Monday, August 10, 2015

Screen brightness problem with Microsoft Windows 10 and Intel HD Graphics Driver

I have a problem with Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade on a VAIO 64 bit Laptop. Everything went smoothly except that the screen brightness was uncomfortably low after the upgrade. The Fn F6 brightness control on the keyboard shows the display set to the maximum, but despite that, the brightness is low. We tried the default driver, which gave good brightness but limited the resolution to 1024 X something. At this resolution, parts of the screen are not visible to me and it is impossible to work with. Then we checked for updates to the default driver and it found an update for the Intel HD graphics driver and installed it. Now we are back in the same state as before, with a dim display, but full resolution.

Comments and suggestion would be highly appreciated. 

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Teachers with Fake Degrees


We should thank the Bihar High Court for having taking action that has had this result. The teachers with fake degrees who have not resigned face the threat of punishment and recovery of salaries paid to them. Taking strict action and bringing guilty teachers to justice will raise the confidence the world has in the educational system of Bihar. The State has to do this with all possible speed.
The law in India prescribes a jail term for crimes such as adulterating milk with water. Visit
Faking a degree certificate to land a teaching job is certainly a crime worth a punishment harsher than the one prescribed for adulterating milk. We should not allow shoddy prosecution to let thousands of forgers to get away with the harm they have done to thousands of students’ careers.

This post is a follow-up to a related post of mine http://obvioustruths.blogspot.com/2015/08/fake-degrees.html


Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Fake Degrees

An interesting news item had come out in March 2015, and I have been waiting to see suitable reactions from the educational world. To my surprise, there has been no significant reaction. The country has treated the shocking news as something routine! I refer to the story of an 8th standard dropout who passed himself off as a Professor of Power Systems using forged documents and was teaching in an engineering college near Chennai during the last three years.  Visit

When some Indians use fake degree certificates to get into positions they do not deserve, they are robbing every Indian graduate to some degree. One way of reducing such fraud is to have every educational institution run a service to verify degrees/diplomas online. The user should scan and upload relevant documents for verification and pay online something like Rs 250 per document, for the service. The verifying institution would send the document back with a stamp saying “verified on at

However, it would be foolish to assume that such measures alone will rectify the rot that has set into our educational institutions. I assume that a selection committee probably chaired by the Principal of the college, the Head of the Dept., and a couple of professors must have “selected” the candidate for appointment as a professor! In some universities, the committee would include a representative of the Chancellor of the University. All these worthies in the committee have got away scot-free! Presumably, they all have “genuine” degree certificates! What about the management of the Institute that must have collected fees from the students, to have them them taught by illustrious teachers?
If even an educational institute cannot find a difference between a real teacher and a fake one, what does the industry do? Can you blame them when they write off the bulk of the colleges, ignoring all applications from their students? They need only to “short-list” 30 or 40 institutions for campus recruitment.


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