V-C meet clears streamlined admission, common test

Scores attained on a national level aptitude test besides Class XII marks could soon decide on admissions to undergraduate courses across the 40 odd Central universities in the country. A similar common test with a subject component along with marks attained in graduation could also be the basis for admission to postgraduate courses. That apart, ‘Navratna’ status to varsities that meet certain criteria, faculty and student mobility besides credit transfer across central varsities and a four year integrated BA BEd/BSc programme were approved of as part of academic and administrative reforms for Central universities on Wednesday.

Vice-Chancellors of all Central universities on Wednesday met in New Delhi and approved in principle a proposal that is envisaged as a streamlined admission system to the universities and colleges affiliated to them. While the modalities of the proposed aptitude test/common entrance exam and the normalisation of Class XII board exam results have yet to be worked out, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said that a committee would submit a report on the same in two months and attempts would be made to implement this system by the next academic session after due consultations. Sibal added that concerns of varsities with special categories like Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Milia Islamia University would be factored in before the proposal is implemented.

US Military Must Stop Using Oil In 30 Years, Defense Think Tank Says

The success of the US military in coming decades will depend largely on the development of a world-wide system for producing a variety of biofuels, according to a new report released today. That way, the military can stay refueled and able to operate anywhere, even when petroleum supplies are tight.

"Fueling the Future Force", by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., makes a set of recommendations for the Department of Defense about how it can move toward running without any petroleum in 30 years' time.

However, it seems to have a poor grasp of where biofuels come from, the energy required to make them, and how to estimate the future availability of oil.

The report is very clear that this transition off of petroleum would be a huge challenge, and if it is to be successful, would require big steps starting now. "The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) must prepare now to transition smoothly to a future in which it does not depend on petroleum," the report says. "DOD should ensure that it can operate all of its systems on non-petroleum fuels by 2040."

The CNAS acknowledges that the cost of petroleum will rise, squeezed both by rising demand and because of shrinking supplies. It doesn't utter the words "peak oil" anywhere, but it does say: "the geology and economics of producing petroleum will ensure that the market grows tight long before petroleum reserves are depleted."

The report seems to vastly underestimate the scope of this challenge, however, for two big reasons. First, the only analysis of geological restrictions in supplies that the report mentions is a brief overview of various countries' reserves-to-production ratios (R/P ratios). For the US, it points out, R/P is now about 11, so if it produced oil at today's rates, the proved reserves would last only 11 years.

Does that mean the US is going to run out of domestic oil in 11 years? No, because the production from mature fields will fall with time. Because of this focus on R/P ratios, I think the authors have overestimated how much oil will be available in the medium-run, over the next 10 years or so. Instead of being able to somehow hold production constant, production will instead decline in those areas with low R/P and little prospect of adding new reserves.

As the site The Energy Standard puts it in a post titled "R/P ratio is completely useless": "One of the favorite argumentative tools used by people who do not understand oil production limits is R/P ratio." The use of it in the CNAS report makes me wonder about their understanding of oil supplies and depletion.

The other, much bigger oversight is that the report says little about where the biofuels will come from. What is the net energy, or energy return on investment (EROI), of biofuels? Are they much less dependent on petroleum than petroleum itself?

The report envisions a worldwide biofuel network that the DoD could draw on:
"new fuel sources must hold the potential to be available globally. DOD relies on international companies and other countries to provide fuel supplies for its use outside of the United States."

Rather than relying on a single fuel,

if DOD can procure fuels from a portfolio of sources, such as fuels made from locally grown switchgrass, algae, camelina or other crops, that diversity can help to keep prices competitive (especially as a hedge against weather or economic conditions reducing crop output in any given region) and deny suppliers leverage over the United States.

The report mentions improvements in biofuel production:

Efforts by the National Laboratories, academia and the private sector are focusing on basic science that will enable more efficient use of second-generation biological fuel sources (made from non-food crops) by increasing efficiency in processing plant materials while retaining net energy gains, and by overcoming other technical hurdles.

However, what are these "net energy gains" now? They're very small with today's biofuels, and may not be any better with other biofuels. Cellulosic biofuel, such as from switchgrass, may be able to produce more gross energy, plot for plot, but it would take a lot of energy to turn the cellulose into a fuel. But what the military—and the rest of us—use is net energy (that is, the gross energy you get out of the whole process, minus the energy you put into the process).

If biofuels are going to replace petroleum, and maintain a high level of energy use, then the EROI on biofuels would need to improve dramatically. This seems unlikely. For more on this, see "Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade Part 2: Biomass".

