The "captain of moonshots" at Google parent company Alphabet sees widespread, world-changing wireless Internet on the horizon.
Astro Teller, head of the boundary-pushing X research team, shared his vision of the future during a talk at the TED Conference here late Monday.
Teller shared insights into the X team's balloon-powered high-speed Internet service known as "Project Loon," which aims to get billions more people online by reaching remote or rural regions that are not yet connected.
"There is a lot of different technology out there, rolling them out will be complicated," Teller said.
"But, somewhere between five and ten years, it will change the world in ways we can not possibly imagine."
Project Loon began its first tests in Sri Lanka on Monday ahead of a planned joint venture with the government there, the country's top IT official told AFP.
It promises to extend coverage and cheaper rates for data services.
Service providers will be able to access higher speeds and improve the quality of their existing service once the balloon project is up and running.
Once in the stratosphere, the balloons will be twice as high as commercial airliners and barely visible to the naked eye.
Teller told the TED audience that he expected Project Loon balloons to be tested over Indonesia this year.
- Craziest idea to date -
The project, he quipped, might be the craziest to date at the X lab, which was once part of Google but became a separate unit with a restructuring that created parent company Alphabet.
The name of the project was intended to remind the team how bizarre it initially seemed.
As with all their projects, members of the X team first tackled the toughest technical challenges facing Loon with an eye toward quickly scuttling the mission if the goal was not realistic, according to Teller.
"We had round silvery balloons; giant pillow-shaped balloons, balloons the size of a blue whale," Teller said.
"We busted a lot of balloons."
Each potentially terminal technology challenge for Loon has been surmounted well enough to continue the project.
The current design is a balloon within a balloon, one containing helium to keep it aloft and the other with air that can be released or added to alter the weight and, as a result, move up or down to ride the wind.
- Kudos for failure -
The balloons can navigate fairly well, and send Internet signals to each other in order to increase their reach into remote areas.
As a Loon balloon floats out of an area, it hands the connection off to another floating into that same area.
And, Teller said, the bandwidth is good enough to stream free online TED talks for which the conference is renowned.
Last year, one of the balloon stayed up for 187 days, he said, circling the world more than a dozen times.
"Our balloons today do everything we need," Teller said. "So we are going to keep going."
Teller said his team refers to their base as "The Moonshot Factory" because their goal is to blend audacious ideas with the realities of getting them to market.
People on the X team get kudos, bonuses and even promotions for finding fatal flaws that kill projects and thereby let resources shift to more promising dreams.
"We use the word 'moonshot' to remind us to keep our vision big, and the word 'factory' to remind ourselves that we need concrete plans to make them real," Teller said.
"We spend most of our time trying to break things and prove we are wrong."
X lab's work on an automated system for vertical farming was killed last year when the team couldn't get it to grow staple crops such as grains or rice.
An ultra-light air-ship for hauling cargo was abandoned after the team realized the costs to build the first prototype would be astronomical.
"We can't spend $200 million to get the first data point about whether we are on the right track," Teller said. "So we killed it."
The lab's self-driving car was a natural moonshot, and is humming along, according to Teller.
Problematic Internet Use is now considered to be a behavioral addiction with characteristics that are similar to substance use disorders.
Individuals with PIU may have difficulty reducing their Internet use, may be preoccupied with the Internet or may lie to conceal their use.
A recent study that I coauthored with UNC Chapel Hill doctoral students Wen Li and Jennifer O’Brien and UNC professor Matthew O. Howard examines this new behavioral addiction.
Perhaps not surprisingly, individuals with PIU have been found to experience several negative mental health problems which could include depression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), hostility, social phobias, problematic alcohol use, self-injurious behavior and trouble sleeping (i.e., sleep apnea, nightmares, insomnia, and struggling to stay awake during the daytime).
Our study is the first to look at how PIU affects family relationships among U.S. university students. Intriguingly, we found that college students with PIU report effects that are both negative and positive.
Measuring PIU and its problems
To better understand PIU, we focused on students whose Internet use was excessive and created problems in their lives.
Study participants were undergraduate or graduate students enrolled at UNC Chapel Hill. We required that participants be individuals who were spending more than 25 hours a week on the Internet (time that was not related to school or work). Additionally, participants had to report experiencing at least one health, relationship or emotional problem due to PIU.
