• 'Pokemon' to Help Kids in Delhi Govt Schools
• EU Pitches for more Indian Students
• Rudra's Killer App
• Chhattisgarh Tribal Students in for IAS, Medical Coaching
• Jadavpur University to Archive Street Books
• Frankfurt Book Fair to Promote Indian Literature

• Kalam Launches Virtual Campus
• IITs Retain Rank as World's Third Best Tech Varsities
• The Molecular Matchmaker
• "I Don't Feel Any Different"
• 'Indians can Learn any Foreign Language Easily'
• Mizoram Achieves 90.27 per cent Literacy
• Echo of Big Bang Wins US Dou Nobel

pilot scheme to boost education through a 'one-stop education portal' for addressing all the learning-related needs of students, was launched by President A P J Abdul Kalam in New Delhi on Monday. Sakshat, a portal that promises to provide one-stop solution to educational requirements, is a key initiative of the Human Resource Development Ministry. Kalam saw the internet revolution as "a powerful tool for good educational initiatives in the rural areas." Observing that nearly 10 million youth were injected into the employment market every year, Kalam said the country also needed large number of talented youth with education for the task of knowledge acquisition, knowledge imparting, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in the 21st century. "A national policy for creating a global human development cadre for India has to emerge," he said at the launch of the initiative. Among others present at the launch ceremony were HRD Minister Arjun Singh. Sakshat programme should think of extending the system for providing world class vocational skills to youth for making them internationally competitive, Kalam told the gathering of academics and students. "We have to start right now to realise this goal since the overall time available for such an educational growth is short," he added.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, October 31, 2006

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There is only one constant to learning in schools - innovation in teaching. It works wonders if adopted properly, said an analysis on innovations in teaching under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan. Pokemon, an animated character, helped students in Delhi government schools to grasp what they learnt till primary level, before graduating to the upper primary level. "It helps students to understand the lessons as they can relate with Pokemon easily than with a character in a book," said Siksha Sangam, a compilation of the unique learning models. The Delhi model has been indigenously prepared by State Council for Education Research and Training (SCERT)and was initially introduced in 200 schools and is now being expanded to another 300 schools. A similar programme for classes till X is also being developed. Computer would not have worked in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, but a school on a boat brought children from 170 deprived families to classrooms. Bring the children to schools under National Child Labour Project had failed. "Providing schools close to their homes helped," the compilation said. These families are living on boats for decades. The best methods are not restricted to conventional schools. Even minorities can gain if they are ready to modify madrassa system of learning as done in West Bengal.

Along with religious teaching, conventional books translated in Arabic are being taught, thereby helping the students to compete with others. Specialised training under SSA has been given to teachers for the new modules. Girls in schools in Gujarat are being used as a tool to impart education to mothers. In Gujarat, class VII schools girls took the task of educating their mothers with the help of SSA volunteers. In Haryana, a state with lowest sex ratio in the country, bicycles helped in retaining girls in schools. The state government has bicycles to 21,000 girls who have taken admission in upper primary level. Hundreds of such examples are listed in the compilation, which can now be replicated in different parts of the country. "We want to study the new innovations in learning and see whether can be implemented in other parts of the country. There can also be an answer for a particular problem in a schools in Assam with an innovative method adopted in Kerala," a senior ministry official said. The official added that the study shows that learning cannot be limited to just classrooms. There have been successful projects on multi-lingual teaching, teaching about neighbourhood and reading material for vocations, which have improved students learning capabilities.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, October 25, 2006

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Ajay Sood has worked out a method to increase the sensitivity of certain diagnostic tests by at least 200 times.

TESTING for an infectious disease is very simple, theoretically speaking. The patient's blood or tissue sample would contain the parasite or a molecule that will normally be absent in a healthy individual. Biologists call it an antigen. You take the tissue sample and bring it in contact with an antibody that can recognise and bind to the antigen. Then you only need to find out whether the antibody has actually bound to the antigen, which is easy if enough antibodies bind to the antigens. So, what is the problem?

The difficulty is in bringing the antigen and antibody near enough for them to bind to each other. During a normal laboratory test, this actually happens through a random process. The lesser the number of antigens in a sample, the more difficult it is to form an antigen-antibody complex. If the number of antigens is too small, the complex may not form at all-which is one reason why many tests fail. Now, physicists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore have come up with a method to solve this problem. Their method is so general that it has potential applications in any diagnostic test involving antigen-antibody interaction.

