Scientific Indians

Datawind’s Ubislate 7+ is available for all

admin — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:22:22 +0000

If students missed out to register Aakash (Ubislate7) tablet, Datawind has launched a new tab to woo them back. Datawind’s Ubislate 7+ is an upgraded version of Aakash which will be available in the last week of January.

Interested buyers can book it in advance by clicking on the ‘pre-book’ tab available on the website of Aakash. They can also call on a Toll Free No: 1800.180.2180 for more information.

While Aakash was priced at Rs. 2,500 the new version is priced at Rs. 2,900. Ubislate 7+ supports 3200 mAh battery, comes with an operating system of Android 2.3 and enables Wi-Fi and GPRS functionality.

Unlike Aakash (Ubislate7) which is a student version tab, Ubislate 7+ will be available everywhere and to everyone. With the launch of another tablet from Datawind’s stable, the group believes that it is indeed the cheapest tab available worldwide.

Alongside these, the tab comes with lots of accessory options, ranging from car chargers and external antennas to keyboard case. Interestingly, it has 2 USB ports and can also be used as a phone. It also has an option of 3G as it supports an external 3G dongle.

For more details pertaining to its configuration read below:

Hardware

• Processor: Connexant with Graphics accelerator & HD Video processor

• Memory : 256MB RAM / Storage (Internal): 2GB Flash

• Storage (External): 2GB to 32GB Supported

• Peripherals: 2 Standard USB port

• Display and Resolution: 7 display with 800×480 pixel resolution

Software

• OS: Android 2.2

• Document Rendering

• Supported Document formats: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, ODT, ODP

• PDF viewer, Text editor

• Multimedia and Image Display

• Image viewer supported formats: PNG, JPG, BMP and GIF

• Supported audio formats: MP3, AAC, AC3, WAV, WMA

• Supported video formats: MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, FLV

• Communication and Internet

• Web browser – Standards Compliance: xHTML 1.1 compliant, JavaScript 1.8 compliant

• Separate application for online YouTube video

• Safety and other standards compliance

• CE certification / RoHS certification

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins chat God, politics in final interview

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 04:14:56 +0000

British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on 15 December 2011 at the age of 62.

Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

A heavy smoker and drinker, Hitchens cut short a book tour for his memoir “Hitch 22″ last year to undergo chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer.

As a journalist, war correspondent and literary critic, Hitchens carved out a reputation for barbed repartee, scathing critiques of public figures and a fierce intelligence.

In his 2007 book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Hitchens took on major religions with his trenchant atheism. He argued that religion was the source of all tyranny and that many of the world’s evils have been done in the name of religion.

The son of a British naval officer, Hitchens studied at Oxford University and worked as literary critic for the New Statesman magazine in London before moving to New York to work as a journalist in 1981. He settled in Washington the following year, initially as correspondent for the left-wing magazine The Nation. He retained his British citizenship when he became an American citizen in 2007.

Hitchens was not one to mince words. In his book on Bill Clinton “No one left to lie to”, he called the former U.S. president a “rapist” and a “con man.” He once referred to Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a “fanatical Albanian dwarf.”

The author of 25 books – including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and George Orwell – and countless articles and columns, Hitchens never lost his biting humor.

“I’m a member of a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers,” Hitchens said in an interview with CBS “60 Minutes” aired on March 6, 2011.

In a 2010 interview with Reuters, Hitchens dismissed criticism that he moved from left to right and helped former U.S. President George W. Bush sell the 2003 war with Iraq to the American public with what turned out to be bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam was an enemy of the civilized world and he should have been taken out a long time before,” Hitchens said of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. “I have no regrets about that at all.”

The 2001 attacks on the United States by Islamic fundamentalists in hijacked passenger planes made Hitchens ever more critical of the role of religion in the world, and led him to appreciate the merits of American democracy.

“I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion, and organized religion,” he wrote.

A trinity of the most ungodly kind executed an intellectual and literary attack on “faith” in the last decade, spurring right-wing and left-wing religious thinkers to draft frenzied responses in an attempt to curb or at least moderate the gains being made by atheists worldwide.

Sam Harris’s End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and the late Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great all dominated best-seller lists at most bookstores between 2004 and 2007.

As vitriolic as these books read, closer attention to the raison d’être behind them revealed articulate indictments of intellectually apathetic and complacent minds that may be idly believing in ideas that are inherently violent or otherwise damaging to humanity. Their rebukes praised the rational mind over the ‘faithful,’ which was a criticism many spiritual leaders — at least the more thoughtful ones — could take something from.

“One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond. That pleasure is now denied us. The problems that drew his attention remain—and so does the record of his brilliance, courage, erudition, and good humor in the face of outrage.” – Sam Harris

Sam Harris’s farewell to Hitchens, found here, speaks of mutual respect and a touch of regret that the two, who, in some respects, were of a similar ilk, hadn’t spent more time together. But, Harris does refer to a recently videotaped debate on the afterlife, which “Hitch” and Harris, et al, took part in well into the final stages of the cancer that took his life.

“Hitch lived an extraordinarily large life. (Read his memoir, Hitch-22, and marvel.) It was too short, to be sure—and one can only imagine what another two decades might have brought out of him—but Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries.”

