Coffee Addicts: The Calculus of Caffeine Consumption

Got this from Arvind Narayan’s blog post, in which he takes us through his research on caffeine consumption from a scientific point of view (Click on his blog to read the full analysis), with pretty cool results and analysis for Coffee Addicts (which are generally the corporate riff-raff) and how to use caffeiene to your best advantage.

I’ll just cover his basic results here:

1) Caffeine tolerance builds up rather quickly (2-3 weeks) and further, is near-total. That means that if you drink coffee regularly, pretty soon you start producing more adenosine in respose; thus you need your caffeine dose just to get up to your normal level of brain activity, and you’re dopey if you don’t take it.

2)  Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain (by tricking your brain into thinking it is adenosine.) A decrease in the activity of adenosine (which is a sleep chemical) increases neuron firing rate and increases focus and concentration.  (see above picture)

3)The best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.

4) When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep.  Sleep has effects on memory consolidation and is extremely beneficial in overcoming cognitive bottlenecks, making the brain maximally alert right after waking up. Thus, a possibly very effective coffee drinking pattern would be two cups a day, one early in the morning and one right after an afternoon nap. (Unfortunately, napping is stigmatized in the Western work culture, despite much scientific evidence touting the benefits. I hear that such stigmatization is non-existent in China. Good for them.)

5) Consistent caffeine consumption is as good as nonconsumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. a better strategy is periodic abstinence, it lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required.

That’s about it… interesting eh?  What wasn’t covered in the research and what I’m interested in is the placebo effect of caffeine. As far as I recall there was some research done where 10 people were in a room 9 were given pure caffeine and 1 was given concentrated valium (all of them were told they were being given concentrated caffeine, and in another room it was vice versa.  In each case the subjects given valium in a caffeiene context and caffeine in a valium context had still manifested symptoms as the rest of the group in their particular context.  Hence, both the caffeine and valium had the opposite effect in those individuals.  word.

All in All, I think the above research has very interesting insights into coffee addicts planning their coffee consumption to get the most benefit.  Other than that I just don’t think most people would really care.

Why the New iPhone is So Damn Great…

Yes, you have standalone GPS devices; yes, you have phones that support GPS. But tell me, how many third-party applications have you used on either? Not many, I reckon, because the platforms weren’t very tempting for developers, and the screens and GUIs of most devices other than the iPhone simply aren’t good enough. Standalone GPS devices, on the other hand, were closed affairs; what the manufacturer put in, that’s what you got.

GPS can do so much more. In its most basic sense, adds another dimension to your life: it knows where you are. It knows where everyone is. Geotagging your photos? That’s just the surface being scratched. Think social networking; in fact, we already have that, and it’s called Loopt. It’s an application that alerts you when your friends are nearby and allows you to share your location and photos with them. Yes, we’ve had such applications before, but now the location is going to be very precise – you’ll be able to know which club, street, or coffee shop they’re in.

It’s not only about social networking. Everything: event recommendations and reviews, weather, traffic and flight info, gaming – all of it will have a “location” component from now on.

Link:Mashable

Whoever is listening… I want one! I want the new iPhone. I’m so excited about it I’m gonna go hysterical! wow.
: iPhone, GPS, Tehcnology, New, Cool, Location

Creative Design: Read at Work

A very creative campaign from Clemenso BBDO, an Auckland based Advertising agency, for the New Zealand Book Council is the launch of the site Read at Work. What this flash site does is mask your entire screen as a Windows Desktop and fill it with folders of faux Powerpoint presentations (which actually look like real work documents! but are works of literature by some of literatures greats such as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson.

So for those who would like to do a little reading at work but don’t feel comfortable kicking back with a paperback, here’s the site for you to do just that… Read at Work.

P.S. The Windows desktop might arouse more suspicion if you work on a Mac :P

: Read at Work, Creative, New Zealand, Clemenso, BBDO, Books

Let the Government Pay for Your Music Video

What a Brilliant idea… the unsigned UK Band, The Get Out Clause, wanted to make a music video but couldn’t afford the high cost of all the camera crew and equipment. So they spotted suitable sights all over Britain which were covered by the surveillance cameras – Britain has about 13 million of these cameras so suitable locations for the band were not hard to come by.

They set up their sound equipment and began to play at the different locations… then they wrote to all the security companies asking them to hand over the video footage under the Freedom of Information Act! Brilliant!

Source: The Telegraph

Technorati Tags: The Get Out Clause, Cool, Music, Britain, Surveillance, Camera’s , CCTV, Music Video

Google Killer: Powerset Semantic Search Engine

Having been long predicted as the shaping the next generation of search, Semantic Web Applications are now coming to the fore with Powerset leading the way. Powerset has released its beta version, allowing the public to finally try out the new key word technology. Ushering the new era of search, Powerset hopes to change people’s expectations of search by offering a far more intelligent and efficient form of searching, at least in theory.

