Friday 31 January 2014

Call for Papers
 
American International Journal of Contemporary Research
ISSN 2162-139X (Print), ISSN 2162-142X (Online)
 
American International Journal of Contemporary Research (AIJCR) is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed multidisciplinary journal published by Center for Promoting Ideas (CPI), USA. The main objective of AIJCR is to provide an intellectual platform for the research community. AIJCR aims to promote contemporary research in business, humanities, social science, science and technology and become the leading journal in the world.
 
The journal publishes research papers in three broad specific fields as follows:
 
Business and Economics
Management, marketing, finance, economics, banking, accounting, human resources management, international business, hotel and tourism, entrepreneurship development, business ethics, development studies and so on.
 
Humanities and Social science
Anthropology, communication studies, corporate governance, criminology, cross-cultural studies, demography, education, ethics, geography, history, industrial relations, information science, international relations, law, linguistics, library science, media studies, methodology, philosophy, political science, population Studies, psychology, public administration, sociology, social welfare, linguistics, literature, paralegal, performing arts (music, theatre & dance), religious studies, visual arts, women studies.
 
Science and Technology
Astronomy and astrophysics, Chemistry, Earth and atmospheric sciences, Physics, Biology in general, Agriculture, Biophysics and biochemistry, Botany, Environmental Science, Forestry, Genetics, Horticulture, Husbandry, Neuroscience, Zoology, Computer science, Engineering, Robotics and Automation, Materials science, Mathematics, Mechanics, Statistics, Health Care & Public Health, Nutrition and Food Science, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and so on.
 
The journal is published both in print and online versions.
 
AIJCR publishes original papers, review papers, conceptual framework, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, technical notes, and book reviews.
 
AIJCR is indexed with and included in Cabell’sEBSCOUlrich’s ,IndexCopernicus International, and Gale. Moreover the journal is under the indexing process with ISI, ERIC, ProQuest, Scopus, DOAJ and Econlit.
 
AIJCR is inviting papers for Vol. 4 No. 2 which is scheduled to be published on February 28, 2014.  Last of submission: February 10, 2014.However, an early submission will get preference in case of review and publication process. 
 
Send your manuscript to the editor at editor@aijcrnet.com
 
For more information, visit the official website of the journal www.aijcrnet.com 
 
With thanks,
 
Dr. Andrew Lessard
The Chief Editor, American International Journal of Contemporary Research
Records of Britons in India during Raj now available online
 
Over 2 million records chronicling the lives of British individuals who went to India since the time of the East India Company are now available online through the joint efforts of the British Library and a family history website, adding a new resource for historians  andresearchers.

The records include ancestry details of leading individuals such as Prime Minister David Cameron, whose six times great grandfather, 19th century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, was born in erstwhile Calcutta.

The India Office Records held at the British Library spanning over two centuries of the British, from the East India Company to the Raj through to independence in 1947, have been scanned and are fully searchable online for the first time at the website.

The records will be of interest not only to family historians, but also social historians, academic researchers and biographers. Insights can be gained into the culture of British India as the records reveal much about the careers and family lives of expats, the offices of power and the men who held them, infant mortality, Anglo Indian marriages and family relationships.

The newly-released records chronicle the lives of Europeans living in areas under British influence and include individuals from all walks of life, the British Library said.

The details of their lives and deaths are documented in a variety of records ranging from returns of baptisms, marriages and burials, civil and military pensions and wills, to East India Company cadet papers and applications for the civil service.

The British in India collection makes it possible to find missing ancestors and build a vivid and detailed picture of what life was like for those early expats.

Among the highlights are the baptism records of writers Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell.

The library said that the lives of women in India, from top officials’ wives to girls who attended the orphan schools, have been brought out of the shadows for the first time.

