General News

1:02 AM Unlabelled
Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind: Stephen Hawking
  
Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned that the rise of artificial intelligence could see the human race become extinct.
In an interview with the BBC, the scientist said that while "primitive forms" of artificial intelligence have proved useful, if the technology is developed to a level that can surpass humans, it "could spell the end of the human race."
He said that advanced artificial intelligence would "take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate."
Human biological evolution will not be able to compete and "would be superseded," he said in the interview Tuesday.
The eminent scientist on Tuesday also announced that the speech software developed for him by Intel would be open sourced, and made available publicly in January to could help millions of motor neurone disease sufferers.
The wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist, who shot to international fame in the 1980s with his book "A Brief History of Time", hailed the decision by US tech giant Intel at a press conference in London.
"By making this technology freely available, it has the potential to greatly improve the life of disabled people all over the world," said Hawking, his words relayed by the robotic voice of his computer.
His current system, developed by Intel over the past three years, reduces the number of moves needed to spell out words, as well as giving him new functions for the first time such as sending email attachments.





 US President Barack Obama today praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts...

Washington: US President Barack Obama today praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to shake up the 'bureaucratic inertia' in India, less than a month after he described the Indian leader as a 'man of action'.
However, Obama said that this was a long-term project and one would have to see how successful Prime Minister Modi is in his efforts.
"Modi has impressed me so far with his willingness to shake up the bureaucratic inertia inside of India. But that is a long-term project and we'll have to see how successful he is," Obama told a business roundtable, which was attended by top corporate leaders of the country.
The roundtable was organised to discuss the current economic condition of the US and across the globe. Last month in Myanmar on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit, Obama in his brief interaction with Modi had told him that he is a 'man of action'.
On his return from the 10-day trip to the Asia Pacific region that took him to Beijing, Myanmar and Australia, Obama announced that he has accepted an invitation to be the chief guest at the annual Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 26 next year.
In his interaction at the business round table, Obama said the US, over the last six years, has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and the rest of the advanced world combined.
The growth of emerging markets have been slower than anticipated, he noted.



Phillip Hughes was remembered in an emotional funeral service in his hometown of Macksville



Phillip Hughes was remembered in an emotional funeral service in his hometown of Macksville, New South Wales, attended by thousands, including eight members of the Indian squad currently in Australia. As the mourners walked through the streets of Macksville, millions around the world stopped to remember the deceased cricketer.

India stand-in skipper Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, coach, Duncan Fletcher and Team Director Ravi Shastri were part of the Indian contingent present at the services. 

Australian captain Michael Clarke was among host of Australian cricketers in attendance, all of them doing their best to stay composed and fight back the tears.

Clarke said: "It's now forever the place where he fell. I stood at the wicket and knelt down to touch the grass and I swear he was with me, picking me up off my feet to check if I was OK, telling me we just needed to dig in, and get through to tea. 

"Telling me off for that loose shot I'd played, chatting about what movie we'd watch that night, and then passing on a useless fact about cows.

"I could see him swagger back to the other end, grin at the bowler, then call me through for a run with such a booming voice, a bloke in the car park could hear it.

Clarke said Hughes' life was lived for the game and his soul had enriched not just the sport but all of their lives.

"Is this what people, indigenous people believe about the spirit of a person being connected on the land he walked? If so, they're right about the SCG. His spirit has touched it, and it will forever be a safer place for me."

Clarke said the global tributes for Hughes, from Karachi to Lords in England, had "sustained and overwhelmed" him in equal measure.
 
He also praised the team and cricketing community, the "baggy green brothers and sisters" who had lifted him up when he felt he could not keep going and said the spirit of cricket would hold them all together.

"Phillip's spirit, which is now part of the game forever, will act as a custodian of the game forever. We must listen to it, we must learn from it, we must dig in, dig in and get through to T. And we must play on.

"So rest in peace my little brother. I'll see you out in the middle," Clarke said while holding back tears. 

Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland said: "I also want to offer love and support of that entire cricket family to Phillip's own family, they have lost a beloved son and an adored brother."

Sutherland said that if the life of Phillip Hughes demonstrated one thing it was that a "great deal can be packed into a very short time if you have the talent, passion and a big adventurous spirit".

"The wave of emotion that has washed over our country this past week tells us so much about the affection millions felt for Phillip and also about the privilege place cricket has near the heart of this nation.

"Quite simply the boy from this proud community of Macksville personified the spirit of Australian cricket."

Sutherland said Hughes' journey from backyard to baggy green cap 408 personified the Australian cricketing dream and the pair of centuries in just his second Test would be an "abiding memory for a whole generation of fans".

He said since Hughes's death "cricket's heart has been pierced by pain, but it will never stop beating".

The Indian cricket contingent undertook a long journey from Adelaide to Macksville via Sydney and Coffs Harbour to join the massive gathering at the Macksville High school grounds – Hughes’ alma mater. They sat among the grieving audience as Hughes’ family members, friends and team mates poured their hearts out at the beautiful service in the memory of their loved one.

Other well known cricketing names present were Shane Warne, Brian Lara, sir Richard Hadlee, Ricky Ponting, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Michael Hussey and Mark Taylor.

Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, opposition leader, Bill Shorten, and Federal Minister for Sport, Peter Dutton, were among the politicians in attendance.

Hughes’ service was screened live around the world. Besides those present at the venue, thousands watched it on a big screen set up outside it. Around 3000 people gathered at the Adelaide Oval to view the service on the big screen at the stadium.

While this service was open for the public, Hughes’ actual last rites will be conducted on Thursday in the presence of family and close friends.






Deadly Ebola reaches Hyderabad

The deadly disease Ebola has now reached to Hyderabad. An Indian who returned back to India from Nigeria was admitted in a Gandhi Hospital for the Ebola disease. According to doctors though he took treatment for the disease but when he came back he was suffering with fever and other symptoms of Ebola immediately he was admitted in the hospital and his blood samples were sent for testing and it has come to know that the patient is suffering with Ebola disease. The senior doctors are not taking all the major steps to prevent the disease spreading to other patients in the Hospital. It is known fact that Ebola a deadly disease is a virus and it may spread to other people also with in no time.
  
Top director’s mother passed away


Top director in Tollywood VV Vinayak lost his mother Naga Rathnam (59). She had been suffered from illness from few months and undergoing treatment in KIMS hospital. She passed away on December 2nd.
It may be recalled here that VV Vinayak has brought her many audio events. The last rites of Vinayak’s mother will be held on December 3rd. Vinayak’s father Krishna Rao passed away four years ago and Vinayak tried his best to save his mother’s life.
VV Vinayak is all set to direct his next film with Akkineni Akhil. The muhurat of this film was postponed due to his mother’s death. Tollywood celebrities expressed their condolences to VV Vinayak and many celebs are expected to attend the funeral of VV Vinayak’s mother.
We at iluvcinema.in extend our deepest condolences to VV Vinayak’s family. May her soul rest in peace.



Pakistan Is The Second Worst Country In The World For Women!

It is sad to know that no country in the world has managed to overcome rising gender inequality. According to a report released by the World Economic Forum, Yemen followed by Pakistan are the worst countries in the world for women.  After measuring economic and social disparities between men and women in around 142 countries, the report discovered these five countries to be the worst performing in bridging the gender divide.
 

1. Yemen
2. Pakistan
3. Chad
4. Syria
5. Mali
What is on the menu in AAP's Rs.20,000 lunch?

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has returned to the way of raising funds through organizing lunches and dinners for people willing to pay an exorbitant price. In Mumbai, the party raised Rs.91 lakh by organizing a lunch, where a plate was charged at a whopping Rs.20,000. On Sunday, the party again threw a paid lunch party for the generous donors. 
The event has been organised by the trader's wing. It had adopted a similar strategy before Lok Sabha elections, when Kejriwal had taken part in such programmes across the country.
"We will likely hold similar programmes in Bangalore and perhaps, in Kolkata," an AAP spokesperson said.
The party aims to collect Rs.30 crore for the up-coming assembly elections and has been carrying out several drives to boost its revenue.
Here is the list of food items that were on the menu.  
Lunch Buffet
Roasted Tomato Soup
Veg Hakka Noodles
Jeera Rice 
Dal Makhani 
Aloo Gobhi Masala
Paneer Lababdar 
Malai Kofta 
Assorted Indian breads
Mix Raita 
Arhar 
Chutney 
Papad
Green Salad 
Aloo Chana Chaat Salad
Veg Ceaser Salad
Death By Chocolate
Vanila Ice Creams 
Chocolate Fudge Cake







 Cricketers Who Died Of Injuries on the Field



SYDNEY: Phil Hughes Thursday joined the list of cricket players who died of the injuries sustained while playing the game.

Here's a list of the players who died after getting injured while playing:

1. Phil Hughes (Australia, 25) - 2014

The Australia batsman was struck on the head by a bouncer during a Sheffield Shield match between South Australia and New South Wales. He fractured his skull and suffered massive bleeding in his brain and was operated upon in a Sydney hospital. Hughes died of his injuries two days later.

2. Darryn Randall (South Africa, 32) - 2013

Randall was hit on the side of the head when attempting a pull shot in a South African domestic match. The wicketkeeper-batsman collapsed and was immediately rushed to hospital, but he died from the blow.

3. Zulfiqar Bhatti (Pakistan, 22) - 2013

The Pakistani player was struck in the chest by the ball while batting during a domestic game and fell to the ground. He was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

4. Richard Beaumont (England, 33) - 2012

Beaumont collapsed on the field after suffering a suspected heart attack and was declared dead after his arrival to hospital.

5. Alcwyn Jenkins (England, 72) - 2009

English umpire Jenkins was officiating a league match when he was struck on the head by a ball thrown by a fielder that hit him accidentally. Jenkins could not recover from his injuries.

6. Wasim Raja (Pakistan, 54) - 2006

Pakistan cricketer Wasim Raja died of a heart attack when playing for Surrey Over 50s in Buckinghamshire.

7. Raman Lamba (India, 38) - 1998

Lamba, a former India international, was hit on the head while fielding during a club match in Dhaka. He went into a coma three days later, before being pronounced dead.

8. Ian Folley (England, 30) - 1993

Folley was hit by the ball below the eye accidentally while batting in a domestic match for Derbyshire against Workington and suffered a fatal heart attack in the hospital.

9. Wilf Slack (England, 34) - 1989

Slack collapsed and died during a domestic match in Banjul, Gambia. He had suffered four blackouts in previous matches, but despite carrying out tests, doctors were unable to diagnose the cause of his death.

10. Abdul Aziz (Pakistan, 18) - 1959

Aziz was hit on the chest while batting in a domestic match in Karachi and was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.

11. Andy Ducat (England, 56) - 1942

Ducat suffered a heart attack during a game at Lord's, where he collapses and died.

12. George Summers (England, 25) - 1870

Summers was struck on the head while batting for Nottinghamshire against the MCC at Lord's. He didn't treat his injury and returned home only to die from its effects four days later.
Alibaba’s Jack Ma needs India as much as India needs him

The founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba and China’s richest man, Jack Ma, is in India after apparently being swayed by the persuasive powersof prime minister Narendra Modi to come and do business in the subcontinent.
And expectedly, his visit to New Delhi has got India’s fledgling e-commerce industry rather excited. Alibaba, after all, is one of the world’s largest internet companies and raised an astounding $25 billionin its initial public offering (IPO) this September.
Yet, Ma and Alibaba need India just as much as India need the Chinese e-commerce behemoth.
For one, India has been a strong sourcing destination for Alibaba for some years now. The company established a customer service operation (PDF) in Mumbai in 2010, when it was adding over 30,000 new users to its Indian base of 1.45 million small businesses (as of June 2010).
In 2010, India was the largest supplier market outside of mainland China for Alibaba.com and the second largest buyer market.
“Indian small businesses are savvy and they understand the advantages that the internet can bring to them both in domestic and foreign trade,” David Wei, the CEO of Alibaba.com had said.
Four years on, Indian vendors on Alibaba still comprise the second largest group of sellers after the Chinese.


Size does matter

After its record IPO, “Alibaba is looking for growth opportunities across the globe,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail advisory firm Technopak.
For Ma, India’s geographical proximity to China, a sprawling manufacturing sector and unorganized distribution make it an ideal market to expand Alibaba’s core business-to-business (B2B) model, said Singhal
India already permits 100% foreign direct investment in B2B e-commerce—but the fastest growing e-commerce market in Asia is beingled by business-to-consumer (B2C) focused firms.
With the country’s e-commerce market projected to grow to $6 billion in 2015, a 70% increase over 2014 revenues, according to Gartner, the size of India’s marketplace makes it important for Alibaba. “The sheer numbers do create a momentum,” said Devangshu Dutta of  Third Eyesight, a retail consulting firm.


India’s interest

Indian e-commerce firms could have an interest in Alibaba’s arrival for one of three possible reasons, according to Singhal.
First, as a potential joint venture partner to benefit from Alibaba’s size, expertise and financial clout. India’s largest e-commerce companies are still only a fraction of Alibaba’s size, and there is much to learn from a company that can sell goods worth $1.8 billion in 60 minutes.



Second, domestic firms may be seeking a strategic investment from Alibaba, along the lines of what Softbank has been doing in India lately. Masayoshi Son—Softbank chief, Japan’s richest man and an early investor in Alibaba—poured in over $600 million in Snapdeal late last month.
And finally, investors in Indian e-commerce companies might want to pull out as the marketplace heats up and look to sell their stakes to the likes of Alibaba. “The competitive intensity might get too much,” said Singhal.
Australian cricketer Phil Hughes dies, three days after head injury on pitch
  
Phil HughesAustralian cricketer Phil Hughes, who suffered head injury during a Sheffield Shield game between New South Wales(NSW) and South Phil Hughes on Tuesday, passed away on Thursday.  
A press release by the Australian Team Doctor Peter Brukner said, "It is my sad duty to inform you that a short time ago Phillip Hughes passed away."

"He never regained consciousness following his injury on Tuesday. He was not in pain before he passed and was surrounded by his family and close friends."
"As a cricket community we mourn his loss and extend our deepest sympathies to Phillip's family and friends at this incredibly sad time."
"Cricket Australia kindly asks that the privacy of the Hughes family, players and staff be respected.
Phil HughesPhil Hughes, who was batting for South Australia in the domestic first-class match against NSW, was hit on his head by a steaming delivery from bowler Sean Abbott on Tuesday. The 25-year-old southpaw paused for breath with his hands on his knees before collapsing face-first onto the ground.
The on-field players immediately rushed to his aid while NSW cricket team's doctor John Orchard sprinted his way onto the field.
On November 30th, Hughes would have turned 26. 


  
BENGALURU: Police have denied permission for the Kiss of Love protest planned for Sunday. City Police Commissioner M N Reddi told reporters the organisers had not provided any clarity on the nature of the protest.
Police have invoked Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (punishment for obscene acts or words in public) to deny permission to the event, which the organisers say is against moral policing.
Rachita Taneja, who has urged people to come out and show affection in public, had been unable to explain the Kiss of Love protest, he said.
Also Read:
“The organisers could neither vouch for the behaviour of protesters nor say how many people would attend the protest,” he said. He added the police were in no way supporting moral policing either.
“We have already issued a notice to Pramod Muthalik of the Sri Rama Sene for the threats he has issued,” Reddi said. Muthalik had called for statewide protests if the police allow the Sunday event.
When Express pointed out that the protest was against moral policing by the likes of Muthalik, Reddi said the mode of protest was unacceptable.
“Who is to stop them if they had gone on a one-day fast or dharna? Based on similar protests in Delhi and Kerala, we know there is potential for people to indulge in obscene acts,” Reddi said.
He defined obscenity as an act not in accordance with a society’s standards.
“It may not be obscene for someone to wear a bikini in Goa, but to do so here on M G Road would be obscene. Similarly, kissing in front of Town Hall is not okay, but it is okay in Amsterdam,” he said.





