You'd think advertisers would have learned by now how to avoid embarassing themselves. Clearly, they have not. Every year there are advertisements that fail to account for cultural values, context, or placement, and wind up sending an unintended message. Sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes its tragic. You've all seen the jars of Gerber baby food, right? The one with the big baby face on the front? Turns out when they first tried to sell it in rural segments of Africa, it wouldn't sell -- like at all. Turns out that the majority of the population in those markets is illiterate and so the products contained pictures of what was inside the jars and boxes. Well, the locals thought Gerber was selling, achem... baby. Needless to say, the packaging was updated shortly thereafter.

Here's the problem with advertisements where people are aware they are being targetted: What if the machine makes a mistake? What if it identifies the 18 year old male who's captain of the football team with a couple of his female friends and the machine decides that there are three females in the party instead of two, and spits out an advertisement for tampons or makeup. Perhaps even doing an impromptu photoshop with their faces and a "before and after" shot, with directions to the nearest makeup counter? Well, he might need some coverup then... To hide his suddenly very flushed appearance.

The problem with mechanical identification of any physical trait in a human being is that it won't ever be 100%, because the meanings associated with those traits are context-dependent. That is to say, the correlations are the problem, and it's true whether it's a matter of sex, race, or age... And when people are aware they are being targeted by those factors, and especially when its misread, and very especially when others are aware of this -- it can have significant social reprecussions. In marketing, context and placement means a lot -- and the only thing saving people from taking it personally is the very fact that they know it's targeted impersonally. When that changes, marketers are going to be in for a real surprise.

I once had a conversation with a department head at Caltech who told me that, thanks to their endowments, they could easily afford to charge a much smaller tuition, and that like 70% of their students were given fairly good financial packages, but if they lowered their base price and charged less than other universities, people would assume that they were of lesser quality. Since the value of a degree (not of an education) is in how other people view it, cutting their prices would be a great detriment to their graduates.

As long as the system is in place, and as long as there are more people who want to go to good schools than those schools can accommodate, it is in their best interests to keep their sticker prices high. They only have reason to show you the price you will pay if nobody is considering them because they are too expensive.

No, this is why we need critical thinking. People don't learn how to separate fact from BS. Because of this, we have people who will believe something with no fact and insist that it is fact. Look at North Korea, that is where the US will be heading if people think they can believe anything they read in textbooks, the internet, what random people say when they use "big words". Some of the most fun I had in high school is telling people total lies but using words that they didn't understand so they believed me.

Until you try to take cover behind a box and start wondering whether you'll be shooting right into the box because the tip of your gun is behind it or whether you'll shoot the target in your unobstructed crosshair. If it's the former have fun drawing imaginary lines between your model's gun and the target all the time.

Granted, even first person games suffer from this sometimes but it isn't nearly as bad.

For Those Asking "What's the Point?"... the detail is in the name. This network is being used to distribute encryption keys (not the content), while the network speeds may not look impressive at first glance, current high end RSA key is only 2048 bits long. A key every second on prototype tech really isn't too shabby. A single key can be used for an entire conversation. Someone else also pointed out that the problem with current crypto isn't that it can be broken, rather that there are ways around it. These ways all involve discovering the key somehow, rather than by brute force. Using a quantum network to distribute the key means that you can guarantee that the key you have hasn't been eavesdropped upon. Public/private key encrption has its own methods to deal with this, but this may not always be appropriate. If this allows guaranteed key security then you can use much simpler symmetric encryption.

Heheh. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cringe over the Jonas Brother's being featured on the "tour" slideshow.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/904features/

Genuine indication of real-world interest or too much South Park? ;)