प्राध्यापकांसाठी ‘पीएचडी’ची अतिरिक्त वेतनवाढ बंद ?

Source: Loksatta dated March 27, 2019

CBSE का नया पॉडकास्ट एप शिक्षा वाणी' लॉन्च, मिलेगी सीबीएसई की सभी जानकारी

सीबीएसई ने विद्यार्थियों और अभिभावकों को सभी जरूरी जानकारी से अपडेट रखने के लिए सीबीएसई ने एक नया पॉडकास्ट एप लॉन्च किया है। इस एप का नाम ‘शिक्षा वाणी' है। इसके जरिए अभिभावकों और छात्रों को परीक्षा और उत्तर पुस्तिका के मूल्यांकन से जुड़ी सभी जरूरी जानकारियां दी जाएंगी।

12वीं के बाद CBSE ने सुझाए 113 कॅरियर ऑप्शन

सीबीएसई ने पॉडकास्ट की सुविधा लोगों को सही और जरूरी जानकारियां देने के लिए शुरू की है। इन पॉडकास्ट्स के जरिए लोगों को अकादमिक, ट्रेनिंग और एग्जाम से जुड़ी जरूरी जानकारियां दी जाएंगी। यह एप प्ले स्टोर पर एंड्रॉयड यूजर्स लिए उपलब्ध है। यहां रजिस्टर्ड यूजर्स को नई जानकारी के साथ ऑडियो और वीडियो फाइल मिल जाएंगी। इन्हें सीबीएसई द्वारा अपलोड किया जाएगा।

शिक्षा वाणी एप में छात्रों, अभिभावकों और प्रिंसिपल के लिए अलग-अलग सेक्शन हैं। इससे स्कूल के प्रिंसिपल बोर्ड के दिशा निर्देर्शों को जान सकेंगे। सीबीएसई के ट्रेनिंग एंड स्किल एजुकेशन डायरेक्टर डॉ. बिस्वजीत साहा ने बताया कि यह एप स्कूलों के प्रिंसिपल गूगल प्ले स्टोर से डाउनलोड कर सकते हैं। इससे उनको सीबीएसई द्वारा दी जाने वाली हर जानकारी मिलेगी। अब तक यह वेबसाइट के माध्यम से दी जाती थी, लेकिन अब उनको यह ऑडियो वीडियो के माध्यम से भी दी जाएगी। .

Source: https://www.livehindustan.com/career/story-cbse-new-podcast-app-launch-shikshan-vani-will-get-all-information-of-cbse-2461706.html (Accessed on 27 March, 2019)

Stadia is Google's new streaming service for games — no console needed

It is, however, launching a streaming service just for video games that will work on any TV withChromecast, computers running a Chrome browser, and Google's Pixel devices. You don't download the games to your devices, just play them over any Wi-Fi connection.

The Netflix-like product is called Stadia (that's the proper plural of "stadium") and is expected to launch later this year with big name titles including "Assassins Creed Odyssey" and specialYouTube features. Even without a console, it could help Google (GOOGL) take on game industry leaders Microsoft (MSFT), Sony (SNE) and Nintendo (NTDOF).

Google announced its big foray into gaming Tuesday during a presentation at, fittingly, the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

To read more, visit:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/19/tech/stadia-google-gaming/index.html (Accessed on March 27, 2019)

पुस्तकाची देवाणघेवाण सोपी - मोबाईल अँप द्वारा

Source: Maharashtra Times dated 26 March, 2019

The artificial-intelligence approach to teaching English in rural India

Artificial Intelligence is drawing a lot of interest from corporates, start-ups and the government because of its potential for business and social transformation. Indian AI sector has seen 18% YoY growth in 2018 and NITI Aayog has also identified five prioritysectors— health, education, agriculture, smart cities and smart mobility in its research paper on National AI Strategy.

ISTOCK

Globally, the total economic value derived from AI is predicted to reach USD 3.9 Trillion by 2022. Hence, this is the right time for innovation in AI-based applications for improving the quality of life of rural population of India, especially in primary sectors. TEACHER SHORTAGE Indian village schools suffer from persistent shortage of qualified teachers. Globally, there is a need for 24.4 million primary school teachers to achieve UNESCO’s goal of universal primary education by 2030. In India, although the overall pupilteacher ratio (PTR) has been improving gradually, most of the teachers in rural areas lack proper training.

