After weeks of acrimonious negotiations and public blame game, Indias broadcasters, advertisers, ad agencies and Television Audience

Measurement (TAM) Media Research the sole agency which measures viewership TVT will capture viewership in absolute numbers. This is a way to address the complaints of television networks which said TRPs, measured in relative terms in points, did not accurately present the growth in viewership. TVTs will be the sole currency in the public domain. TVT rolling average will be provided every week. This is statistically more stable data. But for internal evaluation, the percentage of television viewership rating weekly will be provided to advertisers and agencies. All future changes in audience measurement will be made based on inputs by a joint technical committee of the industry body, the Broadcasting Audience Research Council.

TRPs failed to present viewership growth accurately, complain networks Now, TVT rolling average will be provided every week

India, China trying to evolve effective mechanisms to check LAC face-offs: Antony
NEW DELHI, July 27, 2013 Till the final settlement of the border issue, we are trying to find out more effective mechanisms to prevent occasional incidents. There are many points in the LAC that are disputed and they are patrolled by both sides. So, sometimes it leads to some face-off, Mr. Antony told reporters here on the 14th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas (26th JULY). On the one side, both sides are trying to find a long-term solution to the long pending border dispute. Till that time, our aim is to maintain peace and tranquility (free from disturbance) at the border, he said. We are going to have another round of meeting of the Joint Working Group in Beijing soon on this issue. So, I think we will be able to find out a solution to such unpleasant incidents on the border, he said. In one of the recent incidents of incursion, Chinese troops had entered Chumar area in Ladakh on July 16-17 on horses and ponies, staking their claim and demanding that Indian troops leave the area.

Two sides to meet again in Beijing soon Chinese troops had entered Chumar area on July 16-17

DIFFERENT TERRORIST GROUPS?

South Africa fights to protect rooibos tea name

It is a tea not quite like any other. It can be drunk hot or cold, with milk or without, by infants and pensioners alike. Six cups a day are said to be good for the health, and rinsing in it can supposedly work wonders for pets with skin allergies. Rooibos (red bush in Afrikaans) has been grown exclusively in South Africa for generations and is now worth an estimated 600 million rand ($62 million approximately) a year for the country. So a French companys attempt to trademark its name was never going to be dismissed as a mere storm in a teacup. Caffeine-free and rich in minerals, antioxidants and vitamins, rooibos is traditionally grown in the Cederberg region, 150 miles north of Cape Town. The plant is harvested, cut and sprayed with water, and the damp leaves are allowed to ferment for 12 hours before being spread out and dried in the sun, giving them a distinctive amber hue. South Africa began exporting the tea in 1904 and now 70 per cent goes to European Union (EU) states. The industry employs about 4,500 people. I think its one of the most special products, Ms. Snyman said. It comes from an internationally recognised biodiversity hotspot and areas where there is not a lot of other economic activity. Many of us have grown up cultivating it and have a lot of fond memories. Its got a natural sweetish taste and a lot of health benefits. Its different from other herbal teas. The name rooibos can only be used to refer to the dry product, infusion or extract that is 100 per cent pure rooibos, derived from Aspalathus linearis President Barack Obama has nominated yet another Indian American , Vince Girdhari Chhabria, to a key judicial post in California. Nominated to be U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California, Mr. Chhabria is currently deputy city attorney for government litigation at the San Francisco city attorneys office, where he has worked since 2005.

PARAM is a series of gigaflop supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM Yuva II. Param means supreme in Sanskrit. After being denied Cray supercomputers as a result of a technology embargo (ban on trade; with a particular country), India started a program to develop indigenous supercomputers and supercomputing technologies. Supercomputers were considered a double edged weapon capable of assisting in the development of nuclear weapons. For the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency in the field, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up in 1988 by the then Department of Electronics with Dr. Vijay Bhatkar as its Director.[2] The project was given an initial run of 3 years and an initial funding of 300,000,000 . Because the same amount of money and time was usually expended to purchase a supercomputer from the US. In 1990, a prototype was produced and was benchmarked at the 1990

Zurich Supercomputering Show. It surpassed most other systems, placing India second after US. The final result of the effort was the PARAM 8000, which was installed in 1991.[1] It is considered India's first supercomputer.

