Aakash tablet goes on sale for Rs 2500 online

DataWind, the Canadian company that is manufacturing Aakash, has started the online booking and pre booking of the much anticipated low cost Android tablet. Online booking is for students' version of the tablet and pre booking is for UbiSlate 7, the upgraded version of Aakash.


Students' version of Aakash will be available for Rs 2,500 and will be delivered in seven days. The commercial version, UbiSlate 7 is priced at Rs 2,999. The payment mode for both the tablets is cash on delivery.


The commercial version of Aakash tablet will be powered by Android 2.3 and will have a resistive touchscreen, Cortex A8-700 MHz processor and graphics accelerator HD video processor, 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of internal memory.


Other specifications are a one standard USB port, 3.5 mm audio jack, a 7 inch display with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, resistive touchscreen, GPRS and WiFi support.


"The improved version of Aakash tablet will be available in retail outlets by January end," a spokesperson of DataWind told The Mobile Indian.


The tablet was to be made available in retail stores by the end of November. "The delay in the availability of the tablet has been due to upgradation in the tablet and some unforeseen delay in manufacturing," the spokesperson said.


To book and prebook student and commercial versions respectively of Aakash tablet, users have to visit DataWind's website and fill up the required form. In case of booking they will get a booking ID and a message which will state, "You will shortly receive an email confirmation from our support team with further details."


In case of pre booking users will get a confirmation message which will state, "The commercial version of the Akash UbiSlate 7 would be launched in early weeks of December. After the commercial launch we would get in touch with you to deliver your device as soon possible."


As a matter of fact, the confirmation message a reader will see is factually incorrect as The mobile Indian had reported earlier the Aakash tablet will be available only by January end.


Datawind has however not cleared how it is going to establish the identity of students who will book the cheapest version of Aakash tablet. When The Mobile Indian contacted spokesperson of Datwind he said, "Anyone can book the student version of Aakash tablet."


This defeats the purpose of providing students an affordable tablet as now anyone can place an order to get the tablet. Interestingly, now it has been revealed that the government has procured only 10,000 Aakash tablets for distribution in schools and colleges of the initial 1 lakh proposed.


It looks like the company was in a hurry to start the online booking process and has not done not proper homework before staring it.

MIT builds camera that can capture at the speed of light (video)

A team from the MIT  media lab has created a camera with a "shutter speed" of one trillion exposures per second -- enabling it to record light itself traveling from one point to another. Using a heavily modified Streak Tube (which is normally used to intensify photons into electron streams), the team could snap a single image of a laser as it passed through a soda bottle. In order to create the slow-motion film in the video we've got after the break, the team had to replicate the experiment hundreds of times. The stop-motion footage shows how light bounces through the bottle, collecting inside the opaque cap before dispersing. The revolutionary snapper may have a fast shutter but the long time it takes to process the images have earned it the nickname of the "the world's slowest fastest camera."

Microsoft launches ExcelMashup.com, looks to make spreadsheets both hip and exciting

Most of our day jobs aren't nearly as amusing as life at Wernham Hogg and Excel  doesn't make things any more exciting. But, if you're looking to spice up your spreadsheets, Microsoft's ExcelMashup.com may be just what you've been waiting for. The site lets you create apps of your very own using Redmond's various products. For example, you can combine some Excel JavaScript, a workbook stored on SkyDrive  and a little HTML to create apps that run in a browser. Add a dash of Bing  Maps and you've got a Destination Explorer! For the uninitiated, there are tutorials and for the showoffs a shared code space. There's even nifty Interactive Code Snippets for trying out bits of script before adding them to your own project. Want to make the cute girl in reception notice you? Coding your own apps in Excel won't help, but it'll probably land you in less trouble than putting Gareth's stapler in Jello again.

Sony A77 reviewed: A 24.3 megapixel game-changer?

It's been a long time coming, but the patience has paid off with Sony's A77 finally getting its first pro review. Sure, the $1,400 cost of entry (body only) will weigh heavily on even the most enthusiastic cameraman conscious. But, what's a few hundred dollars when it comes to a camera that Popular Photography says has "radically changed the world of DSLRs"? It seems only the rival Canon 7D holds a candle to this would-be king, besting Sony's latest when it comes to noise and performance at higher ISOs. However, the A77 wins on its all-around charm, with a 24.3 megapixel Exmor APS-C sensor, articulated LCD screen, world-first OLED EVF and impressive video-shooting chops. Video-wise, that top dollar gets you a high-end performance of 60fps at 1920 x 1080 with the fast phase-detection auto-focus we've also seen on its predecessors, the Sony A55 and A33.

Neuroimaging Of Brain Shows Who Spoke To A Person And What Was Said

Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices.

 In their Science article "'Who' is Saying 'What'? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech," the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique 'neural fingerprint' in the listener's brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.

Seven study subjects listened to three different speech sounds (the vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/), spoken by three different people, while their brain activity was mapped using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI). With the help of data mining methods the researchers developed an algorithm to translate this brain activity into unique patterns that determine the identity of a speech sound or a voice. The various acoustic characteristics of vocal cord vibrations (neural patterns) were found to determine the brain activity.

Just like real fingerprints, these neural patterns are both unique and specific: the neural fingerprint of a speech sound does not change if uttered by somebody else and a speaker's fingerprint remains the same, even if this person says something different.

Moreover, this study revealed that part of the complex sound-decoding process takes place in areas of the brain previously just associated with the early stages of sound processing. Existing neurocognitive models assume that processing sounds actively involves different regions of the brain according to a certain hierarchy: after a simple processing in the auditory cortex the more complex analysis (speech sounds into words) takes place in specialised regions of the brain. However, the findings from this study imply a less hierarchal processing of speech that is spread out more across the brain.

The research was partly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO): Two of the four authors, Elia Formisano and Milene Bonte carried out their research with an NWO grant (Vidi and Veni). The data mining methods were developed during the PhD research of Federico De Martino (doctoral thesis defended at Maastricht University