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indianexpress: Pune roads, which remain chock-a-block with an array of vehicles throughout the day, have further compounded their misery. Courtesy, the festival of lights which has brought in 13,000 more vehicles — a staggering 10,000 of them being two-wheelers. The auspicious days of Diwali saw sales of two-wheelers touch an all-time high with all major players in the segment announcing maximum discounts and concessions as part of their marketing schemes.

According to RTO officials, two-wheeler sales were on a high for a month. As many as 9,653 two wheelers were sold since October 20. The delivery of these vehicles was taken by the buyers in the past five days or so. “The figure will easily cross 10,000 with the registration office opening on Monday and some outright purchases likely to be registered.”

A major chunk of the vehicles are two-wheelers. “The average daily registration of two wheelers in city is around 300. But in last five days of Diwali, the daily average has crossed 700. Compared to last year’s festive season, the registration of two wheelers is up by 30 per cent,” said officials. The rise in registration is mainly being attributed to the various concessions offered by major two wheeler players. The number of four wheelers registered during this festive season was 3,140.

“Two-wheelers are the need of the hour in Pune. With poor public transport system, two-wheeler is a necessity,” says Prashant Bedekar, a resident of Satara Road, who bought a two-wheeler.

The second-hand two-wheeler market too is abuzz with activity. “The sale had gone up by 30-35 per cent in last five days. The demand for mobikes is on the rise,” said Munir Shaha who deals in second-hand two-wheelers.

indianexpress: In March 2006, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation issued a work order for construction of a grade separator at Akurdi. The project was then estimated to cost Rs 14 crore. A week after the work order was issued, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh “stayed” the construction of the grade separator following objections from the local Congress unit. In September, the CM lifted the stay and the work took off.
 
Twenty months later, the Dilip Band-led PCMC administration has pegged the project at Rs 28 crore — seeking a 100 per cent hike in its expenditure, a move which has drawn fire from corporators and civic activists. The PCMC standing committee has however refused to approve the hike sought by the civic administration. Twice, it adjourned the meeting after its members raised objections to the administrative proposal. The committee has now decided to visit the grade separator site and verify the reasons cited by the civic administration for cent per cent hike in the project cost. “We are not satisfied with the design shown to us by the administration. So, we have decided to visit the spot on Monday. It’s clear that there is some problem with the project and so they want to revised it. But we are also surprised by the massive hike sought by the administration,” said standing committee chairman Ajit Gavahane.

When contacted, PCMC City Engineer Eknath Ugile refused to comment on the reasons advanced by the administration while seeking the Rs 14 crore hike in the project. “We have placed reasons before the standing committee. After the committee’s site visit, we will explain everything,” he said.

Executive Engineer Madan Mohan Salve said the changes in the length, width, height, internal design, hike in steel and cement prices, excavation of hard rock, have all pushed up the project cost. The length of the grade separator which was originally 560 metres, stands at 605 in the revised plan. From 4.50 metres, the grade separator’s height has gone up to 4.85 metres. The plan for two lanes, which earlier measured 7.5 metres each, now have been extended to 9 metres. “Besides these changes, internal design is being improved drastically. The removal of hard rock will require a lot of efforts. Earlier, we had not realised this,” Salve said.

indianexpress: The National Insurance Academy’s (NIA) proposal for Deemed University status is in the final stage with the University Grants Commission (UGC).

In July, UGC made it mandatory for institutes to get accreditation from NAAC (National Assessment & Accreditation Council) or NBA (National Board of Accreditation) before granting Deemed University status. Accordingly the NIA has volunteered for assessment and accreditation by NAAC and a peer team comprising eminent academic experts will be visiting the Academy on November 29 and 30 for assessment and accreditation.

The NIA governing board meeting, headed by T S Vijayan, chairman, Life Insurance Corporation of India, will be held on November 30 at NIA campus. Yogesh Lohiya, CMD of GIC, B Chakrabarti, CMD, The New India Assurance Co, M. Ramadoss, CMD, The Oriental Insurance Co., V Ramasaamy, CMD, National Insurance Co Ltd, G Srinivasan, CMD, United India Insurance Co, G C Chaturvedi, additional secretary and mission director - NHRM, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, J L Bajaj, former additional secretary, MoF, Dr D B Phatak, director of Kawal Rekhi Institute, IIT, Mumbai, three MDs of LIC, president, Insurance Institute of India and executive director, HRD, LIC and the other governing board members will also attend the meeting.

indianexpress: Vilas Lokhande, an agriculture graduate and farmer in Jambroon village, 15 kms from Nanded city has devoted one acre of his land for growing soya bean only through traditional methods like using vermicompost for the soil or cow’s urine for pesticides; i.e. organic methods. What is more important is that he has decided not to use chemicals on this plot. On the remaining three acres, he has sowed other oil seeds including soya bean and is tending the crops the way he has been doing all this time using urea and Diammonium Phosphate.

