In bitcoin mining, as we know. energy-guzzling computers are developed to verify bitcoin transactions and vie with one another for new coins. In the US, the bitcoin mining is approaching 38 per cent of the world’s mining. There are emissions from the energy hungry mining sector. These emissions, as per the report of environmental groups, equal the emission of 6 million cars each year.

The world is thinking of doing rapid decarbonization. The bitcoin mining contributes 27.4 million tonnes of carbon footprint from mid-2021 through 2022. It is three times more than the largest US coal plant.

Bitcoin industry defends itself by stating that the amount of electricity consumed by it is relatively smaller — just 0.09 per cent to 1.7 per cent of the total US power consumed. Thus cryptocurrency sector is greener than other heavy industries. In addition, more than half the power it uses comes from the renewable sources. It is cleaner than the cement industry. The US mining companies are publicly traded. They are expected to reveal their energy consumption.

Besides this, miners claim they provide stability and financing to energy grids of renewable power-generation.

It also goes without saying that a lot of mining operations are responsible for bad or dirty energy projects. Bitcoin is a technology with a lot of positive and negative climate potential.

Vedanta of Agrawal, and Taiwan’s Foxconn jointly wants to set up a first silicon fabrication plant in India investing $20 billion or Rs.1.6 trillion. The plant will be located in Gujarat, though initially Maharashtra too was vying for it. Silicon from this project will be sliced into wafers. In stages, these wafers will be converted into microprocessors or computers. on a chip. There will be a display glass unit as a part of this project.

Vedanta may or may not do the processing. It can restrict itself to producing raw materials only, and processing will be left to other firms. A silicon fab is the starting print. In the chain ahead, lacs of jobs will be created. By itself, the costly fab business may not create many direct jobs. Fab manufacturing is automated.

The government proposes to give huge subsidy for silicon fabs say to the extant of 50 per cent. If one single plant eats up massive subsidy of billions of dollars, what if more such plants are set up. Do we have this kind of money? Will it not be prudent to import silicon wafers?

India does not have comparative advantage in fabs. However, India is good at chip design. It also generates jobs.

Silicon plants will become viable when the domestic market for fabs expands.

There are integrated plants abroad — these produce silicon as well as computer chips. However, all big fab makers sell major part of their production to processing facilities across the world.

American companies do not use their own fabs, e.g., Nividia, Qualcomm and Broadcom. They produce advanced chips. Maharashtra can invite processing units. It can create jobs here.

America is ahead in IC design. The plants are sophisticated. Design and patents are their forte. Producing silicon fabs and chips are being outsourced. Its share of chip production globally is 12 per cent. China and Taiwan are producers of silicon and chips.

America to wants to attract investment in fabs and semiconductors. Though not immediately but in future, India too must produce its own fabs. Right now, India will have to incur a huge subsidy bill.

Fruit salts are compounds with fizz or effervescence. The acids used are drawn from fruits — from citrus fruits (citric acid) or grapes (tartaric acid). These organic acids are mixed with alkaline salts such as sodium bicarbonate, or sodium carbonate or sodium bitartarate. The flavours and sugar are added to make them palatable. The reaction of organic acids and carbonates results into salts such as monosodium citrate in solution with carbonates and tartarates. These are fruit-derived salts and hence are referred to as fruit salts.

In 1852, a British pharmacist James Crossley Eno created a fruit salt mixture and sold it from its pharmacy in the port city of New Castle upon Tyne. It helped the sailors to keep fit in the voyages. In 1868, he founded a company Eno’s Fruit Salt Works.

Eno helped to relieve people of flatulence or gases in the stomach. It relieved acidity too. It was a fast working and effective remedy.

Eno entered India 50 years later in 1972. Eno’s slogan in the 1990s was, ‘Eno on, acidity gone.‘ The fizz bubbles are called bulbule in Hindi. The term was creatively used in advertising. ‘Eno bulbule , de azaadi jhatse.‘ Eno has introduced flavours like lemon, ajwain, cola etc.

Eno’s brand personality is packed with humour. A character in ad after taking Eno is shown burping that shows Eno has acted, and the character is recovering. A burp is used as a trigger to memory of the brand.

Scholarly content is published in serial content publications. Subscription costs of these publications rise faster than the inflation cost. Academic libraries funds were not sufficient to afford the increasing costs. The unique scholarly content cannot be replaced by cheaper tittles or journals. The publishers of such journals take advantage of this situation, and use the scholarly material to do commerce. This is called serial crisis.

How to tackle this? There are two methods. One can subscribe to a large number of scholarly publications centrally for a country or a network of institutions. It is called the Big Deal. Another method is called Open Access (OA). It means no-cost access to research works published either as journal articles or book. OA happens in two ways. The work can be archived in an open online repository. Alternatively, the work can be published in an OA journal or book. India has 128 OA repositories and reservoirs. Shodhganga is one such large reservoir of Indian theses. OA repositories have some limitations since they do not follow the standards of research publications. There are no digital identifiers for global indexing.

The logic behind Open Access is simple. The research is funded by tax-payer’s money. Therefore, it should be freely available.

OA will end the serial crisis of 50 years. OA movement started in the 1990s. If medical research is made open, it can save lives. In August 2022, the US announced OA policy. By 2025, all federal agencies will have to implement open access policies. There was early development of OA in Europe — the Budapest Initiative, 2003. The Bethesda Statement, 2003, Berlin Declaration, 2003. By 2018, all key funding organisations decided to follow OA. Even in Australia, two funding agencies followed suit. India espoused OA policy in 2014.

Senior and middle-level i-bankers from Bank of America, J.M. Financial, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and others are shifting to other jobs in high-growth corporates or startups.

Banking is a high-stress job. Bankers would like to move to the buy side and in corporate roles. There is no pressure of revenue targets year-on-year. Another reason for the change over is the monotony of doing the same activity over a period of time. They would love to work on innovations and challenging products. They are good at working out mergers and acquisitions (M&A) too. They are good at fund raising too. In banking, there is burn-out.

There are fintech firms and digital lenders who offer opportunities to i-bankers. Cards such as Slice which allow you to pay in three instalments, or in one instalment like a charge card without any interest are interesting propositions.

Some i-bankers join other domains too. There are new opportunities and better work-life balance.

NFTs are non-fungible tokens. It is necessary to be clear about the concepts of ‘fungibility’ and ‘non-fungibility’. Fungible means any product or asset that can be interchanged with another product or asset of similar type. Money is fungible because if you take a single 2000 rupee note or four five hundred rupee notes or ten 200 rupee notes or twenty 100 rupee notes, the value remains the same for each one. Metals such as gold and silver are fungible, as are other commodities. Even bonds and shares are fungible. Cryptos too are fungible, as one bitcoin and another bitcoin has the same value.

Non-fungible means something that is unique and cannot be replaced with something else. NFTs represent a unique underlying asset. In economics, non-fungibility refers to something that cannot be replaced or interchanged owing to its unique properties.

NFTs indicate digital representation of ownership of such a product on a blockchain. An NFT could be a digital or physical asset or anything else that has value.

India has 70,000 hospitals, of which about 25000 are multi-specialty hospitals with around 150 beds and above. These hospitals perform traditional surgeries. About 140 robotic surgery systems which are more precise and comfortable have been introduced in India. A global market leader from the US da Vinci sells robotic surgery systems all over the world. It is managed by Intuitive Surgicals. There are other firms — J & J and Medotronic.

If in cardiology patients, robotic surgery is used, the patients could return home the next day and 50 per cent leave the hospital in two days. The patients would be back to work or playing golf in about a week to 10 days.

