Quick notes: Jamsetji Tata | Drone terror...

• Jamsetji Tata is top philanthropist of the last century: Tata Group founder Jamsetji Tata donated $102 billion.. biggest philanthropist globally over the last 100 years
  




• Reliance turns to Clean tech: Apart from the four gigafactories, RIL would invest in carbon fiber manufacturing, green fertilizers and green chemicals to support the hydrogen and solar ecosystem.



• Power without accountability: Taint on our judges


Will justice Chandrachud order criminal proceedings against himself for ordering excess Oxygen delivery to Delhi and causing deaths in other states?

Or will he go easy on #Kejriwal so that no one can question him too?

Difficult choice.#KejriwalExposed #OxygenChorKejriwal

— Eminent Intellectual (@totalwoke) June 25, 2021




• Covaxin neutralises Wuhan flu: India's Covaxin effectively neutralises both Alpha and Delta variants of coronavirus, the US' National Institute of Health has said.



• Sushant Sareen on drone terrorism: 'The fact that this happened and the fact that we were not able to bring it down, we were not even able to trace from where it came from and where it went, certainly raises questions on our level of preparedness.'



• Break free from car-dependence: Reduce the number of traffic lanes in cities and build less parking to discourage people from driving or even owning a car in the first place, making city travel faster for everyone.. We have to start getting cars off the road—and fast—if we want to avoid cities being overrun by gridlock



• Filthy western tradition: Blowing out birthday candles might be a bad idea

Quick notes: Platform monopolies | 5G RAN...

• USA following India's lead: A House bill called the Ending Platform Monopolies Act would make it illegal for very large platform companies to own certain kinds of related businesses. That implies Amazon could be forced to, say, spin off its private-label products business so that it’s not competing with other sellers on the platform.
  
  Big Tech targeted by new pack of antitrust bills. To rein "unregulated power" wielded by Big Tech.



• India e-commerce rules cast cloud over Amazon, Walmart: E-commerce firms must ensure none of their related enterprises are listed as sellers on their shopping websites. Amazon holds an indirect stake in two of its top sellers.
  
  - Rishi Sunak drawn into father-in-law Narayana Murthy Amazon tax dispute.
  
  - After losing out in China Jeff Bezos has made India the centerpiece of his ambitions... Amazon, Walmart learn to live with the kirana India's retail backbone.



• Reliance Jio 5G radio-access network (RAN): Intel to work with India’s Reliance Jio on 5G network tech... Rather than using gear primarily from telecommunications-specific firms such as Huawei, carriers are shifting toward using software to handle more network functions.



• Bayraktar TB2: How Turkeys Cheap Drones Won 3 Major Wars.




• RISC-V in HPC and supercomputing: RISC-V evolving to address Supercomputers and AI.
  
  - Intel showing interest in RISC-V... end to ARM's mobile monopoly?
  
  - SiFive’s P550 is one of the world’s fastest RISC-V CPUs



• Atmanirbhar America: U.S. senators propose 25% tax credits for domestic chipmakers.
  
  - EU wants silicon: Intel considering German fab near Munich. Hopes to get some $9.7B in govt subsidies



• More power to the vernacular: Facebook gives away its largest language database for free.
  
  - AI could make African languages more accessible with machine translation



• Chidambara Rahasyam: UPA legacy leaves govt ‘bonded’ to oil PSUs. Under-recoveries of oil companies due to their bearing the subsidy burden on petrol and diesel was converted into ₹1.30-lakh crore oil bonds by the then govt.



• Plastic pollution: Take-out food is littering the oceans.



• Nigeria: Twitter promoting Boko Haram

Quick notes: Turncoats | Cyclone detection...

• Kaangress-like: Turncoats, internal feuds, centralized control -- BJP looking a lot like Kaangress.



• Early cyclone detection: Indian scientists develop new technique that can detect tropical cyclones earlier than satellites!
  
  Prior to the formation of a cyclonic system over the warm oceanic environment, the initial atmospheric instability mechanism, as well as the vortex development, is triggered at higher atmospheric levels. The method developed by the scientists aims to identify initial traces of pre-cyclonic eddy vortices in the atmospheric column and track its Spatio-temporal evolution.



