News

indianexpress: It has been 13 days since the forest department took two elephants that were roaming on the city’s streets into its custody. However, there has been no legal action against the mahouts, who, since they are permitted to take the elephants for a daily walk, continue to use them to collect alms. Moreover, with no court orders sought, the question about permanent custody of the elephants remains.

The elephant is protected under schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act, and using it for begging is banned under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.
 
Two female elephants, Lakshmi and Poornima, aged between 50 and 60 years, were seized during a raid by the forest department after a tip-off by animal rights group People For Animals (PFA) on June 6. The mahouts, who had no certificates to establish ownership of the elephants, managed to escape along with the elephants, and were recaptured on June 7, after which the elephants were brought to the Peshwe Park, where they are being kept in a shelter.

Both elephants have health-related problems. Lakshmi has cataract and is partially blind in both eyes. Both have wounds in the trunk, feet and the head, which, according to sources, were caused due to prodding with a sharp instrument called ankush.

Upkeep costs Rs 2,000 per elephant and the daily fodder includes bitter gourd, sugarcane, jaggery, fresh vegetables like carrots and cabbage, and mixed varieties of grass.

On June 7, the forest department agreed to take legal custody of the elephants, while the PFA agreed to bear the initial upkeep costs till court orders were received. “It has now been 13 days, and we have paid over Rs. 30,000 for the elephant’s feed, and we are running out of funds,” said PFA animal welfare officer Manoj Oswal.

indianexpress: The cantonment general hospital is set for a makeover soon. Apart from a revamp of the 100-bed Sardar Vallabbhai Patel Cantonment General hospital (SVPGH), the hospital will house a superspeciality clinic in the future. In fact, the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) plans to rope in private players to run the clinic on a Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis, the proposal for which will be finalised within a fortnight.

Currently, Ruby Hall Clinic and five other private hospitals have pitched in to set up the superspecialty hospital. The SVPGH has a 70 per cent occupancy rate but often has had to transfer patients to bigger hospitals for want of superspecialty treatment. S K Sardana, CEO of PCB told Newsline that the need for a superspecialty hospital arose due to lack of one in the cantonment area. “People with heart or kidney problems cannot avail of treatment at the cantonment hospital since facilities are not readily available. So the PCB decided to tie up with a group of hospitals and provide the faculties,” Sardana said.

The proposed superspecialty hospital will have an Intensive Care Unit, trauma care centre and other facilities like labs and CT scans. Moreover, it will also act as a source of revenue for the PCB. “The board will earn revenue by leasing out space admeasuring five acres and more to the private trust to run the superspecialty hospital,” Sardana said.

The new hospital will come up in place of the nurses’ quarters that are in a dilapidated condition. “Six proposals have been received and presentations have been made by the private parties,” Sardana also said.

Cantonment residents can expect a special discount of 20-25 per cent on medical bills.

indianexpress: After five-year-old Hritik Shivaji Deshmukh, a resident of Wadgaon Rasai hamlet of Shirur tehsil died after falling into a 150-feet borewell on June 17, the district administration has undertaken a drive to block unused borewells in the district.

The drive, organised jointly by the district collectorate and Zilla Parishad, will cover all 1,800 villages in the district. District Collector Prabhakar Deshmukh said the drive will check both public and private borewells that are not in use. “With such incidents on the rise, there is need to take coercive action and we would be blocking the unused ones to prevent such incidents, he said.
 
ZP CEO SK Bankar said there are a total of 9,294 public borewells of which 500 are damaged. He added that a notice in this regard will be issued to all gram panchayats. “We will immediately take up a check on the utility of the borewells and if not in use, they would be closed,’’ he said.

While public borewells are six inches in diameter, private borewells are eight inches and are found in plenty in all villages. Bankar said that in case of these eight inch diameter borewells, if the casing of the lid were to wear off, the gap would widen to almost 12 inches making them extremely dangerous. He added that the entire drive should be completed in a month’s time.