To recruit our participants, our team sent out an email on a Friday evening. We were not sure if this would be a good time to reach students, but we were surprised that within two hours, 39 students responded. Of those who responded to our email, 27 students attended our four focus groups and completed our questionnaires.
Roughly half (48.1 percent) of our participants were considered “Internet addicts.” These participants answered “yes” to five or more of our eight questions (e.g., preoccupation; inability to control use; lying about use; depressed or moody when trying to stop).
Half of the participants of the study were considered to be Internet addicts.
Another 40.7% were considered to be “potential Internet addicts.” These participants answered “yes” to three or four items. All of the participants met the criteria for PIU using the Compulsive Internet Use Scale, a 14-item scale that included items like difficulty stopping; sleep deprivation; neglect obligations; feelings of restlessness, frustration or irritation when Internet is unavailable.
We used focus groups, which are group conversations guided by a facilitator, to discuss shared experiences or knowledge regarding PIU. Each focus group had six to eight participants.
Here is what we found
Three key themes emerged in the conversations: (1) family connectedness, (2) family conflict/family disconnection, and (3) Internet overuse among other family members.
We had examples of positive connections. Some participants reported that the Internet connected them to their families. For example, participants discussed using Skype, Facebook or email to maintain relationships with family while they were away at college.
A student we call Hannah explained:
But like using Skype helps keep you connected and also when we are at home we watch a movie together, it’s like family time, you know. And um, like you know, if we read the same, like article, then we can talk about it on Skype.
Another student, Lisa said:
I hate talking on the phone. So, that allows me a way to stay connected and especially with my mom who would… Normally, I would just not respond to her at all, but now we have an email dialogue going. That helps us stay more connected.
Despite the positive consequences that participants discussed, we found that across the focus groups, participants spent more time talking about the negative consequences of Internet use.
For these participants, Internet use caused family relationships to disconnect or become conflicted.
Instead of interacting with their family when they were at home, participants reported that they were “on the computer the whole time.” One participant described ignoring her family during her visits home as a result of her Internet use:
My grandma and my parents will complain about my Internet use because I will be sitting in front of the TV and I’ll have my laptop and so will my little sister. We’ll be sitting in front of the TV on our laptops not talking to each other. So, my parents will complain about that.
Andrew said,
I think for me, this year I went home and one of the reasons was just was to have more family time, but what I ended up really doing was staying on my computer pretty much the whole time, which was kind of defeating the purpose of actually going home.
Steve described how his Internet use affected a visit with his brother and his friends at a sports bar:
At one point we’re all watching the basketball game, and all four because we’re all on our phone, and he looked at us and he said, ‘Really guys, I am here for two days, you all just wanna [sic] be on Twitter and Facebook?’ So, while it can enhance with setting up social situations, it can also detract from them once you were actually in them…Yeah, he was very just like…He flew out for the weekend. You know he spent US$300 on an airplane ticket just to sit there and watch me on Facebook.
It’s not just the students
It may not be surprising that college students with PIU reported that members of their families also overuse the Internet.
Some participants expressed frustration at the lack of boundaries or rules in place for their younger siblings or other relatives. A participant we called Melissa shared about her little brother:
He just turned four, but they got him an iPad. Like, which I don’t agree with. I think it’s so stupid, but he is always, always on it. He gets really defensive if you try to take it away or put boundaries on it or something like that.
Small children are getting addicted to their devices as well.
Hannah, for example, described a cousin whose Internet gaming has impaired his vision, but he is unable to stop playing:
My cousin, he is addicted to video games. And he’s like, I think he is like 10, 12, something like that, I don’t remember. I feel like it’s a stupid game, there’s no deepness to it. You kill someone. They die. You get killed, it starts over again. He can play that for eight hours straight without moving. His eyes are really bad right now. He can’t control himself.
Participants described their parents' PIU as well. Several participants described their parents as “constantly checking email” for their work. Others described their parents as regularly on computers, phones or iPads “on Facebook” or “browsing.”
