[silk] Microsoft's worldwide telescope
Google Earth -- Microsoft Universe? http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ The free Web-based application allows users to zoom around the universe and browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics. The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with the Microsoft high performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image environments. Worldwide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies, and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums
Re: [silk] aqvavit
On Wed, Sep 5, 2007 at 12:44 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also see lifestraw.com Udhay http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/18/lifestraw-purifies-water-instantly-for-under-2-a-year/ LifeStraw purifies water instantly for under $2 a year More on this theme, with another interesting concept here: a solar-powered water bottle that purifies up to a gallon of water at a time. http://www.indexaward.dk/2007/default.asp?id=706show=nominationnominationid=56 Another in this vein. Interesting. Anybody have more details? Udhay http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20754/ Monday, May 12, 2008 Low-Energy Water Filtration A new membrane-free water-purification system uses small amounts of energy. By Lee Bruno Most water-filtration technologies require a lot of energy to push water through membranes that eventually become fouled and need to be replaced. Both factors make water filtration costly for most applications. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have been able to overcome those challenges by incorporating scientific insights from the physics of toner particle movements into a low-energy water-filtration device that doesn't use membranes. That's all good news for the looming specter of filtering brackish drinking water that threatens much of the developing world and even some water-stressed areas in developed countries. In the past, however, the economics have been the stumbling block for creating affordable water-treatment systems. The United Nations estimates that over the next eight years, some 900 million people will need a safe supply of drinking water. PARC researchers call their device the spiral concentrator. It is a spiral-shaped, 50-centimeter-long piece of plastic tubing that's one millimeter in diameter. As water is pumped through one end of the device, particles in the water are pressed up against the walls of the tubing. Particles as small as one micron in size are separated out by centrifugal force and shunted away from the clean water via diverging forks in the spiral concentrator. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require as much energy as it would to push contaminated water through a membrane. Such membranes are typically built from resin and have many tiny holes perforated in them, ranging in size from a few micrometers to a few nanometers. The PARC innovation sprang from an earlier contract research project with the U.S. Army. The aim was to design a device to concentrate biohazards like anthrax by concentrating few parts per liter of contaminants so that a sensor could detect their presence. The PARC researchers have lots of experience with studying the physics of particles. Toner in copy machines is made up of miniature, electron-charged particles. Understanding the physics of how these charged particles move in both air and liquid has been a key area of PARC research. The lessons the researchers learned about particle toner were used for PARC's biological agent detection system and for the water purifier. The purifier requires a constant flow rate of water so that the movements of the particles conform to predicted patterns. That flow of water can be achieved with a low power pump that can be driven by a panel of solar cells. However, because the spin concentrator can separate particles no smaller than one micron in size, it can't remove bacteria. Scott Elrod, manager of the hardware systems laboratory at PARC, says that smaller particles could be separated out by adding alum to the water being filtered. Alum is used in water treatment plants to chemically bind small particles to larger ones, which can then be separated out using gravity. In the case of the spin concentrator, centrifugal force will supply the horsepower to remove those congealed particles. Elrod says that in the next two months, the researchers expect to scale down the device into a parallel stack of spin concentrators that are small enough to be sold commercially. They also plan to test the system with larger volumes of water, to reach the maximum volume of 100 liters per minute filtration rate. Researchers have already done the calculations on paper indicating that the parallel schema and water volume should be able to be handled. -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Microsoft's worldwide telescope
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Suresh Ramasubramanian) writes: Google Earth -- Microsoft Universe? http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ The free Web-based application allows users to zoom around the universe and browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics. The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with the Microsoft high performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens [...] There is a similar Google application, Google Sky, that has been around for some time. I can only imagine this is Microsoft playing catch-up. -- Perry E. Metzger[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [silk] Young Saudis ask, 'Where is the love?'
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Ramakrishnan Sundaram wrote: Asking a woman for her number can cause a young man anxiety anywhere. And in neighbouring UAE, Emirati men and women come to malls with rolled up pieces of paper with their numbers on them, which they throw to people who interest them. I saw many secretive couples at a public park last year on a very hot afternoon in Ahmedabad, many of the women had handkerchiefs masking their faces and wore gigantic sun-glasses to make themselves unrecognizable. I also met an askari who sternly warned me not to take any pictures ( i was carrying a camera...). Later, after I had bought him an ice cream, and he had determined that i was a good guy, he told me was a kind of guardian for these lovers - apparently some parents and unscruplous were in the habit of secretly photographing such trysts, and either using it to threaten or blackmail the couples...
Re: [silk] Young Saudis ask, 'Where is the love?'