 My Arrest Changed My Attitude About Life
  
(Devyani Khobragade is a diplomat and works for the Indian Foreign Service.)

I turned 40 this year and decided that I should  now start living my life. My distressing arrest December last year vividly brought in the realisation that one morning I could drop my children to school and drop dead. Life is ephemeral  and I have to live it according to my beliefs, my passions, for my happiness - with gratitude and compassion. 

So, on my birthday, I resolved to drink more smoothies, make more time for exercise,  speak my mind without  the fear of the consequences, start working for causes that embody my beliefs and hopes. 

My adversity turned into an opportunity as I refocused inside and reevaluated my priorities and values as externalities went completely beyond control - devastatingly affecting my professional and personal life. 

So, what if i had turned from a person to "l'affaire khobragade"; so what if I was alleged, accused and suspected of things that even went against my grain; so what if my integrity was under question and my career was in the doldrums!

I asked myself how my happiness could be affected by things beyond my control. To  improve my mental endurance, I started vipassana, perhaps the  most austere and rigorous form of  meditation, and soon realised I needed more physical endurance to support my mental quest - that the way to the mind was through knowing your body's responses and being attuned to them. 

So I started running, waking up early for a mediation and a run. Even as I started running, I could see the man-woman disparity in opportunity. While my male friends and colleagues could run outdoors easily after work at night,  I could not dream of stepping out, and had to run within the safety of the perimeter of my residential compound, howsoever boring and uninspiring it may have been. 

That's how I decided to run the Marathon two months ago.  As I was filling up the registration form for this particular Marathon, a question popped up - Why do you want to run the Marathon? - and the answer came very naturally to me -I I wanted to run to claim the public spaces that rightfully and equally belong to us women. 

How many times does an Indian woman, especially living in Delhi and small cities, towns, and villages  get to  experience their own road, the common public space, at her own terms? On the contrary, one always sees men dominating the public space as their own, doing and saying what they want, and most audaciously flaunting all public decorum - the prime example of it being urinating against any public wall that they can conveniently locate.

I wanted to run the roads without the fear of being stared at, or having lecherous comments passed at me, or cars stopping, slowing down near me.

And I ran - freely and happily; although in a controlled environment,  but nevertheless I could experience my city through its public places. I could witness that feeling and it was exhilarating and liberating. For the first time I felt I belong to Delhi and Delhi now belongs to me. 

Like I felt growing up in Mumbai that I could eat wada pao or bhel on the roads, take a train back from college at 11 pm at night, sit at Marine Drive with my girlfriends and try out my first smoke, feeling free and without watching  my back. 

I  ran the marathon with the hope that  more women can come out and run, play and enjoy their own  city, town or village. It's my hope as a mother of two girls and my collective responsibility with all Indians to make our public spaces safer for our girls and women. And a greater responsibility of Indian men to provide an  equal space and equal freedom and respect to our girls and women in public (and in private).

So here is cheers to more women running the Delhi marathon next year and more women and girls feeling safe and happy outside. 

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. NDTV is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information on this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.





Disco Shanti is in Critical condition


Yesteryear actress Disco Shanti and wife of late actor Sri Hari is in critical condition her health is deteriorating day by day. The actress is undergoing treatment at a Singapore hospital and she is suffering with liver problem from last few months. Disco Shanti is suffering with the health problems from the day Srihari died due to liver infections. Earlier she was treated in Hyderabad and Chennai however when the doctors gave up she was taken to Singapore for the further treatment. It is known fact that Disco Shanti has sizzled in the film industry with her item songs during 80’s and90’s while shooting for a movie Srihari fallen in love with her and married and both the couple have two sons.




5 Ways to Stay Young and Fit


Unfortunately, staying active is a lifestyle that we as a population have grown out of. But you can regain this commitment by following these five rules.
Break a sweat every day
Challenge yourself every day to participate in a physical activity that causes you to get out of breath or sweat. To change your body, you must train outside of your comfort zone. If you like your body the way it is, then don't stress it. But if you want to build strength, get a six-pack or lose fat, then work hard.
When exercising, you should not be able to carry on a conversation with your buddy. (Don't get me started on people reading a magazine on the treadmill.) Next time you're at the gym:
  • Increase your weights
  • Hit the incline on your treadmill or run hills
  • Add a plyometrics workout
  • Combine strength training with various rounds of conditioning; for example, perform a Overhead Shoulder Press, then sprint on a treadmill at nine mph on a six-inch incline for 30 seconds. Rest for 90 seconds and repeat four times.
Go back to grade school
You did it all when you were younger: jumped rope, climbed trees, went bike riding and ran sprints around the playground. You couldn't sit still long enough to stay at a desk or computer like you do now.
Become more active. Go for a walk or jog in the morning before starting your day. Join a group fitness class, recreational league, swim club, ski or bowling team.
Use what you have
Look around and take a quick inventory of what's available to exercise with. Do you have a bike, rope, old tires to flip, chains to pull, balls to throw, boxes to jump on or paint cans to carry? If you have some of this stuff and a creative mind, you can put together a great workout. You don't need a expensive gym membership to look expensive. (Got a rope? Five Reasons to Go Back to Basics With the Jump Rope.)
Eat clean
By eating as clean as you can, you'll automatically avoid foods loaded with sugar, trans fat, and saturated fat. Eat foods that display a variety of colors more frequently, and keep everything in moderation. Plan time to go to the grocery store so you are not rushed. Also, plan your weekly meals ahead of time. (See What's Fake and What's Real? The Ultimate Food Survival Guide andNo, Really—Don't Shop When You're Hungry: A Study.)
Rest as hard as you work
There's a fine line between the amount of work you do and the rest that you allow yourself. Rest can take the form of physical rest, or, for most of us, mental rest. Exercising, deep breathing, and vacations will take care of your mental rest. If you feel physically exhausted, try switching up your workout routine or take a week off. You will come back fresh and ready to do more. (See Why You Shouldn't Work Out Every Day.)





 US lawmaker seeks faster visas for Indian and Pakistani docs

Ahead of President Barack Obama’s slated plans to take unilateral executive action to overhaul America’s “broken” immigration system, a Democratic lawmaker has introduced legislation to expedite visas for Indian and Pakistani physicians.
The measure introduced Wednesday by Grace Meng, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would require Secretary of State to speed up review of visa applications of Indian and Pakistani physicians who are scheduled to work at US hospitals.
Entitled the Grant Residency for Additional Doctors (GRAD) Act of 2014, Meng’s legislation also requires that the expedited review of J-1 visa applicants be the sole responsibility of a designated officer or employee from March to June, since most residency programmes begin each July.
The J-1 is a temporary non-immigrant visa that international physicians use to work in US medical residency programmes. State Department’s current review process is way too long and delays negatively impact doctors from India and Pakistan who are set to do residencies at American hospitals, a media release from the lawmaker’s office said.
In many instances, the long delays in the issuance of visas has resulted in hospitals being forced to withdraw offers to foreign physicians who had already accepted, effectively preventing these doctors from entering the US at all, it said.
Meng’s bill seeks to remedy the difficulty that international physicians – especially doctors from India and Pakistan – have encountered in securing J-1 visas from American Embassies in their countries, it said.
“The lengthy and excessive visa delays that physicians from India and Pakistan are forced to endure is unacceptable,” she said.
“The long waits not only impact the plans and commitments that these physicians have made to US hospitals but also affect the millions of Americans who depend on these facilities for critical medical treatment, particularly in communities where there is a shortage of doctors,” Meng said.



Second Time Through, Mars Rover Examines Chosen Rocks
  
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has completed a reconnaissance "walkabout" of the first outcrop it reached at the base of the mission's destination mountain and has begun a second pass examining selected rocks in the outcrop in more detail.
Exposed layers on the lower portion of Mount Sharp are expected to hold evidence about dramatic changes in the environmental evolution of Mars. That was a major reason NASA chose this area of Mars for this mission. The lowermost of these slices of time ascending the mountain includes a pale outcrop called "Pahrump Hills." It bears layers of diverse textures that the mission has been studying since Curiosity acquired a drilled sample from the outcrop in September.
In its first pass up this outcrop, Curiosity drove about 360 feet (110 meters), and scouted sites ranging about 30 feet (9 meters) in elevation. It evaluated potential study targets from a distance with mast-mounted cameras and a laser-firing spectrometer.
"We see a diversity of textures in this outcrop -- some parts finely layered and fine-grained, others more blocky with erosion-resistant ledges," said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Overlaid on that structure are compositional variations. Some of those variations were detected with our spectrometer. Others show themselves as apparent differences in cementation or as mineral veins. There's a lot to study here."
During a second pass up the outrcrop, the mission is using a close-up camera and spectrometer on the rover's arm to examine selected targets in more detail. The second-pass findings will feed into decisions about whether to drill into some target rocks during a third pass, to collect sample material for onboard laboratory analysis.
"The variations we've seen so far tell us that the environment was changing over time, both as the sediments were laid down and also after they hardened into bedrock," Vasavada said. "We have selected targets that we think give us the best chance of answering questions about how the sediments were deposited -- in standing water? flowing water? sand blowing in the wind? -- and about the composition during deposition and later changes."
The first target in the second pass is called "Pelona," a fine-grained, finely layered rock close to the September drilling target at the base of Pahrump Hills outcrop. The second is a more erosion-resistant ledge called "Pink Cliffs."
Before examining Pelona, researchers used Curiosity's wheels as a tool to expose a cross section of a nearby windblown ripple of dust and sand. One motive for this experiment was to learn why some ripples that Curiosity drove into earlier this year were more difficult to cross than anticipated. 
While using the rover to investigate targets in Pahrump Hills, the rover team is also developing a work-around for possible loss of use of a device used for focusing the telescope on Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument, the laser-firing spectrometer.
Diagnostic data from ChemCam suggest weakening of the instrument's smaller laser. This is a continuous wave laser used for focusing the telescope before the more powerful laser is fired. The main laser induces a spark on the target it hits; light from the spark is received though the telescope and analyzed with spectrometers to identify chemical elements in the target. If the smaller laser has become too weak to continue using, the ChemCam team plans to test an alternative method: firing a few shots from the main laser while focusing the telescope, before performing the analysis. This would take advantage of more than 2,000 autofocus sequences ChemCam has completed on Mars, providing calibration points for the new procedure.
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012, but before beginning the drive toward Mount Sharp, the rover spent much of the mission's first year productively studying an area much closer to the landing site, but in the opposite direction. The mission accomplished its science goals in that Yellowknife Bay area. Analysis of drilled rocks there disclosed an ancient lakebed environment that, more than three billion years ago, offered ingredients and a chemical energy gradient favorable for microbes, if any existed there.
Curiosity spent its second year driving more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Yellowknife Bay to the base of Mount Sharp, with pauses at a few science waypoints.
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess ancient habitable environments and major changes in Martian environmental conditions. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.






Man tests positive for Ebola, kept under isolation
  
In the first case of Ebola in the country, an Indian national returning from Liberia has tested positive for the deadly virus and has been quarantined at a special facility at Delhi airport.
The Health Ministry said the 26-year-old man, who reached here on November 10, was already treated for the deadly disease in the African country and carried no symptoms but tests of his semen samples were positive, prompting authorities to put him under isolation.
This is the first confirmed case of Ebola, though the victim contracted the virus abroad and has already been treated.
“The situation is under control and there is no need for any alarm. However, all precautions are being taken in this regard,” the ministry said in a statement.
It is a known fact, the ministry said, that during convalescence from Ebola, people continue to shed virus in body fluids for variable periods.
However, presence of virus in his semen samples may have the possibility of transmitting the disease through sexual route up to 90 days from time of clinical cure, it said.
He will remain under isolation in the special health facility of Delhi Airport Health Organization till his body fluids test negative and is found medically fit to be discharged, it said, insisting that the man is a treated and cured case of Ebola.
He had carried a certificate of medical clearance from the Liberian government, mentioning that “he has successfully undergone care and treatment related to Ebola and after post treatment assessment has been declared free of any clinical signs and symptoms and confirmed negative by laboratory analysis”, the official statement said quoting the Liberian document.
His three blood samples tested here were also found negative for and, therefore, according to WHO and CDC specifications, he is deemed to be cured, it said.
However, the ministry added that the virus may continue to be positive in secretions like urine and semen for a longer time.
Liberia is one of the countries which have seen a number of Ebola cases.

  




 This map shows how Zomato is taking over the world
  
Indian restaurant search service Zomato just raised $60 million from Info Edge, Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital. The company will use the money to develop new products and, more importantly, to expand its global presence.
Valued at $660 million, Zomato is not as big as Indian e-commerce heavyweights such as Flipkart (valued at $7 billion) or Snapdeal (valued at $2 billion). But,  Zomato—which has raised around $113 million so far—is one of those rare Indian startups that has a presence in many countries around the world.
The last 12 months have been quite eventful for the company’s global ambitions. It has acquired startups in New Zealand,  Czech Republic, Slovakia in the last three months. In October, Zomato started its operations in Canada, where it would be competing with business ratings and reviews website Yelp.
The company has presence in 18 countries as of now. Here is a map that shows Zomato’s rapid expansion around the world.

  




 Venkatesh gets Notice from  GHMC


News Details :  After Nagarjuna its time for Venkatesh to face the norms from Telangana new Circar, GHMC has send few notices to Venkatesh for not considering the construction on Film road number one without prior permission from the authorities.

They mentioned Venkatesh to give a proper rectification in 10 days and else they are warning for about destroying the construction. Earlier Nagarjuna faced this kind of threat for his N Convention center and some how he made it happen through using the central leads but its a tough job for Venkatesh to handle such as this is not a proper base for him to be diplomatic at times.










Peter Kassig beheading video shows Cardiff student among jihadists


A British medical student and a Frenchman who went to Syria last year are believed to have appeared in a video showing a squad of Islamic State jihadists beheading Syrian soldiers and displaying the severed head of American aid worker Peter Kassig.
Ahmed Muthana told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper his 20-year-old son, Nasser Muthana, appeared to be among the group of 16 jihadists seen in the video.
"I cannot be certain, but it looks like my son," said Ahmed Muthana, who lives in the Welsh capital city of Cardiff. 
  France's interior minister said analysis by the DGSI security service suggested that one of the men shown herding prisoners to the execution site was Maxime Hauchard, a Frenchman from the northern Eure region who left for Syria in August 2013.
"This analysis suggests with a very high probability that a French citizen could have directly participated in carrying out these abject acts," Bernard Cazeneuve told journalists.
French Judges last year opened a preliminary investigation against Hauchard on suspicion that he was conspiring to commit terrorist acts, the charge commonly levied against citizens who have fought with Islamist militants.
Hauchard was interviewed by French television in the summer saying that his goal in joining Islamic State was to become a martyr.

