TAMIL 2.0

I have here a second proposal for the Tamil language. I call it Tamil 2.0. I also call it "Hispanotamil" and "Hispanic Tamil". Here it is -- in executive summary form.

The proposal is pretty simple: we propose an extended Tamil alphabet. The proposal maps Devanagari alphasyllabary (that is, the Hindi/Sanskrit alphabet/alphasyllabary/abugida) one-to-one to the extended Tamil alphasyllabary. It works as follows.

(1) consider the Hindi alphasyllabary. It has two sections: one for the vowels and one for the consonants.
(2) Let the vowels in Hindi map one-to-one to the existing vowels in Tamil. This mapping remains the same.
(3) The consonants in Hindi are in two subsections: the first subsection is the famous 5x5 consonant layout of Sanskrit. The second subsection is the remaining consonants: ya, ra, la, va, et cetera.
(4) Let the consonants in the second subsection map one-to-one to the corresponding consonants in Tamil.
(5) The leaves the last subsection: the 5x5 grid. This is mapped quite simply as follows:
(a) use | | to soften a sound.
(b) use ( ) to retain the existing sound. (Or use nothing.) Note that adding parentheses around an expression in mathematics does not change its value.
(c) use the consonant "ha" to add the aspirated sound.

(6) In addition to this, use the "(" symbol to mimic the "chandra" symbol in Hindi going on top of a character. The "(" after an unmodified Tamil consonant/"a" Tamil letter modifies the sound to "a" as in "cat", and the "(" after a long Tamil consonant/"aa"  Tamil letter modifies the sound to "au" as in "caught".

All this is quite clear from the schema below.

Did not include one thing in the graphic: using the "(" symbol. It is used as below.

pal = ப( ல்

pot = பா(ட்

Al = அ( ல்

aught = ஆ( ட்

Very simple and very clean.

Update (April 9, 2016): there is one typo in the above graphic. It is the "na" with the three swirls in the third line, not the "na" with the two swirls.

LANGUAGE: some more screen shots

Some more screen shots to accompany my Tamil paper proposal. Many of them are duplicate views. No harm in posting some extra pictures of the same thing.

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IMAGE1 = PAGE 1

IMAGE2 = PAGE2

IMAGE3 = PAGE2

IMAGE4 = PAGE1

IMAGE5 = PAGE1

IMAGE6 = PAGE1

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RESPONSE: Response to Manivannan

I came across a citation of my paper on the Tamil language on the Internet. I believe that my paper has been improperly cited. So this post is by way of response.

I am going to request this author to not cite my paper in the future. This is because I don't think he has understood it. Furthermore, I hate to say this, but I don't think he is conducting himself professionally.

However, given that he has chosen to cite my paper, I would like to respond to Mr. Manivannan (the person who cited my paper but done so improperly). My response has two substantive portions:

(1) Note on manner of academic engagement:

Mr. Manivannan claims to have read our paper (and, therefore, implicitly to have understood it).

I do not believe, however, that the author of the paper has done two things required to professionally engage with the paper: firstly, to make an attempt to fully understand the paper itself; and secondly, to make an attempt to either understand the mathematics in a paper or report inability to do so. Here is the requisite section of the paper where Mr. Manivannan has attempted to place this paper in the context of other papers, other proposals, et cetera.

Usage of diacritics to render foreign sounds, loan words, academic notation, etc., is not a new idea. There have been other proposals to use diacritics to render Sanskrit (Sharma, L2/10256), Hindi (Manikutti, 2012) or other foreign sounds (Sevakumar, 2010) in Tamil using the Tamil character set. However, such usage in random proposals, printed texts or a few other non-standard sources needs to be weighed against standard practices of language community. 

(Simply put: If you do not understand the math, Mr. Manivannan, you should say so. It is okay. It is acceptable to say that you don't understand the math in the paper but that you disagree with it.)

(2) Notes on the points raised:

(a) Mr. Manivannan has not clarified what his actual point of disagreement with my proposal is.

(b) In fact, Mr. Manivannan has not clarified what his actual point of disagreement with any of the other proposals, in fact, is. Calling another scholar's work a random proposal -- and clubbing it with other authors as well -- is rank unprofessionalism. I don't even know whether my proposal should be considered under the category of "printed text" or "random proposal".

(c) There is no indication that Mr. Manivannan has understood any of the mathematics in the paper.

(d) It is to be noted that, one of the sub-proposals in the paper goes as follows: use such characters as "|", "_", et cetera, to introduce foreign sounds. These are already being used in Tamil. So much for lack of conformance with Tamil orthography.

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The only thing I can think of at this point is complete disengagement. Let Mr. Manivannan do what he wants, but he needs to start providing some proof that he understood the math.

