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indianexpress: Ticketless travel is raking in big money for Pune division of the Central Railway. In the last eight months, the travelling ticket examiners (TTEs) apprehended as many as 52,053 passengers for either not carrying proper tickets or being ticketless. And in the process, the Pune division has netted over Rs 2.2 crore as fine between April and November.

The Pune division includes area between Pune and Baramati (excluding Daund) and Kolhapur to Malavali with 71 stations. Last year, the division had collected Rs 1.6 crore from 38,530 passengers travelling without ticket. The railways officials are attributing this to “increased vigilance” from TTE. “We have increased the number of ticket collectors in the last one year,” said Railway PRO Yogendra Singh. However, the Pune division is still 24 TTEs short. Each person is fined Rs 250, and this holds true irrespective of whether the person is travelling in a local train or a long distance train. “When they are traveling long distances, people think that they will have to pay only Rs 250 even if they get caught, which is less than the actual ticket amount. This is especially true in the north bound trains,” said an official. During holiday seasons, ticketless travel soars. Last month, maximum defaulters apprehended were 9545 people, the highest up till now in this year. “Because of the festive season, more people use trains. Many of them think they can get away ticketless. However, this is the time we are out on full force,” said an official. Likewise, in April, when the summer vacation began, 9,241 people were caught. Officials expect the upcoming Christmas season to reap rich dividends as well. However, there has been a declining trend in apprehending people who travel with excess and unbooked luggage. Till November last year, 19,212 cases were registered last year for carrying unbooked luggage. By this November, the number is down to 17,489. Festive season or otherwise, the numbers are going down. Railway officials say that while more people are traveling ticketless, they seem to be leaving their luggage behind.

indianexpress: After five years of rigorous follow-up, the Pune Municipal Corporation on Tuesday succeeded in getting the no objection certificate from the Defence Ministry for carrying out road development work under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) in the area coming under various defence establishments in the city.

“PMC has at last succeeded in taking work permission for the various road works in the land owned by various defence establishments,” Mayor Rajlaxmi Bhosale told reporters.

She said it will give impetus to the various development works to be carried out under JNNURM before the Commonwealth Youth Games scheduled in October 2008.

In all, 62,230 sq metre land will be released by the Defence Ministry in the city. This will enable the widening of Nagar road, Lohegaon Airport road, Bhau Patil road, development of Sangamwadi-Sadalbaba dargah stretch, construction of a new bridge adjacent to Holkar bridge and also a railway overbridge in Khadki.

PMC is also expecting the no objection certificate for part of the Alandi road and Jaykar road, both owned by the defence establishment.

“The Defence Ministry has issued the NOC after PMC agreed to various conditions of payment for the land as evaluated by the ministry at current rates, construction of boundary walls and construction of any damaged defence estates and a two-way subway for the Sangamwadi-Sadalbaba dargah stretch,” Suraj Mandhare, PMC deputy commissioner, land and estate, said.

indianexpress: It is harvest time in Patan taluka of Satara district. But little did 20-year-old Abasaheb Govind Ghadge know that he would be the next victim of a snake bite. Abasaheb, who was administered three anti snake venom injections at the Rural hospital in Patan, was saved in time and his blood pressure levels were back to normal. Only the hapless Ghadge had to be restricted to the hospital due to the swelling of his right leg.

Shifted to the Sub district hospital at Karad, the medical superintendent Dr V D Sawakhande had no other option but to tackle the problem by giving him a herbal drug pinak. Sawakhande said that Abasaheb had developed resistance to ASV but was back on his feet after they gave him pinak tablets. Earlier trials on some 25 patients suffering from snake bites were conducted in Satara district and the recovery time had considerably narrowed due to the use of pinak, says Sawakhande.

Pinak, manufactured by a Satara-based pharmaceutical company following research and successful trials by Dr. Gita Pawar has helped treat several patients. While Pinak has yet to be approved by the Central Government, this tablet can cure or prevent death instantly as compared to ASV, says Sawakhande. Made by the Shri Bharade Ayurvedic pharmaceutical company, the tablets have been provided to doctors in rural areas. In Pune, a trial was conducted at a government hospital on the tablet’s effectiveness. The tablet helps reduce the dosage of anti-snake venom (ASV) injections and shortens the hospital stay, the directorate of health services is now planning a larger clinical trial.

indianexpress:  After re-tendering the road works to accommodate increasing rates of construction material, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) administration has proposed special relief to those contractors carrying out various works of laying water supply pipeline in the city.

“The increase in price of pig iron — raw material to manufacture pipes — by 25-30 per cent has increased the prices of pipes used for supplying water. It has resulted in slow pace of work by contractors,” Municipal Commissioner Praveensinh Pardeshi said while a proposal was being tabled in the standing committee meeting scheduled on Friday. The civic administration said some contractors already carrying out work in various parts of the city either slowed down their work or refused to carry out any work because the prices of pipes have gone up. Besides, the contractors also quoted 30-35 per cent above tender rates for proposals to undertake new work, the proposal said adding that the re-tendering process would delay the execution of work by three to four months.

The delay in laying water pipelines would also hamper the various road works and other development works undertaken by the PMC, the proposal said.

