Voice sounds different when recorded and played back

Sound can reach the inner ear by way of two separate paths, and those paths in turn affect what we perceive. Air-conducted sound is transmitted from the surrounding environment through the external auditory canal, eardrum and middle ear to the cochlea, the fluid-filled spiral in the inner ear. Bone-conducted sound reaches the cochlea directly through the tissues of the head.

When you speak, sound energy spreads in the air around you and reaches your cochlea through your external ear by air conduction. Sound also travels from your vocal cords and other structures directly to the cochlea, but the mechanical properties of your head enhance its deeper, lower-frequency vibrations. The voice you hear when you speak is the combination of sound carried along both paths. When you listen to a recording of yourself speaking, the bone-conducted pathway that you consider part of your “normal” voice is eliminated, and you hear only the air-conducted component in unfamiliar isolation. You can experience the reverse effect by putting in earplugs so you hear only bone-conducted vibrations.

Some people have abnormalities of the inner ear that enhance their sensitivity to this component so much that the sound of their own breathing becomes overwhelming, and they may even hear their eyeballs moving in their sockets.

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Website Designing Tips

Web Design and Usability Tips

1. Response or load time for a website is fairly important. If your site is slow, visitors are likely to go away and it will also be difficult for them to learn new or foreign concepts.
2. Remove the ‘homepage‘ link on the homepage because it can increase navigational confusion. This will make the user doubt that the homepage is indeed the actual homepage.
3. Follow conventions for web design (”blue for hypertext links“) This will allow site visitors to mainly focus on your content instead of using their mental power to learn how to use your website.
4. Fluffy flash designs that do not support real user needs are not recommended because they weaken usability.
5. Splash screens are not useful because it gives the first impression that a website is more concerned with its own image than other user’s problems. Websites need to communicate respect for the user’s time.
6. Website usability tests can be easily performed by getting users to interact with your design while they think out loud. Record their comments and filter it into your quality improvements.
7. Simplicity is Rule #1 for usability. The less features there are available in a design, the less there will be to compete for the user’s attention.
8. Try to mainly rely on typography instead of bloated designs and graphics. The goal is to enhance appearance without delaying the response time. The blandest sites can get the most page views and users.
9. Serve senior web users by making making your website more readable and clickable. Use large text for hypertext links and minimize usage of pull-down menus and moving interface elements.
10. Change the color of visited links. This will allow users to decide where to go next on your website. Links that don’t change color can cause navigational disorientation in users.

Copywriting and Usability Tips

1. Large amounts of text on one webpage do not work well because it makes it difficult for users to extract useful information. “The more you say, the more people tune out your message.”
2. Good copywriting style should be to the point and should not be dominated by internal niche jargon and ‘marketese‘ or marketing sales speak.
3. Write so that lower-literacy users can understand and appreciate your content. Sites which target broad audiences must make lower literacy users a priority.
4. State the most important information in the first two paragraphs because most users will read this material and scan the rest of the article.
5. Split your content into subheadings and use bullet points. Also highlight keywords or important phrases by making them bold.
6. Use brief headlines with strong information-conveying words. People scan headlines and content blurbs in feed readers faster than email newsletters.
7. Do not use tiny font sizes or small text because of it will not work for a large part of the web audience (Teenagers and People in their 40s onwards).
8. A website’s tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Your tagline should communicate your site purpose within the crucial first 10 seconds.
9. Use old and familiar words when writing to be found by search engines. Supplement unique words or madeup phrases with known or legacy words because they are used the most by customers and visitors to your website.
10. The headline must make sense when it is detached from the rest of the content. This is important because online headlines are often used in a list of articles or email programs, which sets it out of context.
11. Make the first word of the headline an information carrying word that will help with scanning. Examples to be used include the name of the concept or company discussed.
12. Do not start your page titles with the same word all the time because it will cause difficulty when scanning a list. Move common terms to the end of the list and place it in brackets.
13. Show numbers as numerals. Numerals will catch the attention of users better because numerals represent facts. “It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.”
14. Blog links should say where they go. This information can be provided in the anchor text or surrounding words. “Life is too short to click on an unknown. Tell people where they’re going and what they’ll find at the other end of the link.”

