AWARDS OCTOBER 2014

AWARDS OCTOBER 2014

• Haider wins award in Rome
  Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider has won the 'People's Choice Award' in the Mondo Genere (World genre) category at the ninth Rome film festival. Earlier the People's Choice Award was claimed by much-feted films such as Dallas Buyers Club (2013).
  
  Haider is a 2014 Hindi drama film directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, and co-written by Basharat Peer and Bhardwaj. It stars Shahid Kapoor as the titular protagonist, and Tabu, Shraddha Kapoor, and Kay Kay Menon portray other lead roles.
  
  The film is a modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare s Hamlet, set amidst the insurgency-hit Kashmir conflicts of 1995 and civilian disappearances. Haider, a poet, returns to Kashmir at the peak of the conflict to seek answers about his disappeared father and ends up tugged into the politics of the state.
  
• World media summit awards
  P. Sainath, Al Jazeera English, USA Today and Global Post were among the winners of the World Media Summit (WMS) Global Awards for Excellence, 2014.
  
  Sainath won the Public Welfare Award for Exemplary News Professionals in Developing Countries, while Al Jazeera English received the Public Welfare Award for Exemplary News Teams in Developing Countries.
  
  Under the Media Innovation Award, the USA Today emerged winner for its story ‘Behind the Bloodshed’ (The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings).
  
  The Award for New Media Reporting was won by Global Post of the United States for its story ‘Myanmar Emerges’. The honourable mentions were: ‘Chicago Under the Gun’, Chicago Tribune; ‘Meteorite hits Russian Urals’, Russia Today; ‘Privacy and Information Security’, Al Jazeera; ‘Overdose’, ProPublica, US and ‘Mandela: The Father of the Rainbow Nation’, Al Jazeera.
  
  About World Media Summit:
  With the arrival of digital age, media organizations see profound changes in business environment and diversified subscriber demands. Traditional media outlets face major challenges as well as unprecedented opportunities. Dealing with severe challenges and winning development opportunities has become a common aspiration of media organizations worldwide. On the sidelines of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Mr. Li Congjun, president of Xinhua News Agency, held separate talks with leaders of other world-renowned media organizations such as News Corp., The Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, Kyodo News, the BBC, among others.
  
  They exchanged views on the challenges of the new era and vowed to enhance exchanges and cooperation. They reached consensus that it was necessary to hold a World Media Summit, which would serve as an efficient platform for media organizations to communicate and pool collective wisdom for their survival and development.
  
  The first World Media Summit was successfully held Oct. 8-10, 2009 in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The summit was jointly initiated by nine global leading media organizations - Xinhua News Agency, News Corp., the Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, ITAR-TASS, Kyodo News, BBC, Turner Broadcasting System, Google Inc., and was organized by Xinhua.
  
  The summit was attended by leaders of more than 170 media organizations from across the world. Then Chinese President Hu Jintao addressed the opening ceremony of the summit, asking global media organizations to contribute to building a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity
  
• Malala: Malala Yousafzai won the 2014 World’s Children Prize on 29 October 2014 after a global vote involving millions of children. She received the prize at a ceremony in Mariestad near Stockholm
  
  Laxmipathi Gowda: Dr C L Laxmipathi Gowda, Deputy Director General for Research, ICRISAT has been honoured with the 2014 Sano Touzaburo Special Prize from Japan's Niigata International Food Award Foundation. The prestigious award is in recognition of Gowda's contributions in improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the dryland areas of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in his nearly 40 years of scientific research work at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
  
  S. Venkat Mohan: S Venkata Mohan, scientist at the CSIR-IICT here has been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize 2014 in Engineering Sciences. His contributions in generating wealth from waste leading to the establishment of a viable link between waste remediation, renewable energy and third generation biofuels, has been recognised
  
• Kochhar: Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO, ICICI Bank received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Carleton University, Canada.
  
• Malala: Malala Yousafzai will accept the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia. Malala was chosen months ago for the Liberty Medal, which is bestowed annually on someone who strives to secure freedom for people around the globe.She is now the seventh person chosen for the medal who subsequently received the Nobel prize.
  
• Ashwika Kapur: Ashwika Kapur of Kolkata on 24th October won the prestigious Panda Award, aspart of the annual Wildscreen Film Festival held at Bristol, U.K. She is the first Indian woman to win the coveted wildlife photography award for her film on a Kakapo parrot.
  
  Ms. Kapur’s film “Sirocco — how a dud became a stud” is based on Sirocco, a Kakapo parrot, which is perhaps the only bird to have bagged a government job.The male bird was appointed as the Official Spokesbird for Conservation in New Zealand and it helps in conservation advocacy on social media.
  
  The film earned 26-year-old Ms. Kapur a nomination for the best Newcomer category, competing against two other nominees. This year, the Windscreen Film Festival received 488 entries from 42 countries.
  
  The Kakapo parrot, a nocturnal and flightless species of the parrot, is classified as a critically endangered species since 2012 on the IUCN Red List.The bird, found in New Zealand, is known to be one of the longest-living birds and its known population is 125. Over 14,000 people from 162 countries voted the Kakapo the world’s favourite species in 2013. The tiger and the African elephant came second and third, respectively.
  
• Jean Tirole: French economist Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize for economics for work that has shed light on how governments can "tame" the big businesses that dominate once-public monopolies like railways, highways and telecommunications.
  
  "This year's prize in economic sciences is about taming powerful firms," Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a news conference after awarding the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize.
  
  The academy said Tirole has clarified policies about regulating industries with a few powerful firms, especially after a wave of privatizations had set governments a conundrum over how to encourage private investments in sectors like healthcare and railways while reining in profits.
  
  It was the second Nobel Prize for a French national this year after author Patrick Modiano won the literature award - a fact not lost on Prime Minister Manuel Valls, trying to deflect attacks from France's EU partners over its battered public finances.
  
• Shakti Devi: An Indian police officer has been named recipient of a prestigious international female peacekeeper award by the United Nation or UN's police division for her "exceptional achievements" in her duty with the UN mission in Afghanistan, including her efforts towards helping victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Inspector Shakti Devi of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, currently deployed in the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), has been awarded the International Female Police Peacekeeper Award 2014.
  
  Ms Devi has been honoured for her "exceptional achievements" in leading the establishment of Women Police Councils in several parts of Afghanistan, the UN Police Division said in a communication to the Indian mission.
  
  It said Ms Devi has contributed to the improvement of the status of female police and has effectively helped the police of Afghanistan move towards achieving their goals of fully adopting democratic principles of policing.
  
  The objectives of the award are to promote an understanding of police in peace operations throughout the world, highlight the efforts of female police in global peace operations, increase understanding of the roles of women officers in various countries and encourage participation in UN peace operations by all countries of the world.
  
  The award is organised in collaboration with the IAWP Awards programme and delivered during its annual conference.
  
  India is the largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, having contributed more than 170,000 troops in 43 out of 69 peacekeeping missions mandated by the United Nations Security Council so far. The UN owes India US Dollar 110 million, the second highest outstanding payment to any country, for costs relating to peacekeeping operations and troops.
  
• Richard Flanagan: He won 2014 Man Booker Prize. The Tasmanian-born writer is the third Australian to win the prize, and the first since the prize was extended to include writers from all countries and not just the Commonwealth. Mr. Flanagan was presented with a trophy from the Duchess of Cornwall and a £50,000 cheque from Emmanuel Roman, Chief Executive of the Man Group, which sponsors the prize.The book written by Richard for which he got aware is - The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  
• Man booker prize
  The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Booker-McConnell Prize and commonly known simply as the Booker Prize) is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.
  
  The Booker Prize is greeted with great anticipation and fanfare. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the "longlist
  
• Rajan: Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan has received the Euromoney’s Central Bank Governor of the Year Award 2014 in Washington on October 10 While announcing the award, Euromoney recorded, “the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan’s tough monetary medicine combated the storm ravaging the deficit-ridden economy in the recent emerging market crisis. Now, he is battling vested interests to arouse a sleepy financial system for over one billion people.”
  
