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Life Imitates Art at Intel
figa writes "Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman at Intel's Research Laboratory at Berkeley are using the Situationists' exploration of urban space and psychologist Stanley Milgram's social experiments to design wearable devices."
Fighting the Crack Ban in Fine Restaurants
How many times has this happened to you? You've just finished a wonderful dinner at your favorite fine dining establishment -- the filet was rare, the port was perfect, and that lemon sorbet? Bliss.
What could be better? A Crack Aficionado knows. Time to get high, high
You push back your chair, loosen your tie, and fire up a small chunk of that funky stuff. Ahhh, the good life.
But then it happens. From nowhere, your formerly friendly waiter swoops in, all aflutter, trotting out that same old story: "I'm sorry, sir, but we do not permit crack smoking in our restaurant." Next thing you know, you've got the maitre d', the sommelier, the owner's silent partners, and fourteen jack-booted thugs in gray SWAT team tacticals swarming all over you, and you're hustled out the door with your jacket over your head.
Damn.
Crack Aficionados have always faced discrimination, so it's no surprise that even in five-star restaurants where every hand sports a Dunhill or a Macanudo in that sweet post-prandial afterglow, crack smokers still can't enjoy a smoke without having the heat come down all over them. Trend setters make the old order uncomfortable. It's just the way of the world.
This sort of unfair treatment is something we all have to deal with sooner or later, but you can be ready when it happens. With CA's guide to fighting the crack ban, you'll have an answer the next time some monkey in a tux screams, "What the hell are you doing?"
Assert Your Rights
When faced with opposition from management, a keen knowledge of history, morality, and our Judeo-Christian traditions can serve you well. Point out that nowhere in the Bible, the Magna Carta, or the Constitution is crack specifically denounced (or even alluded to, as far as our interns can tell. There could be something in Psalms, but the jury is still out.). Sure, there might be a few lines buried in Section 201 of the U.S. Criminal code, but who reads that stuff anyway? We're talking big picture here.
Argue the Point
Restaurant-industry workers are people-friendly. They work in a social business. A well-constructed argument can coax out their natural flexibility, tipping the scales in your favor.
The Socratic Method has stood the test of the centuries. When faced with a hostile waiter, employ this method to solve the problem. In a soft and measured tone, lay out your position, listen carefully to the waiter's response, and then call him a fool. Ask him how many credits he racked up before he dropped out. Crumple up a dollar and fling it in his face. When he turns away to search for the manager, give him a swift boot in the ass to hurry him on his way.
The Patriotism Card
Everyone loves America. America is about freedom. After all, this is not Russia. This is not China. This is not the place where the wall came down. Is this not America, the land of the free, and the home of the brave? You're damn right it is.
You're an American (Unless you're not, in which case here's your first lesson: lie. Always lie). Point out that as a citizen of this country, no one has the right to obstruct your pursuit of happiness, even if your happiness lies inside little rocks from South America.
Tell them you were in Desert Storm. If you put your butt on the line while liberating that Wal-Mart in Kuwait City to make the world safe for totalitarian theocracy, you'll be damned if anyone is going to tell you how to live your life.
Point the Finger
No one likes a tattle-tale, but let's face it: we all do what we have to do. If management is miffed because you're heating up a little cocktail at your table, what about all the cancer-spewing cigarette smokers busily killing everyone all around you?
What about the guy next to you puffing on a Cubano? That's illegal too, and no one is calling the Feds. It's not fair. It's just not fair. Say it out loud. "It's just not fair." Yell it. "It's just not fair!" Grab the waiter by t
I hope they figure out a way to discreetly "wink" to a stranger in the room, without invading their privacy, or already having their phone#, over a mobile phone.
--
make install -not war
From one of the links:
Call me a philestine, but I have no *fucking* idea of whether it's good or whether it's whack.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Imagine bluetooth enabled wearable computers, that could become clusters when in close proximity of each other. Image everyone at a soccer game wearing them; not only do you get to enjoy the game, but you make one huge super cluster.
Setec Astronomy
Buy an iPod mini and study the heck out of that. It would probably be cheaper for them.
Wasn't he the fellow who demonstrated that people are willing to administer debilitating electrical shocks to each other if ordered to do so by a guy in a white coat? I'm all over that.
I hope they're not designing the devices based on the experiment where Milgram asked subjects to electrocute other people strapped to chairs for getting answers to simple questions wrong. (They weren't really getting electrocuted, but they acted as though they were) Though, I guess it might be kind of funny.
