Good evening aspirants. Welcome to daily news analysis by Shankar A. S. Academy. Today's date is 26th September 2023. Displayed here are the list of topics we are going to see today. Now without wasting any time, let us get into the discussion. Look at this editorial article. The editorial here is about recently concluded G20 Summit. The author of the editorial highlights various positive outcomes of G20 Summit. The author also comments about polarization of world and how the room for non-alignment is shrinking day by day. So this is about the news article. For this discussion I plan on doing something different. See usually we discuss the important points from editorial and finally we display the model mains question. But today I will first display the mains question and then we will discuss how to approach the question and also how to use the points from editorial in your answer. So this is the plan for today's discussion. Before getting into discussion let us look into the syllabus. In mains it comes under GS paper 2 under the topic of global groupings and agreement involving India are affecting India's interest. Now let us start the discussion. First look at this question. The recently held G20 Summit helped to transform India's position in global politics comment. So this is the question we are going to answer today. The key word here is comment. Now what should we do when the question contains a key word comment. If you see the word comment it means the examiner is asking you to provide your own thoughts opinions or insights into the particular topic. To support your opinion you must provide supporting evidence or examples whenever possible. Now how to approach this specific question. The question says that the recently held G20 Summit helped to transform India's position in global politics. So in the introduction part you have to write some points about G20 Delhi Summit. The main body of answer can be split into two parts. In first part you can write some points supporting the statement and in the second part you can write some points about counter arguments to the statement. In conclusion part you have to take a balanced stand. So this is how you approach this question. Now let us start with the introduction. In introduction I have already mentioned that you can write some points about G20 in general and few points about Delhi Summit. For example you can state the following facts about G20. G20 is a group of 20 countries which was formed in the year 1999. It was formed to address global financial crisis faced during the period of 1997 to 1999. It was only in 2008 G20 was upgraded to a summit level forum. So this is due to the global financial crisis of 2008. The term summit level forum in this context refers to meeting of head of the state or governments for the purpose of diplomatic negotiations. And in the introduction you can also write some points about Delhi Summit. For example you can state this fact. India is hosting the G20 Summit for first time. In 2002 India hosted G20 meeting before it was raised to summit level forum. You can mention the theme of 2023 summit which is Vasudeva Kudumbakam. You can also mention about New Delhi declaration that was adapted during the recent summit. So these are the important points which you can add in the introduction part. Now coming to the body of the answer. In this we have to provide various points supporting the statement that is the statement provided in the question. For this we can take the points from today's news editorial. The first one is regarding Russia Ukraine war. New Delhi G20 leadership declaration called upon peace in Ukraine. The New Delhi declaration was different from 2022 Bali declaration of G20. So the difference between the two declaration is that Bali declaration heavily criticized Russia's action in Ukraine. But the New Delhi declaration instead of accusing Russia's action it sought for a resolution to the conflict. The New Delhi declaration received 100% consensus from all member nations. Even Russia and China also agreed to the declaration. Getting 100% consensus is a diplomatic victory for India. This diplomatic victory will help transform India's position in global politics. Then you can mention about admission of African Union into G20. African Union was admitted as a permanent member in G20 to increase the representation of Africa in G20 forum. India played an important role in the admission of African Union into G20. So this will also help transform India's position in global politics. Then you can mention about reforming multilateral development banks through G20 forum. In New Delhi declaration India highlighted the importance of reforming multilateral development banks. Examples of the multilateral development banks are IMF and World Bank. Through this India gave a voice to global south. Then you can mention about global biofuel alliance. This global biofuel alliance is an India already initiative that aims to promote adoption of biofuels. It aims to place biofuels as a next stage of energy transition. This global biofuel alliance will help to mitigate climate change for some extent. Then you can also say various steps taken by India as a part of G20 summit to ensure food security. Here you can mention about India giving its voice for timely implementation of black sea grain initiative. You can also mention about G20 high level principles on food security and nutrition and also about millet initiative called Maharishi. So these are important steps which India participated to ensure global food security. Finally you can mention the steps taken to prevent diversion of small arms and light weapons for terrorist activities. The last year G20 Bali declaration only focused on financing of terrorism and strengthening of FATF that is financial action task force. But this year's New Delhi declaration seeks to address wide range of concerns. It clearly condemned terrorism in all forms and manifestations. So New Delhi declaration is basically wider and larger than Bali declaration that happened in last year's summit. So clearly through Delhi summit India addressed all major concerns like increasing geopolitical polarization, voicing the needs of developing world, climate change, food security and terrorism. So we can say that Delhi G20 summit helped transform India's position in global politics. But there are some issues as well. You have to write about the issue in second part of the answer. In this you can mention about India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor IMEC. This project clearly counters China's Belt and Road Initiative and surely it will anger China. China even mentioned that IMEC should not become a geopolitical tool. So this shows that India failed to balance between India's regional needs and global ambitions. Then you can also mention that India failed to address the rift between West and Russia. The US is strengthening its position by including non-nato states into NATO. Russia for its part is also deepening its ties with China, North Korea, Iran, Turkey and other African countries. So this resulted in a more polarized world as it existed during Cold War. India could have used the G20 summit to bring consensus between the two sides that is the West and Russia but it failed. So you can write these two points as a counter-argument to the statement given in the question. Since it is a Denmark question, these eight points are sufficient. Now coming to the conclusion part. In conclusion, you can take a balanced position. You can mention that although the Delhi G20 summit has largely helped India transform its position, a lot has to be done before India becomes a true superpower. This is how you have to approach the question and use the points from editorial in your answer. See through this discussion, on one hand we covered the points mentioned in the editorial, on other hand, we also discussed how to approach the question and generate points. We are planning to do this procedure more often. So please mention in comment section your thoughts on this discussion. You just mentioned whether we have to continue following the traditional approach of covering the editorial or we have to follow this new approach. Based on your feedback, we will try and revamp our program. That is all regarding this discussion. Now let us move to the next topic. Look at this news article. Recently, Fifth World Coffee Conference held for first time in Asia in Bangalore. In that conference, Piyush Goyal, the Union Minister of Commerce and Industries, told that coffee is an international commodity. It also acts as a unifying force to bring cultures, countries and colors together. So in this context, let us see about coffee from Pralim's perspective. See coffee is a tropical plantation crop. Its seeds are roasted, grounded and are used as beverage. Now let us see the geographical conditions required for coffee growth. Firstly, coffee needs warm and wet climate. Secondly, a well-drained loamy soil is good for coffee plantation. The soil should be rich in humus and minerals like iron and calcium. The temperature range should be between 15 degree Celsius and 28 degree Celsius. On the rainfall range should be 150 to 250 centimeter, which is necessary for coffee growth. Coffee is generally grown under shady trees. The conditions like frost, snowfall, temperature above 30 degree Celsius are not good for coffee growth. Moreover, coffee requires dry weather at the time of ripening of berries. Actually, coffee is grown on hill slopes at a height of 600 to 1600 meters above mean sea level. So these are the basics of coffee plantation. Now let us see the varieties of coffee. There were three varieties of coffee, Arabica, Robusta and Liberica. Out of these three varieties, India mostly grows Arabica and Robusta. Here, Arabica is a superior quality of coffee. Now let us see the distribution of coffee plantations in India. Coffee is mostly grown in western gods in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Here, Karnataka alone cultivates more than two-thirds of coffee grown in the country. See the distribution here. Karnataka has 54% of coffee plantation, Kerala has 19%, Tamil Nadu has 8%. Nowadays, even in non-traditional areas like Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and north-eastern states, the coffee is cultivated. Interestingly, India is the only country in the world where a entire coffee cultivation is grown under shade, handpicked and sun dried. Because of this only, our coffee is highly valued in world market and is sold as premium coffee in Europe. Now let us see about the coffee board. Coffee board was established under Coffee Act of 1942. It is headquartered in