Slashdot Mirror
The Year in Ideas
Some Anonymous Dude writes "The NYTimes magazine reviews this year's great ideas including the anti-paparazzi flash, forehead billboards, scientific free-throw distraction, and why popcorn doesn't pop." From the intro: "Once we have thrown back all the innovations that don't meet our exacting standards, we find ourselves with the following alphabetical catch: 78 notions, big and small, grand and petty, serious and silly, ingenious and. . . well, whatever you call it when you tattoo an advertisement on your forehead for money."
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
BugMeNot.
well, whatever you call it when you tattoo an advertisement on your forehead for money.
Materialistic and depraved?
How the heck is tattooing GoldenPalace.com on your forehead for $25,000 a great idea??????? I'd need atleast $50K lol...
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
You can anti-paparazzi flash be a GREAT idea.
It only applies to 0.00001% of the worlds population...
But... why not go one step further and make peanut butter and jelly cups? Strawberry goes well with peanut butter and chocolate, and if you want to go crazy with the concept so does raspberry and orange marmalade.
Additionally, those apple-cinammon creme-filled cupcakes were pretty good back in the day, but were inexplicably pulled from the market at the same time they replaced the chocolate on the chocolate cupcakes with black wax. They need to bring those back (preferably avoiding the waxy "improvement" to the frosting.)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I could just wait for this article to come out each year instead. Anybody else see that the majority of those have been on slashdot before?
I may be wrong but you're downright ugly!
The New York Times Online Registrations will surely be Slashdotted! Perry White would be proud.
This list of great ideas is a real stretch...must be a slow news day
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/14/ 2119209&from=rss
I'm not fat, just big boned...
That's an idea that has been around for ages. It's just that its proponents are far more organized now than they were years ago.
Sure, they are getting a lot of publicity and having some effect in certain areas, but then you have to consider which areas those are. Kansas isn't known as a hub of scientific discovery, for instance. It really doesn't matter what they want to believe. The world as a whole, including most Christians, see ID for the nonsense that it is.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Am I the only one that can't find any article? What gives?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
I like how they talk wistfully about that great, stomach churning invention from 2005: "In Vitro Meat."
Ah, yeah, remember In Vitro Meat?
No? Neither did I.
It's because that article was published the same day (Dec. 11th, 2005).
I'm not sure a contemporaneous story could have "helped make 2005 what it was," at best it could be "helping to make 2005 what it is."
IV Meat is still worth a read though, it's a cyberpunk fantasy come true.
In Vitro Meat (free BugMeNot required).
Adding malware to music CDs.
Circumcision is child abuse.
$25,000 is a LOT of money for someone who's never had more than the $121.45 which food stamps pays per month. To someone in IT, $25,000 might be a 2 month contract, and not very much money. Buy a top notch digital camera to play with, maybe a new plasma TV, eat at a fancy restaurant all month, and your $25K is gone. But for someone who is poor, that $25K might last 2 or 3 years. It is enough to buy a 7 year old Honda Civic with 110,000 miles for $1700. That should be solid transportation for another 5 years. That 25K will buy lots of chicken at the grocery store at $0.79 cents a pound. Add the 10 pound bag of potatoes that is $1.99, and that will last a month. For someone who has been poor, you would be surprised how easy it is to stretch $25 into a weeks worth of good eats. There isn't any steaks, but there is plenty of roasted chicken, rice, oven baked potatoe wedges, and hearty soups made from the left over bones of the chicken with some veggies. I sometimes get a kick out of fancy resturants that use peasant recipes to make meals they charge $40 per plate. The original purpose of these recipes was to conserve and be frugal. For example, there is an Italian resturant near my home that has a $7 soup which is made from olive oil, garlic, basil, water, and lots of day old crusty bread cut in cubes. It is a creamy soup, very tastey, and something that $1 could make a big pot with 20 servings. The bread breaks apart and thickens the flavorfull water.
For someone who is poor, that $25,000 extra cash might be reason enough to buy a case of two buck chuck and stock the wine cabinet.
I know we all live in the USA, but there is a gap growing between the rich and the poor. $25,000 is a lot of money no matter who you are! Those guys who box are often poor, and come from homes where the needs were far greater than the wants.
Having said all that, I hate the blatant advertising. People should not use their body or uniform to advertise. It is a shame, because that $25,000 might be more money than the boxer could make any other way. It is one guaranteed payout.
test
Furthermore: tattooing a slogan on your forehead -- why does that fall under the category "Science"?
"Started in August 2003"
-wikipedia
you misspelled "gourmand's nightmare."
What I do love, though, is anything that prompts the New York Times to publish a joke about "tube steak."
It's 'Grammar.'
And both things you say are wrong, as those words are both both verb and noun.
And, last but not least, everyone around here loves to pick on people who post about grammar and spelling.
Perhaps you're a grammar troll?
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
"Affect", as it is used in psychology, is a noun. When we refer to someone's mood, we refer to their "affect". You can, in this sense, affect an effect on an affect.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
That was reasonably funny an on-topic relative to the average /. post, yet it was modded to -1. It should be 3, Funny at least.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
whatever you call it when you tattoo an advertisement on your forehead for money.
Slashdot?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I found this tidbit interesting:
Under "Making Global Warming Work For You", there was "Millions of acres of ice may soon become suitable for nautical traffic and oil exploration. An estimated quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources are in the Arctic."
And people wonder why the energy industry/US government is doing all it can to drag their heels on climate control...
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I read the list of innovative ideas...they mostly seemed like Sharper Image catalog entries. An infrared pet dryer? Robot jockeys? Singing toothbrushes? How grand.
So, I say we start a list of what the REAL big ideas of 2005 were. I'll start. This is the first year I recall where it was widely expressed in the media that there are major global cities, even some in the United States (ye gads!), that are unmaintainable over the next hundred years, and can be expected to be abandoned to the elements. Whether it's New Orleans being returned to swamp, or the cities of the Southwest that could dwindle as energy and water costs rise, the notion of the likely failure of many of our great cities seems significant. At least, it seems more important than the "Snap-On Celebrity Smiles" that made the list.
Anyone else have any other real ideas that came from 2005 that are worth commenting on?
Rock on with your bad selves,
dex
Oh yes, I can't wait for society to accept the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ahh, what a blissful day that will be when the Church of the FSM is recognised as a world religion.
Accredited Bliss
By CHARLES WILSON
If you think financing a motion picture is difficult, consider for a moment the fund-raising bench mark that the filmmaker David Lynch set this year for his new David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace: $7 billion. The director of "Mulholland Drive" hopes to finance seven "universities of peace," with endowments of $1 billion each, where students would practice Transcendental Meditation.
Developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950's, T.M. is a technique whereby individuals repeat a mantra to themselves during two 20-minute sessions per day. Lynch began practicing it 32 years ago as a student. T.M. rid him of his deep anger, he says, and enlivened his creative process. "When you dive within," Lynch says, "you experience an unbounded ocean of bliss consciousness."
Lynch says he believes that undergraduates today - 3 of 10 of whom say they suffer from depression or an anxiety disorder - need to find that unbounded ocean even more than he did in 1973. To that end, he has recently offered to help underwrite for-credit "peace studies" classes, which would include T.M. instruction, at a number of universities. Pending approval, American University will offer one of these classes next year. Researchers there will also begin studying the technique's effects on student grades, I.Q.'s and mental health.
Drawing on the work of John Hagelin, a quantum physicist and T.M. practitioner, Lynch harbors broader hopes that the seven universities of peace could enable the square root of 1 percent of the world's population - about 8,000 people - to simultaneously do an advanced version of the T.M. technique called "yogic flying." Lynch and Hagelin say that a mass meditation of this size could have a palliative effect upon the "unified field" of consciousness that connects all human beings and thereby bring about the conditions for world peace.
This fall, Lynch toured 13 schools across the United States to promote his plans. Skeptics might wonder how a filmmaker renowned for his dark visions could devote so much energy to the cultivation of happiness. Lynch, however, sees no contradiction. "You don't have to suffer yourself to portray suffering," he says.
Anti-Paparazzi Flash, The
By ALEXANDRA BERZON
Published: December 11, 2005
If you have ever felt sorry for celebrities hounded by cameras as they go about their daily business - be that pumping gas or entering a flashy nightclub - you can rest easy. A group of researchers at Georgia Tech has designed what could become an effective celebrity protection device: an instrument that detects the presence of a digital camera's lens and then shoots light directly at the camera when a photographer tries to take a picture. The result? A blurry picture of a beam of light. Try selling that to Us Weekly.
