What the MP,India Children's Murders Tell Us About Caste and Cleanliness in India

An 'Open defecation free' village has seen a caste crime of staggering brutality over what is ostensibly, open defecation.

The bodies of the two children at their house in Madhya Pradeh's Shivpuri district,India

Children were beaten to death for defecating in the open in Shivpuri, a district of Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior Chambal region, India.

It was September 25 morning. Twelve-year-old Roshni and 10-year-old Avinash, who did not have a toilet in their house, had defecated in the open near the Panchayat Bhavan, said Sirsod police station in charge R.S. Dhakad. “The accused objected to their act and beat them mercilessly with sticks,” he added. The children were taken to the hospital, where the doctors declared them brought dead. The accused are two bothers of a Yadav community in Bhavkhedi village of the Shivpuri.

Shivpuri is nearly 312 kilometres north of Bhopal,MP, India. Bhavkhedi village is 27 odd kilometres from the district headquarters.

The brothers, Hakim Yadav and Rameshwar Yadav have been arrested. They had clicked photos on their mobile phone before attacking the minors. Hakim Yadav later told police that he killed the children because he had been “commanded by god to kill demons.”

Roshni’s elder brother and Avinash’s father, 35-year-old Manoj Walmiki, told police that his family had been forced to defecate in the open as an influential member of the village panchayat – incidentally a relative of the Yadav brothers – did not let him build a toilet at home.

Manoj also told reporters that the family had been repeatedly targeted by upper caste villagers. They were not allowed to draw water from the village hand pump unless all other residents had done so. “I had a heated argument with the accused two years ago. They had wanted me to work for them as a labourer for a meagre sum. They abused me on caste lines and threatened to kill me,” he said.

The Walmikis’ hut.

According to the Shivpuri superintendent of police (SP), Rajesh Chandel, an FIR has been registered under Section 302 of IPC and relevant sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against the two accused.

Manoj’s is the only Dalit family in the village. His mud house has thatched roof and plastic sheets as walls. It does not have electricity connection. A functioning toilet would need a sceptic tank or a connection to a sewage network, enough water to clean and flush, and regular flow of water in flush tank. None of these are things the Walmikis look remotely close to being able to secure for themselves.

Shivpuri collector Anugrah P. who met the family to hand over cheques of ex-gratia of Rs four lakh for each of the children had an argument to justify the ODF tag. “There was a toilet in the house where Manoj’s family lived jointly. They moved to this house a little while ago,” she said.

The Madhya Pradesh chief minister too has expressed concern over the murders and directed police to take strict action against the accused.

Also in the fray is Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati who condemned the brutal attack on the Dalit minors and slammed the successive BJP and Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh for “failing to provide proper toilet facilities”.

The sufferings of  this particular Dalit family points to a gradual but certain strengthening of caste lines in rural Madhya Pradesh. Shivpuri district is no exception, with its significant population of the Dalit Jatav community throughout the Gwalior-Chambal region.

As per 2016 data released by the National Crime Records Bureau, Madhya Pradesh ranks first and neighbouring Rajasthan is second when it comes to atrocities against Scheduled Castes, based on the crime rate.

Facebook went down for more than 45 minutes on Sunday night

Social media users were left frustrated on Sunday as Facebook and Instagram suffered outages.
Users in the UAE were greeted during the evening by a message on Facebook saying "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."
Others were told it would be back after "required maintenance", and were unable to share or post content.

Instagram users meanwhile were unable to log into their accounts, although at 8.15pm UAE time the service appeared to be functioning smoothly.

The Down Detector website reported issues with Facebook from 9.36am EDT, with its live outage map showing the worst of the problems in the Far East, India, Australia, Malaysia and  United States.

Many people took to Twitter instead to vent their frustrations and to confirm that they had been prevented from accessing Facebook and Instagram.

The Express said that the outage monitoring website Down Detector logged more than 7,000 reports issues on Facebook. Down Detector said that Facebook started having problems about 9:30 a.m., Eastern time.