In traditional cardiac bypass, the surgeon cuts open sternum or the breast bone. Robotic surgery is minimally invasive. It reduces the average stay in the hospital. da Vinci units have been used for over 10 million procedures across the globe. Still, even in the US, the penetration level of robotic surgery is just 30 per cent. The issue is access and affordability. Around 300 million surgical procedures — both robotic and non-robotic — take place around the world per year. The figure is likely to reach 590 million by 2030. Many surgeries could shift to robotic systems if there is access.

Around 50-60 per cent cardiac procedures could be done robotically. It will reduce blood loss and will have faster recovery. The mortality rate in robotic cardiac surgeries is only 0.7 to 0.8 per cent.

SSI Mantra, an Indian company founded by a US-returned cardiac surgeon, has set up manufacturing facility for robotic systems here in India.

They have a tie-up with Motherson Group who will make up the components, and SSI Mantra will assemble them. They have purchase orders from the hospitals, and would be able to sell the robotic systems in double digits. They expect to sell 100 systems per year very soon and in next five years around 2000 systems.

The cardiac surgeon has set up a team of 100 people with a facility of 30 thousand sq.ft. in Gurugram. Here they assemble components from vendors. Some components such as drives and motors are outsourced from abroad.

Ethereum, the second largest blockchain network, has attempted the software upgrade called Merge to make it a mature system — replacing the power-hungry computers to order transactions on the network. The system will be more energy efficient, and will reduce carbon consumption by an estimated 99 per cent. The set up will use piles of the networks native token — Ether, placed in special, so-called staking wallets.

It will be scaled up. They have to fix privacy. The metamorphosis represents the difference between an early Ethereum and an aspired Ethereum. Merge changed the character of Ether, making it resemble yield-bearing securities. Staked Ether will generate a return expected to be around 5.2 per cent after the Merge. It will make the coin more attractive to investors. There are going to be glitches for some time to come.

Big Tech is being scrutinised all over the world for its anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies. Big Tech has its command big money which can be used to manipulate systems in a specific country. They can fund those groups which influence government policy which can lead to the dilution of tech regulations. Whistle-blowers, of late, have exposed unethical practices of Big Tech — payment by one company to another, keeping a particular search engine as a default option. All this at times goes against the larger interests of society.

The issue is monopolisation by a few players. They have monopoly over delivery of information. They can swing elections and politics of a nation. Hate speech could be used to change the election results. Some of the practices violate the fundamental rights. There is scarce respect for privacy and those nations with no privacy protection laws are at a disadvantage.

Big Tech shows a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. They share data with the parent company. Under the pretext of being just intermediaries, they spread misinformation and hate speech.

They are also affecting the economics. Market forces determine the prices in non-digital arena. Big Tech decides the prices in the digital space. The value is created by consumers in digital space by providing data. However, the consumers are taken for a ride. Self-regulation has not worked satisfactorily. Big Tech kills competition. They buy out smaller tech firms. They discourage innovation and competition. They use the personal information they gather for their own benefit.

The State has to intervene and has to protect privacy, remove legal protections for Big Tech, improve the transparency about the algorithms used and content moderation done and end discriminatory algorithmic decision-making.

Departed souls are remembered in a myriad of ways — one way is to honour them by putting a QR code on the graves, their final resting place.

A QR code is a two-dimensional barcode that is read by scanning it. These have been used since the 1980s, although they have been widely used today.

A QR code is made by using free tools such as QR code Generator or QRCodely. One can, of course, buy readymade QR codes through internet. You need not use your real phone number as the code’s URL. Instead, you can use email address or an anonymous unique identifier such as UUID — Universally Unique Identifier.

A QR code on a grave shows that you care about the identity of the deceased. You engage with people walking past the final resting place. It provides information about the resting person — name, age when passed away and a brief note about them. It can be a memory trigger. Mostly, QR codes are text-onlyQR codes. You can put a poem or quote even. There are QR codes with images and pictures. Here pictures of family members are shared. Future generations can gather how their ancestors looked like.