Shveta Sharma

Today we are exploring the universe. We are miles apart yet we can talk to each other and see each other in matter of seconds through internet. Do the craziest possible calculations in fraction of seconds with the help of computers. But would it all have been possible without the invention of the number ZERO or the current Number System and Decimal system?

Indian scientists have shaped the course of mathematics and astronomy for the world to marvel upon. One of the very early pioneers in astronomy and mathematics was Aryabhatta who invented the number "ZERO" in 5th century A.D. Many argue the point saying that the concept was known even before Aryabhatta did, by the Greeks. It was just not used appropriately by them. However, the concept of zero has always(even before Aryabhatta invented Zero) been defined as "SHUNYA" (which means "VOID") in Sanskrit and used in India (Sanskrit is an Indian language which is the oldest and the most complete language in the world) . It was denoted as an empty place or a dot earlier. Later Aryabhatt used word KHA which later became ZERO to signify SHUNYA.
Not just this, the modern day number system and decimal systems also finds its origins in India.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, a famous French mathematician and Astrnomer said that "The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. " http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Indian_numerals.html

Aryabhatta also gave close approximation for Pi as 3.1416 (upto 8 decimal places) which is used today. He further gave tables of half chords which are now known as sine tables, along with cosine tables.He was the one who came up with formulas to calculate Volume of a cube or area of a square.
Aryabhatta in his book also gave an algortihm named Aryabhatta algorithm , which today people are trying to use for cryptography applications. Further, Algebra, Geometry (as early as 1000B.C.) and trignometry were also invented by the Indians.

India has provided vital elements of the scientific foundation without which humanity could not have entered this modern age of science and technology.

Aryabhatiya - book on astronomy and mathematics written by Aryabhatta
http://www.gongol.com/research/math/aryabhatiya/

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Everyone talks about child labor, how cruel it is and that it should be eradicated. True, it is unacceptable to make a less than 16 year old kid work when he should be enjoying and getting education like his richer counterparts.
But does anyone ever stop to think how to go about it?

One of the major reasons of child labor today is poverty and large population. The parents of such families are often unemployed or underpaid. Children get jobs easily as they can be exploited and can be paid less than the expected wages. If these kids don’t work, the family has to go with less or no food for days at times.

Laying off kids working for companies and opening schools to give free education to these kids will not help at all. It will only end up making life worse for the kids and their families. Further, the parents will never understand the concept. They would rather have their kids earning for the family and also learning skills that would ensure he can work and get money in future.

Kids from such families should be given free education at schools. Apart from the basic education, they should also be taught skills that will help them to earn later on. Additionally, whatever these kids make in the schools using the skills that they are taught, should be sold so that they can earn while they are learning.

Furthermore, the government should ensure that the older earning members of the families can get good enough income for the family. Generate jobs and ensure that the employees get at least the minimum wages fixed by the government.
The elders of the family also need to be educated about family planning. Their concept behind bigger families is that larger family means more earning members. They need to be told that larger family also means more people to feed.

We should also not forget that it’s not just the responsibility of the government, but all of us as the members of this society to help these families in the hour of crisis like disease, calamity etc. The people need to pitch in in helping the government get rid of this problem.

We know that child labor can never be eradicated completely, but if parents have alternatives like these, then we definitely can have some control over this problem.

http://www.childlaborphotoproject.org/childlabor.html

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Web 2.0 is a web based platform that allows sharing of information among the internet users. One of the most popular Web2.0 applications is Wikipedia.
Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is web based, multilingual encyclopedia. It is a large database of write-ups collaboratively written and edited by its users who have access to internet. It is a non commercial website run by Wikimedia foundation and survives on donations and Wales' modest fortune.
The word Wikipedia, coined by Larry Sanger, is derived from two words:
• Wiki: which are series of web pages that can be edited by anyone who has access to internet.
• Encyclopedia: which is a book that contains information on all branches or one branch of knowledge (www.wikipedia.org).
History:
Jimmy Wales loved to read Britannica and surf the net. He thought why not combine the two hobbies. In 1999, he left his job and created an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, which everyone with internet access could view free of cost. There were volunteers who helped add, edit and update the content on the site regularly. However, the writing content was extremely slow because of the 7 arduous stages of fact checking and peer review. At this speed, it would have taken a lot of time to equal the Britannica. Larry Sanger, the editor in chief of Nupedia, proposed the idea of using Wiki to get the content for Nupedia. The wiki was named Wikipedia and was formally launched on January 15, 2001. However, within 2 weeks, Wikipedia had grown bigger than Nupedia. Wikipedia's rapid growth quickly overshadowed Nupedia's development
Published online in more than 250 languages, Wikipedia has more than 8 million articles. On September 9, 2007 Wikipedia English had its 2 millionth article published, nearly 20 times as many as in Britannica. This number nearly doubles each year.
Due to Wikipedia’s open nature, some people have tried to deface, delete or push one sided views on it. In some cases extreme steps have to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most of 2004. Further, if anything unacceptable gets published on wikipedia, it gets removed as soon as possible. According to an M.I.T. study, on an average, an obscenity or anything unacceptable randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in 1.7 minutes.

