Today's GK(13-9-13)

SEBI relaxed KYC norms for foreign investors

Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on 12 September 2013 issued the new Guideline to make Know Your Client requirements (KYC) easy for foreign investors. These guidelines related to registration and disclosure norms for low risk foreign investors.

SEBI classified foreign investors into three categories depending on their risk profile like category I, category II and category III.

Category I

Category I includes

Government and Government related foreign investors such as Foreign Central Banks, Governmental Agencies, Sovereign Wealth Funds, International, Multilateral Organizations and Agencies.

Category II

Category II includes

• Regulated broad based funds such as Mutual Funds, Investment Trusts, Insurance / Reinsurance Companies.
• Appropriately regulated entities such as Banks, Asset Management Companies, Investment Managers/ Advisors, Portfolio Managers.
• Broad based funds whose investment manager is appropriately regulated.
• University Funds and Pension Funds
• University related Endowments already registered with SEBI as FII/Sub Account  .

Category III

Category III includes

All other eligible foreign investors investing in India under PIS route not eligible under Category I and II such as Endowments, Charitable Societies/Trust, Foundations,
Corporate Bodies, Trusts, Individuals, Family Offices.

Category I investors have been exempted from submission of documents like financial statements and board resolution papers. Their top management, partners, directors, trustees and authorised signatories would not be required to submit proof of identity, proof of address and photographs, submission of the list, identity proof, address proof and photographs for their ultimate beneficial owners.

SEBI decision to reclassify foreign investors as per their risk profiles was recommended by a   committee headed by former Cabinet secretary K M Chandrasekhar.

Comment

These measures come at a time when concerns are being raised about outflows of foreign capital and weakening of the rupee against the dollar and other foreign currencies. The new norms are expected to make it much easier for the foreign investors to enter the country and make investment decisions.

Cricketers S Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan handed Life Ban for IPL Spot-Fixing

Cricketers S Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan on 13 September 2013 were handed life ban for IPL spot-fixing by BCCI (The Board of Control for Cricket in India). Amit Singh banned for five years, while Siddharth Trivedi got banned for one year. Harmeet Singh has been excused, while a decision of Ajit Chandila will be taken later. An internal probe conducted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India found, Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan guilty on multiple accounts, including conceding a pre-determined number of runs per over in exchange for bribes.

Amit Singh, who played in the IPL till last year, was seen as the conduit between the cricketers and bookies.  S Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan were found guilty of spot-fixing during sixth season of the Indian Premier League. They had played for Rajasthan Royals.

Cabinet approved the proposal to invest 4.3 Billion $ in the World Bank Bonds

The Union Cabinet of India on 12 September 2013 approved a proposal to invest 4.3 billion US dollar in the bonds of the World Bank Group. The investment has been planned to receive additional cheaper funding from the multilateral agency for infrastructure related projects.

• The RBI will make investments in the bonds that will be floated by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). IBRD is the lending arm of World Bank.
• RBI will get returns on the investments made on the bonds. The tenure of the bonds would vary from time to time.

The decision was taken in the backdrop of the borrowing headroom of India, which was reaching its upper limit. The planned investments would bring in larger sums for infrastructure financing in the country.

During the same meet, an in-principle approval to the proposal of setting-up of two semiconductor manufacturing facilities was also given by the Union Cabinet.
• These manufacturing facilities would play a major role in controlling the import of electronic products like chipsets.

The Government would make an investment of about 25000 crore rupees and the government support level for development of these units will be decided following the negotiations with the chip makers.

Ray Dolby, the pioneer of Noise Reduction in Audio Recordings died

Ray Dolby, the American Engineer and the pioneer of noise reduction in audio recordings died on 12 September 2013. He was the founder of Dolby Laboratories. The 80 year aged Ray Dolby in his end days suffered from Alzheimer disease.

His works in noise reduction and surround sound has been appreciated across the world and have won recognitions too.

About Ray Dolby

• Ray Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in 1933 and grew up in San Francisco.
• He started his career working in Ampex Corporation, when he was a student. He helped in the early development of videotape recording systems
• In 1963, Ray took up a two-year appointment as a United Nations advisor in India
• He returned to England in 1965 to establish Dolby Laboratories in London
• Ray served as chairman of Dolby’s Board of Directors from 1965 until 2009, and retired from the board in 2011.
• He holds more than 50 US patents, and has written papers on videotape recording, long-wavelength X-ray analysis, and noise reduction.

Educational History of Ray Dolby

• He received a PhD degree in physics from Cambridge in 1961 and was elected a Research Fellow of Pembroke College (Honorary Fellow, 1983). During his last year at Cambridge, he was also a consultant to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.
• He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship
• In 1957, he received a BS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University
• During his last year at Cambridge, he was also a consultant to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

Fellowships and Honorary Membership

• Audio Engineering Society (AES)
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society
• Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)
• Royal Academy of Engineering

Awards

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Scientific and Engineering Award; Academy Award of Merit (Oscar)
• National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement; Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development; Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award
• AES: Silver and Gold Medal Awards
• SMPTE: Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal Award; Alexander M. Poniatoff Gold Medal; Progress Medal
• IEEE: Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award; Edison Medal
• American Electronics Association: David Packard Medal of Achievement
• Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame
• National Inventors Hall of Fame
• Médaille du Festival de Cannes
• Berlinale Camera

Honorary Degrees and National Recognition

• US National Medal of Technology
• Doctor of Science, Cambridge University
• Doctor of the University, University of York
• Honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE)
• Ray makes his home in San Francisco with his wife, Dagmar Dolby. Ray and Dagmar have two sons, Tom and David

How you get to feel what you feel

The Lasker Foundation of New York has announced its annual awards for the year 2013 a few days ago. The award for clinical medical research has gone to a trio “for the development of the modern cochlear implant — a device that bestows hearing to individuals with profound deafness,” with the statement that this device has for the first time substantially restored a human sense with a medical intervention. The Public Service Award goes to the philanthropic couple Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft “for leading a historic transformation in the way we view the globe’s most pressing health concerns, and improving the lives of millions of the world’s most vulnerable”. The couple has so far donated as much as $26 billion (more than the total worth of Mr Mukesh Ambani) towards this noble task. And the award for basic medical research goes to Drs Richard Scheller (of Genentech) and Thomas Sudhof (of Stanford) “for discoveries concerning the molecular machinery and regulatory mechanisms that underlie the rapid release of neurotransmitters.”

We focus on the basic medical research award here since the winners have explained the molecular basis of brain activity, in other words the mechanisms behind how we feel sensations. Neurotransmitters are molecules that are ferried across from one nerve cell (called neuron) to the next, transmitting signals of pain, pleasure and such other sensations. Opium has one such molecule, alcohol another and caffeine a third. What Scheller and Sudhof showed is how such signal molecules are taken across nerve cells and regulated. Each of them worked independently but complementarily for over 25 years and identified the proteins and cellular machinery involved.

Of the over 200 types of cells that our body is made of, nerve cells which are responsible for sensations are unique in their architecture and function. A neuron has a globular body with a head that looks like a flower with hundreds of petals. Each of them is called dendrite. At the other end, it has a long stem called the axon, occasionally over a metre long (for example the nerve cells in your foot), fanning out in the end into hundreds (over a thousand) of branches. In effect a neuron resembles a bonsai palm tree, but with a longer stem, its leaves as dendrites and roots as axon terminals.

Like an electric circuit

Neurons connect with one another like in a complex electrical circuit; each axon terminal connects with the dendrite of the next neuron. Given the multiplicity of dendrites at one end and axon terminals at the other, one neuron can actually connect with hundreds of others. Given this, one can imagine the complexity of inter-neuron connections that make even the tiniest of brains.

This inter-neuron junction point is called the synapse (literally a connection point). Here is where the action is. The synapse is made of sacs or bags containing neurotransmitter molecules that help in transmitting information or the signal from the axon of the “pre-synaptic” neuron to the dendrite of the “post-synaptic” neuron. How this is done, how the neurotransmitter is released and regulated has been the work of Scheller and Sudhof.

Neurotransmission is thus a combination of electrical signal and chemical transport. It starts out with an electric pulse that runs down a nerve cells axon. When it reaches the terminal tip, calcium ions enter the cell. Responding to this, the cell triggers the synaptic sac containing neurotransmitter molecules to burst open, much like a long needle bursting a water-filled balloon. The neurotransmitter molecule then attaches itself to specialised receptors on the surface of the dendrite of the next neuron, with a lock and key specificity. Signal is thus passed on downstream. The task is to identify the molecules involved in these processes.

Sudhof isolated a set of proteins (e. g, synaptotagmin) which are activated upon calcium signalling and help in capturing and bringing together the synaptic balloon to the membrane of the pre-synaptic neuron terminal while Scheller isolated and showed another set of proteins (named syntaxin, VAMP, SNAP) involved in the synaptic fusion apparatus. By now we know as many as 60 members of this family synaptic cell adhesion proteins involved in neurotransmitter release and uptake.

As Scheller pointed out, there were a lot of little Eureka moments during these two decades of work that gave rise to the big picture. But what they showed is the fundamental mechanism of membrane fusion by all organisms, for inter-cellular communication.

This is in health. What happens when this protein-mediated pathway is blocked? This is what happened when a snake or even the microbe tetanus inject their toxins into our body. They go to block the protein mediated pathway causing neural inaction. Illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia too are defects in the fusion process described above. As the Lasker review states: “Thus, the work by Scheller and Sudhof has revealed the elaborate orchestration that lies at the crux of our most simple and sophisticated neurobiological activities.”