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In the initial years, medicine was highly influenced by religious practices and the clergy. The origin of diseases was traced to the anger of a deity. The remedy was to propitiate that deity. Medicine was practised in France by Shaman before 17000 years. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the religious leaders practised it. In India, the bhagats, guravs, mantrics and clergy were into medicine. In Arabia and China, it was believed that mantras, witchcraft and propitiation of dieties cure the diseases. Even planets, stagnant water, sins committed and spells spread the diseases that lead to holocaust or burning of some people at stake.

In the development of modern medicine, dissection of the dead bodies played a vital role. That gave an idea of the causes of diseases. The religious people looked down upon the dissection.

In ancient times, the nursing of the diseased in monasteries was considered worship of God amongst the Buddhists and Christians. Here the symptoms of the diseases were addressed without the diagnosis of the disease. Such places become hospices that later led to hospital. In the Muslim rule the first hospital was established in 875 AD. Later, 34 hospitals were established across Spain to India. In the struggle between the Church and monarchy, the kings of England reduced the importance of religion from the hospitals. Hospitals were committed to practise modern medicine.

The cause of the diseases are the flaws in the organs. This principle was enunciated by Geovanni Battista Morgagni, an Italian anatomist after 700 postmortems. Rudolf Virchow put forward the principle that there are cells in the human body and the changes in the cellular structure cause diseases. Louis Pasteur, a French biologist, traced diseases to microorganisms and made the vaccine for Anthrax. He also developed the method of pasteurisation of milk. His contemporary was Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, who used carbolic acid as disinfectant and initiated aseptic surgery. Ronald Ross , a British medical doctor, made research for malaria in India. Robert Koch, a German physician and microbiologist, discovered the microbes of TB, cholera and anthrax. He supported the concept of infectious disease. Jonas Salk, American medical researcher and virologist, made polio vaccine. Sabin made oral polio vaccine.

The discovery of sulphas and antibiotics made modern medicine respectable. Organ transplant and DNA studies are the recent advances in medical science.

Tik Tok as a platform allows people to share 15-second videos of themselves. Such sharing was possible on other platforms as well and hence not revolutionary. And 15-second space may not allow full self-expression. However, this constraint itself makes it an attractive platform. It calls for a particular mode of expression. Just as previously Twitter did with its 140-character limit. It almost borders on art from. It could be an artefact of popular culture.

The space is full of playful innocence. People of all age groups and class participate. There are choreographed dances, stunts, miming of songs, enactment of little skits, playing of pranks or doing something weird. The idea is to catch attention of a large number of viewers. It creates popular culture. The songs on it are eclectic.

It showcases talent which is sliced thinly. Flipping through Tik Tok videos is a pleasure. It is addictive. It showcases self-confidence of the performers. It allows them to display what is most marketable about themselves. Some master this format and create high viewership videos. Some are less gifted but still are watchable. There is diversity seen in the videos. Some are silly and trivial.

Though it attracts attention it can render the audience zombie-like. It becomes a national past-time. It is unrefined content. However, this is the very reason to celebrate it.

There are legitimate concerns about paedophilia. This platform is as susceptible to misuse as any other.

Here content is created by the young, and the old have to cede space to them. However, we will have to live with the reality of the digital world.

The dynamic now force is to be harnessed. In fact, it is fostering and encouraging creativity.

5G or fifth generation is ultra-fast wireless broadband technology. It is capable of delivering up to 10-50 Gbps peak data download speeds on a smart phone. It is 1000 times faster than a 4-G connection. A three-hour movie is downloaded under a second. Early 5G networks will offer 1Gbps data speeds, rising to 2-3 Gbps initially.

5G spectrum bands

5G will run on three frequency ranges — sub 1 GHz, 1-6 GHz and above 6 GHz. They are called ultra-high data speeds of 10 Gbps or more.

Airwaves in 3.3-3.8 GHz range (within 1-6 GHz band) are likely to run early 5G networks.

India has earmarked spectrum in the 3.4 and 3.5GHz bands for 5G services. It may identify more later.

