Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Take Your Pick Answers

Take Your Pick Answers

MEDIA & PUBLISHING
1. Led to the formation of Amar Chitra Katha by Anant Pai
2. The Times Group / Bennett, Coleman & Co
3. Malayala Manorama
4. Reader's Digest

BANKING
1. Axis Bank
2. Standard Chartered
3. Grameen Bank
4. WaMu (Washington Mutual)

CONSTRUCTION & REAL ESTATE
1. Tuvalu
2. DLF
3. TDR (Transfer of Development Rights)
4. L & T

RETAIL
1. Trent / Westside
2. Staples
3. Pantaloons
4. Marks & Spencer

THE NOBELS
1. Ribosome
2. Isolation of Deuterium / Heavy Water
3. Murray Gell-Mann
4. Frederick Sanger

INVENTORS & INVENTIONS
1. SCUBA / Aqualung
2. TEL (Tetra-Ethyl Lead)
3. Browning
4. Radiocarbon Dating

SOFTWARE & IT
1. Lotus
2. Matroshka
3. Gnutella
4. Windows 7

TERMINOLOGY
1. Survival of the Fittest
2. Cloud Computing
3. Inferiority Complex
4. Red Eye Effect

Zed

Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Long Visual Connect Answers

Long Visual Connect Answers

1. NESTLE

The guy is Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, a brand owned by Nestle. The woman below is Liliane Bettencourt, CEO of L'Oreal. Bettencourt and Nestle each control a a quarter of the shares and voting rights at L'Oreal. The pic to the right of Willy Wonka shows the Chinese milk scandal of 2008 when the Hong Kong government claimed to have found melamine in a Chinese-made Nestlé milk product. The logo to the right of Bettencourt shows Novartis. Nestle has agreed to sell Alcon, the world's largest eye-care company to Novartis in 2010. The other logos are Perrier and San Pellegrino, mineral water brands of Nestle.

2. HERSHEY'S

The guy shown with the quote is Milton Hershey. Row 2 shows the writer O'Henry (extreme left), the name of a choclate brand marketed by Hershey's in USA. The pic to the right of O'Henry shows the Hershey Bears, a premier team in the American Hockey League. The pic to the right of Hershey Bears shows Walter Murrie who was President of Hershey for 20 years and then founded M & M. The pic in row 3 shows three Hershey mascots at the entrance of the Hershey's theme park.

3. CADBURY

John Cadbury. The pic to the right of Cadbury shows Bournville which has been associated with Cadbury from the outset. The engine has Cadbury Bournville on it and formed part of Cadbury's epic factory at Bournville. The pic to the right of Bournville shows Salmonella, the bacterium that Cadbury products were purported to contain during the Salmonella Cadbury scare. Below Salmonella is the Great Root Bear, the mascot of A & W Root Beer which is currently owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Schwepped which was with Cadbury). The pic below John Cadbury shows the logo of the Cadbury World, their entertainment park.

4. KRAFT FOODS

Kraft Foods began as a processed cheese manufacturer. They used to own Duracell and Tupperware. Altria (Philip Morris) owned Kraft at one point. Kraft Foods replaced AIG in the Dow Jones Index after the latter's collapse. Kraft purchased Groupe Danone's biscuit and cereal division for US $7.2b in 2007. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has an acquired an 8% stake in Kraft worth US $4b in 2008. The woman below Buffett is Irene Rosenfeld, the current CEO of Kraft.

5. RBS

The logo above Banco Santander is Fortis. Fortis, Banco Santander and RBS bought ABN AMRO in 2007, the largest banking takeover in history. The logo to the right of Fortis is Natwest (National Westminster Bank) owned by RBS. The man below the logos is Sir Fred Goodwin (longtime CEO) associated with the excesses that led to the downfall of RBS and its subsequent nationalization. RBS printed a 5 pound note as a tribute to Jack Nicklaus. RBS owns an insurance arm called Churchill Insurance. To distinguish it from Winston Churchill, they have the logo (to the left of Churchill) with a large bulldog.

6. Defence strategies to hostile takeovers

When faced with a hostile takeover, a company's response can be called any of these.

Crown Jewels Defence - Selling one's prized assets so as to make the buyer less interested

Nancy Reagan Defence - She was famous for her 'Just Say No' stance in the anti-drug programs of the 80s. So when a company just isn't open to being acquired, it is termed as such.

Pacman Defence - When a company offers to buy the prospective buyer (from Pacman when a certain mode or object allows you to devour the ghosts that are intent on devouring you)

Jonestown Defence - Named for the Jonestown suicide triggered by Jim Jones, leader of the People's Temple religious cult. When a company divests all its assets in a bid to avoid the buyout, it is termed as such.

