Can't touch this...

Technology reveals a new world of communication where it’s cool to be ‘out of touch’.

For years, touch was considered an important part of communication – until it took a young girl from Goa to tear through the scratch guard, break through the guerrilla glass touchscreen and create a touch-free revolution in mobile technology. To the mobile phone junkie, this translates into a future where he wouldn't have to touch a thing to be in touch with the world.

So, one doesn’t ‘touch’ a mobile phone anymore, how does one communicate? Through gestures, of course. The next generation of phones is being prepared for gesture recognition through '3dim', or high quality 3-d sensing achieved through patented signal processing methods. So, instead of issuing commands to your mobile through touch, you can use a set of hand movements that it can recognize and respond to.

But interpreting gestures and signs can be a pretty confusing affair – at times, the same gesture could mean different things to different people, like the famous Indian head bobble. To avoid the muddle that gesture recognition could cause, technology has come up with a few alternatives that could help us communicate, both with our mobiles and with one another.

Accoustech: A technology that uses acoustics to help mobile phones convey a message – this is in complete irreverence to the silent mode. Mobiles will henceforth use sounds, like snarling noises to indicate year-end appraisal, childlike laughter to signal wife leaving town, sobs to announce that your favourite serial is beginning – and loud growls to indicate hunger.

Chromatech: This technology works through chromatic gradations - or colour changes that the mobile displays. Bright shades of yellow indicate that gold prices have come down, red communicates a bad feeling that the prices have gone down further after your gold shopping, green indicates that the neighbours got a better deal than you did, and shades of black and blue point out that what you’ve bought is not even 18 carat gold. Employers can also use this technology to find out if their employees are faking a fever and playing hooky, by holding their mobile close to them - if it turns pink, they are in good health and are fit enough to work.

Optech: This uses an optical mode of communication. The wallpaper and the display of the mobile screen change based on your mood, from bright, happy flowers and tranquil waterfalls to Megadeth skulls and Ghost Rider close-ups. Other display techniques include a change in opacity and dual tones, for the Gemini types or for those in two minds.

Aromatech: This technology enables your mobile to release various aromas that can convey a message. Digital scent technology has been around for some time now - so why not make use of it? It could also help employees alert their colleagues who are goofing off. A quick garlic and BO whiff from their mobile would be enough to let them know that the boss is approaching their desk.

Statech: Using technology that releases static pulsations, mobiles resort to communication of the seismic kind, thereby giving the good old vibration mode its share of the limelight. This method allows the mobile to sense its owner's mood and pass on messages through a series of vibrations. So when someone sends you a message about a big question mark on IPL 7, your mobile will make sure that you look appropriately shaken up.

Energetech: This is cutting-edge technology of the energetic kind, in the form of shock impulses that involve electroreception. In other words, the mobile carries your message in the form of an impulse. If the recipient is carrying his mobile in his person, the effect would be telling - or screaming, depending on the intensity of the shock.

Note: All the new technologies were created by taking traditional communication methods used by animals and changing the 'tic' in their names into tech. All of them are deemed fictional until the time someone really comes up with them.

Technology in sleep mode

Finally, a research document on how our sleeping positions are linked to technology.

It’s a revelation that has come as a wake-up call – who would have thought that our sleeping positions would actually reveal our technology preferences!

Foetal

Those who sleep in the foetal position were born with a USB cord instead of an umbilical cord and consider themselves to be technology’s children. They are known to worry unnecessarily – has that mobile been charged? What if the laptop performed the ‘blue screen of death’ act tomorrow? They are also known to be sensitive inside and cannot handle any kind of rejection, especially of the password kind. Imagine being denied the pleasure of checking the number of ‘awwws’ that a cute family photo uploaded earlier on Facebook has received – it’s things like this that make them curl up in the foetal position.

