Indian Tsunami warning system goes live

*Hyderabad:* The Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth
Sciences Kapil Sibal on Monday inaugurated the National Tsunami Early
Warning System set up at the Indian National Centre for Ocean
Information Services (INCOIS) in Hyderabad.

The System has been established by MoES as the nodal ministry at a cost
of Rs 125 crore in collaboration with Department of Science and
Technology (DST), Department of Space (DoS) and the Council of
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The Indian Tsunami Early Warning System comprises a real-time network of
seismic stations, Bottom Pressure Recorders (BPR) and tide gauges to
detect tsunamigenic earthquakes and to monitor tsunamis.

The Early Warning Centre receives real-time Seismic data from the
national seismic network of the lndian Meteorological Department (IMD)
and other International seismic networks.

The system detects all earthquakes of more than six magnitude occurring
in the lndian Ocean, in the less than 20 minutes of occurrence.

The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) has installed four
BPRs in the Bay of Bengal and the two BPRs in Arabian Sea. BPRs
installed in the deep ocean are the key sensors to confirm the
triggering of a Tsunami.

In addition, NIOT and Survey of India (SOI) have installed 30 Tide
Gauges to monitor the progress of tsunami waves. Integrated Coastal and
Marine Area Management (ICMAM) has customized and ran the Tsunami Model
for five historical earthquakes and the predicted inundation areas.

Communication of real-time data from seismic stations, tide gauges and
BPRs to the early warning centre is very critical for generating timely
tsunami warnings.

The inundated areas are being overlaid on cadastral level maps of 1:5000
scale that is extremely useful for assessing the population and
infrastructure at risk.

High-resolution Coastal Topography data required for modelling is
generated by the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) using ALTM and
Cartosat Data.

INCOlS has also generated a large database of model scenarios for
different earthquakes that are being used for operational tsunami early
warning.

Tsunamigenic zones that threaten the Indian Coast have been identified
by considering the historical tsunamis, earthquakes, their magnitudes,
location of the area relative to a fault, and also by tsunami modelling.

The east and west coasts of India and the island regions are likely to
be affected by tsunamis generated mainly by subduction zone related
earthquakes from the two potential source regions, viz., the
Andaman-Nicobar- Sumatra island arc and the Makran subduction zone north
of Arabian Sea.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has made an end-to-end
communication plan using INSAT.

A state-of-the-art early warning centre has been established at INCOlS
with all the necessary computational and communication infrastructure
that enables reception of real-time data.

The National Early Warning Centre will generate and disseminate timely
advisories to the control room of the Ministry of Home Affairs for
further dissemination to the Public.

Seismic and sea-level data are continuously monitored in the Early
Warning Centre using a custom-built software application jointly
developed with MIS and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that generates
alarms alerts in the warning centre whenever a pre-set threshold is crossed.

The efficiency of the end-to-end system was proved during the large
undersea earthquake of 8.4 M that occurred on September 12, 2007 in the
Indian Ocean.

For the dissemination of alerts to MHA a satellite-based virtual private
network for disaster management support (VPN DMS) has been established.

In case of confirmed warnings, the National Early Warning Centre has
been equipped with necessary facilities to disseminate the advisories
directly to the administrators, media and public through SMS, e-mails,
and Fax.

Periodic workshops will be organized for the user community to
familiarize them with the use of tsunami and storm surge advisories as
well as inundation maps.

Easily understandable publicity material on earthquake, tsunami and
storm surges has been generated and will be distributed to the general
public.

(this is not my own write-up; I have saved it for my documentation)

Free e-mail service that bridges the gap between mobiles and computers

The fierce battle for control of the web's free e-mail accounts, worth
billions of pounds, has stepped up a gear with Yahoo! offering a
revamped service with features aimed at bridging the gap between
web-based e-mail and mobile phones.

The new offering, which is accessed through an internet browser, allows
users to send text messages from computers to mobile phone handsets -
for free.

The service has been lauded by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street
Journal, the doyen of gadget reviewers, as the best out of the e-mail
services provided by the "big four" â€" of Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and
AOL.

The feature works on certain phones in the US, Canada, India and
Portugal, for the time being, but Yahoo! is looking at introducing it in
other countries, including the UK. The company believes that in coming
years, more people will access the web through mobile phones than
computers.

*George Hadjigeorgiou, head of e-mail for Yahoo! in Europe, said: "We
are focused on making it easy for people to connect to those who matter
most to them." *

The prize in the contest to lure e-mailers is a multi-billion- dollar
advertising market. E-mail is regarded as one of the three fundamental
pillars of e-commerce by Wall Street's analysts - alongside internet
search and online video.

Mobile advertising alone is expected to be worth some $11 billion (£5.5
million) a year by 2011.

"If Yahoo doesn't continue to innovate in e-mail, somebody else will,
and they'll lose that audience," Jordan Rohan, an RBC Capital Markets
analyst in New York, said.

Other recent innovations from rival companies include Google Gears, a
piece of free software that allows users to operate web-based tools,
such as e-mail, even when they do not have an internet connection.

Yahoo Mail also offers "unlimited" storage for e-mails and attachments,
beating the 2.9GB offered by Google's free Gmail and Microsoft's
Hotmail, which is boosting its free storage capacity to 5GB.

The Yahoo service also includes an instant messaging tool (for those
times when an e-mail is deemed too slow), which can also be used to talk
to users of Microsoft's services.

The combination of the Yahoo and Microsoft instant messaging systems
creates a communications platform with some 350 million user accounts.
There are plans to extend the alliance to internet telephony using VoIP
(voice over internet protocol) technology. Such a joint platform would
eclipse the 100 million user base of Skype, the leading internet
telephony company, and the 19 million user accounts boasted by BT.

Despite the growing attrction of social networking sites, e-mail remains
the "base-line communications system of choice", Mike McGuire of
Gartner, the technology analysts, said.

More than 20 million Britons visited a non-work e-mail website last
month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings , the market researcher. The
vast majority of those accounts are provided for free, their suppliers
willing to subsidise them - at a cost of hundreds of millions - because
of the route they provide to potential revenues from advertising and
sales of goods.

Moreover, while users of social networking sites such as Facebook and
Bebo skip from one site to the next and are regarded as "chronically
unfaithful" by internet executives, e-mail users are regarded as
relatively loyal.

"E-mail websites are pretty sticky," Mary Beth Kemp, a senior analyst
for Forrester, the technology consultants, said. "They are a good way of
reaching consumers and, lets face it, of selling advertising. Nine out
of ten web users use e-mail."

The loyalty of e-mail users has been cited as one of the reasons why
Google still only comes forth in the ranking of the UK's e-mail
providers, with 1.7 million users - compared with Hotmail's 11.8
million, which leads the field. Google's service entered the market
several years behind Microsoft and has found it tough to lure users away
from rivals.

There are more than 27 million active e-mail addresses in the UK â€" not
counting work accounts, according to Nielsen. As many as 60 billion
e-mails are sent every day across the globe, according to IDC, the
researchers. By contrast, the Royal Mail delivers a third as many items
- per year.

However, e-mail's blessings may be mixed. According to Ironport, the
spam filtering company, more than nine out of ten e-mails in most
people's inboxes are unsolicited.

*Getting the message across*

*Yahoo! Mail *
*Number of users* 254 million
*Capacity* unlimited
*Integrated instant messaging* Yes
*Import contacts* Yes, from a range of e-mail programmes including
Hotmail, GMail, AOL and Outlook, plus a few other smaller applications
*Pros* preview pane (similar to Outlook), integration with other Yahoo!
services, drag-and-drop sorting of mail, keyboard shortcuts
*Cons* still contains a few bugs, especially Apple's Safari browser;
slower to load than original Yahoo! Mail. Prominent adverts in
message-viewing pane

*Windows Live Hotmail *
*Users* 260 million (Source: comScore)
*Integrated IM* No
*Capacity* 5Gb
*Import contacts* Yes, from a range of e-mail programmes including
Hotmail, GMail, AOL and Outlook, plus a few other smaller applications
*Pros* Can be synched with Outlook. New version includes many
improvements rolled out in new Yahoo! service. Works with Safari and
advertising is less intrusive than in Yahoo! Mail

*GMail Users* 79 million (Source: comScore)
*Import contacts* Yes, although you will have to format them into a
readable file type before importing from some programmes
*Integrated IM* Yes
*Capacity* 2.9Gb
*Pros* Effective search tool for finding messages. Long exchanges
consolidated into a single message file, helping to keep inboxes under
control
*Cons* Interface less attractive; capacity is now limited compared with
rivals. Some consider it intrusive that messages are scanned for
keywords to allow the delivery of targeted ads

*AOL Mail Users* 48 million (Source: comScore)
*Capacity* unlimited
*Integrated IM* Yes
*Pros* Allows sent messages to be "unsent" (removed from receiver's
inbox), provided receiver is also on the network. The service also
integrates well with AOL IM system
*Cons* Compared with the updated versions of its big two rivals, AOL
feels considerably less slick. There's no gaping flaw, but there's
little to set it apart either

*Facebook Users* 60 million (Source: comScore)
*Integrated IM* Yes
*Capacity* n/a
*Pros* More spontaneous and social than a straightforward e-mail
program. Enables sharing of photos and videos and offers a blend of
public and private messaging
*Cons* Can only be used to contact other Facebook users. The core
application doesn't allow files to be attached to messages

http://www.timesonl ine.co.uk/ tol/news/ world/article236 4805.ece
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2364805.ece>