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indianexpress: CELEBRATIONS were held across the city to mark the 60th year of Independence on Wednesday.

Governor S M Krishna unfurled the national flag at the Council Hall to kickoff the celebrations.
 
At the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) headquarters too, Mayor Rajlaxmi Bhosale hoisted the National Tri-colour in the presence of leaders of various parties in the civic body. Municipal Commissioner Pravinsinh Pardeshi was present along with the PMC staff. The PMC also felicitated 216 citizens for their contribution to the society.

Earlier, the PMC had organised a special programme titled Azadi ke saath saal on the eve of Independence Day on Tuesday.

The Pune divison of Central Railway celebrated the day with a cultural programme.

Around 70 physically disabled students of Asha school near Sub Area HQ celebrated the function by singing patriotic songs. At Sevadham too, a residential school for differently abled students, various cultural programs were held along with a tree plantation drive.

The PMC school board celebrated I-Day with school president Sudhit Janjyot hoisting the tricolour.

indianexpress: The level of discomfort felt as one enters a damp building is rarely due to physiological or psychological reasons. This discomfort called the sick building syndrome is in most cases because of indoor pollution.

While outdoor pollution dominates public perception, a research on the ‘comparative study of particulate matter emitted during cooking in city households using chulha and kerosene stoves’, that will soon be unveiled by the Pune Municipal Commission’s (PMC) Air Pollution Management Cell says that indoor pollution is more intense and deadlier than its outdoor version.

The PMC cell studied indoor pollution levels due to fuels in three places — slum houses, urban kitchens and canteens. The average levels in the slums were 250 microgram per cubic centimetre (µg/cu. cm) when the standard WHO level is 50 µg/cu. cm. The WHO standard exists only for outdoors pollution, however the standards for indoor pollutions are expected to be lower.

“In some city slums the level shot up to 1,800 µg/cu. cm. The highest level was 4,000 µg/cu. cm in a slum house here,” said Ajay Ojha, head of the cell. In canteens the levels of air pollution are 25-50 per cent more than WHO permissible levels while in urban houses it is 10-15 per cent higher, said Ojha.

The cell surveyed 600 slum houses on various parameters — fuel usage, patterns of fuel usage, area of the house, ventilation, hours of cooking, area of cooking — but placed samplers in 50 of them. “We started out with the intention of monitoring the houses during the cooking hours in the morning and evening for a minimum of eight hours. But the smoke was so intense, our samplers got choked within four hours,” said Ojha.

indianexpress: WITH the monsoon slowing down a little, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has also jammed the brakes on its move against encroachments on nallas after it failed to initiate action against 79 structures despite serving a 24-hour notice for their demolition.

The PMC had earlier come under attack for failing to act against encroachments on nallas and alongside the Ram Nadi which had resulted in the flooding of various parts of the city on July 2.

After drawing flak, the PMC took the anti-encroachment drive on a war-footing, issuing notices to 321 structures. During the process, a 24-hour notice was given to 125 structures and a 30-day notice to 158 structures.

According to the information furnished to Congress corporator Nitin Jagtap, the PMC said it has completed action against 46 of the 125 structures to which it had served 24-hour notices, however no action has been taken against the rest. As for those structures that had been served a 30-day notice, the civic body said that action has been taken against all of them.

indianexpress:  PUTTING up a united front to protest against the construction of the Balbharati-Paud link road — proposed by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) — members of 12 city-based NGOs along with four citizens have sent a joint letter to Municipal commissioner Pravinsinh Pardeshi opposing the road.

The letter has been signed by representatives of the NGOs National Society for Clean Cities (Satish Khot), Parisar (Sujit Patwardhan), Kalpavriksh (Anchal Sondhi, Tasneem Balasinorwala), Pune Tree Watch (Vinod Jain), Pune Traffic and Transportation Forum (Ashok Shreenivas), Centre for Developmental Studies and Analysis (Aneeta Benninger), Tekdi (Saili Palande), Gomukh (Vijay Paranjapye), Nagrik Chetna Manch (SCN Jatar), Akhil Law College Road Parisar Rahivasi Sangh (Rajesh Shende), Centre for Environmental Education (Sanskriti Menon), and the Better Roads Group. Apart from this, former mayor Vandana Chavan, Dr Adhiraj Jogalekar, Anil Kelkar, and Dr Uday Kulkarni have also signed the letter.
 
Listing reasons for opposing the road, the letter states that the road does not achieve the goal of reducing congestion as proposed by the PMC. Two independent studies have been cited, which show that only a fraction of the total vehicles from Senapati Bapat Road would use the link road. “Further, we are concerned over the new congestion at the start and end of this proposed road at the entrance of Symbiosis College and at Paud Phata,” the letter says.

indianexpress: THE National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) — a unit of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) based in Talegaon — has tied up with the Yashwantrao Chavan Academy for Development Administration (YASHADA) to impart training to the state apparatus of disaster management. It has also trained 500 personnel of the state police, home guards and volunteers through a five-day intensive programme on search and rescue operations.

