Laxmi Das, the Indian beggar who has opened a bank account. Wow!

When 60-year-old Laxmi Das recently deposited her earnings in an Indian bank in Calcutta, it was a bit more than the usual mundane money transfer. 

Ms Das handed over 91kg (200lb) of coins - the produce of 44 years of hard begging - enabling her to open an account and qualify for a credit card. 

Laxmi began begging near Hatibagan, a busy road junction in northern Calcutta, at the age of 16. 

Officials say she could have saved as much as 30,000 rupees ($692).

"She would spend frugally from her daily collection and save the coins. She was very possessive about them," says her sister Asha. 

Ms Das saved the coins in iron buckets covered with jute bags at her home in a shanty town near the crossing. 

In all, she collected four buckets of coins - of all denominations - some even minted as far back as 1961 and now clearly out of date. More...

See also: How to send an SMS in India!!!

And this: Desiring a son, 70-year old Indian woman gives birth to twins...

And this: The Question Box, rural India's Oracle...

Barack Obama related to Warren Buffett? No surprise there; the elite families are all connected by blood-lines...

Maybe now we know why President Barack Obama, leader of the free world, and Warren Buffett, "oracle of Omaha," get along so well.

They're related.

So says the research of Ancestry.com, the online genealogical enterprise that has gained a name for making long-lost connections.

Obama and Buffett are even closer than Obama and actor Brad Pitt, whom Ancestry.com pegged for ninth cousins a couple of years ago. More...

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Daily CEO pay now exceeds U.S. workers annual salary...

U.S. corporate CEO salaries rose 16 percent in 2012 according to a new report from research firm Equilar. Top salary: Larry Ellison of Oracle - over $96 million. Top exit bonus: James Mulva of ConocoPhillips - $156 million.

Average salary for the CEOs of the top 200 U.S. companies with revenue of over $1 billion was $5.3 million. The big money, however, is paid out in stock and options which added another $9 million to the median compensation package for the CEOs.

Worst off were the workers at these companies whose median pay is now at a historic low compared to the CEOs. In 1965, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO made 20 times the average worker. Now the ratio is 273 to 1 ie the average CEO's daily salary is now greater than the annual salary of their workers.

Ellison did even better - he was paid the equivalent of the average U.S. salary of $45,790 every single hour last year.

“So much for the idea that shareholders were finally getting through to corporate boards on the topic of reining in pay,” writes Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times. The salary survey was commissioned by her newspaper. Full story...

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India hungry for everyday Internet access...

India has built a global reputation as a major player in information technology, but lack of Internet access among its own citizens is posing a threat to long-term growth.

One typical young Indian frustrated by the country's poor Internet facilities is Srishti Sharma, 18, a student at the elite Lady Shri Ram college in the capital New Delhi.

"There are times when you desperately need to do some research using the net, and the only place you can go to is the library which is packed since there are only about ten computers there," she said.

Instead Sharma lugs her laptop out of the college grounds to Internet cafes and pays for access to a wi-fi connection.

"Almost every day I have to leave campus to do my work. It's really irritating, you end up wasting so much time going back and forth," the political science student said.

 In many ways, Sharma is among the lucky ones as India's 1.2 billion people scramble to reap the benefits of the country's economic transformation. More...

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Google’s free wifi at Indian railway stations is better than most of the country’s paid services...

Google’s free internet at Indian railway stations is turning out to be a big hit.

In September 2015, Google announced a plan to install high-speed wifi at 400 train stations, in support of prime minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign. The project went live in January, when the bustling Mumbai Central station in India’s financial capital became India’s first railway stop to provide free, high-speed public wifi.

Six months in, Google says the service is available at 19 stations—and has already been used by 1.5 million Indians. By the end of this year, Google plans to have wifi installed at 100 of the country’s railway stations.

The free public internet is in bigger demand in smaller cities than in larger ones, given the poor connectivity of high-speed broadband outside of the major metropolitan centers. “Per capita consumption of data in tier II cities far exceeds the consumption we are seeing in tier I cities,” Google said.

In Mumbai, 100,000 people made use of the public wifi connection within a week of its debut. But it didn’t even take a day to attract that many users when the service launched in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of the eastern Indian state of Odisha. “We’re seeing similar usage patterns emerge in tier II cities like Patna, Jaipur, Vishakhapatnam,” Google said. Full story...

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How Google, Facebook, Microsoft avoid paying billions in taxes...

The top corporate income tax level in the United States is 35 percent. In the United Kingdom, it's 28 percent. But in Ireland, it's only 12.5 percent, and in Bermuda there's no corporate income tax at all. That means multinational companies that shift their earnings through Ireland or Bermuda can save billions of dollars in taxes each year.

On today's Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions — and in some cases, billions — of dollars by taking advantage of offshore tax havens.

