City Images

It will take months or even years for this road dug up during the pandemic to return to normalcy. 

The hapless residents will have to put up with such constant degradation of road facilities.

 

How The Hindu Newspaper Corrected an Error!

In the 70s and 80s, school principals used to instruct students to read English newspapers such as The Hindu for improving English skills. But the last three decades had seen an erosion in the perfection of sub-editing across English newspapers in India. One can see lots of grammar and spelling errors, poor sentence structures, misleading headlines, and heavily editorialized news. 

In keeping with the highest traditions of professional journalism, The Hindu had issued a correction to an error that I pointed out on Twitter on Dec 1, 2020.  

On its front page, a news story had an error about the end date of the current Assembly term in Karnataka. Instead of 2023, the news story mentioned the year as 2013. A silly mistake. 

On Dec 2, The Hindu on page 4 published a correction. 

But the same story on the newspaper's online edition (accessed on Dec 2, 10: 50 am IST) had a different text. The edit made created a grammatically weak sentence at the end of the respective paragraph. This poor sentence remains unedited on Dec 2. 

Three Types of Mutations in SARS-COV2 Virus Infections

In a paper, No evidence for increased transmissibility from recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2, published in the Nature Communications journal, the authors state that none of mutations identified lead to the increase in the spread of Covid-19. 

This definitely is good news. 

The paper also lists three ways in which the SARS-CoV2 virus mutates in infected humans:

• Mistakes in copying errors during the replication (multiplication) of the virus.
• Interactions with other viruses in the affected human cells.
• Changes in the host RNA modification systems.

The paper says that out of the identified total of 12,706 mutations, about 398 strongly supported recurrent mutations were observed. It also added that the genomic diversity of the virus remains low, but vigil should be maintained continuously.