Aakash: World’s Cheapest Tablet PC MADE FOR INDIA

The eagerly awaited Aakash tablet previously codenamed Sakshat is here finally.
HRD minister Kapil Sibal released the Aakash tablet, whose real price is Rs. 2,999, at a press conference in the capital.
The Govt. of India even distributed 500 free tablets to students from different parts of India who had come to attend the event. The Aakash tablet will be available for students at a subsidized price, which would bring down its value to $35 (Rs. 1,700) making it the cheapest tablet ever.
The device is equipped with a 7-inch touchscreen and runs on Android 2.2-Froyo OS. It is both GPRS and Wi-Fi enabled and available with an affordable Internet plan of Rs.98/2GB. It can also double up as a phone by inserting a SIM card and headphones.
The tablet is not only cheap. It is exciting too. Being GPRS enabled, it allows the consumer to access Internet like he/she would do on a mobile phone. No only that, it can also become 3G enabled using a dongle.
Along with that, it also offers 32 MicroSD support and a USB port. Along with numerous Android apps, it would come with Office Suite and educational softwares.
Being affordable definitely does not make it boring. In fact, it can play HD quality video and you can also store your music collection. It also comes pre-loaded with email, Facebook and Twitter.
The tablet comes from Datawind, a Canadian company run by two Indians Suneet and Raja Tulli, who beat several other bidders to win the tender for the tablet. Datawind mostly sells Chinese products, but, the Aakash tablet would be sold and manufactured in India itself by a company called Quad based in Andhra Pradesh.
The Aakash tablet has been in the news ever since it was announced back in 2009. It was earlier known as Sakshat and has been expected to release for long.
It is one of the unique initiatives anywhere in the world to empower the masses. It will bring a computer to those people who could never afford a PC for its price and power consumption.
The Aakash tablet actually achieves the main purpose of a tablet. To provide a machine that gives one an alternative to a PC, is easily portable, but most of all, making a computer most accessible ever.

Technical specifications:

Operating system: Android 2.2
Screen: 7″ resistive
Processor: 366 MHz + HD video co-processor
RAM: 256 MB
Flash memory: 2GB + 2GB Micro-SD (expandable up to 32 GB)
USB ports: 2

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HOW SEARCH ENGINE WORKS

If you need to buy a product online and you do not know the exact website that is offering the same, what will you do? Like most of the people, you will go for a search engine. And in a moment, the desired web pages will be in front of your eyes. That’s the work a search engine does. Not confining itself in just searching web pages, it also searches images, videos and lot more from the databases stored on the entire World Wide Web.

There are billions and trillions of web pages available on the World Wide Web. No doubt most of them are full of some useful information but managing all of them or accessing them in order to find the needed web page is a daunting task and so rather impractical too. On the other hand, it becomes quite easy using a search engine. Search engines are the first stop for smart internet users to find out specific information or a website. Since the last decade, with the rapidly growing volume of web pages, search engines became an inseparable part of the World Wide Web.

If you are familiar with the internet and websites, you must have used a search engine too. Typically a search engine can be defined as – “A search engine is a sophisticated piece of software that can be accessed through a web browser and by accepting a search query from its users, it results a list of web pages related to the query.” It’s the algorithms that make all these executions in a flash of a second. But the process is much more complex than it seems.

How Search Engines Work?

A search engine incorporates a number of processes to bring out the desired results. These processes can be majorly divided into three different tasks: 

1.      Web Crawling

Before a search engine is able to display a web page in its search result pages, it should know about that web page thoroughly. How does it know about web pages? Web crawling is the process that a search engine uses to get information about all web pages on the internet. And the part of the codes that does this is known as Spider or Crawler.

Crawlers continuously visit the web pages on the internet to get the entire content listed in the database of search engines. As there are billions of web pages, generally a search engine employ thousands of crawlers which keep visiting the whole World Wide Web day and night. By going on each web page, it reads every text from the page and stores them in a database known as search engine index.  During crawling, if any hyperlink is found then crawlers also visit that too. Hence they travel from one page to another until all the pages are crawled. In fact they never stop and revisit the pages to search any updates on the old pages.

