Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

The of effects tech company shuttle buses from San Francisco to Silicon Valley

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A number of Silicon Valley workers live in San Francisco and a number of the biggest tech companies offer private shuttle buses for employees. This has led to changes in a number of San Francisco neighborhoods:

Take the public transportation provided by corporate shuttle buses from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. It’s not news that these shuttles, and the big digital tech companies that run them, are changing the fabric of San Francisco as we’ve known it. What feels new is that it’s not enough to say that change is coming soon. It’s already, very much here…

On one hand, some have called the shuttles “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area” because they allow the “techy progeny” of Silicon Valley to be “launched into SF proper.” That the shuttles are “alienating everyone who isn’t in technology” — or that there’s simply too much tech for one city to take.

Others are of the mind that it’s simply time to get over it and recognize a new reality; cities change, neighborhoods rise and fall. That in fact a paradox of Silicon Valley is in its “distributing meaningful equity” to ordinary people who wouldn’t otherwise access such wealth. (And then there’s the logic that wonders whether public transportation is yet another bit of infrastructure that should be upended by the Valley’s “meritocratic“ spirit.)…

What we’re talking about isn’t simply the replacement of presumably authentic recent immigrants by their presumably younger, whiter, or better educated new neighbors. What we’re talking about is the replacement of an entire system of urban inter-relationships, built up over generations and stratified in ways that make sense within an urban context — now short-circuited by the inexorable demands of the (suburban) digital technology landscape.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. The arrival of “the creative class” is not just a positive occurrence. This is a group many big cities would love to have for their wealth (think of the tax money!) as well as their innovative and creative spirits. Yet, as the term gentrification describes, this group can at the least change the character of places and more problematically push out existing residents.

2. This hints at the interdependence within metropolitan regions. Tech workers may like their jobs in Silicon Valley but San Francisco offers a more exciting, urban, and cultured place to live. And, San Francisco benefits from its business connections to Silicon Valley. It would also be interesting to consider the role of San Jose which offers a bigger city closer to Silicon Valley but one that has less of a reputation for social life.

With these changes, it puts officials in San Francisco in an interesting position. Existing urban residents tend to resist major changes to their neighborhoods. But, as noted above, cities have a hard time turning down new money.

When a country depends on one company, like Finland did with Nokia

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Here is a quick overview of how important Nokia once was for Finland:

Nokia, meanwhile, has been declining even faster, as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Apple Inc. have carved up the market between them. The company that used to account for 20 percent of Finland’s gross domestic product has seen its sales decline dramatically in the smartphone era and is operating at a loss.

That raises an interesting question: What does this mean for Finland?

I’m not exaggerating how dependent Finland’s economy has been on Nokia. Here’s the Economist last year, detailing the extent of the country’s reliance:

NOKIA contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer’s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country’s total, and it generated nearly a fifth of Finland’s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. No wonder that a decline in its fortunes — Nokia’s share price has fallen by 90% since 2007, thanks partly to Apple’s ascent — has clouded Finland’s outlook.

Since the trend in recent decades has been more toward diversification, this might strike many as surprising. But, I suspect Finland is not alone though I’m thinking more about countries reliant on companies dealing with natural resources like oil or minerals.

I’m also prompted to think whether the United States is in a similar position. There are clearly American brands known worldwide that also have large revenues: General Motors, Walmart, Budweiser, McDonald’s, Apple. But, even with (incorrect?) quotes like “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” our economy has a number of important corporations. At the same time, this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t interrelated. Remember the talk from several years ago about what might happen if General Motors went bankrupt? Or, what might be the ripples if Walmart declined significantly? Perhaps more importantly, the companies cited above all make material goods. As the recent economic crisis suggested, we are very susceptible to problems in the financial industry where the products are less tangible and yet financing, investments, and debts are incredibly important parts of the modern economy. These companies are so large and intertwined with so many areas of the economy that their fate to that of many others.

Commercials that market smartphones as education devices shouldn’t fool many

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In the past few months, I’ve heard several commercials for smartphones that suggest kids can and will use them for educational purposes. When your child needs help on their homework, they can whip out their phone and find the answer.

Who do they think they are fooling? While parents want to hear about helping their kids succeed in school (this is an American constant over the decades), these commercials offer implausible possibilities. Kids could use their phone for homework or studying. But, I suspect the smartphone is used for two other tasks that will far outweigh educational purposes: social interaction (texting, chatting, Facebook, etc.) and media consumption (music, YouTube, TV and movies, etc.). The real education provided here might be in how to be a media-saturated, 21st century American kid.

