It used to be that UK students would spend the summer working in a call centre to raise the funds to go travelling, but now they are going travelling to work in a call centre. Indian outsourcing firms, including HSBC's Indian operation, have started employing UK backpackers on local wages to work in their call centres. Apparently the firms reckon UK staff will provide Indian colleagues with the cultural tips needed to better interact with British callers. But given the state of your average Brit student after a few months sampling the dubious delights of Goa, Sneak is not sure the ultra-professional Indian outsourcers know quite what they are getting themselves into.

April 29, 2005 Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)

Worrying developments in the world of peering into people's skulls, reported over at New Scientist.
In an impressive feat of mind-reading, US-based boffins Yukiyasu Kamitani and Frank Tong used non-invasive functional MRI scanning of the bonce to work out what a person was looking at. Not a playing card, sadly, but an image of parallel lines in one of eight different orientations. By focusing on brain regions responsible for visual perception they were able to tell which pattern the victims were viewing.
Meanwhile UK-based egg-heads John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees used the same scanning technique, but showed two images in quick succession to their human guinea pigs, with the first flashing up too quickly to be consciously perceived. But the scans were quicker than the mind, and allowed the boffins to tell which image had been shown, even though the subjects weren't able to say.
Fortunately with current technology it's pretty obvious when you're being scanned, given that it involves sticking your head inside what looks like an industrial dry-cleaning machine. But in the future, who knows how compact an fMRI scanner might become, nor what devices it might surreptitiously be added to, so that giant corporates can tell what we're all thinking. Come the year 2020, Sneak for one will not be buying an Apple iHeadband, Nokia CommunicatorCap, or Microsoft SkullClamp, that's for sure.

April 27, 2005 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Peplow's short but sweet blog from the April meeting of the American Physical Society, over at Nature.com, is worth a read, detailing the quirkier side of the life of a science geek:

"The merchandise stall is doing a roaring trade... they have a red bumper sticker that reads, 'If this sticker is blue then you're driving too fast'."

April 27, 2005 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting coverage over at the San Jose Mercury News: it seems that Apple is none too pleased with an upcoming biography of Apple big cheese Steve Jobs and has cleared all books by the same publisher - John Wiley & Sons - off the shelves of Apple stores in retaliation. Sneak hasn't read the book, but it has a simply fantastic title: iCon - Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. Interestingly the first word, iCon - writ large on the cover of the book - can be taken four different ways. There's the obvious Apple iMac/iPod/iAnnoy connotation. There's the equally appropriate reference to a desktop GUI element, originally popularised by the Mac. Then there's the fact that Jobs has achieved iconic status in his role as Apple cheerleader and business visionary. And finally there's also the argument that a lot of the Jobs' magic is, allegedly, all a big con. Sneak is not sure, but is guessing that it's the final aspect that has got Apple in such a shelf-clearing blather.

April 26, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boffins at the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry have spent some of HP's money to determine exactly how distracting it is to be constantly interrupted by intrusive communication technologies such as mobile phones, email-capable handsets and instant messaging. "An average worker’s functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming emails," HP asserts. "This drop in IQ is more than double the four-point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana."
It's an interesting point of comparison and Sneak does wonder if this might be yet another case where marijuana has measurable beneficial effects. After all, the drug is highly likely to make people care less that the phone is ringing, and thereby might actually boost the average office worker's IQ by up to six points from its current, distracted level. It's a thought, anyway...

April 25, 2005 Top tips | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some things lose a little in translation; others gain a little something. This Spanish internet service provider falls into the latter camp...

April 25, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is well aware that just about anything is for sale on eBay, but thought that the company would draw the line at promoting the auctioning off of the recently deceased. But feed “Pope John Paul” into Google at the moment and you’ll see an ad from eBay that reads:

Great deals on Pope John Paul
Shop on eBay and Save!
www.eBay.com

Well, if you want to buy an ex-pope - bereft of life - at least now you know where to go to get a great deal.

April 20, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tired of the nine to five? Fed up with the board snubbing your left-field technology suggestions? Enjoy driving round in circles? Then Sneak has the answer. John Widdowson, chief boffin at Her Majesty's Government Communication Centre (HMGCC), and the man in charge of technology for MI5 and MI6, is stepping down and the government is now seeking a new real-life Q to take over. The successful candidate will have responsibility for James Bond's next wave of gadgets, overseeing efforts to improve the battery-life of bugs built into fountain pens, satellite phones that can fit in a tie pin and nanotechnology capable of controlling rats' brains so they can do our spook work for us, apparently. It's not all fun and games, however. Applying for the post would require a willingness to work at HMGCC's top secret lab. In Milton Keynes. But Sneak thinks it's a small price to pay for Queen and country.

April 20, 2005 Top tips | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newly appointed Siebel chief George T Shaheen has not exactly received a resounding thumbs-up from all concerned. On today's investor relations conference call, one analyst criticised Shaheen's lack of "specificity" as regards future plans. "As you're speaking the stock has dropped 21 cents," he said. "You're getting a real-time observation."

April 13, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is already a fan of the Yagoohoogle search aggregation search - a simple means to simultaneously search Yahoo and Google with a single query. And of course it occurred to Sneak that the site provides an opportunity for making the practice of Googlewhacking much, much harder. For the cave-dwelling, recently comatose and otherwise uninitiated, Googlewhacking is the search for two-word Google search queries that lead only to one web site. Yagoohooglewhacking, therefore, is the search for two-word queries that lead to only one web site via Google and also one web site via Yahoo. By borrowing from Googlewhack.com’s handy Whack Stack, Sneak has determined, for example, that the pairing of “isophagy” and “indigenous” is currently a Googlewhack and a Yahoowhack and therefore also a Yagoohooglewhack. No doubt there are one or two others remaining to be found...

April 11, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Trendy urban car firm Smart some time ago latched onto the fact that its customer base is likely to be keen on the iPod, and so launched a special "i-move" model designed to accommodate one of Apple's music players on its dashboard - although at £12,500 it has been at the pricey end of iPod case options. The firm has since become even more smitten with things Apple: its recent Geneva Motor Show stand was graced by the mutant offspring of a Smart ForFour and a first-generation iMac. Two cars were bedecked inside and out with translucent coloured plastic panels, offering glimpses of the inner workings of doors, engine bay and dashboard. Sneak is not sure that it is such a good idea to bring Apple design onto the road, given the IT industry's tendency to build machines that crash every now and then without warning.

April 7, 2005 Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apparently a team of boffins employed by UK firm Corpora Software has come up with a means to automatically determine whether an article is positive or negative in tone. New Scientist goes on to speculate that this might make the profession of PR redundant. Sneak would, of course, be the first to welcome the end of PR, but reluctantly recognises that there is a bit more to the profession than reading the papers. No computer program, however sophisticated, is ever going to schmooze over an alcoholic beverage, suddenly suffer a coughing fit to interrupt a spokesman who has started to say the wrong thing, or succeed in cajoling a bored hack to attend a pointless press conference with its powers of persuasion. Other than that, the software - called Sentiment, and which analyses the grammatical structure of articles - aims to help out by ranking articles as positive, negative or neutral. It sounds like a huge step forward and a remarkable feat of ingenuity. Sneak wonders if it can detect sarcasm.

April 4, 2005 Science | Permalink | Comments (1)