Connectivity

A 5G network will connect smart phones and a whole array of products such as cars, homes, machines, robots, home gadgets or even a dog collar.

It will enable M2M or machine-to-machine communication. The devices will talk to each other using sensors. It will be 5G-powered IoT. A home will be connected by wireless.

Latency

5G network will cut down latency to a millisecond vs. 120 milliseconds on 3G, 60 milliseconds on 4G.

Latency is the response time when you click a link or start streaming a video on your smartphone that sends a request to the network, which in turn responds, delivering a website or playing the video requested.

On a 5-G network, request fulfillment will be instantaneous.

5G Network Launches

T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T will launch full — blown 5G services in the US in 2019. China, Japan and South Korea are also targeting 2019 launches.

In India, under 20% mobile towers are fiberized vs. 75-80% in China, Japan and US. It is ideal to support 5G speeds.

The poor financial health of telecom in India can hinder 5G investments.

India expects to auction 5G spectrum only by late 2020. 5G could be rolled out not before 2022.

AI is not free of bias. The above photomatching application uses a decade old data base to train machine learning systems. The uploaded photos are analysed by the AI that is trained on the most widely used image-recognition database.

The parameters used are skin colour, gender and race. Some results are outrageous — wrongdoer, offender for a dark-skinned man and Jihadist for an Asian woman. These are bizzare categories. This is by design to show what happens when technical systems are trained using problematic training data. Such results are not shown to people being classified.

There are 14 million images on the ImageNet database. They are classified into 22,000 categories.

There are other systems from MS and Google. They fail to identify Serena Williams and Obama.

The bias provides unpalatable results.

By perfecting the database, the bias can be removed. However, it is a pious statement. Here, a system ‘trains itself’. How the bias can be addressed?

Abbosh, Nunes and Downes has written Pivot to the Future to alert organisations to see the major changes taking place. These are either to be leveraged or countered depending on situation Pepsi realised in 2010 that the market of the cola drinks is under threat from the health and environment activists who are gaining ground. They changed the strategic direction to keep the company going. They classified the products, which are ‘fun for you’ , ‘better for you’ and ‘good for you’. They restructured the organisation keeping continuity in mind. Sears could not hold the space in retailing against the onslaught of technology that enabled online e-commerce from the likes of Amazon.

Technology is a major disruption. There are pitfalls and the organisation has to steer away from these pitfalls.

The pivots to steer away are ‘trapped values’.

Trapped Values

These values reside in four buckets.

Society: It fails to engage profitably to solve societal issues. To illustrate, it finds difficult to cope with the environment.

Consumers: There are trapped values in under-utilised private assets. There are homes in tourist places which can be rented and cars which could be shared.

Industry: There is lack of co-operation and investment in shared infrastructure, e.g. charging stations for electric vehicles.

Enterprise: There is limited use of digital technology to transform business.

Management has to recognise that present offerings will not appealing in future. They have to innovate and embrace technology. Management has to be patient to reap the benefit. It takes time. Management has to be generous, as the customers and partners tend to benefit probably even more. They save on cost of experimentation. Management must be realistic — some investments do not work out and cost in terms of time, effort and money.

Technology standards play a great role by allowing inter-connect between various devices. They promote competition between products which comply with the standard. SEP commences when technology firms get their patented technology included as a part of an industry standard. These selected patents are termed essential for practising that standard. Thus the patent holders become SEP holders.

Technology standards come into existence in two different ways

i. A company releases technology which is adopted by other market players. It leads to the creation of a de facto standard. To illustrate, Adobe’s PDF or portable document format.

2. Sometimes standards are created by a group of organisations called SSOs or standard setting organisations. The consortia work together on a set of technical specifications or an individual product. To illustrate, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed global standards for information communication technologies (ICT) which cover e-commerce, mobile devices, networking media content and distribution. Similarly, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has developed the standards for wireless local area networks (W-LAN) or Wi-Fi.

SSOs through meetings discuss on matters relating to the adoption of mutually acceptable technology rights to facilitate inter-operability.

