A new Japanese import is on the cards. The Chennai Corporation is planning to bring in advanced technology from Japan to improve the stormwater drain (SWD) network in the city. So far, management of stormwater drain network has only been partly effective.
Corporation engineers will be sent to Japan for a training programme, which would cover techniques to construct and manage SWDs effectively. The Chennai Corporation Council passed a resolution on Monday permitting engineers K. Chinnasamy and G. Tamilselvan to attend this programme.
Expenses for the training — which is from September 23 to December 5 — will be met by Japan International Co-operation Agency. The knowledge the engineers will acquire from this exercise is expected to be useful in the implementation of new projects in watersheds of waterways such Adyar and Cooum.
With the help of World Bank funding, work on SWDs will begin next month in zones such as Ambattur and Valasaravakkam. Designed with advanced technology, new SWDs are likely to reduce the displacement of people living along the banks of waterways and canals.
The work on construction of drains will prevent flooding of neighbourhoods in many of the added zones.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu /Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Aloysius Xavier Lopez / Chennai – September 06th, 2015
Women are prone to diabetes at every stage of their life, so a community-based approach is needed to help woman patients understand the disease, said endocrinologist Dr Usha Sriram of ACEER clinic.
The clinic on Saturday launched ‘Women2Women’, an initiative by women for women to address the rising epidemic of diabetes in India. “Diabetes in women is different, difficult, neglected and on the rise. Women are particularly more vulnerable to more complications and a shorter lifespan,” said the doctor. The premise of the initiative is that women are great change agents as they are able to share, communicate, support and nurture, she added.
About 100 women diabetologists and physicians from across the country will be trained in capacity building and will come together for physician training, review of educational material and launch of tools and portals for community empowerment. The first phase of the programme is designed to reach 2,500 women physicians across the country and 50 lakh women in the community.
The highlight of this programme is the community education approach to prevent and manage diabetes.
The doctor pointed out that this is the first time that a coalition of women endocrinologists and diabetologists are coming together to focus on how to reach women for better health outcomes. Actor Radhika Sarathkumar and Dr Sr Jasintha Quadras, principal Stella Maris College were present at the launch.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / TNN / August 30th, 2015
In a bid to increase public awareness of cervical cancer, considered to be the most common cancer among women in India, the Christian Medical College is hosting the Sixth Asia Oceania Conference on Genital Infections and Neoplasia (AOGIN) from August 27 to 29 at its campus.
The theme this year is “HPV infection and HPV related cancers”. There will be five concurrent workshops on the first day on Colposcopy, Community Screening, HPV detection, Cytopathology and Research Methods. In the evening, there will be a public meeting on measures adopted to increase awareness of cervical cancer, its prevention and treatment. This will be followed by the AOGIN-India Presidential Oration by Professor Shalini Rajaram from New Delhi.
Over 15 international universities’ faculty members and over 50 national universities’ faculty members will be taking part. There will be lectures, debates, panel discussions and video presentations. The topics covered will be basic science of HPV, vaccination, screening for pre-cancer and treatment of cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, anus and oropharynx. The conference will end with a round table discussion on “Collaborations and linkages to tackle cervical cancer”.
It is hoped that the conference will increase public awareness, stimulate young doctors, galvanise NGOs and increase leverage with the government to take preventive steps to fight cervical cancer in India.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> TamilNadu / by Express News Service / August 27th, 2015
The Department of Library Services, Christian Medical College conducted a regional workshop on ‘Scientific Writing’ in collaboration with the University of Madras to enhance communication skills.
Dr. Amudavalli, Head of Library and Information Science Department, University of Madras, in her opening address titled “Introduction to Scientific Writing” emphasized the importance of communication and presentation skills. She said reading books enhanced writing skills and said despite advancements in technology, there is no replacement for books and newspapers.
This reinforces the larger role that librarians have to play in information transfer. The librarian provides personalised service to users, she said.
Professor Dr. Nagaraj Sitaram, from Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering, Bengaluru, presented an informative session titled “Preparation and Presentations of Research Proposals” and dealt with the dos and don’ts in research preparation and proposals. He addressed the elementary principles beginning with identification of the problem, composition, organisation, precision and fluidity in writing to support scientific findings in order to be published.
