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indianexpress:   IN another setback for HIV-infected children seeking education, the Bhugaon Zilla Parishad school and Junior College has refused admission to two boys citing ‘lack of seats’. Ramesh and Navin (names changed) passed their standard VIII exams this year at a one-teacher Zilla Parishad recognised school run solely for 53 HIV orphans at Bhugaon, nearly 13 km from Pune.

The Kerala High Court on Thursday issued notices to the authorities and Parents-Teachers Association of a school in Kottayam, asking them to permit five HIV children ‘boycotted’ by other students to attend school.

In Sangli, 28 children, all HIV/ AIDS affected, were welcomed last week to their schools with flowers, chocolates and books. Earlier, the schools had not allowed the children to enter the classrooms.

Ramesh and Navin are now getting ready for another academic year under the National Open School. “What can we do if the schools do not want to admit us,” said Ramesh, even as he and Navin wait for a volunteer from Pune to teach them Maths and English at the orphanage run by NGO Manavya.

Last year, Pirangut school authorities had voiced their reluctance despite education officer T N Supe’s letter of recommendation (June 23, 2006) to provide admission to the two children in standard VIII.

The Indian Express had reported how the same students had been rejected by the ZP school and the days spent at a regular school had scarred them.

Shunned and practically ostracised by Bhugaon villagers who fear their children will get infected, these orphans have been studying at a one-teacher school set up by Manavya that takes in women and children with HIV. “They told me I will spread the disease to the other boys. So I was discontinued,”said Navin

indianexpress: DISTRICT health officials have decided to focus on chikungunya and dengue control measures after the recent case of chikungunya and 14 cases of dengue in Pune district.

There have been four outbreaks of malaria in Pune district with 807 cases reported from January to June, this year.

The emphasis will be on observing “dry day”, where all water containers are emptied out, once a week and weekly fogging to control breeding of mosquitoes. Pune is one of the high risk districts in the state for vector-borne diseases, the others being Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara and Raigad, the health officials said.

With June as the month for monsoon preparedness under the state vector-borne control programme, joint director of health services (malaria and filaria) Dr BP Gaikwad at a press meet in Zilla Parishad stressed the dry day concept.

He called for local self-government bodies to take coercive action and fix one day as “dry day” in the week . Training of the officials with visits to at least 100 houses to find out whether there are any malaria cases, would be monitored, he said. All private and government hospitals have been alerted and medicines have been stocked, he said.

Gaikwad said there have been nine outbreaks of gastroenteritis, diarrhoea, and hepatitis this year in Pune district. “Efforts are on to supply clean drinking water by using necessary water purification measures,” he also said.

indianexpress:  PUNE has got its first major global IT leader setting up base in the city with software giant Microsoft Corporation announcing plans to invest in an information technology (IT) park at Hinjewadi in Pune. Microsoft India had been looking at expanding operations in India and Pune was among the cities the company was evaluating.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh at the company’s headquarters at Seattle in the US on Thursday that the park will be set up at Hinjewadi near Pune.
 
Deshmukh is on a 10-day tour of the United States to promote Maharashtra as a preferred investment destination in India. Microsoft will also help the State government use IT to boost agricultural productivity, a press release said.

Pune has thus nudged out other cities to house the new Microsoft India facility. Microsoft Corporation India has a presence in 10 cities across the country while the research and development centres are located in Bangalore and Hyderabad. It will be Pune’s turn to join its competitor cities.

Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan who was previously heading Cummins India Limited and was based in Pune has said on several occasions that Pune was a strong contender for housing Microsoft’s new facility.

Deshmukh and members of the delegation were at Microsoft’s headquarters. After the meeting with Gates, there are indications that many Microsoft projects will be launched in the state. Deshmukh and Gates said relations between Microsoft and Maharashtra will be strengthened.

indianexpress: EUROPEAN companies are emulating their American counterparts by setting up shop in India apart from growing development teams here.

For instance, The Netherlands-based Decos Technology Group has realised that Indian talent could play a significant role in hardcore product development besides IT services. Their Indian subsidiary, Decos Software Development Pvt Ltd, has been involved in building products being used extensively by customers back home, in Germany and now India as well. Decos has developed products in areas of document management, content management, GPRS-based vehicle tracking and PC-based audiology equipment.

The Decos Audiology workstation sold the highest number of audiometers in The Netherlands’ most prominent hospitals. Decos also crossed the 1,000th car tracker sale last year. With this growth, Decos has established its customer presence in six countries. Product marketing has started in India with the company looking at the selling the audiometer product here. There are enquiries from the US for the audio and vehicle tracking product.

Decos chairman, Paul Veger, is impressed with the growth of Decos India. “We have been able to recruit very talented engineers in Pune and grow our team,” says Veger. Decos India plays a fundamental role in the growth of the Decos Technology Group because its talented engineers can build products that Decos can market worldwide, Veger also says.

Till now the focus was purely on building the brand in The Netherlands. Decos however is now graduating from being a captive unit for the parent, to doing business with other companies in all of Europe. Decos set up base in India at Pune in 2000 and now has 50 people on board. It has just moved to a new facility in Pune on Airport Road. Uday Kulkarni, business development manager, says they are likely to outgrow this facility and look for a second development centre by October 2007.

indianexpress:  IN the last fiscal, the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) had introduced several measures to attract passengers.

Prominent among them were planning package tours, increasing the frequency of State Transport buses and making them sleeker in design, even installing PCOs inside.

