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Bangalore outsourcing revenue increases
India’s technology hub Bangalore experienced a 20 per cent growth to $2.05 billion in its software and back-office outsourcing exports in the April-September half-year period, an official said last week.
Also, 57 foreign companies opened offices in the city and had invested a total of $209 million until Sept 27, when the figures were calculated, B.V. Naidu, director of the federal government body Software Technology Parks of India told reporters.
“The momentum of outsourcing growth is the same as we witnessed last year and we expect it to accelerate in the next two quarters,” Naidu said. India’s financial year starts in April.
Naidu expected full year revenues to be at least $8.7 billion, or 30 per cent higher than the last year’s figure of $6.7 billion. Industry leaders had feared that Bangalore’s outsourcing revenue growth might slow down due to the city’s sagging infrastructure and resistance from US labour groups. But the latest growth figures suggest there has been no decrease in Western outsourcing.
Western companies save costs by farming out software development, engineering design and back-office functions to India and other countries where wages are low and skilled workers are plentiful. “I won’t say our infrastructure problems have been sorted out, but we still have rich human resources and that ensures dynamic growth for us,” Naidu said.
Many of the world’s largest technology companies, including Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp, Oracle Inc, and Google Inc, have their offices in Bangalore. India’s revenue from Western outsourcing was $17.2 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2005.
Laptop for children
The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world’s children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.
The machines’ AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there’s no electricity. They’d be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes.
For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full colour to glare-resistant black-and-white. And surrounding it all, the laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly, because “they have to be absolutely indestructible,” said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader who offered an update on the project last week.
Negroponte hatched the $100 laptop idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also take home to use on their own. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
Exploring the unknown
A new course, aiming to teach students all about the search for extraterrestrial life, has been launched at the University of Glamorgan. The degree represents the UK’s first undergraduate course in astrobiology, the study of the search for life beyond Earth, and has attracted interest from a number of young people who are keen to discover about the possibility of life on other planets.
A degree in alien life seems, on the surface, to be the latest possible contender for the title of a so-called Mickey Mouse degrees, a title used by the former higher education minister, Margaret Hodge, to describe degrees where “the content is perhaps not as rigorous as one would expect”.
It also sounds like the sort of thing to attract the attention of science fiction enthusiasts, and the course does indeed look at the ways in which popular literary culture has influenced scientific debate concerning life on other planets.
However, many of astrobiology’s key issues are grounded firmly within scientific disciplines, and its goals represent a major driving force behind current space programmes, with most scientists regarding the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe as beyond reasonable doubt.
Evolution debate
The concept of ‘intelligent design’ is a form of creationism and is not based on scientific method, a professor told a US court recently. Robert T. Pennock was called as a witness in the trial over whether creationism should be taught in US public schools.
Pennock, a professor of science and philosophy at Michigan State University, testified on behalf of families who sued a Pennsylvania school district. He said supporters of intelligent design did not offer evidence to support their idea.
Proponents of intelligent design argue that life on Earth was the product of an unidentified intelligent force, and that Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection cannot fully explain the origin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms. “As scientists go about their business, they follow a method,” Pennock said. “Intelligent design wants to reject that and so it doesn’t really fall within the purview of science.” The case continues.
Earth’s twin
European scientists are preparing to monitor the neighbour from hell. Venus Express, a robot spacecraft little bigger than a fridge, is to be the first mission to the second rock from Sun in 15 years.
Venus is 4.6bn years old, of similar diameter and mass to the Earth, and made of the same rocks. It occupies the same neighbourhood and should be warm and welcoming, like Earth. But it is not.
Fred Taylor, of the University of Oxford, said: “It’s very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet so much like the Earth. It is telling us that we really don’t understand the Earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries.”
Venus Express will take off on Oct 26, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. A second upper-stage Fregat rocket will push it on to a 162-day trajectory towards Venus.
In April the spacecraft will be sent pirouetting as close as 155 miles around its partner, and then soaring 41,000 miles away. It will do this for 500 Earth days.
One day on Venus, which alone of all the planets rotates backwards, lasts 243 Earth days. The planet’s air is thick, at 90 times the pressure at sea level on Earth, and there are dense clouds of sulphuric acid. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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