“Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.

And officials are taking it seriously.”

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James Martin over at PC World loves the voice-to-text transcription service at jott.com. He started using the service to record himself memos, reminders, and ideas with his cell phone. Jott.com transcribes the emails and sends them to you.

Jott.com recently started offering an extremely useful voicemail-to-text service. Martin found that the accuracy is pretty good, most of the time. Its also described as fast. There are certainly some rooms for improvement. The transcription service is a bit expensive- $10/month for 40 messages- and the service is limited to one phone.

There are other services out there: Google Voice offers a free transcription service, GotVoice gives you two weeks to try the service free, and Phonetag is worth looking at as well.

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A hearing aid that fits on your teeth? Thats what Sonitus Medical has been working on for the past few years. The novel approach blends several technologies to solve the problem of single-sided conduction hearing loss. Essentially, this aid will help those who are deaf in one ear.

The patient will wear a behind the ear hearing that receives sound through microphones and transmits that sound wirelessly to an in-the-mouth (ITM) device.

The non-surgical in-the-mouth device takes the form of a dental grade acrylic that embeds a battery, a wireless receiver, and an actuator that transmits the sound from a behind the ear hearing aid directly to the cochlea.

I am happy to see that the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a place where innovative new technology is born. Resound started here, Insound resides here, and Sonitus is up and coming.

I give them a couple years until they are bought by a giant holding company such as Sonova. Thats the trend at least. They will be infused with large of amounts of capital- a potential win-win all around. I just hope the trend of consolidation doesn’t stifle the innovation and nimbleness these companies possess.

This tooth aid has to go through a clinical trial and FDA approval before it hits the market.

Couple notes: It looks like patients will potentially need to visit three different doctors: an ENT, dentist, and audiologist. Wow. A lot of potential bills there. The dental acrylic alone would be costly.

Its worth noting that this company seems to be fighting for comprehensive hearing health coverage by insurance companies. I hope more hearing aid manufacturers see the dearth of hearing aid insurance coverage as affecting their bottom line- a solid argument can be made that better insurance coverage can eventually lead to greater profits (and a happier clients).

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[Netflix Blog]

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From Gizmodo:

The Hifiman HM-801 looks like an old portable cassette player, but apparently it might just beat out most music players in sound quality. At least that’s what CNET though when they had a listen. They even found it worth $790.

The Hifiman was designed with audiophiles in mind, so it comes with features such as user removable headphone amplifier circuitboard/module, a Burr-Brown PCM1704U digital-to-analog converter, and Burr-Brown OPA627 Op-Amp. Instead of a hard drive or flash memory, the player uses 32GB SDHC—meaning that capacity is only as limited as your tolerance for carrying around spare SD cards.

Many of us might not care about some of the finer details of the Hifiman, but what we should care about is this: It sounds amazing. According to CNET, this particular player is one of the very few which will actually take full advantage of everything your high-end headphones are capable of. [CNET]

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The prevalence of online hearing aids isn’t a surprise. You can find top of the line hearing aids for a much cheaper price than you’d get at an audiologist office.

But, really, its a terrible thing for the consumer and the hearing aid industry. First of all, the consumer is going to have a lousy experience with the product. I know some people who will write me and tell me that’s not true and let me know how much they enjoy their online purchase of premier hearing aids. Hate to sound didactic- but they don’t know what they are missing. The hearing device isn’t calibrated to their loss, and if that is the case there isn’t any point in going after the best hearing aids. You might as well go for the cheaper ones and get them properly set to ones specific hearing loss.

Secondly, every hearing aid is going to experience some sort of problem at one point or another. You’ll get a microphone that cuts in an out, a shrill amplification quality, too much feedback, or any number of problems. It WILL happen. If you’ve bought the hearing aid online your faced with some expenses you might not have expected. In most cases a hearing aid thats bought through an audiologist will come with a warranty so you can send it in for free. Thats not the case with the online hearing aid- you either have to throw it away or pay to have it serviced.

Ok- the online trend on ebay is also terrible for the industry as a whole. It cheapens the perception of the brand. In my mind its somewhat similar to the car rental market. I think a Ford Focus SEEMS cheap because I see them as rental cars everywhere. It diminishes an intangible asset- brand perception. This works the same way for the flooded online (typically ebay) hearing aid market. Furthermore- since the aid is out there without any professional service attached- it ensures a low-grade experience. Thats damaging for all of these brands.

I think the industry ought to be working harder to get rid of online sales (the ones that don’t come with professional services). Maybe hearing aid industry and audiologists as a whole need to do something to re-gain the trust and wallets of their clients. I don’t know the answers for that. There are thousands of lower income and middle income people out there who either aren’t wearing aids or going straight to online sellers. I don’t really blame them. But its not a good thing.