Bangalore. This coffee board comes under the control of Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Until 1995, the marketing of coffee was done by coffee board. But after the liberalization reforms, the coffee board lost its importance in coffee sector. It mainly conducts research and development, transfer of technology, enhancement of protection, quality improvement, export promotion and supporting the development of domestic coffee market. So this is about coffee board of India. So this is all about this discussion. Let us move to the next topic. Take a look at this front-page article. This is about China-Tibet issue. Dalai Lama has said that Tibetians are only asking for more autonomy and not for political separation. He also said that he is ready to talk to China regarding Tibetan issue. Know that Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and he also served as political leader of Tibetan government in exile. So in our discussion today, we shall see about Tibetian issue and India's stand on this issue. Before that, the syllabus regarding this discussion is given here. You can take a look at it. Let us begin with the location of Tibet. See Tibet is located to the northwest of India, also bordering China, Nepal, Myanmar and Bhutan. Before 1951, Tibet has a theocratic government in which Dalai Lama was a religious head and also the political leader. Here, theocratic government means a government that is run by religious leader based on the rules of religion. In case of Tibet, the Buddhist rulers named Dalai Lama ruled the country since 1391 AD. All through history, Tibet has been a buffer zone between China and India. But during the colonial era, British government expanded into Himalayan region and created tensions between India and China. In 1914, the British signed Simla Convention with Tibet. This convention established the borders between Tibet and British India. Later in 1949, when Communist Party took over China, they refused this Simla Convention and the borders that are created by it. So, this is the origin of India-China border issue. In 1950, the People's Liberation Army of China invaded Tibet, asserting that Tibet was part of China's territory. In 1959, Dalai Lama started an uprising against Chinese rule in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. But this uprising became a failure and was brutally struck down by Chinese army. So, Dalai Lama, along with the thousands of Tibetan refugees, fled to India. Indian government accommodated them in Dharmashala in Himachal Pradesh. So, with this information, now let us see about India's Tibet policy. India officially recognizes Tibet as an autonomous region of China and India also approves one China policy of China. This means that India does not support Tibetan independence or challenge China's sovereignty over Tibet. The central Tibetan administration, also known as Tibetan government in exile, was established in Dharmashala by Dalai Lama. It represents the Tibetan diaspora and advocate for Tibetan rights. Dalai Lama renounced his political authority in 2011 and since then he remains only as a religious head. Dalai Lama continues to promote Tibetan Buddhism and its culture from India and India supported Tibetan cultural and religious practices, allowing Tibetan monastries and cultural institutions to thrive in India. So, India's support for Tibetan exile community has been a consistent future of its Tibet policy. India's position is to seek a peaceful resolution to Tibet issue through dialogue between Chinese government and Tibetan leadership. India-China border dispute, particularly in the region of Akshaichin, remains a contentious issue. The Tibetan issue is also connected to this dispute and it makes India's Tibetan policy more complex. As India-China tensions grow and turn violent after Galwan Valley clash, China has began to raise Tibetan militia groups. Further, Indian army also trains Tibetan special frontier force. So, this could lead to Tibetians fighting each other in future. So, in conclusion, Dalai Lama and Tibet is one of the major irritants between India and China relations. So, this is all about this discussion. Now, let us move to the next topic. Look at this news article. Recently, Parliament Standing Committee on Education submitted a report called Implementation on National Education Policy 2020 in Higher Education. This report is submitted in Parliament recently. It analyzed salient futures of national education policy in higher education and the progress made in achieving the objectives. So, in this discussion, let us see the criticisms of national education policy from our main six-um perspective. Firstly, the national education policy was announced without a proper consultation with the states. That is, it was announced in a top-to-down manner. Recent data from Parliamentary Standing Committee states that, out of 1043 universities functioning in the country, 70% comes under the states act. It also says that 94% of students are in state or private institutions with just 6% of students in central higher educational institutions. So, from this we can understand states are major stakeholder in policy making and not getting their consent is a major drawback of this policy. Secondly, national education policy aims to increase the public expenditure from 4.43% to 6% of GDP. While it is a good idea to improve the infrastructure of education, we do not know how this increased expenditure will be shared between central and state governments. So, this is another concern regarding national education policy. Thirdly, NEP aims to make mother tongue as a medium of instruction up to the class of five. It also proposes that reading and writing skills in other languages will be taught in grade three and beyond. This is a double-edged sword because it aims to increase the mother tongue-based education and at the same time, a shift towards mother tongue has implications especially for marginalized and rural children. This is especially a concern in India where English is widely associated with employability and privilege. Fourthly, it mentions the implementation of three-language formula. Though the states are given autonomy to decide on the languages which are thought, but there is a condition that they should be native to India. This policy decision will go against two-language formula of states like Tamil Nadu. Next, the Indian institutions will face several issues in implementing the multiple entry and multiple exist system, ME-ME system. Here, the ME-ME system is an educational approach that allows students in higher education to enter and exist their academic programs at various points. So, this might look like a flexible system which is efficient in western universities but it might not work well in countries like India. It would be very difficult for colleges to predict how many students would enter and exist so it will disturb the pupil-to-teacher ratio. An important concern of ME-ME is that it may encourage the mid-term drop-out of students with a diploma than pursuing engineering. It will seriously affect the future of students and it may also affect their future job prospects. So, this is a concern about ME-ME system. Lastly, the national education policy might lead to privatization of higher education, which is dangerous to the idea of social justice. See, the NEAP aims to gradually face out the system of affiliation to a university in 15 years and grant autonomy to colleges which will open the doors to privatization. So, these are the important concerns of national education policy. So, this is all about this topic. Now, let us move to the next part of our discussion. Look at this news article. It speaks about bilateral talks held between external affairs minister Jay Shankar and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres that is held on Monday. In this meeting, they discussed about the need for reforming international financial institutions and their sustainability agenda. So, in this context, let us see the problems with global financial institutions and the steps that are need to be taken to reform them. First, let us see the problems associated with global financial institutions. The first major concern is underrepresentation of developing countries in managing these global financial institutions. See, the World Bank President is a U.S. citizen and he is always appointed by U.S. President and the IMF Managing Director is a European Union National appointed by European Commission. So, here there are no proper representation from developing countries like India and China. So, this is a major concern of international financial institutions like World Bank and IMF. The next is these institutions do not keep up pace with global growth. For example, World Bank has 22 billion in paid up capital and this will be used for low interest loans and grants for development programs around the world. But the concern is this money as a percentage of global GDP is less than one fifth of 1960 level. Thirdly, the World Bank is often criticized as spreading agenda of world capitalism. For example, if you take structural adjustment program SAP by World Bank. Here the SAP means a free market policy reforms that are imposed on developing countries by World Bank as a condition for receiving loans. So, many critics accuse that SAP policies have increased the gap between rich and poor in many developing countries. The UN Secretary General recently accused the response of IMF and World Bank to COVID-19 pandemic as a glaring failure. UN Secretary General also said in a recent interview that sense of bias and injustice is inherently present in current international financial architecture. This is because such institutions was established when many developing countries were still under the colonial rule. Many regional financial institutions like BRICS Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Asian Development Bank are created to meet the aspirations of developing nations. So, let us see the steps taken to ensure the reforms in multilateral financial institutions. First is IMF quota reforms. These are created to ensure the voting rights of developed countries in IMF. The leaders of global financial institutions are open to all countries as this will increase the credibility of institutions. The resource base of global financial institutions should be regularly increased by global cooperation to ensure the loans provided to developing nations. So, these are the steps that need to be taken to reform the global institutions like IMF and World Bank. So, this is all regarding this discussion. Now, let us move to the next topic. I will look at this news article. It says that