Note: We have a new contributor, Konpal Ali - an enthusiastic Electrical Engineering (EE) major who tells us, in a non-dense fashion, about the nature of her recent EE project.

Making our very first EE project was pretty exciting (just the first one though, I must add). There were all sorts of ideas: a tracking device (sort of like GPRS but simpler), a model green city lit up by LED’s and whatnot. After discussing all the ideas with our Professor, it was a little disappointing to know that we were biting on much more than we could chew since this was our very first project. My project partners and I decided eventually to settle for an ultimate spy device of some sort (yes some sort and ultimate, that’s me): the FM phone transmitter.

We were happy doing this project because it had room for making the device more complex (or, in other words, for shashkay). The basic idea was to tap signals from a phone line, frequency modulate them, and transmit them in the radio frequency range. These modulated waves were then picked up by a remote radio receiver within a 200 feet range (or a much larger one if we added a tiny antenna. Another shashka), and voila - you would be able to hear what the annoying old lady next door has to say about your guitar abilities to her grandchildren. Simple as it sounds, it turned out to be pretty messy and that was when I realized how complex practical circuits can get when you are dealing with high frequencies - high frequency is not friendly.

We were to make use of the fact that in the telephone line the many frequency signals could be grouped into 3 sets:
I. The very high frequency noise we were to get rid of,
II. The low frequency signals which power the phone lines (which is why telephones work even when WAPDA decides to test our patience), and
III. The moderate frequency audio signals we wanted to spy on.
After this classification it becomes a matter of separating out the three, and simply frequency modulating the audio signals (III) required for transmission (nothing simple about that I must add). 
 
RECTIFICATION: From the phone line, our circuit (see Fig) took in a mixture of the three signals - the happy family mentioned above and first of all rectified them (conversion from A.C to D.C, for dummies). This was required because the circuit consisted of two transistors (T1 and T2), which are powered by direct current only. After this initial rectification the fun began. Resistors R1 and R2 were used as potential dividers.

SEPARATION OF SIGNALS: R1 took the happy family (a mixture of the three signals) on to the path of gloom and sorrow - separating them out. The happy family encountered what was on ‘overall low pass filter’ (see Fig), which meant the members of the happy family with high frequencies would be grounded (read: killed). Inside the ‘overall low pass filter’, the very high frequency noise (I) was grounded (killed) right away by a low capacitance capacitor C3. The low frequency power signal (II) passed through one of the branches, while the moderate frequency audio signal (III) through another branch (see Fig).

AMPLIFICATION: The power (II) and the audio (III) signals (which hadn’t been killed), then moved on to the transistor T1. T1 was turned ON by the power signal (II), and in turn did its job:  amplifying the audio signal (III).
FREQUENCY MODULATION: The now amplified audio signal (III) then moved on to the LC oscillator and from here was frequency modulated into carrier waves in the Radio Frequency region so that it could be transmitted further along in the circuit. The audio signal had now officially been converted to radio waves that had the audio message we required (the new III).

AMPLIFICATION (AGAIN) AND TRANSMISSION: As the Radio Frequency is a high frequency in the spectrum, the low capacitance capacitor C7 was used to transmit the radio waves to transistor T2. By this time we did not have low frequency power signals (II) left to turn on the transistor (as they had been used up by transistor T1), which is why we had the potential divider consisting of R1 and R2 in the beginning. Some of the rectified ‘happy family’ had come down to the rescue via the potential dividers second branch (i.e. the branch containing R2), and its low frequency power signal component (i.e. II) was used to power T2 and thus amplify our radio waves. At this point in the circuit (i.e. right after amplification by T2), the radio waves were transmitted (an antenna can be placed here if a larger range for eavesdropping is required).

ACTUAL SPYING: The transmitted radio waves were tapped using a radio which had been set to the frequency of the modulated radio waves (III), and the eavesdropping process thus begun!

For people confused about Fig: C6, L1 and L2 make sure the rest of the signals from the potential divider branch coming from R2 are grounded (killed) and don’t mix with the output of the initial rectifier.

