Technology Ticks

Several years ago, I attended a seminar on future technology hosted by Bruce Sterling.

To him, it's all about information communication, RFIDs and things talking to things -- for example, a bottle of whiskey could communicate via RFID to a handheld reader its contents, history, tags etc. 

Now they're trying to do the same with cars. Hari Balakrishnan at MIT is equipping cars with mobile sensors to send data to a central computer and predict road conditions.  

There's another professor at Boston University who's experimenting with using car signals to communicate with other cars -- sort of like the telephone game where a message is passed down along a chain of people.

Food for Thought: would the message will be corrupted when it's passed down the car chain?

Source: http://dvice.com/archives/2008/11/outfitting_cars.php

This MP3 player, designed by Kang Min-Kyung, Kim Tae-Seung and Og Jeong-Min, uses a tap-and-water metaphor to represent the music player and music.

The metaphor works as you can see from the photo.

But what's really really cool is that the designers took the tap-and-water thing further. You can start/stop/pause the music by "kinking" the line.

From Yanko, "The supply of water stops whether the hose are pressed. If pressure is applied by hand to the earphone line as capacitance technology, the music temporarily stops. And when you relinquish your hold of the earphone line, the music starts again."

Crazy, funky, sexy music player. But how does capacitance technology work in this case? All I know is that if I kink my wires too much, it'll just die on me.

Source: "Music Flow" MP3 by Min-Kyung Kang, Tae-Seung Kim, & Jeong-Min Og (Yanko Design)

This news from Business Week (read it here) is a bit outdated but worth a gander on how Japan's cracking down on smokers.

In addition to non-smoking areas or banned smoking in restaurants, making it illegal to walk around Tokyo with a lit cigarette -- kind of like not walking around in London with an open bottle of booze -- the Japanese have installed "cigarette vending machines have been programmed to sell only to people carrying an age-verification smart card with an integrated-circuit chip inside".

Of course, people will exploit loopholes in the system (a kid used his mom's card and these cards are not required in regular shops) but I think it might just work.

Mostly because of Japan's propensity to obedience.

American President Barack Obama certainly does things differently.

According to Gizmodo, he will be filming his weekly address and putting it up on Youtube (The Washington Post also ran a story on it here).

No doubt, it'll be full of propaganda by his PR staff but damnit, I'm very impressed by his technological savvy and how clued-in he is on Internetizens' behaviours.

At least he knows how to reach out to the people, and because everyone watches Youtube, to everyone else in the world.

PS: Unfortunately White House bureaucracy is forcing him to give up email. Hopefully, he'll find some way to circumvent it.

PPS: Here's a funny Onion video on after-elections Obama supporters... Try not to laugh too loud.

What do you do if someone hogs/interrupts/hijacks conversation but you're too polite to tell him to bug off?

Well, there's help.

Dr Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created software programs "that tell speakers whether they tend to interrupt others, for example, or whether they dominate meetings with monologues, or appear inattentive when others are talking."

In order to create a database for his programs, Alex Pentland uses "Reality Mining" where he equipped "people in banks, universities and other places with customised smartphones or thin badges packed with sensors to pick up data on the timing, energy and variability of their speech."

Perhaps -- I cross my fingers and toes -- we'll see these programs soon.

Read the full article at New York Times.
(Damn good newspaper!!!)

 

Putting Google Earth on the iPhone is brilliant!

For one thing, it's more useful than your Lonely Planet guidebook -- as the restaurant, bars, what-to-do and where-to-do information are constantly updated by Google Earth fanatics in real-time; not print-time  (CNET's informative wonderful review) .

I wonder how would travel publishers respond? Would they put out their own Google maps where users pay for updates? Or would they simply fold up en-mass?