Incubator,mentor and other related definition.....( Post:003-2011 )

What is a business incubator?
An organization which provides a conducive environment for successful development of start-up ventures by providing the entrepreneurs with proper guidance and specialized services

What is Business Incubation?
Business incubation is a dynamic process of business enterprise development. Incubators nurture young firms, helping them to survive and grow during the startup period when they are most vulnerable. The goal of business incubators is to produce healthy firms that create jobs and wealth, strengthen the economy, commercialize new technologies and revitalize communities.

Business incubators provide:

• hands-on management assistance 
• access to financing 
• business and technical support services 
• shared office space, access to equipment. 

What is Mentoring?
"Mentoring is to support and encourage people to manage their own learning in order that they may maximise their potential, develop their skills, improve their performance and become the person they want to be." Eric Parsloe, The Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring

Mentoring is a powerful personal development and empowerment tool. It is an effective way of helping people to progress in their careers and is becoming increasing popular as its potential is realised. It is a partnership between two people (mentor and mentee) normally working in a similar field or sharing similar experiences. It is a helpful relationship based upon mutual trust and respect.

What is Mentor?
A mentor is a guide who can help the mentee to find the right direction and who can help them to develop solutions to career issues. Mentors rely upon having had similar experiences to gain an empathy with the mentee and an understanding of their issues. Mentoring provides the mentee with an opportunity to think about career options and progress.

A mentor should help the mentee to believe in his/herself and boost his/her confidence. A mentor should ask questions and challenge, while providing guidance and encouragement. Mentoring allows the mentee to explore new ideas in confidence. It is a chance to look more closely at yourself, your issues, opportunities and what you want in life. Mentoring is about becoming more self aware, taking responsibility for your life and directing your life in the direction you decide, rather than leaving it to chance.

MORE SIMPLIFICATION:

In many professions, it is not uncommon for a newcomer to the field to be placed under the care of an established and seasoned professional. This professional is often charged with the task of helping to train, advise, and share practical experience with the new person in the organization. This process is commonly known as mentoring, and the professional who is responsible for the care and nurture of the newcomer is referred to as a mentor. Here are some examples of how a mentor goes about providing support.

One of the most important roles of a mentor is serving as a teacher to the novice. Mentors share their body of experience, relating what they have learned in ways that will connect with the newcomer. The range of experience often includes such valuable information as industry basics, some solid facts about how the corporation works, applications of the goods and services produced by the company, and tips on how to perform individual job responsibilities. Along with this official type of mentorship, the mentor may also serve as an unofficial advisor on such matters as which employees in the company should be watched with a close eye, and who tends to be trustworthy.

Mentors do not take the new employee through a basic orientation and then leave them on their own. The work of the mentor will continue well after the employee is past the usual ninety-day probation period for employment. That is because the mentor also functions as a counselor for the new employee. When there is frustration with an incident in the workplace, or a matter comes up that requires a different approach, the employee may wish to sit down with the mentor and talk through the situation. As counselors to new employees, mentors help the novice to draw not only draw on past experience for answers, but also help the novice to discover a new way to apply older principles.

Finally, mentors function as advisors. While counseling involves helping the novice discover answers, advising places the mentor in a position to provide a feasible course of action that is relevant to the situation. For example, if the novice is completely stumped as to handle a collections issue with a client that is about to go bankrupt, the mentor can probably provide the new employee with a step by step process of what needs to be done. Offering advice when unusual situations occur is a common part of the work of the mentor.

Being a mentor is not for the faint of heart. The responsibility requires knowledge, solid communication skills, and a great deal of patience. At the same time, being a mentor can be extremely rewarding, as there is a great deal of satisfaction in watching your former charges grow in prestige and competence over the years.

RELATED WEBSITES:
http://www.indianangelnetwork.com/incubator/faqs.html

Ram Charan's 8 effective sutras for Business Leaders.( Post:002-2011 )

1. Positioning (and when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money. (finding a central idea for business that meets customer demands and that makes money.) 
2. Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others. (detecting patterns in a complex world to put the business on the offensive.) 
3. Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business. (getting the right people together with the right behaviour and right information to make better, faster decisions and achieve business results.) 
4. Judging people by getting to the truth of a person.(calibrating people based on their actions, decisions and behaviours and matching them to the non-negotiables of the job.) 
5. Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts. (getting highly competent ,high-ego leaders to coordinate seamlessly .) 
6. Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve. (determining the set of goals that balances what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve.) 
7. Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals. (defining the path and aligning resources , actions and energy to accomplish the goals.) 
8. Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business. (anticipating and responding to social pressures you do not control but that can affect your business.

