dkspost parts 61-76

Part 61

What are the skills needed by many to handle requirements of industry 4.0.? Industry 4.0 means the fourth revolution with AI and connected world.

World economic forum listed many. Let us see them.

Eight critical characteristics in learning content and experi­ences have been identified to define high-quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution— “Education 4.0”:

1.Global citizenship skills: Include content that focuses on building awareness about the wider world, sustain­ability and playing an active role in the global community.

2.Innovation and creativity skills: Include content that fosters skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity and sys­tems analysis.

3.Technology skills: Include content that is based on developing digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility and the use of technology.

Let us the remaining tomorrow.

Part 62

The remaining skills are listed below. Kindly express your views on their relevance and also whether we need more or less skills and whether every one need to acquire all these skills. These are for school going children. The next question to look at how do we impart these skills?

4.Interpersonal skills: Include content that focuses on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership and social awareness.

5.Personalized and self-paced learning: Move from a system where learning is standardized, to one based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace.

6.Accessible and inclusive learning: Move from a sys­tem where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to one in which everyone has access to learning and is therefore inclusive.

7.Problem-based and collaborative learning: Move from process-based to project- and problem-based content delivery, requiring peer collaboration and more closely mirroring the future of work.

8.Lifelong and student-driven learning: Move from a system where learning and skilling decrease over one’s lifespan to one where everyone continuously improves on existing skills and acquires new ones based on their individual needs.

Part 63

Good sir. 🙏

It’s simple. I will read it a few times to have a feel of it.

Please help me with the description of robotic process automation.

My response

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software bots to automate highly repetitive, routine tasks normally performed by knowledge workers.

Intelligent Automation

An Integrated Robotic Process Automation platform which comes bundled with key essential technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing for front office, middle office, back office and IT operations automation.

It helps in reducing cost, improve response time, grow business and achieve compliance. Ready bots and development environment are available to build new bots.

Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers.

It is bot software to ape robots.

Initially robots were designed for motion. Now we want them to do routine jobs. So robots are combined with bots to do this. Bots can analyze, can help people, can alert etc. Chatbots are well developed. Next stage is cobots, collaborating robots,

Part 64

MGPL Narayana has comments on global skills.

“I agree with this advocacy of learning content and learning experiences in the changed world. It is not only digital technology, but the event like the current pandemic situation is forcing the change happen faster than it was projected. Innovation and creativity are widely accepted and highly desirable qualities in our times. We forget that as kids we were all creative, but over a period of time we get onto traditional pursuits. As the saying goes,  “children enter school as question marks and leave as periods”. The learning environment plays a very important role in shaping the creative mindset. In a highly connected world, sustainability is a paramount important. The advocacy on Global Citizenship Skills is highly desirable by inculcating in the kids the awareness of greater world. The earlier discussion postings that you highlighted rightly funnel into these contents and experiences through this framework, Education 2.0″

My response

I agree with your emphasis on learning environment. It is the main problem we have . We are in education 1.0 and trying to jump to education 4.0.  can we do it? And how?

I just want to give an example. In my visits to several institutions for TEQIP audit and mentoring, I was to interact with faculty and students. Both faculty and students said we are from rural areas and so don’t expect anything from us. So step one is to break such mindsets

 Build their confidence levels. After a lot of persuation it was partially understood by them. Similarly the students want teachers to teach everything. For instance they wanted teachers to teach Python language. This at an NIT. I said no body taught me a programming language. It is self learnt. We at IISc expect students to pick up languages and use it to solve problems.

Remember the book – deep work by Cal Newport. So mindset changes are needed. It won’t come in a day . The environment will help in this.

The second experience is more interesting. Teachers used to complain students are not motivated they don’t know English- great excuses for not doing the job. On the other hand , students used to complain teachers don’t know the subject; they copy without thinking  even including halls in the US universities. . The students also said most teachers are poor in English. See the irony of the situation. We need to address implementation at the level of upgrading the mind sets of teachers first. It is a tough job not easy. Some principals understood this and encouraged younger faculty and involved them in activities. This worked well for many. Today survival of institutions is a big issue. So we need to wake up and get into attacking the mindset changes very seriously.

But let us take the first step in the direction.

