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indianexpress: IT was celebration time at Anglo Urdu Girls’ High School this year too when two students — Bibi Raza Maghrabi and Tanzeela Shaikh — bagged the top two ranks in the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination held in February 2007. While Maghrabi topped the Pune division with 95.69 per cent, Shaikh came second with 94.46 per cent, sharing the second rank with Abhijit Mukhekar of Shree Samarth Vidyamandir, Ahmednagar.

Both are students of the Maharashtra Cosmopolitan Education Society’s Golden Jubilee Education Trust-sponsored coaching classes conducted for standard X students. “I started studying right after standard IX results in May, beginning with four hours a day in the beginning, and later putting eight hours daily as the examination approached. This was excluding the time spent in classes,” said Maghrabi, who found Mathematics the toughest to tackle.
 
Her father runs a medical store and she wants to enter the medical field. “I am interested in biology, especially clinical research,” said Maghrabi. The next step is to perform well in standard XI and XII. Both Maghrabi and Shaikh will now join the MA Rangoonwalla Talent Promotion Scheme’s scholar batch, that will groom them.

For Shaikh, the aim to get a rank was the biggest force. “It kept me going even when I found it difficult to wake up every morning at 5.30 am,” she said. Shaikh, whose father is a head clerk at the Abeda Inamdar Senior College, says she wants to become a doctor. “This has been our greatest dream, and we are very proud that she is pursuing it,” said Shaikh Aqueel, her father.

This year’s performance is yet another feather in the cap of the Anglo Urdu Girls High School, which has had 24 girls in the merit list since 1993. “Since 2002, our students have been securing top ranks consecutively,” said Anglo Urdu Girls School principal Aziza Mahmood Khan.

indianexpress: FOR those who spread rumours in times of disaster, here is a word of caution. With the district collectorate deciding to implement section 54 of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, in letter and spirit from this year, such people might just end up in prison.

Section 54 of the act states: “Whoever makes or circulates a false alarm or warning as to disaster or its severity or magnitude, leading to panic, shall on conviction, be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to one year or fine.”
 
Talking to Newsline, district collector Prabhakar Deshmukh, who is also the chairman of the District Disaster Management Authority (DDMA), said strict action will be taken against rumour mongers. “We have witnessed how false warnings circulating during flood situations in the past two monsoons created unnecessary panic,” he said.

Deshmukh added that citizens should call the DDMA’s toll free number 1077 for authentic information during such times.

Recalling the last two monsoons, Deshmukh said that rumours ranging from inundation at various places in the city to increasing water levels of dams leading to largescale release of water had caused immense chaos and confusion among citizens. “Strict action is needed against rumour mongers because such false alarms cause waste of time and energy,” he said.

In fact, the caution is also for the media. The district collector said false warnings in the audio visual and print media too will be dealt with severely. “Last year, a leading channel was flashing news on release of huge amounts of water causing panic and confusion among the viewers,” he said.

The other sections of the act that will be implemented strictly include section 51 that deals with people refusing to comply with any directive given by the district or state authority. Section 52 deals with false claims of relief and benefits during disasters, while section 53 deals with officials indulging in misappropriation of relief material.

indianexpress: WITH another low pressure area forming over northwest Bay of Bengal off the Orissa coast, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast increased rainfall activity in the State.

Pune is expected to get a few spells of rain over the next 48 hours. The city on Tuesday recorded 2.4 mm rainfall till 5.30 pm taking the total rainfall for June to 194 mm, against the normal of 100 mm for the month. Deputy director general (weather forecasting) A B Mazumdar said the low pressure development will only enhance rainfall activity in the State, Chattisgarh and Orissa.
 
“There will be increased rainfall activity in the coming two to three days,” he said.

The earlier depression in the Bay had seen increased rainfall activity in the State and the second one in a week’s time will only renew the rainfall activity, he said.

indianexpress: RELIANCE Communications and Cisco Systems have joined hands to launch Reliance Business Internet Services for the small and medium enterprises in the city. This foray into wireless broadband that begins with Pune will soon be rolled out nationally.