While complaints slowed early afternoon, Eastern and functions slowly returned to normal, some problems continued to persist

There was no comment made by Facebook on what was causing the problems beyond the error messages when users tried to log in.

I saw this issue at 11:40 PM Malaysian time. This issue got resolved around 12:30 AM. Total 45 minutes Facebook site was down. Only web site was down, fb messenger was working. 

ISRO’s new Commercial Arm : NewSpace India Limited

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) was inaugurated new commercial arm called NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) in Bengaluru

A private entity, Bengaluru-based Newspace India Limited, has been set up under the Department of Space to aid the transfer of ISRO technologies for commercial purposes. The company was incorporated on March 6 with Radhakrishnan Durairaj and Suma Devaki Ram as directors and a paid-up capital of Rs 10 crore.

This has come after the Union cabinet last month cleared the establishment of such a company to commercially exploit the research and development work of the space agency. This includes the small satellite programme, the small satellite launch vehicle (SSLV) programme and the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV).

K. Sivan, the chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told Times of India that the said entity will be a link between ISRO and the industry and help transfer its technologies to private firms for a fee.

While the space agency currently has a commercial arm – Antrix Corporation Limited – according to Sivan, Newspace India will play a different role since Antrix is solely involved in commercial launches of foreign satellites.


As per Antrix’s website, the company “promotes and commercially markets the products and services emanating from the Indian Space Programme.”

Other than commercially exploiting the tech transfer of SSLV, PSLV programmes and lithium-ion cells etc, Newspace India is also meant to market space-based products – in India and abroad.

“Once companies start mass production of small satellites and launchers, ISRO will be charging them for using its launch services,” Sivan explained.

Writing for Times of India, Surendra Singh noted that setting up this company will encourage the private sector to play a greater role in the production of small launchers as well as satellites.

According to Sivan, till now, ISRO has been directing engaging with private companies as well as overseeing the process of transfer of technology – for example of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre-developed lithium-ion (Li-ion) cell technology. According to a January 2019 release on ISRO’s website, ten industries were selected for the transfer of Li-ion cell technology.

Google+ Shutting Down for consumers

Google is shutting down the google+ on 2 April 2019 and for complete shutdown it will take  10 months.
The decision follows the revelation of a previously undisclosed security flaw that exposed users’ profile data that was remedied in March 2018.

Google says Google+ currently has “low usage and engagement” and that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds. Still, the company plans to keep the service alive for enterprise customers who use it to facilitate conversation among co-workers. New features will be rolled out for that use case, the company says. Google is focusing on a “secure corporate social network,” which is odd considering this announcement comes alongside news that the company left profile details unprotected

In addition to sunsetting Google+, the company announced new privacy adjustments for other Google service. API changes will limit developers’ access to data on Android devices and Gmail. Developers will no longer receive call log and SMS permissions on Android devices and contact interaction data won’t be available through the Android Contacts API. That same also API provided basic interaction data, like who you last messaged, and that permission is also being revoked.

As for the Gmail changes, the company is updating its User Data Policy for the consumer version of the email service. This will limit apps and the scope of their access to user data. Ben Smith, Google fellow and VP of engineering, writes: “Only apps directly enhancing email functionality — such as email clients, email backup services and productivity services (e.g., CRM and mail merge services) — will be authorized to access this data.”

Any developer who has this access will have to undergo security assessments and agree to new rules about data handling, like not transferring or selling user data for targeting ads, market research, email campaign tracking, or other unrelated purposes.

Google previously tried to quell privacy concerns earlier this year after The Wall Street Journal detailed how common it is for third-party app developers to be able to read and analyze users’ Gmail messages. At the time, Suzanne Frey, the director of the company’s security, trust, & privacy division of Google Cloud, emphasized that users should review what apps have access to their accounts and revoke it if necessary. Last year, Google announced that it would stop its long-standing practice of scanning the contents of individual Gmail users for advertising purposes. Of course, the company still has plenty of data it can target advertisements against, like Search history, YouTube views, and other Chrome actions.