Hritik had fallen into the borewell while playing with his younger brother even as his parents were weeding the fields. The child got stuck around the 12 feet mark where the diameter was six and half inches. The incident was immediately reported to Shirur police by the sarpanch.

Last July, the city and Pimpri-Chinchwad were on flood alert after the Mutha and Pavana rivers swelled to ominous levels, following release of water from Khadakvasla and Pavana dams.

indianexpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has prepared Action Plan 2007 to combat possible flood situation this monsoon. The flood control scheme is a detailed plan released by the civic administration in June announcing its preparedness to deal with possible floods.

This includes 24-hour, equipped flood control rooms in the PMC, police commissionerate, district collectorate and Sinchan Bhavan that will be operational during the monsoon and separate vehicles that will move in the city to alert people about the floods.
 
Irrigation officials will alert the PMC about the discharge of water from Khadakvasla twice a day. The warning will be issued to people residing along the river if the discharge from Khadakvasla crosses 45,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) and they will be shifted when it crosses 50,000 cusecs. The PMC will also seek help from NGOs and Ganesh mandals to shift people to safe places. Zonal officers will coordinate with the NGOs and mandals in their areas.

The PMC will provide PMT buses and trucks to shift those affected to civic schools. In addition, the PMC will set up 39 help centres.

A list of PMC officials and their responsibilities during emergency has been sent to the ward offices. These officials have been asked to take stock of the situation and provide basic amenities to people shifted to relief camps. Meanwhile, the PMC has appealed to those living in the riverbed to move out before water levels rise.

The PMC’s flood control room can be contacted on 25501130.

indianexpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has prepared Action Plan 2007 to combat possible flood situation this monsoon. The flood control scheme is a detailed plan released by the civic administration in June announcing its preparedness to deal with possible floods.

This includes 24-hour, equipped flood control rooms in the PMC, police commissionerate, district collectorate and Sinchan Bhavan that will be operational during the monsoon and separate vehicles that will move in the city to alert people about the floods.
 
Irrigation officials will alert the PMC about the discharge of water from Khadakvasla twice a day. The warning will be issued to people residing along the river if the discharge from Khadakvasla crosses 45,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) and they will be shifted when it crosses 50,000 cusecs. The PMC will also seek help from NGOs and Ganesh mandals to shift people to safe places. Zonal officers will coordinate with the NGOs and mandals in their areas.

The PMC will provide PMT buses and trucks to shift those affected to civic schools. In addition, the PMC will set up 39 help centres.

A list of PMC officials and their responsibilities during emergency has been sent to the ward offices. These officials have been asked to take stock of the situation and provide basic amenities to people shifted to relief camps. Meanwhile, the PMC has appealed to those living in the riverbed to move out before water levels rise.

The PMC’s flood control room can be contacted on 25501130.

Last July, the city and Pimpri-Chinchwad were on flood alert after the Mutha and Pavana rivers swelled to ominous levels, following release of water from Khadakvasla and Pavana dams.

indianexpress: Scientists have successfully coated a liquid surface with a thin layer of silver metal, creating a highly reflective mirror that could be used to create mammoth liquid-mirror telescopes on the moon.

Such a lunar observatory could be as wide as football a field, letting scientists peer back to a time when the first stars in the universe were born.

Researchers led by Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec, Canada, applied the silver film layer to the surface of an ionic liquid, a fluid that consists only of charged particles called “ions.” Table salt, if heated above 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), melts and transforms into an ionic liquid.

The researchers used a commercially available ionic liquid called ECOENG 212, which has a viscosity between that of water and honey. They applied electric current to silver strands suspended in the ionic liquid while in a vacuum environment. The silver evaporated and “that coats the liquid with a thin reflective layer of metal,” Borra said. “It’s basically the same technique used to coat a glass mirror with aluminum or gold.”

The technique is detailed in the June 20 issue of the journal Nature.

msnbc: Scientists have successfully coated a liquid surface with a thin layer of silver metal, creating a highly reflective mirror that could be used to create mammoth liquid-mirror telescopes on the moon.

Such a lunar observatory could be as wide as football a field, letting scientists peer back to a time when the first stars in the universe were born.