• Light and lightness: Sleeping and waking one hour earlier cuts risk of depression.. “Keep your days bright and your nights dark. Have your morning coffee on the porch. Walk or ride your bike to work if you can, and dim those electronics in the evening.”



• Agrisolar Symbiosis: Solar farms could double as pollinator food supplies. In rural areas, an increase in pollinators can be beneficial to crops.



• iOS15: China exempt from Apple 'private relay' privacy feature . . . . . . . . Big Tech is all woke if we tolerate.. grovels if we act tough!




• Ladakh: 'Be ready with boots, bricks, bandobast'.. Chinese troops are not very far from the LAC -- 150-200KM. They can return to their previous positions in about 4-5 hours.



• 2-DG price: The final pricing of the 2-DG COVID-19 drug, touted as an “affordable” option, has left much to be desired with Dr Reddys announcing a steep Rs 990 per sachet.



• Covid Vaccine IP: How Big Pharma lobbied against India.. Lobby groups advocated not removing India from USTR priority watch list.



• Top virologists raise doubt: Was China ready with vaccine even before pandemic?



• Kerala Model: Go to Bangalore (GTB) model

GTB = Go to Bangalore model...

If you fall sick go to Bangalore (healthcare model)

If you want to study go to Bangalore (education model)

If you want job go to Bangalore (economic model)

....

Of course when in Bangalore don't forget to preach merits of communism 😎

— Affable Misanthrope (@mea_gulpa) June 6, 2021

Quick notes: Vaccine efficacy | Amateur sleuths...

• Low efficacy: Early adopters of Chinese vaccines see case surges; China plows ahead anyway.



• Amateur Sleuths Expose Entrenched Media: For most of last year, the Wuhan lab leak idea was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right.
  
  The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive.
  
  The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. They are a group of amateur sleuths.. One of them is a 20-something Bengali man who calls himself The Seeker, an expert at searching the back alleys of the web



• Dr Monali C. Rahalkar and Dr Rahul Bahulikar: How an Indian scientist couple worked to trace origin, course of COVID-19.
  
  "Mysteriously, several databases of WIV which were online are now offline. The most important of all was a viral database which had information about 22,000 coronavirus samples, 16,000 of them from bats! This database went offline in September 2019. The reason, according to Shi’s statement to a WHO-China joint investigation team, was that there were more than 3,000 hackers. The question is, what were the hackers seeking in September 2019, when there was no trace of the pandemic?"



• TecHalli: New name for erstwhile 'silicon valley' Bengaluru



• G7 tax consensus and India's Digital tax: India had in 2016 introduced a 6% equalization levy on advertisement services by offshore digital firms to Indian businesses. Last year it expanded this to cover other e-commerce supplies by non-resident firms but at a lower 2%. It covers all sorts of digital e-commerce transactions in India and transactions which use Indian data.
  
  Six countries, including India, are on a US target-list for retaliatory tariffs. China never allowed foreign social media companies and hence is exempted from punitive tariffs by the US!




• Rights for nature: How granting a river ‘personhood’ could help protect it. “Designating the river as a legal person was the clearest message we could send.. The idea that nature is a sentient being isn’t new to Indigenous and other traditional peoples. The vision of the Innu is that Nature is living. Everything is alive,”



• Russia did it first: Sans space and vaccine, best inventions by Russians to know about

Quick notes: Indigenous children | Vaccine mess...

• Victims of Christism in Canada: Some 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families during this period (1874-1996) and placed in state-run boarding schools. When attendance became mandatory in the 1920s, parents faced threat of prison if they failed to comply. The policy traumatized generations of Indigenous children, who were forced to abandon their native languages, speak English or French and convert to Christianity.
  
  Christian churches were essential in the founding and operation of the schools. The Roman Catholic Church in particular was responsible for operating up to 70% of residential schools. "It was our government's policy to 'get rid of the Indian' in the child. It was a breakdown of self, the breakdown of family, community and nation."



• Low-Cost Turkish Drones Reshape Battlefields and Geopolitics: Smaller militaries around the world are deploying inexpensive missile-equipped drones against armored enemies, a new battlefield tactic that proved successful last year in regional conflicts, shifting the strategic balance around Turkey and Russia.
  
  Drones built in Turkey with affordable digital technology wrecked tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as air-defense systems, of Russian protégés in battles waged in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. These drones point to future warfare being shaped as much by cheap but effective fighting vehicles as expensive ones with the most advanced technology.
  