• Sanjay Rajaram: Sanjaya Rajaram, an eminent Indian scientist, has been awarded the World Food Prize in recognition of his significant contributions to global wheat production. Mr. Rajaram, currently a Senior Scientific Advisor at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), has developed some 480 wheat varieties that have been released in 51 countries across six continents and an estimated 58 million hectares.
  
  His wheat improvement research has helped secure a 1.3 per cent rise in global wheat production per annum in the last four decades, an official release said.
  
  The World Food Prize, presented at the 2014 Borlaug Dialogue, currently being held in Des Moines, United States, from October 15-17, is the foremost international award recognising individuals whose achievements have advanced human development by increasing the quality, quantity, or availability of food.
  
  THE WORLD FOOD PRIZE is the foremost international award recognizing -- without regard to race, religion, nationality, or political beliefs -- the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.
  
  The Prize recognizes contributions in any field involved in the world food supply -- food and agriculture science and technology, manufacturing, marketing, nutrition, economics, poverty alleviation, political leadership and the social sciences.
  
  The World Food Prize emphasizes the importance of a nutritious and sustainable food supply for all people. By honoring those who have worked successfully toward this goal, The Prize calls attention to what has been done to improve global food security and to what can be accomplished in the future.
  
  Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in world agriculture, envisioned a prize that would honor those who have made significant and measurable contributions to improving the world's food supply. Beyond recognizing these people for their personal accomplishments, Borlaug saw The Prize as a means of establishing role models who would inspire others. His vision was realized when The World Food Prize was created in 198
  
• PAMARTHY SHANKAR: Sakshi's ( A telugu news paper) cartoonist Pamarthy Shankar bagged the first prize for caricature in the prestigious Grand Pix World Press Cartoon 2014. The Portugal award, considered cartoonist's Nobel, was given to him for his caricature of legendary Nelson Mandela that was published on December 6, 2013. He is the first Asian to win the prestigious prize. As part of the award, he would be given a cash prize of Euros 10000 at a ceremony to be organised in November in Portugal.
  
• SUAREZ: Barcelona’s Luis Suarez received the Golden Boot award as Europe’s top scorer last season. The Uruguayan scored 31 times to help Liverpool into second in the premier league.
  
• Jak Ma: Alibaba Group founder and Executive Chairman Jack Ma speaks accepted the Game Changer of the Year award at the Asia Game Changer Awards, hosted by the Asia Society, on October 16, 2014 at the United Nations in New York, NY. Ma, China's richest man, was one of several award winners, including a Pritzker Prize winning architect (Shigeru Ban), an Academy Award winner (Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy), and this year's Noble Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai.
  
• Nobel Prizes
  Nobel committee has declared prizes in Medicine or Psychology, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace, the recipients are……
  Medicine: American-British scientist John O'Keefe and Norwegians May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the brain's "inner GPS" that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space and help understand diseases like Alzheimer's, the award-giving body said on 6th October.
  
  The Mosers join an exclusive club of married couples to win a Nobel Prize that includes scientific greats Pierre Curie and Marie Curie.
  
  Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
  
  Their findings in rats - and research suggests that humans have the same system in their brains - represented a "paradigm shift" in the knowledge of how cells work together to perform cognitive functions, the Nobel Assembly said, adding that knowing about the brain's positioning system may "help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss" that affects people with Alzheimer's disease
  
  O'Keefe, of University College London, discovered the first component of this system in 1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map of the environment, not just registering visual input.
  
  Thirty-four years later, in 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, a married couple at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell - the "grid cell" - that generates a coordinate system for precise positioning and path-finding, the assembly said.
  
  All three Nobel laureates won Columbia University's Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize last year for their discoveries. They will split the Nobel prize money of 8 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million).
  
  Physics: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura have been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. They were recognized for inventing energy-saving, blue light-emitting diodes, commonly known as LEDs.
  
  On 7th October, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics to Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Shuji Nakamura of the United States.
  
  Even though the invention was 20 years old, the researchers had "already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all," it added. In the 1990s, the trio discovered how to produce blue light beams from semi-conductors. Combined with red and green, their contribution led to the invention of the white bulbs used for LED lamps.
  
  The jury pointed to the benefits of the invention, particularly its efficiency compared to other standard lightbulbs at a time when one-fourth of developed nations' electrical consumption is used for lighting.
  
  The research group will split the 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million; 870,000 euros) in prize money. They will receive their prize in Stockholm on December 10 at a formal ceremony
  
  Chemistry: The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers for improving the resolution of optical microscopes.
  Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner used fluorescence to extend the limits of the light microscope. The winners will share prize money of eight million kronor (£0.7m).
  
  Profs Betzig and Moerner are US citizens, while Prof Hell is German.
  
  Optical microscopes had previously been held back by a presumed limitation: that they would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. This assumption was based on a rule known as Abbe's diffraction limit, named after an equation published in 1873 by the German microscopist Ernst Abbe.
  
  This year's chemistry laureates used fluorescent molecules to circumvent this limitation, allowing scientists to see things at much higher levels of resolution. Their advance enabled scientists to visualise the activity of individual molecules inside living cells.
  
  Peace: Satyarthi (an Indian), and Malala will share nobel peace prize for this year. Both of them made Strule against the oppression of children and young people, and for the right of all children to education, according to Norwegian Nobel Committee.
  
  Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for advocating girls' right to education. With this she became the youngest Nobel Prize winner so far. Her age is 17.
  
  Yousafzai, aged 17, becomes the youngest Nobel Prize winner by far.
  
  Yousafzai was attacked in 2012 on a school bus in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan by masked gunmen as a punishment for a blog that she started writing for the BBC's Urdu service as an 11-year-old to campaign against the Taliban's efforts to deny women an education.
  
  Unable to return to Pakistan after her recovery, Yousafzai moved to Britain, setting up the Malala Fund and supporting local education advocacy groups with a focus on Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Syria and Kenya.
  
  Satyarthi, who gave up a career as an electrical engineer in 1980 to campaign against child labour, has headed various forms of peaceful protests and demonstrations, focusing on the exploitation of children for financial gain.
  
  Yousafzai last year addressed the U.N. Youth Assembly in an event Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called "Malala Day". This year she travelled to Nigeria to demand the release of 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
  
  The prize, worth about $1.1 million, will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the award in his 1895 will. The previous youngest winner was Australian-born British scientist Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the Physics Prize with his father in 1915.
  
  Literature: Patrick Modiano has been named the 111th winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The 69-year-old is the 15th French writer to win the prestigious prize, worth 8m kronor ($1.1m or £700,000).
  
  Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even widely read people in other countries. His best known novel is probably Missing Person, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 and is about a detective who loses his memory and endeavours to find it
  
  About Nobel Prizes:
  The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories by Swedish and Norwegian committees in recognition of cultural and/or scientific advances. The will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the prizes in 1895. The prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace were first awarded in 1901. The related Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was created in 1968. Between 1901 and 2012, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 555 times to 856 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 835 individuals (791 men and 44 women) and 21 organizations
  
  Other awards
  Arogyaswami Joseph Paulraj: Indian-born scientist Arogyaswami Joseph Paulraj and mathematics scholar Himanshu Asnani at Stanford University in the Silicon Valley have been awarded prizes by Marconi Society in Washington. Paulraj, was honoured with the prestigious award for his pioneering work on developing wireless technology to transmit and receive data at high speed. Asnani, 27, received the Society's Paul Baran young scholar award for contributing to point-to-point and multi-terminal channel coding and source coding problems.
  
  Named after radio inventor and Nobel laureate Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Marconi Society awards annually individuals whose work and influence emulate the principle of creativity in service to humanity. Marconi's daughter Gioia Marconi Braga had set up the society in 1974 through an endowment.
  
  Paulraj donated his cash prize of $100,000 (Rs.60 lakh) to the Society's young scholar programme. Asnani was also presented with a cash prize of $4,000 (Rs.2.4 lakh).
  
