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An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

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Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#61

Post by squeaky-clean »

raamdev wrote: post #18

I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…

I've had trouble getting up and staying awake forever. I was terrible in my teens, my parents would actually throw water on me some mornings. Now I use an alarm app (Sleep As Android, I'm sure there are others) that can choose different puzzles and difficulties.

To turn off the alarm, I'd have to solve 3 problems like "2x5+14-6" without getting any wrong. I eventually got really good at doing math in my sleep apparently, because I overslept a few days after about a year of using it. Later finding that my alarm was in the solved state.

Now I use the mode that makes you physically shake the phone a certain number of times (and a certain amount of force) to turn off the alarm. I have it set so it takes about 20 seconds of vigorous shaking, and by the end of it I'm fairly awake.

I did the ringtone thing for a bit and it just made me really hate my ringtone. I would never hear my alarm and go "maybe someone is calling", but I would always hear my ringtone and go "Wtf, why is my alarm app...? oh..."

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#62

Post by cyberferret »

tome wrote: post #3
dfsegoat wrote: post #2

Along these same lines, one of my favorite examples of this type of work (human factors related to attention/alerting) is "Bitchin' Betty" and company - the female voice that makes up the "oral alert system" from the F/A-18 superhornet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8 A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice so that pilots would know to immediately pay attention to t…

That's really interesting! And now and off-topic question: why would rolling right stop a plane from going in the sea?

Possibly the pilot was in a sustained left banking turn and didn't realise that he was losing altitude and/or airspeed. The "Roll Right!" command was possibly to force him to go 'wings level' and maintain altitude.

Any time you bank the wings of a plane to make a turn, you have to also pull back on the stick to maintain the same amount of lift to keep you in level flight. The more you bank, the more 'back stick' you need to maintain the lift.

It's a logarithmic corellation, i.e. in a 90 degree banked turn, it is impossible (you need infinite lift) to maintain altitude.

Most aircraft get to the point where the bank is just to steep and you cannot generate enough lift to hold your altitude any longer. Pulling back on the stick some more will just end up bleeding off airspeed and putting you into a stall/spin. At that point your only recourse is to go back to 'wings level' and rebuild airspeed.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#63

Post by 1_2__3 »

The Air France example is not a good one - there's no indication the pilots didn't hear or heed the warning, it's that a loud voice blaring "STALL!" was only one of multiple "pay attention to me now" things in the cockpit. To claim the alert needs to be more noticeable/annoying/loud/whatever is completely wrong - they needed information, not alerts.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#64

Post by raamdev »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #61
raamdev wrote: post #18

I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…

I've had trouble getting up and staying awake forever. I was terrible in my teens, my parents would actually throw water on me some mornings. Now I use an alarm app (Sleep As Android, I'm sure there are others) that can choose different puzzles and difficulties. To turn off the alarm, I'd have to solve 3 problems like "2x5+14-6" without getting any wrong. I eventually got really good at doing math in my sleep apparen…

I think working for a few years in IT roles where I was on call 24/7 in case a server went down, where I worried that any call I got might be a disaster call, trained my brain to always consider the sound of my phone ringing as a possible emergency. I've been using the iPhone "Old Phone" ringtone for years now and when my alarm goes off I usually catch it by the first or second ring (confirmed by people who have actually called and woken me up). One other thing I've learned is that if I use an ascending alarm, where the ringtone starts quiet and slowly gets louder, it takes a lot longer for me wake up, presumably because my subconscious learns that an ascending ring is most likely not a phone call... my wife and daughter are awoken long before me if I use an ascending alarm, but if I just use a normal one I'm able to wake up and turn it off before it wakes them.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#65

Post by cyberferret »

russdill wrote: post #39

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYcMcf-o3Zs Anyone hear a weird beeping noise? Wonder what it could mean...oh well, I'm sure it's not important, we're about to land anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw Geez that sound is annoying, I hope it stops soon.

Air incident investigations have shown that under stress/duress, a pilot will ignore things that seem stupidly obvious due to focusing on one aspect of the crisis.

That first landing looked far from 'perfect'. He was coming in high and possibly too fast, and I daresay he was focusing too much on how much runway he would have left after landing. He could have also assumed that the warning was the overspeed warning from extending landing flaps at too high a speed (though most light aircraft don't have that warning system).

That second one was a lot less explicable - looked like a normal landing approach. Surprised that the instructor also didn't pick it up.

Interestingly, that second pancake landing is in exactly the same type of aircraft that I did my initial flying training in. Something about seeing that instrument panel, and hearing that warning alarm made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and raised my pulse a little. Even 25+ years after I last flew that type!

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#67

Post by ascorbic »

to3m wrote: post #32

"Most adults can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz" - 9 year old adults, perhaps... I'm not an alarm designer, but my understanding is that if you want pretty much everybody to be able to hear something, not just your kids and your dog, 10-12KHz is a much better upper limit.

Anecdotally, around 19 kHz was the cutoff among most of my colleagues in their mid 20s to mid 30s when I tested this a few years ago.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#68

Post by Jemmeh »

vvanders wrote: post #12
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like cursing should also have been considered.

Just have them call up Peter Capaldi, he'd be a great fit.

I mean yeah. If the Doctor tells me to do something in a panicked voice I'm going to listen.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#69

Post by busterarm »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #31

I'm notoriously bad about sleeping through alarms. I used to have to use 4 at a time. The two most effective things that I've done to wake myself are: a) I had my computer play a song with a high BPM at 100% volume on repeat starting on a timer. Shutting it off required typing a few commands to kill the process. This was effective for a while until I started sleeping through it too. b) What I do now is I have a cheap…

Another commenter suggested a sunrise clock, I use a Happy Light with a Bluetooth timer switch so I can set the time it goes off with my phone. I set it to go off between 30 to 60 minutes before I actually want to get up, and then off sometime after I leave the house.

I have a bad habit of falling asleep with the lights on anyway.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#70

Post by crooked-v »

Kluny wrote: post #41
cpeterso wrote: post #37

I don't want my alarm clock to annoy me. I just want it to wake up. I'd like an alarm with a gentler, pulsing sound that only gets louder or more annoying if you don't get up soon. I found an Android alarm app that tried to wake you when you're in a shallow sleep phase. IIRC, the app would quietly ring 45, 30, and 15 minutes before the wake time you set, so if you happened to be in a shallower sleep phase then you wo…

I was thinking the same thing. I don't want to wake up angry. When someone figures out a way to wake me up that feels like being gently kissed by a loved one, prodded by a dog, or the smell of frying bacon and fresh coffee, then they'll really have something.

You can get coffee makers (including, I'm sure, K-cup variants) with timers.

The "bacon alarm clock" is also a real thing, being basically a timer-driven toaster oven with precooked bacon in it, but that'd be a bit more worrying to run automatically than just a coffee maker.

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