My mom talks about me using the phone at the table when we’re eating, cause like if there’s a break in conversation, ‘Oh, Facebook opportunity’ [others laughed and she laughed too]. And then, like, somehow in my mind [the] conversation is over, but it’s really not. So then she’s like ‘You’re always on your phone, what are you doing?’ But then, like two minutes later, she is checking the weather. So I don’t know [she laughed].
A few participants shared that they were the only ones in their family with PIU.
Cindy explained that her family was from another country, which may explain their low Internet use,
I find that I don’t really have family members with an Internet problem, and I am the only one who grew up here. So, that might be…
Gina said,
My parents are technophobes. They don’t even know how to turn on computers.
Although our sample size is small, we followed rigorous approaches to ensure that we obtained the best possible data. We conducted focus groups until we achieved data saturation, which means that when we reviewed the final focus group no new themes were discovered.
The conclusions come through loud and clear. PIU exists and it affects family relationships. While those effects may be both positive and negative, those who suffer adverse consequences from PIU may have difficulty addressing their PIU because of requirements to use Internet for classes via online assignments (e.g., writing blogs), online courses and materials accessed online.
Apple Inc is on target to introduce its next iPhone and iPad models on March 15, and aims to start selling the devices in the same week, technology blog 9to5Mac reported, citing sources.
Apple, which will introduce a new 4-inch iPhone, dubbed the "iPhone 5se", and a new iPad Air at a launch event, is unlikely to take pre-orders for the new devices, the blog reported.
The technology giant has hit a trough in iPhone demand. The 0.4 percent rise in shipments in the fiscal first quarter was the slowest-ever increase in iPhone sales since the phone was launched in 2007.
The new 4-inch iPhone 5se is designed to spur iPhone hardware upgrades for customer seeking faster devices without upgrading to the far larger iPhone 6s and 6s Plus screen sizes.
Apple could not be immediately reached for comment.
(Reporting by Alan John Koshy in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
Smartphones could become the makeshift quake detectors of the future, thanks to a new app launched Friday designed to track tremors and potentially save the lives of its users.
MyShake, available on Android, links users to become an all-in-one earthquake warning system; it records quake-type rumblings, ties a critical number of users to a location, and could eventually provide a countdown to the start of shaking.
Its inventors say the app, released by the University of California, Berkeley, could give early warning of a quake to populations without their own seismological instruments.
"MyShake cannot replace traditional seismic networks like those run by the U.S. Geological Survey," said Richard Allen, leader of the app project and director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.
"But we think MyShake can make earthquake early warning faster and more accurate in areas that have a traditional seismic network, and can provide life-saving early warning in countries that have no seismic network."
Earthquake-prone countries in the developing world with poor ground-based seismic network or early warning systems include Nepal, Peru, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, he said.
The algorithm behind MyShake, developed by a handful of Silicon Valley programmers, relies on the same technology smartphone gamers depend on to sense the phone's orientation, known as the accelerometer, in order to measure movement caused by quakes.
What smartphones lack in sensitivity - they can only record earthquakes above magnitude 5 within 10 kilometers (6 miles) - they make up for in ubiquity.
Currently, 300 smartphones equipped with MyShake within a 110-km square area are enough to estimate a quake's location, magnitude and origin time.
There were some 3.4 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide in 2015, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, so the app's creators hope to build a seismic network covering the globe.
"We want to make this a killer app, where you put it on your phone and allow us to use your accelerometer, and we will deliver earthquake early warning," Allen said.
Sophisticated early-warning systems can warn of coming quakes as much as a few minutes before they begin, but cannot stop them causing death and destruction on a large scale.
Nepal is still rebuilding after two separate earthquakes in April and May 2015 that killed 9,000 people, injured more than 22,000 and damaged or destroyed nearly 900,000 houses.
(Reporting by Sebastien Malo, editing by Tim Pearce. Via the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change.)
In the latest crackdown on gay rights in Indonesia, the government has demanded all instant messaging apps remove same-sex emoticons or face a ban in the Muslim-majority country.
The emojis -- which are available on the popular apps LINE and Whatsapp as well as Facebook and Twitter -- depict same-sex couples holding hands and the rainbow flag, commonly used to symbolise the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
"Such contents are not allowed in Indonesia based on our cultural law and the religious norms and the operators must respect that," Ismail Cawidu, spokesman for the Communication and Information Ministry, told AFP Friday.