In October, Drucker reported that Google had saved $3.1 billion in taxes in the past three years by shifting the majority of its foreign profits into accounts in Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda using financial techniques called "the Dutch Sandwich" and "the Double Irish" arrangement. Basically, he says, Google credited its Irish office with the majority of its non-U.S. sales revenue — and then shuttled that money through various subsidiaries located in Ireland and other countries to save billions in taxes. More...

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Florida girl uses computer to save flood victims! Cool!

Tiffany Monk, 16, stood outside her Melbourne trailer during Tropical Storm Fay on Thursday and noticed floodwaters slowly overtaking her community on Eau Gallie Boulevard.

"There were people trapped in their home," Monk said. "Water was rising and there was no way out. (There were) people with oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and there was no way out. They needed help."

Monk snapped photos of Groveland Mobile Home Park and then sent e-mails.

"You really have to see this," she said in e-mails she sent along with photos of tires floating by in her road. "We are trapped in. Literally, there is no way out."

"Finally, I e-mailed the radio station 107.1 and I was like, 'Nobody seems to be coming in here to help us,'" Monk said. "We need help and we are trapped in. And then 20 minutes after that, news people started showing up here."

Emergency personnel realized the severity of the situation and sent large trucks to pull out the elderly and disabled people who had a few feet of standing water inside their trailers.

Many were taken to the shelter at Sherwood Elementary School in Melbourne. Police then took some people back into their homes to save personal items.

"I was just trying to help out the best I could," Monk said. "I've learned that if you actually take action then someone might listen to you."

"She was worried about the elderly down there and nobody was doing anything," Monk's mother, Connie said. "So, she decided to get on the computer and see what I can get done."

Source

See also:

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The anti-iPad: India releases world's cheapest computer at £22...

India has unveiled the world's cheapest computer device, a £22 tablet, and hailed it as the 'anti-iPad' which will help millions of poor people around the world join the digital revolution.

Ministers declared the "Aakash" – Hindi for "sky" – a "defining moment" for India and the world, and said the device will accelerate the decline of "digital illiteracy," boost educational resources, and reduce corruption by allowing users to access government services online.

 The seven-inch tablet was developed by a UK-based technology company in partnership with the Indian government. Two years ago Indian officials presented a "$10 laptop" which turned out to be a storage device. Full story...

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In 2015, tech billionaires pursued anti-aging and cheating death like never before...

Silicon Valley came up with a lot of things this year, like creating an on demand pot-to-front-door service, and devising a sparkly way of destroying enemies by shipping them glitter—but one thing it’s still working on is figuring out how humans can live forever. Research into surpassing life expectancy norms has become the pet project of tech billionaires, with entrepreneurs from Mark Zuckerberg to Sergey Brin writing out million-dollar checks to fund their quest.

The list of entrepreneurs jumping on the death-defying bandwagon has grown rapidly over the past few years, creating a veritable who’s who of generous donors. Notorious within the ranks are Peter Thiel, PayPal’s co-founder and developer of Breakout Labs, a funding body for radical research into early-stage science geared toward tackling degenerative diseases; Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who has donated some $430 million to anti-aging pursuits; and Paul Glenn, a venture capitalist who doles out grants to lab researchers at the likes of Harvard and MIT to investigate “the mechanisms of biological aging.”

“When I interviewed Glenn at his home, there was a book entitled Reversing Human Aging on the coffee table,” Adam Leith Gollner wrote in The Daily Beast two years ago. “I asked him how he felt about that idea—about making the Benjamin Button fairy tale real, in effect. ‘I’m of the anything-is-possible school,’ Glenn answered.” Full story...

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Outsourcing education? British students get maths tutition from teachers ... in India!!!

A primary school has hived off maths tuition to graduates in India because they are cheaper to hire than home-grown teachers.

Pupils at the North London school are taught online by tutors 4,000 miles away.

The company behind the service expects more schools to follow suit as the public spending squeeze takes hold.

Moving back-office work or customer service centres to the subcontinent is commonplace in the private sector. But this is believed to be the first time it has happened in teaching. More...

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From no doctor to e-doctors in rural India...

There aren't too many doctors in the village of Hari Ke Kalan, in the Punjab region of northern India. But for $1, residents who bicycle to a new health clinic can get an appointment with a physician appearing on a large-screen television and beamed in over broadband Internet.

The clinic, built by a startup called Healthpoint Services, is one of a network of eight "e-health points" that the for-profit company has built in India as part of a growing effort by entrepreneurs to capitalize on the rapid expansion of cellular and broadband access in the poorest parts of the world. With successes such as text-message-based mobile payments taking off in some countries, many experts see medicine as the next major application of technology in poor nations.

In India, the rural population often has little access to medical services. When villagers get sick, they must either make a costly trip to visit clinics in big cities, take their chances with poorly trained local practitioners, or go to free government clinics that are staffed by physicians only a few hours a week. Full story...

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Paul the psychic octopus stirs up conspiracy theories over his death!!!

The cephalopod oracle certainly made a few enemies with his uncanny knack of predicting the outcome of major football encounters.

