Hasta La Gadget!

If you are an avid reader — or writer — of fiction, chances are you took note of a news item that appeared in the Pacific Standard last week (reprinted in Salon over the weekend). Titled “Study: Reading Novels Makes Us Better Thinkers,” the article, by Tom Jacobs, cited a recent paper out of the University of Toronto indicating that subjects who read a short story scored lower afterward on tests designed to determine “need for cognitive closure” than did people who’d read an essay.

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Most of us charge up our smartphones and tablets when we sleep, but how many of us actually do so without having to plug in our device to a nearby power outlet, where most of the time, these power outlets would be located somewhere near the bed? Vodafone has something up their sleeves which could very well change the way we juice up our devices, and that is by doing so while you snooze the day away. At the recent Isle of Wight festival, Vodafone’s presence is clearly felt, the least of those being their ever present Recharge-Trucks that carry enough juice to power up to 2,000 phones simultaneously. This time around, the folks at Vodafone want to do better by offering wearable technology that can power up your peripherals and gizmos, relying on nothing else other than your body heat and movement.

The Power Pocket is a device that has been incorporated into a pair of Power shorts as well as the Recharge sleeping bag, where both of these have been joint developed with the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton. The Isle of Wight festival is a good place to use these as a trial run, and basically to charge up your smartphone while you sleep requires technological wizardry, and not magic. Basically, in the Recharge sleeping bag, as your body dissipates heat on the inside layer, there will obviously be a difference between that temperature and the colder one on the outside, and thanks to the Seebeck effect, this is where the power is generated.

It has been described by one of the persons behind the Recharge sleeping bag, “Eight hours in the sleeping bag, roughly speaking, will provide 24 minutes of talk time and 11 hours of standby time. That’s assuming the inside of the sleeping bag is 37 degrees – human body temperature.”

If one were to take the Power Pocket shorts into consideration, it is touted that an entire days’ worth of walking and dancing in the Power Pocket shorts will allow one to juice up a smartphone for four hours, not too shabby, eh?

Press Release
[ Vodafone allows you to charge up your smartphone as you sleep copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Look, there’s no question that HTC’s in a bit of trouble, and it’s at least partially because of its marketing woes. While HTC just recently posted some weak quarterly financials, rivals like Samsung are flush with cash to pump into their marketing and ad budgets. That said, HTC is looking to make a big a splash as it can, and Bloomberg reports that the Taiwanese OEM has reportedly tapped none other than Robert Downey Jr. for a two year, $12 million smartphone ad campaign.

Yes, really. And to be clear, they’ve reportedly inked a deal to feature RDJ’s likeness, not that of movie alter-egos like Tony Stark/Iron Man (though really, wouldn’t a tie-in like that make more sense?). Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan goes on to note that Downey will get final say over the ad campaign’s creative elements, which seems like it could go either way. He may be a gifted improvisor, but one could argue that the least thing HTC needs right now is yet another voice attempting to steer the company’s message.

After all, HTC spent much of last year looking for a bold thinker to fill its CMO position, and went through two of the them before CEO Peter Chou decided to appoint someone from outside the company. That someone was Benjamin Ho who served as (among other things) CMO for Motorola’s Asia Pacific operations. Since he officially took over the job, he’s been talking up how HTC’s “quietly brilliant” days are over, noting to the Wall Street Journal back in March that a punchier approach was needed to stand out in a crowded sea of competitors and that the company planned to double its global marketing budget to do it. Naturally, HTC has never provided a hard number — last year the company said it spent a mere 1/6th of what Samsung does on marketing — so it’s tough to gauge just how much this $12 million deal could hurt if it flops. Here’s hoping RDJ doesn’t get embroiled in any new scandals any time soon.

In a move that’s sure to make gadgeteers cheer and worry worts grumble, the Federal Aviation Administration (lovingly called the FAA) is reportedly making plans to relax some of the rules put on passengers regarding in-flight use of electronics.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen promise of our Kindles during take-off, but it appears that the FAA is at the very least moving in the right direction.

If you have miraculously managed to avoid commercial airline flight, the usual practice on a plane ride is to turn off all electronics during take-off and landing, usually during the climb to 10,000 feet.

The rule was implemented in the sixties, when electronics more easily interfered with the electronic equipment in the plane’s cockpit, posing a clear threat to the safety of everyone on board.

According to the WSJ, citing a draft by a high-level advisory panel to the agency, fliers will be able to use electronic devices during take-off and landing, but cell phone functionality is still banned. These amendments to the law are still up for modification, as they haven’t passed through the FAA yet, but it seems clear from the report that everyone agrees on one thing: the rules are highly outdated.

The draft also cites that recent industry research shows that one third of passengers, at least once in their life, have forgotten to turn off electronic devices in the danger zone.

It’s interesting to see the evolution of our technology enact grand-scale change to an industry that’s sometimes overly cautious. Especially when the transformation is relatively recent.

It was only a year ago that the International Air Transport Association was claiming that gadgets in the sky are more dangerous than we expected. Still, it’s been a long time coming considering that iPads are used in cockpits and (as stated above) many fliers forget to turn off their electronics anyways.

So who’s up for a game of Dots?

Buildings, streets, and entire cities crash into one another. Countless urban details – housing block windows, city maps – overwhelm your field of vision. Black squiggles race across the surface surrounded by flashes of colour: a beam of yellow, a red parallelogram.

The world Julie Mehretu paints is bogglingly chaotic. Yet when I meet the American artist in her light-soaked workspace overlooking New York’s Hudson River (Martha Stewart has her office a few storeys below), the mood in the studio is the exact opposite: calm, collected, in total control. She is preparing for not one but two major solo exhibitions – one in New York, one in London – and a pair of assistants quietly help her apply the final painstaking touches to her latest paintings. Bird’s-eye views of cities in the Middle East are taped to the walls. The bookshelves groan with volumes on everything from French genre painting to Ethiopian history; her studio is as much a think tank as a laboratory. And Mehretu’s wife, the artist Jessica Rankin, has stopped by – they’re preparing to leave town, and they have two sons’ schedules to get in order.

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