ISRO has successfully tested CE-20 engine that is to be used for Gaganyan mission. This CE-20 engine will power the cryogenic upper stage of Gaganyan mission. So, this is about the news article. In this context, let us see important points about Gaganyan mission. The Gaganyan mission is India's ambitious human space flight program. The mission aims to send Indian astronauts, also known as volume knots, into space. This is basically a technology demonstration mission. Through this mission, ISRO aims to demonstrate human space flight capability by launching a crew of three members to the orbit of 400 km for a three-days mission. Launch vehicle Mark III, that is LVM-3, will be used to launch this Gaganyan mission. Now, let us see the important components of this mission. The first one is orbital module. This orbital module will comprise a crew module and a service module. The crew module is habitable space with earth-like environment in the space for the crew members. It has human-centric products, life support system, avionics, and deceleration systems. It is also designed for re-entry to ensure safety of the crew during the return of mission. The service model will be used for providing necessary support to the crew module while it is in orbit. It contains thermal system, propulsion system, power systems, and deployment mechanisms. It remains attached to the crew module until the mission's end. So, this crew module and service module are the important components of this mission. Now, let us see the significance of the mission. Firstly, it will demonstrate human space flight capabilities. This in turn will lay foundation for sustained human space exploration for India. Secondly, the mission will help in employment generation and resource development in advanced science and research and development activities. Thirdly, in future missions, scientists can conduct experiments in microgravity including biology, material science, and astronomy. Then the mission will technically help India for future collaborations in global space station development. It will also motivate our youth to study and choose a career in space science. Finally, the mission will strengthen international partnership and global security through sharing of peaceful goals. So, these are some of the significance of the mission. So, this is all regarding this discussion. Now, let us move to the next topic. Now, we have come to the prelims practice question discussion. Look at the first question. Consider the following statements about cultivation of coffee. Look at the first statement. It requires warm and mid-climate with a temperature range of 15 to 25 degrees Celsius. Yes, this statement is correct. The marketing of coffee in India is spearheaded by coffee board of India. This statement is incorrect because the marketing of coffee is privatized after LPG reforms of 1991. Look at the third statement. Stagnant water is necessary for enrichment of aroma of the crop. This statement is incorrect because the stagnant water damages the coffee crop. So, the correct answer is option A. One pair only. Now, look at the second question. Rapid financing instrument and rapid credit facility are related to the provisions of lending by which one of the following institution. The correct answer is option B, international monetary fund. So, the rapid financing instrument and rapid credit facility are related to international monetary fund. Now, look at the third question. Consider the following statements about LVM-3 that is launch vehicle Morg-3. Look at the first statement. It is a three-stage launch vehicle with a solid stage, liquid stage and a cryogenic upper stage. Yes, this statement is correct. The cryogenic upper stage is powered by CE-20, India's largest cryogenic engine. Yes, this statement is also correct. CE-20 is the India's largest cryogenic engine which we have seen in the news today. Look at the third statement. LVM-3 is capable of placing 8000 kilogram payload in geostationary orbit. This statement is incorrect. LVM-3 is only capable of placing this much weight in lower-earth orbit and not in geostationary orbit. See, LVM-3 is capable of placing 4000 kg payload in geostationary orbit. So, the correct answer is option B. One lead two. So, these are the main questions for you today. Interested aspirants can write the answer and post it in the comment section. With this, we have come to the end of the discussion. If you like the video, please share it with your friends. And don't forget to subscribe to Shankara ES Academy YouTube channel. Thank you.


Coming up next we've got a great show for you. We're going behind the scenes with the Public Safety Communications Office. You're going to learn the importance of communication in response to emergencies, the requirements and technical skills that it takes to keep that system together. And we'll be talking to the lead person of that organization, Karen Wong, so stick with us. Cal OES logo, Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Coming up next, live from the State Operations Center. Follow us on social media, photos, videos, latest news and information. Twitter logo, twitter.com slash cal underscore OES. Facebook logo, facebook.com slash California OES. Thank you for joining us. I'm Tina Walker and I'm here with Lori Newquist and we're with the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Today we're sitting in the heart of the State Operations Center, which is actually the hub of communications for the deployment of resources and personnel for response to any incident throughout California, be it wildfire flood, you get the picture. Today we're joined with Karen Wong with the Public Safety Communications Office that recently joined the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and we're so happy you're here with us today. Thank you. It's exciting. It is, it's fun and we like to have this time to talk to you a little bit about PSCO and how it's actually integrated into Cal OES and how it helps an emergency response throughout the state. So tell us a little bit about the organization. In the organization we have roughly 400 people that support and work with PSCO. And as we have merged into Cal OES, some of those folks now sit at OES headquarters in procurement and HR and some of the other areas. But the majority of our staff are actually overall for Richards Boulevard and out in dispersed statewide and geographical areas strategically state placed for response if there's any radio issues as far as outages or just working with our client agencies to keep the radio systems up and running. We have three major programs. Our first program is, excuse me, 9-1-1, and we're responsible for the funding of the infrastructure in this local reimbursement and policies for the infrastructure for 9-1-1, and also getting state to move forward with the next generation of 9-1-1, which is basically having our 9-1-1 system on an IP backbone. Having the system on the IP backbone, one of the areas for emergency response that is going to be extremely helpful is that with that PSAP is being tied together. And PSAP is a public safety answering point. So I kind of use that term we use all the time, but it's actually the public safety answering point. And with having them tied together, we've lost some of the PSAPs, the earthquake up north in Fortuna. We lost the PSAP for a couple of days because we had the outage with having PSAPs all tied together on an IP backbone will have intelligent routing. So if a PSAP goes down, it will intelligently route to the next closest PSAP so the 9-1-1 calls can always be answered. And that's extremely important to the citizens. That's probably the biggest benefit of the next generation of 9-1-1. However, we'll also be able to accept text messaging anybody with a child or knows of a child somewhere between nine and probably early 30s. Everybody texts. And so there's an expectation by the citizens of California actually at the national level that we should be able to text 9-1-1. There will also be a benefit. The other benefit will be to be able to send still pictures and also video. So if there is something going on that, you know, the call taker or actually the first responder needs to see prior to responding, we'll be able to get the pictures over to them or the video. So it's really pretty exciting. So let's talk about 9-1-1. A lot of people wouldn't have known. Well, and I certainly didn't until PSCO came over to Cal OES that you take care of that 9-1-1 infrastructure. What services or agencies in California do you serve or take care of? There are 458 public safety answering points in California and who they belong to are the sheriffs, the police chiefs and fire and EMS. So they're distributed statewide and it doesn't necessarily go with county. It actually goes by population. So we will have several PSAPs in a highly populated area and then our more rural counties will have just one or two. So what's next for the future coming up? I mean, we're already, we're doing text, we're doing videos, we're doing photos already with this communication. What's next? What's coming up next in the future? Well, we're not quite there with the video, photo and text. What we have right now is we have our legacy 9-1-1 system. And that's our basically telephone system that we all trust and rely upon. Moving over to an IP backbone has been a challenge only because we cannot have 9-1-1 fail. So what we have done in California is we first developed our strategic plan for 9-1-1 to get all of our stakeholders together. We have a 9-1-1 advisory board who have the appointees by the governor's office who represent the sheriff's office, the police chiefs association, fire chiefs, as well as a couple of our larger stakeholder associations, APCO and CalNINA. So we have our board. We worked closely with our board. They reached out to their own stakeholders. We put our strategic plan together and the strategic plan really pointed us to go to the next generation of 9-1-1. Then we developed a roadmap on some of our questions and what we thought we needed to do to get there. And a lot of it was public outreach. So as that came up in early 2011, we held six public meetings. And we actually solicited the local sheriffs, the local police chiefs, the local fire, as well as the public to get us feedback on what the expectations of 9-1-1. We learned a lot about 9-1-1 and one of the most significant things and everybody that knows me has to hear this is there are actually heart pumps now that are being, you know, put in people that need the heart pumps to stay alive that can call 9-1-1. Amazing. But there's nobody on the other end to take that call because we