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The Mind of an Inventor
kipb writes to tell us that Newsweek has an interesting article about Danny Hillis and the company he co-founded called Applied Minds. One of the featured devices that Hillis talks about is a device designed to increase the amount of privacy one has working in the average corporate cubicle. "Babble" is about the size of a paperback book and plugs into the phone with two external speakers that you place on the top of your cube. While holding a normal conversation on the phone Babble plays back random meaningless snipits of your own voice which makes your conversation practically unintelligible to people as close as 4 feet away.
It would also make calls unintelligible within 4 feet.
Meanwhile Johnson in the next cube has been interpreting the voices as instructions to bring an AK-47 to work and begin the Day of Reckoning.
So the two morons I am forced to sit next to at work who never get off the phone can broadcast MORE OF THEIR VOICE TO ME.
I'd break down crying if I weren't already burnt out inside.
How is this a good invention?
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Oh great. Gimme 40 of those in an office & see how long before someone snaps...
the voices! the voices!..!
Why Is this Useful. Where at work, its noisy enough as it Is, why add more to it. Plus when did Privicay become an Issue at the job. I can see this to twart coorproate espinoge but really. I have headaches enough at work listening to stupid people I dont need any more of It
This guy seems like more of a Mad Scientist than an inventor to me.
What if the "meaningless snipits" just happen to have the words "fire", "bankruptcy", "layoffs", "harassment", "pregnant" or "terror" in them?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I wonder how much user testing they have tried with this product. It sounds like the helpful MS Office paperclip, or automatic spell checking as you go along - great ideas in theory but intrinsically flawed in practice.
Privacy or not, I cannot think of anything more irritating, to myself, colleagues and the person I'm talking to on the phone, than meaningless drivel coming out of my speakers in my voice.
I can hear it now:
Me: Can you confirm that order please?
Stationers: Two printer cartridges, twelve reams of paper, and one partridge in a pear tree.
How about buying a few thousand and hiding them at strategic locations in the meeting places of the US Congress and other world parliaments? Of course it is always possible that nobody would notice since most of what comes out of those places is practically unintelligible anyway.....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
--Pat
...reading the linked article? It is full of descriptions of amazing things, and indeed does say that Hillis is quite childlike - his inventions are almost toys, very expensive and shiny toys. It's not just Babble.
--;
My cubicle neighbor's nonsense is annoying enough, and now this device will make me suffer his inate monologues full-time?
How about a device that will play "sh!" everytime his voice is recognized (think Austin Powers 2).
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Instead of contributing to the overall noise level, why not research an effective noise cancellation solution? I realize that they're not completely effective, but they ought to be able to muffle the noise somewhat to the point that your noise blends in with the background noise of a thousands mouse clicks and Windows ding sounds.
I can do this already after a fifth of gin
=)
In Kissinger's memoirs, White House Years, he describes how he and others, probably Nixon included, while in Moscow for a summit meeting, brought along a device I believe he called "the babbler", which was a tape player that played the sounds of many people speaking or maybe splices of babble. Then they could converse in their presumably bugged living quarters while playing the babbler. Kissinger wrote that it became intolerable after a while, it was so distracting.
While holding a normal conversation on the phone Babble plays back random meaningless snipits of your own voice which makes your conversation practically unintelligible to people as close as 4 feet away.
Yes, I believe this device could be a change catalyst which would allow us to re-engineer our business case and leverage best-practice synergies to proactively actualise our bottom-line.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No - increase headaches.
I thought it was going to be a cone of silence like device, where it could cut down on outside distractions - maybe some white noise generation. A cone of silence type device.
Nope, it's a damned chatterbox. I can't imagine anyone who would want to hear random snippets of themselves while talking on the phone, talk about totally breaking your train of thought.
If you need privacy while speaking in your cubicle, you can just as easily leave your cubicle and use either a cellphone or another phone to have that privacy. If you're really talking about company secrets at work and your coworkers *shouldn't* be overhearing, go petition to your boss to get a real office, because you shouldn't have to be the one to find some crazy solution to what should be a nonissue. If it's personal, then pop out to break and actually deal with it, instead of muffled tones that waste more time than you need to spend, and distract everyone else around you whether they want to listen in or not.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Does anyone else think it'd be fun to hide this in the conference room hooked up to the speakerphone?
The article says:
"As promised, when the speakers play a scrambled version of your voice, your real conversation can't be understood by someone standing even four feet away. (In tests by NEWSWEEK, no one wanted to stand four feet away, because the chatter from those boxes was anything but soothing.)"
What the article doesn't say is how the chatter from those boxes affects the person talking on the phone. I'm prepared to believe that it doesn't irritate the user him-or-herself, but I'm from Missouri, you've got to show me.
Or at least show me some convincing testimony from Newsweek reporters!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Ignore the links to "True Artificial Intelligence" and "Stumbling upon" which link to Mentifex's web site.
He is a troll of the AI community. Before you assign him informative mod points for links to his own useless work, please read the following page http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html
:shrugs:
:grins: One of the few advantages of being deaf, that and not hearing some of what you don't want to.
Useless to me since I'm deaf and use a TTY anyway. A TTY is a text based telecommunications device that works over a phone line. You can buy software TTY's though they aren't as good as the hardware.
Kind of hard to overhear a TTY since it isn't verbal.
Go here to see babble... go here to hear babble.
Yes, I believe this device could be a change catalyst which would allow us to re-engineer our business case and leverage best-practice synergies to proactively actualise our bottom-line.
Sounds like ozmanjusri got a Babble plugin for Slashdot.