App that Will Let You Donate Your Voice!

VocaliD aims to give a voice to those who cannot speak by customising the voice of people who can.Very soon, speech-impaired patients will not be stuck with just the generic computerised voices such as physicist Stephen Hawking in order to be heard by others. A research team, that includes an Indian-origin scientist at the periphery is currently working on an app that may allow people to donate their voice to those who have severe speech impediments owing to stroke, Parkinson’s or cerebral palsy etc.

The programme: VocaliD aims to give a voice to those who cannot speak by customising the voice of people who can into synthetic speech. “For these individuals, this is the only way that they interact with people around them,” Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University in Boston and VocaliD’s co—director was quoted as saying, referring to generic computerised voices currently available. However, all this is going to change soon. 

Under VocaliD, the researchers first listen to the limited sounds that their patients are able to produce. This gives them an idea regarding the sound of the person’s speech: whether it’s high—pitched, raspy or breathy. A surrogate is then selected, who is similar in age and sex to the patient. This surrogate then donates his voice, by reading through thousand sample sentences, sourced from various books. His/her voice is then blended with the patient’s and broken down into tiny units that make up speech. This is achieved by a software tool called ModelTalker. “You probably wouldn’t recognise it as having come from the donor any more,” Timothy Bunnell of the University of Delaware in Wilmington, who created ModelTalker and is also VocaliD’s co—director was quoted as saying. 

HOW TO SET VIDEO AS DESKTOP WALLPAPER

STEPS :

1.Open VLC Media Player.
2. Then Go to Tools > Preference
Or press
CTRL + P and Selecet Video from
left panel
3. Then Choose DirectX video
output from
output dropdown list.
4. Save the changes ans restart
VLC Media
Player.
5. Play any video you would like
to set as
your desktop wallpaper.
6. Then click on Video and select
DirectX
Wallpaper from the dropdown
list.
7. Now Minimize vlc player and
you will see
your video running on your
desktop as
wallpaper.
8.If you want your default
wallpaper back
then uncheck DirectX Wallpaper
from video
dropdown list.

Hope you like this simple trick!!

How To Block Websties without any Software

Steps:
1] Browse C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers
\etc
2] Find the file named "HOSTS"
3] Open it in notepad
4] Under "127.0.0.1 localhost" Add 127.0.0.2
www.sitenameyouwantblocked.com , and that
site will no longer be accessable.
5] Done!
-So-
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.2 www.blockedsite.com
For every site after that you want to add, just
add "1" to the last number in the internal ip
(127.0.0.2)
IE: 127.0.0.3 www.anywebsitetoblock.com
127.0.0.4 www.anywebsitetoblock.com
127.0.0.5 www.anywebsitetoblock.com

The Odds of Finding Life and Love | It's Okay to be Smart | PBS Digital ...

The science of why there are roughly 871 special someones for you out there.

Since the dawn of recorded history, poets and philosophers have ponderedthe nature of love and, in recent times, so have scientists. But can the concrete lens of science really be applied to something as seemingly abstract and amorphous as amore? Joe Hanson, mastermind of the wonderful science-plus compendium It’s Okay To Be Smart, has a new online show in partnership with PBS and the latest episode explores what the search for extraterrestrial life can teach us about our odds of finding that much-romanticized human soulmate, using the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, and a lesson in love from Carl Sagan — who, with his timelessly magnificent Golden Record love story, should know a thing or two about the wisdom of the heart.

Joe ends with a beautiful quote from Sagan’s 1985 debut novel,

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

3 Simple Ways to Catch a Liar in the Act

Two people want to sell you something. One of them is lying.

The first tells you calmly, “I promise you’re going to love this.”

The second is much more animated. He exclaims: “You’re going to [bleeping] love this. It’s [bleeping] amazing, totally unbelievable, [bleeping] going to blow you away. Everybody loves it. You’re going to love it, too.”

Which one is more likely to be telling the truth? According to researchers cited by Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, three verbal cues give bald-faced liars away.

How did the researchers come to this conclusion? They saw what happened when they brought in 104 people to play something called “the ultimatum game.”

The rules are simple: One person is given a secret sum of money. He’s introduced to a second person, and he has to propose to split what he has been given with that second person. The second player, who has no way of knowing for sure how much the first person has been given, can either accept the division as proposed or reject it. If the receiving player rejects the offer, he gets a token sum, but the offering player gets nothing.

Thus, the person with the money has incentives to make his offer seem reasonable, and also possibly to bluff. As the report further explained:

[E]ach game included two minutes of videotaped conversation in which the receiver could grill the allocator with questions, prior to deciding whether to accept or reject the offer. This provided ample opportunity for the allocator to tell the truth about the money, lie, or try to avoid the subject altogether.

“We wanted to create a situation where people could choose to lie or not lie, and it would happen naturally,” says the study’s lead author, Lyn M. Van Swol, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Watching how the players interacted, Van Swol and her colleagues at the University ofWisconsin and Harvard concluded that players exhibited three easy “tells” when they were lying.

