Any answers??

What is round tripping?

Round tripping has several meanings. In finance, it refers to money that leaves the country, often routed to the diaspora, making its way back to the country in the form of foreign direct investment. It also refers to a company that sells an unused asset to another company, while agreeing to buy it or a similar asset at the same price. This is also referred to as Lazy Susans. In technology, round tripping refers to the repeated conversion of a document from one format to another -- for instance, a rich text format to a doc format and so on. This sort of round tripping may affect the quality of the content.

What is creative capitalism?

It is a new idea that aims to achieve both the goals of generating profits as well as solving the problem of inequality between the rich and poor by using market forces in a better way. Several companies around the world have adopted this concept by integrating philanthropic motives with product development, and treating the poor as a new class of customers. It involves a systematic approach to research, product design, distribution, partnership and profit models to help this new class of customers which businesses have traditionally ignored.

What is the Kit-Cat Club?

Kit-Cat Club was London's political and literary club, active between 1700 and 1720. The four dozen members included leading Whig politicians and London's best young writers. Among them were Charles Seymour, the sixth duke of Somerset; Sir Robert Walpole; Thomas Pelham-Holles, the duke of Newcastle; William Congreve; Joseph Addison; Sir Richard Steele; and Sir Godfrey Kneller, who did portraits of the members. The club was the centre of opposition during Queen Anne's Tory ministry (1710-14).

What is the CAPTCHA Project?

CAPTCHA refers to a category of information technologies used to ensure that a human rather than a computer is making an online transaction. It is an acronym for Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart and patented by Carnegie Mellon University. It is a challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is a human. A typical CAPTCHA requires a user to type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appear on the user's screen. The origin of the CAPTCHAs was to counter the characteristics of software agents (bots) that automatically fill up web forms as individual users.

What is a false vacuum?

False vacuum and true vacuum form a metastable system. Metastable state is a state which does not change with time but is susceptible to falling into lower-energy states with only slight interaction. It is analogous to being at the bottom of a small valley when there is a deeper valley close by. True vacuum is the name applied to a condition of the true lowest energy state of the vacuum. False vacuum refers to a condition with an elevated vacuum energy density. The two conditions are separated by some energy barrier — which is why they form a metastable system. If the current universe is in a state of false vacuum, it is conceivable that some experiment would concentrate enough energy into a small enough place to coax the vacuum over the energy barrier and into the true vacuum state. This could perhaps be catastrophic.


What is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

Dissociative Identity Disorder is defined as the occurrence of two or more personalities within the same individual, each of which, during some time in the person's life, is able to take control. This is not often a mentally healthy thing when the personalities vie for control. It's also known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV replaced the acronym MPD with dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Why does the moon appear upside down in the southern hemisphere?

The moon orbits near the equator of the Earth. In the southern hemisphere, we are standing at the opposite side of the globe, from a person who is standing in the northern hemisphere. So, we are literally standing upside down with relation to the person at the other end. We, therefore, see the moon from a completely different vantage point. So, if a man sees the moon crescent facing up in the northern hemisphere, it'll appear upside down to a person in the southern hemisphere.

Which is the world's hottest pepper?

The bhut jolokia variety which grows in north-eastern India, was given a rating of 8,55,000 Scoville heat units by Ritesh Mathur and his colleagues at the Defence Research and Development Establishment, Gwalior. They reported their finding in an August 2000 issue of Current Science. The scientists tested a Tezpur variety of the bhut, or Capsicum Frutescens var. (botanists know it as Nagahari). The Guinness Book of World Records recently certified the bhut jolokia as the world's hottest chilli pepper. The chilli probably gets its name owing to its demonic bite — bhut means ghost and jolokia means chilli. A single seed of the bhut can cause intense spicy sensations in the mouth for up to 30 minutes. Smeared on fences, they are also employed to scare off wild elephants.

ANY ANSWERS?

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No kidding: SMS jargon spells trouble for teachers

Schoolteachers across India are witnessing a strange phenomenon while correcting exam papers. With mobile phones having crept inside classrooms, SMS language has made its way into answer sheets: students facing a time crunch during tests routinely replace ‘are’ with ‘r’ and ‘you’ with ‘u’ and ‘through’ is now spelt as ‘thru’.

“Before any written assignment, our teachers have to remind the class that they’re not on SMS or internet chat and words have to be spelt the way they are in the dictionary,’’ says Anahita Devitre, principal of JB Petit High School in Fort.

