Psychology, Society, Tech

Stealth Advertising

English: QWERTY keyboard, on 2007 Sony Vaio la...

English: QWERTY keyboard, on 2007 Sony Vaio laptop computer. Français : Le clavier QWERTY d’un ordinateur portable Sony Vaio de 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In magazines you see “features” which are in fact adverts, you can tell what they are because they will say “advertisement feature” somewhere, yet on the internet some advertisers seem to be able to get away with insidious tactics.

Download pages are often a minefield of big colourful buttons marked “download” only one of which will be the actual thing you want to download, the others being adverts for security scanners, toolbars and other such extraneous stuff that end up clogging up the computer at best and costing the unsuspecting user cash at worst.  I have noticed that these stealth ads have leaked out onto other parts of the web, I saw one that was designed to look exactly like the placeholder box you see when a browser plug-in has crashed, complete with worrying words like “your computer needs an upgrade”.  Being an old hand at this computing malarkey I recognised it for what it was and ignored it but someone less knowledgable might click on it and download the scanning tool or whatever it was, again often paying for it too – even if it was simply by it being ad-supported, thinking that it was essential.

This is the same tactic used by virus writers, using authentic looking error messages to panic un-knowledgable users into a download.  This rarely works in the real world, if you saw in a magazine a box that said “your heating has failed, you need to upgrade it now or your house will explode” you’d know instantly it was absolute bull, the tactics in that world are to plant seeds of doubt “has your boiler been serviced recently?  Could it be a potential killer?  Bwah ha ha ha ha.”  But the immediacy of computers and the internet, combined with the still mysterious nature of how they work to some people makes getting the sale that much simpler.

The message is clear; be careful what you click on.  Unless ad-funded toolbars are your thing, of course.

Disclaimer – I know not what adverts appear below this post as I have no control over them but it would be supremely ironic if there’s a box down there, right now urging you to click it to fix errors with your pc…

Standard
Music, Psychology, Tech

The Joys and Perils of the MP3 Shuffle

mixtape

mixtape (Photo credit: miss_rogue)

Before digital music you’d select your evening’s musical entertainment based on your mood, selecting an appropriate album or maybe even a mixtape.  If you’re unfamiliar with what a mixtape is ask a grown-up, and by the way you’re making me feel old.

Anyway, for the last decade we’ve been increasingly able to digitally store our hundreds of albums in one place and play them at our convenience without once having to get up and change the disc though up until very recently the devices that could store literally everything you have were expensive.  Now though things have changed, personally I have my entire 6,300 track collection taking up one-third of my Google Play Music store even if it did take a couple of weeks, on-and-off to upload.

Modern MP3 players now have decent, large displays, and of course phones and tablets have music player apps so you can idly scroll though lists of albums and tracks and then feel the unbridled joy of seeing a track you haven’t heard for ages and instantly enjoying it.  Having your entire collection there at your fingertips can rekindle your love of the music and bring back, Proust-like, memories of summers listening endlessly to a favourite album.

Then, if you’re brave, there’s the ability to not just shuffle tracks on an album or a playlist or the limited selection on a device, a selection carefully, er, selected for a particular mood or whatever stage in your life you’re at, but your entire musical history.  It has been said that MP3 players have a mystical ability to choose appropriate music for your situation, my car stereo has done that to me many times – played a song that has reminded me of lost love or given me hope when I’m down, and when it has thousands of tracks, all personal to you, to choose from anything can happen.

You sit down to listen to some tunes, your device plays some great songs, many you’d forgotten about, you feel fantastic.  Then it happens, the first bars of a song play and before you can hit “skip” you’ve got tears pouring down your face as the song so intimately linked to a person or event, to feelings of loss and grief come flooding back.  I’ll be honest it happens to me, “My Immortal” by Evanescence does it to me every time.  Sometimes though even this can be cathartic, reminding you of the good times too.

Standard
Blog on The Landscape, Politics, Psychology, Society, Tech

Waste to Watts

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Have...

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Haverton Hill near Billingham. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the UK there have been regular plans to build waste incinerators which have always failed because locals near where they were planned always made the same arguments “what if they burn something hazardous”  “the smell will be unbearable” and so on.  Often it seems to be just a case of “not in my back yard” a phrase that afflicts so many development plans in our country.  Though in the past many incinerators in this country haven’t had the best record for cleanliness.

Such plants were generally only for waste disposal but in northern mainland Europe they think differently about their waste.

As Gizmodo reports Norway’s capital, Oslo, has a waste problem – they don’t have enough.  Half of the city’s population is powered and warmed by rubbish.  In the area there are 400 waste-to-energy plants converting household waste, industrial scrap and even medical waste into power.  Northern Europe produces about 150 millions tonnes of burnable waste to feed plants that were built to take 700 million tonnes and now they’re looking to import waste from other countries – the UK for example exports about 1,000 tonnes annually.

The plants operate in a similar way to fossil fuel power stations: burning fuel to heat water into steam to drive turbines and they’re between 14 to 28 percent electrically efficient but they also use the waste gasses to heat water and then condense the fumes to produce biogas used in metro busses.  What remains is ash and some remaining gas, contaminants and toxins tend to be destroyed in the process.

The system clearly works yet were still cramming more and more waste into landfills.  Our local councils’ recycling schemes help with reducing the level of dumped waste but actually using the waste as a resource instead of something to be buried, out of sight, out of mind until the area is eventually redeveloped into a combined recreation area/ticking time bomb of methane-fuelled fury would be even better.  There are waste-to-energy plants in this country, such as the one pictured above, but really we need to get behind this concept on a wider scale.

But again we come up against the nimbys who want power plants to be out of sight, out of mind too, preferably large, fossil fuelled, pollution spewing and far, far away, in someone else’s back yard.  The thing is that many smaller plants, although costly in setup, could eventually reap benefits for us all – cheaper electricity, cheaper heating and less trash heaps.

We’re demanding more and more power but we’re not willing to pay the price financially or in terms of our urban landscape.  Designers can make even the most industrial of buildings look attractive so the argument against the plants comes back to the idea that “they’re burning dirty waste near my home” – but as the Oslo example shows that argument is becoming, well, rubbish.

Standard
Gadgets, Tech, Uncategorized

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Case on It

Case Mate iPhone case

Case Mate iPhone case (Photo credit: The Style PA)  

My first mobile phone was a Motorola in 1998, it was about the same size and shape as a hot-dog bun but weighed significantly more, it had a single line display and a pull-out aerial that the instructions warned you not to touch in use for reasons that seemed unnecessarily sinister at the time and was so solid that it felt like if you dropped it the surface onto which it fell would suffer more than the phone.

Today though advances in materials and phone technology have given us phones that we cosset and cradle like tiny woodland creatures.  Just a couple of days ago my belt buckle, for reasons only known to it, decided to attack my Xperia which was in my pocket, I heard the metal hit the glass screen.  I winced as I pulled the phone out.  Thankfully it wasn’t damaged, working in the glass industry I should have had a bit more confidence in its direct impact resistance but had it been hit from the side it might have been a different story.

We hear stories of iPhones’ metal bodies scratching and the anodization flaking off, of screens being cracked by light falls onto floors and so on, often very soon after getting the thing.  Product designers for Apple, Samsung, HTC, Sony etc spend months meticulously researching and creating these shiny devices and the first thing people feel the need to do is clamp them inside cases meticulously created in parallel by case designers.  It is a bizarre paradox that people buy something and the appearance of it is part of the decision but then have to hide it away to maintain its integrity.  I put my phone in a fleece-lined sleeve when it’s in my bag or in a pocket sans-keys etc otherwise but I still feel anxious when it’s in my hand, constantly thinking of how much a new screen would be.  This anxiety has also created the new market of gadget insurance.

Fashions don’t help, so many phones are now made with shiny, glossy materials which are not exactly the best at adhering to either your hand or a surface.  At this point I will defer to the commenters of Gizmodo UK:

ollypercival “I CANNOT BELIEVE how slippery the N4 is. I put it down on what I swear is a flat surface and 5 minutes later I hear the clunk of it hitting the floor. I actually got the spirit level out to check I wasn’t going mental.  If it’s on my bedside table and someone calls me, it’s practically in the bathroom before I can catch up with it.”

hyperspacey “My manager warned me to keep an eye on it seeing as it’s like an air-hockey puck with a death wish.”

Ebbysantos “I’ve not got a case for it, I just can’t get used to the things, plus what’s the point of covering such a pretty thing with a utilitarian bit of plastic?  Would be like putting Jennifer Lawrence in a bright yellow waterproof onesie!”

Quite.

