After he won the National Geographic Bee and punched the air in jubilation, 13-year-old Aadith Moorthy, who lives in Park Harbor, Florida, confessed that he was expecting many more ‘dangerous’ questions.

The one that clinched the title for Aadith was: “The largest city in northern Haiti was renamed following Haiti’s independence from France. What is the present-day name of this city?”

“Cap-Ha tien,”Aadith answered with ease.

Aadith tells Abhishek Mande just what he meant by more difficult questions and how he prepared for the big day:

Going by last year’s questions I was expecting it to be tougher. The final question in the previous competition was: Name the country in which the Timis River flows. The answer is Romania. In contrast this year’s was a simpler question since it (Haiti) was in the news because of the earthquake. So I knew the answer. I have not been one of those kids who knew the capital cities of all countries when they are two or three years old.

As a child I used to travel to many places around the world and would be fascinated by their cultures. My love for geography comes from my travels. Somewhere along the way I heard about the National Geographic Bee competition and decided to give it a shot. Last year I reached the state level but did not win it. I was very upset and sad.

That was where I met my coach Kumar Nandur. He is a speech pathologist but has trained a few kids for the Geographic Bee. Mr Nandur gave me books to read and that was how I started my preparations. But most importantly he taught me to keep my cool and carry on. I realised that there was no point in brooding over my loss.

I started my preparations soon after. For the first four months I read books and learned 20 facts per day. During my breaks I would spend 10 hours preparing for the state competition but during my school days I’d restrict it to about an hour or two. I had set a timetable — I’d spend three days per continent and move on to the next. I also studied all my atlases and every inch on the (world) map.

During my studies, I found Africa the most difficult to remember, primarily because it is a continent that people don’t talk about much and has a lot of developing countries. There are many different cultures and languages that are spoken across international borders.

In fact, the most difficult question in the national final was related to the continent: Tswana is a Bantu language spoken by the largest ethnic group in what landlocked country? I had to think for a while before answering ‘Botswana’.

In contrast, Asia was far simpler to study — partly because I come from there and the names are simpler to pronounce and remember. After I won the state competition I had six weeks to prepare for the nationals. Here I doubled my pace. I started studying 50 facts a day and started reading more books. I was quite confident of winning. But I had a bad start and missed the very first question! This was where I remembered what Mr Nandur taught me. I knew I had to keep my composure and I did. I am the only person who has won the competition despite having missed the first question.

I visit India very often — almost every year — and spend a month-and-a-half to two months there. During my stay, I visit my gurus to learn Carnatic music. I started singing when I was four and my first lessons were learnt in the US. Now I have my teachers in Bangalore from where my family comes. Sometimes I come down; at other times my teachers fly here or otherwise I have phone classes.

I have performed in India as well as in the US. I really enjoy music. Both my parents have been supportive of my decisions and have stood by me during the competitions. My mother Suguna, who is a housewife, used to browse the internet to source information. Dad (Subramaniam Satyamoorthy), who works for Nielsen Catalina Ventures, would get me printouts and highlight things I should be focusing on. He would constantly keep me on my toes by quizzing me all the time. Both have been very cooperative.

Besides geography and music, I like math, mythology, physics and astronomy a lot. During my free time I like stargazing. When I grow up I plan to become a physicist and use the $25,000 scholarship to get into MIT.

Right now though, with the Geo Bee behind me I am focusing on my exams. School term gets over in the next two weeks, after which I will visit India again.

Source: Rediff

Kothari said the project was inspired by ‘a personal frustration at the whole news reading experience’ on mobile devices. The stylish and easy to use news aggregator service was developed in the Launch Pad class, where the budding entrepreneurs are given an opportunity to develop and introduce a product in just ten weeks.

Pulse is a clean and visual news aggregator and the reader takes up to 20 news sources that can be followed and a visual mosaic of the news can be created. The article can be tapped and a clean rendered view of the news story can be presented. The app allows users to see text-only versions of articles, which are basically cleaned-up versions of a news site’s RSS feeds, or to see the full articles as they are presented on the Web. It also lets sharing articles through Twitter and Facebook by passing the individual sharing tools presented by each news site.