(Btw, at this point, James Bonilla has this to say: "By talking about a paper you clearly don't understood, Mr. Manivannan, you look like a fool. You have clearly not understood the paper. You are clearly dismissing the paper. God! What a jerk!!" Sorry, but those were James B.'s exact words.)

If Mr. Manivannan so wishes, we can engage on Quora or some platform where a BNBR-type ("Be Nice Be Respectful") norm is enforced by external moderators.

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TECHNOLOGY: Four DARPA projects that could be bigger than the Internet

From DefenseOne:

Forty years ago, a group of researchers with military money set out to test the wacky idea of making computers talk to one another in a new way, using digital information packets that could be traded among multiple machines rather than telephonic, point-to-point circuit relays. The project, called ARPANET, went on to fundamentally change life on Earth under its more common name, the Internet.

Today, the agency that bankrolled the Internet is called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which boasts a rising budget of nearly $3 billion split across 250 programs. They all have national security implications but, like the Internet, much of what DARPA funds can be commercialized, spread and potentially change civilian life in big ways that its originators didn’t conceive.

What’s DARPA working on lately that that could be Internet big?

INNOVATION: Memory cells built on paper

Via IEEE.org:

A team based at the National Taiwan University in Taipei has used a combination of inkjet and screen printing to make small resistive RAM memory cells on paper. These are the first paper-based, nonvolatile memory devices, the team says (nonvolatile means that the device saves its data even when it's powered down).  

As Andrew Steckl outlined in his feature for IEEE Spectrum last year, paper has a lot of potential as a flexible material for printed electronics. The material is less expensive than other flexible materials, such as plastic. It boasts natural wicking properties that can be used to draw fluids into sensors. And it can be easily disposed of by shredding or burning.

TECHNOLOGY: Scheduling algorithms based on game theory makes better use of computational resources

Via Phys.org:

Rubing Duan and Xiaorong Li at the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore and co-workers have now developed a scheme to address the scheduling problem in two large-scale applications: the ASTRO program from the field of cosmology, which simulates the movements and interactions of galaxy clusters, and the WIEK2k program from the field of theoretical chemistry, which calculates the electronic structure of solids1. The researchers' new scheme relies on three game-theory-based scheduling algorithms: one to minimize the execution time; one to reduce the economic cost; and one to limit the storage requirements.

The researchers performed calculations wherein they stopped the competition for resources when the iteration reached the upper limit of optimization. They compared their simulation results with those from related algorithms—namely, Minimum Execution Time, Minimum Completion Time, Opportunistic Load Balancing, Max-min, Min-min and Sufferage. The new approach showed improvements in terms of speed, cost, scheduling results and fairness. Furthermore, the researchers found that the execution time improved as the scale of the experiment increased. In one case, their approach delivered results within 0.3 seconds while other algorithms needed several hours. 

Facebook and Free Basics: let us harness the Wisdom of Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds is a powerful thing. But in the case of the latest marketing campaign launched by Facebook around Free Basics, it is not quite clear that the wisdom of crowds is coming to the fore. First, some background on the Wisdom of Crowds.

In 1785, a French mathematician named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (known as Marquis de Condorcet) used statistics to champion democracy. 

Democracies are based on the collective decisions of large groups of people. But citizens aren’t experts on every topic, and so they may be prone to errors in the choices they make. And yet, Condorcet argued, it’s possible for a group of error-prone decision-makers to be surprisingly good at picking the best choice. 

Condorcet’s logic was simple. Assume you have a group of people each independently making a choice about a question. Assume that they have a chance of making the wrong choice–but that their choices are better than random. If the decision they’re trying to make is either thumbs up or thumbs down, for example, their chance of picking the right answer only needs to be greater than 50 percent. The odds that a majority of them will pick the right answer is greater than the odds that any one of them will pick it on their own. What’s more, Condorcet argued that the group’s performance gets even better as its size goes up. 

Condorcet’s argument is the foundation of what’s now commonly called the “wisdom of crowds.” Individuals who have imperfect understanding of a situation can band together to become good at collective decision-making. 

There are some famous stories that illustrate the wisdom of crowds. Just over a century ago, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 people to guess the weight of an ox. None of them got the right answer, but, pooled together, their collective guess was almost perfect. In his book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, James Surowieckiwrites about the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Contestants could get help answering questions either from an individual friend whom they considered an expert, or from a poll of the audience. The majority of the audience picked the right answer 91 percent of the time, while individual friends only did so 65 percent of the time. 