don't have that type of an infrastructure set up yet. So that's why next gen is so important. We have five pilot projects. We have one at the northeastern part of California, and we've actually tied 32 PSAPs in 13 counties together. We were also able to test, first in the nation, to test the ability to do a lat-long location-based routing of the caller over an IP network. And that had not been done. It was still kind of sketchy at times with our wireless 9-1-1 calls, but we were able to pinpoint that and save minutes for the folks calling 9-1-1 to get response out there. So you kind of touched on saving minutes for those that are calling in. And I notice on my cell phone bill there's kind of a surcharge. Yes. Tell us a little bit about that. What does that mean? What does that tell? What are we paying for? We're paying for this network for the state. Right now I think it's based at one half of one percent of your interstate calls. So all the calls that you make within California get this one half of one percent based for this account. And it's called the state emergency telephone number account, and it's really to fund the 9-1-1 statewide. And again, we're one of the few states in the nation that have this ability to fund the statewide system. So all the equipment that's in the public safety answering points, all of their accessories that they need, whether it's a headset, the multitude of monitors, some of them have actually six monitors in front of their system in order to be able to take the calls and be able to identify the locations. And you touched on public outreach, too. And part of that education program, tell us a little bit about 9-1-1 kids. Right, 9-1-1 for kids is an incredible organization, and they serve the schools. And what they do is they go out and we help them fund some of their educational resources, as we do for other public safety answering points, but they're educational resources for kids. And what they do is they keep track of the real heroes, the children that have called 9-1-1 for their parents. And we have several award ceremonies for them throughout the year. There is also one, the largest award ceremony that we hold at the state capitol every year. So that's always fun to participate. We have a picture here. Is there a story you can share with us related to this little girl that's being recognized? A photograph titled 9-1-1 for kids with award winners and Smokey the Bear, Sparky and other characters. Text below states, educating children on how to use 9-1-1 correctly, youngsters can act quickly to obtain public safety or medical assistance. The little girl being recognized actually saved her mom by calling 9-1-1. She was in a very tough situation, and I don't remember the details specifically, but she was in a very stressful situation and through leaving her house, going over to another neighbor's house, being able to articulate what happened, get on the phone, tell the police to come, she was actually able to save her mother. And then also, you'll see the dispatcher holding hers as well. She also, they have to talk a lot of the children through how to communicate and actually give the resources that they need where they need to be. So they really work together. It's phenomenal that some of these children can do in a very stressful environment. And so how did they learn to do this stuff? I mean, do you guys give them some tools, give them some information that helps them move forward in learning this process and being able to do that properly? 9-1-1 for kids is an outreach for elementary schools. And so what we do is we, through the Sentinel Fund, the state emergency telephone number account, fund the tools that they need to get these out there. So they'll be coloring books. There'll be other educational guides that they use to teach the children about 9-1-1. That's awesome. So we've talked about 9-1-1, and then there's another component to communication that is more service-based, I would think. Tell us a little bit about the radio communications aspect. The radio communications, we have, we design, engineer, install, and maintain the radio communications for all the state's public safety agencies. CHP, Cal Fire, Fish and Game, Parks and Rec. Oh yes. As well as some of the other small ones, we also do DOJ. We just got through installing some radio equipment for Department of Insurance because they do have investigators as well. So we support the radio systems. Radio systems tend to last forever. So we have to support not only 1980 technology, but current technology as well. So our staff are very diverse in radio communications. They're pretty amazing. Companies will go out of business, so they have to actually fabricate the parts that we need to keep our legacy radio systems going. We do a lot of that in-house. We have our special projects unit before any radio system is deployed or even any new handheld system is that's used by any of our client agencies. They have to go through a rigorous testing. So we make sure that they can withstand the heat in the desert, the cold up in our higher elevations, the salt water that they are being exposed to daily. So they go through a pretty rigorous. See, these are things that we want to even know. You know, as far as radio use, it's like what we don't even consider that weather can impact it. And so that's a critical component is training and then continuing that system. What about installation? We have a picture here that shows a pretty impressive tower with guys working on the tower. Tell us a little bit about that. And also we have a picture of a microwave installation and really for the general public and also for me. What is it tells us about the installation and what exactly is microwave microwave actually is one of those old technologies that I keep saying this becoming new again. It is just a radio frequency that you have these very large dishes as you can see on the picture that actually captures the radio frequency it can span quite a ways our towers can be 50 miles apart line of sight. Probably not quite as temperamental as a radio system with a Montana. And it's our backbone that we have our microwave network that actually spans the state of California. So it is our backbone for a radio system that what's going on with our microwave system right now it has been in place since roughly 1947. Wow. We actually have the book that was written. They did it in books back then to the Department of Finance to actually make this program an organization and it was actually under Department of Finance at the time before they moved it to general services. But they had the same microwave maps that we use today because it's the same footprint. So we have an analog system and roughly 50% of our microwave is analog. And we're now we just we did a strategic plan again with all of our client agencies very collaborative on how we're going to move forward to make this microwave a digital system for them. And the digital system will provide data if they need to send data over this network, which we've never done before. So we're working on that. And it's it's critical to many of the organizations that we serve and also for the few of us that have been around for a very long time. It is the green phone system. And right. It has always worked off about the earthquakes we've had in California that green phones have always worked. So I want to kind of go back a little bit here and just kind of touch on something you guys have a huge responsibility for the state of California in handling all communications and radio communications and whatnot. Why the state versus say Motorola. We have. Gosh, I want to say, I'm probably overstating this roughly 20 different systems. So every department needs something different for their own solutions. But the part of we also did I need to step back a radio strategic plan, because what we want to do is start moving all the agencies to a system system. But we have to understand that parks may have a different need based then also obviously the California Highway Patrol that runs up and down the highways all the time. So what we want to do is find like agencies that we can maybe consolidate or merge their systems together. It's a 10 year plan because it will take so long to get there because again radio systems last for so long. So there's no one company that would give us the solution that we need. So we have several different solutions out there and then in addition a lot of the componentry that goes along would not be any one type of system. And also with the. We require open architecture and open source. Okay, so we the proprietary source. We just wouldn't be going forward with. Okay, so considering the huge system that PSCO maintains tell us a little bit about that whole maintenance operation the maintenance operation there are folks that are statewide. And we have folks that are on call throughout the weeks we have a different on call type of a program, but they're expected to respond to any outage within two hours. And it's not your typical health desk so they can call into our network operation center the knock. Anybody has an outage. And what they'll do is we actually have folks rolling within two hours. So we don't take the trouble take wait for two hours to call we actually have folks rolling because the radio system cannot be out. So I believe you have a picture of a snowcat we do. And so radio systems go down in the middle of snowstorms. A photograph of a snowcat in snow as high as it is titled communications maintenance services text below states maintenance services are provided statewide 24 hours seven days a week 365 days a year regardless of conditions. Radio systems go down in the middle of snowstorms. So what we do we actually have nine snowcats strategically placed throughout California where we get a lot of snow. This one particular picture shows what they had to do to actually get to the vault. We have several other pictures where the snowcat is up on top of the vault and they're actually opening the trapdoor on the top of the vault to get down into the vault to do the radio work. Very much trained at inclement weather we make sure that they have the training on how to of course use the snowcat and then also cold weather survival skills. And then we also have a picture of a four by four driving through some terrain and another example of the different pieces of California your folks need to travel through to respond. Yeah, most of our mountain tops are not easily accessible so it's required that we have four will drive trucks that they can get to the mountain tops and in order to do that they need training to make sure they do. I've gone to a few of the mount