He said of particular concern was that the colourful emojis and stickers could appeal to children.
"Those things might be considered normal in some Western countries, while in Indonesia it's practically impossible," he said.
Cawidu said the ministry had contacted all companies that used such content, including Twitter and Facebook, and failure to comply with the request to remove the emojis could lead to the apps being banned in Indonesia.
LINE Indonesia has already removed its gay emojis from online stores and issued an apology.
"LINE regrets the incidents of some stickers which are considered sensitive by many people," the messaging app said in a statement.
"We ask for your understanding because at the moment we are working on this issue to remove the stickers."
While homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, the topic remains a controversial subject.
In January, the University of Indonesia told a support group providing sex education and counselling for LGBT students that they did not have permission to hold meetings on campus.
And last year Aceh, the only province in Indonesia which implements sharia law, introduced caning as a punishment for gay sex.
Prominent gay activist Hartoyo said the move to ban the emojis was symptomatic of a wider crackdown on LGBT rights.
"This is just the latest in a series of incidents that have happened recently," he said.
"The government has let this ignorance go on for far too long and it has put our nation in danger."
Entire-home listings were targeted for removal as the home-sharing tech company was facing intense criticism from New York authorities over its service
Airbnb “purged” more than 1,000 listings from its site in order to rig a survey of its New York City hosts, according to a new report released on Wednesday.
The move came as the home-sharing tech company was facing intense criticism from New York authorities. According to the report, compiled by watchdog Inside Airbnb, the “purge” targeted entire-home listings, which allow Airbnb users to rent an entire apartment, from people with multiple properties on the service, a particular issue with New York authorities.
A report released by the New York state attorney general’s office in October 2014 said that about 72 percent of Airbnb’s listings potentially violated local laws, which mandate that short-term rentals have to be rented out for more than 30 days.
New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has been closely monitoring the company amid concerns that it is impacting New York’s rental market. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The alleged purge occurred before 1 December when Airbnb released data on its New York City hosts. In its December report, Airbnb claimed that as of 17 November, 95 percent of its “entire home” hosts had only one listing. During the first half of November, entire-home listings by such hosts dropped from 19 percent to 10 percent.
“That claim was true for less than two weeks of the year,” claimed the Inside Airbnb report.
“Airbnb’s one-time purge was a PR effort, and does not indicate a change of heart for the company. No similar event took place in other cities in North America or elsewhere,” wrote the report’s authors, Murray Cox and Tom Slee. “Contrary to Airbnb projections, levels of multiple-listing entire homes have already jumped back to 13 percent of the total, only two months after the purge.”
According to Airbnb, the number of hosts with one listing has remained basically unchanged since mid-November. On Monday 8 February, that number was 18,010 hosts, which is about 94 percent of New York hosts. In November, that number was 16,886 -- or about 95 percent of hosts.
An Airbnb spokesman pointed out that the last weekend of October is usually a busy time for Airbnb as many people visit New York City for Halloween and the New York City marathon. According to him, the busy weekend at the end of October could explain the drop in listings at the beginning of November.
When asked if the number of hosts with multiple listings was 19% in the months prior to November as suggested in the Inside Airbnb report, the Airbnb spokesman declined to comment on the accuracy of that data.
“The facts are clear for all to see – the vast majority of our hosts are everyday people who have just one listing and share their space a few nights a month to help make ends meet. Airbnb is an open people-to-people platform where listings come on and go off throughout the year,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement.
“We’ve also done significant work to educate our community about what is in the best interest of their city and we routinely review our listings to ensure guests are having the quality, local experience they expect and deserve.”
When Airbnb released its initial data in 2015, it said it was doing so to “help policymakers craft smart rules for home sharing”. One of the local politicians interested in the issue is New York City councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, who said she was surprised by the report.
“This analysis calls into question the overall accuracy of the data Airbnb provided and how genuine Airbnb is about the “community compact” they presented to NYC government officials and the media in December 2015,” Rosenthal said of Wednesday’s report. “It raises two further questions: one, are there other discrepancies in the data Airbnb provided to the public? Two, do these or other factual discrepancies exist in the offering documents Airbnb used to raise capital from investors?”
