Wither IITs
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I think education in Indian Institutes of Technology has become a big joke!
Read this news item from Times of India:
A general category student scoring 5 in maths, 0 in physics and 3 in chemistry and an SC/ST student who scored up to 40% lower — 3 in maths, 0 in physics and 1.8 in chemistry — was given a seat in IIT-JEE 2008.
Now that relaxation will also be 50%. In 2009, if the general category subject cut-offs remain constant, an SC/ST student with 2.5 in maths, 0 in physics and 1.5 in chemistry would squeeze into the hallowed IITs.
This year, score of the last general category student to be admitted was 172 (out of 489). The cut-off for an SC/ST student was 104.
Next year, assuming the general category cut-off remains the same, SC/ST students with 86 marks (50% of 172) will make the cut-off.
No wonder employers shun the IIT-ians and prefer even upcountry engineering colleges over the much-hyped IITs.
Poor IIT alumni, they can’t flaunt their snobbish, elitist name of their alma mater any more!!
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Technology trends
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- ZDNet reports that antivirus software moves out of your computer to a network cloud.
This next-generation antivirus system ‘virtualizes and parallelizes detection functionality with multiple antivirus engines, significantly increasing overall protection,’ according to the team leader. Even if the results look promising, it should be noted that this is just an academics project for the moment.
- Do you need an operating system to load (forever sometimes…) for your minimum functionality of seeing your emails, look up your calender for schedules and write a few letters? No, as the “instant ON” and other technologies that Intel and Dell are putting on the PCs. OS is going to be one of the applications that will run on the hardware “as required”. So the days of OS being the fundamental veda of the computer are getting numbered!
Read about the “end run around the OS” on ZDNet.
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Internet telephony to open up in India
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Yes. It is a dream come true for Indians!
IP Telephony or internet telephony has long been expected to materialize in India in full flow so that cheap telephone calls to and from India become a reality. So far,there has been a restriction on calls through internet terminating in a local telephone service. Now that restriction has been removed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the statutory governing body. In other words, it was PC to PC or Phone to PC in India; now it can be anything to plain old phone in India! So services like Vonage will become a reality in India too. And it will turn out to be a boon to the Non-resident Indians (NRIs) who are spending through their noses currently to keep in touch with their kin residing in India.
Here is the news as it appeared in IndiaTimes:
In a significant step that will have bearing on Indian telecom services and push the rates down further, Telecom regulator on Monday recommended complete opening up of Internet telephony.
The Internet service providers (ISPs) have been permitted to provide unrestricted Internet telephony which means they can terminate Internet telephony calls on PSTN (public switched telecom network) and vice-versa.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has even allowed the national long distance (NLD) operators to connect to ISPs through public Internet (Internet cloud) for unrestricted Internet telephony. But for that to take place, ISPs and NLDs will have to thrash out mutual agreements for unrestricted Internet telephony, said TRAI.
The move will further boost competition in the domestic long distance segment and result in lower STD tariffs. The move will permit calls from personal computers to fixed line and mobile phones. Currently, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a mobile or a fixed phone. This is expected to open huge channels of revenues for ISPs.
NLD shall make suitable commercial and technical arrangements with access providers i.e PSTN/PLMN (public land mobile network lines) for unrestricted Internet telephony said the regulator in a statement.
You can read the rest of the story here.
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The next web
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If you are keen on getting a “Wow” from your date and flaunt your geeky erudition to the gullible, you should nonchalantly drop such pieces of jargon as Web 2.0, Mashup, Semantic web and all that jazz.
But it seems the exotic Semantic Web is really round the corner and is sure to revolutionize the way we use the web to get information. Simply “Googling” for it is going to be passé. Here is what ZDNet has to say about the phenomenon that is ushering in a paradigm shift on the internet:
Google is essentially a media company - as Tom Foremski succinctly points out here - logging your actions for Ad Word generation like a supermarket rewards card program while leveraging brute force search of the indexed web as you search for your keywords and phrases.
Wikipedia is essentially a single destination site, which means lots of laborious single issue searching.
The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
This semantic, machine-read next generation enables much richer search. So if you are looking for information about pinball machines for example, this Freebase example gives you a rich contextual grouping of related and highly relevant information.
Read more about on ZDNet.
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Slow boiling frogs
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It is generally believed that a frog placed in cold water and raise the temperature so gradually that the increase in heat is not perceptible to the frog at any given moment, the frog will make no attempt to escape from the vessel in which is heated. In fact the story gets extended to believe that the poor frog starts enjoying the cozy warmth that it dozes happily and dies without even opening its eyes! Sadism, indeed!
But why slow heating? It is at once conceded that if you put the same frog in boiling water it will quickly jump out!
This anecdote is generally used to illustrate an axiom that you can introduce any change in the system very gradually such that the folks affected by it do not perceive the change immediately and react against it. It also means that you will get cooked without your knowledge if you just wallow in the comfort of the present environment if you resist change.
What about the veracity of the “slow boiling frog” theory? Snopes discounts it and votes an outright “False”. This is what Snopes has to say about this belief:
The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about
2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.
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New Talkinator
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Talkinator is a service that provides free, no-signup, no registration group discussion rooms. You can add chat to your web site in seconds!
Just read their “Privacy Policy”!
The Privacy Policy here is simply: THERE IS NONE. Talkinator/ManyBrain doesn’t ask, require or even want your personal information - however, rooms are only as private as you keep them. No messages are encrypted and its theoretically possible for someone to guess the name of your talkinator room.
In addition - DO NOT give anyone your personal information in talkinator room. Its completely insecure. Anything you type in a talkinator room could be seen by anyone (including, but not limited to, freaks, weirdos, internet crazies, software engineers, nutjobs, probable nutjobs, likely nutjobs, really likely nutjobs, really really likely nutjobs, CAPS-LOCK-LOVERS, the Police, the FBI, the CIA, and your mom). Keep that in mind.
Clever parasite
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LiveScience reports of a strange behaviour of a vine plant which entwines with a host plant sucking its nutrients. But it does not stop with that mischief. It also indulges in biological engineering in hacks into the intra-plant communication system of the host plant and does a sort of a sql injection to turn the host’s behaviour to suit the interests of the parasite!
Clever indeed. This is what the report says, inter alia.
It’s bad enough when a parasite latches on to your body to suck you dry. But when it starts eavesdropping on your communications, enough already.
That’s what the parasitic dodder vine does. It consumes water and nutrients from a host plant and, scientists have just discovered, it taps into the host’s communication system.
Plants use RNA molecules to send messages to different parts, say from roots to leaves. In the new study, RNA molecules from a host tomato plant were found in the parasitic dodder vine, up to a foot away (30 cm) from where the dodder grafted itself to the host.
Picking up these RNA messengers could help the parasite synchronize its lifecycle with that of the host plant, explained Neelima Sinha at the University of California, Davis. “It might be important for the parasite to know when the host is flowering, so it can flower at the same time,” before the host dies, she said.
Read the full story in the Live Science web site.
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About Me
I am S.K!
Ok, what's the big deal, you may ask! But you may miss a good deal if you do not dwell deep into this web site, specially hand-crafted for you. But what about me, the person? Wait, I am not good at making things up. If you stumble upon a good-sounding résumé, please pass it on to me!
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Quirky something
He who knows not, knows not he knows not, shun him.
He who knows not, knows he knows not, educate him.
He who knows, knows not he knows, awaken him.
He who knows, knows he knows, listen to him.
He who knows not, masquerades he knows and gets away with it, HE is your leader, follow him! -
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