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indianexpress: THE documentary film Kachra Kondi (Garbage block) appealing for a change in attitude of citizens about efforts undertaken by the civic conservancy staff will be screened on Sunday. The first screening will be on invitation while a second one at 12 noon will be open to all at National Film Archives of India (NFAI).

The film commissioned by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) tries to look at the lives of conservancy staff including sweepers, garbage lifters, toilet cleaners and people who dispose unclaimed bodies.

There are at present 8,000 conservancy staff under the PMC Employee’s Union while over 5,000 people work in the unorganised sector and are hired by contractors.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, PMC Employee’s Union leader Mukta Manohar — who has also scripted the film — said some initiatives in terms of use of technology like lifting of garbage has given relief to these people nonetheless it is still inadequate.

The Union plans to reach out to a maximum number of people by screening the film during Ganeshotsav.

“We want people to discuss the issue. The more we reach to the common people, the better it will be for the people who work in inhuman conditions,” Manohar said.

Said Atul Pethe, director and producer of the film, “This is a section that is always neglected by the society. They are termed as uncivilised only because they dispose the garbage generated by the civilised society”.

Union member Prakash Jadhav said the Union is also planning to screen the film in PMC gardens in the evening for discussion amongst citizens.

indianexpress:  IN a bid to boost the employability of fresh graduates entering the industry, software giant IBM has launched a four-year Masters in Science (MS) programme aimed specifically at its non-engineering employees in Pune. The programme will be carried out jointly by IBM and the Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology (VIIT).

According to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between IBM and VIIT on Thursday, VIIT will provide the expertise for IBM’s Accelerated Career Excellence (ACE) programme, which will provide the BSc-qualified IBM employees with an opportunity to upgrade their qualification by doing a four-year MS programme in software engineering. The programme, which will be conducted part-time, will be fully funded by IBM.

“The curriculum of the ACE course had been developed jointly by the University of Mysore and IBM in 2006, with an aim to tap the new talent pool among the non-engineering employees and groom their technical skills,” said IBM General Manager for Learning and Knowledge Guru Prasad. This ACE programme will now be started at IBM’s Pune facility.

While the faculty will be provided by VIIT, IBM will provide the necessary funds for the venue, infrastructure, stationery, library facilities, examinations, and internal assessment. The course will be free of cost for the employees. “Classes will be conducted on Saturdays and Sundays. At the end of four years, employees will not only have in hand an MS degree, but also four years of IBM work experience,” said Prasad.

“Lack of employability is a major problem in the industry today. Such models of industry-institute partnership can go a long way in solving this crisis. The venture will also benefit both parties, since in exchange for its expertise, VIIT will get an opportunity to enhance qualifications of the IBM workforce,” said VIIT managing trustee Bharat Agarwal, speaking at the MoU signing ceremony.

indianexpress: Despite the monsoon arriving only on June 18, late by over three weeks as compared to last year when the monsoon hit the district as early as May 31, the storage levels in 24 reservoirs across Pune are comfortably high. While the intensity of rain this year has been far greater, also less water has been drawn for irrigation purposes.

While last year Panshet had received 290 mm rainfall till June 28, this year it has already crossed 447 mm. Similarly Temghar received 280 mm rain last year, while this year it’s almost double that already at 532 mm.

“Most dams in Pune district have received around 10 per cent more rainfall this year compared to the same period last year,” said Vijay Ghogare, executive engineer of the Khadakvasla irrigation division.

This has resulted in the rise of storage levels of the reservoirs. Last year, on June 28, Panshet had 1.12 thousand million cubic feet (tmc ft) of water, while this year it has 2.17 tmc ft. Similarly, at Varasgaon, it’s gone up from 1.32 tmc ft to 1.65 tmc ft this year, at Khadakvasla from 0.34 tmc ft to 0.52 tmc ft and at Pavana, from 3.01 tmc ft to 3.30 tmc ft.

According to Ghogare, unlike last year there is less demand for irrigation from the reservoirs. “This year the districts of Haveli, Daund, Indapur and Baramati received good rainfall and did not need reservoir waters which is another reason why the levels are high,” he said.

If the intensity of the rains continues then the reservoirs will get filled sooner this year, said Ghogare. Last year, waters were released from Khadakvasla spillway on July 3, from Panshet and Varasgaon on June 29. “There is no reason to worry as Pune is well protected against floods,” he said.

indianexpress: THE Pune Pravasi Sangh has demanded starting of trains from Pune that will run exclusively on tatkal bookings. The demand comes in after the Railway Board’s recent decision to run five trains that will depart from Delhi and will be kept exclusively for tatkal bookings.

Sangh president Kanubhai Trivedi said, “After the decision is finalised, the tatkal trains departing from Delhi will go to five destinations including Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Guwahati and Babatpur.”
 
The need for a tatkal train from Pune too comes since trains from here to Benaras, Jammu Tavi, Indore, Howrah, Nagpur and Ahmedabad have a long waiting list, Trivedi said. “The administration can run tatkal trains to certain destinations on a priority basis,” he said.

He also said that tatkal trains in Pune will help passengers to reach their destination comfortably. “They end up paying additional money to touts. Once tatkal trains are started, this money will be saved and commuters will pay only the specified money for a tatkal reservation. Also, hassles will be reduced,” he said.

In a tatkal system, the reservation is done five days before the date of the journey. The passenger is required to pay a certain percentage of the amount to receive the ticket during an emergency.

indianexpress: THE India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast heavy spells of rain in the state going by the well-marked low pressure area over the northwest and adjoining central parts of Bay of Bengal concentrating into a deep depression.