tops they always take me to the nice easy ones and they're still you need a formal drive. Yeah, so when they have to respond we need to make sure that they're trained to be able to respond. The towers and we kind of jumped over this I want to go back the towers you saw the installation we do tower training. Everybody must be certified in tower training and it's not so much just being able to climb and install, but also they need the first aid part of it so if one of our staff. Either has a medical condition or is hurt while they're up there installing, they have to go through training on how to get that person safely off the tower, because by the time 911 could respond. We can't have somebody just sitting up there and when 911 responds, they wouldn't be trained to go up the tower and move the person anyway so they go through rigorous training CPR first aid as well. And you've touched on the next subject I kind of want to segue into is training. I'm curious to know and I'm sure everybody else would be to is what kind of training do they go through there's various different things that they do out in the field. We've touched on working on these four by fours and going up high terrain climbing towers responding to fire incidents and whatnot. Tell us a little bit more about what the requirements are for their certification and what kind of programs they go through. And another question to kind of going into that as well is do they are they required to go out as partners or do they go out individually. Depends on where they're going out so I'll go back to that in just a second whether they partner up or they go out individually. The training process takes about two years. What we're finding is resources that have the skills that we need and also have the FCC license to work on FCC frequencies are hard to come by. And so we have a very difficult retention and issue because we get our staff trained and they're usually you know somebody else recruits them for their own and you know a state that the salaries are usually different. But it takes about two years for technicians to actually be trained once they come into our system. So what we're doing now is we're working closely with military. We have a TAP program that as the military is bringing home the troops they have a transition program. We go there we let them know what we're doing that we need folks so we're recruiting through the military. We're also working with American River College. We have a couple of tours every time they start a semester. We're working with a professor to start putting some of our curriculum in their training. Radio frequency is not something that's normally at the colleges people that go into it want to do the fun stuff. They just really don't realize how much fun this could be as well. So we're doing an outreach but the hands on training is basically what we have to provide. So we have to train on the older legacy radio systems as well as the new system. So we have a whole training program with all the pieces of equipment that they need to be trained on. So we'll have hands on training within our own facility but then they also do on the job training with senior technician. And I think we have some slides here too that want to tell us a little bit about those the incident based. We have an incident based team which this is a training for that. We actually go through training with Cal Fire on how to survive in a fire because what happens is when there's a large fire. A lot of the times they need our radio techs radio techs get deployed out to the incident base and they actually will report to the communications commander there and they will spend their days making sure the radios are in the program so everybody can communicate but if the fire expands out past our communication capabilities their helicoptered over to the perimeter of the fire where they'll set up a temporary repeater. So we will continue the communication so they work hand in hand with the incident base command and without them out there and from making sure that the radios can be interoperable and that they have communication systems throughout that fire. The firefighters would not be able to communicate and it would be extremely dangerous for them. So they are extremely important at many of these fires. How long does it take to stand up mobile communication when they're responding out. Okay, it's always stood up by Cal Fire by the time. Yeah, it's stood up by Cal Fire they call our technicians then become Cal Fires and so they put them in the communication command and that's where they work. Oh, and we won't see them until the fire is done. And they're released so they don't actually have to set that up what they would have to set up would be the temporary repeaters if they needed to expand their communication system. And I think we had another slide that was about training to know what exactly are they doing. They are actually setting up a repeater a temporary repeater out on one of the mountain tops in the fire and you can kind of see the smoke behind them. We have several pictures where you can actually see flames behind them. So sometimes we can't go too far out from the fires perimeter or communication system won't work. Right. So they have to be pretty adjustable on where they're going to put the repeater and then also have to be very aware of their circumstances, which is why they go through the instant base training with Cal Fire. Now we also respond to civil unrest. If there's a civil unrest and there's been a couple in San Francisco over the last couple of years where they've been asked to be on standby in case they had program radios for the interoperability piece. That's so fascinating that you are actually emergency responders and not only in in maintaining equipment but also responding to incidents and then being responsible for coworkers while you're on scene. Now we only have a couple of minutes left Karen and before we release you to go off to your more important day than chatting with me and Lori. Tell us why all of this matters. It all matters. Communications is the basis for all emergency response, whether it's CHP on the road and it's a traffic citation, whether it's fighting the fire, whether it's a citizen calling in with an emergency and then making sure the 911 system works and getting out there. It all matters. Without communication everything breaks down. It just breaks down. CHP could not operate their vehicles and go out and do what they do every day without a communication system that works all the time. What we base our communication systems on in the IT world, they talk about it's up like five nines which is 9.999. Ours is engineered at 6.9 and it has to be maintained at 6.9 because first responders cannot do their jobs without a radio system that stays up and the citizens cannot get a hold of their emergency response without the ability to call 911. So every day everything that we do matters and I've never worked with a more dedicated staff than I have with the Public State Communications staff. They come in every day with the dedication to provide these services. So Karen tell me, what are you passionate about in this program? I mean it's fantastic. Everything that you guys are doing is just amazing. It's the job itself and I think it goes back to public service. We are a public service organization and this is like the prime location to be providing the public service. If I'm in a 911 meeting, that will be my passion. If I'm at a radio, this is just something that's so important. It's hard to say that one is more important than the other. It just happens to be the situation at the time. So I make really passionate about all the areas and the staff that are in those different areas are also just as passionate about the job. Can you share with us in your experience a success story? Like is there a benchmark event that happened with PSCO that you go back to to share the success of the organization or something that inspired you personally? There's been a lot and I guess it's been the client agency support throughout this. They, what we did, when I first came, we had a consultant company come in and do a 360 of our organization and they looked and we have communication problems and there's issues with our billings and there's a lot of different issues. However, everyone said that they were very satisfied with the work and they would not go anywhere else to have our service done. So every time we meet with the client agency, while we always have issues to work through, the passion that we're working for towards a common goal is always there. So it's situations like that that I get excited. I get excited when staff are like getting excited themselves about the next generation 911 and where we're going and getting this text to 911 pilot out, which will be out. It's getting excited with the prospect of radio over IP, which we are just, we have one system set up in the state. It's moving forward. It's hard to say one item and it's truly, I love this job. I always say this is like the best job in the state.  So I mean, it's an incredible program and I know the public would love to know is there anything they can do to help. The public can fight by giving us feedback, which we honestly, we have citizens call because we want 911 to work for them. And it's pretty amazing. There were gosh, about five years ago where the backlog of wireless telephones be an answer for 911. And we now have a system in place that the calls we've gone from 40% to 2% because we had a routing on empirical data project. So we were able to get those calls to the right PSAP. So now we get calls from the public because the expectation has been risen that the calls are going to be answered when they're not answered. And they give us all the information so we can go back and pinpoint that that may have been an accident on a freeway in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which is usually the case. And then what they do is they let us know they couldn't get through. So that tells us as strengthens our need to get to next gen. And to give us feedback, we look at text for 911. We think it's really important, is it? I believe it is, but the feedback from the public would be extremely important. Thank you so much, Karen, for joining us today. I've learned a lot and I'm sure our viewers have gotten a lot more information about PSCO and it's been very helpful. Thank you very much. And thank you for joining us. And remember, if you need any additional information about the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the Public Safety Communications Office, you can visit us on the web at www.caliama.ca.gov. Thank you.