Monday 27 January 2014

Dear All,

We are pleased to inform you that access to Cambridge Books Online (e-Books) has been initiated  on TRIAL ACCESS until 28th February, 2014. You are requested to make the best use of the trial access to e-Books provided by the publisher. Based on the feedback from the faculty and students on the usage of these e-Books, the library may be consider for the purchase to the library.
 
TRIAL PERIOD: Until 28/02/2014

Cambridge Books Online offers access to eBooks from our world-renowned publishing programme, covering subjects from all disciplines across science, technology and medicine, as well as humanities and social sciences.
 
Please visit the publisher website http://ebooks.cambridge.org  to access the e-books OR access it from the library homepage as well as on e-resources page at http://library.tiss.edu  The TRIAL ACCESS is also available through ezproxy remote access facility.

with best regards,

Thanks & regards,
 
 
Dr. Mallikarjun Angadi
Deputy Librarian
 

Monday 20 January 2014

IT professionals launch new education website

BHUBANESWAR: A group of young IT professionals has launched a new software-based website intending to enhance the quality of the education system and to enrich campus life in an innovative way.

"(http://www.backyard.in) is an online educational cum social networking service like Facebook. It will help everyone in an educational institution — including the principal, administrators, faculties and students — in enhancing the quality of education and the software will tie the whole college in a logical thread," Sarathi Sabyasachi Sahoo, the leader of the group, said.

Sahoo, an IT professional who worked with Yahoo for five years said: "We have taken 40 technical and management colleges and two colleges in the city into consideration at the initial stage. Before developing the software, a survey was conducted by our team members in various technical colleges in the city and we got a good response to the idea." 

Stating that the software/website will provide various services to the students, Sahoo said each individual will be given login id and password to access his/her ID, provide a dashboard with separate login-in access to all students along with teachers, various modules of the software will take care of all processes of an institution like- student-teacher interaction, senior-junior interaction, doubt clearance, regular e-attendance, buying and selling of goods like draft, apron and others.
The software has the module to manage the hall of fame, notice board, and the library. 

Various feature of this website include advance search bar, genuine id for students, user friendly interface, performance graph for students in terms of subjects, latest news update on the dashboard, question and answer section (where a student can ask any question on any subject under the courses of study and this can be answered by the concerned teacher or any other student).

The website also provides facilities like in-built chat and message, unlimited photo upload and information about the college events, news and holidays, he said.

Source | Times of India | 20 January 2014

Thursday 16 January 2014

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law is pleased to announce the opening of the application period for the Program of Advanced Studies on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law that will be offered from May 27 to July 13 of 2014. This Program offers 19 courses in English and Spanish lectured by over 40 scholars of relevance in the field of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and gathers more than 170 participants from more than 40 different countries and with different levels of professional experience. The Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law provides through this Program the unique opportunity to learn and interact with judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Special Rapporteurs of United Nations, members of the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights, recognized members of NGOs and professors from all over the world. The Program is offered in three categories which include the modality of Certificate of Attendance for foreign students, ABA Credits for U.S. students and finally, the Diploma Course that is offered to a select group of 35 law professionals who fulfill the admission requirements. The application form for this program is available at http://www.wcl.american.edu/hracademy/app.cfm.



Human Rights Essay Award Competition

Deadline: February 1, 2014

This annual competition sponsored by the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law seeks to stimulate the production of scholarly work in international human rights law.
The 2014 topic is Persons with Disabilities and International Human Rights Law. Participants have the flexibility to choose any subject related to the assigned topic. The best articles may be published in the American University International Law Review.
The Academy will grant two Awards, one for the best article in English and one for the best article in Spanish. The Award in each case will consist of:
  • a scholarship to the Academy’s Program of Advanced Studies
  • travel expenses to and from Washington D.C.
  • housing at the university dorms
  • a per diem for living expenses
For detailed guidelines about the award please visit:www.wcl.american.edu/hracademy/hraward.cfm or contact us at: hracademy@wcl.american.edu


Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
American University Washington College of Law

Wednesday 1 January 2014

Dear All,

We are happy to bring to your kind notice that the "Current Labour Reports" is available for online access. Please use the following details to access the same.