Part 65

Mr. Srinivasan, PNB

“Good morning sir. Scientist Roddam is no more. A reference from you highlighting his contribution would be appreciated 👍🙏”

My response

A good friend of mine. Worked with him in many committees. Discussions with him were exciting and illuminative. A remarkable person with phenomenal clarity, good thinking, and great humility. He never got upset or angry. Was active till the end. An inspiration for most of us.

He started the aerodynamics activities at IISc. Later he started activities on climate. Now the atmospheric sciences at IISc is a big department. He was involved in analyzing the failure data of Avro planes for Dhawan committee. He was a student of Prof Dhawan. That made, I think, Prof Dhawan reluctant to recommend him as Director of IISc. But he became director of NAL and later NIAS. He was the chief guest for the valedictory function of reach to teach program by FAER.  He was involved in many scientific activities. He will be missed by many people and the scientific community.

Part 65 – continued

Mr. Bala is doing a great service for improving education. He has a web site and all my posts are available there. Any of you or your friends want to get information or see my posts, I request them to visit qtimelearning. It is given below.

Part 66

Let us see implementation aspects later. Let us look at another aspect.

People are gifted with virtually unlimited potential for learning and creativity. How do we make use of it ? Education should sharpen this. 

In his modern classic, Frames of Mind (1983), psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligences, which posits that each of us possesses at least seven measurable intelligences (in later work Gardner and his colleagues catalogued twenty-five different sub intelligences).

The seven intelligences, and some genius exemplars (other than Leonardo da Vinci, who was a genius in all of these areas) of each one, are:

Logical-Mathematical—Arya Bhatta, Bhaskara, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Leibnitz, Einstein, Marie Curie

Verbal-Linguistic—William Shakespeare, Panini, Tiruvallur, Shivaram karanth

Spatial-Mechanical—Michelangelo, Buckminster Fuller, Dreyfuss

Musical—Mozart, Thyagaraja,

Bodily-Kinesthetic—Yoga gurus, wrestlers, athletes, Muhammad Ali,

Interpersonal-Social—Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi,

Intrapersonal (Self-knowledge)— Gautama Buddha, Shankaracharya, mother Theresa, Dalai Lama,

The theory of multiple intelligences is now accepted widely and when combined with the realization that intelligence can be developed throughout life, offers a powerful inspiration for aspiring people. This should be developed in our education system.

Part 66 – Continued

We looked at three views of human traits. First Da Vinci’s principles; second skills needed as per studies of world economic forum; third is multiple intelligences of Gardner. It is time to think on them. You can see the confusion of terms like thinking, skills and intelligence.

I believe intelligence cannot be categorized like Gardner. These are skills. Intelligence is multidimensional, multilateral. Let me take an example. How do you recognize an acquaintance? You don’t recognize by face or speech or emotions or gestures or behaviors alone.  You need more time and parameters to recognize him or her in the beginning. You don’t recognize by looking at the face alone. You may not remember the face. Multiple factors play a role. You can recognize the person a well acquainted one from a distance even when his face is not visible. You recognize by gait, way of walking, overall structure of the body, gestures etc. Initially you take more time to recognize that person. But after several meetings, recognition is instant. So we perceive, recognize and resolve with multiple factors and use knowledge / experience and definitely intuition or liking to arrive at conclusions and decisions. It is not one skill or one dimension that is used.

Same is true with intelligence. You use multiple skills in various situations. You know what combination to use in different situations. When ordering in a restaurant, you may not use mathematical skills, but may be taste and liking.

This MI concept is explained by Gardner with a Chinese example. During his first visit he was told “These are simply eight areas in which we (meaning Chinese here) want all our children to excel.” When he returned to China six years later, he learned that a great many schools, particularly for young children, claim to be based on MI ideas. Again, I queried widely why this was the case. I received a surprising reply from one informant, who said, “If we had a psychologist in China who was pushing for progressive ideas in education, we would not need to quote the words or ideas of Howard Gardner. We don’t. In the absence of such a person, mentioning you and your ideas is a good way to open up our rather rigid educational system. So, it is another way of looking at skills.

Part 67

Gardner proposed his theory to question IQ tests according to some. He says measurable. Is intelligence measurable?

