Category: technology

Posted on

Subliminal Sound to “Cure” Video Game Addiction

A Korean venture start-up claims to have developed an audio sequence that can communicate with addicted game players below the conscious level. The company wants game manufacturers to play the embedded subliminal messages when a young user has kept playing after a preset period of time.
From The Korea Times article:

“We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second,” Xtive President Yun Yun-hae said.
“Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing,” the 35-year-old Yun said. “Tests tell us the sounds work.”

Any scholarly evidence I’ve ever read up on has indicated that subliminal messages don’t work, but apparently marketing such messages is big business.

Xtive applied for a domestic patent for the phonogram and is looking to take advantage of the technology in other sectors.
“We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential,” Yun said.

Posted on

Gmail Auto Log-out Problem

Three friends of mine are travelling the South Pacific (currently they’re in New Zealand). One of them mentioned to me that he is having trouble accessing gmail from his laptop. I was wondering if anyone has heard about anything like this:

Whenever anyone tries to access their gmail account from our laptop it logs in and then automatically logs out and shuts down that window. I think an add-on has been enabled or disabled to some how to prevent this gmail thing from working.

I think their best bet will be to contact the gmail team and see if they have any suggestions, although my gut tells me it’s a malicious script/virus. What do you think?

Posted on

Human Computation

This Google sponsored tech talk, human computation, explains how the fact that humans are sometimes smarter than computers can be used to solve some interesting problems and is extremely interesting. I am going to have to check out these tech talks more often.
For more video’s like this one, check out Google’s collection of Tech Talks.

Posted on

M.I.T. Digital Drawing Board

Check out the future of digital drawing in this video of an M.I.T. researcher showing off some of the features in their new digital drawing board.

Update: This looks like a prototype for the Smart Board. At the time I originally posted this the technology was mind blowing.

Posted on

CBC Podcast Roundup

I’ve subscribed to a few really good podcasts from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp that I need to tell the world about:

And if you haven’t already, let me just re-recommend that you subscribe to the TED Conference talks and theThis American Life podcast. These are my two favourite sources of inspiration and entertainment on the web right now.

Posted on

This American Life

I recently subscribed to the This American Life podcast and I love it. They just started offering their show as a free podcast this week and I’m so glad they did; consider me hooked.

A quick description of their show for those that have never heard of it:

One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we’d sometimes tell public radio program directors that it’s basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.

It’s easy to say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all.

Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.

There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun. There are shows on public radio with no sense of fun or surprise and we hate those shows.

Proudly powered by WordPress