Varsity gets user-friendly digital map from students

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Vadodara: With the creative efforts of students of MSU’s department of geography, the university has got its first digital map showing various faculties and locations of the MSU campus.

The campus of MSU includes various faculties and departments scattered at various locations of the city such as Fatehgunj, Sayajigunj and Nizampura. In past years, the geographic appearance of the university campus has changed and keeping this requirement in mind the detailed map of university campus was prepared by the students.The entire university is represented in five maps. The first map presents the location of the university and its different campuses in Vadodara city. The other four maps represent separately the main campus, Fatehgunj campus, Faculty of Engineering and Technology and Faculty of Medicine.

source

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GIS map to identify vulnerable polling booths

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

KRISHNAGAR, West Bengal, India: Even as police launched a massive crackdown on anti-social elements in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, the Nadia district administration, perhaps for the first time, has come up with a GIS map to identify vulnerable areas and sensitive booths in both the Krishnagar and Ranaghat constituencies. Unlike the previous elections, the Election Commission, this time, has adopted some parameters to classify booths as sensitive or hyper-sensitive. It should be noted that the word ‘sensitive’ does not merely refer to ‘polling booths’, but to the entire area housing the booth as security has to be provided to the total area that comes under its jurisdiction.Superintendent of police Mr H K Kusumakar said the booths would be classified as sensitive if they had registered over 75 percent polling in the previous polls or if a candidate had managed to secure more than 75 per cent of the total votes polled in the booth. Source : http://www.thestatesman.net

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Soft tissue preserved in 80-million-year-old dino fossil

Posted on May 10, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh and colleagues presented evidence  in Science that they had successfully recovered and identified collagen, a type of protein, from the femur of an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur.

read on…

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Is India failing to win hearts and minds in Kashmir?

Posted on May 10, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Found this thought provoking story on Reuters.

Is India pushing the ordinary Kashmiri people further away by enforcing regular curfews, putting most of their separatist leaders under house arrest and denying them religious freedom by banning Friday prayers in Kashmir’s Jamia Masjid (grand mosque) on a regular basis to avoid violence?

Could this be the right time to hold talks with the separatists to resolve the Kashmir crisis? And do Indian authorities agree?

read on..

Posted in Countries, opinions | 1 Comment