Scorched Earth Defence - Similar to the generic war practice (eg - Russians adopted it when Nazi Germany invaded during WWII, Iraqis adopted it during the Gulf war - the burning of the Kuwaiti oilfields is shown) and similar to the crown jewels defence. A company makes itself seem less attractive to the prospective buyer.

The final connect is, as must be obvious by now, the Kraft buyout of Cadbury. The principal players are Kraft and Cadbury. The US $7.2b loan is funded by RBS. The possible defence options for Cadbury might have been those in the answer to question 6. Nestle and Hershey stand to be affected.

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Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Visual Connect Answers

Visual Connect (Sci-Tech) Answers

1. FINGERPRINTING

William Herschel (pic to the left of Uranus) discovered Uranus. His grandson (another William Herschel) initiated fingerprinting for practical purposes while working for the Indian Civil Service. The man in the pic to the right of Uranus is Alphonse Bertillon, the creator of anthropometry - an identification system based on physical measurements. Bertillon's method would later be supplanted by fingerprinting. The pic to the right of Bertillon features the frontispiece of Bertillon's Identification anthropométrique (1893) illustrating the idea. The man below William Herschel is Francis Galton (eugenics). After having studied the fingerprints during ten years, Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints. He had calculated that the chance of a "false positive" (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion. The pic to the right of Galton shows the structure of the skin with the Eccrine glands, which are responsible for fingerprints.

2. JOHN MCCARTHY
xkcd strip about Lisp (the words blacked out) which was invented by John McCarthy. He coined the term Artificial Intelligence. The TIME mag cover shows Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame. In 1999 he formed a company called LoudCloud, whose logo is seen to the left of the cover. This was the first company for commercial exploitation of the Cloud Computing concept (now formally called Saas - Software as a Service, seen in the rough sketch). This concept was first anticipated by John McCarthy. The buildings with the unique architecture are part of MIT's famous CSAIL whose present structure and function owe their existence to John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky (on the pic to the left of CSAIL).

3. BUTTERFLY EFFECT
It is essentially a fancy name for 'Sensitive dependence on initial conditions' in chaos theory, namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. The graph of this is shown. The man in the pic to the right of the graph is Henri Poincaré, the French polymath who laid the foundations for Chaos Theory. The man to the left of Poincare is Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who discovered that linear statistical models for weather patterns may not be accurate. Small variations led to drastic differences in the endpoint. He was unable to come up with a title for his talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972. Someone chipped in with "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" as a title. This is shown in row 2 of the collage. The pics in row 3 show plots of the Lorenz attractor.

4. WAR OF CURRENTS / AC vs DC / EDISON vs TESLA
Thomas Edison (the only person in the collage) favoured direct current while Tesla was a proponent of alternating current. Edison opposed capital punishment, but his desire to disparage the system of alternating current led to the invention of the electric chair. Harold Brown, who was at this time being secretly paid by Edison, constructed the first electric chair for the state of New York in order to promote the idea that alternating current was deadlier than DC. Experts announced proposals to harness Niagara Falls (pic to the right of Edison) for generating electricity, even briefly considering compressed air as a power transmission medium. Against GE and Edison's proposal, George Westinghouse, using Tesla's AC system, won the international Niagara Falls Commission contract. Westinghouse started Westinghouse Electric Corporation and was a lifelong champion of Tesla's AC. His company later became Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) - whose eye logo is shown. The final stage where the battle was settled was the World's Fair of 1893 whose iconic image is that of the Ferris Wheel (shown below the electric chair). Tesla won the contract and demonstrated the efficiency of AC. The stamp commemorates the first use of transmission lines (using AC) at Frankfurt railway station.
An ironic corollary to this rivalry is that Westinghouse was awarded the Edison medal by the IEEE.

5. HYBRID CAR
The man (with a moustache) is Ferdinand Porsche (of Volkswagen fame). He was also the first to invent an electric car in 1900. While Rewa is claimed to have the first assembly line dedicated for the manufacture of an electric car, the Woods Motor Vehicle Company was a manufacturer of electric automobiles between 1899 and 1916. In 1915 they produced the Dual Power with both electric and internal combustion engines and this continued until 1918. The man in the TIME cover is the writer Hermann Wouk whose brother Victor Wouk whose PhD thesis titled "Static electricity generated during the distribution of gasolene" led to his successful conversion of a Buick Skylark vehicle with a 20-kilowatt direct-current electric motor and an RX-2 Mazda rotary engine. The electric equipment for this car was provided by Eureka Vacuum Cleaner Company. Henney Kilowatt was an electric car made in 1959. The person below Porsche is Dr Andrew Frank, who is considered the father of modern plug-in hybrids.

