Human Development Report 2011

• The Human Development Report 2011 of the UNDP affirms what critical scholars have been saying for years now: the high economic growth achieved by India has not translated into a better quality of life for the vast majority of its citizens.
  
• Among 187 countries ranked in the HDR, India comes in at a dismal 134 in the main composite index that looks at life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling, Gross National Income per capita, and other metrics. Failure to invest in core areas, such as education and health care, has led to the incongruity of better per capita GNI but not a higher HDI.
  
• In the gender inequality index, India fares poorly, trailing neighbours Bangladesh and Pakistan, although it is better placed in terms of GNI per capita. These are proof positive that a serious course correction is needed in government policy. The first order priority should be to massively scale up public investments in education and health care in the coming Plan period.

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to distinguish whether the country is a developed, a developing or an under-developed country, and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life. The index was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian economist Amartya Sen.

Countries fall into four broad human development categories, each of which comprises 47 countries: Very High Human Development, High Human Development, Medium Human Development and Low Human Development (46 countries in this category).

Due to the new methodology adopted since the 2010 Human Development Report, its HDI figures appear lower than the HDI figures in previous reports.

From 2007 to 2010, the first category was referred to as developed countries, and the last three are all grouped in developing countries. The original "high human development" category has been split into two as above in the report for 2007.

Formula One in India

• In a country of nearly 1.2 billion people where over 60 per cent are below any commonsensical definition of the poverty line, it is quite natural that motorsport, especially Formula One, is associated with the rich, new Indian elite.
  
• Recently P.T. Usha, one of the greatest athletes the country has produced, trashed Formula One as a criminal waste of money. There are not many who think differently.
  
• However, understanding the nuances of F1 would enable people to appreciate the sport better. And the truth is F1 is a sport and a business. The top Indian business houses vying for advertising space during the inaugural Grand Prix of India held at the Buddh International Circuit (BIC) in Greater Noida showed that F1, which has a total global television audience of 527 million, is indeed a fantastic medium for promoting brands in overseas markets.
  
• The sport could also act as a powerful vehicle for the steadily growing Indian automotive sector to position its brands globally. After all, the engine maps and components used in the F1 car are not very dissimilar to the ones in a road car today.
• The Grand Prix of India, which attracted 95,000 spectators, has opened a new chapter in the country's sport. India's ability to organise top-end, world-class events, especially after the fiasco of the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, has been re-established.
  
• The early apprehensions about the conduct of the race and the fears that the farmers would protest against the event on account of the inadequate compensation handed out to them for land acquired to build the track blew over as the big day dawned. The crucial role played by the Mayawati government in this regard and the help it offered to the local organisers, Jaypee Sports International, must be recognised.
  
•  F1 races in Asia — the Korean, Chinese, and Abu Dhabi — outside Japan tend to be handicapped by a lack of understanding of the sport, which has led to a rapid fall in spectator interest. It is here that young cohorts of the 'Facebook Generation' of avid F1 fans could give India an edge. The 5.371-kilometre long BIC, designed by the renowned German architect and track designer, Herman Tilke, and built at a cost of $400 million, has drawn a lot of praise from F1 officials and the drivers. The future of F1 in India depends on how well the facility is utilised.

profligate

prof·li·gate

adj.

1. Given over to dissipation; dissolute.

2. Recklessly wasteful; wildly extravagant.

This is perhaps why the debate whether motor racing is a sport or a meaningless exercise involving profligate spending still rages on in the country.

Agni IV (Agni II Prime) test fired

• India has a formidable new addition to its armoury — Agni-IV. The missile's first test flight under its earlier name, Agni-II Prime, in December 2010 ended in failure
• The missile successfully carried a 800-kg warhead to a distance of over 3,000 km. Agni-III missile, which was first successfully tested in 2007, already has a range of over 3,500 km when carrying a 1.5 tonne warhead. With less payload, this missile's range would be considerably greater.
  
• The success of Agni-III and Agni-IV reflects the maturing of capabilities in the long-range missile programme.

New found bacteria get Indian nomenclatures

China accomplishes docking exercise in space

• China's space programme on hailed its first ever docking exercise in outer space, conducted by an unmanned spacecraft, launched this week, with a space laboratory module — a step seen as a crucial landmark along China's road to launch its own space station in the next decade.
• The unmanned spacecraft Shenzhou-8 docked with the Tiangong-1 laboratory module which was launched on September 29, a development described by the China space programme as a "major technological breakthrough".
• China is now only the third country to accomplish a docking exercise in space, after the United States and Russia. Both those countries carried out similar exercises more than three decades ago.
• While China still continues to lag the two countries in its space technology, Beijing hopes to close the gap by becoming the third country to put into orbit its own space station, by 2020 — the year the International Space Station is brought down.
  