The history of that experiment wasn't very humorous, however, as several participants sustained substantial psychological damage after they later realized they'd been willing to essentially kill another person via electrocution with only simple prodding to justify it. (This is one of the more interesting experiments along these lines that happened in the last half-century)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I highly recommend Steven Strogatz' book "Sync" and also Mark Buchanan's book "Nexus" for more in-depth information about the small-world theory and its relation to complex networks and human interaction.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I hope everyone realizes the irony in (ab)using situational theory to produce desire. But I guess there's no real irony anymore...
If A identifies B as a familiar stranger, then wouldn't B most likely identify A as a familiar stranger also?
A real relationship requires interaction (even if it is to ignore each other), so if a familiar stranger is a relationship without any interaction, is it a relationship at all?
It was about a service called Dodgeball which basically takes the whole concept of Social Networks that's been the recent fad, and puts it in cellphone form. You can send out a message, and friends and friends of friends can see where you are, and a picture of you.
When I was in the UK I heard about a similar service which was basically like Match.com for the cellphone.
I think that once these are developed further, and people become more accustomed to them, it will be quite common to meet new people on the street through the medium of technology like this.
The good news is the technology isn't that complicated, its the whole hurdle of social acceptance that will make or break its success.
I hope that if it doesn't take off here in the states, it at least becomes mainstream in the UK and Japan which tend to be more open to those sorts of thing.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
What about a Mini IPod size, personal area server with built in WI-Fi 802.11, Bluetooth, voice command, GPS receiver and MP3 player. Interface with a 3" High Depth LCD touch screen bluetooth wrist watch with biometeric authentication on the back and a SD slot on the side. Work in conjunction with a Bluetooth wireless cellular camera headset with dictation and noise cancelation feature. Yes you can listen to MP3 and downloading direction while talking with a friend on the headset about the porn on your wrist.
I hope the put more thought into the sizing of these wearable devices than you see in normal clothing departments!
I'm 5'3", 125 lbs, but with 34DD boobs...yeah, the mall is a nightmare. Everything is made for all-over petites with small chests, or for people with big boobs and big waists. Whatever happened to the small people with curves?
Swim suit season is a bitch. I can't remember the last time I bought a swim suit that a)I liked, and b)fit right.
I agree with this post.
-- Guy Debord
European philosophy and European social science ideas in general have an amazing tendency to get heavily suggared when crossing the Atlantic. Being Intel one of those quintessential American companies, I guess one shouldn't be surprised. Hasn't anyone warned this guys that Guy Debord is really dead?
The power glove is BACK, Bitches! http://homepages.compuserve.de/rspezial/vidgas/pgl ove1.jpg
Toothing?
Did they really mean to say "pubic" at the end of the first paragraph??
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in pubic places.
I think they are considering putting computers down there but they aren't sure if people are ready to extend the "Familiar Stranger" relationship.. or something.
-ashot
Does this mean that Intel is also attempting to make better tin-foil hat designs?
I can see the future marketing slogan "Tin-foil Hatnium 2: The choice of a loony generation"
so does this project mean the possibilty of the future bringing a device by which i'll know when walking down the street:
a) if that hot girl i caught eyes with thinks i'm hot...
b) i'll get spam while walking to the bus...
c) how ugly "rawkgrrl2004" really is...
this opens a whole new world to hackers...
I'm looking forward to when my underwear vibrates to let me know that I've got an incoming message.
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"All hail the glory of the Hypnotoad."
I saw another, older paper that Intel has done on this, for maximizing developer efficiency: Here it is
Has anyone done any studies that have pointed to the opposite? That people are encumbered by too many gadgets, and work best with limited exposure?
I've seen too many people who use PDAs, making it harder for them to get things done (have to spend 5x as long writing information compared to using a pen/paper)
Like what you hear? Read my blog
I knew a tech once who put his emergency call pager in his pocket. So he'd look forward to it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Following is a summary of the Milgram study to clarify misinformation in the parent post; a full explanation can be found in The Perils of Obedience, penned by Stanley Milgram. Additionally, a participant in the original experiment writes his personal account here; other discussion abounds.
The goal of Milgram's research was to see how people reacted to an authority figure telling them to administer electric shocks to a victim in the next room which would then protest in varying degrees depending on the amount of shock (actually a tape recording). These shocks were to be given when the 'subject' misperformed a simple memory task. With each wrong answer, the voltage of the shock was increased, starting at 14 volts ranging to 450 at the high end. The switches were labeled in groups of four, starting with 'slight shock' and the final two switches marked merely with 'XXX'.