I feel as explained earlier, intelligence is use of observation, experience and thinking and it is a multitrack activity and uses multiple skills, including experiences, imitations and intuitions, many times without a rationale. The so-called intellectuals have a single-track mind when they talk of rationalism and atheism. Even those who look at systems thinking, design thinking, or scientific approach miss a lot. They see a forest as a collection of trees. Remember a forest is a huge eco system housing a large variety of trees, shrubs, grasses, animals, insects, ferns and many other biological entities and many resources like water, minerals etc. as well as growing. We need a similar view of life, living and intelligence. Our learning process simplifies a lot of aspects and approximates many parameters and behaviors. We classify for our understanding, but events in reality are always intermixed and random – not mostly predictable. We are today puzzled with the happenings due to covid and we are yet to understand it. We will slowly improve our understanding with both experience and science. Remember research starts with hypotheses many times. So the key learning is not to have one track mind, not to get attached with one aspect like mathematics or logic only. Look outside and everywhere. Build multiple skills. Use intuition and commonsense. As Rig Veda says knowledge comes from everywhere. Try to analyze and find the truth .

Remember this

 “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.” Truth is one but experts give many meanings and manifestations and interpretations.

Part 68

Mr.  Sambamurty, past CEO of IDRBT introduces his views on leadership.

“A good leader cultivates a “sense” of future.

Future sense  of technology, future sense  of consumer behavior, future sense  of ecosystem. These influence the skill sets and mind sets.

Any strategy needs to begin with sense of future and it needs to be shared with rank and file.

These outlive tenure of CEO. But by cultivating sense of future and share this sense, a leader can leave a legacy.”

He is correct about the need for a futuristic outlook. we know that world is changing and changing at a high speed.  Prof Clayton Christenson talks of disruptions. One reason companies loose business is due to the blindness in looking at changes and disruptions happening with time across the world. As Charles Darwin says adaptability to changes is the best chance for survival. In order to adapt, we should know what is happening in the world. Netflix is a good example of good thinking and transformation. It moved from offline video lending shops to online streaming to production. It survives today and is growing.

Instead of talking about leadership alone, today futuristic outlook is needed by even normal people for survival. One example I want to quote is the single skilled COBOL programmers. They lived in their well and lost jobs when COBOL went out of the window. Many technologies are transitory. So it takes us to have a look at future proofing. We cannot predict future trends accurately. But we can be ready to welcome changes. Normally it takes about five years for a new innovative technology to come into practice even now. So it gives us time to get ready. So continuous learning habit is an essential requirement not just today but for ages. Curiosity is another requirement for not success but survival. Multiskilling is another requirement. What we need is a holistic picture to decide and select life goals.

Part 69

Mr Srinivasn, ex PNB, has a request.

“Good afternoon. If possible, please devote some attention on biometric uniqueness.

Some body in a lecture talked about when the data storage becomes robust one day in future there may be some body whose biometric features could match with someone in the previous birth who was a member of the institute.

Based on this he can claim to continue with the membership without any need to qualify.

I was prompted to ask this based on the encouragement given by you.

Please ignore this if found absurd

Regards.”

My response

Normally many facts like the uniqueness of finger prints are based on practical experiences and evidence. Many aspects in life are based on approximations. Finger print representation is also based on approximations. You take a large sample and check for similarities or differences. So far there seems to be no cases of similarities between many finger prints. So we accept the uniqueness as a fact. we started using it as an identifier only recently. There is no detailed scientific analysis. We need to wait and see. There is no strong basis for the factors chosen to represent finger prints. So if duplicates are found, better abstraction techniques with more factors may be developed. There is more scientific work on DNAs. The premise of uniqueness is based on statistics and not explainable. But even scientists accept conjectures and hypotheses and try to prove or disprove them.

Even if you say uniqueness does not exist, the number of cases will be very very small. So, the probability will be very very small. These can be handled separately. I have not seen or heard about equality of two persons finger prints so far. It may happen or may not happen.

There are other problems with biometric identification we are facing today.  Finger prints fade with time. So identification is not possible. Now we have a serious denial of service there. An alternate is face recognition. Story is the same. Have faith and wait for problems. Then try to solve it. Life is not science. If the entire life processes can be well defined, robots will become better humans. That day is far off.

