If you’re one of the billion-plus people who employ Microsoft’s bread and butter Office software each month, you may start noticing some changes. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced new updates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, but the company is proceeding rather cautiously and rolling out these out gradually over the next few months.
The changes, from a collapsed “ribbon” to newly drawn icons, may help modernize a venerable but aging franchise.
In recent years Office has mostly been transformed from a set of desktop applications to a cloud-connected app and services. And that means Microsoft no longer piles on a bunch of new features at once into software that you bought and were meant to live with every two to three years, until the next new version came along.
“We were like bakers in a kitchen putting all the wonderful touches on our creations and then we did the big reveal,” says Microsoft corporate vice president Jared Spataro.
So call these next changes coming to Office more of a modes reveal. The refresh is based on the so-called “Fluent Design” system that Microsoft announced last year for Windows 10:
Simplified ribbon
The three-line ribbon toolbar at the top of your screen is being whittled down to a space-saving single line. The idea is that you can better focus on your own content in a Word document, for example. If you’re not keen on this new view though, Microsoft still gives you the option to expand the ribbon back into its present form.
You can also now customize the ribbon. According to Microsoft, 95% of us use the same 10-ish commands in the ribbon. But the remaining 5% of commands differ from user to user. You will now be able to pin the commands most meaningful to you to the ribbon.
The online version of Word is the first app to get this simplified ribbon. It comes to Outlook for Windows next month. But those of you who toil in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Windows have to wait for until Microsoft solicits more feedback from a broader set of users.
Fresh icons
Users of the web version of Word at Office.com will also be the first to experience new colors and higher contrast icons that may be easier to make out for people with poor vision.
A Microsoft designer with low vision found that when the contrast is lower, and icons are of the same color, they may blur, making them harder to disseminate.
These newly designed icons will appear for select “Insiders” in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows later this month. In July, they will show up in Outlook for Windows, and in August start rolling out to Outlook on the Mac.
Improved search
The moment you place your cursor in a search box, and before you type anything, you’ll see recommendations generated by artificial intelligence and based on past searches or what you’re working on.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
Remember the blissful summers of childhood? No school, running through sprinklers, and begging your parents for a dollar or two before chasing the ice cream truck around the neighborhood. There’s nothing like a sticky commute in mid-July rush-hour traffic to make want to trade it all for that carefree life.
Luckily, nostalgia sometimes comes on a stick. We rounded up all of the classic ice cream treats from our childhood and ranked them from most craveable to most disappointing to our matured adult tastebuds.
Credit: Reviewed.com / Jeremy Stamas
Patty and Cindy haven’t forgotten the sweet allure of a cone on a hot day.
Our panel of tasters are some of Reviewed’s ever-opinionated staff:
• Cindy Bailen, Staff Writer
• Patty Camerota, Assistant Social Media Producer
• Jonathan Chan, Staff Writer
• Michael Desjardin, Senior Staff Writer
• Samantha Gordon, E-Commerce Editor
• Jackson Ruckar, Photo/Video Producer
• Jeremy Stamas, Video Production Manager
• Andrew Winson, Data Entry Manager
1. North Star Ice Cream Sandwich
Credit: Walmart
“One bite and I remembered why I love these. That sticky chocolate cookie and the generic vanilla are legit creamy and sweet in the right way.” -Samantha
“This is what memories are made of.” -Patty
“There’s something really special about the way this looks—the paper wrapping, the straight lines, the stark contrast of the dark cake and bright ice cream filling. I also like that it’s soft, so it’s easy to eat, and the whole thing mixes together in your mouth to create a perfect combination of flavors. Side note: remember the kids who would lick the ice cream around the sides first and then eat the rest of the sandwich? I hated those kids.” -Jeremy
“Hard to be impartial, because it tastes like childhood.” -Andrew
“Each bite was reminiscent of childhood and summertime.” -Cindy
Tragically, you can’t buy North Star ice cream online. In-store only.
2. Dove Bar (Dark Chocolate)
Credit: Amazon
“Can’t go wrong here. The dark chocolate is so melty and delicious and the ice cream is basically gelato.” -Samantha
“This had the best chocolate of the bunch, with its dark, strong flavors. The chocolate was thick, though, so it was hard to eat without making a mess, and the ice cream wasn’t anything special.” -Jeremy
“Almost exactly like a Klondike bar, except smaller, cleaner to eat, and more expensive.” -Andrew
“Luxury in an ice cream bar.” -Cindy
“Love the dark chocolate shell on this one—it’s so much richer than the garden-variety chocolate often found in ice cream bars.” -Michael
You’ll have to trek to the store for these!
3. Drumstick (Vanilla Fudge)
Credit: Walmart
“This is the one treat in our roundup that lived up to my childhood memories. The alternating combinations of wafer, ice cream, chocolate, and nuts kept me eating.” -Jon
“Every layer offers something delicious, and well, the surprise nugget of chocolate on the bottom? What a score.” -Patty
“The cone beats the ice cream and coating hands down.” -Cindy
“Ah, the classic Drumstick. I love how chewy the cone is, and there’s really no beating that fudge nugget at the bottom. Yeah, I said “fudge nugget.” What are you gonna do about it?” -Michael
“This one was, honestly, too indulgent. The chocolate coating-to-ice cream ratio was skewed toward the chocolate. If you have a chocolate craving, this will more than satisfy it though.” -Samantha
“I prefer chocolate ice cream, but this had way too much chocolate going on.” -Jeremy
“Very rich-tasting, but a bit of a chocolate overdose for me. I would have preferred it with vanilla ice cream.” -Cindy
“In face of so much competition, the original Klondike back seems like a bland throwback. However, I can’t deny that there’s something satisfying about unfolding that foil paper.” -Jon
“This has a similar nostalgia factor to the ice cream sandwich, but the chocolate just isn’t that good. It had a too-sweet after taste and didn’t pair all that well with the ice cream.” -Jeremy
“Boooo. These are boring, flavorless, and messy. What would I do for a Klondike bar? Nada.” -Patty
“Just the right amount of chocolate shell. The only downside here is these things get messy fairly quickly.” -Michael
“If you haven’t had one since you were a kid, don’t. It’ll ruin the illusion that this was ever good.” -Samantha
“Disappointing. This was just underwhelming in its size and level indulgence. Equal parts chocolate, vanilla ice cream, and wafer, the lack of anything standing out cause this treat to turn to bland mush.” -Jon
“Pretty meh overall, soggy and mediocre cone. I was disappointed in this as I remember it as a childhood classic.” -Jackson
“This was nowhere near as good as I remember it being. I’m truly saddened by this development.” -Michael
“These were rough. Really rough. The cookies tasted like cardboard and the ice cream was weak in flavor.” -Michael
“It wasn’t that bad, but if I wanted an ice cream sandwich, I’d much rather use good ice cream and cookies that I actually liked and make my own.” -Samantha
“The ice cream is mediocre, the cookie is mediocre, and both of them together isn’t enjoyable to eat. I thought this would be my favorite, but it ended up being at the bottom.” -Jeremy
“Unimpressed. Nothing special about the ice cream. The cookie was kind of dry, and hard, on top of which biting into the cold mini-M&Ms was an unpleasant squeaking sensation like biting into cold pieces of wax.” -Andrew
Oh, man. Available in-store only.
8. Good Humor Oreo Bars
Credit: Amazon
“I always expect the cookie crumbles on these things to be crunchy, but they’re always mushy and soft. I wouldn’t choose this for dessert even if it was the only choice.” -Samantha
“The brand Oreo makes me think about a crunchy cookie with cream in the middle, but this popsicle turned mushy only after a few minutes at room temperature. The lack any jaxapositioning textures made me just shrug my shoulders.” -Jon
“The Oreo flavor did come through nicely, and I appreciate the cookie crumble texture on the outside (reminds me of my favorite part of an ice cream cake). But unfortunately this pop isn’t very craveable.” -Patty
“I didn’t taste the Oreo at all… It was more like ice cream with the dust that’s left over when you finish a sleeve of Oreos.” -Jackson
— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today’s newsroom and any business incentives.
Happy Hump Day! Father’s Day is slowly approaching, which means you should start looking for a gift, if you haven’t gotten one yet. Amazon has a ton of deals and price drops every day on some our favorite products, which is perfect for those of us who don’t want to break the bank, but still want to get something special for Dad. Whether he’s a tech guy or a novice chef, there’s something that he will love—or for you to treat yourself with.
1. A tool kit to tackle summer projects
If you have a handyman in your life, you might want to take advantage of this deal for a Bosch Tool Kit for a Father’s Day gift. This kit comes with a 12-volt driver, a 12-volt impact driver, and two batteries, so its perfect for whatever upcoming summer projects your family is planning. Right now, it’s down 40% on Amazon.