News organizations are yet to get accustomed to iPad strategies but are quite hopeful about the success of pulse. “You absolutely do not have to give away something great for free,” said Michael Dearing, a former eBay executive who is a teacher of the Launch Pad class. “If you build something great, people will pay you for it,” added Dearing.

Nearly 15,000 people have downloaded this app and it has generated more than $40,000 in revenue, taking into account Apple’s 30 percent cut. Akshay and Ankit have created a company, Alphonso Labs, and are now working on versions of the app for other devices, as well as talking to potential investors.

Source: Silicon India

The three researchers of Indian-origin were Sanjay Vashee, Radha Krishnakumar and Prashanth P Parmar, who were part of the team led by Craig Venter.

In a scientific breakthrough, Venter’s team have created artificial life by developing the first bacteria cell controlled by a synthetic genome after 15 years of toil.

In the third meeting of Hastings Center workshop examining moral issues in synthetic biology, the J Craig Venter Group announced the creation of the first synthetic bacterial genome.

“This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made,” said lead researcher Craig Venter.

The cell was created from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesiser, starting with information in a computer, said the researchers.

The Hastings Center has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary research into ethical issues in emerging technology.

The new life form, called ‘Synthia’, can pave new remedies in healthcare and and in producing biofuels, said the Daily Mail

The researchers spent 15 years and spent £27.7million to achieve the breakthrough.

However there have also been fears that the discovery has opened many risks — the research, which has been detailed in the journal Science, could be abused to create the ultimate biological weapon and also any mistake could lead to millions being wiped out by a plague, like in the scenes of the Will Smith [ Images ] film I Am Legend, the UK daily said.

Project participants include synthetic biologists, bioethicists, philosophers, and public policy experts.

“Synthetic biology certainly raises deep philosophical and moral questions about the human relationship to nature,” said Gregory Kaebnick, a Hastings Center scholar who is managing the project.

“It’s not clear what the answers to those questions are. If by ‘nature’ we mean the world around us, more or less as we found it, we may well decide that synthetic biology does not really change the human relationship to nature—and may even help us preserve what is left of it,” he added.

Nor is it clear that the questions raised by synthetic biology are new ones.

“We have come up against similar problems in other domains — most notably, in work on nanotechnology and gene transfer technology — but synthetic biology poses them especially sharply and pressingly,” said Thomas H Murray, president of The Hastings Center and the project’s principal investigator.

Source: Rediff

If you have watched singer Falu and her band perform at the fabled Joe’s Pub in New York or the more famous Carnegie Hall or on Fox TV, you would not have missed a tall and contemplative man. When she introduces the band members, she smiles broadly at the man, Gaurav Shah. You can see her blushing, though they have been married for 10 years.

“He is the soul of our band,” Falu says. “He is not just a singer; he writes songs, and though I have been into classical and traditional music since the age of 3, and he started learning it much later — we both were trained under (sarangi maestro) Ustad Sultan Khan — he knows much more than I do. He constantly challenges me to be better and he is a great inspiration to me and the band.”

Shah, who knows Sanskrit, Hindi and Gujarati, was just about 3 when his parents migrated to the United States from India [ Images ]. He is also a professor of medicine at Columbia University and is involved in cancer research.

“Music is my passion, it is my religion,” says Shah, who performed with Falu at a Carnegie Hall concert last month. “But surely, medicine also means a lot. I think I am drawn to these disciplines because art and medicine bring freedom to people. Art can educate us and help us rise above tension and the bad things happening around us. Medicine helps us to be free from physical diseases.”

The band is named after Falu, who is the main attraction, though few realise how much her husband is involved in the music and the performances.

Her work has caught many publications’ attention. The Aspen Times called her ‘one of the more impressive voices of the globalisation of music.’ She was featured in a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal two years ago on new genres of music.

Falu calls her style ‘Indie Hindi’. She has also been called a ‘Sufi Rocker’.

