Daily Hindu Editorials

👉 The confusion continues till date 👈 The growth of data has been exponential. According to an IBM report, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created per day. This has created a new class of professionals — data scientists. The question is, is data science another ‘hot’ job or a new form of science? In the Hollywood movie 21, six students, brilliant with numbers, make money at the blackjack tables of Las Vegas casinos by using numbers, codes, and hand gestures. Can we call them data scientists? 👉The ‘fourth paradigm’ In 2009, pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray argued that data science is the “fourth paradigm” of science, the other three being empirical, theoretical and computational paradigms. In terms of the volume of data to be handled nowadays, it certainly sounds sensible. However, data have always played a major role in scientific developments and the growth of knowledge, not just now. About two centuries ago, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was la...

👉To realise India’s potential in the field, a strong buy-in from policymakers is needed👈 The NITI Aayog has published an ambitious discussion paper on kickstarting the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in India. AI is the use of computers to mimic human cognitive processes for decision-making. The paper talks of powering five sectors — agriculture, education, health care, smart cities/infrastructure and transport — with AI. It highlights the potential for India to become an AI ‘garage’, or solutions provider, for 40% of the world. To pull this off, India would have to develop AI tools for a range of applications: reading cancer pathology reports, rerouting traffic in smart cities, telling farmers where to store their produce, and picking students at high risk of dropping out from school, among them. It is a tall order, but several countries have similar ambitions. The U.S., Japan and China have published their AI strategy documents and, importantly, put their money where the...

👉Why the 20th anniversary of the Pokhran nuclear tests was so muted this month👈 Some anniversaries are celebrated with enthusiasm while others are merely observed. The muted response to the 20th anniversary of India’s nuclear weapons tests this past month puts this milestone firmly in the second category. It is a far cry from the triumphalism that overtook India 20 years ago. And yet, in crossing the rubicon (a phrase from that era) India took a gamble with the international nuclear regime that, despite the turbulent reception, has largely paid off. Even if India today is not quite at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)-sanctioned top table of the original five nuclear weapons states (NWS), it is not in the company either of the other two self-declared nuclear weapons powers, Pakistan and North Korea. Therein lies the rub. 👉No place at the top table Today India occupies a special position as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, to quote from the 200...

👉Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation👈 David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring trust was to be trustworthy by demonstrating competence, reliability and honesty. India has been fortunate in inheriting a statistical system from stalwarts like P.C. Mahalanobis and C.R. Rao that has historically demonstrated all three. However, with the growing demand for statistics and increasingly challenging data collection environment, the move by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) towards developing a National Policy on Official Statistics is most welcome. There is much to like i...

👉India must be careful in picking up best practices from elsewhere in drafting a data protection law While the Americans and Europeans both call a sport football, they play a very different game. This difference is rooted not only in culture but in the rules of the game that provide rewards for goals, and penalties for breaching allowances. In the case of privacy regulations too, such a marked distinction is visible. With the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect on May 25, 2018, the absence of a comparable regulation across the Atlantic poses a question for India: What path should it take? Should it follow the U.S. or Europe? Or, in fact, should India take the lead in this regard? 👉American exceptionalism Last year, in November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Carpenter v. United States, which many commentators termed as one of the most critical electronic surveillance case in decades. Among other finely threaded legal arguments ...

👉India’s transition to clean energy could improve the quality of life of women👈 India can increase its GDP by up to 60% by 2025 by enabling more women to participate in its workforce, a 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute had stated. However, social and cultural constraints can prevent this from becoming a reality. Many women who work outside home still have primary household and parenting responsibilities that need to be balanced with their work life. Studies estimate that India’s ambitious target of achieving 175 GW of renewable energy (RE) by 2022 could create 3,30,000 jobs in the wind and solar energy sectors alone. Can this rapidly growing industry create jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities for women? And can these opportunities provide better salaries and health-care benefits, skilling and training opportunities, and enhance the quality of life for women and their families? What can decision-makers — in government and in the private sector — do to support the...

