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indianexpress: They came from small towns to the National Defence Academy in Khadakvasla with dreams of joining the Armed Forces when none in their families had thought of such a career. So when cadets S S Choudhary, UB Singh and Kapil Kumar topped their respective streams of arts, science and computer science, an enormous sense of achievement filled them.

At the convocation ceremony for the NDA’s 112 th course held on Wednesday, Kumar and Choudhury were awarded the Chief of Naval Staff Trophy for standing first in the overall Order of Merit while Singh was awarded the Chief of Naval Staff Trophy for topping the science stream.

Their achievements only enhances NDA Commandant T S Randhawa’s views that the quality of students has not suffered. The NDA, in the past few years, has been getting a substantial number of cadets from rural areas.

Kumar’s father is a farmer in Meerut. “I had always cherished the dream of joining the Armed Forces since I was in Standard X. After three years at the NDA, I will go to the Indian Military Academy Dehradun for a year before training at the Army Air Defence at Gopalpur in Orissa where I will learn about missile defence systems, weaponry and air defence.”

Such talk has made his father Virender so proud that he does not mind his son not helping at the family farm. “I can look after the fields. For me, serving the country is more important,” he said.

Choudhury, who came from Alwar, was driven by a desire to join the Armed Forces since his school days in the Army School at Chittorgarh. His mother Sheila, a senior state-level BJP leader from Rajasthan, said her son’s choice of career is apt.

“Politics is no career. He is joining the Armed Forces and will serve the nation,” she said. Choudhury meanwhile is all set to rough it out at the Indian Military Academy (IMA).

indianexpress: Even as students of the State Board schools and their parents get set for the new academic year scheduled to begin in the second week of June, there are some worries on the textbook front. Apart from a rise in prices of textbooks in the new syllabus, the unavailability of textbooks for Marathi and geography has become a matter of concern.

“Prices of textbooks with the new syllabus have increased by up to 50 per cent from the previous year,” said Deepak Mungekar of Anmol Book Stores in Appa Balwant Chowk. For example, a set of textbooks for standard X costs Rs 268 this year, as against Rs 135 last year, or the standard VI Hindi textbook costs Rs 12 this year, as against Rs 6 last year.
 
The price hike is for textbooks of the classes II, VI, X and XII, where a new syllabus has been introduced this year, while other textbooks have remained the same.

Maharashtra State Bureau Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research (Balbharti) Director Vasant Kalpande said the price increase was due to an increase in cost of paper. “In the new standard X textbooks, the number of pages are also more in number, and two colours were used instead of one,” said Kalpande.

Moreover, Kalpande said instead of comparing the price increase of the same textbook from last year, a comparison should be made with what the parents paid for their child’s books in the previous academic year.

indianexpress:  After its recent move of introducing a special bus for women commuters, the Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) will now be hiring women drivers for its buses. The transport body plans to begin recruitment for the same from this year. This provision was made in the PMT’s financial budget of Rs 402 crore for 2007-08 presented on Wednesday which will be finalised and placed with the civic general body for approval.

Acting General Manager, Neelima Mary Kerketta said that transport bodies in other cities already have women drivers and Pune too will follow the model. “On a pilot basis, national level sports women will be employed as drivers,” she said.

The budget has also made other provisions like appointing a private company to clean up the buses. The arrangement comes in since there is no provision for washing buses at the PMT depots. T S Dharurkar, personnel manager, PMT said that buses will be cleaned and wiped daily. “Several new buses have been purchased and they need maintainence. They will be washed at least once in four days,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kerketta said that the PMT budget will not be affected after the merger of the PMT and the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Transport (PCMT). “The budget will continue to be in effect even after formation of Pune Metropolitan Transport Company Limited,” she said. The budget of PMT and PCMT will be merged after PMTCL and both will be executed as per the provisions. There will be also be additional funding upto Rs 100 crore for PMTCL after its formation, Kerketta said.

indianexpress:  The Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) will soon auction as many as 40 routes in Pimpri-Chinchwad area after the formation of Pune Metropolitan Transport Company Limited since the transport body lacks additional buses to cater to a larger area and to cut out administrative losses.