One thing the report doesn't seem to have considered is that if the US military ends up having a hard time refueling in future decades, so will many of their opponents—both states and insurgents. If military supremacy is not about an absolute level of strength, but instead about being stronger than your opponents, then the US military could adopt other approaches to maintaining its advantage against states such as China. But maybe in coming decades, the US would be a distinct disadvantage compared with OPEC countries, unless it finds alternative ways of fueling its military.

The report says that aiming for the military to simply use less energy overall is not a good way to go. Perhaps in a perfect world. But if we're actually close to a peak in world oil, then it might be the only way to go. Maybe the military can get better at using mules and donkeys.

Saying No to ‘I Do,’ With the Economy in Mind

 The United States crossed an important marital threshold in 2009, with the number of young adults who have never married surpassing, for the first time in more than a century, the number who were married.

A long-term decline in marriage accelerated during the severerecession, according to new data from the Census Bureau, with more couples postponing marriage and often choosing to cohabit without tying the knot.

“People are unsure about their job security, and a lot of people lost their jobs,” said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a private research group that analyzed census figures. “Getting married is obviously a big step and if you’re not comfortable about your future, it makes sense that you’d postpone a big decision like this.”

Will McElroy, 26, of Atlanta, has been dating his girlfriend, Ann, for three years. They have discussed marriage, but he lost his job as a computer programmer this year and is now more focused on looking for work than planning for the future.

“Yeah, it definitely takes money to get married,” he said, and “being married probably means eventually buying a house and having kids, right?”

Among the total population 18 and older, the share of men and women who were married fell from 57 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2009 — again, the lowest percentage since the government began collecting data more than 100 years ago. The share of adult women who were married fell below half, to 49.9 percent.

Society could be in store for a brief marriage bump if economic good times return, sociologists said, but it is likely to be a temporary reversal, at best, of a long-term downward slide.

Two factors contribute to the decline in marriage among adults ages 25 to 34, said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University: less marriage and more cohabitation, which has become far more socially acceptable, even with children.

“It’s a mistake to think of all unmarried people as single,” Dr. Cherlin said. “Lots are living with partners.” This is especially true, he said, among those without college degrees, who often wait until they feel economically secure enough to marry.

Joel Greiner, 31, director of counseling for the Journey, an interdenominational church in the St. Louis area, said about a third of the couples in his congregation who attend premarital classes live together before marriage, telling him they are “testing out the waters to see if it will work and wanting to save money.”

But Mr. Greiner says the talk of economics may be cloaking the primary issue. “It’s more a fear of intimacy and fear of marriage,” he said.

According to the federal data, the share of young adults who have never married climbed from 35 percent at the start of the decade to 46 percent in 2009.

There have long been large racial differences in marriage rates, with blacks far less likely to marry than whites, but that difference has been shrinking as cohabiting becomes more popular with whites, Dr. Cherlin said. And many young adults, he said, are postponing marriage rather than forgoing it altogether.

Mr. McElroy in Atlanta said he would definitely start thinking about a wedding once he gets a new job and the economy picks up.

Fort Delhi, complete with missiles and Sukhois

With just four days to go for the Games, the Indian Air Force has put in place a tight security cover against aerial threats. The Army, for its part, has deployed specialised teams to conduct night surveillance of all the venues, besides activating its anti-nuclear, chemical and biological contamination units.

On Monday, the Air Force activated a comprehensive air defence network over the city, covering a 60-km radius from India Gate, involving the deployment of mobile surface-to-air missile units, radars, anti-aircraft guns as well as armed choppers to take on aerial threats. Fighter aircraft, including SU 30 MKIs and MiG 21 Bisons, have also been kept ready at nearby air bases.

The Army has deployed specialised teams to deal with chemical, nuclear and biological threats and put a long-distance night surveillance network in place at all venues. An extensive network of L70 air defence guns that can be used to neutralise low flying targets has also been installed. In addition to this, bomb disposal teams and sniffer dogs have been kept ready.

"We have taken all contingencies into consideration, including aircraft hijacking, low-speed aerial threats, balloons and microlights," an official said.

Sources said armed choppers, including Mi 35 attack helicopters, will be airborne during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games. Two searcher Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will also be put into action during both the ceremonies.

Specially-trained sniper units of the Delhi Police will be deployed at mobile observation posts to deal with sub-conventional threats such as aero-models and balloons. A network of Pechora, OSA AK and Igla surface-to-air missiles will be put in place by the Air Force while L70 anti-aircraft guns will be kept ready for use by the Army. Mi 17 and Mi 35 armed helicopters will patrol the skies, and smaller Cheetah/Chetak choppers will be deployed for emergency transport and casualty evacuation contingencies.

Commonwealth Games is more nostalgia, less sports??

