Movie Mush: Ko (Go for Ko!)

Cinematographer turned Director K.V. Anand is back after a two year gap with 'Ko' starring Jeeva, Ajmal and Piyaa and how! Only if you check your watch do you realise that the movie's length is almost 3 hours.

Racy screenplay and an interesting twist in the second half are what that makes you sit through the entire length of the movie without ever getting bored. Jeeva is a young photographer of a tamil daily who takes high risks to cover his stories. Piyaa and yesteryear actress Radha's daughter both have a crush on him. (Sometimes I wish I can be a tamil hero so that all girls have a crush on me too!).

K.V.Anand's 'Ayan' was a runaway hit because of its smart screenplay and direction. This movie is equally as interesting and the twist smartly hidden by effectively using Kotta Srinivasa Rao and Prakash Raj. Not to forget, the song sequences are breathtakingly beautiful.

But the movie is not without its minuses. How come some one who has his feet directly over a 'kanni vedi' survive it and the guy who is a few feet away get killed? Guess you can't have everything perfect in a movie.

Anyways I give Ko 7/10.

Go for Ko!

My Final Year Project - Part 4: Project Implementation

As a continuation of my earlier posts, in this part, I would like to explain how the project was implemented and what are the test results. Our project drives on the basic ideas of:

• ·  Voluntary blood donation is the safest way of donating blood.
• · Blood collection is the most challenging part among the duties of a blood bank.
• · With the immense human resources available in our country, the gap between demand and supply of blood can be bridged easily.
• ·  The main reason why blood collection is low is because of the inability of the blood banks to maintain contact with one-time users due to a variety of reasons.
• · Websites are an easy and cost efficient way for a blood bank to keep in touch with the young, literate, potential donors.
• ·  Because a major percentage of the voluntary blood donors belong to the 18-40 age category, using social networking plug-ins enhances the reach of our website.
• ·  By collaborating with blood banks, their bulletins and details of their upcoming camps can be posted in the websites, enabling interested users to go and donate at any time that they are free.

Hence, our idea is to create a social networking site and add Facebook connect features to it and promote it among youngsters to join. The main aim of our project is to prove that social networking can be used for a good cause. We launched our site on the 18th of March. By the 25th of March, there were a 104 users. More than a 100 users had joined in the span of a week. With proper advertisements and Facebook shares and invites, our site could grow at a tremendous pace.

Movie Mush: The Adjustment Bureau

I'm a fan of Matt Damon and the trailer seemed promising, so I watched "The Adjustment Bureau" with expectations. Maybe I shouldn't have!

The storyline is simple: The affair between a politician, David Norris (Matt Damon) and a ballerina, Elise Sellas, (played by the beautiful Emily Blunt) is affected by mysterious forces keeping the lovers apart. The mysterious forces here are the Adjustment Bureau, who are people who control the way the world functions.

Now what do these hat-cladding people from the Adjustment Bureau do? They can stop time, decide who meets whom and what happens everyday. In short, they are eerily similar to the guys from the 1998 movie 'Dark City' except that those hat-cladding people were bad and these, are good. The story may sound almost cliched to people who have watched movies such as The Marix series and 'The Dark City'.

But the writers do try to explain how the members of the Bureau alter only significant events and let other events to the human free-will. And the movie does have its moments, such as those when the scene in which the purpose of the existence of the Adjustment Bureau is explained and especially during the climax, when David tries to fool the bureau and elope with Elise.

Matt Damon puts in a solid performance as a young politician with high aspirations and Emily Blunt matches her role to a T. They share a good chemistry and the romantic scenes are well acted. But the use of hats and turning the door knobs clockwise to use the Bureau's path is almost fairy tale stuff and makes you snigger, almost.

The movie has an interesting start, picks up speed on the way but the end is soft. As an audience, you were just expecting something more. But ah, that doesn't happen. The climax is a little abrupt and is not explained convincingly. Overall, it is worth a watch, but only just.

I'd give it 6/10.

Important Questions: Wireless Networks

UNIT 1:

Very Important:

Design of wireless modems,

Diversity and smart receiving techniques,

Random access for data oriented networks,

UWB pulse transmission.

Important:

broad Modems for higher speeds,



UNIT 2:

Very Important:

Cellular topology,

Capacity expansion techniques.

Important:

Securities in wireless networks.



UNIT 3:

Very Important:

Mechanism to support a mobile environment,

IS-95 CDMA forward channel,

IS – 95 CDMA reverse channel,

GPRS and higher data rates.

Important:

Communication in the infrastructure.





UNIT 4:

Very Important:

IEEE 802.11,

The PHY Layer,

MAC Layer.

Important:

HYPER LAN,

HYPER LAN – 2.







UNIT 5:

Very Important:

Bluetooth,

Wireless geolocation technologies for wireless geolocation.

My Final Year Project - Part 3: Project Research

One fact related to blood donation: A donor must give blood only once in 90 days. Again, many people don't know this. Our idea for the project before we actually started working on it was very simple: Create a city level donor database in which the data of all the blood donors will be entered in the database and the donors can be searched from the same in need of blood by both blood banks and blood donors. We had further plans of making a search filter where those who had given blood within the last 90 days would be avoided being considered eligible. Now, this, was a great idea, no doubt. But, the problem is, when we started meeting blood banks as a part of our project research, asking them what their problems are, they had more serious problems to contend with.