These most recent changes are being attributed to an internal Google effort called Project Strobe, which involved a review of “third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps’ data access,” according to Google.

For more information visit here

Times when avengers 4 movie title “End Game” reveal in movies

There are two movies where Marvel gives us hit of avenger 4 movie title.
The first movie is Avengers:Age of Ultron and second is Avengers: Infinity War.
After the fighting with Ultron in tony stark's party, Tony stark  reveal the avengers 4 title while argumentation.

Look at the below video

The second movie is Avengers: Infinity War where doctor strange giving hit of avenger 4 movie title.
When Dr.strange pass the time stone to Thanos that time he saying “we are in the End Game”.


Watch the below video.

Hyundai is building a car that can walk on four legs

I'll admit I'm one of those people that has looked derisively at the AT-AT Walkers in "Star Wars" and other weird walking vehicles from various science fiction franchises in the past. I mean, walking is mechanically more complicated, slower and less efficient than a rolling wheel - hence the dearth of any practical walking vehicles. At least, until now.

Hyundai debuted a video animation at CES 2019 in Las Vegas showing off its walking car concept dubbed "Elevate." Unlike the All Terrain Armored Transport that George Lucas threw into the Battle of Hoth, this vehicle involves some inspired engineering that I wouldn't mind having along for some epic back-county skiing or biking trips some day. But just like the AT-AT, I sure wouldn't want one pursuing me, ever.

Hyundai-concept-car

While it's not armed with laser cannons (yet), Elevate's mobility capability is impressive thanks to what Hyundai calls "five degrees of freedom," which is how it describes the five different joints on the legs that connect to each wheel. The legs can fold up, allowing the vehicle to drive like a normal car but can also enable it to go just about anywhere by either rolling or walking when unfolded. Here's how the company describes it:

"This design is uniquely capable of both mammalian and reptilian walking gaits, allowing it to move in any direction. The legs also fold up into a stowed drive-mode... this allows Elevate to drive at highway speeds just like any other vehicle. But no other can climb a five foot wall, step over a five foot gap, walk over diverse terrain, and achieve a 15 foot wide track width, all while keeping its body and passengers completely level."

The concept comes from Hyundai Cradle, the carmaker's venture arm that invests and partners with innovative startups. The partner for Elevate isn't exactly a startup however: Detroit-based design firm Sundberg-Ferar has been around since 1934. Hyundai is pitching the concept as the future of disaster response, especially when rescue might involve navigating debris fields, as well as a resource for people living with disabilities and other day-to-day scenarios.

“Imagine a car stranded in a snow ditch just ten feet off the highway being able to walk or climb over the treacherous terrain, back to the road potentially saving its injured passengers – this is the future of vehicular mobility,” said Sundberg-Ferar design manager David Byron.

Elevate is also a fully electric vehicle with a modular design that allows for the entire cabin to be swapped out, enabling completely different applications such as military use. Of course, right now all we have is the above video and a small scale model Hyundai had on stage at CES. I reached out to Hyundai to ask how far along they are on producing a proof of concept and will let you know what the company has to say. 

Govt mulls stopping foreigners from skilled jobs below RM10,000 pay grade

PETALING JAYA: The government plans to stop foreigners from working in jobs with salaries below RM10,000.Human Resources Minister M Kulasegaran said Putrajaya was considering the abolition of the Category II and Category III employment passes given to expatriate workers.

There are three categories of employment passes. Category I refers to jobs paying RM10,000 and above, Category II is for salaries between RM5,000 and RM10,000, and Category III is for jobs below RM5,000.
Kulasegaran said Putrajaya was planning to only keep Category I, with the first and second categories to be phased out.

“We hope this can be done as soon as possible,” he told reporters after officiating the new Malaysia Expatriate Talent Service Centre (MYXpats Centre) today.He also said the plan would be first discussed with stakeholders.

He said the government wanted to ensure more Malaysians could fill up jobs under the second and third category.Last year, there were a total 117,000 expatriates working under several sectors, with 2,158 expatriates working under Category III, the minister said.

Google's Brain Team: What does it do?