British Prime Minister David Cameron will chair a meeting of the government's emergency response committee, Cobra, in the next 36 hours to receive briefing from intelligence and security officials in light of the latest video, his spokesman said.
Britain's security threat level was raised to its second-highest in August due to the risks posed by Islamic State fighters returning from Iraq and Syria.
The announcement of aid worker Kassig's death, the fifth such killing of a Western captive by Islamic State, formed part of the video which showed the beheadings of at least 14 men the group said were Syrian military pilots and officers.{mosimage}
Islamic State, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria, includes thousands of foreign combatants and has become a magnet for jihadis from Europe and North America.
IS has released videos of the beheading of two American and two British men which feature a masked, black-clad militant brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent, who has been dubbed "Jihadi John" by British media.
Sunday's video showed most of the killers unmasked and the Daily Mail said the man who appeared to be Nasser Muthana was standing alongside Jihadi John. Muthana appeared in a video in June urging Muslims to join IS.






Brahmaji son attacked by TDP MLA followers

  
Tollywood Character Artist Brahmaji’s son was attacked by TDP MLA followers when he was on his way to airport to receive his father. According to sources, Brahmaji’s son Sanjay was paying the money at a toll gate, the TDP follower was honking repeatedly and Sanjay told the man to be patient as he was paying the toll gate amount but suddenly some of the followers of MLA got down from the car and started abusing Sanjay and also manhandled him however the MLA Prakash Goud was watching the show setting in the car. Sanjay got annoyed by the development and he would file a police complaint for the behavior of the MLA followers with him at the toll gate.



1984 riots: 'Why nobody noticed Amitabh Bachchan spewing venom in India’



AMRITSAR: A prime witness in 1984 anti-Sikh riots said that everyone who had been watching Doordarshan saw how superstar Amitabh Bachchan provoked the rioters.

"I wonder why no one in India lodged case against Amitabh Bachchan for provoking killing of Sikhs," said Jagdish Kaur, prime witness in 1984 anti- Sikh riots while talking to TOI on Thursday.
Following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, India erupted in riots against Sikhs in 1984. Reminiscing the sad memories of hate crime against Sikhs she said, "I watched live relay on Doordarshan and saw Amitabh Bachchan raising his arm and shouting the slogan, 'khun ka badla khun sae laengae' (Blood for blood) two times. "

Jagdish Kaur said that everyone who had been watching Doordarshan was witness to how the bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan provoked the anti- Sikh riots. "I am not concerned that a case has been registered against him in Australia but all I want to know why nobody noticed Amitabh's provoking statement in India," Kaur asked. She said that ever since she saw Amitabh spewing venom in full public glare she never watched any of his movies or programmes on TV. "Any mention of him or his work reminds me of his role in the 1984 riots," she said.

Recently a US-based Sikh human rights group lodged a criminal complaint against Bachchan in Australia for instigating and abetting 1984 anti Sikh riots. Australia's 'Criminal Code Act 1995' states that Australian courts can have jurisdiction over cases involving crimes against humanity irrespective of whether the offense was committed in Australia or not.

Jagdish Kaur, then 42, had seen her husband and son being murdered in cold blood by a frenzied mob inside her house in Palam Colony (West Delhi) on November 1st 1984. She also saw her three brothers Narinder Pal Singh, 35, Raghwinder Singh, 28 and Kuldeep Singh ,21, all contractors with MES, burning to death by the mob while they were trying to save themselves.



 Actress Rajini files complaint against DRS school

  
Yesteryear actress Rajini has filed a police case against the management of DRS International School for harassing her children for no reasons. Actress Rajini who got married to one Malhotra has three children Ajay, Rithika,and Dhanush all of them are studying in the DRS International school but her elder son Ajay who is studying in class 10th got harassed by the class teacher due to which she shifted him to another school but the other two children are still continuing in the same school however the management started harassing the two children mentally and physically due to which the children had to take medical help unable to face the torture the actress went to Balanagar DSP and filed a complaint against the principal, concerned teacher and the Management. The DSP assured the actress that action would be taken against the management. It is not new for DRS International school to torture the students because earlier also such incidents taken place and the management is having support of big political leaders.




Porn star breaks both legs jumping from 3rd floor to escape rapists

Lola Taylor had entered the apartment to discuss a possible new production. However, the men attacked her and brutally raped her.
A Russian porn star fleeing from two men who brutally raped and assaulted her broke both her legs when she jumped out of a window to get away.
The adult actress, Lola Taylor, 22, had entered the flat in Yasenovo district of Moscow after she was invited by the two men to discuss a possible new production. However, the men attacked and raped her over several hours.
Lola Taylor's ordeal lasted several hours before she finally managed to flee her assailants.
Taylor eventually managed to escape by jumping from the third floor balcony where she was found bleeding and with torn clothes by Blasius Vinogradov, 54, who was out walking his dog.
He said, "I was just minding my own business when this blonde girl with torn clothes and bleeding mouth hit the ground. She was unconscious and it was clear she had broken both her legs."
Taylor eventually managed to escape by jumping from the third floor balcony where she was found bleeding and with torn clothes by a passerby.
Taylor, a former librarian, was taken to a nearby hospital. A police spokesman said: "She was in a bad way and had been subjected to hours of rape and abuse prior to the fall."
The two accused, Dmitry Kosenkov, 30 and Maksim Pilipenko, 33, were arrested after evidence of the crime was found from their apartment.








I lived through the Sikh riots—and 30 years later, I’m not ready to forgive or forget

  
Most chronicles of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots focus on Delhi and Punjab. Few acknowledge Daltonganj—a typical town in Bihar (now in Jharkhand)—as a place that heavily bore the brunt of the carnage.
I know differently.
Thirty years ago, when the violence broke out on the streets of that town, I was all of 30, married, with a little girl. We lived in a joint family with my parents, three brothers, their wives, and children.
Three years earlier, the year my daughter was born, I had felt the need to stand up on my feet, and I had opened a shop of automobile spare parts in Daltonganj’s busiest area.
The whole of the town is no bigger than a Delhi neighborhood. Like much of small town India, it has a fair share of different communities, one hospital, two film theaters, and a handful of schools.
In its anonymity thrived its innocence. Until October 31, 1984.
I clearly remember it was a Wednesday. It was around four in the evening. One India-Pakistan cricket match had been abruptly canceled midway, and people huddled around their radios began spreading the message: “The BBC said that Indira Gandhi was assassinated this morning.” Not until 4:50, when the Urdu news report was transmitted via All India Radio, did we know that it wasn’t a rumor. The prime minister had been murdered.
It was the last day of Chhath Puja, so I was expecting one of my Hindu friends to visit me. This friend—let’s call him Ashok—came every year to give me holy prashad. A couple of hours had passed by—and though people were in a state of shock, everything seemed pretty much like any other day. The market was closing down and people were returning to their families.
When Ashok arrived, I was preparing to leave, too. “Don’t go home tonight. It’s not safe,” he told me. A medical shop close to the hospital run by a Sikh had apparently been looted. Another Sikh laundryman had been attacked.
Who did it, I did not know. What was going to happen, I could not tell.
I somewhat panicked. A couple of my Hindu friends got together and suggested I should stay the night with my friend Kamlesh, who lived right across the street from my shop, instead of returning home to my family. I conceded.
The next morning, mayhem broke out. As I peeped through the windows of my friend’s house, I saw a mob of some 600 people break into the wooden door of my shop and loot it. They carried rods and kerosene. The inhumanity was frightening. Some people who I would often sip tea with in the evenings were right there, in front of my eyes, devastating my livelihood. My brother’s shop next door was looted and set aflame.
The whole day, I hid behind the windows, barely knowing how long would this go on; barely understanding how were they, we—the Sikhs—at fault. Indira Gandhi had been killed by his two Sikh bodyguards, but how did it justify attacking innocent Sikhs who are, like everybody else, just trying to earn their living?
I did not know about my family’s whereabouts for hours. Eventually, the telephone lines improved and I could use my friend’s phone to find out that they were being protected by one of our neighbors.
Later that day, my friend Kamlesh received a threatening phone call; people were saying he had hid a Sikh in his house. Kamlesh’s neighbor, a fearless Hindu, offered to help. The same night at 11, I removed my turban, opened my hair, covered myself in a white sheet and moved over to my friend’s house.
Sikhs cover their hair out of respect for god’s creation. That is our identity. As a Sikh, it was no less than demeaning to be forced in a situation to let it down.
On Nov. 2, a curfew was declared. The looting and the killing nonetheless continued. Another day passed. The army arrived. On Nov. 4, the curfew ended, but the army men stayed on for several days afterward.
I was clueless about how the rest of the town fared. I was pained with rage and agony. For two hours, when the curfew was lifted, I joined hordes of other Sikh men into the police station, and told a cop: “I am one of the victims and I want to have a look at my shop.” The cop who had been patrolling the areas asked me: “Which one was yours?” I told him—only to be informed the shop was completely emptied. I insisted on seeing it for myself.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Instead of returning home, I went with the cops to my shop. I opened what was left of a broken door. Three or four stray dogs greeted us, huddled inside the tiny space, looted of my once simple life.
I somehow got rid of them, sat right there, and cried and cursed endlessly. I found a sack and collected whatever items remained. I asked Kamlesh to keep them for me, but he declined because the army had announced that they would be searching the rioters’ homes for their bounty. That, I think, never happened.
After four days, I returned home with the sack. My wife and mother, who had little hopes of seeing me again, cried and cried–as they would for many days to come. There were several mob attacks on my house during the course of these four days, but our longtime neighbors—a joint family of Rajputs, just like ours—saved us.
The loss all around was unprecedented. The nearby gurudwara was strewn in blood—and those marks have barely rubbed off to this day. The head priest was slashed to death—and his young children were beaten and harassed. The broken windowpanes of the gurudwara remain, a bitter memory to the stone pelting that went on for hours on the holy shrine.
In Daltonganj, countless Sikh men were beaten up. A dozen died. Some houses were stoned; others set ablaze. Some Sikh locals who were traveling out of the town were dragged out of trains and killed. The hospital refused to admit the injured, unless men cut their hair. Turban-wearing Sikhs had to make a choice: cut your hair or not get medical care. In the wake of the rampage, several Hindus, too, could not leave their homes.
Thereafter, a few Sikh families sought help from their related families in Punjab and left the town. I, too, went and found a place in Amritsar, but I could not convince my family to relocate. My father—who had witnessed his father’s killing during India’s partition in 1947—was hellbent on the whole family migrating together, or not migrating at all. My mother had lost her brother in the brutal attacks on Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs alike in 1947. Any form of killing is wrong—but I can attest it’s worse when the nation corners one single community.
In his first-person accounts from Sikhs across the nation, Jarnail Singh’s book, I Accuse, captures the anguish of a community that is still struggling to forgive and forget—given there has been no justice till this date. Across the nation, more than 8,000 Sikhs were killed, women were raped, burnt alive, homes brought down, children forced to grow up. These have affected the psyche of the people permanently.
Thirty years have passed, but the memory of the riots doesn’t fail me. In some ways, I have put it behind and moved on. In some ways, I have not. I still feel vulnerable to be living among many of those people. The pain, the trauma, the betrayal of the government, the suspicion of my friends, and the mistrust in justice—these cannot be taken away from me. It isn’t easy to forget. And so, I never will.
As told to Shelly Walia, a reporter for Quartz India and Amarjit Singh Walia’s daughter. 




Chiranjeevi gets Strong Warning From Modi
  
Narendra Modi’s Government have sent final warning notices to around 20 former ministers including Megastar Chiranjeevi.From few months NDA Government requests the ministers and MPs of previous congress govt to vacate the houses allotted to them as early as possible.


The Lok Sabha Secretariat has sent notices to about 120 erstwhile MPs to vacate their Government accommodation,to accommodate newly elected MP's and NDA ministers presently who are staying at their respective state bhavans in Delhi or the private Hotelsin the city.

Chiranjeevi will have to vacate his house and the same will be given for Union HomeMinister Rajnath Singh. So Modi's Government gave final warning to all  MP's including chiranjeevi to vacate their accommodation within a week of receiving the notices.




Wonder Woman Gets To Work For Breast Cancer Awareness, Superheroine Style!
  

 Wonder Woman: raising breast cancer awareness!
Rose MooreWriter, cosplayer and all around nerd. @RoseMooreWrites

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and while the shops are full of pink ribbons in every shape and form, artist Maisa Chaves (Halfy on deviantart) took a slightly more novel approach. 
She created a series of posters highlighting the importance of regular self-exams, featuring some of the most famous females in comic-book-land.Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Storm, and Catwoman are front and center (so to speak) with the message that "When we talk about breast cancer, there are no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against this enemy, and when in doubt, talk to your doctor."

It's a powerful message about the fact that no-one is immune to the possibility of cancer, although I'm choosing to shut off the part of my nerd-brain that immediately started going off about healing ability and immortality with one or two of these characters! For the average person, these are recognizable as "super women," and that makes it an incredibly effective point.

It also takes an element of comic-book-art that can be a sore point for many people (the overt sexualization of female characters) and puts a very different spin on it. It makes sense - if these superheroines are all being drawn with chests to rival a Playboy Bunny, why not put them to good use raising awareness?
All in all, I think that these posters are absolutely incredible, and tapping into the current popularity of comic books will help to drive the message home (hopefully) to younger women as well. 
Now, the only thing missing is a fifth poster to raise awareness of the possibility of breast cancer in men...maybe it's time to capitalize on the bat-nipples?





Veteran Tamil actor S.S. Rajendran dead

Tamil cinema’s Yesteryear actor S.S. Rajendran known as SSR, and a contemporary of Sivaji Ganesan and MG Ramachandran, who was battling for life at a private hospital in Chennai, breathed his last on Friday. He was 86.
SSR, closely associated with the Dravidian movement, and later became a member of DMK, and got elected to the assembly. He joined the ADMK after MGR launched the party. But he could not get along with both MGR and Mr. Karunanidhi and quit politics. He was responsible for the growth of DMK in the southern states. He organised the party 's conference in Palani. He had penned his autobiography but died before its formal release.
Parasakti, starring Sivaji Ganesan, gave him the much needed introduction in the film world. Though he had acted a few films earlier and some more like Ratha Kanner, Rangoon Radha andSivagangai Seemai.
Some of his outstanding films includePoompuhar, for which the dialogues were penned by DMK leader M. Karunanidhi, Sivagangai Cheemai, a film by late lyricist Kannadasan,Saradha and Manimagudam, a film he played opposite former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.
He is survived by 2 wives, including actress Vijayakumari (his wife Thamarai Chelvi had passed away earlier) and 7 children.
IANS adds:
“He was admitted to Meenakshi Hospital yesterday (Thursday) in critical condition. He passed away this morning (Friday) due to issues related to lung infection,” a family source told IANS.



