Vivekanand and ambiguity.......!

Yesterday I was reading a Marathi news paper "TARUN BHARAT".It had a special section about the stories and one of them was about the Swami Vivekananda. Story was some thing like.... leave it I will tell the story later....first see how the sentence is ambiguous in meaning.
Sentence: "Give him what you want" or "What you want, give it to him".
The above sentence is always taken as ...ex: you are told to give ur friend a pen or book. You give him book, as you wanted to give him that.
But there is another meaning to the sentence "Give him what you want" and that goes like this...
ex: you are asked what u want from the pen and book? say ur answer is pen. then you should give him pen and not the book.
Logically say ...what you want=X ..then..... give him what you want= give him X.
Isn't it funny?


And this sentence relates to the Vivekananda as:

Once Vivekananda and his friend had gone to the Vivekananda's home for the lunch break from school. The friend was from a poor family and was very hungry. Vivekananda took him to home and asked mother to give them some thing to eat. she was engaged in some work and said go and take LADDUS from the dabba. She actualy said,"There are two laddus in dabba, give him what you want." And Vivekananda gave him the bigger one took a smaller for himself. Mother had seen this and when vivekanand came back to home she asked him,"didn't you liked the laddu?"
He told he liked it and his friend too. Then she asked," why did you gave him the bigger one and took the smaller?" Intelligent Vivekanand replied ,"You had told me to give him what I want, I wanted the bigger one and So I gave it to him."

Salute to great Vivekanand!

unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.

A baby is to be monitored by a network of microphones and video cameras for 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.

Deb Roy at MIT's Media Lab, US, devised the unusual project and even volunteered his own family as its guinea pigs. Since his newborn son left hospital nine months ago, Roy's whole family has been monitored by 14 microphones and 11 one-megapixel "fish-eye" video cameras, attached to the ceilings of each room in their house.

By capturing a continuous stream of data about his son's experiences, Roy hopes to better understand the early development of language.

How babies go from gurgling at birth to fluent speech by the age of three is hotly debated. Most psycholinguists agree that simply listening to speech is not enough for a child to piece together the basic rules of a language. Yet they still argue about the importance of specific "language genes" and other non-verbal environmental stimuli.

Deleted scenes

In an effort to identify these extra environmental cues researchers have previously recorded mothers and babies playing, both at home and in the laboratory. But following babies in such an unnatural environment provides a distorted picture of their experiences, says Roy, and makes it difficult to tell whether changes in a child's speech are sudden or merely appear that way because of gaps between recordings.

To provide a more complete picture Roy has developed a surveillance network at his own home in a project dubbed "speechome". The cameras are switched on between 8am and 10pm each day and will capture 85 per cent of the baby’s waking hours up to his third birthday. For occasional privacy, Roy and his wife can switch off cameras or delete recordings using wall-mounted touch displays. A selection of video clips of the surveillance set up can be viewed here.

Footage recorded by the cameras is automatically transmitted to MIT for analysis. Computer algorithms identify activity in specific sections of each room and collect these into so-called "behaviour fragments". Human analysts then classify specific acts, such as making coffee or doing the dishes.

Unparalleled scale

Comparing footage with early sounds made by Roy's son should help his team better understand the stimuli crucial to language development. Algorithms are also being developed to automatically transcribe speech and recognise people and objects in each room.

"It allows us to put a microscope on the day-by-day and hour-by-hour changes that go into learning a language," says Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at Harvard University, who is an adviser to the project. "Nothing remotely on this scale has ever been done."

If successful, Roy says the project could lead to better strategies for diagnosing and treating language disorders. It could even spawn computer programs that can learn to how to speak for themselves, he adds.

Roy is aware that the project raises ethical issues. But ultimately he thinks he may be providing his son with an incredible gift. "He might be the first person to have a memory that goes back to birth," he says.

Dear All,We are pleased to inform you that C-DAC Mumbai is organizing the National Seminar and BOSS Workshop towards "Language Literate Computers" from 25-27 March 2008, at Bhubaneswar, Orissa. Anybody interested are welcome to attend.Please find the details at:<http://www.cdacmumb ai.in/index. php/cdacmumbai/ research_ and_publications/research_ groups/lcg_ language_ computing/ lcg_events/ llc_2008>