Monday 28 November 2016


Degradation of Environment

Introduction:

It is a common problem faced by people to have access of breathing fresh air. This is more acute in urban areas for multiple factors like high population density, lack of cleanliness, inadequate housing with unhealthy living condition, deficient facilities for disposal of garbage, overstrained infrastructure leading to shortage of water, power, insufficient public transport resulting to influx of large number of private vehicles contributing to not only pollution but also traffic jams wastage of fuel & time.

Indian Scenario:

India is home to 11 out of 20 most polluted cities of the world. Delhi is not only the most polluted city in India but also in the world next only to Bejing. 

Reasons for pollution in a city can be categorized from the following major sources:
  •         Vehicular sources
  •          Household sources
  •          Industrial sources


One of the major issues of dramatic rise of air pollution in most Indian metropolitan areas is direct result of multi-fold increase of all form of automobiles. This is enhanced by lack of seriousness of law enforcing agencies to stress on improve vehicular technology, poor fuel quality, poor vehicular maintenance and almost non-existent traffic planning.

Recently during analysis of high degree of air pollution in Delhi, it is focused that burning of stubbles by farmers of neighbouring states are significantly contributing to rise of PM 2.5 / PM 10 level. As a precautionary measure Supreme Court has imposed a ban on the same the implementation of which is only partial.

World Situation:

The WHO report, highlighting links between energy, air pollution and health, says no country is immune as a staggering 80 % of the cities that monitor pollution levels fail to meet the air quality standards prescribed by World Health Organization. No country in the world has solved the air pollution problem completely.

Clean air is a basic human right that most of the world population lacks, the report concluded. The proven energy policies and technologies can deliver major cuts in air pollution around the world, bring health benefits and provide broader access to energy with improvement of sustainability.

The perfect balance of nature which has maintained life for millions of years is being threatened by technology. The air we breathe, the water we drink and the land that gives us food are all progressively getting polluted. Concern for ecology has become universal.   

Use of ‘Renewable Energy’ like Solar energy, Hydro power, Wind power, etc. should be emphasized instead fossil fuels to improve the environmental scenario.

There is a huge burden of solid wastes from household sources especially in metropolitan areas due to scarcity of vacant land. All the cities are toiling hard to find out suitable places for dumping huge quantity of solid wastes generated daily. 

During rains the percolation of water from wastes deteriorates ground water quality.  Attempts are made towards fruitful utilization of solid wastes to reduce huge mounds of wastes in the dumping grounds, avoid contamination of ground water and eliminate dirty environment attracting flies, insects and animals.

The safe disposal of hazardous E-wastes with recovery of recyclable materials have not yet picked up to the required extent.

Another area that deserves attention is ‘Noise Pollution”. Noises in the proximity of airport may be unavoidable. But the noise generated in industries can be reduced if not totally eliminated by installing suitable noise barriers. However, the vehicular noise generated especially in India by avoidable un-necessary honking arising out of impatience and hurries can be eliminated by little positive thinking on the part of the drivers and strict measures by law enforcing agencies.

In the advanced countries economic developments have caused unprecedented crisis leading to pollution of air, water and land. In the developing countries, the deterioration of environment is due to poverty and inadequate infrastructure.

Conclusion:

The challenges of the future are to eliminate rural poverty, strengthen rural-urban linkage, intensify agricultural production, manage land and water to feed growing population, family planning, industrial ecology, control wasteful land conversion, create employment opportunities, environmental education, etc. 


Related Snaps



Prof. P.K. Mukherjee
Associate Professor
Dept. of Management Studies

Photography and its importance in Today’s scenario

In simple words photography can be defined as capturing of moment with a device called camera. And in technical terms it can be defined as drawing with light or capturing light with the help of a device called camera. So it is very clear that in absence of light & camera photography is not possible. We need a sufficient amount of light to click a picture. Camera is a light tight box with has a lens on one side and recording medium on the other side.

The word "Photography" is derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphy ("to draw"). This word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. We can define photography as a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.

Photography has become the part and parcel of our lives these days. We cannot imagine our life without photography. There is no field left which does not use photography. Weather its newspaper, advertising, fashion, medicine, industry, astronomy etc. photography is tend to stay there and with advent of Facebook, WhatsApp and other social networking media use of photography is increasing day by day.  Whether we are at home or outside we tend to see so many photographs every day. The most common use of photography is to preserve memories. As memories fades away with time so we keep photographs of the special occasions or moments to preserve the memories we don’t want forget. But besides preserving memories photography is an important tool of communication. There is a very well-known saying about photography that “a picture is worth than thousand words” i.e. the message which cannot be communicated by a thousand word story can be easily communicated by a single photograph.

Photography has an extremely important role today. It is used in advertising, magazines, science and research, newspapers and perhaps even in your own work. Without photography, our lives would certainly not be as exciting. We would have never been able to show Earth from outer space, or the first man walking on the moon.

Practical application of photography are found in nearly every human endeavor from astronomy to medical diagnosis to industrial quality control.

Photography extends human vision into the realm of objects that are invisible because they are too small or too distant, or events that occur too rapidly for the naked eye to detect. We would of never been able to find a cure for many diseases if photography was not around.

Photographs are also used in attempts to sway public opinion. Governments, political parties, and special-interest groups have long used the graphic representation and emotional impact of photographs to further their causes.

Photography can also help to bring about desirable changes. Photographs of child labourers helped to bring about legislation protecting children from exploitation.Photography is also a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. For example, photography has become popular as a means of crystallizing memories.   

Most of the billions of photographs taken today are snapshots--casual records to document personal events such as vacations, birthdays, get-together and weddings.As a nonverbal means of communication, photography can overcome the barriers of language and communicate through universal visual symbols. Photographs can also be objects of art that explore the human condition and provide aesthetic pleasure. Photography is a satisfying hobby or a rewarding career for millions of people.



Ms. Sanyogita Chaudhary
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Communication Studies
One Person Company and the Principle of Separate Corporate Personality.

One Person Company (OPC) came up in the Companies Act, 2013. Section 2(62) of the Act defines One Person Company as ‘a company which has only one person as a member.’ This implies the entire share capital is held by one person, and he is the only director of the company.The question that persists w.r.t. such a company is that whether an OPC is same as a sole proprietorship concern and whether the principle of separate corporate personality is applicable on such a company.

When the Court of Law is of the view that the company is just a bubble or has been created to evade the revenue department or otherwise to create fraud, the court may disregard the separate corporate personality principle of the company and lift the corporate veil flowing between the company and its owners. So does that imply that the corporate veil would get automatically lifted when a question of liability arises despite that the OPC is a limited liability company. It appears that the answer to this question must be in negative. The corporate veil is lifted by courts where there is evidence showing the company was used to commit fraud or wrong that injured the party seeking to pierce the veil, or to prevent “fraud or improper conduct”. Corporate veil is also lifted where the company is used as a device or façade to conceal the true facts, thereby avoiding or concealing any liability of individual in control of the company.

To conclude there is a limited principle of English Law which applies when a person is under an existing legal obligation or liability or subject to an existing legal restriction which he deliberately evades or whose enforcement he deliberately frustrates by interposing a company under his control. The court may then pierce the corporate veil for the purpose, and only for the purpose, of depriving the company or its controller of the advantage that they would otherwise have obtained by the company’s separate legal personality.

And as far as the property of the OPC is concerned, i.e. whether the OPC’s property is Sole shareholder’s property it has been generally opined that although a sole shareholder’s shareholding might provide the key whereby to unlock the company’s assets, the principle of corporate personality precluded treating those assets as substantially the same as the shareholding. Further, even if the Court is persuaded to lift the “corporate veil”, it is not the negation of the Separate Corporate Personality principle, it is a limited jurisdiction, very uncommonly exercised; and even if the court is persuaded to treat the assets of the company for some default or breach of its owner those assets remain in the separate beneficial ownership of the company.


Thus an OPC is an “company” incorporated under the Companies Act; and although its entire share capital is held by one person, that does not detract from the legal status of the OPC as an incorporated body having a distinct corporate entity and corporate personality. It is a body corporate by the name contained in the memorandum, capable of exercising all the functions of an incorporated companyunder this Act and having perpetual succession with power to acquire, hold and dispose of property, both movable and immovable, tangible and intangible, to contract and to sue and be sued, by the said name. Accordingly, the company’s assets are the company’s assets and not the assets of the person who owns all the shares of the company.

 Ms. Divya Gupta
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Management Studies

Wednesday 16 November 2016

Apache Hadoop

Hadoop is a framework from Apache Foundation for storage and large scale processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware.It is an open source framework. Commodity hardware consists of already available computer hardware that is inexpensive, easy to maintain and works on plug and play basis with other hardware. The principle of using commodity hardware is that it is better to have more computing power by pooling low-cost and low-power hardware in parallel then having a fewer high-cost and high-power hardware. The advantages are use of components based on open standards, easy switching between different hardware and linear scaling in case of increase load. All the modules of Hadoop are designed with the assumption of hardware failures because the commodity hardware is more prone to failure.

Apache Hadoop has its genesis in Google File System and MapReduce paper published in 2003. In 2003 at Apache Foundation Doug Cutting was working on a web crawler project named “Nutch”. To meet the parallel processing need of crawling and indexing, the project implemented distributed file system and MapReduce. In 2006 Hadoop is born out of Nutch and Hadoop is named after the Doug Cutting son’s yellow elephant toy.

