News

indianexpress: Wooing the Muslim vote bank, said to account for about 12 per cent of the total votes, is serious business for most political parties. The promises, ranging from direct Haj flights to more graveyard space take a leaf off the wish list that Muslims have held dear for long but some of the social leaders from the community say these issues are no longer critical to them. The community is more bothered about jobs — one area where they don’t have equal representation, they said.

The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has come out with its manifesto in Urdu, even as the Congress has come out with a standalone manifesto targeting the Muslims. Even the newly formed Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has come up with appeal letters of its president Raj Thackeray in Urdu. The Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena combine though said there was no special manifesto for Muslims.

NCP, in its bid to woo the Muslim votes — traditionally monopolised by the Congress — with direct flights from Pune for Haj devotees, more graveyards to bury the dead and a manifesto in Urdu.

“The Muslims have realised that Congress has not done anything but merely used them. We are giving commitments, which will be fulfilled. The direct flight for Haj devotees is a promise and it will be a reality by next year,” said NCP city unit president Jaidev Gaikwad.

indianexpress:  The ongoing dispute over the presence of TB patients at Sassoon general hospital has led the State Director of Medical Education and Research (MER) to announce that the TB ward and patients will remain at the Aundh general hospital. However, 20 beds will be accommodated at the ‘Infosys’ building at Sassoon campus but for respiratory diseases like cancer of the lung, bronchitis, pneumonia and not TB.

“The TB patients will remain at the Aundh General hospital’ whereas 20 beds will be allotted at Sassoon hospital for treatment of cases of respiratory diseases,” Dr W Y Tayade, Director, MER, told Newsline.

It may be recalled that heads of the ayurveda, plastic surgery and ophthalmology departments had objected to the Sassoon hospital dean’s move of shifting the ayurveda department to accommodate patients from the TB ward. The department heads had asked the dean to reconsider the proposal as they feared potential infection of patients in their wards by multi drug resistant TB patients.

The absence of a ward to isolate and treat TB patients is a long-pending one. As per the Medical Council of India (MCI) norms the department of respiratory diseases and tuberculosis should have a 60-bed ward within the campus for post-graduate and undergraduate training of the subject.

indianexpress: With Pune emerging as a premier industrial hub, the $12.4 billion Eaton Corporation- a diversified industrial manufacturer—has commenced operations of a medium and heavy-duty truck transmission component plant at Ranjangaon near the city. While the new facility is likely to be completed by end of this calender year, the company plans to expand its existing hydraulics manufacturing facility in the city as well.

The new plant, spread across 60,000 square feet, will house machining, heat-treating and assembly operations and employ about 120 people. “The Ranjangaon plant marks the entry of our truck business in the country and will cater primarily to exports to the US, Europe and Brazil,” said Alexander Cutler, chairman and chief executive officer of the company. Eaton currently operates in four business segments- electrical, fluid power, truck and automotive.

Besides the new plant, Eaton is also expanding its hydraulics unit in Pune in keeping with its strategy to become a leading supplier of such products in the Asia Pacific region. Plans are afoot to increase employment by 250 people and add 40,000 square feet of manufacturing floor space by 2010.

The facility called the Eaton Center of Excellence (COE) for gear pumps is being expanded to commence manufacturing of steering control units and hitch valves. It will also house a testing centre and will be completed

msnbc: America’s big names in engineering, as well as millions of Internet users around the world, are being asked to weigh in with their picks for the greatest technological challenges of the next century — a nine-month process that could give birth to new research initiatives.

The project, called the “Grand Challenges for Engineering” program, is aimed at gathering up all those ideas and distilling them into a list of 20 puzzles for engineers to solve — in fields ranging from energy to communications to aerospace to advanced materials.

The National Academy of Engineering, an arm of the Washington-based National Academies, is supervising the project, armed with a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The academy is a congressionally chartered, nonprofit organization that provides the U.S. government with expert advice on engineering issues.

NSF asked us to do this,” William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, said of the Grand Challenges project. “I think they had two things in mind: One is to help them to better focus research funding and people on the problems that are really important. The other is a simple desire to excite people, to make them aware of the possibilities.”

msnbc: Researchers in California said they have created the world’s densest memory circuit, one that’s about 100 times denser than today’s standard memory circuits, while remaining as small as a human white blood cell.

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, reported the development in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The circuit has 160,000 bits of capacity, compared with previous generations of molecular circuits that were demonstrated at 64 bits.

But researchers point to the circuit’s density as the real breakthrough: 100 billion bits per square centimeter, which the researchers said is about 100 times more tightly packed than current memory circuits.

“As the semiconductor industry moves forward, they’re always making things smaller and smaller, and according to their own projections, just a few years from now they’re manufacturing approach will run out of steam,” said Caltech chemistry professor James Heath, who authored the research with J. Fraser Stoddart at UCLA. “What we did is leapfrogged that and developed another approach.”

msnbc: Would you trust a robot to park your car?

The question will confront New Yorkers in February as the city’s first robotic parking opens in Chinatown.

The technology has had a good track record overseas, but the only other public robotic garage in the United States has been troublesome, dropping vehicles and trapping cars because of technical glitches.

Nonetheless, the developers of the Chinatown garage are confident with the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and maneuver space normally required.

A humanoid robot valet won’t be stepping into your car to drive it.

Rather, the garage itself does the parking. The driver stops the car on a pallet and gets out. The pallet is then lowered into the innards of the garage, and transported to a vacant parking space by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways.

There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans.