What's Not Cool about the SpareOne cell phone

      The Spare One, like every other product, has its drawbacks. The cell phone claims to have a fifteen year battery life, but that number is actually very relative. Fifteen years only describes the shelf life of the battery, but does not take into account the usage. The battery life of the phone while being used is only ten hours. Also, the company only claims fifteen years if you are using a specific battery, the Energizer ultimate lithium battery. 

      According to Danah Boyd, our ever-present messaging systems and devices mean that we “never really have to disconnect.” (The Shallows, page 86). Thanks to the Spare One, even in emergencies where there is no power or electricity, we don’t have to disconnect. The fact that there is a market open for these “emergency cell phones” shows that our society is becoming extremely dependent on technology. In past time periods, when there was some emergency, one could always go to neighbors for help with a problem. Now, since our community is communicating more and more through technology, and less and less in person, emergency situations in which technology have failed have become more of a problem. 

     Also, you need a cell phone plan for the phone to work. For most people, that only entails placing your current SIM card to the Spare One, but to other people, it could be more difficult and even expensive to create a cell phone plan. Another drawback is that the Spare One sacrifices a display on the device for battery life. The lack of a screen makes calling difficult. Also, there is no way to save contact lists, and many people don’t memorize phone numbers anymore because we don’t have to. 

      The Spare One is $50.00. That is a lot for a backup cell phone that you may never get a chance to use. The Spare One is definitely not a perfect product. It is very good at what it does, but for many people, it will not justify the cost of the product.

New Technologies - What's Cool about the SpareOne phone

Scheduled for release in March 2012, the SpareOne phone, made by Powerskin, is a mobile device that runs on a single AA lithium battery. The phone comes equipped with an Energizer Lithium 91 battery, a battery that doesn't degrade when it's not being used. That single battery allows the phone to have a shelf-life of up to 15 years and 10 hours of talk time. It’s an affordable phone at $49.99. It has no screen and can only do one thing: make phone calls.

With moderm smartphones boasting specs like 5” screens and super AMOLED resolutions, the SpareOne phone may seem like a backward step advances in the mobile phone industry. However, the SpareOne was not made to be like a smart phone. It was made to be your phone's backup. 

We live in a world that is extremely dependent on mobile devices for communication. As Turkle puts it in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, "Compassion is due to those of us--and there are many of us--who are so dependent on our devices that we cannot sit still for a funeral service or a lecture or a play." Our cellular devices are the primary tools that we use for everyday life nowadays, so it has become necessary to have some sort of backup for when your tool’s battery life gets drained from all the texting, calling, gaming, and web surfing. What do you do if the power goes out, your phone is dead, and there is no workable outlet? What do you do when your car breaks down in the middle of a deserted high way, and your phone is dead? Or if your phone is lost or stolen? A backup—just in case situations like this happen—might be needed.

The SpareOne phone’s primary use is for emergency situations. If a natural disaster occurs and assistance is needed, it might be smart to have a SpareOne phone lying around your house or in your car. And it doesn't need a SIM card to make emergency calls. Its long shelf-life means that you can put it in storage and know that it’s there for you when you need it. At only fifty dollars a phone, you can keep one in your car and in your home. It’s a good phone to have—just in case. 

What's Cool about StumbleUpon

                StumbleUpon- Pro

                StumbleUpon is a website that caters to the user.  It allows you to choose topics and takes random pages from the internet about those topics and shows them to you after which point you can like it, saving it your profile, or dislike it, preventing the page from being shown again. Over time, it learns more of what you like, giving you the best content in your selected categories. In a sense, it makes the internet your own. StumbleUpon organizes the internet in a way that allows you to discover what you might never know otherwise and eliminate the things you never wish to think about. It is also good for the mind. In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), he states that the brain craves stimulus and that the internet provides it in a way that causes activity in all areas of the brain, so much so that it can be a mental exercise for the elderly. It also can provide too much for our brains to handle by receiving too many sources of stimuli at once, “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it”(page 118). StumbleUpon can appeal to both, by giving a nearly endless amount of content to keep the brain busy and stimulated but by narrowing it down to topics you enjoy and know it lessens the total amount of stimuli and eases into new stimuli.

To use Carr’s analogy, if we imagine the transfer of working memory into long term memory as filling a bathtub then the internet equates to “many information faucets, all going full blast” while a book is transferring information “thimbleful by thimbleful.”(pages 124-125) StumbleUpon essentially is the plumber who takes some of the faucets out and reduces the water flow to more your liking, allowing for deeper concentration than the internet initially provides by easing that cognitive load into something much more manageable. It also helps build communities of like minded people by bringing you and others to the content enjoyed.

 In the digital age, the way we learn and develop is changing thanks to the internet. Like many before us, we are in the twilight of a new age as the old ways of learning start to fade and the digital age begins to rise. StumbleUpon is the perfect site for our time of transition, allowing for better browsing of the internet for the minds of all generations.