When search engine crawlers visit an html page, they store all the texts (except the frequently used words like a, an, the, is, on, at, etc.) of the web page in to the index. Generally these two things are stored:

·         What text were found on the page

·        The corresponding Link of the webpage where that keyword were found.

Crawlers give much significance to the keywords that were found in the Title, Meta Tags of the web page.

The below tool simulates a search engine crawler by displaying a webpage in a way, exactly a search engine crawler reads it:

Enter URL to Crawl

2.      Indexing

After crawlers finish the crawling, they store the information from web pages in a repository known as Index. This process is generally referred as indexing. An index is the database which is used to provide the search results. It stores the keywords and the links of the web pages where that keyword was found. For example suppose that there are 4 keywords that were found on the 5 web pages. Then in a simplest form they will be stored something like this:

Keyword                               Web Pages

Apple                                      2, 4, 5

Ball                                          1, 4

Cat                                          3, 5

Dog                                         1, 3, 4

Where 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are the URLs of web pages.

Now if a user searches the term dog in the search engine then the web pages 1, 3 & 5 will be displayed in the search result page, where their order will be depend on the various factors including the frequency of keywords in the web pages.

To avail better results to its users, search engines stores more information about web pages than just keywords and the web pages. They can also store the frequency of the keywords they found, location of the keyword in the page, links of the web page associated with that keyword on other pages, etc. Each time a web page is crawled, the index is refreshed.

3.      Responding a Query

On searching just a simple keyword or a combination of keywords (called key-phrase), the entire index is checked to find out the associated web pages with the keyword/phrase. Web pages are sorted in an order of their corresponding weightage. Every search engine applies different criteria to determine the weightage hence every search engine displays different results for a similar query. Search engine also facilitate you to make more complex search queries by using the following Boolean operations:

·         AND – All the terms associated with ‘AND’ operation must appear in a web pages.

·         QUOTATION MARKS – A search term in quotation marks is treated as a complete phrase and in response to such a query, web pages that directly include that complete phrase are displayed.

·         OR – One of the terms joined with ‘OR’ operation should appear in the web pages.

·         NOT – NOT is used to display web pages without the term connected with the NOT operation.

·         FOLLOWED BY – The searched term must be followed by the other one.

Factors affecting Search Results:

A search engine display search engine result pages (commonly called SERPs) according to its Index. URLs stored in higher position in the index are displayed on higher rank in SERPs. Different search engines decide the index positions using different criteria; however these are some common factors that most of the search engine uses to decide the index positions:

·         Domain name is an important factor for all search engines. If the searched key phrase matches with a domain name, that page is indexed on higher position corresponding to that keyword/key phrase.

·         Web Pages with the searched term in its Page Title are stored on higher positions.

·         Crawler search the term in the URL itself and if found then its increase wightage for that web page.

·         Searched term in meta description, meta keywords & content.

·         Back links (A web page’s links found on other web pages) of the web pages.

Some Facts about Search Engines:

1.      Search Engine Optimization is a large business in the industry, where professionals work to bring web pages on higher position of the search engine result pages.

2.      Search Engines frequently change their algorithms in order to provide quality sites at the top.

3.      Google is now also facilitating users to conduct a search by an image or voice.

4.      Approximately 93% of total consumers use a search engine to find and access a website.

5.      85% users do not see after 1^st page.

6.      The first result gets an average of 50% traffic, second gets 15-20% and tenth gets only 2-3% of the total traffic.

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SOME INTERSTING INFO TO KNOW

