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'STOP!' my mom bellowed. 'Don't you dare bite on that sandwich anymore. Don't you even watch TV?' Comfortably couched in front of my monitor, I stare back at her feigning innocence, wondering whether to gulp down the remains of the local food joint specialty behind her back or wait a little longer. But alas, she chooses to keep guard. 'Haven't you read all those reports in the newspapers? Do you really work for a newspaper in the first place? Can you even read?' And in that kind of context, I just had to do what any journalist with an assignment would. Yep, you got it right: I figured out the most comfortable means of collecting information, yawned, and logged on to the Internet.
   So what is really happening around? I did a little searching on all the major search engines, and the food adulteration issue in Bangladesh came in the top 10 search entries every time. Suddenly, everybody from Mama (of Mama Halim fame) to Chacha (who cooks up Hajir Biryani - how could you?) to Bombay (not Mumbai, it's the local guys who make chanachur) is a food adulteration star born overnight. At this point I came across Zaman bhai's editorial at http:// newagebd.com/2005/aug/31/edit.html, and decided to dig up a few more webpages.
   With all the major dailies having their own websites, it's not surprising that almost all of them host mobile food court reports that leave you with a sour taste in the mouth. Search engines do have a habit of citing completely irrelevant information, and in this case, the only actual food adulteration cases were the ones hot and happening in Bangladesh. Now isn't that Bangali. In case you want to look into the existing theory, 'adulterated food' is defined in terms of US law at http://www4. law.cornell.edu/uscode/21/342.html, a blazingly fast website managed by Cornell University. Imagine whitening bread with alum and chalk, and using mashed potatoes, plaster of Paris (calcium sulphate), pipe clay and sawdust to increase the weight of the loaves. Sounds pretty much 'us', doesn't it? Well, this was actually a common food adulteration practice in the nineteenth century. RSC.org, subtitled Advancing the Chemical Sciences, has a nice article on the fight against adulteration at http: //www.rsc.org/ Education/EiC/ issues/2005Mar. It reads great, but as long as we're dealing with food let's look up something that tastes better, shall we?
   There are practically zillions of websites in existence which give away free recipes. Even if you're not much of a cook, you might want to check out www.epicurious.com ('epicure' stands for a person refined in tastes in medieval Latin). You'll be amazed at the sheer detail gone into making a killer gourmet dish, er, website. Of course, there're all sorts of recipes that you can get your hands on, and also tips for students and wannabe chefs, recipe contests, a fantastic recipe search feature and a friendly, colourful interface that you'll fall in love with. I'm hailing this website as the one-stop gourmet destination on the Web.
   But then again, the Web is huge, and just take a look at what got caught in it. If you're familiar with polar expedition novels, you've probably heard of Pemmican. It generally consists of a mixture of pounded beef with beef fat, and was invented by the Hudson Bay Company and based on traditional native North American Indian recipes. As expected, it's compact, nutritious and can remain edible for a very, very long time. Hop off for the recipe at http:// www. coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/food2.htm. Want to taste Viking bread, the way it was really prepared 1,000 years back? Follow the directions on http:// www.yesmag.bc.ca/projects/vikingbreadbw.html and you can make it in your very own kitchen in no time. Caution: just don't hit anybody with it.
   It's pretty weird, but for some reason amateur physicists these days are intent on demonstrating 'kitchen science' online - laboratory tricks which mostly have nothing to do with cooking (now that's what we call a mean fry!). Some of them, however, do involve stuff like getting electricity out of a lemon using two strips of metal. If you're interested, try out http: //www. bizarrelabs.com. The site also has lighter sections, such as one called Bizarre Yolks and featuring egg tricks from the kindergarten days: how to tell a raw egg from a hard boiled egg, making an egg float, and the sorts. I only wish our chefs got to learn those.
   In the meantime let's get health conscious. To my mother's delight, I push away the sandwich and head off for www.caloriescount.org/calculator with the sole mission of creating a diet chart that I can manage online. For your information, there are many software and websites available to do the job. CaloriesCount.org is unique: first of all, it's a paid service (you can try it out for a few days though) and makes sure it raises the stakes high enough for its genre. The site boasts an exhaustive set of features, including different approaches to help you keep in shape: diet control, weight reduction, workout directives and so on. Go pick the strategy you like most.
   But hey, 'edible' is relative too. If you are allergic to certain kinds of foods, you should better be wary of them. I came across an interesting article on http :// kidshealth.org parent/ growth/ which provides an informative insight into food allergies children offer suffer from and how they can be overcome (I'd never have guessed that the most common allergen for kids is milk!). Again, if you have diabetes you'll be needing a customized diet control program with all the medical information chalked out. Unfortunately, despite the abundance of such services offered on the Web, almost all of them are hardly relevant in our part of the world, where eating habits differ greatly from the West. The closest match I could get for a Bangladeshi context was www.diabetesindia.com/diabetes/index, India's premium website for diabetes patients. Let's get this straight: the site isn't great, but does the job fairly well; and in the end you simply can't help wondering how come this kind of thing hasn't been developed in our country yet.
   It's time I signed off now, but not without taking a look around at www.foodreference.com. And isn't it the icing on the cake: this gem of a site has tonnes of features you won't find together under the same roof anywhere else. There're articles, trivia, recipes, food history, and even magazines, poems and reviews of books on food! There's also a 'cooking tips' section, the best I've come across (which also provides you with all sorts of facts, such as how to preserve 'zebra' tomatoes and that cocoa butter is used widely in soaps and cosmetics), and a section on 'food quotes' (ranging from NY Times Restaurant Critic Bryan Miller's 'square meals, not adventurous ones are what you should seek' to Oscar Wilde's famous 'an egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different'). Creative, to say the least; nevertheless, enough for a day's food for thought.
   I lazily terminate the network connection and reach out for the unadulterated, homemade delicacies that my mother has just served.
   — Tashfeen Mahmud

THE voluntary IT education centres in the country have taken their jobs as a responsibility for greater computer awareness. Started last April at Chokoria, Dishari now has its fourth IT education centre in operation at the port city including the ones at Kushtia, Sylhet and Manikganj. Having their fourth one on task, Dishari now claims to have passed a total of 616 students in just about three years, with its sixth batch running at Chokoria.
   Dishari, a concern of British American Tobacco Bangladesh, has been upraised to educate the less privileged of the selected regions with IT education. The concept was fortunate enough to have had a good acceptance in communities where Dishari is operating at present.
   While the centre approaches a year since its initiation, it has trained a number of working participants. Only this month, it has started another batch with journalists, doctors, professors and participants from various fields who have been interested in learning IT education. The operational officer of Dishari, Tawhidul Alam informed New Age that the vocational courses with the working participants are held during afternoon so that the time slot for the regular batches does not conflict.
   Having observed the interior of the classrooms with the equipments provided at this particular centre, members of the visiting Bangladesh ICT Journalist Forum (BIJF) was impressed on BATB’s service provided at here as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR).
   The machines provided for the students including the trainer and server PCs are all built on Intel Pentium 4 processors with 2.40 GHz of speed and 512 megabytes of RAM, each having the uninterrupted power supply connection. Students are facilitated with large screen view for demonstration using projectors. BATB has completely dedicated an independent area of 1,670 square feet for the purpose of Dishari at a total set up cost of taka 20 lacs. What made Dishari set up their fourth centre at Chokoria was the demand from different segments of people like farmers and other low income groups living at the port city where BATB itself has its main operation.
   Basic operation of computers and Microsoft Office products that are frequently in use are demonstrated at here by trained instructors. Minimum of SSC is a prerequisite for admission at Dishari in order to understand fundamental English.
   Students of the present batch took their interest on this course to gain the basic knowledge on computers and why not when it’s provided free of cost. Possibly learning from their previous batch and Dishari’s past records, these students hope for jobs as computer operators in some organisations after qualifying from here as they had informed New Age.