This may be effective marketing but it also hints at another issue: the idea that new technological devices automatically lead to more learning. Where is the evidence for this? We can argue that kids needs to keep up with technology to understand and use it for their good like applying for jobs. We can argue the new technology engages kids. We can argue the technology can open up new opportunities like forming and maintaining beneficial relationships or learning how to code. But, suggesting it actually leads to more learning is a more difficult case to make.

My conclusion: such commercials play off the interests of parents who would say they want to help their kids succeed without marshalling much evidence that the new smartphone will help kids learn.

Greener driving doesn’t just involve greener cars; could also make a smarter, greener road

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In addition to greener cars, improvements to the infrastructure of roads would help make the whole system greener:

In Toronto, a university team has rolled out a software system that enables traffic lights to learn how cars and trucks flow under them—and then adjust their patterns of reds and greens to move that traffic more smoothly. The software, which uses artificial intelligence techniques, is installed at 59 intersections in downtown Toronto. The team’s computer modeling says this system of “smart self-learning traffic lights” reduces travel times by 25 percent and lowers carbon-dioxide emissions by 30 percent, according to a report issued this spring by the University of Toronto’s Baher Abdulhai, who is one of the system’s designers.

A slick piece of traffic-light software doesn’t get the juices flowing as much as, say, a battery-powered car that can rocket from zero to 60 in fewer than four seconds and never needs to fill up at a gas station. (That car would be the Tesla Roadster.) But such ho-hum advances may matter more. The United States has approximately 100,000 plug-in electric vehicles on the road, according to Plug In America, an electric-vehicle advocacy group. Though that’s a big jump from a few years ago, it still constitutes just 0.04 percent of the roughly 250 million cars of all types on American roads. And given that not quite 16 million new cars are sold in the United States annually, turning over today’s auto fleet will take many years. That means techniques that make the existing mass of cars move around more efficiently could have a much bigger near-term effect than radically environmentally friendlier ways to spin a car’s wheels…

The automotive analog of the smart grid is what some have dubbed the smart road. Companies from Google to major auto makers are testing cars that either are fully driverless or use technology to minimize a driver’s role in controlling the vehicle. One ostensible benefit of Big Brother sitting at the wheel is that he’d probably operate the car in a way that gets better gas mileage than you would. In Europe, a consortium of institutes and companies that includes Volvo is developing what it calls “road trains.” The concept, funded by the European Commission, is part NASCAR and part George Jetson…

Other, less technologically radical smart-road trappings have begun rolling out on a bit larger scale. More and more cities around the world have car-sharing programs, which use wireless technology to enable someone who has signed up to find an available car using a computer or smartphone and unlock it using a program’s membership card. Typically a user pays per-minute or per-hour for the car. When she’s done with it, she parks it near her destination, either in one of the car-sharing program’s designated spots or in a regular on-street parking space. The details vary according to the program. Because at least some members do away with owning a car, each shared car reduces the number of total cars on the road.

Fewer drivers tooling around city streets in their cars in search of parking spaces could have a sizable effect on the roads. An analysis of several studies conducted over many decades suggests that a whopping 30 percent of traffic in large cities is caused by drivers looking for parking spots, according to a 2006 report  by Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban-planning professor, who with his students conducted his own deep dive into traffic in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village. More traffic, of course, means more fuel consumed and more greenhouse gas emitted.

Perhaps all of these approaches would be best. It would be interesting to compare the costs and the beneficial impact of all of these options: having greener cars likely passes a lot of the costs to new car buyers but the other options dealing with the infrastructure could spread the costs across taxpayers and new apps or information (like Waze) could be put in the hands of drivers.

Additionally, these options bypass appear to bypass one sticking point for many Americans: feeling like they have to give up their car or that the government is trying to make driving more difficult. By making driving easier and letting them feel more in control (with some cost of course), they then don’t feel like their “right to drive” is being impinged upon. At the same time, this article doesn’t weigh all of these options versus increased mass transit.

First American inpatient hospital Internet addiction facility to open

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Internet addiction is a growing topic of discussion and the first hospital inpatient facility to address it is set to open soon in Pennsylvania:

The voluntary, 10-day program is set to open on Sept. 9 at the Behavioral Health Services at Bradford Regional Medical Center. The program was organized by experts in the field and cognitive specialists with backgrounds in treating more familiar addictions like drug and alcohol abuse.