Shah, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, has been listening to a variety of Indian music (religious, Kishore Kumar [ Images ]) as well as Western pop.

“That is why in our concerts you find a healthy mix of the two,” he says. His interest in Indian music continued as he graduated from Harvard College and then Columbia Medical School, both with “highest honours”.

Another Indian physician-musician is Roopa Marya, also a professor and with two albums to her credit.

“Though I grew up in Texas in an area that did not have hundreds of Indian families as one finds in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, I had many Indian friends, and I attended Indian festivals and events,” Shah recalls. His mother Lina, a homemaker who would sing often while doing chores, was a big influence on him. At the age of 8, he asked her to tell him a few things about Indian melodies and musical schemes.

“There is a lot of music in my mother’s family,” he says. “Her mother used to sing a lot. So in a way, I have been listening to Indian music from my baby years.”

Attending a flute concert by Ronu Mazumdar, who was travelling across America, also ignited an interest in instrumental music in Shah, even before he became a teenager. He plays the harmonium at Falu concerts.

“I was also interested in the philosophy behind the songs,” he says. “And all kinds of songs, from the Indian movies, bhajans, ghazals and qawwalis.”

He began learning Sanskrit on his own, later taking credit courses at Harvard. He also studied ghazals and Urdu under Professor Ali Asani at Harvard.

Shah is so much into his music that he confesses it has never helped him relax from his medical work. “Music is an obsession with me, and for many years I used to practice it 10 hours a day, several times in a week,” he continues. “Of course, I cannot give it so much of time now. But Falu often spends a full day many times a week doing riyaz.”

The “craving” for learning more music made him take a year off to go to India. He met Falu Dalal through a common friend and ended up taking courses with her.

“I still remember our first meeting,” he chuckles. He had gone to meet her at her house. “She was carrying the tanpura from one room to another.”

Adds Falu: “I looked at him and wondered how this guy from Texas, who had a cap on him pointing in the other direction, was going to learn Urdu and classical music?”

Little did she know then about Shah’s obsession.

She looks up to him in more than one sense. “He understands me completely as a person and as an artist,” she says.

What is his songwriting process?

“To write songs, I find myself retiring to a zone of inspiration and nostalgia — which is sometimes difficult with the stress of medicine,” he says. “I find it most helpful to go back to nature — for example, take a walk in the woods, or go on a long drive through the mountains. I also find it helpful to remember my mentors — Ustad Sultan Khan and others. My lyrics are usually in English but the melodies draw from Indian classical and semi-classical traditions.”

Falu and Gaurav do not like the word ‘fusion’ for their music. The word sounds experimental, she says. ” I think the best example I can give is that of North Indian classical music, which came into being in present form perhaps 600 years ago — and which draws beautifully from Carnatic music elements as well as Persian and Arabic music elements, and is an experience, not an experiment.”

Though the two perform together most of the time, occasionally Falu sings with others. For instance, she performed with A R Rahman [ Images ] in the presence of Michelle Obama [ Images ], Oprah [ Images ] Winfrey and Elizabeth Taylor [ Images ], she has appeared on the companion CD to the Deepak Chopra bestseller The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, and performed with cellist Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.

“But there is nothing,” she says, “like a performance with my band and Gaurav by my side.”

Earlier, the Obama administration had named Shah’s wife, Shivam Mallick Shah as Director of Special Initiatives, Office of Innovation and Improvement at the Department of Education, thus making the Shahs the Indian American community’s first ‘power couple’ in the Obama administration.
Shah will — once he is confirmed — head the country’s top non-military foreign assistance programme.

‘The mission of USAID is to advance America’s interests by strengthening our relationships abroad,’ Obama said while making the nomination.

‘Rajiv brings fresh ideas and the dedication and impressive background necessary to help guide USAID as it works to achieve this important goal.’

The nomination assuages a deeply felt lack; Congress has in recent times been agitated over the fact that the top post at USAID has been left unfilled.

