Maths and Science Education soon in Local Languages on Khan Academy

Tata Trusts has entered into a five year partnership with Khan Academy with the aim to provide free, world- class education in Maths and Science for anyone who seeks it in India in local languages. The effort is also to focus on designing and improving the Academy's content creation capacities primarily for the middle and low income students in urban areas in the first two years. In the following three years, the plan is to reach out to the rural hinterland.

This will hopefully see online education penetration at a much higher level in India - especially in rural India. Read more about the partnership here.

The Newest Indian Language

We have a new Indian language! OK fine, it is not a real language. I am talking about Kilikili - the constructed language created for the movie Baahubali. As of now, it boasts of 750 words and 40 grammar rules. [1]  It will be interesting to see where this goes - if it will enjoy the success of other constructed languages from film/television like Klingon.

If you want a sample of it, here you go, some soundbites from the movie's audio launch:

How the language you speak changes your view of the world

A new study has found that language we are using at a specific point of time impacts the way we view the world at that moment. Read the article here - https://theconversation.com/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-view-of-the-world-40721 .

Create a custom greeting for Diwali!

This Diwali, you can create a custom greeting using Scripton. 

Type in your message, click "Diwali Greeting", select the card image, click "Create Greeting Link", copy the link and share it with your friends.

Identify Patterns in News

I wanted to do something constructive with all the data that I've collected over the years instead of just archiving it - so I've come up with the latest product from writeKA - Trend Search. Plug in any term, and find out how it has been faring in news titles over the last few years. Here are some things to try:
See Narendra Modi's meteoric rise
Patterns for iPhone
Patterns for Nobel, why we were not too surprised with Malala but didn't know who is Satyarthi!
The rising Ebola threat
etc

What I'm providing now is fairly basic, just term prevalence thats it. I plan on adding the following in the coming days (in no particular order):
Trend Search in Indian languages
Trend Comparison
Trend Reasons (showing stories that cause spikes)

Give me more ideas.

Have fun with writeKA trend search.

Trying to learn a new language? Find a book on writeKA

If you are thinking of learning a new language, here is something new for you. A book search function has been introduced on writeKA with which you can easily pick books to learn a new language through a language of your choice. For example - books to learn Hindi through English. You can compare prices for each book across Amazon India, Flipkart and Infibeam.

I'm still loading the catalog, so there will be many more books to pick from in the days to come.

A good day to start learning (again)

Happy Vijayadashami!

Today is Vijayadashami, the day when Vidyarambham is observed. Vidyarambham is a Hindu tradition where children are formally introduced to any kind of education.




It is considered auspicious to start the day by writing the following mantra:

om hari sri ganapataye namah

ഓം ഹരി ശ്രീ ഗണപതയെ നമഃ

It means "Salutations to Hari (Lord Vishnu), Shree (Goddess of prosperity), and Lord Ganapathy".

If you can't find some sand or a tray of rice to write that to start your day as per tradition, use Scripton. :) Go ahead, follow the link below and type in "om hari sri ganapataye namah"

Type in Malayalam

You can also do the same in Hindi.

Type in Hindi

We're never too old to learn and it's a good day to start again. Coursera is a great place to take up courses from some of the best universities in the world for free. There are many others, including Edx, Udacity, Open Learning, Khan Academy and Udemy, but I have not used them yet. You can read more about "moocs" here.

WriteKA turns nine!

WriteKA turned nine years this month!

To celebrate the anniversary, I have relaunched the website with a new responsive UI that will work well with mobile devices as well. Take a look at the changes - 

Scripton - Type in Hindi

News in English

News in Hindi

News in Malayalam

News in Tamil

News in Telugu

News in Kannada

News in Gujarati

News in Punjabi 

Learn a new language, it's good for you!

A new study has revealed that being bilingual can actually delay dementia. While it is more difficult to master a new language as you grow older, the effort also makes your brain work harder which is good for you. Read more here - http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/13/am-i-too-old-to-learn-a-language.

ഓണാശംസകള്‍

എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും ഹൃദയം നിറഞ്ഞ ഓണാശംസകള്‍!

റയിറ്റ്ക

Economic growth leads to extinction of languages?

A new study has indicated that economic growth is most strongly linked to language extinction. More information here - http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/09/languages-are-being-wiped-out-economic-growth

Does language impact personality?

Interesting article on The Economist - http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingualism?fb_ref=activity

More about the Rupee Symbol Unicode

While reading about all the news lately about the new rupee symbol being accepted into Unicode I came across this document about currency symbols in Unicode. It seems that there is already a Unicode character identified as the rupee symbol with hex code 20A8. Special fonts developed should probably replace this character in the font map with out new symbol because though rupee is a common currency in multiple nations, the character20A8 is attributed to India - at least in the currency symbols Unicode document.

If you are wondering what the symbol looks like, here you go - ₨ (If it looks like Rs - try selecting it, its actually a single character) I hope it renders correctly because again how the character renders depends on the font you use and the Unicode support on your computer (browser and OS support).

Again, if you want to show this in HTML, the code is
₨

You'll also notice that the document has codes for the rupee marks in many Indian languages too including Bengali, Gujarati and Tamil.
Bengali Rupee Mark (Hex Code - 09F2, HTML Code - ৲ , Character - ৲)
Bengali Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 09F3, HTML Code - ৳ , Character - ৳)
Gujarati Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 0AF1, HTML Code - ૱ , Character - ૱)
Tamil Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 0BF9, HTML Code - ௹ , Character - ௹)

HTML Code for new Indian Rupee Symbol

Most of you must know that we got our own brand new currency symbol yesterday. It will surely be added to Unicode sometime in the future, but for now we are mostly stuck with using images or special fonts to display this on the computer. I just figured out an easy way to display this until we get our own Unicode character. Its pretty simple - the Devanagari "ra" (र) with a strike-through. It should look like र and its pretty close to what the symbol Here are some options for displaying it in HTML:
<del>&#2352;</del>
or
<del>र</del> in UTF8 text.

We can also use half "sa" and but it might not display properly everywhere. The earlier strike-through version looks closer to the real symbol (especially on IE). The code for half-sa is:
&#2360;&amp;#2381;&#8205;
and it looks like - स्‍

Just my र0.02. ;-) Hope you guys find it useful. By the way you should be able to copy and paste the symbols from here into Word or other applications which support formatting. You should be able to copy and paste the half-sa version into any application - even notepad if it displays correctly on your computer. But just remember that Devanagari Unicode could display differently on different computers.

Tracing the spike... its on Mumbai Mirror!

Earlier this month, on 7th April precisely, visits on writeKA went up 400%. It has tapered down now though there are more visits on average now. It was strange because the increase was proportional across organic searches and direct visits. Now I know the reason. :D writeKA was featured on the Mumbai Mirror newspaper (in print). I don't know if coolsitetoday came first or that (the content is the same), but here's a link to the newspaper's online edition. Now I am all enthusiastic to put out more features again... :-) If anyone has a copy of the print, could you save it and give it to me?

writeKA is the cool site of the day

writeKA has been featured as the cool site of the day on CoolSiteToday - heres the direct link - http://www.coolsitetoday.com/?coolid=1239042600.

writeKA on Twitter

Like everyone else these days, writeka has joined the twitter bandwagon. Follow the latest updates here - http://twitter.com/writeka.

Top Gadget Developer #53

Hey - I'm on the top Google Gadget Developer list at number 53... By the time you look - http://www.google.com/ig/authors?hl=en&gl=us&rl=en_us&start=52&sa=N, it is possible that my rank has changed or I'm not on the list at all! The ranking is very dynamic and is dependant on the number of active users of a developer's gadgets when the ranking is done. Anyway, I'm happy to be on it even for a short time! :-)

News in Gujarati and Punjabi

I've added two more languages to the Indian Language News portal - Punjabi and Gujarati. Check them out:
Punjabi News
Gujarati News
You can also add the corresponding Google Gadgets to your website or iGoogle.
Add Punjabi News to iGoogle
Add Gujarati News to iGoogle
I'll be adding more news sources as I make the news engine better. Do give me your feedback.

Indian Language News Gadgets for Google

I know its been a long time since my last post. I've been busy with stuff other than writeKA. This weekend, however, I just sat and did some changes to writeKA's Indian Language News portal and also made some new Google Gadgets that display news in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. Google Gadgets can be added to your iGoogle page or your website.

Add English News to iGoogle
Add Hindi News to iGoogle
Add Malayalam News to iGoogle
Add Tamil News to iGoogle
Add Telugu News to iGoogle
Add Kannada News to iGoogle

This is how it looked when I was testing the widgets today:

The widgets allow you to change the number of news items you want to see and also the font size. You can change these parameters in the Widget Settings as shown in the image below.

Each news item can be expanded to see the source of the news and also a short description of the news. As always, please do send me your feedback.