Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Misleading graph of Dyson vacuum suction power?

Posted on by

The latest edition of Time includes a back cover ad from Dyson with a graph of their vacuum’s suction:

DysonVacuumSuctionGraph

From the graph and the numbers below, it is pretty clear that Dyson has more suction power than the two other pictured vacuums: 160 air watts compared to 68 and 43 air watts. Fair enough, particularly for those who need the most air watts. But, I also wonder if this graph doesn’t represent a common problem with infographics: it is confusing a linear relationship, 160 air watts is more than twice as much as the competing vacuums, with volume. Not only does the Dyson have the most suction power, it is clearly the biggest vacuum in this graph. While I don’t think Dyson wants to sell their vacuum as the largest (in fact, they often pitch its manueverability), it isn’t necessarily bad to show that your product visually dominates the competition.

“Sociological experiment” with children using mobile devices

Posted on by

An Australian psychologist suggests we don’t quite know what will happen with lots of young children now using tablets and other electronics:

Research indicates that almost half of all toddlers up to two years old have played with a mobile device. It also reveals that 15 per cent of that group can also operate a home entertainment system. That rises to 31 per cent of three- to five-year-olds and a third of six- to eight-year-olds.

The study of 750 adults across Australia who have an internet connection included questions about how children interact with technology and was conducted by media intelligence firm Magna Global.

Most frequently used were iPads (27 per cent for three- to five-year-olds and 43 per cent for six- to eight-year-olds) followed by Wi-Fi-enabled laptops (21 per cent for three- to five-year-olds and 38 per cent for six- to eight-years-olds)…

Jordy Kaufman, a child psychologist and founder of the Swinburne BabyLab, has studied how children interact with devices. ”Given the massive uptake of mobile device use by young kids, we can be said to be engaged in a grand sociological experiment where no one knows what the results will be,” he said.

But he cautions that just because we do not know the outcome, that does not mean the use of devices is negative. There are opportunities for learning from iPads that did not exist before, Dr Kaufman said.

I suppose there are three possible reactions to the situation. Go all in and see the use of mobile electronics as simply part of the progress of the modern world. Americans tend to like progress and new opportunities and these devices certainly fulfill these two requirements. This full usage may occur even with evidence that they don’t contribute much to learning. The opposite reaction is to not allow children access to such devices. To some degree, this is helped by the fact that such devices are not yet completely ubiquitous. But, some may want to wait and see how children respond to mobile devices. And, there is some middle ground where children could use new electronics in moderation alongside more “traditional” activities.

It sounds like we need some sort of randomized experiment to help figure this out. But, we are getting close to a time where it would be really difficult to pull this off.

The best civic apps for Chicago

Posted on by

Finding people to test civic apps is no easy task but here are some of the best civic apps in Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune:

Foodborne Chicago Many people don’t report food poisoning to the health department, slowing responses to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. This service scans Twitter looking for anyone complaining of food poisoning and flags anything that appears to be legitimate and local. A real person reviews the flagged tweet and, if it checks out, sends a reply via Twitter asking them to report the poisoning to the health department via an online form. (Developers: Joe Olson, Cory Nissen, Scott Robbin, Raed Mansour, Daniel O’Neil)…

Spothole Do you see a pothole? If so, click “Spot a Pothole” and easily file a complaint from your mobile phone. The app then uses an algorithm to rank the potholes, allowing city crews to address the most critical ones in a given area. (Stefan Draht, Brett Schnacky)

Can I Bring My Bike on the Metra Right Now? Simple question. Simple answer. Plus additional information on bike parking around Metra stations. (Steven Vance, Francesco Villa)

Clear Streets A more muscular version of the city’s Plow Tracker. This site reports which streets have been cleared of snow and includes a “plow leader board” of most active trucks. (Forest Gregg, Derek Eder and Juan-Pablo Velez)…

Sweeparound.us Type in your address and find out when your street will be swept. Register for an email, text message or calendar alert — or all of the above — to remind yourself to move your car to avoid a ticket or tow. (Scott Robbin)

Was My Car Towed? Supply your license plate number and find out whether the city towed your car. (Scott Robbin)

These could be very useful in a pinch. I get the idea that these apps are intended to help residents improve and understand the services in their city. At the same time, the apps listed by the Tribune seem fairly negative (potholes, avoiding tickets, making sure restaurants are clean, etc.) and giving citizens tools by which to complain about or track what the city is doing with their tax dollars. What about civic apps that help residents enjoy the city more? Perhaps this has already been taken by apps like Yelp. Plus, do apps like these take out the randomness of urban life or simply free people up to enjoy the city even more?