Texting via SMS is not the only culprit. Computer spellchecks are giving birth to a generation that hasn’t learnt to spell; now the computer checks spellings for them. To add to the confusion, Devitre points out that children often forget that their computer spell-check is set to American standards, while at school, they’re learning the Queen’s English. As a result, children are rather confused when it comes to spelling words like colour, which they often spell as ‘color’ and organise, which they spell with a z.

Advertisements, with their bhelpuri of misspelt words, have only worsened the situation. “Children often spell Chocolate as Choklate, thanks to the ads around them,’’ says Yasmin Chagla, principal of Cumballa Hill School and Nepean Sea Road. The fact that several advertisements are now in Hinglish certainly doesn’t help children learn.

However, the city might just witness a reverse trend. Spelling Bee, one of America’s most popular classroom contests, which began in 1925 and went on air in 1941 is set to hit Mumbai next month. Children may soon go the extra mile to ensure they can spell well, sans spell-check.

The promoters of Spelling Bee in the US have approached The mastii-kustii to start the Indian chapter of the contest, which will begin in November.

Meanwhile, many parents say that it’s not just children hooked onto SMS or internet chat who’re having trouble with their spellings. “My son doesn’t chat online and he doesn’t own a mobile phone, but his spellings are getting worse. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that children don’t read books anymore. Now, there are just so many other things that they can do with their time,’’ says Kamal Katgara, a parent whose child studies at Bombay International School in Babulnath.

“With the pressure of studies increasing over the years, kids are struggling to cope with science and mathematics, so naturally languages take a backseat and spellings are just one of the casualties,’’ adds Carl Laurie, who heads Christ Church, a school in Mazgaon. Teachers across the city admit that they too, are no longer laying as much emphasis on spellings as they used to.

Raj Aloni, principal of JJ Fort Boys High School, is used to getting letters from students and parents in which she’s addressed as ‘The Principle’ instead of ‘The Principal.’

To Aloni’s horror, during a Geography examination, she found that children, while filling in the name of the subject in the answer paper, actually copied the correct spelling from the question paper.

Of the commonly misspelt words in Mumbai classrooms, those with double letters like ‘success’ and, ‘accommodate’ are routinely misspelt. ‘College’ invariably turns into ‘collage.’ Thanks to advertisements, Quality has now become Kwality. “Spellings are getting a little more phonetic,’’ points out Katgara.

Ramadoss is right to call for legalising gays

We have to endorse Anbumani Ramadoss on this one. The health minister has acquired a reputation as a maverick in the UPA cabinet, moreover one who’s so taken up with administrative politics in New Delhi’s elite All India Institute of Medical Sciences that he has little time to address the rot in the country’s public health-care system. Ramadoss, however, has done the right thing in arguing for decriminalising homosexuality, contradicting the home ministry’s stand on section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

The Delhi high court is examining a public interest litigation on the subject, which says that private consensual sex between adults shouldn’t be considered a crime. Section 377 renders certain kinds of private consensual sex — those which allegedly “go against the order of nature” — a crime. Homosexuality is deemed to fall under its purview. Punishments can be draconian, going up to 10 years in prison. This law has colonial and theological origins, having been incorporated by the British into the Indian Penal Code in 1860. It’s time now to take a fresh look at the law.

The problem with section 377’s antiquated provisions is twofold. Firstly, if one doesn’t go by theological certainties, how does one determine what is natural and what goes against the order of nature? Contraception can, from a certain point of view, be seen as going against the order of nature. But we don’t ban contraception for that reason. More fundamentally, however, banning private consensual activity between adults is a way of restricting personal choice. It’s a throwback to times when state and society were considered sacrosanct and the individual had no rights.

The government’s case against homosexuality doesn’t carry much logic. It has argued that homosexuality results in the spread of AIDS and decriminalising it can lead to breaches of peace. But soaring crime graphs haven’t really been recorded in the many countries that have decriminalised homosexuality. And as Ramadoss has observed, it’s precisely when gay populations are forced to go underground that AIDS control programmes can’t reach them, creating the greatest threat to themselves and others. Section 377 may have some validity as far as protecting the rights of children and minors are concerned. But with growth of the sphere of personal choice and alternative lifestyles, as well as increasing recognition of the rights of gays, the state should no longer concern itself with what consenting adults choose to do in private.