Digital microscope with Smartphone

Chinese Scientists Invent Lightbulbs That Emit Wi-Fi

18th Oct 2013 | 22:00



A group of Chinese scientists at Shanghai's Fudan University have a bright idea: A lightbulb that produces its own Wi-Fi signal. According to Xinhua, the technology is called Li-Fi, and the prototype actually works better than the average connection in China.

As many as four computers placed near a Li-Fi bulb can connect to the net, using light frequencies rather than the usual radio waves. The bulb is embedded with a microchip that produces a signal, yielding rates as fast as 150 mbps—far faster than typical connection speeds in China, and about three times faster than the speed I'm getting right now. (Seriously, I just did a speed test.)

One of the perks of Li-Fi is that it's affordable. Have a lightbulb and a Li-Fi kit? Boom—you have internet. Next month, researchers are showing off 10 sample kits at a trade show in China, and the country is moving in a direction that could make Li-Fi a practical and commercially viable asset—especially since, as Xinhua reports, Chinese people are quickly replacing old fashioned incandescent bulbs with LEDs.

Of course, there are still a few technical details—mostly dealing with microchip design and manufacturing—that would need to fall into place before Li-Fi becomes ubiquitous. So for now, Li-Fi remains an experiment with a bright future.

John Newman-love me again pump up the volume n listen

caught with canvas 4

Roja song (Instrumental)

This Is What We Paid For (real face of Chandrababu Naidu and his VISION 2020)

Britain’s foreign aid has been used to bankroll a programme for mass starvation

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th May 2004

Tony Blair has lost the election. It’s true he wasn’t standing, but we won’t split hairs. His policies have just been put to the test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition, and crushed. In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment.

Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was the West’s favourite Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state capital. Time magazine named him South Asian of the Year; the governor of Illinois created a Naidu Day in his honour, and the British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did what he was told.

Naidu realised that to sustain power he must surrender it. He knew that as long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would receive the money and stature which count for so much in Indian politics. So instead of devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy company McKinsey.

McKinsey’s scheme, “Vision 2020″, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents quite another.(1) It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state’s hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by “user charges”.(2) It extols small businesses but, way beyond the point at which most people stop reading, reveals that it intends to “eliminate” the laws which defend them,(3) and replace small investors, who “lack motivation”, with “large corporations”.(4) It claims it will “generate employment” in the countryside, and goes on to insist that over 20 million people should be thrown off the land.(5)

Put all these – and the other proposals for privatisation, deregulation and the shrinking of the state – together, and you see that McKinsey has unwittingly developed a blueprint for mass starvation. You dispossess 20 million farmers from the land just as the state is reducing the number of its employees and foreign corporations are “rationalising” the rest of the workforce, and you end up with millions without work or state support. “The State’s people,” McKinsey warns, “will need to be enlightened about the benefits of change.”(6)

McKinsey’s vision was not confined to Naidu’s government. Once he had implemented these policies, Andhra Pradesh “should seize opportunities to lead other states in such reform, becoming, in the process, the benchmark state.”(7) Foreign donors would pay for the experiment, then seek to persuade other parts of the developing world to follow Naidu’s example.

There is something familiar about all this, and McKinsey have been kind enough to jog our memories. Vision 2020 contains 11 glowing references to Chile’s experiment in the 1980s. General Pinochet handed the economic management of his country to a group of neoliberal economists known as the Chicago Boys. They privatised social provision, tore up the laws protecting workers and the environment and handed the economy to multinational companies. The result was a bonanza for big business, and a staggering growth in debt, unemployment, homelessness and malnutrition.(8) The plan was funded by the United States in the hope that it could be rolled out around the world.

Pinochet’s understudy was bankrolled by Britain. In July 2001 Clare Short, then secretary of state for development, finally admitted to parliament that, despite numerous official denials, Britain was funding Vision 2020.(9) Blair’s government has financed the state’s economic reform programme, its privatisation of the power sector and its “centre for good governance” (which means as little governance as possible).(10) Our taxes also fund the “implementation secretariat” for the state’s privatisation programme. The secretariat is run, at Britain’s insistence, by the far-right business lobby group the Adam Smith Institute.(11) The money for all this comes out of Britain’s foreign aid budget.

