Rel Com - MTN Deal

There has been huge debate going on in the Reliance group about this deal. Be it the Reliance ADAG group or Mukesh Ambani's RIL. The Reliance Communications - MTN deal is not a very simple one anyways. It involves MTN to first buy a minority stake in Rel Com, and then Rel com buying a majority stake in MTN to have a hold over the combined entity.

The problem comes when Mukesh Ambani stepped into the debate stating that according to the agreement of January 12, 2006 which was splitting agreement of the two brothers RIL has first right to refusal on sale of ADAG companies. Reliance Communications, Owner - Anil Ambani has come out in anger saying that RIL is not really interested in the company and these talks are just to spoil the MTN deal from happening.

It is now believed that top MTN officials are in Mumbai to meet up with the big bosses at Rel Comm to strike the deal.

Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence

16.05.2006 A neural network is an interconnected group of biological neurons. In modern usage the term can also refer to artificial neural networks, which are constituted of artificial neurons. Thus the term 'Neural Network' specifies two distinct concepts:

- A biological neural network is a plexus of connected or functionally related neurons in the peripheral nervous system or the central nervous system. In the field of neuroscience, it most often refers to a group of neurons from a nervous system that are suited for laboratory analysis.

- Artificial neural networks were designed to model some properties of biological neural networks, though most of the applications are of technical nature as opposed to cognitive models.

Neural networks are made of units that are often assumed to be simple in the sense that their state can be described by single numbers, their "activation" values. Each unit generates an output signal based on its activation. Units are connected to each other very specifically, each connection having an individual "weight" (again described by a single number). Each unit sends its output value to all other units to which they have an outgoing connection. Through these connections, the output of one unit can influence the activations of other units. The unit receiving the connections calculates its activation by taking a weighted sum of the input signals (i.e. it multiplies each input signal with the weight that corresponds to that connection and adds these products). The output is determined by the activation function based on this activation (e.g. the unit generates output or "fires" if the activation is above a threshold value). Networks learn by changing the weights of the connections. In general, a neural network is composed of a group or groups of physically connected or functionally associated neurons. A single neuron can be connected to many other neurons and the total number of neurons and connections in a network can be extremely large. Connections, called synapses are usually formed from axons to dendrites, though dendrodentritic microcircuits and other connections are possible. Apart from the electrical signalling, there are other forms of signaling that arise from neurotransmitter diffusion, which have an effect on electrical signaling. Thus, like other biological networks, neural networks are extremely complex.

While a detailed description of neural systems seems currently unattainable, progress is made towards a better understanding of basic mechanisms. Artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling try to simulate some properties of neural networks. While similar in their techniques, the former has the aim of solving particular tasks, while the latter aims to build mathematical models of biological neural systems. In the artificial intelligence field, artificial neural networks have been applied successfully to speech recognition, image analysis and adaptive control, in order to construct software agents (in computer and video games) or autonomous robots. Most of the currently employed artificial neural networks for artificial intelligence are based on statistical estimation, optimisation and control theory. The cognitive modelling field is the physical or mathematical modelling of the behaviour of neural systems; ranging from the individual neural level (e.g. modelling the spike response curves of neurons to a stimulus), through the neural cluster level (e.g. modelling the release and effects of dopamine in the basal ganglia) to the complete organism (e.g. behavioural modelling of the organism's response to stimuli).

Ipv6 - The Next Generation Protocol

Definition

The Internet is one of the greatest revolutionary innovations of the twentieth century.It made the 'global village utopia ' a reality in a rather short span of time. It is changing the way we interact with each other, the way we do business, the way we educate ourselves and even the way we entertain ourselves. Perhaps even the architects of Internet would not have foreseen the tremendous growth rate of the network being witnessed today.With the advent of the Web and multimedia services, the technology underlying t he Internet has been under stress.

It cannot adequately support many services being envisaged, such as real time video conferencing, interconnection of gigabit networks with lower bandwidths, high security applications such as electronic commerce, and interactive virtual reality applications. A more serious problem with today's Internet is that it can interconnect a maximum of four billion systems only, which is a small number as compared to the projected systems on the Internet in the twenty-first century.

Each machine on the net is given a 32-bit address. With 32 bits, a maximum of about four billion addresses is possible. Though this is a large a number, soon the Internet will have TV sets, and even pizza machines connected to it, and since each of them must have an IP address, this number becomes too small. The revision of IPv4 was taken up mainly to resolve the address problem, but in the course of refinements, several other features were also added to make it suitable for the next generation Internet.

This version was initially named IPng (IP next generation) and is now officially known as IPv6. IPv6 supports 128-bit addresses, the source address and the destination address, each being, 128 bits long. IPv5 a minor variation of IPv4 is presently running on some routers. Presently, most routers run software that support only IPv4. To switch over to IPv6 overnight is an impossible task and the transition is likely to take a very long time.

However to speed up the transition, an IPv4 compatible IPv6 addressing scheme has been worked out. Major vendors are now writing softwares for various computing environments to support IPv6 functionality. Incidentally, software development for different operating systems and router platforms will offer major jobs opportunities in coming years.