SEP patent holders enjoy an advantage as others are keen to be licensees of SEP holders.

Patent Hold-up

An SEP holder can ask for more than the value of its patented technology. The intention is to capture the value of the standard itself. It is called patent hold-up. Companies invest lot of their resources in making their devices standard compliant. It is not easy for them to opt out of the standard.

The IP policies of SSOs are so framed that the SEP owners are encouraged to disclose patents which they consider essential before the acceptance of such standard.

FRAND

SSOs ask SEP holders to disclose all their IPR and to license their SEPs under fair, reasonable and non-discrimatory (FRAND) terms. SSOs mandate SEP holders to license their patents on FRAND terms to other SSO members and also to outside implementers. The objective of FRAND licensing is to safeguard against hold ups by EP owners after an industry has adopted a standard.

Despite FRAND, litigation arises to decide what is fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. There may be non/incomplete disclosure by patent holders. There is non-willingness of licensees to negotiate FRAND terms in good faith.

Can the machines think like the human beings? Can they have intelligence? Allan Turing, British mathematician, developed a machine during the World War II to decode the messages of the Germans. Later after the war, they developed Turing Test to measure the intelligence of the machines. It was used to decide whether machines and computers can think like the human beings. Turing test was simple. A man on the other side of a partition asks written questions to the computer and a human being. The questioner has to identify on the basis of written answers whether the human being or computer has answered, if they could not be identified it means the computer is answering as good as the human being. It means the computer has started thinking before answering. It passes the test of artificial intelligence. It was a practical method.

The term artificial intelligence was first used in 1956 in a workshop conducted by John McCarthy and that paved the way for the research in AI.

What is intelligence? It means to understand the environment around us. It means to relate things. It means to think and then learn. All this is used to make a right decision for action. In the field of AI, all this is expected of a computer. We visualise a humanoid with intelligence when we consider AI, of course, robotics too is included in this. Then in games, we have to decide the strategy taking into consideration several factors, e.g. chess, poker etc. Here too AI can be used. Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition and Computer Vision are the branches of AI.

AI is applied in driverless autonomous cars, computerized recapitulation of a book, drawing, story writing etc. It is used to identify spam e-mail and to diagnose diseases. Many websites interact through chatbots .

AI uses computer science, statistics, language, philosophy and psychology. Machine Learning (ML) has become the buzz word. The computer here is given data inputs which makes it learn on its own. It analyses and decides Deep learning is a part of ML. It mimics the neural network of the brain. It is used mainly to comprehend language and analyze it.

In the published pulp fiction magazine boom in the US between the two World Wars, a hero emerged called Zorro. On 9th August, 1919 he appeared in All Story magazine for the first time, and has completed a century of his existence in 2019 by captivating so many through movies, comic books and crime thrillers. He gave rise to many other masked heroes.

Pulp fiction is not treated as literature, but still remains staple reading of middle and lower middle households and migrant job seekers in the cities. Lovecraft wrote such stories. H.G.Wells wrote such science fiction. Edgar’s Tarzan and John Carter’s adventure stories belong to this genre. Instead of pulp paper, such literature is now printed on glazed white paper. Zorro was created by Johnston Macculley. He was the hero of a novel The Curse of Capistrano. This hero had a black mask on the face. He fought for the oppressed. He defeated the enemies and scratched the letter Z with his sword on their chest.

In 1920, the first movie of Zorro called Mask of Zorro was released. This silent movie is available on YouTube. Don De la Vega becomes Zorro, after having black dress and a mask. Zorro appeared in the book form in Mask of Zorro published in 1924. The other Zorro like masked men who appeared in pulp fiction were Black Star, Thunderbolt, Green Ghost, The Spider, Man in Purple and Crimson Clone. Zorro, however, sustained for a long time.

Batman created by Bob Rane in 1940s was inspired by Zorro.

Later, comic books and neo-literature magazines appeared, ending the demand for pulp fiction magazines. Still every decade had a movie based on Zorro. Zorro became popular in Europe and Asia too in the 1960s. Many personalities were patterned after Zorro in comic books.

