Image from www.brake-fast.net Thanks to Steve Portigal and Page Sands for bringing this to my attention: the Brake-Fast Doggie Bowl is designed to stop dogs wolfing down their food quite as quickly as they would otherwise, which can cause painful (and dangerous) bloating. The raised […]
All posts filed under “Innovation”
High frequency ringtone download
High frequencies being tested in the urban badlands: see, no teenagers here! A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone […]
High frequency wave files back up again
They’re back up (well, the wave files anyway), thanks to the Internet Archive.
Shaping behaviour: Part 2
Speedometer, rev counter and fuel and temperature gauges on the dashboard of my 1992 Reliant Scimitar SST. Photo taken on B1098 alongside Sixteen Foot Drain, Isle of Ely, England. In part 1 of ‘Shaping behaviour’, we took a look at ‘sticks and carrots’ as approaches […]
Sniffing out censorship
Image from News Sniffer News Sniffer‘s Revisionista monitors alterations to published news stories from a variety of sources by comparing RSS feeds, sometimes revealing subsequently redacted information or changes of opinion (e.g. note the removed phrase in the first paragraph of this story about Cuba). […]
Education, forcing functions and understanding
Mr Person at Text Savvy looks at an example of ‘Guided Practice’ in a maths textbook – the ‘guidance’ actually requiring attention from the teacher before the students can move on to working independently – and asks whether some type of architecture of control (a […]
Friday quote: Precedents
It is remarkable… how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born. From a post by Vera Bass, ‘Teaching requires learning’, 6th November 2006. Many people have probably also said this, but that’s the point, pretty much.
Friday quote: Precedents (the flipside)
As a flipside, perhaps, to the quote on precedents from a couple of weeks ago: If there is something really cool, and you can’t understand why somebody hasn’t done it before, it’s because you haven’t done it yourself. (From Lion Kimbro‘s fascinating How to Make […]
Forcing functions designed to increase product consumption
A few days ago, Tim Quinn of Dangerous Curve posted an interesting observation on the Simple Control in Products page: “This may not be what you had in mind, but I immediately thought of such things as toothpaste pumps that ‘meter’ use to insure the […]
‘Carmakers must tell buyers about black boxes’
According to Reuters, “The [US] government will not require recorders in autos but said on Monday that car makers must tell consumers when technology that tracks speed, braking and other measurements is in the new vehicles they buy.
The illusion of control
Scott Adams recounts an anecdote illustrating the ‘illusion of control’ and how important it is to many people – even to the extent that it is the single defining characteristic of mankind which one might use to explain human behaviour to aliens: “The maintenance man […]
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
An image from Hendricus Loos’s 2001 US patent, ‘Remote Magnetic Manipulation of Nervous Systems’ In my review of Adam Greenfield‘s Everyware a couple of months ago, I mentioned – briefly – the work of Hendricus Loos, whose series of patents cover subjects including “Manipulation of […]