“[Internet addiction] is a problem in this country that can be more pervasive than alcoholism,” said Dr. Kimberly Young, the psychologist who founded the non-profit program. “The Internet is free, legal and fat free.”…

Young and other experts are quick to caution that mere dependence on modern technology does not make someone an Internet addict. The 20-year-old who divides his time between his girlfriend and “World of Warcraft” likely does not require intensive treatment. The program is designed for those whose lives are spiraling out of control because of their obsession with the Internet. These individuals have been stripped from their ability to function in daily life and have tried in the past to stop but cannot…

Last May, the American Psychiatric Association released its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5, or DSM-5, for the first time listed “Gaming Disorder” in Section III of the manual, which means it requires further research before being formally identified as a disorder.

This bears watching. This will likely be a real problem for a small subset of the population and yet critics of the Internet could continue to use it to criticize all Internet use. How exactly this is constructed as a social problem (or not) will strongly influence how this is perceived in the United States.

It would be interesting to know why exactly the first hospital facility is being set up in central Pennsylvania. Why not elsewhere?

Efficiency the reason we have the telephone button layout we have today

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Bell Labs made a number of important discoveries decades ago including making the choice of how telephone buttons should be laid out:

This layout is so standardized that we barely think about it. But it was, in the 1950s, the result of a good deal of strategizing and testing on the part of people at Bell Labs. Numberphile has dug up an amazing paper — published in the July 1960 issue of “The Bell System Technical Journal” — that details the various alternative designs the Bell engineers considered. Among them: “the staircase” (II-B in the image above), “the ten-pin” (III-B, reminiscent of bowling-pin configurations), “the rainbow” (II-C), and various other versions that mimicked the circular logic of the existing dialing technology: the rotary.

Everything was on the table for the layout of the ten buttons; the researchers’ only objective was to find the configuration that would be as user-friendly, and efficient, as possible. So they ran tests. They experimented. They sought input. They briefly considered a layout that mimicked a cross.

And in the end, though, Numberphile’s Sarah Wiseman notes, it became a run-off between the traditional calculator layout and the telephone layout we know today. And the victory was a matter of efficiency. “They did compare the telephone layout and the calculator layout,” she says, “and they found the calculator layout was slower.”

It is interesting that they searched for what was most efficient. This is not surprising; telephones are pieces of technology and the user is likely to want to dial the number as quickly as possible so they can get on with the phone call. But, efficiency isn’t necessarily everything. Imagine Steve Jobs and Apple, an organization known for their designs, made this initial choice: would they have chosen something more elegant or would they have selected efficiency as well? It is a small thing yet it hints at George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis where efficient and rational approaches tend to win out in our world.

A side note: Bell Labs should be better known in the United States for their role in developing new technologies.

Born into digital lives: average newborn online within an hour of birth

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The newborns of today arrive online very quickly:

The poll found that parents were the most likely to upload pictures of the newborns (62 per cent), followed by other family members (22 per cent) and friends (16 per cent).

The most popular platform for displaying these first baby images was Facebook, followed by Instagram and Flickr…

Marc Phelps of baby photo agency http://www.posterista.co.uk, which commissioned the survey, said: “The fact that a picture of the average newborn is now online within an hour just goes to highlight the enormous impact social media has had on our lives in the past five years, and how prevalent these pages are in helping to keep loved ones informed on the special occasions in our lives, such as the birth of a new child.

Some more on the survey:

The poll by print site http://www.posterista.co.uk, which surveyed 2,367 parents of children aged five and under, aimed to discover the impact social media have had on the way new parents share information and images of their offspring…

The top five reasons cited for sharing these images online included keeping distant family and friends updated (56%), expressing love for their children (49%), describing it as an ideal location to store memories (34%), saying it is a great way to record children’s early years (28%), and to brag to and “better” other parents’ photos (22%).

It sounds like complete digital immersion. The most common reason given for this practice mirror the main reasons users give for participating in SNS like Facebook: to remain connected with others. But, the next four reasons differ. The second and fifth reasons suggest posting photos about newborns is about social interactions, first with the new baby (positive, though the baby doesn’t know it – plus, this could be part of a public performance of how love is shown in the 2010s) but then also in competition with others (negative). The third and fourth reasons are more about new digital tools; instead of developing film or printing pictures, SNS can be online repositories of life (offloading our memories online).

