Sixth Sense to Merge the Digital and Real World

If you have the movie Minority Report and thought the technology that Tom Cruise uses to interact with the computers was cool and wish you had access to a similar technology, then your wait might be over soon.



If the technology which is a prototype, can do things that are featured in the video, the gap between the digital world and real world would be further narrowed. Just cool stuff.....

Link obtained from Churumuri

You Dont Need a Title to be a Leader

With Lok Sabha elections fast approaching, the political scene is India is heating up. Every party wants to projects its candidate as the next prime minister. First it was NCP turn, projecting Indian cricket chief and current agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar as its Prime Ministerial candidate. Now it is the turn of the BSP.

In the latest political developments in the ever changing world of Indian politics, Ms Mayawati wants to join the Third Front only if she is projected as the Prime Ministerial candidate of this hurriedly clobbered coalition of parties. Her reasoning behind the claim to the post of the Prime Minister is “based on the fact that she is the leader of the largest state in the country and more popular than any other leader in the state”.

Granted she is the leader of the largest state in the country. But India does not just comprise of Uttar Pradesh. There are other states in the union and Mayawati may have forgotten about that in her hunger for power.

The so called leaders can play all the shenanigans they want, but ultimately it is the citizens of India who will decide who they want to be Prime Minister, be it ManMohan Singh, LK Advani, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Deve Gowda.

Maybe Ms Mayawati should read You Don't Need a Title to be a Leader just to put things in prespective.

A Case Study in Bad Marketing

The below video produced by Rafael, an Israeli Defense Company, is a case study in "What Not to Do When You are Marketing a Product". For three long minutes you are not sure what this video is about.
This video was shown at Aero India 2009 recently.



After watching this video, if I were AK Antony I would not want to trust the defenses of my country to whatever the company is trying to sell, however good the product may be.

Holi Hai

Today is holi, the festival of color. And no song captures the mood of Holi better then Rang Barse from the film Silsila

Has Lalu Yadav Really Turned around the Indian Railways?

The amazing turnaround of the Indian Railways from a loss making entity to a profitable venture has caught the eyes of the the premier business schools, Harvard, Warton and IIM-A, in the world. Writing for the American Magazine, Graeme Woods writes,

Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting surpluses in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.

But has this turnaround been real and are there costs associated with the turnaround that we dont know about. For example, on the day that Lalu Yadav presented his last Railway budget before a new government takes office, one of the trains derailed killing about 16 people and injuring scores of others.
1. So in the name of profitability has safety of the railways been compromised?
2. What happens when the new government comes to power with somebody other then Lalu as the rail minister?
3. Will there be a smooth transition of power and will the turnaround continue?
4. What about the sordid state of affairs in the maintenance of railway equipment as highlighted by the picture below?
5. Is this the image of the developing India that the railways wants to project to the world?

Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party

CPAC, the stage which has featured previous Presidents including Ronald Regan as key speakers, hosted Rush Limbaugh as the keynote speaker this year.

In response to this speech, Tim Egan writes on his blog:

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

And, of course, let us never forget that the bailouts of banks and insurance companies were initiated by the Republican president Limbaugh defended for eight years.

Read the full post by Tim Egan at Fears of a Clown

Keeping Wall Street Honest

The news for the economy gets dire by the day. Gone are the heady days when the Dow Jones was 14000. As of yesterdays close, the Dow Jones was below 6600, the lowest it has been in 12 years. The last 15 months have changes the face of Wall Street: Lehman Brothers bankrupt, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch acquired by other companies, the once giant insurance company AIG hanging on by a thread with billions of dollars in taxpayers baliout and the once behemoth among banks CitiBank virtually on the brink.

Now the question is how did we get here and why did so many so called smart minds on Wall Street and 24/7 business news channels not anticipate it? Jon Stewart provides his take on how one 24/7 business news channel failed to do its job and keep Wall Street honest.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

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