Russia, Kiev seeks to draw NATO directly into Ukrainian conflict. Moscow urges the US-led West to stop the Kiev authorities from carrying out a terrorist attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as Kiev seeks to draw NATO directly into the conflict, Russian ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said. We call on the curators of the Kiev regime to exercise responsibility and exert influence on their wards in order to avoid a large-scale catastrophe. Western ruling elites should understand that the failures on the battlefield make Kiev eager to create a pretext for the deployment of the NATO contingent to Ukraine, thereby to inflate a regional conflict into World War III. American and European citizens are hardly ready to march in orderly rows to hell, into which the Zelensky government is dragging the entire planet. The envoy said, commenting on the Ukrainian government's allegations about Russia's plan to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Statements that Russia is preparing a provocation against the nuclear power plant it controls are absurd. Russian citizens work at the facility, IAEA experts who cannot but know who is shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are present there on a rotational basis too, the Russian ambassador pointed out. The reactors are protected, however, besides power units there are more vulnerable infrastructure facilities. Cooling systems, storage sites for fresh fuel and nuclear waste. Any projectile hit is extremely dangerous as radiation contamination of vast territories can follow Antonov added.


Welcome to this lecture on digital communication using GNU radio, my name is Kumar Appaya. In continuing with our series of lectures on GNU radio, in this lecture we are going to put together some of the learnings from the previous lectures and particularly see how you can use a constellation, a constellation object in particular in GNU radio, how you can decode the received value. For example, if you have additive Gaussian noise, how you can get the minimum distance point and convert that to symbols and we will then inspect the symbol error rate in the presence of noise as well. This will put together several concepts that you have been seeing over the past lectures and making them work together will allow you to put together powerful simulations that can confirm the theoretical and conceptual knowledge that you have gained. Let us begin with an approach to construct and generate constellations from symbols on GNU radio. So let us begin by first looking at the chunks to symbols block. So I will press control F for command F and type chunk. So we grab the chunks to symbols block and place it here. The chunks to symbols block plays the role of a table lookup. You have to provide a symbol table and the chunks to symbols block takes an integer 0, 1, 2 or so and gives you the 0th, 1st or 2nd corresponding object from the symbol table. We will keep the dimension as 1 and we will start with a commonly used constellation that is the QPSK or QAM4. We will specify this constellation by placing the constellation elements in a list.  The integer which you input if it is 0 then this particular symbol is outputted. If it is 1 then this is output. If it is 2 then this, if it is 3 then this. For convenience for later use I am going to change this to a byte. It makes no difference because a byte can also take the values 0, 1, 2 and 3. Now in order to actually create these symbols randomly we are next going to introduce a random source. So I am going to say control F for command F and type random. Then we will get the random source, place it in the beginning and we will make the random source output a byte which is 1 of 0, 1, 2 or 3. Now as you have seen in the previous lecture one issue with the random source is that it will only output the same sequence of random values again and again repeatedly. So to ensure that we have enough randomness we will just make the size of this larger to a 100,000. That will ensure that the sequence does not have too few random values that keep repeating at least there is a sizable number of random values. We say okay we connect the random source to the input of the chunks to symbols. Before we visualize this constellation let me also preemptively add noise or rather the facility to add noise. So I am going to say control F for command F. I am going to type noise and I am going to get this noise source over here and I want to be able to control the standard deviation or variance of this noise. So I am going to change this amplitude to noise STD say okay and I am going to also add a QT GUI range that will allow me to change the noise standard deviation. So say control F for command F, range let us get the range and place it over here. If I double click the QT GUI range and change its ID to noise STD this will now become a knob which I can tune to change the amount of noise. Now the default value I will set to no noise let it start at 0 let the standard deviation go up to 10 and let us make the step 0.01. Now we have a means by which we can control the noise because the default value of noise STD is 0 the amplitude shows 0 here that is not a problem. Now we need to add these up so I will say control F for command F and say ADD add we will connect the chunks to symbols and noise source together. We need a throttle so I will get control F I will get throttle. So now that we have a throttle we can now connect this to a constellation sync. So visualizing this in a time sync is essentially going to give you 1s and minus 1s pair of signals because this is just 1 plus 1j or 1 minus 1j minus 1 plus 1j so the real part is plus 1 or minus 1 the imaginary part is plus 1 or minus 1 therefore what is more interesting for us is to use a constellation sync. We will say control F for command F C O N S T so there is this Q T G Y constellation sync let us grab it and connect it over here. We are now ready to visualize the constellation which this particular flow graph generates what does the constellation mean well let us just see it and we will get to know.  So what is happening is that this can be looked up on as something like a 2D histogram without the counting of course and the constellation sync is presenting to you all the values that it sees from the input. The random source is essentially producing 0 1 2 and 3 randomly and each of those numbers picks out one of these constellations and you are able to pick I mean one of the constellation points one of the quam 4 points and this is essentially displayed. Let us now just add a little bit of noise and see what happens if I make the noise standard deviation point 0 2 you can now see some slight bit of movement here what is this so over here you are taking the 1 plus 1j point and adding Gaussian noise to it. How do I understand it think of it this way if you have just 1 plus 1j then it's like an impulse sitting here which means only 1 plus 1j is being sent if you had a 2D histogram will have a stick here a stick here a stick here a stick here all those would be of the same height. Now instead of a stick you will essentially have a small 2D Gaussian sitting here which is taking your 1 plus 1j point and spreading it slightly around why slightly because the noise standard deviation is point 0 2 which corresponds to a very small amount or in communication terms a very high SNR scenario. Let us now make a modification by increasing the amount of noise so as I increase the amount of noise it is evident that the spread is larger 1 plus 1j if you add noise to it which is essentially a 2D Gauss complex Gaussian it starts throwing it in farther and farther locations let's actually before we go further make a slight change for better visualization if I double click the QT GUI constellation sync one thing that you can see is that the number of points is 1024 we can actually make it 1024 0 just to add little more density to our constellation we can make the grid and we can also autoscale it autoscale will not keep because we have the X and Y axis correct now let us execute this flow graph now if you add noise let's say we add we keep increasing the noise to about 0.1 you can see that you have a reasonably dense constellation this is in fact a Gaussian because at the center it is concentrated but as you go further away you can see that the points are becoming a little more sparse now this is a very high SNR scenario if you really want to compute it this 1 plus 1j corresponds to an amplitude of root 2 this corresponds to a sigma of 0.1 and you just find the ratio and appropriately get the symbol to noise ratio it will turn out to be something like you know 14 in linear scale convert to db but if you start increasing the noise then something strange starts to happen so if you start increasing the noise then the probability that your 1 plus 1j gets affected by the additive noise and then is incorrectly detected as say minus 1 plus 1j or 1 minus 1j or even minus 1 minus 1j starts becoming higher and higher and in fact if you make the noise very very large then things become crazy and you may end up making a large number of errors when you perform the detection now this is very evident because we have seen that as you increase the noise power or decrease the signal to noise ratio you are going to encounter more and more symbol errors but it would be useful for us to have a way by which we can quantify or measure it we will look at that in a moment before we continue to actually get the symbol error rate or