News

IndianExpress:  BLAMING the State for going on a witch hunt to protect the people who carried out the Rs 9.1-crore Employment Guarantee Scheme scam in Solapur — first reported by The Indian Express — the government officials expressed dissatisfaction over the way in which the probe into the fraud was handled. Pune divisional commissioner Prabhakar Karandikar said action was taken against those who inquired into the malpractices.

‘‘As far as EGS is concerned, thieves are being let off and honest officials are being targeted,’’ he said while speaking at a discussion on the report of the EGS Evaluation Committee held here on Monday
 

IndianExpress: IN his first nomination, Pune University Vice-Chancellor Narendra Jadhav has proposed the name of Pandit Vidyasagar, Director, Department of Energy Studies as Director of the Board of College and University Development (BCUD).

Vidyasagar assumed charge on Monday and convened the first meeting with all BCUD members. ‘‘Today was only a preliminary meeting, but tomorrow a detailed meeting will be held to discuss future plans,’’ Vidyasagar told the Pune Newsline.

Vidyasagar takes over after Nayana Nimkar, who was BCUD Director at the time of former V-C Ashok Kolaskar. The BCUD post is co-terminus with the post of V-C.

IndianExpress:  ON the occasion of Teacher’s Day, Pune District Education Association (PDEA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Dr Vijay Bhatkar-headed Education To Home (ETH) research lab for the implementation of ‘Digital Campus’ in 57 schools and 15 colleges in Pune, which falls under PDEA.

PDEA secretary Satish Ursal said that the project aims at digitising most of the work in educational institutions like time-table scheduling, student-teacher discussion (SIG-Student Information Group) and all other relevant information.
 

IndianExpress:  THE Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS) of the city police was virtually on its toes, since Monday afternoon, with three bomb hoaxes being reported in quick succession in the Camp area.

The first hoax was reported at Poona College for Arts, Commerce and Science, where an unidentified person called up the college office at 1.15 pm and told the receptionist about a bomb being planted in the college premises. More than 3,000 students were asked to vacate the premises. Seeing the rush, residents of the locality panicked and moved out to distant places seeking cover. Sniffer dogs were pressed into service and the entire building was thoroughly checked by the BDDS.

IndianExpress: AN unidentified person walked away with a tin box containing Rs 2.96 lakh from the cash counter of the State Bank of India on Dr Ambedkar Road on Monday afternoon.

According to the Bundgarden police, bank employee Dhanashree Divakar Godbole (52), was at the cash counter as special assistant in place of the regular cashier who was absent. The man asked about a telegraphic transfer.

Godbole put the box on the counter and turned to the safe when it was picked up by a man wearing a white shirt and trousers, dark complexioned and of medium build, she said.

IndianExpress: PUTTING an end to speculation on the rehabilitation of hawkers at Fashion Street, the Pune Cantonment Board has decided to revamp its older plan. Now, in place of the dilapidated structure that currently houses the market, a spanking new state-of-the-art building will come up.

According to the Board, the new structure will also reduce the problem of parking vehicles in the area as there will be underground and level parking in the building. PCB Executive Officer SK Sardana said: ‘‘We want to change the outlook of the market and have big plans. The complex will accommodate all the hawkers and there will be no room for grievances. The cost of the project is estimated to be around Rs 9 crore.’’

TMCNet: The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has chosen IBM to design a supercomputer to make use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell B.E.) processor. The supercomputer will offer sustained speeds of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop.

The ‘hybrid’ supercomputer, codenamed Roadrunner, will be set up at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. IBM (News - Alert) says that the Cell B.E. chips will work along with the systems based on x86 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (News - Alert), Inc. (AMD).

Roadrunner will manage various scientific and commercial applications. The supercomputer will also have sophisticated software to handle 16,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and over 16,000 Cell B.E. processors. IBM claims that Roadrunner will find solutions to some difficult problems in computing.

BetaNews: A new, potentially less expensive substitute for flash memory may have taken a step closer to becoming reality today, as Samsung announced it had completed a prototype for a promising new, potentially more efficient non-volatile memory scheme.

Called phase-change random-access memory (PRAM), the patents for this concept date as far back as 1968. While the idea is conceptually simple, the problem for the last four decades has been finding the right balance of chemical materials that will behave as predicted on paper.
The basic concept, as outlined 12 years ago by its inventor, Dr. Stanford Ovshinsky, is to exploit the conductive properties of what’s called chalcogenide ceramic material, capable of existing in two physical states, amorphous and crystalline. Varying the pulse of an electric current sent through this material will change its state, or its phase, instantaneously.

TechTree: Taiwan-based Genius has announced its latest offering, the LuxeMate 810 Media Cruiser, which the company says, is a uniquely innovative 3-in-One wireless input device with integration of keyboard, mouse, and remote control functions.

With the breakthrough transparent design concept, it is claimed to be the next generation of keyboard development, as well as a brand new visual experience challenge.

Specially designed for the Microsoft XP media center edition (MCE), it is a total hardware solution to control media center features, giving a handy control for Live TV, Online radio, DVD, Internet exploration, and MSN on PCs.

TechTree: Polaris Software, a known name in specialty application services, has inaugurated a super-specialty centre focused on building technology solutions for the investment banking sector, named “The Capital” located at Hyderabad.

The super-specialty centre, built with an investment of nearly Rs 70 crores, was inaugurated by the Honorable Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Dr Y S Rajasekhara Reddy.

Polaris claims this is the world’s first super-specialty centre focused on technology solutions for investment banking. The centre is spread over an area of eight acres at the Manikonda IT Park and can house up to 2000 seats. Presently, there are 1,250 professionals employed by the centre.