National Statistical Office (NSO), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has conducted a survey on Household Social Consumption: Education as part of 75th round of National Sample Survey (NSS). Prior to this, surveys on the same subject were carried out during 64th round (July 2007- June 2008) and 71st round …
WHEN Sharon Lopatha of Maryland, USA, disappeared in 1996, the police checked her home computer for clues. They learnt she had posted messages in a forum devoted to sexual sadism. Her body was found buried in the front yard of a man who browsed the same forum. In another instance, …
EVEN as we count off the days to the next century, scientists and computer professionals are hard at work, wracking their brains to come up with a solution to the millennium bug, a problem that promises to acquire fearful proportions in the next few years. What exactly is this bug? …
THE computer scores another point. Distance learning became possible years ago with the advent of the World Wide Web. Now, us software experts have taken "distance learning" a step further. Deaf children in the US will soon be able to learn written English with the help of an Internet program …
THE silicon chip may be no more if one American company has its way. Ball Semiconductor Inc (BSI) believes that in the future, silicon chips will be spherical. Microchips got their name because they are "chipped" off a flat silicon wafer upon which the circuits have been etched. But wafer …
WHILE working on the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the century's most acclaimed science fiction films, director Stanley Kubrick and legendary science fiction author Arthur C Clarke created HAL 9000, a 22nd century supercomputer on-board the spaceship Discovery. HAL could do amazing things: it could fly the …
SOFTWARE that allows airline pilots to calculate their takeoff speed more accurately should increase safety margins in aborted takeoffs and also cut maintenance costs. The speed at which a plane can lift itself off the runway, known as vl, has to be calculated from the various flight characteristics of the …
WHEN it comes to writing reports, British Telecom's (BT's) research engineers have resorted to using Radar to make sure that their output is up-to-date and contains all references to relevant research. The Radar in question is a clever computer program named after the underdog character in MASH, the television comedy …
A distributed computer built from 68 personal computers has been found to be one of the 500 fastest computers in the world. The Avalon computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, costs a mere US $150,000 to build and can handle more than 20 billion operations per second. It …
The idea of aroma-emitting televi-sion sets is being extended to Websites by Ricoh of Japan, which wants to equip both television sets and computers with devices that would eject smells that will go with the programme or website that the user might have chosen. Ricoh says Web pages could carry …
radio stations that sound almost as good as a compact disc could be with us soon. Broadcasters in Europe and Canada are already testing these high-quality digital broadcasts, but the special sets needed to receive them are so expensive that nobody is making them. Now, a British company has come …
he changed the way most of us perceive popular entertainment and went on to become a teen phenomenon. Even today he remains an icon invoking nostalgia through his songs and films. But there is a place where Elvis Presley, the uncrowned King of rock
A radical new approach to the timed release of drugs is being patented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( mit ), usa . It uses a tiny silicon microchip etched with thousands of microscopic pits, each filled with a dose of the drug to be administered. Each tiny pit …
computers are becoming "literate". Using a recently developed software, home computers will now be able to access your writing skills. However, getting rid of critics might just take a little more time. Teachers benefit the most: grading student essays is far from getting tedious, say the developers of the software. …
Humans suffer from an inherent disadvantage in using a computer: both hands are occupied with the keyboards and a person is unable to operate a mouse at the same time. So Sun Microsystems of California, USA, has filed several lengthy patents on a system in which the user's eye controls …
Quantum computers have always thrilled scientists as these could break unbreakable codes. Though not practically feasible yet, they are useful tools to explore the theoretical limits of computation. E Knill, R Laflamme and W Zurek have recently built a fault-tolerant quantum computer, that operates reliably provided the components operate within …
The department of electronics (DOE) has launched software packages for Indian languages free on the Internet as part of a national initiative to promote information technology in Indian languages. Inter-net users can now freely download two specific software packages
With the growth of the Internet has come problems of copyright infringement. Given the decentralised nature of the Web, it is a daunting task to keep track of copyright pirates. But now US-based Broadcast Music Inc is using a program to monitor how copyrighted music is being used on the …
Staring at the Sun Welcome to Roque de los Muchaches, one of the Island of La Palma in the Canaries. This mountain is littered with the eerie domes of astronomical telescopes. But amid the white domes, another unworldly structure rises on seemingly fragile metal legs. It is the Dutch Open …
geographic Information Systems ( gis ), a computer software for mapping geographical data for civic and environmental planning, is now being used in Sikkim and Darjeeling for landslide management and mitigation. One of the major problems in mitigating a disaster is the lack of warning. The advantage of having a …
