Hindu Notes from General Studies-02
First phase of Chabahar port opened
News
- Indian, Afghan and Iranian officials held a trilateral meeting to discuss implementing the trade and transit agreement announced in May 2016.
Beyond News
- Chabahar port is seen as a feeder port to the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) to Russia as well as land route to Central Asia.
- It is also seen as a rival to the Chinese-built Gwadar port off Pakistan, about 80 km away, which is a critical link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
- It also provide alternative access to landlocked Afghanistan to regional and global markets.
- India has committed $500 million to building two berths at Chabahar to process trade and develop an economic zone around them, as well as $1.6 billion for a 650-km rail link from Chabahar to Zahedan and into Afghanistan.
‘Law needed for those wrongfully imprisoned’
News
- The Delhi High Court has asked the Law Commission of India to see if a new legislation can be brought in to provide relief and rehabilitation to victims of wrongful prosecution and incarceration.
Beyond News
- There is no statutory or legal scheme at present to compensate those who spend years in jail only to be acquitted later.
- The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) says of 4,19,623 inmates lodged in various jails across the country in 2015, 67% are undertrials.
Prison records show that 3,599 undertrials were detained in jails for five years or more in the country.
- The Supreme Court in various judgments over the years has held that compensation can be awarded by constitutional courts for violation of fundamental rights under Article 21 of the Constitution.
- Hindu Notes from General Studies-03
What’s behind the bitcoin boom?
News
- As the price of the bitcoin leapt past $10,000 this week, marking a tenfold gain in 2017, many investors seemed to nurse a ‘missed-out’ feeling.
Some bit coin facts
- In the financial markets, asset bubbles are spotted by comparing the traded price of an asset to its fair value.
- For stocks, the valuation metric may be the price-to-earnings or book value multiple. For oil or gold, there’s the cost of producing each barrel or ounce. The rupee is assessed on real effective exchange rate.
- But it’s hard to say if there’s a bubble brewing in bitcoins because it has no such valuation measure. Its price is therefore decided mainly by demand-supply dynamics.
Beyond News:
- The rupee-equivalent price of a bitcoin has zoomed from under Rs. 600 in November 2012 to more than Rs. 6.8 lakh by November 2017, a cool 300% annualised return.
- In the same period, the BSE Sensex has produced a staid 11.5% despite a bull market.
Indian scenario:
- In India, the RBI is still undecided on the issue of how and if at all it will regulate virtual currencies.
- Meanwhile, it has issued disclaimers that it hasn’t authorised bitcoins as a medium of exchange, warning investors of potential ‘financial, operational, legal, customer protection and security-related risks’ if they dabble in them.
This software can identify people from their DNA in minutes
News
- Researchers have developed a software system to accurately identify people and cell lines from their DNA in a matter of minutes.
Beyond News
- The technology has a wide range of applications, but its most immediate use could be to flag mislabelled or contaminated cell lines in cancer experiments, according to the study published in the journal eLife.
- The software is designed to run on the MinION, an instrument the size of a credit card that pulls in strands of DNA through its microscopic pores and reads out sequences of nucleotides, or the DNA letters A, T, C, G.
- The device has made it possible for researchers to study bacteria and viruses in the field, but its high error-rate and large sequencing gaps have, until now, limited its use on human cells with their billions of nucleotides.
New tool to stop hacking
News
- Scientists have developed a new anti-hacker tool, called High-fidelity Adaptive Deception & Emulation System (HADES), which rather than blocking an intruder, deploys an alternative reality feeding hacker with false data.
Beyond News
- HADES has been developed by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S.
- Rather than being summarily removed from a data source, a discovered hacker is led unobtrusively into HADES, where cloned virtual hard drives, memory and data sets create a simulation very much like the reality.
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