Log

The Log people sleep on their sides with their arms close to their body – being stubborn by nature, they cannot tolerate any change in technology. This translates into a resounding ‘no’ to the new Chrome browser that they are asked to check out every time they log into Gmail, and to the latest smartphone that the ads glorify, despite the fact that their ancient Motorola mobile frequently gets mistaken for the TV remote. They are also known to be gullible and often end up trusting Mr. John Smith from the UK who asks for their bank details to transfer his entire fortune to them, or Ms. Thandiwe Traore from Nigeria asking for some urgent help as she is stranded amongst cannibals and needs money to bribe them and escape. 

Yearner

Yearners are known to sleep on their sides with their arms stretched out– a habit that comes from checking their mails and messages even as they walk. And as their name suggests, they yearn for the latest version of any technology – be it iPhone 6 or Google’s self-driven car. They are also chronic time wasters, which automatically makes them any social networking site’s delight.

Freefaller

Freefallers sleep on their stomachs with their arms outstretched, gripping their pillow – almost as if they are holding on for dear life to what they have. Technology has let them down so many times that they are reduced to nervous wrecks, always anticipating that stinker mail from the client or that disaster call from work in the middle of the night. So subconsciously, they are forever ready to pick up that mobile from their bedside on first ring, which explains why their arms are outstretched. As for gripping their pillow, it’s a sign that they have spent weary years clutching the printer that typically went haywire minutes before a presentation.

Soldier

Imagine standing in attention – and dropping into bed in the same position. That’s the soldier position, and people who sleep in this position tend to be militant about their technology as well. You’ll never catch them downloading stuff onto their computers, checking out apps for their mobile or looking at online deals greedily for the next best sale in town. ‘Soldier’ sleepers have a tendency to snore because of their sleeping position– if only the technology that was kind enough to offer us a sleep mode could give them a silent mode.

Starfish

Researchers have related the starfish position – where people sleep on their back with their arms spread out around the pillow – to a friendly disposition. Just prop them up in front of a terminal in that very pose and you’ll realize how apt the description is. Sitting with their arms wrapped around the monitor, with their face almost into it, ‘Starfish’ sleepers spend hours on chats and Skype calls, listening to the problems of the world and offering their help.

Note: All sleeping positions are real, but all associations to technology have been fabricated. The scope of this research was restricted to sleeping positions at home – those at the workplace have not been considered.

Splitting hairs on technology

What technology gives, technology takes. Here’s some hair-raising proof…

There are two kinds of people in this world – the haves, who are of the hirsute variety and are desperate to lose some hair, and the have-nots, who would do anything to get the fuzz back on their head. However, both have one thing in common – they are both running a fine-toothed comb through technology, to find an answer.

While records reveal that the haves have had a close shave with technology, the hair clinics have been bombarding the have-nots with messages like ‘Hair on, or happiness gone’. And it’s working, because it’s common knowledge that while it can get lonely at the top, it certainly can't get sparse. So these hair clinics used cutting-edge technology to come up with Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT). Of course, looking at the current crop of cricketers and commentators, one realises that the transplant has to be done carefully or the result would be closer to a fruit than FUT, what with the 'FUT head' resembling a pineapple.

Another key advancement is the laser light treatment which promises not only to make light of the baldness problem, but also make the future of bald pates brighter and put a mane on man. Called photobiostimulation, the technique has resulted in stimulating the economy of several countries to a large extent, with billions of dollars being spent on GDP (Gross Development of Pilus). Cloning has become another rage, with cells from a strand of human hair being cloned into thousands of replicas, all of which could be planted in the barren areas. It didn't matter if people suddenly had no resemblance to their mug shots in their passport or driver's license - it was a case of prioritising social recognition over facial recognition.

However, there is another school of thought that is losing hair at the very mention of laser light being used to grow hair. Wasn't laser technology supposed to aid hair removal in the first place? Refusing to be drawn into petty fights involving the laser ("That's more Darth Vader's domain, isn't it?"), the beauty industry worked in close collaboration with the medical fraternity - much like a shampoo and conditioner - and came up with the Intense Pulsed Light (IPL), which helps in hair removal and in photorejuvenation (a technical term for looking refreshed and youthful in a photo after an IPL session).

