Wednesday, April 3, 2013

DECCAN HERALD 11

Panorama
By M A Siraj

Worlds first solar plane set to fly. P 12

Using IT to unravel ancient wisdom contained in manuscripts

uch of Indias traditional wisdom lies shrouded in classical languages and in manuscripts that are turning brittle and are threatened with extinction. Most of such manuscripts are owned privately with owners being secretive and possessive. Modest estimates put the number of these manuscripts at around one million. But Peter Scharf, professor of Sanskrit at Brown University in the US, says their number may range from one million to five million. According to Dr N V Ramachandran, director, Asian Classics Input Project, Palakkad, oldest known palm-leaf manuscript was of the 6th century while the oldest paper manuscript belongs to 10th century. B Krishnamurthy, director (strategy), Vyoma Linguistic Labs Foundation, Bangalore, says his search for Sanskrit manuscripts on the Internet has revealed 434 sources of the extant manuscripts in India. With IT revolution providing accessibility to the remotest recesses of knowledge sources, there is huge demand to bring all the traditional Indian knowledge, principally in Sanskrit, but considerable

portion in other classical languages too, into public domain. The NDA government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee took the first visionary step in this direction by setting up the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) in 2002. Since then, some headway has been made in transcribing some manuscripts, mainly belonging to Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha medicinal system. But much remains to be done. Dr Girish Jha, of Jawaharlal University says these manuscripts could have greater relevance in three important modern sectors, namely Vimana Shastra (Aeronautics), Metallurgy and Cosmology. As far as food and medicine are concerned, their relevance has been recognised since antiquity. It was only on this basis that the Indian scientists fought against overseas patenting of turmeric and were instrumental in returning the credit to India. In fact, CFTRI, Mysore headed by its former chairman Dr V Prakash was able to expedite patenting of hundreds of Indian foods, treatments and herbal medicine during the last 15 years on the basis of manuscripts. Says Dr. Darshan Shankar, Vice Chairman, Institute of Ayurvedic & Integrative Medicine, Bangalore, a rough guess

reveals that there were more than 50,000 manuscripts pertaining to Ayurveda lying untapped without being catalogued. Myriad software Information Technology with its myriad software does provide an answer to the challenges in transferring the concealed knowledge to the public domain. Prof Scharf says there is an urgent need to focus on using IT for creating a worldwide network of data bases of ancient Indian manuscripts such that anyone, in any part of

the world, could easily access any word, phrase, sentence or statement from any digitised manuscript housed anywhere in the world. He envisages a system where manuscript owners whether individuals or institutions, could produce online catalogues of manuscripts held by them using any of the open source cataloguing software currently available and upload onto this worldwide network. A 3-day national seminar on Application of Information Technology for conservation, editing and publication of manuscripts held recently in Bangalore called for creating a distributed platform of IT in relation to manuscripts using inter-operability protocols without exercising any control over participating individuals and institutions. According to Prof M A Lakshmithathachar, founder chairman of the Academy of Sanskrit Research, Melkote, digitising a single manuscript might entail two years of a techno-savvy Sanskrit scholar. The country cannot afford this and will have to look for alternative strategies. He suggests development of speech to text software, a machine readable text, which would bring down the time, energy and cost by 80 per cent. Prof Thathachar says

that since Sanskrit had retained the uniform phonetic intonation remarkably well through millennia and through vedic recitations under Gurukula system, it raises hopes of success of speech to text software enormously. However, the process would not be hassle-free as manuscripts have followed varied alphabets, modes and style of writing during different centuries. Some experts also emphasise induction of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the digitisation project. Prof A G Ramakrishna of Indian Institute of Science, who has developed OCR software for Tamil, says that his team has been able to digitise 200 books in Tamil using this software. They were also working on Tamil/Kannada TTS (Text to Speech) Software. However, it can deal with text alone, not the pictures and pictures will have to be removed before using OCR. He recommends development of a good Devanagiri based OCR software which should include all the rare characters, diacritical marks and augment it with a phoneme based speech recognition system. Dr P Ramanujan, assistant director CDAC points out lacunae in speech to text software. He says key elements present in

oral teaching such as correct pronunciation, intonations, bhava etc are not found in the print medium and these could be compensated by e-learning where voice, visuals etc can also be added. Ramanujan has been instrumental in developing Unicode Manuscript Editor at C-DAC enabling comparative analysis of various manuscripts. Work load could be drastically minimised as various versions of the same manuscript are found in various libraries. He cites the example of a particular text of which he was able to gather 35 versions from different sources including four version of the same text from one library alone. C-DAC has put about 15,000 images pertaining to 100 manuscripts together with the manuscript editor on the website www.parankusa.org which has several Vedic texts with exhaustive commentaries and hyperlinks. But there are several milestones to be reached. Girish Jha says following resolution of issues with the OCR the work needs to progress on text readers, search engines, inter-linking of sources of data, translation software and pronunciation analysers etc before a real breakthrough is made in exhaustive digitisation of ancient wisdom.

