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Users will simply have to think of what they want to say and a voice synthesizer will translate the thoughts into speech almost immediately. They have tested the device on a patient who has " locked- in syndrome", after a stroke stopped neural signals travelling from his brain to the rest of his body.

The rare condition means that the person is aware and awake, but cannot move or communicate because of complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes.

The 26- year- old volunteer was asked to think of a series of basic vowel sounds. The researchers were able to translate these and vocalise them in just a fraction of a second using the new system.

His accuracy increased with each practice session from 45 per cent to 89 per cent.

Scientists began the experiment three years ago, when they implanted an electrode in the patient's brain on the boundary of the two regions that govern speech and movement.

Within four months, neurites had grown into the electrode and begun producing neural signals.

Source: Mail Today Implant in brain that could read your mind

So in villages that don't receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular "radio" service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

"I call it the poor man's iTunes," says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India's largest cellular companies. "A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available."<center></center>

The cricket fan without a television or radio can dial up and listen to the latest match live on his phone. Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cell company by subscribers, has a special service that calls hundreds of thousands of farmers every day with recorded messages of weather reports and advice about crops.

Tata Teleservices has a service which lets farmers use their cellphones to control the pumps that water their crops.

Source: Live Mint Cellphone entertainment takes off in rural India

The play's focus is collateral, with the money lender Shylock demanding a particularly onerous form of recompense if his loan wasn't repaid: a pound of flesh. Mr. Geanakoplos, too, finds danger lurking in the assets that back loans. For him, the risk is that investors who can borrow too freely against those assets drive their prices far too high, setting up a bust that reverberates through the economy.

For years, his effort to understand this process didn't draw much interest. Now it does--yet another after-effect of the brutal deflating of the credit bubble. The crisis exposed the inadequacy of economists' traditional tool kit, forcing them to revisit questions many had long thought answered, such as how to tame disruptive boom-and-bust cycles.<center></center>

Mr. Geanakoplos is among a small band of academics offering new thinking about those cycles. A varied group ranging from finance specialists to abstract theorists, they are moving to economic center stage after years on the margins. The goal: Fix the models that encapsulate economists' understanding of the world and serve as policy-making tools at the world's biggest central banks. It is a task that could require a thorough overhaul of the way those models work.

"We could be looking at a paradigm shift," says Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor now at Columbia University.

That shift could change the way central bankers do their job, possibly leading them to wade more deeply into markets. They could, for example, place greater emphasis on the amount of borrowing in the economy, rather than just the interest rates at which borrowing is done. In boom times, that could lead them to restrict how much money various players, ranging from hedge funds to home buyers, can borrow.

Source: Live Mint Crisis compels economists to reach for new paradigm

PRANAV Mistry makes up things as he moves.

And if you were him, this newspaper would be feeding you a live video of Wednesday's top news on a salmon pink backdrop, streamed straight from the studios of ET NOW.

And the smartphone in his pocket would capture live feed from the website and a camera would track his finger using computer-vision techniques while a projector beamed it on to the pink backdrop.

All of it made up by devices costing under $350.

"I now realise that many ideas I came across during my IIT Bombay days are getting done in places like MIT in the US, and everybody is giving a lot of attention," Mistry, who is in Mysore to talk at the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, told ET in an interview.

A PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Media Lab, Mistry, 28, has come a long way from being the president of the Young Scientists Club at hometown, Palanpur, in northern Gujarat. "I come from a middle-class family and have always learnt to work with affordable solutions," he says. Patent application for device filed

Called SixthSense, the prototype is made up of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant-like mobile wearable device while the projector and camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user's pocket via bluetooth. Mistry has filed a patent application for the device.

Source: Economic Times With Easy Tool, Indian Blurs Physical-Digital World Gap

Last Thursday, the management student tweeted, "Trying to decide between a Lenovo or an Acer laptop."

Soon, and much to his surprise, he had a reply from the Chinese computer maker's India arm, Lenovo India Pvt. Ltd. "I only expected some users to respond," he said.

