Dr M Khalid's global village blog

If your garden looks thirsty, then the birds are thirsty too so help them out and provide a safe place for them to drink Lot of birds die due  to thirst: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/visakhapatnam/Citizens-urged-to-help-birds-quench-thirst/articleshow/34084825.cms In a balcony-below: Why do birds need a bath? How many crackers can you eat without having a drink? Seed eaters, such as greenfinches, have dry meals and desperately need a drink to wash them down. In fact, most small birds need to drink at least twice a day so being able to rely on a supply in your garden can make a big difference. Birds need water for drinking and their feathery ablutions too - bathing and preening are essential to keep feathers in good condition. Put out a balcony bird bath If you have a balcony, stick out a bird bath – you’ll have a great view. You can get hanging versions if you don’t have space for a container. A small bath is big enough. Shallow is best and don...

Raghuram Rajan , the head of India’s central bank, ran into a wall of resistance on Thursday when he urged some counterparts in developed economies to more formally consider the effects their domestic  stimulus  has on  emerging markets . Alongside central bankers from the United States, Europe, and Brazil, Rajan took the stage at a high-profile event here to list his proposals for better monetary cooperation and a global “safety net” that could provide funds for countries in case of economic emergency. He has grown increasingly vocal for change, given how hard the currencies and stocks of emerging economies such as India have been rocked by big shifts in capital flows brought on by the unprecedented monetary accommodation in rich nations. FACE-OFF In easy-money era, Rajan pushing policy coordination Cuts to Fed's bond-buying has roiled emerging markets Bernanke, others say domestic needs should be focus Global reserves ‘safety net’ also proposed in Washington ...

Since 1995, I’ve been focused on the potential of personalization as a business strategy to attract customers and vanquish competitors. I was one of the original partners of the 1to1 marketing consultancy, Peppers and Rogers Group, and in 2001 I wrote  Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy . For much of this time, Amazon has been the single best example of the power of personalization. It’s 1-Click ordering – patented in 1997 and granted in 1999 - was a brilliantly obvious idea that removed friction from the buying process. To this day, I buy goods from Amazon that it never before occurred to me that they carry; it is so easy to make a 1-Click purchase, I always check first to see if Amazon carries an item for a reasonable price. In the late 90s, when my partners and I were delivering hundreds of 1-to-1 marketing workshops worldwide, Amazon was already doing the things others only dreamed of doing. In the ensuing years, they hav...

Highly recommended ! Must see ! Especially from 7:00 minutes to 29:00 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUWces5TkCA#t=2973 Highly recommended ! Must see ! Especially from 7:00 minutes to 29:00 minutes. Do you know the oil crisis of the 70s made Cuba into a agriculturally strong nation due to adoption of best practices based on natural and organic farming. This is becasue most of the oil consumption is for food production (even in developed countries today). Today Cuba produces 80% of agriculture products organically. It is a big producer of organic pesticides and exports them to several countries as it is in excess of its use. The Cuban government responded to a food crisis in September 1993 by eliminating the majority of state farms and turning them into basic units of cooperative production. Much of the 80 per cent of all farmland that was once held by the state was turned over to the workers and re-established as worker-owned enterprises. Ref: http://www.unep.org/gr...

Google researchers have developed technology that nearly perfectly deciphers the distorted combinations of numbers and letters commonly used on the internet to test whether or not someone is human. Ian J. Goodfellow, Yaroslav Bulatov, Julian Ibarz, Sacha Arnoud, and Vinay Shet, set out to develop  a more accurate method to identify numbers in images taken for Google Street View. Their model identified, with better than 90 per cent accuracy, tens of millions of numbers contained in Street View images taken in a dozen countries. Using the model in conjunction with Google's infrastructure, it takes less than an hour to transcribe all the views of street numbers in France. The technology was also pitted against the hardest category of the character-blurring forms known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). It is based on the concept of the  Turing test , which is a standard way to assess whether a human can ...

