MIB Approves Ninth Self Regulatory Body, PADMA, Under The IT Rules, 2021

• The organisation — with 47 digital news publishers on board — will look at grievances related to digital media news content on their platforms.
• With this, the Ministry has approved nine self-regulatory bodies since May 2021 under rule 12 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
  • They include DIGIPUB News India Foundation, Confederation of Online Media (India), and NBF- Professional News Broadcasting Standards Authority, among others.
• Self-regulatory bodies will “oversee and ensure adherence by the publisher to the code of ethics; address grievances which have not been resolved by publishers within 15 days; hear appeals filed by the complainant against the decision of publishers etc.

Paris Club proposes 10-year moratorium in 15-year Sri Lanka debt re-structure: report

• The Paris club has also called upon the Global north and south to take a similar haircut in restructuring of Sri Lankan debt. So far no official proposal has been made by Paris club to China or India.
• The Paris Club is an informal group of creditor nations whose objective is to find workable solutions to payment problems faced by debtor nations.
• The Paris Club has 22 permanent members, including most of the western European and Scandinavian nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
• The group is organized around the principles that each debtor nation be treated case by case, with consensus, conditionality, solidarity, and comparability of treatment.
• The Paris Club stresses the informal nature of its existence. As an informal group, it has no official statutes and no formal inception date, although its first meeting with a debtor nation was in 1956, with Argentina.

Disbursement of Jeevan Pramaan Patra through Postmen and Gramin Dak Sevaks: Rajya Sabha QA

• Jeevan Pramaan is a biometric enabled digital service for pensioners. Pensioners of Central Government, State Government or any other Government organization can take benefit of this facility.
• The scheme was launched on November 10, 2014.
• In order to get this life certificate the individual drawing the pension is required to either personally present oneself before the Pension Disbursing Agency or have the Life Certificate issued by authority where they have served earlier and have it delivered to the disbursing agency.
• Using Jeevan Pramaan, a pensioner can now digitally provide proof of his/her existence to authorities for continuity of pension every year instead of requiring to present himself/herself physically or through a Life Certificate issued by specified authorities.
• The Digital Life Certificate facility is not available to Remarried or Re-employed Pensioners. They are required to submit the Life Certificate the conventional way to their Pension Disbursing Authority.

National telemedicine service of India - eSanjeevani achieves 8 crore teleconsultations

• It is a web-based comprehensive telemedicine solution, launched by the then Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, in 2009.
• Created by: Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Mohali, is the creator of eSanjeevani.
• Two modules of eSanjeevani:
  • **eSanjeevani AB-HWC:**The doctor-to-doctor telemedicine platform, being implemented at all the Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) in the country under Ayushman Bharat (AB) Scheme of Government of India.
    • It was rolled out in 2019.
  • eSanjeevani OPD: It is the Patient-to-Doctor remote consultation services rolled out in 2020 amid the first lockdown imposed to fight Covid-19 pandemic, while the Outpatient Departments (OPDs) in the country were closed.
    • The initiative is a contactless and risk-free modality that enables delivery of health services to the citizens in the confines of their homes free of cost.
    • The C-DAC is working towards adding another innovative feature in eSanjeevani OPD that will enable roll out of National OPDs on eSanjeevani OPD, to offer remote health services to patients in any part of the country.

World Soil Day - the United Nations

• It aims to highlight the value of healthy soil and to promote the sustainable management of soil resources.
• In 2014, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) declared December 5 as ‘World Soil Day’.
• The day was chosen as it coincides with the birthday of Thailand’s king, HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who led the programme and made it happen.
• Theme: "Soils: Where food begins".

Armed Forces Flag Day

• It aims to honour the martyrs, veterans, and serving personnel of the Indian military.
• The day has been marked every year since 1949 to celebrate the valiant efforts undertaken by military personnel to safeguard the country’s borders and raise funds to ensure their and their family’s well-being.
• It aims to raise donations for the welfare of the Armed Forces Staff.
• It is observed to enable more public participation in Armed Forces.

History:

• The Defense Minister''s Committee on August 28, 1949, created the Armed Forces Flag Day Fund.
• In 1993, the Defense Ministry of India amalgamated all relevant welfare funds, including funds for war victims, the Kendriya Sainik Board Fund, the ex-welfare servicemen''s fund, and other units, to establish the Armed Forces Flag Day fund.

ChatGPT: This Elon Musk-founded AI chatbot is taking the internet by storm

• The tool has been developed by OpenAI, a research institute founded in 2015.
• This tool ‘knew’ every topic under the sun; it could answer questions and carry on a conversation.
• This tool interacts with humans in natural language and is impressive because aside from answering general queries, it has many other functions.
• ChatGPT is much more than a chat bot.
  • For example, you can ask it to write a program or even a simple software application.
• It can also do creative tasks such as writing a story. It can explain scientific concepts and answer any question that needs factual answers.

