Abstract

Living cells require proteins, fats, carbohydrates and nucleic acids for their structure and function. DNA, the master molecule, is embedded in chromosomes
and contains a linear array of thousands of Genes that encode information for proteins. Each Gene represents an informational unit for one protein. Before a
cell divides, DNA is duplicated so that the each of two daughter cells receives identical sets of Genes. Many chemical and physical agents damage DNA, and a
faulty repair changes the informational quality or even loss, which can be lethal or cause carcinogenesis, metabolic disorders or reduced life-span. Genes
can be modified in a test tube, or inside a cell. Genetic manipulation involves deletion of a gene or insertion of a new Gene. Gene insertion may be
beneficial or disrupt the Gene order leading to as yet unknown dangers.

About the Speaker – Dr. Sohan Modak

Sohan Modak has a doctorate from the University of Geneva and did post-doctoral work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Kentucky, Lexington
(USA). He served as staff scientist at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (1970-77), Visiting Professor at the Ohio State University and
Scientist-Engineer at French Center for Nuclear Energy Grenoble(1978-79). In 1979, he joined  the University of Poona as Professor. He founded the
Biotechnology Training Programme, NCCS, Bioinformatics-DIS. Sohan was Professor Emeritus at the Karnatak University, Dharwad (2001-03) and G.N.
Ramachandran Sr. Res.Fellow at the IGIB Delhi (2005-2008). He published research in Developmental Neurobiology, Molecular Biology and Genomics. He now
mentors studies on Molecular Evolution.

About InnoVidya

InnoVidya is a group of educators and industry professionals who want to reach out to students, teachers, trainers and working professionals and catalyze significant improvements in their learning ecosystems. In addition to the InnoVidya website and the InnoVidya mailing list, we also hold public lectures on the 4th Saturday of every month. Lectures usually involve talks by senior educators, industry visionaries, or social and/or for-profit entrepreneurs working in the space of higher education.

We are currently based in Pune, but we expect that this initiative will expand all over India.

If you’re interested in the state of education in India, please subscribe to email/RSS updates at: http://innovidya.org.

Event Details

The event is on Saturday, March 16, 2013, at 11am, at the Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA, at University of Pune campus.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. There is no need to register. There is ample parking space at the venue.

The article extensively quotes InnoVidya member [Sohan Modak][http://in.linkedin.com/pub/sohan-modak/1/805/450], who was one of the pioneers of Biotech in the country, and initiated the first biotech course at Pune University.

What went wrong? The article quotes Sohan Modak thus:

“That’s what happened—biotech became an interesting proposition and universities wanted to do their own courses. Private universities, run or backed largely by politicians which had been running MBA courses till then, got into the act seeing the market opportunity. They offered a two-year course with training of some kind leading to a degree. There was no quality control either on the students taken in or on the faculty. Now the country has over-produced biotech students who have not learned technology, not been taught much, and there are no jobs”

Opportunities still exist, though.

Opportunities in biotech exist in the agriculture and floriculture sectors, covering so-called exotic vegetables such as coloured bell peppers, mushrooms, or cut flowers for the overseas market. As one grower explained, the cost of production of one coloured bell pepper is Rs.0.50, which retails at Rs.5-10. And the cost of production falls as the farm gets bigger.

There are more interesting points made in the article, including the promise shown by the creation of high-quality science education institutes like IISER in Pune. You can read the full article here

(What follows is a live-blog of the talk. You should really watch the video above – read the live-blog below only if you’re too lazy to watch the full video. The live-blog below is just a collection of some of the interesting points made. It is not intended to be a full transcript, and large sections might be missing. Please forgive the typos and bad grammar.)

