Category Archives: Science & Technology

AP CM to inaugurate IT incubation centre in Vizag on Sept 29

Business & Economy, Science & Technology

Visakhapatnam :  

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu will inaugurate the IT incubation centre at Rushikonda here on September 29 and on the same day a major seminar on IT development will also be held, according to State HRD Minister G. Srinivasa Rao.

He said here on Wednesday that an IT start-up centre would also be inaugurated. He said the Government was keen on removing the hurdles to the growth of the IT industry in the State and the academic institutions in the State would also take all steps to turn out the suitable personnel for the industry.

There would be interaction between the educational institutions and the IT industry. The Government would play the role of a facilitator, he added.

He said several industries would be set up in the vicinity of Visakhapatnam and the AP Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) chairman would visit the city on September 21 and hold a review meeting here.

He would review how much land had been allocated to each industry such as Brandix and the promised jobs. It would be reviewed whether the industry had fulfilled the job obligation and what steps should be taken in case the industry failed to do so, he said.

If there were any genuine problems holding up the growth of the industry, they would be addressed but it would not be allowed to hold onto the piece of land given to it without generating any economic activity, he said.

He said a skill development centre would also be set up here with the assistance of the local industries. The AP Government was taking steps to supply power 24 hours a day to all the industries.

The State Govt. had also allocated land to the NTPC at Pudimadaka village in Visakhapatnam district to set up a power plant with a capacity of 4,000 MWs.

source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com / Business Line / Home> News> National / by The Hindu Bureau / Visakhapatnam – September 17th, 2014

Solution in sight to abandoned, sunken trawlers

Science & Technology

Space for navigation at the Fishing Harbour may increase soon with the Visakhapatnam Port Trust adopting a two-pronged approach to get the unused trawlers removed.

Efforts made earlier had not yielded any result. This time, Visakhapatnam Port Chairman M.T. Krishna Babu has taken a bold move to identify the trawlers with court problems and others without any case so that they could be taken to the slipway and later dismantled as part of scrapping in order of priority.

There are 60 to 65 trawlers which are either abandoned by their owners due to non-payment of bank loans or recurring losses. Some of them have also sunk over the years.

As per rules, ‘no objection certificate’ from AP Pollution Control Board is a pre-requisite for their removal. For past several years, the board has been objecting to issuing of NOC despite several representations from the port as well as the Association of Fishing Professionals and Association of Indian Fishery Industries (AIFI).

The board has been insisting on shifting the vessels to a ship-breaking unit, which is only available at Alang in Gujarat. As this is not possible, now efforts are being made for dismantling them and later shifting the parts to scrap market without causing any pollution.

One-third of berthing space at the Fishing Harbour set up by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1976 in an area of 24 hectares is occupied by the abandoned and sunken vessels. According to an estimate, 14 trawlers have sunk with a hole in the hull. The oil tanks are also said to be empty.

Mr. Krishna Babu told The Hindu that in the first list, they would remove some of the trawlers without court cases safely to the slipway and later begin their scrapping process. Subsequently, efforts would be made to remove other vessels with court permission to ensure ‘operational safety.’

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Visakhapatnam / by Santosh Patnaik  / Visakhapatnam  – September 22nd, 2014

Vizag Boy Excels at Global Meet

Education, Records, All, Science & Technology

Visakhapatnam :

City-based student Syed Tazib Rehman has proved his mettle at the Global Cancer Conference and Medicare Summit 2014. He is one of the 12 students across the world whose online presentations were selected for special appreciation. Rehman is a student of Sri Chaitanya Junior College Visakhapatnam. All the selected students except Rehman were graduates and post-graduates.

The 12 students would repeat their presentation before the President of India and other officials on September 15 at HICC, Hyderabad. Earlier, Rehman  bagged the ‘Bala Ratna’ award for ‘Creative Scientific Innovation’ in  2013.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Andhra Pradesh / by Express News Service / September 15th, 2014

HRM Body Awards DCIL for Innovative Practices

Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion
DCIL chairman-cum-managing director Captain DK Mohanty receiving the award at a grand ceremony held at Bangalore
DCIL chairman-cum-managing director Captain DK Mohanty receiving the award at a grand ceremony held at Bangalore

Visakhapatnam :

Dredging Corporation of India Limited (DCIL) has bagged the ‘Organisation with Innovative HR practices’ award presented at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress 2014, a conclave of CEOs and HR professionals.

DCIL was selected for the award in recognition of the strategic position the organisation holds in the fraternity. Chairman-cum-managing director DK Mohanty received the award at a function held at Bangalore.

The DCIL, during the past three years, has taken various steps for improving the working condition on board the dredgers and redressal of grievances of the floating staff.