As a part of our project, we had met 9 blood banks in the city after gaining permission from Chennai Corporation AIDS Control and Prevention Society (CAPACS), which funds these blood banks. But our meetings with the blood banks changed our project idea on its head.

Problems faced by blood banks:

1 RELUCTANCE OF DONORS
It is a sad fact that in a country as populous as India, there is a lack of availability of donors. Hence, reluctance among donors serves as the most important reason why India is suffering from an acute shortage of blood and blood packets. This reluctance stems from both fear and wrong notions about blood transfusion.

2 INABILITY TO RETAIN ONE-TIME DONORS
One-time donors are those donors who have donated blood once – for the first time – during blood donation camps or along with their friends who may be regular donors. They are a great potential source of future donors: with proper guidance and motivation, they can be made aware of the great social service that they do by just allocating a few minutes of their time every 3 months. But, unfortunately, the blood banks have too many other duties to perform: to test, store and distribute blood that they do not tap into these potential future donors.

3 INABILITY TO PREDICT DEMAND
The demand for blood is almost always unpredictable: a massive natural disaster could cause a sudden spurt in rise of the demand for blood. Even the daily requirement of blood is not constant; hence the individual blood banks usually have their own target of the number of voluntary blood donations they would like to receive per day. Even this target is difficult to reach for many blood banks.

4 LACK OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN BLOOD BANKS
This is another sad problem concerning blood banks. Blood banks are not willing to share the details of the available blood units in their stock with each other – especially government blood banks are unwilling to share their blood stock level with private ones. Such lack of cooperation also reduces the efficiency of the functioning of these blood banks.

5 HEAVY MISMATCH BETWEEN DEMAND AND SUPPLY
Due to all the above said reasons and more, there exists a great negative mismatch between supply and demand. This mismatch also causes a strain on the functioning of the blood banks, because often they have to turn down the request for blood for patients.

Now, all of these led us to the conclusion that a simple searchable database is not the solution to the problems faced by the blood banks.The bigger problem was that not enough blood is being voluntarily collected. One blood bank official mentioned to us, "You college students are the biggest source of voluntary blood donation to the blood banks. In the months of April, May and June, because the colleges are closed, we face a huge shortage in our blood needs".

We were of the conclusion that for a permanent solution to the problem of blood collection, it is imperative for people to donate more than just once. That is, it is important to cultivate the habit of regular blood donation in the minds of the blood donors. Now, habits can't just be cultivated. Our solution, was to promote the habit of voluntary blood donation among first time donors, so that they would be ready to donate blood again. And that is what we aim to achieve through www.bloodix.com

Important Questions: Satellite Communication

UNIT 1:

Very Important:

Kepler's Laws

Orbital Elements

Inclined Orbits

The Sub-satellite Point

Important:

Predicting Satellite Position

Atmospheric Drag





UNIT 2:

Very Important:

The Polar Mount Antenna

Attitude Control (Both methods)

Transponders

Important:

Station Keeping

TT&C Subsystem

Sun Transit Outage




UNIT 3:

Very Important:

Master Antenna TV System

Transmit-Receive Earth Stations

Transmission Losses (Free-Space Transmission is very important; other sections also little important)

Link Power Budget Equation

System Noise

Uplink – The Earth Station HPA alone

Important:

Community Antenna TV System

Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power

Carrier-to-Noise Ratio




UNIT 4:

Sorry, full unit is important, it seems. Unable to provide any specific Qs.




UNIT 5:

Very Important:

Power Rating and Number of Transponders

MPEG Compression Standards

VSATs

Orbcomm

Important:

Global Positioning Satellite System

Frequencies and Polarization

Important Questions: Mobile Communication

UNIT 1:

Very Important:

Evolution of mobile communications

Frequency reuse

Interference and system capacity

Improving Coverage and capacity in Cellular systems

Important:

Examples of wireless communication systems

Hand off strategies






UNIT 2:

Very Important:

Reflection: Brewster angle method

Diffraction: Fresnel Zone geometry

Ground Reflection (Two-Ray) Model

Types of small scale fading (be thorough with any 3 methods)

Important:

Reflection: Other Methods

Diffraction: Other Methods

Practical Link budget design

Small scale Multipath propagation





UNIT 3:

Very Important:

MSK, GMSK

M-ary QAM, M-ary FSK and OFDM

Performance of Digital Modulation in Slow-Flat Fading Channels

Non-linear Equalization (both types)

RAKE receiver

Important:

Diversity Techniques

Survey of Equalization Techniques






UNIT 4:

Very Important:

Vocoders (all 4 types)

Linear Predictive Coders: LPC vocoders alone

GSM Codec

FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, SDMA

Important:

Selection of Speech Coders for Mobile Communication

Capacity of Cellular CDMA and SDMA.






UNIT 5:

Very Important:

Global System for MOBILE (GSM)

Digital European Cordless Telephone (DECT)

Important:

AMPS

Second Generation and Third Generation Wireless Networks