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TECHNO BUZZ

Voulez-vous a mouse with your burger?

Of the American cultural influences most disdained by the French, fast food and the Internet are near the top of the list. Yet somehow a French company is finding success in combining the two.

At a Burger King along the Champs Elysees in Paris, patrons can order what might best be described as a digital value meal: Whopper, Coke, fries and 15 minutes of Internet access. "Mangez, surfez!" urge signs surrounding a pod of PCs inside the restaurant. "Eat, surf!"

There's no end to this airplane

When you think of an airplane, a certain shape comes to mind -- the nose, the wings... and the tail. But the X-36, a research aircraft developed by the NASA's Ames Research Center and McDonnell Douglas, is missing one of those parts. It was designed without a tail to increase agility and help the aircraft avoid detection by radar, says X-36 program manager.

There's also something else the X-36 doesn't have -- a pilot. The experimental plane is remotely controlled from the ground.

Using a video camera in the nose of the aircraft, the pilot, using a control stick, guides the flight from his virtual cockpit.

The controls, including rudder pedals, work "just like any other aircraft," says Bailey, who expects unmanned flights to become increasingly important to the military.The X-36 had its first test flight this summer at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

Laser Could One Day Aid Disease Diagnosis

Technology is once again helping doctors battle disease. A small, handheld laser combining semiconductor technology and biological samples may one day make it easier to diagnose sickle cell anaemia, distinguish cancerous from noncancerous pap smears, or even to determine if a blood sample contains HIV. The prototype device was recently patented by the New Mexico-based Sandia National Laboratories that is funded by the Department of Energy. While it is still in the experimental phase, the ultimate goal of the device, called a biocavity laser, is to have a rapid and compact way to diagnose illnesses, said Dr. Paul Gourley, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories (USA) .

ROBOTICS

Many of you have got your impressions about robots from watching science fiction movies. But is it what an industrial robot is in real life?It should be obvious to you that your hand has much greater dexterity than a robot hand. Also, a great deal of effort is required to get robots to perform tasks that humans consider very boring. Once programmed, however, a robot can perform a task repeatedly without getting tired or bored.

An industrial robot is generally an arm with a gripper and some capacity for movement such as straight lines and rotations, called degrees of freedom. Japan has been successful with robots capable of two straight movements and two rotations; whereas, the US is going for all 6 degrees of freedom. More advanced robots have microprocessors as brains. Sequences of motion for the robot can be programmed into memory by leading the robot through the desired sequences. Even more advanced robots have artificial senses such as sight, touch and force. A fundamental problem in the assembly of industrial products is fitting pieces together with close tolerances , such as gears or placing a weld in exactly the correct place. A human is an excellent assembler because we automatically make minor adjustments in position to fit parts together correctly. If a robot without sight tries to do the same it must know exactly where the two parts are in space and the sequence of motions to fit them together. Lacking the ability to make corrections, the robot can easily jam or wedge the two parts together. The initial progress in assembly without senses. These initial successes required considerable effort to overcome the orientation problem.Robots without senses are used in painting and welding. Also, Kawasaki was able to program a robot without senses to assemble a motorcycle gearbox by having the robot gripper vibrate slightly to compensate for inaccurate positioning.

Advances in the use of robots in assembly have required the development of robots with senses. To create a program which gives a robot the capacity to pick up randomly arranged parts is a major undertaking. To provide a robot with a camera so that it can see is no problem. What is a problem is providing the robot with machine intelligence to interpret the input from the camera. One solution is to have the parts to be assembled arrive in exactly the right orientation. This is expensive. Thus, while acceptable for mass production, it is inefficient for batch production.

Some success is being achieved at creating machine intelligence which can recognize parts in an arbitrary setting. Work is progressing to give robots such senses as sight, touch, force. With these sense a robot can be programmed to make minor corrections to the sequences of steps it makes. Much current success in assembly by robots with senses is achieved by greatly simplifying the task of identifying alternatives. In production this can be achieved by using bar codes. Bradly-Allen has a plant which automatically assembles many kinds of controllers for electric motors on the same which sequence of operations to perform on each product coming down the assembly line by reading the bar code on the product. Robots with senses are also used for quality control checking in this plant. IBM created a plant in Austin to assemble laptop computers which employed robots with senses. The robots were controlled by PC-ATs. This technology will probably be used to assemble all IBM personal computers in the near future.Robots, once programmed, put the right chip in the right slot - something humans do not always do. Robots can currently assemble electronic products such as laptop computers, gear boxes, electric motors and other components. With each new plant to assemble a product such as an auto, more and more of the assembly will be automated. Since robots are not humans, the jobs they do best, differ from humans. Furthermore the best assembly by robots frequently requires a complete redesign of the product and manufacturing procedure to take advantage of the capabilities of robots. This product redesign usually involves simplification and reduction of the number of parts and consequently, usually results in greater reliability.

NETWATCH

USE YOUR ILLUSIONS

At what is surely one of the most astounding sites on the World Wide Web, you'll discover all types of visual wonders.There are interactive Java enabled illusions and 'live' demonstrations to articles on psuedoscience, psychic phenomena and illusionary art. There are tons of illusions to explore, along with detailed explanations of the science behind them,illusionary puzzles plus an illusions gift shop!

This site is founded by Al Seckel and other academics to foster positive educational values through an interactive exploration of the senses.

