Sunday, October 16, 2011

Successful launch of PSLV-C18 / MEGHA-TROPIQUES Mission

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C18) successfully launched the Indo-French MEGHA-TROPIQUES Satellite on October 12, 2011. This has been the nineteenth successive successful flight of PSLV.

Three co-passenger Satellites (a) JUGNU from IIT, Kanpur (b) SRMSat from SRM University, Chennai and (c) VesselSat-1 from Luxembourg were also launched by PSLV-C18. The user institutions also have confirmed establishing contact with the satellites.

MEGHA-TROPIQUES Satellite, a joint endeavour of ISRO and the French National Space Agency (CNES), is intended to study the water cycle and energy exchanges in the tropical region covering 20 deg on either side of the Equator.

The first originality of MEGHA-TROPIQUES is to associate three radiometric instruments allowing to observe simultaneously three interrelated components of the atmospheric engine : water vapour, condensed water (clouds and precipitations), and radiative fluxes. The second is to privilege the sampling of the intertropical zone, accounting for the large time-space variability of the tropical phenomena. Moreover, the MEGHA-TROPIQUES microwave radiometer MADRAS could be one element complementing the constellation of mini-satellites of the Global Precipitation Mission .

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Multidimensional Poverty Index

The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was developed in 2010 by Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme

The MPI is an index of acute multidimensional poverty. It reflects deprivations in very rudimentary services and core human functioning for people across 104 countries. Although deeply constrained by data limitations, MPI reveals a different pattern of poverty than income poverty, as it illuminates a different set of deprivations. The MPI has three dimensions: health, education, and standard of living. These are measured using ten indicators. Poor households are identified and an aggregate measure constructed using the methodology proposed by Alkire and Foster. Each dimension and each indicator within a dimension is equally weighted.

The following ten indicators are used to calculated the MPI:
  • Education (each indicator is weighted equally at 1/6)
  1. Years of Schooling: deprived if no household member has completed five years of schooling
  2. Child Enrolment: deprived if any school-aged child is not attending school in years 1 to 8
  • Health (each indicator is weighted equally at 1/6)
  1. Child mortality: deprived if any child has died in the family
  2. Nutrition: deprived if any adult or child for whom there is nutritional information is malnourished
  • Standard of Living (each indicator is weighted equally at 1/18)
  1. Electricity: deprived if the household has no electricity
  2. Sanitation: deprived if they do not have an improved toilet or if their toilet is shared (MDG Definition)
  3. Drinking water: deprived if the household does not have access to clean drinking water or clean water is more than 30 minutes walk from home (MDG Definition)
  4. Floor: deprived if the household has dirt, sand or dung floor
  5. Cooking fuel: deprived if they cook with wood, charcoal or dung
  6. Assets: deprived if the household does not own more than one of: radio, TV, telephone, bike, or motorbike

A person is considered poor if they are deprived in at least 30% of the weighted indicators. The intensity of poverty denotes the proportion of indicators in which they are deprived.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Wassenaar Arrangement

The Wassenaar Arrangement has been established in order to contribute to regional and international security and stability, by promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies, thus preventing destabilising accumulations. Participating States seek, through their national policies, to ensure that transfers of these items do not contribute to the development or enhancement of military capabilities which undermine these goals, and are not diverted to support such capabilities.

The decision to transfer or deny transfer of any item is the sole responsibility of each Participating State. All measures with respect to the Arrangement are taken in accordance with national legislation and policies and are implemented on the basis of national discretion. Therefore, for specifics on Export Controls in Participating States contact the National Authorities in that country.

Representatives of Participating States meet regularly in Vienna where the Wassenaar Arrangement's Secretariat is located.

The Australia Group : An Introduction

The Australia Group is an informal arrangement which aims to allow exporting or transshipping countries to minimise the risk of assisting chemical and biological weapon (CBW) proliferation. The Group meets annually to discuss ways of increasing the effectiveness of participating countries' national export licensing measures to prevent would-be proliferators from obtaining materials for CBW programs.

Participants in the Australia Group do not undertake any legally binding obligations: the effectiveness of their cooperation depends solely on a shared commitment to CBW non-proliferation goals and the strength of their respective national measures. Key considerations in the formulation of participants' export licensing measures are:

  • they should be effective in impeding the production of chemical and biological weapons;
  • they should be practical, and reasonably easy to implement, and
  • they should not impede the normal trade of materials and equipment used for legitimate purposes.

All states participating in the Australia Group are parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), and strongly support efforts under those Conventions to rid the world of CBW.

BIMSTEC

Monday, October 3, 2011

U.S. closes major atom smasher(Tevatron) after 25 years

  • The Tevatron, a 25-year-old atom smasher in Batavia, Illinois, run by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, was shut down for the last time on 30 September
  • Tevatron's closure, which marks the end of a quarter-century of U.S. dominance in high-energy particle physics, was attributed to the U.S. Department of Energy's decision not to spend the 35 million dollars needed to extend the Tevatron's operation through 2014.
  • Helen Edwards, the lead scientist for the construction of the Tevatron in the 1980s, terminated the final store in the Tevatron, which uses magnets cooled to minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit to push the particles at nearly the speed of light.
  • It has made major contributions to physics, including the discovery of three of the 17 particles thought fundamental to the universe. And in 1995, it achieved its biggest success, finding a subatomic particle called the top quark, the last of six fundamental building blocks of matter to be discovered.
  • Meanwhile, it also became a prime training ground for two generations of young physicists. And the Fermilab hopes to be able to conclude from Tevatron data that either the Higgs boson does not exist or that it's still a plausible theory.
  • Physicists at the U.S. lab will turn to conduct a smaller and more focused project to study the universe in a new way. The new venture, called Project X, could cost up to 2 billion dollars, but it has no funding yet.