Ajay Sood at the department of physics came up with an important discovery last year. He found that a fluid passing over a carbon nanotube generates a voltage and, thus, a current inside the tube. While he was exploring the potential applications of this discovery, he was also working on several other topics, particularly on the physics of colloids (a suspension of particles in a liquid). The current invention stems directly from his work on the behaviour of colloids in electric fields.

Other scientists have tried many methods to bring the antigens close to each other. Some have used ultrasound waves, which force the particles to move and thus collide. Others have tried magnetising the colloidal particles and then applying an external field, a process that brings the antigens and antibodies together. It was known that an electric field, applied parallel to the electrodes (negative and positive plates that generate the field) makes the particles form chains. But this fact is not useful for diagnostic tests. Sood and his student Ajay Negi used fields, but perpendicular to the plates instead of parallel to them.

When a perpendicular electric field of a certain strength is applied to a colloidal suspension, particles in the sample start coming together in a cluster. While clustering, they also bring the antigen and the antibody closer to each other, thus improving the chances of forming the antigen-anti-body complex. Sood's calculations show that the chances increase at least 200 times, an enormous improvement in an actual test. Sood had tried the method on two types of antigens in his lab: on specifically coated antigens and anti-bodies, and then on the commercially available kit for rheumatoid factor. He also filed a patent application in the Patent Cooperation Treaty countries, which includes all developed and several developing countries.

Sood's method is general, and needs to be applied to specific kits for specific diseases. His team started with typhoid, in a joint project with the Gwalior-based Defence Research and Development Establishment, which is already developing kits for this disease. His next goal is to work on malaria diagnostic kits. IISc will then look for a commercial partner. If the IISc team can improve the efficiency of the kits for major diseases, the institute is looking at a market worth billions of dollars.

Courtesy: Businessworld, October 23, 2006

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After US, Australia and Great Britain, it is now the European Union which is wooing Indian students. It is going a step forward and even offering part-time jobs and credit transfer system to students. A European Higher Education fair is being organised in New Delhi where students will get to know the prospects for higher studies, avenues for job, scholarships, part-time working provision and credit transfer system in the European countries, says Apoorv Mahendru of German Academic Exchange Programme. About 100 recognised universities from 25 member countries of European Union will project their courses, facilities and related matters in New Delhi from November 24 to 26, he says. "The member countries of European Union are now targetting the Indian students. The participating universities will facilitate information on their academic curricula, along with special programmes and procedures to enrol students," says Mahendru from the coordinating agency for the event. The fair is seen as a bid to boost internationalisation of higher education and cultural exchange, he says. "If the student mobility increases, there will be more cultural exchange and interaction," he says. Presently majority of the Indian students going abroad for higher studies prefer to go to the US followed by UK and Australia. Of late students have shown interest to go to European countries like Germany, France and other countries.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, October 23, 2006

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Kiran Desai defies the odds to win a Booker for her Inheritance

When the demure young woman clad in a shapeless kurta and with a sing-song Indian convent school accent stood up to receive one of the world's top literary prizes, she was perhaps the only one in the glittering Man Booker Prize ceremony at London's Guildhall on Tuesday evening who didn't actually turn a hair of her un-blowdried shoulder-length crop. "It's like winning a lottery," she told Outlook in her characteristically matter-of-fact tone. "No one in the competition is a heavyweight or lightweight. It's all a matter of luck."

Just how chancy the whole business of winning the Man Booker can be is the way the bookies' odds kept shifting this time.

At £50,000, the award is not the richest literary cash prize, but in terms of soaring post-Booker sales, not to speak of advances for future books, there's no literary prize that is more coveted than the 27-year-old Man Booker. This year it was Peter Carey who emerged as the early favourite, tipped to win a third time. But he didn't make it to the shortlist of six. Nor did Nadine Gordimer. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, on the other hand, was initially dismissed as the 7/1 outsider, and remained an outsider to the last. The last time an Indian won the Booker was Arundhati Roy in 1997.

Which is perhaps why Kiran Desai didn't waste much time in either daydreaming about the prize or preparing for it. Neither of her parents-to both of whom she squeezed in a thank-you in her impromptu acceptance speech ("I'm Indian and so I'm going to thank my parents")-attended. It's part of the family tradition to not defer travel plans for such incidentals like literary prizes.

"I haven't yet got through to my mother, who is visiting a relative somewhere around Dehradun," says Kiran. "She'll probably get to hear of it in a day or two." Kiran's mother is well-known writer Anita Desai, more famous for the three times she's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize than the 14 novels she's written so far.

Her father Ashvin, in whose home in Delhi Kiran spends a few weeks every winter, is also travelling. "He's somewhere in Morocco with my brother and they may have heard the news from my sister," says Kiran casually.

