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Showing posts from July, 2015

Sad demise of the Missile Man- Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam

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Extremely sad news reaches our nation today as the 11 th President of India, Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam, passed away today in Shillong due to cardia arrest. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was present at IIM – Shillong to address the audience. He tweeted this earlier today regarding the same, Going to Shillong. To take course on Livable Planet earth at iim. With @srijanpalsingh and Sharma. – APJ Abdul Kalam (@APJAbdulKalam) July 27, 2015. He collapsed during the lecture and was taken to Bethany Hospital nearby. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit and was declared dead by the hospital authorities at 7:45 pm. Many popular leaders have been tweeting about the sad demise and the Indian Government has declared 7 days of national mourning following APJ Abdul Kalam’s death. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam had been a very popular president and a renowned scientist. He was also a Bharat Ratna recipient and was loved by the entire nation for his great ideas and non- political mindset. His “

Selfie With Daughter – A new platform for change

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#SelfieWithDaughter is an initiative by PM Narendra Modi to bring about a social change, a change in mind sets of millions of people, to break the attitudinal wall covering the opinions and thinking of the majority in our nation.  It is a campaign to stop sex selection abortions, in this campaign the PM has requested fathers to post selfie’s with their daughters and post it with #SelfieWithDaughter.  It is a different way of bringing change, a method that would bring change by elements within the dominant forces in the society rather than the usual ones where outside forces are used. It does not instigate any kind of rebel or protest but is a simple way of looking at a girl child through the lens of respect, love and care by the society. It asks people to care, nurture and love their girl child and fills everyone’s heart with emotions. Unlike earlier initiative’s to protect a girl child or for educating a girl child which was depicted as a necessity for a developing nation

The Victim Card

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How many times in life have you played the card of being a victim? There have been incidents in our lives that have left scars on our souls that cannot be healed and does not even fade away with passage of time, scars that are deep buried down slowly but can be refreshed again with a little remembrance and these are the scars that make people believe they are different from others. A belief, a notion that they are victims due to these particular incidents and they just can’t get over with it. People build a safe wall around them, they construct a strong layer and won’t let anyone break that wall and enter the nice warm nest they inhabit. But mostly very conveniently they put the victim card in front and blame those certain incidents in their life for all the shortcomings and failures they face in the future. They think their cocoons make them special and they can keep blaming everything on their regressive or dark past but it is not true. Everyone has been a victim

Discriminating Reservations - Caste based policy

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Going through the newspapers these days I am taken back to time two years back when like all the students I was also hooked to cut offs and checking eligibility criteria for my college admissions. With the sky rocketing cut offs of Delhi University which is the headline of almost all the nation daily I couldn’t help but notice the ridiculously high cut offs of some courses and more importantly the wide gap between the cut offs of different categories. This reservation implies that higher education institutions, public sector units and government bodies must reserve 22.5 % of available seats for students belonging to Scheduled Castes (15%) and Scheduled Tribes (7.5%) and an additional 27% reservation for Other Backward Classes. Just to fulfil this criteria colleges release cut offs with relaxation up to 10% or more for students applying from reserved categories. Initially the system of reservation was established to uplift the condition of ST, SC and OBC(s) bu

Deconstructing Arranged Marriage

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The East is always looked upon by the world for its culture, morals, values and ethics. People have been travelling to east since time immemorial in search of their true self, their pure soul and enlightenment and India always tops the chart as the  favorite  destination for all these hunts. The institution of Arranged Marriage is the high held trophy that Indians are proud to show the whole world. Arranged Marriage is considered one of the greatest forms of marriage beholding all the values a sacred marriage possesses. It’s not only a ceremonial tying of knot between two people who promise to be together in sickness and health but also for  both the families. However this much praised form of marriage is becoming hollow from within with time. The ancient logic has clearly failed to live through modern times. The parents lay all the ground rules for the marriage with a little or no say from their children who are actually getting married. Arranged Marriage has been

