Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

California issues first autonomous car driving permits

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Several corporations recently received California’s first autonomous car driving permits:

On Tuesday, Audi became the first car manufacturer to receive a California autonomous car driving permit (as of this writing, Mercedes-Benz and Google have also filed for and received permits). The permit was presented to Audi by Sen. Alex Padilla, who signed the state’s new autonomous vehicle laws that went into effect Tuesday; the law will allow for the legal testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads…

One is the specific mention of a visual indicator that clearly signals to the driver when autonomous mode is engaged. Making sure the driver is completely familiar with the technology and understands when the car is under machine control versus human control is something carmakers must get absolutely right. Consider what GM is doing with its Super Cruise technology, which allows the car to take over steering and pedal operations in certain highway conditions. Earlier this month GM announced that Super Cruise will be available in select 2017 model year cars. Those cars will likely have the same indicator that we experienced when testing Super Cruise—a large light bar on the top of the steering wheel that indicates when the car is in control (green), when the driver needs to take over (red), and when the driver has control (blue). Hard to miss that. Oh, and it issues an audible alert as well.

Something else to consider: According to the permit, should the driver be unable to take control of the vehicle during an emergency or system failure while autonomous mode is engaged, “the autonomous vehicle shall be capable of coming to a complete stop.” Pretty important! But also a little scary when you think about a car just stopping on the highway. After all, the permit doesn’t say the car must be able to safely pull off the road and come to a complete stop. And in reality, that’s probably asking a lot for now. It’s a reminder that if we want to test autonomous vehicles in the public domain seriously, we have to understand there will be risks…

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the permit calls for an extra device—separate from the data recorders already required in cars—to specifically monitor and record the autonomous systems and their sensors. On top of that, the information must remain accessible for three years. As optimistic as lawmakers and auto manufacturers are about the potential for autonomous vehicles, they also know that one bad accident could stymie progress and reaffirm the public’s worst fears. In case an accident does happen—and eventually, it will—at least they’ll know exactly what went wrong.

Some interesting extra pieces to these permits. All of this suggests that there are still some important things to sort out before driverless cars hit the roads in large numbers.

A few other possible additions that came to mind:

1. An indicator on top of the car or with the front and back lights that shows other drivers that the car is in autonomous mode. We haven’t heard much how such vehicles would change their behavior based on the drivers around them. Say someone doesn’t like their speed and so they tailgate the car, an action that sometimes leads to the front driver speeding up. What would an autonomous car do?

2. A running set of easy-to-understand output from the autonomous car to the driver. It is one thing to provide an indicator that the car is running itself but another to give feedback to the potential driver. Granted, these vehicles are likely making a ridiculous number of calculations per second but I’m guessing some users would like to know what the car is “thinking” as it acts.

The rise of nomophobia

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Smartphones have greatly increased in number as has our need to have them nearby:

Nomophobia is a term describing a growing fear in today’s world — the fear of being without a mobile device, or beyond mobile phone contact. Among today’s high school and college students, it’s on the rise. An increasing number of college students now shower with their cell phone. The average adolescent would rather lose a pinky-finger than a cell phone. A growing percentage text or tweet instead of actually talking to others.

Nomophobia is everywhere in industrialized nations. The term is an abbreviation for “no-mobile-phone phobia,” which was coined during a 2010 study by the UK Post Office. The Post Office commissioned YouGov, a research organization, to look at anxieties suffered by mobile phone users. The study found that nearly 53 percent of mobile phone users in Britain tend to be anxious when they “lose their mobile phone, run out of battery or credit, or have no network coverage.”

The study found that about 58 percent of men and 47 percent of women suffer from the phobia, and an additional 9 percent feel stressed when their mobile phones are off. The study sampled 2,163 people. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed cited keeping in touch with friends or family as the main reason that they got anxious when they could not use their mobile phones. The study compared stress levels induced by the average case of nomophobia to be on par with those of “wedding day jitters” and trips to the dentist…

A full 66 percent of all adults suffer from “nomophobia.”

Unfortunately, this article is short on citing reputable sources outside of one YouGov study in the UK. However, I have seen other similar findings trickle out in recent years.

As I’ve noted before, if this behavior becomes widespread, particularly among normal adults, is it really a problem or phobia? Perhaps the more unusual people are the ones without smartphones or Facebook accounts (they do occasionally pop  up in the college student population) who also may feel odd: peer pressure to join, missing out on information that everyone else seems to have, paying attention to other things more than new technology.

Google wants to build cities and airports?

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Google has its hands in many things but now it is planning to build cities?

Google’s seemingly limitless ambition has seen the company take on drones, self-driving cars and even the problem of aging, but the company’s founders have even grander plans – to build cities and airports.