Part 70

There are views and doubts on Intelligence and skills. There are also views like native intelligence and questions like can intelligence be acquired?

Gardner himself talks of several other intelligences. Let us see his comments in his book.

“there will be efforts to propose new intelligences. In recent years, in addition to the explosion of interest in emotional intelligences, there have been serious efforts to describe a spiritual intelligence and a sexual intelligence. My colleague Antonio Battro has proposed the existence of a digital intelligence and has indicated how it may fulfill the criteria that I have set forth. The noted cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner has challenged me to consider “attention” as a kind of intelligence. I’ve also mentioned my own recent interest in the possibility of a pedagogical intelligence. I have always conceded that in the end, the decision about what counts as an intelligence is a judgment call—not an unambiguous determination following the rigorous application of an algorithm.”

So there seems to be a lot of confusion. Since we are focused on education, we need to be concerned on what we need to learn and how do we learn.

That is where the WEF skills become important. We need to inculcate habits as proposed by Da Vinci. The main reason I quoted Gardner was to open the minds of people to the fact that mathematics and algorithms are not everything. All problems cannot be completely formulated, understood and solved by mathematical principles alone. It helps but we need to go beyond. Human brain solves problems by attacking on multiple directions not in one track. Sometimes we get answers by intuition. MGPL Narayana is trying to connect intuition with systems thinking. But we cannot do that. It will be oversimplification. Systems Thinking is an acquired habit while intuition is natural. So, we need to understand first the way people solve problems. A lot of management books are appearing today talking about traits of successful people. We are told to imitate people. Mentoring is also imitation.

So, learning process needs to address these before building learning methods and contents.

Ambience plays an important role in education and learning. Why students do better at IISc and not in a college. Normally it is dismissed saying we get the best students. But that is not the only reason. Independent work, freedom, trust, motivation, good intentions build the ambience. So, we need to build the ambience not the buildings. Concentration should move to these aspects which are not tangle but visible.

Do you need a break from this monotony of posts from me? If you want, we can take a break. Please inform me.

Part 71

We have some comments. Let us look at them before proceeding further. Mr Jayashankar has comments and experience on finger prints.

“In finger prints as you said will fade away with age and nature of work one is doing. What about eyes comparison. In Aadhaar system they are taking both finger prints and eye comparison. I am not aware as to what is checked in eyes as a uniqueness. If you know, kindly explain for the benefit of others.

In fact some ten years back the finger print in visa was introduced in US. Please went at that time officially and however the person who was sitting in emigration, could not get the finger print of mine.

He then allowed me to pass after checking other credentials.

NJ”

My response

Regarding your comments on finger prints, it is pure evidence basis only. Not scientific. One day we may be surprised with two identical finger prints. Same is true with iris and face recognition.

We define one classification method, use some parameters and when you get wrong results you go for more. We keep learning. Dependence on one method is not enough. That is why Aadhaar has two – finger prints and iris. Now face recognition is picking up. We have not yet learnt the basics of identification in a visible way. Humans identify using multiple features. But machines struggle. As of today both iris and face recognitions are doing well. Finger prints have aging problems. Technology is also changing. Instead of using optical scanning of finger prints, we can use high frequency RF which can sense vibrations also more dynamic and at much less costs.

You may see more RF scans in future instead of X-rays and expensive CT scans and eye screening.

Part 72

Mr Aravind from TCS is a close friend and has been involved in both business excellence and educational excellence for decades. He was involved in educational activities of TCS ION. We had discussions regularly. He has provided very deep and perspective comments on education and learning models.

“Sir, the discussion thread on learning styles and teaching styles especially Gardner is informative. I had learnt a bit of Gardner and looking forward to more on similar lines. I have read a bit about David Kolb’s learning styles, perception and cognition, Dunn & Dunn (multiple dimensional instructions), Grasha Reichmann inventory and social learning (environment). Is this all related to Myers Briggs personality? In fact, I am also interested in Unconscious bias if possible.  Unconscious bias is a result of people allowing their own beliefs, stereotypes to cloud their judgements while taking decisions. This could be in the form of dressing of students, linguistic proficiency (clouding ability to judge his or her analytic ability), gender, race and of late coming into caste too.”

