Waze has a number of measures to reduce distractions and keep your eyes on the road ahead, but there has been one inescapable distraction: you usually have to touch the screen to get things done. That’s a problem, especially in areas where distracted driving laws make it illegal to poke at your phone while on the move. It shouldn’t be a problem for much longer. Waze’s latest update includes a hands-free navigation option that lets you handle most tasks using only your voice. Say "OK, Waze" and you can navigate to a destination or report a traffic jam without losing focus.
Also, Waze is now one of the few navigation apps that acknowledges the two-wheeled motoring crowd. There’s a new motorcycle mode that can route you through roads too narrow for cars, gives bike-appropriate ETAs and refines paths based on input from other motorcyclists. While the experience is otherwise largely the same, this could make all the difference if it shaves a minute or two off your ride and makes sure you arrive on time.
This update will also be important if you regularly take advantage of special lanes to zip through traffic. Waze is now billed as the first navigation app to explicitly support high-occupancy vehicle lanes, potentially saving you gobs of time if you’re carpooling or otherwise eligible. HOV support is available in 22 states plus three major Canadian cities (Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver), with more on the way.
US singer and actress Cher poses on October 10, 2013 in Paris.
Internet users have made it clear to US telecom regulator Ajit Pai that his proposal to scrap net neutrality rules is unpopular with the masses. But with two weeks left before the Federal Communications Commission votes to eliminate net neutrality rules, Pai today blamed actress/singer Cher and other celebrities for boosting opposition to his plan.
In a speech hosted by conservative group R Street and the Lincoln Network, Pai also addressed criticism from MCU actor Mark Ruffalo, actress Alyssa Milano, former Star Trek actor George Takei, and Silicon Valley actor Kumail Nanjiani. Pai also claimed that Twitter and other Web companies pose a greater threat to Internet freedom than Internet service providers like Comcast.
Pai said:
Another concern I’ve heard is that the plan will harm rural and low-income Americans. Cher, for example, has tweeted that the Internet “Will Include LESS AMERICANS NOT MORE” if my proposal is adopted. But the opposite is true. The digital divide is all too real. Too many rural and low-income Americans are still unable to get high-speed Internet access. But heavy-handed Title II regulations just make the problem worse! They reduce investment in broadband networks, especially in rural and low-income areas. By turning back time, so to speak, and returning Internet regulation to the pre-2015 era, we will expand broadband networks and bring high-speed Internet access to more Americans, not fewer.
As in the above quote, Pai continues to claim that net neutrality rules decrease network investment despite the fact that ISPs themselves have told investors that the rules do not harm their network investments. Meanwhile, Pai’s FCC is scaling back the federal Lifeline program that helps poor people purchase broadband.
Here’s the Cher tweet that Pai was talking about:
Net Neutrality means
Trump can Change The
Internet ‼ï¸It Will Include LESS AMERICANS NOT MORE‼ï¸
Now Comcast,AT&T,Google
Will show you ONLY WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO SEE ‼ï¸SLOWER AND MORE EXPENSIVE AT THEIR WHIM‼ï¸SEE LESS,CHARGED MORE…
Ruffalo apparently got on Pai’s nerves with this tweet:
Taking away #NetNeutrality is the Authoritarian dream. Consolidating information into the hands of a few controlled by a few. Dangerous territory. https://t.co/ZVdvmGzcHf
“These comments are absurd,” Pai said. “Getting rid of government authority over the Internet is the exact opposite of authoritarianism. Government control is the defining feature of authoritarians, including the one in North Korea.”
Milano earned a rebuke from the FCC chairman with this tweet:
I know. We’ve faced a lot of issues threatening our democracy in the last year. But honestly, the @FCC and @AjitPaiFCC’s dismantling of #NetNeutrality is one of the biggest.
Pai’s response to Milano was, “I’d like to see the evidence that America’s democratic institutions were threatened by a Title I framework, as opposed to a Title II framework, during the Clinton Administration, the Bush Administration, and the first six years of the Obama Administration.”