PMT’s acting general manager Neelima Mary Kerketta on Wednesday said the tendering process of route auctioning has already begun. The transport body’s operational area will be 11 crore km per year including PMC, PCMC, cantonment areas of Pune, Khadki and Dehu, Alandi, Talegaon and 124 rural areas.
 
The merged fleet of PMT and PCMT comprising 1,400 buses will be able to cater to only 6 crore km per year. “Some routes will be auctioned,” said PMT personnel manager T S Dharurkar.

The PMT aims to cut back losses on the PMT-run routes by 50 per cent by auctioning the routes.

On an average there is a loss of Rs 3.5 per km on a route and auctioning the routes will help in covering the loss.

indianexpress: * ONE and a half-year-old Shruti Dadhwad at Kalse village in Ambegaon was bitten by a cobra. Her parents took her to the rural hospital at Ghodegaon where Pinak, an ayurvedic tablet, was placed under her tongue and she recovered .
* A 25-year-old woman from Patan taluka in Satara district too was bitten by a cobra. Totally paralysed and unconscious, she was on the ventilator when the doctors administered Pinak. “The tablet had been useful on two occasions. She regained consciousness,” said Dr Sanjay Kshirsagar.

Pinak has been prepared by Dr Geeta Pawar. Approved by the FDA last year, it has undergone a clinical trial at Sassoon General Hospital where the doctors tested it for effectiveness against snake bites. Bouyed by its success where this tablet helps reduce the dosage of anti-snake venom (ASV) injections and shortens the hospital stay, the directorate of health services is now planning a larger clinical trial.

Dr S B Shelar former medical officer at Ghodegaon Rural Hospital said, “Most patients are poor and hail from the hilly regions with high incidence of snake bites during the monsoon. We get nearly four-five cases everyday. Patients treated with Pinak have had shorter stays at the hospital,” he said.

Dr D B Kadam, professor of medicine at Sassoon said in the short clinical study, a group with snake bites was given the ASV while the others were given ASV and Pinak. “We wanted to test whether this tablet can help reduce the dosage of ASV and shorten the hospital stay,” said Kadam. While the results were encouraging, doctors feel it is yet too premature to replace the ASV with Pinak.

“It can work well with ASV injections,” says Sassoon General Hospital medical superintendent Dr P S Pawar, adding that the tablet sells mainly in Satara and Ratnagiri. According to Dr Geeta Pawar, this tablet has helped at least 300 patients

indianexpress:  In a bid to assist the city traffic police that is facing a staff crunch, the PMC on Wednesday appointed 200 traffic wardens. The traffic police is currently facing a shortage of 400 personnel.

The new traffic wardens will be deployed after they are trained at the Police Commissionerate. Municipal Commissioner Pravinsinh Pardeshi said that the police commissionerate was facing shortage of traffic police and it would take some time to employ trained staff. “The PMC has therefore decided to help the traffic police,” he said. The traffic wardens will be paid a monthly salary of Rs 5,700 by the PMC and will initially be appointed for a period of one year.
 
While the traffic wardens will help in streamlining the traffic, they will not have any authority to levy fines or seize licences from violaters.

The candidates will be selected from the government approved Pune Zilla Suraksha Mandal which keeps the records of ex-servicemen personnel and former security guards. Pardeshi said the remaining 200 wardens will be appointed later and the candidates employed will be ex-servicemen.

bbc: Microsoft has unveiled a new touch-sensitive coffee table-shaped computer called “Surface”.
Designed to do away with the need for a traditional mouse and keyboard, users can instead use their fingers to operate the computer.

Also designed to interact with mobile phones placed on the surface, Microsoft says it will initially sell the unit to corporate customers.

