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indianexpress: From class bullies, overcrowded rickshaws, rude bus conductors, to dirty drinking water in schools, a range of problems were discussed at the meeting of school representatives for the Balsena (children’s army) on Monday. As per directives issued by the District Collectorate to the Zilla Parishad Education Department, regional committees will be set up in each area in the city, comprising representatives from schools in the area.

The meeting, conducted at the Garware Balbhavan, saw some 42 students from 18 schools come together to chalk out an agenda and decide the modalities of setting up regional committees. This included schools like Rewachand Bhojwani Academy, More Vidyalaya, Maharashtra Mandal School, Nanasaheb Parulekar School, and Sane Guruji School, as well as some teachers.

Balsena, a group formed by the child rights organisation Childline aims at empowering children to fight for their own rights.

The regional committees, which will be operated from one of the schools as a regional centre, will comprise two members nominated from each school. “By next Monday, all school representatives have to come up with a list of nominated regional committee members, recruited Balsena members and a list of the specific problems faced by school children in their area,” said 11-year-old Maharashtra Mandal School student Gautami Joshi, who has been designated as the ‘public relations officer’ for the Balsena.

Apart from this, the meeting also highlighted the previous work done by the Balsena, including toilet hygiene surveys and anti-child labour drives. Students also expressed their views on various issues they felt should be included on the Balsena’s agenda.

indianexpress: The Yerawada police arrested three medical students from DY Patil Medical College, Phugewadi, for assaulting a well-known city-based cardiologist on Saturday night.

The suspects, identified as Yuvraj Singh Surjit Singh Cheema (21), of Punjab, Robins Rakesh Goyal (21), of Delhi and Saurabh Sukuram Pal Singh (22), of Ghaziabad were arrested after a complaint was lodged against them by Dr Manoj Durairaj (36), of Tridal Nagar, Yerawada.

According to the police, the inebriated trio were in their Santro when they picked up a quarrel while overtaking Dr Durairaj’s car near Bund Garden bridge around Saturday midnight and assaulted him with a broken liquor bottle.

Cheema and Goyal are third year MBBS students while Saurabh is in his second year, the police said.

The suspects first gave their names as Anurag Suranjit Singh Thapar, Rushiraj Rakesh Patil and Rohit Param Singh Khurana, the police said.

Investigation officer PSI Amarnath Waghmode said, “The trio attacked Dr Durairaj with a broken liquor bottle which could have claimed his life had he not ducked. They aimed for his neck but instead he hurt his nose.The trio repeatedly beat him till he wound up the car windows.”

indianexpress:  The Zilla Parishad education department, which was slapped a fine of Rs 5,000 on May 29 by State Information Commissioner (SIC) for Pune Region Vijay Kuvalekar for denying information to school teacher Haribhau Jagannath Bagade under the Right To Information Act, has been sitting on the orders for the past two months.

In a letter to Kuvalekar, Bagade has said neither has the ED provided any information nor paid him the compensation. Kuvalekar had pulled up Public Information Officer (PIO) cum deputy education officer (secondary division) Dnyanoba Bhujbal and other officials over the issue.

Bagade, who worked as a secondary teacher in Swami Vivekanand Shikshan Sanstha’s Chhatrapati Vidyalaya in Wadgaon Rasai in Shirur, nearly 50 km from Pune, was forced to retire on December 31, 1995 after his date of birth was assumed as December 12, 1937. Bagade was born on December 12, 1938.

Bagade approached Lokayukta, Mumbai and Judicial Magistrate Court, Koregaon, Satara where the court, in a verdict on August 29, 2000, upheld Bagade’s date of birth as December 12, 1938. The verdict was validated by Lokayukta, Mumbai.

The State government passed the order to ED, Zilla Parishad and Deputy Education Directorate to immediately arrange for the payment of a year’s salary to Bagade. The order was addressed to the deputy directorate (education), Pune which forwarded it to ED which took no action.

The delay forced Bagade to file an RTI requisition on September 30, 2006 seeking information on the action taken by the department on the State government’s and Education Directorate, Pune’s orders. When no information was forthcoming, Bagade filed the first appeal on November 13, 2006 before Education Officer (secondary section).

indianexpress: When commuters from Mumbai started their journey to Pune to attend office on Monday, they did not have the slightest idea about trains running late due to submerged tracks. It was only when announcements flashed at Dadar, Kalyan and Karjat stations, that the hundreds of people knew they would be late for work.

Officials from Central Railways said submerged tracks and technical snags in signaling system had caused the delay.
 
The heavy downpour in Mumbai on Monday affected trains running between Pune and Mumbai. While the Pune-Mumbai Intercity expresses were delayed by 30 minutes to 1 hour, long distance trains like Mumbai-Bangalore Udyan Express and Mumbai-Kolhapur Koyna Express were running behind their scheduled time by 4 and 2 hours, respectively.

Seema Nair, who works at Shivajinagar and regularly commutes between Mumbai and Pune via the Intercity express had boarded the already crowded Indrayani Express only to realise that it had not crossed Karjat station even though it was 8 am. The train arrives at Pune station at 9.15 am.