1) If you are right handed, you will tend to chew your food on the right side of your mouth. If you are left handed, you will tend to chew your food on the left side of your mouth.
2) To make half a kilo of honey, bees must collect nectar from over 2 million individual flowers
3) Heroin is the brand name of morphine once marketed by ‘Bayer’.
4) Communications giant Nokia was founded in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill by Fredrik Idestam.
5) Tourists visiting Iceland should know that tipping at a restaurant is considered an insult!
6) People in nudist colonies play volleyball more than any other sport.
7) Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.
8 ) Astronauts can’t belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
9) Ancient Roman, Chinese and German societies often used urine as mouthwash.
10) The average person who stops smoking requires one hour less sleep a night.
11) The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. In the Renaissance era, it was fashion to shave them off!
12) Because of the speed at which Earth moves around the Sun, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.
13) The night of January 20 is “Saint Agnes’s Eve”, which is regarded as a time when a young woman dreams of her future husband.
14) There are over 25 million bubbles waiting to burst out of each bottle of Champagne
15) Google is actually the common name for a number with a million zeros
16) It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times!
17) The heat of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale
18) Gold is the only metal that doesn’t rust, even if it’s buried in the ground for thousands of years
19) Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end
20) If you stop getting thirsty, you need to drink more water. When a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.
21) Each year 2,000,000 smokers either quit smoking or die of tobacco-related diseases.
22) When it originally appeared in 1886 – Coca Cola was billed as an Esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage.
23) Zero is the only number that cannot be represented by Roman numerals
24) Kites were used in the American Civil War to deliver letters and newspapers.
25) The song, Auld Lang Syne, is sung at the stroke of midnight in almost every English-speaking country in the world to bring in the new year.
26) For every real Christmas tree harvested, two to three seedlings are planted in its place.
27) Drinking water after eating reduces the acid in your mouth by 61 percent
28) Peanut oil is used for cooking in submarines because it doesn’t smoke unless it’s heated above 450°F
29) The Shell Oil Company originally began as a novelty shop in London that sold seashells
30) The roar that we hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear.
31) Nine out of every 10 living things live in the ocean
32) The banana cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man
33) Airports at higher altitudes require a longer airstrip due to lower air density
34) Fish and Chip selling officially remained an offensive trade until 1940 due to the smell it produces
35) The University of Alaska spans four time zones
36) The tooth is the only part of the human body that cannot heal itself.

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GOOGLE DOODLES

Over the years, doodles on the Google homepage have made searching on Google more fun and enjoyable for its users worldwide. When doodles were first created, nobody had anticipated how popular and integral they would become to the Google search experience. Nowadays, many users excitedly anticipate the release of each new doodle and some even collect them!
Doodles are known as the decorative changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists. Whether it is the beginning of Spring, Albert Einstein’s birthday, or the 50th anniversary of understanding DNA, the doodle team never fails to find artistic ways to celebrate these unique events.
Having a little bit of fun with the corporate logo by redesigning it from time to time is unheard of at many companies but at Google, it is a part of the brand. While the doodle is primarily a fun way for the company to recognize events and notable people, it also illustrates the creative and innovative personality of the company itself.

 

The Idea

In 1998, the concept of the doodle was born when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. A stick figure drawing was placed behind the 2nd “o” in the word, Google and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.” While the first doodle was relatively simple, the idea of decorating the company logo to celebrate notable events was well received by the users.
A year later in 2000, Larry and Sergey asked current webmaster Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. Pleased with the result, Dennis was then appointed Google’s chief doodler and doodles became a regular occurrence on the Google homepage. In the beginning, the doodles tended to celebrate largely visible holidays; nowadays, doodles represent a wide array of events and anniversaries from the Winter Games to the Mars Rover landing.
Over time, the demand for doodles quickly rose both in the U.S. and internationally. Creating doodles is now the responsibility of a team of talented designers. For them, creating doodles has become a team effort to enliven the Google homepage and bring smiles to a myriad of Google users worldwide.
The doodle team has created over 300 doodles for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally.
A group of Googlers regularly get together to decide the events and holidays that will receive doodles. The ideas for the doodles themselves are gathered from numerous sources including Googlers and the general public. The doodle selection process aims to celebrate interesting events and anniversaries that reflect Google’s personality and love for innovation. They are aware that the list of doodles is not exhaustive, but they try to select doodles that show creativity and innovation.

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Scientists who Were Killed by Their Own Experiments

These are the great people whose discoveries have changed the world but they were unfortunate as they died or injured themselves while performing their experiments. The advances they have made to science are incredible and many of them opened the doors for some of man’s greatest discoveries and inventions.