The responses given by the 'subject' (who mentions his heart condition at some point) are: a grunt at 45 volts, loud complaining at 120v, an agonized scream at 285v, then eventually silence in response to the highest levels.
If the participant giving the shocks complained, the experimenter (Played by a tall, deep-voiced man dressed very scientist-y) as the authority figure told them to continue. Depending on the number of times a participant complained, they were told something else by the experimenter. These were:
'the experiment requires that you continue'
'it is essential that we continue'
'you have no other choice'
If the participant refused to continue after the final imperative, the experiment was halted. Milgram had predicted that only 4% of the participants would reach the 300 volt mark, and only 1 in 1000 would deliver the highest shock possible.
A full 25 of the 40 participants delivered the full range of shock. The experimenter halted the session the third time a 450 volt shock was delivered. This result generalizes across race, sex, country of origin and social status. Many of the participants did show signs of extreme stress towards the end of the experiment (clenching fists, laughter, squinting, sweating). Many people allege that there were long term effects (a la Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), though no one seems able to cite these cases. Many of the people in their short-term responses reported that they felt that overall it was a positive experience in which they could learn about themselves. Of course, that could just be a coping strategy to help deal with the trauma. People are built mentally tough, it is a rare person that would have severe long-term effects from this one isolated experiment.
gnaa gonna make your ass look like goatse bob
I'm sure that there are no other pager users in this world that do the same thing. ;)
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"All hail the glory of the Hypnotoad."
here is something similar I found while googling this www.peoplesprimary.com/?n=LRHbare
To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.
Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.
As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
The journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations." The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
This reminds me of some of the esoteric social interaction stuff that was being done in MS Research when I worked there as a contractor. Does anybody need a little gizmo to change color when they keep running into the same people at a convention? Or is this a big steaming pile of grant fodder? Maybe I'm missing the point, but maybe not.
This device needs to store _a_lot_ of info about other's people devices, making a real time nightmare to manage. Imagine an underground train at rush hour, you cross hundreds of people. First, is it going to store all of them? Second, if this is wireless, what kind of bandwidth do you need to send all that info at the same time?
I guess that the storage of the data is the biggest issue. How long will it store it for? a week? a month?
Judging for my daily life, I don't see how this device would ever be dark. At home, it picks the signals from my neighboards, at work picks my co-workers', at lunch... etc., etc.
As a social theory though, it's very interesting.
-P@
signal_connect(0, "test_top.dut.my_sig", "clk");
The Situationists made the powers-that-be so nervous, that when they helped catalyze the revolt in 1968 that had virtually every blue collar worker in France on strike, it was the French Communist Party that ultimately had to put it down.
You can be sure Debord would put a gun to his head before doing R&D for the Intel corporation. In his last book, he said he feared the spectacle would try to integrate even his ideas in some borg-like fashion, and thus he had to be even more cryptic than he already was. It seems his fears have come true. Paulos is spectacular all the way.
Ed Bradley might be on 60 minutes but he's just a nigger to the rest of us.
Excuse me. You left forgot to complete your sentence. I believe you meant to write:
"...to the rest of us in-bred hillbilly trailer trash."
Hope this helps.
Let's see.. we live in our homes.. (/home/).
And then go out to walk on street... (mv /tmp)
We see but don't interact with others (ronly access files in /tmp).
We notice familiar strangers (those 'always there' files in /tmp).
An 'event' has to happen to convert one of those strangers (ronly files) to someone knew (changing permissions).
See.. we live in /tmp! :)
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
One of the scenarios describes a guy who uses his device to check if a group strangers are familiar to eachother. How does this work? Does his device send a query to tell ask them if they know eachother? Would it be easy for the strangers in the room to send an untrue response to such a query?
Thats one for the lads!
Karma whoring
You end up in a car accident. In order to prove that the accident was not your fault you need to be able to find the witnesses again. You press your doohickey, and hope for the best.
A large company pays owners of shops for the right to place a doohickey device in their shop. In return the owners can buy valuable data material about the behavior customers in their shops.
As doochickeys merge with bluetooth mobile phones, bluesnarfing becomes increasingly popular :)
In Solviet Russia, The Technology Wears You!
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
I thought for a second these wearable devices would be telling their wearers to shock people to death. But apparently it was based on another of Milgram's ideas.
...get the spelling right. It isn't "whack," it's "wack".
"Whack" can mean either "cap" (as in "ice") or it can mean pud-pulling, but the other wack lacks an "h".
oh please, there are respectable hill billy's and trailer owners that shouldn't be grouped in with an idiot like that!