• Who is the one God that we see everyday? The Sun. The Sun’s energy is so important, that it has been elevated to a God all over the world – Ra (Egypt), Tonatiuh (Aztec), Apollo (Greek), Shamash (Sumer), etc.
• In the last 25 years, world energy consumption is going up. And it’s mostly oil, coal and gas. In spite of all the talk of biofuels and renewable energy replacing fossil fuels, we are actually using more fossil fuels every day.
• There is a direct correlation between Energy usage per capita and GDP per capita of a country – with two important exceptions (Russia, high energy consumption, but low GDP, and Japan which has low energy consumption even though it is rich).
• We have a problem:
  • GDP and Economic Progress depends upon greater energy use.
  • Most fuel used today is fossil fuel
  • Hence, more energy = more environment degradation
• Historical sources of energy:
  • Muscle (human/animal) power
  • Fire (wood) / Solar (agriculture)
  • Wood; Charcoal; Coal; Wind; Water (Sails/Mills)
  • Energy Conversation technologies catalyzed the Industrial revolution:
    • Steam Engine (Factories, Ships, Trains)
    • Steel – Ships, Rails
    • etc.
  • Petroleum
  • Natural Gas
  • Nuclear
  • BioFuels
• India’s Reserves:
  • Coal – 500+ years
  • Lignite – 1000 years
  • Crude Oil – 30 years
  • Natural Gas – 20 years
• India’s Imports:
  • Oil: used mainly in transport (40%), industry (20%), electricity (15%), agriculture (10%)
• India’s shortage of liquid/gas hydrocarbons is the problem. $30B of it every year is used in electricity and agriculture. Both of these can be replaced.
• Reducing energy consumption is not an option. Because that can only be done by reducing the standard of living (and essentially going back to the stone age).
• Today’s Fuel Usage:
  • Cooking / Lighting: Wood, Kerosene, LPG, bio gas, electricity
  • Electricity: Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Oil, Solar, Wind, Bagasse
  • Transportation: Electricity (mainly Trains), Hydrocarbon liquids (Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, bunker oil) from oil, coal, natural gas
• We cannot do transportation without liquid hydrocarbons. So any “renewable energy solution” needs to tackle this problem
  • Fossil fuels have high energy density. This high energy density is needed for transportation
  • Renewable energy has low energy density.
  • Energy densities: Petrol=48MJ/kg, Coal=32, Biomass=15. This is a problem.
  • Why? Hydrocarbons are just carbon and hydrogen – and hydrogen is what gives the energy. Biomass has carbon, hydrogen and lots of oxygen. Oxygen not only does not give energy, but it consumes energy because we have to spend effort to remove it. That is why biomass energy density is much lower than hydrocarbons.
• Example of biofuel use: We can convert sugar to LPG. A sugar mill that processes 6000 tons per day of sugar cane, will produce 70 tons of LPG per day.
• Biofuels are not only environmentally friendly, but due to their decentralized nature, they have other major advantages:
  • Move jobs from urban to rural areas
  • Capture of energy is not catastrophic to the area where the energy is being captured. (A visit to a coal mine town will convince you of this point.)
  • Additional source of energy at point of consumption…
  • Lower distribution costs
  • Lower theft/loss during distribution
  • Security against terrorist / cyber attacks
• Petroleum subsidy by Government of India: Diesel Rs 11 per liter, LPG Rs 33/kg, Kerosene Rs. 32/l, Petrol Rs. 1.5/l.
• The same subsidies should be available to biofuels. This will:
  • lower the import bills
  • pump more money into the rural economy
  • reduce global warming
• Solar Energy:
  • Major problems: It’s diffuse, it’s intermittent, it cannot be stored easily
  • Types:
    • Solar Thermal: direct heat/steam and electricity
    • Solar Photovoltaic: direct conversion to electricity. Modules last 20 to 40 years. Very little maintenance cost. Cost of installation is the only real cost.
    • Solar Bio – algae + CO2 -> algae oil -> ethanol etc.
  • Economics:
    • At $1/watt is “break-even” price for solar power
    • Prices have gone from $100/watt in 1976, to $1/watt now. So we are at break-even price
    • Now, the best solar power is competitive with the best coal power in terms of price
  • Random note: China invested in Solar R&D. Now 50% of all solar panels in India come from China
• Fuel from municipal solid waste
  • MSW -> biogas -> heat/electricity
  • MSW -> Syngas -> ethanol/electricity
• Summary:
  • There is no major shortage of fossil fuels at current consumption rates
  • Global Warming is the major driving force for renewable energy
  • Onshore wind is already competitive with grid (but not available everywhere)
  • Solar PV is competitive with diesel set electricity (generators, pumpsets, emergency power)
  • Biofuels meet specifications for transportation fuels
  • Technology Challenges:
    • Improve Solar/Wind energy storage efficiency
    • Reduce capital expenses of solar/biofuels
• Strategies for Clean Energy Growth:
  • Government should mandate cleaner fuels & fuel efficient engines
  • Promote CO2 capture and use in growing algae -> algae oil -> diesel.
  • Government should use subsidies to promote this:
    • Use Solar/MSW electricity for sugar mills
    • Use bagasse for ethanol/gasolien/diesel/LPG and chemicals.
    • (Note: fossil fuels are already subsidized by the government)
  • Decontrol the sale/purchase/price of fuels and electricity from solar/wind/biomass. Give private market and free enterprise a free hand in this market
  • Foster growth of startup companies for alternate energy tecnology

