Skip to main content

Posts

Virtual Labs – A platform for remote e-learning

By
India has been constantly growing mobilization of resources and introducing new initiatives to improve accessibility and enhance education in the University sector in the last decades and progress has been made with considerable variations [1]. Most universities in both urban and rural areas are striving to achieve good quality education with their major limitations being organizing or accessing a standard laboratory environment and lack of technically skilled personnel in the field of biotechnology education [2]. Also, majority of schools in remote areas lack good teachers, good laboratories and other facilities for teaching [3]. Laboratory experiences are vital components in teaching biology courses to apply the theoretical knowledge to practice, in fields such as biotechnology, physical sciences and chemical sciences. To revolutionize the problems in the current trend of education, virtual laboratories are becoming a new technology that have a promising role in supporting the ed
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Thank you INCF for travel support

By
My sincere thanks to INCF for supporting my travel expenses for the NCBS CAMP'14. We had a wonderful course. We were 30 participants including national and international students and 20-25 wait-listed students were selected for lecture only sessions. The components in the course were well structured, which includes Remedial, Lectures, Tutorials, Discussions and Individual Projects. We got highly qualified faculty around the world to teach us the basis of memory and plasticity, various levels of modeling in computational neuroscience, sub-cellular electrical and chemical signaling in single neurons. And at network level we studied correlation and ion channel dynamics. How the spiking neuron network learns and memorizes the given patterns of information was one of the highlight of this course.  Tutorial session was very helpful for me, it gave us detailed understanding of variety of simulation platform, which includes NEURON, MOOSE, NEST and BRIAN. Why we want to use
Post a Comment
Read more

Hermitage San Paolo of Marchirolo

By
Visiting historic sites has been a wonderful pastime.  Northern Italy is famous for many such places. Not too far from Milan is Varese, a city with a lot of history, which is now a buzz place for many who prefer to live close to the Switzerland. A few kilometers from Varese is a small village called Marchirolo. Driving 30km from Varese city one is welcomed by meandering roads taking us to small and ancient villages occupied by hermitages of the past. Welcoming sight at Marchirolo is the Church of San Martino. Church of San Martino History reads that The parish church of San Martino di Marchirolo was created August 19, 1633 by the bishop of Como, Lazarus Carafino. San Martino church from the side as one takes the "Mulotteria" to San Paolo hermitage Bell tower of San Martino church It is a walk of 55min on a mulatteria (an old expression of saying a route meant for weight-bearing mules in the past). The walk is not treacherous but climbs rapidly and the
Post a Comment
Read more

ideal phd mentor

By
Taken from here . Here's the transcript: The Ideal PhD Mentor--A Student's Perspective "Ideally, the supervisor should be an expert teacher, a mentor, and a facilitator to catalyze the student's professional growth, such that the student's accomplishment is limited only by the extent of his or her ability." "But aren't you supposed to find this out yourself? You are already a postgraduate!" Those were the familiar words of my graduate supervisor in response to my often-desperate requests for quick solutions to my research problems. I must have been exceptionally inquisitive, but my supervisor's answer was always frustrating for me, the product of a well-established undergraduate system where practically everything was given to me on a plate. We had all the handouts to refer to, and if we still did not follow, we could always access and review the lecture slides or simply ask the tutors during the many tutorials following the lectures. But the
Post a Comment
Read more

The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness

By
Original version here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/science/24angier.html By NATALIE ANGIER Published: November 23, 2009 As the festival of mandatory gratitude looms into view, allow me to offer a few suggestions on what, exactly, you should be thankful for. Be thankful that, on at least one occasion, your mother did not fend off your father with a pair of nunchucks, but instead allowed enough contact to facilitate your happy conception. Be thankful that when you go to buy a pale, poultrylike entity, the grocery clerk will accept your credit card in good faith and even return it with a heroic garble of your last name. Be grateful for the empathetic employee working the United Airlines ticket counter the day after Thanksgiving, who understands why you must leave town today, this very minute, lest someone pull out the family nunchucks. Above all, be thankful for your brain’s supply of oxytocin, the small, celebrated peptide hormone that, by the looks of it, help
Post a Comment
Read more

From Khalil Gibran's "the Prophet" : On Work

By
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison? Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret. But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written. You have been told also that
Post a Comment
Read more

Calculus and Fun

By
I found a "bed-time tales" version of Calculus recently and am thrilled why i did not read it while my school days or atleast in college. The book is titled " What Is Calculus About? " by Warwick Sawyer. http://www.amazon.com/What-Calculus-About-Mathematical-Library/dp/0883856026 Some quotes include: "Mathematicians tend to be uninterested in the engineering applications and ignorant of them. Engineers tend to be ignorant of mathematics since l900 ... I have looked through the 1962 volume of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and in the first 350 pages of that, covering about 24 papers, I have tried to access the kind of mathematics being used . . . (Problems in Teaching Mathematics in Schools and Colleges and Universities.)" Another nice one about calculus goes like this "The basic problem of differential calculus is the following: we are given a rule for finding where an object is at any time, and are asked to find out how fast it
Post a Comment
Read more