Wishing you all a very Happy New Year

It has been a very busy year. Lots and lots  of things have happened. This year there will be election in USA. Europe seems to have forever changed but the Euro concept seems to be solid. Millions of unhappy people trying to find a place to live and dream. Violence is rampant. Nice thing that Cuba is in a much better position and hope Iran will be too on equal footing. Oil price has helped India, China and Japan. This is the chance for India to take off and make life comfortable for the downtrodden and provide universal health and education.

Hope for less conflict and more cooperation and hope the climate gets improved.

Internet has changed the world. Business is not as usual. Apps are going to conquer the world and robots will be roaming the streets.

Have you scheduled your trip to Mars yet!

Adieu 2015

Jay

Wishing you all a very happy and prosperous New Year. May all your wishes come true.

SpaceX landing is another great succcess story of 2015

Failure does not mean despair; it is always a precursor for success. So it proved to be for SpaceX which acgieved safe landing of a resuable rocket after a couple of failures.

SpaceX also achieved launching and deploying 11 small satellites into a low orbit.

More here:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/21/news/companies/spacex-launch-rocket-landing/index.html

Elon (tweet happy) happily tweeted,
"11 satellites deployed to target orbit and Falcon has landed back at Cape Canaveral. Headed to LZ-1. Welcome back, baby!"

It is notable that Bezos has tweeted just once in this life,
"The rarest of beasts - a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy. Check out video: http://bit.ly/1OpyW5N"

Asia's Present to Science in 2015

Element 113, the superheavy element was synthesized by Professor Kossuke Morita's group at Japan's RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based science.

It was pure perseverance and years of careful experimentation from 1980s that finally lead to this success. As this event has been recognized by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry as well as International Union of Pure and Apllied Physics, Japan gets to pick the name for this element to replace the unpronouncable place holder UNUNTRIUM (Uut).

This is the significance of this finding in Professor Mortia's own words,

"From the viewpoint of chemistry, it's very important since we are filling in one space in the periodic table, and there may be only 173 spaces there. So far, fewer than 120 [elements] have been discovered." "It's also important symbolically.

All the elements before were discovered in the West, and it is wonderful that we now have an element discovered in Asia."

Read more from Asian Scientist Magazine at: http://www.asianscientist.com/2016/01/topnews/kosuke-morita-element-113-iupac-iupap/
The below photo is a copy from the above news source:

Moving away from binary democracy...

It has been mostly Democrats or Republicans in this binary dictated democracy. I have no political connections but I would like another party or two joining the political scene so that we have a full flavored democracy.

It looks like it may be possible. whether or not it is going to happen is very much to be seen.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Jim Webb may go independent. That is manna to my ears.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/jim-webb-mulls-running-independent-n447416

Even Donald Trump has hinted going Independent. That's also good. I do not like quite a few of his ideas, but then I will not find a single candidate that I am comfortable.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/23/politics/donald-trump-third-party/index.html

Ben Carson also has hinted;

http://www.chieftain.com/home/4219970-120/carson-party-republican-convention#

I see great future if something different happens.....

My views have not changed since 2006 when I first articulated but many years before that in the past.

Mail app on Windos 10 does nothing, What now?

Windows 10 Mail App stops responding and probably Calendar and People apps as well. When you click on the app nothing happens. You go to settings to see if you can uninstall. You will find there is no uninstall for this. It is part of the operating system and you cannot uninstall it.

This happened on my Windows 10 Pro on my Toshiba Satellite S70 series as well as Toshiba's Windows tablet running Windows 10.

What now?

You can run the following (System File Checker) on the command-line with elevated permissions. It will try to verify and fix problems with files (http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-to-run-system-file-checkersfc.html).

However, this did not solve the problem on both the devices.

Next following this thread I launched Windows PowerShell with elevated permissions and ran the following statement (it appears the problem is due to some permissions with Windows Store) :

Get-appxprovisionedpackage –online | where-object {$_.packagename –like "*windowscommunicationsapps*"}
| remove-appxprovisionedpackage –online

Here is the screen shot of this run:

MailAppProblem

This fixed the problem on my laptop, but the Tablet is still having the same problem- non-responsive mail app.

Just before I ran the PowerShell application I had noticed that there was a new Windows Update and the Windows 10 build was 10586.

My tablet still had the build 10240 which I am upgrading to 10586. Let me see if this fixes the problem. Since these are Windows 10 programs, Microsoft should make sure they work all the time as most users may not even know what powershell is not to speak of elevated permissions, sfc etc.

Note: The build on the tablet now  is 10586  and is working.

New Delhi has taken the top position...

In Global Public Square by Fareed Zakaria, I learnt that among the cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Mexico City and New Delhi, it appears New Delhi is the most polluted city.

We really should attack this problem at the origin, the show rooms for cars; the rickshaw testing; the two wheelers and the smoke stacks that throw up the dirt.

