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The Daily Janchetna

Year11, Issue:8, Thursday, Nov.12,2020.

. Message of the Day .

The society we live in is dynamic in nature. It changes and changes continuously. Customs, traditions, folkways, mores, values and institutions undergo changes by and by. The change is from traditional to modern nature but the change is spontaneous and slow, so slow that we are unable to realize it. Reason for the slow change may be contributed to the inherited culture. Habits, display of the culture, die hard and so is the society.

Do involve yourself in social activities to bring the desired changes without expecting instant results. Fruits of the mango tree sown by you will be enjoyed by your grandchildren.

. History of the Day-4 .  

. Today’s History .

12th November

Important Events:

1879 — Sachivottama Sir C.P.R. Iyer, lawyer, administrator, politician and Advocate-General of Madras Presidency, was born  

1938 — Jitendra Prasad, Congress leader and political advisor to prime minister, was born  

1940 — Amjad Khan, Hindi film actor, was born 

1946 — Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Indian educationist and Independence activist, passed away  

2007 — Khanmohammad Ibrahim, Indian Test cricketer, passed away

Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali

Was Born

Ornithologist and naturalist Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali, known as the “birdman of India’, was born on November 12, 1896, to a Sulaimani Bohra Muslim family in Bombay. Ali’s parents died before he turned four. He and his brothers and sisters were then brought up by an uncle and aunt.

W.S. Millard, the then secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), introduced the young Ali to the serious study of birds. Millard identified a coloured sparrow that Ali had shot with his toy gun, as a Yellow-throated Sparrow. Millard also showed him the BNHS’s collection of stuffed birds and provided other valuable help and encouragement. 

This incident of the Yellow-throated Sparrow was the spark that eventually made Ali take up ornithology as a career, not a common choice in the India of that era. He also started maintaining a diary at a young age, and made interesting and quirky observations on birds.

After completing his school education he spent a year in college in Bombay and then went to Burma to look after mining and other family businesses there. In his seven years at Burma he would spend time in the forests, learning about wildlife and birds, and hunting.  

Remembering his Burma days, in an interview conducted in 1982 by H.S.A. Yahya, the then Reader, Centre for Wildlife And Ornithology, Aligarh Muslim University, Ali said: “[I] was deeply interested in birds and that is why I took the opportunity in Burma where the mining business was all in thick forest and in forested country. That part of the country where I was, the Tenasserim, was particularly good for birds. The forests were situated in a place from where transport was most difficult because there were no roads and no paths or any other facility of that sort.”

After returning to India he joined Davar’s College of Commerce to study law and accountancy but also started taking evening classes in zoology at St. Xavier’s College. In 1918 he was married to Tehmina, a distant relative.

Speaking about the role she played in his career, Ali said in the 1982 interview that it was his “great fortune” that he married Tehmina “who had had all her education in England and been used to quite a different sort of life to what she would have in the kind of work I wished to do”. But, she insisted, “that I should take up only the work that I was interested to do”.

Ali, who was shattered when she died at a young age in 1939 after a minor surgery, added: “Now when I look back, I think the chief…[factor] that made me continue with ornithology was my wife, because you really cannot do much if you do not have a like-minded companion.”

Ali became a guide lecturer in 1926 at the natural history section of Mumbai’s Prince of Wales Museum, a post he held for two years before taking a study leave to Germany. Here he met prominent ornithologists such as Bernhard Rensch and Oskar Heinroth and got first-hand experience in bird ringing.

After returning to India, Ali and Tehmina moved to the coastal village of Kihim near Bombay. Here, among other detailed observations, he examined the breeding and mating patterns of the Baya Weaver. Later, he conducted bird surveys in princely states such as Hyderabad and Cochin.

Ali was more interested in studying birds in the field than finer details of systematics and taxonomy. As he wrote in a letter in 1956: “My head reels at all these nomenclatural metaphysics! I feel strongly like retiring from ornithology, if this is the stuff, and spending the rest of my days in the peace of the wilderness with birds, and away from the dust and frenzy of taxonomical warfare.”  

Ali was an influential figure in Indian wildlife conservation and environmentalist circles in the post-Independence era. Both prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi supported his work. Ali’s appeal to Nehru for funds to ensure the survival of the BHNS proved fruitful. Ali, who died in 1987 after suffering from cancer, once described his lifelong love for birds as “essentially aesthetic and scientific, and in some cases . . . even . . . pragmatic”.

Remembering Ali after his death, environmental activist and writer Bittu Sahgal wrote: [H]is life was spent exploring the wonder and utter usefulness of nature without once becoming emotionally attached to the ‘sanctity of life’ concept that so many people still confuse with conservation.” In a tribute to Salim Ali, ecologist Madhav Gadgil wrote in November 1996 in Current Science: [Ali] will be remembered as the man who taught Indians to appreciate, to study at first hand, to treasure, to work towards conserving the rich living heritage of the country.”

. Current .

Will robots take over HR?

The transformation of human resources (HR) from an administrative facilitator to a strategic business partner is increasingly driving organizations to invest in HR technology solutions. According to a survey by global consultancy firm, Sierra-Cedar, 64 per cent of Indian companies plan to increase their HRTech spend in 2017.

Following automation and analytics, robots -- more specifically software bots -- are considered the future of HR, with a growing number of organizations acknowledging their vast potential.

While several facets of HR would still need a human interface, we could see robotic process automation in areas such as HR analytics and compensation and benefits. 

Simply put, technology is constantly challenging industry assumptions of what HR can and can't do.

"As a precursor to robotics, automation is making us realize that many of our processes are redundant, and can be automated to free up time for meaningful work," says Richard Lobo, executive vice-president and head, HR, Infosys. "Robotics, as a technology, is slowly making inroads into HR and one of the forerunners are chatbots. These are the ideal form of technology to provide a better employee experience."

The information technology company has been one of the early adopters of robotics.

Infosys, HR Helpdesk, has implemented an interactive virtual agent through which employees can get instant resolutions to their queries on policies and processes cutting out the need to raise a request to meet an HR executive.

The company has created a huge knowledge repository that the interactive virtual agent uses to provide relevant responses. In case employees cannot get the required resolution through the virtual agent, they also have an option to chat with a helpdesk advisor in a live format. Helpdesk advisors can automatically view the conversation history of the employee with the virtual agent.

Since, the launch of the virtual agent in May 2016, nearly 10,000 employees have used it.

Experts say robotic process automation (RPA) technology models software bots to perform repetitive rule-based tasks in lengthy multi-step processes, but RPA cannot replace the 'human' -- at best it can empower HR professionals to focus on creative and interpersonal skills by automating mundane tasks.

"With HR being one of the most complex document and paper-led processes in an organization, the implementation of RPA can help reduce costs, increase accuracy and drive efficiency," points out Rajeev Banduni, CEO, GrowthEnabler. "Some of the tasks being automated include payroll management, compliance and liability risk management, recruiting and on boarding and technology integration during mergers and acquisitions."

Fast-growing companies, who are faced with rapidly expanding count of employees, business locations, and M&As, can leverage RPA to automate multiple HR activities to fastrack growth and expansion. The Institute of RPA estimates that implementation of RPA in HR can result in about 25-50 per cent reduction in costs and drive faster implementation with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

Agrees Infosys' Lobo. He says bots can be quite useful in HR in validating internal data, report creation-formatting, data cleanup in replacing manual-excel-based tasks. They can also help in bringing down the effort spent in candidate management process, assessing data of new employees and so on. These would help HR eliminate time spent on tasks that usually take up more time than they should.

Jagjit Singh, chief people officer at PwC India, says automation could drastically reduce and limit face-to-face interaction on the transaction side. To cope with these challenges, HR professionals need to reinvent themselves with greater focus on improving their business acumen, leading and managing change, nurturing leaders and building organizations that can respond to the needs of a multi generational workforce, while at the same time being adept at leading-edge technology.

Corporations are also coming around to the view that all this would require new investments.

Leading retailer Landmark Group, for instance, has made significant investments in HRTech and has automated the payroll process in the organization. It is leveraging technologies, including artificial intelligence and data analytics, to run an automated payroll process.

According to Venkataramana B, group president, HR, Landmark Group, "While the processing of day-to-day HR activities like payroll could be completely automated with bots, its use would be both beneficial and game-changing in the analytics space where robots are connected to several data sources and can analyse large amounts of internal company data and external market data to provide empirical insights to improve recruitment, performance management, learning and development and so on."

