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Artificial intelligence and the future of medicine

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India's luxury airline Vistara flies into the sunset

Indian full-service carrier Vistara will operate its last flight on Monday, after nine years in existence.

A joint venture between Singapore Airlines and the Tata Sons, Vistara will merge with Tata-owned Air India to form a single entity with an expanded network and broader fleet.

This means that all Vistara operations will be transferred to and managed by Air India, including helpdesk kiosks and ticketing offices. The process of migrating passengers with existing Vistara bookings and loyalty programmes to Air India has been under way over thepast few months.

"As part of the merger process, meals, service ware and other soft elements have been upgraded and incorporates aspects of both Vistara and Air India," an Air India spokesperson said in an email response.

Amid concerns that the merger could impact service standards, the Tatas have assured that Vistara's in-flight experience will remain unchanged.

Known for its high ratings in food, service, and cabin quality, Vistara has built a loyal customer base and the decision to retire the Vistara brand has been criticised by fans, branding experts, and aviation analysts.

The consolidation was effectively done to clean up Vistara's books and wipe out its losses, said Mark Martin, an aviation analyst.

Air India has essentially been "suckered into taking a loss-making airline" in a desperate move, he added.

"Mergers are meant to make airlines powerful. Never to wipe out losses or cover them."

To be sure, both Air India and Vistara's annual losses have reduced by more than half over the past year, and other operating metrics have improved too. But the merger process so far has been turbulent.

The exercise has been riddled with problems − from pilot shortages that have led to massive flight cancellations, to Vistara crew going on mass sick leave over plans to align their salary structures with Air India.

There have also been repeated complaints about poor service standards on Air India, including viral videos of broken seats and non-functioning inflight entertainment systems.

The Tatas have announced a $400m (£308m) programme to upgrade and retrofit the interiors of its older aircraft and also a brand-new livery. They've also placed orders for hundreds of new Airbus and Boeing planes worth billions of dollars to augment their offering.

But this "turnaround" is still incomplete and riddled with problems, according to Mr Martin. A merger only complicates matters.

Experts say that the merger strikes a dissonant chord from a branding perspective too.

Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist, told the BBC he was feeling "emotional" that a superior product offering like Vistara which had developed a "gold standard for Indian aviation" was ceasing operations.

"It is a big loss for the industry," said Mr Bijoor, adding it will be a monumental task for the mother brand Air India to simply "copy, paste and exceed" the high standards set by Vistara, given that it's a much smaller airline that's being gobbled up by a much larger one.

Mr Bijoor suggests a better strategy would have been to operate Air India separately for five years, focusing on improving service standards, while maintaining Vistara as a distinct brand with Air India prefixed to it.

"This would have given Air India the time and chance to rectify the mother brand and bring it up to the Vistara level, while maintaining its uniqueness," he adds.

Beyond branding, the merged entity will face a slew of operational challenges.

"Communication will be a major challenge in the early days, with customers arriving at the airport expecting Vistara flights, only to find Air India branding," says Ajay Awtaney, editor of Live From A Lounge, an aviation portal. "Air India will need to maintain clear communication for weeks."

Another key challenge, he notes, is cultural: Vistara's agile employees may struggle to adjust to Air India's complex bureaucracy and systems.

But the biggest task for the merged carrier would be offering customers a uniform flying experience.

These are "two airlines with very different service formats are being integrated into one airline. It is going to be a hotchpotch of service formats, cabin formats, branding, and customer experience. It will involve learning and unlearning, and such a process has rarely worked with airlines and is seldom effective," said Mr Martin.

Still, many believe Vistara had to go − now or some years later.

A legacy brand like Air India, with strong global recognition and 'India' imprinted in its identity, wouldn't have allowed a smaller, more premium subsidiary to overshadow its revival process.

Financially too, it makes little sense for the Tatas to have two loss-making entities compete with one another.

The combined strength of Vistara and Air India could also place the Tatas in a much better position to compete with market leader Indigo.

The unified Air India group (including Air India Express, which completed its merger with the former Air Asia India in October) "will be bigger and better with a fleet size of nearly 300 aircraft, an expanded network and a stronger workforce", an Air India spokesperson said.

"Getting done with the merger means that Air India grows overnight, and the two teams start cooperating instead of competing. There will never be one right day to merge. Somewhere, a line had to be drawn," said Mr Awtaney.

But for many Vistara loyalists, its demise leaves a void in India's skies for a premium, full-service carrier - marking the third such gap after the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways.