Lenovo got in touch with Kaushik, asked him for his specifications, gave him suggestions on various computer models and a list of authorized dealers from whom he could purchase the laptop. "Lenovo helped with the (purchase) decision," said Kaushik who bought a Lenovo G450 laptop two days after the company reached out to him.
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Lenovo India went on social media's newest and least understood avatar, Twitter, in end-July.

Members on the networking site communicate through messages shorter than 140 characters--a concept that has become a rage globally and continues to grow as users find new applications for it.

"Our expectation was only to listen to customers," said K. Ramakrishnan, country manager, marketing, at Lenovo India.

In less than two months, the company has generated enquiries and translated some of them into sales, for both individuals and bulk buyers.

Several Indian companies are advertising and closely tracking themselves on social media on the Internet--all the content generated on a gamut of blogs, online video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites and even on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Few have been effective.

Source: Live Mint Firms logging into networking sites to connect with customers

Suresh Dumbre's day starts with a text message on his mobile phone. The message, in Marathi, usually comes at 7 am. The 40-year-old vegetable farmer in Dawadi village in Pune reads it aloud: Cabbage. Pune: Rs 64 for 10 kg. Mumbai: Rs 80 for 10 kg. Kolhapur: Rs 80 for 10 kg. Now, Dumbre knows how much his cabbages will fetch him in the nearby wholesale markets. He leaves home with his stocks only after reading the message.

Every day, at seven, 100,000 farmers in Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab receive similar messages tailor-made to their specific crop and market requirements. Each of them has paid an average of Rs 50-Rs 100 a month for this service. Reuters Market Light (RML), the SMS-based information service targeted at farmers, was launched two years ago by the $13.4 billion Thomson Reuters Group. "We expect subscriber numbers to touch one million in three years," says RML's Managing Director, Amit Mehra.

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Last Thursday was an eventful day in Dumbre's life. He sold his cabbages at Rs 88 for 10 kg, the highest price they have ever fetched him. Later that evening, at the Sarpanch's office, he describes his experience to others over a cup of chai: A 10 kg sack of cabbages used to fetch him just Rs 25, and if he was really lucky, Rs 35. "I was at the mercy of middlemen who dictated the price." Dumbre became an RML customer barely a month ago and is thankful to his Sarpanch, Hore Jijbhau Manohar, for introducing him to RML. "The daily price updates have helped me make a profit of Rs 500," he says with a smile.

Apart from market alerts, Dumbre also gets weather and temperature alerts, fertiliser prices and technology tips on his phone. Bantu Desai, a grape farmer in Nashik grasps for words as he recalls how an RML weather alert once helped him save Rs 2 lakh. "Humidity is disastrous for grapes. An RML message warned me that humidity would be high in Nashik. I quickly bought a humidity-cover spray and saved my crops." Another farmer, Vilas Todkar, was not so lucky. He had not subscribed to any such alerts and says that he lost crops worth about Rs 4 lakh.

RML is trying to reach out to as many farmers as it can, says Amit Mehra. It is now all set to roll out services in other states, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. "I believe this service could lead to (cumulative) savings of $5-6 billion," he says confidently. Mehra describes RML as a social enterprise initiative from the house of Thomson Reuters. "We wanted to take a lead in offering market solutions that have an impact on the society, and yet, are profitable."

Source: business.outlookindia.com SMS Farming

Schools are adding and revamping classes on the meltdown, its roots and consequences. Professors say they want students to avoid repeating mistakes blamed for the blow-up.

Among the class lessons: Question assumptions behind financial models. Probe for better information about complex products. Don't let greed motivate decisions. Better understand the role of regulatory agencies and governments.

Schools began introducing these themes last school year, but now are incorporating them more systematically. "It would be a mistake to go into the classroom in today's world and not offer very serious reflection of these issues," says Stuart Gabriel, a finance professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Students need "an understanding of the profound earthquake that has rumbled through these areas."

A leading topic at many campuses: financial modeling.

As a result of the crisis, professional investors and analysts were criticized for not adequately considering potential flaws in the assumptions behind their models.

Source: Live Mint M.B.A Lessons That Fit The Times