Michael Jackson tops Forbes list of highest-earning dead celebrities



Five years after his death, singer Michael Jackson is generating a fortune and is the top-earning dead celebrity, raking in an estimated $140 million in the past year for his estate, Forbes said on Wednesday.
He earned more than twice as much as singer Elvis Presley, who died in 1977 and came in second with $55 million, and three times more than cartoonist and Peanuts comic strip creator Charles Schulz, who took third place with $40 million. 
"Few celebrities prove the point that there is (financial) life after death better than Michael Jackson," according to Forbes.
It is Jackson's second straight year atop the list. He regained the title in 2013, a year after being pushed into second place by actress Elizabeth Taylor.
Jackson's second album released after his death, "Xscape" debuted at No. 2 on the pop charts in the past year and the singer also appeared as a hologram at the Billboard Music Awards. Two Cirque du Soleil shows, "Immortal" and "One," account for much of Jackson's earnings along with his music catalog and publishing empire.
Taylor, who died in 2011, came in at No. 4 with $25 million and reggae singer Bob Marley completed the top five with $20 million in earnings in the year to October 2014. Marley died of cancer at the age of 36 in 1981.
Singer John Lennon, the former Beatle who was gunned down in New York in 1980, was No. 7 with $12 million.
The 13 deceased celebrities included on Forbes list earned a total of $363.5 million.
Forbes compiled the list by talking to estate managers, lawyers and licensors and analyzing estimated posthumous earnings between October 2013-14.





Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Recruitment


The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) is a major space research centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), focusing on rocket and space vehicles for India's satellite programme. It is located in Thiruvananthapuram, in the Indian state of Kerala. The centre had its beginnings as the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in 1962. It was renamed in honor of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space program. November 21, 1963 marked India's first venture into space, with the launch of a two-stage Nike Apache sounding rocket from TERLS. The first rockets launched were built in United States. Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre comes up with latest recruitment details on various post based on Education / Qualification for the interview process all over India.


Current Recruitment Notification from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre -109 Vacancies Available


Job Title
Qualifications
Number of
Vacancies
Asc  Desc
Last Date 
to apply
Company Name:Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre
Posted on :09-10-2014
B.Tech/B.E
109
21-10-2014

Recently Closed Recruitment Notification from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre

Job Title
Qualifications
Number of
Vacancies
Last Date 
to apply
Company Name:Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre
Posted on :01-09-2014
B.Ed,Any Graduate,Diploma
3
08-09-2014
Company Name:Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre
Posted on :13-08-2014
ITI
50
05-09-2014
Company Name:Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre
Posted on :11-08-2014
B.Sc,Diploma,B.A,M.Sc
37
03-09-2014
Company Name:Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre
Posted on :11-08-2014
B.Tech/B.E,M.E/M.Tech
7
01-09-2014


Why Fresherslive for Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Recruitment?

The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) is a major space research centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), focusing on rocket and space vehicles for India's satellite programme. It is located in Thiruvananthapuram, in the Indian state of Kerala. Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre provides recruitment details for Junior Research Fellow, Research Associates, Scientist/Engineer, Administrative Officer, Account Officer, Purchase and Store Officer, Medical Officer, Fireman, Library Assistant, Draughtsman and Other Vacancy Jobs. FreshersLive is a leading government job website in India. It is very popular across India for providing Government job notifications from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and listed recent and upcoming jobs details in this page. The page contains latest recruitment process like Job Details Job Locations, Interview Dates, Online Application Form, Fee Details, Eligibility, Qualifications and Job Notifications from VSSC. Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre comes up with recruitment drive details across different time once in a year. All the latest Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre recruitment notification which is currently active from all Government companies will be available here at FreshersLive.com



    Indian Railways Recruitment 2014

    Total No Vacancy : 12986
    10th , 12th Pass , Graduation 



    RAILWAYS JOBS


  1. 8 Oct 2014
    Diesel Locomotive Works 200 Apprentices Recruitment 2014 : Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi has published an employment notification for recruitment 200 apprentices under Apprentice ACT 1961 (40 Batch ITI). Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi are invited application Form from Relevant Trade passed candidates for recruitment 200 apprentice post. Eligible candidates can apply through prescribed format Application form […]
  2. 28 Sep 2014
    Northern Railway Recruitment 2014 for Sports Quoata: Application are invited from the eligible candidates for the posts of 21 sports persons in different game/discipline such as Atheletic (Men) , Boxing (Men), Badminton (Men), basket Ball(Men), Cycling (Men), Weight Lifting (Men), Kabaddi (Men), Boxing (Women), Basket Ball (Women), Cricket (Women), Kabaddi (Women). The educational qualification, age […]
  3. 25 Sep 2014
    RailTel Corporation of India Ltd Recruitment 2014: 50 Field Supervisor: RailTel Corporation of India Ltd. invites application for the posts of 50 Field Super visor. It is a NOFN project in Gujrat,Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli.The details of Educational qualification, age limit, how to apply, application process for RailTel Recruitment 2014 are […]
  4. 19 Sep 2014
    RRB Recruitment 2014 for 6101 Engineer Posts : Government of India, Ministry of Railways, Railway Recruitment Boards (RRB) has published an employment notification for recruitment 6101Various Posts. RRB Online application are invited from eligible Indian Nationals for the following posts of Junior Engineer, Depot Material Superintendent, Chemical & Metallurgical Assistant, Senior Section Engineer, Chief Depot […]
  5. 19 Sep 2014
    RRB Recruitment 2014 for 6101 Jr Engineer, Sr Section Engineer Posts : Government of India, Ministry of Railways, Railway Recruitment Board (RRB), Allahabad has published an employment notification for the recruitment of 6101 Junior Engineer, Depot Material Superintendent, Chemical & Metallurgical Assistant, Senior Section Engineer, Chief Depot Material Superintendent vacancies. Eligible candidates can apply through […]
  6. 17 Sep 2014
    Central Railway Group-C & D Recruitment 2014 : Railway Recruitment Cell (RRB), Central Railway has published an employment notification for recruitment against Open Advertisement Sports & Guides Quota for the year 2014-15. Eligible candidates can apply through prescribed format form between 01-09-2014 to 15-10-2014. Further details about Central Railway Group-C & D Recruitment 2014 regarding […]
  7. 17 Sep 2014
    RLDA Recruitment 2014: Rail Land Development Authority: Applications are invited from , experienced and motivated Persons working in Central Govt. / State Government/ Indian Railways /Central & State Public sector undertakings  (PSUs)/ Statutory Authorities  for different manager such as Joint General Manager/Civil, Joint General Manager/Real Estate & Urban Planning,Joint General Manager/Finance & Accts, Manager/Project, Manager/Vigilance, […]
  8. 17 Sep 2014
    RAILTEL Corporation of India Ltd Recruitment 2014 : RAILTEL Corporation of India Limited A Government of India Undertaking under Ministry of Railway, Sansad Marg, New Delhi. Railtel Corporation of India Limited has published a recruitment notification for recruitment of 80 Various Executive Vacancy in Gujarat & North Eastern state on Dep/Re-employment/Consultant basis Signalling/Telecom/IT/Civil Engg. domain. […]
  9. 13 Sep 2014
    North Cental Railway Apprentice Trainee Recruitment 2014 : North Central Railway has published an employment notification for recruitment 25 Fitter (Millwright Maintenance Mechanic) Post. Application are invited for Act Apprentices Act, 1961 for the year 2014-15 from candidates fulfilling the conditions mentioned in the notification in the under mentioned designated trades. Eligible candidates can apply […]
  10. 12 Sep 2014
    BMRCL Recruitment 2014: 480 Maintainer, Train Operator: Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) invites online application for Maintainer, Train Operator Posts.Educational qualification for BMRCL Recruitment, age limit for BMRCL Recruitment, how to apply for BMRCL Recruitment, application process for BMRCL Recruitment are mention below.Last date for online application for the above mention posts 13/10/2014 up […]
  11. 12 Sep 2014
    MMRDA Recruitment 2014 – Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited : Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited has published an employment notification for 24 Officer post. Mumbai MetroRail Corporation a Joint Venture company of Govt. of India and Govt of Maharashtra is implementing Colaba-Bandra-Andheri (SEEPZ) Metro Line-3 in Mumbai. MMRC intends to appoint qualified and experienced professionals for […]
  12. 11 Sep 2014
    Central Railway Recruitment 2014 for Group-D Post : Railway Recruitment Cell (RRB), Central Railway has published an employment notification for recruitment against Open Advertisement Sports Quota for the year 2014-15. Eligible candidates can apply through prescribed format form between 09-09-2014 to 07-10-2014. Further details about Central Railway Recruitment 2014 regarding age limit, essential qualification, hot […]
  13. 21 Aug 2014
    Konkan Railway Recruitment 2014: 80 Trackmen, SHKH Posts: Konkan Railway Corporation Limited, invites application for the posts of 50 Trackmen, Station House Keeper Helpers (SHKH)from eligible land loser candidates(Self / Sons / Spouse / Unmarried daughters / Grandsons / Unmarried Granddaughters only) whose land has been acquired for Konkan Railway project, irrespective of the percentage […]
  14. 20 Aug 2014
    North Eastern Railway Recruitment 2014 for Sports Quota: North Eastern Railway has published 31 Group ‘C’ & ‘D’ posts against Sports Quota such as Power Lifting (Men), Handball (Men), Handball (Women), Athletics (Men), Athletics (Women), Volleyball (Men), Weight Lifting (Women) and others.Educational qualification, age limit, selection process, how to apply are given below. Last Date […]
  15. 16 Jul 2014
    South Western Railway 278 Apprentices Trainee : South Western Railway has announced a recruitment notice for recruit 278 apprentices trainee. South Western Railway Applications are invited for engagement of Act Apprentice in Central Workshops, Mysore South Quota .Eligible and interested candidates may apply  before 18th August 2014. Further details of South Western Railway 278 Apprentices […]
  16. 12 Jul 2014
    Western Railway Recruitment 2014 : Western Railway Recruitment Against Sports Quota for The Year 2014-15. Western Railway has announced an employment notice for Direct Recruitment of Sportsperson against Sports Quota (Open Advertisement) for the year 2014 – 2015. Eligible candidates may Apply Prescribed application form before 12th August, 2014.Other details like age limit, Pay Scale, qualification, process of selection, how […]
  17. 10 Jul 2014
    South Eastern Railway Trackman Helper-II Result : You are looking For South Eastern Railway Result for SER/RRC/02/2012 adn Panel List ? The result of written examinations Employment Notice No. SER/RRC/02/2012 (For Rectt of Trackman, Helper-II, Etc in S.E.Railway ) . Railway Recruitment Cell (RRC), South Eastern Railway (SER), Garden Reach, Kolkata has declared the Result […]
  18. 13 Mar 2014
    DMRC (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Ltd) Recruitment – 2014 ADVT NO: DMRC / OM / HR /I/ 2014Website: www.delhimetrorail.comApply for 1194 Junior Engineer,  Assistant, Maintainer and other Vacancies of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMCR): Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), a joint venture company with equity participation from Govt. of India and Govt. of National Capital Territory of […]
  19. 12 Mar 2014
    East Central Railway Recruitment 2014 Apply for 422 Apprentices Posts Notification No-E/Training/Act-Apprentice/MGS/2014 East central Railway Recruitment 2014 Apply for 422 Apprentices Posts: East Central Railway are invited in prescribed proforma for apprentices Training under Apprentices  act-1961 from the candidates who have passed High School with atleast 50% marks and completed ITI in the Trade. Application […]






State Bank of India issues job notification for Senior Executive post


RELATEDS

The State Bank of India (SBI) has recently published a recruitment notification inviting interested and eligible candidates to fill up various vacant positions of senior executive. The bank has been actively working towards non-profit activity called Community Services Banking since 1973.  
Vacancies
Total Posts: 1
Name of the posts:Senior Executive
Pay Scale: Total compensation package (CTC) shall be about Rs 25 lack per annum but will not be a limiting factor for deserving candidate.

Eligibility
Age Limit: The minimum age of the applicant should be 55 years and maximum should be 40 years.
Educational Qualification: Candidates must have done C.A/Post Graduation Diploma in Company Secretary/Post Graduation in any other discipline from a recognised university or a reputed institute with relevant experience.
Selection Procedure: An interview would be conducted to select the candidates.
How to apply: All interested job seekers can fill application through the official website. After filling the application form, candidates must send hard copy of application along with necessary details and attach recent passport size photographs and send to 'The General Manager, State Bank of India, Central Recruitment and Promotion Department, Atlanta Building, 3RD Floor, BBR, Nariman Point, Mumbai -400021(Maharashtra)'.
Important Dates: The last date to submit application form is October 22, 2014.





 Cyclone Hudhud alert for north coastal Andhra Pradesh, south Odisha




The Indian Meteorological Department has issued a cylone alert for the north coastal Andhra Pradesh, south Odisha.
A release from the the IMD on Wednesday said, the deep depression over north Andaman Sea and neighbourhood has moved west-northwestward. It has intensified into a Cyclonic Storm Hudhud and lay centered over north Andaman Sea near latitude 12.3oN and longitude 92.9oE, close to Long Island at 8.30 am of October 08, 2014.
The release further says that the the deep depression is now crossing Andaman and Nicobar Islands close to Long Island. Thereafter, the system would continue to move west-northwestwards and intensify further into a severe cyclonic storm during next 24 hours and subsequently into a very severe cyclonic storm during subsequent 36 hours.
The system would cross north coastal Andhra Pradesh and south Odisha coast between Visakhapatnam and Goplapur around noon of October 12, 2014.
"It (deep depression) will intensify into a cyclonic storm during the next 12 hours. It would cross Andaman and Nicobar Islands close to Long Island within a few hours. Thereafter, the system would continue to move west-northwestwards towards north Andhra Pradesh-Odisha coast during 96 hours," the Meteorological Department's bulletin said.
The gusting speed would be 85 kmph as soon as the deep depression takes the shape of cyclonic storm later during the day. The wind speed would remain at about 90 kmph all along the day and it would continue till Thursday.
However, the cyclonic storm would further intensify and take the form of severe cyclonic storm Thursday with gusting speed of 110 kmph. On October 10, the severe cyclonic storm will take the form of very severe cyclonic storm with gusting upto 125 kmph on October 10, it said.
The very severe cyclonic storm condition would continue till October 12 when the maximum speed could reach 145 kmph.
However, the wind speed would come down to 100 kmph and the system would take the form of a cyclonic storm on October 13, it said.
The IMD is yet to make clear the place of the landfall so far.
Fishermen have been advised not to venture into sea along and off Andaman and Nicobar Islands during next 48 hours.

Odisha CM Naveen PatnaikOdisha prepares for cyclone

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said on Wednesday the state is fully prepared to meet any eventuality arising out of a possible cyclonic storm.
"I reviewed the cyclone situation with all the concerned departments. All the preparations have been made to meet the situation. The departments have been asked to prepare contingency plan to deal with it," he said after reviewing the preparations.
It was decided in the review meeting to write to the Election Commission to relieve officers engaged in election duty outside Odisha. Assembly elections are due in Maharashtra and Haryana Oct 15.

Approaching cyclonic storm leads to panic buying
People in Odisha are stocking essential items as a cyclonic storm.
While the prices of vegetables have increased by 40 per cent in the past 12 hours, some items like candles have vanished from shop shelves. Traders are also trying to cash in on the sudden rush by increasing prices of essential commodities.
People have resorted to panic buying of items like groceries, vegetables, candles, match boxes, batteries and fuel.
Potatoes, which were available for Rs.25 a kilo on Tuesday morning have shot up to Rs.30 a kilo and are expected to touch Rs.35 by Wednesday.
The memory of cyclonic storm Phailin that hit the state Oct 12, 2013 is still fresh in the minds of people. Phailin wreaked havoc in coastal Odisha although there were fewer casualties compared to the killer Super Cyclone of 1999.
"People have resorted to panic buying of vegetables, milk and candles in bulk quantities. Potatoes, match boxes and candles have disappeared from the market," said Sudhakar Panda, secretary, Odisha Byabasayi Mahasangha, a merchants' association.






