This work describes flax fiber reinforced polymeric composites with recent developments. The properties of flax fibers, as well as advanced fiber treatments such as mercerization, saline treatment, acylation, peroxide treatment and coatings for the enhancement of flax slash matrix incompatibility are presented. The characteristic properties and characterizations of flax composites on various polymers including polypropylene, pp, and polylactic acid, epoxy, bio-epoxy, and biophonolic resin are discussed. A brief overview is also given on the recent nanotechnology applied in flax composites. This article was authored by Hrishikesh Abhyankar, James Njuguna, Huijun Zhu, and others.


The president's budget proposal eliminates public media funding. Learn how you can help at lptv.org slash action. The project to start construction on the Jean Dillon Elementary School in Bemidji will soon begin. Haiti Clotter shows us how they're breaking ground. Members of the school board, district principals and county commissioners were on hand with their hard hats and ready to dig into the dirt for the groundbreaking ceremonies on Jean Dillon Elementary School. The school is named after Jean Dillon who served on the Bemidji School Board for nearly 25 years. Dillon's widow Darlene was at the ceremony and was touched by the outpouring support. I still am having a hard time I say wrapping my head around this because it's such an honor and I just never ever realized that a school would be named after him. The floor plan was modeled after Lincoln Elementary and that floor plan was used as the basic structure for the new school. One, two, three. Sam Anderson, a civil engineer with Carvaco Engineering worked on the side design of the school mainly focusing on the outside of the building. He says the new school will be an improvement. This is going to reduce a lot of the impact that it has on the current elementary schools overall I think it's just giving a lot more space for the students that we have now in the growing school district. Jean Dillon Elementary will be 120,000 square feet and serve 600 students in grades four and five. It will also have several gyms and music and art rooms for the community to use. We talked at length about what our community needs, what's in the best interest long term of the community and the school district and we came up with a very thoughtful plan to make things better well into the future. The school is expected to open in stores for the first day of classes for the 2018-2019 school year. In Bemidji, Haiti-Claude, Lakeland News. Dr. Hess says although there were many votes against Jean Dillon Elementary School, more than 7,000 people in the school district voted for the school. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


right wants to look Ridley there caught it touchdown Atlanta Calvin Ridley into the end zone he's gonna take the shot for pence who makes the catch a sensational plan that looking he's gonna scorch it deep downfield and it is caught touchdown Atlanta Russell Gaines in zone intercepted Jalen Hawkins it's a great catch


What's going on everyone? Sam here with Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping one box of, just refreshed it, maybe double check, make sure this is right. 2021 Penini Playbook Football for Max G. So good luck Max. Let's pull something big man. I have decent, I don't want to jinx it, I do have decent luck sometimes in playbook. Jamar chases live in this, which is pretty cool. Empty box there. Would love to pull something big here for you man. Like a nice, nice quarterback booklet. We've got Kenne and Wang Wu, mammoth materials, that's the $2.99 for the Vikings. Nice one there. There you go. Got Travis ETN Jr. on the mammoth rookie materials, that is also the $2.99. I appreciate that Grayson. Thanks man. Let's hope. I would love to pull you something huge in your first break.  That'd be sick. Low number Ronaldo. Got James Robinson on the goal line graphs, the $1.99 for the Jags. Nice hit there. And last card of the break is a rookie jersey autograph going to the Vikings. That is a Mir Smith Mars set. Nice hit on the booklet there for you Max. Wish it was a little better for you man. I do apologize on that but get them next time for sure. Appreciate you buying in with us though Max. Always appreciate the support. Congrats on everything. Get those right out to you. Thanks again man.


The Ministry of Agriculture has officially handed over the management responsibilities of the banana ripening facility in Larkai, Denry to the National Fair Trade Organization, the NFTO, a move anticipated to have a positive impact on the entire supply chain by promoting fairness, sustainability, and quality in the production and distribution of bananas. The handing over ceremony of the ripening facility signifies a strategic move to enhance the banana industry by adding substantial value, responding to the robust demand for ripe bananas at both the local and international levels. Chairman of the NFTO, Eustace Monroe, welcomed the responsibility and affirmed his organization's commitment to upholding fair trade principles, with a particular emphasis on enhancing the banana sector. If you look at the situation having to do with NFTO, not NFTO but Winfresh, where they got the money from? They got the money from the second stage, the added value, ripening the fruits for supermarkets. Because the banana is a very cheap fruit. And to make morning bananas, you must have a very large volume of bananas. And banana is used as a loss leader in all supermarkets. It's the cheapest fruit, but you must have volume to make some money. Right now, at our stage now in St. Lucia, I do not think we have that kind of volume that will muster a lot of profit. So you must get some added value, something that can boost this farmer's income. Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development, Honorable Alfred Prospe, emphasized the importance of establishing these infrastructures in aligning with the government's commitment to promoting fair trade and improving the quality of bananas in the agricultural sector. I'm sure we have seen an increasing demand for ripe bananas. You hardly see ripe bananas in the supermarkets shelves. Now, although we know it is as a result of the storm, but if we understand the nutritional value of ripe bananas, the rule that ripe bananas play in terms of food security, you would understand the importance of this ceremony today. And I want to urge the NFTO to take full advantage of this opportunity, use it as a new revenue-generating project to be able to allow the NFTO to become more sustainable. Minister Prospe expressed the ministry's dedication to creating a more equitable and sustainable agricultural environment, marking a significant step in collaboration with the NFTO towards building a resilient and competitive banana sector. From the information unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Amanda Fake-Lock reporting.


Welcome to today's ANS webinar. The topic for today is sharing scientific data. Astronomy is a case study for a change in paradigm. Many of you will have heard people talking about big data. When people talk about big data, they often say astronomy is a good example of that. Or in fact, there's one meeting I was in recently, someone from astronomy said, oh yes, we've solved all these problems. So astronomy has been at the forefront of dealing with data and very large data volumes for a long time. And today we're delighted to have a visitor to the ANS offices, François Genouver, to talk about how astronomical data resources have been networked and then integrated globally through the Astronomical Virtual Observatory. François has been managing astronomical data for a very long time. She's probably best known as the director of the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre, that she will speak about today, but also as one of the authors of the Riding the Wave report and the follow-up document, the Data Harvest. She's associated with a number of European projects that she'll also talk about. And she's a member of the Research Data Alliance, and as of a week ago, two weeks ago, co-chair with me at the Technical Advisory Board. So she'll talk more about some of the projects she's been involved in as part of this talk. So I'll now show her and hand her to François. Okay, hello everybody. I know you are here. I don't see you, but everything is okay. So the idea is that astronomy, I think for me, data is one of the research infrastructures. The elements you need to be able to do research. And in astronomy, it's interesting to think about it, because we are one of the disciplines who are, obviously, having big research infrastructures. The ones we have on top of the mountains are the ones which are on satellites to make observations. So we are one of the disciplines which are associated with research infrastructures, physical ones, the solid ones, you know. But what is really interesting is that in this world where we have these big things, which require lots of efforts and so on to be built, we also now consider that data is part of the research infrastructure of a discipline. And I think this is the changing paradigm which is described in the title. There are disciplines in which we are not this big physical infrastructure, but in those cases, data can also be a research infrastructure, and I would say it should be a research infrastructure in all disciplines. And I think many people are by these days working on this to make it happen. So the idea here is to tell you the story, or at least part of the story, or my view of the story of what we did in astronomy a long way to go through that. So what is data in astronomy? I told you it's evident, and actually it seems evident, that we have these big things on the mountains, or in desert, because not everything is on mountains, or in space. And there are observations, and it's evident that a large fraction of astronomical data is what is observed by the telescopes. In general, we have competitive goals for proposals, we have community answers, people get observation times, and then this builds a set of observations from that particular telescope. And in that case, the agencies in charge of the telescopes take care of data and disseminate it, and I will go back to that later. We also have big projects which do systematic surveys of the sky, homogeneous observations, not a small bit of the sky observed from a proposal, but an homogeneous observation of the data, of the sky, which can give billions of objects with an homogeneous data set of measurements, or images, spectra, and so on. This is on the observational side, but there are also the results. And in the research process, we are doing modeling, and we want to compare the modeling results with the observations. And this is also part of the astronomical data we have to deal with, the results of modeling. And we have also all the results of the research process which are stored coming, linked to publication. So all this is data we have to deal with if we want really to be serious about building the data infrastructure. In our case, we also built a long-range, value-added databases. And the one I was the director of in Strasbourg as this kind of role, it was created in 1972, which is long, long ago, to deal with electronic data, which was rather far-seeing at that time. And the idea is to gather information in particular from publication, but to check it, to homogenize it, and to distribute it. So we have, for instance, I will give an example because this does not exist in all disciplines. We have a database which is called SIMBAD, which contains information about astronomical objects, something like 8 million objects now. One of the interesting information in that is that it has all the names of objects. And you will see here an example. You don't go into, I'm sure you cannot see it very well, but in that case, this object has 78 different names found in the literature or in catalogs. So this is typical of what happens, and there is an added value to put together all the names of the objects in a single place so that people who do infrared astronomy, they know the Thomas catalog, they know that they are colleagues from the radio community called the object