Cricket must be an Olympic sport

Cricket must be an Olympic sport - Gilchrist

Adam Gilchrist has called for a dramatic reduction in the number of Tests in a move he believes will preserve the five-day format in the face of the Twenty20 challenge. While delivering the Cowdrey Lecture at Lord's on Wednesday, Gilchrist said Tests were the "most impractical vehicle to use" when trying to promote the game globally and he continued his push for the expansion of Twenty20, along with a call to include cricket in the Olympics

"To preserve [Test cricket's] future, which we must - less is in fact more - we should go back to the future where there were fewer Test matches, but a lot more important ones," Gilchrist said. "And where the best cricketers of the day played closer to 50 Tests in their career, not 150."

Despite wanting a cull of the five-day itinerary, Gilchrist said Tests should be tampered with "as little as possible". "Its rules, customs and playing conditions - like Major League Baseball - should remain as close to how it has been played for the past 130 years," he said. "Many of cricket's innovations should be applied only in the shorter forms of the game. This not only includes the expanded umpire referral system, but especially the mooted introduction of night Test cricket and a different coloured ball needed to accommodate this."

Gilchrist, who captained Deccan Chargers to the IPL trophy in May, does not believe Twenty20, which he wants in the Olympics, answers all of cricket's problems. "Whilst I now appreciate and enjoy playing and watching T20 cricket - especially after captaining the Deccan Chargers to the 2009 IPL title - I am at heart a traditionalist, who firmly believes that Test cricket is the ultimate test of a player's and team's ability," he said. "This is not to say that T20 isn't a skilful game. It certainly is.

"For all their similarities, T20 still requires many different skill sets from the longer forms of the game. The fact that some very well credentialed Test cricketers have struggled to adapt to the game, whilst others who will probably never come close to playing Test cricket have thrived in T20- is surely proof enough."


Gilchrist spent considerable time in laying out his reasons for cricket's inclusion in the Olympics. "The single best way to spread the game globally," said Gilchrist, "is for the ICC to actively seek its inclusion as an Olympic sport.

"Without doubt, the Olympic movement provides one of the most efficient and cost effective distribution networks for individual sports to spread their wings globally. It would be difficult to see a better, quicker or cheaper way of spreading the game throughout the world.

"The Olympic movement's only remaining dead pocket in the world happens to coincide with cricket's strongest - the subcontinent," said Gilchrist. "This region, which includes India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, represents just over one fifth of the world's population. But with the exception of their great hockey teams of the past, these cricket powerhouses have received barely a handful of Olympic medals in nearly 100 years of competition.

"What better way for the IOC to spread the Olympic brand and ideals into this region, than on the back of T20 cricket? The rewards for both the ICC and IOC getting this right would be enormous."

Blind People Can Read SMS: Courtesy Nokia

Nokia's new Braille Reader application allows blind and visually impaired people to read a discreet SMS using phone vibration. 

Nokia has introduced an interesting piece of software, called Nokia Braille Reader. The new application allows blind people to read a discreet SMS using phone vibration. The Nokia Braille Reader application gives SMS for the blind and visually impaired and captures received SMS messages and brings them to the foreground for reading using Braille and tactile feedback. Developed at Nokia Beta Labs, the application has been developed in a joint project between Nokia, Tampere University and the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired.


The Nokia Braille Reader application is an application developed specially for blind people using Nokia mobile phones. The application uses Braille and also a tactile feedback to enable blind people to read SMS messages. Each text message is fed into the application and the characters are converted into braille. Then each character is read out to the user using the vibrating facility of the phone. As braille is a series of raised dots each character can be communicated by changing the vibration to depict raised or not with a whole sequence allowing the user to figure out which character it is, explains Geek.com.

The Nokia Braille Reader application is absolutely free to download and use and is compatible with Nokia devices based on S60 5th Edition, including Nokia N97, 5800 XpressMusic and the newly released N97 mini, 5530, 5230 and X6.

Download the Nokia Braille Reader - http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/nokia-braille-reader. 

Mobile Users Can Switch Operators From 31 Dec: TRAI

The Mobile Number Portability, which allows subscribers to retain their mobile telephone number while discarding one service provider for another, shall be implemented from 31 December 2009 in metros and category 'A' service areas and by 20 March 2010 in rest of the country.

 The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has announced that Mobile Number Portability (MNP), which allows subscribers to retain their mobile telephone number while discarding one service provider for another, shall be implemented from 31 December 2009 in metros and category 'A' service areas and by 20 March 2010 in rest of the country. MNP facility shall be available only within a given licenced service area.

According to the TRAI notification, a subscriber holding a mobile number is eligible to make a porting request only after 90 days of the date of activation of his mobile connection. If a number is already ported once, the number can again be ported only after 90 days from the date of the previous porting. The subscriber who wishes to port his mobile number should approach the Recipient operator (the operator to whom the subscriber wants to port his number). The subscriber may be required to pay porting charges, if any, to the Recipient Operator.

The subscriber making the porting request is required to have cleared all the bills issued prior to the date of porting request. He shall give an undertaking that he has already paid all billed dues to the 'Donor Operator' as on the date of the request for porting and that he shall pay dues to the Donor Operator pertaining to the mobile number till its eventual porting and that he understands and agrees that in event of non-payment of any such dues to the Donor Operator, the ported mobile number shall be liable to be disconnected by the Recipient Operator.

A subscriber may withdraw his porting request within 24 hours of its submission to the Recipient Operator. However, the porting charges shall not be refundable.

The regulation envisage a maximum time period of four days for the completion of porting process in all licenced service areas except in the case of J&K, Assam and North East licenced service areas where the maximum time allowed is 12 days. However, efforts will be made to further reduce the porting period. Access providers are required to implement 'All Call Query' method. The originating operator shall be responsible to route the call to correct terminating network.

Chandrayaan-1 Not A Failure, Finds Water On Moon!

India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has reportedly found evidence of large quantities of water on the lunar surface, before the project was terminated by ISRO.

 India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 was not a failure indeed. Despite of premature end, Chandrayaan-1 has reportedly found water on the lunar surface -- one of the main mission of the spacecraft. According to The Times newspaper, India's first lunar mission has found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface, before the project was called off.


"It's very satisfying," the newspaper quoted Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission's project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bengaluru, as saying.

This discovery is credited to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an imaging spectrometer, was one of the 11 instruments on board Chandrayaan-I. M3 was aimed at providing the first mineral map of the entire lunar surface.

Both ISRO and NASA, as of now, have refused to reveal anything on this. A spokesman for Brown University had also declined to comment, saying there was an embargo. "It will be a major announcement of a major discovery and is something great for Chandrayaan. It will mark a major leap for India's space programme," he told The Times Of India.

Lunar scientists have for decades contended with the possibility of water repositories. They are now increasingly confident that the decades-long debate is over, says a recent report published by Nature News. "The moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth." The results from the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are also "offering a wide array of watery signals."

The breakthrough is expected to be announced by NASA on 24 September 2009. According to NASA website, "NASA will hold a media briefing at 14:00 p.m EDT on Thursday, September 24, to discuss new science data from the moon collected during national and international space missions."

Chandrayaan-1 was India's first unmanned lunar probe which was launched by ISRO on 22 October 2008. After suffering from several technical issues including failure of the star sensors and poor thermal shielding, Chandrayaan stopped sending radio signals on 29 August 2009 shortly after which, the ISRO officially declared the mission over. Chandrayaan operated for 312 days as opposed to the intended two years but the mission achieved 95 per cent of its planned objectives.