| Fitter, Happier: an eight week exercise in using technology to help lose weight Jun 21st 2012, 15:00 For 27 years he ate what he wanted and avoided exercise like the plague. Can an arsenal of fitness gadgets make this human healthier in just eight weeks?  From the snake oil salesman to the Thighmaster(TM), science and technology have promised the end of obesity, ill health and lethargy for centuries. Today, weight loss gadgetry is all around us, with affordable commercial systems available from Nintendo, Nike, Adidas and countless other manufacturers, all promising their technology will turn us into paragons of healthy virtue. How is it then, that for all of this, we live in an age where a quarter of the American population is obese? Do any of these seemingly endless health aids actually work? Will a $200 wristband or a $100 pedometer cause you to banish microwave dinners and saturated fats, take up regular exercise at the gym at least three days a week and sleep well with no bad dreams? Or has the health industry made technology another ineffective distraction that only provides you with a vague sense that you're doing something positive? Is the real answer what it's always been: go for a walk in the trees and eat your greens? Continue reading Fitter, Happier: an eight week exercise in using technology to help lose weight Fitter, Happier: an eight week exercise in using technology to help lose weight originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments | | Google launches Endangered Languages website to save 3,000 at-risk tongues Jun 21st 2012, 14:33  Google lets users surf the web in 40-plus languages, and its Translate service accounts for 57 different tongues, but those numbers are dwarfed by the grand total of 7,000 currently existing languages. On its official blog today, the company announced the Endangered Languages Project, a website dedicated to preserving at-risk dialects by providing information via audio, video and text samples. Google collaborated with the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Eastern Michigan University to compile research on the 3,000 languages at risk of dying out, and each language's profile includes results drawn from Google Books. Click through to the source link to check out a global visualization of these tongues -- it's mind-boggling that there are 52 endangered languages in Brazil alone. Google launches Endangered Languages website to save 3,000 at-risk tongues originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink  Google Official Blog |  The Endangered Languages Project | Email this | Comments | | Minority Report at 10: a look at technology from today to 2054 Jun 21st 2012, 14:00  Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story, opened in North American theaters 10 years ago today. It was preceded by the director's A.I. a year earlier, which was famously a pet project of Stanley Kubrick's for decades prior, and was followed up by Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds a couple of years later. Together, they formed an unofficial trilogy of sorts that represented a turn to darker science fiction for a director noted for his more optimistic excursions into the genre. Of the three, Minority Report was the best-received out of the gate, both as a film and as a detailed vision of the near-future unlike any since Blade Runner.
That reputation has largely held up in the decade since (while A.I.'s has grown quite a bit), during which time it's also become a sort of technological touchstone. For all its bleakness, the future of Minority Report was one that we could recognize, and one that we were reaching towards -- at least when it came to the technology. Human-computer interaction would be more natural than ever, advertising would be everywhere and more personalized, and smart cars would deliver us to our smart homes. Today, it's almost as common for a new technology to be described as Minority Report-like as it is to be described as Star Trek-like. That was hardly just the result of good luck. Continue reading Minority Report at 10: a look at technology from today to 2054 Minority Report at 10: a look at technology from today to 2054 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments | |
