Technology News Blog

Steadicam demonstrating at BES Expo 2010

At the Broadcast Engineering Society (India) Expo 2010, being held at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi; Steadicam, a Tiffen International Ltd venture, is displaying its camera stabilizing system that have revolutionized the world of video and film acquisition.

While demonstrating its product to the visitors, Robin Thwaiks, International Director of Sales, Steadicam, mentions that the system costs around $4000. Steadicam system allows the camera person to have a rig tied around the body and at the same time capture a steady video or film while moving.

Further elaborating its usage in India he says that the camera stabilizing system is more often made to use in film production or studio production. This embarks on a disadvantage for Steadicam as most of the visitors at the Expo are from the news production industry.

For the production personnel from the news broadcast domain, camerapersons are in rush, thus carrying off a Steadicam device becomes quite unreasonable. Besides, for news gathering people quality of the video, as in terms of shaky images, is also not a major concern.

Over being asked about the response at the show from the first day, he replied that not much visitors have turned up.

Google transliterate IME application for 14 Indian Languages for download

Google has launched transliterate applications for Indian languages. This Google transliteration IME (Input Method Editor) software supports fourteen Indian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Kannada and other international languages like Arabic, Persian, Greek and so on. Google transliteration IME is free download software and the users can download it without even signing-up and the other advantage is they no need to appear online to use this Google transliteration IME application as they can work in offline also.

Google transliteration IME operation: According to Alootechie, this Google transliteration IME software is a desktop application that can be easily accessed even

India plans manned space mission in 2016

New Delhi, India (CNN) — Indian researchers have announced plans to send their astronauts to space in 2016.

The cost of the proposed mission is estimated at $4.8 billion, said S. Satish, spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Studies have begun on the design of the crew capsules that will be used to put a pair of astronauts 300 kilometers aloft for seven days, he said. The project budget has been sent for federal approval, he added.

A training facility for astronauts will also be built in southern India as part of the program, which Satish said would be solely Indian.

In 1984, Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to explore space in what was a joint mission with the then Soviet Union.

In 2008, India launched its first unmanned mission — Chandrayaan-1 — to the moon that dropped a probe onto the lunar surface.

In 312 days, Chandrayaan-1, meaning moon craft, completed more than 3,400 orbits and met most of its scientific objectives before vanishing off the radars abruptly last year, according to the space agency.

The craft carried payloads from the United States, the European Union and Bulgaria. One of its aims was to search for evidence of water or ice and identify the chemical composition of certain lunar rocks.

The Chandrayaan-1 mission came to be seen as the 21st century, Asian version of the space race between the United States and the USSR — but this time involving India and China.

Satish said the agency was also planning to send a second version of Chandrayaan in 2012.

India held its first rocket launch from a fishing village in southern India in 1963.

Now, the South Asian nation lists more than 60 events as “milestones” in its space program, which includes the successful use of polar and geosynchronous satellite launch vehicles.

Indian scientists say their country has the world’s largest constellation of remote-sensing satellites.

These satellites, according to the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, capture images of the Earth used in a range of applications — agriculture, water resources, urban development, mineral prospecting, environment, forestry, drought and flood forecasting, ocean resources and disaster management.

Another major system, or INSAT, is used for communication, television and meteorology.

India, however, maintains competition does not drive its space ambitions.

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350. (more…)

What Apple’s iPad Means for Your Wallet

LONDON—Phew! Thank heavens the iPad is coming. Solving the economic crisis should be a breeze—it has an app for that.

Apple’s new all-singing, all-dancing hand-held computer is the talk of the moment. Even thousands of miles away in London, when I staggered off the redeye Thursday morning, the front pages showed a gaunt but grinning Steve Jobs clasping his latest creation.

But if we can hack our way through the hype, what are the financial implications of this latest techno marvel—for consumers and for investors?
• Look out: The iPad may cost you around $1,000 after all.

Yes, the headlines note the prices will start at the low, low level of $499. Mr. Jobs on Wednesday even mocked those who had predicted prices nearly twice as high. But were those earlier forecasts so wrong? If someone buys the basic 16-gigabyte model with 3G, they will pay $629 up front—plus $30 a month from AT&T for unlimited data.

Cost for a year: $360. Add that to your initial $629 and your cost is … $989, plus tax (and whatever insurance you’ll need to cover your portable glass and aluminium treasure). Models with more memory will cost even more.

How often we ignore the monthly bills, or place them in a different mental category than the initial cost. But money is money.

Botttom line? If you’re getting an iPad, buying the $499 Wi-Fi-only device is surely the smartest financial move. Especially as you have to question whether the AT&T 3G network, already staggering under the strain of all that iPhone use, will really give you the full iPad experience. Streaming HD video for all? Good luck with that.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPad at an Apple Special Event on Wednesday.

• Don’t assume it will mean that much for your Apple shares.

A lot of investing is about anticipation, and Apple stock had already risen ahead of the announcement. (There’s an old saying on Wall Street: Buy on the rumor, sell on the news.)

How much new demand will this device generate, anyway? A 5- or 7-inch iPad might have created a new market for pocket-sized computers. But the 10-inch, 1.5-pound iPad is a netbook without a keyboard, and a heavy, bulky handheld.

As I wrote earlier this month, the best thing Steve Jobs could have done for his stockholders would have been to start handing out dividends. Brian Marshall, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech, says the company’s net cash pile is up to about $43 a share. But no dividends. Bah.

• Yes, it’s a challenge for Amazon.com.

Steve Jobs wants the iPad, and Apple’s new “iBook” store, to go head to head against Amazon’s Kindle for the e-reader market.

Expect Amazon to respond—maybe as early as tonight, when it announces results.

You have to figure sooner or later Amazon will cut its prices. The Kindle DX, currently $489, has to come down. So, too, do the charges for Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions. (Amazon has plenty of room to cut: Its margins are reported to be huge.)

But will the iPad really be a Kindle killer? Here’s a contrarian case:

Serious e-book readers don’t want a multifunction device with a light-emitting screen. Most are grownups with Computer Screen Fatigue, if not Computer Screen Revulsion. They spend far too long staring at those screens for work. They want to read normally, by ambient light.

The Kindle—and other devices that use a low-power e-Ink screen—also offers much-longer battery life. And since you should be able to read Kindle e-books on an iPad anyway, through the iPhone’s Kindle app, it may not become a either-or matter.

This battle is just heating up. The bigger concern for Amazon investors may be their firm’s lofty share price, now trading in the neighborhood of 40 times forecasted earnings.

• The real winners from the iPad—and the mobile Internet boom it represents—ought to be the cellular carriers.

It’s a case of supply and demand. Thanks to smartphones, mobile computers, streaming videos, applications and the like, use of their networks is rocketing. AT&T has struggled to cope with the traffic caused by all its iPhone customers. You have to wonder why it was so keen to sign up iPad users, too, at just $30 a month for unlimited data. It may end up suffering from the winner’s curse.

Rival Verizon Wireless (jointly owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group) supposedly “missed out” on the iPhone and the iPad, but it, too, will benefit. Too much traffic on one network will drive customers to switch to the others. The cellular stocks are not expensive based on traditional measures. (Verizon has a 6.3% dividend yield.)

One analyst who covers Apple told me privately that the one worry that kept him up at nights was that sooner or later the networks were going to start raising their prices for data traffic, especially for the iPhone. They should. They control the bandwidth, which is the scarce resource in the supply chain. If they don’t make it pay, it will be their own fault.

Cellular networks may be the sleeper stocks in this story. Those who crave excitement may find all they need in Apple and Amazon.

Deepak Lal: Man-made global warming

It has been a bad two months for the purveyors of the “science” of manmade global warming. The BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) stood firm at Copenhagen from being bounced into an agreement on mandatory carbon emission cuts. With the Democrat’s defeat in Massachusetts, there is little hope of President Barack Obama pursuing the US climate change Bill, leaving Europe — particularly the UK — out on a limb with their legislation of targets for savage CO2 emission cuts which, if implemented, will lead to their rapid descent into the Stone Age.