https://usffiles.usfca.edu/FacStaff/jpallen/public/we2_si-draft.pdf

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Web 2.0 was initially a term popularized by O’ Reilly media (O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Media) )as the name of web development conference that started in October 2004. During this conference, it was suggested that web was in the phase of rebirth. Earlier, the emphasis was on networking, i.e., connecting computers and making the technology more efficient for computers. However, with this rebirth, it is all about connecting people and making the technology efficient for them. This is what later came to be defined as Web 2.0. The term Web 2.0 basically embraces everything that’s new on the web. It also uses some of the technologies that were derived in the late 1990s. It is defined as the internet based platform which makes it easy for users, whether they are web designers or not, to collaborate and share files. These files can be in any format, whether audio, video or text.
Some of the popular examples of Web 2.0 applications are:
• Wikipedia, a multilingual online encyclopedia which is collaboratively written and edited by its readers.
• YouTube, which allows sharing videos.
• Facebook, which is a social networking site where users can communicate with each other and share their photos, videos, links, etc.
• Flickr which is a website where users can share digital photographs.

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The word ‘Renaissance’ is a French word which means ‘rebirth’. European renaissance was the time which brought great social and cultural changes and paved way for new inventions in Europe. It was a period of new awakening in Europe.

European renaissance was the period between 14th and 17th century immediately following the middle ages period in Europe. In order to understand Renaissance better, we need to know the middle ages period and the period before it.

Before the middle ages period, Rome ruled most of the Europe. During this period there were various advancements in the fields of government, science, technology, art etc. However, with the fall of the Roman rule, the Western Europe fell into a sluggish period called the middle ages. During the middle ages, the church held most of the power and the economy was supported by agriculture. People grew up superstitious, ignorant and illiterate as exploration and learning was almost stopped.

In 14th century, a deadly disease called ‘Black Death’ spread across Europe that led to death of many people. The priests were not able to protect the people or come up with a solution against the disease. This led to people losing their belief in church.

People began to question their society’s way of living. They overcame their fears and started exploring. This all led to cultural movement which came to be known as the ‘European Renaissance’. It brought back the era before middle ages when Rome ruled most of the Europe. This period saw growth in economy and changes in various social and cultural aspects. People “moved from a God-centered to a more humanistic outlook”.1

The Renaissance http://histclo.com/chron/med/renas.html

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/REN/REN.HTM

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Communication is not only essence of being human, but also a vital property of life.” (John A. Piece http://www.WorldOfQuotes.com ).
In order to live, people should be able to share information and express themselves. It is as important as breathing, eating and drinking. For a civilzation to shape up nicely, it is very important that the communication process is good in that society.
From the very early days, people have found ways to communicate with each other. They can share information in both verbal and non-verbal ways, be it using symbols or markings on the wall that early humans used, or the spoken language that is used now. Apart from spoken language, people also use other mediums like, in writing, symbols, body language, eye contact, sign language, tone of voice which can tell the mood of the speaker, etc.
Claude Shannon, known as the founding father of the electronic communications age, was a researcher at Bell laboratories. He came up with a model for communication in 1948 which proposes that any communication has to have six elements in it: source, receiver, encoder, decoder, channel and a message. When applied to human communication, source and receiver are the people who communicate with each other, message is the information that needs to be communicated, a channel through which the message is to be sent (can be a telephone, internet, newspaper or face to face communication), an encoder which is used to encode the message before sending it through the channel (language) , and a decoder which decodes the message for the receiver on the basis of which the receiver decides whether he or she understands the message (human brain).
Communication process can get hampered by the external noises like too many speakers trying to communicate at the same time. “To effectively communicate we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication to others”. (Anthony Robbins, http://www.WorldOfQuotes.com). Hence, listening is the most important part for communication to be a success.
Keeping all this in mind, human communication can be defined as the process of exchanging information between source and receiver, verbally or non-verbally, either through speech, in writing or through gestures, using some channel while keeping the external noise minimal.

http://foulger.info/davis/research/unifiedModelOfCommunication.htm

Posted by Shveta Sharma at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)