1. Verbosity

The first tell was simply that the liars tended to use a lot more words to make their points than the truth-tellers did.

“Just like Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the lie,” says Van Swol. The only caveat here is that people who deceived simply by omitting facts, rather than offering untrue ones, also tended to use fewer words. So don’t consider this tell foolproof.

2. Profanity

It turns out that people who swear more often tend to lie more often, too. In the study, this was even more pronounced after the receiving player challenged them.

“We think this may be due to the fact that it takes a lot of cognitive energy to lie,” Van Swol says. “Using so much of your brain to lie may make it hard to monitor yourself in other areas.”

3. Projection

The final major tell was that liars tended to use third-person pronouns more often (“he,” “she,” and “they”), presumably instead of making offers and justifications in the first person (“me” or “I”).

“This is a way of distancing themselves from and avoiding ownership of the lie,” Van Swol explains. Liars also used more complex sentence structure.

In case you’re wondering about the human-nature part of this experiment, the researchers divulged that 70 percent of the allocators told the truth about how much money they had received.

Some analysts suggest that humans have reached the peak of athletic performance and we won't evolve to be any better than we are now.

Ponzo illusion

When the moon is close to the horizon, your brain makes it look larger than it really is, due to the Ponzo illusion.

Want to make free calls in INDIA? Try this service

BANGALORE: For those who do not mind the annoyance of advertisements right in the middle of a conversation, a team of engineers in Bangalore has a free voice calling service for any part of the world. Termed FreeKall, it brings voice-over-internet-like services to those withoutinternet access.

The idea, which was thought up in the dorm of M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, was launched as a service last Saturday. Still in beta, or testing phase, nearly four lakh FreeKalls have been made so far.

"The response has been phenomenal. Our servers crashed about seven times and we had to bring it back up," said Yashas Shekar, a 23-year-old who cofounded the company with college-mates Vijayakumar Umaluti and Sandesh Eshwarappa. "On the flip side Sandesh, and Vijayakumar have not slept since Saturday," chuckled Shekar, a former Godrej Interio employee who shut his first venture, a web development firm, to concentrate on this startup.

The service, in some ways, is reminiscent of the trunk calls of the last century, except that the cloud infrastructure does the job instead of an operator. To make a FreeKall a user dials number 080-67683693 and the call is disconnected after just one ring. Following this, the system calls back the user, and an automated system prompts the user to dial the desired number. Lo and behold, the call is connected. The system can currently support 10,000 requests per second. If it goes beyond that, it will not be returned.

"I must say, someone has thought out of the box. This can be truly disruptive if it works out well," said Hemant Joshi, who oversees the telecom practice at consulting firm Deloitte.

FreeKall makes money by making people listen to advertisements. So, when the call is connected, the user hears an advertisement instead of a ringing tone. And at intervals of two minutes, the caller and the called party will have to pause the conversation and hear an advertisement for soaps, shampoos and the like.

For now, unregistered users can make calls that last three minutes. For those who register, the conversations can last 12 minutes. In about a month, there will be no limit on the amount of time a person can FreeKall. International calls will be possible in about a month, once legal clearances are obtained.

The company is aiming for 10 million calls a day in India and expects revenue of $30 million ( 185 crore) by the end of the next fiscal. It plans to take its business to Africa soon.

Freekall has tieups with a media agency called Streetsmart Media Solutions for the advertisements.

The idea originated in 2008 when Umaluti, 25, thought of facilitating free calls, albeit manually, through a call centre. The other cofounders, with their experience in web development, looked at a cloud-based implementation and decided to revisit the college project idea last year.

FreeKall has received 10 lakh in seed capital from Ranjith Cherickel, a telecom professional who has worked at Nokia Siemens Networks, Verizon Wireless and Skype. "I expect them to expand internationally in less than a year. This will work well in developing countries and potentially in high-tariff developed markets," said Cherickel.

Although there are several applications that provide free calls, the 3G infrastructure in India is not robust enough to support calls at all time and all places. What FreeKall is doing is trying to tap into areas that services such as Skype and Viber are yet to penetrate.

"The company should move fast in terms of engaging with advertising networks and digital agencies and consider how best to get IP protection. A lot depends on them showing value to advertisers by profiling users accurately and delivering relevant targeted ads," said Ravi Gururaj, chairman of Nasscom Product Council.

By launching an app in about a quarter, the company is also looking to capture the smartphone market and minimise the number of steps to make a call.

Shekar knows that smartphone adoption and internet connectivity will only increase. "But it's not going to happen in the next five years at least. By then, we would have captured a big market," he said.

Joshi of Deloitte warned of problems such as heavy loads and connectivity problems for cloud telephony. As for telecom service providers, for whom a major chunk of the revenue originates from voice calls, this will not be disruptive in the short term, said Joshi.

"Those who use this service will mostly be prepaid users, and the average revenue per user is small enough."

THE NUMBER : 080-67683693