   ‘I would like to take computer engineering when I get into university and I strongly believe I am aided by the curriculum followed by Dishari,’ said Anisul Islam, a student of the present batch.
   Tahmina Akhter, a proud student of Dishari was fortunate enough to get a job at Proshika NGO as a computer operator, with a score of 79.60 per cent she acquired from this centre and now she is happy enough with the pay she is about to earn.
   Dishari retains the same set of policies for every centre that include internship for two months to three best students out of six batches run every year on two months duration. Each intern is salaried taka 2000 per month. At the end of each academic year, the best student at every centre is given the opportunity to study his chosen course at a specialised IT institute at the expense of BATB.
   ‘As there is no IT facility in Chokoria as yet, those willing to do the advanced courses have to move to Cox’s Bazar for that purpose’, informed Taufik Imam, Dishari and community relations manager.

Scientists at an IBM research center in Silicon Valley have created a magnetism-manipulating tool suited to building molecular computers, the company revealed.
   The development was touted as a step toward making computers based on the spin of electrons and atoms.
   ‘We have a tool in place to develop the product of the future,’ said German-born researcher Andreas Heinrich of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
   ‘We all know we can’t shrink the silicon-based technology used in today’s computers down to the atomic level.’
   ‘We have to look at a radically different concept, and that is what we are doing here.’
   The new method was called ‘spin-excitation spectroscopy’ and used a specially-designed microscope capable of creating magnetic fields as much as 140,000 times stronger than that of the Earth, scientists said.
   Researchers were able to manipulate atoms and measure the effect their spins had on each other, according to IBM.
   ‘We can study the magnetic phenomena used in hard drives, but on the scale of single atoms,’ Heinrich told AFP. ‘It could enable us, in the very far future, to be able to build computer devices on an atomic scale.’
   — AFP

Japanese electronics maker Toshiba Corp. on Friday started rolling out its high definition DVD players in Japan, becoming the first company to offer next-generation optical disc players worldwide. Toshiba said its new HD DVD machines, which will compete with rival Sony Corp.’s Blu-ray technology, will sell for about 110,000 yen ($940) in Japan. Sony aims to offer Blu-ray-based players in the United States for around $1,000 in July.
   The new machines are expected to breathe new life into the slowing home video market, but the failure of the competing Toshiba- and Sony-led groups to agree on a unified format has paved the way for a costly battle reminiscent of the VHS-Betamax war of 25 years ago that caused widespread customer confusion.
   ‘Why do we need next-generation optical disc players now? Because viewers are increasingly asking for them as high-definition TVs spread rapidly,’ Toshiba Corporate Senior Vice President Yoshihide Fujii told a news conference.
   At the core of both DVD formats are blue lasers, which have a shorter wavelength than the red lasers used in current DVD equipment, allowing discs to store data at the higher densities needed for high-definition movies and television.
   The Japan launch of Toshiba’s HD DVD players will be followed by the U.S. debut in April.
   Toshiba, Japan’s second-largest electronics conglomerate, is set to offer two models of HD DVD players, the HD-XA1 and HD-A1, in the United States for $799 and $499, respectively.
   The company said it would aim to sell 600,000 to 700,000 of the new machines globally in the fiscal year ending in March 2007. It added that it would aim to launch HD DVD-equipped PCs in the April-June period.
   The prolonged battle between the two formats has divided Hollywood and the computer industry. At stake is pole position in the multibillion-dollar markets for DVD players, PC drivers and optical discs.
   ‘The media often describes Blu-ray (discs) as high capacity and HD (DVD discs) as low cost. But HD DVD does not fall behind Blu-ray even in capacity,’ Toshiba’s Fujii said. ‘Manufacturing multi-layer discs is much easier for HD DVD.’
   Shortly after the announcement, shares in Toshiba closed up 1.0 percent at 684 yen, outperforming the Tokyo stock market’s electrical machinery index IELEC, which gained 0.17 percent. Sony shares were unchanged at 5,450 yen ($1=117.33 Yen).
   — Reuters