There are some in England, Germany and Holland who wanted Paul turned into paella after he predicted defeats for them in the World Cup this year. Perhaps he ended up in the stomach of a disgruntled fan?

Or maybe he was assassinated by Iran? The Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denounced the sea-based soothsayer as a symbol of decadence and decay in the West earlier this year. More...

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Teacher in U.S., students in Haiti! Awesome! Thank you, Internet!

Two dozen Haitian students manage a ragged unison in their stab at English.

"Today we go to school," they pronounce, more or less as one. Their instructor approves and gives the next cue.

"In school I will learn to write."

"In school I will learn to write," the students repeat.

(...)
On this day, the teacher, Justin Purnell, sits 1,300 miles away in Asheville, N.C. The students are packed into a bare-bones classroom in Port-au-Prince, watching and answering via video on a laptop computer propped in front of them. The steamy air carries the whine of a generator running in the makeshift tent camp outside. Full story...
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India's much-hyped $10 laptop is just a ...

At least, this time, almost the entire world - every news outlet, online and offline - got pranked. We are not alone.

For the better part of three days, tech news sites and bloggers were in a tizzy. The Indian government had announced a $ 10 laptop which would be made available to students in India. It had the potential to change education in India for the poor, providing them with access to the internet, information and lessons.

Well, guess what - the $ 10 laptop (which is not even a laptop, or priced at $ 10) has been unveiled. And it is an embarrassment to anyone who bothered to write an article about it. More...

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Meet the world's youngest headmaster, 16-year-old Babar Ali from India! Amazing story...

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He's a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

The story of this young man from Murshidabad in West Bengal is a remarkable tale of the desire to learn amid the direst poverty.

Babar Ali's day starts early. He wakes, pitches in with the household chores, then jumps on an auto-rickshaw which takes him part of the 10km (six mile) ride to the Raj Govinda school. The last couple of kilometres he has to walk.

The school is the best in this part of West Bengal. There are hundreds of students, boys and girls. The classrooms are neat, if bare. But there are desks, chairs, a blackboard, and the teachers are all dedicated and well-qualified. More + video...

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Maoists in India apologise to kids for destroying their schools...

Maoist guerrillas have apologised to students in Bihar for damaging their school buildings and affecting their education.

"Hundreds of copies of the apology have been distributed among schoolchildren. We told them that we were sorry for targeting their schools. We also told them what forced us to target their schools," a Maoist leader told IANS on condition of anonymity.

The letters, written in Hindi, were distributed by the rebels of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) on behalf of the Sone-Ganga-Vindhayanchal zonal committee in their strongholds. More...

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The Question Box, rural India's Oracle...

Given all the clever people who worked in information technology, and all the enthusiasm they had for its potential to empower ordinary citizens, why didn't more of them come up with ways of taking computers to the people that didn't require millions of dollars, miles of cable and man-hours to realise?

It wasn't an idle inquiry. That same month, in the Indian village of Ethida, several hours' drive from New Delhi, the second Question Box came into being.

Like the first, which had opened in September in Phoolpur, another village in the region, it is, essentially, a large tin with a phone inside, and it does exactly what it says. On pressing a button, you are connected to an operator. You ask her a question, she searches on the internet and then tells you the answer. More...

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A VERY expensive getaway: Obama family's separate weekend trips cost at least $2.5 million...

U.S. President Barack Obama cost the taxpayer an estimated $2.5 million after he and his family took separate weekend breaks.

President Obama spent Valentine's weekend in California, where he managed to squeeze in three rounds of golf at a California course owned by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison.

Meanwhile, his wife Michelle and family flew to Aspen in Colorado for a skiing trip on board a separate presidential aircraft.

According to the White House, President Obama flew to San Francisco on Thursday afternoon where he had several events, before taking Saturday, Sunday and Monday off. He delivered a speech at a summit on cyber security before attending a round-table meeting with business leaders. His final official engagement of the weekend was a fundraiser to a Democratic National Committee event at the home of venture capitalist Sandy Robinson.

Guests paid $10,000 for dinner and a photograph with the president or $32,400 to co-chair the fundraiser. Full story...

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Computer in Delhi slum wall leads to million dollar TED prize...

Sugata Mitra on Tuesday was awarded a million-dollar TED Prize to pursue the promise of building schools in the Internet cloud where young minds can learn unfettered by grown-ups.

Mitra's journey to the prestigious TED gathering in the Southern California city of Long Beach began more than a decade ago in Delhi, when he stuck a computer in a hole in a slum wall to see what the children would do.

"I left it to the wolves, so to speak, knowing it would be smashed open and sold," Mitra said of that day in 1999.

"Eight hours later I came back to find them browsing the Internet in English," he recalled. "I realized I had accidentally stumbled onto something universal."

What the physicist-turned-educator seemingly stumbled upon was a way of teaching children better suited for workplaces, cultures and economies increasingly driven by fast-changing technology. Full story...

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