Man dead after altercation in south Edmonton

In an incident that happened overnight in South of Edmonton city where a 21-year-old man is found dead. 
This was possibly done in apartment parking lot located at 122 Street and Whitemud Drive around 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday and emergency crews was called .

 Paramedics attempted to save the man’s life, but he died on scene.

Indiahacks 2016, World's Largest Developer Confluence Attracts Over 50,000 Developers

IndiaHacks 2016, one of the world’s largest developer confluence hosted by HackerEarth in association with Altimetrik, has attracted over fifty thousand developers till date. The massive event commenced on January 8, 2016 with an Artificial Intelligence programming contest and Fintech hackathon – two out of the nine technology tracks scheduled for the month-long code fest. The event has seen over one lakh registrations for the various tracks. On an average every developer is participating in more than two of these contests. More than 25% of developers are from outside India with the event continuing to attract more participants from the coding community. 

As one the fastest growing community for developers in the world, HackerEarth is conducting Indiahacks to encourage programming and celebrate the spirit of hacking among coders. The month long code fest will see a combination of online hackathons and programming contests. There are three programming tracks around Algorithms Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. These tracks will have developers solving complex programming problems by using concepts of algorithms, data structures, data science, artificial intelligence etc. Additionally, there will be six online hackathons in the domains of FinTech, IoT, Gaming, Open Source, Online Commerce, Travel and Transport. These hackathons will see developers build unique and interesting products according to the themes in less than 48 hours.

Hacks will be evaluated based on parameters like uniqueness of the idea, usability of the hack, code quality, design etc. The top 20 shortlists from each of the tracks will be invited to an offline conference, where they will get another 24 hours to build on their hacks and pitch to a panel of judges. The winners of IndiaHacks will be decided at the offline developer conference on March 19th & 20th, 2016 in Bangalore. The winning team will be rewarded with a fully paid trip to San Francisco. Other exciting prizes include X-box, GoPro Hero 4, and HackerEarth goodies.

Altimetrik is a business transformation and technology solutions company, part of the $100 million Vattikuti ventures. Through their ‘new methodology’ that is based on the fundamentals of Design-Thinking and Design-led Engineering, Altimetrik is at the epicenter of powering the next wave of  IT and business transformation. It is this outlook that led Altimetrik to sponsor HackerEarth’s IndiaHacks 2016, as a major hiring and outreach opportunity to nurture young talent and give programmers and coders the opportunity to transform themselves into ‘Design Engineers’.

Supporting Quotes

Sachin Gupta, CEO & Cofounder, HackerEarth

“HackerEarth aims to be the largest developer community that helps developers to improve their programming skills, compete against the best and network with each other. The objective behind conducting IndiaHacks is to bring thousands of developers together, foster innovation and showcase some of the best minds in the developer community. The massive amount of registrations we have seen this year is overwhelming and is a testament to our vision in making HackerEarth the largest developer community in the world. We are delighted that compared to last year, IndiaHacks 2016 has seen a 20X increase in participation.”

Madhavan Satagopan, Chief Technology Officer, Altimetrik

“As a transformational company, 2016 is set to be a very exciting year for Altimetrik. To name a few such exciting initiatives – We're already in the process of scaling our business across sectors and even expanding our footprint. Our 'new methodology' which we also call our 'secret-sauce', requires an extremely crucial ingredient – Design Engineers. Thus, given that Altimetik hires only through hackathons and ideathons, we envision this synergy with HackerEarth as an unconventional hiring platform and the citadel for innovation where Altimetrik will find the right talent that has both the Design Engineer’s aptitude and attitude. We are confident that IndiaHacks 2016 will be able to help us in our future endeavor to create a better digital world.” 

About HackerEarth

HackerEarth is the fastest growing community of developers in the world. Developers engage on the community to learn new programming concepts, improve their technical skills, discover relevant jobs, and compete in programming challenges. HackerEarth also provides a platform for recruiters to discover the best technical talent through this community of developers. By democratizing talent sourcing, HackerEarth is making it more objective and skill driven – where each of its developers are indexed and ranked by their skills and automatically validated by mining their online social and professional data.

Bihar Elections: Now focus on Economy

The battle for Bihar is over. The Grand Alliance decimated the BJP-led NDA, scoring a landslide two-thirds majority in the assembly polls. It secured 178 seats in the 243-member House — RJD: 80 seats, JD(U): 71 seats and Congress: 27 seats. The NDA secured 58 seats, with the BJP on its own securing 53 seats. Political analysts are now dissecting the reasons for the NDA's electoral defeat, and along with them economy watchers have come out with views on possible economic impact of the verdict. I think the NDA's defeat in the Bihar elections is unlikely to have any major negative implication on the economy.

