Tambaram railway station getting ready to become another terminal

T. Madhavan 

CHENNAI, July 08, 2017 00:00 IST

  Modern facilities being created to augment train services from Tambaram

The Tambaram Railway Station is getting ready to become the third terminal of the Chennai Railway Division after Chennai Central and Egmore. With more modern facilities being created, it is becoming one of the railway terminals of the Chennai Suburban Railway Network.
Sources with Southern Railway said that the civil work on the coach terminal wa complete, and it was ready for launch. Augmenting train services from Tambaram terminal requires more coach allotments and Chennai Division officials have been in touch with the Railway Board and coach suppliers.

A decision was made a few years ago to decongest Chennai Egmore and have a terminal at Tambaram to operate a few trains from there. Over a period of time several Express/Super Fast trains were diverted from Chennai Central to Egmore. But to decongest Egmore station, two daily express trains — Circar Express to Kakinada Port and Kacheguda Express to Kacheguda — are being operated from the Chengalpet junction. Sources said that they were focussing on improving passenger amenities at various stations on the Chennai Beach-Tambaram section. Once they get clearance from the Railway Ministry, the terminal would start functioning.

After taking up work on the second entrance on the Velachery Main Road, the Tambaram railway station has achieved many milestones in terms of infrastructure.

Clean platforms

Additional platforms, water facilities, escalators connecting the eastern and western sides of the station, CCTV cameras on platforms and at entry and exit points, clean and litter-free platforms are some of the additions that were made in the past two years, said a railway official. The latest addition is food plazas on both sides of the station. The credit for this would go to the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation. The construction of food plazas began in November last year, with an investment of Rs. 3 to Rs. 4 crore and it took about 8 months to complete. The aim is to dish out quality food to passengers coming to Tambaram station, he said.

Finally, a mobile that doesn't need charging

DAILY MIRROR





Claimed To Be First Of Its Type, The Handset Harvests Wi-Fi Signals And Light To Operate

The first battery-free mobile phone has been invented, sig nalling the end of chargers and dying handsets. Engineers in the US say the phone can make and receive calls using only a few microwatts of power, which it gets from light or Wi-Fi signals.

 

The inventors also made powerhungry Skype calls using the battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype, made of commercial, off-the-shelf components, can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station.

Professor Shyam Gollakota, a member of the research team at the University of Washington, said: “We have built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power.“
“To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed,“ he added.

The team, involving computer scientists and electrical engineers, eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions -converting analog signals which convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand. They said this process consumes so much energy that it's been
impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources. To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone's speaker. In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these the “transmitting“ and “listening“ modes.

Using components on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions, such as transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.
The battery-free phone still does require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The proto type has a power budget of 3.5 microwatts. The researchers demonstrated how they harvested this small amount of energy from two different sources. The battery-free phone prototype can operate on power gathered from ambient radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away . They also got power from ambient light with a tiny solar cell -roughly the size of a grain of rice.

Researcher Joshua Smith said: “The cellphone is the device we depend on most today . So if there were one device you'd want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cellphone. The proof of concept we've developed... could impact everyday devices in the future.“

Flyer assaults crew member, forces U-turn

Seattle:    REUTERS





A Delta Air Lines flight bound for Beijing returned to Seattle on Thursday after a 23-year-old male passenger, from Florida, assaulted a flight attendant in the firstclass cabin before being subdued by other travellers, a SeattleTacoma International Airport spokesman said.

 

The pilot decided to turn back and call for police, fire, and medical personnel to meet the plane after the incident. No further details have been released.The FBI interviewed passengers and had no information to suggest the incident was a threat to national security . The flight attendant and flyer were sent to hospital after the Boeing 767-300 landed safely.





Quality of exams depends on quality of instruments used for evaluating answers





There seem to be a growing tendency of late, both in the media and among certain quarters, to take a swipe at the exam evaluation system. But we need to understand the very evaluation process so that the pronouncedly aggressive stance of the exam critics doesn't reinforce tension and anxiety in the minds of students.

 

There was a hue and cry recently when some students who had got very high marks in four subjects veri fied the poor marks they got in one and ended up with a 400% difference in the corrected total in that particular subject. These are aberrations and normal in a public examination where the number of variables (students) is very large. As the entire system of evaluation is based on human intervention, research has proved that there is `standard error of measurement' (SEM) of 5-7% built into it. There could be wrong totalling, wrong transfer of assessed marks on the title page, non-assessed portions or supplementary sheets being omitted.

The problem arises when we do not factor in such mishaps. The system blinks automatically when students get high marks in 3-4 subjects but poor marks in 1-2 subjects and vice-versa. The system then must take the pain to pull out the answer scripts and have a relook at those copies to sort out the discrepancies, if any . In my experience, around 70% of such discrepancies are found and the marks modified before the declaration of result. It's when these discrepancies are corrected after the announcement of results that frenzy ensues. To ensure that evaluation process is not unfair to a student, board officials need think of the importance of 3 Is: Imagination, Investigation and Involvement.

In today's scenario, even if a student gets 94%, his family is not happy . They want a scrutiny or verification of the results, and, of late, a re-evaluation. The critics say this brings transparency into the system. What is worth considering, however, is that like all issues, this also has another side. When higher studies depend on marksbased elimination rather than selection, allowing reevaluation can create chances of malpractices and manipulation that will be difficult to check in a large system like board exams.Extending the existing system of verification in which totalling mistakes and unassessed omissions are taken care of to re-evaluating will create chaos and confusion in the sys tem. The environment in which the original evaluation is carried out cannot be recre ated in the re-evaluation. For one, the re evaluator will begin with the notion that the answer script has been given inadequate marks in the original evaluation.

