Instead Of Looking At A Map, Why Not Listen To One?

How many times when traveling have you looked a map and wondered what a certain area of a city was really like. I don’t mean where the nearest bakery was or how many square-feet a certain park held, but the actual ambiance of a place.

Listen Here, a product developed by University of Dundee student Nicola Hume, uses microphones and audio feed to help you get a feeling of what a certain section of a city feels like before you go. The goal is to get people away from tourist traps to experience the real culture. Listen Here uses a concept map, allowing travelers to use a stethoscope-like device to listen to what certain parts of a city sound like. Points of interest are decided by locals, who place microphones in their favorite areas, secured by bike locks.

“Using sound alone to represent environments creates a sense of mystery and encourages exploration,” Hume explains on the Listen Here website.

Of course, the product has a few flaws. The most major concern, as Natt Garun of Digital Trends points out, is the potential problem of eavesdropping. This could make Listen Here illegal in certain American states. Because of certain concerns, the potential launch of the product is still being sorted.

Is Listen Here something you would use on your travels?

Life Straw Makes Dirty Water Clean

I heard about the Life Straw while I was at a kid’s birthday party last weekend. The father of a friend of mine showed me the article in a magazine. I think it was a recent issue of Time. This straw sure would have come in handy when I was drinking Niger River water years ago. (See post.)

The Life Straw wasn’t created with tourists in mind. If you took the global knowledge quiz, you would have found out that over 1 billion people in the world don’t have clean water. Treating water to make it drinkable and not a disease carrier is a problem in most places. The Life Straw though, is designed to filter out the things that make water unsafe. The user sucks water through the straw where it is cleaned as it passes through. Really amazing.

The straw was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of best inventions. Now, it’s in the market and could really make a difference in the lives of all people. Cholora, typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea will hopefully fade into the past. Picking up one of the straws before you head out to a place where the water is dicey might be a good idea. It’s light and it packs easily.

Here is the facts page from the company that makes its Web site so you can learn more about what it does and how it works. And here’s an earlier write up about it in gizmag.