My response is not easy. He knows more than me on learning methods. I will discuss methods of learning later and discuss his views at the appropriate times. Getting into them will lead to specialized and long discussions. One thing is clear. They say one size does not fit all. The general omnibus system of teaching helps some but not to many. Second there is no single method. Combine different methods, mix and match. Find your solution. Develop habits like concentration, focusing of mind, thinking, asking questions, listening carefully, understanding and not scorning and rejecting views of some without valid reasons. But we will see some of these aspects later.

He has raised a serious topic – bias. We are biased naturally. There was a book I read about bias in selections, decisions with most people. Unbiased activities are rare. We see biases everywhere. But it is dangerous in education. But can we move away from caste? Current focus is to avoid gender bias. At least it is moving in the right direction but slowly. Governments have taken several steps to reduce the bias and discrimination against girl child.

But how do we handle language bias. The kind of hatred spread across the country is unbelievable. How do we solve this? Worse is the caste bias. About 50 years back, I thought the differences amongst castes will reduce. Instead, it has gone in the opposite direction. Caste affinities have increased. Hatreds are the norm. We go backwards. Is there a way to hide the caste of children in schools? How do we sensitize and motivate teachers to reduce biases and have a humanly behavior? School books talk of family and described a person as a servant. Demeaning right. A very tough, detailed and challenging job. Our Television does not help in reducing biases. They increase the divide. Tolerance is missing.

I agree with Aravind that this is an important issue to be addressed and solutions found. Otherwise, we will have a highly divided society.

Mental changes are needed. Plato said selection of officers should not be based on knowledge but integrity. How do we implement that? Can we select teachers who do not have biases through subtle questions? Can we rework the entire curriculum? Can we discard all books and go digital? Digital contents with visuals will help in this. Can we mix virtually students at college level and even at high school levels. Each group will have students from at least ten states. Online learning, meeting will make this feasible. Have less lectures and more discussions. Go away from school or college concept. For languages, the group’s may be different. Focus on poverty, social inclusion, good behavior etc. It is an arduous job needing commitments from groups. How many people will buy this? How do we handle the opposition? We are a vote bank country. May be RSS should take it up?

There is not one problem to address but many. We have some reasonably egalitarian states and some highly conservative states. So, solutions differ. The urban scene is very different from rural scene. Poverty is a a strong issue in urban areas and we have government vs private schools’ syndrome. In rural areas, caste plays a major role. Maybe we should conduct contests to get many solutions.

Individuals may have a personal life and beliefs, but socially we should have a standard uniform set of rules for behavior and interactions with society. We need to cure our blindness. Hope there will be many opinions on this.

I welcome comments.

Part 73

Mr Ramaprasad comments on digital.

“Not possible to have only digital schools and colleges with the present infrastructure even though idea is good that this can eliminate caste bias since the students in this set up are in different strata”

My response

I understand that digital schools are still some years away. But we can’t escape it because of its advantages. Further many ways are being developed to reach inline teaching to students in places with no internet. If 5G comes, it will have a large reach. As it is most schools have computers.

Most importantly, I did not say digital schools but digital contents tested and certified by AI for several biases. So these contents can reach students either online or printed form. It will have good reach to all schools.

But the question is can we avoid biases. I think it will be difficult to convert all people as ideal ones. Biases come from beliefs. Even so-called intellectuals have greater biases. See people who wrote our history not fully evidence based, a lot of conjectures to suit their beliefs. Our newspapers have biases. All communities, all classes and castes have biases. We can try to reduce it.

Mrs Bharathi Prabhu has two comments. We see one now.

“Sir,

Becoming aware of our biases is the first step in getting rid of them, psychologists say…

Implicit.harvard.edu tests biases of people across areas such as race, gender.

In our country we will need to test for caste, socio economic status etc.

One may argue that we really don’t need a test to say that people are biased. But even those who claim not to be biased are found to be so.

Mahzarin Banaji an Indian Origin researcher is part of this. They are collecting data about people’s biases on the net.

It is very sad that caste continues to play a dominant part in our lives. Greater exposure and inter mingling may reduce its negative impact.