But an equally important drama has been playing in New Delhi with Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), having to retract various purportedly “scientific” claims made in the panel’s 2007 report. The one which has rightly come to the fore in India is Glaciergate, concerning the IPCC’s claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. When the government-sponsored report by eminent Indian glaciologist Dr Vijaya Raina came out in November, saying that the IPCC’s claims were baseless and recklessly alarmist, it was dismissed by Dr Pachauri, a railway engineer with a PhD in economics, as being “arrogant” and “voodoo science”. Subsequently, he had to eat crow as he and the IPCC had to admit that their predictions about Himalayan glaciers were without scientific foundations.

Glaciergate had been preceded by Climategate in November, when a hacker leaked hundreds of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. These show that Professor Phillip Jones, the director of the CRU — the source of the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC relies — along with a tight network of colleagues had for years discussed various tactics to avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws. They kept coming up with innumerable excuses to conceal the background data on which their findings and temperature records are based. Jones, astonishingly, even claimed in 2008 that this data from all over the world was “lost”. But the emails show that scientists were told to delete large chunks of data. As this was done after the receipt of a freedom of information request, it became a criminal offence, and the University of East Anglia had to agree to release the data in collaboration with the met office’s Hadley Centre after obtaining the agreement of other met offices around the world.

The unwillingness to release the data was for two reasons. First, since 1977 when sunspot activity has decreased as the Sun seems to have gone to sleep, both terrestrial and more accurate satellite temperature readings show the Earth is cooling, even as CO2 emissions have increased (See fig. 1), contradicting the man-made global warming theory. Second, they have been keen to resurrect the infamous “hockey stick”.

Till 1999, when a recent physics Phd- turned-climatologist, Michael Mann, published a paper on the 1,000-year temperature record, the accepted trend was given by fig. 2, which appeared in the 1990 IPCC report (reproduced in its Chairman John Houghton’s book Global Warming (1994)). This shows that temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period had been higher than those predicted to increase as a result of rising CO2 emissions. Mann and his colleagues (Nature, 1998:779-787) showed that, including data from Californian pine cones and with suitable statistical manipulation, the data was best represented by fig. 3, where the temperature was constant followed by a rapid rise with the Industrial Age. Their “hockey stick” became the iconic figure in the 2001 IPCC report.

Till two Canadians, statistician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, published an article showing that “there was an error in a routine calculation step… that falsely identified a hockey stick shape as the dominant pattern in the data. The flawed computer program can even pull out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random numbers” (Energy and Environment, 2003:752-771).

With the subsequent furore, the US Congress set up two scientific committees to examine climate history. They upheld McIntyre and McKitrick, and one investigation chaired by Dr Edward Wegman — a leading statistician — excoriated the Mann papers as well as his various highly placed supporters who had tried to whitewash them. Wegman also commissioned a “social network analysis” of Mann’s defenders to find out how independent they were, which found that they “are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface”. Mann’s supporters were “a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility”. (Wegman Report, 2006 is available at gochttp://www.cimateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf).

These revelations of the debauching of climate change “science” by the IPCC continue apace. As I write, there is a report that the IPCC’s 2007 claim that global warming is linked to a rise in natural disasters has also been shown to be scientifically invalid. The IPCC vice-chairman says it will be reviewed.

The unravelling of this politicised climate “science” has already had political consequences. At the recent BASIC environmental ministers gathering, Xi Zhenhua, the Chinese representative, said that Beijing would keep an “open attitude to the disputes in the scientific community” as “there is a view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature itself”. As a start, to help in an honest resolution of these disputes, the IPCC needs to be disbanded. If necessary, by the BASIC countries withdrawing, and setting up a truly independent global scientific commission of scientists supporting the two alternative theories on global warming outlined in my previous columns. Meanwhile, to end conning the media, Dr Pachauri should issue a statement that he not be referred to as the world’s leading climate scientist. No more than Al Gore or me!

Tonight showing: Big, bright moon

CHENNAI: Get ready to witness one of the most spectacular phenomena of naked-eye astronomy on Saturday, a full moon day when the moon is also closest to the earth, appearing bigger and brighter.

While the size of the moon remains the same throughout the year, the elliptical orbit in which it travels ensures that it is at different distances from the Earth at varying times. At the farthest point on its orbit – apogee – the moon is 4,05,948 km from the earth and at the point where it will be positioned closest to the planet – perigee – the moon will be 3,59 861 km closer to the Earth. It is at this time that the moon will appear 15% bigger and 30% brighter than usual. The visually fascinating phenomenon often goes unnoticed though it can be observed by anybody who cares to glance up on the right day.

