Cold, dead fingers: Will motorists give up in-car cellphone access without a fight?

Highway deaths are up in the United States, as is the use of smartphone apps. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sees a link and last week issued guidelines – not mandates – that would have the major phone-OS developers figure out a way to severely limit the functionality of smartphones while a car is moving. But only the driver’s phone would be crippled, not the passengers’ phone, in NHTSA’s proposal.

Calling features would still be enabled, via handsfree link. Incoming texts would be read aloud and a speech-to-text response could be generated. Music playback would also be available. That’s about it.

Spike in fatalities unseen since the 1960s, NHTSA says

NHTSA says the 7% increase in fatalities in 2015 is unprecedented in the past half century and preliminary data on 2016 suggests the death toll rose a further 10% this year. The last time it was that high was the 1960s, when fatalities year over year increased by 7% to 9% in four of the 10 years. Since then, the death rate (total fatalities) has been flat or gone down in 26 of 46 years.

Traffic deaths each year per 100,000 population and per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, left axis, and total motor vehicle deaths per year (car, truck, bus, motorcycle, bicyclist, pedestrian). Source: NHTSA FARS database.

How big is the problem? Depends on what stats you use

The concern by safety officials comes from a spike in traffic fatalities. How big of a spike depends on which data gets publicized. The chart above is from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Here are three ways to look at the data.

• Raw fatalities. This is how many people died in a year. Since the US population grows each year, using this data set often provides the most dramatic increases. The death toll in the US in 1970 (the start of the safety era with seat belts mandatory since 1968) was 52,627 when the population was 205 million; in 2015 the US population was 321 million, 57% more, but the fatality rate was a third lower, 35,092 in 2015. So, historically the death rate is down. But in 2015 the death toll was 2,417 more than in 2014, or 7% more. The five-year increase, 2015 vs. 2010, was 6%.
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• Deaths per 100,000 per year. This accounts, somewhat, for our growing population over time. It’s a measure that’s understandable. If you live in a town of 100,000, on average 11 people died last year. In 1970, it was 26 per 100,000. From 2014 to 2015, deaths per 100,000 went up 7%, too, same as the raw fatalities rate. The five-year increase was 2% (2015 vs. 2010). Deaths-per-100K peaked in the 1930s at almost 30 per 100,000 people. It drops in bad economic times, during World War II (driving restrictions), and during gasoline shortages (mid-1970s, early 1980s), but it’s generally heading down.
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• Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This statistic does the best job of factoring in fluctuations in the economy and fuel shortages, as well as safety improvements in cars and roads. The line slopes steadily downward, from almost 25 deaths per 100 million VMT in 1921 (the first year of more detailed auto fatalities record-keeping)  to just over 1 last year. In 2014 it was the lowest in history, 1.08 deaths per 100 million VMT. In 2015 it was 1.11, an increase of 3%, the only increase in the past decade. That’s noticeable and worrisome, but 3% isn’t 7%.

Even as auto fatalities have gone up 3% or 7% in the past year, you’re still pretty safe in a car. Multiply 11 fatalities per 100,000 people times the 80 years a person is in a car as a passenger or driver (or out walking or biking), you get 880 fatalities per 100,000, or slightly less than a 1% chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident over your lifetime. That’s low but still high enough that you’ll likely know of a friend or family member killed in an accident. It’s a leading cause, (for years the leading cause), of deaths in children and adults under 25. For better or worse, suicides, homicides and drug deaths are now challenging auto accidents among those 25 and under.

What are the odds a cellphone kill switch is adopted?

By asking cellphone-makers and OS providers to voluntarily restrict what services the phone provides in a moving car, the feds look a bit less like spoilsports. There is likely to be pushback. Whenever drivers are asked to self-rate their driving, the majority say they’re above average, which isn’t possible statistically, and they might bristle at seeing their quote freedoms curtailed.  (See below.)

There are reports that Apple in 2008 applied for a patent on technology that would lock out phones that were in motion; the technology supposedly could determine which phone was the driver’s. The patent was cited in a 2014 lawsuit over an alleged distracted-driving fatality.

CellControl, a Baton Rouge, LA, company, offers DriveID, a dash-mounted $129 hardware-software product that can limit the driver’s use of his or her phone. DriveID is managed by parents in a family situation or by a fleet manager in a commercial setting. Pokemon Go has been cited as a factor in some car crashes, so much so that the current version has a lockout that disables the app when it’s being played at greater than walking speeds. The change was hastened by a video showing a Pokemon Go motorist sideswiping a police car.

It’s possible phone-makers will use a limit-your-phone-access mandate as a reason to keep from adding competing apps into the handful now enabled under Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Specifically: You wouldn’t see Apple Maps on an Android phone and you wouldn’t see Google Maps or Waze on an Apple phone running CarPlay.