6. DDT
The man is Paul Hermann Muller won the 1948 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of DDT as an effective poison against several arthropods. The woman is Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring triggered the anti-DDT revolution and led to the eventual banning of DDT at the Stockholm convention of the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) whose logo is shown. DDT is particularly toxic to birds as it causes eggshell thinning and has been directly linked to the endangered status of birds such as the Bald Eagle and the Osprey.

Zed

Quark Open Quiz 2010 - They Add Up Answers

They Add Up Answers

Set 1
1. Enron (Jeffrey Skilling)
2. Tupolev's Tu-144 (Soviet Union's answer to the Concorde)
3. Accor
4. Renault
ACCENTURE

Set 2
1. Sara Lee Corporation (Owns Kiwi & Goodknight)
2. Kingfisher Red (Air Deccan is now Kingfisher Red)
3. Karbonn Mobiles
4. Walt Disney Company (the pic shows "the nine old men of Disney" - the original group of nine animators used by Walt Disney for 30-40 films)
KAWASAKI

Set 3
1. Nokia (World Mobile Throwing Championships)
2. Timken
3. Varig (Brazil's national airline)
4. Lenovo (the Thinkpad owes its origin to the Shōkadō bentō, a traditional black-lacquered Japanese lunch box)
VALENTINO

Set 4
1. Dabur
2. Nestcape (called Mosaic originally)
3. Fortis (Shivinder Singh (Malvinder Singh's bro) owns Fortis which acquired Wockhardt)
4. Volkswagen
VODAFONE

Set 5
1. Tang
2. Starbucks (How Starbucks built a company one cup at a time)
3. Allianz (Allianz Arena)
4. Videocon (Venugopal Dhoot who is an accomplished flautist)
ALTAVISTA

Set 6
1. Pillsbury (Charles Pillsbury)
2. Cadillac (named after Antoine sur de la Mothe Cadillac, founder of Detroit)
3. Territorial Army
4. Arcelor (before the buyout)
CATERPILLAR

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Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Infinite Bounce Answers

Infinite Bounce Answers

Biz

1. Gardener

2. Basmati Rice

3. Tally Solutions

4. Monster Jobs

5. Brooke Bond

6. Saint Gobain

7. John Maynard Keynes

Sci-Tech

1. Joseph Fourier

2. Tamiflu

3. X - Lady Ada Lovelace

Y - Charles Babbage

4. Chandrayaan-I

Took off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and landed at Shackleton (Ernest Shackleton of Endurance fame) crater on the Moon.

5. Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.

6. Intelligent Design

Zed

Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Prelims Answers

Prelims (Non-Visuals)

1. Dokomo / Docomo

2.

A- Jack Welch

B - Jeffrey Immelt

C - Boeing

D - Robert Nardelli

E - Chrysler

3. Weta Digital (Peter Jackson)

4. Pranav Mistry, SixthSense

5. Google Earth

6. Quantum Entanglement / Entanglement

7. Vespa

8. Spinal Tap

9. AstroTurf

10. Perpetual Motion

11. Ecole Polytechnique

12.

X - Wolfgang Pauli

Y - Carl Jung

13. Alfred Wegener

14.

a. Credit Rating and Information Services of India Ltd.
b. Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization

15. Transformers (the toyline, the 1984 buyout was by Hasbro)

16. Jack Kilby

17. Johnnie Walker (they're moving out of Kilmarnock after 189 years)

18. Sir Isaac Newton

19. Fabindia

20. Teeth (Odontoceti, Baleen whales have baleen plates for chewing and intake)

21. Detecting landmines

22.

A - George Lemaitre

B - Big Bang

C - Fred Hoyle

23. Vanity Fair

Prelims (Visuals)

1. Dr Vijay Bhatkar (the man behind CDAC and PARAM)

2. Twitter (Jack Dorsey)

3. Aerostatic Flutter

4. Scrabble

5. Medea & Gaea

Medea was the wife of Jason (and the Argonauts). Out of spite for Jason when he left her for another woman, she killed her own kids (fillicide). She is considered the archetype of the bad mother.

Gaea is the Greek Goddess of the Earth and is considered the archetype of the good mother (mother earth).

Medea Hypothesis - Postulates an inherently suicidal earth waiting to self-destruct

Gaea Hypothesis - Postulates the presence of an inherent homeostasis (regulating mechanism) so that when something changes drastically, the other components change to restore balance

6. Maxwell's Demon Paradox

Sadi Carnot's Reflections of the Motive Power of Fire led to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment featuring Maxwell's, supposedly an acutely perceptive creature whose interference would lead to a reduction in entropy over time (a violation of the 2nd law)

7. They are brands that have become generic terms.

Tarmac, Jacuzzi, Frisbee and Kleenex

Zed

Quark Open Quiz 2010 - Take Your Pick

Take Your Pick

Originally intended as a buzzer round modeled along the lines of University Challenge, we had to make it a Take Your Pick sort of round.

