The report presents a mixed picture. Over the past 25 years, there have been notable improvements in child well-being in the group of countries examined in this report: steady decline in child mortality, overall reduction in adolescent suicide and increase in school completion rates. But the last five years have …
NOT SO long ago you had to run to the local polyglot to get a missive in an unfamiliar language deciphered. Come computers and you can now read that blasted letter without supercilious help. The key to multilingual ability lies in a software called Apex Language Processor (ALP), which transforms …
School kids in rural Tamil Nadu have, computer education rolling their way. A computer-on-wheels programme,. devised by Anna University in Madras, is teaching three computer languages - Basic, D Base3+ and Lotus - to high school children in rural areas of the state. Five computers are taken to each school …
VASANT Yeshwant Gharpure of Pune palms a very unlikely calculator -- one made of cardboard, but capable of addition, subtraction and squaring upto four digits, including decimals. "The principles," says Gharpure, "are very simple and follow those of the well-known slide rule and log tables." The doodad can even handle …
Environment will become a compulsory subject in government schools in Delhi from the next academic season. According to the state education minister Sahi Singh Verma, "The elder citizens of the Union Territory have hitherto displayed a callous disregard for air, land and water. Our only hope is action from the …
JOHN BERGER, American art historian and sociologist, in an essay entitled Why look at animals?, points out that in the 19th century, animal toys such as rocking horses became popular during a societal move away from nature and towards urbanisation, and animals ceased to form a part of the immediate …
THE WORLD Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) gutsily staged a street play in January this year in enemy territory, Delhi's Sadar Bazar -- the core of animal skin trader Sansar Chand's territory. Chand, who masterminded the biggest poaching network in north and east India, was nabbed by Delhi police in …
A LITTLE girl gazes wide eyed at the elephant while her bored mother pulls her away: "You've seen an elephant on TV haven't you". "But ma," replies the little girl, "I didn't know it was so big." Jeremy Chervais science writer and author of Zoo 2000 recounted this story recently …
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 …
The National Literacy Mission (NLM) plans to lead Delhi's 2.48 million illiterates "from darkness into light". Besides reading and writing, the mission will focus on sex education, AIDS awareness, drug and alcohol addiction, greenery, sanitation and hygiene, physical fitness, family planning, first aid, legal education, women's empowerment and immunisation. K …
HOW DO Chinese tots outperform their American counterparts? Psychologist David C Geary of the University of Missouri at Columbia, USA, who has studied the performance of Chinese and American schoolchildren, found the Chinese kids got three times as many items right in a test and they could hold more digits …
Under a 1978 agreement between the ministry of health and the Delhi Medical Students' Association, 33 per cent of all post-graduate seats in AIIMS were reserved for AIIMS graduates because they were not eligible to apply in regional medical colleges. As SC/ST students found it difficult to qualify for the …
IN CONTRAST to Indian Science Congress at Jaipur,the Children's Science Congress in the Capital was a vibrant affair. For the 350 youngsters who attended the National Children's Science Congress in the Capital recently, the projects they had prepared "were not science, they were fun." As a result, the projects were …
Dental students of Bangalore University can now face the prospect of failure with a broad display of teeth. University authorities reportedly granted grace marks to several Bachelor of Dental Sciences students to enable them to pass the 1992 annual and 1993 supplementary examinations. University sources say more than 150 students …
A SUSTAINABLE society is one that is prepared to monitor the impacts of its activities carefully, openly and democratically, analyse them and use its wisdom and knowledge to solve problems. The knowledge capital of a society is just as important for sustainability as its natural or human-made capital. Several meetings …
ANY ATTEMPT at promoting awareness of the interdependence of humans and the environment is a welcome step. This is especially true of the need to tell children about the harm that has been done to the once-good earth by generations of Homo sapiens -- the only species that is mentally …
AS PART of its literacy campaign, Bangladesh has started a food for education programme, under which a poor family will get 15 kg of cereal a month if one child goes to school, reports Panos. This would be an incentive for parents to send to school children who are otherwise …
India's agricultural universities are producing far too many forestry graduates for the jobs available. Protests by the graduates prompted the Union ministry of environment and forests (MEF) to write to the department of personnel in the Union home ministry, requesting them to include forestry as an optional paper in the …
LEWIS Carroll would have been delighted to put Alice into this wonderland. And James Thurber's Walter Mitty would have found in it an excellent refuge from his importunate wife. Virtual Reality (VR) is the latest in fantasyware -- a three-dimensional, computer-simulated landscape in which, unlike the dreamworld created by novelists …
WITH US unemployment remaining steady at an unhappy 7 per cent, the only consolation that President Bill Clinton had to offer Americans is that the Japanese are finally experiencing the same problem. In an effort to counter the joblessness that is troubling the world's largest economies, Clinton proposed a global …
Centre of Concern for Child Labour 247, Akashdarshan Apartments Mayur Vihar-I New Delhi 110 091 Ph: 2252298 Bandhua Mukti Morcha 7, Jantar Mantar Road New Delhi 110 001 Ph: 3329043 Nanban Obula Padithurai Manuchalai Road Madurai 625 009 Institute for Social Education and Development Block No 41/3, 14th Lane, Indira …