Americans didn’t like enforced ignition interlocks

History shows motorists reacted badly to heavy-handed behavior modification. In the mid-1970s, cars were equipped with ignition interlocks that wouldn’t allow the car to be started until the driver and front seat passenger had buckled their seat belts. This was supported by the auto industry in part to stave off mandatory airbags, which at the time were seen as a substitute for seat belts. The buzzers were loud, sometimes electrical gremlins kept the cars from starting, and on many cars it was easy to defeat the interlock. Automakers pulled back within a couple years.

Circa 1980 some automakers, again trying to keep airbags out of the picture, installed automatic seat belts with complex (read: not always reliable) mechanical arms that draped the seatbelt across the driver’s and passenger’s torsos. If driver or passenger opened the door while backing up, the belt retracted and wrapped itself around the occupant’s neck. This, too, died an early death.

Is there a sensible compromise?

Given how little Americans like to be told what to do when driving, they’re not going to like limits on their freedom to use their phones in ways ranging from distracting or potentially hazardous to downright stupid.

Driver-assist technology can help make the occupants of a car safer should the driver be distracted while creating or reading a long text. A car equipped with lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, and forward emergency braking will alert the driver if the car ahead suddenly slows, or if the car is drifting out of lane. For someone who’s texting, that is either a safety feature … or it’s an enabler for someone to write longer texts before they get in trouble.

While texting is the main concern, better voice recognition and one-shot destination entry will make it easier to enter an address without stopping. Right now, every phone has that feature, but only some embedded navigation systems. Already, most automakers lock out the LCD display’s ability to tap in the address. Automakers so far have resisted implementing technologies that could recognize when a passenger, not the driver, is entering address information. Mercedes-Benz offers a unique technology, SplitView, that shows the driver and passenger different views of the same center stack screen. Alternating pixels point left and right.

If NHTSA moves to reign in the use of smartphones in cars, there’s likely to be pushback. Even if distracted driving is the cause of the current 3%-7% increase in fatalities, drivers still see the overall risk to themselves as minor. And there’s conflicting research as to what constitutes distraction. Studies show that just talking on a hands-free phone takes up some of the driver’s attention. Tuning the car radio has always been distracting. Some research says talking to a passenger can be distracting. In the past, two of the biggest distractions were the driver dropping a lit cigarette in his or her lap, or a bee flying in the car. Those are small distractions now with the decrease in smoking and air conditioning that allows for windows-closed driving.

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The Human Connectome Project zeroes in on the firmware of the brain

Is the mind an emergent property of the brain, or is it something… else? Cartesian dualism is a polarizing topic, but like many other ideas that we thought were the province of philosophers, we’re getting light shed on it from a surprising source. Researchers from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) have just released our best-ever functional map of the human brain. It’s twice as finely detailed as anything that has come before it — and it’s tiptoeing closer to settling the mind-body problem. As it turns out, the brain as computer analogy has its shortfalls.

“The brain is not like a computer that can support any operating system and run any software,” says neuroscientist David Van Essen, Principal Investigator of the Human Connectome Project. “Instead, the software — how the brain works — is intimately correlated with the brain’s structure — its hardware, so to speak. If you want to find out what the brain can do, you have to understand how it is organized and wired.”

Image: Glasser, Van Etten et al

Because different subsurface brain structures look more or less the same from the outside, neuroscientists have heretofore relied mostly on gross anatomy and unfortunate happenstance to tell us what parts of the brain did what. (Here’s looking at you, Phineas Gage and Patient H.M.) Structure and function are tightly coupled in the brain, down to the molecular level. But the brain does so many things. Missing borders between brain structures can badly compromise our ability to understand how the brain works.

The HCP has been working for nigh unto six years to shed light on this problem. Their most recent announcement is impressive: The project just doubled the spatial resolution of our best known functional map. In doing so, they also integrate several different ways of explaining differences between brain regions. The researchers report that they’ve found a total of 180 distinct areas per hemisphere, regions which are bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography. This development stands to change neuroscience, by opening up our understanding of the relationship between structure and function.

Using multimodal MRI data from the HCP and a semi-automated approach, the new “parcellation” of cortical function checked its predictions by comparing them with brain scans from hundreds of healthy volunteers, so that the model could divide functional regions with exquisite accuracy. The parcellation divides both the left and right cerebral hemispheres into 180 areas based on physical differences like cortical thickness, functional distinctions like which areas respond to language stimuli, and differences in the connections between functional regions. If you think of it using the metaphor of, say, Google Maps, this approach combines political maps with satellite imagery; the most important divisions are invisible from a zoomed-out perspective, but important all the same.

