Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2019

Notes:
India and the United Kingdom (UK) have launched a two-year joint initiative – Innovating for Clean Air (IfCA) in Bengaluru. The aim of the initiative is to provide a unique measurement system for air quality by integrating satellite and sensor data and extending support to India’s transition to electric vehicles. The UK-India joint initiative is expected to provide stakeholders of the two countries opportunities to test interventions related to air quality and Electric Vehicle (EV) integration. The programme is being led by Innovate UK, a wing of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and is funded by the Newton Fund along with various partners from Karnataka and India. The key partners for the programme are the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Enzen, Project Lithium, Confederation of Indian Industry, C40 Cities and Clean Air Platform.

Notes:
Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Steel, Dharmendra Pradhan has recently launched Atal Community Innovation Centre (ACIC) in New Delhi to encourage the spirit of innovation at the community level. The aim of the initiative is to encourage the spirit of innovation through solution-driven design thinking to serve society. The ACIC is a new initiative of Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) to support community innovation drive in the country. It will provide a platform in many of the rural, tribal areas and Tier-II and -III cities and unserved regions to have access to latest technologies for innovation and to ideate and create prototypes for innovation.

Notes:
NDTV India’s senior executive editor, Ravish Kumar has been honoured with the prestigious 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for his ‘ethical journalism’. Kumar has won the honour for his news show, Prime Time, which deals with real-life & under-reported problems of ordinary people. He is among five individuals who were declared winners of the award. The four other winners of the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award are Ko Swe Win from Myanmar, Angkhana Neelapaijit from Thailand, Raymundo Pujante Cayabyab from Philippines and Kim Jong-Ki from South Korea. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is the highest honour given to Asian individuals and organisations and often referred to as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.

Notes:
The book “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age” has been co-authored by Microsoft President Brad Smith & Carol Ann Browne, and will release on September 11. The book will provide a behind-the-scene look at the multinational technology company and tell some of the biggest stories to hit the tech industry in the past decade. The book comes at a time when the company finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These include privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of AI, big tech’s relationship to inequality and the challenges for democracy, far and near.

Notes:
The State Bank of India’s (SBI) Shanghai branch has become the first Indian bank to link up with China’s National Advance Payment System (CNAPS). After being a member of the CNAPS, SBI Shanghai can also offer real time transfer of local funds within China by routing them through the PBOC. It eliminates the need of tie up and maintenance of accounts with multiple Banks for fund transfer. The CNAPS provides real-time settlement services for all payments cleared in mainland China, as well as in all clearing banks in offshore yuan centers, such as Hong Kong. The CNAPS system is complemented by its international counterpart, the CIPS (China International Payments System or Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payment System), launched in 2015 with the aim of boosting international use of the Chinese currency, yuan. The CNAP was launched in 2008 by People’s Bank of China (PBOC).

Notes:
A 23-year-old Indian-origin doctor, Bhasha Mukherjee has been crowned Miss England after fending off competition from dozens of other models. She holds two different medical degrees & has an IQ of 146, which makes her officially a ‘genius’. Mukherjee speaks five languages – English, Bengali, Hindi, German and French -and has a Bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Nottingham. As winner of Miss England, she will be entered into the Miss World contest and will also bag a holiday to Mauritius.

Notes:
Anant Setalvad (84), yesteryear cricket commentator, has passed away in Mumbai on August 4, 2019. His pleasant baritone voice distinguished him from other cricket commentators from the mid 1960s through to the 1980s. Regarded as a giant in cricket commentary on All India Radio (AIR), Anant shared the microphone with Vijay Merchant, Pearson Surita, Raju Bharatan, Balu Alaganan and Suresh Saraiya. He was commentator for AIR in Ranji Trophy and other BCCI tournaments and also for Test matches. He was on the AIR panel for the 1969 India-Australia Test match in Mumbai and also in the panel for the 1973 Test against the Tony Lewis led England at the CCI.

Notes:
Nobel Prize-winning US author Toni Morrison (88) has passed away in New York, United States on 5th August 2019. She is the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature for her novels depicting the struggles of black Americans living in a white society ridden with racial discrimination. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “Beloved” that told the story of a runaway female slave and was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the highest civilian honor – Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Notes:
The Rajasthan government has launched a new higher education model titled “Resource Assistance for Colleges with Excellence (RACE)” for distribution of faculties and movable assets among the government colleges at the district level to rationalize the availability of resources. The new model will create a pool for sharing of facilities which will benefit the colleges lacking infrastructure. The colleges in need will have to submit their requirement to the nodal college in the district that will send the teachers on deputation (if needed) and provide the facilities such as projectors, digital libraries, equipment and technicians.

Notes:
According to the University Grants Commission (UGC), all universities in India – public and private – will get final subscription to access the Swedish anti-plagiarism software Urkund from September 1, 2019. The Urkund software was chosen through a global tender process. As part of the exercise to prevent plagiarism in the coming years, the software will be provided free of cost anti-plagiarism software to all 900 universities, including private players. It will be available to teachers, students, researchers & everyone. The Union Government also notified the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 to prescribe the graded punishment for plagiarism. Beside this, a UGC committee on improving research culture, headed by former Indian Institute of Science (IIS) director P. Balaram, noted that Indian academics have contributed 35% of all articles published in about 11,000 fake journals between 2010 and 2014. Most of these articles were in fake engineering journals, followed by articles in fake journals of bio-medicine and social sciences.