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 …
PANDA Electronics Co, China's leading television manufacturer, has had enough of selling no-frills sets. It is gearing up for a into the satellite dish and telephone businesses. Panda believes that only by expanding into new areas will it be able to keep pace with foreign competitors, who are bound to …
US drug companies are responding to criticism of the high cost of prescription medicines by putting out a new message for consumers: "We are not out to fleece you. We are, in fact, toiling hard to 'discover' drugs that will cure terminal diseases". They have kicked off a television advertising …
ARE forests linked with the spread of malaria? Or, for that matter, do terrain, agricultural practices, water-bodies or ground-water have any bearing on the disease? Now, a computer-based analysis technology -- the Geographical Information System (GIS) -- may provide answers to these complex questions. The Malaria Research Centre (MRC) in …
A JAPANESE company has introduced a bathing system that helps conserve water. The Full Time Bath enables the same water to be used for upto a month of body-scrubbing. The computer-controlled system, equipped with double-filtration and anti-bacterial function, keeps the recycled water as sparkling clean as tap water. The company …
SANSKRIT -- long the preserve of priests and Vedic scholars -- may soon become more accessible to the common person, thanks to a new computerised educational system being developed by researchers at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Says G V Singh, leader of the project that is being conducted at …
OCTOPUSES, sting rays and other marine creatures may soon have their first encounter with a personal computer (PC). Bruce W Macdonald, a marine engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, Queensland, has developed a WetPC that can help divers to count fish, check maps and diagnose equipment …
• US computer software companies are in a state of shock over an announcement by Compton's New Media, a small US company, that it has been granted a patent on computer systems that retrieve information from multimedia databases. Several industry groups intend to contest the claim in court and say …
A computer software that demonstrates animal dissections will soon help save the lives of countless animals. Once the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) completes its project for the computer dissection of frogs, these animals need not be killed in school and college laboratories. Similar software programmes for other animals …
DR COMPUTER As scholars expounded on the significance of traditional sciences, a computer in the pandal outside prescribed lifestyles to the more practical-minded. The diagnostic system was a software called Prakruthi, devised by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Based on the principles of Ayurveda, the system fires …
A sophisticated environmental pollution information and control system (EPICS) is being developed jointly by the Union ministry of environment and forests and the Delhi-based National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS). According to A K Mathur of NISTADS, the key feature of EPICS would be the production of …
Travellers entering USA may soon be identified by their hands. The identification system, known as Inspass, provides each traveller with a card that has a nine-byte code describing the shape of their hands. Inspass uses a solid-state television camera that photographs the hand from overhead and from the side and …
GERMAN scientists say an understanding of car crashes could help childbirth specialists tell if a woman needs a Caesarean section (International Business Week, No 3327-657). The team of researchers at the Deutschland-based Electronic Data Systems, struck by the similarity of forces that come into play in a car crash and …
IT'S TIME you took your neglected stamp collection seriously, for mail may soon become electronic. The familiar sound of the postman's bicycle bell will be replaced by the beep of the computer and the crackle of telephone lines as electronic mail, or E-mail, transforms communications. Already about 15 million people …
WHAT SETS the BBC apart from other TV networks is the kind of subjects it chooses for its documentaries and the quality research it puts into bringing alive subjects that are considered unexciting by most commercial networks. Two very different kinds of series on computers -- Computing for the Terrified …
DINOSAURS went extinct because the lumbering, gormandising behemoths were unable to adapt to a changing world. The contemporary car -- a fuming, fuel guzzling, latter-day dinosaur -- probably awaits the same fate. With oil getting scarcer and air fouler, it won't be long before today's cars are veered out of …
Virtual reality has done it again. It is now possible to watch a filmed "tour" of the Abbey of Cluny in France in all its splendour. The abbey, which was built in the 10th century, was among the largest of its time and destroyed after the French Revolution. It has …
THE NEXT electronics revolution may be round the corner. A group of scientists at the Delhi-based Solid State Physics Laboratory (SPL) claims to have produced a diode made of silicon, which will make tomorrow's supercomputers smaller and faster. "I think we are the first in the world to make a …
* PATENT wars are heating up. British drug manufacturer Glaxo has won one patents case against a Canadian manufacturer, but faces a second against another. Both claim Glaxo's products -- stable and unstable forms of Zantac -- are not different enough to justify different patents. Zantac is the world's best-selling …
US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton announced on September 29, a sweeping liberalisation of export controls on computers and other high-technology products. This indicates a change in attitude from 1989, when the US had banned exports of supercomputers to India fearing they would be used for space or atomic research (Down To …
SORTING out similar types of plastics from waste may now be possible through a system based on the different ways various plastics reflect a near-infrared light (Environmental Science and Technology, Vol 27, No 7). The different reflection patterns are then analysed by an artificial nerve-like computer programme, which is "trained …