The Georgia Tech team was initially inspired by the campus visit of a Hewlett Packard representative, who spoke about the company's efforts to design cameras that can be turned off by remote control. Gregory Abowd, an associate professor, recalls that after the talk, the team members thought, There's got to be a better way to do that, a way that doesn't require the cooperation of the camera. The key was recognizing that most digital cameras contain a "retroreflective" surface behind the lens; when a light shines on this surface, it sends the light back to its source. The Georgia Tech lab prototype uses a modified video camera to detect the presence of the retroreflector and a projector to shoot out a targeted three-inch beam of light at the offending camera.
The current version is bulky and expensive, but the researchers say a more practical example could be ready for commercial sale within a year. They imagine their contraption installed in environments where cameras might not be welcome: locker rooms, for example, or trade shows. The Motion Picture Association of America has already expressed interest in mounting the technology in movie theaters to combat video pirating.
Anti-Rap
Fair Employment Mark, The By CHRISTOPHER SHEA For a decade now, Congress has declined to pass the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which would make it illegal for companies to fire or demote on the basis of sexual orientation. And yet some of the nation's biggest companies, including AT&T, I.B.M. and General Mills, say they'd be happy to abide by the legislation. The Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres and his wife, the Quinnipiac University School of Law professor Jennifer Gerarda Brown, wonder: Why wait for Congress to pass a law when you can, in effect, do it yourself? In their book "Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights," Ayres and Brown present a plan for partly enacting ENDA without Congress's help. Their Fair Employment mark is a seal of approval - think of the Orthodox Union's imprimatur that a product is kosher - mated to a novel legal scheme that would effectively privatize this area of antidiscrimination law. Under the plan, companies can acquire a license committing them to abide by a recent version of ENDA (specifically, one introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy in 2003) and to open themselves to lawsuits by employees or job applicants if they violate it. In return, the companies can display a mark on their products advertising their commitment to nondiscrimination. The mark itself, a simple "FE" (not unlike the Underwriters Laboratories' "UL," which signals that an electronic product has passed safety tests), is intentionally prosaic - designed not to inflame the minority of consumers who might boycott a company that protected homosexuals, while potentially appealing to the more than 80 percent of consumers who oppose workplace discrimination against gays. Ayres says he hopes that if the FE mark catches on, and there is no subsequent explosion in lawsuits, legislators will then give ENDA another look. But while he has personally pitched corporations including Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, so far no major company bears the mark. False-Memory Diet, The By JOHN GLASSIE According to the results of a study released in August, it is possible to convince people that they don't like certain fattening foods - by giving them false memories of experiences in which those foods made them sick. The research was conducted by a team including Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who is known for her previous work showing the malleability of human memory and calling into question the reliability of recovered memories in sexual-abuse cases. She turned her attention to food as a way to see if implanted memories could influence actual behavior. After initial experiments, in which subjects were persuaded that they became ill after eating hard-boiled eggs and dill pickles as children, the researchers moved on to greater challenges. In the next study, up to 40 percent of participants came to believe a similarly false suggestion about strawberry ice cream - and claimed that they were now less inclined to eat it. The process of implanting false memories is relatively simple. In essence, according to the paper that Loftus's team published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, subjects are plied with "misinformation" about their food histories. But a number of obstacles remain before members of the general population can use this technique to stay thin. Attempts to implant bad memories about potato chips and chocolate-chip cookies, for instance, failed. "When you have so many recent, frequent and positive experiences with a food," Loftus explains, "one negative thought is not enough to overcome them." More work is needed to determine if the false-memory effect is lasting and if it is strong enough to withstand the presence of an actual bowl of ice cream. It's also not clear, at this point, how people could choose to undergo the process without thereby becoming less vulnerable to this kind of suggestion. Nevertheless, the technique does seem to work. Loftus's newest, unpublished studies have looked at whether a memory of a positive e
National Smiles
By D.T. MAX
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. "I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile," Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.
Keltner hit upon this difference in national smiles by accident. He was studying teasing in American fraternity houses and found that low-status frat members, when they were teased, smiled using the risorius muscle - a facial muscle that pulls the lips sideways - as well as the zygomatic major, which lifts up the lips. It resulted in a sickly smile that said, in effect, I understand you must paddle me, brother, but not too hard, please. Several years later, Keltner went to England on sabbatical and noticed that the English had a peculiar deferential smile that reminded him of those he had seen among the junior American frat members. Like the frat brothers', the English smile telegraphed an acknowledgment of hierarchy rather than just expressing pleasure.
"What the deferential smile says is, 'I respect what you're thinking of me and am shaping my behavior accordingly,"' Keltner says. His theory was put to the test earlier this year when a British journalist showed Keltner 15 pictures of closely cropped smiles and Keltner guessed right - Briton or American - 14 times. "I missed Venus Williams like a fool," he remembers.
To be sure, further research is needed. For one thing, the experiment did not control for skin condition, facial shape or bad English teeth. Still, the findings have intriguing explanatory possibilities. Do George W. Bush and Tony Blair get along because they both use their zygomatic major in distinctive ways? And was the strength of the special relationship during World War II based on the fact that Churchill smiled like an American while Roosevelt smiled like an Englishman, thus earning each man the affection of the other's countrymen? If so, we must amend the memorable observation (a favorite of Churchill's) that we are one people divided by a common language, adding that we are two peoples joined by separate smiles.
Open-Source Reporting
By ALEXANDRA STARR
No liberal blogger could complain about a dearth of material in 2005. From the Bush administration's ham-fisted response to Hurricane Katrina to the indictment of the former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay, opportunities to lambaste the Republican Party were abundant. Of course, staying abreast of all these developing stories was not a facile proposition, at least in the experience of Joshua M. Marshall, editor of the left-leaning blog Talkingpointsmemo.com. And so this October he put out a plea for help, asking his readers to share their knowledge of the spreading Washington scandals. He termed the effort "open-source investigative reporting."
The phrase echoes the open-source software movement, whose programmers pool their expertise to write source code. Other Internet-based endeavors, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, also draw on a virtual community to produce Web site content. Talking Points Memo provided an ideal platform for a similar experiment: the blog attracts some 100,000 readers a day, many of them hard-core news obsessives. In Marshall's words, they represented a "huge nationwide information-gathering apparatus."
Marshall challenged his virtual news corps to dig into a succession of Republican embarrassments. Drawing on news reports, they laid out a detailed chronology of the events that culminated in the arraignment of the former vice presidential chief of staff I.
Thanks for the laugh.
That should be 'rhetorical', from the Latin word 'torica' meaning 'goes round and round'.
Scientific Free-Throw Distraction
By JASON ZENGERLE
Every basketball fan knows that the seats behind a backboard don't afford a great view of the court, but they do provide an opportunity to affect a game's outcome. By waving ThunderStix - those long, skinny balloons that make noise when smacked together - or other implements of distraction, fans sitting behind the basket can unnerve an opposing team's foul shooters and make them miss. But not, a new theory holds, unless the fans gesticulate in a particular way.
According to Daniel Engber, a basketball fan with a master's degree in neuroscience, the standard "free-throw defenses" are too haphazard to be effective. Fans tend to wave their ThunderStix willy-nilly, creating a unified field of randomly moving objects. Because of the way the human brain perceives motion, free-throw shooters can easily ignore this sort of visual commotion. "Fans might think they're doing something by crazily waving their ThunderStix," Engber says, "but to the players it's all just a sea of visual white noise." Which is why, Engber surmises, N.B.A. teams' free-throw percentages at home and on the road are nearly identical.
The key to a successful free-throw defense, Engber argues, is to make a player perceive a "field of background motion" that tricks his brain into thinking that he himself is moving, thereby throwing off his shooting. In other words, fans should wave their ThunderStix in tandem.
Last season, Engber proposed this tactic to the Dallas Mavericks' owner, Mark Cuban, who took him up on the idea. For three games, Cuban had members of the Mavs' Hoop Troop instruct fans to wave their ThunderStix from side to side in unison. And as Engber subsequently reported in the online magazine Slate, the initial results were encouraging. In the first game, the Mavericks' opponent, the Boston Celtics, shot 60 percent from the line, about 20 percent below their season average. In the second game, the Milwaukee Bucks shot a meager 63 percent. But in the third game, the Los Angeles Lakers shot 78 percent - about the league average. Which apparently was enough to persuade Cuban to abandon the strategy.
Engber, however, remains a believer. "It's a pretty basic idea when you're studying what kind of perturbations of the visual world affect movement," he says, "that something systematic will have more of an effect than something random."
Seeing With Your Ears
By ALISON MOTLUK
Seeing is something that most of us expect to do with our eyes. But what if you are born blind or lose your sight later in life? Peter Meijer suggests you consider seeing with your ears instead.