Besides fresh investments in HR, it is critical that corporations identify processes ideal for the implementation of RPA and manage expectations of stakeholders. A clear road map of implementation and expected goals should be outlined. The criticality of HR functions leaves minimal space for failure; hence implementation of automated technologies needs to account for unintended consequences. Incorrect or incomplete implementation can lead to enterprise level risks.

Banduni of GrowthEnabler emphasises the need for a phased implementation with constant validation of results.

The perceived threat of RPA as 'job-stealing robots' is another major hindrance and should be carefully managed by organisations in addition to creating new responsibilities for the employees freed up by automating repetitive tasks.

. Informative .

Seven Theories of Life

1 Panspermia

2 Simple Beginnings

3 RNA World

4 Chilly Start

5 Deep-Sea Vents

6 Community Clay

7 Electric Spark

Life on Earth began more than 3 billion years ago, evolving from the most basic of microbes into a dazzling array of complexity over time. But how did the first organisms on the only known home to life in the universe develop from the primordial soup?

Here are seven theories complied by the science daily Live Science which suggests the origins of Life.

7 Electric Spark

Electric sparks can generate amino acids and sugars from an atmosphere loaded with water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, as was shown in the famous Miller-Urey experiment reported in 1953, suggesting that lightning might have helped create the key building blocks of life on Earth in its early days. Over millions of years, larger and more complex molecules could form.

Although research since then has revealed the early atmosphere of Earth was actually hydrogen-poor, scientists have suggested that volcanic clouds in the early atmosphere might have held methane, ammonia and hydrogen and been filled with lightning as well.

 

6 Community Clay

The first molecules of life might have met on clay, according to an idea elaborated by organic chemist Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

These surfaces might not only have concentrated these organic compounds together, but also helped organize them into patterns much like our genes do now.

The main role of DNA is to store information on how other molecules should be arranged. Genetic sequences in DNA are essentially instructions on how amino acids should be arranged in proteins. Cairns-Smith suggests that mineral crystals in clay could have arranged organic molecules into organized patterns. After a while, organic molecules took over this job and organized themselves.

5 Deep-Sea Vents

The deep-sea vent theory suggests that life may have begun at submarine hydrothermal vents, spewing key hydrogen-rich molecules. Their rocky nooks could then have concentrated these molecules together and provided mineral catalysts for critical reactions.

Even now, these vents, rich in chemical and thermal energy, sustain vibrant ecosystems.

4 Chilly Start

Ice might have covered the oceans 3 billion years ago, as the sun was about a third less luminous than it is now. This layer of ice, possibly hundreds of feet thick, might have protected fragile organic compounds in the water below from ultraviolet light and destruction from cosmic impacts. The cold might have also helped these molecules to survive longer, allowing key reactions to happen.

3 RNA World

Nowadays DNA needs proteins in order to form, and proteins require DNA to form, so how could these have formed without each other? The answer may be RNA, which can store information like DNA, serve as an enzyme like proteins, and help create both DNA and proteins. Later DNA and proteins succeeded this "RNA world," because they are more efficient. RNA still exists and performs several functions in organisms, including acting as an on-off switch for some genes. The question still remains how RNA got here in the first place. And while some scientists think the molecule could have spontaneously arisen on Earth, others say that was very unlikely to have happened. 

Other nucleic acids other than RNA have been suggested as well, such as the more esoteric PNA or TNA 

2 Simple Beginnings

Instead of developing from complex molecules such as RNA, life might have begun with smaller molecules interacting with each other in cycles of reactions. These might have been contained in simple capsules akin to cell membranes, and over time more complex molecules that performed these reactions better than the smaller ones could have evolved, scenarios dubbed "metabolism-first" models, as opposed to the "gene-first" model of the "RNA world" hypothesis.

1 Panspermia

Perhaps life did not begin on Earth at all, but was brought here from elsewhere in space, a notion known as panspermia. For instance, rocks regularly get blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts, and a number of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth that some researchers have controversially suggested brought microbes over here, potentially making us all Martians originally. Other scientists have even suggested that life might have hitchhiked on comets from other star systems. However, even if this concept were true, the question of how life began on Earth would then only change to how life began elsewhere in space.