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Want your kids to fight global warming and save the environment? Here's how to get them going
1 BE INNOVATIVE.
If your child can't stop scribbling at every possible surface, fill your child's table with used printed paper and empty cereal boxes. They make for great scribbling surfaces and give complete freedom to your child's creative instincts.
2 WATER THERAPY
During monsoons, place empty container or a bucket in the balcony and watch your child's excitement as the small drops of rain fill it up to the brim. The same collected water can then be used to sail small paper boats or even water plants in the garden.
3 ON THE VIGIL
Get your kids involved. Make them in charge of checking if all the lights and fans are off when there's nobody in the room. Moreover, give them the authority to fine you, in case you forget to switch them off. This will not only make kids vigilant but also teach them the importance of saving power.
4 BEST OF WASTE
Play with waste. Get your kid and his friends together and arrange a treasure hunt in your locality. The one who is able to collect the most number of waste plastic bags and cans will be the winner. This will not only clean the neighbourhood but also teach them the importance of keeping your surroundings clean.
5 NEW CREATION
Is your kid asking for a new toy? Well, then collect your trash, put all of it in a box, get a bottle of glue and ask your kid to make the toys they want. Brownie points if they make something out of the box and innovative.
They may not come up with something interesting every time but there's nothing to lose. It will teach your kid that even the smallest thing, after it’s been used, can be utilised for something else.
6 LIGHTS OFF
Once a week, have no electricity days. These are the days when you voluntarily switch off your power and engage the kids in playing games that do not require electricity. This will make sure your child doesn't take electricity power for granted and will also give them the opportunity to explore new and varied interests, something that they may have not known otherwise.
7 GET IT EXCHANGED
Kids grow up real fast, don't they? So, get together with your neighbours once a month and organise a kid's clothes exchange program.
The logic is simple. Instead of letting the clothes go waste, you exchange them. You give away outgrown clothes to those who can wear it and you take clothes that in turn fit your kid. It's easy on the wallet and teaches your kid to save rather than splurge.
IF YOU think that McLuhan’s global village is becoming a reality and boundaries are shrinking, it’s at a huge cost. The Government of India is planning to substantially cut down on the number of foreign nationals that can be employed in Indian schools which have affiliations with different foreign national boards.
From a 50% ceiling on foreign nationals, the committee, which has been constituted by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), to frame a policy to regulate these international schools, is now proposing to allow such schools to hire maximum 20% of their total number of teachers from foreign countries. Any number beyond this will be allowed on proper justification on a case to case basis.
“At present, the requests for appointment of foreign teachers in schools affiliated to foreign boards in India are being considered on a case-to-case basis. Since India has a vast pool of competent teachers, allowing foreign teachers to work in India in such schools needs a clear policy,” said an MHRD official.
Over the past few years, there have been a considerable growth in the number of schools affiliated to the foreign boards in India, particularly those affiliated to International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) and Cambridge International Examination (CIE). The number of schools affiliated to IBO has grown from two in 1998 to 33 in 2006. The number of schools affiliated to CIE stood at 148 in 2006. This has forced the government to come up with a clear policy regarding these schools.
The demand for these schools have been growing because of increasing willingness in pursuing undergraduate studies from abroad. These schools also increase the potential of employment opportunities abroad as well as ease the process of transfer of students in case their parents are shifting base from one country to another.
The committee also recommends that the schools need to obtain permission from the Central government before declaring itself an international school. A standing committee, consisting of representatives of Central Board of Secondary Education, Council for Indian School Certification Examination, Council of Board of School Education, Association of Indian Universities and state governments and eminent educationalists will be constituted by the Central government to look at the applications.
This committee will stipulate conditions relating to curriculum, fee structure, facilities to be provided as well as the number of foreign teachers to be appointed in such schools. The committee will prepare a list of international boards, which can be permitted to affiliate schools in India. The schools will also be required to publish their annual reports in a prescribed manner to ensure accountability and transparency. According to the proposal, the existing schools will also have to obtain the approval of the Central government within a stipulated period.
How would you like to zoom across Venus, sail by the pole star and finally drop your anchor at the moon? Well as Microsoft and Google take their battle for digital supremacy up in the galaxies your vehicle to cruise amongst the stars is set to only get better. To start your space expedition, you could take your pick from three 3D virtualization programs for the sky from Microsoft, Google or Stellarium, all of which are currently offering free services.
Google’s service, Google Sky—which initially came as an ‘extra’ for Google Earth and let you look up at the sky, virtually, from the ground—now also comes as an online destination at www.google.com/sky.
On the other hand, Microsoft’s brand new offering with WorldWide Telescope www.worldwidetelescope.org comes with rich graphics and special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. Cruising with World-Wide Telescope, however, requires downloading a hefty piece of software, which of course, runs only on Microsoft Windows.
