Geek News and Musings

The famous experiment by Ivan Pavlov, which demonstrated classical conditioning, involved ringing a bell every time a dog was served food, and noting that after a few times of this, the dog associated the bell with food and salivated when the bell was rung. We’ve accidentally run a nearly identical experiment at home with my own dog, who is quite calm most of the time but barks whenever someone she doesn’t recognize approaches our door. Since many of those people ring the doorbell, she now associates the doorbell with “time to bark.” And she’ll do so even if she’s standing outside with me, with the door wide open, when I ring the doorbell.

But, of course, dogs aren’t the only ones subject to Pavlovian responses. A somewhat hilarious story in Slate from a few weeks ago demonstrates how birthday messages on Facebook seem to elicit the same sort of Pavlovian response from people. David Plotz noticed how “polluted” Facebook seemed to get with birthday wishes on the said day for any of your friends. He also realized that these messages didn’t really feel all that authentic, since they felt “programmed” in response to the little Facebook bell. So he decided to run an experiment.

I was born on Jan. 31, but I’ve always wanted a summer birthday. I set my Facebook birthday for Monday, July 11. Then, after July 11, I reset it for Monday, July 25. Then I reset it again for Thursday, July 28. Facebook doesn’t verify your birthday, and doesn’t block you from commemorating it over and over again. If you were a true egomaniac, you could celebrate your Facebook birthday every day.

He noted that for July 11th, he received 119 birthday wishes via Facebook. Four close friends were confused, but “most of them attributed the confusion to their own faulty memories.” When July 25th came around, he received another 105 birthday wishes. The number of people suspecting something was up was nine. The really stunning thing:

Of the 105 birthday wishes, 45 of them—nearly half—came from people who had wished me a Facebook happy birthday two weeks earlier.

On July 28th, just three days later, when it was his birthday again, he still ended up with 71 birthday wishes. 16 people noticed something was up. Though it appears lots of people still hadn’t caught on:

Almost 30 people wished me a happy birthday on July 28 having already wished me a happy birthday on one of my previous non-birthdays. Sixteen people sent me Facebook birthday wishes on all three Facebook birthdays, not noting or perhaps not caring about the repetition. One friend even wished me four happy birthdays, congratulating me twice on one of my fake days. The messages from one of these three-time greeters, a friend I’ve never met named Barry P., were almost poignant.

On July 11, he wrote: "Wishing you a very happy birthday David & a wonderful year!"

On July 25, he upped it: "Wishing you a very happy birthday David & your best year ever!"

On July 28, the superlative was gone: "Wishing you a very happy birthday David & a terrific year!"

So, the next time you’re feeling down, just trying ringing that doorbell and watching all your friends salivate in response, wishing you the very best…

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Olympus is trying to do with their new E-PMT1 PEN Mini camera what other manufacturers already have: bring DSLR power to the masses. It’s their smallest Micro Four Thirds camera to date, and it’s definitely got its proverbial sights set on the mass market — and the fact that it comes in six colors certainly doesn’t hurt. Olympus was kind enough to let me play with an E-PM1 at the U.S. Open of all places, and here are a few of my quick impressions.

The body is a bit on the plasticky side, but it fortunately doesn’t feel like it will fall apart at the seams either. Corners had to be cut to keep the price down, and while the body probably could have been a bit sturdier, it feels robust enough to stand up to the rigors of everyday use. The rest of the package was spot on: it performed pretty nicely in most low light situations I found myself in, and the autofocus was nice and snappy.

As something of a novice photographer, I appreciated the simple terms that Olympus has peppered throughout its UI. While being asked to manually change shutter speed on a typical DSLR may elicit a clueless look from an aspiring photographer, Olympus makes it a cakewalk: just change the “Motion Control” setting (complete with self-explanatory icons) to achieve the desired effect. That said, the menu system was a bit confusing at times: after changing the art mode (Olympus’s name for filters) in the menu for example, you couldn’t use the same method to change it. Rather, you press a different button and change art mode from the settings it brings up.