👉Three interesting happenings in the world of science from the week gone by: Why men have a thing for blondes; a mutant to fight plastic waste pollution; and an eye in the sky looking for life👈 👉Why men have a thing for blondes Scientists have now made it easier to solve murder mysteries… so long as the murderer leaves a DNA sample behind and doesn’t dye their hair after the crime. The colour of human hair is determined by genes, and 124 of them were discovered just last week. Analysing and comparing the hair colour and DNA data of nearly 300,000 people of European origin, the study published in Nature Genetics has improved our understanding of how pigmentation genes evolved by adapting to the external environment and social cues. It will also help understand diseases like skin and prostate cancer, and explain why men have a thing for blondes. 👉A mutant to fight plastic waste pollution The days of plastic waste are numbered. And all because scientist...

👉Tech giants do not understand the social costs of their business decisions👈 The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the U.S. Congress has unleashed a wave of outrage against the social networking giant. But Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley titan facing difficult questions about ethics and trust. Earlier this year, about 3,100 Google employees signed and internally circulated a letter protesting Google’s involvement with Project Maven, a Pentagon program. As a partner in the project, Google will help develop advanced Artificial Intelligence capabilities for military drones. The employees’ letter begins, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war... We ask that Project Maven be cancelled, and that Google draft, publicise, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” It goes on to add that if Google doesn’t withdraw fro...

💥When societies take positions against the consensus of science, for economic or ideological gains, they risk failure It has been a time of crisis for science over the past several years. In cases where society and policy need inputs from science, there is now a widely prevalent view that the conclusions of scientific inquiry can be challenged for economic or ideological reasons. Here I briefly discuss the process and practice of science, establishing where conflicting views are germane and where they are a futile denial of evidence. 👉On three pillars In essence, science is the organised method developed to understand nature. The method has developed over centuries and the knowledge gained has proved to be so effective that human history and the human condition over the past several centuries have been dominated by the knowledge and mechanisms made available by science. However, it should be recognised that while scientists and society may have strong moral and ethi...

💻Data science can help us get insights into key sectors but privacy should not be compromised Data and data science have suddenly emerged into the spotlight. First, there was a data breach at Facebook, which saw allegations of the U.K.-based Cambridge Analytica (CA) illegally accessing over 87 million users’ information for personalisation of digital campaigns. Then there were allegations that the official mobile apps of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Congress party had sent user data without consent to foreign companies for analytical purposes. The rapid rise of data science can be attributed to the voluminous amount of information that is being generated with every activity of ours in this digital age — IBM says that 90% of the world’s data has been generated just in the last two years — and the strides concurrently made in the world of mathematical modelling, computation, and Artificial Intelligence-powered algorithms. These trends are creating unprecedented, fa...

💥 There is no such thing as total failure; ISRO should learn from its satellite launch problem The loss of communication between the ground station and the Indian Space Research Organisation’s latest satellite after its launch on March 29 is deeply disappointing. ISRO’s mission aimed to place the communication satellite, GSAT-6A, in space. However, shortly after the second orbit-raising operation, the ground station lost track of the satellite on March 31, when it was on course for the final firing. Understanding why this happened is crucial. A launch operation can be simplified into the initial three stages, during which the satellite is boosted to different heights by the launch vehicle and then placed in a geosynchronous transfer orbit. This is an elliptical orbit into which a satellite is placed initially before being transferred into a geosynchronous orbit where it maintains a position above a fixed longitude. During each of these stages, a part of the rocket completes its ...

💥Indian authorities may now have the opportunity to directly access data stored on U.S. servers Consider a scenario where a crime is committed in India and the suspect and victim are both Indian citizens. If the suspect used a U.S.-based messaging service to plan the crime, an Indian officer investigating would have to raise a request for data to the U.S. government where it is stored. Two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), which will enable the U.S. government to enter into agreements with like-minded states for cross-border data sharing. This will allow law enforcement agencies from these states to directly obtain electronic data, held by communication service providers headquartered in the U.S., to combat crime. New Delhi, on the back of this development, will soon push for an India-U.S. data sharing agreement to serve the interests of its law enforcement and, more importantly, to make headway in t...

