add up to form a distinctive face.  Hence, the most important skill of a caricature artist is observation. (I like to believe that I am good at it, hence my fiddling with this topic) 

The second skill is what to exaggerate and how much. Maybe, throw in something additional like clothes that the person wears the most or his general nature, say, replace the legs with a spring for an over enthusiastic person. 

And voila. You have a caricature !!

How can software help ? (any image processing software will suffice)

For amateur artists, the process is not easy even if they have good observation skills. Following are some tricks. 

1. Try to get a good photograph of the person. Nothing better if the exact posture can be found. It may not possible if it is a celebrity. To compensate, you can do a image search and find the one closest. No need to get the exact one. Use your imagination.

2. Cut the head and body and place it in two layers. 

3. Draw the head on a new layer above the head; and body on a new layer above the body.  This step is like copying of the silhouette from the layer below. (the new layer should be transparent backgrounds)

3. This is most important. No one can teach how to observe. Assuming you are competent find at most two features which you wish to exaggerate. (Ref: Geon
theory of Recognition by Components and the Gestalt theory of Figure &
Ground) 

4. If you haven't read the theories, please go back to step 3. 

5. Use the cage deformation (transformation) tool and exaggerate the feature. This tool obeys the law of constant mass. For e.g. if someone's eyes are a bit wide and you wish to push those to the edges, you need to adjust the upper cheeks accordingly. This tool provides a cage which you can adjust. 

6. Do the same for a single feature from the body. 

You still need to retouch for artistic qualities. And merge all layers sans reference.
See how far the machine can bring you if you know how to observe. And this is what personal computers are meant.

The disturbing thing is that good old cartoons and caricatures have disappeared from newspapers. Following is a tribute to sirs - Mr. R.K Laxman and Mr. Kutty. I miss you. (my first attempt; please pardon errors)

My father's photographs. 

 Now he is scolding me !!

Blackhole

The faraway land, dark in quicksand,
Fears even the ray, in losing its way. 

Shylock Resurrected - Intent of a businessman

(work in progress)

The credibility to charge interest on worthless pieces of paper is the greatest invention of capitalism.

The three important factors behind any venture to be successful are "intent", "ability" and "luck".

Let us try to examine whether we can assess all of these.

It is impossible to predict or assess someone's luck. We need to look at the other two factors to find the odds of the person being unlucky. This brings to "ability". This factor can easily be measured using data, the one that is the standard practise now. For example, to assess "luck", one can see the cash reserve or proper insurances. Such data will always be private and consent based. In the current financial framework, it has to be driven by the government appointed regulators. The important factor that gets overlooked is "intent".

Most of the bad loans are due to the wrong intent.

Suppose a person takes a loan to start a restaurant. It may happen that the menu does not strike a chord with the customers and the business fails. This is not a lost cause. The restaurant still has the furniture and crockery. People employed by him were paid which they had spent and the money had gotten re-circulated in the economy. And there are more valuable assets in the form of knowledge gained. With little guidance, this business can be recovered. However, if the person made a world tour with the loan, then it is impossible to recover.

"Intent" - the main ingredient in the recipe for success can also be measured with the advancement done in computer vision. It is the most mature application of second generation artificial intelligence.

The idea is to build a lie detection platform. Typical with lie detection methodology, there will be questions which the person is likely to say the truth and few where he is likely to cover it. The questions have to be annotated with the expectation of falsification. Thereafter, the system can detect subtle changes which humans cannot. For e.g. pupil dilation is impossible to observe with the naked eye. Other things may be changes in posture or voice tone (pitch) or detecting unusually long answers.

Study:
1. Computer vision systems developed by Israeli companies. 
(these were primarily used in military surveillance)
2. Softwares used in casinos

References:

1. Actual tender for building such a system.

https://theprint.in/india/governance/modi-govt-looks-at-lie-detection-test-to-tackle-bad-loans-in-mudra-scheme/192802/

Is Aadhar a necessary evil ?

In 2008 when I was learning fascinating technologies, I became particularly interested in applying those in politics. I had a Thinkpad T60 laptop (military grade) that could use fingerprint to authenticate the owner. One of the areas I thought this technology could be used was to address double (or multiple) voting in elections. 

I was badly wrong. It violated a fundamental principle of democracy. Elected leaders need to work impartially even for those people who did not agree with their ideology; fingerprint based voting will leave a trace, who voted for whom. The indelible ink by Mysore Paints and Varnish is a solution which still stands the test of time. 

Origins

Mr K Subrahmanyam, a security analyst, first proposed the need of an ID card for people living in border villages, most likely. as part of an assessment of the security lapses that happened before the Kargil War. Since it was difficult to use other forms of prevailing identification e.g. PAN card or driver's license in those remote villages, the alternative biological means of identification was explored. Fingerprint based identification method was proposed by Sir William James Herschel (magistrate posted in British occupied Bengal) and formalized by Edward Henry assisted by two Bengalis - Hem Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque. It had been predominantly used by law enforcement agencies as the guilty often lied about their true identity escaping suspicion in the event of repeated crime. 