These will include hotels, casinos, phone stores and restaurants.

‘Multi-touch’

So-called “multi-touch” interfaces - which allow the user to move several fingers on a screen to manipulate data, rather than relying on a mouse and menus - have been making waves in tech circles for some time.

  We envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer

One of the most hotly-awaited examples is Apple’s iPhone, which is scheduled to be released in June.

Hewlett-Packard has also been looking at expanding multi-touch technology, in addition to leading research scientists such as Jeff Han of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

bbc: US cities are battling the problem of vandalism head on with a hi-tech system that analyses and tracks graffiti and its perpetrators.
In the US, cleaning up graffiti is estimated to cost about $10bn (£5bn) per year.

Rather than simply obliterate the graffiti, the system keeps a permanent record of it which allows police to compile a database of similar daubings.

This surveillance of graffiti has angered some privacy advocates.

Gang graffiti

Graffiti Tracker, the brainchild of graduate student and crime analyst Timothy Kephart, uses global positioning systems (GPS), digital photography and computer databases to track and catch graffiti artists.

The system - dubbed Graffiti Analysis/Intelligence Tracking System (GAITS) - takes pictures of graffiti, using GPS cameras that record the date, time and exact location.

It then extracts information from the photographs and provides reports of each incident of graffiti which can be matched against other graffiti stored on a computer database in an effort to track down the perpetrator.

Keeping a database of known graffiti means offenders can be charged with multiple counts of vandalism.

The ability to locate where graffiti occurs means work can also be tracked. In one case, the system showed that graffiti was located in close proximity to a suspect’s house, the park he used and the school he attended, providing compelling evidence for the police.

itwire: Toshiba’s exclusive relationship with Intel has come to an end with the announcement that a forthcoming model will be fitted with a processor from AMD.

Details of the new model are extremely sketchy, though Toshiba officials have indicated it will be an entry-level notebook for the US and European markets.

The company last used AMD chips around seven years ago. Since Toshiba is the fourth largest notebook manufacturer, the news will be a PR boost for AMD even if it is financially less significant than recent similar announcements from HP and Dell.

Toshiba reportedly plans to extend the use of AMD chips to its midrange models. As much as one-fifth of its sales in the US and Europe could include the AMD parts, implying Intel could miss out on sales of over one million units per year. A million of anything is a lot, but the global production of Intel and AMD based PCs, servers and notebooks is expected to be around 260 million in 2007.

During AMD’s antitrust action against Intel, it alleged that “Toshiba received a very substantial payment from Intel in 2001 not to use AMD processors. Toshiba thereupon dropped AMD. Its executives agreed that Intel’s financial inducements amounted to ‘cocaine,’ but said they were hooked because reengaging with AMD would jeopardize Intel market development funds estimated to be worth $25-30 million per quarter.”

itwire: Gears, an open source technology allowing browsers to support offline web applications has been released by Google to coincide with the company’s annual Developer Day.

Web applications are fine when you’ve got an Internet connection, but what happens when someone cuts through the cable or you want to work during a flight and Wi-Fi isn’t available? Or, for that matter, when you’re trying to get something done at an overloaded hotspot?

That’s where offline web apps come into their own.

Gears provides three main JavaScript APIs. LocalServer stores and accesses application pages offline, Database stores and accesses application data on the user’s computer, andWorkerPool performs long-running tasks such as synchronising data between the user’s computer and the server.

There’s nothing magical about Gears - web applications must be rewritten to take advantage of its facilities. A Gears-enabled version of Google Reader has been released to demonstrate what’s possible.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

Support for the project has been voiced by Adobe, Mozilla and Opera.

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla Corporation. “We’re pleased to see Google working with open source and open standards bodies on offline web applications.” Mozilla’s Firefox project planned to include support for offline apps, and hopefully Gears will accelerate development and provide the broadest compatibility