MSRTC’s chairman Sudhir Paricharak said they have undertaken several of those measures. “The corporation has purchased 65-seater buses for shorter routes. We’ve also brought in comfortable, high-tech buses like the MahaBus,” Parichalak said.

Moreover, the corporation has tried rehauling its depots and encouraged the staff to behave courteously. Beautification and cleaning of stands were also undertaken. A computerized announcement system was installed in several stands. Such a system has been installed at Shivajinagar ST stand in Pune. The corporation has also initiated ‘Pravasi Wadhwa Mohim’ on an experimental basis. The campaign was kicked off to woo passengers back through courteous behaviour.

There has been an increase in passenger turn-out — from 3.5 crore in February 2006 to 3.68 crore in February 2007.

indianexpress: AFTER 66 labourers were detected with malaria in Rahatni area, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation’s health department has begun issuing notices to builders asking them to provide proper amenities to construction workers.

“We will keep a hawk’s eye on construction activity. If the builders refuse to heed our advice, we will cancel their licences,” said health chief Dr Nagkumar Kunachgi on Friday.
 
The health department has begun fogging and spraying exercise at garbage bins, cesspools, ditches, gutters and nallas. PCMC medical director Dr Rajshekhar Iyer said after complaints of a high number of fever cases from Rahatni and Pimple Saudagar areas, his department had conducted a survey in both suburbs.

“Out of the 765 blood samples collected, 66 have tested positive,” he said. With this, the number of persons affected by malaria since January has gone up to 87. Kunachgi said the affected labourers had not been provided proper toilet facilities. “Besides, near the construction sites there are puddles, pools of water and muck,” he said.

techtree: Nokia India has unveiled the first enterprise phone in the country, the Nokia E90 Communicator, which offers email access, Web browsing, and a Maps application, among others.

The E90 features two cameras: a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash and auto-focus, and a QCIF one for video conferencing.

The phone includes features such as an FM radio, a music player, a video player, ‘active notes’ for taking notes and tagging them to individual names, ‘Quickoffice’ for viewing, opening, and editing email attachments, Zip Manager, and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The Communicator also has an integrated GPS and Nokia Maps application to help users find routes and locate services.

E90 offers fast connections over WLAN and HSDPA with enhanced 3G for mobile use of data and transmission of rich applications.

With the Nokia S60 browser with 16-million colors, the phone is capable of displaying the full width of a Web page at once.

Speaking at the launch, Chakrapani GK, country general manager of Nokia Enterprise Solutions, said, “The launch of Nokia E90 Communicator is the tipping point for business mobility in India. With the launch of Nokia E90, we are bringing an altogether new and expanded view of business mobility to the market place, as well as a culmination of power, performance, and productivity.”

abc: Talk about identity theft: Scientists changed one species of bacteria into another by performing a complete gene swap.

It’s a step in the quest to one day create artificial organisms, part of a bigger project to custom-design microbes that could produce cleaner fuels. But the way it was performed, dubbed a “genome transplant,” has genetics specialists buzzing.

“This is equivalent to changing a Macintosh computer to a PC by inserting a new piece of software,” declared genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter, senior author of the new research published Thursday by the journal Science.

For years, scientists have moved single genes and even large chunks of DNA from one species to another. But Venter’s team transplanted an entire genome, all of an organism’s genes, from one bacterium into another in one fell swoop.

These weren’t complex bacteria, but cousins from a family of small, simple microbes known as Mycoplasma. Nor do the researchers know exactly how the transplant took hold. But somehow the new genes cleanly replaced the old and started working correctly not very often, but in just enough cells to prove the concept.

The experiment “is a landmark in biological engineering,” said Dr. Barbara Jasny, a deputy editor of Science.

pcworld: When it comes to brokering the peace between HD DVD and Blu-ray, we tend to think of multi-format players, so it’s easy to forget that Warner Home Video was supposed to be releasing a hybrid two-sided disc format called Total HD later this year. It’s one of those everybody-wins formats because consumers are guaranteed a usable disc and Warner cuts costs and maximizes shelf space.

So, uh, what’s happening with that?

It seems that Warner’s holding off until they can build up a critical mass of Total HD titles, in the area of 10 or 20; that way retailers can group them together and they won’t get lost amid all the not-so-Total HD discs. So your dual-format bliss will have to wait until early 2008.

cnet: The next generation of computer games, sporting more realistic visuals than ever, is not yet in full swing, but a range of new graphics chips is letting gamers beef up their PCs today in anticipation.

It’s the latest round in the grudge match between Nvidia, the last remaining independent graphics chip company, and ATI Technologies, which was folded into PC processor maker Advanced Micro Devices last year.

The new chips are some of the most impressive pieces of silicon ever produced–sporting more than half a billion transistors and hundreds of processing engines, and accompanied by more than half a gigabyte of memory.

The magic lies in their ability to run games using DirectX 10, the latest version of the software from Microsoft, enabling games to run on its Windows operating system.

Only a handful of games take advantage of DirectX 10 now, but the most anticipated releases later this year–jungle shooter Crysis, online role-playing game Age of Conan and Unreal Tournament 3–all use it.

“People are buying the new cards because you buy with a degree of headroom to support games coming down the pipeline. People want to buy today knowing they can maximize that experience,” AMD spokesman Jon Carvill said.

AMD brought its newest Radeon chip to the table last month, giving it a powerful product to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce lineup, which it refreshed in late 2006.

Reviewers have praised the $400 Radeon 2900 XT’s specs and said that although initial tests showed it underperforming a comparable Nvidia card, the results should improve as AMD’s engineers tweak its software.