For 72nd Birthday, Big B Plans Digital Gift for Fans

The actor, who has a fan following ranging from the age groups of 8 to 80 years, has over 10 million 'followers' on Twitter and 16,000,000 'likes' on his Facebook page. In fact, he is the most followed person on Twitter in India.(AP Photo)


NEW DELHI: On his 72nd birthday, Amitabh Bachchan is geared up to surprise his fans! An active user of social networking media, he will sending a personal video message and digitally signed posters to a few lucky ones on Saturday.

This is his way of "reciprocating the love" of his audience.

Big B, in association with micro-blogging platform Twitter and celebrity digital media network Fluence, will respond to all his fans that follow him on Twitter handle @SrBachchan, and tweet and send him birthday wishes with the hashtag #AB72Wishes starting Wednesday.

These lucky fans will receive a digitally signed, specially autographed poster by Amitabh, and one of the fans will also receive a specially recorded personal video message by the Big B.

"Every year on my birthday, I am overwhelmed by love and affection that I receive from my fans, from across the world. This year, I have found this unique way to reciprocate the love, even though the message is communicated through a digital medium for me it is as personal as wishing each individual myself," Big B said in a statement.

The actor, who has a fan following ranging from the age groups of 8 to 80 years, has over 10 million 'followers' on Twitter and 16,000,000 'likes' on his Facebook page. In fact, he is the most followed person on Twitter in India.

“Mr. Bachchan has been setting standards in using Twitter to connect with fans in real-time and sharing his voice on the platform. We are delighted to host his birthday celebration on Twitter and bring a new experience to his millions of fans and followers," said Rishi Jaitly, market director (South and Southeast Asia, Twitter.





Jayalalithaa's bail plea hearing on in Bangalore

A Karnataka High Court bench on Tuesday began hearing of the criminal revision petition of jailed former Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa amid tight security.
A regular bench headed by Justice A.V. Chandrashekara is hearing Jayalalithaa's revision petition, argued by her counsel and noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani seeking suspension of the sentence and bail from jail.
A special court on September 27 had convicted Jayalalithaa in the Rs.66-crore disproportionate assets' case and sentenced her to four years' simple imprisonment, with a fine of Rs.100 crore under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Prevention of Corruption Act.
"Jethmalani sought immediate bail for Jayalalithaa on health grounds, as she has diabetes, low blood pressure, acute back pain and is aged (66 years)," one of her defence lawyers told IANS at the court.
In his 90-minute deposition, Jethmalani also assured the judge that his client (Jayalalithaa) would abide by any condition put forth for bail, as she was a former chief minister and would not disappear or escape from the country.
Special public prosecutor G. Bhavani Singh, however, opposed the bail plea, asserting that Jayalalithaa may influence witness and tamper with evidence if set free, as she was powerful and supremo of the ruling party (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu.





No Skype calls within India from November 10


Over-the-top (OTT) telecom player Skype will stop the calling facility from its application on mobile and landline phones within India from November 10. "As of November 10, 2014, Skype will end support for calling within India meaning calls to mobiles and landlines from Skype within India will no longer be available," Skype's parent company Microsoft said in a statement on Monday.
Using a feature of Skype, a user can make video or voice calls using Internet service for which he/she will only be charged for Internet consumed for the service. Microsoft said, "Users in India can still make free Skype-to-Skype calls worldwide, international calls to mobiles and landlines and users outside the country can call mobiles and landlines in India." It added that Skype WiFi and SMSs are also available to users in India.
The development comes after the Union home ministry wrote to Department of telecommunications (DoT) to block voice over Internet protocol offered by OTT companies because it conceals details of the caller, including his or her mobile number, which poses a security risk.


SECURITY RISK

Security agencies have raised alarm over the 'parallel telecom network' being offered by OTTs. Besides, location of OTT servers outside India poses further risk. DoT earlier had held talks with OTT companies after Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in August decided not to impose extra fees on these popular services as demanded by telecom companies. A top DoT official said any OTT operator can offer free messaging or even calls across any telecom network in India. This also makes it vulnerable and could pose a security risk. Skype's announcement comes within a week of Microsoft's mobile phone arm launching Lumia 730 smartphone in India which positions itself as phone fit for Skype calls and videos.


'BLOCK WE PHONE APP'

Intelligence Bureau (IB) has asked Department of Telecom (DoT) to block the We Phone application as it facilitates spoofing of caller id and is difficult to identify to locate or identify actual caller.
- IB had written to DoT around a month back to block We phone application, which is freely available on Android Play Store and Apple's application store as it allows user to spoof call, an official source said;
- We Phone, which offers call service similar to Skype, allows user to make free calls using mobile Internet service to other subscriber having same application;
- The application, after verifying the user's phone number at the time of installation, gives an option to disable the number to hide it
- IB has told DoT that in free version of this application, caller id on receiver screen starts with +1777 whereas in paid version, any number can be set to display as caller id;
- IB has written that the server of We Phone is located outside India and any call made from We Phone is routed through the server located abroad and therefore it is difficult to identify and locate the actual calling number or user.





 Jayalalithaa's Bail Plea Hearing in Karnataka High Court Today

BANGALORE: The Karnataka High Court will hear AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa's plea seeking immediate bail and suspension of her four-year sentence in an 18-year- old disproportionate assets case.
Bracing up for the anticipated entry of AIADMK supporters and leaders into the city from the Hosur border, the police have tightened security in and around the High Court and Parappana Agrahara Central Prison, where Jayalalithaa is lodged since September 27.  
The High Court vacation bench had on October 1 deferred till October 7 pleas of Jayalalithaa and her close aide Sasikala and her relatives V.N.Sudhakaran and Elavarasi, who were also convicted in the case, to be taken by a regular bench after the end of Dasara vacation.       
"We have made all security arrangements to avoid any untoward incidents. We have information on a lot of AIADMK supporters and leaders flocking to the city from the border areas of Hosur," ACP (Law and Order) Alok Kumar said here.
Also Read:
The police are prepared for the influx of AIADMK supporters and leaders, who are camping in various lodges and resorts on the eve of Jayalalithaa's bail plea hearing, Kumar said.     
"Let them come. We have handled the situation on earlier occasions--on the verdict day and bail plea hearing days. We will handle the situation this time too," Kumar said.        
Section 144 of the Cr.P.C has been clamped within one km radius of the High Court and Parapanna Agrahara Prison, where Sasikala, Sudhakaran and Elavarasi are also lodged. As many as 500 and 1,000 police personnel have been deployed in areas surrounding the High Court and Parapanna Agrahara jail, respectively, Kumar said.  
He said 500 police personnel, including from Karnataka State Reserve Police Force and City Armed Reserve, and two DCPs and five ACPs would be deployed at the High Court. 1,000 personnel, including four DCPs and six ACPs and personnel from KSRP and CAR, will be deployed around the jail premises, Kumar added.          
Jayalalithaa’s counsel Ram Jethmalani had on October 1 pleaded for suspension of the sentence pending appeal and for her release on bail, which was opposed by Special Public Prosecutor Bhavani Singh, who was the SPP in the Special Court in the disproportionate assets case.         
In his verdict on September 27, Special Judge John Michael D’Cunha had convicted Jayalalithaa, sentencing her to four years imprisonment, and slapped a staggering fine of Rs 100 crore in the corruption case.      
Sasikala, Sudhakaran, disowned foster son of the former Chief Minister, and Elavarasi were also sentenced to four years in jail, besides a fine of Rs 10 crore each.  
In her petitions seeking immediate bail and challenging her sentence, Jayalalithaa has maintained that the charges of amassing wealth against her were false and that she had acquired property through legal means.

Pasted from 



The Steve Jobs Nobody Knew

How an insecure, acid-dropping hippie kid reinvented himself as a technological visionary - and changed the world

