Indian Science and Technology

India has a long and distinguished tradition in science and technology from the ancient times to great achievements during this century; the latter half prior to independence has been related largely to pure research. At the time of independence, our scientific and technological infrastructure was neither strong nor organised as compared to the developed world. This had resulted in our being technologically dependent on the skills and expertise available in other countries. In the past four decades, an infrastructure and capability largely commensurate with meeting national needs has been created minimising our dependence on other countries. A range of industries from small to the most sophisticated has been established covering a wide range of utilities, services and goods. There is now a reservoir of expertise well acquainted with the most modern advances in basic and applied areas that is equipped to make choices between available technologies, to absorb readily new technologies and provide a framework for future national development.

An Airline Pilot Was Arrested In A Jet’s Cockpit On Suspicion Of Being DRUNK

Hundreds of stunned passengers watched police march the 44-year-old American first officer off the Boeing 777.The United Airlines flight to San Francisco was delayed at Heathrow for almost three hours while a replacement co-pilot was found.Cops swooped after a tip-off from ground staff, who suspected the airman was boozing before the 5,300-mile flight.One stunned passenger said: “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. The pilot was frog-marched off the aircraft.“A couple of police officers stormed on to the plane as we were all sitting down and went straight for the cockpit.

“We didn’t have a clue what was happening and we were kept waiting on the plane for hours.“It is horrifying to think we were apparently so close to being flown thousands of miles by somebody who could have been drinking.“It was a horrible start to our trip but if it wasn’t for the person who called the cops, our dream holiday could have become a nightmare.”The pilot was arrested at 9am on board flight 955 after failing a breathalyser.He was bailed and ordered to return to Heathrow airport police station in January.

United Airlines has suspended the officer, who earns around £40,000 a year, until the police investigation is over.A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “The crew member was arrested on suspicion of being aviation staff performing an aviation function whilst exceeding the prescribed alcohol limit.”The flight was due to leave Heathrow's Terminal One at 10.05am but was delayed until 12.53pm.

McCain And Obama In Tense Final Debate

Barack Obama and John McCain have clashed over their economic plans and other issues in a fractious final TV debate before the US presidential poll.

In a series of testy exchanges, Mr McCain accused Mr Obama of lying and of having ties to a domestic "terrorist".Mr McCain also accused his Democratic rival of wanting to raise taxes.Mr Obama sought to link Mr McCain with President Bush and said he was running a negative campaign. Immediate voter polls found Mr Obama came out on top.A CNN poll of debate-watchers said Mr Obama won by 58% to 31%, while a CBS survey found the Democrat the winner by 53% to 22%.

A poll of undecided independent voters by US network Fox also suggested Mr Obama was the victor.McCain's reference to Mr Obama's association with Bill Ayers, once a member of a US group that waged a violent campaign against the Vietnam War, continued the main Republican line of attack from the past 10 days.

Mr Obama rejected Mr McCain's criticism over Mr Ayers - now a university professor with whom he has served on a charity board - pointing out that he had been a child at the time of Mr Ayers' radical activities."Mr Ayers is not involved in my campaign," he said.Mr McCain, senator for Arizona, also accused Mr Obama of big spending on attack ads.The Illinois senator responded that 100% of Mr McCain's political adverts had been negative and that voters were more interested at this point in how the candidates planned to fix the economy.

Software Outsourcing India

Grounded firmly on the foundations of trust, teamwork and technology, ITOI has been providing offshore software development services for companies across the globe from the software outsourcing center in India; since 1999. We have clients from the US, UK, Denmark, Germany and India.

"A lot of people focus on India for lower costs. What is remarkable in India is the caliber of the computer engineers. The cost savings were an additional benefit on top of that" said Larry Ellison, Founder and CEO, Oracle in an interview. Microsoft and Oracle have their largest offshore software development centers in India.

New Protests Break Out in Kashmir, Across India

For a second day, police in Indian-controlled Kashmir have opened fire during protests in the main town of Srinagar.

Thousands of Muslims took to the streets Wednesday to mourn fellow protesters killed in skirmishes with police. Demonstrators chanted slogans calling for revenge and independence from India, while destroying police bunkers.

Others scrambled to stock up on supplies as Indian forces briefly eased a total curfew.

Officials say at least 21 people have been killed since Monday, when Muslim separatists began demonstrating against an economic blockade and India's rule over the region. Many others have been wounded in clashes.

Muslim separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq today called for three days of mourning and urged people to protest peacefully.

United Nations spokesman in New York, Farhan Haq, today said the High Commissioner for Human Rights is monitoring developments and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is aware of the situation.

Muslim protesters oppose the Hindu blockade of a major highway leading to the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley. The blockade has disrupted the flow of supplies to the region.

Meanwhile, the demonstrations spread throughout India - as Hindu nationalists in New Delhi, Mumbai and the tourist city of Agra blocked traffic and railway lines for several hours, bringing the cities to a temporary standstill.

Hindu protesters are demanding that the government re-instate a land transfer to a Hindu shrine.

Kashmir is divided between Pakistan and India, and claimed by both. Islamic separatists have been fighting for Kashmir's independence from India, or for the region's merger with Pakistan.

Dendrimers

A dendrimer is a highly branched macromolecule with a spherical shape. The surface of the particle may be functionalized in many ways and many of the properties of the resulting construct are determined by its surface.

In particular it is possible to construct a cationic dendrimer, i.e. one with a positive surface charge. When in the presence of genetic material such as DNA or RNA, charge complimentarity leads to a temporary association of the nucleic acid with the cationic dendrimer. On reaching its destination the dendrimer-nucleic acid complex is then taken into the cell via endocytosis.
In recent years the benchmark for transfection agents has been cationic lipids. Limitations of these competing reagents have been reported to include: the lack of ability to transfect a number of cell types, the lack of robust active targeting capabilities, incompatibility with animal models, and toxicity. Dendrimers offer robust covalent construction and extreme control over molecule structure, and therefore size. Together these give compelling advantages compared to existing approaches.

Aerobic biodegradation of pollutants

The burgeoning amount of bacterial genomic data provides unparalleled opportunities for understanding the genetic and molecular bases of the degradation of organic pollutants. Aromatic compounds are among the most recalcitrant of these pollutants and lessons can be learned from the recent genomic studies of Burkholderia xenovorans LB400 and Rhodococcus sp. strain RHA1, two of the largest bacterial genomes completely sequenced to date. These studies have helped expand our understanding of bacterial catabolism, non-catabolic physiological adaptation to organic compounds, and the evolution of large bacterial genomes. First, the metabolic pathways from phylogenetically diverse isolates are very similar with respect to overall organization. Thus, as originally noted in pseudomonads, a large number of "peripheral aromatic" pathways funnel a range of natural and xenobiotic compounds into a restricted number of "central aromatic" pathways. Nevertheless, these pathways are genetically organized in genus-specific fashions, as exemplified by the b-ketoadipate and Paa pathways. Comparative genomic studies further reveal that some pathways are more widespread than initially thought. Thus, the Box and Paa pathways illustrate the prevalence of non-oxygenolytic ring-cleavage strategies in aerobic aromatic degradation processes.

Enzyme

Enzymes are biomolecules that catalyze (i.e. increase the rates of) chemical reactions. Almost all enzymes are proteins. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process are called substrates, and the enzyme converts them into different molecules, the products. Almost all processes in a biological cell need enzymes in order to occur at significant rates. Since enzymes are extremely selective for their substrates and speed up only a few reactions from among many possibilities, the set of enzymes made in a cell determines which metabolic pathways occur in that cell.

Like all catalysts, enzymes work by lowering the activation energy (Ea or ΔG‡) for a reaction, thus dramatically increasing the rate of the reaction. Most enzyme reaction rates are millions of times faster than those of comparable un-catalyzed reactions. As with all catalysts, enzymes are not consumed by the reactions they catalyze, nor do they alter the equilibrium of these reactions. However, enzymes do differ from most other catalysts by being much more specific. Enzymes are known to catalyze about 4,000 biochemical reactions. A few RNA molecules called ribozymes catalyze reactions, with an important example being some parts of the ribosome. Synthetic molecules called artificial enzymes also display enzyme-like catalysis.

Locative media

Locative Media are media of communication bound to a location. They are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions. While mobile technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), laptop computers and mobile phones enable locative media, they are not the goal for the development of projects in this field. Rather:

"Locative media is many things: A new site for old discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other people. A framework within which to actively engage with, critique, and shape a rapid set of technological developments. A context within which to explore new and old models of communication, community and exchange. A name for the ambiguous shape of a rapidly deploying surveillance and control infrastructure." (Russell, 2004)

Custom software

Custom software (also known as Bespoke software) is a type of software that is developed either for a specific organization or function that differs from or is opposite of other already available software (also called off-the-shelf or COTSsoftware). It is generally not targeted to the mass market, but usually created for companies, business entities, and organizations. Custom software is also when companies or governments pay for customized software for budget or project managing.

Examples of bespoke software include ATMs and Supermarket checkout scanners. Other examples include many web sites and web-based applications.

However, according to the US government, million and multi-million dollar projects for custom software are available to bid on. (Refer to www.ccr.gov for more information.) Multiple companies with security clearances are able to bid for these massive projects. Other companies will successfully bid on these projects and then sell the project to another company for profit.

Active Object

This article is about a multi-threading technique. For the lockstep protocol variant, see Active objects.

The Active Object design pattern decouples method execution from method invocation that reside in their own thread of control.s The goal is to introduce concurrency, by using asynchronous method invocation and a scheduler for handling requests.

The pattern consists of six elements:

* a proxy, which provides an interface towards clients with publicly accessible methods
* an interface which defines the method request on an active object
* a list of pending requests from clients
* a scheduler, which decides which request to execute next
* the implementation of the active object method.
* a callback or variable for the client to receive the result.

Planet (software)

In computing, Planet is a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the weblogs of members of an Internet community and display them on a single page. Planet runs on a web server. It creates pages with entries from the original feeds in chronological order, most recent entries first.

Planet is written in Python and maintained by Jeff Waugh and Scott James Remnant. Released under the Python License, Planet is free software.

Optimization

Optimization or optimality is a term that may refer to:

* Optimization (mathematics), trying to find maxima and minima of a function
* Optimization (computer science), improving a system to reduce runtime, bandwidth, memory requirements, or other property of a system; in particular
o Compiler optimization, improving the performance or efficiency of compiled code
* Search engine optimization, in internet marketing, methodologies aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings
* Process optimization, in business and engineering, methodologies for improving the efficiency of a production process
* Product optimization, in business and marketing, methodologies for improving the quality and desirability of the current product or a product concept
* Optimality theory in linguistics.
* Optimal classification, a process which arranges classification element attributes in an order which minimizes the number of queries necessary to identify any particular element.

Network model

The network model is a database model conceived as a flexible way of representing objects and their relationships. Its original inventor was Charles Bachman, and it was developed into a standard specification published in 1969 by the CODASYL Consortium. Where the hierarchical model structures data as a tree of records, with each record having one parent record and many children, the network model allows each record to have multiple parent and child records, forming a lattice structure.

Media ecology

In 1977, Marshall McLuhan said that media ecology "means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out."

Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.

Social networking spam

Social networking spam is spam directed at users of internet social networking services such as MySpace. Users of social networking services can send notes, that may include embedded links to other social network locations or even outside sites, to one another.

This is where the social network spammer comes in. Utilizing the social network's search tools, he/she can target a certain demographic segment of the users, and send notes to them from an account disguised as that of a real person. Such notes typically include embedded links to pornographic or other product sites designed to sell something. As of 2006, spamming software such as FriendBot is available to automate this process.

Unfortunately for victims, until recently no filters were available for MySpace notes. The best a MySpace user could do was block notes from the sender's address. MySpace now includes an option for users to “report spam/abuse” addresses. Spammers, however, frequently change their address from one throw-away account to another.

E-mail spoofing

E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and other parts of the email header are altered to appear as though the email originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), ill-intentioned users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. It is often associated with website spoofing which mimics an actual, well-known website but are run by another party either with fraudulent intentions or as a means of criticism of the organization's activities. The result is that, although the e-mail appears to come from the email indicated in the "From" field (found in the email headers) it actually comes from another e-mail address, probably the same one indicated in the "Reply To" field; if the initial e-mail is replied to, the delivery will be sent to the "Reply To" e-mail, that is, to the spammer's email.

Difficulties with e-mail forwarding

There are some additional details when an e-mail forwarder is involved. Forwarders perform a useful service in allowing you to have one simple permanent address, even if you change jobs or ISPs. List servers perform a similar function, forwarding e-mail to many receivers on behalf of one sender. Forwarders pose no problem for an end-to-end authentication method like DKIM and DomainKeys, as long as the signed message is not modified (some lists do this).

CSV limits its focus to one-hop authentications. SPF and SenderID have in essence the same limitation, they don't work directly behind the "border" ( MX ) of the receiver. For SPF forwarders to third parties could rewrite the Return-Path (MAIL FROM) in a similar way like mailing lists. This approach emulates the SMTP behaviour before RFC 1123 deprecated source routes; for a technical explanation see SRS.

For SenderID, forwarders to third parties and mailing lists are asked to add a Sender: or Resent-Sender: header. For many mailing lists, the former is already the case, but other forwarders avoid any modifications of the mail in addition to the mandatory Received-timestamp line.


Use of a forwarder prevents the receiver from directly seeing the sender's IP address. The incoming IP packets have only the forwarder's IP address. Two solutions are possible if one can trust all forwarders. Either one trusts the forwarder to authenticate the sender, or one trusts the forwarder to at least accurately record the incoming IP address and pass it on, so one can do their own authentication.

The situation gets complicated when there is more than one forwarder. A sender can explicitly authorize a forwarder to send on its behalf, in effect extending its boundary to the public Internet. A receiver can trust a forwarder that it pays to handle e-mail, in effect designating a new receiver. There may be additional "MTA relays" in the middle, however. These are sometimes used for administrative control, traffic aggregation, and routing control. All it takes is one broken link in the chain-of-trust from sender to receiver, and it is no longer possible to authenticate the sender.

Forwarders have one other responsibility, and that is to route Bounce messages (a.k.a. DSNs) in case the forwarding fails (or if it is requested anyway). E-mail forwarding is different from remailing when it comes to which address should receive DSNs. Spam bounces should not be sent to any address that may be forged. These bounces may go back by the same path they came, if that path has been authenticated.

Concurrent Versions System

In the field of software development, the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, provides a version control system based on open-source code. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers (potentially widely separated in space and/or time) to collaborate. Dick Grune developed CVS in the 1980s. CVS has become popular in the open source software world and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Robot software

Robot software is the coded commands that tell a mechanical device (known as a robot) what tasks to perform and control its actions. Robot software is used to perform tasks and automate tasks to be performed. Programming robots is a non-trivial task. Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.

Some robot software aims at developing intelligent mechanical devices. Though common in science fiction stories, such programs are yet to become common-place in reality and much development is yet required in the field of artificial intelligence before they even begin to approach the science fiction possibilities. Pre-programmed hardware may include feedback loops such that it can interact with its environment, but does not display actual intelligence.

Currently, malicious programming of robots is of some concern, particularly in large industrial robots. The power and size of industrial robots mean they are capable of inflicting severe injury if programmed incorrectly or used in an unsafe manner. One such incident occurred on 21 July 1984 when a man was crushed to death by an industrial robot. That incident was an accident, but shows the potential risks of working with robots. In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics were developed for robots to obey and avoid malicious actions.