If your dad is constantly asking you seemingly silly questions about, well, everything, you might want to get him an Amazon Echo for Father’s Day so he can ask Alexa instead. Right now, Amazon is running a sale on three Echo devices: the Dot (perfect for small spaces), the Echo (perfect for the living room), and the Show (perfect for the kitchen). My dad loves using his Echo to listen to music, ask about the weather, and set a timer when he’s cooking. Plus, if yours is more of a tech guy, he can link up other smart home devices to it.
While on a road trip, we use our phones for music, navigation, and giving updates to family members (when you’re not behind the wheel, of course). All these things can drain your battery pretty quickly, so you don’t want to be on the road for a while without a good car USB charger. Trust me. This one from Anker has two ports and fast charging capabilities, so you can offer juice to multiple devices. Right now, it’s at its lowest price in the color white.
The Dad’s who think they’re becoming an expert chef need to be introduced to sous vide this Father’s Day. This fancy way of cooking involves slowly heating food in a temperature-controlled water bath for the perfect texture and doneness. In order to do so, you’re going to need an immersion circulator. The Anova Bluetooth Precision Cooker is the best one we’ve ever tested and right now, it’s at its lowest price of the year on Amazon.
DNA kits are all the rage right now. Everyone wants to know where their ancestors really came from or if they have any long-lost relatives lurking around. Right now the popular 23andMe DNA kit is 20% off. And if you want to take your DNA a step further to learn more about your heritage and your genetics, the Health and DNA kit is also 30% off right now. Plus, they make great gifts for Father’s Day (hint, hint).
As true-crime obsessives already know, last Friday Netflix dropped The Staircase, a docu-series chronicling the 2001 death of Kathleen Peterson and the subsequent murder trial of her husband, Michael. While the project followed a long and circuitous route to the streaming giant—it originally premiered in the US on the Sundance Channel in 2005, then received a two-hour follow-up in 2013, all before Netflix packaged it together and added some new footage—it immediately became a word-of-mouth sensation.
If you’ve binge-watched all 628 minutes, you might be tempted to think that the big question is: Did Michael Peterson kill his wife, or did Kathleen Peterson fall down the stairs? But whenever there’s fervent interest in a murder case, there are often alternative theories—and one very popular hypothesis that you didn’t see in Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s series posits that there was a third party involved in Kathleen’s death: an owl.
Preposterous? It depends on who you ask.
The Raptor Motion
“The first time I heard about the Owl Theory I said to myself, ‘That’s totally stupid!'” says de Lestrade, who has spent the past 16 years following Michael Peterson’s life both in and outside of prison. “But later, Larry Pollard explained to me in a very effective way what he thought could have happened.”
“Larry,” also known as T. Lawrence Pollard, is a lawyer and former Peterson neighbor, and the primary architect of the Owl Theory. In 2009, Pollard filed a motion requesting that Peterson’s conviction be set aside and all charges dismissed or that he be granted a new trial based on the discovery of “new and compelling evidence” that the real culprit in Mrs. Peterson’s death was a raptor, or bird of prey. Included in his 40-point motion, Pollard stated:
The “Owl Theory” was advanced to the Defendant’s lawyers and the Prosecution at the conclusion of the trial, namely, that Mrs. Petersonmay have been the victim of an attack by a wild bird outside herhouse, an attack which caused puncture wounds to her elbows, injurieson her face and around her eyes, and lacerations to her scalp. Thetheory was dismissed at the time on the basis that owls do not attackhuman beings and that the theory lacked credibility.
Among the physical evidence Pollard believed backed his claim was “the presence of blood droplets on the brick walkway and the slate landing outside the home” as well as “the existence of feathers attached to Mrs. Peterson’s hair and found by the medical examiner clutched in her left hand with fresh blood.”
In a Netflix bonus feature (see below), Peterson’s attorney David Rudolf makes clear that he believed there was enough evidence to warrant further investigation into whether an owl could’ve done it. “The only real difference, if you will, between our theory at trial and the Owl Theory is the initial infliction of the wounds,” he says.
Testing the Theory
According to Rudolf, the first time he was presented with the theory “was a day or two before the closing, [so] I couldn’t do anything with it.” Had the case been retried, Rudolf says he absolutely would have delved further into its plausibility.
“I consulted with Dr. Carla Dove, the chief ornithologist from the Smithsonian Institution in DC, who agreed to do DNA testing on the feathers,” Rudolf says. Larry Pollard also consulted others, including a neurosurgeon, a professor of veterinary medicine, and Kate P. Davis, executive director of Raptors of the Rockies. (“All three agreed that the wounds on Kathleen’s scalp were consistent with an owl attack,” Rudolf says. All three also provided Pollard with affidavits.)
In Davis’ mind, there’s no question that a raptor was involved. Within just a few minutes of getting a call from Sophie Brunet, editor of The Staircase—who became romantically involved with Peterson during the course of production—Davis conducted a simple experiment. She grabbed a metal salad bowl from her kitchen, covered it with and eighth of an inch of clay, went out to where her own barred owl, Graham, lived, then “picked her up over my head and dropped her on that salad bowl.” She took pictures of the resulting talon marks and sent them to Sophie, who confirmed that they matched Kathleen’s injuries.
When Davis, who has had plenty of personal experience with talon marks on her own body, saw the photos of Kathleen’s injuries, she agreed that they were a match. “I bet my bottom dollar that Kathleen, after the partying and all that, went outside to move some Christmas decorations, the owl hit her in the back of the head, she pulled it off with her hands—[which is how she] got the feathers and poke holes in the side of her face—and dropped it, and that’s why there’s blood outside,” Davis says.
But Davis also maintains that the owl wasn’t the direct cause of death. “She was compromised to begin with, she’s walking up these steep stairs, she’s feeling woozy,” she says of Kathleen Peterson. “She walked up to that 15th stair and she fell backwards.”
Yet Daniel George, a now-retired crime scene technician with the Durham City Police Department who was the first technician on the scene in 2001, doesn’t believe that there was any fall at all—partly because of where the blood was and where the body was. “There was nothing up on the steps themselves,” says George, who recently recounted the experience for An American Murder Mystery: The Staircase, Investigation Discovery’s own special on the Peterson trial. “There’s 19 steps, but no blood any further than five feet up the steps.”
“The amount of blood is really troubling, yes, but how do you explain the type of cuts and lacerations she [had]?” asks de Lestrade. “I don’t know what happened the night Kathleen Peterson died, but I have hard time believing that’s a murder. It is very difficult to explain Kathleen Peterson’s injuries if it is a murder. That’s why, today, I believe the Owl Theory may be the best theory to explain what happened to Kathleen.”
Not So Fast
Though owls have been known to swoop and injure people (earlier this year, there were at least three incidents in Atlanta), hearing of the Peterson case was the first time the idea of a “killer” owl occurred to ornithologist Dove. “It’s not something I would even think about,” she says. “But then somebody showed me a video of an owl attacking this big man. I have no idea one way or the other. I’m not saying I’ve ever heard of it happening—I certainly haven’t. I don’t really know.”
Though Dove consulted with both Peterson’s legal team and the filmmakers of The Staircase, she never had a chance to examine the actual evidence in the case—only photos. And that’s not enough. “When we do the identification work, we do it from fragments of feathers,” Dove says. “We need the fluffy, downy part, which is the fuzzy part at the base.”
The pictures she saw of the feather samples, though, were inconclusive, and couldn’t even point her to a particular taxonomic order of birds, let alone a narrower group or family. “We offered to go down there and go through the evidence to see if we could find more feather fragments,” she says, “but it never materialized.”
As for whether there could have been an owl present, George admits that while investigating the staircase itself, they did find “one item in particular that was maybe a sixteenth of an inch long—it was a curved shape and it looked almost like a mini-talon. We didn’t know what it was.”
Yet the item, which was shipped off to the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) to be tested, didn’t have any blood on it. “It could have been a piece of a fingernail, it could have been a dog’s toenail, it could have been anything,” George says. “It could have been a piece of wood that was on the steps.”
While many owl theorists have pointed to the fact that the injuries to Kathleen’s head were deep but did not leave her with any deeper skull or brain damage—which would be expected with the blunt force trauma Michael was accused of inflicting on his wife—George says they were still “down to the skull … it certainly didn’t look like anything an owl could have done. It almost looked like it was cut. But the medical examiner determined that those lacerations were caused by a brutal beating of blunt force trauma to the skull.”
Still, Dove and her team saw enough reasonable evidence in the photo to agree to examine the evidence more thoroughly. “We’re professionals and we’ll examine anything that’s reasonable,” she says. (Except maybe the time they received a request to examine some angel feathers; “that was a little bit far-fetched for me,” she admits.)
In early March 2017—less than a week after Michael Peterson entered an Alford plea to involuntary manslaughter—North Carolina’s WRAL.com reported that Rudolf had filed a motion to obtain the feather fragments from evidence so that they could be sent on to Dove for further testing. But the money dried up. “Once the case was concluded,” he says, “there was no funding to test the feathers.”
Given all the uncertainty, the biggest question surrounding The Staircase might actually be: In more than 10 hours, why did the series not mention such an insane-sounding, but still plausible, theory? De Lestrade’s answer is simple: “I decided to keep it out of the film because it was never presented in court. I wanted to stick to Michael Peterson’s judicial journey. I just wanted to present how the legal system will treat the case.”
Could there be another feather left in his documentary cap? Hoo knows.
The cable and Internet provider, which owns NBC Universal, said last month it planned an all-cash offer for the Fox studios and networks, but hadn’t named the price. Comcast could start at $60 billion, topping Disney’s $52 billion offer, said CNBC. The Philadelphia-based Comcast was expected to wait for the judge’s ruling in the Justice Department’s suit against AT&T-Time Warner before making a formal bid.
After the AT&T-Time Warner decision was announced late Tuesday, Fox (FOX) shares rose 1% and Comcast (CMCSA) shares slipped 2.6%. Disney (DIS) stock fell 1%.
Despite their grip on the nation’s Internet, phone and pay-TV needs, companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are aggressively seeking to add new businesses. An entertainment library, such as shows produced by Fox’s studios and its regional sports networks, has emerged as a coveted alternative to the core subscription business now characterized by tepid wireless revenue growth and a shift by households to cut the cable cord.
The 21st Century Fox assets up for grabs include the historic 20th Century Fox movie studio, which has produced such classics as Miracle on 34th Street, Alien, Titanic, and the original Star Wars film, plus Fox’s television studio (The Simpsons, Empire) and FX and National Geographic channels. They also include a one-third stake in Hulu, Fox’s 22 regional sports networks and its stake in U.K.-based satellite TV and Internet provider Sky.
Disney, Comcast and Fox each currently hold 30% stakes in Hulu.
A successful Comcast deal would be a blow to Disney and CEO Bob Iger, who has pinned Disney’s future to hit movies and TV shows it could gain with Fox that could bolster Disney’s own streaming services.
A Comcast win would spell disappointment for Marvel fans who may have looked forward to an X-Men mash-up film with Marvel’s The Avengers and Fox’s X-Men, Deadpool, and the Fantastic Four.
And Disney’s hopes to secure the complete rights to Star Wars would also be thwarted by a Comcast deal.
The 18-foot pythons in Uganda’s Python Cave don’t bother Brian Amman too much. It’s the black forest cobras that worry him.
“They’re extremely venomous and known to be fairly aggressive,” says Amman, a disease ecologist with the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. A single bite from one of the 10-foot snakes can kill a human in as little as 30 minutes. “Although we’ve not had any encounters,” he explains, “because they’re in there with all this food.”
In 2008, Amman found himself in Python Cave looking for that food source: a population of roughly 50,000 Egyptian fruit bats. Scientists believed they could be carriers for Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever virus closely related to Ebola, and they were studying the bats’ behavior to try to understand how the disease spreads from animals to humans.
Amman is one of the CDC’s elite team of disease detectives, who travel the world to study dangerous viruses and bacteria in the hope of preventing human illness and death. He goes in prepared, carrying traps and nets (and even pillowcases) to catch and transport the bats.
Then he and his colleagues get to testing their hypotheses about the animals.
“We think the bats with Marburg virus are going out and they’re going into farmers’ cultivated fruit crops,” Amman says. “They’ll give it a little bite.” Sometimes they’ll leave it behind on the ground, still carrying live virus. “If the next day or the next morning some child or some family pet comes along and eats that fruit,” he says, “it could very easily start the next outbreak.”
So once Amman and his colleagues have caught the bats, they glue tiny GPS “backpacks” on their backs to track their movements. When the bats leave the cave, the GPS unit is activated and begins recording their location. When they return at dawn, the information is downloaded wirelessly and they are able to map the movements of the bats.
“We can actually sensibly build a risk map and determine what areas in this particular vicinity are going to be at risk for exposure to Marburg virus,” Amman says. That helps the CDC and other global health organizations deliver critical public health information. “We can get the message out that, ‘Hey, don’t pick up fruit off the ground. If it’s been bitten, leave it alone.’”
It’s all about protecting the public—but, along the way, Amman will still have to protect himself. He brings a wide array of protective gear with him. There’s everything from Tyvek suits to protect his skin and clothing, powered air-purifying respirators to filter air from contaminants, Kevlar-lined chaps to protect his legs from snake bites, and turtle-skin gloves (usually used by law enforcement officers) to protect from bat bites.
Watch the video above to hear more about the gear Amman and his colleagues at the CDC use in the field.
Another WWDC has come and gone, and even though Tim Cook and company showed off the future of Apple software, the company’s Mac hardware has been left untouched. The Mac faithful, those devoted members of the community that kept the company afloat in the dark days, cling to every shred of hope that Apple throws their favorite Mac a little love.
Unfortunately, many Macs have been left behind by cheaper, better options on the Windows PC side of the fence. Consider for a moment that Apple still sells the 2013-era Mac Pro for $3,000—highway robbery from a pure performance perspective. Would you buy a car at its original MSRP even though it’s been sitting on the lot for five years? I don’t think so.
With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of excellent Windows alternatives to the most popular Mac models. Especially if you rely on your computers for your livelihood, there’s no reason to wait on Apple to finally cater to your needs. From the low-end to beastly 32-core prosumer rigs, the PC world is getting really exciting again.
Sure, macOS has its advantages, but Windows 10 is a mature, stable platform that’s updated and improved on the regular. Switching to PCs means you’ll be able to grab the latest and greatest computers at a wide array of prices from any number of PC manufacturers, without having to light prayer candles at a shrine dedicated to Steve Wozniak.
MacBook/MacBook Air
Microsoft
Apple’s most portable notebooks are in an awkward spot. While the MacBook has seen recent spec bumps, its small screen and single USB-C port feel limiting. The MacBook Air soldiers on with the same screen, processor, and chassis it’s had for three years. If you prefer a cushier keyboard, USB-A, and magnetic charging connection, you’ll be paying top dollar for a dowdy display and crusty Intel processors from generations long past in the MacBook Air.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop is a solid substitute for these slimmer Macs. You get newer chips, a brilliant 13-inch display, a wonderful keyboard, and an eye-catching design. Starting at only $799, it’s a premium notebook without the performance drawbacks of what Apple’s offering right now.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is arguably the only MacBook worthy of the professional branding, since it has the biggest screen, fastest graphics, and hottest processor of Apple’s laptop lineup. Plus, you get Apple’s Touch Bar, which, is of dubious value, but is a nice bonus.
But it’s put to shame by Razer’s latest flagship Razer Blade laptop. With a six-core Intel processor and Nvidia 10-series graphics as the standard configuration, it’s positioned to make the mightiest Mac notebook look downright antique. Peep that slim display bezel … gaze lovingly upon its traditional style RGB-backlit keyboard and humongous glass trackpad. It even has USB-A ports, Thunderbolt 3, and RAM that you can—gasp—upgrade!
The Mac Mini is one of my all-time favorite computers. Unfortunately, the last update this model received from Apple was all the way back in 2014, and the refresh made the poor Mini slower in some configurations and nigh impossible to upgrade in all of them. It’s still sold at outrageous prices all these years later, starting at $500 for a wimpy fourth-generation Intel i5 processor.
If you love tiny-yet-powerful mini computers, might I recommend the Intel NUC? These computers are mini-er than Apple’s Mini and feature newer seventh and eighth-generation chips that run rings around the li’lest Mac. You can buy them either as complete models running Windows 10, or as barebones kits where you add your own RAM, storage, and OS of choice.
If you’re a gamer or want to get into VR, there’s even the Hades Canyon model, with powerful AMD Radeon Vega graphics under the hood. And, whereas Apple charges you beaucoup bucks for a three-year AppleCare warranty, you’ll get that standard with each NUC.
I’ll be the first to admit that the iMac is a super-nice desktop computer. While many other PC makers try to ape this stylish, slim all-in-one, few truly match its appeal. It’s also one of the models Apple’s been the most consistent about keeping fresh; the current lineup runs on Intel’s seventh generation chips, and many include AMD graphics to boot.
The machine I’d recommend checking out is HP’s epic desktop, the HP Envy Curved All-in-One. With a wide 34-inch curved display, you get the real estate of two separate monitors in one contiguous LCD panel. But whether you’re popping full apps next to one another with room to spare, or just blowing up a widescreen movie to take up this entire screen, HP’s Envy stands apart.
Apple has promised its demanding users an update to the long-in-the-tooth, 2013-vintage Mac Pro. It said the new system was in the works last year, but it’s looking unlikely a new Mac Pro will hit store shelves before 2019. Until then, the five-year-old, thermally constrained, expansion-averse cylinder can be had … at 2013 prices. The iMac Pro is a good pick for professional needs, but it’s seemingly not built to last, cramming its storage, RAM, and display into a hermetically sealed, non-upgradeable chassis. If you’re tired of waiting for Apple to offer a true pro desktop, why not check out what Dell’s dishing out?
The Dell Precision 7820 starts at $1,700 for a six-core Xeon-powered workstation—roughly half the price of Apple’s competing model. These modular, upgradeable towers offer plenty of possibilities to make this machine last for a decade or longer. Unlike Apple’s old-ass trash can, Dell’s workstations can be upgraded with ridiculously powerful processors with dozens of cores, modern graphics, and up to 384 GB of RAM. You don’t even have to open the case up to add more storage thanks to an externally accessible caddy solution.
For users clinging to their trusty cheesegrater Mac Pro towers, Dell’s traditional, functional, buttoned-down tower should feel like coming home. Plus, Dell’s pro machines all come with a three-year on-site repair agreement, so you’ll never be caught waiting around for someone to pay attention to you at the crowded Apple Store (and you’ll save hundreds over buying AppleCare).
Say there’s a fire. A fire caused by a car crash, inside a 2.5-mile tunnel under a major American city. It’s a terrifying idea, but if you want that kind of problem to ignite anywhere, it’s in the stretch of State Route 99 that, later this year, will start whisking traffic underneath downtown Seattle.
That’s because this bit of SR 99 is more than the hemisphere’s largest-diameter bored tunnel and the country’s longest roadway tunnel outside of Alaska, much of it dug by Bertha, formerly the planet’s largest boring machine. To go with such superlatives, it might be the world’s smartest tunnel, too.
The theoretical firefighting begins within moments of the flames’ first appearance, as the tunnel’s 8.3 miles of built-in heat sensors pick up the change in temperature. Of the 300 cameras, those closest to the problem zoom in on the flames. First into action is the deluge system, which can dump 17 inches of water per square foot into the tunnel, through 21 miles of piping. It’s so much water, the tunnel’s engineers had to run models to be sure the decks (those things that hold up the cars) could manage the weight. Eventually, 3.8 miles of drainage pipes will dry things out, ushering the water to a sewer treatment plant.
Next on the emergency procedure checklist comes clearing out the smoke and bringing in fresh air. Most tunnels use jet fans to push air from one end to the other, an understandable but less than nimble approach. SR 99 has vents every 100 feet, so the eight exhaust fans and 17 jet fans can move air into or out any part of tunnel, via the ventilation stacks at either end. “There are very few tunnels able to extract air,” says Susan Everett, the Washington State DOT project engineer in charge of commissioning the tunnel. “And there are very few, maybe one in Japan, that can extract at the pinpoint accuracy we can.”
Meanwhile, the tunnel’s operating system automatically changes the digital signs around the tunnel to stop incoming traffic, and instruct motorists already inside to clear out. They’ll do that on foot, via the world’s only self-sufficient tunnel emergency walkways, complete with their own pressurized air and fan systems.
While all this goes down, the latest info on what’s happening flows through 13 miles of fiber-optic cabling and 95 miles of electrical wiring, to the nearby Traffic Management Center. Inside the NASA-style control room, where monitors line the walls as well as rows of workstations, every movement in the tunnel gets noticed.
At the less catastrophic end of the scale, say a mattress falls of a truck. The tunnel’s sensors will detect the change as cars slow down and move out of the blocked lane (with time, they’ll get better at spotting what’s normal and what isn’t). From there, the cameras will zoom and tilt toward the problem, relaying their feeds to those monitors at mission control.
In case traffic starts to build up, environmental sensors on the roadway deck measure carbon monoxide, NOx, and particulate levels every minute, for a continuous five-minute average. If anything gets alarming, they can automatically turn on the jet fans and, if needed, the exhaust ventilation system to keep everyone safe. “If we see traffic backing up and raising carbon monoxide levels, we can start to extract air right at that location,” Everett says. “It is always equalizing, with more air rushing in.”
All these monitoring systems, of course, get their own lookout. Yet another system tracks recommendations for routine and preventative maintenance. When it’s not saving Seattleites from poisonous smoke (which should be all the time), the emergency passageway doubles as a maintenance corridor, allowing crews to stream up and down the tunnel in electric carts. Workers can pull equipment offline in sections, working on individual components without taking down the entire system.
That bit’s necessary because the watch never ends. Whether it’s the old-school loop detectors (those wires embedded in the roadway to detect vehicle movement) or the newfangled incident detection camera network spotting a flickering light or that wayward mattress, the computers, backed up by Washington State DOT personnel, keep tabs on the tunnel at all times. Because digging deep isn’t always enough—you’ve got to dig smart, too.
Last week’s announcement that Apple intends to make it easy for developers to create Mac variants of iPhone apps became something of a matter of semantics. Would it ever merge the two operating systems? Are the apps being ported to macOS? They’re certainly not being emulated.
But Apple’s move signals a larger trend in consumer tech. Big-name device makers are looking closely at the technologies running on their most successful hardware offerings and finding ways to incorporate that magic into the rest of their products. The shift is driven partly by the popularity of mobile apps and touchscreens, industry insiders say, but also by emerging technologies like voice assistants. Apple is not the only company doing this; Google and Microsoft have stirred their pots. Even Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube borrows elements of its interface from the Amazon Echo Show to create a product with a strange (but maybe useful) mix of features designed with a “voice first” ethos.
‘It’s frustrating if you’re buying it and trying to use it at first. But whatever the next platform is, this is how it’s going to happen.’
Steven Sinofsky, investor and former Microsoft exec
In their earliest implementations, these Frankensoftware solutions can be confusing or downright janky. Mobile app windows running on your computer might not size properly, interactions feel forced, and your tablet or TV screen might actually have to switch between user interfaces while you’re tapping or barking. (Remember Windows 8?)
But these software experiments also hold the promise of being able to use the apps or input methods you want, whenever you want to use them. And it could potentially make things a lot easier for developers, who have often had to build separate versions of their apps for each new platform as it emerges.
Droided Up
Apple’s move to put mobile apps on macOS grabbed headlines last week, but Google has been running Android apps on Chromebooks for two years now. This is especially notable when you consider Chromebooks were originally developed to just run web apps in a browser. Last month, Google took its software a step further by allowing Linux apps to run on Chrome OS, which previously only worked if you hacked your Chromebook with specialized tools.
Kan Liu, a 12-year Google veteran and senior director of product management for Chrome OS, tells me over the phone that enabling Linux apps was really aimed at “power users”: People who work in coding environments like Visual Studio. But getting Android apps onto Chrome OS was part of a much broader strategy. “For users who were heavily investing in our mobile ecosystem, we wanted to enable those users to experience the same apps and functionality,” Liu says. “And from a market perspective, Chromebooks have come a long way in a short time.”
For anyone who remembers the earliest days of Android apps on Chrome OS, that “same apps and functionality” part might have seemed like a stretch. While some Android apps on Chrome OS supported larger interfaces, most just looked like enlarged phone apps. There weren’t many multitasking options. Other apps in the Google Play store came with the message that your Chrome OS device wasn’t compatible with the app.
But Google says it’s improved the experience over time, building features like window management directly into the Chrome OS framework. “Now, if you’re a developer, you automatically get support for things like multi-windows,” Liu says. And for “end users” (people who buy Chromebooks) that should in theory mean the best of both worlds: mobile apps running on something built like a laptop.
Speakin’ Out
Amazon’s newest Fire TV product is another example of Frankensoftware, although in this case the catalyst is voice technology, not touchscreens. The new Fire TV Cube has a microphone array, like Amazon’s tubular Echo gadgets, so you can command Alexa to turn on your TV or change programs. But while the Fire TV Cube runs on Fire OS, Amazon’s well-known operating system, it has the user interface of the Amazon Echo Show, another type of Echo gadget.
Amazon executive Sandeep Gupta said during a recent demo that the idea behind the Cube is to “really enable voice experience in a way that makes sense and actually highlights the use of voice,” and that Amazon effectively used the Echo Show display as a blueprint for how that voice-first approach would work on a TV set. Here’s the interesting part, though: once you stop using your voice and switch back to the ol’ remote, your Echo Show-like interface on the screen will change back to the old Fire TV interface.
It’s hard to say how well all this actually works—or whether the world is ready for voice-first entertainment queries—without using the Cube for a while (and I haven’t received a test unit yet). But if it does turn out to be a success, then a single piece of hardware can support apps across multiple interfaces: apps for the voice-first Fire TV; apps for a remote-controlled Fire TV; and voice apps, or “skills,” from the Echo.
Merge Ahead
This commingling of software is also supposed to provide benefits not just to the people who use the apps, but to the people who make them as well. “We don’t always necessarily think in terms of a specific device or not,” Google’s Liu tells me. “But when we build platforms and frameworks, I think our goal is always to make it as broad and as flexible as possible for developers.” That, in turn, can lead to better business opportunities for app makers.
Liu gives some examples: Evernote, he says, sees four times the amount of user engagement on a Chrome OS-based Pixelbook than it does on Android. And while Chrome OS users account for only seven percent of the user base for the note-taking app Squid, Chrome OS users have accounted for 21 percent of the app’s total revenue over the past month.
For Apple developers especially, this kind of cross-platform support makes sense. There are more than two million apps available for iOS, but only a fraction of that number available for macOS. Apple is finally starting to pay some attention to the Mac App Store—the company is giving it a redesign this year—but the changes are mostly cosmetic. On the app-making front, anything Apple does to make it easier for iOS developers to check some boxes and bring those apps over to macOS could inject some much-needed life into the desktop’s App Store.
Steven Sinofsky, an investor and former Microsoft executive who oversaw the radical overhaul that was Windows 8 back in 2012 (and who left the company later that year), says these kinds of software convergences happen every so often and can be met with resistance at first. “There’s this notion that there’s a core set of functionalities, and then come along new and interesting scenarios and interaction models, and it seems like people are bolting things together,” he says. “But that’s how platform shifts happen. Platforms start as apps, and then become platforms.”
“It’s frustrating if you’re buying it and trying to use it at first,” Sinofsky adds. “But whatever the next platform is, this is how it’s going to happen.”
In other words, Frankensoftware might seem like the wretched experiment of a bunch of FOMO-driven executives when you’re struggling to swipe, tap, or shout your way through an interaction with a new product. But from now on, most every connected thing you buy is going to have a little bit of something else in it. And once the companies making those things figure out a way to make these interactions effortless, it won’t seem like such a bad thing.
Two people accused of killing and dismembering a woman one of them met on a Tinder date appeared in a Nebraska court Tuesday on first-degree murder charges.
Aubrey Trail, 51, and Bailey Boswell, 23, appeared in Saline County Court to face the charges related to the killing of Sydney Loofe, 24. Authorities say Boswell met Loofe via the dating app Tinder. After a Nov. 14 date, they agreed to go out the next night.
Loofe’s mother reported her daughter missing on Nov. 16. On Dec. 4, her remains were found in a field about 90 miles southwest of Lincoln. Her dismembered corpse had been stuffed into several garbage bags.
In late November, Trail and Boswell were arrested on unrelated fraud charges in Branson, Mo., and have remained in jail since then. The pair lived together in Wilber, Neb.
In newly unsealed documents, prosecutors allege that Trail and Boswell were captured by surveillance footage at a Home Depot on Nov. 15, buying the tools that they would use to cut up Loofe’s body. And the purchase was made hours before Loofe’s death, while she was still at work and unaware of the grisly fate that awaited her.
According to the documents, Trail told investigators that he strangled Loofe with an extension cord. Authorities believe Boswell helped Trail dispose of the body.
Authorites have not offered a motive in the case, but the Nebraska Attorney General’s office said it may seek the death penalty.
Last week, Canadian company Carbon Engineering published research findings that show how carbon dioxide could be sucked up from the atmosphere for less than $100 per ton. In 2017, the world emitted some 32.5 gigatons of the stuff. But hey—baby steps.
Scientists have long speculated that so-called “negative emissions” technologies like CO2 removal could not only slow the accumulation of carbon in the air, but even reverse it. Before last week, though, all that speculation was, well, largely speculative; nobody had convincingly demonstrated how to pull off negative emissions at scale. Previous estimates had pegged the cost of sucking carbon from the skies, for instance, at $600 per ton—way too pricey to qualify as a viable cleanup solution. The findings from Carbon Engineering, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Joule, point the way toward a future in which negative emissions are not only technically possible but financially feasible.
So yeah—it’s big, significant, encouraging news. But it’s not all blue skies and rainbows.
Carbon removal technologies, promising though they may be, are overhyped, says David Keith, an applied physicist at Harvard and Carbon Engineering’s founder. “And the overhyping has become a political trick.” That hype, he says, makes it easier for policymakers to avoid drafting near-term mitigation strategies and exceed their carbon budgets, in hopes that their debt will be repaid at some point in the future. What begets this trickery? Computer simulations.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeled more than a thousand scenarios in search of ways to limit a rise in global temperatures, the most propitious projections relied heavily on the assumption that CO2 removal would one day swoop in and save our collective asses: Of the 116 IPCC scenarios found to limit warming to below 2° Celsius, 101 relied on negative emissions. “It enables policymakers to claim that we’re very close to keeping global temperatures below a 1.5 or 2 degree increase, while sweeping under the rug the hard work that remains to be done researching carbon dioxide removal,” Keith says.
Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture equipment pulls carbon from the air at a test plant in Squamish, British Columbia.
Carbon Engineering
Many people share his concerns. As a collection of climate researchers noted in a 2014 commentary published in the journal Nature: Negative emissions’ “credibility as a climate change mitigation option is unproven and its widespread deployment in climate stabilization scenarios might become a dangerous distraction.” An essay by climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, published in Science in 2016, leveled even harsher criticism: “Negative-emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble,” they wrote. “The mitigation agenda should proceed on the premise that they will not work at scale. The implications of failing to do otherwise are a moral hazard par excellence.”
Granted, the argument could be made that negative emissions technologies ceased to be a moral hazard when they became a necessary condition. Carbon Engineering’s latest data was published in a world in which atmospheric CO2 levels are higher than at any point in human history, and rising. The company’s method proposes to attenuate that rise by combining the carbon dioxide it captures with hydrogen to produce carbon-neutral liquid fuel. “That’ll be the first application of our technology en masse—making a completely clean fuel,” says CEO Steve Oldham. “And, if we need it to, we might one day use it to collect excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
And if the IPCC’s models are any indication, we probably will need to. “The moral hazard discussion would have been great to have in 1980, when atmospheric carbon levels were lower, but it’s too late now,” says Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. Lackner pioneered the concept of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, and was quick to counter Anderson and Peters’ editorial in Science with a letter of his own. “Throwing a life-preserver to a drowning victim may not assure a successful rescue, but it is not a high-stakes gamble. Offering the life-preserver is preferable,” he concluded.
Anderson and Peters rebutted Lackner’s rebuttal by extending his analogy; relying on negative emissions, they argued, would be akin to “letting someone jump into a raging torrent, and telling them that we may be able to save them with a technology that we have not yet developed.”
Science squabbles notwithstanding, both sides of the moral hazard argument agree that negative emissions technologies like those in development at Carbon Engineering should be pursued with vigor. Last week, Peters took to Twitter to reiterate his point that while relying on them at scale is a high stakes gamble, “we need research, development, & eventual deployment of negative emission technologies.”
Keith concurs. “As of today there is extraordinarily little research on it,” he says. “The number of scientists funded to do work on carbon removal globally is seriously small.”
And that’s a problem. Because the only thing worse than assuming that carbon removal will save the day is assuming it will save the day—and then not funding its development.
Open the Uber app in downtown San Francisco, and you’ll discover you can do a lot more than hail a ride. You rent a bike, thanks to Uber’s recent acquisition of Jump Bikes. You can rent a car, courtesy of a partnership Uber has struck with the startup Getaround. In a test version of the app, which I saw when I reported on Uber last January, a train schedule popped up if you hailed a ride to Caltrain.
These small tweaks are part of Uber’s plan to transform from a ride-sharing service into a global logistics platform. If this strategy works, one day you’ll open to the Uber app’s city grid every time you want to figure out how to get yourself—or anything else—from one point to another. In other words, you’ll use Uber like you use Google Maps’ app: to find out what’s around you and how to reach it.
Uber isn’t alone in its quest to turbo-charge maps: On your phone, the map app is the new search box. Uber, like a lot of companies, anticipates that mapping will become the way that people merge their digital and physical lives: a real-time search function for the world immediately around you. But that means maps are about to become a lot more sophisticated. “The level of detail and precision…are core to what we do,” says head of product Manik Gupta, who spent more than seven years working on Google Maps before he defected to Uber.
Search has always been partially about location: if Google knows you are in Indiana, you’ll get more meaningful results when you type “today’s weather” into your laptop. Traditionally, though, the physical and digital worlds have been divided. You use search when you need information, and a map when you need to get someplace.
But now, a number of companies are producing maps that decode the three-dimensional world. Have a toothache? Plug “dentist” into Google Maps. Want to know where exactly the Puerto Rican Day Parade ends? Pull up Snap Maps. Need to get to the airport quickly? Open Uber or Lyft. “Maps are a really powerful canvas for search,” says Eric Gunderson, founder of Mapbox, a company that offers developer tools for companies to create maps. “It’s a canvas for context, for understanding where people are. It’s a canvas for understanding data.”
As maps emerge as the front door to many of our digital experiences, businesses are vying to be the first app you open—the same way that Microsoft and Yahoo once fought Google to own search. “Everybody’s always fighting to become the entry point for everything you do,” says Luc Vincent, who helped pioneer Street View at Google and now runs Lyft’s mapping and marketplace division. Now that entry point seems primed to become a map.
Even Google, which has long dominated maps, is anticipating the shift. In addition to its Google Maps app, Google powers many of the mapping interfaces other businesses are building. In May, Google rebranded this mapping business as Google Maps Platform. The revamp, the first since it launched the tools 13 years ago, lumps its 18 developer tools into just three categories, making them easier to understand, and introduced a clearer pricing structure. Google also began rolling out specialized sets of mapping features for specific industries like gaming and ride-sharing, where it began testing its ride-sharing offering with Lyft, in which it is an investor, last fall.
While Google’s mapping tools offer the most comprehensive options for companies that want to add maps to their apps, several other companies offer geolocation tools for developers. The Dutch company Tom Tom counts automakers as its customers and often powers their navigation systems. There’s Here, the name for the Nokia mapping assets, was bought by a group of German automakers in 2015. But the most frequent alternative to Google Maps is Mapbox. Its customers include Snap, Instacart, Foursquare, and The Weather Channel, among many others. Mapbox’s tools cost considerably less than ones from Google Map Platform. Mapbox lacks some of Google’s features, like Google Street View, but other startups, like the Sweden-based startup Mapillary, are attempting to crowd-source alternatives to Streetview. So companies looking for an alternative to relying on Google can often piece together the mapping features they need.
Uber draws data from many of these services to piece together its own maps. From the start, it has licensed geolocation services from Google, as well as Tom Tom, Open Street Map and others. In recent years, the company has invested heavily in developing its own mapping technology. Since 2015, when Uber first bought deCarter and then bought part of Bing’s mapping assets from Microsoft, the company has been acquiring small map-related startups. Insider Uber, engineers are using digital imagery from the real world to improve the much vaunted ETA, or estimated time until arrival. They are using machine learning to offer destination predictions to riders, and improve navigation for drivers. In many cities across the world, Uber is deploying a fleet of cars with distinctive cameras to collect its own imagery in an effort to improve pick-ups and drop-offs.
But for Uber to become the de facto transportation and logistics app, it must be the most accurate: An error as minor as locating a passenger on the wrong side of a street might break a sale by adding extra wait time. These challenges will only grow. To deliver a meal to your 7th floor apartment, or direct you to the best (and closest) optometrist, Uber not only has to get better at figuring out where you are it must improve its ability to signal to a user how to best navigate the terrain. To navigate you through the world of the future—where autonomous cars and augmented reality introduce digital tools into the physical grid—exactingly perfect maps will be critical.
The companies best positioned to position us will rise to the top of this new world order, and no one wants to be left behind.
For almost as long as the internet has existed, so too have pro-eating disorder communities: blogs, groups, forums, and social media profiles where users share stories and photos related to disordered eating and body image. Some members simply want a judgment-free place to express their feelings about a complicated illness, but others promote more dangerous behavior, like encouraging extreme diets or dissuading people from getting help.
And as with other kinds of harmful contenton the internet, platforms hosting pro-ED communities have long struggled with how to moderate them. In 2001, Yahoo removed more than 100 pro-ED sites from its servers, saying they violated its terms of service. A decade later, a HuffPost exposé about teenage girls creating “thinspiration” blogs on Tumblr prompted that site and others to ban explicitly pro-ED communities.
New research published last month in the peer-reviewed journal New Media & Society highlights how pro-ED groups continue to evade attempts at moderation. The study also found that sites like Pinterest and Instagram sometimes suggest more pro-ED content to users via their recommendation algorithms. It isn’t an isolated problem—researchers have found that recommendation engines on platforms like YouTube also suggest problematic content, like conspiracy theories. But unlike fake news, users who share pro-eating disorder content could be suffering from a serious illness like anorexia or bulimia. Companies need to weigh not just the content itself, but also the effect that removing it might have on the vulnerable people who share it.
“It’s very, very difficult to tease out what would fit under the category of toxic, or pro-eating disorder content,” says Claire Mysko, the CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association, which has worked with social media sites to help moderate pro-ED communities. “The people who are posting it and who are engaged in these communities are really struggling. You don’t want to set it up as this is good and bad, demonizing the users who are posting this content.”
The Hashtag Dilemma
The New Media & Society study focuses on hashtags as a tool for content moderation, and underscores how difficult it can be for tech companies to find problematic content and to decide what should and shouldn’t be removed.
After the HuffPost article was published in 2012, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr began moderating pro-ED hashtags and search terms.
Now when users search for tags related to eating disorders, such as #bulimia, the sites either block results entirely or surface a pop-up message asking if they want to seek help.
What it looks like when a user searches for “bulimia” on Tumblr.
New Media & Society
It’s an understandable strategy: hashtags, unlike images, can be easily categorized and flagged by automated detection systems and human moderators. They’re also how many people find new content, so blocking certain hashtags limits how many people a post may reach. Historically, tagged content has also been over-emphasized by social science researchers for many of the same reasons. It’s easier to analyze a large data set of specific hashtags than to manually comb through untagged content.
But specific hashtags aren’t permanent fixtures of social media, and they can easily morph to suit the communities’ needs. A separate 2016 study from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that pro-ED users simply began to intentionally misspell or alter terms: “#thinspiration” became “#thynspiration,” “#thinspire,” or “#thinspirational,” for example. In order to evade moderation, many pro-ED accounts and blogs don’t use any hashtags at all, making them harder for platforms to find and researchers to study.
“This group is really savvy, because they know what they’re doing is unacceptable in society’s eyes, in the platform’s eyes, in trolls’ eyes,” says Ysabel Gerrard, the author of the recent study and a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. “They’re so aware that their account might be taken down.”
She immediately found that Instagram’s pro-ED hashtag ban has an easy workaround: You can search for people who have the keywords in their usernames, just not hashtagged in their posts. She identified 74 public accounts that had terms like “proana,” “proanorexia,” or “thighgap” in their names or bios and who also posted pro-ED content. Then, she analyzed 1,612 of their posts—only 561 of which had hashtags—by cataloguing the content of the image and its caption.
On Tumblr, Gerrard followed a number of terms related to pro-ED content, like “thinspo,” “proana,” and “bulimic.” Tumblr allows you to follow topics without needing to follow specific users. For example, you can simply follow “movies” without following any specific user who posts about that topic. Through this method, she found 50 pro-ED blogs and analyzed 20 posts from each, or 1,000 posts total. Only 218 of the posts were tagged.
’This group is really savvy, because they know what they’re doing is unacceptable in society’s eyes, in the platform’s eyes, in trolls’ eyes.’Ysabel Gerrard
Examining the 2,612 Instagram and Tumblr posts, Gerrard uncovered a complicated lexicon of signals that would likely evade any platform’s moderation efforts. For example, she found a number of posts related to diet plans, like the Ana Boot Camp Diet, which promotes drastically lowering your caloric intake. Advertised as the ABC Diet, it’s difficult to distinguish from much of the mainstream fitness and diet content that proliferates on apps like Instagram. Some of those diets, like the popular ketogenic diet, are also incredibly restrictive, indicating how blurry the line is between pro-ED communities and others that ostensibly don’t violate a site’s rules.
The Role of Recommendations
One of the most troubling findings of the study is the role that recommendation algorithms play. Gerrard found that after viewing pro-ED posts on Pinterest, the site suggested she might “love” other “ideas” that were all “connected to death and suicide, such as ’how to die’ and ’wanting to die quotes.’” Eating disorders often co-occur with other forms of mental illness, like depression and anxiety. The site also recommended “popular Pins for you” to Gerrard via email, which included topics like “hip bones.”
“We have policies against saving this type of content from other sites and social media to our platform,” a Pinterest spokesperson said in a statement. “If this content enters our system, we have a number of automated and manual processes in place to remove it or make it harder to find, and we will not show results if someone searches for these terms. We take this content very seriously and are always working to get better.”
Instagram and Tumblr’s recommendation algorithms behaved similarly, according to Gerrard’s research. On Instagram, for example, Gerrard never liked or commented on any posts—which could be seen by users and potentially influence their behavior—but she did “save” pro-ED content to her saved posts folder, which doesn’t send notifications to the poster. After she began saving things, Instagram’s Explore tab flooded with other pro-ED content. Instagram and Tumblr did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Recommendation algorithms on other platforms have also inadvertently promoted problematic content to users. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal found earlier this year that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm amplifies conspiracy theories and other extremist content.
“Platforms have not yet algorithmically reconciled their moral stances on eating disorders and self-harm, meaning they simultaneously push and deny problematic content to their users,” Gerrard wrote in her study.
What Platforms Can Do
Not all experts agree that pro-ED content should be taken down wholesale. One study found that these groups can be useful places for people to articulate their illnesses, sometimes for the first time. Another concern is that if platforms remove pro-ED users, they will move to harder-to-reach places like private groups and ephemeral apps like Snapchat.
At the same time, there’s no doubt that pro-eating disorder groups can be toxic and harmful. “It was one of the worst exacerbators of the illness for me, those websites,” says one woman who has recovered from anorexia and asked not to have her real name used. “A forum is a perfect place to spend all your time and your energy on your disorder. You’re getting validation for your sickness.”
Mysko, the CEO of NEDA, and Gerrard agree social media companies can do more to help the people who struggle with eating disorders who use their sites.
Gerrard suggests platforms refrain from cancelling a person’s entire account, and instead consider deleting individual posts. That way, they’re not abruptly cut off from other users who may be supportive. Many pro-ED accounts use pseudonyms, making it difficult to reestablish contact if an account is suspended.
Gerrard also recommends platforms employ trained moderators who specialize in identifying harmful pro-ED content. Companies’ Community Guidelines are often vague; it’s not easy for moderators or users to know when they’ve crossed the line.
Mysko says platforms should also consider working directly with already-popular fitness and health influencers to promote healthier messages about eating and body image. Pro-eating disorder groups and blogs have always been online. What’s changed is that they now exist alongside a sea of personalized, often gendered content that reinforces the same ideal of thinness, just not explicitly.
“There’s a tendency to compare. A lot of people are really perfectionist, and that really gets amplified in a social media space,” says Mysko. “It’s a constant reinforcement of those insecurities that are at the heart of many eating disorders.”
If you or someone you care about is struggling with an eating disorder, you can call the National Eating Disorders Association’s hotline at (800) 931-2237. You can also text “NEDA” to 741741. More information about available resources can be found here.
Moving to a new country can be hard. You don’t know the language. Cultural differences create conversational landmines. And you just can’t be sure that everyone will like you. As it turns out, that as true for people as it is for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, which officially sets up residence in France today.
Amazon announced its expansion into France last week. The first wave of Echo devices ships today. But the task of prepping Alexa for its debut there began much longer ago. And how it learned not just a new language but an entirely new set of perspectives and priorities can tell you a lot about how Amazon will translate its homegrown voice assistant into a global success.
We Come From France
Alexa already spoke English, German, and Japanese before the France launch. But Google Home’s Google Assistant spoke all of those as well, along with French and Italian. It’s a global linguistic arms race. Winning hinges on getting it perfect, fastest.
When you think about what it takes to launch Alexa in France, start with the basics. There’s the language, obviously. But unpack that: French is complex, both linguistically and societally. It has formal and informal address. It demands of its speakers euphony, harmonious and seamless transitions between words to maintain an almost musical cadence. And as you might expect from a country with nearly 70 million inhabitants, a multitude of regional accents inform pronunciations.
Teaching Alexa how to speak French, in other words, is about as far from basic as it gets. You can feed the machine learning models all the French words in the world (literally), but teaching it how to use them requires a human touch. Like any good problem that machine learning solves, it starts with data.
“Amazon and actually everyone else of the big players will have a French language decoder available that does a pretty good job of recognizing speech, a particular language. That’s the foundation,” says Alex Rudnicky, a speech recognition expert at Carnegie Mellon University. “Once you have that, you have to figure out how people might talk to something. Then it gets a little trickier.”
‘We have different ways of asking the same question. We have different ways of saying the same thing.’
Nicolas Maynard, Amazon France
For Amazon, that meant introducing Alexa to workers in its five French fulfillment centers, who interacted with the burgeoning voice assistant in Boigny-sur-Bionne and beyond. From there, it broadened out to French Amazon customers who were granted early access to a voice assistant in their mother tongue. The conversations were unscripted, to let Amazon’s AI understand not just how it could best answer questions, but what kinds of questions were more common. Cooking, perhaps not surprisingly, came up frequently. But early Alexa users in France also sought out information about television a surprising amount, prompting Amazon to partner up with a popular French magazine to have a TV-related skill ready at launch.
More fundamentally, all of those interactions helped the algorithms behind Alexa to identify the many flavors of French-speakers. “In terms of accents, it’s very hard to say how many different ones,” says Rohit Prasad, head scientist of Alexa AI. And that means more than just the stark differences between what you’ll hear in the North of France versus the Southeast. “You can have people who have moved from the Middle East or India.”
Rather than slog through the process of modeling every single accent and variable, Prasad says, Amazon has set Alexa’s parameters broadly enough to understand voices from Le Mans to Marseilles.
Alexa also must also then contend with English words that the French language has absorbed; “weekend” is in common usage there, but with a French accent. And that’s before you even get to musical artists with English-language names that French pronunciation transform into an almost entirely new word, like Radiohead, or Earth, Wind, and Fire. (No, really.) For that, trial and error with beta testers has gone a long way.
After all that, you wind up with an Alexa that hopefully understands what people say when they speak French to it. But understanding isn’t anywhere close to conversing.
Duration and Time
Every language has its quirks. French just happens to have especially problematic ones for a voice assistant. “You cannot just take everything that is in the US, do a translation, and expect it to work in France,” says Nicolas Maynard, country manager for Alexa France.
Take the word “you.” In English, pretty straightforward. But in French and other Romance languages, it comes in formal and informal varieties. In France, Alexa always uses formal address; it’s there to help people, not befriend them, and better not to risk offending customers. But plenty of people engage Alexa informally, a distinction that has repercussions for comprehension.
“We have different ways of asking the same question. We have different ways of saying the same thing,” with the pronunciation varying depending on if you’re being polite or not, says Maynard. Alexa needs to understand both.
Amazon has set Alexa’s parameters broadly enough to understand voices from Le Mans to Marseilles.
It gets more complicated still. English uses different words to indicate time versus duration: o’clock and hours. French carries no such distinction, and you can imagine how that plays out when setting a timer, or an alarm. The things you take for granted in one country become potential potholes in another. And that’s just the grammatical whirligigs Amazon’s team has covered in advance.
“The tricky bits are figuring out exactly how people express a concept. The other bit is what is it that people do, how do they go about performing tasks in different cultures,” says CMU’s Rudnicky. “You have to have a sense of how people think of what it is that they’re doing before you can put something together.”
And not just what they think, but what they care about. Obviously French Alexa needs to know soccer, but it also boned up on rugby before its debut. Not to mention another area of particular interest to the French audience.
“French people do love to know when are the holidays,” says Maynard. “But the holidays are split in different zones in France. Depending on what city you’re in, the holidays are not at the same time. So we had to teach Alexa the different holidays in the different zones.”
What else? Generations of French school children have grown up memorizing the poems of Jean de La Fontaine and others; Alexa knows them, too. Alexa France has its own favorite movie (Stephen Spielberg’s A.I.), a favorite in the World Cup (France, obviously), a favorite singer, favorite book, all carefully chosen to reflect the broadest possible appeal. That extends to Alexa’s voice in France, selected as much for its sparkle of personality as its totally neutral accent.
Helping Alexa’s entry into France will be 200 localized skills that scratch the itches of early testers. Amazon has signed on the expected suspects; Air France, the leading newspapers Le Figaro and Le Parisien, popular radio stations, and other assorted content providers, all tailored for the market. To each culture its own voice-assistant needs. “In certain countries, certain skills are more important than others. In Japan and the UK, transit skills are important. In the US, maybe less,” says Toni Reid, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa experience.
So yes, Amazon has put in the work to make Alexa as French as possible. The question now is how quickly it can adjust for all the things it didn’t account for. “With any complex computer system, there’s always something you didn’t think of, and of course people pick up on it,” says Rudnicky.