And Grow More Tree.

Abstract

Currently over 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels. However these fuels are the major sources of the green house gas pollutants which lead to severe environmental degradation including climate change. Energy from non-polluting sources – like biomass, solar and wind – is under development worldwide. Due to the recent exciting research and technological advances, it is now technically feasible to produce conventional transportation fuels like diesel and gasoline from biomass like sugarcane bagasse and municipal / forest wastes. Solar energy, in addition to generating electricity directly (photo-voltaics), can also produce liquid fuels, like diesel. Waste gases like CO from steel/cement/power/chemical plants can be catalytically converted to transport fuels like ethanol & diesel. Presentation describes some of these technologies and their potential adoption in large commercial plants.

About the Speaker – Dr. Paul Ratnasamy

Dr .Ratnasamy has a PhD from Loyola College, Chennai, and did his post-doctoral works at Clarkson College of Technology, New York, at Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and at University of Munchen, Germany. He was the Director of the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, from 1995 to 2002 and Professor (Biofuels) at the  University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, from 2009 to 2011. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Engineering Technology in 1984, Viswakarma Medal of the Indian National Academy in 1994 and a Padmashree in 2001.

About InnoVidya

InnoVidya is a group of educators and industry professionals who want to reach out to students, teachers, trainers and working professionals and catalyze significant improvements in their learning ecosystems. In addition to the InnoVidya website and the InnoVidya mailing list, we also hold public lectures on the 4th Saturday of every month. Lectures usually involve talks by senior educators, industry visionaries, or social and/or for-profit entrepreneurs working in the space of higher education.

We are currently based in Pune, but we expect that this initiative will expand all over India.

If you’re interested in the state of education in India, please subscribe to email/RSS updates at: http://innovidya.org.

Event Details

The event is on Saturday, Feb 23, 2013, at 11am, at the Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA, at University of Pune campus.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. There is no need to register. There is ample parking space at the venue.

Parents are not certain about the safety of the girl child travelling to school even if it is only 1/2 km away from home.
Apparently simple issues like the need to cross a highway / stream on the way to school keeps kids away.

and with attendance, for example:

[Teachers] are feared by the students and why would they not. In my wanderings around India over 15 years I have seldom seen a classroom where the teacher did not have a cane on the table. There were occasions when he did not have chalk but he always had a cane. I am speaking from the experience of having been in 100s of classrooms across 10 States in India.

And attainment. Here he points out:

The Indian education system was designed by the British rulers to create clerks to help the few thousand British administrators run a country of 40 million people. It was not designed to promote thought and encourage a culture of curiosity

Read the full article. It is interesting, and ends with hope…maybe…

Alan Turing, was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. The most important award in computer science, the Turing Award, is named after Alan Turing.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, and hence we are celebrating it with a talk on his life and his contributions to computer science. This talk is targeted towards anyone interested in computers – no special knowledge of computer science will be assumed.

About the Speaker – Dr. Mathai Joseph

Dr. Mathai Joseph did his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, and joined the Tata Institute of F undamental Research in 1968. He was appointed to a Chair in Computer Science at the University of Warwick in 1985. At various times, he has been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Warwick and University of York.

