Students at the premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), are looking to make the governments more accountable. As part of their social initiative during the yearly Techfest, students of IIT Bombay will be organising training camps in the run-up to the festival not just in IITs but in over 50 colleges that take part in the festival.

The Techfest will be held between January 2 and 4, 2015. The training workshops will be held as pre-fest preparations from this month and will run up to September. "Each year, the fest has a social initiative. Last year, we had one on cancer and tobacco. This year, we thought of making the government more accountable. We ideated for a month and we read different laws and found out that Right to Information (RTI) is the best way to do that," said Hitesh Sahare, an IIT-Bombay student and events manager of Techfest.

The laws that were considered before squaring on RTI were Right to Education (RTE), Right to Services and even social audit. "We could not integrate social audit into the campaign in this kind of a large-scale exercise. Right to Services was not there in all states. On RTE, the basic problem we faced was that the government is not accountable. RTI had a better outreach as it is a central Act and everything was going hand in hand if we question them and make them accountable. That is why we squared on this," added Sahare.

The Techfest has collaborated with the National Campaign for People's Right to Informaiton (NCPRI). The workshops will be held from August 28 across 14 cities and in over 50 colleges by NCPRI activists from the areas where the colleges are situated. The two-day workshop will tell students how to file RTI, be part of participatory democracy, share success stories of RTI and end with each student filing one question through RTI they have always wanted to ask the government.

"The workshops will be held in different dates at different engineering colleges between August and September. We are doing this because it is a better thing for empowerment of the community. These are prospective engineers and they will get experience from a young age. The idea is that students who are in technical background use RTI. Once they know the Act and confront, small issues can also become public interest issues," said Bhaskar Prabhu, co-convenor of NCPRI.

IITians expect around 60,000 to 70,000 students to benefit from the excercise.

The initiative will be formally launched by another IIT alumnus and former central information commissioner, Shailesh Gandhi. "The idea is not just to expose them to RTI but make them think in terms of governance of the country. RTI is a great tool to hold the government accountable; it empowers people and we need a large number of people to do this. It will also help in true participatory democracy," said Gandhi.

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IITians look to make government more accountable

Stuttgart, Aug. 13:

Swipe to the left or right or up and down these are gestures that every smartphone owner knows. Other gestures for use on touchscreens or laptop touchpads tend to be known only to advanced users. Heres an overview: The one finger tip and swipe: The one finger movement is the mother of all gestures for touchscreens. With one finger an app is generally started, says Roland Stehle from Germanys Society for Entertainment and Communications Electronics (gfu). The one finger tip gesture is also used to scroll up and down on the screen or to move to the left or right.

The gesture is built on experiences from the real world and the movement therefore seems natural, says Katrin Wolf from the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS) at the University of Stuttgart.

Two finger drag: Its also intuitive to use two fingers for pushing something together or pulling it apart and thats the gesture most commonly used for zooming in and out. Its like kneading clay or dough, says Wolf. Dragging enlarges the dough and compressing it makes it more compact.

Rotation: Making a rotary motion with the finger on a screen or touchpad typically rotates the image or document. With some smartphones the device is rotated instead to achieve the same effect.

Multi-finger swipe: This gesture is available on some touchpads and tablets. From a motor perspective I can use several fingers for more coarse things, says Tom Gross, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Bamberg in Germany. The gesture is not used, for example, within an application but to switch between open applications. On a MacBook the four-finger swipe can be used to hide all windows and show the desktop.

User-defined gestures: Users can also define for themselves what a gesture will do, for example using a swipe on the numeric keyboard to unlock the screen. Gross believes the future will see a hybrid form of pre-defined and self-conceived gestures coming to the fore.

Shake: In addition to finger tip touches, swiping and rotating there are gestures that involve the entire hand. For example shaking to make a music player jump to the next track, says Stehle. On other devices its similar to a shake of the head, for example to reject a phone call.

Tilt: This gesture can have different effects. Sometimes it signals zooming in or out. In other cases it can mute the phone if the user puts the device down with the screen facing down, says Stehle.

(This article was published on August 13, 2014)

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Finger aerobics on the screen - touch gestures must be intuitive

Although I largely disagree with the author, I appreciate his willingness not to see science as the end of it all, to open the door for farther realities, and to tackle the difficulties involved. In the process, however, I find a too unquestioning commitment to the latest contentions of science. He correspondingly cites many recent thinkers, regrettably mainly philosophers, evidently because he is himself one.

He also speaks amply of historical figures and their deeds, although I was early in the book discouraged by careless inaccuracies. He writes (pp.12-13): "The Egyptians...knew that a 3, 4, 5 triangle is right-angled. It was Pythagoras or someone in his group who generalized it to all right-angled triangles (the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides)..." But the "it" only speaks a right-angled triangle, not mentioning squares. Worse, the author then describes Euclid's fifth postulate (he also oddly applies "postulate" to "common notion") as stating that "parallel lines never meet". This is the definition of parallel lines; the postulate states that certain lines meet.

Notwithstanding such weaknesses, the author takes us through numbers of progressions in scientific, philosophical and spiritual thought, the progressions in my view not always constituting progress. Here I will concentrate on alluded to recent views and arguments the author concurs with and I find decidedly faulty.

The author cites (pp.138-9) philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland as making "some very good points" about us being "hung up on folk psychology. We think that what we believe today must be the absolute bedrock of inquiry. Our sense of consciousness must be untouched. However, they argue that that is not the way things go in science".

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Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age ...