Robotic Surgery

Definition

The field of surgery is entering a time of great change, spurred on by remarkable recent advances in surgical and computer technology. Computer-controlled diagnostic instruments have been used in the operating room for years to help provide vital information through ultrasound, computer-aided tomography (CAT), and other imaging technologies. Only recently have robotic systems made their way into the operating room as dexterity-enhancing surgical assistants and surgical planners, in answer to surgeons' demands for ways to overcome the surgical limitations of minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery.

The Robotic surgical system enables surgeons to remove gallbladders and perform other general surgical procedures while seated at a computer console and 3-D video imaging system acrossthe room from the patient. The surgeons operate controls with their hands and fingers to direct a robotically controlled laparoscope. At the end of the laparoscope are advanced, articulating surgical instruments and miniature cameras that allow surgeons to peer into the body and perform the procedures.

Now Imagine : An army ranger is riddled with shrapnel deep behind enemy lines. Diagnostics from wearable sensors signal a physician at a nearby mobile army surgical hospital that his services are needed urgently. The ranger is loaded into an armored vehicle outfitted with a robotic surgery system. Within minutes, he is undergoing surgery performed by the physician, who is seated at a control console 100 kilometers out of harm's way.

The patient is saved. This is the power that the amalgamation of technology and surgical sciences are offering Doctors.
Just as computers revolutionized the latter half of the 20th century, the field of robotics has the potential to equally alter how we live in the 21st century. We've already seen how robots have changed the manufacturing of cars and other consumer goods by streamlining and speeding up the assembly line.

We even have robotic lawn mowers and robotic pets now. And robots have enabled us to see places that humans are not yet able to visit, such as other planets and the depths of the ocean. In the coming decades, we will see robots that have artificial intelligence,coming to resemble the humans that create them. They will eventually become self-aware and conscious, and be able to do anything that a human can. When we talk about robots doing the tasks of humans, we often talk about the future, but the future of Robotic surgery is already here.

Big Bang machine passes first test

Cheers echoed around the Cern control room near Geneva on Wednesday as scientists celebrated the first test of the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

It took less than one hour for the inaugural beam of protons to be successfully guided around the 27-kilometre ring housing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Scientists hope to recreate conditions just after the so-called Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

Experts say it is the largest scientific experiment in human history and could unlock many secrets of modern physics and answer questions about the universe and its origins. The LHC is also the biggest and most complex machine ever made.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10.36am local time, indicating that the particle beam the size of a human hair had travelled clockwise the full length of the tightly sealed chamber 100 metres beneath the Swiss-French border.

Scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym as Cern, later sent another beam around the chamber in the opposite direction.

"My first thought was one of relief," Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, told journalists after the beam finished its first lap. "It is a machine of enormous complexity and can go wrong at any time, but this morning has been a great start."

Evans didn't want to set a date but said he expected scientists could conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months".

"Baby"

"The atmosphere here was absolutely electric," British PhD student Tom Whyntie told swissinfo. "It's unbelievable to think that we're finally here and the beam has gone all the way around."

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. If everything goes to plan, two beams will be fired in opposing directions and smashed together in four bus-sized detector chambers, creating showers of new particles that can be analysed by powerful computers.

The Cern laboratory will start stepping up the power with the hope of reaching a new threshold of energy by the end of the year. Further increases are planned until the equipment runs at full power, probably by 2010.

This is just the beginning of a long experiment, physicist Daniel Denegri, told swissinfo.

"The baby has just been born, or I should say twins as there are two beams, but they have to grow up," he said. "Our main concern now is to increase the number of protons step by step and ensure we don't damage the machine. But it's like a new car, you don't step in it and start driving at 160km/h."

Black hole fears

Physicists around the world will be watching whether the collisions recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, a theory of the origin of the universe that dominates scientific thinking.

The organisation has repeatedly refuted suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for Cern.

The organisation is backed by leading scientists such as Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Once the particle-smashing experiment gets to full speed, data measuring the location of particles to a few millionths of a metre, and the passage of time to billionths of a second, will show how the particles come together, fly apart or dissolve.

Higgs boson

It is in these conditions that scientists hope to find fairly quickly a theoretical particle known as the Higgs boson, named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964. The particle is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

According to Denegri, there is a high chance that Cern will find the elusive particle.

"If we are lucky, it might take a year-and-a-half – or it could be up to five years. If nature chose to create the Higgs boson, we will find it," he said.

The Cern experiments could also reveal more about dark matter – the invisible mass of energy that is believed to form 96 per cent of the universe – antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.

The SFr6billion ($5.95billion) project, first conceived in the early 1980s and organised by the 20 European member nations of Cern, has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,260 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million (SFr600 million).

But the high costs and years of hard work are definitely worth it, say the experts.