The biz picks were Media & Publishing, Retail, Construction & Real Estate, Banking

The sci-tech picks were The Nobels, Inventors & Inventions, Software & IT, Terminology

MEDIA & PUBLISHING
1. What significance does the question “Who was Rama’s mother?” have in Indian publishing?

2. 360 Degrees is the event management wing of which Indian conglomerate?

3. K M Mammen Mapillai is known for the Madras Rubber Factory (MRF). His father, K C Mammen Mapillai was imprisoned in 1938 for his inflammatory editorials. Which daily was he the editor of?

4. Which magazine has its current slogan as “Life Well Shared”?

BANKING
1. Of which Indian bank is Shikha Sharma the CEO?

2. Which bank has signed a sponsorship deal with Liverpool FC to commence at the start of the 2010/2011 English Premier League season and last for four years?

3. There is no legal instrument between this bank and its borrowers. The system works entirely on trust. The Bank also incorporates a set of values embodied by the Sixteen Decisions. At every branch, borrowers recite these Decisions and vow to follow them. Which bank are we talking about?

4. As of now, which is the largest bank failure in US history?

CONSTRUCTION & REAL ESTATE
1. Which country made revenue from the sale of its internet domain name in 1998?

2. How do we know the company founded as Raisina Cold Storage and Ice Company in 1946?

3. In a dense downtown area, there may be a building of historical value surrounded by skyscrapers. This building is only three stories high, but each building in the area has the right to thirty-five stories of airspace. The municipal government may permit skyscraper developers to purchase the right to build a taller building. In this case, a skyscraper developer may purchase the unused 32 stories of air rights from the owners of the historic building, giving them the right to build a skyscraper to a maximum height of 67 stories. What concept is being illustrated?

4. This firm was conceived during a holiday in Matheran when Søren Kristian read a report quoting Mahatma Gandhi – “I am not leading a movement to rid India of its white colonial masters in order to substitute them with brown ones”. Which firm?

RETAIL
1. What resulted from Tata’s selling of their 50% stake in Lakmé to HLL for Rs 200 Crore?

2. In 1985, Thomas Stemberg was working on a proposal for a business and needed a ribbon for his printer, but was unable to obtain one because his local dealer was closed for the Independence Day holiday. Which business came about as a result of this?

3. Which retail outlet came out with the tagline ‘Even the Odds’ when it introduced odd numbered shirt sizes (39, 41, 43) for the first time in India?

4. To which retain chain is the famous motto “The customer is always and completely right!” attributed?

THE NOBELS
1. Venkataraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in Chemsitry for 2009 for studies regarding the structure and function of which intracellular component?

2. Harold Urey is famous for the Miller-Urey experiment. In recognition of what was he awarded the Nobel for Chemistry in 1934?

3. The Nobel citation for Physics in 1969 read - "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions". He was among the earliest proponents of Quantum Chromodynamics. Who?

4. Marie Curie. Linus Pauling. John Bardeen. Who completes this exclusive club of four in Nobel history?

INVENTORS & INVENTIONS
1. What invented is credited to Jacques-Yves Cousteau?

2. Thomas Midgley Jr. improved the process of synthesis of CFCs and led the effort to use CFC as refrigerant. His legacy involves one more invention that has resulted in serious consequences for the environment. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Name the other invention.

3. He had made his first firearm at the age of thirteen out of a piece of scrap metal. Over the course of his career, he went onto have 128 gun patents. He is also the founder of the eponymous firearms company. Who are we talking about?

4. What concept / invention would one associate Willard Libby with?

SOFTWARE & IT
1. Mitch Kapor derived the name for his company from the Padmasana position in Yoga. What company did he found?

2. The .mk format series can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file. This is akin to a container which can hold inside it other containers deriving its name from a Russian word. What does mk stand for?

3. The name of this file sharing concept is partly derived from the fact that its developers Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper supposedly ate a lot of a hazelnut spread brand by the Italian chocolate manufacturer Ferrero. Identify.

4. Which product recently out grossed Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows to become the highest grossing pre-order in Amazon’s history?

TERMINOLOGY
1. Although attributed to Charles Darwin, this phrase was actually coined by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology. Darwin later picked it up for use in paralleling his own term ‘Natural Selection’. Which phrase?

2. As a concept, this dates back to 1960 when John McCarthy opined that “computation may someday be organized as a public activity”. The first attempt at deriving commercial value out of this concept was made by Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame. Name the term.

3. Which term in psychology was coined by Alfred Adler?

4. This is a phenomenon observed in animals which do not have a tapetum lucidum. It is caused by the circulation of blood in the choroid, which nourishes the eye, and also depends on the amount of melanin being present behind the retina. So the effect is more pronounced in albinos. Which phenomenon?

Zed