Read this article here on Yahoo news.

Read about things we can learn from another polluted city here.

Watch this Video:

Indo-Japanese agreement on High Speed Trains is done deal besides..

Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have agreed for the Bullet train to run between Mumbai and Ahmadabad. The joint study  by India and Japan has already progressed and is in its final stages. However there are still many policy matters to be ironed out. The decision to go ahead with Japan instead of China has lot of merits. Basically China is a new comer to this area with little field experience.

High speed trains are not the only pacts signed (Visa on arrival to Japanese starting March 2016, defense related business and technology transfer, etc.), read on and don't forget the video.

Read More here:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Shinkansen-will-transform-India-the-way-it-transformed-Japan/articleshow/46139274.cms

My first time on the bullet train (Shinkansen) from Tokyo to Osaka was a thrill ride that included the view of Fuji from within the 'Vista' car. The curtsy of the railway staff bowled me over completely. The inside cabin cleanliness was 'out of the world' for one flying out of Calcutta. Over the years the image has not changed. Lots of local systems have the same level of service even today.

 I wholeheartedly endorse this project even though it is really making the wealthy more comfortable. Is it going to be inexpensive for the regular folks? I hope it will spin off a development spree in other regions.

There are huge cultural differences between the two countries. Just because it is running like clock work in Japan does not mean it will be a similar experience in India. Indians will be able to cover this gap by doing some learning on existing systems by paying attention to:

Punctuality

Cleanliness

Cleanliness

Security

Customer care

Maintenance of toilets

Clean catering

Note: Cleanliness repeated for emphasis.

Although I share and agree with most of the comments here, I really believe this is a good thing. I agree that the amount involved is quite large while there are pressing problems of greater importance like,

Clean Toilets

Urban garbage removal

Traffic Congestion

More effective schooling

Physical education at schools

Here is a video

A way to democratize pollution

The Chinese are really worried about their environment, which looks pretty bad right now. The winds are not helpful, they drive the pollution across the seas to Japan and Korea.

More importantly Chinese are concerned about themselves. by monitoring pollution using the Laser Egg (a very fancy name: http://www.origins-china.com/) common man on the street is montioring the weather to see for himself what it is like, not waiting for the Government data.
But it could really take on and democratize the pollution question getting it out of the hands of politicians and into the hands of the people. Laser egg will get the data people need to so that they can plan their actions.
Here is a picture of the Laser Egg from the Chinese site,

Here is a video.




Right now it is sold out, wait for a few more days before you try.

You may require this sometimes..

This is especially useful and necessary when you want to transfer stocks from one financial institution to another.
What you sometimes need is a Medallion Signature Guarantee which you can get from a bank (your bank where you have an account). The bank guarantees that the signature is your signature by verifying it against your signature with them and sometimes they take the responsibility if the signature is forged. The guarantee is in the form of a seal.

This is not the same as a notary stamp which is provided by a person who is authorized as a public notary.

Engineered Mosquitos to do the trick

Malaria is still a severe problem in tropical and sub-tropical areas of the World. Here is a map from CDC showing the most affected regions.

Malaria_01
Here are some main malaria related facts from CDC:

• 3.4 billion people (half the world’s population) live in areas at risk of malaria transmission in 106 countries and territories
• In 2012, malaria caused an estimated 207 million clinical episodes, and 627,000 deaths. An estimated 91% of deaths in 2010 were in the African Region.

If you are travelling to countries where this may be a problem check out this table here. Pregnant women are especially susceptible.

While medication can help, it is better to prevent getting sick from Malaria. Get rid of the bothersome mosquitoes or, make them ineffective.

This is where the mosquito engineering comes in and where genetic engineering is useful.

The following are adopted to combat the mosquitoes:

• make them unable to fly
• decrease their olfactory sense
• make them infertile
• make them unable to spread disease

All are useful but not totally effective. This additional approach has been developed at University of California using a technique called CRISPR/Cas9 which could render entire mosquito populations from transmitting the parasite to humans.

Read more details here and here.

Here is a video:


Related article here.(http://www.cnet.com/news/neuroscientists-light-up-a-flys-brain-to-see-into-the-past/)

Is there no better way than amuse yourselves than ....?

I am talking about the Chinese who are amusing themselves by painting dogs look like other animals. It may be their own pets, but really!!

I saw this news item on Fuji Sankei Television (http://www.fujisankei.com/fnn_all/index.php) in Honolulu and it is quite disgusting. They paint dogs with tiger stripes using deadly paint and sell them at exhortation prices. The fact is, the colors are so deadly, the dogs last only a week or so as they tend to lick themselves and get poisoned.

Here is the video on TV captured.



This news is also on other news media and here is a link to DailyMail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1284646/Meet-Tiger-Dog-Chinese-owners-dye-pets-look-like-wild-animals.html