There’s a very simple law of physics which says that light travels from a bulb to an object. IPL simply reverses this law and light - an entire spectrum of it - is made to penetrate the skin and travel to the bulb - of the hair, at its roots. Disputing any law generates a lot of heat and it is apparently this heat that destroys the hair, shaft and all.

But there are issues with it. The variable pricing could make people's hairs stand on end. And it's certainly not advisable for pregnant women and people with sensitive skin. Besides, areas where hair removal has been done should not be exposed to harsh sunlight. (In Chennai, that would mean not having an IPL session all year.) Reports also have it that the treatment may not be entirely painless.

To all those looking for an option, may we suggest the IPL (Indian Premier League). With nine teams, 200 players, 496 sponsors, 12,496 runs, 219,865 ads and 4,780,961 tweets, you have enough stats to make you want to tear your hair out. Following it on the mobile or on your tablet calls for a bit of technology, but look at the positive side of things - it's absolutely free.

Besides, who would have thought that technology's worthy answer to DHT (dihydrotestosterone – the hormone responsible for baldness in men) would be DTH?

A future gone wrong

The dumbest predictions about the future – and how most of them turned out to be right.

The men who supposedly saw the future said things that bordered on the ridiculous, but on closer inspection, one has to confess that they came pretty close to nixing it. Here is a list of such forecasts on technology.

This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. — A memo at Western Union, circa 1878.

In other words, the folks from the 19^th century simply hung up on the telephone. Considering the fact that one can't send and receive sms-es, download ring tones, play games, surf the net or catch up on Facebook using the telephone, one has to admit that it does have too many shortcomings to be seriously considered a means of communication. Truly a device that’s inherently of no value to us – couldn’t they have made it smarter, like the smartphone perhaps?

Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night. — Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

One will never know what made the bigwigs at 20^th Century Fox switch off at the very mention of television, but it is a fact that people did get tired of staring at a plywood box every night. And that was how TV evolved to its current hot, wall-mounted avatar. Now, it was up to people to get tired of staring at a plastic frame-mounted LED screen every night, but the TV guys were too smart to let that happen. They came up with IPL.

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia. — Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London.

Intense research was done to figure out if the passengers would be able to withstand the breakneck speeds at which trains travelled initially, often clocking 15 miles an hour effortlessly. Eventually, serendipity helped uncover the cause of asphyxiation and difficulty in breathing – it was the stench from the toilets. Ever since, trains began a new era in transportation and have progressed to operating at over 200 miles per hour.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Though this is as erroneous as Bill Gates' ‘640k memory ought to be enough for anybody’ quote, it’s a pretty accurate estimation of the number of computers currently being sold in India, what with everyone opting for tablets, phablets and piglets (when playing Angry Birds, that is).

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain. - Martin Luther, German Reformation leader, Table Talk, circa 1530s.

The world took him seriously and soon, the sale of books went down dramatically (barring those titles that had shades of grey in them). But then, blogs came into our lives – everyone wanted to blog, be read and eventually be published. Today, the multitude of blogs is a great evil. There's no limit to this fever for writing; everyone must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.

Computers in the future will weigh no more than 1.5 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949

Haven't you heard your colleagues huff and puff with their laptops, claiming that they weighed a ton? Close enough.

Losing the human touch

By the year 2020, technology had almost ruined cinema – this is how the industry fought back.

April 6, 2020. It has been 125 years since the first visual special effect – the stop action technique that helped replace an actor with a dummy seamlessly - was demonstrated on film. Ever since, technology has played a major role in evolving cinema, from black and white to colour and from silent movies to talkies... Unfortunately, it did not stop there.

During the initial years, movies had been more about people, their lives and their stories. When technology came into the picture, visual effects took a giant leap, with matte techniques that blended multiple shots to create an illusion. Special effects like the Schüfftan process allowed miniature sets to be shown like Godzilla’s penthouse and made actors look the size of Gremlins in front of them. This removed the need for large sets, and consequently, scores of set designers, art directors and carpenters saw their careers being pulled down.