Thinking more broadly, what are the ethics of posting pictures of people online who haven’t given their permission or don’t know they are online? This could apply to children but this could also apply to friends or even strangers who end up in your photos. Some have suggested companies like Facebook have information on people who don’t have profiles through the information provided by others. Plus, if you don’t go online, others might think you are suspicious. So, perhaps the best way to protect your content online is not to withdraw and try to hide but rather to rigorously monitor all possible options…

Will citing the Kindle location, and not the page number, become the norm?

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Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise contains an interesting bibliographic twist: he sometimes cites Kindle locations, not page numbers. Here is an example: footnote 42 in Chapter 8.

McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die, Kindle location 46.

Silver doesn’t do this for every book though he does sometimes say a book is the Kindle edition if he is giving the full citation. Is Silver on to a new trend? Will readers and scholars want Kindle locations?

I think we’re probably a long ways from this becoming standard. The problem is that it requires having all of your books in Kindle form. Ebooks are popular but I’m not sure how far people are willing to go to replace all of their older books with Kindle editions. (Particularly if you are dealing with more esoteric published material.) I could see this happening more for new books which are more likely to be purchased in Kindle form. Or perhaps we are headed for a world where everyone has Kindle access to all major books (a subscription service? An expanded Project Gutenberg?) on their phone, tablet, or computer and looking up a Kindle location becomes really easy.

Perhaps this won’t really matter until I see it in a student research paper…

Want better crash test ratings for your car? Have a trunk in the front

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The latest model from Tesla Motors received high marks in crash-test ratings. What is the secret to the safety of this electric car?

The luxury electric sedan earned an overall safety rating of five out of five stars from the federal agency, Tesla announced Tuesday. It also earned at least five stars in every category, a feat that puts it in the top 1 percent of cars tested by NHTSA…

Because the $70,000-plus electric car does not require a large gasoline engine block, there is added room in the front of the car for crumple zones, which absorb energy from front-end collisions. The motor is only about a foot in diameter and is mounted close to the rear axle, away from the most common impact zones. The car’s front section is instead used as a second trunk.

“A longer crumple zone means there’s a longer period of time in which the crash is unfolding,” said Russ Rader, a spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which has not yet tested the Model S. “The vehicle can slow down over a longer period of time, which benefits the people inside.”

In its press release, Tesla compares it to a diver jumping into a pool of water from a tall height. “[I]t is better to have the pool be deep and not contain rocks.”

Didn’t more cars in the past have the engines in the rear? This idea could prompt all sorts of government action: why not require, or at least strongly recommend, the front of the car should not have an engine for safety reasons? Perhaps Tesla is doing some other interesting things with their design to minimize crash damage but this seems like an “easy” fix to the number of injuries and fatalities in cars each year.

Turning Apple’s brand and products into a religion

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A new book lays out how Steve Jobs transformed Apple into a religion:

Jobs’ Zen master Kobun Chino told him that he “could keep in touch with his spiritual side while running a business.” So in true Zen fashion, Jobs avoided thinking of technology and spirituality in dualistic terms. But what really set him apart was his ability to educate the public about personal computing in both practical and mythic ways.

The iconography of the Apple computer company, the advertisements, and the device screens of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad are visual expressions of Jobs’ imaginative marriage of spiritual science and modern technology…

Technology ads provide parables and proverbs for navigating the complexities of the new technological order. They instruct the consumer on how to live the “good life” in the technological age…

Jobs embraced elliptical thinking as a means of promoting technology objects that pose their own paradoxes. In the Apple narrative, the seemingly oppositional notions of assimilation/isolation and freedom/enslavement are resolved by Apple’s invocation of enlightened paradox.

Others have also made this argument: see this 2011 post as well as this 2012 post.  Claiming a brand is like a religion could be an analysis of a secular age (this piece suggests we traded gods for technological progress and consumerism) or it could be a slam against followers who blindly follow a brand (certain brands may inspire higher levels of devotion yet not all inspiring brands are accused of inspiring religious-like followings).

Yet, beyond Apple, wouldn’t most, if not all brands, aspire to this kind of devotion? Religion implies a devoted set of followers who are willing to participate in rituals, of which the most important is buying the new product. Evangelism, telling others about the products and brand, might also be high on this list. Another key is that brand followers and users think they are participating in a transcendent experience.