“We’re changing the way information is searched by doing a much deeper analysis of the pages we index,” said Scott Prevost, Powerset’s product director.

Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset’s engine, applying technology developed in-house as well as licensed from Xerox’s PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. “Meaning is what we index,” he said.

Google’s Marissa Mayer has even elaborated on the benefit of the semantic web…

“People should be able to ask questions and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions — not about what words will appear on the page but more like ‘what is this about?’. A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that,” she said.

She also said that Google seems intelligent more through brute force because of the amount of data it crunches rather than it being really “smart” and working out what the user really means when they are searching for certain terms.

I can already see Google Scurrying to upgrade their system to incorporate this though… they certainly have the budget to do it. The current form of Powerset is limited, consisting only of millions of pages from Wikipedia and Metaweb Technologies’ Freebase, a Web-based structured database of information. Whatever it is, here’s to ushering in a new era in search, one that will ultimately provide a real challenge to the Google’s and Yahoo’s of our increasingly connected world.

Could this possibly be the beginning of a Web 3.0?

Google Maps provides Street View

This is a brilliant new addition to Google Maps, especially those looking or directions. It now provides you with a picture of the place you are looking at and shows you where to turn. This is becoming more and more like the Star Trek Scenario where Science fiction is hitting reality. I don’t see too much of al ine between the integration of GPS into this system and then the system will know exactly where you are an give you directions as you move… with pictures.

But that’s the future, right now, this is an awesome development. I doubt South Africa will see this for a while, Google Maps doesn’t even cover any of our areas fully at the moment. But there’s always hope :)

Google has built its Street View into Google Maps’ ability to provide driving directions, the company said Tuesday.

With the feature, a small camera icon appears next to the intersections in the turn-by-turn directions. Clicking on the icon brings up a view of the intersection so people can see the area in question.

Google Street View is available in 44 areas of the United States, and there are strong signs Google is bringing Street View to Europe. Street View is available through the Google Maps programming interface so that those using Google Maps can add Street View abilities to their Web sites.

Link

TwitterSnooze: Pull the Plug on Verbose Twitters

Now this is a brilliant twist to the over-saturation of social media input into our lives. TwitterSnooze allows you to silence any member of your twitter community for a number of days. So when your friend has a bout of recurrent verbosity, and you don’t really feel like deleting them from your list, simply silence them with TwitterSnooze.

It’s amazing the amount of needs which spring up from our newly defined social habits in the Web 2.0 era, and the amount of web apps available to satisfy each need.

Maybe Web 3.0 will be a filtering of Social Media and provide all things relevant.

The Twitter Blacklist

The Twitter Blacklist identifies all the idiots who Twitter spam and follow thousands of people in order to draw attention to themselves. I think it’s a really cool idea… I especially remember when I first joined Twitter and got all excited when so many people started following me, only to later realise what a bunch of self-obsessed, ego-driven idiots they are.

How do you know a person is a Twitter Spammer? The site gives a good ratio of identifying them by looking at how many people follow them vs. how many people they follow.

1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer. — evan

For those using Firefox, install Greasemonkey and then add in the Twitter Blacklist script.
There’s even an API for programmers so they can query if a certain user is on the blacklist.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Blacklist, Twitter

Share your iPod Music: Introducing miShare!

You no longer have to be a hacker or tech g33k extraordinnaire to get music off your iPod and share it with whoever you want.This cool little gadget will do it all for you. Simply plug it in, hit the button and you’ll be able to share movies, photo’s, songs and even entire playlists (provided they’re not DRM protected.)

No computer cables, No hectic software, just two iPods and miShare.

There is one downside… it doesn’t work for iPhones or the iPod Touch as yet, but the firmware is being upgraded as we speak so register on the miShare website to keep updated.

The gadget sells for $100.

Technorati Tags: miShare, technology, Gadgets, iPod, Sharing, DRM

Twitter, Banned in Dubai?

Just got his bit of news from Techtree.

The message reads: “We apologise the site you are trying to visit
has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the
religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab
Emirates.”

Apparently Dubai has blocked the Twitter site, but there’s no indication as to why. There is speculation over governments seeing Twitter as a threat to their sovereignty, but come on. Firstly, this is Dubai, one of the most liberal places in the UAE, also, which self-respecting internet user won’t figure out all the anonymous browsing websites there are out there to get hold of twitter anyway?

This story is seriously dodgy.

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