Astronomer Komala Murugesan says, “The moon appears bigger also because of other reasons. When we look at the eastern or western sky we see the moon through the earth’s atmosphere, which is dense when observed at these angles. Moreover being winter, the atmosphere is foggy, which means there are water droplets in the atmosphere which spread the light far. And when the moon is in the perigee position, the sun is directly opposite it, making it appear clearer and brighter.”

Google e-library under fire

NEW DELHI: Even as it has been fighting China on Internet openness, Google is embroiled in a litigation in which publishers and authors from around the world, including India, have accused it of violating copyright in its quest to create the world’s largest online library.

Joining a global campaign against the latest version of Global Book Settlement (GBS 2.0), Indian Repographic Rights Organisation (IRRO), which is the official copyright society for Indian authors and publishers, and Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) filed their objections at a New York district court on Thursday, the deadline for doing so.

GBS 2.0 gives Google copyright immunity to distribute millions of books online, in exchange for sharing the revenue it generates with the rights holders. With the introduction this week, Apple’s iPad Tablet expected to enhance the popularity of digital books, GBS 2.0, which gives a first mover advantage to Google, is being vehemently opposed by the search giant’s rivals such as Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo!.

The deal has divided opinion among copyright owners as some of authors and publishers have welcomed it as a fresh stream of revenue. One of the most controversial aspects of GBS 2.0 is “opt out”, a mechanism which puts the onus on copyright owners to keep their books out of the purview of this Google innovation. As IRRO’s statement put it, “This implies that if a person is silent, he is deemed to have consented to an agreement.”

According to IRRO, Indian authors, without any representation of their interests, would be affected by the secret negotiations that a few US-based publishers have had with Google. While GBS 2.0 is ostensibly limited to books published in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, the deal would impact the rest of the world too as any author published in any of the four named countries would be covered by it.

In the keenly contested US litigation, the detractors of the Google deal gained strength when the governments of Germany and France filed objections. The US government is due to disclose its stand to the court by February 4.

Discovery launches two new channels in India

Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, a division of media firm Discovery Communications, on Thursday launched two new 24-hour channels in the country.

The non-fiction channels — Discovery Science and Discovery Turbo — will initially air on the Tata Sky’s DTH platform, but would soon be extended to other platforms.

“Right now, the channels are available on Tata Sky and in the next 2-3 months, it should be available with other DTH operators and cable companies as well,” Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific Senior Vice President and General Manager (India) Rahul Johri said.

Discovery operates three channels — Discovery Channel, Discovery Travel and Living and Animal Planet —— in India, reaching 116 million cumulative subscribers in English, Hindi and Tamil.

“Its been our effort to provide unique content. So, while Discovery Science would have shows based on impact of science, say space, human body and genetics, Discovery Turbo will have shows centred around anything with motors like cars, aeroplanes and ships,” Mr. Johri said.

Later, the channels would also have content relevant to India, he added.

Asked about its HD channel, Mr. Johri said, “We expect to launch it soon … may be it will be within this fiscal.”

The company had last year received licence from the I&B Ministry to operate three channels in India —Discovery Science, Discovery Turbo and Discovery HD.

Mars to be seen biggest and brightest on January 29

New Delhi: ‘Red Planet’ Mars will be seen biggest and brightest in the midnight skies of January 29 and will appear as ‘dazzling red jewel in the sky’.

mars-to-be-seen-biggest-and-brightest-on-january-29

The planet will look red and brightest among the stars and will be seen alongside of the first full moon of the year with naked eyes.

Amitabh Pandey, founder president, Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE), said. “On January 27, Mars will be closest to Earth and on the midnight of January 29, it will be in line with the Sun and the Earth.”

“Mars takes about 687 Earth days to complete one revolution around the Sun, whereas Earth takes around 365 days.”

He says further, “So Mars comes close to Earth once in 26 months … the position is called opposition. A planet is said to be “in opposition” when the Sun, the Earth and the planet are in one line.”

India eyes man in space by 2016

India has announced its bid to the fourth nation to put a man in space, and says it’ll put a pair of astronauts into a seven-day low-Earth orbit in 2016.