On Tue, 13 May 2008, Deepa Mohan wrote: But it reminds me about the newspaper reporter who wrote in the paper, Half of the population of this town are idiots. Bowing to popular outrage, he then printed a retraction...Half of the population of this town are NOT idiots. Ha. And where every parent thinks their child is above average? :) Brian
Re: [silk] Crazy English in China
On May 12, 2008, at 6:32 PM, ss wrote: May I point out that you have contradicted yourself? If 50% of people in the world speak Chinese, how does one reach the conclusion that more than 50% of all knowledge exists in English? One could easily conclude this depending on how one defines knowledge for the sake of this analysis. For example, scientific, technical, and medical publications are overwhelmingly English, even from publishers in non-English countries with no significant native English reach. I can easily imagine that some kinds of prattle in some languages easily exceed English by volume, but that is only slightly related to the total value of the content in the language. A large population of a language's speakers does not imply knowledge, but the economic product of said people does. 1) You are making this assumption as an English speaker who does not really know how much knowledge is locked up in French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Sanskrit, Tamil or Arabic for that matter. See above. Most scientific, medical, and technical publications are published in not more than four languages (Chinese being the sole non- European language), and the majority of content is only published in English. The number of languages of publication for this type of knowledge have been dwindling very rapidly, and most such publishers have plans to publish exclusively in English within the next ten years. Ironically, most of these publishers are not based in English- speaking countries. We may not be able to quantify how much knowledge is locked up in a language, but we can pretty easily quantify how much knowledge is published in a language which is a fine proxy. 2) The reason why a lot of knowledge exists in a particular language such as English is precisely because English speakers have taken the trouble to learn non English languages and have translated non English works into English. How much knowledge has really been translated into English in the last few decades? I would make the observation that for many types of publication in most countries manuscripts are required to be submitted in English, even if the author's native language will be a translation target. More than a few authors have had the misfortune of having their works translated into their native language from English manuscripts by translation services. The assumption that English has all it takes to survive forever is comforting, but might not be true. It might not be true, but there is a strong economic pressure to converge on a single set of standards, whether it is SI metric units or English language. The purveyors of many kinds of knowledge have already chosen their one language, English, out of the around twenty that were routinely supported a few decades ago. Translation is no longer economical, as both the cost overhead and latency are too high to be viable in modern markets. Back when the state-of-the-art knowledge did not change much over intervals of several years it was plausible, but we work on much shorter timeframes now for most things. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers
[silk] On Innovation in India
http://seekingalpha.com/article/76511-where-are-indias-innovative-companies-products-and-solutions According to the article, the missing ingredients required to jump-start India's innovation ecosystem are; 1. Access to intellectual and relational capital. 2. A well developed Angel and Venture Capital industry does not exist in India. 3. An active segment of the Press focused on promoting early stage ventures and building Entrepreneurs into Business Celebrities. 4. A Comprehensive Understanding of the Indian Consumer and the lack of formal Government support to promote Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 5. Establishing Compelling Reasons to Innovate. Quite safely, one can say that 5 exists and as for 4, the less government 'support' the better, yes? -- Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org/ Join our Facebook Page too: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pratham-Books/9307274926
[silk] The historical roots of India’s booming service economy
http://voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1122 India stands out from other emerging economies because its growth has been led by the service sector rather than labour-intensive manufactures. This column summarises recent research showing that India has a long history of strength in services, and its service-led development may play to historical strengths rather than hindering its progress. India's recent spectacular rate of economic growth, combined with the sheer size of its population, means that it is beginning to take its place as one of the key players in the global economy. 1 One way in which India stands out from other Asian economies is in the better performance of its service sector. Whereas other emerging Asian economies, such as China, have experienced growth led by dynamic manufacturing performance, India's growth has been led by sectors such as business services. This is sometimes used to portray India's performance as fragile, focusing attention on shortcomings of the industrial sector. 2 But as much of manufacturing becomes increasingly automated and de-skilled, it is not clear that manufacturing-led growth is such a good long-run bet on the road to development. It may be that a focus on services will prove to be a better long-run route to prosperity. Furthermore, this pattern of service-led development may be more in tune with the legacy of India's past. Measuring long-run productivity performance Although we know a great deal about the long-run development of rich countries such as Britain, we know much less about the past performance of less developed countries such as India. In recent research, we seek to remedy this by drawing on quantitative information collected by the British during their period of colonial rule in India to compare sectoral productivity performance in Britain and India from 1870 to the present. 3 Our research demonstrates that India's recent service-led development has deep historical roots. During the colonial period, India's comparative productivity performance was already better in services than in industry or agriculture. This emphasis on services is in line with much recent research on long-run growth among the developed economies, which finds services playing a key role in comparative economic performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as during more recent times. 4 India has long lagged behind Britain. Between 1870 and 1970, output per worker in India fell from around 15 per cent of the UK level in the economy as a whole to less than 10 per cent, as India fell further behind. Since the 1970s, India has begun to catch up on the United Kingdom, but by the end of the twentieth century it was still further behind than in the early 1870s. Even with the rapid growth achieved by India in recent years, it will take time for India to regain its relative position of the late nineteenth century. Productivity by sector Agriculture has an important part to play in explaining this disappointing overall Indian productivity performance. The sector remains India's largest employer, accounting for three-quarters of Indian employment in the late nineteenth century and nearly two-thirds of employment today. Furthermore, agriculture is the only sector where India has continued to fall further and further behind, with labour productivity dropping from around 10% of the UK level in the late nineteenth century to around 1% at the end of the twentieth. It is clear that India needs to increase productivity in agriculture if overall productivity performance is to improve substantially. Much of the existing research on economic growth and development emphasises the role of industry. This is particularly so in the context of twentieth century Asia, where the high-profile cases of Japan, South Korea and China have all been seen as manufacturing-led development.5 The Indian case, however, does not conform to this pattern, and this shows up in the comparative productivity data. Indeed, although there have been fluctuations in comparative India/UK productivity in industry, there has been no trend, with India at around 15% of the UK level in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Only in services has there been an improvement in comparative India/UK labour productivity, from around 15% in the late nineteenth century to around 30% by the end of the twentieth century. Services have thus played a positive role in India's productivity performance throughout the period, limiting Indian relative decline before 1870 and leading the process of catching-up from the 1970s. The service sector productivity growth is not confined to modern services such as finance – it is also visible in trade and transport. Explaining India's better performance in services The productivity gap between Britain and India has been smaller in services than in industry or agriculture since the First World War. The recent emergence of a dynamic service-led Indian economy