PARAM Series
PARAM 8000
Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos 8000 transputers. Transputers were a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture designed for parallel processing at the time. It was a distributed memory MIMD architecture with a reconfigurable interconnection network.[6] It had 64 CPUs.

PARAM 8600
PARAM 8600 was an improvement over PARAM 8000. It was a 256 CPU computer. For every four Inmos 8000, it employed an Intel i860 coprocessor.[6]The result was over 5 GFLOPS at peak for vector processing. Several of these models were exported.

PARAM 9900/SS
PARAM 9900/SS was designed to be a MPP system. It used the Super SPARC II processor. The design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated. Typically, it used 32-40 processors. But, it could be scaled up to 200 CPUs using the clos network topology. PARAM 9900/US was the Ultra SPARC variant and PARAM 9900/AA was the DEC Alpha variant.

PARAM 10000
In 1998, the PARAM 10000 was unveiled. PARAM 10000 used several independent nodes, each based on the Sun Enterprise 250 server and each such server contained two 400 Mhz UltraSPARC II processors. The base configuration had three compute nodes and a server node. The peak speed of this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS.[7] A typical system would contain 160 CPUs and be capable of 100 GFLOPS[8] But, it was easily scalable to the TFLOP range.

PARAM Padma
PARAM Padma (Padma means Lotus in Sanskrit) was introduced in April 2003. It had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOP) and a peak storage of 1 TB. It used 248 IBM Power4 CPUs of 1 GHz each. The operating system was IBM AIX 5.1L. It used PARAM net II as its primary interconnect. It was the first Indian supercomputer to break the 1 TFLOP barrier.[9]

PARAM Yuva
PARAM Yuva (Yuva means Youth in Sanskrit) was unveiled in November 2008. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS. There are 4608 cores in it, based on Intel 73XX of 2.9 GHz each. It has a storage capacity of 25 TB up to 200 TB.[11] It uses PARAM net 3 as its primary interconnect.[9]

Further developments
In July 2009, it was announced that C-DAC was developing a new high-speed PARAM. It was expected to be unveiled by 2012 and was expected to break the 1 Peta FLOPS barrier.[12]

Param Yuva II
Param Yuva II was made by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in a period of three months, at a cost of 16 crore (US$3 million), and was unveiled on 8 February 2013. It performs at a peak of 524 teraflops and consumes 35% less energy as compared to Param Yuva. It delivers sustained performance of 360.8 teraflops on the community standard Linpack benchmark, and would have been ranked 62 in the November 2012 ranking list of Top500. In terms of power efficiency, it would have been ranked 33rd in the November 2012 List of Top Green 500 supercomputers of the world.[13][14] It is the first Indian supercomputer achieving more than 500 teraflops.[15][16] Param Yuva II will be used for research in space, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, aeronautical engineering, scientific data processing and pharmaceutical development. Educational institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology can be linked to the computer through the national knowledge network. This computer is a stepping stone towards building the future petaflop-range supercomputers in India.

PARAM net
PARAMnet is a high speed high bandwidth low latency network developed for the PARAM series. Each port provided 400 Mb/s in both directions (thus 2x400 Mbit/s) as it is was a full-duplex network. It was first used in PARAM 10000. PARAMnet II, introduced with PARAM Padma, is capable of 2.5 Gb/s while working full-duplex. It supports interfaces like Virtual Interface Architecture and Active messages. It uses 8 or 16 port SAN switches. The grid computing network GARUDA is also based on it.[18]

Operators
PARAM supercomputers are used by both public and private operators for various purposes. As of 2008, 52 PARAMs have been deployed, of these 8 are located in Russia, Singapore, Germany and Canada. PARAMs have also been sold to Tanzania, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ghana,Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. In computing, FLOPS (for FLoating-point Operations Per Second) is a measure of computer performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second. Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray.
[1]

PMO steps in for Attappady tribes (PALSKKAD district in KERALA)

The Prime Ministers Office (PMO) has intervened in the problem of malnutrition deaths plaguing the tribal belts of Attappady in Palakkad district in the State. (As many as 54 children have reportedly died owing to malnutrition in the Attappady hills in the past 11 months.)

