The advertisers will not stop until every person on the face of the planet has some sort of attention span deficit disorder just due to the sheer amount of flashing, screaming, annoying crap that's all vying for your attention on a constant 24/7 basis so that you buy their products. Futurama's 'prediction' of advertisements beamed directly into your dreams isn't a far cry from something that an advertiser might do.
Don't worry - people get really used to flashing and screaming. I didn't pay much attention to TV / screens around me a couple of years ago. For about 5 years now, I live without a TV in my home - and I can see the effect. In pubs, I have to sit with my back to the screens, otherwise I can't stop looking every couple of seconds... it flashes, there's stuff happening, I can't have a normal conversation if I see it. Even typical slots machines are way more distracting than they appear...
I designed two counter-technologies to help people defend their personal space from unwanted electronic intrusion. Both devices were designed and prototyped with reference to the culture-jamming “Design Noir” philosophy. The first is a pair of glasses that darken whenever a television is in view.
... The advertisers will not stop until every person on the face of the planet has some sort of attention span deficit disorder just due to the sheer amount of flashing, screaming, annoying crap ..."
I was wondering how you could hack this tech into something useful?
It is interesting tech. Hacking it would be cool, but there are implications outside of how intellectually interesting a technology is. Though that is more of a commentary on the people behind this application of the tech (advertisers) than it is on the tech itself.
OK, I'm going to put my hand up here and say I don't know what I'm on about... but hear me out.
Cereals have iron in them, literally iron shavings are put into cereals to ensure that the population receive a good portion of the RDA.
Iron is particularly susceptible to induction (all metals are, but iron moreso), and iron when exposed to an electrical magnetic field then magnetic hysteresis is going to occur resulting in the iron in the cereals taking on a much stronger magnetic field than is currently natural.
Has this kind of effect been investigated such that this kind of packaging is known not to have any negative effect on the consumers of magnetised food?
Additionally, my second thought concerned the use of RFID for stock check, and whether a shelving system laced with induction systems is going to interfere with RFID in any way?
Basically... I'm trying to invent reasons this might not appear on a shop-shelf soon. I really don't want to enter a supermarket and be presented with something that looks like Vegas.
Hysteresis is a short term effect, measured in seconds. Full on magnetization won't happen to microscopic particles of iron at room temperature and atmospheric pressure in a tiny, rapidly changing, magnetic field.
And even if they became as magnetized as they possibly could, (which isn't very, because these are small particles) they're still going to be digested, reduced to single atoms, and bound to transferrin/ferritin/hemosiderin/hemoglobin proteins. Metallic iron doesn't naturally exist in the human body. The only people NMR imaging is contraindicated for are metalworks and such who are routinely exposed to high velocity metallic iron fragments, (via angle grinding, etc) that mechanically embed themselves in the skin, fingernail beds, eye orbits, etc. Completely unnoticeable in everyday life, less so when you climb inside a superconducting magnet.
Also, they're not shavings; they may be produced that way, but food-grade iron is milled down to a fairly fine mesh. It's a powder. There's no sharp edges.
Mild aside: Iron was so rare in the ancestral environment that humans never evolved a mechanism for excreting it, and it's heavily recycled. All ingested iron is metabolized, which means iron poisoning is fairly easy. This means that breakfast cereal, which is popular with children, who tend to have very low body weight, doesn't contain much of iron. The box of corn flakes I'm looking at only has 108 milligrams of iron in 340,000 milligrams of corn flakes.
Are you sure about that, I would have thought that iron would be in a compound form, not in the metallic form. For example food supplements use things like this:
"The iron in the cereal is pure iron! Really! It is the same iron found in nails and automobiles. It is mixed in the cereal batter along with many other additives. The very tiny particles of iron quickly react with hydrochloric acid and other chemicals in the digestive tract, changing to a form easily absorbed by the body."
That's a secondary school lesson guide for a science class in which the students extract the raw iron shavings from the cereal. It's a trivial process (you need a magnet, some water, and some crushed cereal - high iron content cereal obviously yields more dramatic results).
And now I've done a quick bit of Googling, I think I'd loosely speculate that iron with strong magnetic fields, consumed, might affect the performance of some medical equipment that use magnetic fields to perform their detection.
Specifically MRIs can detect oxygen carrying red blood cells because of the iron in hemoglobins and the change in magnetic strength when oxygen is attached to the red blood cell. Hemoglobins are apparently renewed, in part, by digesting iron (in things like cereals).
A wikipedia entry on MRI suggests that the sensitivity of FMRI (functional MRI) is fine enough to determine brain activity based on the magnetic response of hemoglobins.
So if the consumed iron had a stronger magnetic memory, this could have an effect on measurements of existing medical equipment which is tuned to the current norm.
When your body absorbs iron, it breaks it up into it's constituent atoms which are already magnetized. The only difference between magnetic and non-magnetic iron is that magnetic iron has a larger percentage of it's atoms aligned in a specific direction.
Further, like most terrestrial humans, you spend your entire life living in a magnetic field. I'm willing to bet it's vastly stronger than anything emitted by these cereal boxes. If you are truly concerned, you can test this by putting a compass next to your cereal box.
I'm not sure why you got down voted but I bumped you up one. Fascinating question regarding iron! Whether a realistic issue or not, I love when someone thinks of something offf the wall that didn't cross my mind.
As for the RFID question, without going into length, no interference should occur
Considering that the powerful magnetic fields used in MRIs don't harm people at all, and that magnetic fields in general have no effect on our health, I don't think microscopic amounts of magnetized iron are going to have the FDA very alarmed.
Wow, I feel bad enough about the waste I create with a regular cereal box. Now I will have to seek out an electronics recycler to dispose of every piece of food packaging.
It'll be interesting to see if the manufacturers or retailers will be required to do something about that (probably depends on the country). Will there be something analogous to the electronics-recycling legislation some countries have, where retailers (e.g. grocery stores), at least those who sell more than N amount of this kind of thing, will be required to accept the boxes back for proper disposal?
I saw this at CES. Some of the more interesting applications the company had in their booth:
* Charge your Tesla simply by driving it on top of a pad in your garage. They claim it's only 7% less efficient than the current plug charger.
* Soup in a self-heating container. Place the container on your inductance charging pad, press a button on the container. The container itself contains a heating element.
You can charge mobile devices by placing them on a pad. The Palm Pre had this out of the box. You can retrofit other phones like the iPhone to have this ability also.
Kinda. The Touchstone charging system is an optional-- and not terribly cheap-- (US$50) accessory.
I use it, it's pretty neat. There's an advantage beyond the obvious: the charging puck is always stuck to a surface[1], and the phone should always be stuck to the puck, (using magnets built into the back of the phone) so I tend to lose the phone a lot less often. The OS can also tell if you're using the induction charger, if you pull it off the puck while the phone's ringing, it'll automatically pick it up, and switch to speakerphone if you put it on the puck during a call.
There's also disadvantages. It can't transmit as much power as the USB cable, and it's quite inefficient, getting fairly warm in use. If induction chargers ever became popular, presumably the hippies would get upset about the pointless waste of electricity.
[1]: There's double sided foam tape on the bottom of the puck that's actually the first application I've ever seen of the gecko setae "superglue" that various tech sites have been banging on about for the last decade. It never loses its stickiness, but also gets dirty astonishingly easy.
I can't wait to have the AC EMR from the coils of the shelves mess with my cellphone and my VISA's magnetic strip etc. as I walk up and down the aisles to find my son's favorite cereal brand.