Dr. K.P. Vijayakumar, a professor from the University of Kerala in his topic on “Research Report Writing” emphasized efficient writing skills through experts sharing their views and experiences on the essentials of scientific writing. Dr. V Chandrakumar, University of Madras spoke on Reference Management.
There were about 90 delegates from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Puducherry
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> TamilNadu / by Express News Service / August 27th, 2015
The Centre has given the go-ahead for the state to convert Adyar Cancer In stitute into a centre of excellence and a State Cancer Centre.
Announcing this in the assembly, chief minister J Jayalalithaa took credit for the upgrading of the institute and praised it for the good work it has been doing to treat cancer patients for many years. She said the institute would be upgraded at a cost of `120 crore.
The chief minister had in a 2013 letter to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought that the institute be upgraded.
“A proposal for upgrading the centre as a national centre is pending with the Union ministry of health and family welfare and it may be approved to enable it to expand and strengthen its capacity to treat cancer patients in larger numbers,” Jayalalithaa had stated. In a statement in the assembly on Tuesday, Jayalalithaa said, “The Centre has accepted the request to make the cancer institute a centre for excellence. It will be [done] at a cost of Rs 120 crore.”
The state will also provide mammography equipment to 15 district government hospitals at a cost of Rs 2.25 crore, she said.
Thanking the chief minister, Adyar Cancer Institute chairperson Dr V Shanta said the institute will spend the funds allocated to it over a period of 10 years. “It can be used only for purchase of equipment and construction of buildings,” she said. “We cannot use the funds for maintenance or to increase salaries of our employees. It is great honour that our work has been recognised.”
Stating that the cancer institute is a leader in its field, Dr Shanta said it could play a leadership role for all cancer treatment centres in the state.
“It is my dream to assume a leadership role and coordinate the screening and prevention measures being done by various centres in districts. As a nodal agency we will be able to collate data collected from these centres and analyse it,” Dr Shanta said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / by B. Sivakumar, TNN / August 26th, 2015
The story is also a vindication of sorts for India’s patent regime that is often criticized in the West for not honouring intellectual property rights in medicine.
Less than four months ago, Greg Jeffery was on the verge of getting liver cirrhosis. The 61-year-old Australian, suffering from hepatitis C, desperately needed a drug called Sivoldi to reverse the life-threatening condition.
The problem was, each Sivoldi pill cost over 1,000 Australian dollars and the total treatment regime of 84 tablets would have set him back by around 100,000 dollars.
Jeffery, a historian and author, didn’t have that kind of money. Desperate to source the drug at a cheaper rate, he landed in Chennai three months ago. There, he not only got the drug but bought it for less than one-tenth the price in Australia.
“The same treatment with the same drug in India is $900,” Jeffery told Australian TV channel, ABC.
” Basically as soon as I got home I started taking it. Within 11 days all my liver functions had returned to normal and within four weeks there was no virus detectable in my blood — I was essentially cured,” he told the channel.
Jeffery’s story, now all over Australian media, has renewed the debate on whether life-saving drugs should be priced so high.
” If you haven’t got the money, for a lot of people it’s a death sentence — you die,” Jeffery told ABC. ” I was right on the edge of cirrhosis of the liver, once you get cirrhosis you then open up to tumours and cancer.”
And just like the protagonist of Hollywood movie Dallas Buyers Club, Jeffery is now helping other Australians in a similar situation to source the drug from India.
” I get about 40 to 50 emails every day, seven days a week and they are from people who have hep C, whose mother or father has hep C, wife or husband has hep C,” he told the channel.
The story is also a vindication of sorts for India’s patent regime that is often criticized in the West for not honouring intellectual property rights in medicine.
In January this year, India’s patent office rejected the patent application for Sovaldi (chemical name sofosbuvir) from US pharma giant Gilead Sciences on the ground that there was little evidence to show that ” minor changes in the molecule” had substantially improved the drug.
What made the ruling possible was a controversial provision in India’s law that says patent applications can be turned down if they fail to show sufficient novelty and inventive steps.
The decision opened the doors for Indian manufacturers to copy the drug and sell it cheaply. According to one report, 10 Indian companies were now making sofosbuvir. Two Hyderabad-based companies have reportedly priced their copied version at a retail price of Rs 19,900 per bottle of 28 tablets of 400 mg dosage, which is one-90th of Gilead’s price.