💥India still depends on European genetic panels. This has to change In Nalgonda district of Telangana, Sai Chaitanya, 21, has been waiting for advancement in Indian genetic research. He has Ichthyosis, a condition caused by the mutation of a single gene, which has led to the growth of fish-like scales on his skin. Like him, many others are virtually locked into disease-prone gene pools and yearn for early detection and treatment. In India, private enterprises engaged in genome mapping now offer testing for relative genetic risks, which effectively predict the risk of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. The costs involved vary from ₹25,000 to ₹50,000. The not-so-apparent factor in genetic test results is that they do not guarantee comprehensive or accurate prognosis for individuals. Across India, screening for genetic diseases is a painstaking, expensive, and less-than-efficient process. This is because the country has not yet developed indigenous genetic panels speci...

💥Europe’s new data protection regime offers a sound basis for India to craft its own legislation During the throes of India’s independence struggle, an image of Mahatma Gandhi spinning khadi symbolised not only economic and political autonomy but to its critics an insular withdrawal from industrialisation and technology. This tension is gingerly revealed in a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to Aldous Huxley, as a partial defence of the Mahatma’s position, when he writes, “I believe in the machine and would have it spread in India, but I also believe in the social control of it.” While dialogues of the past do seem distant to the rapid advances in the fields of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence, they undergird deeper truths and surface visibly in debates over the formation of a privacy and data protection framework. 👉It’s all connected At present India has the second highest number of Internet users in the world, and is an important market for many globa...

💥Laws to do this are non-existent in India After the Cambridge Analytica crisis exploded, Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Facebook against the misuse of Indians’ data and any attempt to influence the electoral processes of this country. Unsurprisingly, the issue subsequently took on a partisan hue after the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress started trading accusations about hiring the services of Cambridge Analytica. Regardless, the fact remains that a clear mention was made by representatives of that company, which stands accused of misusing the data of 50 million users stored on Facebook and rigging multiple elections worldwide, of political involvement in India. In a sense the data of Indians has been ripe for the plucking for some time now. Statista, an online data portal, estimates that India had 281.81 million mobile phone Internet users in 2016 and would have an estimated 492.68 million mobile phone Internet users by 2022. In 2019, there would be a...

💥Stephen Hawking lost most of his bets, but beat all the odds to take physics forward and to the people  Stephen Hawking had a rich history with bets; particularly losing them. The best known was the one with Caltech (California Institute of Technology) cosmologist Kip Thorne, about the existence of black holes, which was in many ways at the heart of Hawking’s scientific success. Cygnus X1 was a mysterious galactic source of X-rays and appeared to be a black hole. It was the first time that physical evidence for one seemed to be on the horizon. Hawking said this was unlikely and Thorne — later on scientific consultant to Interstellar — was certain it was. Fifteen years down, in 1990, Hawking conceded defeat and gifted Thorne the wager, a year’s worth of Penthouse magazines. He later on bet Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t be able to detect the Higgs boson, the ‘God particle’ that is one of the foundational bricks on which the standard...

💥 India needs to invest more widely and deeply in scientific enterprise Last month, theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku tweeted: “The economics of space travel have changed. It cost about $100 million to produce The Martian with Matt [Damon]. But the Indians sent their probe to Mars for $70 million… They should give an Oscar for the best supporting rocket!” The tweet attracted about 123 comments that ranged from outrage that Indians should spend this much on space probes rather than on education or hospitals to “I am proud to be an Indian.” These reactions alert us to a deeper question: are Indians investing enough in science, and how should this investment be apportioned? As per data provided by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, India invests about 0.8% of its GDP on research and development, and supports 156 researchers per million of population. The figures for China are 2%, and 1,113, respectively. China’s investment is now comparable to any developed country, w...