This is a comparison of 3 Task Management apps: Redbooth (formerly Teambox), Asana and Basecamp. We compare features, pricing, user ratings and more. Check out our  Task Management reviews  and  Task Management articles & resources , so you can be sure you are choosing the right app for your business. If you feel you need further help in making your choice, do not hestitate to  contact us for free advice . REDBOOTH (FORMERLY TEAMBOX)4/5 7 user reviews for Redbooth (formerly Teambox) →  ASANA 3.6/5 5 user reviews for Asana →  BASECAMP 2/5 1 user reviews for Basecamp → http://www.getapp.com/user-compare/task-management-software/asana-vs-basecamp-1-vs-teambox-1

1: SharePoint suffers from false starts and spotty organizational adoption 2: SharePoint is in place, augmented with third-party applications and is integral to business processes 3: Organizations that have gone to Bring Your Own Cloud with no set platform standards http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-consultant/huddle-vs-sharepoint-a-comparative-analysis-in-three-collaboration-scenarios/#. Power of both together  http://www.huddle.com/sharepoint-and-huddle/

The optical device could enhance optical information processing in computers. Photo: Bloomberg Washington:  Scientists have developed a new “groundbreaking” optical device that may lead to more powerful computers that run faster and are cooler. The optical device could enhance optical information processing in computers. In an optical diode, the light input in one direction is transmitted while the light input in the opposite direction is blocked. The new optical diode, designed by  Lan Yang  and her collaborators from Washington University in St Louis, is made from parity-time (PT) symmetric micro-resonators in which loss of one of the resonators is balanced by the gain in the other. Breaking the PT-symmetry, by tuning the coupling strength between the resonators, leads to strong field localisation and hence enables nonlinearity-based one-way transmission for light. Yang’s group created the optical diode by coupling tiny doughnut shaped optical resonators—...

University leavers have seen their starting salaries plummet over the past five years, new figures show. Research by the Complete University Guide says graduate starting salaries in professional posts fell by 11 per cent in real terms, from £24,293 to £21,702, between 2007 and 2012. That compares with a 4 per cent fall in real terms between 2005 and 2010, the study says. Those starting jobs in medicine and dentistry - which had the highest starting salaries in 2007 -  suffered some of the sharpest falls in income, down by 15 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. Those starting in a career in law received 17 per cent less than they did five years ago, the guide said. Only two subjects - materials technology and librarianship and information management -  registered higher inflation-adjusted pay in 2012. Dom Anderson, outgoing NUS vice-president for society and citizenship, said graduates are “facing an incredibly bleak labour market”. “Graduates are queuin...

Banks' NPAs rise to 2.8L crore in 5 years HT Correspondent , Hindustan Times   New Delhi, April 02, 2014 As overleveraged companies saddled with stalled projects struggle to repay loans, it is the banks who are probably keeping one eye on the outcome of the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. A fractured mandate in the elections could turn matters worse for banks, global investment banks have warned. Between two general elections of 2009 and 2014, gross NPAs (non-performing assets) — shorthand for loans that could turn bad — of Indian banks have soared from  Rs.  69,000 crore to an estimated  Rs.  2.8 lakh crore. “In the current downturn, corporate asset quality has deteriorated due to a sustained deceleration in GDP, policy paralysis, high interest rates and higher corporate leverage,” according to a research note issued global brokerage firm UBS last month. “The issues related to investment cycle (fuel availability, land acquisition etc.) are s...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The rising cost of child care is among likely reasons for a rise in the number of women staying home full-time with their children, according to a new Pew Research Center report released Tuesday. Other factors cited by Pew to explain the increase include more immigrant mothers, who tend to stay home with children in greater numbers than U.S.-born moms; more women unable to find work; and ambivalence about the impact of working mothers on young children. The share of mothers who do not work outside the home rose to 29 percent in 2012, the study found. That's up from 23 percent at the turn of the century, according to the report. At the height of the recession in 2008, Pew estimated 26 percent of mothers were home with children. The at-home moms include women who are married, single, disabled, enrolled in school or unable to find work. Pew cited a 2010 U.S. census report that singled out the expense of child care as a factor. In inflation-adjusted dollars, ...

JOPLIN, Mo. — We see that President Barack Obama has reached his goal of 7 million people enrolled in Obamacare. We heard the president in the Rose Garden jubilantly proclaiming that the goal was reached and that Obamacare is the law of land.   We’ve also been listening to the mainstream media gushing with excitement. However, when you look at the numbers, you have to ask yourself, “What’s all the excitement about?” When Obama started pushing his health care law, he told us there were 30 million people, or approximately 10 percent of the population, who were uninsured and that we needed this law to make sure all people had coverage. He also told us that people could keep the doctors they had and the insurance they had prior to Obamacare being enacted. However, since Obamacare has become law, we’re seeing that much of what the president said was not factual and that this law is nothing to gloat about. It has been reported that as soon as Obamacare went into effect, anywhere f...