Unfortunately for my project partners and I, the exact capacitors we required weren’t available and so we weren’t able to transmit in the Radio Frequency range but in the Short Wave region and so we couldn’t use our spy device with a radio. Regardless, the whole project was a pretty eye-opening experience. There is a vast field out there, and it is fascinating how we can come up with so many applications by just messing around with a bunch of basic things. Furthermore, the biggest realization that came with this project was the fact that although Engineering might not directly involve discovery, the importance of application has always had priority. The bottom line is we discover to invent.

Konpal

Ever wonder how they make 3D movies? Well here's how.

The first step is understanding how our mind perceives 3D, or to put it simply 'depth'. Each of our eyes sees a slightly different image and the brain puts these together to form a 3D image. If you close one eye you are technically seeing 2D however, your brain assumes so many things that it doesnt make much of a difference. But if you hold up something close to your face and then look at it with one eye in turn you will notice a huge difference in the image.

So this is simple. All that needs to be done is to fool the brain into thinking that it is getting two images and let it put them together to form a 3D image. Animated 3D movies are made normally but when they render them they make two movies from two different carefully placed cameras that represent each of the viewers eyes. When shown in cinemas both the recorded movies are projected onto a special screen using two projectors. The projectors project perpendicularly polarized light with respect to each other and the screen maintains this polarization. All that is needed are simple 3D glasses with polarized frames that make sure that the image made from the right camera coming from the right projector goes into our right eye and the light from the left projector goes into the left eye and our brain puts it all together to give us stereoscopic 3D vision of a 2D screen!

Magic, no. Physics, yes!

Hassan

This famous author suggested that drugs should be exploited for their visionary effects in his 1954 book 'The Doors of Perception.' The Doors, yes, those doors took their name from this book.

From psychedelic sixties 'set text' to Brave New World; now there's something you don't see every day!

Nimra

The Kumars were one rich and exciting family. Once they went to Kashpal and took a great liking to locals. They were friendly, sincere, alot of fun and extremely beautiful. It would be a delight to have them around the house thought the Kumars. So the night they were leaving they caught a lovely young Kashpalese girl and took her with them.

My how adorable she was! She became the pride of the neighborhood. Relatives and friends from afar came to see her. The children would play with her all day. As she grew older she got her own room. Unfortunately however, she never learnt the language very well nor was included much in normal daily life. It was good food and games for her. She had a comfortable bed and all the food she could ever dream of eating and the largest selection of movies! Kashpal only had one T.V. where the whole town would get together in the evening to watch the single broadcast. She had her own huge plasma screen with a huge movie collection.  Getting out of the house
created massive social problems as she encountered new and confusing situations every time she went out. School was unthinkable. After creating several faux pas for the family she was not allowed to leave her room. Movies did not distract her. Her days were spent gazing out of the window into the distant mountains.

Weeks became months that became years as she rotted in that room. The family's children grew too old for childish games, the games that were the entirety of her existence, the only thing she knew how to do. The children went on to university, they met people, they played with ideas, they tried new things, they fell in love. She only gazed at the mountains. The parents feeling the emptiness that came with their children going of to college decided to have another child. But there were no more rooms. Mona would have to leave.

She was given away to a foster home. During her stay with the Kumars she had become a sort of legend. The stunningly beautiful Kashpali girl who only relatives and friends of the Kumars could meet was now staying at a simple and public place. People from all over the country came to gaze at her. Buses full of school children were taken on educational trips to meet her so that they became more aware of the world. She knew only the games that she played as a child. The hordes of people would play them with her. They would run around and she would follow. They would do things and she would copy. More buses. More students, more children, more games, more parents. More buses. Her childhood games became her adulthood existence.

Based on the story of the Snow Leopard kept at the wildlife zoo near Lalazar. Snow Leopards are meant to track, hunt and run in the snow. We should not have met and absolutely never on my terms.

Feel free to feel otherwise.

