Bangladesh seizes North Korean diplomat's illegally brought Rolls-Royce

Kolkata, May 15: Veteran Bengali author Debesh Roy, who was conferred the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel 'Teesta Parer Brittanto', died at a private hospital in Kolkata on Thursday, his family members said.

Roy was 84 and he is survived by his son. His wife had died earlier.

He was admitted to the hospital near his residence at Baguihati, in the eastern fringes of the city, on Wednesday after having symptoms like sodium potasium imbalance, sugar problem and breathing problem, his family members said.

He suffered a massive cardiac arrest and died at 10.50 PM.

A regular contributor to a number of Bengali dailies, he was a staunch critic of the attacks on liberals by in the country in recent times and attended protest meetings despite his failing health.

He was born in Pabna in present-day Bangladesh on December 17, 1936. He had five decades of career as a writer.

Besides Teesta Parer Britanta', he will be remembered for books like Borisaler Jogen Mondal , Manush Khun Kore Keno and Samay Asamayer Brittanto . His first book was Jajati.

His last rites will be performed tomorrow.

In a study conducted in 117 countries, researchers have found that the world is experiencing the most dramatic reduction in the seismic noise (the hum of vibrations in the planet's crust) in recorded history due to global COVID-19 lockdowns.

Measured by instruments called seismometers, seismic noise is caused by vibrations within the Earth, which travel like waves and the waves can be triggered by earthquakes, volcanoes, and bombs - but also by daily human activity like travel and industry.

This quiet period was likely caused by the total global effect of social distancing measures, closure of services and industry, and drops in tourism and travel, the study published in the journal Science, reported.

The new research, led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium and five other institutions around the world including Imperial College London (ICL), showed that the dampening of 'seismic noise' caused by humans was more pronounced in more densely populated areas.

"Our study uniquely highlights just how much human activities impact the solid Earth, and could let us see more clearly than ever what differentiates human and natural noise," said study co-author Stephen Hicks from ICL in the UK.

For the findings, the research team looked at seismic data from a global network of 268 seismic stations in 117 countries and found significant noise reductions compared to before any lockdown at 185 of those stations.

Researchers tracked the 'wave' of quietening between March and May as worldwide lockdown measures took hold.

The largest drops in vibrations were seen in the most densely populated areas, like Singapore and New York City, but drops were also seen in remote areas like Germany's the Black Forest and Rundu in Namibia.

Citizen-owned seismometers, which tend to measure more localised noise, noted large drops around universities and schools around Cornwall, UK and Boston, US - a drop in noise 20 per cent larger than seen during school holidays.

The findings showed that countries like Barbados, where lockdown coincided with the tourist season, saw a 50 per cent decrease in noise.

"The changes have also given us the opportunity to listen in to the Earth's natural vibrations without the distortions of human input," the study authors wrote.

Earlier in April, a study published in the journal Nature, reported at least a 30 per cent reduction in that amount of ambient human noise since lockdown began in Belgium.

Twitter has joined efforts to do away with racially loaded terms such as master, slave and blacklist from its coding language in the wake of the death of African-American George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.

The project started even before the current movement for racial justice escalated following the death of 46-year-old George Floyd in police custody in May.

The use of terms such as "master" and "slave" in programming language originated decades ago. While "master" is used to refer to the primary version of a code, "slave" refers to the replicas. Similarly, the term "Blacklist" is used to refer to items which are meant to be automatically denied.

The efforts to change these terms in favour of more inclusive language at Twitter were initiated by Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver and the microblogging platform is now backing their efforts.

"Inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs. At Twitter, the language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that. #WordsMatter," Twitter's engineering team said in a post on Thursday.

As per the recommendations from the team, the term "whitelist" could be replaced by "allowlist" and "blacklist" by "denylist".

Similarly, "master/slave" could be replaced by "leader/follower", "primary/replica" or "primary/standby".

Twitter, however, is not the first to start a project to bring inclusivity in programming language.

According to a report in CNET, the team behind the Drupal online publishing software started using "primary/replica" in place of "master/slave" as early as in 2014.

The use of the terms "master/slave" was also dropped by developers of the Python programming language in 2018.

Now similar efforts are underway at Microsoft's Github and LinkedIn divisions as well, said the report.