Was it superstition that made her turn down her mother's suggestion to wear a sari for the awards ceremony? "Perhaps," says Kiran. "I just didn't want to think about it too much, that's why I didn't even prepare a speech." In fact, as she confessed to Outlook, she spent the tense two hours while the judges were behind closed doors deciding the winner among the six shortlisted books watching the reactions of her publishers and editors. "My UK and US editors were the most nervous, they just couldn't relax. But my Indian publishers (Penguin India) were the sweetest. They kept reassuring me that I was a winner, even if I didn't win the prize."

So how does it feel to be transported in a moment from a writer who spent the better part of the last eight years sharing an apartment in Harlem with assorted flatmates who quarrelled about who stole their lunch or dinner from the common refrigerator to becoming literature's most famous-and potentially richest-star of the year? "I don't feel any different, though it's a mad rush just now to get through the back-to-back interviews before I catch a plane to Germany in the next two hours," says Kiran. "It's not like winning the Miss Universe title, I feel very much a part of the books world and don't see how anything will change. Except perhaps now I can afford to rent an apartment of my own."

Kiran, who was born in Chandigarh, lived in Kalimpong "with the Bengali half of my family", attended convent schools first in Kalimpong, where Inheritance is set, and later in Bombay and Delhi's Loreto Convent, says: "I did not start writing till I was 20.

I was a science student. But when I began writing stories I immediately loved it so much. The first book (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) was spent just in the happiness of that realisation, that this is what I wanted to do. The second time was more difficult: realising what a writer's life really is. It can't be healthy-this solitary life, disappearing for years into the book and characters you are writing about. And I wasn't entirely sure that I was committed to it. I was much more shaky about what I wanted to do than I was even 10 years ago."

About the book that won her the Booker, Kiran says, "I'd have never written this book if I were aiming for the bestseller list. It's a very dark book for one."

Kiran, who in her Booker speech said she owed her mother "a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine", spent one memorable snow-bound winter while she was writing Inheritance holed up with her mother in the countryside. "The whole day would pass without either of us saying a word until dinner. Sometimes I'd ask my mother: wouldn't you like to go out? Meet more people? Talk on the phone at least? Come to New York? But she just looked at me and said: 'No, I'm perfectly content.' And she is, she does not need anybody." That's the kind of life Kiran is looking forward to resuming once the Booker glory fades.

How close does she feel to India, considering she left as a teenager, first to live in the UK and later in the US? "I am a Delhi girl at heart," Kiran insists. "I went to school here and left when I was 15. Most of the people I was friends with in Delhi are in the US now and so we all come back every winter and meet the same people all the time. We keep saying, 'Why are we meeting here when we meet all the time in New York?' But the Indian community in the US has grown so much that it feels very similar to Delhi."

If there's one thing Kiran is thankful for having bagged the Booker, it must be the fact that it's cleared a doubt that reared up soon after completing Inheritance: was she ready to embrace a writer's solitary life for the rest of her life? "The twenties are a period of such confidence and knowing what one wanted compared to the thirties," she had confessed to Outlook only 10 months ago when she launched her book in Delhi this January. Now she's sure that there's nothing she'd like better. "I am addicted to going to my desk every morning. That won't change because of the Booker."

Courtesy: OutLook, October 23, 2006

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Software claims to slay the virus before it gets into your PC.
IMAGINE A VIRUS THAT LOCKS UP the files on your PC and then 1 demands a ransom for unlocking them. You're better off just imagining-many users in the West actually woke up one fine day with their PCs flashing ransom notes of a few hundred dollars. Players like 1 Symantec, McAfee, AVG and Sophos, who make up the global $8 billion (Rs 36,800 crore) anti- virus market, have been pulling out all stops to deal with such at- tacks. But success has been limited. That's because "the anti-virus Software available today is reactive rather than proactive," says N.S. Basker, Managing Director, Rudra Technologies, a Chennai based maker of anti-virus software. This means there is always a lag between the time a virus is identified and before an anti-virus software patch can be designed; in between millions of PCs are disabled.

All anti-virus technologies are either signature based or heuristic-and generally a combination of both. The signature-based works by identifying the binary string unique to each virus. The heuristic one locates the programming code typical for certain types of virus propagation. Both have their drawbacks. The heuristic one sometimes does not understand a genuine file. "We have devised a breakthrough technology that kills the malware at the intention level itself," explains Basker. A patent is pending for this. This means an intruder with aft AK 47 gun (bad intention) is killed at the door before he even gets in. This principle is followed by the Rudra anti-virus software, which straddles the hard disc and the RAM and just eliminates/destroys the malware before it gets embedded inside. Therefore, it needs no upgrades and is not concerned about virus identifications. Just in case you think it is too good to be true, company officials reveal the software, priced around Rs 1,800, has been widely received in Malaysia and adjacent countries and global IT majors like Microsoft and HP are in talks for bundling arrangements.