Prior to the election results, some concerns surfaced that a NDA defeat may hit the government's reform agenda. It was pointed out that a victory would help the Centre to strengthen its presence in the Upper House where its legislative agenda has been repeatedly blocked. But the fact is that Bihar has 16 Rajya Sabha seats out of which four seats are currently held by the BJP, the other 12 being occupied by Janata Dal (United) MPs. Out of the total seats, five (all JD-U members) will fall vacant in 2016 and six in 2018 (four JD-U and two BJP members). So, a BJP win would have hardly helped clear the current RS logjam, though it is now clear that the NDA will get only one out of five Bihar Rajya Sabha seats in 2016 and one out of six seats in 2018.

In the backdrop of the Bihar defeat, industry experts have urged the Centre to give undivided focus on its economic agenda. According to a global financial house, the importance of the Bihar election is overstated and the incremental economic reforms are likely to continue irrespective of the verdict. According to some others, the elections verdict may even result in a better outcome for the future of economic reforms if the Centre takes this as a lesson that only sticking to the development agenda could help them win. I support these views, but at the same time I think the verdict should not be taken by the Opposition as a mandate to obstruct Parliament.

The PM recently said that the Indian economy is better placed today, with some major economic indicators, including GDP growth, foreign investment, current account deficit, fiscal deficit and revenue collection giving a better picture. There is no denial of this fact. In addition, control in corruption and sign of improvement in Doing Business raking are also positive developments. But there is still much to be done. Exports are down, quarterly corporate results are not showing uptick in sales, manufacturing is struggling, banks' NPA problem is still looming, and so on. Also, issues like power sector woes, bankruptcy norms and rail-road project development need to be adequately addressed.

I invite your opinions. I'd also like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and prosperous Diwali.

Indian MPs not blamed by Sri Lanka, says envoy

New Delhi, Mar 15 (ANI): Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to India Prasad Kariyawasam on Thursday said that the Sri Lankan government was investigating the role of factions lobbying for theLiberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the step had nothing to do with Indian parliamentarians.

"Concerns expressed by me with regards to the LTTE lobbying groups abroad and elsewhere in the world campaigning in Sri Lanka stand. So, investigations are with regard to the LTTE lobbying groups, nothing to do with the Indian members of Parliament. So, I feel sorry about that and in fact I would like to apologise to members of parliament of Tamil Nadu," said Kariyawasam.

Reportedly, Kariyawasam had commented upon the UN report on violation of human rights in his country and blamed pro-Tamil rebel factions, believed to be active in southern India.

Kariyawasam contended that his statement was taken out of context by the Indian newspapers and he had immense respect for lawmakers from Tamil Nadu.

"The report has on some instances misquoted and on some instances taken out of context. So, that is per my perspective. It is very unfortunate that the headline says something like that and naturally the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs has expressed concerns about the tone and the content. I am very sorry about that because that is not what I meant. I have a lot of respect for the Tamil Nadu parliamentarians," said Kariyawasam.

Colombo had expressed displeasure over Tamil Nadu lawmakers demand of backing the US-led resolution on war crimes.

US and EU-initiated draft resolution on 'Promoting Reconciliation and Accountability in Sri Lanka' at the ongoing 19th Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to put the probe's recommendations into effect.

Kariyawasam further said that said the Sri Lankan government would act on the findings of the local panel, the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

"Allegations with regard to the human rights violations are there and Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission has been appointed by the President and their report is out and they have proposed a way out as to how we should go about examining these alleged violations. So, that is how the truth will come out," he added. (ANI)

Vietnam holds meet on n-power

Hanoi, March 8 (IANS) Vietnam Thursday held discussions with foreign experts on building nuclear power operations in the country.

The discussion was organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST). Participants included experts from Russia, France, Japan, the US, South Korea, Germany and Britain.

Addressing the conference, MoST Deputy Minister Le Dinh Tien saidnuclear power has become an important power source worldwide, Xinhua reported.

Vietnam's consistent viewpoint is to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, he said.

According to a master plan, Vietnam's first nuclear plant will be launched by 2020.

In November 2009, Vietnam's National Assembly approved a project to build two nuclear power plants in central Ninh Thuan province with a capacity of about 4,000 MW.

Vietnam has signed cooperative agreements with Russia and Japan on building these plants.