find out whether a symbol error has occurred we need to use our minimum distance decoding remember from our lecture earlier lecture that minimum distance decoding is optimal when you have equiprobable symbols under Gaussian noise the chunks to symbols block specifies the symbols now we need to build a minimum distance decoder in order to get back the symbols at the receiver and compare them to the transmitted symbols to verify that the symbol is correct or mark it as incorrect now this can be done by adding some computations in GNU radio but because it is cumbersome and a common operation GNU radio provides a bit more sophisticated and easier to use in build constellation approach that does not rely on chunks to symbols wherein you can do this minimum distance decoding and other such aspects very easily so let us now move to that approach so there are three blocks that we will see first we will see two of them let's remove chunks to symbols and first to control f and get constellation object and place it on our flow graph now this constellation object is a strange block just like variable and range it doesn't have any inputs and outputs but it is a specification that results in a variable this variable is of type constellation so let us double click this so its default type is variable constellation there are bpsk qpsk dpq psk 8 psk 16 quam we will actually just stick with variable constellation to start with so the symbol map is 0 1 3 2 now they have chosen this particular map for a specific reason reason being that these actually have the meaning of bits as we shall see later for now you can just ignore this and this is basically what would be output if the random source generate 0 will be this if the random source generates 1 it will be this the random source generates 2 it will be the last one and the random source 3 will output this now there are other aspects that I am not going to cover at the moment but this is a variable that will result in a constellation I'm going to say okay and the second block I am going to take is the constellation encoder so control f s a c o n s p e there is this constellation encoder we can grab that block and connect it over here now we can now we can double click the constellation encoder and the constellation object will be this one but the name is variable constellation 0 I'm instead going to change it to my c o n s t my const for convenient naming and we will now name this my const m y c o n s t and we're set and we're going to connect this over here and now we will execute the flow graph now if we run before we begin notice that the constellation has changed a little and it is at 0.7 plus 0.7 j like this is actually 1 by root 2 plus 1 by root 2 j the reason is because the constellation encoder has normalized ever constellation for example let me just increase the noise over here and you can see that the points are concentrated around this particular area which is not 1 plus 1 j but 0.1 sorry 0.7 plus 0.7 j why did this happen let us actually double click the constellation object so there is something called normalization type when you choose normalization type is amplitude then the constellation is scaled so as to make these values have some square divided by the number of points equal to 1 so let's change it to none if I change it to none then you can see that they go back to 1 plus 1 j if I change it to power in this case also they will be at 1 by root 2 plus j by root 2 these exact meanings of these we will cover later but for now let us keep it as amplitude the other aspect is that if you execute the flow graph you can see that adding noise does put a 2d Gaussian over here and as the 2d Gaussians variance or standard deviation starts increasing to a level where it's really really big then some of these points will go into the other decision region remember the decision region for this particular constellation is the x-axis and the y-axis so any point that crosses the the quadrant so to speak for example the first quadrant is the decision region for 1 plus 1 j the second quadrant is the decision region for 1 minus 1 j and similar anything that crosses is going to cause an issue now as I mentioned to you the minimum distance decoder is optimal our task is to find out whenever we receive a particular data point which was the closest constellation point that it would map to the reason for this is because under Gaussian noise in if you have equi probable symbols the minimum distance decoder is optimal fortunately in GNU radio the minimum distance decoder has been implemented it is present in the constellation decoder so let us grab the constellation decoder control and controller for command F you type constant there's a decoder available now the decoder also needs to know which constellation you're talking about so double it and say my const now before we use this decoder to get back our constellation symbols let us first check whether it actually does what we wanted to that is let us first check whether it does minimum distance decoding we can easily do that by just moving around a point and checking whether it decides correctly let's actually do that so I'm going to actually create two ranges and construct a particular received value and see what the constellation decoder gives me let's check so I'm now going to just add a constellation encoder also after this so control I'm going to control C or command C control V or command V add a constellation encoder and then I'm going to add a constellation sync I'm just going to grab this from over here now I'm going to also title this as test so that we know that this is not this particular constellation and now I need to construct a received symbol so for that I'm just going to need I'm just going to need two values so two real value which I will construct into a complex number I'm say control f range and I'm going to say get this range double click this I'm going to call this r underscore real for the real received value starts at z let's say it's it's it's one no let's say it's one let's say it starts at minus one stops at one step is I think 0.05 would be good enough and default value is let's say one now I'm going to copy this control C and paste this control V and call this r underscore image for the imaginary part and then I'm going to actually view that as well over here so I'm going to say control I will click this and I'm going to just add two inputs and I'm going to add a constant source so control f or command f I'll grab a constant source and this constant source I'm going to make the constant value a sorry r underscore real plus 1 j times r underscore image so what I've done is this constant value even though it's called constant is going to keep varying with my range and it's going to appear on this constellation sink and I'm also going to connect this source to the decoder so this constant source is going to be decoded and reproduce the original point while you're also going to see the second one if you are worried about colors the decoded one is going to be blue the ink and the original one is going to be red received symbol that is let me execute this flow graph and let's focus on this test I had one plus one j as I told you it got decoded to point seven plus point seven j let's actually add a grid now I have these two things let us actually just keep moving this constellation point receive point here now the moment I move it to the left of zero the minimum distance constellation point should actually be minus 1 by root 2 plus j by root 2 let's check as you can see if I move it to the left then automatically it decodes to minus 1 by root 2 plus j by root 2 because that is the minimum distance solution let me move it down a little if I move it below 0 I move it below 0 you can see that it moves to minus j minus 1 minus 1 by root 2 minus j by root 2 and if I move it to the right let's just make this rather than scroll it let us make it 0.3 so this actually does the right thing it does the minimum distance decoding as I move this test point around it does give me the right point even if you scale it for example if I'm now going to do 1 minus yeah it's still and 1 minus 1 plus 1 j is this let us do 0.7 plus 0 point minus 0.8 so it does a good job of finding the minimum distance point in essence the constellation decoder does the job for you so let us now get rid of our test setup but just keep the constellation decoder a constellation oops control Z control Z control Z yeah we'll just keep the constellation decoder and now our task is to find out from the noisy output what the decoded point is and compare it with the original random sources input the approach that we will take is to first get the decoded output and then compare it with the encoder rather the original source but we will do that using our own custom python block because it is much simpler to do it using that approach if you remember in a previous lecture we have seen how you can make your own python blocks and we are going to use this feature in order to find out the errors and then we will use a histogram to count the number of errors let us begin so I'm going to connect the noisy output to the constellation decoder and now I am going to just get this particular output and this particular output of this random source and build a comparison system using an embedded python block so I'm going to say control F for command F embedded I'm sorry say python block double click it and I'm going to say open in editor you can choose any editor that you desire so let us