Apache Framework : Basic Modules
1.      Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
2.      Hadoop MapReduce
3.      Hadoop Common
4.      Hadoop YARN

IN HDFS, data file is divided into blocks and copies of these blocks are created and stored on other nodes in the Hadoop cluster. The default block size is 64 MB. This redundancy offers high availability. A Higher Block size is recommended as it requires less metadata by the NameNode. Whereas in typical file system on disk the block size is 512 bytes. In RDMS block sizes varies from 4 KB to 32 KB.Each data block is stored by default on three different servers; in Hadoop, this is implemented by HDFS working behind the scenes to make sure at least two blocks are stored on a different rack to increase reliability in the event you lose an entire rack of servers.All of Hadoop data placement logic is managed by a special server called NameNode. The NameNode server keeps record of all the  files in HDFS, like where the blocks are kept and more. NameNode is stored inside the memory for quick response.

Hadoop works on servers available in very large cluster. MapReduce tries to assign commutation to the nodes where the data to be processed is stored, this is known as data locality.Because of above principle SAN or NAS in a Hadoop is not recommended. SAN or NAS the extra network communication overhead can cause performance bottlenecks.IN Hadoop Map Reduce we don't have to deal with Name Node. When a Hadoop Job is fired and the application has to read data and starts to work on the programmed Map Reduce tasks, Hadoop will contact the Name Node, locate the disks that have the parts of the data that need to be accessed to carry out the job and then send your application to run locally on those nodes. Map Reduce is two distinct jobs. The first is map job, which takes a set of data and converts it into individual elements, which are broken down into rows(key/value pairs).  The reduce job takes the output from a map as input and combined those data rows into a smaller set of rows.

In Hadoop, a Map Reduce program is known as a job. A job is executed by dividing it down into pieces called tasks.An application submits a job to a specific node in a Hadoop cluster, which is running a program called the JobTracker, then the JobTracker establish the connection with the NameNode to find out where all of the data required for this job is stored across the cluster, and then breaks the job down into map and reduce tasks for each node to work on in the cluster, then these tasks are scheduled on the nodes in the cluster where the data exists. Note that a node might be assigneda task for which the data required by that task is not local to that node. In such a case, the data will be transferred to that node. In Hadoop cluster, a set of continually running programs, referred to as TaskTracker agents, monitor the status of each task. If the task fails the status is sent back to JobTracker.

Hadoop common components are a set of libraries and programs that are used by the various Hadoop sub projects.YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) is a resource management platform responsible for managing the resources in the Hadoop cluster and utilizing them in order to schedule users and applications. The difference between MapReduce and YARN is that, in MapReduce there is single JobTracker, whereas in YARN we have multiple Application Master which will manage the applications by assigning them to different containers on different Nodes.


 Mr. Vijay Gupta
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Information Technology






HASKELL – Functional Programming Language

Need of Functional Programming Languages
Writing large software systems is really complex, difficult and expensive. Maintaining such complex systems is often time consuming and costly. So it is significant to structure it well. Well-structured and less complex software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a set of modules which provides reusability to cut down future programming costs. Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, can make it easier as compared to the conventional languages. Conventional languages lay theoretical restrictions on the way problems can be decomposed. Functional languages push those constraints to back. Haskell is the highest level functional programming language with shorter programs and less bugs.

Functional Language and its advantages
A functional language is one where the exclusive or effective form of expressing algorithms is the interpretation of mathematical functions which involves avoiding state changes and fickle data. This is as against the languages that are declarative, imperative, and procedural which gives priority to state change. Further, Higher level programming languages can write the same program using less lines of code. The number of bugs in a program is proportionate to the number of lines of code, so a shorter program has fewer bugs.

Some of the advantages are:
Brevity: Programs written in functional languages tend to be much shorter than their essential equivalents.
Ease of Understanding: Programs written in functional language are generally not difficult to understand. It would be easier to understand those programs even with very less knowledge of logic.
No Core Dumps: Most functional languages especially Haskell, is a strongly typed language, excluding a huge class of easy-to-make compile time errors. Moreover, strong typing means no core dumps! which simply means that there is no possibility of treating an integer as a pointer, or a null pointer.
Code Reuse: Haskell's is a strongly typed language but is much less restrictive than, say, Pascal's, because it uses polymorphism.
Recursion: Recursion is one of the important features in functional programming, as it is the lawful and often the only way to iterate.
Lazy Evaluation: Authentic computations are referentially clear and they can be implemented at any time and still yield the same result. This property of functional language makes it possible to suspend the arithmetic computations of values until they are needed, that is to compute them lazily.

