Nicole Coulanges said she has seen too many times students wake up in the morning wondering what happened the night before. After a shower, a glass of orange juice and a hearty brunch, they manage to convince themselves that they didn’t do anything seriously worth regretting.

Coulanges admits the same has happened to her. She never thought she did anything crazy during the night, but she would wake up with some mistakes in her cell phone sent box.

‘Yeah, I didn’t think I did anything crazy,’ said Coulanges, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. ‘I get through my day and see the sent messages and I’m like ‘What did I just do?’ I wish that someone had taken my phone or I had left my phone at home.’

To prevent drunk people from sending out inappropriate e-mails, Google has created a new Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles which requires users to correctly solve five math problems before getting the go ahead to send their e-mails.

Coulanges said she has opened up her cell phone, taken a look at the dialed calls, read through the outbox messages and consequently buried her head in her hands.

‘Sometimes I’m like ‘Oh crap, look what I just sent – I look like an idiot,” she said.

Gmail engineer Jon Perlow can relate.

On the company’s Gmail blog, Perlow wrote, ‘Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send,’ referring to the regrettable incident with a late night e-mail and an attempt to rekindle old flames with an ex-girlfriend.

‘Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you may later regret. …But Mail Goggles may help,’ Perlow wrote.

No, a breathalyzer doesn’t pop out of the screen, nor does a calculator to compute your blood alcohol content. Rather, math problems with difficulty levels ranging from an easy level one to a most difficult level five appear.

Questions cover the four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The person must correctly solve problems like 33+8, 99-83, 4×10 and 56/7 in order to send a message.

The feature stems from the idea that if people are not capable of doing simple, fourth-grade math, then they are probably not sober enough to send e-mails.

‘What better way to check, than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?’ Perlow writes.

Syracuse psychology professor Tibor Palfai explained that ‘alcohol absolutely affects math-computing skills by depressing the central nervous system.’

By default, the feature is activated during weekends between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., though the settings may be altered to fit your own needs. The feature can also be activated for Messy Mondays, Trashed Tuesdays, Wasted Wednesdays or Thirsty Thursdays.

Time magazine writer Claire Suddath put the Goggles to the test: she and a bottle of wine ‘surrendered her Saturday night to research’.

Five glasses later, Suddath found that being required to do math at 2:30 a.m. was more of a deterrent than the actual problems themselves, for which she was able to use the Google calculator for, anyway.

Mail Goggles is an innovation on the site, but adding it to the cell phone or to Facebook, where most drunken mischief happens, could make this idea more applicable to college students.

Whether or not Mail Goggles will work depends on the situation. Coulanges said sometimes it would be better to leave phones at home.

‘If I’m going to be drinking I shouldn’t have my phone with me, it’s always a bad idea,’ she said.

tpollock@syr.edu

Published on October 21, 2008 at 12:00 pm