This has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. They have no way of knowing if she did it. They gave her her a flip phone and at the end of a year they're going to have her take a polygraph test. That's the setup. Wow.
They didn't even give her the flip phone, she bought that herself.
That being said I think you should reframe your thinking on this- they got over 100,000 applicants and a ton of press. My guess is they were always planning on paying out the $100,000 and the polygraph test is just another way they can throw some marketing around. The Vitaminwater brand has over a billion dollars in revenue for CocaCola each year- rising up from $350 million a year before coke's marketing team got ahold of them. Their marketing department knows what they're doing, and this $100k is a drop in the bucket for the press it's gotten.
This doesn't sound bad at all if you can use a laptop, which the rules say she can. I strive for functionality parity between my phone and laptop, so anything I need to do or data I can access is reachable from both.
I also came here to say that. This is basically free money. Although, you might have a hard time navigating around a city without modern navigation tools like Uber, Lyft and Google Maps.
> a Kyocera flip phone that she can only use to call and text
She should get a Twilio account. ;-)
I say this half seriously, because I know it may not be in the spirit of the challenge, but it would be enriching to cobble together some simple scripts to receive an SMS and proxy things like Google queries, maybe maps directions, Calendar lookups, maybe a Tweet-sender, HN headline fetcher, etc. It would be constrained but educational and fun. (I say "fun" because HN.) Bonus marks: IVR and/or voice rec version.
Google actually did run a service on 600613 (I think) for some time that would text directions and info from certain queries. I was disappointed when I found out it was down.
When I finally got an unlimited text plan(~2009), I asked soo many questions. I was still on dial-up at the time, so it was actually faster than trying to look something up on Yahoo. And as a bonus, I could still use it while my mom was on the phone!
They are used for intimidation primarily. If you are being interrogated by a police officer and gullible enough to believe in polygraphs then you are more likely to tell the truth.
However, I bet the effect wears off after the first interrogation because you lose that last ounce of doubt "what if it works".
It's ironic that a mainstream brand which presumably advertises a lot is sponsoring this challenge considering that smartphone addiction is caused by advertising (as it incentivises the social platforms to maximise engagement so they see more ads thus make them money).
My dad doesn't own a smartphone. He has a flip phone that he takes out when he goes on trips but where he lives (rural Maine) there is no cell reception so he doesn't see a point in having anything fancier (also, having watched him attempt to operate a smartphone, it's probably for the best). Does someone want to pay him $100k for that?
This is trivial. Get a gps for the car. She has a flip phone. And she can still use laptops and desktops. She could even get a laptop with lte if she really wants. I'd do this for a tenth or even a hundredth of the price although the lie detector test seems suspect.
In other news man ties arm behind back for an entire year for $100K...
Not only is a lie detector test far from definitive but why? Why would you knowingly put yourself in danger this way? It's akin to driving without seatbelts or airbags.
Are you serious about not having a smartphone being on par with not wearing your seatbelt? If anything, not having a smartphone is safer than having one because you’re not going to be staring at it while driving, crossing the street, juggling knives, etc.
Actually, she'll win more like $200k, $100k for the contest and another $100k producing value for others because of all the additional free time she'll have thanks to the absence of useless distractions.
Much of modern life has been altered by and adapted to the expectation that the average person carries in their pocket a relatively powerful computer and camera. For someone who has grown up and adapted to that world, giving up the smartphone will be a lot harder than for someone who hasn’t relied on one yet.
Why do people need to be rewarded money to do something like this? Why can't the reward be a better social life or better mental health? As the person says in the article, "Getting away from the smartphone has been freeing, and it has opened my eyes and made me more aware of some of my other bad health habits." That's a pretty good reward for most. I'd take that $100k and use it to spread awareness about social media and its health effects. All a project like this does is reinforce the idea that people should only do things for monetary gains, including bettering their body and mind.