Hassan

Which is a syndrome really, which is the association of several clinically recognizable features; signs, symptoms etc.
Marfan's is an autosomal dominant condition meaning that if one of your parents has it, you have a 50-50 chance of having it too. Not any odds that I fancy. Marfan is in fact a disorder of the connective tissue, but it has a wide range of symptoms, with severities ranging from mild to severe. The most common effect of Marfan's Syndrome is myopia while the most serious can be cardiovascular malformations. People with this disease tend to be loose jointed with long, thin arms and legs. So did Daddy Long Legs have Marfan's Syndrome? The short answer is no. The long answer includes: because a) he was a fictional character and b) I doubt Jean Webster had ever heard of Marfan's. I  know I hadn't until one of the characters on a TV show happened to have it. I of course wanted to know whether the script writers had got their details right (turns out they had) and you all got to hear about Marfan's. I know TV is supposed to make us stupid but some of the details that they get right are truly fascinating, especially in the police procedurals. So, I also know, what not to do when planning to commit murder :) What random trivia\ weird diseases have you learnt about from TV shows?

Signing out: Bond. Jamila Bond. Kicking ass in Pakistani style since 1989. There may also have been a few spy shows in there...

PS: spell check seems to think that severities is not a real word. I disagree. And even if it isn't, it ought to be anyway.

Nimra

Kamil Ahsan's essay "Darwin's Method: Induction, Deduction or Synthesis?" is now up in the Biology tab of the Work Section. The essay talks about the nature of scientific inquiry and how the theory undercutting all of Biology was discovered, not as one often hears by a 'eureka' moment or patient observation, but by hypothesizing. Here is an excerpt:

"At some point it must be recognized that evolution by natural selection was not the result of years of observation in which Darwin had no working hypothesis, but instead years of observations geared towards designing proofs for a hypothesis based on little more than a hunch; a frantic search on ‘the species question’ that ensued as little more than a rat race with Alfred Russell Wallace."

This brings the essay count in the Biology tab to 3, still one behind the Physics tab. As always, please leave comments on the essay on this blog post.

The year 1917 witnessed the publication of Einstein's remarkable paper on Quantum Theory of Radiation, which - among other things - laid the theoretical basis of lasers. Lasers have since been used for a variety of purposes spanning areas as diverse as entertainment and medical treatment. Now, along with powerful integrated circuits designed with utmost sophistication, Photonics is considered to be the ‘happening’ revolution in electrical and electronic system design and communication. Quantum electronic devices are key elements of such systems. At its root the revolutionary idea of lasers is nothing but a question: “How can we harness a spatially coherent and narrow divergence beam of light?” Einstein has his theories of relativity to his credit also which changed the way we perceive things around us. Yet another mind boggling shift in perception about material things especially at the sub-atomic level comes from Schrodinger. Again: how did the complicated math needed to explain the wave theory originate in the first place, is a question of the representation of the consequences of an idea; simple yet elegant. The idea simply says: “energy is quantized”. Revolutionary ideas carried out with passion and persistence make big things happen.

For me, ideas are what set humans ahead of other animals. Apart from motor control which enables humans to make and use tools, the enormous other gift of evolution is the expansion of the neo-cortex that carries out thinking and formulates ideas. Homo sapiens are only different because they have ideas. Most of the scholars would agree that free questioning and robust collection of ideas are necessary for scientific and academic advancement. Before and after the Renaissance, the centers of scientific excellence were those who collected, respected and spread ideas. Spreading an excellent idea is as important as perceiving it; rather more important. Any revolutionary idea cannot reach its zenith in total isolation. New ideas come from the old ones; in their rectification or annihilation. But the process of taking these steps is important. So here I find two lessons of human achievement: help ‘make’ and ‘share’ ideas.

When the 21st century started, we were witnessing a revolution in the way we think about sending and receiving information. The legendary advancements in the present century would not have been possible without this sharing of ideas; riding on the intelligent designs of communication systems and paths. Learning, education and research is all about creating and sharing ideas and so is the human achievement. TED is one of the many ways of realizing the dream sharing of ideas. Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED); a platform for “ideas worth spreading”.

Most of the readers would have seen TED talks on TED.com or YouTube. Some might be TED fans, following the TED talks online and TED blog to listen to fresh ideas. I think that surfing for TED videos online is a far better use of time, both for entertainment and learning then stalking random Facebook profiles, downloading for TV shows on Rapidshare and Googling for celebrities’ pictures. There is entertainment value to those three but somehow TED has captured a reasonable number of videos on internet. It is now a phenomenon. Toronto Globe and Mail puts it the best way:

“At around this time of year (March 19, 2009), it seems the Internet is 35 percent TEDTalks. TED is a funny phenomenon, though. On the one hand, getting the YouTube generation to sit down and watch lectures seems a counter-intuitive proposition. But there's something about these videos that seems to have captured the Web's shiny, aspiration spirit.”