another name, and it's the same object. So this is cross-cutting across sub-disciplines, in a sense. Another thing is that we store all the publications in which this object has been cited. In that case, there are nearly 3,000 papers in which the object was cited. And so this is very good, but this is also a nightmare for users because in some cases it's just cited because someone says, this object is like that one. And so we have, along the years, been able to develop a tool which sorts publication by relevance, which means we know where the object name appears in the paper and this gives us an idea of the importance of the object, of the paper for the object. If it's in the title or in the abstract or in the keyword, if it's in the table, this means there is data about the object in a figure, caption, and so on. And also something about the weight of the paper itself because we know how many types it has been cited, how many objects there are in the paper, and so on. So this is a recent tool, but it is a powerful tool to help the users to find their ways in that kind of crazy publication records. So why sharing data? In astronomy, at least, it's at the real core of science needs of scientists, of the astronomers because now it's nearly impossible to do astronomy by only observations with a given telescope. You have to put together observations with different techniques, with different telescopes, different wavelengths, and so you need to use data. You, in general, did not take yourself that someone else has taken and compare your own data to understand the physical processes at work in the object. You have the example here. I like this one of the crab nebula. There was a star which exploded there in 10,000, sorry, 1,000 something long ago. And if you look in optical wavelengths, you have here what remains of the objects, matter filaments which continue to go further from each other, and in the end there is a very compact object and what you see in white is the matter. What happens to the matter inside with respect to the object? This is x-ray, and you understand what happens, what the object is only when you do this kind of thing. We also have more sophisticated views of the sky at different wavelengths. There is also the question of time variability. Most objects are variable. Comparison of theoretical models with observations and so on, so you need to share data and different kinds of data. And of course, if you are a politician, these infrastructures cost a lot and you are required to optimize the science return so the data is reused for different aims and for the first objectives of the first robot. So what happened for us is that data is available and it is used. So this means we have done this kind of paradigm. Astronomers use remote distributed data in their everyday work. There are more papers from data retrieved from archives and from original observations. I have here an example of a Hubble Space Telescope. The raw thing is what the papers written from the archives download and you see that there are more papers from the archives than from people who just got observation time, GO. And also combination of new observations with archival data. If I take my small example of the CDS, we had more than 800,000 queries per day on the services last year. And it's only one of the components of the network so this means it's really used. So the basic elements, how we have a common data format and it began in the 70s, there are defaults but at least it's here and it's the basics of data sharing. We have a very strong tradition of international collaboration. We share data, it's open and to be fair with people who do very good proposals to get observation time, they get the data for one year and then the data is open to everybody to take advantage of their good ideas for everybody. And also what we did with the data is fully driven by community needs. Which means that when you have an observation archive or when you have a service, you think about your users and not about yourself. And I think this is one of the key of success. So networking, we began early. We were early adopters of the web and we began to network, I did value services and journals in 1993 at CDS. I will show you a bit. And the archives joined very soon after that so before the end of the 90s we had a network of online resources around archives and bibliography. So this is an example of this early networking. You have the ADS database which is a bibliographic database maintained by NASA which has links to all online resources. Among these resources there are tables published in journals we publish at CDS online which are easy result page. And here you have a landing page of links to online data here. And on the other side this also links to the archive of the ISO satellite which is at ISA in Spain. And so you see you can build these powerful links between the results in the papers and the original data and the catalog list of objects which results from the studies. So this was before 2000. Then it was all good and all used and all useful but we wanted to do better so we decided to build seamless access to data not only to network resources. The networking took full advantage of the fact that HTTP allows you to click from one page to another but there is text to explain on the pages to explain what it is about. So this is the full power of the internet that we began to use early because it was useful. Going towards the virtual observatory it's to have seamless access so it's a bit different. You just click on one button and you see all the available data in one direction of the sky for instance. So we began that at the turn of the century. This means it's a very hard task because you have to define standards to make all this interoperable to share the way to build a query to share the registry of resources, a list of resources where their characteristics and information about what they do and so on. So the virtual observatory framework is for interoperability standards and it's also tools to access data and the idea is to be able to discover, to access and to use data. So we built an alliance which is called the International Virtual Observatory Alliance to define the standards. It's an alliance of national VO initiatives. There are procedures in spite of the World Wide Web Consortium but adapted to our own needs and every time it was possible we made sure to use generic elements because we are not an isolated island. We can be seen as a successful but isolated island. We have OAPMH registries. I know those of you who are in libraries know that very, very well and we have vocabularies which are W3C, SCOS, RDF, so we are clean with that and other people can reuse what we have done and other people can link to our resources. But we spent lots of time and efforts and it's not easy to define the disciplinary elements of the data framework. So if you are interested you can visit the virtual observatory page, IVOA, the IVOA page. You see that here you will recognize if you are in this country you will recognize this. We were meeting last weekend. I just came from the meeting to here yesterday. We have two meetings each year to discuss the standards which are milestoneed in the standards definition to exchange on tools and so on and the last one was here in beautiful Australia the last days, let's say. So here if you are interested there are things which are for astronomers. You have here the suite of standards if you like standards they are all here open and you are here if you want to know how we work this is for what we do and it's there is a weekend so you can see what we do and how we are organized. So this is the standard framework. You see the starting point of the architecture is very simple, it's functions. We need to find data to get it, to use it. There is a sharing and we need some things in the middle to be able to do all that. So this is the functions. Then these are the groups which are working to fulfill to enable these functions. The registry of resources and finding, getting these data access protocols. Here we have query language semantics, data models, formats and so on and here the users and here the providers which can be computers and archives and so on. And the users can be both people and computers so we have to be careful with that also. The 800,000 queries on the CDS most of them are for programs which query the databases otherwise it's crazy. You see that guy on the web typing the number of queries? No, it's not that. So here you have just for fun to frighten you a bit the real standards. I'm not sure it's up to date completely but here you have each data access protocol as a corresponding data model for instance and you have all the things we have developed and when we have a new standard here it appears here with all the standards which are related. It's a complex picture. It takes time. It's very difficult because you need to have international agreement on standards but I can say that after it began the IVOA was created in 2002 and now we have something which is operational and it has been operational for a few years. So I think that it's interesting there are several disciplines or many disciplines who are building a disciplinary interoperability framework or they want to do it. These things can be very different because the disciplines are different they are different organizations, cultures and so on and I'm not telling you you have to do the same thing as what we do because it's not true. What you have to do you have to find yourself. But the characteristics of what we do is that it's inclusive and open which means we are in a world if you do particle physics very soon and then there are things but it's pyramidal can you say pyramidal in English? It's some kind of pyramidal world. In our case we have these different telescopes on different mountains in different countries most of them international by essence or global like you certainly heard about in this country in particular so we do not have we cannot have a central point or the top of the pyramid this does not exist. We are, we work, we live in a multiple world and we have if we are serious about sharing data it may keep the global endeavor so this was the starting point of what we did with the virtual observatory and before that also the networking of the resources so the idea is to have a model which is open and inclusive this means that you can, anyone can participate and put the resource in the registry or build a tool to access data and you can do that by putting a fit interoperability layer on top of the data we don't care about how you deal with your data this is your business it's not the view of business you do what you wish but if you want to be a member and if you want to participate you have to be able to query to answer a query with certain protocols you have to have certain vocabularies attached to your data and so on and this works but do what you wish these are things which are under your own responsibility one of the problems we have is the view is invisible if it is successful so people will think that it's useless because you don't see it and so there is some kind of difficulty to get you have to have clever research agencies from these agencies to make it work but it is used people use it every day because when they use my service we will link to another one they use the view, they don't know it and since the services and the tools are used people use the view every day we have gone recently further in that which means that data providers we put lots of collective intelligence in the building blocks of the view and the data providers themselves began to embed some of the view building blocks in their own archives and services they are not asked to do that but they can do it and we see more and more we have an excellent example in Australia we discovered one last week people who never talked to but they have done their things they provide their data in the view and they have used building blocks in their own services and so this means it works so this is also to say that it's not only data which is interoperable but also tools which means that you can broadcast results we have a standard which allows to broadcast results from one tool to another so you can go from an image to a table of objects and their characteristics just by clicking on one star here or one object here you can find where this object is in a table and in a diagram the protein, the table and so on and this is a spectrum so you can play a lot with different tools and so you can have different views and study objects and study the observations with different tools which are connected to each other seamlessly so I think this is also a very important thing so case for success seen from the science users it's exactly that seamless access to data and also interoperable tools which means that you navigate from one place to another you don't know it's another of the problems eventually you don't know but in the end you get the information you need seen from the data providers because you know we need to have an update it's not so... it's not immediate to update the view framework you have to do some work on your site to be able to answer the queries and so on we made a workshop with European data providers two years ago and we were surprised in a sense to see how many people that many people already took at least part of the framework of the whole framework and we asked them why and they understand very well that it gives more visibility for their data and also I spoke about collective intelligence before they insisted on the fact that when you see the framework and the standards and so on and the tools you don't need to reinvent the wheel because people already worked we worked as big groups there are something like 70, 80 people up to 100, 120 people attending the IVOA meetings and people really work the whole year to build the standards and the tools so these people worked and they proposed solutions and as I said both for data sharing but also elements which can be useful for the archives and the services if you provide a very good visualization tool there is no need for a particular telescope to provide its own one because they can use the one which works well for them also so this saves time so the current status of the VO is that the VO framework is operational at least first you know you can also always improve things so we want to make it better for advanced usage and to gather priorities linked to the needs of future large projects of a discipline I will come back to that so to give you an idea of the methods we have been doing as Andru told you I led and we have had a series of European projects funded by the European Commission and it gives an idea of the methods this is why I give a few view graphs on that here the method used to build this kind of framework so we have national initiatives in Europe there is one in my country but there are some in other countries also and we thought it was useful to coordinate these activities in Europe and doing that we understood that the three pillars to build this kind of things is that you have to provide support for the data providers to help them to update the framework we have to support the astronomers in their scientific usage overview by giving them tools and also by providing tutorials and so on and of course there are the technological activities to update the view framework so we had several family projects the last one is the one which has its logo it finished at the beginning of this year and now we are in another phase which means we have the view operational and we want to do better taking into account the future of very large projects so that their data is usable at best by the community so we are one part of a large project which has been set up because the European Commission put a call to make a cluster of S3 what is S3? S3 is the European strategic forum for research infrastructures so it's a list established at the European level of very large infrastructure for all disciplines you have data infrastructure of humanities in the S3 list and in our case I will show you the kind of things we have in the S3 so the idea is to make sure that the data from this big S3 will be fully available in the virtual observatory so that they are interoperable with the rest of it fully in the international framework and so this is fully aligned I told you that the current IVOA priority is to do exactly the same so we were happy the core of the proposal from Brussels was to build a cluster of these big projects and people agreed that it was important that data was an important part of this clustering so you see here this is the Cherenkov Telescope Array SKA I'm sure you heard about these are neutrino telescopes at the bottom of the bottom of the sea and this is a gravitational telescope gravitational wave telescope which is not an S3 but it's big and it's useful to have it above so what is interesting here I told you in the VO we have the people who develop the VO in IVOA we also have people from Data Archives which represent big guys which have big archives and so we are sure that we develop things which are not in the blue and that this fills the needs of the Data Archives in this case the project puts together the VO people in Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK very well trained teams of people who develop the VO framework and also the representatives of the large projects not the archive but the project themselves and their pathfinders because the S3s are not here by definition so we need to have real data and they have pathfinders and these people are included it's not only astronomy it's astronomy and astro-particle physics which include new messengers I told you about neutrinos and gravitational waves ESO, the European Southern Observatory the big telescopes in Chile are associated and ESO, the European Space Agency is not associated but they are working in very close collaboration with us they are the current chair of the IVOA from ESO and we work together so I am near the end so all this was for the big data and for me I don't like big data I like data so I really think that astronomical data is both big and smaller data we have these big things from observatory archives and disciplinary data centers but we also have all these data from publications we began to put data from publications online in 1993 with the European Journal we have data which are tables which used to be printed on paper and we put them on the web so that data can be reused the numbers can be reused there are also images, spectra time series and so on so you have a small table of 100 lines in the same service as a catalog from a sky survey with 2 billion rows and they are accessible with homogeneous metadata so this is data we have 14,000 of these data sets in CDS in the service which is called Vizier and this is what is important for us is that data is validated the data which is on the computer so and so but it's data validated by publication it's fully discoverable and usable in the virtual observatory and it's together with the lab survey this is a map of the sky with intensity depending on the number of points which are in the database for that point of the sky and if you do your metadata well you can do extremely powerful things by extracting information from the rule collection here this is a spectrum for an object which is built from points extracting from the rule data set at different wavelengths and each of these points is linked to the original so you know everything about where it comes from and you can reuse the information so the conclusions I think that compared to when I began the way we do science in my discipline changed completely not a lot completely because data is available online and we have interoperable data and tools so I already told you but I want to insist on it data in astronomy we are seen as one of the big guys but it includes big and smaller but useful and validated data otherwise we lose all the results and I think it's too bad so the research, smaller data has researched results and they are at the same level as the big ones and so to go back to long tail as it is called there is this as a huge diversity and it's supposed to be one of the characteristics of some of the things people call big data and this is part of the game of this to go back to something I said already this is a user centered approach not to keep data not to preserve data this is a collateral consequence but the starting point is to do research so technology and it's not to do technology neither to preserve nor to do technology it's not the point the point is to enable science so technology is a tool not a name I should have added preservation is a collateral consequence not a name at least for us and that is sharing this science with us we spend lots of time at CDS to evaluate relevant new technologies to identify whether they fit our needs but we know very well that we have to beware a lot because people will tell you but why don't you use that look it's a miracle it will solve all your problems and two years after there is nothing left and when you are here for 40 years or more than 40 years you cannot afford to follow the buzz you really have to study what is going on and to choose what is useful for us for you and which has a chance to remain at least for some years you understand very well that in 43 years now we change technologies many many many times so I'm not telling you you have to stay the same otherwise we would have been dead long ago but you have to be reasonable and to understand to make serious assessment of the new technologies and to see if they fit your needs then some elements of what we do are used by nearby disciplines and again I already said that generic elements which are the key points the registry of resources and the discovery and vocabulary it can be interfaced with the generic data framework so now if I go to a more general conclusion sharing scientific data now it can be called open science it's very bad to speak about the G8 in this country I know because you are a powerful country but you are not members of the G8 to my knowledge but I am sorry to say that so I should not speak about the G8 but it gives an idea of the level at which these things are taken and tackled now in June 2013 the G8 ministers of research made a very very strong open data statement you can find it if you look for ministries G8 data June 2013 it was in in UK so you can find it under the British government there is also more and more demand from funding agencies at least for data management plans and so on there will be demand for trusted reposits the data from project is deposited in trusted repositor is very strong so this is moving towards the kind of thing we have been doing for a long time so everybody is moving on that towards that I think we have been pioneers really in those endeavors and we are eager also to share lessons around and one of the good vehicle to share is the research data alliance this is my last paragraph maybe you all know about it but it's good to remind that the research data alliance was founded in March 2013 by Australia the European Commission and USA National Science Foundation and NIST so there are at this floor many people deeply involved in the research data alliance there are something like more than 3,000 members which is a lot after so few such as short time in more than 100 countries this is fully bottom up to tackle all the aspects of scientific data sharing technological as well as sociological so maybe you have heard that before but please have a look and join thank you okay thank you François so we now have time for questions let me start with a question at Stephanie's prompting so one of the comments you made towards the end of your talk was you were talking about data that was validated by the publication so do you mean by that that simply having data associated with the publication means the data is somehow more valid or that there is something else going on I think that it's exactly what I said but the fact that the data is linked to a publication means someone at least looked at the research process not at the data itself you know you can put up a catalogue which has been done by your own way in your own computer and with your own telescope and it's completely different from having a full publication so I really think that there is the publication does not validate the data itself the bytes in the data but at least it gives an idea of a method the reference that the results are meaningful and so it's different from getting a list of a table from someone like this what we do when we get in the in this year the thing we when we go back to you know in this frame here before we put data data comes with a description of course and we check at least some of the values because we have a description we can check some things the referee cannot check but if we have one of the sky coordinates which is out of value for instance these things we check and we also have checks because when something is wrong we have users who complain so there is some kind you know when something is here we have to say that we curate the data some people don't like it but in my discipline people want the data as good as possible so we curate the data we keep track of the changes and this is done that way and I think that at least the fact that the research process is somehow validated by a referee is an important point but in this case the data is validated not just by the publication but also by your archive because you're adding additional value we add additional value the fact that the kind of description we attach to the data is something which explains what are each if it is a table for instance each column has a unit each column we know what it is and so on so we will see it's something in which we put added value and the validation is the science validation not the added value thank you so we have a question why not a 12 month embargo asking is that the book does everyone use it why not 6 month embargo why not an 18 month embargo and what's the starting point is it the start from the date of observation or from the date of lodgement so in that case I think it's something which is practical a pragmatic solution to the fact that we need people to make very good proposals for the preservation time on telescopes because we need to get data which is as useful and as good as possible so we need people to spend lots of time and effort to do the proposals and then the selection process can be awful you know the pressure is extremely high in some cases so we think it's fair with people to give them some time to have the data for themselves because which is made public and it's also a way to keep having people motivated to improve the quality of the data in the end so this is a pragmatic solution I know some people shout at me because it's not normal and so on but I really think it's a pragmatic solution to continue to improve the quality of the content of the data framework of the data infrastructure because you get extremely good data if the proposals were extremely good and then people you have to be fair with them so this is it's not default but it's in general it's 12 months there are things which comes with in some cases there is no embargo in some projects data is immediately available not everyone use it there are still places which don't want to share data because they have a feeling but in many public places when they work with public money they are more or less obliged to share it there are private telescopes in the US and now they share data but it has not been done from the very beginning 6 or 18 I think it's simply pragmatic it gives a chance to write a publication in one year 18 is too much and I think I am not sure about the start date really I think it's the date at which people get views the data but I am not completely sure and the pipelines are done so people get the data quickly so it's more or less from the data observation we have another question asking how can other disciplines emulate the success the astronomy has had is there something magical about astronomy that makes this possible I think well I think that the fact that people decided to share the data from one radio telescope with people with another radio telescope 35 years ago or more was one of the key I think you need to find people who really want to share data for good reasons and that if you are lucky these are the good people and there will be a snowball effect but you cannot so I have to answer quickly because there are many questions so I really think it's up to each discipline to organize itself I am sorry to say that in the talk I tried to show up some of the handles what we have used to make it but I cannot give advice when I am in front of people and discuss with them but there is no magic so if I can be slightly naughty I have heard that one of the reasons that astronomers are so happy to share the data is that there is no commercial value in the data I think it helps a lot usually I write it on the view of the telescope the fact that there is no commercial value means that we do what we wish for ourselves so a question asking about the conventions for citing astronomy data at the point that there is a strong culture of sharing the data and standards for doing it what about citing the data I think that when the data is in vizier which is on the screen people cite either the paper or the vizier because vizier is site ever not with a DOI but with a PID which is from the bibliographic database if you use astronomy data from a telescope people are supposed to cite the original to say that it was observations so and so from that instrument from the telescope so we are currently working on that at the IOU we were discussing DOI we had a very lively discussion on DOIs but there are ways of citing which are simply to write that you have used the data from that telescope observation number so and so and this is something which is supposed to be done by good practice that's a human readable but we were discussing exactly that there are ways we have ops ideas which are well defined and so there are at least PIDs and I think everybody is willing to go to DOIs so it will be done very soon a question about the main data standard that's used in the astronomical community and is that the standard that's used by astronomers in their day to day work or is that a standard that's used primarily for sharing after conversion? No the data is produced in FITS what we call FITS and so everybody use FITS there are tools to visualize and to use FITS so FITS is ubiquitous but correct me if I'm wrong there are different versions but basically at FITS there is the core FITS for images and data cubes it's less well developed for spectra and so on but FITS is really when you have a telescope the data you receive in general is FITS so some things like SKF are trying to use other kinds of formats because it's a bit different with our data cubes so we have also a very lively discussion on data formats but at least in everyday life FITS is very useful and very present and for the benefit of those who have not looked at the FITS format I encourage you to do so it's very nice because it's self-documented and it looks like a punch card because it was done at that time so there are lots of problems to be wider than 80 colors which is very bad when we program in 4K. Yes exactly the Writing Away report which François has contributed to as a member of the Hydrolexa group mentioned the need to develop and use new ways to measure data value and reward contributors how does the IVA engage with their users around the value of data? IVA is not a political organization IVA is just doing interoperability so it's not one of the questions we tackle I think that measuring data value with a kind of citations which can be done we can count number of times things are cited in publications but it's not completely done for the moment and I also have problems with citation because we all know it's not a good criteria, a good matrix so this is really an issue and I agree with what we wrote I think that for us for instance even for CDS it's very important to be able to say that the data was we had this number of queries I gave you we can tell every time there is a table in this year people can know how many times it has been queried so this is one of the things you can find on the website and with full search I can also know that the CDS services have been cited in 1000 papers last year which is a lot but it's because they are full text people don't care to site services in their reference list So if I can use the privilege of the facilitator to ask a follow up question on that I know that the analysis that you showed us at the Hubble Space Telescope showing that more than half of the publications were from data reuse rather than from initial observation that in order for them to collect that information was actually quite painful they had to do a combination of text mining and manual searching and all sorts of horrible things to work out which publications were associated with which data which is what we do every day for Sylvain it's not what we do for HST but there are like variants to that so it's one of the reasons we are discussing DOI's but it's not because we will have DOI that it will be easy to find the information because the whole chain is not set up so we can push to enable an external infrastructure to make recitation but as long as the publishers are not completely organized to do that it's not free enough So no magic answer there for us I think it's magic. So a question about the underlying data in a database that a paper points to may change as time goes by particularly as you have more observations added do Symbatovizia make any particular attempt to handle this changing and the question makes the point that in a DOI based data publication this should not happen I'm not convinced I agree with that I am not sure how do you do In our case for Symbatovizia we are changing data all the day because we add things and we correct errors so we have in Symbatovizia data coming from publications which is wrong we have a wait for people to put annotations on objects saying this is wrong and we correct and we also find errors when we include other data so we correct data because people don't want something static they want something which is as good as possible so we do it. In Vizier we also correct things and we keep an history of the changes and I think that in DOI we discussed this two days ago and it's clear that some people think you never change anything when it's DOI based and there is an understanding of DOI which is you have the current version so this is something which is to be discussed I know people shout at me when I say we change data but I know other it's not astronomers who shout but other people it's people from the outside because they think something is here we will check some and we won't change anything but well so this is a good discussion a good topic for discussion but we are user we follow user needs you know too bad Okay so the pragmatism over purity this is a good question so a question about data disposable do astronomers routinely dispose of data or do you keep everything just in case it would be useful I need an explanation about data disposable so I'm not sure about well so let's pick the easy example so we know that with some instruments like the SKA you can't keep everything you have to throw most of it away I don't think the question is talking about this I think the question is talking about once you decided this is a useful observation of that part of the sky do you keep that forever what happens is that the telescopes keep the data you know most I cannot say but the agencies which built the telescope feel that they are the mandate to keep the data and to make it available on the long term for the moment it never stopped so you know you have all the history of data from the ESO telescope which is online I know for space that it was not probably the case at the very beginning but now there are archives nearly everywhere and open archives so there were more difficulties for instance for planetary missions for some of the space early space missions and now I think it's well said that data is kept by the agency distributed by the agency and open after some time so again let me go back and ask a follow up question do you keep the data forever even where Simbad has looked at it and said it's wrong of course in that case it's the publication you know the rule for the publication is that you don't change your publication in some cases we have in Simbad attached to the object or to the when we find an error in the publication there can be a note from Simbad people attached to the paper in our database saying this is wrong there is an error so we try to keep track of these things but the publication stays as they are because it's the way it is but data is not the publication okay I was going to say the last question but that's in fact not true when data is used from the IVLA is there a process for allocating credit to the observer or the archive and follow up on that are there procedures for facilitating collaboration on new publications based on shared data so maybe the first one first is there a process for allocating credit so I think it's simply good fair practice when you use data what comes from the IVLA is that you get data but you know where it comes from so you are supposed to follow good practice and so I have no other answer but when we send data we get data from the IVLA it's written where it comes from it's part of the data you get when you have this photometric viewer here each point has a link to the original paper and facilitating collaboration I think that on new publication based on shared data I think this is part of routine work of the astronomers there is no tool to do that but shared data you have all the tools which allow you to access the data which is in the archives in added value databases so it's just that the data is here and then you manage the person who asked the question about whether the underlying data would change was motivated by the problem of reproducibility but I think we are less obsessed by reproducibility than other disciplines well in part I guess because it's very hard to reproduce an observation no but the observation the observation is you can reprocess the observation but the observation is the observation I don't think we have the kind of problems in some disciplines where the original material is found to be fake interpreted and so on in this kind of ground so again I know reproducibility people say you have to be able to reproduce as the starting point of open science but not really for us for us it's just to do new science the core point is not reproducibility but maybe we are naive so the last comment in my question box is thank you this is an excellent question of answer session I would agree with that it's a good question it's a good result to speak to a computer but this makes me feel you are wrong yes there's really real people there we didn't queue the questions up so thank you for the excellent questions thank you for as well as for the excellent answers and thanks again for your I think you listened to it thank you


Hi, I'm Salvatore Bobona, and today's lecture is Global Social Problem of the Week, Me Too in Developing Countries. The Me Too meme was coined in 2006 by American human rights activist, Tarana Burke, to raise awareness of the continuing pervasiveness of sexual abuse. She meant it as an expression of solidarity to communicate to the victims of sexual abuse that they were not alone. The meme was popularized by actor Alyssa Milano in response to widespread allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. Thus was born the hashtag Me Too, which is now a global meme translated into dozens of languages and reaching the whole world. On October 5th, 2017, The New York Times reported extensive sexual abuse allegations against the prominent film producer Harvey Weinstein. Now, Weinstein, in case you don't know him, is a really big time producer who's produced over 300 movies and TV shows, titles you'll recognize like Pulp Fiction, Goodwill Hunting, Scary Movie, Seal Team Six, and even Project Runway. Weinstein, however, reportedly abused dozens of female employees and prospective employees, both famous and obscure. And I should say reportedly abused dozens is suspected of perhaps abusing hundreds, although we really don't know. His abuse was repeatedly reported to his firm, to business partners, to anyone you could imagine in the industry who worked with him. But due to his commercial success, people continued to employ him, continued to work with him, continued to invest in his company. Essentially continued to treat him as a respectable member of the business community. Weinstein's seeming immunity from law and morality rested on his multiple dimensions of power over his victims. As one victim put it, I am a 28-year-old woman trying to make a living in a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64-year-old world-famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me, 0, Harvey Weinstein, 10. And I think that really encapsulates the problem. The problem is that Harvey Weinstein wasn't just male and his victims were female. He wasn't just middle age and his victims were young. He wasn't just an employer and his victims were employees. He wasn't just a film producer and his victims were aspiring actors. He was all of these things and they were all of those things. Multiple dimensions of power put Harvey Weinstein in a position of advantage over his victims. Weinstein was even a major donor to Hillary Clinton's campaigns, reportedly bundling $1.4 million in donations, mainly from Hollywood donors. Bundling is a practice in US politics where one person will arrange campaign contributions from many other people, bringing them in as donors to the campaign. The Clinton campaign had been warned about his reputation, but of course when you're a famous producer bringing in millions of dollars of campaign contributions, you can get away with a lot of problems. Due to his power and money, warnings about his behavior were ignored and not just ignored in the business community, ignored in the political community. One email from Lena Dunham, the actor and comedian to the Clinton campaign, literally said, quote, I just want you to let you know that Harvey is a rapist and this is going to come out at some point. I think it's a really bad idea for him to host fundraisers and be involved because it's an open secret in Hollywood that he has a problem with sexual assault. Yet these warnings were ignored, I think, likely because of the money and the visibility that he was able to bring in to people who worked with him. The Weinstein scandal instantly opened a global conversation when it broke in October, but the actor, Alyssa Milano, is the person credited with turning it into a global meme with a tweet on October 16th in which she said, if you've been sexually harassed or assaulted, write, quote, Me Too, as a reply to this tweet. And the funny thing is, Alyssa Milano did not apparently use the hashtag Me Too.  Of course, the Me Too meme quickly morphed into a global social movement with much of the attention focused on the US entertainment industry but with a much broader buy-in from the global public. So we all know that if the Oscars, Me Too was a major theme of protest at the Oscar ceremonies this month, but it's not just been the Oscars. It's been at all levels of society.  So to begin with, women are at greater risk than men. But on top of that, young people are at greater risk than middle-aged people. Sexual minorities are at greater risk than heterosexuals. Racial minorities are at greater risk than whites, at least in the United States. Less educated people are at greater risk than more educated people. Poor people are at greater risk than richer people. And these aren't just assertions. These are all quantifiable power differentials that we have data on actually about rates of sexual assault having these differentials across all of these power disadvantages.  In less developed countries, those problems are exacerbated by weaker legal protections and weaker norms of equality. Women of all ages, for example, face much greater risks of sexual abuse in countries where women lack full legal or social equality with men. LGBT people and other sexual minorities are at severe risk where homosexuality is criminalized or migrant workers can be at severe risk in countries where they lack legal standing or legal rights or where their employers may be in charge of their legal status, their visas, their ability to live in the country. According to the World Bank, I'll just give some examples for each of these. According to the World Bank, there are 32 countries in which women cannot even apply for a passport without permission from a male guardian. That's more than 10%, that's more than 15% of the countries of the world. Now, India is a country, India is the target example here. India is a country where women have the legal right to apply for a passport without permission from their husband. But there are widespread reports of courts in India and registrars in India actually requiring a husband's permission. Even though the law says that women are completely emancipated in India, nonetheless, often lower level officials don't enforce law and actually try to prevent women from getting passports. In addition to that, India has a serious problem, like much of South Asia has a serious problem with child marriage and child marriage often meaning marriage of girls, of young girls to adult men. These are rates of child marriage in India by state with Rajasthan in northwest India having the highest rate, almost 4% of all teenage girls are married as teenagers. And this is something that cuts across all religions in India. So it's not just a Hindu problem or a Muslim problem or a Sikh problem or a Buddhist problem, it's a problem for all religions and all groups in India. Now, in India there are very serious efforts both by the government and by civil society to prevent child marriage. In other neighboring countries, especially in Pakistan, there's much less civil society pressure to limit child marriages. So in some of India's neighboring countries the problem can be even worse, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. Another example is the problems faced by LGBT and other sexual minorities.  Now to put that in perspective, again, that's over one third of the countries in the world criminalized homosexuality, which of course puts homosexuals and other sexual minorities at extreme risk of exploitation and blackmail.  Note in this map, this also lists the countries where there's recognition of same-sex unions and Australia, of course, since this map was made, has recently transitioned into the category where same-sex marriage is allowed. And a similar problem affects migrant workers and maybe the most severely targeted group are live-in foreign domestic workers, that is, foreign maids who live especially throughout Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East where it's very common to have migrant worker maids from other countries. Very often maids come from the Philippines or Indonesia and they're very open to sexual abuse because they live with the families that employ them. The families that employ them have control over their visas, so if the family ceases to employ them, they lose their visa, all of this makes them extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation and sexual pressure. On top of that, in most countries, only unmarried women are allowed to serve or are allowed to be employed as foreign maids or women who don't have children. They're almost never allowed to have boyfriends or male relatives in the country, so they're effectively being set up for sexual exploitation. This is not a small number of women. This picture shows maids on a day off in Singapore. This is a practice throughout Singapore, Hong Kong, the Persian Gulf, maids having only one day off a week in Singapore and Hong Kong or maybe no days off at all where they're only friends or other poor, young, unmarried women from their own countries of origin where they have virtually no connection to the societies in which they live. And we're talking about several million, if not tens of millions of women, not a small number. Key takeaways. First, the hashtag MeToo social movement started in the U.S. entertainment industry in October 2017, but has since spread widely.  And finally, vulnerability to sexual abuse is extreme in countries with weak legal protections and weak norms of equality where women or anyone subject to sexual abuse may not feel comfortable or may even be legally barred from seeking redress through the justice system. Thanks for listening. Again, I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at my website, SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter.


Good evening. An important announcement. Shankar IAS Academy is starting third pre-storming batch from Jan 8th. Pre-storming is prelims test series program. In this year prelims exam that is 2020 prelims exam around 51 questions reflected from our pre-storming program and YouTube Hindu news analysis program. The additional details of the program are given here for your reference. With this let us move on to today's Hindu news analysis. The list of topics chosen for today's discussion along with the page numbers is given here for your reference. Here is the first news article. Let us take up this op-ed column which talks about the challenges prevalent in conducting speedy trials for sexual offenses against women. In this regard the author talks about two bills which are introduced in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra legislatures to deal sternly and expeditiously with the cases involving sexual assault on women. So let us talk about these two bills and also the important points mentioned by the author. The relevant syllabus is given here for your reference. First author briefly outlines the two bills. The first one is Andhra Pradesh Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 2019 which is also known as Disha Bill. So if you are following news in the last year a brutal and heinous rape occurred in the outskirts of Hyderabad city. Now victim name is Disha a medical practitioner. After the Nirbaya case this case got a very high public support and shook the entire country. In this regard AP assembly has passed Disha Bill 2019. So this bill seeks to amend the provisions of CRPC and IPC. So by amending these two the bill aims to strengthen the provisions relating to crimes against women and children. Coming to features of the bill the bill makes a way to ease the process of delivering justice. It envisages the completion of investigation within 7 days of report and trial within 14 days. So total is 7 plus 14 21 days. The bill also mandates establishment of women and children offenders registry in an electronic format which will be made public. Remember guys AP will be the first state in India with a public registry of women and child offenders. Even though central government is having a registry for this purpose it is not public. The bill also mandates exclusive punishment of death penalty in cases relating to rape and murder of a woman where there is adequate evidence. And as said before judgment will have to be pronounced in 21 working days from the date of offence. Further the bill also mandates stringent punishment for sexual offences against children which will be life imprisonment. The bill also mandates punishment for harassment of women through social media. For the first time the punishment will be of low nature. For the repeated offenders the punishment will be increased. Know that no such provision exists in the Indian penal code for sexual harassment on social media. Moreover the bill also mandates creation of exclusive special course, special police teams and appointment of special public prosecutors in special courts. Already the CM of AP has recently inaugurated a new police station called Disha police station which will be completely women led police station. But the bill has been withdrawn temporarily by AP government because central government has raised some issues with the bill before it could get the presidential assent. And in the recent months the modified bill has been passed by AP state assembly and may soon receive the assent of president. And the second bill has been introduced in the state of Maharashtra. The bill aims to deal sternly with the cases of sexual assault on women. It is named as Shakti Act 2020 and it is modeled on the lines of AP's Disha Act. The proposed Shakti law involves two bills. First one Maharashtra Shakti Criminal Law Act 2020 and special court and machinery for the implementation of Maharashtra Shakti Criminal Law 2020. The bill seeks to amend IPC, CRPC and even the POXO Act that is prevention of children from sexual offenses act to include new offenses, increased punishments and speedier investigation and trials. So the changes are proposed in existing sections of rape, harassment, acid attack, child sexual abuse, etc. Similar to AP, this bill also proposes death penalty in cases of rape, aggravated sexual assault on minors and in cases of acid attack when previous injuries caused. So in these circumstances, the offender or the accused may even get death penalty if proved guilty. The bill also proposes an additional law to deal with abuse of women on social media. So on a broad perspective, these two bills aim to strengthen the law mechanism to protect the women or to deter the men from assaulting women. So in this context, Arthur notes that the time of investigation depends on various factors like severity of crime, number of accused persons and agencies involved. It also includes lot of procedures like examination of scene of crime by the officers, forensic experts, recording the statement of victims, witnesses, medical examination, collecting other documents like DNA findings and many more such formalities need to be done and mainly the accused should be arrested. So the speed and quality of investigation also depends on whether a police station has separate units of investigation and law and order. It also depends on availability of police workforce to speed up the investigation process. So here, Arthur is of the opinion that investigation of sensitive offenses should be done expeditiously, but setting narrow timelines like 21 days for investigation creates scope for loop holes in the procedures which may be exploited during trial. In some cases, even innocent people will be held guilty. So the police should be given additional resources so that they can work more efficiently, more effectively in bringing offenders into the justice. So there should be a balance between speed of justice as well as speed of investigation. So many of us know this quote called justice delayed is justice denied. But we should also note that justice hurried is justice buried. So this is all about the discussion of this opiate column wherein we had a brief discussion on the women protection bills introduced by AP and Maharashtra and what are the issues with speedy investigation processes. With this, let us move on to next news article discussion. Let us take up these news articles. One is an editorial. These two news articles talk about the political situation in the neighboring country of Nepal. See what happened was the president of Nepal has dissolved the lower house of Nepal parliament on the recommendations of Prime Minister Oli. The president of Nepal has also called for a two-face election to be held in coming year. So in our today's news analysis, we will see the special facts about India-Nepal relations and we'll also focus on the deep in India-Nepal relations since the adoption of new Nepalese constitution in 2015. Before going further, the relevant syllabus is given here for your reference. See in physical terms, India shares land boundary of around 1700 kilometers with Nepal. If you see in the order of decreasing order, first comes Bangladesh, next China, third Pakistan and fourth Nepal in terms of length of borders with India. As close neighbors, India and Nepal share unique ties of friendship and cooperation. This is characterized by an open border, deep-rooted people-to-people contacts of kinship and culture. There has been a long tradition of free movement of people across the border. If you see, there are a lot of Nepalist Gurkhas working in India. There is also a regiment called Gurkha Regiment in Indian Army. Further, Nepal citizens are even eligible for Indian government jobs. So, it shows that the relations between India and Nepal are so intimate and so close. So, Nepal shares border with five Indian states Sikkim, West Bengal, Bihar, UP and Uttarakhand. So, immediately after India's independence in 1947, a treaty of peace and friendship was signed between India and Nepal in the 1950. So, this treaty forms the bedrock of special relations between India and Nepal. As per the provisions of this treaty, Nepal citizens can avail facilities and opportunities in India on par with Indian citizens. Nearly 80 lakh Nepalese people live and work in India. And talking about political exchanges, there are very frequent exchanges of high-level visits and interactions between India and Nepal. And in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after taking the charge, visited Nepal twice in the year. Even President of India went to Nepal in 2016. So, it shows that the high-level visits, say Prime Minister, President, are very frequent between India and Nepal. And talking about institutional dialogue mechanisms, India and Nepal have several bilateral bodies like India-Napal Joint Commission. And this commission is co-chaired by external affairs minister of India and foreign minister of Nepal. In terms of defence cooperation, India and Nepal are so close. Since 1950, India and Nepal have been awarding each other's army chief with the honorary rank of general in the recognition of mutual harmonious relationship between two armies. The Gorka Regiments of Indian Army are raised partly by recruitment from Hill Districts of Nepal. Currently, around 32,000 Gorka soldiers from Nepal are serving in Indian Army. Between the two countries, there is a joint military exercise called Suryakiran. However, particularly since 2015, there are many bilateral issues between the neighboring countries, India and Nepal. This is because in September 2015, Nepal adopted a new constitution. India was unhappy with the newly approved constitution, mainly because it did not provide adequate safeguards for Madesis. See, Madesis are people in Nepal who are living close to India's borders. And many of those people have very close family ties with Indians. Even though India raised objections with Nepal, Nepal went ahead with adoption of new constitution in 2015. So this became a very contentious issue between India and Nepal. India even put an unofficial blockade on Nepal for not listening to India's requests. And using this as an opportunity, China became much closer to Nepal by offering all the required things when India put an unofficial blockade. So the main point here is the unrest in Madesis in the borders of Nepal is a very potential aspect to destabilize the Indian side of border. And not just from security issue, Madesis farm around 30% of total population of Nepal. So they feel that they are being ignored and neglected by the majority in Nepal. So coming to the issue, India was not happy with Nepal's government as it did not address the concerns of Madesis. And in the same year that is 2015, Nepal was struck by a devastating earthquake which killed around 9,000 people. It was the deadliest earthquake in the seismically active region in the last 81 years. As said before, because of unofficial blockade by India, Nepal faced problems in procuring fuel, medicines and essential supplies. Nepal even accused India that it is causing another humanitarian crisis in Nepal. And as said before, China has effectively taken advantage of the misunderstandings between the two countries. And to make it even worse, Nepal played cartogenic aggression in the last year by publishing a map with Indian territories as its territories. Through the map, Nepal asserted that the three disputed territories of Limpyadura, Lipu Lake and Kalapani are parts of its territory. The issue of cartographic aggression by Nepal government affected the relations between the two countries. So the bottom line is, in the last five years, India and Nepal relations are not so great. And coming to present political turmoil, that is, as we said before, on the recommendations of Prime Minister, Nepal's president has dissolved the lower house of Nepal's parliament. So in this political turmoil, China has interfered in the crisis by sending a senior delegation of Communist Party of China to meet dividend factions in the ruling coalition. Actually, the current government in Nepal is a coalition government. So there are issues between the coalition partners. So China is trying to meddle into Nepal's political affairs and trying to bury out the disturbances between the coalition partners. But coming to India, so far India is playing a wait and watch attitude. As of now, India has not involved in the current political turmoil of Nepal. So let us wait and watch what role India will play in bringing stability in Nepal. So this is all about the discussion of this news article. We had very elaborate view on India-Napal relations, which will definitely help in your main answer writing, particularly in GST. Let us move on to next news article discussion. Let us take up this data point. See, in this month, Reserve Bank of India released the results of November 2020 around of its consumer confidence survey. So because of COVID-19 pandemic, the survey was conducted through field interviews wherever possible and through telephonic interviews elsewhere. So the perceptions and expectations on eight parameters have been obtained from more than 5000 households across these cities. The eight parameters are given here. Economic situation, employment, price level, income spending, etc. So simply put, as the name suggests, the consumer confidence survey is about the market sentiment or the confidence of consumers in the economy. Let us see some of the important findings. See, this survey uses an index called Current Situation Index. As per this index, it is found that consumer confidence remained very low in November 2020 compared to last year. The weak confidence can be attributable to consumer sentiments on general economic situation, employment scenario, increased price levels, and fall in household incomes. There is also another index called Future Expectations Index, which is used by RBI for analyzing the responses in this survey. According to this index, households across the cities are optimistic about one year ahead situation. It means the people are seeing that the situation will improve by November 2021. As you can see in this graph, Future Expectations Index is over 100 while Current Index is somewhere around 50s. And the data point talks about the negative perception of salaried workers. It says that negative perception increased the most among salaried workers. Around 58% of workers have felt that their household income has worsened in July 2020 compared to last year. As said before, the increase in negative perception is highest among employed salary workers. This is because during lockdown, we have seen that there has been wage cut, salary losses, or loss of jobs mainly faced by salaried employees. And the survey shows that the conditions of salaried workers have not improved even until November 2020. As shown in this graph, small traders and laborers have seen major recovery from around minus 90 to minus 6.8. Even entrepreneurs have seen some amount of recovery. But if you see salaried employees, the job losses have increased from April 2020 to July 2020. And this graph shows about employment platoons. After a steep fall in the number of people employed post lockdown, the job market initially revived at a brisk pace. Here in the March 2020, the number of employed people has been very low. But by July and October, it has revived and declined marginally in November 2020. So if we take a broad perspective, people across the country are having low confidence in the current situation. And the most dissatisfaction is seen among salaried workers because the recovery in the salaried workers has been negative with the increase in job losses in the recent months. Even the employment platoon reflects the same figure with the decrease in number of employed people in November 2020. So this data point have a very brief idea and try to use those figures in your main answer writing. Let us move on to next news article discussion. Let us take up this lead column from today's editorial page. In this column, the author discusses the current ongoing debate that is farm legislations and focuses on two important questions which needs more attention. First one, why have successive governments used the government's extreper that is government's treasury to provide farm subsidies? Second, how large is India spending on farm subsidies compared to other countries having substantial interest in agriculture? So we will be focusing more on these two questions and we will try to address how Indian agriculture can be made profitable. Yes, there have been a lot of news articles, lot of editorials in the recent days regarding farm legislations. But today's article tries to divert our attention to even more important aspect or we can say it as broader aspect of Indian agriculture. Before going further, the relevant syllabus is given here for your reference. So let us move on to first part that is the farm subsidies part. Here comes the problem of adverse terms of trade. Let us try to understand what it means. See, even today Indian agriculture sector supports a major part of rural workforce in the country. If you see in the year 1950-51, the agriculture sector contributed around 45% to GDP with 70% of workforce. And in the present day, the share of agriculture in the country's GDP is just 16% but even today 50% of workforce is still dependent on agriculture. If you see the shrink in agri sector is even more evident in terms of trade. Since 2000s, the farming communities are consistently facing a downfall in export prices than import prices. So in the current day, the imports are looking much attractive compared to our exports. According to author, this erosion in the farm income due to unattractive exports is triggered by growing failure of not achieving maximum productivity. And this lack of productivity is caused by a one more factor that is investment. So when we look back, the share of this sector in total investment undertaken in the country consistently fell from 18% in 1950s to 11% in 1980s. And the current figure is around 7.6%. It means the investment which is going to agriculture is just 7.6%. Next comes the problems with yield in Indian agriculture. If we compare the yield of major crops, that is rice and wheat, India is ranked at 59 for rice and 45 for wheat in the year 2019 in terms of productivity. Productivity means number of turns of production per each acre. So it means that the productivity in India is very low compared to other countries. And if you remove the states of Punjab and Haryana from this list, the productivity will be even more or less and our ranks will be very worse with respect to other countries. So this reflects the difficulty of survival of Indian farmers due to low investments and low yields. The next important issue which is resisting Indian agriculture is markets. In case of present market system, it is dominated by agriculture market committees that is APMCs. Government has recently brought in new act which is popularly called as APMC bypass act, which means farmers are no longer required to sell only in APMCs. So they can even sell outside the APMCs. So author opines that the government has introduced even larger middlemen by bypassing the APMCs. So these are the three major issues. In fact two major issues investment, low productivity and third issue is the new APMC bypass act discussed by the author. So let us see what are the possible areas which needs redressal. The first one comprehensive policy addressing the challenges in the agree sector. And according to author the demand for search policy has never been made by Indian forming communities. And this lack of a proper structural or coherent policy proves to be a remarkable failure on government's part since the independence. For example if you take US where only two percent of its workforce is engaged in agriculture. But US is enacting form lasalations every four years since 1933. So even though only two percent of Americans are depending on agriculture every four years American government is bringing a comprehensive form lasalation to boost the productivity and investments. Similarly the members of European common market adopted their common agricultural policy in 1962. So such policies show the proactive support from the government in addressing the needs of forming sector in a comprehensive manner. So generally when we talk about Indian agriculture we say input problems output problems or farm subsidy problems. We never take a comprehensive view of Indian agriculture. That is what author is saying here. And according to author the farm subsidies can be considered as a price that country pays for the failure of its policy makers in addressing the problems of farm sector. So author is saying that because government has not brought in policy it is paying penalty in terms of farm subsidies. So instead of engaging with the farming communities to bring a comprehensive policy the governments in the last 70 years have just chosen to give subsidies in order to ensure domestic food security and protecting rural livelihoods. So which means MSP again through MSP we are procuring food grains thereby ensuring food security and by giving MSP government is protecting rural livelihoods. And as we said in the recent days this MSP has led to undesirable outcome in terms of excessive stockpiling of food. Though media always says that India is giving a lot of subsidies to farmers if we compare with US and European Union the farm subsidies given by India are just marginal. As per agreement on agriculture members of WTO are expected to notify their agricultural subsidies. And as per 2018-19 data the subsidies in India were around 56 billion dollars. On the other hand in 2017 America provided 131 billion dollars while European Union it is around 93 billion dollars. So these absolute numbers do not provide a good scale to compare the farm subsidies. But if you see the ratios of subsidies to agricultural value addition for these three countries give a much better picture. Thus for 2017 if you take the ratio of farm subsidies to agriculture value addition it is just 12.4 percent for India. While for US it is 90 percent and for European Union it is 45 percent. So with respect to value addition the farm subsidies in India are just 12 percent. So this is the reality of farm subsidies that India provides. So farm subsidies provide a respite to farmers but they are not solution for the longer or broader problems of Indian agriculture. So what India needs is a comprehensive policy as being provided by US and European Union instead of laselations in bits and pieces. So this is all about the discussion of this news article. Let us move on to next news article discussion. Let us take up this news article which talks about the extinction of AFSPA in Nagaland. See AFSPA empowers security forces to conduct operations anyway and arrest anyone without any prior warrant. In this regard let us see about AFSPA Act and also what are the powers given to armored forces under this act. See note that there are two AFSPAs in operation. One