The State of India’s Digital Economy (SIDE) Report measures and analyses India’s digital transformation using data, information and evidence that are specifically relevant to the Indian context. In this, the report departs from the norm for global studies. While global indicators go for breadth rather than depth by choosing the …
It ran along with the railroad. It was a symbol of the strength of many empires. Binding territory by holding it together with thin wires. It was the telegraph: the communication link between district headquarters, towns and states. When the radio came, a universally accepted combination of dots and dashes …
SATELLITE communication has become reality, crossing over from science fiction to emerge as the lifeblood of our times. The information superhighway - known better as the Internet - live television discussions, those essential cricket matches from countries halfway across the globe and a lot more could not have been possible …
LOST? Not sure where you are? A new and improved version of the Global Positioning System (GPS) can tell you to within a centimetre. The system, in use for several years now, is being adapted to track fast-moving objects and could even lead to television viewers in different countries seeing …
COME November 17 and sky watchers will get cricks in their necks. But it will be worth it. The Earth will wade through a spectacular rain of meteors left behind by a passing comet. The last time the planet passed through the cosmic debris in 1966, hundreds of thousands of …
Automated translation of phone calls has long been a dream of telephone companies. Now, AT&T; and Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute have joined forces to make it come true. By the end of 1999, they expect to have a prototype system that will automatically translate spoken Japanese into English, or …
Cellphones are not just a public nuisance - they are also used by lookouts to warn criminals when the police are near. Now Deropa of Boksburg, South Africa, is patenting a transmitter that jams cellphones. All cellphones continually transmit and receive coded signals, with which they communicate with the network …
THE us Navy, oil industry and telecommunication giants are trying hard to take the Law of the Sea Treaty out of the 'deep freeze' as the nation is still to ratify it. The deadline for ratifying the treaty, an international agreement on regulating commerce, navigation and exploration on and beneath …
Satellites perform a number of roles in modern society. According to the Washington Post , communications in the United States were disrupted when the Galaxy 4 satellite spun out of position recently throwing everything into confusion. This event illustrates how much communication relies today on satellites. Galaxy 4 is one …
Very soon, two satellites will be launched for measuring the changes in Earth's gravitational force due to mass changes equivalent to 1 cm of water over a quarter of a million square kilometres. The CHAMP mission (a joint German, US and French venture) in 1999 and a US National Aeronautics …
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 …
the controversy has been raging ever since cellular telephones invaded our lives. These gadgets heat up your brain, meddle with your pacemakers and perhaps, cause cancer. And ever since these words of doom were uttered, scientists have been looking at the connection of these adverse health effects with the increasing …
By the end of this year, Lucent Technologies of New Jersey, USA, says that its optical fibres will be able to carry up to a jaw-dropping 400 billion bits of data per second. Although laboratory tests have produced similar, high-capacity optical fibres earlier, this is over five times the throughput …
IBM hopes to make Internet telephony more attractive. When personal computers (PCs) convert speech into data packets, two people can talk over the Internet. But there is no way of sending a ringing tone. The company's researchers in New York, USA, hope to alleviate this problem by adding voicemail. When …
THE only system available to let hearing-impaired people know of an incoming call is the flash call system. Unfortunately, the system only works in one room and it only takes into account one alarm source, the phone. A new alarm system devised during a recent study conducted by the Centre …
Music will soon be sold and delivered over the telephone. Deutsche TeleKom (DT) is to offer a dial up audio-on-demand service in Germany later this year, allowing customers to compile their own music collection. DT will offer the ,,service by digitising music and compressing it to a twelfth of its …
Toll-free phone Installing the right software can transform the computer into a toll- free phone. To connect, both parties must have Internet accounts, the same brand of telephone software and multimedia computers with 486 processors or better. Internet Phone, a software developed by VocalTecof Northvale, New Jersey is currently the …
THE British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has made history by broadcasting what are thought to be the first radio programmes to be picked up in deep space. Two 15-minute news-and-current-affairs programmes in Spanish for the Americas, BBC Primera Hora (now BBC International) and Via Libre, were detected by a National Aeronautics …
• State-of-the-art technology worth Rs 15 billion will be employed by the Mathura oil refinery to reduce emission of sulphur dioxide and lower the pollution level in the sensitive Taj Mahal area of Agra, said the general manager of the refinery J L Raina in Mathura recently. • The World …
NO INDIVIDUAL can hope to remain anonymous as integration of computing and telecommunications has vastly improved the ability to collate, classify and analyse information about each person. These databases have become as indispensable to the conduct of business and government as wires to an electrical system. Life outside this world …
