Best of Booker Award

Salman Rushdie's novel “Midnight's Children” wins Best of Booker Awardmarking the 40th anniversary of the prestigious literary award.The novel convincingly beat five other shortlisted works from the competition's 40-year-old history, including works by Pat Barker, Peter Carey and Nadine Gordimer.Readers from across the poles poured in their votes via internet and sms, casting a total of 36 percent votes of Sir Rushdie alone, thus enabling him to win by majority.37 percent of the online votes were sent from UK whereas 27 percent of the online voting was contributed by the voters from North America. The voting lines were closed at the midday on 8th July with 7801 votes sent from throughout the world.Maximum voters were young readers falling between the age group of 25-34 years.Midnight Children, published in 1981, won Rushdie literary fame for the first time. It brought him home the 1981 Booker prize and The James Tait Black Memorial prize for the same year. Previously also, it was awarded the 'Booker of the Bookers' prize in 1993, to celebrate the Bookers prize 25th anniversary.

Chandrayaan-I

India's maiden moon mission Chandrayaan-I has reached a major milestone as scientists completed the integration of all instruments onto the spacecraft and are aiming to launch it by September 19..Space scientists at ISRO last week completed the integration of the 11 instruments, six indigenous and five under international cooperation, onto the spacecraft which is no bigger than a typical office cubicle.Chandrayaan-i will be launched atop a polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV), India`s workhorse rocket with a streak of nine consecutive flawless missions.The spacecraft will also carry near infrared and x-ray spectrometers and a laser altimeter to determine the altitude of the lunar craft for spatial coverage of various instruments. These payloads will help researchers ascertain the composition and topography of the lunar surface.The probe will relay video imagery, altitude information and spectral data back to earth through the Chandrayaan mothership, which will be in a lunar orbit 100 km away.The mineral composition will be determined by the hyperspectral imaging spectrometer operating in 400-900 nanometer band with a spectral resolution of 15 nm and spatial resolution of 80 metres with a swath of 20 km.The deliveries of Chandrayaan 1`s five other international instruments began last August, when NASA`s moon mineralogy mapper was flown to India from the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.Nicknamed m3, the 15-pound imaging spectrometer will map the moon`s natural resources through visible and near-infrared wavelengths at higher resolutions than any instrument before.

Civil service exam 2008

The Union Public Service Commission has notified a total of 671 vacancies for civil services examinations this year from past years.During the past few years, the total annual intake was around 500 with an average of 65 IAS posts up for grabs. The other vacancies were for Indian Police Service, Indian Foreign Service and a range of Group A and Group B jobs.But this time around, a total of 110 IAS jobs are available in civil services exam 2008. the total IAS vacancies for 2009 and 2010 are likely to be higher at 120 and 130 respectively.Over 3 lakh candidates apply for preliminary tests.

Google in india

The Google operations in Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad put together, make for the highest number of Googlers outside the United States. India has also emerged as the highest growth market for Google in terms of advertising revenues..The Google team in India is also concentrating on developing non-Hindi and non-English capabilities for mobile device users.The idea is to make social networking and search friendly for the disparate Indian user profile by providing more Indic content.Given the burgeoning size of the mobile users in India, Google is investing huge resources into the next leg of its research and development, focused at the Indian market.

Cat Result

The results of one of the toughest and most competitive management exams in the country, CAT, were released.This year, MBA aspirants scored the most in the Data Interpretation (DI) section. The cut-off for DI is expected to be around 40. The scores for Quantitative Analysis (QA) and language section have taken a fall this year.The number of CAT takers in 2007 has risen to 2 lakh as against 1.5 lakh last year.