  China, too, has become a leading war drone exporter to the Middle East and Africa. Iran-linked groups in Iraq and Yemen used drones to attack Saudi Arabia. At least 10 countries, from Nigeria to the United Arab Emirates, have used drones purchased from China to kill adversaries, defense analysts say.



• Pharmacy of the world: “The govt knew the companies’ production capacities and should have foreseen the need to ramp up manufacturing. Others did exactly this”.
  
  
  



• How India subsidizes healthcare in UK and USA: A BBC report commented that there were 'fewer than 10 doctors per 10,000 people and in some states that figure is less than five'. The BBC chose not to mention that the UK's National Health Service has about 26,000 doctors of Indian origin who received their medical degrees in India.
  
  An article in the New Yorker magazine mentioned that 'India has nine doctors for every ten thousand people -- about half the global average, and only a third as many as the US'. There are about one million physicians of Indian origin in the US, most of whom received their medical education in India but there was no mention of that number. Significant numbers of nurses of Indian origin are also settled in the US and the UK



• Lancet Study - Pfizer Far Less Effective For Delta Variant: People fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are likely to have more than five times lower levels of neutralising antibodies against the Delta variant

Is this the new science standard?
Sample: 16 got 2 doses Pfizer, 12 got 1 dose AstraZ.
Pfizer saw 3 fold reduction of antibodies. "Despite slightly diminished efficacy, Pfizer PROBABLY protects..."
Sample only 26!

Pfizer allowed but Ayurveda not?
What's going on?@yogrishiramdev pic.twitter.com/e68l1Hjh2b

— Maria Wirth (@mariawirth1) May 30, 2021




• Kerala Madrasa Teachers’ Welfare Fund: Why paying pension to madrasa teachers: Kerala HC asks state



• US tariffs in response to digital taxes: The six countries subject to the tariffs, which are set at 25% on about $2 billion worth of goods, include India, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom.



• Great Green Wall: Chinese farmers planting trees to hold back the desert

Quick notes: Freeloading | Dark web...

• Boke Bong: Amartya Sen only Bharat Ratna awardee to avail free air travel.. He travelled 21 times between 2015 and 2019 . . . Freeloader #2



• How Lutyens properties were usurped by the Nehru family:
  -:- Teen Murti Bhavan
  -:- 1, Safdarjung Road
  -:- 10, Janpath
  Nowhere in the world, the official residences of govt heads are usurped in this manner . . . . . . . . . Freeloader #1



• Who benefits from privacy? Is Telegram becoming the new alternative to the Dark Web? Cybercriminals are sharing illegally obtained private data without fear of reprisal



• Sridhar Vembu on India vs Big Tech: Facebook, Twitter can’t dictate terms. Governments have accountability, platforms have none



• Over 200 bodies found at Indigenous school in Canada: From 19th century until 1970s, more than 150,000 indigenous children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools. They were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused. Up to 6,000 are said to have died.



• Myocarditis: Israel reports heart problem link with Pfizer 2nd shot.



• What is science? People talk glibbery about science. What is science? People coming out of the university with a masters degree or a PhD, you take them into the field, they literally don't believe anything unless it is a peer reviewd paper - that is the only thing they accept. And you say to them, let's observe, let's think, let's discuss - they don't do it. It's just, is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not? That's their view of science. I think it's pathetic.
  
  They go into universities as bright young people. They come out of them brain dead. Not even knowing what science means. They think it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No! That's academia and if a paper is peer reviewed it means everybody thought the same before they approved it. An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges new scientific insights they can never ever be peer reviewed. So we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances.
  
  If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they don't come from the center of that profession they come from the fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think of electric lights they don't come from within they often come from outside. We're going to kill ourselves because of stupidity.




• Not a freeloader: Andhra sarpanch buys Rs 4 lakh ambulance with own money to aid villagers



• Looting Karnataka: Black money heist case fuels internal feud in Kerala BJP. The origin of the havala money is a BJP office in Karnataka.



• Power passes through North:

All resources are centralised at Delhi and route to power in Delhi goes via the poor but populous states of North. A natural consequence of this is unfair distribution of political and economic resources between politically strong and politically irrelevant states.

— Vasant Shetty (@vasantshetty81) June 1, 2021