We study a model of opinion exchange in social networks where a state of the world is realized and every agent receives a zero-mean noisy signal of the realized state. It is known from Golub and Jackson [6] that under DeGroot [3] dynamics agents reach a consensus that is close to the state of the world when the network is large. The DeGroot dynamics, however, is highly non-robust and the presence of a single "stubborn agent" that does not adhere to the updating rule can sway the public consensus to any other value. We introduce a variant of DeGroot dynamics that we call 1/m-DeGroot. 1/m-DeGroot dynamics approximates standard DeGroot dynamics to the nearest rational number with m as its denominator and like the DeGroot dynamics it is Markovian and stationary. We show that in contrast to standard DeGroot dynamics, 1/m-DeGroot dynamics is highly robust both to the presence of stubborn agents and to certain types of misspecifications.

The application of integrated circuit technology to Speech Synthesis and Recognition represents an important development in the field. This paper describes a complete Speech Synthesis System on a single chip. The considerations involved in the choice of a compatible algorithm, machine word length and coefficient accuracy are discussed. The device contains a 32 word vocabulary and an innovative implementation of the LPC lattice structure. It operates at a variable bit rate to provide high quality speech with low bit storage requirements. The software supporting the Speech Synthesis System is also described.