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punetimes: The city crime branch on Saturday started a social security cell for the women and children of Pimpri-Chinchwad and the adjoining areas.

The office of the social security cell is situated near Kesari Sanghvi college in Pimpri near the crime branch’s unit III office. The cell was inaugurated by Rajender Singh, additional commissioner of police, while Dhananjay Kamlakar, additional commissioner of police, Anil Kumbhare, deputy commissioner of police (crime) and Vinod Satav, assistant commissioner of police (crime) were present on the occasion.

About 150 women and a few children were also present.Police inspector Rajendra Bhamre, social security cell, told TOI that five counsellors had been posted in the branch.

Earlier, women and children, especially those from the lower middle class and the poor would have to travel all the way to the city police commissionerate, a distance of about 20 km, to seek police assistance and intervention in family troubles and social issues.

Bhamre said that the social security cell at the city commissionerate receives about 500 cases, of which some 25 per cent were from Pimpri and Chinchwad.

punetimes: The Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation’s (PCMC) standing committee approved the allotment of tenders for the rehabilitation of seven slums in the township at a cost of Rs 592 crore.

The approval was granted at a special meeting of the standing committee held at the PCMC main office building in Pimpri on Saturday. Speaking to reporters, Dilip Band, commissioner, PCMC, said that the PCMC has been able to save Rs 156 crore after negotiations conducted with the contractors.

Band said that the total cost of the rehabilitation projects quoted by contractors was Rs 748 crore but they agreed to lower costs after discussions with the civic officials.

The PCMC will construct 18,000 flats in an effort to make the Pimpri-Chinchwad township slum-free by 2011. It will rehabilitate seven slums of the Ajanthanagar, Udyognagar, Vetalnagar, Milindnagar, Vitthalnagar and Ota scheme in Sector 22. These slums are being rehabilitated under the Union government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission (JNNURM). The PCMC has received approval for these projects to be implemented under JNNURM.

punetimes: The Pune regional transport office (RTO) has decided to issue notices to operators of maxi cabs, which are authorised to carry seven passengers, to apply and increase their carrying capacity to 10, provided the vehicles have space to accommodate the specified number of passengers.

The decision was taken at a meeting of the regional transport authority (RTA) on Friday. However, along with increasing the carrying capacity of maxi cabs, the authority has also increased the tax per passenger.

Earlier, the annual road tax for a 6+1 seater cab was Rs 650 per passenger per year. The tax has been increased to Rs 1,500 per passenger, making it Rs 13,500 per cab annually. Moreover, cab owners cannot take more than 10 passengers in the 9+1 seater, failing which they will be fined.

The RTO will give 30 days’ time to cab owners to change the nature of their vehicle. There are around 150 maxi-cabs plying in the city.

In order to prevent auto rickshaws having rural permit from plying in city areas, the RTA meeting passed a resolution to put a 10 cm wide reflective red colour strip on rickshaws plying in rural areas of the district. Several auto-rickshaw operators who were given permits for rural areas have been reported to be operating in city limits.

punetimes:  Pune airport will have to wait till the winter of 2008 for an instrument landing system (ILS). An ILS helps aircraft land safely in reduced visibility conditions resulting from fog or rain.

With winter setting in and the runway at Lohegaon airport shortened due to ongoing recarpeting work, airliners have expressed fears that the unavailability of a precise navigational tool might affectflight landings and subsequent take-offs. Winters in Pune are marked by heavy fog, which results in poor visibility.

Pune airport director, Captain Deepak Shastri, said an ILS would be installed and commissioned at Pune airport only in the latter half of 2008. “The project, which will cost around Rs 100 crore, has already been finalised by the Airports Authority of India (AAI),” he said, explaining that the airport authorities are now co-ordinating with other concerned agencies, including the IAF on the details.

“The ILS is part of the overall upgradation plan of the airport. It will operate 24 hours under all weather conditions,” another airport official said.

As far as this winter is concerned, Shastri said that the airport authorities did not anticipate much trouble, considering the restricted operational hours from 10.30 am to 6.30 pm. Flights are allowed to land and take-off only between 11 am to 5.30 pm.

techtree: D-Link India has unveiled its ‘Green Ethernet’ technology Gigabit
switches that help reduce power consumption, and save energy without compromising on functionality.