Read more: http://www.ram-charan.com/knowhow.htm

The ultimate x-ray machines are ready to go

X-ray data of protein crystals obtained from over 15,000 single snapshots. Credit: Thomas White, DES

When you go to the doctor for an X-ray, the nurse or doctor briefly disappear behind a screen, presses a button for a brief moment, and you’re all set. It seems an X-ray takes about a second but the actual exposure times is much faster. Milliseconds more likely.

Such speeds seem like almost an eternity compared to what is achieved by a new generation of X-ray sources that have begun to become operational: free-electron X-ray lasers. The first of these big machines is the LCLS at Stanford University, which achieves laser pulses shorter than 70 femtoseconds (100 femtoseconds = 1/10 of a trillionth of a second). The beam intensities of these lasers are ten billion times brighter than the sun. And all this with a potential imaging precision down to the atomic scale. In other words, if you like to take things to the extreme, these lasers are for you.

In one of the first studies to make use of the LCLS X-ray free-electron laser, two research collaborations now present first experiments on biological samples in this week’s Nature.

Imaging biological samples

Bones appear much stronger in X-ray scans than soft tissue. That’s because X-rays don’t interact so much with the carbon and hydrogen atoms of soft organic tissue, which makes it more difficult to measure with X-rays. And that’s why these two Nature studies are so relevant. The first of these studies looked at a mimivirus, which with a size of 0.45 micrometers is the largest virus known. The aim was to take a picture of the virus’ interior by measuring the diffraction of the X-rays by the virus.

To image such a small object in this way the X-ray beam is highly focused, to a spot of about 10 micrometers in size. At the same time laser beam intensities are immense: the researchers calculate that a single laser pulse heats the sample by 100,000 K. But that doesn’t really matter. Only one pulse passes through the sample and that is so short that the heating begins only after the X-rays have passed through. The viruses never know what hit them. The image of the virus taken with such a single shot has a resolution of about 32 nanometers, and does indeed show a somewhat softer virus interior.

The topic of the second paper also uses the diffraction of X-rays, but to measure the structure of a protein. To achieve optimum resolution, more than three million snapshots were taken. Of course, because of the high beam intensities the protein can’t stay in the laser beam all this time. Rather, the crystals are flushed through the apparatus in a water jet. The resolution the researchers achieve this way is about 8.5 Angstrom, which is actually not better than what the competition, synchrotrons, can achieve. The benefit of these free electron lasers is, however, that the pulses are so short that the samples don’t need to be cooled down. Room temperature is perfectly fine.

What are these free-electron lasers?

In an X-ray free electron laser the electrons are first accelerated to extreme velocities close to the speed of light. Then these fast electrons are sent on a narrow rollercoaster ride through the so-called undulator. This tight wiggling motion causes a strong emission of short light pulses. And given the high energy that these electrons have this means X-rays.

The benefit of these X-ray lasers is that you can get an extremely high imaging resolution combined with these very short exposure times, along with extremely high intensities. That for the first time opens the door to X-ray studies of dynamic processes at resolutions down to the atomic scale. In biological samples, this might be useful to understand molecular processes. In physics, one could study how atoms in a crystal move, for example in response to electric fields.

Given such clear benefits, it is no surprise that there are several X-ray free-electron lasers that either just started operating or are about to become operational. The first one for high-energy X-rays was LCLS, which at the moment enjoys the benefit of being the first off the marks. XFEL in Hamburg, Germany and XFEL at SPring-8 near Himejiin Japan are the next ones to follow. Last year I had the privilege to visit the XFEL in Japan when it was under construction. This gave me the opportunity to look inside the machine at sections that are usually off-limits. Below are some of the photos taken by other. 

 

The long accelerator line. electrons are accelerated over a distance of more than 400 meters. Once accelerated the electrons are fed into the undulators.	The undulators are being installed. The narrow stripe inside the tube, flanked by magnets, is where the electrons are sent on their wiggling path. During operation this tube is under vacuum.
The detector apparatus that will hold the custom-made CCD chips. Note the copper cooling tubes.	One of the expensive CCD test chips. It has 512x1024 pixels. Each pixel is 50 micrometers wide - quite large, so that only 3000 photons are needed to generate a signal.

 References:

1. Seibert, M. et al. (2011). Single mimivirus particles intercepted and imaged with an X-ray laser Nature, 470 (7332), 78-81 DOI: 10.1038/nature09748

2. Chapman, H. et al. (2011). Femtosecond X-ray protein nanocrystallography Nature, 470 (7332), 73-77 DOI: 10.1038/nature09750

How to fight with corruption.....!! ( Post:001-2011 )

 Indian corruption strategy....!!?

1. govt. fails to make perfect system which can avoid total corruption in even single sector.the sole reason is that personS who are decision maker are also corrupted.
2. govt. spends lots of money on corruption cases involving CBI.why should not kept watch over hard decisions by CBI when metter start from ground to market.Govt should give this power to CBI.Direct involvement avoids lots of bad things because responsibility will go to single person from CBI.