While Pune city on Thursday recorded 18.9 mm rainfall, the IMD forecast for the coming 48 hours is intermittent rainfall. IMD deputy director general of weather forecasting Dr AB Majumdar told Newsline that there is likely to be another formation of low pressure which will see increased rainfall activity as this is the active monsoon phase.
 
“Last year there were several low pressure formations leading to depressions and increased rainfall activity after July 15. This year it is early and the rainfall activity will continue,” he said. The well-marked low pressure area which has intensified into deep depression southeast of Puri sees heavy rainfall activity in the state, especially in the Vidarbha region, Chhatisgarh and northern parts of Andhra Pradesh.

indianexpress:  A TOTAL of 839 admissions were confirmed for the five autonomous engineering institutes in Pune, Mumbai, Nanded and Sangli in the first round of admissions. The centralised admission procedure for the five autonomous institutes began on June 26.

The website of the College of Engineering Pune (COEP), coordinating the centralised admission procedure, confirmed this as of Thursday night.

Of these, 336 seats were confirmed at COEP, 62 at the University Institute of Chemical Technology Mumbai, 244 at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute Mumbai, 36 at Shri Guru Govindsinghji Institute of Engineering & Technology, Nanded and 161 at Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli.

A statement issued by COEP director A D Sahasrabuddhe on Thursday said admissions will continue from 9 am to 5.30 pm, details of which will be put up on www.coep.org.in.

Students selected through this procedure will not be eligible for the centralised admission procedure administered by the state Directorate of Technical Education, which began on June 26.

techtree: IBM has announced its newest supercomputer, ‘Blue Gene/P’, successor to its Blue Gene/L.

IBM claims ‘Blue Gene/P’ almost triples the peformance of its predecessor, while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving package ever built.

The super new system is engineered to operate at speeds exceeding 1 petaflop operations per second, IBM said.

The ‘Blue Gene/P’ design comprises several low-power chips, connected together by five specialized networks. The supercomputer is described by IBM as a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical — not InfiniBand — network, with a new SMP mode that supports multi-threaded applications.

Later this year, the first ‘Blue Gene/P’ will be deployed by the US Dept of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Meanwhile, IBM has found a competitor in Sun Microsystems, which has also announced its ‘Constellation’ supercomputer. Sun claims ‘Constellation’ has surpassed the 1 petaflop mark.

‘Constellation’ comes with a memory of 52.6TB with 105TB RAM, backed-up by a disk space of 1.73PB. The supercomputer would need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack that holds 768 cores.

The first ‘Constellation’ machine named ‘Ranger’ will be installed at the University of Texas at Austin, and will run at 500 teraflops.

itwire: Developed largely at the company’s Beijing office, the desktop search tool provides speedy access to information held in a variety of files.

“or most Linux users, looking for files, documents, or emails usually involves some combination of ‘find’ and ‘locate,’ but sometimes these tools don’t quite do what you’re looking for, like finding that single PDF containing the specific topic you’re looking for,” said product manager Kan Liu.

The Linux software “includes almost all the features from the first Windows version of Google Desktop Search plus the Quick Search Box, so you can quickly search through all your files, emails, web history, and more.”

Tapping the Control key twice opens the Quick Search box, allowing the entry of search terms.

Google Desktop indexes emails stored in Gmail as well as local files. Importers handle OPenOffice.org files, along with PDFs, man pages and other common Linux file types.

“Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean,” said product marketing manager Mendel Chuang.

techtree: Tul Corporation has announced that beginning next month, it will make available PowerColor mainstream and value X10 graphics cards series HD 2600 and HD 2400.

Both series will offer DX10 support, HD 1080p, Universal Video Decode, and HDMI with 5.1 surround sound.

DX10 support makes for enhanced realism in gaming, while with HD 1080p, users can experience sharper images and more vibrant colors.

Unified Video Decoder technology allows offloading of video decoding from the CPU to the GPU, thus lowering system power consumption. This is especially useful for media center PCs.

Meanwhile HDMI facilitates a single connection from the graphics card to the output device with HD visual and audio capabilities.

PowerColor HD 2600 will be introduced in models: HD2600 XT GDDR4, HD2600 XT GDDR3, HD2600 PRO 512MB, and HD2600 PRO 256MB.

Whereas PowerColor HD 2400 will be introduced in models: HD2400 XT GDDR3 with HDMI dongle, HD2400 XT, HD2400 PRO Passive Edition, and HD 2400 PRO DDR2.

cnet: Liquid cooling is all the rage again in servers, and Dell has jumped into the pool.

The Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker has struck a deal with a component and industrial equipment maker to sell advanced cooling systems and services to data center owners.

Financial terms of the deal between Dell and Emerson Network Power were not disclosed. The agreement was announced Thursday.

One type of supplemental cooling technology from Emerson is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. When the liquid refrigerant is in the pipes near the servers, it absorbs the heat coming off the computers, turns into a gas, and then gets pumped back to a cooling unit. The cooling unit then turns it back into a liquid for another cycle.

The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30 percent to 50 percent as compared with other types of cooling systems, said Fred Stack, vice president of marketing for Emerson, in a presentation in San Francisco. Overall, cooling can consume about half a data center’s electricity. By using a more energy efficient cooling method, IT managers can realize cost savings and, in turn, possibly dedicate more of their budget to servers, Stack said.

“The main reason is that we’ve got the cooling near the (servers),” he said. “We get the cooling coils as close as possible to the computers.”