D-Link’s ‘Green Ethernet’ technology implements special power-saving features that detect link status and cable length to adjust power usage. With ‘Green Ethernet’, power consumption of network devices can be greatly reduced, which means less heat dissipation, extended product life, and lower operating costs.

The key benefits of the technology include: saving of power when desktop-to-switches are idle, and optimization of power usage on detection of cable length.

Most switches by default send full power to fulfill a 100m cable reach, regardless of the cable length. However, the cable is typically less than 20m. In this scenario, D-Link’s ‘Green Ethernet’ technology automatically detects cable length, and optimally adjusts power usage to save energy.

Also when users shut-down their computers at night, they rarely ever turn-off their switches, which continue to use considerable power. ‘Green Ethernet’ puts the port in a “sleep mode”, thus reducing power used by the port, thus saving on power.

‘Green Ethernet’ is D-Link’s eco-friendly answer to saving the earth’s environment as part of the global warming alert.

pcworld: Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday took a step toward delivering its next-generation Phenom processor, launching graphics cards that will work with the upcoming processor to provide better graphics.

The next-generation Phenom quad-core processors, due out next week, are part of the “Spider” platform, which uses cards, the processor and a chipset in one platform to deliver better graphics, performance-per-watt and improved high-definition video.

The Phenom launch is part of the promise AMD made when it acquired ATI last year to deliver chips that enhance graphics capabilities. After acquiring ATI for US$5.4 billion, AMD said it would work on a chip code-named “Fusion,” which will integrate a GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU on a single die. Fusion is expected to be delivered by late 2008 or early 2009.

Though Spider has separate parts and doesn’t combine a graphics processor and CPU on a single die, it is moving toward delivering Fusion, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the graphics product group at AMD.

pcworld: Ever get mad trying to figure out why your version of “Voodoo Child” doesn’t sound like Jimi Hendrix?

Help is at hand from what is described as the world’s first robot guitar — an electric guitar that not only keeps itself in tune even after string changes but also allows players to access six non-standard tunings at the push of a button.

After 15 years of research, Gibson Guitar is launching a limited edition Les Paul Robot Guitar next month that has set players abuzz with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

“It will not make you a better guitar player but it will allow the average player to access some very sophisticated tunings,” Gibson Guitar Chief Executive Henry Juszkiewicz told Reuters on Tuesday.

The six non-standard preset tunings were used on hits ranging from “Honky Tonk Women” by The Rolling Stones and Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” to Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” and Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”

Gibson says the robot guitar is aimed at amateurs who have a hard time keeping their guitars in tune, as well as professionals who now use technicians during concerts to keep about 100 guitars tuned to different keys.

msnbc:  To build a better robot, scientists increasingly are looking to nature, making robots that move and interact socially with cockroaches, slither like a salamander and even learn and make decisions like humans.

The new designs, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that robot science is finally catching up with science fiction.

One team of European researchers, led by Jose Halloy of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, created cockroach-sized robots that interacted with their living counterparts.

While they did not look like cockroaches, they were coated with chemicals to make them smell like cockroaches.

And they behaved like robots, so much so that they influenced their roach clan into making a bad choice of shelter, choosing a light shelter rather than a darker one.

“What is new here is that the robot is autonomous, it is not remote-controlled by humans, and it acts at the social level in a group (of) living insects,” Halloy said in an e-mail.

By changing some parameters, the robotic cockroaches infiltrated the group and influenced its behavior.

“We see them as a tool to explore decision-making mechanisms in group-living animals,” Halloy said.

msnbc:  Forget Disneyland. South Korea hopes to draw interest to its burgeoning robotics industry with robot theme parks.

The Commerce Ministry announced a proposal Tuesday to build two parks by 2013 for $1.6 billion.

South Korea regards robotics — which includes software and hardware used mostly in manufacturing but also in some consumer appliances and other devices — as a key area for economic development. The young field has grown about 40 percent a year since 2003, according to the ministry.

Combining culture and entertainment with robot technology, they are to be built in Incheon, just west of Seoul, and the port city of Masan, about 242 miles south of Seoul, the ministry said in a statement.

Visitors will be able to interact with robots and test new products.

The project still needs to be approved in a feasibility study next year before getting off the ground in 2009, the ministry said.