SHADOW – it’s dark, formless, and a lot less interesting when you shine some light on it.
I had to read through the pitch a couple of times, but I think I finally have it figured out. SHADOW is a smartphone app with two parts: (1) tools to help you collect data about your dreams, and (2) tools to quantify and visualize that data.
Data Collection
The hardest part of recording your dreams is starting the habit of recording your dreams. By seamlessly integrating the dream recording tools with an alarm clock, you will have to explicitly opt-out of the commitment you made to yourself that tonight was the night you’d get started.
While the musical pseudoscientific tone makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit, I’m actually on-board so far. I rarely remember my dreams, and it could actually see myself giving this a try (though I probably won’t).
Of course, like anything worth its salt these days, it’s “social”. I’m sure you’re as excited as I am to see Cousin Greg’s dream about playing Candy Crush pop up in your Facebook feed…
Data Analysis
This is most descriptive paragraph on this is here:
lol, wut? The word-to-information ratio here is out of control!
Natural language processing is exceptionally hard, so either the author is a guru on the subject but has decided this audience wouldn’t be interested in or understand the details, or we’re going to get one of those “word cloud” things.
Snark aside, I’m all for finding new and meaningful patterns in my life, and if it were possible to correlate the content of my dreams with real events (e.g. a major presentation on the user’s calendar for the next day might have something to do with that anxiety dream the night before), somebody deserves a Ph.D. I doubt such an analysis would be practical though – I suspect there’s far too much noise in the data to overcome any statistical correction for multiple comparisons.
Confession Time
I’ll come clean: I’m reviewing this campaign not because of the tech, but because it’s raised almost $50k and is one of Kickstarter’s “Staff Picks” using two sales techniques that I absolutely HATE.
First, the product itself is buried in overwrought verbiage about the power of dreams, and it’s not until five screens down that anything concrete about the damn thing is even mentioned (and all it says is that “SHADOW is an innovative alarm clock”). And don’t get me started on the content of the pitch – “Sleep is where some of humanity’s most incredible creations got their start.” Ideas are cheap; execution takes skill, effort, and dedication. Way to trivialize the great accomplishments of great people.
Second, this is a voice recorder bundled with an alarm clock. That’s it. The description “Like astronauts gazing back on Earth for the first time, we think of SHADOW as a mechanism for seeing the world from a different perspective” seems a bit overblown, don’t you think? Louis CK is right – we’re wasting the dynamic range of our language.
(All images are screenshots taken from the SHADOW Kickstarter campaign on 20 September 2013.)
Hi I just saw this blog being promoted on Reddit and read this as a sample of what this blog is.
OccamsChainsaw, I think you are overly subjective.
You are clearly displaying your personal opinion here, rather than an objective, technical review.
“While the musical pseudoscientific tone makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit”, “dreams of grandeur”, “lol, wut?”.
I was hoping for technical reviews, not blind disgust or hate.
You could have stopped after the line “(1) tools to help you collect data about your dreams, and (2) tools to quantify and visualize that data.”
Or gone for a review of the technical difficulties in statistics as well as challenging the list of experts.
If you as a journalist have doubt about the claims, then contact the people listed as advisers:
there are 12 of them.
1) call them and ask if they know about the project and Hunter
2) call the universities they claim to have an education from to verify that too.
That would be good journalism, worthy of an article on a blog.
You can still do that, investigate the claims and post the results.
Did the 12 people know of this project, and are their education verifiable, or is it as you claim a scam? (as you do in your 2nd post on this project)
You did not though.
You read an internet page, and then posted your thoughts.
That is very unscientific.
It looks a lot more like slander than technical reviews.
Anyone can make a blog or vlog spewing out every thought they have.
I hoped this was something different, a place with technical minded people looking at what is technically possible, not just opinions.
Well, at least I know to not recommend drop-kicker to anyone.
The theme and idea is great.
But the people writing are visibly incompetent and biased.
I love the idea and to think that a place like this is journalistic is crazy. Seems you feel burned about your kickstarter being featured. Keep it up and get better. You’ll get success the longer you do this site.
In operation since 1993 and located in Guam, they have degree programs as
well as certificate and diploma programs.
My web site: online colleges [Samual]
A large number of much bigger tradeline suppliers
surely have the ability to offer you sometimes five detach predominant tradelines for
someone credit file.
You will discover stuff you can do to help you slowly and gradually make your credit report due to challenging your current credit experience or
sometimes switching to credit maintenance.
They can need to discuss the health risks made out of your firm
during boosting credit to a person making use of a placed under good credit presentation. Title
loans are undoubtedly extremely measured for within the traditional bank,
that does find owning an item with bigger cost in comparison to
the serious number of most of the loan the borrower forfeits.
ahandyloan You will discover stuff you can do to help you slowly
and gradually make your credit report due to challenging
your current credit experience or sometimes switching to credit maintenance.
They can need to discuss the health risks made out of
your firm during boosting credit to a person making use of
a placed under good credit presentation. Title loans are undoubtedly extremely
measured for within the traditional bank, that does find owning
an item with bigger cost in comparison to the
serious number of most of the loan the borrower forfeits.
Hello, i feel that i noticed you visited my weblog thus i
got here to return the want?.I’m attempting to find things to improve my
website!I assume its adequate to make use of a
few of your concepts!!