Rear and front projection ensured that big budget outdoor shots could be completed indoors by projecting the background on a screen. Chroma keying allowed the film to be shot with a blue screen or a green screen as a backdrop - the background could be added later, during post production. Suddenly, locations were no longer so important. The Swiss Alps could be added at the director’s leisure to a Bollywood song – and with that, location scouts, location managers and coordinators lost their way in the industry.

3D computer-generated imagery (CGI) led to animated images vying with live actors for space in the movies. Soon animated characters – dinosaurs, giant snakes, aliens and ghosts - began to star in movies, leaving actors to play mere supporting roles. Entire movies were set in simulated environments and virtual worlds. Motion capture made it easier to use humans, capture their movements and facial expressions, and then create animated characters that would represent them on screen. Since these characters were created using software, costumes and make-up became redundant – the careers of costume designers, costume supervisors, make-up artists and scores of tailors simply came apart at the seams.

Soon movies became more about technology and less about people. What began as a collective effort of hundreds of people was soon reduced to a bunch of tech geeks making a movie. The last straw was when filmmakers realized that actors were no longer needed – they could be replicated on screen using CGI. The casting director, the casting agent and the casting couch soon found themselves without a role to play in the business.

Soon even actors began finding it difficult to find work – their computer generated counterparts filled in for them adequately. (Besides, producers were glad to do away with star tantrums, long breaks, big egos, bigger vanity vans, their burgeoning entourage and the huge monies they demanded.) But audiences the world over began to get restless. The magic was missing and soon they stopped going to the theatres. In the beginning, it was mistaken to be the onslaught of television. In the 80s, it was attributed to home videos and a decade later, piracy was made the fall guy. Finally, it took the utter failure of Avatar VII – the Titanic goes to Mars, for the film fraternity to realize what had gone wrong. The audience was missing the human element.

To bring back actors on screen would be regressive. Technology was doing a great job of simulating them in the movies. How else could one get the audience to see real people on screen? “For at least 5-10 minutes, if not the entire duration,” theatre owners pleaded. Much thought went into it and finally, after intense research, the experts found the solution.

And that was how, starting April 1, 2020, the newsreel came back into our lives. 

Be what your boss wants you to be

There's a big difference between working hard and working smart - and that's where technology comes into play.

As humans, most of us spend over 30% of our life at work. And when we transmogrify into mules, donkeys and dogs at the workplace, the number increases alarmingly to 50%. Spending half our lives in the office is bad enough, so why make it worse by working hard as well? The problem is, most of us don't know the difference between working hard and working smart.

This is explained better by ‘Gates Theory of Diminishing Productivity’, which states that 20% of all employees spend 80% of their time staring at Windows Office while the other 80% spend 100% of their time staring out of their office windows. In other words, what you choose to stare at determines how hardworking you are.

One of the first steps to making your boss believe that you’re the man is by making your presence felt in conference rooms, during brainstorming sessions, meetings and presentations. What you need to do is spew jargon until it impresses the right people. Just google for ‘bullshit generator’ - and you'll be surprised at the sheer volume of bovine droppings present online. So how do these corporate poop creators work? By stacking three columns of words, of which the first set could be actions, the second, descriptors and the third, systems, for instance. So, at your command, the site pulls out a word randomly from each column, puts them together and magically creates phrases for you to fling around, like ' mesh best-of-breed architectures', 'integrate user-centric paradigms' or 'disintermediate enterprise supply-chains'. If you’re in IT, there are sites that specialize in jargon that might interest you, like 'beta-test authentic APIs', 'capture peer-to-peer blogospheres' and 'share semantic tagclouds'.