Glorifying Story - Ira Singhal tops UPSC exams

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“I suffer from scoliosis due to which my spine is curved. But my physical condition has never deterred me from pursuing my dreams,” Ira said. Ms. Ira Singhal, the topper of the UPSC examination 2014 inspires a lot of people. Her glorifying story makes other believe in their dreams. She topped the distinguished examination from general category despite being differently abled. The Union Public Service Examination declared results for the civil services examinations on Saturday on the fourth day of the closing date of the personality tests or interviews recommending a total of 1,236 candidates for appointment to IAS, IFS, IPS and central services. Four out of the five toppers are women this year. The examination is conducted in three stages- preliminary, mains and interviews. About 9.45 lakhs people had applied for the examination but 4.51 lakhs appeared for the examination. Out of these 16, 933 were declared qualified for the mains examination and 3,038 were declared

Project Soli: NextGen Gesture Control

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When you surf the net, every now and then you stumble upon something that just mesmerizes you to the point where you begin to feel its unreal. Well something like this happens when you get to know what Google's ATAP(Advanced Technology And Projects) has been planning recently in field of Gesture control, Project Soli. It is Google's Radar based gesture control technology, that can in a very literal sense, control anything mechanical. At a time when most of the gesture controls can be termed inaccurate or unreliable.(In some cases even sloppy). Google has come up with an enticing example of how powerful Gesture control can actually be. At the very basic level, motion controller were brought to existence to make user interfaces more interesting and intuitive, and open new windows of opportunities for designers and developers. Small segment of Project Soli demo video To which the ATAP team took a pretty unique approach with this technology. Instead of using a camera

#9 Final Touch

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In "#7 Material Cards" , we added cards to our first tab. Now it is time to add content to our second tab. I will not be covering everything which the video showed in the " #1 Overview " i.e the color-chooser part. You can see the whole code here . But yes, I will be showing some extra stuff in data-binding. It will look like this... When you'll move the slider, the height of box will change. So let's get started. If you do not know how to create Custom Element, go here . 1. Create "second-tab.html". <link rel="import" href="bower_components/polymer/polymer.html"> <polymer-element name="second-tab" attributes="z"> <template> <style> </style> <!--Content held by our element goes here--> </template> <script src="second-tab.js"></script> </polymer-element> 2. Add content. <div class="contain

#8 Custom element

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Custom Elements are Polymer's most prominent feature using which, one can create an element according to his needs and share it with others too. They let you define your own element types with custom tag names. Just like <image>, you can have <cool-image> in your HTML. Two-way data-binding, declarative event handling and declarative inheritance are some of the special features. Copied from the Polymer-project (v0.5) website , here are the advantages : less code re-usability they express the function of code they encapsulate internal details they implement APIs per element type NOTE:  This post uses Polymer v0.5. So let's begin making our custom element " nick-name ". Our element will open a material dialog-box, take name as input and change the label in Drawer-panel to "Hello [name]" (using data-binding ). 1. Create nickname.html and add following code. <link rel="import" href="bower_components/polymer/polym

#7 Material cards

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In the previous post , we added tabs to our Polymer Chrome App. Now we add some content to the first tab - CARDS. This may be seem a little off-topic but I will be using Angular Material JS, to show that one need not rely on Polymer for implementation of material design. The Angular Material project is an implementation of Material Design in Angular.js. bower install angular-material --save Include the following Angular Material dependencies. <!--Angular-Material Dependencies--> <link rel="stylesheet" href="bower_components/angular-material/angular-material.css" type="text/css"> <script src="bower_components/angular/angular.js"></script> <script src="bower_components/angular-material/angular-material.js"> </script> Now we use core-animated-pages, where we add content to tabs using sections. Here is a little help where the Tab content should go.... <!--Main Toolbar--

#6 Fab and Tab

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Hey guys, as the post title says, today we will be inserting Tabs and FAB (floating action button) into our chrome app , using polymer. You will be learning : FAB Desktop notifications Tabs FAB Insert the paper-fab just after the toast and before the core-drawer-panel. Since it will be displayed across all tabs and above all elements, make its z-index=1. <!--FAB--> <paper-fab id="paper-fab-notify" icon="social:notifications"></paper-fab> Add style to position FAB to bottom-right. paper-fab { z-index: 1;  /*always on top*/ position: absolute;  /*fixed position* at bottom*/ bottom: 25px; right: 25px; background: #FF6000; } For Notifications , add the following javascript snippet. But to get notifications, you have to allow them from chrome settings : -  Go to Chrome Settings --> Show Advanced Settings --> Privacy --> Content Settings (first button) --> Notications --> Allow all sites to show notificati