At present the corporation employs about 750 marine personnel to man its dredgers. During the past two years, the Corporation recruited 32 Diploma in Nautical Sciences (DNS) and 29 Trainee Marine Engineers (TME) with professional skills, who are undergoing training on various dredgers. In due course they will be elevated as Dredge Masters and CEOs.

Attrition rate in the Corporation has also reduced considerably among the floating officers, owing to the constant efforts made by DCI in providing training to DNS and TME engineers who completed their requisite courses from Indian Maritime University affiliated institutions. Availability of trained manpower in the field has been suitably addressed by innovative methods as well.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Andhra Pradesh / by Express News Service / September 16th, 2014

[Techie Tuesdays] Anand Chitipothu – The village boy who is impacting the world

Inspiration /Positive News and Features, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Anand Chitipothu had very humble beginnings and he made sure he worked hard to make the best use of whatever he had to make an impact on the world. Our Techie Tuesday for this week works at archive.org and is a Python enthusiast to the core.

The impact of the kind of work which Anand has been doing is not limited to one person or even a country. If you have a website or just browse the internet casually then there are chances that you might have clicked an archived link and visited a backed up version of a webpage at some point of time. Archive.org is a project by Aaron Swartz to create an archive of the internet and Anand works at Open Library – A project under archive. org, which aims to have a web page for every book.

AnandANDHRA17sept2014

Anand comes from Lingarao Palem, a small village near Guntur in Andhra Pradesh and had his early schooling in Telgu medium. It was only when he started studying in class 12th (intermediate as it was called then) he switched to English medium. In his first attempt Anand couldn’t get a seat in EAMCET – The common Entrance Exam conducted by Jawaharlal National University Hyderabad. Anand waited for a year and joined the electrical Engineering Course at Regional Engineering Collage (Now NIT) Bhopal. It was here that he was introduced to computers embarked on a journey which would change the course his entire life also affect a huge number of lives in the years to come.

They were introduced to PASCAL but the experience wasn’t good. The only things they could manage was to compile and run very basic programs on a DOS machine. Also the access the computer was a luxury even in the premier engineering college. Anand remembers, ” The computer center would close soon after the college hours and they wouldn’t let us skip the classes to use the computers. The only available time was lunch break and an hour just after the college times. ” To overcome the problem Anand and his friend decided to pool in some money and bought a computer for themselves to practice.

During the holidays Anand bought C programming books and practice reading and writing programs on paper. Once the college would reopen he would then go and practice those programs on the computer. The year was 1996 and Internet was not easily affordable by everyone. The only means available for Anand was to install Linux distros which used to come with magazines like PC Quest and language they could play around was C. Anand made best use of all the tools he had. He would look at a math equation and then figure out a way to plot a curve for that equation using C on the computer.

There was never a dearth of problems for them to work on and for Anand it was always a new challenge. Once he wrote a simulator for the 8085 microprocessor when the actual device started giving problems. Anand recalls, “8085 is microprocessor that is taught to electrical engg. students. It requires you to type in the machine code of the program in keyboard. In the lab, the instrument always used to give some error due to some hardware issues. So I wrote a simulator to try it without having to go to the lab and hold a physical device.”

By the time Anand passed out, he knew that his heart lie in computers and not in electrical engineering. Anand tried to get a job in programming but it was in vain. He decided to pursue higher studies in Computational Sciences and appeared for GATE. He got a seat in IISc. IISc proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Anand had moved from C to VC++ and from VC++ to Java. Each language was better than the previous one. There was ease of use. Talking about his migration from VC++ to Java, Anand says,  “I hated VC++ because of the way it works. It generates a lot of code and asks you to modify that. It used to become a mess very quickly. On the other hand Java was very beautiful, everything that you want to do is specified in the code. What happens on a button click, what is the title of the button etc, are all in the code. But in VC++, it was driven by UI. ”

After IISc, Anand took a job in a Strand Life Sciences – A startup from IISc itself. Which is where the introduction to Python happened and the interest in Python grew. After experimenting with Python for some time to automate workflows and developing tools in Jython (Python on a JVM) Anand started looking around for more Python related communities and joined Bangpypers – The Bangalore Python Group where he attended Python meetups and met likeminded Python enthusiasts.

Working in a startup, it was evident for Anand to read and follow the startup community. He started following Paul Graham very closely and decided to plunge into web programming after getting to know about viaweb(the startup Paul Graham sold to Yahoo in 1998). Anand tried to learn different frameworks like Django, Plone but found them too complicated.

Aaron Swartz released web.py framework at the same time and Anand took to it. Soon he started web programming and also after looking at the simplicity of Python, the dislike for Java crept in. Anand Says, “I knew how to build websites, my hands were itching to build something using the new things that I learnt. By then I started disliking java, after tasting Python. Java is too verbose. It takes too much code solve something. It was like ‘I knew what to do, I knew how to do, but takes 3 days coding to finish it’.”