Researchers led by Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec, Canada, applied the silver film layer to the surface of an ionic liquid, a fluid that consists only of charged particles called “ions.” Table salt, if heated above 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), melts and transforms into an ionic liquid.

The researchers used a commercially available ionic liquid called ECOENG 212, which has a viscosity between that of water and honey. They applied electric current to silver strands suspended in the ionic liquid while in a vacuum environment. The silver evaporated and “that coats the liquid with a thin reflective layer of metal,” Borra said. “It’s basically the same technique used to coat a glass mirror with aluminum or gold.”

The technique is detailed in the June 20 issue of the journal Nature.

bbc: Google would consider keeping a user’s search data for longer than 18 months if they had explicitly consented, one of the firm’s key executives has said.
The web giant currently anonymises a user’s search history after 18 months.

There are concerns among some privacy advocates that Google could know too much about a user’s web history.

But Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search, said the firm would look at letting users opt in to having their search data held for longer.

Google currently offers an opt-in personalised search facility, which learns how and what users search for in order to improve the accuracy of results.

Personalised search

Speaking at a press event in Paris, Ms Mayer said: “Personalised search tracks and shows you in your search history the clicks and trends of your searches.

“Based on what we see as your searching pattern it ultimately can enhance your result.

“There’s a simple way to turn it on and off. We will only use the data that a user gives us to target personalised search.”

Google anonymises that information after 18 months and so the search engine has to re-learn the patterns of user behaviour.
 Our goal is to have a Google search as fast as a light beam to and from our data centres from your location

Marissa Mayer, Google

She said: “We have declared that we keep our records of searches for 18 months. We think that this was a good compromise and also something which benefited our users.

“Eighteen months is sufficient to do a good job of personalising so we think that personalised search will continue and will be successful.

pcworld: Nvidia, known for graphics processors designed for video gaming, is expanding into the market for high-performance computing processors.

Nvidia today introduced the Tesla line of processors, which it bills as making high-density parallel processing capabilities available in workstation computers.

The Tesla graphics processing unit (GPU) features 128 parallel processors and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation. A gigaflop refers to the processing of a billion floating point operations per second. Nvidia envisions the Tesla being used in high-performance computing environments such as geosciences, molecular biology or medical diagnostics.

Nvidia also will offer Tesla in a workstation, which it calls a “Deskside Supercomputer,” that includes two Tesla GPUs, attaches to a PC or workstation via a PCI-Express connection, and delivers up to 8 teraflops of processing power. A teraflop is the processing of a trillion floating point operations per second.

A Tesla Computing Server puts eight Tesla GPUs with 1,000 parallel processors into a 1U server rack.

The list price for the Tesla GPU would start at US$1,499 and the deskside computer at $7,500. Both will be available beginning in August. Qualification samples of the Computing Server, with a list price of $12,000, will be available in September. The product will be fully available in the November-December time frame, Nvidia said.

cnet: For months, the industry has been calling on Microsoft to ease restrictions forcing customers to use only the priciest versions of Windows Vista for desktop virtualization.

It was not surprising, then, when Microsoft started telling reporters and analysts that it was going to change the policy and allow lower-priced home versions to also be used. What was surprising to journalists, bloggers and analysts alike was a terse statement e-mailed Tuesday night from Microsoft stating that the company was reversing its plans and sticking with the old restrictions.

“Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last fall,” the company said in its e-mail. A company representative declined to comment further or say what prompted the move.

Once the domain of true geeks, virtualization is creeping into the mainstream. The technology, which allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on one computer, has become particularly important for Mac users who want to run Windows programs side-by-side with the Mac OS.

All along, Microsoft has been saying there are security risks associated with the latest generation of virtualization technology. Indeed, a researcher showed a program at last year’s Black Hat security conference that showed how virtualization could allow malicious code to operate invisibly, similar to a rootkit. And, in discussing its plans to ease the restrictions, Microsoft said it still had security concerns, but had concluded it was better to let users decide whether to take on those risks.