Web deceit: How people let their guard down

Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we cant refuse
By Somini Sengupta

Check-in with no formal check-out

By Julie Weed

ay youve come across a discount online retailer promising a steal on handstitched espadrilles for spring. You start setting up an account by offering your email address but before you can finish, theres a ping on your phone. A text message. You read it and respond, then return to the website, enter your birth date, click F for female, agree to the companys terms of service and carry on browsing. But wait: What did you just agree to? Did you mean to reveal information as vital as your date of birth and email address? Most of us face such decisions daily. We are hurried and distracted and dont pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we cant refuse. Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioural economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studies how we make these choices. In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy and we do, again and again we tend to act inconsistently. Acquisti is something of a pioneer in this emerging field of research. His experiments can take time. The last one, revealing how Facebook users had tightened their privacy settings, took seven years. They can also be imaginative: He has been known to dispatch graduate students to a suburban mall in the name of science. And they are often unsettling: A 2011 study showed that it was possible to deduce portions of a persons Social Security number from nothing but a photograph posted online. He is now studying how online social networks can enable employers to illegally discriminate in hiring. Acquisti, 40, sees himself not as a nag, but as an observer holding up a mirror to the flaws we cannot always see ourselves. Should people be worried? I dont know, he said with a shrug in his office at Carnegie Mellon. My role is not telling people what to do. My role is showing why we do certain things and what may be certain consequences. Everyone will have to decide for themselves. Those who follow his work say it has important policy implications as regulators in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere scrutinise the ways that companies leverage the personal data they collect from users. The Federal Trade Commission last year settled with Facebook, resolving charges that it had deceived users with changes to its privacy settings. State regulators recently fined Google for harvesting emails and passwords of unsuspecting users during its Street View mapping project. Last year, the White House proposed a privacy bill of rights to give consumers greater control over how their personal data is used. Acquisti has been at the forefront, testifying in Congress and conferring with the FTC. David C Vladeck, who until recently headed the agencys Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Acquistis research on facial recognition spurred the commission to issue a report on the subject last year. No question its been influential, Vladeck said of Acquistis work.

VALUE OF PRIVACY: Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioural economist at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. NYT

Companies, too, are interested; Microsoft Research and Google have offered Acquisti research fellowships. Overall, his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policymakers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We dont always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one. Too much confidence His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy-related decisions, says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions. This is perhaps Acquistis most salient contribution to the discussion. Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control might be an essential step, but it might also be a bit of an illusion. If iron ore was the raw material that enriched steel baron Andrew Carnegie in the Industrial Age, personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs users make when they give

up that data and who gains and who loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). Privacy is delayed gratification, he warned. As the Web matured and became more commercialised, he grew increasingly concerned about Web services that demanded real names. He questioned why companies should track the online behaviour of users in order to tailor their ads. These concerns led him to his only foray into a business enterprise. In 2002, with a pair of fellow graduate students at Berkeley, he made a cryptographic tool that would allow people to make purchases anonymously from e-commerce sites. He quickly realised, however, that even though consumers claimed to want privacy, they didnt want to pay for it. The startup failed. His interest in privacy economics deepened. To think about privacy more clearly, he argues, technologists need to understand human behaviour better. With that end in mind, he will teach next fall in a new, interdisciplinary one-year masters programme at Carnegie Mellon called privacy engineering. The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do, he said. The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance. At Carnegie Mellon, where he landed in 2003, he investigated the question with Facebook users. He started tracking a cohort of

more than 5,000 people, most of them undergraduates at the time. He noticed that although people revealed more and more of their personal history responding to Facebooks prompts about whether, say, they had just had a baby or had voted they were also restricting who could see it. Over time, they were, on the whole, less likely to let everyone see their date of birth, for instance, and what high school they had attended. Experiments like this have their limits and are open to different interpretations. This study, for instance, focused largely on college undergraduates who might have become cautious about who could see information about them as they approached graduation and prepared to enter the job market. Aiming to learn how consumers determine the value of their privacy, Acquisti dispatched a set of graduate students to a mall on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. To some shoppers, the students offered a $10 discount card, plus an extra $2 discount in exchange for their shopping data. Half declined the extra offer apparently, they werent willing to reveal the contents of their shopping cart for a mere $2. To other shoppers, however, the students offered a different choice: a $12 discount card and the option of trading it in for $10 if they wished to keep their shopping record private. Curiously, this time, 90 percent of shoppers chose to keep the higher-value coupon even if it meant giving away the information about what they had bought.
The New York Times

