Save paper - Printing project reports on two sides

We all know that printing less will help save some paper, which means some trees are saved.If you are/were a student, you know how much paper it takes for a project report. General rule in most universities is that you only print one side of the paper. We may submit 3-6 copies of project reports depending on the number of committee members involved. If you use approximately 100 pages for your report, that makes around 300-600 pages. Think about all the reports printed by each student from your university. That really is a big number. If you are interested to do something to help save some trees, here is a chance.

 A petition addressing the vice-chancellor of Anna University, Tamil Nadu, India has been created. The idea is to ask him to enforce "double side printing" for student project reports. You may think, "why not just avoid printing totally?". But, the idea here is to move one step at a time. Lets first start using LESS PAPER and then proceed towards PAPER LESS.

 Already 600+ people have shown their support. We need more hands to save trees. Join us to bring this change. Here is the link for the petition in change.org.

  USE BOTH SIDES OF EVERY PIECE OF PAPER

If you are not a student of Anna university, but still like the idea, why not create a similar petition to ask your university/work place to enforce a similar rule? Go ahead and create a new petition with change.org (see title "Start a petition" on the same link).

Pictures From The Sky...

I was on my way from Taipei to Frankfurt. For the first time, I had a long flight during the day. I was afraid that it could be a boring and tiring flight, but in the end, it turned out to be pretty awesome. First of all, there were not many people in the flight (off season) and so I had all the 3 seats in the row for myself that I could even lie down and sleep. But the most amazing part was that the sky was pretty clear and I could get a wonderful view of some breathtaking scenery from my window. The route covered the desserts of Xinjiang, China, Plateau of Tibet, Tajikistan and Caspian sea.

I decided to take some pictures of some of them. These pictures here are nowhere close to the real stuff I saw through my eyes. Also that I am no professional and used a simple canon Ixus 75 pocket camera to take these pictures.

Its a HOAX!!! Please Don't Spread It...

This morning, when I opened my Facebook account, I found this message shared by some of my friends. The picture was really horrible and had the following message below it. "DO NOT LIKE IT. COMMENT. AND PLEASE SHARE IT OR JUST UPLOAD YOUR OWN...BUT SOMEHOW SPREAD IT IF YOU'RE EVEN 1% HUMANITY — ITS STILL NOT OVER YET... CHRISTIANS BURNT ALIVE BY JIHADS IN NIGERIA.."



There were a lot of heated discussions beneath and I was just curious to know when and how the incident took place. So I started browsing a little to know more information about it. In a short while, I came to know that the information spread along the shocking image is a complete HOAX. The image seem to be real but has no association with the Christian-Muslim problems in Nigeria. It is a tragic result of a tanker explosion that happened in Congo, another African nation.The real incident is here.

This is just one example of such hoax messages that keep spreading and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter make it even more easier to spread these information like wild fire.

One other such HOAX I came across recently is about the contact lenses melting in the eye of a guy who attended a barbecue party who finally lost his eye sight forever. Such information creates immediate attention and we think that it will help some of our friends and try to spread the information immediately. But, what we don't think is whether the piece of information we are trying to spread has any truth behind it. My intention is not to blame anyone who spreads these information as they do it out of good heart (or whatever possible reason it can be). But, what I want to convey here is that we should try to spend couple more minutes to see whether the information is from an authentic source and carries the right information.



Most HOAX messages come with one of the following ideas:
(1) Scientific details/medical science related issues that we are not completely aware of.
(2) Religious issues.
(3) Technology related issues.

Most of them try to create sympathy or use our unawareness and thus makes us spread the information. But, as an educated lot, it is better if we spread the right information and avoid passing these HOAX messages. If we are not sure about the message, it is better not to pass it on rather than passing a false information.