When I first met Steve Jobs, I thought he was a loser. It was 1980, and I was just a Silicon Valley kid who knew nothing about computers. I had gotten a job at this little computer company near my house called Apple because my mom worked there. It was based in what looked like an abandoned dentists office on Bandley Drive in Cupertino, just a block or two from Apple's current headquarters. Jobs was 25 at the time, and what I remember about him is how he would storm around the office, yelling, and how he wore tattered jeans, and how everyone seemed to be afraid of him. I knew his type: uneducated, blustery, a guy who thinks a lot of himself. At the time, I had no idea what computers would amount to and no idea that this guy would turn out to be one of the greatest visionaries of our time. To me, he just seemed like a lost hippie kid, and I was not terribly interested. After less than a year at Apple, I left to go on to more exciting things, like dealing blackjack in Lake Tahoe.
It was only a few years before I understood exactly what I had walked away from. Jobs not only turned Apple into the most valued company in the world, worth an estimated $342 billion, he rewrote the rules of business, combining Sixties idealism with greed-is-good capitalism. At a time when software was the model, he built hardware. At a time when everyone focused on the macro, he focused on the micro. He never did anything first, but he did it best. More than anyone else on the planet, he is responsible for fusing the human realm with the digital, for giving us the ability to encode our deepest desires and most intimate thoughts with the touch of a finger. "He's the Bob Dylan of machines," says Bono, who knew Jobs for years. "He's the Elvis of the hardware-software dialectic."
But, God, he could be a dick. Those who knew Jobs best and worked with him most closely - and I have talked to hundreds of them over the years – were always struck by his abrasive personality, his unapologetic brutality. He screamed, he cried, he stomped his feet. He had a cruelly casual way of driving employees to the breaking point and tossing them aside; few people ever wanted to work for him twice. When he fathered a daughter with his longtime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan at age 23, he not only denied his paternity, he famously trashed Brennan in public, telling Time in 1983 that "28 percent of the male population of the United States could be the father." His kinder side would only emerge years later, after he had been kicked around, beaten up, humbled by life. He grew up poor, an adopted kid who felt cast aside by his birth parents, feeling scrawny and teased and out of place, and he remained deeply insecure for most of his life, certain that it would not last long.
"Steve always had that James Dean, live-fast, die-young thing," says Steve Capps, one of the key programmers on the first Apple Macintosh. As they worked late into the night to design and build the device that would revolutionize personal computing, Jobs would talk about death a lot. "It was a little morbid," Capps recalls. "He'd say, 'I don't want to be 50.'" Brennan recalls Jobs making similar comments when he was only 17. "Steve always believed he was going to die young," Brennan says. "I think that's part of what gave his life such urgency. He never expected to live past 45."
In 2005, not long after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Jobs gave a now-famous commencement address at Stanford University in which he hailed death as "very likely the single best invention of life," one that "clears out the old to make way for the new." Perhaps it was not unexpected that Jobs, the archetype of the modern inventor, would conceive of death in such terms – as if life itself were an idea that had been hacked together by a larger, more powerful version of himself in some big garage in the sky. But if death is life's greatest invention, the greatest invention of Steve Jobs was not the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad. It was Steve Jobs. Before he could alter the landscape of the world as he found it, he first had to design and assemble the Jobs the world would come to idolize. "Steve was a shallow, narcissistic person who became more fully developed emotionally as he went along," says John Perry Barlow, a digital pioneer and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who knew Jobs for several decades. "He created a lot of great hardware, but over the years, he also invented himself."
Jobs was born to insecurity. His mother, Joanne Schieble, was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, where she got involved with a Syrian student named Ab-dulfattah Jandali. When Schieble found out she was pregnant, her father objected to her marrying a Syrian. "Without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me," Jandali would later tell a reporter. "She did not want to bring shame onto the family and thought this was the best for everyone."
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955. Schieble gave her baby up to Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple in San Francisco. Paul, a high school dropout who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, made his living as a debt collector, a repo man and a machinist. Clara worked as a payroll clerk at Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was not what Schieble wanted for her child, but she made one provision for him before she left. The first in her family to go to college, Schieble believed in the value of education: Before she signed the adoption papers, she made Paul and Clara promise to send her son to college.
From the start, Jobs was a temperamental kid. He jammed bobby pins into an electric outlet and burned his hand. He had to have his stomach pumped after he drank ant poison. He woke up early, so his parents got him a rocking horse, a gramophone and some Little Richard records to entertain himself. "He was so difficult a child," his mother would later confide to Brennan, "that by the time he was two, I felt we had made a mistake, and I wanted to return him." Like many other parents of the time, Paul and Clara soon plunked their son down in front of a relatively new technology called television, where he eagerly devoured everything from Dobie Gillis and I Love Lucy to Jonny Quest.
When Jobs was three, Paul moved the family from San Francisco to Mountain View, an unsophisticated town of tract houses and apricot orchards just south of Palo Alto. It turned out to be a fortuitous move, putting young Steve right in the middle of the engineering culture that was just beginning to blossom in Silicon Valley. Not that the Jobs family had much connection to it. Paul tried fixing up old cars and dabbling in real estate, but money always seemed to elude him. In the fourth grade, Steve's teacher, Imogene Hill, asked the class, "What is it in this universe that you don't understand?" When it came to Steve's turn to answer, his reply was heartbreaking: "I don't understand why all of a sudden we're so broke."
Jobs was too mouthy and inattentive to be a great student. But he was saved from truancy and delinquency by Hill. "She was one of the saints of my life," he would later recall. "She taught an advanced fourth-grade class, and it took her about a month to get hip to my situation. She bribed me into learning." Hill paid Steve $5 bills out of her own pocket to do his homework and read. Spurred by her confidence in him, he skipped the fifth grade and went straight into Crittenden Middle School. It proved a rough place for a thin, wispy kid who was never much of an athlete. The other children taunted Jobs about his adoption. "What happened?" they would sneer. "Didn't your mother love you?" When he would recount the teasing years later, his girlfriend Chrisann recalls, "the pain of it still showed on his face."
At 11, Jobs announced to his parents that he was not going back to Crittenden. But instead of telling him to tough it out, Paul and Clara moved the family to Los Altos, a richer town a few miles away, with a better school system. It was in those years that what we now know as Silicon Valley came into being. The orchards that had covered the Valley had recently been bulldozed, and there was a sense of a new world rising, a belief that you could engineer your own future. There were no stuffy traditions, no cultural baggage. You could be whatever or whoever you wanted to be.
Jobs recalled it as a place where everyone was tinkering away in their garages, building their own TVs and stereos with mail-order kits called Heathkits. "These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color-coded," he said. "You'd actually build this thing yourself. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. You looked at a tele-vision set and you would think, 'I haven't built one of those, but I could.' It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence."
When Jobs was 14, a neighbor introduced him to an older kid named Steve Wozniak who was building a little computer board he called the Cream Soda Computer. "Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on," Wozniak later recalled. "But Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy."
Wozniak, five years older than Jobs, was a full-on geek: big, socially awkward, obsessed with electronics, a kind of genius at seeing how wires connected and how to make machines dance. Jobs was never as technically sophisticated, but he knew enough to be fascinated. He and Woz hung out in the way boys do, goofing off and playing pranks; they once hung a huge middle finger they had fashioned out of tie-dyed bedsheets on the school building. But they soon graduated to a pastime that barely had a name in those days: phone phreaking, one of the earliest forms of hacking. After reading an article in Esquire, Wozniak and Jobs figured out how to build small blue boxes that mimicked the tones used by phone operators – enabling users to place free long distance calls at will. According to legend, Wozniak used a blue box to phone the Vatican; adopting a German accent, he identified himself as Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the pope.
Other geeky kids might have left it at that – a fun toy for impressing your friends with stupid pranks. But even then, Jobs saw the commercial potential in cool technology. He and Woz sold the boxes in the dorms on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, making some nice pocket money before giving it up for fear of getting busted. It was an early test run at entrepreneurship. Jobs later said that without the blue boxes, there would be no Apple.
In 1972, when he was 17, Jobs met a green-eyed bohemian girl named Chrisann Brennan who was a year behind him at Homestead High. They soon embarked on a big, messy teenage romance, taking LSD at school and talking about The Pri-mal Scream, a book by Arthur Janov. For Jobs, dropping acid was not only a means to living life more fully – it was a way to overcome the pain of being abandoned by his birth parents. "Steve explained to me how both LSD and primal screaming opened up stored trauma in the medulla," Chrisann writes in an unpublished memoir she shared with Rolling Stone. "He would repeatedly talk about Janov's ideas in regard to how mothers and fathers would fail to love their children and walk out on them in so many ways, creating and perpetuating trauma." Jobs was quiet and funny, so shy that Chrisann had to initiate kissing. He would play guitar for her in his bedroom, crooning like his hero, Bob Dylan. From the beginning, it was clear to Brennan that Jobs was going places. "He told me on our first or second date that he would be a millionaire someday, and I believed him," says Brennan. "Steve could see the future."
Unlike Wozniak, who was content to remain within the boundaries of his geeky life, Jobs was a searcher. He watched art movies and wrote poetry. He chased girls and had lots of sex. He experimented with sleep deprivation, fasting and drugs. "What is this I found in your car?" Paul Jobs asked his son at one point. Steve didn't even try to hide the truth. "That's marijuana, Father," he said. The summer after high school, Steve and Chrisann left home and moved into a cabin in the mountains above Cupertino, where Jobs typed late into the night, rewriting Dylan lyrics in his own words.
Jobs knew that his parents had promised his birth mother they would send him to college, and he took the obligation seriously. In 1972, he left Chrisann to enroll in Reed College, a private school in Oregon known for its free spirits and hippie vibe. But by the end of the first semester, he'd dropped out. "After six months, I couldn't see the value in it," he recalled. "I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK."
Jobs hung around Reed for another six months or so, auditing a class in calligraphy. It was hardly the kind of thing a budding entrepreneur would be expected to study, but Jobs was after enlightenment, not career advancement. "I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms," he later recalled. "I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it."
Jobs came to see himself as part of the tail end of the Sixties idealism. "We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life," he said of his generation. "So people went in search of things. The great thing that came from that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late Fifties and early Sixties. We were going in search of something deeper."
At the time, it seemed that all young searchers ended up in the same place: India. At Reed, Jobs was introduced to the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba, an Indian guru whose ideas had been popularized by author Ram Dass in a best-seller called Be Here Now. Before long, Jobs had embarked on a pilgrimage to India to meet Baba, but the guru died shortly before he arrived. Jobs shaved his head, trekked through the Himalayas and spent a month living in a one-room cement hut on a potato farm. During his wanderings, overcome by the widespread poverty and suffering he encountered, he was struck by an insight that would prove central to his own reinvention, a subtle but significant shift from the spiritual to the practical: "It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together."
The story of the birth of Apple is so well-known that it can practically be recited by schoolchildren: the Homebrew Computer Club, Jobs and Wozniak building the first computer in his parents' garage, naming the company after an apple farm in Oregon that Jobs visited briefly when he returned from India. It's the stuff of Silicon Valley legend.
At Apple, the division of labor was clear: Wozniak was the technical brains, Jobs was the hustler. Jobs pushed Woz to finish his projects and scored the necessary parts at rock-bottom prices; he would later say he learned to negotiate by watching his dad haggle for auto parts at junkyards. From the start, it was Jobs who had the imagination to see that there was a business to be built on personal computers. In some ways, it was a measure of desperation: He was broke, and he needed money. In other ways, it was the extension of the Heathkit impulse that reigned in the Valley in those days: You could build anything, including your very own company.
For Jobs, the model of a successful startup was Atari, the video-game company where he had worked when he was saving money for his trip to India. But Jobs fused Atari's get-rich-quick entre-preneurialism with a Sixties seeking of enlightenment. Larry Brilliant, who met Jobs in India and later went on to run a variety of philanthropic ventures in the Valley, recalls asking Jobs why an idealistic guy like him was starting up a for-profit company. "Remember in the Sixties, when people were raising their fists and saying, 'Power to the people'?" Jobs told him. "Well, that's what I'm doing with Apple. By building affordable personal computers and putting one on every desk, in every hand, I'm giving people power. They don't have to go through the high priests of mainframe - they can access information themselves. They can steal fire from the mountain. And this is going to inspire far more change than any nonprofit."
It's an open question how much Jobs believed his own high-blown rhetoric, and how much of it was simply clever marketing spin. Either way, his fusion of idealism and technology was right for the times: Apple took off. Jobs was worth $10 million by the time he was 24; a year later, he was worth more than $100 million.
But as Apple ascended, Jobs changed. Friends say his temper grew shorter, and he began treating those around him badly. He had resumed his relationship with Brennan, and the two of them were living together in a house Jobs had rented not far from Apple. Then, just as Apple was taking off in 1977, Brennan became pregnant – and Jobs responded by pushing her out of his life. "He would not talk to me," she recalls. "He would only talk to his lawyer." Jobs refused to provide her with any financial help, yet he was violently opposed to her giving the baby up for adoption and had his friends pressure her not to have an abortion. After his daughter, Lisa, was born, Jobs was a distant father, dropping in on her infrequently. Brennan ended up renting an apartment for $225 a month and living on welfare. Jobs continued to deny paternity until it was confirmed by a DNA test.
At Apple, Jobs displayed a rebelliousness that bordered on self-destructiveness. By the early 1980s, the company had grown large enough that Jobs could no longer control every aspect of it, and the popular Apple II had already run its course. After seeing a prototype of a mouse and desktop icons during a visit to Xerox PARC, a research center in nearby Palo Alto, Jobs came away convinced that all computers would one day operate on such a model. But he couldn't get the top management at Apple to agree, so he simply hijacked a team working on another project, took the best ideas from Xerox and elsewhere, and added some of his own. The result was a renegade team at Apple, hidden away in a building off the main campus, that was tasked with creating the first Macintosh.
The dictum that Jobs issued to the Macintosh team was simple: Build the coolest machine you can. Every day, it seemed, brought a new crisis: The disk drive didn't work, the software was fucked up. Through it all, Jobs drove the team of eight programmers hard, working them day and night for months on end. "You'd work on something all night, and he'd look at it in the morning and say, "That sucks,'" recalls Capps, the Mac programmer. "He'd want you to defend it. If you could, you were doing your job and Steve respected you. If not, he'd blow you out of the water." Driven by his own demons, Jobs became legendary for his ability to humiliate others. "Steve simultaneously has the best and worst qualities of a human being," says Andy Hertzfeld, another key programmer on the Mac team. "They're both in him, simultaneously, living side by side with each other."
A control freak, Jobs demanded perfection and originality in every detail: When he could not find the precise color he wanted for the Mac, he ordered a special beige tint created. "His reverence for shape and sound and contour and creativity did not come from the boardroom," says Bono. "It came from that anarchic, West Coast, fuck-off attitude that rules the 21st century. He wasn't going to make ugly things that made profits. The big lesson for capitalism is that Steve, deep down, did not believe the consumer was right. Deep down, he believed that he was right. And that the consumer would respect a strong aesthetic point of view, even if it wasn't what they were asking for."
The launch of the new computer, with the iconic 1984 commercial that brilliantly positioned the Mac as a tool of liberation, gave the world its first glimpse of Jobs the showman. The machine itself became a huge success, selling more than a million units and transforming the computer industry, but Jobs was increasingly unable to control the company he had created. His instincts were still those of an adolescent – but as he quickly discovered, you can't run a Fortune 500 company like a garage band. Jobs recruited John Sculley, the CEO of Pepsi, to lend a steady hand, but he proved incapable of sharing power with the more experienced executive. The two men clashed constantly. Forced to choose between the rebel hothead and the even-handed adult, the Apple board tossed Jobs overboard. "At 30, I was out," he later recalled. "And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating."
Jobs was deeply wounded by his ouster from Apple. The central trauma of his life, after all, was being given up for adoption by his parents, and now he was being kicked out of his second family, the company he founded. A close friend of Jobs once speculated to me that Steve's drive came from a deep desire to prove that his parents were wrong to give him up. A desire, in short, to be loved - or, more precisely, a desire to prove that he was somebody worth loving. Whatever the psychological impact, it was clear that Jobs was devastated, and he didn't know what to do with himself. He was young, handsome, famous, rich – and lost. He took some time off to travel around Italy and talk about personal computers in the Soviet Union. He had also reached out to his biological mother and discovered that he had a sister – the writer Mona Simpson. The revelation that he had a talented, arty sibling pleased him to no end, and the two of them became fast friends. To his credit, he also used this time to connect with Lisa, his daughter with Chrisann Brennan.
Within a year or so, Jobs had a comeback plan. He decided he was going to build what he called "the perfect company," and it was going to be perfect in every detail, from the stylish logo designed by Yale art professor Paul Rand to the state-of-the-art factory that would churn out desktop supercomputers with unheard-of speed and grace, a wonder of modern manufacturing. Even the name of the company reeked of a kind of hubris: NeXT. Its success would be his revenge on the bozos at Apple who had tossed him out. He would show them.
It was around that time that my path once again crossed with Jobs. As it turned out, my wife had met Mona Simpson while working at a literary magazine, and she told us, very quietly, about how she had learned that Jobs was her brother. She talked about the troubles that Jobs was having remodeling his apartment in the San Remo, and how he encouraged Mona to buy more expensive clothes. She was proud of him, and protective, but in private she referred to him as "the Sun King," because he was so imperious.
In 1986, when Simpson's novel Anywhere But Here was published, the writer and editor George Plimpton threw her a party at his Upper East Side apartment. The party was full of New York literati, as well as Steve and Mona's mother, Joanne. I did not know that Jobs would be there - in fact, when he quietly walked up and joined a conversation I was having with several other writers, I didn't even recognize him. Gone was the jean-clad nerd I had known in the early days of Apple: In his double-breasted suit, his dark hair perfectly groomed, Jobs seemed more a metrosexual playboy than a computer geek. As the evening wore on, I noticed that women swarmed around him, though he appeared not to notice. Away from Silicon Valley, where he had spent his entire life, he actually seemed a bit unsettled - a man who had no trouble going toe-to-toe with big-time CEOs, but who went tongue-tied when confronted with someone as intimidating as a poet.
At NeXT, Jobs succeeded in producing a strikingly distinctive object – but one that proved way too expensive for the market. Consumers who bought NeXT computers still swoon over them, calling them the most beautiful machines ever built – but in the real world, nobody wanted to pay 10 grand for a beautiful machine. Jobs managed to persuade Ross Perot to invest $20 million in NeXT, but within a few years, it was clear that the company's machines were headed for computer museums as artifacts built by an obsessively perfectionist man who had confused art with commerce.
In the spring of 1994, I went to NeXT to interview Jobs for Rolling Stone. The offices, like everything else about the company, were a showcase of perfection, with a glass staircase designed by the celebrated architect I.M. Pei. It was a sunny day, and salty air from the bay blew through the building - but it was spooky as hell, because the place was deserted. There might have been a few last programmers plugging away in some backroom, but I didn't see them. Jobs met me in the conference room, which practically had cobwebs hanging from the whiteboard. He was 39, stocky and jowly, dressed in jeans. It was the first time I'd seen him with a beard. There was a Citizen Kane quality to it all - the formerly great man in the big empty castle. "Steve is a little like the boy who cried wolf," Robert Cringely, an influential Silicon Valley writer, told me at the time. "He has cried revolution one too many times. People still listen to him, but now they are more skeptical."
Part of the skepticism came from the fact that, at that moment, Silicon Valley was changing fast. A year earlier, a hotshot programmer at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen had created the first Web browser, and the dot-com revolution was about to take off. There was a sense that something big was on the horizon – something that Jobs seemed to have no part of. Not that he was oblivious: He talked a little about what was then being called "the information superhighway" and astutely noted that the computer was being transformed from "a tool of computation to a tool of communication." But nothing he was doing at NeXT was really connected to the online revolution.
He was clearly still bitter about what had happened at Apple – and he had even more bitterness toward his old nemesis Bill Gates, who, in a cruel bit of irony, was on his way to becoming the richest man in the world thanks to Windows, the operating system that Microsoft had modeled on the Macintosh. Jobs called Microsoft "completely lost" and cast its market dominance - and its stifling effect on innovation – as a threat to the U.S. economy. "Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft," he told me. When I asked how he felt about Gates achieving dominance in the industry by essentially ripping off the approach that Jobs had pioneered, he snapped, "The goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It's not my goal, anyway." Later, when I asked him what his goal in life was, he said, "In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it."
As I listened to him, I once again thought of Orson Welles – a great genius who did his best work at 25 and ended up doing TV game shows and commercials for crappy wine. When I asked Jobs how he felt about the comparison, he had the wit to make light of it. "I'm very flattered by that, actually," he said. "I wonder what game show I'm going to be on."
But here's the thing about Jobs: You could never predict when he was going to say something lovely and profound. Near the end of the interview, I asked him how it felt to walk around in the world and see Mac computers everywhere. "The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life you once had - and that produced about 10 million children," he said wistfully. "In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell the romance every morning when you get up. You'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it."
Two things helped Jobs turn his life around. One was meeting Laurene Powell, a tall, blond Jersey girl studying for an MBA who heard him speak at Stanford after he was booted out of Apple. They were married in 1991 in a small Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite National Park and eventually had three kids together. Friends noticed immediately how becoming a family man matured Jobs. "I saw him coming out of a restaurant in Palo Alto, and he had a baby in his arm," says John Perry Barlow. "He was a changed man. He had a sweetness to him, a contemplative quality."
The other was a little company called Pixar. In 1986, the film production company founded by George Lucas was looking to unload high-tech imaging technology that would allow users to render their own 3D graphics. Jobs, enthralled by the technology, picked the division up for a mere $5 million. Taking over as CEO, he turned the graphics division into an animation studio, cut a deal with Disney for distribution, and gave a budding animation genius named John Lasseter and his team the kind of money and creative license he had never granted his employees at Apple. The result, after years of losses, was Toy Story. In 1995, a week after the film's release, Pixar went public and Jobs found himself sitting on stock worth $1.1 billion. Suddenly, Jobs looked like a genius again.
Apple, meanwhile, was struggling to survive. The board had installed a succession of clueless CEOs, who had done a brilliant job of driving the once-great company into irrelevance. I spent a lot of time at Apple in 1996, reporting a story on the decline and fall of the company for Rolling Stone, and Jobs spent hours on the phone with me, giving me his read on what went wrong and why. It was clear that he was personally offended that a guy as square and conventionally minded as CEO Gil Amelio - a veteran of the semiconductor industry, which is nothing at all like the PC industry - was running Apple. For Jobs, it was like a father seeinghis beloved son in the hands of a child molester.
So Jobs staged a comeback. Like many of his greatest accomplishments, it was swift and brutal. He charmed Amelio and the board sufficiently to convince them to buy NeXT's software for $400 million and use it as the basis for Apple's future operating system, which turned out to be OS X. Then he got himself named as an "informal adviser" to the company. Before long, Amelio was vanquished and Jobs was back in charge. He brought in a new board, sympathetic to his ideas for a turnaround.
For Jobs, this was a huge gamble. Apple was so far gone by that point that reviving it was by no means a sure thing. His strategy was simple. First, he halted Apple's disastrous decision to allow other computers to clone Macintosh's operating system. Next, he went humbly to Bill Gates and struck a deal to keep Microsoft software running on the Mac. Finally, he unleashed a talented designer named Jonathan Ive, giving him free rein to build great computers. His first all-new computer, the iMac, was a simple, distinctive, easy-to-use machine that had the playful spirit of the old Macintosh. It was an immediate hit.
Jobs saw clearly that Apple's future was in more than just PCs – it was in building cool hardware and software to deliver all kinds of content, including music and movies. The iPod, which launched in 2001, was the first move in that direction. I went to see Jobs in November 2003, around the time he introduced the Windows version of iTunes, a move that would make him the most influential man in the record industry. I bumped into him in the lobby – he was wearing shorts and Birkenstocks, looking very relaxed - and we took the elevator up to his office on the fourth floor. It was the least glamorous office you could imagine: no wood paneling, no awesome view, no decanter of whiskey, no silly toys or lava lamps. Settling into the conference room, he began to talk, mostly about the move into music.
iTunes, as Jobs saw it, was a way to stop outfits like Napster from enabling users to steal music – by creating the world's largest music store, with every song available instantly at the user's fingertips. Jobs had just browbeaten the record labels into coming on board, but it was still not clear whether iTunes would be selling individual songs or offering unlimited access to subscribers. "I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model," Jobs mused, "and it might not be successful."
But the business aspects of Apple weren't nearly as interesting as his personal reflections. I asked him about Bob Dylan, what his music meant to him. "He was a very clear thinker, and a poet," Jobs said. "He wrote about what he saw and thought. The early stuff is very precise. As he matured, you had to unravel it a bit. But once you did, it was clear as a bell." He talked about bootlegging Dylan in the early days with Woz. I sensed that he was opening up some, so I pushed him by asking if he ever had any doubts about technology, if he believed we were pushing it all too far: genetic research, cloning, all that.
He looked at me and rolled his eyes. "You know – I'd rather just talk about music. These big-picture questions are just – zzzzzzzz," he said, snoring loudly. "I think we're all happier when we have a little music in our lives."
He waved at my tape recorder. "Turn that off," he ordered. "Can we just talk?"
"Sure," I said, turning off the machine.
"I'm just really uncomfortable talking about this. It's not my thing."
"You don't like to think about the past, do you?" I asked.
"I don't have anything against the past," he said. "I just want to focus on the future."
From there, we went into a freewheeling conversation about the news of the day – starting with Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor. ("I wish he had a little more business experience," Jobs said.) I asked him if he ever considered running for public office. He broke into a broad smile, and mimicked the voice of a reporter: "Yes, Mr. Jobs, and could you please tell us how many times you've dropped acid?" As we talked, I got the sense of another Steve Jobs, someone less certain, less self-confident. I asked him if he had gone to see Dylan a lot when he was younger. "Never," he said with obvious regret. "I was too busy with Apple." I suddenly understood how narrow his life had been, how much his success had cost him - so focused on one thing, so desperate to make it work.
Somehow, we got onto the topic of Bill Gates, and I asked him if he believed Gates was greedy. "I like Bill, but sometimes I wonder – Bill, why do you have to take a dollar out of every dollar that passes through your hands? Why do you have to have it all? Can't you just take, like, 99 cents and leave a penny for someone else?"
He seemed unusually relaxed, in no hurry to end the interview. I thought of a question I had always wanted to ask him.
"Where does your common-man touch for technology come from?"
"Common man?"
'Yeah, you know – simplicity of design. You understand how people use technology in a human way. Where does that come from?"
"You make it sound like I have statues of Chairman Mao on my front lawn," he said, laughing.
"No, I'm serious."
"I don't think it's that profound. I think most people in the technology world don't pay attention to design. They don't know anything about design, they don't care about it."
Suddenly I could see he was getting impatient, that my time was running out.
"Do you have any regrets about your life?"
"Sure," he said.
"Like what?"
"Personal things. Things that have to do with family." I presumed he was talking about Lisa, but I didn't push it.
At this point, my notes falter. I don't remember exactly how we got to this, what it was I asked him that prompted the response. Maybe I asked him if there were things he'd do differently. Maybe I asked him if he felt lucky. Maybe I even asked him if he was afraid of dying. But what I remember is this: Jobs leaning forward at the end of the table and looking at me directly, his eyes intense. "I think that life is something that happens in a flash," he said. He snapped his fingers. "We just have a brief moment here, and then we are gone."
As I said goodbye, he gave me a long look in the eye. I'm not sure what it meant, but there was a humanness to him that I had not seen before. I could see that he was confused and vulnerable. He had made sacrifices, done things wrong, had regrets. What he had shared with me were not the breathtaking thoughts of a visionary, but those of a regular human being.
Only a month earlier, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Jobs never expected to live past his forties. He had more than a passing interest in Buddhism, which teaches that death is not necessarily final - that souls can be reincarnated. Still, for a father with four children, the diagnosis was a brutal blow.
Most people who get pancreatic cancer are dead within a few months. But Jobs got lucky, as he often did. His cancer, a rare neuroendocrine tumor, was slower-growing than most, giving him more time to seek treatment. Instead of fearing death, Jobs embraced it as a tool to clarify his thinking. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," he said in his commencement address at Stanford University. "Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
As always, Jobs sought his ultimate solace in his work. Two of Apple's most innovative and successful products - the iPhone and the iPad – were both launched after he was diagnosed with cancer. Both were risky ventures that could easily have flopped, but Jobs retained his perfectionist discipline. Vic Gondotra, head of mobile applications at Google, was attending religious services one Sunday morning when he got a call from Jobs. "I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone, and I'm not happy with the icon," Jobs told him. "The second 'o' in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong and I'm going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that OK with you?" Gondotra calls it a lesson he'll neverforget. "CEOs should care about details," he says. "Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday."
As his illness worsened, Jobs found his life narrowing even further. He didn't go out at night, never accepted awards, gave no speeches, attended no parties. Instead, he holed up in his home in Palo Alto, where he hung out with his family and learned everything he could about cancer – and how he might beat it. "He knew more about it than any oncologist," says his old friend Larry Brilliant, who is an M.D. His body grew thinner and thinner, and he took a six-month leave from Apple to have a liver transplant.
Late last year, Jobs called me out of the blue to ask about doing another magazine story together. I was struck by how different his voice sounded on the phone. It was not just softer and weaker. It was also more curious. For the first time, he asked me about my kids. I have no idea how he even knew that I have kids – we'd never discussed it. Others noticed the same change in his manner. He no longer seemed as arrogant, and had lots of time and compassion for the suffering of others. When Brilliant's 24-year-old son developed what turned out to be a fatal cancer, Jobs became his "cancer buddy," Brilliant says. Jobs made spreadsheets detailing the pros and cons of various doctors to help him decide whom to see. He called every week, talking Brilliant's son through the chemo, saying, "If I can make it through this, so can you." "Whenever he was down, Steve would call and give him a pep talk to buoy his spirits," recalls Brilliant.
At the iPad launch in January 2010, Jobs was accompanied by his family, including his wife, Laurene, and his sister, Mona. Onstage, he worked through his presentation, looking thin and frail, but courageous. His body was rail-thin, his cheeks gaunt. After the talk, Jobs pulled on a black hoodie and went into the demo area to talk to the media. When I stopped to say hello, he looked at me with glazed eyes – the faraway, unfocused eyes of an old man – and said, "What do you think of the iPad?" I wasn't sure if he recognized me, and it was clear he was having a hard time carrying on a conversation. Apple's PR people quickly whisked him away, and I never spoke to him again.
For Jobs, the slide continued. Brilliant stopped by his house frequently. On good days, they would walk downtown to get a smoothie, the only food Jobs could eat. "We laughed a lot," Brilliant says. "Sometimes we would talk about God, or about the afterlife – which Steve was intensely curious about. He was very frank about what was going on. He was not in any kind of denial." Jobs often had IVs strapped to his arms. "I'd joke with him that from the neck up, he looked great," says Brilliant. "But his legs looked like Bam-bi's." Sometimes, when the talk got heavy, Brilliant – who is not a small man – would crawl onto the bed beside Jobs and hold him. "He was not worried about Apple's future – he knew that would be fine," Brilliant says. "He was thinking about his kids. He said to me, 'I just want to live long enough to see my kids graduate from high school.'"
According to Brilliant, Jobs had come very close to death twice over the summer: "He had gathered his family around him to say goodbye." Somehow, he rallied both times, but the trajectory was clear. Only a few people were allowed to see him in his final days – beyond his immediate family, the list included Dr. Dean Ornish, a close friend, and John Doerr, the venture capitalist. Brilliant last saw him two weeks before he died. In his room, Jobs had two pictures of the guru he never got to meet, Neem Karoli Baba, as well as a book of Baba's teachings, Miracle of Love. Although he was frightfully thin, Brilliant says, Jobs was "mutedly optimistic" that he would make it, that the new cancer treatment he was taking might buy him more time. "When I left," Brilliant says, "it did not feel like goodbye."
Jobs died at home on Wednesday, October 5th, surrounded by his family. He was 56 years old. He had always known he would never live to be an old man, but he came closer than he ever imagined he would. He used the extra years - "borrowed time," he called it – to complete the spiritual journey he had begun as a kid in the apricot orchards of Silicon Valley. "There were those two sides to him," says Bono, who spoke to Jobs not long before he died. "There was the warrior, and then there was the very tender and soft-spoken side. I already miss him." Jobs may be remembered as the man who brought the human touch to our digital devices. But perhaps his greatest – and hardest-won – accomplishment was bringing the human touch to Steve Jobs.