Many of these attributes such as caste, race or even gender work as marks of identity, of belonging, the problem starts when we perceive or believe in inherent superiority of any of these identifiers.”

My response

Agreed. Build personality, confidence, good habits, in students. Give examples of biases.

Part 74

The second comment by Bharathi Prabhu is deeper.

“Encouraged by your patience, I am putting forth a question.

How do we decide which side is correct?

If we take any issue that plagues our country, there will be two or more sides. The farmers’ unrest for instance. If you read Capt. Amarjeet Singh you feel agitation is justified, and if you read some others, you feel they have a point too.

Especially when it involves issues that don’t directly concern us, like the CAA or farmers agitation we can be easily swayed. Depending on the persuasive power of the speaker or writer, we may arrive at conclusions.

As we know, it is quite possible to argue for and against the same topic. Reservation, uniform civil code and all these contentious issues are viewed by people depending on their biases, their experiences and so many factors along with the inherent merit of the case.

How should we analyze?

Thank you”

My response

She understands Psychology better than me. This question of how to analyze is important to be taught to our children. It goes beyond agitations.it also goes beyond logic and mathematics and other skills.

My first response is

” an agitation is important and takes our attention when it takes place. It is forgotten afterwards. Let us look at some factors to do qualitative analysis.

Impacts: Some have impacts, some a bit, and some none. Let me look at some old ones. The biggest and long drawn out and highly impactful one is our independence struggle. It is a movement. But during its time it produced multiple views and understandings.  We learnt a lot of lessons. Passive agitation did not work. Destructive agitation like killing also didn’t work. Active agitation draws attention. Non-cooperation worked. Even at that time many wanted British to stay. British brought caste and religion to the front and divided the people and country, not only India but also Ireland.

We had a prolonged attack on computerization in 1970 s. It delayed and put our development on backfoot. It is also due to government policies. TCS suffered a lot. So, impact is one aspect to consider for analysis.

Let us look at Golak agitation in eighties. It didn’t buy anything.

Transformation: are changes small or large. The changes here are large. Farmers are worried.

Emotional issues: it is not right or wrong that was important but emotions. That is a factor to understand. The farmers agitation has a lot of emotions and perceptions.

Data and prediction of future: In most cases, we don’t have a lot of data and impacts are futuristic. So, we need to guess and use our intelligence. But in general, give and take is a good policy. Government is seen in poor light now. It is public perception not logic or may not be correct.

Seriousness and public opinion: while farmers agitation is serious, public opinion is not serious enough. The belief is it is political used. The serious problem is virus and infections.

There may be other factors also to be considered.

A human is a mix of a large number of beliefs, faith, trust, likes and dislikes, emotions, behaviors and biases. Many decisions are not rational or logical. But emotional and intuitive. Available knowledge is low. Experts are very clever. They have multiple, guarded views and they confuse us.

We can draw a table with pros and cons and come up with a clinical solution but it can’t be practical as we see in farmer’s agitation. They lived with APMC are scared of uncertain future. Their life is at stake. We can analyze it without any stake in it. We become arm chair experts. It is not desirable. Our only wish can be for both parties to negotiate and settle the issue. If a role back is needed, so be it. The government is not a stakeholder, nor it is wise. So, it has no business to say we are doing it for farmers. Let farmers decide what they want and not some bureaucrats who have no idea of reality of farming and suicides. I did not hear Amarendra singh or Kejriwal or Tomar. I just went through the steps. This kind of rigidity has created many failures in negotiations. Hope this is clear.

Part 75

I got many comments which looked at farmer’s agitation in different ways. That shows we can think through practical imagination and perception when data is not fully available. My objective is to suggest that many problems are not amenable for mathematical analysis. But methods exist to analyze them. We can do a qualitative analysis. Then we can assign numbers. We get a structural equation which can be solved to get relationships between two entities – a new one or we can get a set of solutions. We can study the effects also. There is a book by Kenneth Bollen – Structural equations with latent variables. This book describes ways of looking at qualitative problems and analyzing them.

I also took up this this example to show MI that is multiple ways of thinking exists.

Dr Mathur, President, EQUATE, has two questions. Let us see them.

The questions are

“Sir,

My qualifications are in the context of technology research.

