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Indianexpress: The State Election Commission on Wednesday announced the schedule for civic polls in 10 municipal corporations and elections to 249 wards in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad will be held on February 1, 2007. There are 144 wards under Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and 105 wards under Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC).

With the notification, the model code of conduct also came into force from Wednesday. Over 2,000 electronic voting machines (EVMs) will be used in PMC, while the PCMC will have 800 EVMs. Both the municipal corporations will upload the draft electoral rolls on their respective websites - www.egovpmc.com and www.pcmcelection.com — on Thursday.

Besides the websites, CDs of the draft electoral rolls that were prepared on the basis of Assembly segments as on November 30 will be made available by the PMC and it will be also put up for display at the ward offices. Suggestions and objections to the electoral rolls including missing names will be accepted at the ward offices and the election branch headquarters of the two municipal corporations till December 19. The final electoral rolls will be released on January 3.

Indianexpress: Bogged down by problems like what will traffic management for the future broadband networks look like? Or scratching your head while searching for a component of a complex assembly to fit into a 3-D shape? Here’s the solution: pay a visit to ‘Innovations 2007’ to be held on January 6 in the city.

Conceived and organised by the Pune chapter of IITBAA (IIT Bombay Alumni Association) and TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), the show is being held for the first time in the city. Out of 145 innovations from across the country ranging from IT, telecommunications sectors to biotech, pharma, and manufacturing sectors, that came in as entries, 45 were short listed by 11 domain experts. After further scrutiny 15 have been selected to be part of the show to be held at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium on Senapati Bapat Road.

“There were so many top-notch innovations that solved problems, that our panelists had a difficult time making a list of the final 15. The selection process has been a highly rewarding experience and we were surprised by the genuis that exists around us,” said Shantaram Kane, selection process coordinator.

IndianExpress: Puneites will soon get to see a wide range of coins and paper money belonging to different eras. A three-day exhibition-cum-auction has been organised by the International Collector’s Society of Rare Items (ICSRI) at Sonal Hall, Karve Road from Dec 17 to 19. Under the exhibition, a national level numismatic competition has also been scheduled that will see participants from across the country displaying their collections.

The exhibition will showcase coins and paper money of different times ranging from ancient, medieval, Mughal, Maratha, British India as well as currencies of different countries. This is the third time that the ICSRI is holding the exhibition in the city, the first was in 2002 and the next in 2004.

While the ICSRI started holding the exhibition in 1996, the auction part was introduced in 2002. The organisation is also planning a lecture series on encouraging collection of rare coins.

The exhibition will be inaugurated by Dilip Shah, philatelist and numismatist from Jabalpur on December 17.

IndianExpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation has decided to appoint private companies to acquire land for road development. One of the reasons for the Integrated Road Development Project not meeting deadlines is the tardy and slow land acquisition process.

The IRDP focuses on construction of main roads across the city. However, large stretches fall under defence institutes or belong to private parties. ‘‘Acquiring land from private parties is time consuming and delays road work,” said deputy municipal commissioner (land acquisition) Suraj Mandhare. The land acquisition office is also short-staffed, he added. ‘‘We will be appointing private companies who will help complete the land acquisition process faster,” he said.

To acquire land from a private party, the civic administration has to submit to the collectorate proposals with information on schedule, demarcation and maps of the road. The special land acquisition officer from the collectorate takes over the process of acquisition, here. The city land measurement officer and taluka inspector of land records conduct a joint measurement of the proposed road. ‘‘After receiving the area statement, the compensation rate is decided according to government valuation,” an officer said.

IndianExpress: Six persons were killed in six separate accidents that took place in Yerawada, Vishrambaug, Hadapsar and Deccan areas of the city during the past 48 hours.

According to the police,three accidents took place under the jurisdiction of Yerawada police station and one each in Vishrambaug, Hadapsar and Deccan police station areas.