The “India’s best companies to work for (2013)” is released this week by  The Economic Times  magazine and the companies that made top 10 are  Google ,  Intel  Technology , American Express ,  NIIT ,  Forbes Marshall ,  NTPC ,  Ujjivan Financial Services , MakeMyTrip ,  Marriott Hotels  and  Blue Dart Express . Though the presence of Google, Intel, American Express, Marriott etc. is not surprising, I am definitely surprised by the presence of public sector organization like NTPC (looks like they are consistently there in top 10 for many years) and other not so well known names like Forbes Marshall and Ujjivan Financial Services. I am equally surprised by absence of the top 10 IT Services Organization in the above list The study conducted by  Great Places to Work  says the key differentiators that made these companies to top 10 are like Genuine Caring of Employees Willingness to share wealth Equally opportunity...

Gionee one of the top playes in world mobile market discourages online retail of its handsets as a strategy as the prices vary on online sites. wiling to sell on online sites if they fix the price. Confident to be at no1 in the Indian market in 5 years. China's Gionee, the 10th largest mobile handset maker in the world, wants to grab the top spot in  India  within five years, and in the process become the world's fifth largest as well. Speaking at the launch of the world's  slimmest smartphone , Elife S5.5, priced at Rs 22,999, Gionee's President  William Lu  and India operations head  Arvind Vohra  told ET that they want India to become the company's top market, overthrowing its home market  China which currently contributes 40% of global sales.  http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-03-31/news/48735325_1_gionee-arvind-vohra-india-top-spot

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joining the growing list of India-born chiefs at the helm of American companies has caused a “bit of a stir” in China, according to a media report. The Wall Street Journal report titled ‘Why China Doesn’t Export World-Class CEOs’ also said Indians’ good command over the English language and their willingness to move gives them an edge over their Chinese counterparts to get the top jobs. “Language and familiarity with Western culture are the obvious reasons why chief executives such as Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo Inc., Anshu Jain of Deutsche Bank and MasterCard Inc’s Ajay Banga have succeeded in the West. But headhunters also say Indians are more willing to move than Chinese, who see more opportunity and good pay at home,” it said. The report said that Nadella’s appointment as CEO has “caused a bit of a stir in China, where people are questioning why Indians but not Chinese are getting top jobs in the US.” The other reasons cited by the report are the h...

The risk of stroke may be much higher in people with insomnia compared to those who do not have trouble sleeping, a new research has claimed. The risk also seems to be far greater when insomnia occurs as a young adult compared to those who are older, said researchers who reviewed the randomly-selected health records of more than 21,000 people with insomnia and 64,000 non-insomniacs in Taiwan. They found Insomnia raised the likelihood of subsequent hospitalisation for stroke by 54 per cent over four years. The incidence of stroke was eight times higher among those diagnosed with insomnia between 18-34 years old. Beyond age 35, the risk continually decreased. The mechanism linking insomnia to stroke is not fully understood, but evidence shows that insomnia may alter cardiovascular health via systematic inflammation, impaired glucose tolerance, increased blood pressure or sympathetic hyperactivity, researchers said. Some behavioural factors (eg, physical activity, diet, alco...

: 1.      Catalyze - Simplify building apps for healthcare Catalyze offers compliant, cloud-based software for the healthcare industry and simplifies health app development. Catalyze hosted infrastructure breaks down barriers to consumer engagement and helps enterprises manage relationships with consumers. What We Like:  Huge potential to become the healthcare version of Rackspace/Amazon for hosted core infrastructure required to build modern apps for health and wellness. Traction:  Catalyze recently raised $2M last November co-led by Baird Capital’s venture capital group, Arthur Ventures and Chicago Ventures, with participation from the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, Gener8tor, Angels on the Water and other individual investors. 2.      Cureatr  - Secure Messaging and Workflow Navigation for Mobile Care Coordination An estimated 50 percent of preventable medical errors are ...