User ID: 19005
PW: 005019 and
E-mail: srdlib2013@gmail.com

Librarian

Coming soon: Machines with a mind of their own

Subodh Varma | TIG 



    This new year promises to be big on digital technologies, with many things that got started earlier coming together finally. Here are some example of how ‘coming together’ can lead to a big bang… 

THE DATA TRAIL 
    
Big data has been around for some time. It is being collected through a swathe of sources — from satellites to software codes, from gigantic machines like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to aggregates of small datasets like Amazon’s back office operations, and of course from your mobile devices and RFIDs. One estimate puts the total data produced every day in 2012 at a mind boggling 2.5 exabytes, that is, bytes that number 25 followed by 17 zeros. 
    But how does it affect you and me? Among all the data being generated, there is a small but very significant subset of personal data. This could be by Twitter, Facebook or your email, or even by wearable devices like your Google Glass. Then there is your shopping activity, in fact all your activity on the Net. 
    Link all this big data generated by everybody to a cloud based computing machine, which links it to the “internet of things”, and there you have two products. One is the environment tracking you all the time, telling you your location, nearest places you can visit if hungry, physical parameters like temperature and updating you about cricket (or football) scores, even as you track the traffic situation. And the other is companies tracking you. Whether you like this or not, this is what is coming this year. 
    But, isn’t all this happening already? It is – but in advanced industrial societies. Now, with the mobile and tablet revolution, it is destined to enter the big bad third world too. 


GETTING INTERCONNECTED 
    
Just to give an example, consider the smartphone. Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 455.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, Inc. But what is noteworthy is that smartphones accounted for 55% of this, notching up sales of 250.2 million units. Where are sales growing strongest? In Asia/Pacific in both markets — the smartphone segment with 77.3% increase and the mobile phone segment with 11.9% growth. “Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP affordable smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner in a statement. 

MACHINES GET SMARTER 
    
Machine learning is another thing to watch out for. We are used to the technological limit of machines — they will perform as much as the programmer has fed them, no more, no less. But there are signs of a new wave of machines that will interact with humans, other machines and the environment and learn new things. All the 
big data companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook have hired top experts to develop ‘cognitive’ systems of this kind. One specific application is smart devices, another is natural language processing, especially spoken natural language. This will help machine understand and respond to verbal commands more and more – tying up with the internet of things. 
    Another field poised for take-off is the brain-machine interface — how to control machines with your brain and nerves and conversely, how to receive inputs from machines. Using brain waves (recorded as EEG) to control computers or wheelchairs and implanting chips in brains to do the same has been already demonstrated, Nitish V. Thakor, professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University told TOI. But, these are a one way street: brain sends signals that are decoded to control a computer or a robot. The big challenge is how to get information back to brain? 
    “Early results reported this year open doors to achieving bidirectional BMI. We are not there yet, as it requires considerable engineering and scientific work,” Thakor said. 

ROBOTS GET BRAINER 
    
Finally, this coming year may see the rise of better more intelligent, more human robots. A recent robot Olympiad held in Miami, US, displayed the rather limited capabilities of some of the most advanced robots in the world – they were clunky, barely managed to walk and fumbled around with basic tasks that any human could do in a jiffy. One indication that things are going to change is that Google, Amazon and Apple have all spent millions this year on robotics. Google bought eight robotic companies, Amazon announced plans to deliver packages through drones and Apple invested heavily in factory robots. 
    So, get ready for a future full of machines.

SMART PHONES GET SMARTER


Source::: The Times of India, 01-01-2014, p.21,   http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2014/01/01&PageLabel=23&EntityId=Ar02301&ViewMode=HTML
Dear Readers,

We take this great opportunity to wish you a Very Happy New Year 2014. May this year be a happy reading and  progressive year.

With Best wishes,

Library Team