Haskell as Language
Haskell was designed in 1988 by a committee of academics named after the logician Haskell B. Curry whose work in mathematical logic serves as a foundation for functional languages. The language Haskell is based on the lambda calculus, hence the lambda we use as a logo. The committee’s primary goal was to design a language that satisfied the following constraints:

1. The language should be good enough for research, teaching, and applications for building large systems.
2. The language should have its own syntax and semantics.
3. It should be freely available, which means that anyone should be allowed to implement and distribute it.
4. It should be based on unanimity.
5. It should diminish futile variety in functional programming languages.

The outcome of the committees’ meeting was HASKELL 98 which was one of the standardized versions of Haskell language. HUGS was an interpreter used for Haskell. It was simple for people who were learning the basics of Haskell. It offers speedy compilation and more execution speed. For a beginner, it is an excellent language to step in to programming world, since it doesn't have any complex syntax This is how it works

main = print"Hello, world"
 
To run the program
hugs hello.hs
 
Some of the Tools available for Haskell
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) is a state-of-the-art, open source, compiler which gives interactive environment for the functional language Haskell. In addition to the Haskell 98 native code generation across much architecture, GHC implements many cutting-edge features including Software Transactional Memory providing much easy implementation of highly concurrent programs.


Haskell Mode for Emacs
It is a basic Haskell mode for Emacs which provides color coded environment and automatic indentation. In addition, this package comes with Haskell interactive modes for both Hugs and GHCi.
 
Mr. Varun Sapra
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Information Technology

Monday 7 November 2016

Security Breaches using KeyLoggers & Anti KeyLoggers: An Overview  

With the increased innovation in technology the threat of breach to user’s confidential data has increased by huge degree. Today attackers are growing stronger. They are discovering new ways to pierce the security levels on a rapid rate. Thus security is a key challenging area of research for security managers.
            As far as security is concerned besides social engineering,there are many methods of obtaining confidential information. A very common method to obtain sensitive information includes keystroke logging.
             Keystroke logging is the capture of typed characters. It is often used to gather secure information, commit fraud, or obtain system facility access. The data captured can include passwords, user ID’s, and other sensitive bits of information and the attacker can obtain valuable data without cracking into a hardened database or file server. Keyloggers are a prominent class of malware and so they present a special challenge to security managers. Unlike traditional worms and viruses, certain types of keyloggers are almost impossible to detect and work well because they’re simple. They just take raw information – keystrokes – and ship them out of your computer to a third party and that is why this can pose a serious threat to users. As a result, cyber criminals can get PIN codes and account numbers for e-payment systems, email addresses, user names, email passwords or any potential information can be logged quickly without any apparent performance impact on the target PC and surprisingly most users infected with a keylogger will never know it unless an account or credit card is hijacked.In this way,the access to confidential data can sometimes have consequences which can be quite serious.
The most common ways of doing this is through phishing, social engineering, bundling the keylogger with other software .The main idea behind keyloggers is to get in between any two chain of events for example when a key is pressed and when information about that keystroke is displayed on the monitor. This can be achieved using video surveillance, a hardware bug in the keyboard, wiring or the computer itself or requesting information from the keyboard using standard methods.
Though Keyloggers are tricky to detect, still there are some typical signs. For instance you may encounter   slower performance while web browsing, your mouse or keystrokes pause or don’t show up onscreen as what you are actually typing or if you receive error screens when loading graphics or web pages.
CATEGORIES:
 There are two categories of keyloggers
Software-based keyloggers are used to intercept your keystrokes, mouse clicks, clipboard contents, URLs i.e. all the user activity. The second type of keyloggeris  hardware-based keyloggers are physical devices that are usually plugged  between the keyboard and intercept keystrokes typed.

HOW TO PREVENT AND PROTECT THE PC:
Since the chief purpose of keyloggers is to get confidential data, the most logical ways to protect against unknown keyloggers are as follows:
With the help of a one-time password the threat can be minimized .Even if the password you enter is intercepted, the password generated can be used one time only.  So Even if the one-time password has been intercepted, the cybercriminal will not be able to use it to obtain access to critical information.,
  •          By using a system with proactive protection designed to detect keylogging software,
  •          By using a virtual keyboard.
  •          Always Use licensed anti-virus software and update it regularly.
  •          On a regular basis, Update your OS
  •          Be extra cautious while you enter confidential credentials. A simple way can be that one may enter some extra characters -And then delete them using the mouse
  •          By trying an alternative keyboard layout .Since most of the keylogger software available is based on the typical older QWERTY layout so if you use a keyboard layout such as DVORAK, the captured keystrokes does not make sense unless converted.

Ms. Shweta Ohri
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Information Technology