Lakshman Kisan Rathod (30), a resident of Yerawada, in a complaint lodged with the Yerawada police said that his younger brother Santosh Kisan Rathod (25) was killed when he was run over by a tanker on Jai Jawan Road, Ramnagar slums in Yerawada on Tuesday evening.

Pedestrian Dashrath Waghmare (55), a resident of Ganeshnagar, Yerawada was killed when an unidentified scooterist collided against him near Parnakuti police chowki, Yerawada on Tuesday.

TechTree: Microsoft has released Microsoft Robotics Studio, a new Windows-based development environment for creating robotic software for a wide variety of hardware platforms.

Besides, the company has also introduced a new third-party partner program featuring Microsoft Robotics Studio-enabled applications, services, and robots from independent software vendors, service providers, hardware component vendors, and robot manufacturers.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio environment is an end-to-end, scalable, and extensible robotics development platform that includes a visual programming language that enables non-programmers to easily program robots using a drag-and-drop environment; a 3-D tool that simulates robotics applications in physics-based virtual environments, using the licensed PhysX engine from Ageia Technologies; and a lightweight, services-oriented runtime that enables applications to communicate with a wide variety of hardware.

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TechTree: Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced that it will strengthen its commitment to train students on upcoming technologies through a nationwide free training program targeting students of the top universities and engineering colleges in India.

This is a voluntary initiative led by the employees of HP Systems Technology and Software Division (STSD) under the aegis of their University Program.

This program is targeted to train more than 300 students on some of the latest technologies like advanced UNIX, software engineering processes, project life cycle management, and others.

As part of the ongoing ‘Industry-Academia initiative’, HP has set up a ‘University Program Office’ in Bangalore to identify, establish, and manage relationships with leading engineering colleges and universities. The program is designed in such a way that students are engaged with industry professionals at the beginning of their 5th semester and will continue the relationship till the end of their curriculum. The objective of the program is to identify talent at an early stage, nurture them, and equip them to handle projects in a professional environment.

BBCNews: All the news that’s fit to print” was once the newspaper man’s slogan. Now, with news-junkies turning increasingly to the net for their daily fix of world events, papers are beginning to feel the pinch.

Not since the internet began has there been so much free quality newspaper content on the web.

You will have to make the most of it because the current bonanza might not last forever.

Newspapers are still not sure what to do about the internet, no matter how determined they are to prove wrong the doomsayers who claim they are dead.

But Larry Killman of the World Association of Newspapers believes newspapers are “far from dead”.

“People have been predicting their death for years, television was going to kill newspapers, for example,” he said.

“I think there is no doubt that growth in electronic media is the future, but there is still a future for print.”

BBCNews: Imagine you are miles from home and you suddenly realise you have forgotten to send an important document stored on your computer. What can you do?

An internet connection will mean you can work from home anywhere
It is an increasing problem because we are now far more dependent on our computers than ever before - in fact a lot of us can’t do our jobs or even live our lives without our PC.

In pre-worldwide web times, sharing information remotely was close to a black art. Networking was in its infancy and we used floppy disks to transfer most of our data - at that time swapping files between computers was something you did with both PCs in the same room.

One of the first types of remote access was called Laplink. It enabled you to plug two computers into each other with a serial lead.

TechTree: Samsung Electronics has announced that it has developed a prototype fusion memory chip that can significantly increase the data processing speed between processors in mobile applications.

The company says that the new fusion solution, OneDRAM, is expected to be specified in the design of handsets, game consoles, and in other digital applications, especially those that use 3-dimensional graphics.

This 133MHz 512Mb device incorporates a dual-port approach to sharply increase the time that it takes to transfer data between processors. Data managed by the processors is housed in a shared bank where the space for storing data can be adjusted accordingly. This meets the JEDEC low power double-data-rate (LPDDR) memory standard.

Samsung said that due to rapidly increasing demand for multimedia features in mobile applications, designers have been specifying the use of two separate processors, a communication processor and a media processor. The new OneDRAM will channel data between the processors through a single chip eliminating the need to also specify DRAM and SRAM chips for buffer memory.