Anand quit Strand and joined another startup called Picsquare. The required a custom photosite for events. Anand implemented it using web.py. During this time Anand also started working with Aaron Swartz, Anand recollects,” I remember seeing this page couple of times and dreaming about being there. http://web.archive.org/web/20051201022645/http://infogami.com/  though I hadn’t seen the code of Infogami, I tried building a clone of that for fun. It was very crude, but I could make one. 

Reddit.com and Infogami.com were launched around the same time. After few months of helping the startup, I saw an email in the web.py group from Aaron that he is looking for someone to help him on a web.py project. 

I replied to that email saying that I’m interested.He was looking for someone to build the next version of Infogami and I showed the clone that I built. He liked it and I started working with him on building Infogami. While I was working on Infogami, I started contributing to web.py and took over the maintenance of it from him.”

It was in 2007, Aaron asked Anand if he can move to US for a project, Anand decided he can be a part of the project from India itself and would work remotely. The project Aaron wanted Anand to work on was openlibrary and Anand was one of the first members on the team. Aaron moved on to activism while Anand continued working with the openlibrary project.

Like most of us in the open source community, Aarons death came as a surprise to Anand.                                                

“It was a shock. 

I never expected Aaron would do that. A friend of mine started working with Aaron on a project just couple of months before his death. I heard his big plans for future and what kind of things he wanted to build. I miss him dearly. 

We worked pretty well together. He had very good trust on my abilities and I enjoyed working with him. He asked me 2 months before his death if I wanted to work with him on a long-term project. I couldn’t accept because I wasn’t ready to quit the archive at that time.”

Anand is also actively involved in organizing PyCon India and have been in the organizing team since its inception. He is also leading an initiative on organizing Python workshops around the country with his initiative PythonExpress.

For people just starting out in technology, Anand refers them to read an article by Aaron Swartz. His advice to students is, “Be passionate, work hard, try new things. 

World is full of interesting problems waiting to be solved. There are lot of interesting problems around us, we just need to look around.” 

source: http://www.yourstory.com / YourStory.com / Home / by Aditya Bhushan Dwivedi / September 16th, 2014

DRDO to set up electronic warfare lab in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district

Science & Technology

Hyderabad :

Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has proposed to set up a laboratory housing electronic warfare projects and an evaluation facility in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district.

At a meeting with Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu at CM Camp Office today, DRDO officials requested the government to allot land for the lab in Kopparthi village.

The officials informed Naidu that about 3,383 acres has been identified in the village for setting up the lab.

“The Chief Minister replied in the affirmative (to the request on land allotment),” a CM office statement said.

The DRDO team informed Naidu that the Government of India had already sanctioned Rs 468 crore for the project’s first phase proposed to be completed in 42 months.

The total investment earmarked for the project is Rs 10,000 crore over a period of 10 years, the statement said.

They told the Chief Minister the facility would also attract more investments from local as well as foreign firms. It would provide about 1,500 jobs to skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled personnel, it added.

source: http://www.articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com / The Economic Times / Home> Int’l/Svcs> Engineering / PTI / September 10th, 2014

eCabinet: Chandrababu Naidu holds paperless cabinet meet

Records, All, Science & Technology

Hyderabad :

Taking a step further in eGovernance, the Andhra Pradesh state cabinet has now gone paperless.

On Monday morning, wielding iPads in their hands, chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his council of ministers conducted a meeting of what is being called “eCabinet”, a first-of-its-kind initiative in the country.

It was a regular meeting of the state cabinet, but the uniqueness this time was that it is paperless, with the government switching over to the electronic format in conducting proceedings.

The agenda and the minutes of the meeting were all electronically recorded while a power-point presentation was made on important subjects for elaborate discussion, sources in the chief minister’s office said.

Andhra Pradesh government, during Chandrababu’s previous stint as chief minister between 1995 and 2004, had been a pioneer in launching various eGovernance initiatives.

The CM is making use of the advances in technology like ‘Cloud’ to further eGovernance and eCabinet is a "momentous" initiative.
The CM is making use of the advances in technology like ‘Cloud’ to further eGovernance and eCabinet is a “momentous” initiative.