This story is from the October 27th, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.







 Search for MH370 resumes in Indian Ocean

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) on Monday announced that the underwater search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which vanished on March 8, has resumed.
The GO Phoenix, a Malaysian government contracted ship, is the first of the three vessels that arrived in the search zone and the fleet will spend around a year to hunt for the wreckage of MH370 in an area of about 60,000 sq km, Xinhua reported.
One of the largest international aviation searches in history was underway after MH370 disappeared with 239 people on board during its journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
However, the multinational search team had to stop the hunt after nearly two months of fruitless work and the related countries began to map the sea floor which was crucial to continue the underwater mission.
According to the plan, GO Phoenix will use an underwater sonar device called towfish to operate over the seabed.
When the device detects any suspicious wreckage, the ship would put down highly sensitive camera equipment to film it and decide whether it belongs to the MH370.
GO Phoenix would stay in the mission area for 12 days before heading to the Australian coast for refuelling and supply.
Two other ships provided by Dutch contractor Fugro would join the GO Phoenix later this month.
ATSB chief Commissioner Martin Dolan said: "All we want to indicate to everyone is that we're cautiously optimistic... We'll locate the missing aircraft."







Wenger Defends His Shove on Mourinho

Arsene Wenger has refused to apologise and is adamant that he has no regrets about pushing Jose Mourinho after claiming that the angry stand-off was provoked by the Chelsea -manager confronting him.
The latest unsavoury clash between the Premier League's two most senior managers occurred only 20 minutes into yesterday's match when Wenger reacted with fury to a Gary Cahill tackle on Alexis Sanchez.
Wenger then came marching into Mourinho's technical area, with the Chelsea manager standing to signal that his rival should return to his own area. Wenger reacted by twice pushing at Mourinho's chest, although the Frenchman described the force of his actions as minimal.
"You would see if I really try to push," Wenger said. "Come on. I trust you to teach me all the moral lessons in the next two weeks. I can accept that." Asked if he was saying there was no push, the Arsenal manager said: "A little one."
Wenger then said that Cahill should have been sent off and was asked if he regretted his behaviour. "No. What is there to regret? I wanted to go from A to B and somebody confronted me before B without any sign of welcome." So where was B? "Sanchez, to see how badly he was injured."
The two managers were separated by fourth official Jonathan Moss before being called together by the referee Martin Atkinson and warned that they would both be sent off if there were any more problems. Steve Bould, Arsenal's assistant manager, also appeared to mouth the words "shut your gob" to Mourinho's assistant Rui Faria.
The two managers did not shake hands after the match and Wenger was asked what Mourinho had said to him when they were squared up. "Honestly, I don't listen to what he says," he said.
With Atkinson having dealt yesterday with the incident at the time, the Football Association is unlikely to bring any disciplinary charges.
Mourinho, who has previously called Wenger a "voyeur" and "specialist in failure", was relatively conciliatory about the latest episode in their feud. "There are two technical areas," the Chelsea manager said. "One for me, one for him. He was coming into my technical area and not for the right reasons. He was coming to push the referee for a red card, and I didn't like that. I just told him: 'Leave my technical area and don't come back please.'
"But, to be fair, I do so many wrong things in football. Sometimes you lose emotion but not this time. This time I was just in my technical area and it was not my problem.
"It becomes heated because it's a big game, big clubs, big rivals and an important match for both teams. I think these conditions make a game of emotions. Story over. No problem. No outstanding issues."
Wenger also felt Oscar was lucky to stay on the pitch after repeated deliberate fouls and felt that his team were denied a penalty for a handball by Cesc Fabregas. Mourinho said his team dealt with Arsenal "without problems" and claimed that the match was "in the pocket" after Eden Hazard's 27th-minute goal.



Alien World Drives its Star Into Early Retirement


A nearby star is not acting its age, thanks to the influence of a massive exoplanet.

The close-orbiting alien planet, known as WASP-18b, is apparentlydisrupting the magnetic field of its host star so much that the object is behaving like a much older star, researchers said.
"WASP-18b is an extreme exoplanet," study lead author Ignazio Pillitteri, of the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo in Italy, said in a statement. "It is one of the most massive hot Jupiters known and one of the closest to its host star, and these characteristics lead to unexpected behavior. The planet is causing its host star to act old before its time." [The Strangest Alien Planets]

The star WASP-18, which lies about 330 light-years away, is about as massive as our own sun. The gas giant WASP-18b weighs in at more than 10 times the mass of Jupiter and completes one orbit around the star in less than 23 hours, leading scientists to classify it as a "hot Jupiter."
WASP-18b's tight orbit has led scientists to estimate that it may have only one million years of life or so remaining before it's destroyed by the parent star.