This is further aggravated by the fact that India has nearly 100,000 schools, mostly in villages, which are single-teacher schools. This impacts PTR negatively and leads to deterioration of learning experience of the students eventually affecting their motivation to attend classes regularly. Under these circumstances, teaching of all subjects, including English, has suffered a lot across schools in villages. This vacuum in rudimentary education is very difficult to fill using skill-based trainings done later. Unless this conundrum is resolved, ensuring employability of a huge segment of population, is going to be a persistent challenge. Hence, there is an urgent need to augment the teaching community at village schools using digital technologies as well as AI . LANGUAGE TEACHING English has emerged as universally accepted “lingua-franca” globally as well as across India. But various surveys have revealed the state of English language skills of Indian students. Especially, among rural students, the situation is worse, and it affects their employability in various customer facing roles across industries. Teaching of English can benefit from various capabilities of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) technique of AI to make it more effective. On one hand, it helps the students to pick up right skills at right pace, and on the other hand, it exposes teachers to emerging digital technologies. WRITING SKILLS Various NLP-based techniques, generated using (machine learning) ML and word processing, can be used to automate the process of teaching writing English to students. For example, automatic detection of incorrect spellings/punctuations, grammatically incorrect phrases or sentences, generating reward points for correctly formed sentences and such. The process can be made more engaging by starting with partially filled paragraph templates on chosen topics, where students work on correctly guessing and filling the blanks by adding words, phrases, sentences appropriately. Another advanced technique namely, words/phrase prediction on partially constructed sentences can help students to fill the gaps/void which they face while writing a paragraph on some topic. Such a model of Automated Assisted Learning (AAL) enables more experimentation, innovative thinking. Even for translation, the process that is a part of a student understanding the subjects, there are NLP models trained on language translation, which includes the relevant dictionary mapping (e.g. Hindi->English). SPEAKING AND READING For most Indian children, spoken English practice follows learning of writing skills. It is also true that many students who acquire good writing skill, still fear speaking in English, which is perceived as essential skill by employers. One way to help young people to come out of this is to engage them in regular English conversation. A chatbot, like Google Personal Assistant, trained on topic-based conversation can really help students to learn speaking English. To start with, the student can try pronouncing individual words correctly (by listening to pronunciation of the chatbot), followed by speaking individual phrases and complete sentences.

As availability of appropriate corpus is an important pre-requisite of building such a learning application, initially such a model can be targeted for teaching English to students speaking most common languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi or Tamil.

Source: Hindustan Times dated 27 March, 2019

‘I always want to master whatever people call impossible’

A relaxed Michael Phelps looked at the Times Sport page, saw the previous night’s IPL report, and chuckled. “Cricket? Doesn’t that take, like, 10 days to get over?”

He was only joking, of course, but we explained there were three formats, and that this was the ultra-shortened version. He seemed to like the idea, especially an analogy which cropped up about fine wine co-existing with the cheaper variety on the shelves, but still couldn’t stop guffawing about a game taking days to get over!

Phelps’ swimming career, after all, was all about short, sharp bursts of sustained physical, tactical and technical excellence. It was all about extending the will and soaring above the bounds of the possible, something he did better, and more often, than most other sportspersons in history.

The most decorated Olympian of all time, with 28 medals, 23 of them gold, Phelps is that rarest of rare species — a sporting genius. As we found out, though, he can also be remarkably human. Here as brand ambassador for apparel company Under Armour, Phelps is still easing into his various post-career roles, and still staving off the keen urge to compete. Most importantly, Phelps the superstar is learning to coexist with Michael the ordinary family man. 

To read the full interview, please visit https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/i-always-want-to-master-whatever-people-call-impossible-michael-phelps/articleshow/68590185.cms

(Accessed on 27 March, 2019)

30 years of surfing the giant web

Source: The Times of India dated 27 March, 2019