According to the International Business Times, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is firming up just what “infrastructure and facilities” the $2.76bn project will need. These include an new astronaut training facility in Bangalore and a third launch pad at India’s spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Click here to find out more!

ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said the programme’s “space module” will be ready in four years. He wasn’t giving much away, but said the vehicle would have “extra facilities like entry into crew capsule* and an escape chute”.

Other technical challenges facing the ISRO include just how to cook up a decent space curry, and it last year tasked the Defence Food Research Laboratory with coming up with a viable zero-grav bhaji to sustain its space pioneers.

India’s plan to follow Russia, the US and China in putting a man aloft follows its successful Chandrayaan-1 Moon mission, which blasted off in 2008.

Research is robust but communication is weak

For Britain’s climate science community, the past few months have come as a profound shock.

First we had the so-called “climategate” scandal, where e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) showed apparent attempts to thwart Freedom of Information requests.

More recently we have had a series of reports suggesting that “key” sections of assessments of climate change science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were in error.

It all makes a profound contrast to the situation up until last November when the global consensus on climate change science seemed stronger than ever. For scientists, climate research was based on powerful computer models backed by a wealth of real-world evidence. Nothing was certain — in science it seldom is. But we could say with a high degree of certainty — and people believed us when we said it — that the world was warming and the consequences were likely to be serious.

What has changed over the past few months? Certainly not the science. Yes there have been mistakes emerging, and the “climategate” e-mails demonstrate that scientists are human. They do not call into question the robustness of the surface temperature record produced by UEA. There are two other independent data sets that show clearly that global-average temperature has increased over the past century and this warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s.

The more substantive mistake in the IPCC report that Himalayan glaciers were melting so fast that they would vanish by 2035 has been dealt with swiftly and clearly by the IPCC. Some claim that there are more mistakes and in fact, in a subject that is so complex and rapidly evolving, that is likely.

But all those questions have been about the impacts of climate change — perhaps one of the most difficult areas to judge. What has not been called into question is the basic science.

The key finding that “warming is unequivocal and very likely due to man’s activities” remains robust. The basic physics tells us that increasing greenhouse gases cause global warming and we are likely to pay a heavy price if we keep emitting them.

The big difference then, is not in the physics of climate change but the public’s perception of what climate research is all about.

That means it is a communications problem and the blame for that has to lie at least in part with the scientists and in part with the way that science is reported.

Huge growth in mobile use of Twitter and Facebook

Opera’s latest State of the Mobile Web report has shown a massive rise in the use of Facebook through mobile devices, but an even more explosive growth for microblogging service Twitter.

Opera’s monthly report delves into the aggregated usage reports it receives from users of the popular Opera mini – giving a snapshot of what people are surfing through their smartphones and other mobile devices.

January’s report looks at social networking – and although the service’s popularity in Russia gives it a bit of a .ru skew, the growth of Twitter and Facebook are clear.

Facebook number one

If Opera’s report is representative, Facebook is now the clear leader as the most used social network from mobile phones, partly due to a huge 619 per cent growth through 2009.

However, the real success story was Twitter – which despite only entering the top ten list at number seven has apparently experienced a growth of nearly 3,000 per cent.

Although it was leapfrogged by Twitter, MySpace also grew – picking up an 84 per cent increase, but Friendster use declined by 29 per cent pushing it out of the top three.

Charting unknown Himalayan waters

In the wake of a recent controversy over the retreat of Himalayan glaciers in which the UN’s climate science body admitted that it was an error to assert that they would disappear by 2035, water availability has emerged as a key issue with even more uncertainty.

Receding Himalayan glaciers grabbed headlines because they feed major rivers in South Asia and some parts of Southeast Asia, which is home to a sizeable proportion of the planet’s population.

If the glaciers significantly retreated or even disappeared, it would be an issue of life and death for many millions of people who depend on these rivers.

But now that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that it was a mistake to say the glaciers will be gone in a matter of decades, does that mean water is not a worrying issue any more?

Many scientists believe it is – even more so more given the uncertainty surrounding the future impacts of climate change in a region of not only high population, but one of high population growth.

The broad consensus is glaciers themselves are indeed retreating, although the rate of the recession may be debatable.

However, there are other climate-influenced factors that affect river flows, such as changes in precipitation, snowfall and regional temperature.