A report from The Information (paywall) says the co-founder Larry Page has set up a ‘company within a company’ dubbed ‘Google 2.0’ that will look at the tech giant’s long-term future – presumably for when advertising revenue from search traffic (inevitably) dries up.

This could even include building “a model airport and city.” Page has argued that although rival billionaire Elon Musk might be in favour of a ‘hyperloop’ (a train concept that could travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes), the problem with long-range transport is not that planes are slow, but that airports are inefficient.

It might sound far-fetched, but Google’s executives are already building their own private air terminal at San Jose International Airport for $82 million to handle the eight private jets owned by Page and fellow co-founders Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt.

It would be fascinating to know how exactly Google would go about planning and building a city. What urban planning techniques would they adopt? Is building a city primarily a way to get more people to see their ads and use their products? At this point, if you Google “what is the best way to build a city,” the top search results focus on SimCity.

I’m sure this doesn’t ease the minds of those worried about the reach of tech companies – they don’t only want your devices and money, they think they have answers for everything…

The modern world: the real, significant moments in life are captured by cameras

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Looking at a range of events including Ferguson, Missouri, the Ray Rice case, and the release of celebrities’ nude selfies, one writer raises two important questions:

And above all these questions, there’s an ultimate one: What happens when you change a camera into a networked lens?

And: What happens when you add a networked lens to a situation?

Who gains power: the people holding the camera or the people being filmed? (Some argue that cop bodycams would in fact empower the police. After all, who has time to review all that footage?) Whose behavior changes, and how much? What can we expect will happen to the images that result? (Will they disappear into a database forever? If so, what can be done to them there? How will that affect us?)

We don’t know the answer to these twinned questions—but we’re learning a little more every day.

We are sorting through the coming together of two powerful forces: the rise of the visual image (decades in the making) and the Internet enabled and social media fueled interconnections between people. And sometimes, the results are not pretty.

Meme adding more and more gables to your McMansion

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At MemeGenerator, check out the McMansion gables image:

xzibit-yo-dawg - tonight on "pimp my mcmansion" : Yo dawg! We heard you liked gables so we put gables inside your gables alongside your gables!

McMansions are often known for their multiple gables. These add more volume and angles to the roofline. They are typically not necessary so are considered gauche for simply trying to impress.

This is based on the Xzibit Yo Dawg meme which is described thusly:

Yo Dawg, or Sup Dawg, is an image macro series based on portrait shots of American hip hop artist Alvin Nathaniel Joiner, better known by his stage name Xzibit, and humorous captions that are composed around the recursive phrasal template “Yo Dawg, I herd you like (noun X), so I put an (noun X) in your (noun Y) so you can (verb Z) while you (verb Z).” Since rising to popularity in early 2007, the series has been considered one of the most well-known and longest lasting examples of recursive humor on the Internet…

While Xzibit initially began his career in the entertainment industry as a rapper from Los Angeles, his mainstream breakthrough came almost a decade later as the host of the MTV show Pimp My Ride, which ran for six seasons from 2004 to 2007. In the show, Xzibit gained a reputation for adding luxurious amenities and equipments like fish tanks, clothes dryers and fireplaces into the participant’s car, presumably without consent.

So if Xzibit is known for a show featuring consumption, the connection to McMansions makes some sense.

TV increasingly for the old, Internet for the young

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A new analysis suggests the population of TV watchers is aging faster than the US and Internet users tend to be younger:

The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago.

These television viewers are aging faster than the U.S. population, Nathanson points out. The median age in the U.S. was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census, a figure that increased 1.9 percent over a decade. So to put that in context of television viewing, he said TV audiences aged 5 percent faster than the average American…

For younger audiences, control over when and where they watch has driven the trend away from traditional television. Live television viewing was down 13 percent for all ages except for viewers 55 years and older, who are steadily watching their shows at their scheduled broadcast time.

But, what about watching TV on the Internet? Here is more about watching different kinds of videos online:

Teens said they identify more with YouTube celebrities such as comedians Ryan Higa and Smosh, a “Saturday Night Live”-style singing, rapping duo, more than Hollywood A-listers Jennifer Lawrence and Seth Rogen, according to a July poll commissioned by Variety Magazine.

And like YouTube, Vine, which is owned by Twitter and has 40 million registered users, is producing celebrities who are getting increasingly picked up by mainstream media.

Perhaps not too surprising. Yet, it may lead to some interesting changes with both mediums. TV has traditionally tried to chase younger audiences, people that are impressionable and have spend a lot of disposable income. How much should TV chase younger viewers, particularly as the Baby Boomers, people used to TV and spending, age? On the other side, young Internet users do grow up at some point. Can sites like Facebook and YouTube continue to appeal to aging users as well as younger users who want new things?

At the least, this suggests moving images are not going away anytime soon, even if the delivery mode changes.