 If anything, the Commonwealth Games provide a lingering aroma of the British empire that in these modern times only evokes nostalgia and little else of note. The Games have evolved from the British Empire Games, first held in 1930 at Hamilton in Canada, to the British Empire and Commonwealth Games (1954), the British Commonwealth Games (1970) to the present Commonwealth Games (1978).

The event has grown in size too, from 11 countries, 400 sportspersons and six sports to 71 nations and territories, 7,000 participants and 17 disciplines at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games Oct 3-14.

The change in nomenclature also reflects the gradual break-up of the British empire as erstwhile colonies, including India, gained independence.

The last vestiges of the British Raj, as Indians refer to the pre-independence period, still remain to keep the Commonwealth Games fire burning, although top sportspersons tend to give a thumbs down to the quadrennial event.

From India's perspective, the Commonwealth Games present an excellent opportunity to score some points and medals at the international level, though overall, the collective performance has been far from satisfactory.

India's haul of 270 medals (102 gold, 97 silver, 71 bronze) pales into insignificance compared to those of the front-runners. Australia's tally is a whopping 1,894 medals including 728 gold, 615 silver and 551 bronze to England's 1,693 (576-552-565).

India's tally is less than 50 percent of Australia's bronze medal haul.

Only in the last decade have the Indians begun to make a mark. They picked up 69 medals (30-22-17) in 2002 (Manchester) and 48 (22-17-9) in 2006 (Melbourne).

Of the 102 gold that Indians have won so far, 35 have been in shooting, 33 in weightlifting and 23 in wrestling, while the only success in the showpiece athletics event was by the legendary Milkha Singh in 1958 at Cardiff when he won the 440-yard (quarter-mile) dash clocking 46.6 seconds.

Incidentally, India's performance in the hockey competition that was introduced in 1998 has been dismal. The women's team, though, fared better with a gold in 2002 and a silver in 2006 while the men finished fourth in 1998 and sixth in 2006.

With the top stars opting to stay away more often than not, the image of the Commonwealth Games as one of premier global sporting events has lost its lustre though the authorities would like to us to believe otherwise.

This time around, the timing of the Games, near the end of the international sporting season and just weeks prior to the Asian Games in China in November, besides the security concerns and the threat of dengue following unprecedented rains, has left the fields depleted in the wake of pull-outs by high-profile sportspersons.

While the situation is tailor-made for Indians to hog the limelight, it will take a lot more to convince the discerning that performance in the Commonwealth Games is any yardstick at all to measure India's sporting progress.

AdSense Forefather Makes 14 Million Business Listings Available for Free

Gilad Elbaz's last company was acquired by Google and became AdSense, the source of 30% of Google's revenue. His new company,Factual, is a marketplace for live, collaboratively and algorithmically maintained bulk data. This month Factual has announced that it now offers read and write access to 14 million U.S. business listings and locations - for free.Gigaom's Liz Gannes called the offering "a great place database in the sky." Adam Duvander atProgrammableWeb said it was "a first step toward creating a place database to which anyone can contribute...extremely valuable to developers." What makes this data offering so exciting? The ability to cross-reference it with any other location data that you already have and create something new.

The most obvious use-case is this: You want to build an app that checks where a user is physically located, then tells them what businesses are nearby. That data isn't readily and freely available otherwise, and even if you buy it from a major provider it's hard to know that what you get is up to date. Factual now offers 14 million listings in the U.S. and 25 million worldwide as just one of many data sets on the site.

The write access that Factual provides offers a solution to the problem of accuracy, the company says. Gannes explains that Factual "combines data from partners, vendors and users, and applies machine learning to extract and validate facts -- for instance, to determine what the actual current phone number is for a business." (See also our reviewof Factual's basic offering from October.)

A mobile "what's near me" app is just the most obvious use case, though. Such data could really be put to use in enriching any existing bit of location data. The Factual data set includes fields beyond name, latitude, longitude and adress - it's also got phone numbers, whether a business delivers food, whether it serves alcohol and much more.

The Real World, Mashed Into Apps

Imagine any of those fields being cross referenced with any other location data you've got.

• Full bars with the highest Yelp rating within a quarter mile of any movie theatre.
• Family-friendly restaurants within a mile of every historic landmark in the country, for those weekend educational trips with the kids.
• 24-hour restaurants nearest any musical venue.

Every one of those mashups of location data is a Web or mobile app that people would use, aren't they? Those are just a few quick ideas.

The data set needs filling out beyond the basics; many of the fields beyond location and phone number hold sparse data right now. But the potential, the price (free), the pedigree and the programmability of this offering are all very promising.