For someone tasked with advancing a technology which, in the words of Google's chief executive, is "more profound than electricity and fire", Jeff Dean is a remarkably calm man.

Jeff Dean, Head of Artificial Intelligence, Google

As the head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the tech giant, he is responsible for leading a department that is integral to the future of Google, if not the future of human activity on Earth.

That such a cosmic task doesn't faze Mr Dean, who remains Zen even amid the frenzy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, is perhaps unsurprising.

One of his early interventions at Google involved dealing with a threat that "almost certainly" originated from outer space.

Space rays

Back at the turn of the century, Google's search engine began to malfunction, and its small group of coders were mystified as to the cause. It was Mr Dean, along with his close friend Sanjay Ghemawat, who diagnosed the extraterrestrial problem.

Google was running on cheap hardware, explains Dean, "sort of held together with baling wire and chewing gum", and it was therefore susceptible to "a very low probability event".

A particular ray from outer space will come in and hit one of the memory cells that stores a bit - either a zero or one - and flip it to a one or a zero, which is particularly bad if you're manipulating lots of data, because all of a sudden a few random bits in your data will be will be flipped and corrupted.

"Most machines these days have hardware protection against those. But the early machines Google were using really didn't."

These days, however, it's Google's cutting-edge machines that preoccupy Mr Dean's mind, and that of the firm's boldly named "Brain Team".

Its mission, to "make machines intelligent and improve people's lives" could hardly be more ambitious, even if the current applications of AI at Google are somewhat more pedestrian.

It is machine learning that enables Google users to retrieve their photos by searching for objects that appear in them (by typing in cake, or cat, for example), and machine learning that is behind speech recognition tools, which can turn audio from several languages into text.

Google's translation tool is another of the AI team's triumphs, but also provided an early example of the way in which algorithms can "learn from the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be".

Battle against bias

When an algorithm is fed a large collection of text, Mr Dean explains, it will teach itself to recognise words which are commonly put together.

"You might learn for example, an unfortunate connotation, which is that doctor is more associated with the word 'he' than 'she', and nurse is more associated with the word 'she' than 'he'.

"But you'd also learn that surgeon is associated with scalpel and that carpenter is associated with hammer. So a lot of the strength of these algorithms is that they can learn these kinds of patterns and correlations".

The task, says Mr Dean, is to work out which biases you want an algorithm to to pick up on, and it is the science behind this that his team, and many in the AI field, are trying to navigate.

"It's a bit hard to say are we're going to come up with a perfect version of unbiased algorithms."

Allen Blue, founder LinkedIn

A surprising example of a company grappling with these issues is the professional networking site LinkedIn. When its 562 million users log in to their accounts, they are served up unique recommendations for jobs and connections - powered by AI. More importantly, recruiters who use LinkedIn are presented with a list of ideal candidates, filtered by machine learning.

But the site's co-founder, Allen Blue, soon identified a problem with this process. Women weren't showing up high enough on those shortlists.

"What we were able to do is say: 'All right, we're going to correct that algorithm," says Mr Blue, "so that it returns men and women in equal proportion to the people who actually match the search criteria and orders them in a way to make sure that the women are not being accidentally de-prioritised'".

More diversity

But fixing this problem was just the tip of the AI iceberg, he says.

"We are just coming to the place where we understand how it is possible to build a machine learning algorithm with the best possible intentions, but still unintentionally introduce bias into the results," he explains.

His favourite example is facial recognition.

"The first versions of facial recognition trained on pictures of celebrities who are mostly white and mostly male, and that means that there is 97% accuracy on white men but three percent accuracy on African women."

"When we look at the people [on LinkedIn] who actually have AI skills, only 22% of them are women," says Mr Blue.

What's worse, he adds, is that "the women tend to have roles which are a little bit more research oriented more teaching oriented whereas the men have tend to have roles which are more leadership oriented."

"Everyone's biased, but we're not fully understanding how people work if women aren't actually there helping design."

Despite these warnings, both Mr Blue and Mr Dean are brimming with enthusiasm when it comes to talking about the potential positives of AI.

