There is a reference in the Bible that once the Pharisees, with a motive of entangling Jesus in their machination, sent unto him their disciples with the Herodians. Reigned by their hypocrisy, they, deliberately, enquired of Jesus: Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? (Matt: 22:17)

The question was put with a motive that if he said, “No”, then they would inform the Emperor, “Jesus Christ is a traitor and is misguiding and provoking people against you”. And if he responded affirmatively, then they would prove his statement, “I am the son of God”, to be false. However, Christ said: Show me the tribute money... (Matt: 22:19). Accordingly, a penny was brought. He then enquired, “Whose stamp is there on this penny?” “It is that of the Roman emperor, Caesar”, said the people. Hearing their response, Christ said: ...Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matt: 22:21)   Thus Christ stepped out of the confines of the question and created an entirely new space of thinking.

   Baba Amte, winner of Magsaysay award for his work among leprosy affected persons, passed away on 9 Feb 08 at Nagpur.  He started life as a lawyer and did well as he took up criminal cases for the well-heeled during his practice at Durg in then MP. But he was appalled by the fact that his clients often expected him to tell lies. ‘‘A client would admit he committed rape and I was expected to obtain an acquittal. Worse still, when I succeeded, I was expected to attend the celebration party,’’ Baba once recounted. He started working for Harijans in his own fields although he was not expected to mingle with them.

    With six leprosy patients, Rs 14 in hand and a lame cow, Baba went ahead to set up the Maharogi Sewa Samiti in 1949 at a time when leprosy patients were shunned and left to suffer supposedly for sins committed in a previous life. After shifting to Warora in the early 1940s, he set up Anandvan (Forest of Joy), the first fully integrated township for the rehabilitation of leprosy patients and people with disabilities. Today, Anandvan is spread over 176 hectares and houses 3,000-plus inmates. This ideal township demonstrated how persons with disfigured limbs could create a selfsufficient world of their own.

 Source: Times of India New Delhi 10 Feb 08.

WASHINGTON: You may soon not have to drag a reluctant loved one around when out shopping for clothes, thanks to Intelligent Fitting rooms that can help you compare your dressing choices with personal preferences and fashion trends.

The new system developed by Zhang with Takashi Matsumoto of Keio University and Juan Liu, Maurice Chu and Bo Begole of PARC in Palo Alto, California can help shoppers judge their dressing room choices before purchase and can suggest alternative styles. "The system improves (a shoppers) confidence in the decision-making process and improves their shopping experience," told Wei Zhang, a research student in electrical engineering at Oregon State University in Corvallis, as saying.

The dressing room equipped with cameras, machine learning generates an interactive display and intelligent clothes retrieval. In the Smart fitting room the shopper is surrounded by mirrors. In the front, she sees herself in the actual mirror. The left mirror displays her wearing the outfit tried previously, which helps the shopper to compare multiple outfits at the same time.

To right mirror displays images of other people wearing similar clothes or completely different styles that gives the shopper information about the social context of her choice and provide her alternative styles.

Source: Times of India, New Delhi, 25 Jan 08

With liberalization the automobile industry saw the emergence of the small cars with light weight bodies.  A slight damage would mean not repairs but replacement.  Good news for service stations, but ominous for the insurance companies!  Soon the public sector insurance companies found that the motor vehicle insurance policies were unviable with old tariffs and new vehicles.  One of them hit upon an imaginative solution.

Whenever a customer came in for MV insurance, he found the Insurance Company staff to be extra courteous, prompt to attend and eager to serve.  Most of the times the customer was served with a cold drink, unexpected in public sector corridors.  At the end of an enthusiastic conversation came the masterstroke:  the executives wrote down the directions to the nearest branch of their competitor, stating that the other Insurance company was very prompt in issuing the Policies.  Little did the customer realize that the first Insurance company had passed on its troubles and losses to its competitor, while earning points for its customer care.

It is well known that Swami Vivekanand made a huge impact in USA after his famous speech at Chicago in 1892.  Wherever he went to deliver speeches, he attracted crowds.  Some in the American press were not too pleased with this spectacle.  They started spreading insinuations about how the young handsome Sanyasin was trying to lure young women into his fold.  Soon enough these stories reached Swamiji ears.  He knew that this was a trap: the more he denied the stronger the allegations would stick.  Thinking about this he went to his next lecture engagement.

In the middle of his speech he stopped suddenly, came down the stage and went out of the hall. The organisers were amazed. So was the audience. Just as they regained their wits, they ran out of the hall to the tree under which Swamiji was standing smiling. The whole audience gathered round him. He simply said, "I read the papers this morning and thought only the young ladies were going to chase me". The audience broke into laughter. The media learnt that the Sanyasin could be more mischievous than anyone.

Tree frogs, lizards and bush crickets have now inspired a team of Indian researchers to create super glue — an adhesive which is highly elastic, strong and can re-stick up to 25 times without weakening.

   After studying how these creatures use their sticky toe pads to cling on to surfaces, Dr Animangsu Ghatak, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and colleagues have made an adhesive tape by running air or oil filled micro channels through a soft, elastic material, making it stickier than conventional glues.

   During the team’s initial research, scientists found how the pad on the bottom of a tree frog’s toe was coated with a mucus film. This layer of fluid led scientists to think that the pads cling to a surface by wet adhesion.

   The grooves slow the growth of cracks that form when adhesives stretch to their breaking point. Adding fluid diffuses the rupture-causing forces on the grooves through the so-called capillary effect.

   Researchers, who were supported by IIT with a Rs 10 lakh grant and department of science and technology with Rs 20 lakh over the past two years to conduct the study, then copied the idea.

   “While studying these insects, I saw that the patterned surface under their feet made them better cling to the trees. Their feet weren’t smooth. Underneath these patterns, there are fluid vessels, glands and blood vessels. I then came up with an idea instead of having smooth layers of adhesive, what about having similar patterns in the glue? The team then made patterns into the bulk of the adhesive and not just on the surface. The result was a glue with high adhesion,” Ghatak told TOI from Kanpur after her findings were reported in the journal Science on Friday’.

   When conventional sticky tape is ripped off a surface, cracks form on the tape, which also picks up dust and quickly loses its stickiness. “Sticky tape gets contaminated with dust and you only use it once or twice. But lizards and toads use their toes all the time. They don’t get contaminated and they create very strong adhesion. We tried to mimic that. We added tiny fluid vessels in our model adhesive and found that the capillary pressure increased adhesion by 30 times,” Ghatak said.

   “We can use it behind stickers on utensils, fruits and vegetables. This glue will help people remove tags cleanly, without the adhesive or parts of the tag being left behind,” she added.

Set a thief to catch a thief? It’s a line that’s working well for Periyar, ever since some intrepid forest officials started the project some years ago. At a time when tiger populations are dwindling in most parks, Periyar has over 50 tigers and there has been no reported case of animal poaching in the last two years. Activities like sandalwood smuggling, cinnamon bark theft, felling of trees and trespassing have reduced drastically. According to Padma Mahanti, deputy director of the reserve, offences reported last year were the lowest in over five years. “With these people around, Periyar is safe; they are among the best informants in the whole of southern India,” she says.

These people, together with the forest guards, have been entrusted with the task of protecting Periyar’s animals. They are well-versed with the ways of men who plunder and loot the forest wealth. For, many of them have had first-hand experience at it — they were poachers who have now turned protectors.

The international one-day game is a late twentieth-century development that owes itself to Out of Box thinking.

For several decades, international cricket knew only one format, that of a series of five-day test matches.  With industrialization and growth, leisure time for most got structured into week-ends.  The number of spectators willing to spend five days at the ground started dwindling.  Many tests ended without a result as teams deployed defensive tactics.  Test cricket was in a crisis and needed an out-of-the box solution.  But it happened accidentally.

The first ODI was played on 5 January 1971 between Australia and England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. When the first three days of the third Test were washed out officials decided to abandon the match and, fearing spectator backlash, devised instead, to play a one-off one day game consisting of 40 eight-ball overs per side. Australia won the game by 5 wickets.  The match provided just the stimulus to revive spectator interest in cricket as the format was fast-paced, shorter and designed to produce a result.