Courtesy, Business-today, October 22, 2006

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Indians have flair for languages and pick up foreign languages quite easily compared to people from other countries and the flexibility comes because of their innate skills to speak more than one language given the multi-lingual society they grow up. These views come from a French language professor Jean-Charles Pochard with over 40 years experience in teaching French as a foreign language in several countries across the continents. Prof. Pochard, who was working with Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) till recently on a project, says, teaching French to Indian students is also easy. The diverse culture where multiple languages thrive makes teaching any foreign language easy. Prof. Pochard developed programme for training teachers of French online during his four-year stay at CIEFL and this programme is now being seen as an instrument that would bring in remarkable changes in French learning in the country. Though the programme was designed keeping in mind the sensitivities of Indian students' learning capabilities, learners from across the world can gain from it.

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, October 23, 2006

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Tribal and scheduled caste students of Chhattisgarh are all set to break free of the jhinga lala hur hur stereotype as a State-sponsored coaching institute gets ready to prepare them for Union and State public service examinations. The Raman Singh Government, which wrested power from the Congress by cornering 26 out of the 45 reserved tribal and scheduled caste seats in the last Assembly election has worked tirelessly to empower tribal and scheduled caste sections. As part of a State Government initiative to boost career prospects of youth of these sections, the coaching centre in Raipur to be run by the Delhi Education Centre, will select 44 students after a preliminary examination and place them in the right stream depending on their aptitude. The State will bear the full cost of needy students. "There is no dearth of brilliant and talented students from the tribal and scheduled castes but they don't make it to respected services due to lack of exposure and an academic environment," said Tribal and Scheduled Caste Welfare Minister Ganesh Ram Bhagat.

Scheduled castes and tribes account for nearly 44 per cent of the State's total population. Keeping in mind the tribal support it received in the previous election, the BJP Government set up a medical college in collaboration with public sector major National Mineral Development Corporation in Maoist-affected Jagadalpur, Bastar's headquarter town some months back. "Students at the medical college will be inducted through examinations but local people will staff the college," CM Raman Singh told The Pioneer. In another recent initiative, the State Government decided to provide coaching to a dozen girls from tribal and SC communities for an air hostess course. The State has also entered into an agreement with Tata, Essar and IFFCO to set up units in tribal areas. "The State Government is likely to complete three years in office in a couple of months and thus promises made to the tribal and scheduled caste populace, have to be fulfilled with all sincerity before next Assembly election scheduled for 2008," a senior BJP leader said. But, a source close to the CM said by developing extremely backward areas, Raman Singh hoped to defeat the Maoist gameplan by providing jobs to the local youth.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, October 19, 2006

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Mizoram has achieved a literacy rate of 90.27 per cent in March, second only to Kerala's 90.90 per cent, and is making concerted efforts to become number one in the country during the current fiscal, State School Education Minister R. Lalthangliana said on Wednesday.
``Desire to be the most literate State''
Mr. Lalthangliana told the Assembly that the desire to become the country's most literate State has acquired the dimension of a mass movement with all churches, NGOs and student bodies cooperating with the Government in the endeavour. Replying to a question from Zodintluanga of Congress, he said, "The improvement in literacy is not only due to the elementary education system, but also the efforts by the adult education wing of the school education department and cooperation from churches, NGOs and citizens." Under the Sarva Shiksha Abhyian, efforts are being made to enrol all children aged between six and 14 in schools.

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, October 19, 2006

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Think of the books, on subjects as varied as fiction and self-employment tips, that you find people selling in buses and trains. The custom of writing these books, which are meant essentially for those with little education, is not new though. And Jadavpur University has now undertaken a project to archive as many of these books as possible. And the decision to collect such works of para-literature is meant not just to restore the books. It is also meant to throw light on the social and cultural evolution of the state. For, the books do provide a window to this. "These books are called heto books (books sold in haats, or village markets). It is not easy to find these in shops, since these are peddled usually from the streets or in trains and buses," said Prof Sukanta Chaudhuri, director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at JU. As for the range of subjects the books cover, these include religion, education, children's literature, self-help and self-employment tips, popular tales and legends and even pornography. The books, in fact, are somewhat of a rural parallel to the more prominent battala books. The school has already collected over five hundred heto books. "These have been collected mostly from South and North 24-Parganas and various rural markets. Some have even been bought from city vendors," said Poulomi Ghosal, a project fellow in this endeavour.