When it comes to the hiring process, Blue argues, computers can even teach us how to eliminate human failings.
There can be no remedy, he argues, that does not involve increasing the diversity of those who build AI algorithms.

Floods and earthquakes

"When you go in and speak to someone face-to-face, you get a great read, or energy off them, or whatever, that is built on your very idiosyncratic… and therefore biased, views of what makes a good person to come work at a company.

"Artificial intelligence can help you separate that good feeling you get from a viewpoint which eliminates that bias… that's what I mean by pure machines and people working together."

For Mr Dean, it's the work Google's AI teams have been doing on humanitarian issues around the world - such as systems that can predict flooding and earthquake aftershock - that he cites as their proudest achievements.

Data privacy was a big concern at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year

A particular focus is healthcare and biosciences, which had led to tools that can diagnose of a disease called diabetic retinopathy from a retinal image, without the need for an ophthalmologist.

Its these uses of AI that Mr Dean has been extolling at the World Economic Forum, where session after session focused on data privacy and governance concerns about the technology.

For Google's part, Mr Dean is confident that the company's internal principles will help protect against the potential misuse of AI, and reveals that his team have "certainly decided not to publish some kinds of work that we think are might have negative implications".

But he says the way to protect against the misuse of machine learning, is to get the right kind of intelligent humans to come and work in the sector.

"We need more people studying these sorts of fields and more people being excited about them," he says "because that's how we make progress and solve a lot of problems in society."

How to Avoid Getting Overloaded When Your Colleagues Take Time Off for the Holidays

Though the holidays are a popular time for workers to cash in on their vacation days, there are plenty of good reasons not to take time off toward the end of the year. For one thing, holiday travel can be prohibitively expensive, so if you’re looking to visit friends and family, the latter part of the year is perhaps the worst time to do so. Additionally, putting in more face time toward the end of the year can work to your advantage when your manager is focused on things like promotions and raises. And, you’ll probably find that you’re more productive when the ever-present distractions known as your coworkers disappear.

Then again, there’s a downside to having the office all to yourself, and it’s getting overloaded with work when everyone else is away. If you’re worried that your life is going to be miserable during the holidays because your coworkers will be gone, here’s how to mitigate that concern.

1. Set Boundaries

When many of your colleagues take off at the same time, somebody has to pick up the slack. And chances are, that somebody will be you. That said, you shouldn’t have to drive yourself utterly crazy trying to manage your own job plus the work of six other people, so before your colleagues leave, sit them and your boss down and set some ground rules. Explain that while you’re happy to help out, you can only do so much, especially if you have your own deadlines to meet. With any luck, your manager will recognize the tough spot you’re being put in and figure out a way to more equitably divvy up the load so you don’t get slammed.

At the same time, let your colleagues know that while you’d like to serve as a backup for each and every one of them, you can’t help everyone at the same time. This way, it’ll be on them to duke it out and see who gets to ask you for coverage, as opposed to you having to make that decision.

2. Talk to Your Boss About Getting Temporary Help

It’s common to see a lot of empty desks at the office around the holidays, but if you’re concerned about keeping up with your workload in the absence of much of your team, try suggesting to your boss that you hire some temps to help compensate. Whether your manager says yes will probably be a function of your company’s budget, but if there’s wiggle room to get some extra hands on deck, and you’re willing to train those temps, it might ease the burden on you.

3. Keep Your Eyes on the Big Picture

Getting overloaded with work is no fun, especially when it happens because you’re frantically trying to cover for everyone who’s out. At the same time, recognize that in doing all of that work, you’re making a good impression on your boss while building some goodwill with your coworkers. And remember, if you push yourself to step up and cover other people’s workloads when they’re away, they’ll return the favor when it’s your turn to be out.

There’s no question about it: It’s hard being left behind at the office while your colleagues all take time off for the holidays. At the same time, that influx of work you might have to cope with isn’t a long-term or permanent one, so if you can survive the next bunch of weeks, your officemates will be back before you know it.