Many scientists have used Condorcet’s idea (known as the jury theorem) as a launching pad for exploring collective decision-making. They’ve expanded the basic theory to include more features of crowds–such as the way information can move through them. They’ve tested out versions of the jury theorem on real groups of humans and animals. And their research has shown that crowds really can be wise. People can indeed make better decisions in groups than on their own. And while animals may not be able to pick presidents, they can also make good decisions in groups. It may be hard for an individual fish to recognize a predator in a murky ocean and escape in time. But a school of fish can pool its uncertain information to avoid enemies.

Case in point: Facebook published some rebuttals to an article by Mahesh Murthy, an Indian VC, and it turned out that there were problems with Facebook's claims and numbers. The Wisdom of Crowds was in full evidence here. Many people managed to spot the problems with Facebook's advertised numbers. (The only notable thing about one of the numbers, 3.2 million petitioners, was how heavily self-selected it turned out to be). Here is an extract from Facebook's rebuttal.

FACEBOOK’S ADVERTISEMENT CLAIM: In the past several days, 3.2 million people have petitioned the TRAI in support of Free Basics 

 MAHESH WRITES: Let’s again say it for what it is: 3.2 million people out of Facebook’s base of 130 million people who were repeatedly shown a misleading petition by Facebook on top of their pages clicked yes and submit, without being told both sides of the story, and thinking they were doing something for a noble cause, and not to further Facebook’s business strategy. A large number of them, shocked at realizing what they were conned into doing have since said no.

 FACEBOOK SAYS: This is false. Only a small fraction of our 130 million users were notified. We largely provided the notice to people who had previously indicated their support of Free Basics months ago and then notified their friends only if the person showed support once again. And the response rates of support are high compared to average campaigns. There is no evidence that “a large number” of them feel conned. Note: Claims on Twitter about false sends or notifications are disproved by the code – which we will happily supply to TRAI. Our program is benefiting people and we will continue to advocate for its benefits, much like its critics are using their communication channels to make their opinions known.

 MAHESH’S RESPONSE: Thank you for confirming that your Facebook vote-getting effort wasn’t representative, but aimed as you say at only that “small fraction” of your users who had already showed support for Internet.org. In other words, you’d stacked the deck. So why wouldn’t you say this earlier, and why brandish a number like 3.2 million about that you yourself admit is heavily selection-biased and not representative at all?  

The Wisdom of Crowds only operates when people have access to all the information. Facebook should be made to run a proper, scientifically accurate campaign on all their claims. They definitely have enough social scientists to be able to do this. Indeed, if they have the resources to marshal 3.2 million people to petition, as they claim, in what turned out to be a scientifically wildly inaccurate campaign, surely, they can marshal the resources for a smaller scientifically accurate campaign. And why not call out the data collection as such (Sample blurbs to accompany their advertised data: "These are not scientifically accurate data" and "This is not a sample of people without selection bias and, therefore, the opinions of the people cannot be considered representative")?

Here are some further thoughts fro me - based on a Facebook discussion with some friends.

In this debate, there are three constituencies/interest groups here:

(1) Facebook (which incl. the RComm-Facebook JV): they want to offer "so called free internet". In return, they hope to monetise revenue streams arising out of people converting. Their calling the fact that people are converting to a paid Internet a case of "improvement" does not per se make much sense. This is partly because Facebook does not pay taxes in India. This is also partly because people might be paying for a product and not realizing that there may be adverse long-term consequences from the product. (W.r.t FB not paying taxes- it sounds much more like revenues -leaving- the country, and so FB's case would be far more convincing if they agreed to start paying taxes in India and hosted their servers there.) 

(2) VCs/Net Neutrality activists/developers/et cetera: this consituency wants a "net neutral" solution. Mahesh Murthy has argued their case. 

(3) Strategy and Policy people: this includes people like myself and James Bonilla (James Bonilla is a pseudonym for a collective of intellectuals, who wish to remain anonymous). What we would like to see is a mix of the two approaches: let Facebook continue to do what they are doing, and then, at a later point, have them submit more convincing numbers in a quarter or two. In the meantime, there is nothing wrong with having Facebook spend a further 100 crores on their marketing campaigns in India. Can't see how it can hurt - given that myself and the caped crusader James Bonilla are watching them closely ;)

In the interest of free speech, Facebook should agree to publish numbers and data on what they are seeing in terms of traffic and uptake - the demographics of the uptake are as important as the sheer numbers themselves - and Facebook should also agree to present data as it emerges not only to TRAI but also to public advocacy forums (such as the "Association for Democratic Reforms", just to pick a name). Indeed, anyone who wants the data should have the ability to access it. A closed discussion without the relevant numbers is no discussion at all.

The Wisdom of Crowds should be allowed to exercise its power.