Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus wins Nobel Peace Prize

Muhammad Yunus and his micro-finance pioneering effort Grameen Bank emerged surprised winners of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. The prize worth $1.4 million goes to them for"their efforts to create economic and social development from below" as stated by the Norwegian Nobel committee.

Muhammad Yunus is 66 year old economist popularly known as "Banker of the poor". He said Nobel was the pinnacle of recognition after winning several prizes for his work lending to the poor mainly women.

Grameen bank has been instrumental in helping millions of poor Bangladeshis, many of them women, improvetheir standard of living by letting them borrow small sums to start businesses. Loans go toward buying items such as cows to start a diary, chickens for an egg business or mobile phone where villages have no access to the phone.

Kiran Desai Bags Booker


Kiran Desai , an Indian born author bags Booker prize for her novel 'An Inheritance of Loss'. She is daughter of well known Indian novelist Anita Desai, who has been nominated for the prize three times but never won it.

The 336-page novel 'The Inheritance of Loss' explores contemporary issues like multiculturalism, fundamentalism and terrorist violence with the narrative of its protagonist Sai who is a teenage orphan girl. She lost her parents in an accident. The location of the novel shuttles between India and New York.

Kiran Desai, who is daughter of noted Indian novelist Anita Desai, is the youngest female author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize, she is 35. She is the second female Indian author after Arundhati Roy to win this award. Arundhati won this prize at the age of 36 in 1997 for her debut novel 'The God of Small Things'.

Blog Hosting Sites

Blog-City - Feature-rich, easy-to-use service. Free to get started with a fee for premium services.

Blogger.com - One of the leaders in the blog-hosting business. You can create and launch a blog in just a few minutes.

BlogHarbor - For-fee site with lots of nice features.

BlogHI! - You gotta love someone who writes an "about" page like this: "blogHi! is operated by one man only, as a hobby and a service to the internet community. At about $2 a day incoming revenue, with far less profit; it's unfortunately not a profitable enterprise...By this time we guess nobody reads this page anymore, since we never got any donation..."

BlogIdentity - 1GB of storage space, domain name and e-mail address for $99/year.

Blogmaker - A free lifestyle weblog community of online journals & diet logs. Typos on the home page don't enhance its credibility.

Blogsource - Create a blog for free. Has statistics.

Blogstream - Blogging for Everybody. Has a related chat room.

Bubbler.net - Specializes in supporting multimedia content.

Frihost - You get a lot for your money (it's free) with this blog hosting service.

Instablogger - Sells Blog In a Box, a low-cost toolkit that helps novices get started.

LiveJournal - This is a user-supported, open-source service run by Six Apart that lets users create their own blogs for free or add advanced features for a fee.

MosaicGlobe - Free blog/website host for creative professionals. You can pay for advanced features.

SquareSpace - Industrial blog site with advanced editing, content management, structural control and syndication features. Oriented toward SMBs that want to do more than just post opinions.

Tagworld - Kind of a supercharged MySpace, Tagworld combines blogs, photos, videos and tagging into an environment that lets you create custom Web pages quickly and easily.

Typepad.com - Another place to create a blog. Typepad has nice tools and template but you have to pay for it.

Wordpress - Not a site but an open-source tool for blog creation and one of the leaders in the category. This is good if you want to host your own blog.

Xanga - Has a lot of neat features for formatting and displaying photos. You get 200MB of image hosting and some nice authoring tools.

Duck Computing - Offers free wiki hosting. True, it's not a blogging site but wikis are an up-and-coming area of social media.

Wikispaces - Fast, free and easy creation of custom wikis. This is a great place to try out this community editor.

About Windows Vista

Windows Vista will be launched early 2007, with different flavors like

• Windows Vista Business Regardless of the size of your organization, Windows Vista Business will help you lower your PC management costs, improve your security, enhance your productivity, and help you stay better connected.
• Windows Vista Enterprise Windows Vista Enterprise is designed to meet the needs of large global organizations with highly complex IT infrastructures. Windows Vista Enterprise can help you lower your IT costs while providing additional layers of protection for your sensitive data.
• Windows Vista Home Premium Whether you choose to use your PC to write e-mail and surf the Internet, for home entertainment, or to track your household expenses, Windows Vista Home Premium delivers a more complete and satisfying computing experience.
• Windows Vista Home Basic Windows Vista Home Basic is designed to deliver improved reliability, security, and usability to home PC users who just want to do the basics with their PCs.
• Windows Vista Ultimate If you want all of the best business features, all of the best mobility features, and all of the best home entertainment features that Windows Vista has to offer, Windows Vista Ultimate is the solution for you. With Windows Vista Ultimate you don't have to compromise.

Hi-tech Road Infrastructure for Mumbai

The World Bank will release Rs 55 crore under the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (phase II) to revamp the city's traffic system.

This amount will be provided to implement an Automatic Traffic Control system that would use sensors to ensure a smooth flow of traffic. It will also cut the waiting time at junctions to less than a minute. Installing the system across 253 major traffic junctions will cost Rs 55 crore, or approximately Rs 2 lakh per junction.

How it works
Sensors would be embedded on roads to detect the number of vehicles on it.
"These state-of-the-art detectors will ascertain the number of vehicles lined up and transmit a message for a signal change when the number crosses a specified limit," said Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Satish Mathur.

The sensors will relay the message to the signal controller who will, depending upon the area, transmit it to one of the two central computers at the BMC headquarters at CST or the traffic police hub at Worli. The central servers will transmit messages back to ensure a smooth traffic flow.

Currently, timers control traffic movement at junctions.

Special preference
Police vehicles, ambulances, fire brigade tenders and even BEST buses will be privileged vehicles under the new system. These vehicles will be fitted with special chips that would beam a message to the road sensors, which in turn will transmit it to a central computer. This will ensure a minimum waiting time for the vehicle.

Who will benefit?
Initially, only 53 of the 253 traffic junctions will be installed with the hi-tech device. Some areas currently identified include CST, Churchgate, Mahim Causeway, Siddhivinayak temple-Prabhadevi crossing, Dadar TT, Turner Road, Kalanagar-Bandra junction, Centaur Hotel junction, Western Express Highway and Andheri Station-SV Road crossing. In the Eastern suburbs, the ATC system will be implemented at Powai junction, LBS-Wadia, Chembur Railway Station, Govandi Road and the Mankhurd-Charkhop link road.