now start building our block let us double click this and open in editor we'll choose our favorite editor you can choose any editor that is appropriate for editing python and now you get the template block as we have seen earlier in this case remember that we are going to compare two integers but the result which will be an integer can be converted to float 64 so that you can view it in a histogram so let us begin we don't need we don't need this particular comment we don't need this documentation and we don't need any exam any parameters in fact and the only thing is that we are taking two inputs which are bytes so int 8 and int 8 and our output can also be an int 8 or we can directly give a float also let us actually give an int 8 because we are only outputting zeros and ones we should ideally just give an int 8 now we don't have any attributes over here now over here all we are going to do is we are going to check our input items array element 0 with 1 and check where they are not the same and then output the locations where they differ so that that can be histogramed a very quick python aside in order to compare numpy arrays let us first import numpy there are there is an easy approach to do so let's first create an array let's say x is equal to NP dot array and let's say it is one two and let's say three and let's say y is equal to NP dot array and let's say it is one three and let's say four or one three and three that's fine now we want to basically create an array that has a marker of every point where x and y differ so if I say x not equal to y numpy gives me an array consisting of false true false that is these are potentially the locations of mismatch or if you think of it in zeros and ones locations of errors if you think of it in symbols locations of differences so these are the locations where symbol errors are present but I want to convert this to an integer so that I can then convert it to float and histogram it so what do I do it turns out that I can just view this as an array and I can convert it using numpy using the as type to int eight and I end up getting an array consisting of zeros and ones one being the marker for an error this is a very convenient approach so now I just need to can I just need to construct that particular array in the same way I will say input underscore items 0 not equal to input items 1 dot as type int 8 this will output me an array consisting of zeros wherever there are no errors one wherever there is an error and that's it so let us now save and exit now if you look over here you get an embedded python block and very nicely gnu radio has detected that you want to integer inputs and sorry byte inputs and you have a byte output let us just connect this over here and connect this over here now we need to just use a histogram oops let me just make some rearrangements now all you need is a histogram to find out where home I know at how many points these end up differing so I'm going to just say control f for command f and type histogram but for a histogram we need to be able to change the we need to be able to change the data type as a control f and they'll say byte to float okay byte to float is inconvenient let us actually make this an integer by editing this out that'll make it easy I'll double click this and say open an editor so this int 8 let us change it to int 32 and this becomes an integer so I'm going to say control f and say int to float because that makes the conversion easier I could also have converted it to float directly here but I just wanted to avoid it now the values which we're searching for are zeros and ones so I'm just going to double click this and I'm going to say I'm going to maybe make this more more bins very more points and x axis it's a minus 0.2 y axis is 1.2 and that's it now let us execute this so as you can see it gives me a 10,240 zeros which means there are no errors let's start increasing the noise okay there are still no errors at noise standard deviation of point 2 we have a very nice rock solid block at 0 now if I start increasing however let's say if I increase the noise standard deviation to about let's say close to 1 what you can see is that now a fraction of the numbers end up over here and another fraction over here this means that this is the number of total values out of 10,240 that are detected correctly and this is the number that are not detected correctly over here you can see the constellation is really bad let's actually take a pause and go back you can see that over here even though there is noise the chance of this particular point going and crossing over to produce an error is small which is why you don't see this growing let's make this about 0.25 even now you will see that there is not really much in terms of errors over here let's make this close to 0.35 you may be able to see that there's a small jump over here there's a small jump over here indicating that there is some amount of symbol errors that are being detected now if I make it close to 0.5 just so you know the SNR is now lower because the noise standard deviation is increasing there is a stable amount of error that you're capturing you can see from the constellation that most points seem to fall in the correct region of interest but there are some locations where there are still errors as I increase the noise further and further you can see that the chance of having errors is much higher and if you go further and further and further and further you get even more errors and further and further and further further and you end up with a much larger number of errors this is a problem and this means that the signal to noise ratio is not enough to support this kind of you know this kind of communication with a very low symbol error rate if you make the noise so large that it smothers the signals then you get this kind of situation where about three thousand one two hundred or three thousand three hundred symbols are correct while seven thousand of them are wrong so three thousand is correct seven thousand are wrong why does this happen the reason is because you are sending one of four symbols if you now start making random guesses you just randomly guess then one fourth of the time you will be right which means that the ratio between your incorrect to incorrect will be 1 is to 3 right because let's say that I'm giving you numbers between 0 and 3 and I want you to guess the correct number now even blindly guessing 0 all the time will make you correct one fourth of the time which means the ratio of you getting the correct answer to you getting the wrong answer is essentially 1 is to 3 which is why the histogram is clearly telling you that about seven thousand of them are wrong and three thousand of them are correct so now if you now increase the noise then you can see that the ratio is quite close to that one fourth but let me just ensure that you see it if you make the noise really really high let's say the variance is hundred square which is like extremely low signal to noise ratio then if you now observe what you can see over here this is 2,500 or close to it this is 7,500 or close to it the ratio is one third in other words about only 25% of the symbols are being decoded correctly which you can just do with blind guessing because whenever you have four equiprobial symbols always guessing that you're going to get the first symbol will make you write about 25% of the time thus you have now a simple way by which you can characterize the performance of the system by just observing the rates of the symbol errors you can infer the performance you can basically infer how well the performance of the system will be at some SNR's roughly speaking in the signal to noise ratio is closer to you know let's say you know a hundred or something like that then you get excellent performance as you get to make the signal to noise ratio closer lower and lower you're going to start seeing some bit of errors and if you are in a situation where you have a huge number of errors let's say something like this then the only option for you is to make amends by either decreasing the rate of transmission increasing the power or reducing the data rate or some such other trade-off these are some things that we will see in eventual lectures. So in this lecture we have seen how putting together a constellation encoder a constellation decoder and noise can essentially allow you to visualize and measure the impact of noise on various constellations by tuning various parameters and changing various knobs so to speak in GNU radio you can measure or simulate and measure the performance of various constellations and under way and under different scenarios as well as a remark if you have hardware experiments as well and if you put them together in GNU radio this is a convenient way to benchmark the performance of your system as well. In the subsequent lectures we will build on top of this knowledge to put together even more complex simulations that mimic the reality more closely.


MAVS is essential for driving antiviral response and protecting against mitochondrial dysfunction and cellular senescence. It does so by interacting with the OPA1 protein, which helps maintain mitochondrial structure and function. When MAVS or OPA1 are depleted, mitochondrial dysfunction occurs, leading to accelerated senescence in human mesenchymal stem cells. Replenishing either MAVS or OPA1 can reverse these effects and restore normal mitochondrial function. This article was authored by Cui Wang, Quan Yang, Xiao Qianlu, and others.