Mapping wealth by locating iPhone, Android, and Blackberry owners

Posted on by

Check out the maps of cell phone owners in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and a number of other major American cities:

Among other things, cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5 (and even more money to keep up with the latest models that come out faster than plan upgrades do). Consider, then, this map of Washington, D.C., which uses geolocated tweets, and the cell phone metadata attached to them, to illustrate who in town is using iPhones (red dots) and who’s using Androids (green dots)…

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guru Eric Fischer. They’ve converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

The locals and tourists map scales up a beautiful earlier project from Fischer. You could kill a few hours playing with all of these tools, built on the same dataset. But we particularly liked looking at the geography of smart phone devices. As in Washington, above, iPhones are often more prominent in upper-income parts of cities (and central business districts), while Androids appear to be the dominant device in lower-income areas.

It sounds like there could be some methodological issues here. The data doesn’t cover all Twitter users and then Twitter users are already a small subset of the US population. Nonetheless, these are interesting maps. I saw recently that over 50% of Americans now have smartphones – it jumped from 35% to 56% in several years. But, not all cell phones cost the same or aim for the same markets. iPhones aren’t just expensive. They also have a certain aesthetic and set of features that appeals to a certain set of Americans. Samsung had a set of recent commercials that played off the cool factor of iPhones, raising the idea of the phone as (expired?) status symbol. If you asked smartphone owners why they chose the phone they did, how many would admit that the status of the phone significantly factored into their decision?

More broadly, it would be interesting to think about what other common consumer goods could be mapped in ways that show clear patterns.

New ASA task force on social media

Posted on by

The American Sociological Association has a new task force on social media that will meet during the 2013 ASA meetings in New York City:

According to Tapia, the ASA has “worked hard to keep pace with the changes in social media” by adopting practices such as maintaining a Facebook page and working with Twitter. However, she added, many sociologists lack the experience and knowledge to fully utilize social media. While in graduate school, sociology students are required to read an extensive amount of literature that goes back hundreds of years but do not receive comparable training in using online tools.

“The purpose of the task force is to think more broadly about ways in which we can help to shine a bright light on sociology,” she said. “For example, many members are eager to promote their books. But some members don’t quite know how to go about it.”…

The Task Force on Social Media will hold its first face-to-face meeting at the ASA Annual Meeting in New York City on Aug. 10. The bulk of the task force work will be done by sub-committees operating electronically and by conference calls over the next 18 months. There will be a second face-to-face meeting in August 2014 at the ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

As a discipline, sociology could use more positive exposure through social media. According to a posting earlier this year, the full name of the group is the Task Force on Using Social Media to Increase the Visibility of Sociological Research. At the same time, Twitter and Facebook and other places don’t always lend themselves to nuanced scientific explanation of the social world…

US government behind in regulating automated features for cars

Posted on by

As car makers pursue new technologies including driverless cars, the US government is struggling to keep up with the changes:

While truly self-driving cars are years away—if they ever arrive—consumers are seeing far more car models bearing sophisticated semi-autonomous features. These include radar assisted cruise-control, which can keep a fixed distance from the car ahead; systems that warn drivers if they veer out of their lanes; and technologies that can prevent oversteering or even apply the brakes when they detect that a crash is imminent (see “Self-Driving Tech Veers into Mid-Range Cars” and “Proceed With Caution Toward the Self-Driving Car”)…

With three states and the District of Columbia having passed legislation to allow researchers to test such prototypes on real roads, Washington is grappling with how to regulate the cars. John Capp, the director of active safety systems for General Motors, says federal regulators are “trying to understand these things and trying to figure out what role they should have.”…

Unsurprisingly, NHTSA’s statement said that fully autonomous technology isn’t ready for the general public. But the fact that the agency is calling for more study is a reminder of the glacial pace of regulation: in the case of lane-departure warnings and crash-avoidance systems, it’s studying technologies that have already been on the market for several years.

See my post last week on the NHSTA statement. More broadly, this raises interesting questions about technology and the ability of regulators to keep up. For those who want to push technology forward, how much in terms of time, convenience, and dollars is lost if the government slows down the process? At the same time, how much regulation is needed to help protect the public? There is likely some sort of sweet spot when the government has time to declare technology safe and inventors and producers can still get things to the public in a reasonable amount of time…but I suspect this could vary widely across different sectors and the politics involved could change quite a bit. Take, for example, the scandal a few years back involving Toyota and the lack of findings. It cost the company quite a bit, the government still had a duty to step in, but there was little conclusion – except that perhaps we’re all going to have black boxes in our cars  soon. Imagine a few incidents like this happening with a new widespread technology like driverless cars. How much could that set the industry back and feed perceptions that the technology really wasn’t ready?

Game identifying random locations through Google Streetview

Posted on by

Love to see random sites around the world? Check out the game Locatestreet where you are given a picture from Google Streetview and you have to guess (with multiple choice and with the opportunity to utilize a few hints) the correct location.

After playing the version with random US locations, I discovered that context matters – check out the housing styles and the vegetation for some insights into the location. Indeed, you might just see lots of trees and landscape. Also, knowing where population centers are can go a long way in making a closer guess as to where the exact picture was taken…

h/t Atlantic Cities