It is not hard to see why Blair’s government is doing this. As Stephen Byers revealed when he was secretary of state for trade and industry, “the UK Government has designated India as one of the UK’s 15 campaign markets.”(12) The campaign is to expand the opportunities for British capital. The people of Andhra Pradesh know what this means: they call it “the return of the East India Company”.

This isn’t the only aspect of British history which is being repeated in Andhra Pradesh. There’s something uncanny about the way in which the scandals that surrounded Tony Blair during his first term in office are recurring there. Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula 1 boss who gave Labour £1 million and later received an exemption from the ban on tobacco advertising, was negotiating with Naidu to bring his sport to Hyderabad. I have been shown the leaked minutes of a state cabinet meeting on January 10th this year.(13) McKinsey, they reveal, instructed the cabinet that Hyderabad should be a “world class futuristic city with Formula 1 as a core component.” To make it viable, however, there would be a “state support requirement of Rs400-600 crs”(4 billion to 6 billion rupees).(14) This means a state subsidy for Formula 1 of £50million to £75m a year. It is worth noting that thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh now die of malnutrition-related diseases because Naidu had previously cut the subsidy for food.

Then the minutes become even more interesting. Ecclestone’s Formula 1, they note, should be exempted from the Indian ban on tobacco advertising. Mr Naidu had already “addressed the PM as well as the Health Minister in this regard” and was hoping to enact “state legislation creating an exemption to the Act”. (15)

The Hinduja brothers, the businessmen facing criminal charges in India who were given British passports after Peter Mandelson intervened on their behalf, have also been sniffing round Vision 2020. Another set of leaked minutes I have obtained shows that in 1999 their representatives held a secret meeting in London with the Indian attorney-general and the British government’s export credit guarantee department, to help them obtain the backing required to build a power station under Naidu’s privatisation programme.(16) When the attorney-general began lobbying the Indian government on their behalf, this caused yet another Hinduja scandal.

The results of the programme we have been funding are plain to see. During the hungry season, hundreds of thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh are now kept alive on gruel supplied by charities.(17) Last year hundreds of children died in an encephalitis outbreak because of the shortage of state-run hospitals.(18) The state government’s own figures suggest that 77% of the population has fallen below the poverty line.(19) The measurement criteria are not consistent, but this appears to be a massive rise. In 1993 there was one bus a week taking migrant workers from a depot in Andhra Pradesh to Mumbai. Today there are 34. (20) The dispossessed must reduce themselves to the transplanted coolies of Blair’s new empire.

Luckily, democracy still functions in India. In 1999, Naidu’s party won 29 seats, leaving Congress with five. Last week those results were precisely reversed. We can’t yet vote Tony Blair out of office in Britain, but in Andhra Pradesh they have done the job on our behalf.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Vision 2020 can be read at http://www.aponline.gov.in/quick%20links/vision2020/vision2020.html

2. Vision 2020, Page 96.

3. Vision 2020, page 42.

4. Vision 2020, page 195.

5. Vision 2020, page 170. This is worded as follows: ?However, agriculture?s share of employment will actually reduce, from the current 70 per cent [of the population of 76 million] to 40-45 per cent?.

6. Vision 2020, page 158.

7. Vision 2020, page 333.

8. The figures have been tabulated by Tom Huppi in the document Chile: the Laboratory Test, which can be found at http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-chichile.htm

9. Clare Short, 20th July 2001. Parliamentary answer to Alan Simpson MP. Hansard Column 475W.

10. The full list can be read at http://www.dfidindia.org/

11. Government of Andhra Pradesh, ?2002. Strategy Paper on Public Sector Reform and Privatisation of State Owned Enterprises.

12. Department of Trade and Industry, 6th January 2000. Byers to Help UK SMEs Foster Export Links with India. Press release.

13. Government of Andhra Pradesh. Minutes of Cabinet sub-committee meeting on 10th January 2004.

14. ibid.

15. ibid.

16. Clifford Chance solicitors, 3rd June 1999. Vizag – Meeting with the Attorney-General. Fax transmission.

17. Eg P. Sainath, 15th June 2003. The politics of free lunches. The Hindu.

18. Eg K.G. Kannabiran and K. Balagopal, 14th December 2003. Governance & Police impunity in Andhra Pradesh: World Bank urged not to make loan. Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties and Human Rights Forum, Andhra Pradesh.

