‘Need stronger child labour laws’

Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi feels that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ programme will prove to be a “big disaster” if child labour laws are not strengthened.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr. Satyarthi has said, “If investors are coming from foreign countries to manufacture in India and if your laws are so weak in child labour in comparison to international standards then it will become a big disaster.”

He says that the ‘Make in India’ programme is a great move, but it also exposes a serious weakness of the country. “Make in India” cannot be successful on the toil, miseries and abuses of young children in the manufacturing sector,” the 62-year-old founder of ‘Bachpan Bachao Andolan’ told PTI.

“In India, child labour is working because your law allows it. These big brands will be dependent on local producers who are free to employ children. But the international media and human rights organisations are not going to spare us,” said the child rights activist. — PTI

If your laws are so weak in child labour in comparison to international standards then it will become a big disaster

Source:- The Hindu, 14-Mar-2016

Magnetic chips to enhance energy efficiency of computers

In a breakthrough for energy-efficient computing, engineers at the University of California-Berkeley have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can operate with the lowest fundamental level of energy dissipation possible under the laws of thermodynamics.

The findings mean that dramatic reductions in power consumption are possible — as much as one-millionth the amount of energy per operation used by transistors in modern computers.

This is critical for mobile devices, which demand powerful processors that can run for a day or more on small, lightweight batteries.

Data centres

On a larger industrial scale, as computing increasingly moves into ‘the cloud’, the electricity demands of the giant cloud data centres are multiplying, collectively taking an increasing share of the country’s — and world’s — electrical grid.

Reducing energy needed

“We wanted to know how small we could shrink the amount of energy needed for computing,” said senior author Jeffrey Bokor, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.

“The biggest challenge in designing computers and, in fact, all our electronics today is reducing their energy consumption,” he added in a paper appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances . Lowering energy use is a relatively recent shift in focus in chip manufacturing after decades of emphasis on packing greater numbers of increasingly tiny and faster transistors onto chips.

“Making transistors go faster was requiring too much energy,” said Bokor, who is also the deputy director the Centre for Energy Efficient Electronics Science, a Science and Technology Centre at UC Berkeley funded by the National Science Foundation. “The chips were getting so hot they’d just melt.”

Magnetic computing emerged as a promising candidate because the magnetic bits can be differentiated by direction, and it takes just as much energy to get the magnet to point left as it does to point right. — IANS

The findings mean that dramatic reductions in power consumption are possible

Source:- The Hindu, 14-Mar-2016

ExoMars: ‘giant nose’ to sniff out life on Mars

Space engineers are making final preparations for the launch of a robot spacecraft designed to sniff out signs of life on Mars.

The probe, ExoMars 2016 — the first of a two-phase exploration of the Red Planet by European and Russian scientists — is scheduled to be blasted into space on a Proton rocket from Baikonour cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 0931 GMT on Monday.

The spacecraft consists of a module called Schiaparelli that will test heat shields and parachutes in preparation for future probe landings on Mars and a second main component, the Trace Gas Orbiter or TGO, that will analyse the planet’s atmosphere. In particular it will seek out the presence of the gas methane which, on Earth, is produced by living organisms.

“Essentially our spacecraft is a giant nose in the sky,” said Jorge Vago, an ExoMars project scientist based with the European Space Agency (Esa).

“We are going to use it to sniff out the presence of methane on Mars and determine if it is being produced by biological processes.” Methane is normally destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years of its creation. Its presence on Mars would therefore suggest life had recently been active there.

The U.S. robot rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, initially found no sign of methane. Subsequent analyses in 2014 did report the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere in one area. However, some scientists have argued that it may have been created by non—biological means.

On Earth most methane is generated biologically, but it can be made by chemical processes under the surface. To differentiate between these two processes, the ExoMars trace gas detector will not only analyse methane levels in more detail than any previous mission but also study other gases that will provide information about its likely source. “If methane is found in the presence of other complex hydroc

arbon gases, such as propane or ethane, that will be a strong indication that biological processes are involved,” said another project scientist, Manish Patel, of the Open University.

“However, if we find methane in the presence of gases such as sulphur dioxide, a chemical strongly associated with volcanic activity on Earth, that will be a pretty sure sign that we are dealing with methane that has come from the ground and is a byproduct of geological processes.”

ExoMars is expected to arrive at the Red Planet on 19 October after a journey of 496m km across space, and will be followed by a second ExoMars mission, a Mars rover, scheduled for launch in 2018. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2016

Go champ scores surprise victory over Google AI

A South Korean Go grandmaster on Sunday scored his first win over a Google-developed supercomputer, in a surprise victory after three humiliating defeats in a high-profile showdown between man and machine.

Lee Se-dol thrashed AlphaGo after a nail-biting match that lasted for nearly five hours — the fourth of the best-of-five series in which the computer clinched a 3-0 victory on Saturday.

Lee struggled in the early phase of the fourth match but gained a lead towards the end, eventually prompting AlphaGo to resign.

The 33-year-old is one of the greatest players in modern history of the ancient board game, with 18 international titles to his name — the second most in the world. “I couldn’t be happier today...this victory is priceless. I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” a smiling Lee said after the match to cheers and applause from the audience.

“I can’t say I wasn’t hurt by the past three defeats...but I still enjoyed every moment of playing so it really didn’t damage me greatly,” he said.

Lee earlier predicted a landslide victory over Artificial Intelligence (AI) but was later forced to concede that the AlphaGo was “too strong.”

Lee had vowed to try his best to win at least one game after his second defeat. Described as the “match of the century” by local media, the game was closely watched by tens of millions of Go fans mostly in East Asia as well as AI scientists.