The E-PM1′s iAuto mode is a boon to new users — while photos taken using it seem to err just a bit on the warm side, it reduces the amount of know-how needed to take nice shots. Different art modes also add an extra splash of fun to the PEN Mini, and while every camera has them, personal favorites like the tilt-shifting Diorama mode will help position it as the fun camera to use.

All things considered, I’m really starting to fall for the little guy. The problem with Olympus’ approach is that it’s terribly difficult to strike the right balance: water it down too much and pros won’t pick it up as a smaller alternative, but make it just a bit too complex and casual users won’t take the plunge. While not perfect, the E-PM1 seems to stick it mostly in that sweet spot. The Olympus E-PM1 is due for a September release, and will set photographers back $499.99.

Last night, a PR person contacted me and said to expect a mysterious “puzzle piece” to arrive the next morning. I steepled my fingers, squeezed in my monocle, and warned her that it was unlikely that we’d participate in a marketing thing like that.

It arrived anyway. It turned out, however, to be a gigantic 3D-printed robot head. My heart softened just a little at this, not least because of the irony embodied by how thoroughly FedEx had managed to destroy it, despite the enormous padded box it came in. It’s amazing how good FedEx is at destroying packages. Protip: don’t send organs via FedEx, even if it’s just a hobby.

It turns out that the puzzle is part of a code, and a bunch of tech blogs all have to punch theirs in at the website for a new Droid cellular handset. This will unlock something. “Something” presumably being “an ad”, right? So I actually punched it in, just to be a good sport. But it didn’t work. Their flash site just said “Verifying Code” and never did. At this, I said oh well!, then got on with my day.

So now, of course, all the other sites have done their bit and Boing Boing is being harangued on Twitter by Droid fans to get with the program. Sneaky, intelligent PR here. But this makes it interesting! What should I do? Let’s vote:

1) Just punch it in! Also, your pious avoidance of naming the advertiser is vaguely irritating, because you’ve posted it anyway and we’re just going to go and look it up now. I have eight credit cards.

2) Post a picture of the code with a rival manufacturer’s logo concealing a couple of digits, leaving a few hundred possible combinations to try.

        2B) and dont post it until 1 minute remains on the ‘deadline’ countdown at the puzzle website.

3) Screw ‘em.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS!

Assistly, the cloud-based customer support platform that’s backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce, as well as several other angels and VCs, launched version 2.0 of its platform back in July, along with rolling out a new pricing model that includes a full-featured version of its service for free.

Today, the summer features keep on rolling out for Assistly, which today announced that it would be adding two-way integration with Salesforce. Assistly for Salesforce is an AppExchange app that, according to the Assistly blog, will enable sales and support teams to “share a complete view of the customer” — in other words, customer support teams can now see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases — direct from Salesforce. The app will also integrate with Salesforce Chatter to make it easy to involve one’s entire company in customer support, and allow users to send status updates and set rules to automatically generate Chatter messages as customer support cases age.

With Assistly for Salesforce, users can view contact history and more without having to leave Assistly, and likewise, customer support teams can view information from Salesforce — all in an effort to offer a more consistent experience to the customer. Organizations can then use Assistly to show where a customer is in the sales cycle, the status or value of that customer to the company, and the customer’s contact information. In realtime.

Assistly has had an ongoing partnership with Salesforce, and this announcement is a logical extention of the strategic investment Salesforce has made in Assistly — and shows yet another partnership forged by Salesforce to continue adding products and services that complement its existing service.

Since launching in September of last year and taking on new capital, Assistly has brought on companies like Yelp, Etsy, 37signals, Pandora, Vimeo, and Spotify as paying customers. The startup also counts Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors.

For more, check out the video below:

You may recall that back in May, we spotted something in Google’s “Dear Sophie” commercial: an unreleased +1 Chrome extension. This was pre-Google+, when the +1 button still didn’t do a whole lot, so even I forgot about the extension over the past few months. But very quietly, Google actually launched it yesterday.

There was no blog post, no featured placement in the Chrome Web Store — pretty much no fanfare beyond Google SVP of Chrome, Sundar Pichai, posting a link to it on Google+. But it has the potential to be a bigger deal than it seems on the surface.