Beypore port is a Sub-port of Kozhikode port and is situated approximately 10 km south of Kozhikode. It is an estuarine port, where Beypore river discharges into the Arabian Sea. Beypore is 180 km North of Cochin and 391 km away from Trivandrum. Beypore port is the second biggest port in Kerala after Cochin and currently handles about 100,000 tones of cargo and 7500 passengers per annum. The nearest competing ports are Kochi and Mangalore. Now the port has a depth of about 4 meters alongside wharf and approach channel and it is proposed to be developed in stages and utilities like storage shed, cranes and tugs are already installed. Beypore port is one of the oldest ports in Kerala from where trading was done to the Middle East.

Lokayukta courts cant act on private complaints sans sanction: HC

A big relief for elected representatives, bureaucrats and others
Public servants can heave a sigh of relief now. For, one cannot simply drag them to the Special Lokayukta Courts citing corruption charges against them through a private complaint like what has been done in cases of many Ministers, MLAs, and bureaucrats during the past three years. The Karnataka High Court has now made it clear that the Special Lokayukta Courts in the State cannot entertain private complaints, alleging offences under Sections 7, 10, 11, 13 and 15 of the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act, unless the complaint is accompanied with the sanction for prosecution of public servants concerned under Section 19 (1) of the PC Act. The High Court also declared that the Special Courts [established under PC Act], cannot even direct the Lokayukta police to conduct an investigation under Section 156 (3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Cr. PC) on the allegations made in the complaint sans sanction.

UK to go ahead with Rs 2.7 lakh visa bond

Under a pilot scheme, to be introduced in November, first-time visitors from six non-white Commonwealth countries, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, will be required to deposit a cash bond of 3,000 for a British visa. It will apply only to those seeking a six-month visitors visa.

According to the government, these six countries pose the most significant risk of abuse of visas by their citizens. Sri Lanka, Ghana and Nigeria are the other countries. In the long run, we are interested in a system of bonds that deters overstaying and recovers costs if a foreign national has used our public services, the Home Office said. British traders ire On Saturday, the paper said that the u-turn had provoked anger in Britains business circles, who described the plan as an insulting deterrent to wealthy tourists from countries like India and Nigeria. They are urging the government o drop the pilot, saying the restrictions will damage their business if Commonwealth tourists, particularly Nigerians, now the sixth biggest spenders on luxury goods in Britain, are put off, it said. Meanwhile, the Home Office was accused of racism by the ruling coalitions own senior figures for launching an advertising campaign telling illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest. British Home Office says it was meant to target only high-risk applicants Four Indian-American professors are among 13 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists selected for the Simons Investigators awards for their cutting-edge research. Kannan Soundararajan, Rajeev Alur, Salil P. Vadhan and Senthil Todadri will receive $1,00,000 a year for five years for long-term research.

FSI: authorities, planners warned

The Supreme Court has cautioned planners and the authorities against allowing builders to increase the Floor Space Index (FSI) without taking into consideration the availability of adequate infrastructure. The concept of FSI implies the buildable potential of a plot of land. The FSI to be allowed must take into consideration the availability of civic infrastructure, including open spaces, transport facilities, requirements for protection against fire, and water supply and sewerage as well as electricity. An increase in FSI is likely to result into an increase in the density of population. FSI has an important bearing on the quality of urban life. A relaxation of FSI norms or, as the case may be, an enhancement of FSI by urban planners cannot be removed from the issue of adequacy, or as the case may be, inadequacy of civic services. The transportation system is plagued by inadequate capacity of the existing arterial roads, overriding surface of the roads, traffic bottle-necks and over burdened suburban rail system. The traffic density at peak hours is 6 to 8 km per hour. All these aspects will have to be kept in mind while examining the issues concerning recreational areas and traffic problems. The consequence is that the schemes of reconstruction bring along more population and vehicles into an already congested area. The question is whether such exemption is justified, valid and legal? When the cities are overcrowded, the roads are narrow and the traffic is increasing, the situation will be extremely hazardous for the children and senior citizens.