Liz Krueger, a New York state senator, was also skeptical of Aibnb’s 2015 promise to work with city officials.
“Mark Twain reminded us that there are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies, and statistics – and Airbnb has certainly mastered the third kind. Far from being open and transparent, this report shows that Airbnb intentionally misled the press and elected officials in New York,” she said. “If Airbnb really wants to work with the community, they should cooperate with city enforcement officials and ensure their users obey the law.”
Twenty-four percent of U.S. teens say they’re online “almost constantly.” Now much of that time, it seems, is spent incessantly compiling and navigating vast collections and streams of images.
In a 2014 survey, the photo sharing app Instagram supplanted Twitter as the social media platform considered “most important” by U.S. teens.
These results stayed the same for 2015, confirming just how crucial image sharing and consumption have become to young people’s everyday online experiences. Not surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter have since become more image-driven. And Snapchat – which enables users to create and share ephemeral photographs and short videos – is one of the fastest-growing social networks.
Indeed, our relationship with photographs is rapidly changing. As we snap, store and communicate with thousands of images on our phones and computers, a number of researchers and theorists are already beginning to point to some of the unintended consequences of this “image overload,” which range from heightened anxiety to memory impairment.
Overwhelmed – and distracted – by images
In the Rhetoric of Photography course that I’ve taught at the University of Texas at Austin over the past few years, image glut was a constant topic of discussion among my students.
They repeatedly expressed feeling overrun by photographs and addicted to posting images. They even waxed nostalgic about the clunky plastic cameras of their childhoods, wistfully recalling the days of limited exposures and a waiting period before seeing their developed prints.
“Images are produced, commodified, made public and circulated on an unprecedented scale,” sociologist Martin Hand writes in his book Ubiquitous Photography.
Image overload hinges on feeling visually saturated – the sense that because there’s so much visual material to see, remembering an individual photograph becomes nearly impossible.
For my students, this feeling was marked at times by general frustration, low-grade anxiety and flat-out fatigue. Image overload also suggests a level of exhaustion with the process of monitoring and creating photo streams – surviving the pressure to digitally document one’s everyday life and to bear witness to others’ ever-growing image banks.
Many accumulate thousands of images on their phones and digital cameras. The daunting task of organizing, altering and deleting these can evoke feelings of dread. Indeed, according to a 2015 report, the average smartphone user has 630 photos stored on his or her device.
Martin Hand also notes the “degrees of anxiety, concern and fascination” that his own students demonstrated in response to the daunting demands of public image proliferation and upkeep.
“Aside from anxieties about accidental deletion or irrevocable loss,” Hand continues, “people often express concern over the inability to organize, classify or even look at all their digital images in ways that are meaningful for them.”
Meanwhile, Fred Ritchin, the Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography, argues that the constant stream of visual information contributes to the kind of fragmented focus that former Microsoft executive Linda Stone calls “continual partial attention.”
In other words, by always being tuned in and responsive to digital technologies, we become less aware of our surroundings. As our attention succumbs to the allure of being someplace else, our concentration suffers.
Garry argues that a constant flood of photographs doesn’t actively inspire remembrance or generate understanding. As Garry explains, narratives are crucial to memory formation. When viewing a barrage of images, unless there’s some sort of timeline, contextualization or intense focus, we’ll fail to place the image within an overarching story – and it becomes that much more difficult to retain the memory of the image.
Meanwhile, through her research, psychologist Linda Henkel has encountered what she describes as the “photo-taking impairment effect” – the idea that photographing may discourage remembering.
In Henkel’s study, students who visited an art museum with cameras in tow remembered fewer of the objects they photographed than those they simply observed. And if they did remember the photographed object, they were less likely to recall specific details.
However, a second study found that if a student took the time to zoom in on an object, their memory was not impaired – an indication that increased attention and cognitive engagement can counteract this effect.
Snapping photos in the here and now
During my third semester teaching The Rhetoric of Photography, I created an assignment to allow my students to explore their concerns about image overload.
Students would spend at least a week shooting with a disposable camera before developing their film and writing about the experience. I specifically asked them to comment on film scarcity, the inability to digitally manipulate or review images, the feel of the camera and the delay between shooting and seeing their photographs.