With the first mover advantage in this market, Reliance is hoping to reach out to this scattered business community. “This is not about wireless technology but much more profound. This segment is about who gets in first. It will become bigger than the current large enterprise business,” said Prakash Bajpai, president and CEO, Reliance Communications.
 
Bajapi added that through this move Reliance will be taking away the headache of managing the IT component of their business for the enterprises so that they can focus on their core business.

The service has been designed to address the pain points of a small business such as capital investment pressure, lack of access to IT and networking skills, securing the business data and rapid obsolescence available in the country where solutions were being converted into a service, Bajpai said.

Reliance’s service will converge with technology from Cisco, applications from SAP and offer the SME customers a chance to use IT without heavy capex and instead offer a subscription-based pay per use model. Reliance Business Internet Services is targeted at small companies employing below 50 people and medium size companies having less than 300 employees.

indianexpress: Strengthening of its fleet tops the agenda in the Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) budget, with a Rs 392.96 crore outlay, submitted to Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s standing committee on Tuesday. It will also usher in, for the first time, concession for senior citizens even as computerisation of the office and its seven depots will vie for top honours with employee welfare activities.

On the revenue side, ticket sale is expected to account for Rs 224 crore, passes will bring in Rs 45 crore while non-operational activities like advertising and leasing out of PMT properties will earn the utility Rs 7.67 crore.

“The present fleet is 1,126 buses including the newly purchased 200 buses. We will receive 300 more buses — all of them to be hired,” PMT chairman Bhimrao Patole said. The Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT) in a survey about a year ago had suggested a fleet strength of over 1,400 buses for PMT to cater to the city population.

In another initiative, certain to please its employees, the PMT has decided to build flats for its staffers in the vacant properties owned by the body in Kothrud, Katraj and Hadapsar. “The PMT has 96 flats at its employee colony in Shankarsheth road. We will build another 800-1,000 flats in vacant areas at our depots this year,” Patole said.

The PMT will also give away a part of its Petit Estate building for public parking on a BOT basis. Anticipating demand for compressed natural gas (CNG) in the days to come, PMT is planning to supply CNG from its depots, with the approval of the state government, once CNG is available in the city.

The other major focus area will be the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), keeping in mind Commonwealth Youth Games in 2008. The PMT will deploy an officer who will be responsible for checking the bus operations to facilitate the movement of participants and spectators — both from within the city and outside.

indianexpress:  THE property tax for residential properties would be charged from Re 1 to Rs 2.25 per sq feet per month depending on the zone. For non-residential properties, the property tax has been brought down to Rs 4-8 per sq feet instead of the earlier Rs 10 per sq feet.

The PMC has given a major relief to office premises by reducing their property tax rate by 50 per cent from Rs 10 per sq feet to Rs 2-Rs 5 per sq feet. Similarly, the property tax rates for open plot has been reduced and brought from 80 paise to Rs 2 per sq feet if commercially used and 20- 50 paise per sq feet for plot with no use.

Hospitals setting up their own plant for disposing bio-medical waste would not be charged special cleanliness tax while the charitable institutes which were charged property tax as per commercial rates would be charged property tax as per the residential rates.

To encourage eco-friendly housing in the city by introducing various measures, the PMC has announced the societies with eco-friendly measures would be given 50 per cent tax relief.

However the Congress party has criticised the move saying that ruling parties have kept the ready reckoner intact in other form. “ The new rates are not going to make any difference to citizens” said Congress leader Aba Bagul.

indianexpress:  IT is a movement that will make President APJ Abdul Kalam proud. With the goal of bridging the digital divide and taking knowledge beyond boundaries, an online library of over 700 books in English, Marathi and Hindi is being built at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA)’s Muktangan Exploratory Science Centre. The library, available on www.arvindguptatoys.com, has seen 53,000 visitors since it began three years ago.

Initiated by Arvind Gupta, who heads the children’s science centre at IUCAA, the project was inspired by the website www.gutenberg.com, which is the world’s largest online database of free books. “I was fascinated with this concept of a rich variety of books being made available for all to see. In a country where there is a dearth of good public libraries, I felt this was essential,” said Gupta.
 