This is one of Pai’s favorite arguments, one that we deconstructed back in May. In reality, returning to 1990s-era Internet regulation would require more of the Title II utility-style regulation that Pai abhors, not less.
“If this were Who’s the Boss?, this would be an opportunity for Tony Danza to dish out some wisdom about the consequences of making things up,” Pai said today.
Pai’s attempt to cast net neutrality support as a Hollywood-driven phenomenon came on the same day that he released a “Myth vs. Fact” sheet that claims public comments to the FCC don’t show significant support for net neutrality. Pai’s office called it a “myth” that commenters “overwhelmingly want the FCC to preserve and protect net neutrality,” arguing that fraudulent comments far outnumber legitimate ones.
That’s true largely because the FCC imposed no real restrictions on comment uploads and took no steps to remove fraudulent comments from the record. But analyses of comments show that about 98 or 99 percent of “unique” comments oppose the net neutrality repeal.
Even one Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, has joined Democrats in opposing Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality rules.
While Pai had time today to blast celebrities, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says Pai has refused to cooperate with an investigation into fraud in the FCC’s public comments.
Pai attacks more celebrities
Actor George Takei got Pai’s attention by tweeting out an article describing an Internet plan in Portugal that appears to show the Internet being divided up into cable TV-like packages, with the implication that “this would happen in the United States if the plan were adopted.” Pai is right to push back on this claim. The Verge published an article last week explaining that the image of the Portuguese mobile plan has been distributed in a misleading way. The Portuguese plan is similar to zero-rating implementations that give consumers extra mobile data for certain websites, which are already allowed in the US.
Pai also bristled at Nanjiani’s claim that, after the net neutrality repeal, “We will never go back to a free Internet.”
“But here’s the simple truth,” Pai said. “We had a free and open Internet for two decades before 2015, and we’ll have a free and open Internet going forward.”
Pai has claimed that net neutrality rules aren’t needed because ISPs can be trusted not to block or throttle Internet content—even though they have done just that in the past before rules were in place and occasionally afterwards.
Pai does see threats to Internet openness, but not from ISPs. Twitter, he said, “appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users.” Other websites “routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like,” he wrote.
Pai’s speech angered Incompas, a trade group that represents Twitter and other companies.
“Preventing hate speech and bullying behavior online is not the same thing as allowing cable companies to block, throttle, and extort money from consumers and the websites they love,” Incompas CEO Chip Pickering said in a statement today. “Twitter is an amazing platform for left, right, and center. Donald Trump might not be President without it, and Chairman Pai’s plan to kill net neutrality will put Comcast and AT&T in charge of his Twitter account.”
Of course, the FCC isn’t the primary regulator of Twitter and websites. It is the primary regulator of Internet service providers that have to follow net neutrality rules. By deregulating broadband, Pai’s FCC is relinquishing some regulatory authority to the Federal Trade Commission, but FTC enforcement will depend largely on ISPs to make voluntary commitments to uphold net neutrality.
If you’re hoping for a late change before next month’s FCC vote, temper your expectations.
“[W]hen you get past the wild accusations, fear-mongering, and hysteria, here’s the boring bottom line: the plan to restore Internet freedom would return us to the light touch, market-based approach under which the Internet thrived,” Pai said today. “And that’s why I am asking my colleagues to vote for it on December 14.”
One of Japan’s top ad agencies plans to pay millions of dollars to its workers for unpaid overtime.
The company, Dentsu, became the focus of international attention after Japanese authorities said last year that the suicide of one of its employees was caused by overwork. Since the outcry over that case, Dentsu has been trying to improve life for its workers and repair its reputation.
One of its latest moves is to set aside 2.4 billion Japanese yen (more than $21 million) to compensate employees for any “unregistered time” they’ve worked over the past two years, the company said.
The decision was made after employees were asked in a survey to discuss their working hours from April 2015 to March 2017, a spokesman said Wednesday. Although it’s common in Japan for employees to clock their hours, Dentsu staffers would previously write off some of their overtime as personal development tasks or “self-training” for which they wouldn’t be paid, he said.