Reflecting on the disposable camera assignment, many students delighted in the deliberately slow pace of the process.
“Without the option to manipulate or review each of these photos, I had to think even further about the size of my frame, lighting orientation and subject proximity to the camera lens,” one student wrote. “Capturing in this way was satisfying and relaxing. Despite the fact that I could not alter or delete exposures, I had the opportunity to breathe and set up the perfect shot.”
Another commented, “While modern technology has given us the comfort of not having to physically move around as much to take a photograph, when you actually do it you feel more in the moment.”
Students seemed able to achieve the type of heightened focus that Henkel argues may enhance memories. Many students simply felt liberated. The pressure to alter an image until it was just right for public consumption was lifted.
The stress and anxiety my students routinely referred to speaks to the changing role of images, especially for younger generations. No longer do photographs primarily function as works of art or memorial objects.
Even though photography may still capitalize on its primary function as a memory tool for documenting a person’s past, we are witnessing a significant shift, especially among the younger generation, toward using it as an instrument for interaction and peer bonding.
Part of what image overload may well register, then, is the regular pressure to communicate through photographs, which requires a series of ensuing steps beyond simply clicking the shutter: editing, posting, promoting, and responding.
At the end of the assignment, students had roughly 24 pictures to show for their week (fewer than some might post online in a typical day). But they came away with a clearer sense of their own patterns of perception and photographic engagement. They also gained confidence in their capacity to step back (if only slightly) from nonstop image feeds.
With photo streams continuing to proliferate, greater self-awareness can counteract feelings of drowning amidst a flood of images. And by engaging with analog technologies like disposable cameras, we’ll be better equipped to foster a slower, more intentional form of attention that’s crucial to defending our memories and sensations from being washed away.
When Twitter Inc reports results on Wednesday, a less than stellar showing could hammer the stock further as a broad selloff in the technology sector has made investors jittery.
Twitter's shares have lost more than two-thirds of their value in the past 12 months.
Several tech stocks with lofty valuations have plunged in the past few days after dismal sales outlook from LinkedIn Corp and business-analytics company Tableau Software fueled growth fears for the entire sector.
"I think the problem is that in the current market any sign of a weak outlook will be quite harshly punished," Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell said.
Investors want to see Chief Executive Jack Dorsey's strategy to reignite growth in user numbers.
Twitter reported an 11 percent growth in active monthly users in the third quarter to 320 million, the slowest growth since the company went public in 2013.
But one effort, Moments, which showcases Twitter's best tweets and content, has failed to take off as expected, analysts have said.
Twitter is also planning to reorder tweets to prioritize those it believes more users will want to see, BuzzFeed reported on Friday.
Many users decried the reported plan, with the hashtag #RIPTwitter becoming the top trending U.S. item on Twitter on Saturday.
Twitter has been criticized for trying to become more like Facebook Inc, which has been growing at a much faster rate and reported 1.59 billion active monthly users in January.
"We expect only modest sequential user growth (for Twitter) in 2016, likely 1 percent per quarter," Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a preview note on Friday.
Analysts expect Twitter to report earnings of 12 cents per share on revenue of $709.9 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Jack of two trades
Another lingering concern has been Dorsey's dual role of running Twitter as well as mobile payments company Square Inc.
Dorsey, who became interim CEO in July and then CEO in October, has called for "bold rethinking" about the company but has not yet clarified what that means.
Dorsey has also moved to restructure the company by laying off more than 300 employees and making marquee hires, notably that of former Google executive Omid Kordestani as executive chairman.
But four senior executives have quit the company in the past few months, adding another concern about the company's ability to restart growth.
"We believe that had Moments been an early success, the executives would not have left so soon, voluntarily or otherwise," Wedbush analysts wrote.
As of Monday, Twitter shares were trading at 25.7 times forward earnings, shy of Facebook's 30.4.
"Why would you invest in something like a Twitter when Facebook is on a similar valuation with a stronger trajectory - that's the kind of questions investors are asking," Cordwell said.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Abhirup Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency's website this week.
(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing By Cynthia Osterman)
Tesla Motors Inc faces a pivotal moment Wednesday in its fight to convince skeptical investors that it can still win against traditional auto makers in the competition to reshape the auto business.
