Cricket
The game that every indian enjoys !!!

People of India treat cricket as their fifth Veda or fourth Religion after Hinduism, Islam & Christianity. Cricket is not our national game, but it is celebrated as a festival, thanks to our Board, Government, sponsors and the media...
We grow up with cricket and it is the most affordable and enjoyable game on the streets, unlike hockey, tennis or swimming. It is simply because of this fact that cricket has been so dominant.
This game is embedded in the consciousness of the Indians.

Sachin, Saurav, Rahul and many more are the stars or even gods of indian youth. You will find people not knowing the Prime Minister of our own country but they will tell you who is Sachin Tendulkar......

Of course, cricket is more glamorous and much popular among young generation, Cricket is not only remained a sport but due to a lot of money is being invested in this game it has become one of the important Product in the market. The ICL & IPL are recent examples .....
ICL: http://www.indiancricketleague.in/
IPL: http://www.indian-premier-league.com/

There can be many views on Cricket & money relation but finally cricket is religion in India !!!

You may get a good information about the game of Cricket on Wikipedia site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket

Following are some sites about Cricket you may want to visit:
http://icc-cricket.yahoo.com/
http://bcci.cricket.deepthi.com/
http://www.cricket.mailliw.com/
http://www.cricketclub.org/

Enjoy the game !!!!!

This is one of the articles one must read !!! Good one.....

Technology taking over human functions?

By Andrea Runyan

You might think your job is safe from the onslaught of technology as long as you're not a checkout clerk, farmer or call center worker. But I think technology will take over a good percentage of the jobs we'repursuing.

Journalist: This one is obvious. Jobs in journalism are being eliminated not only by syndication and freelancing, but also by newsblogs and other amateur-written news. Increasingly, the job and privilege of journalism are being spread to society at large.

Doctor: What do doctors do? Although doctors are more than machines, you could replace a lot of their functions with programs that stored and updated a huge body of medical knowledge in order to query patients for their symptoms, order tests, interpret the results and prescribe treatments. Computers obviously surpass people in the ability to store knowledge. What would take a doctor several years of medical school and experience to learn, a computer can "learn" in the time it takes to download a few programs. Moreover, computers could be programmed to stay abreast of the latest health news, for example, by searching online -- something many doctors don't find much time to do. But Internet health news does more than help doctors -- it sometimes replaces them. Already, many people go to the Internet instead of doctors to find out what might be wrong with them and what they can do about it. Computer programs could read tests more accurately and use statistical and epidemiological data to prescribe the optimal course of treatment.

Actor: Three words: computer generated graphics. "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo" used actors for voices, and computer animation for the images. In a technology called morphing, actors' previously filmed takes are combined to make new scenes. Jeremy Rifkin writes in "The End of Work" that morphing "allows movie and television producers to isolate, digitize and store every visual expression, movement and sound of an actor and then reprogram them in virtually any new combination, effectively creating new roles and performances for the artist." Anyone up for the next season of "I Love Lucy?"

Writer: Two weeks ago, some MIT graduate students got a computer-written paper accepted to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. They wrote the program such that it would generate "context-free" writing, but it's not so much harder to generate meaningful text. Scott French spent $50,000 to develop an artificial intelligence program and used it to write a romance novel in the style of a bestselling author. The book sold more than 15,000 copies in the first printing in 1993. There's now a prize for the best computer-written novels of more than 70,000 words. Compared to lots of human writing, the stories are pretty good.

College professor: I include this one because many people reading this column might be in this job or considering it. I think video lectures and online courses will chip away at an already tenuous job market. I foresee students being "taught" by video presentations and videotapes of famous professors (students at all schools could be taught by Ivy League lecturers). Think of how we have lectures and section -- and replace the lecturers with videos. That wouldn't be so different from what we have now, given that lecturers (as opposed to section leaders) don't interact much with students.

Friend: The Japanese robot wakamuru can housesit, "understand" and interact with people, and even talk about news it finds each day on the Internet. The Arthur and D.W. children's plush toys, when connected to a computer, have vocabularies of 10,000 words and can "talk" with children responding to their gestures (sqeezing).

The range of things that "only people" can do is getting smaller. You might still think, "But computers can't invent -- they only can do what they're programmed to do." However, Stanford's John Koza is working on "automatic programming," or getting computers to solve problems they weren't programmed to solve, by creating their own programs.
It seems inevitable that computers and robots will soon be able to carry out a good percentage of human functions. So what will people be doing in the future? My hope is that we'll take care as a society to maintain fulfilling jobs for our own species, even as we pass many such jobs to computers and machines. Maybe someday, computers and machines will handle most of the work associated with keeping our species fed, housed and clothed; and most people -- not just the privileged minority -- will get to spend their lives in creative and investigative pursuits.

Andrea Runyan is a junior in Mathematical and Computational Science.
e-mail : arunyan@stanford.edu.

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