The company declined to say how many employees were owed money.
Japan is known for a stringent work culture with demanding hours and a deference to the company. A government study published last year found that one in five workers is at risk of working themselves to death.
The country has even coined a term for the problem: karoshimeans death by overwork from stress-induced illnesses or severe depression.
Matsuri Takahashi, the 24-year-old Dentsu employee who killed herself, had worked about 105 hours of overtime the month before her death in late 2015, according to authorities. The uproar over the circumstances of her death led Dentsu’s president and CEOÂ to step down earlier this year.
The reckoning has also prompted corporate Japan to try to promote a better sense of work-life balance. Some companies have started to adopt a four-day work week, and the government has launched a campaign called “Premium Friday,” which encourages workers to leave early every last Friday of the month.
After Takahashi’s suicide, Dentsu was charged with violating Japan’s labor laws, and it lowered the maximum amount of overtime allowed to 65 hours a month.
In a plan released this summer, the agency promised to create “a new Dentsu,” acknowledging a “lack of consideration for employees’ well-being” and an “excessive disciplinary code.”
CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published November 29, 2017: 5:19 AM ET
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Augmented reality games are entertaining and intriguing because of the fact that they interact with the real world, but that also means that we should be prepared for some real-world consequences. A new study reveals that one of the most popular AR games ever–Pokemon Go–has contributed to a lot of car accidents and property damage.
The study was produced by researchers at Purdue University, who focused on police reports from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, to look at the effect the game had on driving behavior and accidents. The results were striking: controlling for a variety of different variables, the study finds that $500,000 in damage, 37 injuries, and 2 fatalities from car wrecks can be attributed to the Pokemon Go craze. Further reinforcing the evidence, the game’s effect weakened as time wore on and the userbase dwindled.
When the team scaled up the results to estimate the effect on the entire United States, it’s even more shocking. Although this data isn’t as good as the Tippecanoe County data–it is, after all, extrapolative–it’s nonetheless a decent estimate of what the effects have been. The researchers argue that the game helped cause an increase of over 140,000 accidents, 250 fatalities, and $2-7 billion in economic costs.
Whatever your thoughts on Pokemon Go, it can’t be denied that the game had a huge impact on society, at least for a few months. And, as we are discovering, its AR gameplay had some unfortunate consequences. After all, along with causing car accidents, the game has the distinction of also being utilized and exploited in Russia’s disinformation campaign.
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After the huge success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, many big games have incorporated battle royale modes. But even older games are receiving battle royale-style updates thanks to the wonders of fan-made mods.
In a California warehouse in October, quadrocopter drones zoomed and buzzed, racing through an obstacle course of black-and-white checkered arches. On one team: drones guided by software and AI, the work of a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On the other: a drone steered by a human professional—Ken Loo, a Google engineer and Drone Racing League pilot.
The official results? Score one for flesh and blood. The human-piloted drone completed the course faster, on average flying the laps more than two seconds quicker than the software-powered craft.
The competition highlights the different ways that humans and machines actually learn in situations like these, as well as how an AI-piloted drone works in the first place. Here’s how the system works—and why future races could have a very different outcome.
How the drone knows where it is
For the NASA drones to successfully fly around a course, the devices need to know where they are in space. For that, they use two onboard cameras—one that looks forward, and the other, down, a common setup for mid-to-high-level consumer drones. Other onboard sensors measure the drone’s acceleration and rotation. Drones that fly around outside can make use of GPS, but that’s not an option when flying indoors, in a complex environment, at speeds of 30 to 40 mph.
The drone also needs an onboard three-dimensional map of the course at hand, so it can match what it sees with the cameras to that internal map and know where it actually is. That process is known as relocalization. It can relocalize as many as a few times every second, says Robert Reid, the project lead at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“As long as you stay close enough to the existing map,†he says, “we’re very unlikely to crash.â€
For this research (which Google funded) the NASA team used technology from Google Tango, an augmented reality platform that runs off two smartphones, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and the Asus ZenFone AR. Crucially, that same tech can also create the type of three-dimensional map a drone needs to fly in situations like this.