Location as a platform, cross-referenced with place, time, people and content, could be a big part of the future of our computing experience. The first step is to get the data about what is where into as many hands as possible.

"Hopefully," Elbaz says on his very narrative LinkedIn profile, "high-quality, lower or no cost data will unleash a wave of creativity and productivity by application developers and content publishers.
"

Ancient Italian Town Now Has Wind at Its Back

 

The towering white wind turbinesthat rise ramrod straight from gnarled ancient olive groves here speak to something extraordinary happening across Italy.

Faced with sky-high electricity rates, small communities across a country known more for garbage than environmental citizenship are finding economic salvation in making renewable energy. More than 800 Italian communities now make more energy than they use because of the recent addition of renewable energy plants, according to a survey this year by the Italian environmental group Legambiente.

Renewable energy has been such a boon for Tocco that it makes money from electricity production and has no local taxes or fees for services like garbage removal.

A quintessential Italian town of 2,700 people in Italy’s poor mountainous center, with its well-maintained church and ruined castle, Tocco is in most ways stuck in yesteryear. Old men talking politics fill gritty bars, and old women wander through the market. The olive harvest is the most important event on the calendar.

Yet, from an energy perspective, Tocco is very much tomorrow. In addition to the town’s wind turbines, solar panels generate electricity at its ancient cemetery and sports complex, as well as at a growing number of private residences.

“Normally when you think about energy you think about big plants, but here what’s interesting is that local municipalities have been very active,” said Edoardo Zanchini, in charge of Legambiente’s energy division. “That this can happen in a place like Italy is really impressive.”

Italy is an unlikely backdrop for a renewable revolution. It has been repeatedly criticized by the European Union for failing to follow the bloc’s environmental directives. It is not on track to meet either its European Union-mandated emissions-reduction target or its commitment to get 17 percent of its total power from renewable sources by 2020, experts say.

Currently, only 7 percent of Italy’s power comes from renewable sources.

But the growth of small renewable projects in towns like Tocco — not only in Italy, but also in other countries — highlights the way that shifting energy economics are often more important than national planning in promoting alternative energy.

Tocco was motivated to become an early adapter because Italy already had among the highest electricity rates in Europe, and nearly three times the average in the United States, and it could not cope with the wild fluctuations in fossil fuel prices and supply that prevailed during the past decade.

At the same time, the costs of renewable energy have been falling rapidly. And as in much of Europe, the lure of alternative power here was sweetened by feed-in tariffs — government guarantees to buy renewable electricity at an attractive set price from any company, city or household that produces it.

In the United States, where electricity is cheap and government policy has favored setting minimum standards for the percentage of energy produced from renewable sources rather than direct economic incentives like Europe’s feed-in tariffs, stimulating alternative energy has been only mildly successful. But in countries where energy from fossil fuels is naturally expensive — or rendered so because of a carbon tax — and there is money to be made, renewable energy quickly starts to flow, even in unlikely places like Tocco.

With its four wind turbines (two completed in 2007 and two last year), Tocco is now essentially energy independent from a financial standpoint, generating 30 percent more electricity than it uses. Production of green electricity earned the town 170,000 euros, or more than $200,000, last year. The town is renovating the school for earthquake protection and has tripled the budget for street cleaners.

Kieran McNamara, Italy desk officer for the International Energy Agency, said that although small renewable energy projects were not enough to sustain an entire industrial economy like Italy’s, they were important.

“These small projects have their own intrinsic value and make a very, very positive contribution in countries where electricity prices are high,” Mr. McNamara said.

High electricity prices in Italy are a result of various forces, according to the International Energy Agency: Italy has almost no fossil fuels of its own, and until last year, it banned nuclear power plants; new plants will take a decade to build even if strong public opposition can be overcome. Although Italy has officially opened the former state electricity monopoly, Enel, to private competition, the country does not yet have a functioning market, the energy agency has found.

Large renewable projects are still rare in Italy compared with other European countries because Italian planning and permitting procedures are so complicated.

The type of renewable energy coming from small towns like Tocco depends on local resources. In the northern Alpine counties there is a heavy reliance on hydropower and the burning of agricultural waste. Italy’s scorching south tilts a bit more toward solar, although wind, too, is important there because it is by far the most cost-effective renewable technology, the energy agency said.

Tocco itself was primed for success. In a mountain valley that serves as a thoroughfare for passing winds, Tocco was chosen as the site for an early European Union demonstration project in wind power in 1989. It had two inefficient wind turbines installed that lasted about a decade and were not replaced, meeting at best 25 percent of the town’s electricity requirements. Residents called them “sacks of noise.”

But in recent years, with improved technology, silent turbines and a meager public purse, town officials took another look at wind.