In the same spirit and style, local and independent TED-like events (though under agreement from TED global) take place around the globe with the name TEDx. TEDxLahore is coming up on July 31, 2010. Their URL is www.tedxlahore.com. Their speakers list is most likely complete by now. If the world of TED intrigues you, here is something for you just around the corner of the street.

Here are some of my favorite TED videos:

1) Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. Click here.

2) Isabel Allende tells tales of passion. Click here.

3) Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider. Click here.

4) Mitchell Joachim: Don't build your home, grow it! Click here.

5) Pranav Mistry: The Sixth Sense. Click here.

I’ve been reading a book called What About Darwin? that documents, in the immediate wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the responses of people in the intellectual, literary and often political circles at the time. Here’s a few extracts from the book with comments by me in italics:

Mountstuart E. Grant Duff (1829-1906) – Scottish Politician and Author:
26 March 1881: Bywater quoted a passage from a sermon of Burgon’s against Darwin: “If they leave me my ancestors in Paradise, I am content to leave them theirs in the zoological Gardens!”

What a wonderful sermon that must have been! Oh, the days when dissing one’s ancestors was the norm!

Moncure D. Conway (1832-1907) – American Clergyman:
Amid the universal homage to Darwin one adverse sentiment is widely noted and rebuked. L’Univers, the Roman Catholic organ in Paris, said, “When hypothesis tends to nothing less than the destruction of faith, the shutting out of God from the heart of man, and the diffusion of the filthy leprosy of Materialism, the savant who invents and propagates them is either a criminal or a fool. Voila ce que nous avons a dire du Darwin des singes.

Google Translate tells me this means This is what we have to say Darwin’s apes.

THING ONE:
The field of 'pleasure science', claims Morgen L. Kringelbach in his review of Paul Bloom's book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, can answer questions of why we like art, for instance, and how these features have evolved in terms of changing brain networks. He also explains Bloom's essentialist perspective and why he feels that it does not adequately deal with Evolutionary Psychology. Read all about it here at CultureLab.

I’m watching House. Why in the world would anyone be so cruel as to make me write this after a 14-hour work day and that too in my free time? Yes, you guessed right, it’s a very annoying guy named Kamil. Nonetheless, now that I’m writing, I might as well tell you about something I find very interesting.

For you to understand what I’m really talking about, let’s just take a quick trip down my memory lane. So back in, let’s see, probably 2003, there’s this unbelievably sexy kid, ME, sitting in this small computer lab in the basement of my school then listening to an unbelievably and excruciatingly boring lecture on ‘Data and Information’. Yes, it’s as boring if not more than it sounds. Since I was thinking about how to beat ‘Dahaka’ in Prince of Persia Warrior Within, I hear the instructor say something like ‘Data is raw facts and Information is what happens to it once it has been processed’. What an utterly useless fact - a waste of words if I may say so, which is why I completely disregarded it at that time and went back to thinking about Prince of Persia.

I wish I could be dramatic and say years and years passed by and that thought never again entered my mind but I can’t. I soon read it in Stephen Doyle’s book ‘Information Systems For You’. Doyle explained Data and Information by saying that if 5 is Data, $5 would be Information. What a useless analogy! 7 years later, I think I have finally across a problem has really taught me what the difference between Data and Information is (an epic discovery of epic proportions similar to that scene in Godfather Part 3, where ol’ Don tells Vincent, ‘Finance is having the gun and Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger’).
 
Let me start by telling you the problem. So I have 223 friends on Facebook and say all of them use Facebook daily. Now all of them happen to be really good friends of mine who take offence if they don’t get stalked frequently (I am found in fairly strange circles). So they absolutely insist that I know everything about their life, their statuses, all photos and all their close friends’ names and stuff like that. I’m guessing you can see that I’m in a bit of a pickle here. How exactly am I supposed to do that for 223 people in the 2 hours that I log onto Facebook, while watching House simultaneously? 

