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Showing posts from March, 2012

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Florence

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FLORENCE     Florence –  the capital of the Tuscany region and the cradle of Renaissance   We opted for Flix Bus while traveling from Venice to Florence. The road journey takes about three and a half-hour. In Florence, it terminates at the rear end of Santa Maria Novella (SMN) train station. One of Italy’s busiest stations, it got its name from Santa Maria Novella Church just across the plaza from the main entrance. We debarked at the station and refreshed ourselves at McDonald's before hiring a cab for our hotel. Florence, popularly known as ‘Firenze’ by the Italians, is located in central Italy. This dreamy city with a romantic name is the regional capital of the lovely Tuscany region.   Columbus Hotel, where we stayed, is located in Lugarno District. We always prefer to book our hotels through Booking.com as we always land up getting good hotels at good locations. Despite being a little away from the heart of the city and Santa Maria Novella station

LED in general lighting ? Not quite yet

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LED in general lighting - an update   Biswajit Sengupta Despite rapid developments in LED as an efficient source of light it has not been able to capture even 5% of the market share in general lighting application which still is being dominated by the conventional light sources. It is true that apart from high power LED chips there has been great progress in enhancing reliability of drivers and heat sinks. At least the chip manufacturers can safely claim that their products are not going to betray the useful lives declared by them. LEDs do have some unique properties which no other light source can ever have. They are highly efficient, converts almost the entire electrical energy input into light energy; requires very little power to operate ( a green energy ) as it is seen in India almost 18% of the power generated is consumed by artificial lighting ( rest of the world, particularly the developed nations, may be even higher ); smaller solar panels can be used to provide po