‘I am grateful for all that USAID has accomplished under the leadership of Acting Administrator Alonzo Fulgham, and the thousands of career men and women who fulfil USAID’s mission day in and day out — particularly their hard work in jumpstarting a landmark initiative to bring more than $20 billion for agriculture development to the world’s most-insecure countries,’ Obama said, adding that he was looking forward to working with Shah to take those efforts even further.

Hailing the nomination, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — under whose jurisdiction USAID falls — said: ‘Dr Raj Shah is a leader in the development community, an innovative and results-oriented manager, and someone who understands the importance of providing people around the world with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty and chart their own destinies.’

With this nomination, Clinton said, the Obama administration was affirming that ‘development must be a core pillar of American foreign policy.’

Clinton said Shah, a trained medical doctor and health economist who earned his MD from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and his Master of Science in health economics at the Wharton School of Business, has the required skill sets and ‘a record of delivering results in both the private and public sectors, forging partnerships around the world, especially in Africa and Asia, and developing innovative solutions in global health, agriculture, and financial services for the poor.’

The secretary pointed out that Shah has led many of the initiatives that are redefining best practice in the field of development, including the Global Alliance for Vaccines and immunization, the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

‘His tireless efforts to immunise children around the world have helped save countless lives,’ Clinton said.

Shah currently manages the Agricultural Research Service, the Economic Research Service, the National Agricultural Statistical Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — a large portfolio that entails managing more than 10,000 federal employees worldwide, including 2,200 federal scientists, and a budget of more than $2.56 billion.

He also leads the department’s participation in President Obama’s global food security initiative. Though he has been with USDA only since April, Shah has already launched the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — a scientific institute created to elevate and enhance the capacity of agricultural research to address sustainable food production, climate change, bio-energy and human nutrition.

In managing this extensive portfolio, Shah works in close concert with Congress, the State Department, the White House and the international development community.

When he takes over as USAID head, he will be in charge of a budget in excess of $40 billion and a staff of over 2,000 employees in Washington and worldwide.

Administration and Congressional sources predicted that Shah’s confirmation was a mere formality, given “his impeccable credentials and superb track record.” Congressional sources who have worked with Shah described him as a person “of immense integrity,” with an “innate sense and commitment to lifting people out of poverty,” and “passionate in his dedication to development issues.”

These attributes, plus the Congressional dismay at the top post in USAID lying vacant all these months, would ensure a smooth confirmation, Congressional sources told rediff.com.

The Congress is approving of the Obama-Clinton argument that USAID will be crucial to the administration’s ’smart power’ foreign policy strategy, where diplomacy acquires equal importance with the projection of military power, particularly in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan where development must soon follow in areas previously held by the Taliban, if the populations in those areas are to be convinced that militancy and extremism should not be the preferred paths.

“Rajiv is the perfect choice,” a Congressional source told rediff.com, “young, resourceful, committed, and with an unbelievable and impeccable track record, and if he is given the autonomy and independence and clear and defined portfolios and defined responsibilities, you can bet he will deliver, as he did during his nearly 10 years with the Gates Foundation.”

Administration sources said Shah’s nomination came as a distinct relief to Clinton, who has been growing exceedingly frustrated over the protracted White House vetting process for the position. The thoroughness of the process has already led to several highly qualified candidates withdrawing their names from consideration; some even described it, at various times, as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘a nightmare.’

The Congress has been equally frustrated, prompting Senators John F Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Richard Lugar, the committee’s ranking Republican, to write to Obama complaining that USAID, by virtue of not having a head, had been shut out of the inter-agency process in US foreign policy in key countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In their letter, Kerry and Lugar wrote that it was ‘the only agency in the government without a captain at a time when American leadership in development around the world is more needed than ever. We recommend that you give strong consideration to selecting a candidate that has already gone through the vetting process and that has the experience in global development. We believe that time is of the essence and that the longer we wait for a new leader for the agency, the more serious the problems become,’ the Senators said.

Shah’s nomination plays right into the Senators’ line of thinking, as he has already gone through the intense vetting process, and breezed through Senate confirmation when he was nominated Under Secretary of Agriculture.