The Silicon Valley electric luxury car maker reports results on Wednesday after the close of Wall Street markets. Analysts expect quarterly earnings of 8 cents per share on revenue of $1.79 billion.
Many investors are not waiting to see how the company fares against expectations. They're selling, pushing Tesla shares to a slightly more than two-year low on Monday, extending last week's decline of 15 percent after several analysts cut price targets or lowered revenue expectations. Shares closed down 9 percent on Monday, at $147.99.
Tesla shares are now down 33 percent from the price of the company's stock offering last August, valued at about $642.5 million, designed to replace cash that was burned funding engineering of new models and the construction of a battery factory in Nevada.
One person not selling is Chief Executive Elon Musk, who exercised options worth about $100 million on Jan. 27 and held the shares.
Uncertainty about Tesla's prospects revolves around some short-term concerns and a broader long-term threat from the old-line auto companies of Detroit, Germany and Japan.
In the short run, investors are watching for Musk to say how quickly Tesla can ramp up production of the new Model X SUV, which launched in September.
In January, Tesla said it delivered a total of 17,400 vehicles in the fourth quarter, just above the low end of its forecast. Of those, only 208 were Model X vehicles.
Analysts also are questioning whether Tesla's long-promised moderately priced car, the Model 3, will be delayed beyond its current projected 2017 launch date.
Questions about the Model 3 are more pointed now that General Motors Co has confirmed it expects its $35,000 Chevy Bolt electric car to launch at the end of this year.
German competitors also are speeding up plans to offer luxury electric cars. Established automakers were slow to respond to Tesla's technological lead in offering customers new features via over-the-air software upgrades, for example, but others are now investing to catch up.
Tesla now faces "sleepy (auto) giants waking up," according to analysts Adam Hull and Paul Kratz from German bank Berenberg, who initiated coverage of Tesla with a "sell" rating.
(Reporting by Alexandria Sage; Editing by Joe White and Leslie Adler)
People use a lot of words to describe the reviled cockroach: disgusting, ugly, sneaky and repulsive, to name a few. But it may be time to add a surprising new one: inspirational.
Scientists said on Monday they have built a small search-and-rescue robot, inspired by the ability of cockroaches to squeeze through tiny crevices, designed to navigate through rubble to find survivors after natural disasters or bombings.
"We feel strongly that cockroaches are one of nature's most revolting animals, but they can teach us important design principles," University of California, Berkeley integrative biology professor Robert Full said.
Using a specially built obstacle course, the researchers observed how cockroaches scurried in less than a second through crevices smaller than a quarter of their height by compressing their jointed exoskeletons in half.
Once inside the crevice, the cockroaches managed to move rapidly, at nearly 20 body lengths per second, with their legs splayed completely out to their sides.
"If you scale it up to the size of a human, it would be equivalent to about 70 miles per hour (113 kph), over twice the speed of the fastest sprinter," said Harvard University biologist Kaushik Jayaram, who worked on the research while at UC-Berkeley.
The researchers said the cockroaches were about a half inch (13 mm) tall when they ran freely, but compressed their bodies to about a 10th of an inch (2.5 mm) to get through cracks.
Experts have been studying animal locomotion in order to invent robots that can maneuver in tough environments. For example, sidewinder rattlesnakes inspired a serpentine robot.
"Nature has a library of design ideas. This diversity enables discovery. You never know where basic research will lead. The most important discoveries are often from the most unexpected creatures, some of which are disgusting," Full added.
The observations involving the species Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach, inspired the design of a prototype soft-bodied, multi-legged robot called CRAM (Compressible Robot with Articulated Mechanisms) that in the future could be used in swarms to help locate survivors in collapsed structures.
The simple and inexpensive robot, 7 inches (18 cm) long, 3 inches (7.6 cm) tall and weighing 1.6 ounces (46 grams), was constructed using an origami-like manufacturing technique, Jayaram said. It can reorient its legs and compress its body like a cockroach to get through "vertically confined spaces," Jayaram added.
The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
India introduced rules on Monday to prevent Internet service providers from having different pricing policies for accessing different parts of the Web, in a setback to Facebook Inc's plan to roll out a pared-back free Internet service to the masses.
