November 2024

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Daily Current Capsules 26th May 2022
Bilateral Relations
EX Bongosagar
What's the NEWS
  • The third edition of Indian Navy (IN) - Bangladesh Navy (BN) Bilateral Exercise ‘Bongosagar' commenced at Port Mongla, Bangladesh
  • The Harbour Phase of exercise is scheduled from 24-25 May which will be followed by a Sea Phase in the Northern Bay of Bengal from 26-27 May.
  • Exercise Bongosagar is aimed at developing a high degree of interoperability and joint operational skills through the conduct of a wide spectrum of maritime exercises and operations between the two navies.
  • Indian Naval Ships Kora, an indigenously built Guided Missile Corvette, and Sumedha, an indigenously built Offshore Patrol Vessel are participating in the Exercise.
Science and Technology
PARAM PORUL
What's the NEWS
PARAM PORUL, a state-of the art Supercomputer at NIT Tiruchirappalli dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) - a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST)
Know! about PARAM PORUL
  • PARAM PORUL supercomputing facility is established under Phase 2 of the NSM, where in majority of the components used to build this system have been manufactured and assembled within the country, along with an indigenous software stack developed by C-DAC, in line with the Make in India initiative.
  • A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between NIT Tiruchirappalli and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to establish this 838 Tera Flops Supercomputing Facility under NSM.
  • PARAM PORUL system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
  • Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. has been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.
  • This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.
  • Under NSM, till date 15 supercomputers have been installed across the nation with compute capacity of 24 petaflops.
  • All these supercomputers have been manufactured in India and operating with indigenously developed software stack.

Know! about petaflop

A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as:

  1.  A quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS)
  2.  A thousand teraflops
  3.  10 to the 15th power FLOPS
  4.  2 to the 50th power FLOPS
  • Petaflop computing will enable much more accurate modeling of complex systems.
  • Applications are expected to include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, computer-based drug design, astrophysical simulation, the modeling of environmental pollution, and the study of long-term climate changes.
Education
National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2021 report

 

What's the NEWS

  • The Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education released the National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2021 report which assesses the health of school education system in the country by conducting comprehensive evaluation survey of children's learning competencies at classes III, V, VIII and X with a cycle period of three years. It reflects the overall assessment of school education system.
  • The last NAS was held in 2017.
NAS 2021 Highlights
  • The NAS 2021 was held on 12.11.2021 at all India level and covered (a) Government Schools (Central Government and State Government); (b) Government Aided Schools; and (c) Private Unaided Schools.
  • About 34 lakh students of 1.18 lakh schools in 720 districts from both rural and urban areas have participated in NAS 2021.
  • The report also evaluated competencies of students in subjects such as mathematics, languages, and environmental studies (EVS) for Classes 3 and 5; language, mathematics, science and social science for Class 8; and language, mathematics, science, social science and English for Class 10.
  • This nation-wide survey was administered by the CBSE in one single day at the same time.
  • The survey was managed through the technology platform designed and developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC).
  • In order to capture student attainment of Learning Outcomes at the end of Classes III, V, VIII and X, an OMR based achievement test comprising of Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) was conducted.
  • The report is based on the performance in all subjects through disaggregation by gender (female, male), Area (Rural and Urban), Management of schools (Government, Government aided and Private unaided) and Social Groups (Schedule Caste (SC), Schedule Tribe (ST), Other Backward Communities (OBC) and General.
Findings
  • Nearly 80% students found learning at home during the pandemic "burdensome" and felt that they learnt better in school with help from peers.
  • As many as 24% students said they had no digital device at home. Though 45% students found the experience "joyful", 38% also said that they had difficulties in learning.
  • Out of a score of 500, students across various classes performed better in languages, but lagged behind in subjects like mathematics and science.
  • Across various subjects and classes, SC, ST and OBC students perform worse than general category students.
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