The most famous AI victory to date came in 1997, when the IBM-developed supercomputer Deep Blue beat the then-world class chess champion Garry Kasparov.

But Go, played for centuries mostly in Korea, Japan and China, had long remained the holy grail for AI developers due to its complexity and near-infinite number of potential configurations.

Demis Hassabis, the head of the AlphaGo developer Google DeepMind, has described Go as the “Mount Everest” for AI scientists.

“Lee Se-dol was an incredible player and was too strong for AlphaGo,” Hassabis said after Sunday’s match.

“It was doing well...but then, because of Lee’s fantastic play, it was pressurised into some mistakes,” he said, describing the loss as a “valuable” way to fix the problems with the supercomputer.

“Actually we are very happy because this is why we came here, to test AlphaGo and its limit and find out what its weaknesses were,” he said.

Lee said those weaknesses included a difficulty in responding to certain unexpected plays by an opponent, which led to more mistakes.

Go involves two players alternately laying black and white stones on a chequerboard-like grid of 19 lines by 19 lines. The winner is the player who manages to seal off more territory.

On the 78th move, Lee placed a stone unexpectedly in the middle section of the board, stunning many experts and confusing the AlphaGo.

Hassabis later tweeted that the AlphaGo made a “mistake” on the following 79th move and only realised it several moves later. AlphaGo uses two sets of “deep neural networks” that allow it to crunch data in a more human-like fashion — dumping millions of potential moves that human players would instinctively know were pointless. — AFP

Source:- The Hindu, 14-Mar-2016

Govt. hopes to pass Bankruptcy, GST Bills

The National Democratic Alliance government hopes to press the accelerator on reforms and pass the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill for a national Goods and Services Tax (GST) and a separate Bill for Bankruptcy and Insolvency Code, 2015, in the second half of the Budget session beginning April 20, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Sunday.

The current session of Parliament has already seen the passage of one landmark legislation two days ago, Mr. Jaitley said, referring to the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies and Services) Bill, 2016.

The legislation meant to provide statutory backing to the unique identification number was passed last week.

“I do hope to see another two being passed in the second part of the session with regard to the bankruptcy and insolvency laws and GST,” he said, addressing the Advancing Asia Conference.

The passage of the GST and the bankruptcy and insolvency laws, he said, would give a major fillip to India’s reforms process.

Data that may be helpful:

Important Points:

• The Goods and Services Tax Bill or GST Bill, officially known as The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Second Amendment) Bill, 2014, proposes a national Value added Tax to be implemented in India from June 2016. "Goods and Services Tax" would be a comprehensive indirect tax on manufacture, sale and consumption of goods and services throughout India, to replace taxes levied by the Central and State governments. Goods and services tax would be levied and collected at each stage of sale or purchase of goods or services based on the input tax credit method.

 Source:- The Hindu,  14-Mar-2016

Bravery award for Richa Singh

Allahabad student leader Richa Singh, whose ordeal was raised in Parliament on Tuesday, received support both from the ruling Samajwadi Party government and the Opposition Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh.

In a last minute decision, the Akhilesh Yadav government included Ms. Singh’s name in the list of women to be conferred the Rani Laxmi Bai bravery award on International Women’s Day. Her name was not in the original list and she was surprised to receive a call from the government on the eve of the ceremony.

The award was presented to her by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow on Tuesday. “He has assured me his full support. I also received assurances from the SP. In this fight against saffronisation of educational institutions and harassment of a woman student leader, we are reaching out to all parties,” Ms. Singh told The Hindu .

BSP chief Mayawati also extended support to the student leader, who has complained of harassment at the hands of the Allahabad University administration and the ABVP. She said the SP government and the university had not learnt any “lesson” from the death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula.

The BSP chief said the first woman president of the Allahabad University Students’ Union since Independence must be provided with adequate security by the State government. She called Ms. Singh a victim of oppression. “Her only crime was that she opposed the entry of Yogi Adityanath, who is known for vitiating the atmosphere with his communal speeches, into the campus.

Ms. Singh has also been in the limelight for taking on the ABVP and raising issues of gender insensitivity. She now faces the prospect of having her admission cancelled and a case against her election is pending in the Allahabad High Court. Ms. Singh has said the administration was targeting her to “settle scores.”

Source:- The Hindu, 09-Feb-2016

Foreign Secretaries to meet first in Kathmandu rather than Islamabad?

The Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan may meet for the first time after the Pathankot attack in Kathmandu, instead of Islamabad, official sources suggested on Wednesday.

The meeting, put off from January 14 this year, is yet to be rescheduled. Officials say it is unlikely to be scheduled in the next week. As a result, S. Jaishankar and his Pakistani counterpart could meet, for the first time, at the SAARC meeting for senior officials on March 15.

Calling reports of a proposed meeting in Islamabad “all in the realm of speculation,” a senior official told The Hindu that the Foreign Secretary was expected to attend the SAARC standing committee meeting, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj would attend the SAARC Council of Ministers meeting on March 17, where she is expected to meet Pakistan Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz. However, officials said no bilateral meeting was scheduled yet.

The status of the talks was discussed by India’s new High Commissioner to Pakistan Gautam Bhambawale and Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday.

Data that may be helpful:

Important Points:

• The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is an economic and geopolitical organisation of eight countries that are primarily located in South Asia or the Indian subcontinent.^[4] The SAARC Secretariat is based in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Pakistan will host the 19th summit of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Islamabad in 2016. 
• The 18th SAARC Summit was held at the Nepalese capital Kathmandu from November 26 to November 27, 2014 and was attended by the prime ministers of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan, the presidents of the Afghanistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka. The motto was ‘Deeper Integration for Peace and Prosperity’

Source:- The Hindu,  25-Feb-2016