Finally, a new artillery gun for the Army

A few months after clearing critical trials, the Dhanush artillery guns — also called “Desi Bofors” — have entered the production phase to meet Army’s operational gap of field howitzers. The “Make in India” defence manufacturing project took off with the receipt of Bulk Production Clearance (BPC) from the Army for 144 Dhanush guns. Sources said the Ordnance Factories Board (OFB) has already started the production of indigenously manufactured 155 mm/45 calibre artillery gun.
OFB had been waiting for the BPC from the army to start production after Dhanush successfully passed evaluation by the Directorate General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) and the Maintainability Evaluation Trial.

Gun Carriage Factory, Jabalpur plans to supply 6 guns within 6 months, another 12 within 12 months and another 36 guns within 24 months.

This was decided at the OFB’s General Managers’ strategic conference held last month. The decision raises questions about the Army’s plans to get all 144 guns from the OFB within three years.

Dhanush will be the first artillery gun to be acquired by the Army since the purchase of Bofors guns from Sweden in 1980s.

The current order for 144 guns is estimated to be of Rs 1,260 crore, with the Army having an option to acquire up to 414 guns based on operational performance. As per its Field Artillery Rationalisation Plan, Army needs to buy 2,820 artillery guns of various types to replace obsolete guns and equip new units.

Dhanush gun is based on the design and manufacturing technology obtained from Bofors in the 1980s. Under the original Bofors contract, India had obtained Transfer of Technology to manufacture 155mm guns after inducting 410 guns.

The ensuing Bofors corruption scandal, however, hit all such plans till those old schematics were brought out by the OFB in early 2011. OFB claims that the indigenous howitzer is better than the original Swedish gun in range, accuracy, reliability and ‘shoot-and-scoot’ capabilities. Bofors is a 155 mm/39 calibre gun whereas Dhanush is a 155 mm/45 calibre. The enhanced calibre imparts a longer firing range.

OFB is upgrading its manufacturing line for bulk production at Jabalpur Gun Carriage Factory from 2016, wherein it will be able to produce 30-35 guns every year. There are no plans for exporting Dhanush, sources in the OFB said.

A gadget to change the way we sleep

Technologygeeks

British entrepreneur James Proud, presents a white sphere the size of a tennis ball covered in a criss-cross pattern. “It is beautiful, he says, when asked to describe it. “It doesn’t look like a piece of technology. We wanted to make something people actually want to put on their bedside table.” The device,  Sense called, and the first made by Proud’s San Francisco startup company, Hello, is the latest in the world of sleep tracking devices claimed to help improve the quality of an activity we spend about third of our lives engaged in. It will be available in the UK early in the new year.

Until now, such devices have only tracked movement during sleep – giving an insight into when you toss and turn – but Sense takes things further by connecting that to the environment. Inside are sensors that record sudden noise and measure light, temperature and humidity in the room as well as the levels of particulates like dust and pollen that can affect sleep. Just telling people how they slept doesn’t fix poor sleep, says Proud. “They need to understand why they slept that way.” Sense also records a sleeper’s movement, but not by requiring that they wear any device to bed, as most sleep trackers including Jawbone and Fitbit do. A small round plastic “sleep pill” clips onto the pillow. It contains an accelerometer and gyroscope and communicates with the system wirelessly.

The information that Sense gathers while you are asleep can be reviewed in an app. It includes a rating of sleep quality and a log of the disturbances experienced. If you slept poorly around 2am, Sense can tell you whether that was because of light, outside noise or snoring, for example. Sense allows you to play back the noise disturbances – you can hear whether it was a car alarm or a barking dog that woke you. It automatically identifies snoring. Proud’s team trained the system to recognise the periodic sound by playing YouTube videos of people snoring – though Sense can’t yet distinguish whether it is you or your partner. Over time the device also learns which conditions give you the best night’s rest. It might suggest that you lower the temperature by a few degrees, for example. Waving a hand over the device makes it glow a certain colour, indicating how conducive the room is to sleep.
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Sense also has a “smart alarm”. It tries to rouse sleepers at a point in their sleep cycle that makes waking easier. The sleep pill detects when they begin to naturally stir and assumes they are entering a light sleep stage where they can be woken without that groggy feeling. Sense doesn’t wake you more than about 30 minutes prior to the alarm, says Proud, and it won’t let you sleep past it. Proud, who began coding at nine years old, was born in south London but came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011 after receiving a fellowship from Silicon Valley billionaire and Facebook’s first investor, Peter Thiel. Each year Thiel pays a small group of teenagers to forgo or quit university and start their own business.

Hello, founded in 2012,is Prouds second company. The first – GigLocator, which he started at school to alert people to live music listings  was sold for an undisclosed sum the same year.

While Sense is not a device of medical , it can give access to information that can help to understand sleep in ways that we are not easily possible before, says Proud. “It’s up to people to use that information as they wish for medical reasons.”

Derk-Jan Dijk, a sleep expert at the University of Surrey, says he is not aware of any sleep trackers that have been scientifically tested against their claims but he believes they can be positive in that they help promote an awareness of the importance of sleep. Though he also warns they may lead some people to worry unnecessarily about their sleep patterns. “People may become too obsessed with the data,” he says.

Hello, which has raised $10.5m in investment, has more than 30,000 pre-orders for Sense from a Kickstarter campaign. The orders will ship in February. Sales, through the company’s website, will also begin in the US in February and in the UK early next year (pre-orders are currently being accepted from the US only). It is priced at $129.

‘FORGOTTEN’ Twitter founder Noah Glass scrubs graffiti off a wall outside his modest home in an area plagued with drug addicts and homeless people.

It’s a far cry from the $9.9 million mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge seven miles across town owned by his former best friend and co-founder Jack Dorsey.

 A different life ... Noah removing graffiti outside of his compound of a home in San Francisco. Picture: Jeff Rayner / Coleman Rayner Source: Snapper Media

In an exclusive investigation into what became of the man who dreamt up the world-changing social network but got nothing, news.com.au can reveal:

● He has become a recluse who refuses to discuss Twitter

● He is ‘bitter’ about ‘being screwed’ by his friends

● He feels his co-founders “wrote him out of the story” and craves recognition for his role

● His obsessive work on Twitter destroyed his second marriage

● Mates say he’s a genius who deserves to be acknowledged properly by other founders

● He has been working on various projects since — including building a rocket

On November 6 last year Twitter became a public company, confirming its three founders — Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone — as billionaires and Silicon Valley’s biggest success story.

 Billionaire ... It’s claimed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey “backstabbed” Noah Glass. Picture: Jeff Rayner / Coleman Rayner Source: Getty Images

The trio are now celebrities in their own right, have met President Barack Obama and all own multi-million dollar mansions in the San Francisco area.

However Noah Glass, dubbed the forgotten founder, made next to nothing from the website — even though it was originally his company, the first office was his apartment and he came up with its iconic name

Facebook launches friend-tracking feature

 Your phone always knows where you are. And now, if you want, your Facebook friends will always know where you are, too.

Facebook is introducing a mobile feature called Nearby Friends that taps into that steady stream of location information so friends can track each other in real time.

The idea is to make it easy for people to meet up in real life, so they can have conversations in person instead of comment threads, temporarily replacing Likes and LOLs with eye contact and actual laughter. A live meet-up is also an excellent opportunity to grab a selfie with your pal and upload it to the Facebook owned Instagram.

In a refreshing change, the new Nearby Friends feature is not turned on by default.
New Facebook tool finds your friends

Friends will not be able to see where you are unless you decide live-tracking is something you want in your life and visit Facebook's settings to turn it on. Making a potentially invasive new feature opt-in suggests Facebook has perhaps learned from some of its past mistakes and privacy problems.

You can choose to share your general location with all your Facebook friends, close friends or a customized list of people you feel most comfortable with. Further minimizing the potential stalking factor, your location is only shared with other people who are also using the feature and who have chosen to share their location with you.

When turned on, Nearby Friends shows a list of approved Facebook friends who also use the feature and shows their approximate location. A push notification can tell you how many of your friends are nearby. Open the app to see a list of pals, the neighborhood or city where they are, how many miles away that is from your current location, and a time stamp of when they where there.