Zorro is Spanish word for a cunning and agile fox. Isabel Allende, a Chilean woman writer, wrote a big novel on Zorro in 2005.

iPhone 11 series runs on A 13 Bionic chips. It is the fastest Central Processing Unit (CPU) ever put into a smart phone. At the same time, considering its graphic capabilities, it is the fastest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Besides, it is very power-efficient. And to cap it all, it is, designed to handle ML and ‘neural networks’.

Let us first understand some electronics and microprocessor design. At Bell Telephone Labs, three physicists invented a transistor in 1948. Their names were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They shared the Nobel Prize. A transistor is a small circuit with at least three connections. The circuit uses semi-conductors which allow passage of electric current but with a higher resistance than that of metals. Many such transistors are put together to create integrated circuits (ICs). What we call microprocessors are the ICs which process instructions in a computer or a microwave or a smart TV. They are commonly called chips.

In the 1960s, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) found that the number of transistors per sq. cm. in ICs was doubling every year. It came to be known as Moore’s Law. It held for a number of years before slowing down.

A13 has 8.5 billion transistors, whereas its forerunner A12 had 6.9 billion transistors. It is thus a huge advance. A13 is a smaller chip physically. Every transistor is about seven nanometres, and there are 10 million nanmetres to a centimetre.

Chips are designed to carry out computer instructions — opening and closing circuits as required. On binary system, Os and 1s are used. 1s allow the passage of current on a live circuit and no current passes on Os. Chip design involves optimisation to process efficiently the type of problems that the computer most commonly handles.

Chip manufacture consists of three differant tasks —

i. hardware design to make it small and physically efficient.

ii. work out most efficient way to solve specific problems — the logical instructions.

iii fabrication of the chip at scale.

Modern computers have CPUS and GPUS. In a smart phone, they are bundled together on the same chip. Very few companies do both chip designing and fabrication, e.g. Intel. Some do just chip design ( fabless manufacturers) e.g. APM. These license out the patents to cellphone and computer makers. There are companies who do fabrication on contract.

Apple has its own in-house chip design department. It also buys some chips for its Macs from Intel. The Bionic series powers its iPhone range. It designs the chips and then contracts out fabrication to Taiwan Semiconductors. A13 is good at image processing. It is power-efficient and enhances battery life. It is optimised to run AI algorithms. It is a gamer’s delight, a game suit called Apple Arcade. Apple TV too had come. Both are bundled into the phone. The four camera set up in iPhone provides feed which can be edited simultaneously.

iPhone 11 has the capacity to splice and edit. It can revolutionise vlogging. It is useful to create new apps

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Communication has become intrusive. There is over-communication which is unwelcome. Advertisers reach out without caring for whether the person is willing to be reached. If the message is not meaningful, it is better to desist.

Advertising grammar is so adjusted that the reducing span of consumer attention is addressed. Headlines have become catchy and the offers are click-now-or-lose. Data is used to make the offers personalised. Communication is in sync with their past behaviour and preferences. Though personalisation is good, too much of it leads to brands developing multiple personality disorder, and lose the very essence that makes them brands. Video content is the preferred mode.

Advertisers are not the academic toppers, though many are outstandingly meritorious, it is not necessary for them to fit in. What matter more is creativity. Advertising creativity is not well acknowledged.

Advertising has to be responsive in real time, and the agencies cannot spend too much time to create campaigns. They have to respond to context quickly. Advertising cannot afford to be unethical, and must be truly professional.

Advertising, especially digital, is obsessed with technology of data science, streaming, programmatic and trending. Where is talent in all this? Whose job is it to be creative? Talent is not lured into the industry. Real talent is considered pricey. How can existing talent be trained into new dimensions? They should be given breathing space to upskill.

Talent attraction and retention is a big problem. Youngsters have many options. There is a tendency to poach talent within industry. The talent pool remains small. Industry has defaulted in its responsibility of creating fresher, high-quality talent.