Enter genius - ME (Hah! Caught you by surprise this time didn’t I?). The idea is this - rather than me going through all that data my friends expect me to comprehend, I will make a Facebook application that can revamp my Facebook Homepage and just give me an interesting summary of all recent activity on my Facebook in the following order: all the sad and morbid stuff like deaths, illnesses, accidents (and oh, of course, the breakups) come first. Then the happy stuff like graduations, birthdays, marriages (depending of course on how much I like the person) and then all the important relationship changes. Then the boring daily wise-ass remarks, the ooh’s, aah’s and aww weirdo statuses. Also, it shows me a cumulative photo gallery that gives me a sense of what my friends have been up to. That means roughly 40 pictures at max - this involves some REALLY cool math which considers the 6 degrees of separation rule.  

But I’m not going to want to take the fun out of stalking here: I may even want to add an auto-stalk option that’ll give you the stalking results that you might want to look at first before you start stalking yourself. But the question is: how do I tie this up with Data and Information? Well, Data is what I was dealing with when I used to go through boring photos of my friend’s neck or their dog sitting, information is what my application gives me. Information is telling me stuff I need to know and Data is driving me crazy with telling me everything besides the important stuff too. For the super-smart ones (I.Q 130 and above - it’s not polite to say nerds!) information is a graph and data tells you all about the points.

Now let’s delve a bit into how we can make this all happen to give you a better idea of implementation. What I am making here does something called ‘Topic Analysis’. To explain that, say I have this friend, let’s call him Kamil, who’s constantly asking most of my friends for blog posts. Now rather than me seeing Kamil making a similar wall post on 15 of my friends’ walls, I’ll just read the content of all the posts this Kamil guy makes and remove the is’, the ands’ and the but’s and get exactly the content of his post. And then just summarize this like: somebody’s being a real pest and asking everyone to write their blog posts on time with a small photo of Kamil on the side.  And a link to all Kamil’s recent posts if I want to go through them.

Topic Analysis further involves something known as Sentiment Analysis, so if this Kamil guy says Aaarrrghhh or uses words that have a negative meaning like horrible and awful, the ‘Kamil is being a pest’ thing can include
‘…and he doesn’t seem to be very happy about it’. Another example would be that if you had fifteen ill friends, and all of them post statuses on Facebook about it (and its highly probable that they will - ill people don’t get around that much and are notoriously good whiners), you can get a summarized feed of who’s ill and who you’d have to pamper immediately and who can wait. Its kind of really cool.

But I haven’t even started to talk about the fun bit yet. So , let’s take another problem because I absolutely love stalking in my precious little two hours of free time. My application will keep a track of which people I visit most along with things like the frequency of my visits to their profile photos (typical stalking). It will make a record of the gender and some details like, say, race, skin color, communities, and maybe even location (all DATA that can be obtained with absurd ease with a bit of knowhow of the Facebook API and Image Analysis). Then every day, it’ll automatically go through my six degrees of freedom looking for as much as can be found as a match to what I usually look for and bring up results of interesting people I might want to befriend and/or stalk. How cool is that?
 Even this awesome auto-stalking isn’t the best bit. The best bit is how it doesn’t affect my regular Facebook, so on days when I feel like I have time and can go through all that DATA, I have the option to go to my regular home page and do what I do best. If its not such a day, I get to go into Supermom phase and accomplish everything as an awesome socialite and be the one who manages to save the day by not breaking everyone’s heart. It’s a win-win situation.

Topic Analysis, Sentiment Analysis and Image Analysis - the ability to extract what’s important from all that data is what makes Information relevant. In fact, one of the defining features of the Information Age is getting all that information rather than using redundant old techniques. It’s the new thing, and all the cool people will be using my application as soon as it goes up. Who would want to read through paragraphs and paragraphs of useless talk if they could get something like this?
 
“Utterly pointless babbling with frequent mention of Kamil and Facebook“.

There you go – a few words that made you decide whether to Read or Not to Read. If you had read that earlier, rather than going through all that you just did, you would have had a pleasanter few minutes. Too bad for me, my work doesn’t give me the elaborate praise I deserve. Here’s some ACDC to ease the pain: