Author: Gabrielle Taylor
Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic camera tells you if you're boring
We’ve all wandered off on tangents about our incredibly hilarious cat or intolerably handsome mate or unbelievably brilliant infant and usually manage to find our way back, but those with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome can easily stay socially lost. MIT grad student Rana El Kaliouby has developed a solution, an Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic which monitors the body language of those around you and relays you helpful hints like “stop talking about your collection of fat Elvis stamps”. The device correctly identified emotions 90% of the time when exposed to actors, and 64% of the time with everyday people, which is still probably more accurate than even healthy human beings. Damn, we’re self-absorbed. At least, I am. [GT]
Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic [via Popgadget]
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Xuuk eyebox2 knows where you're looking
Red-eye reduction works by detecting the retina and canceling out its effects. The eyebox2 takes that one step shorter — all it wants to know is whether you’re looking at it. While currently a dream-come-true gadget for marketers wondering if a given poster or billboard is even getting any attention, expect similar technology to turn up in everything from subpoenas to invitations to your nauseous cousin’s New Year’s Eve party — because unlike previous eye-tracking tech, this is cheap. Normally the rig goes for around £12,000, but this starts at about £500 — nearly affordable enough to start embedding in those stop signs your lawyer said you didn’t see. [GT]
eyebox2 (via Gizmowatch)
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Chinese S116 solar-powered mobile charges by… candlelight?
Sporting a microSD memory card slot, MP3 player and a 1.3 megapixel camera, the S116 mobile phone from Hi-Tech Wealth, Inc. has a solar panel on the back which supposedly provides 40 minutes of talk time per one hour of light exposure. Apparently it’s even sensitive enough to derive significant charge from light as weak as that provided by a church taper, and the battery lasts 2.5 times as long as the battery in a typical mobile. (I believe the latter, but the former sounds pretty unlikely.) Hi-Tech Wealth, Inc, plans to release six more phones on similar lines over the next year. [GT]
World’s 1st solar-powered mobile developed in China [via Inhabitat]
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Snap on some ultra-pixelated Stolen Jewels by Mike and Maaike
The “Stolen Jewels” collection from Mike and Maaike is literally a high-tech remix of stolen jewelry into an almost unrecognizably low-res form. First taking poor quality images of the jewelry from the web, the photos are pixelated and then printed on scored leather, so that it’s actually possible to pop out each individual “jewel”. Pieces are based on greats like the Hope Diamond Broach, the Golden Jubilee Diamond Broach, and the Great Chrysanthemum Necklace. [GT]
“Stolen Jewels” by Mike and Maaike [via Moco Loco]
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boynq Blox speakers let you slide the bass
Not only are the boynq Blox speakers sculptural and cool looking, the placement of the speakers actually has a practical function: you adjust the bass and treble by moving the speaker along the slide track. They’re powered by dual 5-watt amplifiers and have the usual 3.5mm minijack out. Also, instead of having some big ugly wall wart, they’re USB powered. £17.99. [GT]
boynq Blox speakers (via Stylehive)
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Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) maps the ocean floor
Today the NASA-funded Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) is at the bottom of the Zacaton geothermal sinkhole in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Tomorrow it could be searching for water at the bottom of the icy crust on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. The DEPTHX has 100 sensors, 36 computers and 16 thrusters with which it can navigate and map for up to eight hours without human intervention. Plus, it looks like the kind of thing an alien species might be astounded to find in its watery backyard. [GT]
Robot sub technology could aid planetary exploration
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You are not, in fact, a robot
Jonathan Kahn of seminal web design advice column AListApart points out that, for all that managers may wish otherwise, You Are Not A Robot. The importance in reference to the web design profession is, according to Kahn, that “machines can’t generalize”. For all that bosses or clients may often wish designers would never use judgment at all and execute orders in a precise and mechanical fashion, it’s precisely the impossibility of this dream and unbearability of this sorrow that will keep this job in human hands for the foreseeable future (and then make this article seem as quaint as the idea that there’s only a market for 5 computers worldwide). [GT]
Jonathan Kahn: You Are Not A Robot
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Electrosensitivity to electromagnetic radiation?
The Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column looking sceptically at electrosensitivity has pulled an unusually high and polarized amount of comment: those who say electrosensitivity consistently manifests in the afflicted in a form like “mild radiation poisoning” related to immersion in Wi-Fi networks, mobile phone broadcast areas, unshielded microwaves, and other broadcast fields; and those who say that while electrosensitivity symptoms may or may not exist (Goldacre says they definitely do), the cause has not been appropriately/scientifically tied to high tech devices or fields. Whatever the origin of the symptoms turns out to be, Goldacre does expose some bad gadgets designed to exploit the ill. His medical opinion: don’t buy crap. [GT]
Watch out for that blob of radiation!
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Allergy free Ford Mondeo
Certified by the German TÜV Rhineland group, the “allergy-free” Ford Mondeo uses no chrome or nickel, is constructed with zero VOC adhesives and textiles that don’t harbour allergens, and has a high-tech air filter to ensure dust and pollen never get a foothold inside. The Focus, Ka, S-MAX and Galaxy are the only TÜV certified “allergy-free” vehicles on Earth (outside of Area 51). [GT]
Ford Mondeo (via Newlaunches)
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Watchgate: what happened to President Bush's watch?
The White House says President Bush simply dropped his watch during a scrum of adoration from wildly affectionate Albanians. “The president put it in his pocket and it returned safely home,” said spokesman Tony Snow. An Albanian bodyguard alleges someone picked it up and returned it, but in the video after the jump, it sure looks like you can see somebody lifting it. Tech continues to fluster the spin doctors, ho ho ho. [GT]
Where’s the president’s watch?
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