The third option is Stellarium www.stellarium.org , which is a free open-source program that lets you examine the universe from anywhere in the world, and works in a bunch of languages (no Hindi however).
The experience with these services is as close to visiting an actual galaxy with a visually appealing image-rich environment. These sites let you zoom into an area of the sky as far as the telescope image allows, thus giving you the feeling of actually being there. A simple mouse click can land you on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter as well as the various moons of Jupiter in complete 3D environment. You can also check out panoramas of the sky or the planets taken by spacecraft that have flown there, such as panoramic views of Mars taken by the Rover. Also available are collections of images taken from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the world.
WorldWide Telescope also lets you move back in time to the beginning of the common era or move forward another 2,000 years, and view the sky as it was or will be seen from any point on earth, complete with labels on what you’re looking at (stars, constellations and such).
Both Microsoft and Google projects run with many parallel features, however World-Wide Telescope claims that their images are taken from the Hubble Telescope and 10 major earthly satellites, while Google Sky relies mostly on the Hubble.
Microsoft’s services also come with the ASCOM (AStronomy Common Object Model) driver that lets you attach supported hardware—like a telescope—to your computer and record your own images, which you can add to WorldWide Telescope and integrate into your virtual universe. And by the way, while you are on your space journey, you can build your own ‘guided tours’ of the universe and save them. Similarly, with Stellarium you can install user scripts of events that occurred in the past, record presentations, as well as set the earth time for future or past cosmological events.
There is one caveat however: these services might be as wonderful as they sound, but don’t even think of logging on with a low-end configuration. You need a video card capable of accelerated 3D graphics (to display DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics) with over 2 GB RAM at least with WorldWide Telescope.
The easiest way to find out if your computer is ready for WorldWide universe is to check out Microsoft’s terms for the program. If your computer doesn’t meet the standards they’ve set for use, then it’s not for you.
Also, unlike Stellarium and Google Sky, where everyone can feel right at home, the community in WorldWide Telescope claims to be associated with prestigious groups, such as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. So it might just be a humbling experience to be able to tap into the knowledge provided by these groups while you continue your journey into the universe. 
Science whizkid makes plastic biodegradable
16-Year-Old Canadian Discovers Microbes That Cause Polyethelene To Decompose Faster
It’s pretty much common knowledge that plastic bags take 1000 years to decompose, if they do at all, but that fact just wasn’t good enough for 16-yearold Daniel Burd. He’s found a way to make plastic bags decompose in about three months by his estimation.
The Waterloo, Ontario, high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.
According to a report in the Waterloo Record, Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.
He was able to degrade 43 per cent of some plastic within six weeks.
Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.
The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide—each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.
The young student’s accomplishment has not gone unnoticed. He won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. This prize is prestigious as well as tangible. He received $10,000 as well as a $20,000 scholarship.Burd, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. “Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”
The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.
A researcher in Ireland has uncovered the capability of pseudomonas to decomposs polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know—and they’ve looked—Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.
To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.
“This is a huge, huge step forward... We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.” Burd would like to take his project further and see it in use. AGENCIES BACTERIA LUNCHES ON GROCERY BAGS
To help polyethelene decompose faster, Daniel Burd mixed a landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew
After experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas
It should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic. The bacteria provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste from the procedure is H 2 0 and a bit of CO 2 
Kids learn in Web worlds
London: Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life, reveals research.
They are also a “powerful and engaging” alternative to more passive pursuits such as watching TV, according to a BBCsponsored study.
The research was done with children using the BBC’s Adventure Rock virtual world, aimed at those aged 6-12. Carried out by Professor David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson of the University of Westminster, the research surveyed and interviewed children who were the first to test Adventure Rock.
Children explore the world alone but it uses message boards so children can share what they find and what they make in the various creative studios dotted around the virtual space. The research looked at the ways the children used the world and sought feedback from them on its good and bad aspects.
Gauntlett said the research revealed that children assumed one of eight roles when exploring a virtual world and using the tools they put at their disposal. At times children were explorers and at others they were social climbers keen to connect with other players. Some were power users looking for more information about how the workings of the virtual space.
Gauntlett said online worlds were very useful rehearsal spaces where children could try all kinds of things largely free of the consequences that would follow if they tried them in the real world. For instance, he said, children trying out Adventure Rock learned many useful social skills and played around with their identity in ways that would be much more difficult in real life.
Gauntlett said what children liked about virtual worlds was the chance to create content such as music, cartoons and video and the tools that measured their standing in the world compared to others. “Virtual worlds can be a powerful, engaging and interactive alternative to more passive media,” he said.
He urged the creators of virtual spaces for children to get young people involved very early on. “They really do have good ideas to contribute and they are very good critical friends,” he said. AGENCIES 
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