There is an option to share your exact location with specific friends, which can be handy for coordinating large groups at concerts or finding someone in a crowded area. Your friends will see a little image of your face on a map for a set period of time.

Nearby Friends will be available on Facebook's iOS and Android apps, but will only work for select locations at first.

Facebook, Instagram and many other apps already include features that let people "check-in" to locations, but those location features are different because you decide if and when to share each specific location. You might check into a Starbucks downtown, but never into your home or other spot you'd rather keep private. Nearby Friends is continuously gathering details about where you are in the background instead of waiting for a manual check-in.

This is not the first time an app has used location information to physically connect friends. Similar apps such as Highlight, which got a flurry of attention in 2012, mapped out the locations of nearby strangers. Facebook also purchased a startup in 2012 called Glancee that also connected strangers. That technology evolved into this new, more private feature.

If you turn on the Nearby Friends feature, Facebook starts collecting data on your exact location and keeps details on where you've been in the past, not just places where you've used its app to check in. It also collects location information even when the Facebook app is closed.

But you can turn off this location history in the Facebook app's settings. It's possible to delete individual locations from a history, or clear the whole thing and start from scratch.

Google reveals sharp rise in requests for removal of political content

Google revealed a sharp rise in requests from governments asking for political content to be removed from the web in its latest transparency report published on Thursday.

From January to June the search giant received 3,846 government requests to remove content from its services – a 68% increase over the second half of 2012.

“Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes,” Susan Infantino, legal director, said in a blogpost.

“These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims,” she said.

Google reported a large increase in requests from Turkey where it received 1,673 requests from the authorities to remove content, nearly a ten-fold increase over the second half of last year. About two-thirds of the total requests – 1,126 – called for the removal of content related to alleged violations of internet law 5651, which censors online speech.

In Russia Google reported a rise in requests after the introduction of a blacklist law last year. The law aimed to crackdown on criminal websites, paedophilia and suicide promotion. But critics charge it has been used to censor political speech online. Google received 257 removal requests during this reporting period, more than double the total number of requests it received in 2012.

In the US Google and its peers are fighting to be allowed to disclose how often they receive legal demands for information from the National Security Agency (NSA). Those requests are made through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) court and the companies are legally barred from disclosing them.

On Wednesday a presidential review panel, looking into the NSA in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations, suggested tech companies should be allowed to disclose Fisa requests.

“While the information we present in our transparency report is certainly not a comprehensive view of censorship online, it does demonstrate a worrying upward trend in the number of government requests, and underscores the importance of transparency around the processes governing such requests. As we continue to add data, we hope it will become increasingly useful and informative in policy debates and decisions around the world,” said Infantino, the legal director.

From January to June 2013, the following countries made the most requests to remove content:

    Turkey (1,673 requests for 12,162 items)

    United States (545 requests for 3,887 items)

    Brazil (321 requests for 1,635 items)

    Russia (257 requests for 277 items)

    India (163 requests for 714 items)

In the US Google received 545 requests for the removal of 3,887 items. Among those requests was one from a local law enforcement official to remove a search result linking to a news article about his record as an officer. Google did not remove the search result.

In the UK Google received 117 requests for 556 items to be removed. One request came from a law firm representing a former member of parliament to remove a preview from Google Books that allegedly defamed the MP by suggesting he was engaged in illegal activity. The preview was removed. Another came from a local government council to remove a blogpost that allegedly defamed the council. Google did not remove the blogpost.

The US Army is testing a "smart rifle" technology designed to improve the accuracy of shots.

A spokeswoman confirmed reports that its equipment testing specialists had acquired six TrackingPoint rifles as part of efforts to identify state-of-the-art kit.

The tech allows the user to place a virtual tag on a target seen through the weapon's scope.

If the trigger is pressed, it fires only if the gun is correctly lined up.

This prevents errors such as trigger jerk, range miscalculation and accidental firing from being a problem.

In addition, a Linux-based computer built into the scope can compensate for 16 calculated variables, including temperature, the expected spin drift of the bullet and the direction the wind is blowing.
Scope view A TrackingPoint weapon is supposed to refuse to fire until a red dot is lined up with a tagged target

"I can only train a soldier so much," Lt Col Shawn Lucas, of the army's Program Executive Office (PEO) soldier division,