Educationists stress on univ bifurcation

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: A two-day conference at National College, organized by Maharashtra State Federation of College Principals that started on Saturday, saw participation of more than 500 principals and educationists.

Bhalchandra Mungekar, Rajya Sabha member and former vice-chancellor of Mumbai University, said, “Universities that have more than 300 affiliated colleges should go in for bifurcation.” Mungrekar said he would try to bring Kapil Sibal to Mumbai and give a platform to teachers to air their grievances. He also stressed on involving entrepreneurs in formulating universities’ curricula.

Topics such as increasing number of self-financed courses resulting in decreasing value of traditional courses, colleges being denied grants for professional courses, difficulties of principals in coping with the commercialized approach of modern managements of educational institutes and so on were discussed by representatives of the federation.

Principal Nandkumar Nikam, chairman of the federation, also stressed on the fact that higher education does not seem to be the priority of the state.

EXAM JITTERS FOR SSC PUPILS

‘Science too vast for 60 marks’

Yogita Rao | TNN

Mumbai: Students appearing for the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exams are unhappy that they have to study two papers of science for merely 60 marks and their worry does not end there: they fear that they will not be able to complete the two papers together within the allotted two-and-a-half hours.

In the past two years, students had to answer the two science sections separately and each paper carried 60 marks. This year, they have to answer both science-I and science-II papers together. Though the number of chapters has been reduced, students still feel that they have to study way too much for only 60 marks. “The paper might be simple,but there is so much to write. Also, we need to divide the two-and-a-half hours equally for the two sections,” a student of Canossa High School in Mahim said. “There will be two different answersheets for the two sections and we may lose time shuffling between them. Some questions may demand lengthy answers and that will also consume time.” Another student, Natasha R, also complained that the syllabus was way too vast for a 60-mark paper. “The time provided is ideally enough for a 60-mark paper. But while we can complete the first section in good time, most of us have to rush through the second part,” she added.

Even principal of Children’s Academy in Kandivli Rohan Bhatt is apparently not happy with the merging of the two sections. “Students are finding it difficult to finish the paper in time. When we saw their poor performance in the first semester exams, we asked the board to keep the papers separate. But we were told that it was not possible,” said Bhatt, according to whom, Std-X students are too young to manage time well.

But not all teachers share his views as Nazma Kazi, principal of Anjuman-i-Islam High School, does not think the new system would pose a problem. “This year, students have around 40 marks in internals, including practicals and orals. Students also have to compulsorily clear the written exams with 25%, which will come around to 15 marks. Students usually do not consider science to be a tough paper; the number of failures may also go down now.”

Milky Way’s black hole ‘eating’ asteroids

Washington: The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way may be devouring asteroids on a daily basis, a new study based on findings by Nasa’s Chandra spacecraft has suggested. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, named in honour of Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, has been detecting Xray flares about once a day coming from our galaxy’s central black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*)for several years. Now, researchers found that these flares may actually be caused by asteroids falling into the black hole’s maw. “People have had doubts about whether asteroids could form at all in the harsh environment near a supermassive black hole,” said lead study author Kastytis Zubovas of University of Leicester in the UK. “It’s exciting because our study suggests that a huge number of them are needed to produce these flares,” Zubovas said. The researchers suggested that a cloud around Sgr A* contains trillions of asteroids and comets that the black hole stripped from their parent stars. Asteroids passing within 160 million km of the black hole — roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun — are likely torn to pieces by Sgr A*’s gravity, they said. These fragments would be vaporized by friction as they encounter the hot gas flowing onto the black hole, much as meteors are burned up by gases in Earth’s atmosphere. This vaporization, they said, likely spawns the X-ray flares, which last for a few hours and range in brightness from a few times to nearly 100 times that of black hole’s regular output. Sgr A* then swallows up what’s left of the close-flying asteroid, added the researchers who detailed their findings in the ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’. PTI STELLAR DELIGHT: A Nasa illustration shows a supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy consuming asteroids

WHITE AS SNOW

True colours: Milky Way is really milky

Houston: Milky way after all is milky in colour for sure! Scientists have revealed that our galaxy is aptly named Milky Way as it looks white, the colour of fresh snow in the early morning.
University of Pittsburgh astronomers said their finding is significant because we are located in the middle of the Milky Way, which had previously made it difficult to accurately determine the colour of the galaxy.

Colour is a key detail of galaxies, shedding light on its history of star formation. Since we are located well within our galaxy, clouds of gas and dust obscure all but the closest regions of the galaxy from view, keeping us from directly seeing what colour our galaxy is as a whole.

“We can really only see 1,000 to 2,000 light-years in any direction — the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across,” said study co-author Jeffrey Newman at the University of Pittsburgh. “The problem is similar to determining the overall colour of the Earth when you’re only able to tell what Pennsylvania looks like.”