Earlier, a study from Liverpool University had claimed that sofosbuvir could be produced for as little as $101 for a three-month treatment course.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> Science / TNN / August 21st, 2015
Sangeetha with headmistress Ruby Puthotta (left), her parents and teachers. Photo: K.V. Srinivasan / The Hindu
Designing a robotic racing car, she stood out in the ‘Building Bridges’ programme at the University of Rhodes Island
Sangeetha does not drive a racing car, but she just might help you drive one. This class IX student of Siva Swami Ayyar Girls Higher Secondary School recently designed a robotic racing car at the University of Rhodes Island, Kingston, United States. She is one of 20 students who took part in ‘Building Bridges’, a four-week cross-cultural and academic programme that introduces students to engineering and robotics.
Of the eight students selected from India, Sangeetha is the only one from the state representing a government-aided school. Robotics classes were the best part of the programme, she says, which allowed every team to design a car. Each of the participants was teamed with participants from the United States and Pakistan.
“For two days, our car did not move. Once we learnt coding and the technicalities involved in sensor technology, we stayed late into the night to finish designing the car,” she says.
Sangeetha plans to pursue a career in mechanical engineering and also design an autorickshaw for her father, an autorickshaw driver.
Although much of the expense for the trip was borne by the organisers, her parents spent around Rs. 7,000 towards the preparations she had to make for joining the programme. “She had to do a lot of reading, so we got her an Internet connection and some clothes for the journey. We borrowed money but that’s fine as she has made us proud,” say her parents S. Rajakumari and L. Subramani.
Sangeetha, a national level Silambam player, also stunned everyone with her Silambam performance at the meet.
The Mylapore school got an opportunity to send a student to the programme after it partnered for the ‘STEM Education’ programme, for which five schools from the city were selected.
“The entire class VIII was made to take a test to check one’s interest in science and technology. Twenty were short-listed and trained for almost a year in spoken English, leadership skills and science and maths,” says V. Prema, teacher in-charge of the project. Verizon Technologies and Institute of International Education sponsored the student.
Sangeetha is grateful to the secretary of the school Leela Narendran, headmistress Ruby Puthotta and other teachers who encouraged her.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> DownTown / by Liffy Thomas / Chennai – August 08th, 2015
Pichai Sundararajan aka Sundar Pichai. / Photo: Kamal Narang / The Hindu
“Super excited about his progress and dedication to the company,” says Google co-founder Larry Page.
Google’s announcement on Monday that it would be subsumed within a new parent company called Alphabet had a bonus for people of Indian-origin world over: the company’s head of Products and Engineering, Chennai-born Pichai Sundararajan, was anointed the CEO of the new, “slimmed down” Google.
Underscoring his confidence in the man known as Sundar Pichai (43), Google boss Larry Page said of the restructuring in the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin, “A key part of this is Sundar Pichai.”
Mr. Pichai, who is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and Stanford University, had “really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses,” Mr. Page said in a blog post, adding that he and Mr. Brin were “super excited about his progress and dedication to the company.”
They may well have reason to feel fortunate that Mr. Pichai is the man to head their $66-billion revenue, $16-billion profit, company– by most accounts he combines a deep passion for engineering excellence with a rare managerial quality of attracting the best talent into the teams he works with.
Mr. Pichai started at Google in 2004, where he was known as a “low-key manager” who worked on the Google toolbar and then led the launch of the market-beating Chrome browser in 2008.
Following this his rise through the ranks of Google took on an increasingly meteoric tenor, and soon he became Vice President, then Senior Vice President, and ultimately was charged with supervising all Google apps including Gmail and Google Drive and finally given control of Android itself.
His promotion to Product Chief in October 2014 literally made him Mr. Page’s second-in-command with oversight of day-to-day operations for all of Google’s major products including maps, search, and advertising.
Some of Mr. Pichai’s colleagues describe him in the media as a skilled diplomat, including Caesar Sengupta, a Google Vice President who has worked with Mr. Pichai for eight years, and said to Bloomberg News, “I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk.”
Nowhere was Mr. Pichai’s easy blending of techno-diplomatic competence evident than in early 2014, when the fracas between Samsung and Google was reaching fever pitch, at the time over Samsung’s Magazine UX interface for its tablets, which Google felt may have been deliberately underselling Google services such as its Play apps store.