If you need something a bit more pompous to suit the environment, go for sites that create entire statements, like 'Double-digit throughput increase impact compliant market opportunities reaped from our organic efficiency gain, whereas the clients enhance the situational paradigms'. A statement like this has enough bullshit to power you to the corner cabin. If you are in HR and have the unenviable job of handing over titles to a million minions, ("Make it fancy and impressive or we'll leave - CTS is hiring") opt for sites that can generate job titles. Fancy designations like Customer Usability Associate, Dynamic Quality Representative and Forward Assurance Architect are sure to leave your employees in such a state of euphoria that you won’t have to give them a raise.

Besides the conference room, another key location in your office where appearing busy and seeming productive helps is your workstation. A simple but effective way to do that is by downloading an Excel sheet screensaver that will make it look as if you are busy working on an Excel file whenever your computer is idle, which is probably the whole day. If you can't download the file because of admin restrictions, fear not. You could make it more authentic by converting your existing Excel sheet into a screensaver – check out any of the zillion websites available for this purpose.

So the choice is really between what Garfield says and what Garfield says. You could go with the former President of the United States, James A Garfield, who said, "If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it", or concur with Garfield the cat who believed, "Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?" If you believe in the latter, you’re in luck - technology is right here to give you a helping hand. 

If only mobiles could talk...

If you think technology has made our lives complicated, spare a thought for the mobiles…

Ask any mobile and it will tell you that one of the biggest problems it faces is Electro Mannetic Radiation (EMR) – in other words, harmful radiation from man - in the form of body odour and bad breath – that can send it into a state of shock. The problem is not only limited to such unsafe emission, but also to prolonged exposure to nonsensical conversations carried out by people with suboptimal intelligence. This is measured by mobiles in SAR - Simply Awful Rants. The next generation of mobile phones have been instructed to choose their owners based on the SAR ratings as high SAR values can spell doomsday for them.

Research has also shown that mobiles suffer from acute thermal effects because of staying pressed to the face of the speaker, as a result of which his body heat gets to the phone. Phones suffering from this problem have reported several symptoms, ranging from faded and jaded display screens to a sense of numbness, where they don’t respond to touch. Other symptoms include needless vibration during the most inappropriate of times, erratic sleep modes, partial or complete memory loss, poor reaction times and occasional blank calls.

A few mobiles decided to save themselves through an ingenious technique – they would die on their human owner in the middle of a call, leaving him stranded in mid-stride, mid-sentence and hopefully in the middle of the street that he was crossing. But man’s power of coercion is legendary - he would take the mobile apart, pull the battery out, rub it against his dirty jeans or worse, and put it back. So mobiles quietly went back to work, fearing infections. Besides, worse things could happen to them. They could be sent to some shady service centre in the neighbourhood, where their body parts could be removed and sold at exorbitant prices abroad.

Meanwhile, the mobile union has risen up in arms, protesting against the way mobiles are being exploited. "In the good old days, there were only GSM and CDMA to contend with - and life was simpler,” sighed a clunky Motorola with a gargantuan antenna sticking out of its head. “We just had to make and receive calls and send a few sms-es - even these were rationed because of high air time costs. But now, with Wi-Fi, AR, QR, 3D G-Sensors, motion gaming and other equally complicated jargon, we are so confused that when there’s an incoming call, we start hunting for an app to attend to it.”

A few other mobiles decided to use their ‘size zero’ look to their advantage and would hide amidst files and books, or slip into the gaps between car seats or sofas, thus making it impossible for the owner to find them, especially if they were on silent and the vibration mode was not on. The humans would invariably lure them out of their hiding places, with threats of getting a new mobile.

Some mobiles went for snazzy covers and scratch guards that were actually shields against human radiation. It saved them from all the wheezes and sneezes, the coughs and laughs, all of which drenched them with germs. The Association of Intolerant Radio devices Trying to Impede Mobile Extinction (AIRTIME) finally came up with an idea that would save mobiles from all these problems - hands-free technology. The farther mobiles were from men, the safer they would be.

The other option would have been to construct a radiation shield that would protect all mobiles from such harmful emission, but the mobiles would have to wait at least until the end of 2013 to do that. By then, the world would have more mobile connections than human beings - and it would then be man’s turn to go into silent mode.