Exclusive extracts from the writer’s final interview.

Dawkins sat down with the already mostly hospital bound Hitchens for what turned out to be his last interview before he died of oesophageal cancer on Dec. 15 . The pair met in Texas, where Dawkins presented Hitchens with the Freethinker of the Year Award.

“Never be afraid of stridency”

Richard Dawkins One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a “Catholic child” or a “Muslim child”. I’ve become a bit of a bore about it.
Christopher Hitchens You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency.
RD I will remember that.
CH If I was strident, it doesn’t matter – I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You’ve educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out.
Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, “Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements.”

Fascism and the Catholic Church

RD The people who did Hitler’s dirty work were almost all religious.
CH I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
RD Can you talk a bit about that – the relationship of Nazism with the Catholic Church?
CH The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word “fascist”, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with “extreme-right Catholic party”.
Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It’s not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere.

Hitchens on the left-right spectrum

RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
CH Yes; it’s broken down with me.
RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.
CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

Hitchens on his legacy

RD I’ve been reading some of your recent collections of essays – I’m astounded by your sheer erudition. You seem to have read absolutely everything. I can’t think of anybody since Aldous Huxley who’s so well read.
CH It may strike some people as being broad but it’s possibly at the cost of being a bit shallow. I became a journalist because one didn’t have to specialise. I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag and the definition of the word “polymath” came up. Eco said it was his ambition to be a polymath; Sontag challenged him and said the definition of a polymath is someone who’s interested in everything and nothing else. I was encouraged in my training to read widely – to flit and sip, as Bertie [Wooster] puts it – and I think I’ve got good memory retention. I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth.
A lot of reviewers have said, to the point of embarrassing me, that I’m in the class of Edmund Wilson or even George Orwell. It really does remind me that I’m not. But it’s something to at least have had the comparison made – it’s better than I expected when I started.

Hitchens on Tony Blair

RD You debated with Tony Blair. I’m not sure I watched that. I love listening to you [but] I can’t bear listening to . . . Well, I mustn’t say that. I think he did come over as rather nice on that evening.
CH He was charming, that evening. And during the day, as well.
RD What was your impression of him?
CH You can only have one aim per debate. I had two in debating with Tony Blair. The first one was to get him to admit that it was not done – the stuff we complain of – in only the name of religion. That’s a cop-out. The authority is in the text. Second, I wanted to get him to admit, if possible, that giving money to a charity or organising a charity does not vindicate a cause.
I got him to the first one and I admired his honesty. He was asked by the interlocutor at about half-time: “Which of Christopher’s points strikes you as the best?” He said: “I have to admit, he’s made his case, he’s right. This stuff, there is authority for it in the canonical texts, in Islam, Judaism.”
At that point, I’m ready to fold – I’ve done what I want for the evening.

We did debate whether Catholic charities and so on were a good thing and I said: “They are but they don’t prove any point and some of them are only making up for damage done.” For example, the Church had better spend a lot of money doing repair work on its Aids policy in Africa, [to make up for preaching] that condoms don’t prevent disease or, in some cases, that they spread it. It is iniquitous. It has led to a lot of people dying, horribly. Also, I’ve never looked at some of the ground operations of these charities – apart from Mother Teresa – but they do involve a lot of proselytising, a lot of propaganda. They’re not just giving out free stuff. They’re doing work to recruit.

Richard Dawkins: Illness made Hitchens a symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism

admin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:36:20 +0000

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011): Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world’s fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. He was a champion for atheism, skepticism, science, history and common sense. He will be sorely missed.

On 7 October, I recorded a long conversation with Christopher Hitchens in Houston, Texas, for the Christmas edition of New Statesman which I was guest-editing.

He looked frail, and his voice was no longer the familiar Richard Burton boom; but, though his body had clearly been diminished by the brutality of cancer, his mind and spirit had not. Just two months before his death, he was still shining his relentless light on uncomfortable truths, still speaking the unspeakable (“The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word ‘fascist’, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with ‘extreme-right Catholic party’”), still leading the charge for human freedom and dignity (“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do”) and still encouraging others to stand up fearlessly for truth and reason (“Stridency is the least you should muster … It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements’.”).

The following day, I presented him with an award in my name at the Atheist Alliance International convention, and I can today derive a little comfort from having been able to tell him during the presentation that day how much he meant to those of us who shared his goals.

I told him that he was a man whose name would be joined, in the history of the atheist/secular movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume. What follows is based on my speech, now sadly turned into the past tense.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. He was a reader whose breadth of reading was simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word “learned” – except that Christopher was the least stuffy learned person you could ever meet.

He was a debater who would kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet did it with a grace that disarmed his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He was emphatically not of the school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents might have shouted and shrieked. Indeed they did. But Hitch didn’t need to shout, for he could rely instead on his words, his polymathic store of facts and allusions, his commanding generalship of the field of discourse, and the forked lightning of his wit.