Standard
Psychology, Society, Work

Unrealistic Expectations

Clock watcher

Clock watcher (Photo credit: Craig A Rodway)

It was once accepted that the average working day was nine-to-five, now it’s about eight-to-five, five-thirty at most.  Most people accept that everyone works generally those same hours but there seems to be an increasing expectation, perhaps perpetuated by supermarkets that are open either twenty-four hours or until late, that companies should work round the customers’ work hours.

You might expect a company to provide an emergency service, plumbing or electrics for example, but I’ve heard of people who were waiting for a visit for something non-urgent actually saying “well it’s ok, he can still come out at six or seven o’clock” – oh, can he?  Like the person carrying out the visit doesn’t have a home life to go to when his actual working day finishes.  The same goes for people who work during the day who often won’t actually ask “do you do evenings?” but just say “you’ll have to come out after six o’clock because I work.”  This just takes the old idea of “the customer is always right” to new levels as people behave increasingly selfishly, with little consideration to other people’s lives.

If I need to have some work done then I arrange to have a day off, so the work can be done in normal hours, unless it’s really an emergency.  If it’s non-urgent and I have no holidays left then it can wait.

Standard
Uncategorized

Dance Like No One Is Watching – De stress Your Life

Very good advice

talin401's avatarTalin Orfali Ghazarian

In life some of us tend to lose sight of what is beneficial for us and our well-being and a lot of us are so busy with our daily routine, busy life schedules, balancing work, school, family, friends, activities, travel time, and balancing of just time for yourself. Some of us get distracted and get stressed out and think so much about things and don’t have the energy to do what you want to do sometimes, and life’s challenges get in the way with providing for your family and for yourself and it takes a lot to make ends meet for some and it is a crazy time in life where prices and cost of living is increasing year by year and it has become so difficult and were all going crazy with how to keep up, and among so many things in our lives. I know it’s a challenge…

View original post 457 more words

Standard
Uncategorized

Women’s News: The Problem With Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches Campaign

ladyromp's avatarLadyRomp

m-DOVE-REAL-BEAUTY-SKETCHES-460x345

Kate Fridkis

Blogger, Eat The Damn Cake

Don’t get me wrong, I am a sucker for the message “seriously, though, you’re beautiful.” And I agree with the viral Dove Real Beauty Sketches clip, so many of us get distracted by all of our perceived flaws. We get caught up in criticizing our appearances and miss out on our own beauty. We are often more generous toward strangers than we are toward ourselves.

I like that the Dove campaign is pointing all of this out. I hope it starts a bunch of conversations. And I hope that my reaction is interpreted as a continuation of the conversation, rather than nitpicking criticism. Because I really don’t want to nitpick, I just want to point out some things I noticed as I was watching.

In the clip, some lovely, thin, mostly white women who are all pretty young describe their appearances to…

View original post 1,177 more words

Standard
Meta, Society

Perspective

Map of countries by total population.

Map of countries by total population. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world’s population is currently 6,973,738,433

My blog has 58 followers

It is being followed by 8.317×10^-7%  or  0.0000008317% of the population.

Technology is making ours a small world in terms of communication and commerce but clearly it’s still a big world.

Figures from Google/World Bank data and WordPress. Calculations by Wolfram Alpha (because I was never good at percentages at school).

Standard
Tech

Cat Tracking

cat on wooden fence

cat on wooden fence (Photo credit: (Sascha Uding) Arternative-Design)

Smaller GPS chips have made it possible for even the cheapest smartphone to be a satnav, locator of local takeaways and be able to give its location away to its owner if stolen or, if the proverbial tin-foil-hat wearers turn out to be right, the government.

They’ve also allowed us to plot our runs or cycle rides, places we’ve been, seen, been seen in, rather we’d not been seen in or forgotten we’d been to.

Cats though have been feeling left out of this techy tracky Endomodo-y goodness.  Until now.  This month’s T3 magazine reports on a device invented by Dave Evans called G-Paws which enables your furry friend to be tracked day and night.  Though with you average cat there would be much time spent located “on the sofa/most desirable chair in the living room” or “in the sun by the french doors”.  For about £50 you get an 11g multi-channel GPS with flash memory which can attach to any standard collar.  There’s even a social network so humans can share their cat’s wanderings online.

Combine this with a small camera and your moggy could be geotagging its way around your neighbourhood from sometime in May.

[G-Paws]

Standard