Others like Susheela Patil travelling to Pune to meet her ailing sister at Upper Indira Nagar boarded the Intercity Express even though she had a ticket for Deccan Express. “My train was running 30 minutes late and I was afraid of being caught by a train ticket checker for not purchasing a superfast train ticket,” she said.

indianexpress: The City police are all set to get a digital map of all the 21 police stations including a digital map profiling the crime scene in the city. Regarded as a brain child of additional commissioner of police (administration) Shobha Ohatkar, the project aims at providing details of all the police stations and the crime scenes in the city available to the police at the click of the mouse.

The project is a part of a slew of administrative streamlining measures initiated by Ohatekar ever since she took over in the past two months.

Ohatkar said: ‘’The digital map project will facilitate better planning and co-ordination for various administrative exercises. Besides, the existing 21 police stations, the seven new police stations too have been included in the project which will be completed in three weeks time.’’

The other welfare schemes comprise a comprehensive stress management scheme for police personnel , motivational lectures, special training programmes and strengthening of juvenile justice cell along with speedier disposal of pending RTI requisitions.

indianexpress: Cutting across political lines, parties in the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) demanded amendment to the State government circular seeking to recover compensation paid for land acquired against the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR).

Leader of House Anil Bhosale said the municipal administration should urge the State government to amend its circular dated March 23 and make it effective only on TDR proposals mooted after the circular was issued.
 
“The intention of the State government circular was to stop the corruption in granting of TDR. But it should not impact the TDR that has already been granted,” said leader of Opposition Vikas Mathkari. Congress corporator Arvind Sawant demanded to know the TDR granted by the PMC since its introduction.

techtree: Zebronics recently launched it’s first mainstream motherboard, the Nvidia MCP61 based AMD socket AM2 motherboard.

The Nvidia MCP61S IGP combines North- and South- bridge on a single chip, based on C51 and MCP51, with some simplification.

Pradeep Doshi, director of TopNotch Infotronix, said the launch of this motherboard marks Zebronics’ entry into the mainstream motherboard market. Doshi said they are targeting the value-for-money segment and that soon, more boards would follow with different configuration and performance levels.

Nishant Goyal, manager – sales, South East Asia, Nvidia, commended the move by Zebronics, saying Nvidia motherboard GPUs have best-in-class 3D performance and great graphics compatibility to play top games the way they are meant to be played.

The core of the graphics part of MCP61S (MCP61 – 405) is Nvidia GeForce 6. It supports DirectX 9, Shader Model 3.0, Pure Video, and PCI-E, and is fully Windows Vista Premium compliant. The South bridge acts similar to nForce 410, with SATAII supporting RAID 0, 1, and JBOD, built-in 10/100 Ethernet, 8 USB 2 interface, and 7.1 HD audio.

techtree: Creative has introduced it’s Aurvana in-ear ear phones.

Weighing about 13g, these ear phones boast an ultrasonically sealed enclosure that greatly reduces ambient noise.

The ear phones are powered by Balanced Armature drivers, and come with hypoallergenic durable silicone ear buds that Creative says are designed to shield out unwanted noise.

Made of soft silicone rubber, the ear buds come in 3 different sizes. The cable-fit slider allows changing the length of the cable as well as reducing microphonics.

Along with the included adaptor, music can be enjoyed even while flying. The bundled cleaning tool helps keep the ear phones in pristine order.

The Aurvana ear phones come with a sleek travel case with integrated cable management unit. They are available through Cyberstar Infocom and India Digital Life Style Distributors for Rs 3,999, along with a one-year warranty.

bbc: A colossal 28-wheel truck that will help build a major telescope array in the Chilean Andes has successfully passed a series of tests.
The giant vehicle will heave antennas – each weighing 115 tonnes – up a mountainside to the site of the array, a plateau 5,000m above sea level.

The Alma telescope will study the night sky at sub-millimetre wavelengths.

Astronomers say Alma will illuminate one half of the Universe that has hitherto been shrouded in darkness.

  That entire mechanism has to be tested very carefully with dummy weights, as well as the independent steering of the wheels

Adrian Russell, Alma project manager, North America
Alma stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.

When it is completed in 2012, the £470m ($900m) array will be able to observe some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, and catch planets in the act of forming around young stars.

The telescope project will initially comprise 66 high-precision antennas, installed at the high-altitude Llano de Chajnantor site in Chile’s Atacama desert.

Each antenna has a dish measuring about 12m across and a surface engineered to be accurate to within 20 microns (millionths of a metre).

techtree: Google is planning on delivering a much promised technology for fighting piracy on its recently acquired YouTube video sharing Web site.

Reportedly, this was revealed by Google attorney, Philip S Beck, during the hearing of Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google last week.

Beck was quoted as saying that Google is working ‘very intensely’ on a video recognition technology that will be about as sophisticated as FBI’s fingerprint technology. The roll-out of the video recognition technology is expected to be sometime in September this year.

Once the technology is instituted on YouTube, copyright owners will be able to provide a digital fingerprint that will within a minute or two trigger a block from YouTube whenever anyone attempts to upload a copyright video sans permission of the copyright holder.

Google officials have acknowledged that the company is working on a system to deal with copyright videos being uploaded to YouTube without permission. A YouTube spokesperson too said that Google is collaborating with major media companies on experiments with video identification tools.

Every now and then, Google has found itself in deep waters as regards handling of copyright. In March this year, media conglomerate, Viacom, sued the search giant, alleging copyright infringement and claiming up to $1 billion in damages.