US unemployment figures distorted by lack of response, repeated takings of the survey

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Two new studies suggest unemployment figures are pushed downward by the data collection process:

The first report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the unemployment number released by the government suffers from a problem faced by other pollsters: Lack of response. This problem dates back to a 1994 redesign of the survey when it went from paper-based to computer-based, although neither the researchers nor anyone else has been able to offer a reason for why the redesign has affected the numbers.

What the researchers found was that, for whatever reason, unemployed workers, who are surveyed multiple times are most likely to respond to the survey when they are first given it and ignore the survey later on.

The report notes, “It is possible that unemployed respondents who have already been interviewed are more likely to change their responses to the labor force question, for example, if they want to minimize the length of the interview (now that they know the interview questions) or because they don’t want to admit that they are still unemployed.”

This ends up inaccurately weighting the later responses and skewing the unemployment rate downward. It also seems to have increased the number of people who once would have been designated as officially unemployed but today are labeled as out of the labor force, which means they are neither working nor looking for work.

And the second study suggests some of this data could be collected via Twitter by looking for key phrases.

This generally highlights the issue of survey fatigue where respondents are less likely to respond and completely fill out a survey. This hampers important data collection efforts across a wide range of fields. Given the enormity of the unemployment figures for American politics and economic life, this is a data problem worth solving.

A side thought: instead of searching Twitter for key words, why not deliver survey instruments like this through Twitter or smartphones? The surveys would have to be relatively short but they could have the advantage of seeming less time-consuming and could get better data.

Stat of the day: cable companies now actually have more Internet customers

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New figures show cable companies now have more Internet customers than TV customers:

For the first time, the number of broadband subscribers with the major U.S. cable companies exceeded the number of cable subscribers, the Leichtman Research Group reported today. Among other things, these figures suggest the industry is now misnamed. Evidently these are broadband companies that offer cable on the side.

To be sure, the difference is minimal: 49,915,000 broadband subscribers versus 49,910,000 cable subscribers. But even assuming a huge overlap in those numbers from customers who have both, the primacy of broadband demonstrates a shift in consumer priorities. Nearly all the major cable companies added broadband subscribers over the past quarter, for a total of nearly 380,000 new signups. Cable subscribers don’t have to worry about TV as they know it going away any time soon. But cable is on its way to becoming secondary, the “nice to have” compared to the necessity of having broadband access…

The better margins boil down to the fact that broadband is purely about access, while cable is about content. The crux of the cable side of the cable business is hatching deals with the makers of sports, news, and entertainment so there’s something to send through the box. And the costs can be steep. ESPN, the most pricey by far, tops $5 per subscriber per month.

The temptation with these numbers is to see a decline in television but I don’t think this is necessarily the case. TV has had remarkable staying power over the decades (it doesn’t hurt that the technology keeps getting better with better picture and sound as well as lots more channels) and Americans continue to watch a lot of it, on average. The Internet offers different possibilities compared to TV: access to more specific information, interactions with other Internet users, and a less passive overall experience. They also can be consumed together, presenting intriguing potential for interactions between the two.

Perhaps the bigger story here are the larger profit margins with the Internet…

The Chicago Tribune’s Instagram feed of their vintage photos

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The Chicago Tribune has an Instagram account featuring vintage photos of the city. See highlights here.

One quick thought: the downtown looks remarkably different today including a very different kind of development along the East Branch of the Chicago River, the rise of gleaming skyscrapers in the Loop and elsewhere (the International Style), and a generally cleaner look (though perhaps the consistent black and white portrayal makes a big difference).

What if Facebook could consistently improve users’ moods?

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There has been a lot of hubbub about the ethics of a mood experiment Facebook ran several years ago. But, what if Facebook could consistently alter what it presents users to improve their mood and well-being? Positive psychology guru Marty Seligman hints at this in Flourish:

It is not only measuring well-being that Facebook and its cousins can do, but increasing well-being as well. “We have a new application: goals.com,” Mark continued. “In this app, people record their goals and their progress toward their goals.”

I commented on Facebook’s possibilities for instilling well-being: “As it stands now, Facebook may actually be building four of the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement (sharing all those photos of good events), positive relationships (The heart of what ‘friends’ are all about), and now accomplishment. All to the good. The fifth element of well-being, however, needs work, and in the narcissistic environment of Facebook, this work is urgent, and that is belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self – the element of meaning. Facebook could indeed help to build meaning in the lives of the five hundred million users. Think about it, Mark.” (page 98)

This might still be a question of ethics and letting users know what is happening.  And I’m sure some critics would argue that it is too artificial, the relationships sustained online are of a different kind than that of face-to-face relationships (though we know most users interact with people online that they already know offline), and this puts too power in the hands of Facebook. Yet, what if Facebook could help improve well-being? What if a lot of good be done by altering the online experience?