The special relief for contractors carrying out pipeline work would be applicable for all the works undertaken from June 1, 2007 and include all works carried out in ward offices. However, the contractors delaying the execution of work would not be given the special relief, the proposal also said

indianexpress: Monday morning saw women employees of Infosys, Pune attend a first-of-its-kind workshop on the campus that entailed a demonstration on how to use the pepper spray for self-defence. With about 100 employees in attendance, mainly women and security personnel, Rana Singh, CEO of Bangalore-based Aax Global, the company that manufactures the spray and the one that recently supplied 200 cans to the Pune campus, conducted the workshop. One can of the spray, called Cobra, costs Rs 499.

“I was invited by the Infosys Pune to demonstrate to its women employees the way a pepper can is to be used. Earlier in the month Infosys had ordered 200 cans from our company and they were duly delivered. Now another order is in the pipeline’’ said Singh.

Another big Pune-based IT company too is his client, Singh said.

Confirming this, Satish Kulkarni, head of security, Infosys campus said the workshop was conducted with a view to familiarise the women employees with how pepper sprays work and to encourage them to carry it. According to Kulkarni, the company is looking at equipping all its women employees in Infosys, Pune with cans in the near future.

While Singh has supplied Infosys with pepper cans earlier too, they were mainly for use of the security staff on the campus. This is the first time that orders were placed specially for equipping their women employees with the device, Kulkarni said.

The move is significant in the context of the rape and murder of a 22-year old Wipro call centre employee last month that led to IT companies in the city stepping up security for their employees. A recent survey by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) revealed that women make up 30 per cent of India’s IT industry and this slated to rise to 45 per cent by 2010.

indianexpress: The 101st convocation of the University of Pune (UoP) will be held on December 20, with the degrees handed out by internationally reputed economist and British House of Lords member Lord Meghnad Desai. The convocation will begin at 11 am and will be held at the grounds behind the main building.

Degree certificates will be distributed to students from 9 am to 4 pm. Details of each student’s degree certificate have been sent to the students personally by post. Information will also be available in stream-wise lists on the UoP website www.unipune.ernet.in

Those students who have applied to receive their degrees must produce the receipt of fees for the certificates (‘C’ chalan or bank receipt) as well as the University letter regarding the certificate. The applications must be submitted to the University office.

In case of students who fail to appear for the convocation will be sent their certificates by registered post after January 5.

techtree: Intex India has added the EUP 104, a high-end 1 DIN MP3/CD audio player, to its in-car accessories.

The company claims it is amongst the few models available on the market that are Bluetooth-enabled, feature USB and MMC slots, plus an ‘any-button’ start option.

With the EUP 104, users can listen to music of their choice, loaded not only on a CD or MP3 player, but also on a pen drive, SD/MMC card, and mobile phone. Intex claims the total output of the player is around 50 x 4 W.

In addition to regular functions, the player features a detachable panel, subwoofer output, dot matrix liquid crystal and ID3 tag display, WMA playability, and folder/file search.

The EUP 104 can play 30 preset FM/AM channels, and is priced at Rs 10,000 apiece. It comes with a remote control.

cnet: Intel has released source code for a server software project that lets Fibre Channel communications run on a more ordinary Ethernet network.

Fibre Channel is a higher-end network technology used to connect storage systems to servers. Intel and networking giant Cisco Systems are among those working to adapt it for ordinary and ubiquitous Ethernet technology, a technology called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), appropriately enough.

To further the project, Intel on Tuesday announced the Open-FCoE.org to house the source code. It’s governed by version 2 of the General Public License.

The code itself was announced in November on the project mailing list by Robert Love, a kernel programmer and Intel employee.

computerworld:  IBM announced the availability today of a new corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool aimed at helping users better navigate their personal and corporate social networks.

IBM’s Atlas for Lotus Connections will allow users to identify key experts in a company on specific topics, see how those people are connected and allow employees to seek new contacts through those they have already connected to in the Lotus Connections social networks, IBM said. Atlas is designed to work with Lotus Connections, a set of tools to build social networks that IBM launched in June.

“As people start using the social software and expanding out their networks … there is a lot of value and information in the relationships between all that social data,” said Chris Lamb, IBM’s senior product manager of social software. “A good way to realize that value is to visualize it.”

For example, a manager could use visualization to get a better view of the skills of employees, and a salesperson could use Atlas to quickly identify colleagues in a different division whose expertise or contacts could be useful for working with a customer.

One component, called Reach, is a social software dashboard that helps users navigate the “six degrees of separation” that divide them from a colleague, IBM noted. The dashboard will show users the shortest path to reach an expert based on the level of interaction across the network. An employee could easily surmise, for example, that a colleague with vital information on new product marketing is active in a marketing social community that also includes the first user’s manager.

cnet: You can store energy in chemical batteries. Pentadyne Power stores it in moving objects.

The Chatsworth, Calif.-based company has created and sells uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for data centers and large power consumers that stores energy kinetically. A 25-pound mass spins in a vacuum chamber at a high speed. When a utility needs a jolt of electricity, kinetic power is converted to electrical power. When it’s not needed, the mass just spins to conserve its energy.

The company uses a relatively small mass to avoid potential mishaps (imagine what would happen if a large mass came unstuck from its moorings) and efficiency gains can be made through speeding up rotation.

“Kinetic energy equals mass times velocity squared. So doubling mass doubles energy storage, but doubling the rotational speed increases energy storage exponentially,” the company’s Web site reads.

The mass also levitates on a magnetic field like high-speed trains. This reduces mechanical failure as well as friction. The system has advantages over batteries because, among other reasons, maintenance is lower and the performance does not degrade over time, according to Pentadyne.