Amazing Maths

Twelve Steps to Developing an Effective First Draft of your Manuscript

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You should now have detailed notes you can use to write your draft paper. If you don’t have one already, it may help to prepare an outline for each section which includes a number of major headings, sub-headings and paragraphs covering different points. If you need help in preparing an outline see our article Eight Steps to Developing an Effective Manuscript Outline at www.sfedit.net/newsletters.htm. At this point you will need to convert your notes and outline into narrative form.

Some people recommend that you begin with the Introduction and continue in order through each section of the paper to help ensure flow. Others suggest that you begin with the easiest sections, which are usually the Methods and Results, followed by the Discussion, Conclusion, Introduction, References and Title, leaving the Abstract until the end. The main thing is to begin writing and begin filling up the blank screen or piece of paper.

1. Consolidate all the information. Ensure you have everything you need to write efficiently, i.e., all data, references, drafts of tables and figures, etc.

2. Target a journal. Determine the journal to which you plan to submit your manuscript and write your manuscript according to the focus of the targeted journal. The focus may be clearly stated within the journal or may be determined by examining several recent issues of the targeted journal.

3. Start writing. When writing the first draft, the goal is to put something down on paper, so it does not matter if sentences are incomplete and the grammar incorrect, provided that the main points and ideas have been captured. Write when your energy is high, not when you are tired. Try to find a time and place where you can think and write without distractions.

4. Write quickly. Don't worry about words, spelling or punctuation at all at this stage, just ideas. Keep going. Leave gaps if necessary. Try to write quickly, to keep the flow going. Use abbreviations and leave space for words that do not come to mind immediately.

5. Write in your own voice. Expressing yourself in your own way will help you to say what you mean more precisely. It will be easier for your reader if they can “hear” your voice.

6. Write without editing. Don't try to get it right the first time. Resist the temptation to edit as you go. Otherwise, you will tend to get stuck and waste time. If you try to write and edit at the same time, you will do neither well.

7. Keep to the plan of your outline. Use the headings from your outline to focus what you want to say. If you find yourself wandering from the point, stop and move on to the next topic in the outline.

8. Write the paper in parts. Don't attempt to write the whole manuscript at once, instead, treat each section as a mini essay. Look at your notes, think about the goal of that particular section and what you want to accomplish and say.

9. Put the first draft aside. Put aside your first draft for at least one day. The idea of waiting a day or more is to allow you to "be" another person. It is difficult to proofread and edit your own work; a day or more between creation and critique helps.

10. Revise it. Revise it and be prepared to do this several times until you feel it is not possible to improve it further. The objective is to look at your work not as its author, but as a respectful but stern critic. Does each sentence make sense? In your longer sentences, can you keep track of the subject at hand? Do your longer paragraphs follow a single idea, or can they be broken into smaller paragraphs? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself.

11. Revise for clarity and brevity. Revise sentences and paragraphs with special attention to clearness. For maximum readability, most sentences should be about 15-20 words. For a scientific article, paragraphs of about 150 words in length are considered optimal. Avoid using unnecessary words.

12. Be consistent. Often a manuscript has more than one author and therefore the writing may be shared. However, the style needs to be consistent throughout. The first author must go through the entire manuscript and make any necessary editorial changes before submitting the manuscript to the journal.

Four golden lessons

Steven Weinberg
When I received my undergraduate degree — about a hundred years ago — the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD —though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don’t have to.

Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes — that’s where the action is.

My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesn’t matter if the problems are scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it’s very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth’s motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.

Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by believing one of the oversimplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science.

More improtantly, the history of science can make your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you’re probably not going to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably won’t understand what you’re doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you won’t even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part of history.

Look back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who was Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1903, or President of the United States? What stands out as really important is that at McGill University, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were working out the nature of radioactivity. This work (of course!) had practical applications, but much more important were its cultural implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earth’s cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it removed the last scientific objection to what many geologists and paleontologists thought was the great age of the Earth and the Sun. After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belief in the literal truth of the Bible or resign themselves to intellectual irrelevance. This was just one step in a sequence of steps from Galileo through Newton and Darwin to the present that,time after time,has weakened the hold of religious dogmatism. Reading any newspaper nowadays is enough to show you that this work is not yet complete. But it is civilizing work, of which scientists are able to feel proud.

■ Steven Weinberg is in the Department of Physics,
The University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712, USA.

This essay is based on a commencement talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGill University in June 2003.

Speech by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam

DEVELOPED INDIA
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.
Former President of India



“I have three visions for India.

In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.

Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.

My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn’t this incorrect?

I have a THIRD vision.

India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closelyand consider this the great opportunity of my life.

I see four milestones in my career:

Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.

After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India’s guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.

The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss.

The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram Calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. Load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!

Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?

We are the first in milk production.

We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.

We are the second largest producer of wheat.

We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture Of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE ? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?

I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied:

I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.

Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.

YOU say that our government is inefficient.

YOU say that our laws are too old.

YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.

YOU say that the phones don’t work, the railways are a joke, The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.

YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.

YOU say, say and say.

What do YOU do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - YOURS. Give him a face - OURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don’t throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are.

You pay $5 (approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU comeback to the Parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity.

In Singapore you don’t say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn’t dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah. YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, “see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.” YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, “Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so’s son. Take your two bucks and get lost.” YOU wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand. Why don’t YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo?

Why don’t YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?

Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr.Tinaikar, had a point to make. “Rich people’s dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,” he said. “And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?

In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do that here?” He’s right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.

We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity.

This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room Protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? “It’s the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons’ rights to a dowry.” So who’s going to change the system?

What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away.

Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money. Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one’s conscience too....I am echoing J.F.Kennedy’s words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....

“ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY”

Lets do what India needs from us. Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails.

Thank you
Abdul Kalam

Interesting Chemical Engineering Books

1. Strategies for Creative Problem Solving, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2008, Authors: H. Scott Fogler (University of Michigan), Steven E. Leblanc (University of Toledo)

MATLAB

MATLAB R2007b is released on September 1, 2007. This version is called MATLAB 7.5
MATLAB R2008a is released on March 1, 2008. This version is called MATLAB 7.6

Chemical Engineering books based on various softwares

1. Problem Solving in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering with POLYMATH, Excel and MATLAB, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2008, Authors: Michael B. Cutlip (University of Connecticut), Mordechai Shacham (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
2. Problem Solving in Chemical Engineering with Numerical Methods, Prentice Hall, 1999, Authors: Michael B. Cutlip (University of Connecticut), Mordechai Shacham (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
3. Techniques of Model-Based Control, Prentice Hall, 2002, Authors: Coleman Brosilow (Case Western Reserve University), Babu Joseph (University of South Florida)
4. Process Dynamics and Control, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004, Authors: Dale E. Seborg (University of California, Santa Barbara), Thomas F. Edgar (University of Texas at Austin), Duncan A. Mellichamp (University of California, Santa Barbara)
5. Process Control: Modeling, Design, and Simulation, Prentice Hall, 2003, Authors: B. Wayne Bequette (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
6. Process Control: A First Course with MATLAB, Cambridge University Press, 2002, Authors: Pao C. Chau (University of California at San Diego)
7. Introduction to Chemical Engineering Computing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, Authors: Bruce A. Finlayson
8. Distillation Design and Control Using Aspen Simulation, Wiley, 2006, Authors: William L. Luyben
9. Plantwide Dynamic Simulators in Chemical Processing and Control, 2002, Authors: William L. Luyben
10. Product and Process Design Principles: Synthesis, Analysis, and Evaluation, 2nd Edition, 2004, Authors: Warren D. Seider (Univ. of Pennsylvania), J. D. Seader (Univ. of Utah), Daniel R. Lewin (Technion–Israel Institute of Technology)
11. A Real-Time Approach to Process Control, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 2006, Authors: William Y. Svrcek (Univ. of Calgary, Canada); Donald P. Mahoney (AEA Technology Engineering Software, Hyprotech Ltd, Calgary, Canada); Brent R. Young (Univ. of Calgary, Canada)
12. Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering, 4th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2006, Authors: H. Scott Fogler

A new book on Numerical Computing with MATLAB

This book is written by Cleve Moler. You can download from this website for free.
http://www.mathworks.com/academia/

Microwave Tips

To use your microwave oven even more effectively:

• Cook in round vessels. Rectangular ones are less effective because they come closer to the power source (on the oven’s side) as the dish rotates, and may heat food unevenly, even burn some portions.
• Microwaves are more evenly distributed on a flat plate, and therefore cooking time is reduced.
• Use several smaller containers, instead of one large one, to speed up the cooking process. This way, you can also simultaneously hand out a number of small servings to family or guests

Colour Your Diet

Eating a colourful diet—with green, red, blue, white and yellow fruits and vegetables—is healthy, and can lower the risk of some cancers. But not all foods pack the same punch, says Marilyn S. Nanney, a registered dietitian at St Louis University.

Add these powerhouses to your rainbow:

YELLOW/ORANGE
Health benefits: Protects immune system, vision and heart health
Old standby: Corn
But don’t forget: Mangoes, cantaloupe, oranges, musambi, carrots, papaya

BLUE/PURPLE
Health benefits: Maintains urinary tract health; promotes memory function
Old standby: Grapes
Don’t forget: Brinjals, plums, jambu, blue or black berries.

RED
Health benefits: Sustains memory function and urinary tract health
Old standby: Apples
Don’t forget: Tomatoes, red chillies, strawberries.

WHITE
Health benefits: Maintains heart health and good cholesterol levels
Old standbys: Potatoes, onions, mushrooms
Don’t forget: Cauliflower.

GREEN
Health benefits: Promotes vision, strong bones and teeth
Old standbys: Iceberg lettuce, green beans
Don’t forget: Dark lettuces, spinach, broccoli.

Food and Family

Want your kids to eat healthy? Check your own diet. The more fruit and vegetables Mum and Dad eat, the more Junior is likely to consume, according to a study of two- to six-year-olds at London’s University College. And youngsters who were introduced to these foods earlier tended to reach for them more often. Those who had been breast-fed ate fruit and vegetables more frequently than bottle-fed kids. The likely reason? Breast milk takes on the flavours of the food Mum eats.

Speaking of milk, American researchers found that girls who met calcium requirements had mums who drank more milk. Moreover, those who got at least the minimum recommended amount of calcium at age five (800mg daily) were nearly five times as likely to do so at age nine (1300mg daily).

Is processed yogurt good for you?

Yogurt (or curd) is essential in nearly all regions of India. And nearly everybody likes it. But are the yogurt-coated cereals and processed foods really good for you? Real low-fat yogurt is very healthy, says dietitian Elisa Zied, author of So What Can I Eat? These products are often made with dried nonfat yogurt, which doesn’t always have calcium or any of the other key nutrients in yogurt. But real curd is good as we all know it. Make or choose low- or non-fat varieties. Best to have it with little or no sugar. Home-made, low-fat curd is more healthful than the flavoured ones.

Going to buy high-tech goods?

Remember when shopping for a camera was easy? Fiddle with a few models, pick one and go home happy. Today you practically need a degree in computer science and three months just to research the right one.

The same clutter exists in virtually every category of consumer electronics and technology. Faced with too many choices, people cannot compare all the options competently, says Barry Schwartz, an American professor of social theory and author of The Paradox of Choice. For example, one university study found that a supermarket customer offered 24 varieties of jam was less likely to buy any jam, than a customer offered just six varieties.

So how can time-pressed electronics shoppers make a decision without feeling regret? Experts urge self-restraint:

Stick to a budget: It’s easy to get snowed into adding features that inch up the price, says Brian Clark, founder of The Tech Enthusiast’s Network, a consumer technology consulting service. Begin with an absolute price ceiling, he says, and you will automatically limit yourself to the best product you can afford.

Know your needs: Ask a friend or relative who is up on electronics to explain the options and then figure out which ones matter most to you.

Talk the talk: Before coming face to face with salespeople who favour jargon, bone up on the lingo. Clark says knowing what key terms mean in advance can inoculate you against buying more than you need.

Ease the pressure: If you feel overwhelmed, leave the store, Clark says. Impulse purchases rarely wind up satisfying in the long run.

Train your brain: No product is perfect. And with electronics, there’s always a new, more technically sophisticated version just around the corner. “We tend to focus on what’s disappointing, but with training, you can learn to focus on what’s satisfying about your purchase,” Barry Schwartz says.

Science & Technology Magazines

Go Digital and Save Money.
Subscribing to foreign science and technology magazines from India is very expensive, says Biman Basu, former editor of Science Reporter. In addition copies can get lost in the mail.

His solution: downloadable digital editions. Not only can articles from many such magazines be read on their websites for free, their digital editions (you can subscribe to them using your credit card) are much cheaper than their printed versions. For instance, the British weekly New Scientist costs $51 for an annual digital subscription but $218 for the print edition. Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, costs $28 for digital versus $58 for print. For Scientific American it’s $39.95 and $55.

Many current articles from Psychology Today and National Geographic magazines, too, can be read for free at their websites (do a Google search using magazine titles in each case). And a free weekly read to keep your tech-edge sharp is Walt Mossberg’s “Personal Technology” column in the Wall Street Journal site ptech.wsj.com. But paying for a digital subscription automatically downloads the current issue on your PC and lets you access archived articles in back issues too.

“One bonus,” adds Basu, “digital editions save you 100% shelf-space!” but care should be taken to organize the soft copies of these files.

Buying new TV? Read this first

Your boxy old tube is growing obsolete, so is it…Time to Buy a Flat Panel TV?

What Is It? New flat panel TVs come in two formats, LCD (liquid crystal display) and plasma. LCD screens are just like those on laptop PCs. [Even if your TV screen looks flat, it most probably has a cathode ray tube (CRT), so it’s not a flat panel TV.] Plasma screens have innumerable gas-filled picture elements that get illuminated by electrical signals. LCD sets normally range from 15 to 23 inches in size; plasma, between 32 and 50 inches.

Cost? Depends on the features and brand. In general, the smallest LCD sets start at about Rs60,000, while plasma sets start at about Rs 2.3 lakhs; some 50-inch plasma sets cost around Rs 5 lakhs.

Pros: Both LCD and plasma provide more picture clarity than CRTs. Being very thin, they take up less room than CRTs. Some can be hung on the wall. Cons: Plasma screens tend to have shorter life spans than LCDs—over time, the picture quality tends to degrade. The weight of plasma TVs may require a professional to wall-mount them.

Bottom Line: LCDs are your best choice. But since they’ll soon replace CRTs to become the standard, it’s worth waiting till prices really drop.

Relaxing at home

Quiet, Please! Open windows and more time outdoors can also mean noisy neighbours, barking dogs and the din of speeding cars. Some people have been masking the noise with these methods:

• Use your PC With Atmosphere Deluxe (relaxingsoftware.com), you customize your own nature sound mix. Then, fed through your PC speakers, you’ll hear the ocean or tropical frog pond instead of the mower across the street.
• Tune it out iSplash waterproof speakers (sharperimage.com) play music from an iPod or any source with a headphone jack.
• Consider storm windows An outer laminated window can cut outside noise by up to 10 decibels—perceived as half the amount of sound, says one sound engineer.

Looking to buy a laptop?

Read this…

• Don’t be seduced by super-fast processor speeds unless you’re running graphics-intensive applications such as games or design programs.
• If you are running the software codes, consider for dual core with higher RAM.
• If you want to watch DVDs on the move, buy a laptop with an internal DVD drive. An external drive could be a nuisance if you travel a lot.
• Buy a spare or higher-capacity battery for when you’re not near a plug socket.
• Be prepared to pay extra for software. Even Microsoft Office is absent from many packages.
• Due to their rough life, laptops are more prone to failure making it vital to back up data: a second, external hard drive or pen-drive makes this easier.
• Up-loading digital pictures? You’ll need a memory-card slot (Now a days, all laptops have these slots).
• Buy a decent bag to protect your laptop.

Health Care - Diabetes

Diabetes or Just Normal Thirst?

Do you feel thirsty or tired all the time? If so, you could be one of the estimated 40 million Indians who have diabetes. Here’s what to look for:

• As well as increased fatigue and thirst, typical symptoms include urinating more often (as your kidneys try to excrete excess sugar), weight loss, blurred vision (caused by blood glucose accumulating in your eye’s lens) and genital itching (sometimes due to infection). Cuts may also take longer to heal.
• Type 1 diabetes can be triggered by a virus and tends to develop within days or over a few weeks; Type 2 onset is slower and can be mistaken for stress or ageing.
• People under 40 are more prone to Type 1 but, due to rising levels of obesity, are now the fastest growing group for Type 2-once linked with old age. Both Types run in families.
• If you’re worried, go to your GP for a urine test to measure your glucose level. A healthy diet (low in salt, fat and sugar) and daily exercise are crucial for preventing Type 2.

November 14 is World Diabetes Day.

Computer Comfort

In a recent Microsoft survey, 73% of respondents named their keyboard and mouse as the things they touched most during the day. Half of all respondents said they’ve experienced discomfort using a computer.

If you spend most of your day in front of a computer, Dan Odell, a Microsoft ergonomist, offers these tips for avoiding injury:

Adjust your chair so your feet are firmly on the ground.

Set your keyboard at elbow height. “We see more discomfort in the shoulders and neck than in the hands and wrists,” says Odell. “If your desk is too high, you tend to hold your arms up over the desk, which results in an extra load on your shoulders.”

Avoid extreme reaches. If the mouse is too far away, your shoulder is really rotated when you use it, comments Odell.

Look for products designed for comfort such as a padded wrist rest or a mouse that fits the relaxed posture of the hand.

Don’t ignore even minor discomfort. According to Odell, any misalignment can add up.

Lively Places

Last week I visited Los Angeles, Salt Lake city, and San Francisco in USA with my friends. They are very nice places and I will tell you all the details about sight seeing soon.

A new game on powering your city

This game was made by American Petroleum Company, Chevron. This game will give your concern about the future energy crisis. To access the game, visit the website - http://www.willyoujoinus.com/.