I was just abt to play a prank on people.
Google introduces Retail app for google glass which detects human emotions to help retailers oversell products to desperate or heart broken clients.
For some reason, I am not comfortable with Google - not the search engine, that's great. But, Google being everywhere, watching my mail, my searches, etc is a little uncomfortable for me. You feel naked and powerless. You never know how they use data about you. I am a naive surfer. I surf things that interest me. There are others about whom Google wants to know about. They are not here for charity, are they? They need to make money. They have google ads. The have phones.. They are having glass now. They understand us better than our spouses. The track our choices and mine everything about us. They can sell this data to companies who can sell us products. They want to conquer the world and we're happily letting them do so in the name of digital revolution and evolution. We as a country, never seem to learn from the past. We let the Dutch, Portugese, French and British come and conquer and plunder our land. Yes, they did build rails and schools, but they looted the country too. Thousands of people died, fighting against the British. I don't know how a land like ours could have let that happen.. and that is not even too long ago.. Just 50 years ago all this happened! Now we have a whole nation which lives on McD and Coke. Now we are slaves of the Americans! We buy their brands. We use their apps. We crave for iPhones and iPads. Why can't we be proud of our heritage and create a different nation? The American dream created capitalism. It created the mortgage crisis, Wall St failure and recession and the layman who has no idea what globalization is, is paying 50 bucks for rice and 90 bucks for dal, 82 rupees for petrol and 70 rupees for onions. His life has become messy. We are a conservative nation. Our forefathers used resources carefully. We reused as much as possible. Nothing went waste in a house. But look at American consumerism.. I imagine Costco and Walmart. Everything is super sized..There is so much buying, using and wasting. How much trash do they generate? How many paper products are flushed? How many coke cans are consumed? How many gazillion litres of fuel do their cars use? This 20% people consume 80% of the world resources. They have surrounded all the oil fields and are now the richest country. They are the best marketers of the world. They market such crappy Hollywood movies (and some occasional good ones). The Oscars seem like a joke sometimes. Yes, they have talent. For sure.. They are pretty up there in digital revolution and penetration. But - the question is, do we need all this? Our country is far behind on so many things. Our quality of education is pathetic. Once we address that, we would not have all the educated people migrating to the US or craving for iPhones. We may churn a new breed of youngsters, who know who they are and will create their own stuff instead of being a poor imitator or simple consumer of American products.
I was wandering to read abt Google Glass and came across an existing app!
It's from Sension. Before that, here's a short understanding of Google glass.
It's a handsfree device, so your hands are free - to drive, to sign cheques (does anyone do that anymore?), to carry your luggage, carry your baby, tie your laces, ride a cycle, drink your cuppa or other romantic things as well.
Takes pictures. Records what you see. Share live. Directions. Send messages. Ask questions and be answered. Google translation. Gives your flight info. Basically a phone with camera
Sension started from our passion for education and our goal to give
every student in the world a unique, one-on-one learning experience. We
wanted to replicate the live experience of a teacher reacting to a
confused student in the classroom. Through our initial attempts to
create such a personalized experience, we quickly realized that
consuming web content is currently a broken, one-way static experience.
The software was originally designed to make online teaching tools
respond to a user's behavior for a more interactive learning experience.
"But we quickly realized that this stuff goes beyond what we'd
intended," Voss told The Huffington Post. "Through the process of
building the facial tracker, we discovered it could be used to track
emotions, as well."
“Anything that can be used to facilitate social understanding in people
with autism is potentially beneficial,” Derek Ott, a professor in the
Psychiatry Division at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine
From a prank mood, it brought me into a sober mood. I donno much abt autism.
I feel bad for people who have to struggle a bit more than ABLED people to do the same things. It seems unfair but I know these people are strong enough to overcome such challenges.
Yday I saw a group of hearing and speech disabled kids at MG Road. I asked them if any of them wanted a drop but they responded "Can't hear or speak". I then left. I had tears in my eyes. I shouldn't have. They are normal people. Why do we think they lack something? Imagine a world without the noise.. yes you miss out on the music too.. but today's world is more cacophony than music.. Their world is probably very different...Their vocabulary, their emotions, their responses, would all be different. I wanted to spend some time with them to understand their world. One day maybe I will get a chance.