What's NOT cool about StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a site that lets you rate pages, choose the type of content you want to see, and then suggests other similar pages for you. You can also use a friend’s StumbleUpon account to surf through their preferences. In a way, it’s TiVo 2.0, helping make the vast stretches of the internet easier to digest by telling you what you like. This method of maintaining pre-established interests is detrimental to personal growth and discovery, since users are continually exposed to the same division of information. This allows the account holder to simply stay in their comfortable “box” of interests and never branch out into new, exciting, potentially enlightening information. If someone wants to spend the whole day reading articles about a political issue, StumbleUpon will provide an endless supply of articles with a similar skew that the reader had previously preferred. There is nothing mentally stimulating or challenging about finding information in this way, seeing as the finder isn’t even doing the finding himself. In turn, the mind cannot create new and creative connections to information, since all the information provided is already intertwined for the reader. 

Easily accessed and connected information like this has a significant consequence: reduced memory. As stated in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010), the internet has taken over as our new memory. There isn’t a need to remember details of an issue, or anything for that matter, when it can easily be retrieved online with negligible effort (pg. 180-184). The mind now forgets much more quickly than in the era before websites like StumbleUpon, which is certainly not a positive side effect.  All in all, this website is simply a tool for laziness and unimaginative discovery. 

Nest - negative

            The Nest Learning Thermostat learns from the adjustments made to it and uses this information to create a personal schedule of temperature changes.  Once a schedule is created, the Nest will change the temperature on its own, according to its schedule, without anyone having to touch it at all.  I, however, am not convinced that this would be very useful for everyone.  Do you really change the temperature so many times during the week that you need a thermostat to make a schedule and change the temperature for you?  For this aspect of the device to be useful, you would not only need to change the temperature a lot, but you would need to change the temperature at consistent times.

            The Nest also has an “Auto-Away” feature, which is designed to sense when the house is empty and make appropriate temperature changes in order to avoid wasting money heating or cooling an empty house.  I am skeptical of its ability to accurately determine when a house is empty or not.  First of all, the Auto-Away sensor detects motion.  This could mean that if there is a long period of inactivity in the room in which it is located, it could think that nobody is home, even if there are people in another room.  Also, thermostats are not always placed in central areas of a house, but instead are often located in out of the way places such as hallways and corners.  And so again, it could potentially think that nobody is home just because nobody passed in front of the sensors.  Finally, the sensors can mistake the presence of pets for the presence of people.

Nest - Positive

The Nest Thermostat is a step that is geared towards a more digital and automated age. With the ability to “sense” physical presence in a room, the temperature, humidity, and light levels, the Nest Thermostat will automatically adjust itself accordingly. It does this through a learning process of the owner’s daily routine and manual adjustments of the thermostat. With this capability, the Nest will save massive amounts of energy, money, and waste as thermostats are estimated to control have of the consumed energy in an average household. There are claims that the utilization of Nest can save up to 20 to 30 percent in energy consumption as it will be able to adjust itself in situations otherwise impossible to with a regular thermostat, such as when nobody is home.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) calculated that if a relatively modest 15 percent of total energy use is saved by every household in the U.S. starting today, by 2020 $46 billion would be saved. This figure says enough on its own as one can imagine all the different areas and uses that all that money could be allocated to. In addition to the monetary savings, energy loss and pollution such as carbon would be significantly reduced as a result.

A feature that has an unlimited of future technological implications is its remote control ability. Being able to adjust the Nest from anywhere, via the built-in Wi-Fi hardware in the thermostat, adds convenience and efficiency into the owner’s life. Instead of having to be physically present to adjust it, owners can control the thermostat from anywhere with the use of 3G of Wi-Fi. Another example of the remote control ability is a system and software that allows users to water their plants remotely. Not only does time not need to be allocated in performing the physical task, but exactly amounts of water and fertilizer can be added precisely through the software. With the Nest, all the data that is sent to and from the thermostat is gathered in a database where further analysis takes place.

With access to this vast amounts data, Nest Labs are able to constantly improve the thermostat and automatically update them through the built-in Wi-Fi. In addition, the information in these databases is accessible to owners of Nest Thermostats to observe their own behavior as well as share the information with others. People are now being connected through the thermostat, sharing their experiences, thoughts, problems, and suggestions. Before this technology, there would have never been such hype or conversation stemming from thermostats. Nilay Patel, an editor for news publication The Verge, summed it up with the phrase “social networking to save the earth.”

For the ever-changing technological field, this thermostat is just a small step, hinting of the even greater future products to come. Looking at the interaction created between users, it is exciting to imagine what social benefits more technological advanced products can bring to society. Maryanne Wolf wrote in Proust and the Squid, “The next few decades will witness transformations in our ability to communicate, as we recruit new connections in the brain that will propel our intellectual development in new and different ways... understand[ing] other human beings is especially important today as we make the transition from a reading brain to an increasingly digital one.” It sums up the importance of social connection and getting to know and understand each other as we progress into a digital age. New advanced technologies, such as the Nest Thermostat, certainly do promote social networking and intellectual development.
For more information about Nest, please visit:   http://www.nest.com/

Nest

The Nest Thermostat is a learning thermostat that improves over time by observing changes in its surrounding. There are senses built into the thermostat that detect movement, temperature, humidity, and light. Any manual adjustment made to the thermostat is recorded and eventually the thermostat will begin automatically adjusting itself according to the owner's patterns created through their daily routine. It costs $249.