The subjects of the books the school has collected include cooking, beauty tips, yoga, songs with their notations, law, palmistry and social prejudices. "Next, we shall visit the printers, publishers and wholesalers of these books in order to extend the collection," Chaudhuri said. And the various ways in which the books are going to be sorted is according to the names of the publishers, printers and the genre of the books. "The collection would be a guiding line for people researching topics such as social and parallel culture. The effort would also highlight the evolution of the printing technology," Chaudhuri added.

Courtesy: www. hindustantimes.com, October 16, 2006

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The prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have retained their number three rank among the world's 100 best technology universities, where the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) also find a place. The IITs, which were on number three slot last year also, came next to MIT, Boston, and California University, Berkeley, both in the US, according to a survey conducted by the Times Higher Education Supplement. It placed Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs) at number 68, sandwiched between Hong Kong University and Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The new technology survey showed academic opinion about the top places for science and engineering and puts IIT ahead of Imperial College, London, which comes in at number four. However, in last week's rankings by THES on overall global excellence, IIT had slid to number 57, seven places lower than in 2005. According to a spokesman of the Times Higher Education Supplement, the latest technology table emerged following an assessment of 3,703 academics, who had been asked to rate universities in their area of specialisation.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, October 15, 2006

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Americans John Mather and George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for work on cosmic radiation which helped pinpoint the age of the universe and supported the Big Bang theory of its birth. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the $1.37 million prize, said the two men were instrumental to the success of the cosmic background explorer (COBE) satellite programme launched by Nasa in 1989. Their work took Big Bang theory, which contends the universe began 15 billion years ago as a tiny dot that exploded into today's huge system of stars and planets, out of the realm of mathematical equations and into the world of precise science. When their research was published in 1992, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking called it the "greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time". "The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of microwave background radiation measured by COBE," the Academy said. The radiation they looked at, so-called blackbody radiation, allowed the laureates to show the universe had cooled from its initial fiery state of 3,000 degrees centigrade to a chill 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, which is minus 273 degrees centigrade. This supported the theory that the universe was expanding. Their measurements also showed temperature variations in background radiation in space, in the range of a hundred-thousandth of a degree, that offered clues as to how galaxies, stars and planets were formed by as matter coalesced. Mather, 60, coordinated the COBE programme and was responsible for one of its key experiments while astrophysicist Smoot, 61, of the University of California, Berkeley, was in charge of measuring small temperature variations in the radiation, the Academy said. Mather, of the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told a news conference over a telephone link he was "thrilled and amazed". "I can't say I am completely surprised. People have been saying we should be awarded (it)," he added. Smoot said that the Nobel committee called him at 2:45 am Pacific Time after first dialling the wrong number.

Courtesy: economictimes.indiatimes.com, October 04, 2006

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The world's biggest book fair kicks off this week in Frankfurt and will focus on authors and culture from India as well as the challenges new media pose for the industry. Running from October 4-8, the book fair is expected to attract close to 300,000 visitors to Germany's financial capital and offers an important networking opportunity for authors and publishers. Last year, 600 million euros' ($760 million) worth of rights and license deals were struck on the sidelines of the fair. The book fair also wants this year to raise awareness about Indian literature. Every year, around 80,000 books are published in India. Some 150 publishing firms from India and more than 40 Indian authors, including Amitav Ghosh known for novels such as "The Hungry Tide", are expected to attend the book fair. India is not only in focus culturally and as a growing market, but also as a business partner for publishers because production and printing costs are about 40 percent lower there. "European publishers are outsourcing a lot to India in particular," Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt book fair, said ahead of the fair. The book fair also intends to highlight the problems of illiteracy around the world.

Digital drive
The book fair will also focus on the rising challenge of digitalisation in the form of CD-ROMs, DVDs, audio books and online databases. Part of the fair aims to bring together traditional publishers and new media companies. Web company Google Inc is set to be in the spotlight over its efforts to make extracts of every book printed available online via its search engine, prompting concerns with authors and publishers over copyright. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association will on Wednesday present its own Internet-based book database, which it hopes will contain at least 100,000 titles by the end of 2007. Gottfried Honnefelder, head of the association, said that the aim of the German database was to ensure that book sellers and publishers remained "masters of the texts". But he also said the database was not intended to compete with Google and that the association wanted to cooperate with the search engine. "It would be a shame if Google did not want to use this," Honnefelder said.

Courtesy: economictimes.indiatimes.com, October 04, 2006

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