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Cubicle Privacy
DarthDilbert writes "The NYTimes has a story about a noise canceling box for nosy cubicle neighbors. " Still no protection from mind readers. They know stuff.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/technology/30hil lis.html?ex=1275105600&en=4a1c68b85a47519f&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Reg free link.
They won't help at all. I've never really been able to tell much of a difference between the headphones being on and off. It just sounds like there's an extra humming sound when they're on.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
try improvising a duct system to reduce the necessary number of fans but still keep a good airflow pattern. it worked for me
In Philip K. Dick's _Ubik_ there's a company that sells the talents- or rather antitalents- of people who can block telepaths. The idea is that if a telepath or precog has been hired to monitor you or interfere with you, you hire the company to bring in an "inertial" who will negate the psi, and so eventually that person leaves.
A good introduction to Philip K. Dick in my opinion. It's well written and plotted (unlike a lot of his stuff) and a mind-fuck, but not the complete and total mindfuck of _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_- which is great, but starting with that one would be really starting at the deep end of the pool.
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techrevie
No Privacy in Your Cubicle? Try an Electronic Silencer
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: May 30, 2005
Two people in an office here were having a tête-à-tête, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.
The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.
The voice scrambling technology used in Babble was developed by Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm founded by Danny Hillis, a distinguished computer architect, and Bran Ferren, an industrial designer and Hollywood special effects wizard.
Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound. Already on the market are headphones that can cancel extraneous noises and stereo systems that can direct sound to a particular location.
The system will be introduced in June by Sonare Technologies, a new subsidiary of Herman Miller, the maker of the Aeron chair, as part of an effort to move beyond office furniture. The company plans to sell the device for less than $400 through consumer electronics and office supply stores.
Herman Miller originally turned to Applied Minds without a specific product in mind; instead, they were hoping the firm would help it create new concepts.
"We complement each other well because Danny is a real scientist when it comes to deep analytics and physics," Mr. Ferren said of his partnership with Mr. Hillis. "I have a good general working knowledge and can give him insight on the aesthetics and design side."
The two men formed Applied Minds after leaving Walt Disney Imagineering in 2000. Mr. Hillis was a pioneer in the design of extremely powerful computers known as massively parallel supercomputers, having founded Thinking Machines, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that subsequently went out of business in 1982.
Mr. Ferren has been a leader in movie effects, working on such films as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," and has won Academy Awards for technical achievement. He also developed mirrored sunglasses for Revo in the 1980's. Applied Minds, housed in a cluster of five converted warehouses here, is a technology playhouse for a group of 100 designers who work on projects ranging from designing buildings for government agencies to trying to treat cancer through the emerging field of proteomics, the study of proteins.
"I have known Danny for 25 years and Bran almost as long," said Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. Their partnership, Mr. Negroponte said, "brings together two of the most interesting minds" in the country.
In addition to its work with Herman Miller, Applied Minds is developing some 40 new concepts and products for sponsors as diverse as General Motors, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Northrop Grumman, and the toymaker Funrise.
The Babble voice privacy system is the first commercial example of Applied Minds' approach in collaborative product design. The partnership with Herman Miller began three years ago after Mr. Hillis met Gary S. Miller, Herman Miller's chief development officer, at a technology and design conference in Monterey, Calif.
The Babble scrambling technology is not the first attempt at using technology to provide office privacy. Acoustic materials have been used for dampening sound and white noise generators are commercially available, but the Herman Miller executives said that their new system was more effective.
While many companies resist outside design collaboration,
The "Babble" technology that is discussed in this article is not noise canceling technology! Noise canceling technology uses soundwaves that are 180 degrees out of phase with the original waveform to cancel out the original soundwave.
From the article description, Babble simply 'scrambles' sound waves so that speech is unintelligible, but it doesn't actually make anything quieter (in fact, based on the description it probably increases the ambient noise, just like masking systems). This device is used for speech privacy (which can be useful for meeting HIPAA regs for example), not sound cancellation.
If you want to make things quieter, you'll have to resort to earplugs, sound-canceling headphones, or floor-ceiling partitions (ie walls).
Is it noise cancelling? It seems that it just adds sampled sound to mask conversations.
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"sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range"
Horrible article. No details on how the product works or what it does.
And for the map thingy... It's been done some time ago (2002).
Here's a movie (25 MB) from Sony research (Jun Rekimoto, SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulation on Interactive Surfaces):
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/movies/
Use VLC to view the movie.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Movie taken from
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/smartsk
-Athlon 64 3200+ Venice
-2x512 Corsair PC3200 2.5 CAS DDR
-Leadtek 6600GT Extreme
-Seasonic SS-380 power supply
-MSI RS480R2-IL mATX motherboard
-Pioneer DVR-109 Dual Layer DVD Burner
-Thermalright XP-90 w/Nexus 92mm fan (CPU)
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
No fans
Yes fans - there is a variable speed fan that slowly spins up under heavy processor utilization and slowly spins down when processor utilization goes down. However, even at full speed the fan isn't too intrusive.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Try steelcase:
#
http://www.steelcase.com/na/products.aspx?f=12247