There will be no greens in the buildings and the people will always crave for fresh and pure air. The buildings without greens will add to the ever increasing temperature of the overcrowded cities and urban areas. To put it differently, all constructions without adequate green and recreational areas will have a serious impact on the environment and human life.

An increase in FSI is likely to result into an increase in the density of population: Justice Singhvi Schemes of reconstruction bring along more population and vehicles into an already congested area: Bench

Agreement on Master Partnership signed for giant Optical Telescope

Canada, China, India, Japan and the U.S. sign the pact in Hawaii

Thirty Metre Telescope. Photo: Special Arrangement

Early on Friday, at about 8-30 a.m. India time, the Master Partnership Agreement (MPA) for the construction of the $1.5-billion Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), what would be the worlds largest optical and infrared telescope, was signed by the five partner countries Canada, China, India, Japan and the U.S. in Hawaii, the site for the proposed telescope. The in-principle approval of Indias participation in the TMT project was accorded in 2010 itself ( The Hindu , June 26, 2010). India also hosted a meeting of the Board of Directors of the project in New Delhi which laid the road map towards the TMT construction ( The Hindu , January 23). However, a go-ahead from the legal section of the External Affairs Ministry to sign the MPA, which had to be done before the end of the month, had not come in till Wednesday. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), the main government agency coordinating the Indian participation, immediately authorised P. Sreekumar, the Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore, the nodal Indian institution, to sign the agreement and transmit it to the ongoing meeting of the Board of Directors in Hawaii. The same was scanned and sent to B. Eswar

Reddy of the IIA, one of the Indian representatives in the Board of Directors attending the current meeting. Besides the IIA, the other participating institutions in the TMT-India Programme are the InterUniversity Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCCA), Pune, and the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital. While the IUCAA functions under the UGC, the other two are under the DST. With the signing of the MPA, India will be moving from its current observer status to a full-fledged partner in the project and will be a member of what is called the TMT Collaborative Board. This Board will eventually be replaced by a Governing Board, which will manage the TMT International Observatory on behalf of its partners. We are part of every decision of the project development, said Dr. Reddy. The next stage is signing of the same document by the financial authorities to move forward with ground-breaking at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the home for the TMT, he added. The telescope will be located just below the summit at Mauna Kea at a height of 4,050 m. The main promoters of this international project are Caltech and the University of California in the U.S. and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), with China, India and Japan providing additional financial and technical support in return for participation in its construction and observation time. The construction is expected to begin next year and the telescope is expected to become operational in 2022. India is a 10 per cent partner in the project, which implies a financial commitment of about Rs. 1,000 crore. Much of Indias contribution will be in-kind. Indian institutes and the industry are collaborating to build much of the telescopes control systems, whose estimated value is about Rs. 600 crore, said Dr. Reddy who is also the Programme Director for TMT-India. The DST and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) will jointly fund the Indian component. According to the arrangement, Indian astronomers will get observational time in proportion to Indias share in the total project cost. It may be pointed out here that the financial sanction is yet to be obtained. According to T. Ramasami, Secretary, DST, the Finance Ministrys sanction will be needed only next year. At present, India has three 2 m class optical-IR telescopes and a 3.6 m telescope waiting to be commissioned. The apertures of the current ground-based large optical-IR telescopes are in the 8-10 m range, though other bigger ones like the TMT are also on the anvil, the 39 m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in particular. Though the Indian astronomical community has been using the existing 8-10 m class telescopes, such usage has largely been limited to individual efforts. The TMT, which belongs to what are called the new technology telescopes, was proposed after the enormous success of the first new technology telescope, the twin 10 m Keck telescope on Mauna Kea. The TMT will also be a segmented mirror telescope with its primary 30 m mirror made up of 492 hexagonal segments of 1.44 m each. Precisely aligned, these segments will work as a single reflective surface of 30 m diameter. The TMT has a collecting area of 650 sq. m. and will have observational windows from UV to mid-IR wavelengths (310 nanometres to 28 micrometres). Its large collecting area makes it 81 times more sensitive (measure of the faintest signal that it can detect) than the current largest ground-based telescopes.