How it navigates
Like a racecar driver learning a course, the drone needs to know the best lines to take to get where it’s going quickly. “We either hand-carry the drone around the course, or we manually fly it,†Reid says, “so we can teach the drone where the race track is.â€
But that’s just the beginning. From there, the team figures out the best route for the drone to take by modeling it on computers. That process allows the humans to participate and make sure that the path is actually a safe one that keeps their pricey drone in one piece. In other words, for this competition, the drone wasn’t figuring out the best way to fly all on its own—people were involved. In that sense, it wasn’t a true, independent artificial intelligence system like those that automatically power, for example, language translation on Facebook.
From there, after the drone is programmed with the route, it’s off to the races. Reid stresses that while the route planning actually took place offboard the drone, in the future it could happen using just the drone’s onboard computer.
Learning to fly
For the actual race in October, both the NASA team and Loo had to learn a new course and get ready in a matter of hours. But the way the human and the AI-powered drone actually did that was different.
Loo learned quickly by flying the course multiple times, Reid says. But the NASA team did things differently. “We only need to fly once, and then we can sit there for a few hours crunching numbers to get better,†he says. Interestingly, that optimization process—using algorithms to figure out the best route—took a lot of time.
“The human pilot has to learn by flying—whereas we can record it, and learn without even flying the drone,†Reid says.
Had the NASA team had more time that day to run the software and figure out the best route to take around the course, the resulting race times could have been different—the AI drone might have beaten the human.
Reid says that they’re working on boosting the efficiency of their algorithms, so that in the future, it might take less time to calculate the fastest route. And after that, it’s off to the races. And remember: unlike a person, software doesn’t get tired.
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HDMI Forum, Inc. today announced the release of Version 2.1 of the HDMI Specification! This latest HDMI Specification supports a range of higher video resolutions and refresh rates including 8K60 and 4K120, and resolutions up to 10K. Dynamic HDR formats are also supported, and bandwidth capability is increased up to 48Gbps. 8K video at 60Hz and 4K video at 120Hz might be something you dreamed about just a couple years ago, but it is closer now than ever. The HDMI 2.1 Compliance Test Specification (CTS) will be published in stages throughout the first three quarters of 2018, so it will likely be 2019 when we seem some actual products hit the market. It took nearly a year for the HDMI 2.1 specification to be announced and finalized!
Supporting the 48Gbps bandwidth is the new Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable that is thankfully backwards compatible with HDMI cables already on the market. The cable ensures high-bandwidth dependent features are delivered including uncompressed 8K video with HDR. It features exceptionally low EMI (electro-magnetic interference) which reduces interference with nearby wireless devices.
HDMI Specification 2.1 Features Include:
Higher video resolutions support a range of high resolutions and faster refresh rates including 8K60Hz and 4K120Hz for immersive viewing and smooth fast-action detail. Resolutions up to 10K are also supported for commercial AV, and industrial and specialty usages.
Dynamic HDR support ensures every moment of a video is displayed at its ideal values for depth, detail, brightness, contrast and wider color gamuts—on a scene-by-scene or even a frame-by-frame basis.
The Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable supports the 48G bandwidth for uncompressed HDMI 2.1 feature support. The cable also features very low EMI emission and is backwards compatible with earlier versions of the HDMI Specification and can be used with existing HDMI devices.
eARC simplifies connectivity, provides greater ease of use, and supports the most advanced audio formats and highest audio quality. It ensures full compatibility between audio devices and upcoming HDMI 2.1 products.
Enhanced refresh rate features ensure an added level of smooth and seamless motion and transitions for gaming, movies and video. They include:
Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) reduces or eliminates lag, stutter and frame tearing for more fluid and better detailed gameplay.
Quick Media Switching (QMS) for movies and video eliminates the delay that can result in blank screens before content is displayed.
Quick Frame Transport (QFT) reduces latency for smoother no-lag gaming, and real-time interactive virtual reality.
Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) allows the ideal latency setting to automatically be set allowing for smooth, lag-free and uninterrupted viewing and interactivity.
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