Month: August 2016

For Navy pilots who land jets on aircraft carriers, life is tough. First, there’s the bit about touching down at precisely the right time and position to have the tailhook catch the arresting wire and bring you to a stop before the runway—all 300 feet of it— runs out. And then there’s the fact flight decks don’t stay still. They heave and sway with the sea. In the seconds before touchdown, a pilot typically makes hundreds of small changes to his trajectory.

The US Navy says new tech could make white-knuckle carrier traps a thing of the past. It recently completed testing the Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies, a software mod that makes a carrier approach nearly as routine as a runway landing. In the Pentagon’s honored tradition of strained acronyms, the Navy calls it Magic Carpet.

According to the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Patuxent River, Maryland, which led the development of Magic Carpet, the system works with the plane’s autopilot to maintain the approach using what’s called direct lift control. In short, once the pilot sets the glide angle of the approach, it becomes the “neutral” setting for the controls.

The autopilot tracks the position of the deck, adjusting the throttle, flaps, ailerons, and stabilizers to keep the flight path and angle of attack on point. Instead of maintaining continuous pressure on the stick and making myriad inputs before landing, the pilot can relax. Any adjustments he does make are incorporated into the autopilot settings.

During a week of trials last month, test pilots flying F/A-18 Super Hornets conducted nearly 600 touch-and-go landings and many tailhook-arrested landings on the Nimitz-class USS George Washington. They made both highly accurate approaches and deliberately inaccurate approaches, with varying wind speeds and directions. According to engineers with the Navy and Boeing, the system increased the accuracy and consistency of landings under all conditions. Those landings were less stressful, too: Pilots typically perform 300 corrections to their flight path in the final 18 seconds of an approach. Magic Carpet drops that between 10 and 20.

The Navy is quick to stress that the system is not fully automated, and pilots remain in control. Magic Carpet just simplifies the descent. And because it augments existing flight control systems, it doesn’t require hardware mods. It will take flight on the F/A-18 Super Hornet, the EA-18G Growler, and F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, all of which have the digital flight controls needed to work with the system.

The Navy expects to start integrating the system in 2019. Beyond reducing stress, Magic Carpet could minimize the time and effort needed to train pilots for carrier landings, allowing more time for tactical training. It also could reduce the time and money spent maneuvering carriers into ideal landing positions. Fewer aborted landings saves fuel, and fewer hard landings saves wear and tear on aircraft. And you thought Aladdin’s flying carpet was cool.

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When Samsung released the Galaxy Note in 2011, the average smartphone screen measured less than 4 inches. That made the Note’s 5.3-incher seem like an impractical experiment, not a sign of things to come. Isn’t technology supposed to get smaller over time?

Not if it has a screen. Big phones are mainstream now, and the Galaxy Note 7 shows how refined they’ve become. Its 5.7-inch AMOLED display (1440×2560, 518ppi) seems reasonably sized, and the phone feels surprisingly compact. The slimming effect is due to a curved screen, borrowed from the S7 Edge, that eliminates the side bezels. That makes the Note 7 2.2mm narrower than its predecessor despite having the same size display.

As a result, the Note 7 resembles an oversized Edge. The two phones share other similarities. They use quad-core processors and offer 4GB RAM. Both are water resistant (with an IP68 rating, meaning they’re “dust tight” and you can submerge them) and feature the same excellent camera, MicroSD slot, fast-charging 3,5000 mAh battery, and “Edge UX” shortcuts.

This is the first Note phone to use USB-C charging, and the first Galaxy device with HDR10 video playback. But the marquee feature might be the iris-scanning camera. You can unlock the phone simply by looking at it, and secure folders with retina or fingerprint protection.

And then there’s the S Pen stylus. Before knocking it as a Palm-Pilot-era relic, you should know that you can translate or magnify text with it, and turn any video that isn’t DRM protected into a gif with just a few taps. If you use the stylus often, you won’t have to jump between S Pen-friendly apps quite so much. A Samsung Notes app combines the functionality of several predecessors.

Note veterans will be relieved to hear this stylus won’t get stuck in its cubby if you insert it backward. Samsung wanted the stylus to provide a more-natural writing experience, so they designed it to feel like a 0.7mm ballpoint pen. Cooler still, you can use it underwater. Because why not.