To sidestep this problem, astronomers decided to look at other galaxies’ colours to figure out the hue of our own. Galaxies whose other properties closely match the Milky Way’s can likely tell us what our galaxy’s colour is. The light from the Milky Way closely matches the colour of a standard incandescent light bulb. PTI

Battle bots slug it out at Techfest

Mahafreed Irani | TNN

On the last day of IIT’s Techfest, robots battled it out in the grand finales of various contests: Robowars, mini F1 and a maze-solving game.

The fiercest looking automatons were undoubtedly the battle bots of Robowars. The arena saw metal clash with metal as robots of different shapes and sizes, equipped with choppers, blades, hammers and flippers, clashed. The contest’s winners, a team from Government Engineering College, Aurangabad, designed their robot for two years. “We won because of our sleek design. The flipper helped us fling the opponent, turning it upside down,” said Hemant Chambhare, who named the robot One-Shot Killer. “We spent about Rs 70,000 to build it.”

Jayvis Gonsalves won ‘the most innovative robot’ prize for his Bluetooth-controlled creation. “My robot, Blitzkrieg, is wireless. I didn’t have to worry about any wires getting entangled,” Gonsalves, a student of Dikshit Junior College, Vile Parle, said.

While the robots were locked in battle, nearby, remote-controlled mini cars were racing on an off-road dirt track full of obstacles. Two participants from Chennai, Sharadh Uday and Riten Satra, built their car in just four days. “It is powered by an internal combustion engine and made of aluminium,” said Uday.
One of the attractions at Techfest, that drew large numbers of Mumbaikars, and not just students, was a couple of vehicles designed by students of Adelaide University. Called Micycle and Diwheel, their makers called them environment friendly modes of transport. While Micycle is a stylish self-balancing electric unicycle (a cycle with one wheel), Diwheel, as the name suggests, has two giant wheels, with the rider’s seat in between. It has a joystick for navigating and uses regenerative braking to recoup some of the energy lost during the process of stopping. In another hall, Hakon Wium Lie, the chief technical officer of Opera (the browser) and inventor of the language CSS, used to design websites, spoke to a packed audience about his days at CERN, the laboratory that is at present engaged in the search of the Higgs boson, and how the web was created there. Emphasizing the importance of open, or free, data, he said: “In the early days, we Norwegians would have to pay the government to get access to the laws of the country. So one day, we uploaded all the laws on the CERN server, making it freely available to all.”

In the convocation hall, autonomous robots were trying to figure out a complex maze. This made the International Robotics Challenge perhaps the most complex contest of them all. Participants watched as the robots found their way in the maze, transporting blocks. The winners were a group of engineering students from Sri Lanka. “We love robotics and were kicked about the contest as soon as we got the invite,” said Nipuna Illangarathne of the group.

EXTREME MACHINES: Electric vehicles Micycle (bottom left) and Diwheel (bottom right). The Sri Lankan team (above left) that won the International Robotics Challenge. Cars (above right) at the starting point of the mini F1 racing contest

IIT-B students set up society to study Mars

Srinivas Laxman TNN

Mumbai: A group of IIT Bombay students have embarked on a different type of stellar mission—to “launch” Indian students and others to Mars. Towards this end, they have formed The Mars Society, dedicated to the study of the red planet.

This comes at a time when the Indian space community has proposed 10 experiments related mainly to the Martian atmosphere during an Indian mission to Mars. This muchawaited expedition is now awaiting the formal ‘go’ from Isro, the space commission and the Union cabinet.

Dhruv Joshi, a final-year chemistry student at IIT-B who initiated the move to set up the society, said that when he was in Switzerland last year, he saw a presentation about the local chapter of The Mars Society. “I then decided to form a similar society in India as well,” he told TOI.

As a first step, a conference will be held at IIT-B about Mars. “Whomever I have spoken to about this society at IIT seems extremely excited and thrilled, especially the freshers,” Joshi added.

“The primary aim of the society is to encourage human exploration and colonization of Mars. We hope to recruit university students from technical and scientific disciplines, making use of their passion and creativity to develop a strong team of pioneers,” he said.

Jhonny Santosh Jha, a key player in IIT-B’s Pratham satellite project, explained that the India chapter of the society is now in the process of getting affiliated to the international chapter. “We just have a few members now, but are expanding,” he said, adding that the society will be organizing several Mars-related programmes in the days to come.

Many scientists at Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, an affiliate of Isro, are of the view that an Indian mission to Mars should be accorded precedence over the second lunar mission as India has already launched a successful mission to the moon.

Cool Competition for kids in Mumbai :)