Like cartographers from the Age of Exploration, brain cartographers are creating a tool for others to use in exploration and discovery. Prior work on the connectome gave us a directional diagram of information flow through the brain, and a startling semantic atlas that shows where we process the meanings of certain words and abstract topics. This team of researchers hopes that their work will prove an asset to other researchers as they push back the frontier of ignorance.

“We were able to persuade Nature to put online almost 200 extra pages of detailed information on each of the 180 regions as well as all of the algorithms we used to align the brains and create the map,” Van Essen said. “We think it will serve the scientific community best if they can dive down and get these maps onto their computer screens and explore as they see fit.”

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Five Easy Ways To Save Your [Mobile & Computer] Data

 
Things you should do right now to conserve your data.

Worry less about exceeding your data limit by following these five simple tips for Android users:
1. Reduce the data used by your Android mobile device or computer by turning on Chrome Data Saver Mode. From compressing web pages to removing images when loading a page on a slow connection, you’re able to save up to 70% more data.

2. Offline YouTube videos and watch them as often as you like without using data or buffering each time with YouTube Offline.

3. Whether it’s your neighborhood or a weekend getaway destination, there’s a way to use Google Maps without using any data. Download an area of the world and seamlessly use Maps features like turn-by-turn navigation and access useful location information without a network connection using Google Maps Offline.

4. Identify and remove data intensive apps by going to Settings > Data Usage on your Android device. You may be surprised to see data being used by apps you hardly touch!

5. Disable auto-updating apps on your Android device by opening Google Play and tapping the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) on the top left of the screen. Go to Settings > tap Auto-update apps > select Do not auto-update apps or Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi.

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Neuroscientists just isolated the part of the brain that controls free will

Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we’ve cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision — how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act.

“How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and coauthor of the report. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

The team devised a novel way to track a participant’s focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger’s-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times.

In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. The basal ganglia has also been an important target for research on dopaminergic diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, but the area has also been implicated in OCD, which has a lot to do with attention and volition.

Connectivity isn’t the only important factor here, though. Participants’ frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. Following commands or running through practiced actions, like the way you can sometimes drive home on autopilot, don’t need the same lead time. Timing is crucial.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that this is an entirely novel research tool. It should be examined and held up to criticism and comparison, because it stands to revolutionize how we study not just the brain but the mind. Now that scientists have a way to follow the execution of free will, they can use the technique to watch what’s happening in the brain as people navigate more complex decisions, such as weighing short-term rewards against long-term rewards — and perhaps even pinpoint the tipping point between them.

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Plastic-eating bacteria set to revolutionize waste disposal

 

 

 Few of us are likely to spend much time meditating on the problem of plastic, at least until a tranquil afternoon is violently disrupted by the vision of a stray Walmart bag sailing across the azure sky. Having lived a few streets down from a Walmart, I can personally attest to the menace of runaway shopping bags. But the problem goes far deeper than aesthetics — many plastics leach chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen when introduced into the body, increasing the likelihood of birth defects and other health complications.

For these and many other reasons, finding innovative ways to remove plastic waste from the environment has become an issue of increasing importance.  Thankfully a group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan may have seized upon a solution, one involving the humble bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis.

Bottle breakdown. Illustration: P. Huey. Reprinted with permission from U.T. Bornscheuer, Science 351:1154 (2016)

One of the reasons we find plastics so troublesome is that they are not rapidly biodegradable; they stay resident in the environment long after they have served their purpose. Enter Ideonella sakaiensis: Japanese scientists have shown this bacteria is capable of digesting a chemical called polyethylene terephthalate, the substrate of many plastics we find in household products like bottled drinks, cosmetics and household cleaners. This could be revolutionary – imagine carrying a super soaker charged with an aqueous solution of the bacterium and zapping down those Walmart shopping bags as they careened overhead.

The above equivalent of environmental skeet shooting might even become a popular leisure activity, except for one catch: The bacteria in question digest plastic at an epically slow rate, approximately six weeks to eat through a thin layer of PET. If this method is ever to succeed at disposing of the megalithic Styrofoam structure that my laptop computer shipped in, clearly something faster acting is required.

Thanks to progress being made in genetic engineering, though, a way to rev up the speed at which the bacteria digest plastic could soon be at hand. The scientists performing the study have already sequenced the bacteria’s genome and using gene editing techniques, are well on their way to figuring out a way to increase its plastic eating potency. Technologies like CRISPR, the subject of much hand wringing recently when Chinese scientists used it to edit the genomes of human embryos, are in bad need of a success story.

