Friday, November 6, 2009

A Poor Man's Veyron


While surfing on the net a few days ago...............I came across this awesome car called the Mustang UBB 1000 . I was like it's just another beefed up Mustang what's the big deal about it and I am right it is just another beefed up Mustang..............but the extent of beefing up is what matters. This car was beefed up by a American company(what's new about that???) called the Ultimate Bad Boy(UBB). The Mustang theses guys built produces a heart stopping 1000bhp.........................yeah u read it right ONE THOUSAND f*****g bhp. The only other car which produces 1000 bhp is the Bugatti Veyron. Well I thought these nut cracks at the UBB are as good as the nut cracks at Bugatti. That was before i read the rest of the specs of the UBB 1000.
While the Veyron uses a 8ltr W16 engine with 4 turbochargers, the UBB 1000 uses a 5.4ltr V8 with one huge super charger and both produce the same 1000 bhp. The Veyron's top speed is 253 mph and the Mustang can do 221 mph....................but who cares you will be dead by the time you reach 150mph. And where the Veyron costs a mind boggling 899,000GBP, the UBB 1000 costs just 78,000GBP( with respect to price of Veyron of course). The guys at UBB have created a " Poor Man's Veyron".These guys are as Barney would put it " legend....wait for it...... its coming..........almost there..........dary".( watching too much of How I Met Your Mother lately :D)


Friday, September 4, 2009

Kapil Sibal's Gamble

Our Union Ministry has decided to end the class X exams, replacing it instead by Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation. The ministry thinks that the class X exam is stressful to the students and that they face needless pressure to perform well in their exam, which affects their mental health, etc. Yes, the students do face needless pressure during the exam period, but the pressure is escalated by their respective parents who want their child to be the next Einstein or Newton.
The Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) thing is a brilliant idea to judge the overall development of the student. Educationalist have stressed that it is a better way of evaluating a student than conventional exams. But with no standardisation, the CCE would be a failure as each school assessing a each student differently. The point that the Ministry is banning the class X exam and not the class XII exam itself suggests that the Ministry is unsure whether CCE is the right approach or not. Stress is stress whether the student is facing it in class X or Class XII, on the contrary the stress faced by the student in class XII is much greater than class X .
In my view both the conventional exam and CCE should be used to evaluate the performance of the student. The Ministry says that mugging up the textbook two months before the exams is not going to produce the desired results, but they fail to see that the pattern of the exam itself encourages students to mug the textbook up in order to get maximum marks If the board sets the paper in such a way that it encourages understanding of the subject and application of the knowledge gained throughout the year rather than mere reproduction of the facts stated in the textbooks (some of which turn out to be wrong), the desired results can be obtained