NDRF commandant J S Sandhu said they had been assigned three primary roles, namely — quick and effective response, training in state-of-the-art technology in various aspects of disaster management, and to build capacity of fighting disasters through community training. “We have also tied up with YASHADA to train volunteers in three- or five-day modules in disaster response,” Sandhu said.

The unit has also raised search-and-rescue teams at taluka and village levels. About 230 volunteers from Thane and 250 from Kolhapur have been trained at a three-day community awareness programme held in respective districts. A separate equipment gallery, housing over 300 state-of-the-art gadgets used in disaster response for handling natural and man-made disasters like nuclear, biological and chemical disasters, was inaugurated by CRPF DIGP C M Bakshi on Wednesday.

techtree: Hot-on-the-heels of Google’s announcement that it will start selling additional storage space to be used across it’s applications, Microsoft has reportedly now announced increasing the storage limit for Windows Live Hotmail from 2GB to 5GB.

The move places Microsoft squarely ahead of Google yet far behind Yahoo!’s unlimited storage offering.

A company blog says the changes will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks together with a series of other upgrades.

Significantly, users will now be able to store 10GB of email data for an annual subscription of $14.99. They will be able to forward email from their Hotmail account to a Gmail or any other email account.

Microsoft has announced other improvements including: the ability to shut off the ‘Today’ feature that shows top news and features on the MSN portal; a new security feature named ‘Report phishing’ that warns about possible scam Web sites linked to emails; better performance for Hebrew and Arabic writers; prevention of duplication of contact information; and the ability to set an automated response; among others.

Meanwhile, the company blog says Microsoft is also trying to make Hotmail run faster, as well as trying to increase the amount of time that messages are stored in the junk and deleted items folders before being automatically flushed.

techtree: Transcend Information has unveiled it’s latest range of tiny, multi-colored USB flash drives named JetFlash V35.

These flash drives come in a variety of transluscent colors; have dimensions of about 58.3mm (L) x 17.3mm (W) x 8.8mm (D); and weigh around 8 grams each.

They are extremely thin and can slide into a shirt pocket or tightly stacked USB ports on desktop or notebook computers. The drives can be used in combination with Transcend’s JetFlash elite software package, downloadable at www.transcendusa.com.

Besides, installing JetFlash elite software offers users access to 8 functions including autologin, PC lock, favorites, secret zip, email, databackup, online update, and my Jetflash.

The V35 drives are fully compatible with hi-speed USB 2.0 and USB 1.1, and have plug-and-play installation. They support Windows 2000/Me/XP/Vista, Mac OS 9.0, and Linux Kernel 2.4.2 or later.

Available in capacities/colors including 8GB(Grape), 4GB(Green Apple), 2GB(Peppermint), and 1GB(Cherry), the drives come with a lifetime warranty.

In India, they are expected next weekend. They will be priced at Rs 800 (1GB); Rs 1,400 (2GB); Rs 2,400 (4GB); and Rs 5,000 (8GB).

techtree: The Galaxy GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB graphics processor is now available through ” ” Technology and Gadgets.

Galaxy GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB has faster core and memory clocks and is best suited for DirectX 10 gaming.

The new graphics processor features a 612MHz core clock, 1,080MHz memory clock, 768MB of memory, and a 384-bit memory interface.

Salient features include: Nvidia unified architecture with GigaThread technology; full Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0 support; Nvidia SLI ready; 16x full screen anti-aliasing; true 128-bit floating point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting; Nvidia Quantum Effects physics processing technology; two dual-link DVI outputs supporting two 2560 x 1600 resolution displays; Nvidia PureVideo technology; PCI Express support; OpenGL 2.0 support; built for Microsoft Windows Vista; and Nvidia ForceWare Unified Driver Architecture (UDA).

bbc: The ultimate solution to the Rubik’s cube has come closer thanks to hours of number crunching on a supercomputer.
The research has proved that a Rubik’s cube can be returned to its original state in no more than 26 moves.

The supercomputer took 63 hours to crank out the proof which goes one better than the previous best solution.

The two computer scientists behind the research project believe that with more work they could push the move count even lower.

Cube crunching

It took some smart thinking by graduate student Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman from Northeastern University in Boston to come up with the proof because cranking through the 43 billion billion possible Rubik’s cube positions would take too long even for a supercomputer.

Instead, the scientists used a two-step technique in their calculations.

bbc: A team of UK researchers is combining the power of social network Facebook with communications tool Bluetooth to learn more about human interactions.
Bath University scientists have created a tool which can use the unique ID of Bluetooth devices, like a mobile phone, to build new friendship networks.

Users register with the Facebook tool, called Cityware, that tracks encounters in the real world via Bluetooth.

It is part of a wider project backed by Nokia, HP Labs and Vodafone.

Dr Vassilis Kostakos, research associate at the University of Bath, said: “Networks are everywhere - social and digital.

“The really nice thing about Bluetooth is that when you are walking down the street, although you are not talking to anyone, your Bluetooth device can be talking to other devices.

“People with Bluetooth devices are actually creating an ad hoc communications infrastructure where information can flow through the city over time.”

He said the project’s motivation was in helping people find out more information about “familiar strangers”.