Obese Texters, Back to the Future, and Scams

I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.

Texting reduces obesity

If your kids are getting a little overweight, then treat them to a bit of texting. But it’s not quite how it sounds (I thought it might be something to do with the aerobic workout you get from the thumb twiddling.) No, a study by the University of North Carolina suggests that if obese kids are encouraged to keep a record of their eating habits via SMS, they are more likely to adhere to the health regimen—less TV, more exerices, less Coke—than those who just wrote down the same information. (Attrition rate was 28% against 61% for the paper diary kids and 50% for the control group.)

Part of this may be down to the fact that the kids get instant feedback via SMS on their results. So actually this is more about the interactivity of health regimes rather than the physical benefits of cellphones or texting. (Actually this whole SMS for health thing is quite a meme. Check out this conference here.)

The miracles of life in 2000—as seen from 1950

Popular Mechanics of February 1950 predicted a number of things, some of which have come true, some of which haven’t, and some of which should, if we got our act together.

What they got right

• Highways broad without any curves
• Doubledecked highways
• soup and milk come in frozen bricks (but thought that cooking would be a thing of the past)
• TV connected to the phone; but would buy stuff over the TV with store clerks holding the goods up obligingly for customers to inspect…
• robots in factories, but controlled by punch cards
• air travel would be frequent, but expensive because of jet fuel; rocket plane fare from Chicago to Paris would cost $5000

What they got wrong

• Heart of the town is the airport
• Clean as a whistle and quiet
• Crime to burn raw coal
• Illumnitated by electric suns on 200 ft high towers
• A house would cost only $5000 to build
• Houses don’t last more than 25 years
• Wash using chemicals that shave as well.
• Dishes dissolves in superheated water, so no washing machines
• Plastics derived from cottonseed hulls, Jerusalem artichocks and and fruit pips
• Clean the house by turning a hose on it; everything is synthetic fabric of waterproof plastic; drain in the middle of the floor
• worried by mass starvation, scientists came up with food from sawdust, table linen and rayon underwear converted into sweets
• ‘calculators’ would predict the weather
• storms diverted
• no one would have gone to the moon—yet…

What I wish they’d gotten right

• Used underwear recyled into candy

Scam lady

Janella Spears, nursing administrator in a place called Sweet Home, Oregon, who practices CPR and is a reverend, has given $400,000 to scammers. She got letters from President Bush, the president of Nigeria and FBI director Robert Mueller. Wiped out husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took out a lien on the family car. Everyone told her to stop but she didn’t.

This is the problem with scams; it’s very hard to accept you’ve been scammed, and so perversely it’s easier to continuing giving money in the belief that it will all come good.

Pocket Keys

A team at UCal San Diego have come up with software, called Sneakey, that can take a picture of a key and convert it to a bitting code, which is enough for a locksmith to make a new key:

1. The user provides point locations on the target key with a reference key as a guide.
2. The system warps the target image into the pose of the reference key and overlays markings of where the bite codes are to be found.
3. The user specifies where the cut falls along each line and the bit depths are decoded by the system into a bitting code.

In one experiment, the Sneakey team installed a camera on their four story department building (77 feet above the ground) at an acute angle to a key sitting on a café table 195 feet away. The image captured (below) was correctly decoded.

They’ve not released the software but say it would be pretty easy to put together.