Bihar STET Answer Key 2020 – Re Exam Answer Key & Objections Released

Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) released Re Exam answer key & objections for Bihar STET Dec 2019.

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UPI transactions see biggest monthly plunge

Transactions fall by more than a fourth in April to Rs 1.5 lakh crore; Fastag worst hit https://ift.tt/3dac0J4 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Aarogya Setu app must for private sector workers

Privacy activists said a diverse group of organisations and individuals had endorsed a representation to the Prime Minister's Office and various central government ministries opposing the mandatory use of Aarogya Setu. https://ift.tt/3bWXpAO https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud infrastructure spending grew 37% YoY to $29B in Q1, with Amazon at 32% market share followed by Microsoft at 18% (Synergy Research Group)

Synergy Research Group:
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud infrastructure spending grew 37% YoY to $29B in Q1, with Amazon at 32% market share followed by Microsoft at 18%  —  New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 spend on cloud infrastructure services reached $29 billion, up 37% from the first quarter of 2019.

Indians bet on online gaming to kill boredom

Gaming firms have noted a sharp increase in customers looking to ward off boredom by indulging in games such as poker, rummy and bingo https://ift.tt/2zHEjQL https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Sources: Bangalore-based education app Byju's is in talks to raise up to $400M at $10B valuation, up from a valuation of $8B in February (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Sources: Bangalore-based education app Byju's is in talks to raise up to $400M at $10B valuation, up from a valuation of $8B in February  —  Byju's, an education learning startup in India that has seen a surge in its popularity in recent weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak …

UK launches the Cyber Discovery Virtual Cyber School, an online initiative aimed at teaching teenagers cybersecurity concepts (Danny Palmer/ZDNet)

Danny Palmer / ZDNet:
UK launches the Cyber Discovery Virtual Cyber School, an online initiative aimed at teaching teenagers cybersecurity concepts  —  Online initiative looks to inspire a new generation of cybersecurity talent to bring out their ‘digital Sherlock Holmes’ while schools remain closed.

Chinese e-commerce company Club Factory starts grocery delivery

Club Factory has been accused of shipping cheap products to India directly from China after labelling them as gifts to evade customs duty. https://ift.tt/2Yql48T https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

First trailer for HBO’s Lovecraft Country blends Eldritch horrors and racism

Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams are among the executive producers of HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

H.P. Lovecraft is having a moment. January brought us Richard Stanley's surreal film, Color Out of Space, an adaptation of the short story of the same name, in which a family on a farm encounters a glowing purple meteorite with typically horrific Lovecraftian consequences. Stanley's film adaptation of The Dunwich Horror is rumored to be in development, the second in a planned trilogy. And now HBO has dropped the first trailer for a new series partly inspired by the works of the Cthulhu-loving horror master, called Lovecraft Country.

The series is based on the 2016 dark fantasy/horror novel, Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff, who also found inspiration in a 2006 essay by Pam Noles describing what it was like growing up being both black and, well, a hardcore nerd. The protagonist is Atticus Finch, a black veteran of the Korean War and science fiction fan who embarks on a perilous road trip from his home on Chicago's South Side to a small town in rural Massachusetts. He's looking for his estranged father, who purportedly vanished after encountering a well-dressed man driving a silver Cadillac.

Atticus's Uncle George and childhood friend/fellow sci-fi buff, Leti, come along for the ride. This being inspired by Lovecraft, naturally they encounter all kinds of arcane rituals, magic, shape-shifters, monsters, and an alternate reality or two along the way.

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Namely, a former high flier, slashes staff as demand for its HR software dries up in the pandemic

Namely, an eight-and-a-half-year-old, New York-based company that sells payroll, talent management and other HR services to mid-size businesses across the U.S. via subscription software, has let go of upwards of 40 percent of its employees. The cuts are across the board, from high-ranking staffers, including a CFO who was brought on almost exactly two years ago, and a chief security officer who has spent just the last year with the company, to its entire customer success team.

Namely CEO Larry Dunivan says the company had reduced executive pay five weeks ago, hoping to avoid layoffs, but that the coronavirus and its impact on business made that impossible.

Dunivan — who joined Namely last summer — declined to specify exactly how many employees were let go or whether the percentage was even higher than 40 percent, a number provided to us by one source familiar with the situation.  He did talk about the difficulties of running a startup right now that depends largely on small- and medium-size businesses, noting that even though Namely’s customers sign uo for between one- and three-year-long contracts — as well as pay for a minimum number of employees — many of those customers are finding it difficult to fulfill those contracts right now.

As an example, he pointed to a client that has numerous yoga studios and earlier this year employed 500 people but has laid off all but 15 of them in the shutdown. Said Dunivan, “We had a stark, painful conversation and you could tell I was one of many people she was calling that day. Because I care about that relationship, I waived that minimum for some period of time so she can conserve cash.”

Indeed, said Dunivan, a company like Namely “doesn’t get hit all at once. Because it’s subscription revenue, it happens over time.” But “underlying trends change as customer behavior changes and unemployment rises, and trying to predict future revenue is a tough job” given that no one knows exactly when the world will return to its previous, pre-Covid 19 state.

Nearly four million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing to more than 30 million the nation’s number of unemployment claims.

While the deep cuts are understandable in the current context, they also represent one in a series of milestones that no startup wants to encounter. While Namely was once among New York’s most promising businesses and accordingly raised at least $217 million from investors, including Matrix Partners, True Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, it has seen more than its share of transition at the top. In the most devastating development for the company until now, Namely’s board abrupt fired  the company’s cofounder, Matt Straz, as its CEO in 2018.

Accused of actions “inconsistent with that which is expected of Namely leadership,” as the company told employees at the time, Straz has gone on to launch an employee benefits startup called Bennie, but it cast a cloud over the the company (which still isn’t talking about what happened).

Soon after, the board member who led the investigation into Straz —  longtime Silicon Valley executive Elisa Steele — was appointed as Namely’s permanent CEO, which at the time helped attract $60 million in new funding to the company led by GGV Capital.

Yet by last summer, she had also left as CEO, a decision that she made based on family commitments says one source, and owes partly to the relationship she had established with Dunivan, he says separately.

In fact, Dunivan says that in his previous role as the interim CEO of the human resources company ThinkHR, he was consulted by Steele on business and product strategy, and that “as sometimes happens, one thing led to the other and i joined” the company in her stead. (Steele remains on the company’s board.)

Certainly, he inherited a business that no longer enjoys the sheen it once did.

As says one person with a stake in the business, “I don’t think anyone is giving up on Namely but it had a modest growth plan at the start of 2020 and that’s now been made uncertain because of [COVID-19]. I think the company is just trying to control what it can and to structure itself so it can operate more efficiently with a major drop-off in revenue.” Adds this person, “It’s like a clean sheet of paper.”

It’s an optimistic perspective and surely one that remaining employees will need to embrace, at least until the fourth quarter, which is when Dunivan estimates that businesses across the board may pick up again.

“This is an extraordinarily difficult time, but we look at the world through a fairly conservative lens and we’re making certain assumptions about how new customers will buy, how existing customers will increase or decrease headcount, and how many businesses will be closed and never to come back,” said Dunivan when we spoke earlier.

“It’s my believe that the recovery will start to show signs of life in the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, and our current looks at it through that lens,” he added. “But in the meantime, employers will be paying fewer people.”

Faced with dwindling options, Namely is now among them.

Mobile phone retailers set to reopen stores where allowed

As per estimates by experts, an inventory of 5 million phones is lying in the offline channel for smartphones alone. https://ift.tt/35q9FHj https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Federal judge rules FCC must give access to logs containing IP addresses behind public comments for the 2017 net neutrality vote, after repeated fraud claims (Dell Cameron/Gizmodo)

Dell Cameron / Gizmodo:
Federal judge rules FCC must give access to logs containing IP addresses behind public comments for the 2017 net neutrality vote, after repeated fraud claims  —  A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs …

C-CAMP to invest Rs 1 cr in startup doing testing kits

C-CAMP is helping CoSara Diagnostics, Huwel Life Sciences and DNAXperts complete regulatory processes and scale up capacities quickly. https://ift.tt/3aZPyRr https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Otonomo raises $46 million to expand its automotive data marketplace

New vehicles today can produce a treasure trove of data. Without the proper tools, that data will sit undisturbed, rendering it worthless.

A number of companies have sprung up to help automakers manage and use data generated from connected cars. Israeli startup Otonomo is one such player that jumped on the scene in 2015 with a cloud-based software platform that captures and anonymizes vehicle data so it can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, subscription-based fueling, parking, mapping, usage-based insurance and emergency service.

The startup announced this week it has raised $46 million to take its automotive data platform further. The capital was raised in a Series C funding round that included investments from SK Holdings, Avis Budget Group and Alliance Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Otonomo has raised $82 million, to date.

The funds will be used to help Otonomo scale its business, improve its products and help it remain competitive, according to the company. Otonomo is also aiming to expand into new markets, particularly South Korea and Japan.

“We now have the expanded resources needed to deliver on our vision of making car data as valuable as possible for the entire transportation ecosystem, while adhering to the strictest privacy and security standards,” Otonomo CEO and founder Ben Volkow said in a statement.

Otonomo’s pitch focuses on creating opportunities to monetize connected car data while keeping it safe from the moment it is captured. Once the data is securely collected, the platform modifies it so companies can use it to develop apps and services for fleets, smart cities and individual customers. The platform also enables GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data.

Today, Otonomo’s platform takes in 2.6 billion data points a day from more than 20 million vehicles through partnerships with more than automakers, fleets and farm and construction manufacturers. Otonomo has more than 25 partnerships, a list that includes Daimler, BMW, Mitsubishi Motor Company and Avis Budget Group. The company said it’s preparing to bring on seven more customers.

That opportunity for Otonomo is growing based on forecasts, including one from SBD Automotive that predicts connected cars will account for more than 70% of cars sold in North American and European markets in 2020.

Physicists identify unique signature to confirm quark-gluon plasma in universe

Computer simulation of a merger between two dense neutron stars. After the merger, a phase transition from ordinary hadronic matter (red-yellow) to quark matter (green) takes place.

In the first fractions of a second of our universe's existence, the energy density was so incredibly high that there were no protons and neutrons, just a hot "quark soup" known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Physicists have successfully recreated this unique state of matter in high-energy laboratories, but those conditions are exceedingly rare in the current cosmos. According to a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, German physicists have performed computer simulations indicating that a QGP could form in the immediate aftermath of a binary neutron star merger, and that it should produce a telltale, detectable signature in the gravitational waves emanating from that event.

"Compared to previous simulations, we have discovered a new signature in the gravitational waves that is significantly clearer to detect," said co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. "If this signature occurs in the gravitational waves that we will receive from future neutron-star mergers, we would have a clear evidence for the creation of quark-gluon plasma in the present universe."

A hot, dense soup

Quarks, the fundamental components of subatomic particles, are bound together by force-carrying gluons to form protons and neutrons. But under the extreme high-energy conditions of the early universe in its first microseconds of existence, that couldn't happen. Instead, quarks and gluons mingled freely in a dense soup, until things cooled down sufficiently for protons to condense out of the QGP. Before the first second was up, the Universe had gone through its entire inflationary period, sowing the seeds for the large-scale structures we see today.

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