We need to accept that examination is part of the continuum of education. Why do we gleefully , and at times sadistically , create an aura of awe around exams? What does this psychology suggest? If examination is the body , then evaluation and assessment are the soul. In our pursuit of material fulfilment, we have neglected the soul for an ornamented body. When so much of limelight is focused on the body , the young become oblivious to the more important and more beautiful soul. Parents are geared towards examinations, teaching is oriented towards examination, learning is condi tioned by examination and examination itself is determined by examination. It is an excellent case of the tail wagging the dog.

The quality of examination is deter mined by the quality of instruments used for evaluation. The validity and reliability quotients will improve if these instruments are prepared and administered with great care. The designing of question papers, de velopment of scoring procedures, training of examiners and, of course, effective ad ministration are some areas that deserve a lot of attention.





Photocopies expose markdowns

Manash Gohain





The errors in the CBSE Class XII answer sheets go beyond adding mistakes. TOI gave the scripts to teachers who pointed out glaring inconsistencies in scoring marks 

 

A Class XII student scored 90s in his elective subjects, but only 58 in English in the CBSE board exams. TOI, a copy of the English answer script in hand, consulted three teachers independently, all of whom declared the student could not have got anything less than 80 even under “strict“ evaluation. The student had asked for verification of marks, but it had yielded nothing. Had he not asked for the photocopy of his answer sheet, this discrepancy would not have been revealed.

 

In a similar case, the photocopy of a political science answer script showed that the examiner had marked three answers as correct but given zero for each.These testify that all is not well with the evaluation process of the Central Board of Secondary Education.

On June 28, the education board restricted re-evaluation to 12 subjects and a maximum of 10 questions per subject, an order that Delhi high court reversed on Thursday following a plea filed by four students against it. The court's verdict was a relief for parents like Shalini Sundriyal, whose daughter scored 91 in English, 99 in economics, 89 in psychology and 62 in political science. Though she asked for verification and a copy of the political science answer sheet, she could not opt for re-evaluation because the subject was not included among the 12 mentioned in CBSE's notice. “Thanks to the court's order, we can now get it re-assessed,“ said Sundriyal.

The limit placed on the number of questions open for re-check too faced criti cism after the photocopies showed all answers requiring a relook in some cases. The student who got 58 in English when his teachers said he should have got at least 80, revealed, “My teachers said I was given less marks for all my 13 correct answers.“

There were also complaints that students were given the photocopies on July 5 when the last date for applying for re-evaluation was July 7, which required students to visit the regional CBSE offices.Parents and students charged the board with “cheating“, saying that by delaying the photocopies, it had sought to prevent re-evaluation.

Others are dismayed by the delay in publishing the corrected marks. “I applied for the verification of marks on June 24 and got an email on July 5 stating there was a change in the marks. Why did it take 11 days just to total the marks again?“ fumed one student. “I have given back the original certificate so a new can be issued. But by the time I get it, Delhi University admissions could be over.“

Trichy airport to get new terminal

Trichy: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





The Trichy international airport is to get a stateof-the-art two-level integrated terminal to be built at a cost of `897 crore. Unveiling the plan here on Friday , Airports Authority of India (AAI) said the terminal would be a model for raising similar facilities at other airports in the country 

.

The move comes after sat uration of the existing terminal which could handle 1.35 million passengers last year.The new terminal will be six times bigger than the existing one and will be able to handle 3.52 million passengers a year.A four-member team from MS EGIS -A Francebased Project Management Consultant (PMC) -along with Airport Authority of India (AAI) officials visited the airport on Thursday . They unveiled the final design of the terminal.

“A global tender would be floated soon to award contract for the construction of the new terminal which is likely to start in March 2018,“ said Sanjeev Jindal, general manager, engineering project, AAI. “If everything goes as per plan, the terminal will be ready for use in the next three years,“ he said.

Retired professor arrested for forging marksheet after 33 yrs

Chennai: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





A 62-year-old former professor was arrested on Friday , 33 years after tampering with his college marks.

The central crime branch (CCB) of the Chennai city police arrested N Veerappan, a resident of Kadirvedu near Red Hills, based on a complaint of Manjula, joint director of the directorate of physical instruction (DPI) in Nungambakkam.

Based on a specific complaint that landed at the DPI last month, officials scrutinized his certificates, marksheets and found that marks were tampered with in his marksheet.

Based on the complaint, the petition was forwarded to the forgery wing of the CCB for further inquiry . They verified the document and confirmed the same as forged as it mismatched with the master copy in the government records.

Veerappan retired in 2015 as head of the department of Botany in Thiagaraya College in Washermenpet.

He began his career as an assistant professor in the Botany department at the college in 1989. During inquiries, Veerappan confessed to having committed the crime.

A case was registered and Veerappan was reman ded in judicial custody after being produced before the special court for the CCB in Moore Market in the city on Friday .
Veerappan, a native of Chidambaram, studied Masters of Science in Botany under Annamalai University during 1982-1984.

He cleared one paper in his first semester in 1982 and completed two other first year papers in his second semester and subsequently completed three other first year papers .
Veerappan had made changes in his first year marksheet and applied for the post of assistant professor in 1989.

The retired professor has two sons. One is a practising doctor, while the other is working in a leading company.