otels are changing the way guests check in to their rooms, eliminating the traditional stop at the front desk to speed up, simplify and, in some cases, personalise the process. When guests arrive at citizenM, a small, boutique hotel in Amsterdam, Glasgow and London, they check in at a kiosk and go straight up to their rooms, stopping only to speak to a roving hotel ambassador if they have a question. The kiosk was designed to be easy to use, said Kelly Blakey, a spokeswoman for the hotel, because most travellers are encountering it for the first time. At the Inn at St. Botolph in Boston, travellers who make reservations and enter their credit card information online receive their room assignment and two key codes in a confirmation email. When they arrive at the inn, guests tap one code into a keypad at the front door to enter the property and the other to enter their room. There is a front desk in the lobby if guests have questions, but there is no need to stop there as part of the check-in procedure. The hospitality industry is moving toward more automated check-in systems, said Tyler Craig, vice president and general manager for the NCR Corp.'s travel business, which develops these systems for hotels. Customers are used to ATMs at the bank instead of tellers, checking in for airplane flights online, and they are now looking for that same efficiency when they arrive at a hotel, Craig said. No one wants to wait in line for the front desk anymore.

Guests experience In the age of social networking, Craig added, its more important than ever to get the guests experience right, because an upset customer posting to Twitter, Facebook or TripAdvisor can easily share bad impressions with a wide group of people. Glenn Haussman, editor of the online trade magazine Hotel Interactive, said automated check-in was also a plus for hoteliers who wanted to assign additional duties to the front desk staff. When a guest checks in late at night and the same employee can make sure the check-in goes smoothly and also sell them something to eat, he said, the hotel has saved money on staffing, increased its revenue and increased customer satisfaction. In a typical system, guests check in by computer or phone before they arrive and enter their expected arrival time, which helps the housekeeping NYT

staff with the room cleaning schedule. A bar code is sent to the traveller to print out or display on his or her phone. At the hotel, the guest scans the bar code at a kiosk and types in the number of keys needed. The machine assigns a room and spits out the plastic key cards, and the guest can head upstairs. Additional kiosks can be placed at elevator banks so guests who have problems with a key card during their stay can get a replacement without walking back to the front desk. Hyatt, which already offers both a kiosk option and a traditional front desk to check in at most of its Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Regency and Hyatt brand hotels in major cities, is testing a different method with some of its Hyatt Gold Passport loyalty program members. The guest receives a card with a chip in it and checks in online, and the staff is able to code that card to act as the guests room key. The different check-in methods are meant to provide options for guests, not to supplant any, said David Nadelman, general manager of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco. Leisure guests here for shopping, dining and culture may want the opportunity to talk with our front desk associates to get some quick recommendations, versus a person here on business who may prefer to check in though the Web or selfcheck-in kiosk, he said. High-end hotels are also using new technologies to eliminate the front desk check-in line with personal greeters who shepherd guests through the check-in process in a more comfortable setting, using an iPad or laptop. Andaz West Hollywood has combined its front desk staff, bellmen and concierge functions into hosts, who greet guests as they enter the lobby and sit with them on comfortable couches to check in using an iPad with a credit card reader. Guests are offered coffee, soda or wine to sip. We wanted to make it feel more welcoming, like coming to a friends house, and remove the physical barriers between the guests and the staff, said Jordan Kaye, the director of marketing and communications for the hotel. The hosts also help with guests luggage and offer the type of suggestions that a concierge normally gives, like the location of a new restaurant in town. Travellers who are in too much of a hurry to stop for coffee and a chat on the couch can be checked in by a host in the elevator. A computer station in the lobby serves as a backup for more complex reservations.

WHATS THE BUZZ

Fish oil boosts immune system

Until now, scientists were not entirely sure about fish oils immune enhancing effects, which is widely believed to help prevent disease by reducing inflammation. A new study helps provide clarity on this by showing that DHA-rich fish oil enhances B cell activity, a white blood cell, challenging the notion

that fish oil is only immunosuppressive. This discovery is important as it shows that fish oil does not necessarily reduce the overall immune response to lower inflammation, possibly opening the doors for the use of fish oil among those with compromised immune systems. Fish oil may have immune enhancing properties that could benefit immunocompromised individuals, Jenifer Fenton, Ph.D., M.P.H., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, said.

How geckos keep firm grip even in wet natural habitat

That geckos can scurry up walls, Spider-Man style, is a known fact. But less well understood is how these reptiles cling to wet surfaces, which are common in their rainy tropical habitats. The answer, a new study reveals, is that a gecko's sticky toes enable the animal to walk across wet surfaces that don't get uniformly wet, like waxy leavesbut not on easily wettable surfaces, like glass.

The finding brings University of Akron integrated bioscience doctoral candidate Alyssa Stark and her research colleagues closer to developing a synthetic adhesive that sticks when wet.

Poor sleep could trigger diabetes and obesity

Proper sleep patterns are critical for healthy metabolic function, and even mild impairment in our circadian rhythms can lead to serious health consequences, including diabetes and obesity, a

new study has warned. "We should acknowledge the unforeseen importance of our 24-hour rhythms for health," said Claudia Coomans, a researcher involved in the work. To make this discovery, Coomans and colleagues exposed mice to constant light, which disturbed their normal internal clock function, and observed a gradual degradation of their bodies' internal clocks until it reached a level that normally occurs when aging.