With Kerry and Lugar seized of the need for a quick appointment, and given Shah’s impeccable credentials, confirmation hearings will happen quickly, and be “a formality”, Congressional sources said.

Before his eight years with the Gates Foundation, the Detroit-born Shah had worked on health care policy for the Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign, and served as a member of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s transition committee on health.
He is co-founder of Health Systems Analytics and Project IMPACT for South Asian Americans — a national, non-profit organization dedicated to increasing civic awareness and community leadership of South Asian Americans. He has also been policy aide to the British parliament, and consultant to the World Health Organisation.

Source: Rediff

The trio were awarded for their study of the structure and function of the ribosome, one of life’s core processes.

Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

They showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.

According to statement released by the three scientists have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

They generated 3D models that showed how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome, the award committee said, adding that these models were now being used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering.

Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, Ramakrishnan completed his PhD in Physics in 1976 from Ohio University, US.

He is the Group Leader at the Structural Studies Division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.

Article Source/Credits: rediff.com
Posted on: October 07, 2009

“This is an incredibly historic time; I’m deeply honoured to be here and I hope to serve my country to the best of my ability,” the actor, whose given name is Kalpen Modi, told reporters on a conference call.

Penn revealed in early April that his character Dr Lawrence Kutner on the smash hit, House, MD committed suicide so that the actor could leave the show and take a job with the White House.

Penn said his first day in the White House Office of Public Engagement was like a lot of other people’s first days on the job, citing “a lot of paperwork”, introductory meetings and getting his email set up.

Asked what he did to prepare, the actor laughed and replied: “You’re going to be bored by this. I brushed my teeth, I did floss, used mouthwash, you know, took the bus to work, same thing as everybody does.”

Penn, who is of Gujarati Indian heritage, is the office’s point person for Americans in the arts and the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities.

He said those groups were “incredibly involved” in US politics, “especially this last election cycle” and underlined that they were “not just relegated to just ethnic politics”.

Penn said he had had “a lot of fun” making the Harold and Kumar movies, in which he plays a marijuana-addled slacker, but that he was taking “a sabbatical from acting”.

Article Source/Credits: smh.com.au 
Posted on: July 7, 2009

Adobe System’s chief executive officer Shantanu Narayen and beverage major Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi have been ranked at the 16th and 17th places, respectively in the list of 25 ‘top gun CEOs’ for 2009 who kept their firms thriving amid the recessionary situation.

“This past year has given top executives many reasons to be nervous about whether their firms will stay alive, let alone turn a profit. But some executives did more than just get through hard times and some put their companies on the path to success,” Forbes said.

The list is topped by business solutions provider Automatic Data Process’s Gary C Butler and the magazine said he was “extremely strong at strategic planning and overall execution.”

About Nooyi, the magazine said, she had the right long- term strategic vision and had executed very well.

“PepsiCo dominates the markets it operates in. She runs the business carefully, in good times and bad. I like how she thinks about managing the business,” Forbes said.

About Narayen, Forbes said he had been in the industry for a very long time and “always has a strong sense of what the next key steps are in terms of positioning the company.”

The list also includes Hewlett-Packard’s Mark V Hurd, Walt Disney Co’s Robert A Iger and Procter & Gamble’s Alan G Lafley among the top 25.

The Forbes report said an advisory agency, Brendan Wood International, had ranked the top 25 chief executive officers for 2009 based on their ability to make smart acquisitions, make themselves visible and expand the company’s value propositions, among other things.

Investors can make better long-term investment decisions depending on their confidence in the company’s chief executive and management team, Brendan Wood said.

About 317 US companies were reviewed by 2,500 asset managers to determine the ‘Top Guns’ chief executive officers were ranked quantitatively and qualitatively with data from this past year.

The magazine said only three of this year’s top executives had made to the list previously. They are Andrew Gould of Schlumberger, Nicholas Chabraja of General Dynamics and Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard.

Article Source/Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Posted on: June 23, 2009