Meijer, a research scientist in the Netherlands, has developed a technology called the vOICe, which allows you to represent visual information - to "see" - with sounds. The device is a tiny camera, a laptop and headphones. The camera is mounted on your head and the laptop takes the video input and converts it into auditory information, or soundscapes. The scene in front of you is scanned in stereo: you hear objects on your left through your left ear and objects on your right through your right ear. Brightness is translated as volume: bright things are louder. Pitch tells you what's up and what's down. The image refreshes once a second.
With practice, Meijer says, you can learn to sense instinctively how the features of a soundscape correspond to objects in the physical world. Pat Fletcher, for instance, a proficient user of the vOICe who could see until age 21, describes the grayscale images in her head as "ghostly" but real. At a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in New York in April, researchers from Harvard Medical School announced that when they viewed the activity in the brains of two vOICe users (one blind at birth, the other who went blind later in life), it was in many respects like that of a sighted person while seeing.
Not everyone has the inclination to kit themselves out with a head-mounted camera and a laptop. Fortunately, with the help of an
Uneavesdroppable Phone Conversation, The
By RYAN BIGGE
Sick of your colleagues listening in on your phone conversations? The traditional method of preventing eavesdropping in the workplace is to build dampers and baffles into cubicle walls. But now a device called Babble attacks the problem at the source, transforming the chatter emanating from your cubicle into a flow of meaningless mumblings.
Babble, which hit shelves in June, consists of two speakers and a small sound generator that attaches to your phone. The generator isolates and records the various phonemes - the building blocks of intelligible speech - of your speaking voice. Then when you activate it for a telephone conversation, it generates a stream of random phonemes that counteract the inflections and drops in your voice. When that parallel "conversation" emerges from the Babble loudspeakers and combines with your actual conversation, it produces a choral arrangement of sweet nothings. "It creates the music of voice, without the meaning of voice," explains Danny Hillis, a founder of Applied Minds, a research-and-development firm that created the technology with Sonare Technologies.
While productivity gains may help justify its $395 price tag, Babble could also be valuable for protecting the confidentiality of patient information in places like waiting rooms and hospital reception areas.
Babble can generate voice privacy within a remarkably small space - even at a distance of only two feet between speaker and interloping eardrum. One caveat, however: Babble is designed to counteract your voice only up to the range of normal conversational volume. "After that, it flashes a warning rather than overdrive your voice," explains Bill DeKruif, the president of Sonare. "We're not trying to make arguments confidential."
Urine-Powered Battery, The
By JOEL LOVELL
In their quest to develop a smaller, cheaper battery for medical test kits - like those used to detect diabetes by analyzing a person's urine - scientists in Singapore had a eureka moment of sorts when they realized that the very urine being tested could also serve as a power source.
In the September issue of The Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, Ki Bang Lee described how he and his team of researchers created "the first urine-activated paper battery" by soaking a piece of paper in a solution of copper chloride, sandwiching it between strips of magnesium and copper and then laminating the paper battery between two sheets of plastic. In this setup, the magnesium layer serves as the battery's anode (the negatively charged terminal) and the copper chloride as the cathode (the positively charged terminal). An electricity-producing chemical reaction takes place when a drop of urine, which contains many electrically charged atoms, is introduced to the paper through a small opening in the plastic.
The scientists' largest prototype battery generated a maximum of roughly 1.5 volts, the equivalent of an AA battery, and sustained an average of about 1 volt for about 90 minutes. Lee explains that its uses could extend to any device that consumes a small amount of electricity. "For instance," he says, "we could integrate a small disposable cellphone and our battery on a plastic card, for use in an emergency. And we are continuing to develop batteries that could power regular cellphones, MP3 players and laptop computers." While Lee emphasizes that urine is the biofluid of choice (since "everybody produces large amounts of it"), he notes that other bodily fluids - blood, tears, semen and saliva - will work in a pinch.
Video Podcasts
By ROBERT MACKAY
In October, when Steve Jobs announced Apple's release of the video-playing iPod, he spoke at length about the hit TV shows and music videos that could be purchased and downloaded for the device at the iTunes store. He spent less time talking up the free content available there that could, in the long run, be more significant: video podcasts.
Podcasting is an Internet alternative to
Feedreader spewed out the news for me.
Slashdot was, of course, updated.
One, single, interesting headline: The Year in India
But no.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
...and "affect" is also a noun.
look 'em up.
does not rate the "best ideas of 2005" category implied by TFA. This is a stunt to prop up circulation. [Time mag. did a similar cover storey two weeks ago. Today they layed off a few hundred people.] Not a good sign of the "Times" if you ask me.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.