  Indian-born American scientist and Hitachi America professor of engineering, emeritus at Stanford Thomas Kailath presented the awards to the achievers.
  
  Paulraj joins a select group of IT pioneers who received the Marconi prize in past such as World Wide Web (WWW) creator Tin Berners-Lee, father of internet Vint Cerf, Google co-founder Larry Page and mobile phone developer Martin Cooper.
  
  About prize:
  The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing advancements in communications awarded by the Marconi Foundation. The Prize includes a $100,000 honorarium and a work of sculpture, and honorees are called Marconi Fellows. The Society and Prize are named in honor of Guglielmo Marconi, a Nobel laureate and one of the pioneers of radio.
  
• Jolie: Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie was made an honorary dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her charitable work in fighting sexual violence and for her services to British foreign policy. Jolie, UN Special Envoy, co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PVSI) along with UK Foreign Secretary William Hague in 2012.
  
• Sivathanu Pillai: Renowned defense technologist and father of ‘BrahMos’ cruise missile, Apathukatha Sivathanu Pillai, was conferred the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award by President Pranab Mukherjee on 7th October. The award, which carries cash of Rs 5 lakh, citation and a plaque, was given to Pillai for his outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace and missile technology.
  
  Pillai has been credited with development of critical missile technologies through realization of ‘Agni’, ’Prithvi’, ‘Nag’ and ‘Akash’ missiles.
  
  Pillai, who is also a recipient of civilian honors Padma Shree in 2002 and Padma Bhushan in 2013, has worked as Chief Controller (Research and Development), Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of ‘BrahMos Aerospace’, a joint venture between India and Russia.
  
  Pillai has also contributed to the successful development of SLV3, India’s first satellite launch vehicle, as a core team member and in the evolution of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) configuration for Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). He has written many books including revolution in leadership, Nano science and Nano technology for engineering.
  
  The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award honors each year an Indian, residing in India or abroad, who is an exceptionally outstanding and distinguished business leader, management practitioner, public administrator, educator or institution builder for his or her sustained individual contributions and achievements of high professional award and excellence. Pillai is recipient of the 15th Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award.
  
• Bloomberg: Queen Elizabeth II awarded former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg an honorary knighthood on Monday touting his “prodigious entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors.”
  
• Tobacco board bags award
  The Tobacco Board has bagged the Golden Leaf Award for "its most impressive public service initiatives" in the sector. Tobacco Board Chairman K. Gopal said it was the first Government organisation or agency to bag the prestigious award and "the credit goes entirely to the enterprising tobacco farmers of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka." He received the award recently in Washington at an international conference held by the Global Tobacco Network Forum (GTNF) to discuss the emerging issues in the tobacco sector.
  
  The initiatives taken by the Tobacco Board in extension activities, reduction of pesticide residues, introduction of good agricultural practices and introduction of e-auctions in AP and Karnataka came in for high praise at the conference, he said.
  
  The GTNF was launched in 2008 by Tobacco Reporter to bring together various stakeholders in the sector and discuss issues. The Golden Leaf Award was sponsored by BMJ group, a leader in paper products.
  
  About award:
  The first edition of the Golden Leaf Awards took place in 2006, in Bali, Indonesia. The most recent one took place this fall in Cape Town, South Africa during the Global Tobacco Networking Forum.
  
  Awards are granted on an annual basis to companies that have achieved outstanding performance in five categories—most impressive public service initiative; most promising new product introduction; most exciting newcomer to the industry; most outstanding service to the industry; and the BMJ most committed to quality award.
  
• Jaipur literature fest announces new art award
  The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, the world’s largest free literary festival, on 29th September announced a new art award to be presented in partnership with Delhi-based art organisation Ojas Art. The Ojas Art Award, a new annual addition to the Festival, will be presented to two Indian artists.
  
  It will be worth Rs. 51,000 and Rs. 31,000 respectively. The award will also celebrate and encourage new artistic talent by providing a platform for the artists to showcase their work at the Lit Fest.