News

IndianExpress:  FINALLY, the long-standing demand of Pune for an umbrella development body to meet its development needs has been met. For, the State government will be constituting a body that will work towards integrated development and enhanced coordination among the various government agencies.

The State has decided to constitute Metropolitan Planning Committees (MPCs) for Pune, Mumbai and Nagpur that will help in clearing the infrastructure mess due to lack of coordination among various stakeholders.

IndianExpress: Frantic activity is often the norm before elections and for the 2007 civic polls, things are not much different.

And this was seen as corporators of Pune Municipal Corporation on Monday went on a fund-reallocating spree. Money earmarked in the budget for various projects but lying unused as the projects never took off was sanctioned for for other sundry works, and expectedly, road repairs topped the list.

IndianExpress: PUNE Municipal Corporation (PMC), flush with Rs 199.57-crore funds from the Centre for the beautification of the Mutha river under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JN-NURM), has planned to give the river a facelift by next March. The improvement will be along the river from Mhatre bridge to the Sangam, a 4-km stretch.

Municipal commissioner Nitin Kareer on Monday said the civic administration had submitted a Rs 325-crore river improvement project to the Centre of which Rs 199.57 crore has been approved.

IndianExpress: HERE is a chance for software professionals to get out of their drudgery of writing codes and contribute towards innovative projects. For, city-based Zensar Technologies has tied up with the new kid on the block — techTribe — to pioneer the concept of social networking for collaborative innovation. As per the tie up, Zensar will host its Global Delivery Platform (GDP) community on the techTribe network

IndianExpress:  I‘‘AFTER the Tenancy Act in 1948 and the Zilla Parishad, Panchayati Raj Act of 1962, the only revolutionary act the country has received is the Right to Information Act,’’ said Chief Information Commissioner Suresh Joshi.

He was at speaking at a function organised by Kakasaheb Gadgil Pratishthan at Patrakar Bhavan on Monday.

MSNBC: Honda on Thursday announced a major breakthrough in ethanol production, saying it and a research institute had developed a practical way to use discarded plant material to make abundant quantities of the fuel.

The process, it said in a statement, “holds enormous potential as a major step forward toward the realization of an energy sustainability society.”

Honda on Thursday announced a major breakthrough in ethanol production, saying it and a research institute had developed a practical way to use discarded plant material to make abundant quantities of the fuel.

TechNewsworld: Microsoft said Monday it would launch a cross-platform advertising solution to give marketers access to advertising slots on Xbox video games, Web-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants, as well as traditional Web advertising placements. The converged platform leverages significant recent investments Microsoft has made to enhance its ability to deliver advertising solutions.

TechNewsworld: Intel plans to unveil its new server and desktop range of quad-core processors code-named, respectively, “Clovertown” and “Kentsfield,” at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week. Quad-core processors are designed to let users perform numerous tasks more quickly while multiple applications are running.

MSNBC: The robots are on the move — leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us — and some even do floors.

Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term (”robota” means “forced labor” in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it’s been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland. The majority of the world’s robots are bolted to a spot on a factory floor, sentenced to a repetitive choreography of welding, stamping and cutting.

DNAIndia: India will soon set up an international nano-science centre for material sciences to undertake research and development (R&D) projects in the application of nano-technology.

Announcing this on Saturday, Minister of Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said the centre would be thrown open also to non-resident Indian (NRI) scientists and technologists to take up research projects and collaborate with other public and private institutes for developing nano products.