Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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New app cuts waiting time for passport verification

News

• The Ministry of External Affairs will be awarding the Tamil Nadu and the Puducherry police with a Certificate of recognition to “acknowledge its outstanding work” in the implementation of the “mPassport police app”, a digital, tablet computer-based application for police verification of passport applications.

Beyond News

• Tamil Nadu was the first State in the country to implement the app across all police districts.
• In other States, the application has been implemented only in some major cities. By February 2018, all police districts in Tamil Nadu started using the app for the passport verification process.
• Police verification is a key step in the passport issuance process.
• Prior to the use of the app, the paper-based system of communication between the Regional Passport Offices and police stations, besides the actual verification procedure, resulted in a significantly higher processing time and bureaucratic delay, thereby increasing the time needed to issue the passport.
• The mPassport police app has been implemented on a Tablet PC system that is made available to police officials in charge of conducting the verification. Following the application submission at the passport office, the police verification process is initiated digitally.
• The mobile app helps the police official to conduct field visits to verify the applicant’s details.
• The police official can record the verification results on the field visit itself. Once this is done, all verifications are submitted as a consolidated report via a web application used by the respective police station and then later approved.
• If there are adverse reports, these are reviewed before further processing of the application.
• The use of a digital and mobile app process has significantly reduced the waiting time for the verification process, data from police districts show.
• Barring a few districts, almost everywhere else there has been a steep drop in the time taken to generate the verification reports.
• The app had not just eased the verification process (and consequently the issuance of passports), but had also made it transparent and secure.

Haryana to take five monuments in Nuh under State protection

News

• The Haryana government has decided to take five monuments in Nuh under State protection for conservation under the provisions of the Punjab Ancient Historical Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1964.

Beyond News

• A proposal in this regard was approved by Haryana Chief Minister.
• The monuments to be taken under State protection are: Ghasera Fort, Old Tehsil Building, Kotla Mosque, and Chhatrisand Kuan.
• The Ghasera Fort was ruled by Bahadur Singh Bargujar, a Rajput chief of 11 villages. This is situated around 14 km from Nuh city on Sohna-Nuh road. The ruined walls and a grand entrance show that Ghasera is a historical village. The fort was build by stones and lakhouribricks with lime surkhi 
• The Old Tehsil Building is located on Nuh main road. In 1861, Gurgaon district was re-arranged into five tehsilsnamely Gurgaon, Firozpur Jhirkha, Nuh, Palwal and Rewari.
• Thereafter, in 1872-73, the building of the Tehsil Nuh was constructed by the then British government over the land measuring 14 kanal and 8 marla situated within the revenue estate of Nuh. It is a single storied brick built building comprising 30 rooms.
• Another monument to be conserved, the Kotla Mosque, is around 6 km from Nuh city. The red sandstone and grey quartzite tomb has inscription on the ruined gateway, dating back to 1392-1400.
• The mosque is a square structure on raised platform. The surface of the exterior is simple and the interior is curved with red sandstone.
• There are two Chhatris and a Kuan (well) in Meoli village. An old and small village has these remains which were built in an architectural style of the medieval era.
• The construction material, depth and diameter of the well cylinder, its location and the style adopted for its superstructure depended on the nature of the soil and terrain, the amount of average rainfall and availability of masonry expertise.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

At 0.3mm to a side, researchers create world’s smallest ‘computer’

News

• Researchers have come out with the world’s smallest “computer” a device measuring just 0.3 mm to a side, completely dwarfed by a grain of rice.

Beyond News

• Unlike traditional desktops that retain their program and data with or without a power back-up, these new microdevices lose all prior programming and data as soon as they are switched off, Xinhua news agency reported.
• In addition to the RAM and photovoltaics, the new micro-computing device Michigan Micro Mote  has processors and wireless transmitters and receivers.
• As the Motes are too small to have conventional radio antennae, they receive and transmit data with visible light. A base station provides light for power and programming, and it receives the data.
• Designed as a precision temperature sensor, the new device converts temperatures into time intervals, defined with electronic pulses. The intervals are measured on-chip against a steady time interval sent by the base station and then converted into a temperature.
• As a result, the computer can report temperatures in minuscule regions, such as a cluster of cells, with an error of about 0.1 degree Celsius.
• The system is very flexible and could be reimagined for a variety of purposes.
• The device can help in oncology research.

U.S. stepping up the earth’s protection from asteroids

News

• The U.S. government is stepping up efforts to protect the planet from incoming asteroids that could wipe out entire regions or even continents.

Beyond News

• The National Science and Technology Council recently released a report calling for improved asteroid detection, tracking and deflection.
• NASA’s planetary defence officer, said scientists have found 95% of all these near-Earth objects measuring one kilometre or bigger. But the hunt is still on for the remaining 5% and smaller rocks that could still inflict big damage.
• Altogether, NASA has catalogued 18,310 objects of all sizes.
• There’s no quick solution if a space rock is suddenly days, weeks or even months from striking.
• But such short notice would give the world time, at least, to evacuate the area it might hit.
• Ground telescopes are good at picking up asteroids zooming into the inner solar system and approaching from the night side of the earth.
• What’s difficult to detect are rocks that have already zipped past the sun and are heading out of the solar system, approaching from the day side.

That’s apparently what happened in 2013 when an asteroid about 66 feet in size suddenly appeared and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging thousands of buildings and causing widespread injuries.

World’s most powerful supercomputer unveiled.

News

• US scientists have unveiled the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer that can complete over 200,000 trillion calculations per second providing unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI).

Beyond News

• The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer called Summit will be eight times more powerful than its previous top-ranked system, Titan.
• For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops.
• The IBM AC922 system consists of 4,608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100 Gb/s InfiniBand.
• Summit also possesses more than 10 petabytes of memory paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways for efficient data movement.
• The combination of cutting-edge hardware and robust data subsystems marks an evolution of the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture successfully pioneered by the 27-petaflops Titan in 2012.
• ORNL researchers have figured out how to harness the power and intelligence of Summit’s state-of-art architecture to successfully run the world’s first exascale scientific calculation.
• Scientists has leveraged the intelligence of the machine to run a 1.88 exaops comparative genomics calculation relevant to research in bioenergy and human health.
• The mixed precision exaops calculation produced identical results to more time-consuming 64-bit calculations previously run on Titan.
• In addition to scientific modeling and simulation, Summit offers unparalleled opportunities for the integration of AI and scientific discovery, enabling researchers to apply techniques like machine learning and deep learning to problems in human health, high-energy physics, materials discovery and other areas.

Panel to study impact of floating solar plant

News

• After having received 24 expression of interests (EoI) from companies for Maharashtra’s first-ever floating solar power plant at Ujani dam in Solapur, the government now wants to study the environmental impact the project may have on the fauna and the fisheries business.

Beyond News

• The floating solar power plant of 1000 MW is part of the State’s renewable energy policy, which was announced on July 20, 2015. The Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MAHADISCOM) has been appointed as the implementing agency.
• Doubts raised include impact of covering the water surface with solar panels on the fauna, fisheries business, and whether covering the water may cause any problem to the irrigation system. The panels, which will cover 1/15th of the total reservoir area, may also lead to change in the water level.
• A six-member committee, director (commercial) MAHADISCOM, has been set up, with members from the environment and irrigation departments. The scope of the committee is to study the environmental impact, get environmental and other clearances, and make a graph of possible changes in the water level. The panel will submit its report in two months.
• Kerala is the first State to have a floating solar power plant with a capacity of 250 MW.

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