In this small village, an experiment is on. All 55 families including Lokhande’s have agreed on paper to earmark a part of their land for organic farming see if it can be sustainable and reap them profits at the end of the harvest season. More than three months have passed since the sowing.

“We will compare the cost benefits at the end of this year,” said Dadarao Patil, the sarpanch of Jambroon. On January 10 this year, the villagers held a special panchayat meeting with the Pune-based Maharashtra Organic Farming Federation (MOFF) and resolved in writing that they would give organic farming a chance and allow the NGO to guide them in the process.

“People believe that getting a good yield is impossible without chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We just want to show that it is possible for a farmer to make good money and get a good yield through organic techniques. We have told them that MOFF will not give them any money, only guidance on organic techniques of farming,” said Harbans Singh, coordinator for MOFF in Nanded. “This is a five year project to be completed in stages. In the end, we have promised to help convert Jambroon into a complete self sustaining bio village,” said Singh.

indianexpress: The police crackdown on errant BPO car drivers continued for the seventh consecutive day on Sunday. A search of over 60 cars ferrying employees of BPO units and call centres in Hinjewadi and Yerwada areas was carried out during which a fine of Rs 5000 was recovered from them.

According to the traffic branch, the drive was aimed at checking whether the drivers were adhering to safety norms, possessing valid papers and ensuring security of employees.The police has moved into action only after the rape and gruesome murder of Wipro call centre employee Jyotikumari Chaudhary (22). She was done to death allegedly by her pick-up cab driver and his friend on November 1.

Traffic branch officials said that action was taken against drivers on the charge of rash driving and for not possessing driving licences. Besides, the drivers violated traffic signals and were also found driving at break-neck speed. “This is a dangerous trend which proves fatal for innocent citizens. Only strict action will curb such tendencies. The BPO drivers need to be disciplined at all costs,” a senior traffic branch official said.

techtree: In a significant development, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced launching a high performance chip that applies ‘Parallelism’, a common graphics processors’ technology — to general purpose computing.

The new chip, named “FireStream”, uses an advanced 55 nanometer manufacturing process, and a ‘double precision’ floating point technology for scientific-engineering calculations.

AMD said “FireStream” is based on high-end graphics chips found in Radeon products of AMD’s ATI graphics unit. It features 2GB GDDR3 RAM and a type of memory designed by ATI, besides consuming less than 150 watts power.

The “FireStream” concept stems from people wanting their gaming interaction to be as realistic as possible.

The chip is also a stepping stone for a later AMD product dubbed ‘Fusion’ that will combine a graphics processor with a central processor on the same piece of Silicon.

bbc: The chip industry’s unrelenting quest to build smaller, faster microchips has taken another step forward.
Chip-maker Intel has launched a range of processors, known as Penryn, which will power the next generation of PCs.

The tiny chips contain a novel material and have features just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide.

The only PC processor in the line-up of 16 chips packs 820 million of the tiny switches into an area little bigger than a postage stamp.

“Had we used the same transistors that we used in our chips 15 to 20 years ago, the chip would be about the size of a two-storey building,” said Bill Kircos of Intel.

Paul Otellini, head of Intel, described the challenge of building the chips as “awe-inspiring”.

Although the chip-maker is the first company to make microprocessors with such tiny features, other companies, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), are producing other types of silicon chip.

“We have 45nm designs in production,” said Chuck Byers of the firm.

msnbc: Humans revel in touch. Touch-spoiled babies grow up healthier; lovers can’t keep their hands off each other; and people who master the subtle touch are perceived as friendlier. 

Touch could also be key to making robots accepted by humans as social peers, scientists say. 

On average, robots today can hold human interest for only about 10 hours, but in a new study, a humanoid robot dubbed QRIO (pronounced “curio”) was accepted by human toddlers as “one of them” for 5 months before it was taken away. 
 

“We put in this simple contingency where if the children touched the robot, the robot would giggle,” said study leader Javier Movellan of the University of California, San Diego. “That completely changed everything.” 

msnbc: Since its advent in the early 20th century, the radio has shrunken dramatically from the clunky wooden “cathedral” design of the 1930s to devices you can slip in your pocket. Future radios could be invisible to the naked eye altogether.

Researchers led by Alex Zetttl at the University of California, Berkeley have crafted a fully working radio from a single carbon nanotube 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Carbon nanotubes are man-made microscopic mesh rods composed entirely of carbon atoms.

Fixed between two electrodes, the nanotube vibrates and performs the four critical roles required to receive radio waves: antenna, tunable filter, amplifier and demodulator. Power is supplied by streaming electrons from an attached battery.

Its inventors have already used it to broadcast two songs: “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos and “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys.