Government to replace pen and paper with tablets for data collection.

  Pentium is mightier than pen - at last the government's army of data collectors have admitted to this. July will see the first data collection exercise ever that will substitute pen-and-paper with computing technology (tablets in this case), and this is a first step in what will be a quick digitisation of this vast government programme.

July's first quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) will be conducted by researchers using tablets, and guided by what's known as computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technique. The statistics ministry has asked for around 700 tablets, at a per unit cost of Rs 20,000. Surveyors of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) will track and upload employment data, making huge time savings.
"We have moved a proposal to the finance ministry to get 700 of these devices for PLFS, which is in advanced stages of being implemented. We used to collect data on paper which was then sent to data processing centres and then uploaded, leading to delays. In a way, we are setting a precedent," said an official from the ministry of statistics and programme implementation. This officer and others who spoke to ET did not wish to be identified.

Use of technology can speed up data dissemination, they said.
For example, the government's employment data is available only once every five years from National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO).
Plus, its scope is limited to the coverage area of the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI). ASI looks at registered factories only. The labour ministry's quicker quarterly surveys, started since the global economic crisis of 2008, are also not broad enough in scope. The US produces monthly employment data, and India needs to get there, officials said. Technology is critical in achieving that.

Use of technology so far has been limited to back office. The statistics ministry runs portals that can process data. And postal department employees collect consumer price inflation data in rural areas and feed it into computers in back offices. But the interface of the surveyor and the surveyed has so far been pen-and-paper.

Those tablets in July will, therefore, represent a sort of a breakthrough. They will have data validation powers. They will come loaded with a schedule of questions and software that will, when data is fed, estimate critical indicators like unemployment rate and workforce participation.
Assessing officers will be able to edit data collected while conducting interviews and any anomalies, for example, expenditure exceeding income, will be highlighted immediately.
"Data validation will happen simultaneously and then transmitted online to the centralised data processing unit to process it," the official explained.

Stanford scientists develop new ways to produce clean hydrogen fuel using sunlight.

When sunlight hits the electrode, it generates an electric current that splits the water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen.
WASHINGTON: Stanford scientists have developed a new way to produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight, in an effort to tackle one of the world's biggest energy challenges - clean fuel for transportation.
Hydrogen fuel has long been touted as a clean alternative to gasoline.
"Millions of cars could be powered by clean hydrogen fuel if it were cheap and widely available," said Yi Cui, an associate professor at Stanford University in the US.
Unlike gasoline-powered vehicles, which emit carbon dioxide, hydrogen cars themselves are emissions free.

However, making most hydrogen fuel involves natural gas in a process that releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
To address the problem, researchers focused on photovoltaic water splitting. This emerging technology consists of a solar-powered electrode immersed in water.

When sunlight hits the electrode, it generates an electric current that splits the water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen.
Conventional solar electrodes made of silicon quickly corrode when exposed to oxygen, a key byproduct of water splitting. Several research teams have reduced corrosion by coating the silicon with iridium and other precious metals.
Researchers presented a new approach using bismuth vanadate, an inexpensive compound that absorbs sunlight and generates modest amounts of electricity.
"Bismuth vanadate has been widely regarded as a promising material for photoelectrochemical water splitting, in part because of its low cost and high stability against corrosion," said Cui.
"However, the performance of this material remains well below its theoretical solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency," Cui said.
Bismuth vanadate absorbs light but is a poor conductor of electricity. To carry a current, a solar cell made of bismuth vanadate must be sliced very thin, 200 nanometres or less, making it virtually transparent.
As a result, visible light that could be used to generate electricity simply passes through the cell.
To capture sunlight before it escapes, researchers created microscopic arrays containing thousands of silicon nanocones, each about 600 nanometres tall.
They deposited the nanocone arrays on a thin film of bismuth vanadate. Both layers were then placed on a solar cell made of perovskite, another promising photovoltaic material.

When submerged, the three-layer tandem device immediately began splitting water at a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 6.2 per cent, already matching the theoretical maximum rate for a bismuth vanadate cell.

Facebook shareholders approve proposal to give company's 'supreme control' to Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook Inc shareholders approved a proposal to create a new class of non-voting shares, a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media company he founded.
The company's plan to issue two "Class C" shares for each Class A and Class B share held by shareholders, in what is effectively a 3-for-1 stock split, was approved by Facebook shareholders at the company's annual general meeting on Monday.

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The Class C shares will be publicly traded under a new symbol.

Zuckerberg said in December that he intended to put 99% of his Facebook shares into a new philanthropy project focusing on human potential and equality.

The creation of the Class C shares would allow Zuckerberg to sell the non-voting stock, but keep the voting Class A and Class B shares that would let him retain control of Facebook.

Zuckerberg plans on running Facebook "for a very long time", the 32 year-old CEO told shareholders at a Q&A session at the AGM.
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Shareholders also approved the continued tenure of all the eight board members, including billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who were up for re-election.
Facebook announced the plan to create the new class of non-voting shares on April 27. The approval of the plan was virtually certain since Zuckerberg controls the company.