Zenit-2SB

Russia returned to long-range space exploration on Tuesday with the successful launch of a probe that will, if all goes well, fly to Mars and bring a soil sample from one of its moons back to earth.

A Zenit-2SB booster was fired on schedule from Kazakhstan's Baikonur space centre shortly after midnight on Wednesday Moscow time (2000 GMT), starting the space vehicle on a three-year flight to the Mars moon Phobos. Russia's last inter-planetary space mission was in 1996.

A robot lander will scoop up a sample of the moon's surface and return it to earth in August 2014, mission controllers at Russia's national space agency Roscosmos said, according to the news agency Interfax.

UNESCO membership for Palestine

• UNESCO on Monday granted full membership to Palestine which, until now, enjoyed only observer status at the U.N. agency for education, science and culture.
• The demand for full membership was made by the Palestinian Authority and won the approval of 107 member states with 14 votes against and 52 abstentions at the organisation's General Conference. A 185 of UNESCO's 194 member states were eligible to vote.
• Full membership of UNESCO is a small but significant step forward for the Palestinians in their attempts to gain international recognition and statehood. The vote took place with the backdrop of increased Israeli-Palestinian violence.
• The U.S., which attempted to put pressure on its allies and several smaller states, voted against, as did Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia and the Czech Republic. At 52, the number of abstentions was surprisingly high and included many island nations in the Pacific and the Caribbean as well as major players like Britain and Italy.
• India, as Chair of the "Group of 77 and China" within UNESCO, played a "crucial, contributory yet constructive role in response to a legitimate demand on the part of the Palestinian people", Vinay Sheel Oberoi, India's Permanent Representative to UNESO, told The Hindu just minutes after the vote at the organisation's headquarters in Paris.Keeping Mahatma Gandhi's maxim in mind, that in true victory you do not revel in someone else's defeat, the Palestinian delegation did not gloat over its victory which was greeted with tremendous applause.
• European nations such as France, Ireland, Austria and Norway which broke with tradition to vote for the Palestinians were also strongly applauded. France had abstained in an earlier vote in UNESCO's Executive Board.
• Palestinian officials say they will call on UNESCO to recognise key monuments in the occupied Palestinian territories as world heritage sites. These include the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built over the place where Jesus is believed to have been born.
  

Justice Katju on media

http://thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=5564&mod=1&pg=1&sectionId=19&valid=true

Dynamical Casimir effect

• An international team says that its ingenious experiment in which tiny parcels of light, or photons, are produced out of empty space has confirmed that a vacuum contains quantum fluctuations of energy
• In fact, the scientists have demonstrated for the first time a strange phenomenon known as the dynamical Casimir effect, or DCE for short.
• The DCE involves stimulating the vacuum to shed some of the myriad "virtual" particles that fleet in and out of existence, making them real and detectable. Moreover, the real photons produced by the DCE in their experiment collectively retain a peculiar quantum signature that ordinary light lacks.
• "The DCE was conceived as a kind of thought experiment, sort of like Schrodinger's Cat. According to quantum theory, if one could accelerate a mirror very quickly to near the speed of light, the mirror would radiate light as some of the mirror's motional energy is imparted to virtual photons lurking in the vacuum, converting them into real photons.
• "But it is practically impossible to accelerate a massive mirror to such high velocities. The required accelerations would be greater than the kind of shocks found in supernova or nuclear weapons explosions," 
• Instead, the scientists set out to demonstrate the DCE using microwaves, like those used for mobile phone and wireless communication signals. And instead of a massive mirror, they used a tiny microcircuit called a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID.
• The SQUID acts as a tunable mirror for virtual microwave photons, fooling them into behaving as if they encountered a moving mirror when in fact nothing is physically moving.
• Furthermore, they had to cool the experiment to a small fraction of a degree above absolute zero in order to get rid of unwanted thermal microwaves that would mask the DCE.
• "The fact that the quantum vacuum is not empty, as demonstrated in our experiment, is related to lots of other interesting effects such as Hawking radiation of black holes and the Lamb shift in atomic physics," Prof Duty said.