Month: April 2016

Amazon

The Kindle Oasis and its charging case.

5 more images in gallery

The new Kindle that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos teased last week has been officially unveiled, and it's not a replacement for the expensive Kindle Voyage but rather an even more expensive reader called the Kindle Oasis. The $290 device ($310 without Special Offers, $360 with optional free 3G service) is available for preorder now and customers will begin getting them on April 27th.

All recent Kindles have been riffs on the same basic design, a 6-inch touchscreen surrounded by symmetrical bezels. That design slowly replaced the old QWERTY keyboard non-touch versions starting around 2011 or so and had completely replaced the keyboarded Kindles by the time the Kindle DX was retired a couple of years later. The Oasis changes things up again, switching to an asymmetrical design that you flip over if you want to switch the hand you're holding it in; there's also a raised bump on the back to make holding the reader more comfortable. At its thinnest point, the reader is 0.13 inches (3.4mm), the bump is 0.33 inches (8.5mm) thick, and the reader weighs 4.6 ounces (131g).

One downside of that lighter, thinner design is that the Oasis by itself won't last as long as the other Kindles—Amazon says it will last about two weeks on a charge rather than a month. The good news is that the Oasis' included charging cover allows it to last for another six weeks for a total of two months of battery life. The cover comes in black, "merlot," and "walnut" finishes, and it adds a further 3.8 ounces (107g) to the total weight of the reader.

(credit: Ford)

The push for self-driving cars—at least here in the US—is happening mostly in the name of increasing road safety. More than 33,000 people die on US roads each year, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says its data shows that "in an estimated 94 percent of crashes, the critical cause is a human factor."

Advanced driver-assistance systems (think Tesla's autopilot or the semiautonomous mode on Audi's A4) are already a boon to drivers, reducing fatigue and keeping an ever-vigilant watch out for hazards, but the RAND Corporation has just published a study that suggests we may never be able to prove the safety of a self-driving car.

"Under even aggressive testing assumptions," the authors write, "existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. These results demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability."

(credit: National Cancer Institute)

Personal biases held by physicians and others in the field of healthcare continue to affect patients of all kinds. These can be biases about specific diseases or treatments, or biases about the patients themselves.

Pain management is one area in which racial disparities have been widely documented but haven’t been fully understood. A new study published in PNAS indicates that incorrect beliefs about racial differences cause white doctors and medical students to make less-appropriate pain-treatment recommendations. In short, black patients may be getting short-changed on pain management if their doctors think that black bodies are inherently stronger than white bodies.

To study the phenomenon of racial bias in pain treatment, the researchers conducted two studies. They first examined the beliefs of whites who were not medical professionals to establish baseline prejudices about pain perception for people of different backgrounds. They found that white adults with no medical training endorse at least some false beliefs about biological differences with black people, including the incorrect belief that blood coagulates at different speeds for people of different races.

Verizon workers rallying in July 2015, just before their contract expired. (credit: Communications Workers of America)

After 10 months of failed negotiations, 36,000 Verizon workers went on strike this morning. As a result, Verizon will use nonunion workers to perform repairs, network maintenance, and customer service on its fiber and copper wireline networks.

The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which complain that Verizon is seeking to move jobs offshore, outsource work to low-wage contractors, close call centers, and force technicians to go on months-long assignments away from home.

“Verizon executives want wireline technicians to work away from home for as long as two months at a time, anywhere from Massachusetts to Virginia, without seeing their families,” the CWA said yesterday. “Working parents like Isaac Collazo, a cable splicer from New York, fear they will be forced to choose between caring for their kids and keeping their jobs.”

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, chairman of the Article 29 Working Party.

Exceptions in the proposed EU-US Privacy Shield framework that would allow the US to carry out mass surveillance of EU citizens are "not acceptable," the Article 29 Working Party of EU data protection authorities said today in a press conference.

The Chairman of the group, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, explained that the Article 29 Working Party would look with "great interest" on the forthcoming ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on whether mass surveillance of EU citizens could be legal. If the CJEU finds that the surveillance carried out by GCHQ is unlawful, it would have a big impact on the national security exceptions included in Privacy Shield.

Falque-Pierrotin said that the data protection authorities also had some concerns about the independence and effectiveness of the Privacy Shield ombudsperson who will deal with complaints from Europeans about how their data has been used by the NSA.

Ford

The Ford GT: the company's birthday present to itself for finishing 1-2-3 at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. There's a 3.5L turbocharged EcoBoost engine that's good for more than 600 horsepower.

6 more images in gallery

So far, we've seen the new Ford GT in Forza, at auto shows, and on the track at Daytona. Deliveries of the 600hp (447kW) supercar begin later in the year, but with just 500 cars planned, many have wondered how they will be allocated. On Wednesday morning, the Blue Oval revealed its plan; customers will be chosen from online applicants, and if you have $400,000 and want a GT in your garage, you have until May 12th to apply.

On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke to Henry Ford III about the program. He told us there had been plenty of internal discussion on how to allocate 500 GTs across the 10,000 Ford dealers in the US and 18 other countries. "We want to put the car in the hands of people who are true brand ambassadors for Ford," he told us. That means people who will drive their GTs—to track days, to Cars and Coffee, and the like—rather than lock it away, or worse, flip it for a quick buck.

Senior management at Ford will review the applicant pool and make some hard choices after the May deadline. The lucky few will be guided through the ordering process by a concierge service that will liaise between the local Ford dealer and Ford Performance, the new division that is responsible for developing and building the GT (as well as some of Ford's other more interesting vehicles).