1. What is the role of hypothesis in good research?

2. And why literature survey is important when availability of secondary information is too easy now.

Regards

Dr Mathur

President EQUATE LLP”

 The first question on hypothesis is a thought provoking one. At the moment, such research is minimal. But research based on hypothesis have produced great results. The entire area of data mining has produced many results in health and retail. For example, the concept of good cholesterol came from data mining. Another area which uses hypothesis is AI and it’s impacts and implications. This is mostly in social aspects and not technological aspects. When we integrate humans into engineering, we may need to start research with hypotheses. The collaborative area of COBOTs will be a good area. Cyber security research is mostly reactive. With hypotheses, it can move into proactive mode. Astrophysics uses this kind of research extensively. I have said outward looking is important. If we do that hypotheses will play a major role in engineering research. Both outward looking and bird’s eye views will encourage and spur imaginative research through conjectures and proofs.

The second question: I fully agree with you. First literature survey as is being done today by researchers is a routine ritual. Even when some use it for discovery, it will be a dated, years old discovery. I feel we need a critique of the problem. We will be humbled when we see students discussing a cricket match ball by ball or a movie, scene by scene. Their memory and remembrance power is revealed. Do we take advantage of it in our education system? No, we destroy it. Secondly their critiquing is amazing. Researchers need to learn from them to critique current work. Lastly, the abundance of resources available are mind boggling. We can have websites, blogs, reports, discussions, available on tap. Why don’t we use them? I ask two questions and answers are poor. Question no one is what are the five seminal papers in your topic of research?

Question two is who are the top ten researchers working in your area? That is the situation. Now younger students google a lot. Will it lead to different problems of slavery?

Hope I have addressed your questions.

Part 76

Padmapriya, a student has a concern and question

Delhi HC asks Libgen, Sci-Hub to stop uploading articles as they face copyright infringement charges – india news – Hindustan Times

There are several advocates of making scientific literature open access, but how can this be made practical, given that researchers want their work to be published in prestigious journals which are not free?

My response is

It is totally unfair. Journals do not find for research. Journals don’t find for review. They only print. So they are parasites, cannot claim for copy right. The IP is with the author. In addition, some charge the author for publication. Academics should move for a balanced view where open access to research outcomes should be available. It is a paradox when they publish in a journal, it informs the world of their outputs. But the journals through exorbitant rates close the open access. In these days of online access, this is ridiculous. Most institutions cannot afford to buy these journals. There is the open access movement but moving slowly. There should be public audit. Journals play a neutral role and we need to create a mechanism. Already impact numbers like H index are coming up but it needs modification and transformations. Hope we get open access. Rig Veda says knowledge is free. In a country where Rig Veda is an important philosophy of morality, it is ironic that we are chaining public spirited web sites. It needs a relook. Remember that Xerox copying shops in Delhi got a judgement to legally copy books for individual use. Even conferences are becoming money minded.

Thanks for your support to egg me to write.

Will start from first of 2021. Let us have a few days to assimilate and come up with questions.

I will start with philosophies of learning and engineering.

Greetings for a healthy and happy new year. Let us move in the right direction. Let us find good purpose in life.

I gave two talks recently on

1. Engineering innovations through ages

2. Digital Innovations drive education transformations.

If anyone is interested please ask and I will send the ppts.

Ratan Tata s new year message is apt, relevant and nice. I copy below his four points.

Tata summarized his thoughts by listing four things to keep in mind in 2021:

> “Let’s not take the universe for granted,”

> “there is a large power that governs us. Let’s learn to live with humility and gratitude, as life is uncertain. We must do our best to keep ourselves safe by co-creating solutions that address all humankind.”

> “Technology is transforming the way we eat, live, learn and play — let us be brave enough to embrace it and find solutions collectively through collaboration.”

> “And lastly, to be part of this high world transformation that is happening around us, we need to foster a culture of innovation that converges with the right investment without fear of failure.”

Let us welcome 2021 with

Caution that the virus is there,

With confidence that we will survive and succeed,

With concern for nature and compassion to all,

With cheers that we are positive and optimistic and happy,

With care for health and nutrition, And let us pray for the wellbeing of all people, animals, birds, insects, and for the enrichment of nature.