Since there are only 20 days left in 2012, I think a website which will ask for volunteer hours from people across the nation and then keep a database of the same will be good. After that the same data can be sent to different NGO’s who are looking for volunteer time and they can contact the person and ask him to devote it for a particular job. Based on the volunteers interest, he can either do it or reject it. However by this effort, we can just get a good idea of how many people want to volunteer and it can inspire more people to volunteer also.
December 11, 2012
October 30, 2012
Find your kith/kin
I was going through facebook and I saw that one of my friend had shared about a missing person and was asking her friends to share and help find the person. That is when I thought how with the current technology and smartphone it is so easy to circulate information about such incident so soon. In most of the cases, people/kids who are lost are either suffering from old age/ mental illness and hence not able to think very clearly or it can be kids who just dont know what they are doing and wander away from their guardians. In both these cases, if the information about such incident can be spread to various people in that area very quickly, may be someone can actually have noticed the person and hence able to share information about their location or atleast give more updated information.
Hence, there is a scope for a website and an android app where you can quickly upload/post the photo of the person lost and if not photo,atleast some concrete information about the person and that information should be sent to various people based on their last reported location so that they can help in finding the person immediately. One more usage of such a app can be comb areas across the city to help find people who have been lost for say few days. May be there can be a group of volunteers who just roam around their home/office area with the image of the person lost in their city and try to report if they can get some information about the person or just update that the missing person was not possibly in so and so area. This way, atleast police and the relatives of the missing person can have better idea of where the missing person is.
Ofcourse may be chances of able to find a missing person through this might be very bleak especially if the person has been missing for more than few days but atleast even few missing people are found through this, then it will be fruitful.
Ofcourse one more way of extending this application is for police to post wanted people’s photo so that people who notice such person can report to the police. The website can also act as a shield to protect the identity of the person who has revealed the location of the wanted criminal.
October 19, 2012
Linit – Magazine of GNU/Linux User’s Group, NIT Durgapur
Uploaded the file here as the original link was not working from dropbox. Original link was https://www.dropbox.com/s/8vutzy323foe1a1/linit-final.pdf
linit
September 10, 2012
Idol worshippers
Aseem trivedi, a cartoonist and an active supporter of India Against Corruption group was arrested day before yesterday for sedition for cartoons he put up in his website, cartoonsagainstcorruption.blogspot.in. The cartoons try to mock various symbols of Indian democracy.
Indians in general are very popular idol worshippers. With such a long history, the values represented in our religions have taken different shapes and symbols. It can be images of piligrimage places or different religious symbols or miniature idols itself, Indians tend to worship everything. However, in due course, we have conveniantely forgotten what those symbols or idols represent.
Arrest of Aseem Trivedi is also an example of how Indians are now worshipping the idols of democracy and not the values of democracy.
The parliament did not function for the whole of monsoon season with ruling and opposition parties not able to reach any consensus on the issue of debate in the parliament regarding various allegation of corruption on the Prime Minister in the allocation of coal blocks. Each passing day of the current government brings light to some new scandal or case of corruption by its ministers and still instead of cleaning the parliament of these corrupt politicians, we are trying to take action against those who are just trying to bring these issues of corruption into limelight.
On Dec 13th 2001, this very insitution and symbol of Indian democracy was attacked by terroriost groups and these politicians are still playing politics in name of religion instead of punishing those responsible. But no one seems to question this mockery.
The previous office bearer of First citizen Of India was alleged to have spent crores on foriegn trips with her family and still no one questioned this mockery of the post of First Citizen Of India.
I hope, we start respecting the values represented by these idols instead of the idols itself.
July 13, 2012
June 21, 2012
May 1, 2012
February 26, 2012
January 22, 2012
January 16, 2012
How to derive the minimum number of clues or starting digits needed to complete a Sudoku uniquely
This has been a very difficult challenge to mathematicians and as per the recent article here, http://www.nature.com/news/mathematician-claims-breakthrough-in-sudoku-puzzle-1.9751 , they have proved by brute-force that it is 17. However as I understand, they have tried to come up with all the combinations to derive at this number which is not very efficient and very error prone.
While thinking on how to solve this problem, I realized that to prove that 17 is the number, I needed to represent Sudoku puzzle in linear algebraic equations with exactly 17 variables.