Pillitteri's team targeted WASP-18 with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and found it to be relatively quiet — a characteristic of older stars. Young stars tend to be more active, with stronger magnetic fields, larger flares and more intense X-ray emission. Stellar activity is connected to rotation, a process that slows with age.
Observations of WASP-18 using Chandra revealed no X-ray emission. This by itself would suggest that the star has an age similar to the sun's 5 billion years, researchers said. However, Pillitteri and his team used other data as well as theoretical models to calculate that WASP-18 is actually just 500 million to 2 billion years old, and thus approximately 100 times less active than a star its age should be.
The difference, the researchers determined, is due to the planet.
"We think the planet is aging the star by wreaking havoc on its innards," said co-author Scott Wolk, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
WASP-18b's strong gravitational pull may be disrupting the star's magnetic field, researchers said. The planet's tug exerts forces similar to those imposed on Earth's tides by the moon, but on a much larger scale.
The strength of a star's magnetic field depends on how much the hot gases within the star stir up its interior, a process known as convection. WASP-18 has a convection zone narrower than most stars, making it more vulnerable to the massive tidal forces exerted by WASP-18b, researchers said.
"The planet's gravity may cause motions of gas in the interior of the star that weaken the convection," said co-author Salvatore Sciortino, also of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo. "This has a domino effect that results in the magnetic field becoming weaker and the star to age prematurely."
The results were published in the July issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
More from SPACE.com:
Copyright 2014 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.




 Actress Archana Panday commits suicide

Model turned Bollywood heroin Archana Panday has committed suicide at her residence in Lokandwala area in Mumbai. The actress suicide has came into limelight after two days when neighbors were getting foul smell from the house. They immediately intimated to near by police, the police rushed to the spot and broken the door. The police found the body laying on the ground and later the body was shifted to Hospital for the postmartam.  According to police, the actress may committed suicide because she was not getting proper offers in Bollywood and also had differences with her boy friend however the police is investigating from all the angles.


Global wildlife populations down by half in 40 years since 1970, says WWF


The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Tuesday.
The conservation group's Living Planet Report, published every two years, said humankind's demands were now 50 per cent more than nature can bear, with trees being felled, groundwater pumped and carbon dioxide emitted faster than Earth can recover, Reuters reported.
"This damage is not inevitable but a consequence of the way we choose to live," Ken Norris, Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London, said in a statement.
However, there was still hope if politicians and businesses took the right action to protect nature, the report said.
"It is essential that we seize the opportunity - while we still can - to develop sustainably and create a future where people can live and prosper in harmony with nature," said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini.
Preserving nature was not just about protecting wild places but also about safeguarding the future of humanity, "indeed, our very survival," he said.
The report's finding on the populations of vertebrate wildlife found that the biggest declines were in tropical regions, especially Latin America. The WWF's so-called "Living Planet Index" is based on trends in 10,380 populations of 3,038 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species.
The average 52 per cent decline was much bigger than previously reported, partly because earlier studies had relied more on readily available information from North America and Europe, WWF said. The same report two years ago put the decline at 28 per cent between 1970 and 2008.
The worst decline was among populations of freshwater species, which fell by 76 per cent over the four decades to 2010, while marine and terrestrial numbers both fell by 39 per cent.
The main reasons for declining populations were the loss of natural habitats, exploitation through hunting or fishing, and climate change.
To gauge the variations between different countries' environmental impact, the report measured how big an "ecological footprint" each one had and how much productive land and water area, or "biocapacity", each country accounted for.
Kuwaitis had the biggest ecological footprint, meaning they consume and waste more resources per head than any other nation, the report said, followed by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
"If all people on the planet had the footprint of the average resident of Qatar, we would need 4.8 planets. If we lived the lifestyle of a typical resident of the USA, we would need 3.9 planets," the report said.
Many poorer countries - including India, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo - had an ecological footprint that was well within the planet's ability to absorb their demands.
The report also measured how close the planet is to nine so-called "planetary boundaries", thresholds of "potentially catastrophic changes to life as we know it".
Three such thresholds have already been crossed - biodiversity, carbon dioxide levels and nitrogen pollution from fertilisers. Two more were in danger of being breached - ocean acidification and phosphorus levels in freshwater.
"Given the pace and scale of change, we can no longer exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and irreversibly change living conditions on Earth," the report said.






MOM Spacecraft Sends Pix of Dust Storm Activities on Mars


BANGALORE: India's Mars orbiter has sent a picture of regional dust storm activities over the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet, ISRO said today.            
"Regional dust storm activities over northern hemisphere of Mars - captured by Mars Color Camera on-board Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)", Bangalore-headquartered Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said on its official Facebook page with a picture.        
It said the image was taken from an altitude of 74,500 kms from the surface of Mars.      
MOM spacecraft had sent its first images of the planet on Thursday, a day after creating history by becoming the only such endeavour so far to have met with success on the maiden attempt.    
MOM aims to study the Martian surface and mineral composition and scan its atmosphere for methane, an indicator of life.  
The spacecraft is equipped with five instruments, including a sensor to track methane or marsh gas, a colour camera and a thermal-imaging spectrometer to map the surface and mineral wealth of the planet.            
The Rs 450-crore MOM is the cheapest inter-planetary mission. India is the first country to reach Mars in the very first attempt. European, American and Russian probes have managed to orbit or land on the planet, but after several attempts.            
The orbiter will keep moving in an elliptical path for at least six months with its instruments sending their gleanings back home.       
The spacecraft was launched on its nine-month-long odyssey on a homegrown PSLV rocket from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on November 5, last year.
It had escaped the Earth's gravitational field on December 1 and was placed in the Martian orbit on September 24.



In China, a Glut of Black-Market iPhones and a Glum New Reality for Apple

When Apple's latest iPhones went on sale this month in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York, among the hip urbanites and tech-obsessed was another group clamoring for the devices: Chinese scalpers looking to make a premium by flipping the phones to smugglers.
But the gray market for the new iPhones has already dried up, even though they will not officially go on sale in China for a few weeks, at the earliest.
Wholesalers who helped orchestrate the smuggling of tens of thousands of the phones into the country are now slashing prices to move inventory. At an electronics market in central Beijing, one retailer was recently selling the low-end iPhone 6 andiPhone 6 Plus for 6,500 renminbi to 8,800 renminbi ($1,060 to $1,436), down from 12,000 renminbi to 15,000 renminbi ($1,960 to $2,450) just after the release.
"Stocks of the iPhone 6 are way too high right now," said one wholesaler of smuggled iPhones in Beijing's northwestern tech hub Zhongguancun.
The smugglers' experience represents the new reality for Apple in China.
Four years ago, the iPhone 4 was a status symbol, with the black market booming before the product was officially introduced. Today, the iPhone is simply one option among many, as local companies like Xiaomi and Meizu Technology rival Apple in terms of coolness while charging less than half the price.
A spokeswoman for Apple declined to comment on the smuggling.
The primary route the iPhones have taken into China is via Hong Kong, according to the wholesaler, who declined to be identified because of the illegality of some parts of the operations. Scalpers organize Hong Kong customers with local identity cards to preorder phones that the scalpers then collect outside the store, paying about $325 extra per phone. The phones are then smuggled to wholesalers in the southern Chinese city of Guangdong, across the border from Hong Kong, and from there are shipped to cities across China.
When the prices were high, early last week, the wholesaler said he was making more than $163 per sale. But his profit margins have dissolved as prices have fallen.
"This year, the scalpers' losses will be big," he said.
China represents a major, fast-growing market for Apple, which competes withSamsung for control of the high-end smartphone segment. In January, Apple brokered a long-delayed deal with the country's largest telecom company, China Mobile, which has helped bolster sales. The largest smartphone market in the world, China accounted for 15.9 percent of Apple's revenue in the last quarter.
The new models will help Apple solidify its position in the country. In China there are about 50 million iPhone users, according to Kitty Fok, a managing director of the research firm IDC. She estimates that the company will sell about 4 million phones a month as customers swap their old iPhones for the new ones.
But both Apple and Samsung face stiff competition from local brands, which have been offering cheaper phones with high-end features. As Samsung's sales slipped this year, the company was replaced by Xiaomi as the country's largest smartphone maker, according to the market research firm Canalys.
"The local players aren't only playing the price game," Fok said. "They have products that cater to the local market, big screen sizes, optimized connectivity for China and dual SIM cards."
The Chinese government is not making things any easier. An intensifying crackdown on corruption in the country has led officials, who in the past were known to spend big on luxury products like iPhones, to tamp down on lavish purchases.
The government has also signaled that it would take measures to curb government reliance on electronics made by foreign companies after disclosures by the formerNational Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden about U.S. government surveillance. In a statement issued this month, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said the company had never cooperated with the government of any country to provide access to customer data.
At a conference this month, Wei Jianguo, director general of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said the Shanghai government had told its employees to use Huawei phones instead of phones produced by Apple or Samsung, according to a transcript posted on the news portal Sohu, one of the sponsors of the event.
Three government officials in Shanghai and Beijing said they had not heard about any formal notice to stop using foreign phones and said many in their departments still used iPhones. One of the officials in Beijing, however, said that people in his office refrained from bringing in Apple computers or iPads, because they are a more conspicuous display of wealth.
Out of the gate, Apple is already a step behind with the iPhone 6. Last year, the company released the latest model in China at the same time it did in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe. This year, the release has been delayed as Apple awaits government approval, an often slow and unpredictable process.
The iPhone 6 is likely to get the final license before China's National Day celebrations Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the plans who works for one of China's state-owned telecom providers. If that happens, the new models will most likely begin selling in China a few weeks later.
The delay gives the smugglers a bit more time to get rid of their stock.
The recent scene at the electronics market in Beijing - a multistory mall crowded with stalls of vendors selling everything from calculators and hard drives to surveillance cameras and smartphones - was not encouraging. Only a few customers browsed in the narrow walkways.
No stalls openly displayed the new iPhones. On request, the vendors could procure the devices from a wholesaler. One vendor said the market for the phones was far worse than in past years but said he hoped a new crackdown on smuggling by customs officers would help push their price back up.
In recent days, Hong Kong's marine police have played a cat-and-mouse game with smugglers who use speedboats to take iPhones into China. On Thursday night, the police ran off several men in a mangrove swamp loading boxes of iPhones into a flat wooden boat that would ferry them out to a nearby speedboat. They seized 286 iPhones, according to a statement from Hong Kong customs. In other instances, customs has found hundreds of phones concealed in the axles of trucks and in hidden compartments in cars.
A report from China's state-run Xinhua news service said the government would auction off 2,000 iPhone 6s it had seized in the southern city of Shenzhen.
The vendor at the electronics market said that one way smugglers skirted the stricter enforcement was to walk the phones across the border two at a time. Usually those crossing the border take the phones out of the packaging to convince customs officials that the phones are their own, he said.
Tearing off the plastic on what appeared to be an unopened iPhone 6, he showed how the screen was already dotted with the fingerprints of whoever brought it into China.
"Right now at our market you won't find a phone that is actually in its original packaging," he said.


 Super 30 founder invited to speak at MIT and Harvard


Indian mathematician and founder of Super 30, Anand Kumar, has been invited by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to speak on his globally acclaimed effort to mentor students from the underprivileged sections for admission to IIT.
Kumar, who could not study at Cambridge University years ago due to acute financial constraints, will speak at MIT Media Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory, on September 30, a media release said.
On October 1, he will speak at the International Education Policy programme of Harvard University.
The programme promotes global social justice through their unparallelled and effective leadership of innovative and sustainable education reform worldwide, the statement said.
Kumar's pioneering Super 30 initiative has captured the attention of global media for successfully mentoring students from underprivileged sections for Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
"I will talk about how the world can be a better place using inclusive education as a powerful tool to usher in psychological and societal change. What I have done in the last 14 years in the backwaters of my home state Bihar is a small initiative to provide the right opportunity to a bunch of talented and passionate students from the underprivileged sections, but the results have been astonishing," Kumar said.
"It needs to be replicated on a larger scale, as education alone has the power to tackle all the world's problems," he said.






Bikini-clad airhostesses pose for VietJet ad campaign


When it comes to advertising, airlines resort to all sorts of antics but mostly with a different focus on the legroom on their planes, low prices etc.
An asian carrier has broken away from that mold and has come up with a completely different idea - that of showing off how its cabin crew members look out of their uniform.
The airlines, VietJet, asked 10 of its airhostesses to pose in red and yellow (the airline colours) bikinis for a new promotional ad campaign.
The photos, leaked on Facebook, show the staff walking down the aisles provocatively, opening overhead lockers and also coming down the steps and on to the runway.



The photos were leaked by model Ngoc Trinh, a lingerie model who was part of the shoot.
However, after having carried out the shoot, the Vietnamese carrier has put the campaign on hold and says that it isn't planning to use the photos in an official campaign.
VietJet has earlier also got into trouble for its racy advertising.



Two years ago, the company had to pay a fine of 611 pounds after its air hostesses treated passengers to a Hawaii-inspired dance, again in bikinis. (Scroll down to see video)
Well, whether the airlines want to use the photos or not is secondary now since they have been leaked anyway and have got them some attention.






 Indian Diaspora Organising 'Monumental' Reception for Modi


NEW YORK: People are coming by chartered flights, buses and trains, besides driving down to New York from all over North America, as the Indian diaspora comes together on an unprecedented scale to honour Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a community reception at New York's Madison Square Garden in downtown Manhattan Sunday.

About 18,500 people will be at the venue and several thousand more are expected to watch the reception from a large monitor set up on Times Square and in video relays at more than 40 universities across the US, according to Anand Shah, the spokesperson for Indian American Community Foundation that is organizing it.

“An event like this is something that is monumental for our community,” he said of the enthusiastic response. More than 30,000 people registered for tickets and the 18,500 were chosen by a lottery and 2,000 were placed on a waiting list. 

More than 400 organizations have signed on Welcome Partners for the event, itself an unprecedented show of unity in the community. Although Shah would not say how much has been raised so far to pay for the function, he said the foundation received several thousand modest contributions online.

  
“It's largely individuals who recognize the inflection point that India-US relations are at (and) the opportunity to bring Indian Americans and Americans together and show that India and the US can have stronger relations,” he said.

“This is the first time, a community reception of this scale is being organized,” Thomas Abraham, the founder of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) and one of the pioneers in organizing Indian community events, said. 

“The Indian community groups have been doing a fantastic job in mobilizing the community to reach out to the American society and projecting a good image of India.”
As for what an event like this can achieve, Abraham said, “The community wants to connect to India's leader. I am sure it will motivate more people in the community to do more things for India and help our second generation also to connect with India. A large community reception with India's prime minister will also be noticed by the American society.”

Shah said that several American politicians are expected at the reception.

The Madison Square Garden is the home of the New York Rangers ice hockey team and the Knicks basketball team. Two National Democratic Party Conventions, which nominate presidential candidates have been held there and it has been the venue of George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh and performances by U2 and Michael Jackson.

Modi's reception will feature two well-known Indian Americans, Miss America 2014 Nina Davaluri and PBS Newshour Weekend anchor Hari Srinivasan, as the emcees.

TV Asia will be telecasting the reception. It can also be viewed on the Foundation's website, pmvisit.org.

Shah said that Doordarshan, Times Now and NDTV have asked for video feeds.

Modi will be speaking in Hindi and simultaneously subtitles in English will be on the screen and an audio translation will be webcast on the Foundation's website.

Officials have worked with the organisers to facilitate transportation and to arrange for movement of people, he said. New Jersey Transit will run special trains and Path subway system will run on weekday schedule to provide more frequent services.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
© Copyright 2015. Website by Way2themes - Published By Gooyaabi Templates