Sir David Brewster

Sir David was a Scottish scientist, and a writer. Optics and light polarization was the field of his interest. Optics is a a field requiring excellent vision. In 1831, Sir David performed a chemical experiment which almost blinded him. He remained affected with eye troubles until his death. Sir David Brewster is well known as the inventor of the kaleidoscope – a toy that has gives joy to millions of children over the years.

Alexander Bogdanov

Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian physician, philosopher, economist, and a science fiction writer. In 1924, he started experiments with blood transfusion. After performing 11 transfusions himself, he stated that he had suspended his balding, and improved his eyesight. Unfortunately, Bogdanov forgot to test the health of the blood of the donor which he was using. In 1928, Bogdanov took a transfusion of blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis which made him died shortly.

Karl Scheele

Scheele was a pharmaceutical chemist and had discovered many chemical elements. The most notable of his discoveries were oxygen, molybdenum, tungsten, manganese and chlorine. He also discovered a process very similar to pasteurization. Scheele had the habit of taste testing his discoveries and managed to survive his taste-test of hydrogen cyanide. But he was unfortunate while tasting mercury and died from the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

Elizabeth Ascheim

After the death of the mother, Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim married her family doctor, Woolf. Woolf was very much exited about the new discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen x-rays. His wife also became equally interested in it and she gave up her job as a bookkeeper to continue studies in electrical science. Finally, she bought an x-ray machine and kept it in her husbands office which was the first x-ray lab in San Francisco.
Using themselves as subjects, She and her husband spent some years in experimenting with the machine. Unfortunately, they did not realize the consequences of their lack of protection to x-rays and Elizabeth died of an extremely widespread and violent cancer.

Jean Francois De Rozier

Jean Francois was a teacher of chemistry and physics. In 1783, he witnessed the world’s first balloon flight that created a passion in him for flight. After testing various flights of a sheep, a chicken, and a duck, he took the first manned free flight in a balloon. He traveled at an altitude of 3,000 feet using a hot air balloon. Later, De Rozier planned a crossing of the English Channel from France to England. He took the flight but unfortunately after reaching 1,500 feet in a combined hot air and gas balloon, the balloon deflated and made him to fall to his death.

Sir Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy was a brilliant British chemist and inventor. He got a very rough start to his science career. As a young trainee, he was fired from his job because he caused too many explosions while performing experiments. He was so much passionate about chemistry that he took it up as the field of his career. He had a habit of inhaling various gases while dealing with them. Luckily this habit led to his discovery of the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide. But, unfortunately, this same habit led to him nearly killing himself on many occasions. The frequent poisonings of gases made him useless for the remaining two decades of his life. He had also damaged his eyes permanently in a nitrogen trichloride explosion.

Michael Faraday

After the injury of a brilliant British chemist Sir Humphrey Davy’s eyes, Faraday became an trainee to him. He made efforts to improve Davy’s methods of electrolysis and to make useful discoveries in the field of electro-magnetics. Unfortunately, Faraday also suffered damage to his eyes in a nitrogen chloride explosion. He spent the rest of his life suffering with chronic chemical poisoning.

Louis Slotin

Slotin worked on the US project to design the first nuclear bomb. While performing experiments for his project, he accidentally dropped a sphere of beryllium on a second sphere causing a prompt critical. It is known from other scientists who were in the room that they had witnessed a blue glow of air ionization and felt a heat wave. Slotin was rushed to hospital where he died nine days later.
The amount of radiation he was exposed to was equivalent to standing 4800 feet away from an atomic bomb explosion.

Marie Curie

Curie along with her husband Pierre discovered radium in 1898. She spent rest of her life performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. Her constant exposure to radiation led to her contracting leukemia and due to which she died in 1934. Curie is the first and only person who received two Nobel prizes in science in two different fields, chemistry and physics.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo also referred to as the “father of modern physics”.  His work on the refinement of the telescope was brilliant. It opened up the doors of the universe for future generations. But it also damaged his eyesight. He was fascinated with the sun and spent many hours staring at it. As a result of which, he got extreme damage to his retinas. This was the most likely cause of his near blindness in the last four years of his life.

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