Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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Why make a show of patriotism: SC judge

News: Justice Chandrachud ,part of a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra criticized November order while hearing a petition filed by the Kodungallur Film Society in Kerala to recall the November order.

Beyond News:

• The Supreme Court’s controversial order mandating moviegoers to stand up when the national anthem is featured in cinema halls before every show found criticism from within the highest judiciary itself.
• The court left it to the government to bring out any notification, if necessary, to make or not make the playing of the anthem mandatory in cinema halls.

Background:

• It was a Bench led by Justice Misra, before he became Chief Justice, which passed the order in November 2016, making it mandatory for movie halls to play the national anthem before every show.
• Justice Misra had reasoned that the practice would “instil a feeling of committed patriotism and nationalism.”

Centre eases norms for sewage plants

News

• The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has relaxed standards for upcoming sewage treatment plants (STP), including those to come up on extremely polluted stretches of the Ganga.

Beyond News:

• One of the prongs of the government’s Rs. 20,000 crore push to clean the river was a 2015-proposal to have higher standards for STPs.
• They would have to ensure that the biochemical oxygen demand (Bod) — a marker for organic pollutants — in the treated water had to be no more than 10 mg/litre. Existing laws permit BoD up to 30 mg/litre.

A notification by the Union Environment Ministry this month has junked the 10 mg/litre target.

• It says that STPs coming up after June 2019 — except in major State capitals and metropolitan cities — need only conform to 30 mg/litre of BoD.
• Critics argue that the 10 mg criteria was impractical and required advanced technology that was too costly for most States.

Ministry seeks lower GST for 5-star hotels

News:

• The tourism ministry has proposed a reduction in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rates for five-star hotels and the grant of ‘infrastructure status’ as part of measures to boost the vital jobs- and foreign exchange generating sector.

Beyond News:

• Providing land on lower lease rentals for hotel construction, cutting the number of permits needed to open hotels, as well as establishing a National Tourism Regulator and the related regulatory framework are some of the other proposals made by the ministry.

The aim is to ensure that within five years the sector generates 100 million jobs (from the current 43 million), attracts 40 million tourists (from 14.4 million now), and generates $100 billion worth of foreign exchange earnings (from about $24 billion at present).

Rajasthan tables Criminal Laws Amendment Bill amid uproar

News: Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria on Monday tabled in the Assembly a Bill to replace the ordinance to protect serving and former judges, magistrates and public servants from being investigated for on-duty action without government sanction.

Beyond News:

• The Criminal Laws (Rajasthan Amendment) Bill, 2017, seeks to replace the September 7 ordinance, which drew widespread criticism.
• The ordinance also barred the media from reporting on accusations of such wrongdoings till the government sanctions a probe.

Nb: Details were covered in previous days.

U.P. plans to digitise medical college records

News: The BJP government is planning to start an ‘E-hospital’ facility at medical colleges.

Beyond News:

• The government’s decision to digitalise information on stock supply in government hospitals comes a few months after about 30 children died within 48 hours at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur, allegedly due to shortage of oxygen supply.
• Case histories of patients, and information related to hospital staff and stocks of medicines, could soon be available online in State-run medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh.

To set up the hospital management system, the government has already allotted a budget of ₹10 crore, he added.

• Apart from E-hospitals, the government has also formed a Medical Education Strategy Cell (MESC), the first of its kind in the State, to create a roadmap for phase-wise improvements in the medical education sector.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

AI to monitor fraud

News: Danske Bank, Teradata deploy Artificial intelligence to monitor fraud

Beyond News:

• From fighting financial fraud, reducing the time to find lost packages to optimizing how ships approach the harbour, were some of the artificial intelligence and data analytics-based innovations showcased by Teradata, a leading data and analytics company.
• It uses machine learning to analyse tens of thousands of potential features, scoring millions of online banking transactions in real-time to provide actionable insights about any fraudulent activity.
• By significantly reducing the cost of investigating false-positives, the company said Danske Bank increased its overall efficiency and is now poised for substantial savings.
• Its technology outperformed its competitors in helping clients accelerate their AI initiatives and drive operational efficiencies.

It allows users to run their analytics against larger data sets with greater speed and frequency

Narrow rings of comets spotted forming planets

News

• Scientists using NASA telescopes have spotted narrow dense rings of comets coming together to form massive planets on the outskirts of at least three distant solar systems.

Beyond News:

• Estimating the mass of these rings from the amount of light they reflect shows that each of these developing planets is at least the size of a few Earths, according to Carey Lisse, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the US.

Over the past few decades, using powerful NASA observatories such as the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have found a number of young debris disk systems with thin but bright outer rings composed of comet—like bodies at 75 to 200 astronomical units from their parent stars — about two to seven times the distance of Pluto from our own Sun.

• The composition of the material in these rings varies from ice—rich (seen in the Fomalhaut and HD 32297 systems) to ice—depleted but carbon rich (the HR 4796A system).
• The scientists are especially intrigued by the red dust ring surrounding HR 4796A, which shows unusually tight form for an infant solar system.

Lisse traced the extreme red color to the burnt—out rocky organic remains of comets, a result of the system’s ring being close enough to the star that they have all boiled off.

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