Like recent generations of Galaxy phones, the Note 7 should offer a solid VR experience. However, the USB-C connector means you’ll need a new Gear VR headset. Coincidentally, Samsung announced the $100 Gear VR for Galaxy Note 7 today, and it works with older phones via an included MicroUSB attachment.

No word on what carriers will charge for the phone, but preorders start tomorrow. The phone ships August 19, and it’ll be available in silver, black, and blue.

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You don’t need us to tell you that Comcast has a bad reputation when it comes to customer service. For seven years in a row Comcast ranked at the bottom of 24/7 Wall St.’s annual customer satisfaction poll. Now the company’s business practices may land it in court.

This week Washington state filed a $100 million lawsuit against Comcast, accusing the company of 1.8 million violations of the the state’s Consumer Protection Act. The state isn’t suing Comcast for bad customer service per se, but for the sorts of misleading claims and practices that have given Comcast such a poor public image. (Comcast denies any wrongdoing.)

The state’s biggest grievance appears to be Comcast’s $4.99-per-month “Service Protection Plan,” which Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson’s office calls “near-worthless.” According to the lawsuit, Comcast promoted the plan as a single-fee program that would cover all service calls, including those that involved in-wall wiring. The catch? Any work on “wires concealed within walls requiring wall fishing” was excluded, an exception the suit says meant customers would still have to pay for most in-wall service calls.

“The plan does not, in fact, cover the vast majority of inside wiring,” the Ferguson’s announcement alleges, adding that customer service scripts given to Comcast representatives deliberately mislead customers.

The service’s limitations are now spelled out on the Comcast’s website, but the state claims those changes were made only recently “on the verge of this litigation.” According to the suit, Comcast not only buried the exceptions to the plan in the fine print but failed to give customers a copy of the fine print, or even tell them that the fine print exists.

Comcast disputes that the plan was misleading, saying it covered more than 99 percent of customers’ repair calls.”We worked with the Attorney General’s office to address every issue they raised, and we made several improvements based on their input,” Comcast said in a statement. The company said it was disappointed the attorney general’s office had chosen to sue instead of continuing to work with Comcast. “We stand behind our products and services and will vigorously defend ourselves.”

This isn’t the first time that Ferguson has gone after a telco over deceptive advertising. In 2013, the attorney general’s investigation into T-Mobile concluded that the mobile service provider’s ads promising “no contracts” mislead customers. T-Mobile settled with the state by adding disclaimers about the consequences of canceling your T-Mobile service before you’ve paid off your phone. This time around, Ferguson is looking for more than just a few disclaimers. The lawsuit seeks to have customers’ service call fees refunded and their credit scores revised. (Along with the allegedly misleading service plans, the lawsuit also claims that Comcast damaged customers’ credit scores by running unauthorized credit checks.)

Maybe none of this will make your wait time faster during your next call to Comcast. But it just might make the company take a harder look at its scripts it provides its customer service reps. Bad customer service may not be a crime. But it sure feels like an injustice.

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If moments in the Range’s music seem oddly familiar—a ghostly vocal here, a stray freestyle there—then you spend waaaaay too much time on the Internet.

The Range, the one-man electronic-pop act created by 27-year-old musician James Hinton, seeks out a cappella and spoken-word samples from obscure corners of YouTube, then incorporates them into his intricate instrumentals. It requires a lot of time online, watching amateurs sing their hearts out. Some of their unflinching, disarmingly emotional vocals landed on the Range’s critically exalted second album, Potential, which arrived earlier this year, and for which Hinton spent “something like 200 hours on YouTube over about 35 days,” he says. “I’m not ashamed of the number, but that’s a lot of YouTube.”

While making Potential, Hinton wondered about the lives of those performers—all of them amateurs, with videos boasting view-counts no higher than the triple digits. “The classic ‘YouTube success story’ is usually someone who, in reality, has a lot of private support and a lot of backing,” says Hinton. “[The artists I work with] are all trying to make it work in their off-hours. Life comes at them, and by hook or by crook, they’re not going to let their passion for music go away. I really wanted to get to know them, and see what makes them tick.”

The documentary Superimpose—released today, with a Range EP of the same name—tracks down muses like Damian “Naturaliss” Gordon, a dancehall and reggae singer and corrections officer in Kingston, Jamaica, whose “1000 Blessings” was sampled on the Range’s springy “1804”; Kruddy Zak, a London teenager whose five-year-old freestyle rap was employed for “Copper Wire”; and Kai, a 19-year-old Brooklyn student whose cover of Ariana Grande’s “You’ll Never Know” became the centerpiece of “Florida,” Potential‘s lead single.

Their YouTube clips have that strange intimacy that makes amateur performances so compelling: The people on the screen must be overly confident to win you over, but they can’t hide their earnest hope that you’ll connect with them—even over a long distance. And the straight-to-the-camera, single-shot filmmaking allows viewers to catch every sly smile or anxious eye-dart, making it impossible not to connect to them.

“If the performer is jubilant, and I’m into it, it’s probably because I’m feeling the same way,” Hinton says. “And if I’m feeling emotional or distraught, you can kind of tell from someone’s face or vocal timbre that they’re feeling that way, too. You want something intimate and raw and really unique.”

YouTube Has the Best Vocalists—If You Can Find Them

Hinton waits until his finished track—which incorporates his original instrumentation and the reworked YouTube samples—is finished before presenting it to the performers, which often is the hard part. Some of the clips he mines are years old, and their creators can be hard to find. “It sometimes ends up being a massive detective process,” he says. “Most people don’t check their messages.”

I had not heard of the Range before, but once I explored his music, I thought it would give me a chance to explore a genre that was outside of my usual comfort zone of R&B. Brooklyn singer Kai

When Hinton does finally track down a performer, he sometimes has some explaining to do. “At first, I thought it was a little random [when he reached out],” says Kai. “I had no clue that people were still watching my YouTube videos, because I had been inactive on my channel. I had not heard of the Range before, but once I explored his music, I thought it would give me a chance to explore a genre that was outside of my usual comfort zone of R&B.”

All of the YouTube musicians who wound up working with Hinton get a co-writing credit and a cut of the song’s royalties, and some of them have used the opportunity to further their careers: Naturaliss recently shot a professional video for his “1000 Blessings,” while Kai and Hinton plan to rework their “Florida” track. “I’m currently working on improving my songwriting skills,” she says. “Being a part of ‘Florida’ has been a true blessing. I learned so much about myself, and about my purpose as an artist.”

Searching for New Inspiration on Twitter

For Hinton, connecting with performers via YouTube made the solitary songwriting and recording process “a little less lonely,” he says. “Having people that you could see, by looking at their videos, made me feel like I had collaborators, to some degree.” Although nothing can compete with YouTube’s vast reserves of lost performances and found sounds—”you can’t find that concoction of videos on something like Facebook,” he notes—Hinton is looking for new sources for home-grown samples.

“Lately, I’ve been really considering Twitter,” Hinton says. “There’s a small group of people who post lyrics that are almost freestyles—either one tweet will be an entire idea or they’ll hammer through an idea in poetry form, through a set of tweets. It’s like LiveJournal—pure text, and no context.” Be sure to check your DMs; before you know it, the Range may have turned one of your 140-character missives into a three-minute pop song.

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01

Chicago

The Chicago River was once so full of sewage that in the late 19th century Illinois built a series of canals to actually reverse its flow away from Lake Michigan, to prevent it from contaminating the city’s water supply. More than 100 years later the city launched the Chicago River Corridor Development Plan, a measure laying out new trails, parks, boathouses, overlooks, and the just-opened Chicago Riverwalk, a pedestrian promenade along six blocks between State Street and Lake Street. Each block takes on a different river typology. Marina Plaza, for instance, includes restaurants and outdoor seating, while The Cove has kayak rentals and docks for watercraft. The final piece, the Jetty, a series of piers and floating wetland gardens, opens this fall.

Credit:
Christian Phillips

The Chicago River was once so full of sewage that in the late 19th century Illinois built a series of canals to actually reverse its flow away from Lake Michigan, to prevent it from contaminating the city’s water supply. More than 100 years later the city launched the Chicago River Corridor Development Plan, a measure laying out new trails, parks, boathouses, overlooks, and the just-opened Chicago Riverwalk, a pedestrian promenade along six blocks between State Street and Lake Street. Each block takes on a different river typology. Marina Plaza, for instance, includes restaurants and outdoor seating, while The Cove has kayak rentals and docks for watercraft. The final piece, the Jetty, a series of piers and floating wetland gardens, opens this fall.

02

Oklahoma City

In the 1920s and 30s, the US Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the North Canadian River around downtown Oklahoma City, to avoid flooding. The result was a marshy watercourse that locals liked to joke about mowing instead of rowing. A $53-million project completed in 2004 rejuvenated the stretch, creating the seven-mile, dam-controlled body of water whose name was then changed to the Oklahoma River. Since then, a one-cent sales tax initiative has funded additional enhancements the river and its surrounding Boathouse District. Master planned by local architecture firm Rand Elliot + Associates, the area includes walkways, performance spaces, shopping, and angular glass and steel boathouses. The newest feature, an 11-acre whitewater kayaking and rafting site known as RiverSports Rapids, opened this spring.

Credit:
Rick Morris

In the 1920s and 30s, the US Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the North Canadian River around downtown Oklahoma City, to avoid flooding. The result was a marshy watercourse that locals liked to joke about mowing instead of rowing. A $53-million project completed in 2004 rejuvenated the stretch, creating the seven-mile, dam-controlled body of water whose name was then changed to the Oklahoma River. Since then, a one-cent sales tax initiative has funded additional enhancements the river and its surrounding Boathouse District. Master planned by local architecture firm Rand Elliot + Associates, the area includes walkways, performance spaces, shopping, and angular glass and steel boathouses. The newest feature, an 11-acre whitewater kayaking and rafting site known as RiverSports Rapids, opened this spring.

03

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is historically most famous for two things: The three rivers that bisect it— the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio—and its legendary steel industry. After industry decamped from the river in the 1980s it left behind brownfields, elevated highways, retaining walls, and soil and water contamination that created a less-than-idyllic setting. In the early 2000s, the city’s Riverlife Task Force helped draft a master plan to create the Three Rivers Park loop, encompassing 13 connected miles of parks, trails and riverside amenities. Since then more than 80 percent of the area has been redeveloped and improved for public use. The next major step is a 20-block riverfront park in the city’s Strip District. (Named not for strip clubs, but after the strip of produce wholesale warehouses along the Allegheny River.) 

Credit:
Maranie Rae

Pittsburgh is historically most famous for two things: The three rivers that bisect it— the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio—and its legendary steel industry. After industry decamped from the river in the 1980s it left behind brownfields, elevated highways, retaining walls, and soil and water contamination that created a less-than-idyllic setting. In the early 2000s, the city’s Riverlife Task Force helped draft a master plan to create the Three Rivers Park loop, encompassing 13 connected miles of parks, trails and riverside amenities. Since then more than 80 percent of the area has been redeveloped and improved for public use. The next major step is a 20-block riverfront park in the city’s Strip District. (Named not for strip clubs, but after the strip of produce wholesale warehouses along the Allegheny River.) 

04

Medellin, Columbia

Medellin, a once broken city that has already reinvented itself through innovative urban projects like parks, squares, an aerial tram, and a green belt, is now completely rethinking its river. Like so many others, that waterway was channeled in concrete in the 1950s, a highway built right next to it. But now, following a competition-winning plan by Latitude, Workshop of Architecture and City, the city is burying a 1,300-foot-long stretch of that highway and building a park (Parques del Rio Medellin) on top, providing recreation and re-connecting the river to the rest of the city.
 

Credit:
Parques Del Rio Medellin

Medellin, a once broken city that has already reinvented itself through innovative urban projects like parks, squares, an aerial tram, and a green belt, is now completely rethinking its river. Like so many others, that waterway was channeled in concrete in the 1950s, a highway built right next to it. But now, following a competition-winning plan by Latitude, Workshop of Architecture and City, the city is burying a 1,300-foot-long stretch of that highway and building a park (Parques del Rio Medellin) on top, providing recreation and re-connecting the river to the rest of the city.
 

05

New York

New York’s once ridiculously-polluted East River and Hudson waterfronts were long considered great places… to dump bodies. After transforming the banks on all sides over the last two decades with riverfront parks and paths, the city is further reimagining them through several new initiatives, including BIG’s Big U, a 10-mile-long protective system of landscaping and barriers around Manhattan that double as public space. But the most ambitious foray into the water itself is Family’s Plus Pool, a plus-shaped structure floating in the East River, filtering river water for swimming through a three-level purifying system. Final site selection is set to be announced later this year, and completion is set for 2019. Cities around the world are now shouting for similar facilities.

Credit:
Family

New York’s once ridiculously-polluted East River and Hudson waterfronts were long considered great places… to dump bodies. After transforming the banks on all sides over the last two decades with riverfront parks and paths, the city is further reimagining them through several new initiatives, including BIG’s Big U, a 10-mile-long protective system of landscaping and barriers around Manhattan that double as public space. But the most ambitious foray into the water itself is Family’s Plus Pool, a plus-shaped structure floating in the East River, filtering river water for swimming through a three-level purifying system. Final site selection is set to be announced later this year, and completion is set for 2019. Cities around the world are now shouting for similar facilities.

06

San Antonio

You can’t mention river revitalization without mentioning San Antonio. Like LA, the oft-flooded San Antonio River in the 1920s was replaced (again, by the US Army Corps of Engineers) with a concrete lined “flood bypass channel”—essentially a storm sewer. But unlike LA, work on beautifying it started shortly afterward. By 1937 the San Antonio River Authority had begun building the River Walk, or Paseo del Rio, which over the next several decades added parks, walkways, gardens, restaurants, shops, and other attractions. While the most famous portion of the River Walk is the 2.5 mile stretch through downtown, the River Authority has continuously expanded the project, which now stretches 15 miles. The most recent effort is the $271 million Mission Reach Ecosystem Restoration and Recreation Project, transforming an eight mile stretch north of downtown with 15 miles of trails, restored native habitats, and amenities like benches, shade structures, bridges, and picnic benches.
 
 

Credit:
Paseo Del Rio Association

You can’t mention river revitalization without mentioning San Antonio. Like LA, the oft-flooded San Antonio River in the 1920s was replaced (again, by the US Army Corps of Engineers) with a concrete lined “flood bypass channel"—essentially a storm sewer. But unlike LA, work on beautifying it started shortly afterward. By 1937 the San Antonio River Authority had begun building the River Walk, or Paseo del Rio, which over the next several decades added parks, walkways, gardens, restaurants, shops, and other attractions. While the most famous portion of the River Walk is the 2.5 mile stretch through downtown, the River Authority has continuously expanded the project, which now stretches 15 miles. The most recent effort is the $271 million Mission Reach Ecosystem Restoration and Recreation Project, transforming an eight mile stretch north of downtown with 15 miles of trails, restored native habitats, and amenities like benches, shade structures, bridges, and picnic benches.
 
 

07

Los Angeles

The Valley Bikeway and Greenway project includes bike paths, shade devices, pedestrian walkways, landscaped areas, and educational signage. The biggest challenge, points out Gruen Associates partner Debra Gerod, is connecting existing paths in places they couldn’t be built originally, like under freeways and near bridges. It’s just the tip of the iceberg for the 51-mile LA River. The federal government and the city plan to invest over a billion dollars to reclaim an 11.5 mile stretch of the waterway, from Griffith Park to downtown, hoping to terrace walls, widen stretches, restore natural habitats, and open up riverbanks for recreation, following the guidelines of the city and county’s 2007 Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, created by Mia Lehrer + Associates.

Credit:
Mia Lehrer and Associates

The Valley Bikeway and Greenway project includes bike paths, shade devices, pedestrian walkways, landscaped areas, and educational signage. The biggest challenge, points out Gruen Associates partner Debra Gerod, is connecting existing paths in places they couldn’t be built originally, like under freeways and near bridges. It’s just the tip of the iceberg for the 51-mile LA River. The federal government and the city plan to invest over a billion dollars to reclaim an 11.5 mile stretch of the waterway, from Griffith Park to downtown, hoping to terrace walls, widen stretches, restore natural habitats, and open up riverbanks for recreation, following the guidelines of the city and county’s 2007 Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, created by Mia Lehrer + Associates.

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