Ground-based telescope Like all ground-based observatories, TMT is limited in spatial resolution by the atmospheric turbulence. While the 30 m primary mirror builds on the technological and operational experience of the Keck Telescope, it will be the first ground-based telescope to incorporate the technology of Adaptive Optics (AO) as an integral component of the telescope. AO refers to systems designed to sense atmospheric turbulence in real time, make the appropriate corrections to the beam and enable true image on the ground limited only by optical diffraction. The AO capability will enable the TMT resolve objects by a factor of 3 better than the 10 m-class telescopes and 12 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). According to Dr. Reddy, Indias contributions will include fabrication of edge sensors, which sense relative displacement of segments due to gravity and temperature while tracking objects in the sky. This information is relayed to actuators which move the segments so that all the 492 segments act as a single monolithic mirror to provide the best possible image of objects in the sky. India has the responsibility to build the entire actuator system. The companies involved in the project include General Optical Asia Ltd. (GOAL), Puducherry, Avasarala Technologies, Bangalore and Godrej, Mumbai. We have taken up prototype manufacture of both the edge sensors and actuators. The first batch of them were made and passed rigorous tests at Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). USA, said Dr. Reddy. India designing mirror coating system Godrej and Avasarala have taken up segment support assembly, a very complicated system on which the primary mirror segments sit. Also, India is designing a mirror coating system and exploring the possibilities of setting up a unit to polish 100 segments to the project, he added. India may also provide a part of the 492 mirror segments.

Ask India to correct trade imbalance, lawmakers tell Obama

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U.S. lawmakers have asked President Barack Obama to tell India that it should consider constructive ways to address the deteriorating trade and investment climate, especially policies pertaining to intellectual property rights violations. In a June 18 letter, 171 Congressmen asked the President to ensure that these issues were raised at the highest levels of the Indian government and they were a top priority at the coming U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue and other bilateral and multilateral meetings. India is a highly valued strategic

partner, and we support strong, continued growth in the trade and investment relationship. In an effort to continue this positive trajectory, the Indian government should consider constructive ways to address the deteriorating trade and investment climate in India. Troubled by the growing trade imbalance, the lawmakers said that in the last year, Indian policymakers and courts had taken a series of actions designed to block imports by forcing local production of a wide range of goods. In particular, they were worried that the intellectual property (IP) climate had become increasingly challenging. U.S. companies suffered a host of IP issues in information technology, renewable energy and bio-pharmaceuticals. Last year, several bio-pharmaceutical companies had their patents revoked inappropriately or their appeals denied by Indian courts to market a variety of life-saving drugs. Furthermore, the government issued its first compulsory licence (CL) for a stage three liver and kidney cancer drug. These actions by the Indian government greatly concern us because innovation and the protection of IP are significant driving engines of the U.S. economy, the letter said. The lawmakers said nearly 40 million workers, or 30 per cent of the U.S. workforce, were employed directly or indirectly in IP-intensive industries. These industries would dictate U.S. success or failure in the global marketplace, and were increasingly important for the Indian economy, too. On a bipartisan basis, we understand that the U.S. must demonstrate a strong leadership in protecting IP rights and ensure that our trading partners pursue high standards of IP protection. The chilling effect on global R&D investment, both in the U.S. and India, as a result of Indias IP policies, could have a significant impact on jobs and investment in the U.S. Furthermore, the letter said, India was a thought leader among emerging countries, and others had started emulating its IP policies. The U.S. government must send out a strong signal to the Indian government that these actions are inconsistent with Indias international obligations, set a bad precedent, and undermine the culture of innovation that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself has been promoting.

171 Congressmen say Indias policies could have impact on jobs and investment in U.S.

60th anniversary of Korean war marked amid uncertain peace

Less than forty eight hours after the collapse of talks between South and North Korea over the reopening of the Kaesong industrial estate, seen as a ray of hope for a possible re-unification of the two countries, the two sides marked the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the devastating 1950-53 Korean War in total contrast.

Foreign exchange reserves decline to $279.20 billion

Indias foreign exchange reserves dipped by $985 million to $279.20 billion during the week ended July 19, the Reserve Bank of India said in its weekly statistical supplement.