Content Infrastructure and Usability

1. Do not have a list of links on your sidebar without providing explanations on why each of them are recommended.
2. Navigation and user-interface elements need to be simple so as to allow users to find their way around the website.
3. Online content should be short and includes the use of bulleted lists and highlighted keywords. Write for scannability because users scan, rather than read.
4. Include a editorial focus and direct your visitors to specific material, i.e. Top stories on CNN or Top posts on a blog.
5. Information architectures should not mirror the organization chart and do not use bloated graphics or jargon.
6. Discover the reasons why users visit your website and build your site as a fast and obvious response to these reasons or queries.
7. Local navigation (”see these related products”) should be given more importance than global navigation. A minimalist navigation system should be used to match the user’s model of the information space.
8. Don’t make webpages stand-alone units. They need to connect to related information.
9. Provide interactive content features which allow visitors to do instead or just read. This includes online voting, games, message boards, forums, user submitted content and feedback forms etc. This especially appeals to teenagers.
10. Do not use PDF files because they break reader flow and attention. Only use PDF files for distributing manuals and large documents or reserve it for printing purposes.
11. Optimize your Page titles by using different Page Titles for each page. Page titles are used in taskbars and when users bookmark a site. “Don’t start with words like “The” or “Welcome to” unless you want to be alphabetized under “T” or “W.”
12. Indicate link destination when using within-page links or mailto links. “For example, add a short statement that says something like: “Clicking a link will scroll the page to the relevant section.”
13. Use Breadcrumb navigation. Breadcrumbs offer one-click access to higher site levels, take up very little space and show users their current location as well.
14. Author Biographies should be included for blogs. Users want to know who they are reading and biographies are a simple way to build trust.
15. Highlight Popular Posts. Integrate them in your navigational system or link to your previous articles in newer postings. This is important because you need to provide them with some useful background on the topic or your opinion.
16. Keep your content focused. The more focused your content, the more loyal your readers will be. Building a specialized website allows you to be an authority in your niche.
17. Provide new or follow-up information at the same location of the original information or transaction. For example, if you have a cornerstone and heavily linked article on social voting platforms, you should return to this article to update it with new links to current and future articles on the same topic.

Usability, Monetization and Online Businesses

1. Websites can differentiate themselves from competitors by focusing on visitor needs and figuring out how they access or use data. Differentiation is about being valuable and useful to site visitors.
2. Do not run pop-ups, such as in-content ads or pop-up or pop-in squares because they can often feel intrusive and overwhelming.
3. Good usability will positively translate into profit and will even lead to a very high ROI or Returns on Investment. Nielsen estimates ROI to be around 1000%.
4. Building visitor trust is a big problem that all websites face. Important to affirm the credibility of a website and its respect for user’s rights.
5. Corporate policies which promote usability and user-centered design standards should be essential to all businesses.
6. Have a decent error message that ensures that you don’t lose your user due to programming or server malfunctions.
7. When replying to visitor emails, edit and use subject lines which relate specifically to their query. A good subject line is vital for building stronger relationships with customers or site users.
8. Use confirmation emails and automated messages to close the loop in E-Commerce and other transactions. Tell customers what they need to know. This builds trust by customers for online businesses.
9. To achieve high survey response rates, keep them short and clear. Ensure that the process is quick and painless for users or customers by asking fewer questions and using different surveys for different users.

With due apologies and full credits to dosh dosh dot com
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Merry Christmas !

Here wishing you (yes you who is taking pains to read this blog) a Merry Christmas ! We hope you do have a wonderful time and pray that you have a wonderful year ahead too !

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Hindus not at fault

The Hindu Rate Of Wrath

(An article by Francois Gautier written for OutlookIndia dot com on November 10, 2008)

Is there such a thing as 'Hindu terrorism', as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur for the recent Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign correspondents—a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and non-Hindu, I do hope I'll be given some credit for my opinions, which are not the product of my parents' ideas, my education or my atavism, but garnered from 25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le Journal de Geneve and Le Figaro).

In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo features on kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the true spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million villages possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your diversity, whether you are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or Chinese. It is this Hinduness that makes the Indian Christian different from, say, a French Christian, or the Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim. I also learnt that Hindus not only believed that the divine could manifest itself at different times, under different names, using different scriptures (not to mention the wonderful avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st century religious strife) but that they had also given refuge to persecuted minorities from across the world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, and today, Tibetans. In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions.

You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups like SIMI, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that most of these communal incidents often involve persons from the same groups—often Dalits and tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity and others not.

However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no Muslim was killed in the process; compare this to the 'vengeance' bombings of 1993 in Bombay, which wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet the Babri Masjid destruction is often described by journalists as the more horrible act of the two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister of Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed to have gone off in a Muslim locality of Bombay.

I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this so-called Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at the receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which crucified Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the Haj. They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity through inducements and financial traps, see a harmless 84-year-old swami and a sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are blasphemed.

So sometimes, enough is enough.At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed, should not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices be heard.

There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet. They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities in the world today. Can you call them terrorists?

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Bad Show by Media in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

Mumbai, India was a terrorist target on the 26th of November 2008 where multiple locations were hit and which resulted in around 200 people dead and twice as many injured due to bullets, grenades and bombs. This may have been as an action hollywood thriller except for the fact that this happened in real. But perhaps in trying to cover the events live, the media did outdo what it was supposed to do. Showing what action to save the situation was being taken is what everyone was interested in knowing across the country and the world. But showing commandoes going in from on entrace or showing commandoes landing on top of the building from a helicopter and the like in fact resulted in directly on indirectly helping the terrorists to shift their locations or get alerted with the type of rescue was a spoilsport. In fact such activities should have been barred to help the armed forces, commandoes and police do a better job. The terrorists were somehow informed of what was happening by some persons watching the television live broadcasts. Let the media learn when to censor and when not. This was a situation like broadcasting live a RAPE taking place. Was it not RAPE ? Rape of the security of the country and its innocent people and innocent tourists ? Better watch your step dear Media Men. You did a good job but overdid it. Each of the channels. Hope we never have a situations like this again.

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