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-Grant Peterson

There is some consensus among audiologists and hearing aid manufacturers that most customers want a hearing aid designed so well that they forget its even there. Hence we’ve seen the volume dial disappear and complex algorithms that automatically “sense” different environments- a raucous party, an echoing hall, the drone of airplane travel- and put the hearing aid in an appropriate mode. The automatic transmission of hearing aids is here. Forget about the hearing aid- its doing the work for you.

Other industries follow this same mantra- Shimano, purveyor of beautiful made bike parts, designs easily indexible shifters that work so well one doesn’t need the skill or finesse that friction shifting of the past required. Before indexing, you would know to let off the pedal a bit in anticipation of a needed shift, and be ready for an upcoming hill. Now the shifting is easily done without those steps.

The lower end of the DSLR camera market follows the same idea. Major camera manufacturers, like Canon and Nikon, design these cameras so that someone without any skill or desire to read a manual can pick up the camera and go. Manual white balance, bracketing, aperture priority, and other fine tuning is either completely left out or tucked away deep inside the menus. Utter simplicity. Forget about the camera.

I’m not convinced that these simplifications are an improvement or a better way of doing things. I don’t trust a hearing aid to figure out what volume I need or want or how much noise cancellation I need for a given situation. I know from experience that the hearing aid gets it wrong and shifts into the wrong gear. Some of the quirks that hearing aids had more often in the past- namely that screeching feedback and unnecessary and uncomfortable loudness- are improvements we can be thankful for. I didn’t want to be reminded of my hearing aids by hearing high pitch noise or shouting. But I don’t want to forget my hearing aids entirely.

The world of sound is complex and the hearing aid can’t read my mind. Don’t get me wrong- I understand that there’s a huge pool of people out there that don’t like to think about techy things and don’t want to fiddle around with their tiny hearing aid. It feels like a chore to remember which mode to engage in order to cancel out the loud din in the background at a party. However, I’m not entirely convinced that the hearing aid will do the right thing. And furthermore, the hearing aid user can easily learn how to adjust their hearing aid in five minutes tops. In return they take control of their hearing and needs. The hearing device is no longer in control of them.

I want a volume dial back. Sometimes I want to make the aid louder than it would decide to sensibly be on if it were thinking like a rational computer, which I’m not. Maybe I’m at a job interview and I decide to pump up the volume for a bit- since I want to pay attention to every word. Multiple modes are a good thing- for music, listening to conversation at a table, conversation in my home, the radio and TV, e.t.c. No one algorithm can cover them all and the hearing aid certainly cannot read my mind. Sometimes what seems like the best mode just isn’t. Yes, it takes a bit of learning and some effort, but really not much.

I want control over amplification of a number of different frequencies. The audiologist does that job for me- but it doesn’t mean I can’t get some value out adjusting the aid myself. Unfortunately that just won’t happen. Its too much to ask for reasons that are neither here nor there as they say. Instead, I just get access to this equipment myself, through certain channels out there. I’m extremely happy to have the option to fine tune my hearing aid, even in the wrong direction, on purpose. There’s a valuable learning process that takes place as a result.

Market research is not telling the manufactures to put more manual control in their hearing aids. The information they are getting is telling them to make more automated hearing aids. Its a great thing to design a hearing aid that you don’t know is there- its works so well that you forget about it. That doesn’t have to come at the expense of eliminating manual control- which will always be the best way to take control of your hearing loss, disability, yaddda yadda, in a rich world of sound that swirls chaotically around us.

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The Daily Show isn’t the only show out there with terrible captioning. South Park (also on comedy central) has terrible captioning- so do enummerable shows out there on other networks. The captions arrive late and end up garbled or wrong. Captioning as a whole is in a dismal state of disrepair. I can’t even use captioning anymore. When friends that are watching the TV with me aren’t used to captioning, they end up flabbergasted and laught and sarcastically repeat the jumbled mess on the screen. They look at me like: what the fuck was that? That didn’t make any sense! … my attitude isn’t one of surprise and I’ve seen the mess on the screen so often that I’m jaded and a little too complacent.

I thought I might solve the problem by going on Hulu.com, a service presented by Fox and NBC that offers streaming video of their TV shows, and watching the the shows (the select few that have captioning online) online. I was wrong. The captioning on hulu.com presents the same crappola captioning that you can find on broadcast tv.

I think people who use captioning end up frustrated like myself. But we don’t complain enough or write the networks with those complaints. Its fairly obvious why: its 10 or 11 o’clock at night, we are tired after a long day, and were sitting on the couch doing the modern American thing of relaxing by watching TV, and we aren’t about to get up off the couch and fire off a letter. Maybe that can change:

You can find information about how to file an effective closed captioning complaint here

I complained directly to Comedy Central here: http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

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