Having been through these launches before, in Germany and elsewhere, Prasad has confidence in Alexa’s ability to adapt. “Once we launch, just like what happened in the US and other countries, you get more advanced data, more contemporary data, the models start to improve quite quickly,” he says.
And if it doesn’t? C’est la vie! At least it’ll have La Fontaine.
The self-driving robots are coming to transform your job. Kind of. Also, very slowly.
That’s the not-quite-exclamatory upshot of a new report from the Washington, DC-based Securing America’s Future Energy. The group advocates for a countrywide pivot away from oil dependency, one it hopes will be aided by the speedy adoption of electric, self-driving vehicles. So it commissioned a wide-ranging study by a phalanx of labor economists to discover how that could happen, and whether America might transform into a Mad Max-like desert hell along the way.
The news, mostly, is good. For one, self-driving vehicles probably won’t wreck the labor market to the point where gig economy workers are hired out as mobile blood bags. In fact, they’ll eventually feed the economy, accruing an estimated $800 billion in annual benefits by 2050, a number mostly in line with previous researchers’projections.
Two, robo-cars won’t disappear the jobs all at once. “We have a labor market characterized by churning—continual job creation and destruction,” says Erica Groshen, a visiting labor economist at Cornell University and former Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who worked on the report. “The challenge is to make the transition as smooth as possible.”
The economists predict the most disruptive technologies, like trucks that can drive themselves in most (but not all!) road situations, won’t arrive until the mid-2030s at the earliest. So go ahead and breathe that sigh of relief. But only one. It’s time to prep for fewer truckers and cab drivers, right now.
According to the report, most of autonomous vehicles’ benefits come from saving lives that would be lost to crashes. The 40,000 or so deaths on US roads every year are terrible, and terribly expensive. There’s the medical care, plus the emergency services, plus the legal costs, the workplace costs, the property damage, and the traffic costs. (That includes the costs of the fuel to sit in traffic.) Crashes cost the US economy about $840 billion per year.
Autonomous vehicles won’t delete crashes from American life, but they should reduce them. Robots don’t get drunk, or high, or sleepy, or look at cell phones when they should be staring the road. They won’t even have phones. Thus, the economists estimate driving might reduce crash costs by $118 billion annually by 2050. Factor in quality of life improvements, and you get closer to $385 billion in yearly savings.
The SAFE report also suggests some jobs will be easier to reach via self-driving car. You’d probably be more into a longer commute if you could just twiddle your thumbs (or send even more emails) the whole time. That just might open up a whole new population of workers to different sorts of businesses, assuming traffic isn’t so terrible that it scares everyone off the roads. (The economists chose not to factor in induced demand, or the idea that making travel easier will bring a ton more cars to the road.) OK!
The less great news is that, yes, some categories of jobs will probably disappear forever. Truckers, in particular, will eventually face some displacement. But the timing here is crucial. The first wave of automation to hit American roads won’t be too advanced. People trained as truckers will have to guide vehicles between distribution centers and the long, open highway, where the autonomous tech can do its thing. Meaning: There will still be jobs for people used to sitting behind the wheel.
The big changes won’t kick in for at least a few decades, the economists figure. Their report examines a range of autonomous vehicle deployment scenarios, but even the “fast” version doesn’t see slight unemployment increases—between 0.06 to 0.13 percent, with two or three years of $18 billion in annual wage losses—until the mid-2040s. Or even mid-2050s, when even better automation makes it to the streets. By then, most of today’s truck drivers will be out the biz. The average age of a driver is now 55.
That should leave politicians, CEOs, and lawmakers plenty of time to prep. Perhaps: Ask private companies to help pay for the labor fallout from their tech. Or: Be transparent with workers, and responsive to their concerns. Also: Boost government programs that might redirect and retrain professional drivers. And: Collect more data, and better data, on how market forces are affecting displaced workers.
“We should not panic, but we should not be complacent,” says Amitai Bin-Nun, who oversees SAFE’s autonomous vehicle and mobility work. Remember: To get to Thunderdome, a lot of negligent tech companies, policymakers, and government drones had to pass the buck.
A federal judge has approved AT&T’s merger with Time Warner. He rejected the government’s argument that it would hurt competition in pay TV and cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars more to stream TV and movies. (June 12) AP
A federal judge ruled in favor of AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner on Tuesday in a decision that is likely to raise the curtain on mega-mergers among the nation’s entertainment companies.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon did not impose any conditions that would have prompted AT&T to scuttle the deal, further emboldening legacy Hollywood and telecommunications companies to pair up in an effort to fight deep-pocketed tech rivals such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Google.
Even before the decision, Comcast said it was prepared to bid for 21st Century Fox’s assets, signaling a price war with Disney, which agreed to pay $52 billion for the studios that would help Disney offer alternatives to Netflix.
Tuesday’s ruling is a pivotal chapter in a 20-month saga that began in Oct. 2016 when the largest U.S. telecommunications company first reached an agreement to buy Time Warner in a grab for TV and film content that would diversify its mammoth but mature Internet access business.
Time Warner is a hangout for DC Comics’ superheroes Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, as well as CNN and HBO, the premium network where Game of Thrones resides, and TNT, which just aired some of the NBA playoffs. AT&T owns pay-TV provider DirecTV alongside its extensive landline, wireless and Internet access businesses.
AT&T argued that a bigger company would benefit consumers because it would allow it to offer more new services, like a cheaper streaming service. General counsel David McAtee said the company looked forward to closing the deal next week “so we can begin to give consumers video entertainment that is more affordable, mobile, and innovative.”
It’s likely to use its new channels as a lure for subscribers.
“Expect aggressive bundling of HBO, CNN, and other proprietary sports content (NBA, NCAA, MLB) from Time Warner into the AT&T network as a key incentive for current and new AT&T wireless customers,” wrote Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights, in a note to investors.
Time Warner’s stock climbed 4.9% in after-hours trading. AT&T shares dropped around 1.6%.
The U.S. government sued to block the transaction this past November, arguing the larger company would have too much power and that individuals’ TV tab would rise as a result. That was the position of Donald Trump when he was still a presidential candidate, and AT&T lobbied the court for communications between Trump’s White House and the Justice Department to prove the suit was politically motivated.
The judge denied the legal move, and in the end, it didn’t matter. After a six-week trial, Leon — who also presided over the Comcast-NBC-U mega-deal in 2011 — ruled from a packed courtroom that the government’s case lacked merit.
Judge Leon also strongly urged the government not to appeal the decision, nor was he in favor of issuing a “stay” that could prevent the consummation of the merger by the break-up date of June 21, causing AT&T to have to pay Time Warner a $500 million breakup fee.
“I do not believe that the Government has a likelihood of success on the merits of an appeal,” Leon wrote.
Justice Department assistant attorney general Makan Delrahim said the agency plans to review the opinion and “consider next steps in light of our commitment to preserving competition for the benefit of American consumers.”
Some consumer groups, lawmakers and a trade group that represents smaller cable operators criticized the outcome as bad for individuals and competition.
“History has shown us that when these telecom companies get bigger, they don’t get better,” said Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel for Consumers Union.
The case was the most important U.S. antitrust case since the Department of Justice’s attempt to block Microsoft from using its Windows operating system to monopolize software such as Web browsers on computers. The court’s green light is expected to let loose a stampede of M&A activity in the media and entertainment space, starting with a titanic battle between Disney and Comcast for Fox assets.
Comcast stock declined nearly 4.6% in after-hours. Disney shares dropped nearly 1.5%. Fox shares rose 1%.
T-Mobile and Sprint are pursuing their own $26 billion merger that would create a larger No. 3 cell-phone carrier. Last year, Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.5 billion, a bid to build a digital advertising competitor to Facebook and Google. The entire telecom industry is dealing with cooling revenues from traditional sources such as subscribers.
Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner envisions Silicon Valley stalwarts like Google, Apple, and Facebook “that are currently putting a toe into (such activity), putting their whole foot into it.”
Having been rebuffed on AT&T-Time Warner, it isn’t immediate obvious where the Trump Administration might come down on future mergers. It was unusual for the Justice Department to try to stop a merger between companies that didn’t directly compete with each other.
“They’re going to bring cases, but they’re going to look at each case on its merits,” expects Henry Su, a partner at Constantine Cannon is Washington, D.C.
Suspense about the outcome has been building since the trial ended April 30. A new twist emerged in early May with the revelation that AT&T paid President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen $600,000 for consulting services at the time the company was seeking regulatory approval for the merger.
Even with the merger moving forward, AT&T may temper any rise in TV prices, at least for now. “The parties may do whatever they can to forebear from engaging in any allegedly anti-competitive behavior just so that the court of public opinion will be able to say, `oh yeah, it’s fine,’” Su says.
Contributing: Mike Snider from Tysons, Va.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