It's still too early to say if Air India, which often ranks at the bottom of airline surveys, can successfully fill that void.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygp1w5eq7o

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Building on the professional consensus that no method could claim supremacy, Prabhu (1990) asks why there is no best method. He suggests that there are three possible explanations: (1) different methods are best for different teaching / learning circumstances; (2) all methods have some truth or validity; and (3) the whole notion of what is a good or a bad method is irrelevant. Prabhu argues for the third possibility and concludes that we need to rethink what is “best” such that classroom teachers and applied linguists can develop shared pedagogical perceptions of what real-world classroom teaching is.

H.D. Brown (2002), in his critique of methods, adds the following two observations: (1) so-called designer methods seem distinctive at the initial stage of learning but soon come to look like any other learner centered approach; and (2) it has proven impossible to empirically (i.e., quantitatively) demonstrate the superiority of one method over another. Brown (2002) concludes that classroom teachers do best when they ground their pedagogy in “well-established principles of language teaching and learning” (p.17).

So what are these well-established principles that teachers should apply in the post methods era? One of the early concrete proposals comes from Kamaravadivelu (1994), who offers a framework consisting of 10 macro strategies, some of which are summarized below:

– Maximize learning opportunities. The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge but to create and manage as many learning opportunities as possible.

– Facilitate negotiated interaction. Learners should initiate classroom talk (not just respond to the teacher’s prompts) by asking for clarification, by confirming, by reacting, and so on, as part of teacher-student and student-student interaction.

– Activate intuitive heuristics. Teachers should provide enough data for learners to infer underlying grammatical rules, since it is impossible to explicitly teach all rules of the L2.

– Integrate language skills. The separation of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is artificial. As in the real-world, learners should integrate skills: conversation (listening and speaking), note-taking (listening and writing), self-study (reading and writing), and so on.

– Raise cultural consciousness. Teachers should allow learners to become sources of cultural information so that knowledge about the culture of the L2 and of other cultures (especially those represented by the students) becomes part of classroom communication.

– Ensure social relevance: acknowledge that language learning has social, political, economic, and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2, determine the uses to which the L2 will be put, and define the skills and proficiency level needed in the L2.

(Celce-Murcia, M. 2001. Adaptado)

Re-Planting a Forest, One Drone at a Time

That funny little buzz you hear in the forest may not just be the hum of summer insects. In the near future it could be a small fleet of drones, coming to replant and restore forests that have been stripped of trees by industrial-scale deforestation. It’s all part of an ambitious plan by BioCarbon Engineering, a U.K.-based startup on a global mission to battle widespread clear-cutting, which strips more than 26 billion trees off the planet each year. CEO Lauren Fletcher, who spent 20 years as an engineer with NASA, says the only way to fight industrial-scale deforestation is with industrial-scale reforestation. Their idea: plant 1 billion trees a year. The first targets are in South Africa and the Amazonian jungles, both of which have suffered from widespread forest eradication.

BioCarbon’s reforestation scheme is simple and efficient. Here’s a quick look at how it plans to deploy its drone fleet:

1 Do a 3-D aerial survey. First, drones are sent to fly over a potential planting zone, snapping photos that create 3-D maps of the area to be reforested. The number of drones will vary depending up on the size of the seeding.

2 Create a seeding plan. Once all that terrain data has been analyzed, it then generates a seeding pattern that best suits the terrain.

3 Load the seed pods. The drones, which are equipped with guidance and control software, carry pressurized canisters of seed pods with germinated seeds immersed in a nutrient-rich gel.

4 Hover and plant. Flying at a height of 1 or 2 meters, the drones follow the planting patterns, firing the biodegradable seed pods down to the ground. The pods break open upon impact, allowing the germinated seed a chance to take root.

5 Monitor growth. After planting, the drones do low-level flights to assess the health of the sprouts and saplings.

Such “precision forestry,” as BioCarbon calls it, is extremely efficient. A farmer might hand plant as many as 3,000 seeds a day; Fletcher says his drones can drop up to 36,000 seed pods daily, often in areas where a human can’t reach. Working with local ecologists, BioCarbon will use the drones to spread a variety of tree species, as well as microorganisms and fungi designed to improve the soil quality. “The central focus is ecosystem restoration,” Fletcher says.

On a planetary climatological scale, Morton notes that “tropical deforestation plays a big role in global climate cycles,” claiming the accelerated pace of cutting and burning of forests accounted for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the 1990s. Fletcher and his team want to help reverse that trend. “By planting at the scale we’re looking at,” he says, “we can make a real longterm impact. We hope to do a lot of good in the world.”

(Adapted from https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/07/re-planting-forest-one-drone-time/. Access on 22/8/2017)