As the tagline indicates, the Google +1 Button extension allows you to “+1 a web page, anywhere you go on the web”. That’s important. You no longer have to rely on a site to implement the +1 Button, you can invoke the functionality through your browser. Imagine if Facebook made their own browser and offered an extension to “Like” any page on the web through it — same idea (and one that I still suspect will happen sooner or later).

Right now, the +1 Button just shares content you like on the web. But eventually, the plan is to look at this data as a way to affect Google Search itself potentially. That’s huge. The button also is starting to play a role in how Google serves up advertising to you. Again, huge — though these concepts may make people wary of such a button.

As Google notes in their description of the app:

In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information.

Yes, you read that correctly, “all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google” — and that’s even if you don’t click the button. Nefarious or not, that will worry some people.

And while the +1 Buttons for websites just added the functionality to share your Google+ Circles, the extension doesn’t yet offer that — but I assume it will. It does offer +1 counts though already, which is nice.

Find the extension here. Again, it’s Chrome only for now, we’ll see if they create ones for Firefox, IE, and Safari as well.

I don’t always post about iPhone cases… but when I do, I prefer retro gaming ones. Sure, you could have a cool metallic case, or go all-leather, or make your phone look like R2-D2 — but when you can have a Dreamcast on the back, those other options seem to lose their luster.

It’s one of those things you can have that passively sorts through the crowd and only grabs the attention of those who are in the know. I have an Evangelion shirt that does the same and I’m proud. Anyone who sees you rocking a Genesis on your ear will come up and give you a Sonic-style fist bump. You too will feel as cool as the guy in the picture does.

You have a choice of Saturn, Dreamcast, or the aforementioned Genesis. All cost ¥2100, or 27 of your United States dollars. Plus a few ¥ for shipping, of course.

Wait, where’s the Nomad? You can’t rewrite history, Sega!

[via GameSetWatch]

Readers offer their best tips for using calculators during the day, keeping your computer towers clean and shiny, and migrating to a new Windows installation pain-free. More »

Trains are an often over-looked form of transportation in the US. But trains are actually one of the most fuel-efficient ways to travel — able to move a ton of freight over 400 miles on just one gallon of fuel. Here are just a few quick links on some cool train projects.

• German trains will be powered by renewable energy (and no cheating by using nuclear power…!) by 2050. “That’s not just a declaration of intent. It’s a concrete business target.” [url]
• This video demonstrates the ‘Moving Platforms’ concept — which lets train riders get on/off a moving train via a small transfer train. Prior art from the movies: riding up on a horse and jumping onto a moving train. [url]
• Russia is seriously thinking about building an underground rail line between Siberia and Alaska. If completed, this $65 billion project would create the longest underwater tunnel in the world. [url]
• To discover other interesting transportation-related content, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them.

A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.

Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.

For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.

Wikileaks also says it is in touch with the U.S. State Department and will be taking legal action.

WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL - Guardian disclosure [Wikileaks]

Hey, what do you know! It’s been just shy of two weeks since Apple’s last Beta release of iOS 5, and just like clockwork, they’re back with another serving.

You guys all know the drill at this point: as usual, this Beta release is for developers (and “developers”) only — but on the upside, that Beta version number probably won’t climb too much higher before this thing gets released to everyone.

Plus: at this point, the releases seem to be boiling down to bug fixes and tiny tweaks. If you’ve managed to hold out this long, you’re probably not going to miss too much that you wouldn’t have seen in the first 6.

Alas, Apple doesnt really release a “change log” pointing to all the fun little gems (other sites may post “change log”, but these are almost entirely just developer-oriented API notes. They rarely change much from beta to beta, and most user-facing stuff goes unmentioned.) With that said, we’ll keep an eye out for big, notable changes and update this post as we come across them — be sure to let us know down in the comments if you spot any!

Like the past two releases, Beta 7 can be downloaded as a slim update over-the-air, or as a full image through the Apple developer portal.

« Previous entries