Uncertain times

“There has been too much focus on glaciers whereas there are other factors like precipitation and snowfall that affects the levels of waters in rivers downstream the eastern Himalayas,” says Mats Eriksson, a senior hydrologist with Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which has carried out several studies on the glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.
Rice saplings drying out as a reuslt of a lack of rain (Image: Madhav Nepal/BBC)
Without monsoon rains, young crops soon perish and die

Below the eastern part of the Himalayas are major rivers like the Ganges and the Bramhaputra, as well as their tributaries.

These are vital lifelines for millions of people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.

A recent study for the World Bank has shown that the volume of water resulting from glacial melt in Nepal makes up less than 5% of the flows of rivers leaving the country and contributing to the Ganges downstream.

“That is, about 95% or more of the river flow is the result of rain and melting seasonal snow,” said report co-author Richard Armstrong, a glaciologist from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the US.

If that is true, rivers downstream of the eastern Himalayas will hardly be affected, even if the glaciers recede or disappear.

However, would the other contributing factors to the rivers’ flow, such as precipitation and snowfall, remain the same in the changing climate?

No, say scientists, but whether that will lead to rise or fall of rivers’ levels – and by how much and when – are the questions still waiting to be answered.

“We are seeing some changes in the monsoon,” Dr Eriksson said of the seasonal precipitation system that shapes the climate in this part of the region. (more…)

Chinese Human Rights Sites Hit by DDoS Attack

Five Web sites run by Chinese human rights activists were attacked by hackers over the weekend, as a separate row continued between Google and China over political cyberattacks.

The Web site of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that lasted 16 hours starting Saturday afternoon, the group said in an e-mailed statement on Monday. A DDoS attack involves the attacker ordering a legion of compromised computers all to visit a certain Web site at once, overwhelming its server with requests for communication and leaving the site inaccessible to normal visitors. The group said it could not confirm the origin of the attackers but called the Chinese government the most likely suspect.

Google this month said it had been hit by cyberattacks from China partly aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The company cited the attacks, which also resulted in the theft of Google intellectual property, as one reason it plans to stop censoring its Chinese search engine, even if that means closing down its China offices.

The latest hacking attack also targeted another Chinese rights group named Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch; two news sites run by Chinese activists, Canyu and New Century News; and the Independent Chinese Pen Center, which posts essays by dissident writers, according to the e-mailed statement. Public records show the Web sites all share two neighboring IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, suggesting the sites were all affected by the DDoS attack.

The bandwidth consumed by the attack hit 2GB per second at its peak, the statement said, citing the Internet service provider for the Web sites.
(more…)

ISRO’s most powerful rocket motor successfully tested

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully tested on ground on Sunday at Sriharikota, its biggest and most powerful rocket motor called S-200, powered by 200 tonnes of solid propellants. This is a vital step in the development of its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-III (GSLV Mk-III), which will put a satellite weighing four tonnes in orbit.

N. Narayana Moorthy, Project Director, GSLV Mk-III, called the test a big success. The firing of the motor began at 8 a.m. at the test bed at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) and lasted its full duration of 130 seconds. The performance was exactly as predicted, said Mr. Moorthy. Nearly 600 parameters were monitored. During the test, the motor produced a peak thrust of 500 tonnes.

It is the third biggest solid rocket motor in the world after the booster rocket of NASA’s space shuttle and that of Arianespace’s Ariane-5 launch vehicle. It is 22 metres long and 3.2 metres in diameter.

An ISRO press release said the design, development and successful realisation of the motor was entirely an indigenous effort of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram and the SDSC, in collaboration with public and private sector industries.
(more…)

BSNL launches 3G Services in Tamil Nadu news

Public sector telecom service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) yesterday said it had launched its 3G-service in Tamil Nadu Circle on Saturday, 23 January 2010.

The telco said in a statement that its services are being launched in Coimbatore, Coonoor and Ooty town in the first phase and would gradually be extended to 38 cities across the state in the next three months.

BSNL is planning a capex of approximately Rs1,000 crore including Rs130 crore for 3G to add new capacity.

Capacity addition under Phase V.1 will be 23 lakh lines of which 19 lakh would be for 2G services and the remaining four lakh for 3G.