Christopher Hitchens was known as a man of the left. But he was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left-right dimension. He was a one-off: unclassifiable. He might be described as a contrarian except that he specifically and correctly disavowed the title. He was uniquely placed in his own multidimensional space. You never knew what he would say about anything until you heard him say it, and when he did, he would say it so well, and back it up so fully, that if you wanted to argue against him you had better be on your guard.

He was recognised throughout the world as a leading public intellectual of our time. He wrote many books and countless articles. He was an intrepid traveller and a war reporter of signal valour. But he had a special place in the affections of atheists and secularists as the leading intellect and scholar of our movement. A formidable adversary to the pretentious,

the woolly-minded or the intellectually dishonest, he was a gently encouraging friend to the young, the diffident, and those tentatively feeling their way into the life of the freethinker and not certain where it would take them.

He inspired, energised and encouraged us. He had us cheering him on almost daily. He even begat a new word – the hitchslap. It wasn’t just his intellect we admired: it was also his pugnacity, his spirit, his refusal to countenance ignoble compromise, his forthrightness, his indomitable spirit, his brutal honesty.

And in the very way he looked his illness in the eye, he embodied one part of the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend their lives in denial of its reality. Hitch looked it squarely in the eye: not denying it, not giving in to it, but facing up to it squarely and honestly and with a courage that inspires us all.

Before his illness, it was as an erudite author, essayist and sparkling, devastating speaker that this valiant horseman led the charge against the follies and lies of religion. During his illness he added another weapon to his armoury and ours – perhaps the most formidable and powerful weapon of all: his very character became an outstanding and unmistakable symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism, as well as of the worth and dignity of the human being when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion.

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against cant, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God.

Jamy Ian Swiss – In Pursuit of Psychics | For Good Reason

anand — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:22:25 +0000

Famed magician Jamy Ian Swiss sits down with DJ Grothe to talk about psychics. As an advisor to the James Randi Educational Foundation, Swiss helped put self-proclaimed psychics to the test on ABC’s “Primetime Nightline”. He discusses the phenomenon of celebrity psychics and why their claims should be challenged. But are all psychics knowing charlatans? Swiss says no, but even the self-deluded have the capacity to do harm to an unknowing public.

Sean Faircloth Discusses Children Harmed by “Faith-healing” with Liz Heywood

anand — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:20:31 +0000

This video contains graphic descriptions of physical harm. Over 35 states have laws which give some greater leeway to “faith-healing” parents to engage in medical neglect of their children. For every child that dies in a so-called “faith-healing” home, many children suffer horrible pain but survive. Liz Heywood describes the agonizing pain she suffered as well as psychic trauma resulting from so-called “faith-healing” to author Sean Faircloth, author of Attack of the Theocrats and Dir. of Strategy and Policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation US. There are numerous “faith-healing” congregations. Christian Scientists are the most well known.

The Randi Show – Power Balance

anand — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:13:24 +0000

The Randi Show is a biweekly video podcast produced by the James Randi Educational Foundation. James Randi himself discusses news from the world of science, pseudoscience, and the paranormal. Plus, he shares some stories from his amazing life. In this episode, Randi explores the recent bankruptcy of Power Balance, makers of pseudoscientific “energy” apparel.

The Randi Show – Season of Reason

anand — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:49:12 +0000

Please take a moment to consider donating to the James Randi Educational Foundation during this Season of Reason. In this special episode of The Randi Show, Randi discusses some of the JREF’s many accomplishments this year. Plus, he finally reveals whether he is, in fact, Santa Claus! To find out how you can donate today, visit this link: www.randi.org

James Randi – Why Skepticism Matters | For Good Reason

anand — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:54:03 +0000

In this discussion with DJ Grothe, James Randi explores the meaning and worth of “skepticism,” and explains why skepticism is not the same as cynicism. He talks about the focus of the JREF’s mission, and to what extent social issues such as GLBT rights, civil rights, economic equality, church-state separation, feminism and environmentalism are within skepticism’s purview. He debates whether God’s existence should be a skeptic topic, and reveals why he is an “atheist of the second kind.” And he details recent activities at the JREF to challenge charlatans and educate the public about harmful paranormal claims, and how listeners can get directly involved with this important and unique work.

Sadie Crabtree on Winning Hearts And Minds for Skepticism – at TAM Las Vegas 2011

anand — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:20:56 +0000

At TAM Las Vegas 2011, one of the most popular talks was presented by Sadie Crabtree, JREF communications director. We are pleased to provide the talk free online.

Shortchanged: Understanding the Women’s Wealth Gap

anand — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:33:44 +0000

Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School Women now receive more college degrees than men and enter the workforce with better job opportunities than ever before. So why does the typical woman have less than half of the wealth of the typical man? How is it that never-married women have only 2% as much wealth as similarly situated men? Drawing on the most comprehensive data on wealth and on in-depth interviews, Dr. Chang shows how differences in earnings, in saving and investing, and, most important, the demands of caregiving all contribute to the gender wealth gap. She argues that the current focus on equal pay and family-friendly workplace policies will not ultimately change or eliminate wealth inequalities. The “wealth escalator’—comprised of fringe benefits, the tax code, and government benefits—and the “debt anchor” must be the targets of policies aimed at strengthening women’s financial resources. Date: October 27, 2011