He joined Tata Consultancy Services in 1997 as an Executive Vice President and was the Executive Director of the Tata Research Development and Design Centre until his retirement in 2007.

He was Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Software Technology from 2 005-2007 . He has written several books and numerous papers.

Mathai Joseph was elected as a Member-at-Large of the ACM Council in 2008. He is the President of ACM India and has been a member of the ACM India Council since it was formed in 2009.

Event Details

The event is on Saturday, January 19 , 2013, at 11am, at the Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA, at University of Pune campus.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. There is no need to register.

First, we know that the students and employers are unhappy with what the education providers dish out, but the providers believe they do a swell job!  Now we know the %’s.

Second, we know that we learn the best while working under the pressure of a job and by doing things.  But, the education providers ignore both these avenues of learning in most curricula.

Third, a bitter truth – while we know that job-related training has more impact, the social as well as professional pecking orders place vocational training below academic training!

These three facts have traditionally led good companies to “invest” in training significantly.  However, under cost and time-to-market pressures, companies have started looking at this investment as “cost” and are now expecting a finished product (a productive worker) right out of college.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Companies do not want to invest and colleges believe they are doing fine.  As a result, today’s graduating student is more stressed – increasingly poor experience in colleges and increasingly higher productivity pressure at work!

Thankfully, rays of hope are appearing in the form of alternate education methods: massively online open courses a.k.a. MOOCs (like Stanford’s Coursera and MIT’s OCW), Do-it-yourself (DIY) content, and peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing.

Out of these, MOOCs are getting the most press and hype, but in reality DIY and P2P actually have a higher impact; they are actually making a difference in how the world learns.  The plethora of interactivity and communication mechanisms unleashed by the Internet are fueling all of them.

But guess what?  Even when the Internet was not around (i.e., when I was attending college), I learnt the most – not in my classrooms but – using DIY and P2P in the physical world.

That’s why I think the more things change, the more they remain the same!  Communication technologies used in education over the internet are finally starting to support the basic human behaviors.

Experts and good teachers will have their value that will never go away.  MOOCs meet that need.  For the interested student, DIY and P2P make the best kind of eco-system available.

I expect that the high-priced campuses will soon lose their sheen and the students will eventually benefit.  And therefore, the companies will benefit too.

These “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are earning praise for bringing outstanding college teaching to multitudes of students who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it, including those in remote places and those in the middle of their careers. The online classes are also being promoted as a way to bolster the quality and productivity of teaching in general-for students on campus as well as off. Former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett has written that he senses “an Athens-like renaissance” in the making. Stanford president John Hennessy told the New Yorker he sees “a tsunami coming.”

And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, stem cells or the rise of China. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs.

Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery.

Given this, it won’t be easy to change the education system (and it is not clear whether you want the educational system to change very rapidly in keeping with the times), but if we were to change, then here are the possibilities that he finds interesting:

1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it.
2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration.
3. Just as text books are written by a few professors, and used by everybody else in the world, even lectures and lecture materials will be created/recorded by a few top professors and others will simply re-use this material. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students.
4. We will see “Active learning classrooms” – which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology
5. Globalization of the curriculum
6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data.

Read the full article.

Pune-based outsourced software product development services company Persistent Systems on Tuesday announced that they have partnered with IL&FS Education and Technology Services Ltd. to develop a series of mobile based learning applications on IL&FS Education’s, Exploriments learning platform.

Exploriment is a simulation-based interactive learning platform designed for enhancing students conceptual understanding in science and mathematics. As a technology partner, Persistent Systems will be developing mobile based applications on the Exploriments learning model for various mobile platforms like tablets and other hand held devices.

reports the Business Standard.

The article goes on to say:

Exploriments, doesn’t intend to transfer traditional classroom teaching to digital pedagogy or convert print materials into a digital format. But it endeavours to create a platform that enhances the delivery of quality education through the use of technology by providing a highly interactive, exploratory, and engaging experience for students and teachers.

Read the full article