Now, during his current tenure, the chief minister is making use of the advances in technology like ‘Cloud’ to further eGovernance and eCabinet is a “momentous” initiative, the CMO sources pointed out.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> India / PTI / September 15th, 2014

Man behind submarine museum felicitated

Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion
Vice Admiral (retd) Vinod Pasricha receiving 'Individual Achievement Award' of World Ship Trust of UK from Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Naval Command Vice Admiral Satish Soni at a felicitation function organised at INS Kursura Submarine Museum on the Beach Road in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday. Photo:C.V. Subrahmanyam / The Hindu
Vice Admiral (retd) Vinod Pasricha receiving ‘Individual Achievement Award’ of World Ship Trust of UK from Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Naval Command Vice Admiral Satish Soni at a felicitation function organised at INS Kursura Submarine Museum on the Beach Road in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday. Photo:C.V. Subrahmanyam
/ The Hindu

World Ship Trust of UK honours Vice Admiral (retd) Vinod Pasricha with ‘Individual Achievement Award’. Visakhapatnam is the home of submariners of the Indian Navy and it is befitting that such an iconic museum is part of the city landscape, Vice Admiral Satish Soni said.

Recognising the unstinted efforts of Vice Admiral (retd) Vinod Pasricha, who as then Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Eastern Naval Command, saw INS Kursura beached and converted into a museum World Ship Trust of UK honoured him with ‘Individual Achievement Award’.

Very appropriately he received the award aboard the decommissioned INS Kursura from Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Naval Command Vice Admiral Satish Soni at a simple ceremony here on Wednesday.

The first submarine museum in South East Asia and probably the best in the world became a reality thanks to the efforts of a team of committed Naval officers and others from civil society who worked hard for it, Vice Admiral (retd) Pasricha said in his acceptance speech.

INS Kursura, the ex-Soviet Foxtrot class submarine, was one of the first four submarines acquired by the Indian Navy and commissioned in the late 1960s saw action in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. It served the Indian Navy for 31 years before being beached and decommissioned in 2001. On August 14, 2002 the submarine museum was dedicated to the nation by then Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu and since then has become one of the main tourist attractions of the city.

Visakhapatnam is the home of submariners of the Indian Navy and it is befitting that such an iconic museum is part of the city landscape, Vice Admiral Satish Soni said.

The felicitation speech was read by president Indian Maritime Foundation and representative in India of World Ship Trust of the UK Commodore (retd) Rajan Vir. Visakhapatnam Urban Development Authority which maintains the museum was represented by its Vice Chairman M V Satyanarayana. A number of flag officers and serving and retired officers who were part of the task were present.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> National> Andhra Pradesh / by G.S. Subrahmanyam / Visakhapatnam – September 10th, 2014

Man who brought television to India passes away

Historical Links, Pre-Independence, Leaders, Records, All, Science & Technology
Mallipudi Srirama Sanjeeva Rao
Mallipudi Srirama Sanjeeva Rao

Kakinada:

Several politicians expressed their condolences at the passing away of former Union minister Mallipudi Srirama Sanjeeva Rao, 86, on Wednesday afternoon at his residence in Kakinada.

He is best known as the man who brought TV telecast to India, when the Asian Games were held in 1982. He is the father of former Union minister M.M. Pallam Raju and son of former PCC president and freedom fighter late Mangipudi Pallam Raju.

The second generation Congress leader had been suffering from cerebral paralysis for the past two decades. He is survived by two sons, former Union minister M.M. Pallam Raju and businessman M. Anand. His wife Raja Rajeswari passed away 35 years ago.

His family had close political relations with the Nehru family for several decades. His father Mallipudi Pallam Raju had participated in freedom movement along with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

Sanjeeva Rao studied BE in Gundy Engineering College at Madras and Imperial College of Science and Technology at London. He also worked as a research scientist in AII Research Laboratory in London and developed a sophisticated secrecy system for the Army.

He was elected as an MLA in 1970 from Ramachadrapuram constituency and later he was elected as member of Lok Sabha from Kakinada constituency thrice from 1971 to 1984. He held the post of Union minister for electronics and communication. Television in India was first introduced during Mr Rao’s regime and he inaugurated the first TV tower at Kakinada.

source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com / Deccan Chronicle / Home> Nation> Current Affairs / DC Correspondent / September 04th, 2014

Vijayawada to get its first 15 storey building

Business & Economy, Records, All, Science & Technology
Picture for representation purpose
Picture for representation purpose

Vijayawada:

Vijayawada city is likely to gets its first 15-storey building soon, but at the cost of the city’s popular landmark, the Pinnamaneni polyclinic, presently known as the KIIMS hospital.

According to sources, GEV Projects, which belongs to BJP leader V. Ranga Prasad’s son, and the management of Pinnamaneni hospital have already entered an agreement to construct the 15-storey building on the three acre plot of land located in Municipal Colony, the heart of the city.

As per the agreement, the hospital would be shifted from the premises by August end and construction would start in September. The new building will have both commercial and residential space, said Mr Ranga Prasad. The new building will have hotels, restaurants etc., along with residential flats. GEV Projects will also construct a seven-storeyed hotel for the Novotel group. This hotel will come up opposite the Vinayak theatre.

source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com / Deccan Chronicle / Home> Nation> Current Affairs / DC Correspondent / August 22nd, 2014