Language Model:

• ChatGPT is what is called a Language Model, rather than a chat bot.
• A language model is a software that prints out a sequence of words as output that are related to some words given as input with appropriate semantic relation; in practical terms, it means that it can perform tasks like answering questions and carrying on a conversation with humans.
• It is often used in natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as speech recognition, automatic translation, and text generation.
• There are a few other language models like:
  • BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) from Google.

Standard Techniques:

• The accuracy of ChatGPT or any language model can be measured using standard techniques.
• One such technique is “Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation” or the ROUGE metric which compares ChatGPT’s output of content against a standard expected content and measures the overlap as success percentage.
• For language models like GPT that are also used in translation, another metric called the BLEU metric (Bilingual Evaluation Under Study) is employed; this metric compares overlap in translated content with a standard translation.

Neural Network:

• It is also a neural network.
• A neural network can be thought of as a large network of computers that can fine tune its output of words based on the feedback given to it during stages of training: this training process and the technology together are called Reinforcement Learning.
• The input data is typically huge corpus of text.

OpenAI:

• OpenAI is a research institute and company that focuses on developing artificial intelligence technology in a responsible and safe way.
• It was founded in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs and researchers, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman.

Digital payments worth ₹38.32 trln carried out in Jul-Sep 2022

• UPI is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank).
• It does so by merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood.
• The interface is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and works by instantly transferring funds between two bank accounts on a mobile platform.
• It was launched in 2016, by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

UPI

• In UPI, a user just needs to download the UPI app, register details, and create a virtual payment address (VPA). The user needs to link the VPA to their bank account.
• This VPA becomes the users'' financial address and the user need not remember the details like beneficiary account number, IFSC codes, or net banking user id and password for sending or receiving money.The UPI interface allows multiple bank accounts to be added into a single mobile application.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)

• National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India.
• It is an initiative of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) under the provisions of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, for creating a robust Payment & Settlement Infrastructure in India.
• It has been incorporated as a Not for Profit Company with an intention to provide infrastructure to the entire banking system in India for physical as well as electronic payment and settlement systems.
• The Company is focused on bringing innovations in the retail payment systems through the use of technology for achieving greater efficiency in operations and widening the reach of payment.

TRAI releases Consultation Paper on Introduction of Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) in Telecommunication Networks

• The feature would provide an individual with information about the calling party (similar to ‘Truecaller’ and ‘Bharat Caller ID & Anti-Spam’).
• The idea is to ensure that telephone subscribers are able to make an informed choice about incoming calls and curb harassment by unknown or spam callers.
• Existing technologies present the number of the calling entity on the potential receiver’s handset.
• Since subscribers are not given the name and identity of the caller, they sometimes choose not to answer them believing it could be unsolicited commercial communication from unregistered telemarketers. This could lead to even genuine calls being unanswered.
• Additionally, there have been rising concerns about robocalls (calls made automatically using IT-enabled systems with a pre-recorded voice), spam calls and fraudulent calls.
• Truecaller’s ‘2021 Global Spam and Scam Report’ revealed that the average number of spam calls per user each month in India, stood at 16.8 while total spam volumes received by its users were in excess of 3.8 billion calls in October alone.

World Bank revs up growth hopes to 6.9%

• It was released by World Bank.
• India Development Report titled ‘Navigating the Storm’.
• It revised the GDP forecast considering the strong upturn in the July to September quarter of 2022-23, when it grew 3% despite inflationary pressures and tighter financing conditions, “driven by strong private consumption and investment”.
• The government’s focus on bolstering capital expenditure also supported domestic demand in the first half of 2022-23.
• It expects the Indian economy to grow at a slightly slower 6.6% in 2023-24 as a challenging external environment and faltering global growth will affect its economic outlook through different channels.
• The report said that while a one percentage point decline in growth in the United States is associated with a 0.4 percentage point decline in India’s growth, the effect is around 1.5 times larger for other emerging economies, and the result is similar for growth spillovers from the EU and China.
• It cautions about trade-offs between trying to limit the adverse impact of global spillovers on growth and the available policy space.
• The RBI’s gradual withdrawal of liquidity and policy rate hikes have been aimed at anchoring inflation expectations. However, this has increased borrowing costs, which along with elevated input prices have potentially constrained private investment.
• RBI’s management of short-term volatility in exchange rates has contributed to a decline in reserves, though they are still at a relatively high level.
• A widening goods trade deficit, driven by rising imports and softening exports, has expanded India’s current account deficit to 2.8% of GDP in Q2 this year from 1.5% in the first quarter.
• The adoption of several regulatory and policy measures—including introduction of a new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code and creation of the new National Reconstruction Company Limited—facilitated an improvement in financial sector metrics over the past five years.