19. Government of Andhra Pradesh. Draft Report of the Rural Poverty Reduction Task Force. Cited in D. Bandyopadhyay, March 17th 2001. Andhra Pradesh: Looking Beyond Vision 2020. Economic and Political Weekly.

20. P Sainath, June 2003. The Bus to Mumbai. http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/jun/psa-bus.htm

Cabinet clears Telangana, Hyderabad to be joint capital for 10 years

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Thursday took the first significant step towards creation of a separate Telangana state from out of Andhra Pradesh and decided that Hyderabad will be the joint capital of the two states for 10 years.

Over two months after the Congress Working Committee put its seal of approval, the Union Cabinet approved the proposal of the home ministry for creation of the 29th state and decided to set up a Group of Ministers (GoM) to work out modalities.

"The Cabinet has given its approval for the creation of a new state of Telangana," home ministerSushilkumar Shinde told reporters after the meeting that lasted more than two hours.

He said it was decided that Hyderabad will be the common capital of the two bifurcated states for 10 years.

After the creation of the new state, the security and guarantees including fundamental rights of the people of coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana will be ensured, he said.

The Cabinet approved a GoM that will go into the issue of a special financial disbursement that may be required from the central government for the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh, for building its capital and to cater to special needs of the backward regions.

The new state will have a geographical area of 10 of the 23 districts of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Today's decision brings to fruition the announcement made by the then home minister P Chidambaram on December 9, 2009 for creation of Telangana.

Telanagana sayudha sangham army before merging with Andhra

Osmania Hospital before merging with Andhra

Tom Clancy, US thriller author, dead

NEW YORK: Tom Clancy, whose high-tech, Cold War thrillers such as "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games" made him the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time, has died. He was 66.

Penguin Group (USA) said Wednesday that Clancy died Tuesday in Baltimore. The publisher did not disclose a cause of death.
Clancy arrived on best-seller lists in 1984 with "The Hunt for Red October." He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.
A string of other best-sellers soon followed, including "Red Storm Rising," "Patriot Games," "The Cardinal of the Kremlin," "Clear and Present Danger," "The Sum of All Fears," and "Without Remorse."
Clancy had said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalog. Several of his books were later made into movies, with the latest, based on desk-jockey CIA hero "Jack Ryan," set for release later this year.
His 17th novel, "Command Authority," is due out that same month from G P Putnam's Sons.
Born in Baltimore on April 12, 1947 to a mailman and his wife, Clancy entered Loyola College as a physics major, but switched to English as a sophomore, saying later that he wasn't smart enough for the rigors of science.
Ironically, his novels carried stiff doses of scientific data and military detail.

After graduation in 1969, he married his wife Wanda and joined her family's insurance business, all the while scribbling down ideas for a novel.

In 1979, Clancy began "Patriot Games," in which he invented his hero, CIA agent Jack Ryan. In 1982, he put it aside and started "The Hunt For Red October," basing it on a real incident in November 1979, in which a Soviet missile frigate called the Storozhevoy attempted to defect.

In real life, the ship didn't make it, but in Clancy's book, the defection is a success.
By a stroke of luck, President Reagan got "Red October" as a Christmas gift and quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he couldn't put the book down, a statement Clancy later said helped put him on the New York Times best-seller list.
It led to a string of hits, both on the page and in Hollywood blockbusters. He even ventured into video games with the best-selling "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier," "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction" and "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent."

"He was a consummate author, creating the modern-day thriller, and was one of the most visionary storytellers of our time," Penguin Group (USA)'s executive David Shanks said in a statement Wednesday.

Clancy continued to play off, and sometimes almost anticipate, world events, as in the pre-9/11 paranoid thriller "Debt of Honor," in which a jumbo jet destroys the US Capitol during a joint meeting of Congress.



The latest Jack Ryan movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Chris Pine, is set for release in the US on Christmas Day. Keira Knightly plays Jack Ryan's wife and Kevin Costner plays his mentor at the CIA.

Clancy resided in rural Maryland, and in 1993 he joined a group of investors led by Baltimore attorney Peter Angelos who bought baseball's Baltimore Orioles from businessman Eli Jacobs.

hobbit 2 trailer