is exclusively for Jammu and Kashmir known as Armored Forces Jammu and Kashmir Special Powers Act of 1990. The other act is applicable to some of the north eastern states of India which is Armored Forces Special Powers Act of 1958. So this act is shortly called as AFSPA. So talking about AFSPA Act of 1958 it confers certain special powers to members of armed forces in disturbed areas in the north eastern states of India. We are aware that the north eastern states in India have been hit by violence and insurgency movements for decades. So this act was enacted to give additional powers to armed forces to maintain public order in the disturbed areas. So according to AFSPA Act of 1958 a disturbed area means an area which is for time being declared in an official gazette. So depending on the area either governor or state government or central government can declare whole or any part of a state or UT as a disturbed area by giving a notification in official gazette. So under this act the armed forces will have the authority to prohibit any assembly of five or more persons or prohibit carrying firearms ammunitions. If any person is acting in contravention to any law in force the armed forces can use force and can even fire upon which may even lead to death. So they can arrest without warrant any person who has committed a cognisable offense or against whom a reasonable suspicion exists. So even based on suspicion a person can be arrested that too without a warrant. The armed forces can even enter and search any premises in the disturbed areas to make such arrests. A significant provision is that the armed forces enjoys impunity or indemnity or complete exemption from punishment for their acts. The act says that no prosecution shall be instituted against any person in respect of anything done in exercise of the powers conferred by this act except with the previous sanction of central government. So only with the permission of central government a case can be filed on armed forces. So without that permission the armed forces get complete indemnity or impunity for the acts done under this act. At present AFSPA is operational in the states of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and few areas in Arunachal Pradesh. And coming to today's news article it says that AFSPA has been extended in Nagaland for six more months. This is mainly because Nagaland has a long history of insurgency. See Nagaland became a state in 1963. Even after that the armed insurgency and demand for greater Nagalim or independence has continued. Greater Nagalim means all the Naga areas in the bordering states should be joined to Nagaland. In 1975 the central government signed Shilling Accord with Nagarebels. But the accord was criticized by certain Nagarebel leaders and they continued their insurgency. The most important insurgent group among them is National Socialist Council of Nagaland Isaac Miwa group that is NSCNIM. In 2015 a historic agreement was reached between center and this group which paved the way for peace in the state. If you have watched Uri movie the first fight wherein the protagonist attacked the armed people in the northeast area is based on this Nagaland insurgent group. So this is all about the discussion of this news article. Let us move on to next news article discussion. Let us take up this interesting news article which talks about facial recognition tracking systems in India. In this context we will see briefly what is facial recognition and what are the issues mentioned in the news article. See this facial recognition is a way of recognizing a human face through technology. Facial recognition system uses biometrics to map facial futures from a photograph or a video. It compares the information with a database of known faces to find a match. So it can help verify personal identity but it also rises privacy issues. See most of our phones are having face unlock technology wherein camera automatically detects our face and it unlocks. So that is one kind of facial recognition technology. Now how does this system work? First a picture of a person's face is captured from a photo or video. See the person's face might appear alone or even in a crowd. Then the facial recognition system reads the geometry of the person's face. So key factors include the distance between eyes and distance from forehead to chin. So the software identifies facial landmarks that are key to distinguish one person's face from other. From then a facial signature can be prepared from the data. So therefore the person facial signature which is nothing but a mathematical formula is compared to a database of known faces. And finally if match is found the system identifies who the person is or where this person is from. So this is how the facial recognition systems work. One example is our phones unlock feature. Now who use this technology? See this technology is being used by government at airports, mobile phone makers in cell phones, colleges in the classrooms, social media companies on websites etc. And today's news article says that currently there are around 16 different facial recognition systems in utilization by various central and state governments across India. So these governments are using FRT systems for surveillance, security or authentication of identity. Additionally 17 are in the process of being installed by different government departments. So what are the issues associated with facial recognition systems? Obviously the first one is security. Your facial data can be collected and stored often without your permission. Second these recognition technologies are becoming more widespread. That means your facial signature could end up in a lot of places. You probably won't even know who has access to it. Third is safety. This facial recognition could lead to online harassment and stalking. Like someone takes your picture in a public place and uses software to find out exactly who you are. Fourth one basic freedom. See government agencies and others could have the ability to track you. It means our privacy is being violated. So it could become impossible to remain anonymous. So now as mentioned in the article there are no specific laws or guidelines to regulate the use of this technology in India. So it can pose a huge threat to fundamental rights of privacy and freedom of speech and expression. It can also lead to mass surveillance and overpolicy. Moreover the article says that 100% accuracy in finding matches has not been achieved under this technology. This means that there are even chances of false positive or false negative results. For example when iPhone came up with this face unlock feature the phone unlocked even when the brother of phone's owner used to the phone. Though they look similar they are not twins and they do not look much identical. Even in that case the algorithm failed to distinguish between owner and owner's brother. So this is what we call false positive or false negative. And with respect to India facial recognition has been used when protests were happening against Citizenship Amendment Act and even during Republic Day celebrations last year the police have supported the move by saying that surveillance and security of the state is important. But there should be a proper balance between security of the state and privacy of the individual as outlined in Putta Swami judgment of Supreme Court. Let us take up practice questions from today's news articles. Say this question the consumer confidence survey is released by four options are given here. First one IRDAI that is Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India. Option B SEBI, Option C, RBI, Option D, Neethi Ayub. The correct answer is Option C, Reserve Bank of India. See this question with reference to CRPC that is Criminal Procedure Code consider the following statements. Three statements are given here and we are supposed to identify incorrect statements. Statement 1 The Criminal Procedure Code is the primary criminal code of the country. This statement looks like correct but be careful this statement is incorrect because IPC is the primary criminal code of the country that is Indian Penal Code. The code was drafted during British Raj in the year 1850 and came into force in 1862. Coming to CRPC it was enacted by Indian Parliament in 1974 to consolidate and amend the law relating to criminal procedure. So statement 1 is incorrect. Statement 2 it provides a detailed procedure for punishments under penal laws of the country. Yes the statement 2 is correct. Statement 3 The code provides that investigation relating to all cases of rape must be completed in 90 days of detaining the accused. This statement is incorrect because CRPC provides that investigation relating to offenses punishable with imprisonment up to 10 years must be completed in 60 days and for offenses with higher punishment within 90 days of detaining the accused. To speed up the process the CRPC was amended in 2018 and the period of investigation was reduced from 90 to 60 days for all cases of rape. So statement 3 is incorrect. Statement 1 is incorrect. Statement 2 is correct. So correct answer is option B 1 and 3 only. Next question. Consider the following statements. Two statements are given here and we are supposed to identify incorrect statements. Statement 1 under the AFSPA Act of 1958 only the central government can declare an area as disturbed area. The statement 1 is incorrect because we have seen that either governor of the state or the administrator of UT or the central government any of the three can declare an area as disturbed area. Statement 2 at present AFSPA is operational only in the states of Assam and Nagaland. This statement is also incorrect because as of now AFSPA is operational in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and few areas of Arunachal Pradesh. So the correct answer is option C both 1 and 2 since both the statements are incorrect. See this question. The concerns of Madesi population are discussed in relation to the affairs of so which of the country is related to Madesi population. As we all know the correct answer is option D Nepal. Next see this question with reference to facial recognition technology consider the following statements. Two statements are given here and we are supposed to identify correct statements. Statement 1 a facial recognition software match faces with 100% accuracy without any chances of false positive or false negative cases. This statement is definitely incorrect because we don't have 100% accurate technologies yet. Statement 2 as of now neither central government nor any state government in India use this technology. This statement is also incorrect. As we have discussed many state governments and central government have been using this technology for surveillance and security. So both statements are incorrect. So the correct answer is option D neither one nor two. Let us take up one main question. The panacea for all the ill plaguing Indian agriculture sector is bringing out a comprehensive policy on agriculture elaborate. Write the answer in 150 words and submit your answers in the comment section. Before we conclude one important announcement guys tomorrow there will not be Hindu news analysis because tomorrow is New Year. We wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year. See you all on Jan 2nd. With this we conclude today's news analysis. If you find this session resourceful click on the like button show your appreciation in the comment section and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.