"Mankind has always been about exploration," Whyntie said. "With particle physics we are not reaching out but looking in to the fundamental building blocks of matter. We're exploring as far and tiny as we can go to understand how our universe works. What is beautiful about the LHC experiment is that it's an attempt to answer some of these fundamental questions that everyone asks themselves".

swissinfo, Simon Bradley in Geneva

Dell 2208WFP 22-inch UltraSharp Premium Widescreen LCD Monitor. 1680x1050 resolution. Height adjustable & pivotal stand. 4-port USB Hub. DVI/VGA/HDCP.

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IBM Growth Sustained Worldwide

With over half of its revenue (58%) coming from outside the United States, International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE: IBM) has been more insulated from recent weakness in the U.S. economy than many of its peers.

Further, we are encouraged with IBM's focus on more profitable businesses, such as software and services, and exit of low-margin businesses. IBM has strengthened its position through strategic investments and acquisitions in emerging higher value segments like SOA, Information on Demand, business process services, and open modular systems.

C30 Single Side Plus Mag

Making high-quality plastic ID cards is incredibly easy with the Persona C30 ID Card Printer. It's so easy to operate, there's virtually no learning curve or maintenance. Time to change the ribbon? The ribbon cartridge contains both the printer ribbon and card-cleaning roller all in one disposable cartridge. Just slide it into the printer, and start printing. The Persona C30 prints text, logos, bar codes, signatures, and photos in full color. Add an optional magnetic stripe encoding module to increase the versatility of your cards

Technology

Technology is a broad concept that deals with the usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects the ability to control and adapt to the environment. In human society, it is a consequence of science and engineering, although several technological advances predate the two concepts. Technology is a term with origins in the latin "technologia", "τεχνολογία" — "techne", "τέχνη" ("craft") and "logia", "λογία" ("saying").^[1] However, a strict definition is elusive; "technology" can refer to material objects of use to humanity, such as machines, hardware or utensils, but can also encompass broader themes, including systems, methods of organization, and techniques. The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include "construction technology", "medical technology", or "state-of-the-art technology". Other species have also been observed to have created and used technology, including non-human primates, dolphins, and crows.

People's use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The prehistorical discovery of the ability to control fire increased the available sources of food and the invention of the wheel helped humans in travelling in and controlling their environment. Recent technological developments, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact on a global scale. However, not all technology has been used for peaceful purposes; the development of weapons of ever-increasing destructive power has progressed throughout history, from clubs to nuclear weapons.

Technology has affected society and its surroundings in a number of ways. In many societies, technology has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce unwanted by-products, known as pollution, and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of the Earth and its environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and new technology often raises new ethical questions. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, a term originally applied only to machines, and the challenge of traditional norms.

Philosophical debates have arisen over the present and future use of technology in society, with disagreements over whether technology improves the human condition or worsens it. Neo-Luddism, anarcho-primitivism, and similar movements criticise the pervasiveness of technology in the modern world, claiming that it harms the environment and alienates people; proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and techno-progressivism view continued technological progress as beneficial to society and the human condition. Indeed, until recently, it was believed that the development of technology was restricted only to human beings, but recent scientific studies indicate that other primates and certain dolphin communities have developed simple tools and learned to pass their knowledge to other generations.

Internet And Business Online – The Act Of Interdependence

The best role of business online is that of interdependency. We’ve all heard the old saying, “No man is an island.” When it comes to online business this is especially true. If a business owner who takes their business into the online world determines they will be self reliant and never accept the help of anyone then that individual will not be in business long enough to change their minds. It is accepted fact that the greatest tool for long-term exposure to your website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Without it potential customers can’t find you. It is unreasonable to expect that you can adequately develop a website without optimizing your website for the best possible search engine ranking. Search engines also place a high value on sites that have links placed on existing sites. These ‘backlinks’ demonstrate to search engines that others trust your site. By placing your link on their website these other businesses indicate a trust and recommendation for your site. In effect the two strategies listed above rely exclusively on what others can do for you when it comes to your online business. Shirley Temple once proclaimed in her movie Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, “I’m very self-reliant.” American westerns are filled with lines dealing with pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and holding down the fort. Many of us have grown up to believe if we want something done right we have to do it ourselves. This thinking is in opposition to the rules associated with an online business. The online world can only exist because people share. Individuals share technology, but the also share links, reviews, blogs, forums and a wide range of other marketing strategies that find a commingling of interdependency. In online business you are as dependent on others as they may be on you. Unlike the word ‘dependent’, the term interdependent indicates a mutual dependency. In other words you are depending on others to help provide links back to your site while they are equally dependent on you (or others) for the success of their business. Have you really taken a proactive approach to networking? It’s possible you are reading this today and you’ve never considered asking someone else to place a link to your site on his or her online business site. It can feel awkward depending on others to achieve online success especially if you’ve been lead to believe reliance on others is also a sign of imposing on their otherwise brilliant generosity. I suppose it could be a deep-seated sense of pride that makes it hard to consider the need to ask others for help. However, the truth is depending on others is really what has made the Internet possible. The growth of this online world is comprised of a link of computers, networks and servers that are connected in a way that provides the maximum benefit for all. Building an online business can feel a bit like trying to build a house of cards. Without the ability to rely on the other ‘cards’ around you it is virtually impossible to build. Interdependence. This is the essence of online business