FOR AUTO LOVERS

I hope you enjoyed the Scuderia Ferrari website. So why not try to access the Mercedes website. But then haven’t you got bored of seeing all these E220s and E250s, on every street of Mumbai. So what’s there to see at this site.Have patience….for there’s a lot more to come. Here’s a chance to feast your eyes on some fab pics of the SLK roadster, ‘cause it’s very difficult to spot the only roadster in our city, which is owned by Sunil Gavaskar. Cast a glance on the V-classes and S-classes at this site. Check out the car which was used in ‘The Lost World’. There is also a still from the movie showing Jeff Goldblum posing beside the car.

Tushar Pai

Executive Cell

FUNNY BYTES

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German. Also, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan to be known as "EuroEnglish": In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c"... Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they should go away. By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu undrstand ech ozer. "ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!! "

HOWZZAT

A team of haymakers were assigned the task of scything two meadows,one twice the size of the other.Half a day the team worked on the larger meadow.Then it split into two equal groups: the first remained

in the larger meadow and finished it by evening ;the second group scythed the smaller meadow ,but by evening there still remained a portion to do.This portion was scythed the next day by one haymaker in a single day’s work.

How many men were there in the team ?

Answer to last month’s quiz:

Denote the first two digits by ‘a’ and the next two digits by ‘b’ .Then we have the number 1000a + 100a + 10b + b =1100a + 11b = 11(100a + b)

This number is divisible by 11 and since the number is a perfect square it is divisible by (11 * 11).Therefore (100a + b) is divisible by 11.Using the criteria for divisibility by 11 , we find that 11 divides the number (a + b).And this means that a + b = 11 since each of the digits a,b is less than ten.The last digit ‘b’ of the number,which is a perfect square ,can assume the values 0,1,4,5,6,9. And so the possible values for ‘a’ are 11,10,7,6,5,2. The first two are unsuitable and that leaves us with the following possibilities of the license plate number:7744,6655 , 5566 , 2299 Out of these the only number which is a perfect square is 7744. Hence, that turns out to be the license plate number.

F A Q CORNER

THE ‘FTP’ FAQ

WHAT IS FTP ?

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the primary method of transferring files over the Internet or it's also the name of the program that implements the protocol. Given proper permission, it's possible to copy a file from a computer in South Africa to one in Los Angeles at very fast speeds (at the order of 5--10K per second). This normally requires either a user id on both systems or a special configuration set up by the system administrator(s).

WHAT IS ANONYMOUS FTP ?

There is a good way around the above restriction---the anonymous FTP service. It essentially will let anyone in the world have access to a certain area of disk space in a non-threatening way. With this, people can make files publicly available with little hassle. Some systems have dedicated entire disks or even entire computers to maintaining extensive archives of source code and information. They include : gatekeeper.dec.com (Digital), wuarchive. wustl. edu (Washington University in Saint Louis),etc. . The process involves the "foreign'' user (someone not on the system itself) creating an FTP connection and logging into the system as the anonymous user, with an arbitrary password:

Name (foo.site.com:you) : anonymous

Password: jim@uic.edu

Custom and netiquette dictate that people respond to the "Password : …. " query with an email address so that the sites can track the level of FTP usage, if they desire.

CONNECTION ?

While there have been many extensions to the various FTP clients out there, there is a fixed "de facto standard'' set . The actual command to use FTP will vary among operating systems; for sake of clarity, we'll use FTP here, since it's the most general form. There are two ways to connect to a system---using its hostname or its Internet number. Though the hostname is usually preferred, some sites aren't able to resolve hostnames properly. Assuming that you use the hostname the form is

ftp somewhere.domain

You must first know the name of the system you want to connect to. For e.g.

ftp ftp.uu.net

The response will be

Connected to ftp.uu.net.

and an initial prompt will appear:

220 uunet FTP server (Version 5.100 Mon Feb 11 17:13:28 EST 1991) ready.

Name (ftp.uu.net:jm):

to which you should respond with ‘anonymous’ . The system will then prompt you for a password;for which , a good response is your email address:

331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.

Password:jim@uic.edu

230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.

ftp>

The password itself will not echo. This is to protect a user's

security when he or she is using a real account to FTP files between machines. Once you reach the ftp> prompt, you know you're logged in and ready to go.

WHAT IS THE SPEED OF FILE TRANSFER ?

The speed of the transfer depends on the speed of the 9600bps SLIP connection will not get the same throughput as a system with a 56k leased line.

Also, the traffic of all other users on that link will affect performance. If there are thirty people all FTPing from one site simultaneously, the load on the system (in addition to the network connection) will degrade the overall throughput of the transfer. Lest we forget, the Internet is there for people to do work. People using the network and the systems on it are doing so for a purpose, whether it be research, development, whatever. Any heavy activity takes away from the overall performance of the network as a whole.

HOW CAN I DERIVE OPTIMUM BENEFIT ?

The effects of an FTP connection on a site and its link can vary; the general rule of thumb is that any extra traffic created detracts from the ability of that site's users to perform their tasks. To help be considerate of this, it's highly recommended that FTP sessions be held only after normal business hours for that site, preferably late at night. The possible effects of a large transfer will be less destructive at 2 a.m. than 2 p.m. Also, remember that if it's past dinner time in Maine, it's still early afternoon in California---think in terms of the current time at the site that's being visited, not of local time.