AstrotalkUK

Not for profit website/blog on astronomy, space and my writing

India and Space

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November 21st 2013 marks 50 years of the Indian space program. From humble beginnings devoid of infrastructure, experience or trained engineers, India today has an established track record of designing, building and launching satellites for its own national needs and commercially for others.

The next few podcast offer a glimpse of the people and achievements of this half a century old story .. so far.

Episode 62: An interview with Amrita Shah from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Author of the most comprehensive biography on Vikram Sarabhai (Vikram Sarabhai :  A Life). Book review of this fascinating book here.

Episode 63: Rakesh Sharma – India’s only spaceman. A video interview recorded in August 2013 where Rakesh Sharma talks about his spaceflight, its aftermath and his views on human spaceflight. Two minute trailer below.

Episode 64 – Bangalore Astronomical Society. Probably the most productive amateur astronomical society in India with a huge presence online and thus an international footprint.

Episode 65 – Professor UR Rao. A look back at the contribution of former ISRO chairman who was originally recruited in to the Indian Space program by Vikram Sarabhai. Whilst working at NASA in the early 1960s, a cosmic ray scientist Rao worked on several Pioneer and Explore spacecraft. Rao was in Dallas waiting to meet Kennedy on that fateful day…

Episode 66 –  Interview with director at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre originally known as Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station. TERLS was the site of India’s first rocket launch in to space on 21st November 1963.

Rakesh Sharma two minute trailer

 

IISP NW Regional Meetings

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The videos below are recordings of the NW regional branch meetings of the Institute of Information Security Professional (IISP) recorded in Manchester. The videos and  slides  are made available with the consent of the speakers who remain the copyright owners.

The next meeting, a joint one with the Chartered Institute for IT in Greater Manchester. It is on the evening of 16th September 2013 with Michael Colao entitled “The outlook is cloudy:  How to screw up a cloud implementation or Why almost every cloud security talk you have ever heard is wrong“. Register free here

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11th June  2013 by Professor Fred Piper from Royal Holloway University London, on “Cryptography – From Black Art to Popular Science”. Slides  here.

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23 May 2013 by Kawser Hamid, lead policy officer from the Information Commissioner’s Office on the theme of “Data Protection in the Cloud”. A technical issue (the battery packed up!) meant I only had the first 20 minutes. I thought it was still worth uploading.  Slides  here.

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15th November 2012 by Will Roebuck from www.eradar.eu on the theme of  security  associated with doing business online. Slides  here.

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5th July 2012 by Stephen Porter from Trend Mirco Limited on the theme of cloud security. Slides here.

Astronomy at the Manchester International Festival

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MIF

The Manchester International Festival kicked off  at sunrise this morning and will run through until sunset on Sunday. Activities will run throughout this period – no breaks. The events include music, visual arts, theatre, dance, food and family events, some indoor and some outdoor, many created or performed by internationally acclaimed artists.. and me.

I will be hosting a free guided tour of the night sky for about an hour at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Starting at 1am on Sunday 7th July it will include a practical view of the night sky in the park at the back of Whitworth Art Gallery and talk will cover Manchester’s  connections with

It starts at 1am on Sunday morning. Free – meet at the main entrance of Whitworth Art Gallery.

Jim Reavis – Cloud Security Alliance

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Jim reavis

A short interview with Jim Revis recorded in London on 24th April during InfoSec 2013. In this interview Jim talks about the evolving definition of of Cloud Computing, the CSA’s Star Registry, CSA’s Cloud Computing Security Knowledge certification and his take on how cloud Computing has been and is evolving.

During the interview, Jim refers to a collaborative program between the CSA and (ISC)2 to create a new  professional certification in Cloud Security. More details here.

For my earlier post on CCSK with a downloadable full text pdf – see here

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