According to reports “Defusing the situation fell to Sundar Pichai, the tactful, tactical new chief of Google’s Android division. Pichai set up a series of meetings with J.K. Shin, CEO of Samsung Mobile Communications, [where] they held ‘frank conversations’ about the companies’ intertwined fates [and a] fragile peace was forged.”
Since then, Samsung has apparently agreed to scale back Magazine UX, and the two corporations have announced a broad patent cross-licensing arrangement to implement which they “now work together more closely on user experience than we ever have before,” according to Mr. Pichai.
Another apparent talent of Google’s new CEO – his thinking seems to be ahead of the curve. Although Mr. Pichai trained in metallurgy and materials science at IIT Kharagpur, and Stanford and did an MBA at Wharton, he was already deeply immersed in the world of electronics.
According to one of his college professors Mr. Pichai “was doing work in the field of electronics at a time when no separate course on electronics existed in our curriculum.”
The Google founders no doubt recognised that Mr. Pichai was a man on an evangelical-type mission for pushing the boundaries of technology.
Mr. Pichai most eloquently outlined this mission when he said, “For me, it matters that we drive technology as an equalising force, as an enabler for everyone around the world. Which is why I do want Google to see, push, and invest more in making sure computing is more accessible, connectivity is more accessible.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Technology / by Narayan Lakshman / Washington – August 11th, 2015
Doctors at Rajan Dental Institute performed a new technique where they grafted bones from the patient’s cheekbone.
Chennai :
More than the difficulty she faced while eating and speaking, it was the curious stares of people that upset 17-year-old Manju (name changed). The teenager, who was suffering from a genetic disorder, lost all her teeth by the age of 14, and found it difficult to step into college this year with dentures.
Conventionally doctors would graft the hip bone and give permanent implants in a procedure that spans over a year. But doctors at Rajan Dental Institute here performed a new technique where they grafted bones from her cheekbone and gave her implants – all within a week.
At the age of four, the patient was diagnosed with Papillon Lefevre Syndrome, a rare, genetic autosomal disorder that affects 1 in a million people. “It leads to progressive bone loss around teeth, and subsequent teeth loss. It is often treated by the usage of removable dentures from a very young age,” said Oral and Maxillo Facial surgeon Dr R Gunaseelan.
Two months ago, the doctor and his team performed a procedure called Zygoma Implant technique, in which the cheekbone’s support is used to implant.
“On the fourth day after Zygoma Implant surgery, Manju was given permanent artificial teeth that closely resemble her natural teeth. She is now able to talk without the fear of her dentures falling off and is more confident as an individual,” said the doctor.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / by Janani Sampath, TNN / August 07th, 2015
Sofia Ashraf’s video has had more than a million views on YouTube, drawing attention to accusations against a thermometer factory in the town of Kodaikanal that closed down 14 years ago.
Sofia Ashraf.
An Indian rapper has gone viral with a music video calling on consumer products giant Unilever to clean up alleged toxic waste from a forested southern hill station. Sofia Ashraf’s video, posted online by a nongovernmental organization called Jhatkaa, or “shock” in Hindi, has had more than a million views on YouTube, drawing attention to accusations against a thermometer factory in the town of Kodaikanal that closed down 14 years ago.
Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods company, has denied wrongdoing. It disputes claims of former workers who say their health has been damaged by exposure to mercury. The company said it shut down the factory in 2001 when environmental activists including Greenpeace “brought to Hindustan Unilever’s attention the fact that glass scrap containing mercury” had been sold to a scrap dealer about three kilometres from the factory.
“We have been rigorous in establishing the facts and several independent expert studies have concluded that there were no adverse impacts on the health of our people at Kodaikanal. We have also taken action to ensure the clean-up of soil within the factory premises,” a Hindustan Unilever spokesperson said in an email.
“There is still work to do here – which we are committed to fulfilling – as soon as we have received final consent from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to start the soil remediation.” Set to the beat of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”, and retweeted by Minaj herself, Ashraf also asks Unilever to compensate workers.
“Kodaikanal won’t step down, until you make amends now,” she raps.
source : YouTube
source: http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in / IndiaToday.in / Home> News> India / Reuters Mumbai / August 04th, 2015