Currently, BSNL operates 3,124 sites in Tamil Nadu for mobile services and is planning another 3262 new sites, of which 1,119 would be for 3G services and remaining 2,143 for 2G.

On completion BSNL will operate 6,386 sites for mobile services through out the state.

BASIC ministers task IPCC with need for rigour in climate reports

Amid controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on melting glaciers, Xie Zhenhua, Vice-Chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, today urged the UN panel to make the fifth assessment report comprehensive by also citing contrarian views.

He said there is a view that climate change is caused by the cyclical element of nature itself. “Climate change concerns survival and development of people. We need to adopt an open attitude to scientific research and incorporate all views,” said Xie, while addressing a conference of BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) countries here today. The fourth assessment report of IPCC, chaired by R K Pachauri, had stated — erroneously, it now admits — that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear altogether by 2035, if not sooner.

Stressing the fact that more scientific and consistent views are required, Xie said: “Scientists are waiting for the fifth assessment report and amongst us (BASIC countries), we will enhance cooperation in the report to make it more comprehensive. This will need prompt and scientific action.” (more…)

Scientists identify key factors to help children avoid rejection

American scientists have claimed to have identified three key factors that may help children in avoiding social rejection, which leads to academic failure, depression and experiment with drugs.

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center said that the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues and social cues in social interaction as well as recognise the meaning and respond appropriately to them are key to helping children develop skills to maintain friendships and avoid a host of problems in later life.

A pair of studies indicated that some children have difficulty picking up on non-verbal or social cues.

“They simply don’t notice the way someone’s shoulders slump with disappointment, or hear the change in someone’s voice when they are excited, or take in whether a person’s face shows anger or sadness,” said lead author Dr Clark McKown.

A second major factor is that some children may pick up on non-verbal or social cues, but lack the ability to attach meaning to them. The third factor is the ability to reason about social problems, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology said.

“Some children may notice social cues and understand what is happening, but are unable to do the social problem solving to behave appropriately,” McKown added.

“Because it is not known exactly which behaviours set a child up for failure, or how to measure these skills, it was difficult to provide support,” he said, adding “now, it will be possible to pinpoint which abilities a child needs to develop and offer help.”

“Children’s ability to develop positive peer relationships is critical to their well—being. Compared to children who are accepted by their peers, socially rejected children are at substantially elevated risk for later adjustment troubles.”

A child who can take in social cues, recognise their meaning and respond appropriately, and who is capable of “self-regulating,” or controlling behaviour, is more likely to have successful relationships, the study said.

“The number of children who cannot negotiate all these steps, and who are at risk of social rejection, is startling,” said McKown. (more…)

Siemens Records Fastest Wireless Data Transfer

Siemens researchers have bettered their own record, going from 200 Mbps, now to 500 Mbps.

Researchers at Siemens, Munich in collaboration with researchers from the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin have been able to achieve a new record in wireless data transfer speeds using Ostar LED, which is the brightest white LED available today. Data is transferred by modulating the amount of light emitted by the LED via the power supply. The changes in brightness of light due to modulation is detected by a photodetector and converted back into electrical pulses thus resulting in wireless data transfer.

The researchers have been able to successfully transmit data at up to 500 Mbps over a distance of five meters. When five LEDs are combined, it is possible to transfer the data over longer distances at about 100 Mbps.

The press release from the company states, “Increasingly, wireless networks are compromised by the fact that in many buildings the three independent WLAN frequency bands are multiply occupied, which leads to collisions among the data packets. In a situation like this, visible light, as a currently unused and license-free medium, offers a suitable alternative. A further advantage is that this form of data transfer is impervious to interception. Only the photodetector that is positioned directly within the light cone is able receive the data. In other words, it is impossible to ‘tap’ the data transported in the light beam.”

The applications of this method of wireless communication using light in the visible spectrum, also known as Visible Light Communication (VLC), are many. VLC has the inherent benefits of being unaffected by radio frequency devices and this will find applications in some factory and medical environments. LED stoplights or railroad signals can transmit information to cars or trains. There are applications for VLC even at home, such as data can be transmitted via ceiling lights to a receivers in appliances placed in a room. Siemens also states that this technology can benefit WLAN technology in certain ways.