Knives are used both for murder and cutting vegetables. Superior technology should be adopted but its effectiveness depends on the incorruptibility of the people overseeing the system. 

Drawbacks

Aadhaar was extended from the realm of forensics to prevent leakages in the public distribution system. Isn't that also a means of fighting crime ? Now, information of law abiding citizens are captured in the same manner smudging the lines between black and white. 

Reliance Jio saved huge amounts of regulatory verification costs during on-boarding of its mobile subscribers using Aadhaar system, though, they also have passed the benefits to the customers by abysmally low prices. But, can one guarantee that any tech-savvy Jio store personnel had not stored this information silently in his mobile phone. This impression can be planted at a crime scene misleading the agencies. Maybe the accused will eventually be acquitted but imagine the mental trauma. 

Secondly, the technologies used to implement this important system is not developed by us. One such is Mongo DB, a product from a company funded indirectly by CIA (In-Q-Tel). It is unlikely that any nation will ever own the entire eco-system (exception China) but in matters of strategic importance, it is imperative to use indigenous components for the critical parts, even if those turn out to be shabby. If you buy weapons from a country, can you ever defend yourself in a war against that country ?

There are other loopholes. For e.g. it is not possible to de-register from Aadhaar when a person dies. (see here)

Hence, it not only blurs lines between the good and bad but also the living and dead.

Going backwards

People from poor sections of the society cannot fill up the form for a bank account let aside a loan application. Supporters of Aadhaar will argue that such bio-metric authentication fast-tracks this process which will thereafter unleash the country's potential. Viewed from another angle, it is actually pushing the country backwards. 

One very important difference between man and animal is man's ability to record his thoughts. The complicated forms in any PSU bank is a challenge to the poor man's intellectual ability (if you tick 'a', then you need to tick 'b', and if you tick 'b' then you need to explain ... ) It is an incentive for him to study and think logically for comprehending the nuances of modern civilization. Once he successfully opens an account after navigating through these words and symbols, he has arrived in the modern society. 

Henceforth, he has to be logically defeated. 

Wikipedia - where truth is editable.

In 2011, when I was attending the Wikimedia conference, supporters of right-wing parties were protesting outside the venue of Mumbai University campus; and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia was greeted with black flags. The cause of their agitation was the wrong depiction of the map of Kashmir in Wikipedia. Nothing bad happened further; the conference completed smoothly. 

Mr Wales' Mac-book, however, could not be connected to the projector during his opening speech

The protesters probably did not know the nature of Wikipedia. It wasn't as if Mr. Wales had a team of editors who were writing the articles like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The later is edited by domain experts whereas in Wikipedia - anyone can write. In other words, the truth need not be proven - it is conveniently editable. Although, there are rules to assess the credibility of an article and articles evolve much over time to a supposedly more generally accepted version of the truth. 

Recently, while reading about human evolution, when I got to the part of language development, I was interested to find how my language - Bengali had evolved. It has been proven beyond doubt that Bengali is a descendant of the Sanskrit language, which in turn had descended from the Aramaic language which in turn had come from the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic language. Though some scholars claim Sanskrit had evolved from inside India i.e. the Indus Valley. 

On checking the Wikipedia article on Sanskrit it said that the earliest inscriptions in Sanskrit were found in Ayodhya. This rings a bell; especially now. 

This part on Ayodhya appeared on 18 Jul 2018. Refer difference here.

It may be plausible that the earliest known Sanskrit inscription were indeed found in Ayodhya. Prof D.C Sircar, an epigraphist with Archaeological Survey of India may have unearthed and dated it. Ironically the book he edited Select Inscriptions (bearing on Indian History and Civilization) was dedicated to Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee. 

However, no one from ASI edited or even locked this entry in Wikipedia, especially, at a point of time when a defining verdict was being awaited in Supreme Court. 

(as of this writing)

This edit was done by someone named Ms. Sarah Welch. She created her first page on 26-Dec-2014, and is very active since then with 15 edits per day, mostly on Hinduism and ancient Hindu literature. From the edit statistics, it seems she is an academic or researcher on these subjects. However, most of the articles she wrote on Hindu literature has lower ranking per Wikipedia assessment standards compared to the much better ranking which is on Cattle theft in India. Moreover, she has numerous edits on subjects those seem different from her main subject, for example on 2019 India General Elections, even on Article 370 of Indian Constitution, Citizenship Amendment Act Protests and Assam Accord. 

I am not sure whether Ms. Welch is helping protect the truth. Maybe Ms. Welch genuinely cares for the correct information. But it is quite amazing how there is absence of participation from official entities when gradually evidence from the digital medium is being accepted in the court of law. There were quite some instances of people held guilty for public posts. 

Such platforms, though immensely convenient should always be taken with a pinch of salt. 

References:

Sarah Welch edit statistics from here.