Thanks to sensationalist media outlets and unquestioning audiences, genetic engineering catches more than its share of flack. In reality, if humanity is to persist very far into the twenty-first century without reverting to primitive hunter-gatherer societies, it will require the aid of advanced forms of genetic engineering – if only to remove the immense amount of plastic waste we are currently producing.

We have previously reported on the success of genetic engineering in combatting the Zika virus, producing bananas enriched with beta-carotene to combat and malnutrition, and making salmon available to a wider range of people. If the removal of plastic waste could be added to that list of accomplishments, it might just succeed in turning the tides of public opinion in favor of genetic engineering. Until then, activities like plastic bag skeet shooting are likely to remain the stuff of imagination (well, at least mine).

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New iOS 9.2.1 update un-bricks iPhones, fixes ‘Error 53′

 

 Earlier this month we reported on Apple’s “Error 53″ message and how it bricked perfectly functional iPhones without warning, often after the devices were upgraded to iOS 9. Apple eventually clarified that the problem, which was limited to devices equipped with Touch ID, occurred if a third-party performed repairs to the device and replaced either the home button or the cable that connected the Touch ID sensor to the smartphone’s logic board.

Now, Apple has released a new build of iOS 9.2.1 that will “un-brick” devices previously crippled by Error 53. This new build of the operating system doesn’t include any other new features or capabilities, and it’s strictly meant for customers who currently have a $600 rectangular paperweight sitting somewhere around the house.

Initially, Apple defended bricking customer devices by claiming it did so to ensure Touch ID and Apple Pay were kept secure. This never made much sense, given the length of time that could pass between when a customer repaired a device and when the device failed. A security system that doesn’t lock down an insecure device for eight to 12 months isn’t particularly secure.

Error 53

Now, Apple has backed away from this explanation altogether. In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple explained the problem thusly:

This reports as an Error 53 in iTunes and appears when a device fails a security test. This test was designed to check whether Touch ID works properly before the device leaves the factory.
Today, Apple released a software update that allows customers who have encountered this error message to successfully restore their device using iTunes on a Mac or PC.
We apologize for any inconvenience, this was designed to be a factory test and was not intended to affect customers. Customers who paid for an out-of-warranty replacement of their device based on this issue should contact AppleCare about a reimbursement.

There is one caveat to this update: Touch ID will no longer function on an iPhone that’s been repaired by a third party. First, kudos to Apple for doing the right thing on this issue. Disabling Touch ID if the component doesn’t authenticate properly is the sane way to deal with the problem, particularly when the alternative was bricking a device with zero warning or explanation. Given that Apple doesn’t license any third-party stores to provide repairs in the United States, this entire situation looked like an attempt to force people to pay whatever “official” rate Apple wanted to charge for device repair, while freezing small competitors out of business.

The Touch ID sensor. Image by iFixit

Giving users the option to decide if they want to pay for Apple to fix their Touch ID system is a much better way to deal with the problem. We’re also glad to see the company acknowledging users who were forced to buy new devices and offering them reimbursements for the expense. Presumably they won’t have to return the devices they purchased, since the original models were likely thrown away.

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A Tablet or Smartphone Could Power Your Next Laptop

When you get a load of the new NexDock, you may feel like it's 2011 all over again. Similar to the old Motorola Atrix 4G, this new laptop uses a smartphone as its brain. The company is trying to get off the ground via an Indiegogo campaign.



The NexDock includes a 10,000-mAh battery, keyboard and a 14-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display for $149 (though early backers can get it as low as $99 as of this writing), which is cheaper than most laptops. When you plug in a Windows 10 smartphone into its mini HDMI port, you can use Microsoft's Windows Continuum feature to use your tablet or phone as a full-fledged laptop.

Continuum allows all Windows 10 devices, such as tablets and smartphones, to expand onto larger monitors. This Microsoft operating system feature allows Windows apps to resize gracefully, based on what the OS recognizes as the largest screen size available. Essentially it makes the monitor and phone or tablet into dual monitors, where screens and data can be moved back and forth.

As PCWorld points out, the choice of mini HDMI is curious when more and more phones use USB Type-C, which supports video output. NexDock has plans for future USB-C devices, but they aren't part of the current Indiegogo campaign.

In addition to running off of Windows 10 smartphones and tablets, NexDock also claims their shell can connect to mini PCs, as well as Android and iOS devices. Of course, without Windows 10, you will only have one screen. The Motorola Atrix 4G combined a specific Android smartphone with an 11.6-inch dock for $299, so the NexDock has more versatility and value right out of the gate.

As of this writing, the NexDock is at 10 percent of its goal, with one month left to go in its campaign. The Early Bird package is already sold out. The company claims supporters will receive their docks by June 2016. Will you be throwing your money in the ring?

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