The new rules came after a two-month long consultation process that saw Facebook launching a big advertisement campaign in support of its Free Basics program, which runs in more than 35 developing countries.
The program offers pared-down Internet services on mobile phones, along with access to the company's own social network and messaging services, without charge.
The service, earlier known as internet.org, has also run into trouble in other countries that have accused Facebook of infringing the principle of net neutrality - the concept that all websites and data on the Internet are treated equally.
Critics and Internet activists argue that allowing access to a select few apps and Web services for free would put small content providers and start-ups that don't participate at a disadvantage.
"While disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet and the opportunities it brings," Facebook said in an emailed statement.
On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which had suspended the free Facebook service pending a policy decision, said Internet service providers would not be allowed to discriminate on pricing for different Web services.
"Essentially everything on the Internet is agnostic in the sense that it cannot be priced differently," TRAI chairman Ram Sevak Sharma said at a news conference.
Although the new rules will also have implications for plans by Indian telecom operators to make money from rapidly surging Web traffic through differential pricing, Facebook's campaign turned the spotlight on the social networking giant.
Free Basics is part Facebook's ambition to expand in its largest market outside the United States. Only 252 million out of India's 1.3 billion people have Internet access.
"We are delighted by the regulator's recognition of the irreversible damage that stands to be done to the open Internet by allowing differential pricing," said Mishi Choudhary, a New York-based lawyer who led an online campaign against Facebook.
Facebook shares were down 2.7 percent at $101.30 in early trading on the Nasdaq amid broad weakness in U.S. markets.
(Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal; Writing by Himank Sharma; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee, Mark Potter and Ted Kerr)
Stumping for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Tinder is getting some women banned from the online dating app after sending campaign messages to prospective matches.
Two women - one from Iowa and the other from New Jersey - confirmed to Reuters on Friday that they received notices from Tinder in the previous 24 hours that their accounts were locked because they had been reported too many times for peppering men on the site with messages promoting Sanders' candidacy.
Robyn Gedrich, 23, said she sent messages to 60 people a day for the past two weeks trying to convince them to support the U.S. senator from Vermont in his race for the Democratic nomination against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"Do you feel the bern?" her message to other Tinder users read, parroting a Sanders campaign slogan. "Please text WORK to 82623 for me. Thanks."
Gedrich, an assistant store manager at retailer Elie Tahari who lives in Brick, New Jersey, said a text would prompt people to start receiving updates from the Sanders campaign, as well as a link where they could sign up and volunteer. She has been unable to sign back into Tinder since logging off on Thursday.
Haley Lent, 22, a photographer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told Reuters in a Twitter message that she also got locked out of the app on Thursday night after sending messages trying to convince people to vote for Sanders the previous night.
Lent, who is married, said she talked to 50 to 100 people on the app. She had even bought a Tinder premium membership, which allows users to change their location, for a month so that she could reach people in New Hampshire and promote Sanders.
"I would ask them if they were going to vote in their upcoming primaries," she said. "If they said no or were on the fence, I would try to talk to them and persuade them to vote."
A spokeswoman for Tinder, which is part of Match Group Inc, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp , did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
SWIPE RIGHT FOR BERNIE?
The two women are the not only ones making unusual use of Tinder, better known as a "hook-up" app, as a campaign tool. A Facebook group "Bernie Sanders Dank Tinder Convos" has 782 members.
On Yahoo's Tumblr microblogging site, a thread titled "Tinder Campaigning, The adventures of a perpetual right-swiper in the efforts of electing Bernie Sanders" has dozens of conversations referencing Sanders pulled from Tinder. "Swiping right" is a colloquial reference to approving of a potential match on Tinder.
Gedrich said she got mixed responses from the 300 Tinder users who replied. "Some people would ask what is this for, and I would kind of explain," she said. "Some of them would unmatch me or report me as a bot." A bot (or robot) account is a scam profile used to send spam messages.
Some responses simply read, "Trump2016," expressing support for Republican candidate Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon. "It was really alarming to see that a lot of people don't know what's going on in the world," she said.
None of her matches resulted in an actual date, she said.
(Editing by Anjali Athavaley, Dan Burns and Dan Grebler)