The books deal with a wide range of topics like pedagogy, environment, science and mathematics, education, war and peace, and even include popular children’s literature from across the world. From the classic Totto-Chan stories to Isaac Asimov’s series of Science Facts, Irawati Karve’s Yuganta to Laurie Baker’s Architecture for the Poor, the library guarantees something for everyone.

A unique aspect of the project is it has made available a vast body of literature in Marathi and Hindi too.

“I was disturbed to see that a huge amount of literature in Hindi was very difficult to access,” said Gupta. Today the Hindi collection, which began with the literature by popular Hindi author Premchand on the occasion of his 125th birth anniversary, amounts to 80.

Popular books like Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Helen Keller’s Three Days to See, and Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand, have also been translated into Marathi and Hindi and digitised.

techtree: Seagate is reportedly launching hard drives; namely the Barracuda 7200.11 and the Barracuda ES.2 that deliver up to 1TB of capacity, and that are meant for both desktop PC and enterprise applications.

A 3.5-inch format drive, the Barracuda 7200.11 spins at 7,200rpm and holds up to 1TB of data.

This 1TB drive with four 250GB platters that use Seagate’s second generation perpendicular recording technology, sports a sustained rate of 105MB/s and a serial ATA (SATA) II interface running at 3GB/s.

The 7200.11 has a low power rating of 8 Watts at idle, making for energy efficiency and cooler operation. The acoustics are as low as 2.7 Bels.

The other drive, the Barracuda ES.2, is the enterprise version, with improved mean time before failure. The drive, having both SATA and SAS (serial attached SCSI) interfaces, again holds up to 1TB of data.

Both new hard drives feature Seagate’s power-saving ‘PowerTrim’ technology, wherein if the drives are reading, separate read electronics can be switched off. Similarly so when the drives are writing…

According to Seagate, the power-controlling mechanism within the drives yields up to 25 percent of power saving over say a drive without the mechanism.

Seagate said its Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 1TB hard drives will begin shipping in the third quarter of this year. The 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 will likely be priced at $399.99 (Rs 18,000 approx).

techtree: Umax has reportedly announced the launch of its AstraPix 630 digital ee:camera, which is light enough to be ferried around, the company said.

About 89.5mm x 58mm x 20mm in size, the AstraPix DC-630CM is effectively a 3.3 megapixel CCD auto-focus camera with a 1.5-inch TFT color display, and an optional SD card slot.

DC-630CM’s specifications include: a tri-mode function, 3.2 megapixels (FW interpolation to 5.0MP), built-in 16MB flash memory, built-in flash strobe, 1.5-inch TFT LCD Display, SD card interface, JPEG/MJPEG (AVI) compression, and 8x digital zoom for preview & playback.

The camera can be connected to a PC with USB, and offers video function as well as red eye reduction with pre-flash. Besides, pictures can be displayed as a slide show on a TV screen with TV output.

The camera comes with a rechargeable battery and a charger for around Rs 5,250. It packs accessories including USB cable, user manual, and CD software.
 

techtree: Kingston Technology has announced two USB microSD reader plus card bundles that are designed for moving data between multiple mobile phones, PCs, and other digital devices.

The bundles have a USB connector and memory expansion slot that accepts the microSD card format. Effectively, there is no need to carry additional USB cables or wait endlessly for Bluetooth transfers to take place between cell phones and PCs.

The USB microSD Reader looks like a separate drive letter when in use, and data transfer is as easy as a drag-and-drop. Besides the bundle can be hung from a mobile phone thanks to the included key loop.

The Reader measures around 1.29-inch x 0.60-inch x 0.30-inch, and has a speed rating up to 13MB/sec read and 3.5MB/sec write.

The new bundles have a Red reader for the 2GB card combo and a Black one for the 1GB combo. The 2GB combo or FCR-MRR+SDC/2GBFE is available for Rs 1,500 while the 1GB combo or FCR-MRB+SDC/1GBFE is priced at Rs 850.

In case of each bundle, the USB microSD reader carries a two-year warranty while the microSD card has a lifetime warranty.

Elaborating on the products, Rajesh Panicker, country manager (India) of Kingston Technology, said, “Consumers now have a handy option to back up contact info when changing phones; moving digital music and videos between PC and phone more easily; and downloading new mobile applications for mobile phones without using additional network time.”