Month: May 2017

(credit: Court documents)

At the heart of Uber's litigation with Waymo is another oddly-named self-driving startup called Otto. That's the company founded by Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski right after he left Google, the job at which he was accused of illegally downloading more than 14,000 files. Levandowski sold Otto to Uber within a few months.

While the legal action between Uber and Waymo rages on, Uber is quietly ending another legal fight over the name "Otto" itself. Back in August, just after Uber's acquisition for $680 million, Otto was sued (PDF) by Clearpath Robotics, a large installed-robotics company with a headquarters in Kitchener, Ontario. Clearpath already had a division called OTTO Motors, which manufactured OTTO, described as "the first self-driving warehouse robot."

Comcast’s customer satisfaction score for subscription TV service fell 6 percent in a new survey, putting the company near the bottom of rankings published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Comcast’s score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI’s 100-point scale, a drop of more than 6 percent between 2016 and 2017. The ACSI’s 2017 report on telecommunications released this week attributed the decrease to “price hikes for Xfinity (Comcast) subscriptions.”

Satisfaction with pay-TV providers dropped industry-wide, tying the segment with Internet service (a product offered by the same companies) for last place in the ACSI’s rankings. The ACSI summarized the trend as follows:

Enlarge (credit: WAVY TV 10)

When a video showing a six-year-old girl getting yanked into the sea by a feisty sea lion went viral this week, her parents quickly received international flak—and some potentially critical health information. The online fuss is raising awareness of a severe infection called seal finger, along with some of the other dangers of messing with sea lions.

The infection, which can lead to severe inflammation and amputations if not properly treated, is rare but well-known to marine life experts and fisherman. It’s caused by Mycoplasma phocacerebrale, a type of bacteria known to live in the mouths of seals and sea lions. Mycoplasma species have several notable features, but a critical one for seal finger is that they’re difficult to kill with many standard antibiotics—something the parents of the snatched six-year-old would clearly want to know. If it weren’t for the Internet, they might not.

The girl, who was swiftly retrieved from the harbor by her quick-thinking grandfather, is reported to have a 5-by-10 centimeter wound on her lower body from her sea lion encounter. Her parents were unaware of the risk of seal finger infection until media reports about the viral video included marine experts, who mentioned the danger. The parents have since consulted with marine experts and doctors. Though it’s not certain that she has the infection, she’s receiving antibiotics as a precaution.

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With Destiny 2 moving the franchise to the PC for the first time, a lot of players were hoping Activision would use dedicated servers to ensure stability and reliability. The company mentioned last week that those hopes for a dedicated server wouldn't be fulfilled, but Destiny 2 Engineering Lead Mat Segur says the game's hybrid server model is a bit more complex than that announcements suggests.

Unlike the original Destiny, where matches were hosted on one player's console, "every activity in Destiny 2 is hosted by one of our servers," Segur said in a Bungie blog post yesterday. "That means you will never again suffer a host migration during your Raid attempt or Trials match."

But those servers won't handle all the data for every player in the game. While "the server is authoritative over how the game progresses... each player is authoritative over their own movement and abilities," Segur continued. "This allows us to give players the feeling of immediacy in all their moving and shooting—no matter where they live and no matter whom they choose to play with."

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Early in March, President Donald Trump surrendered his personal Android phone—the phone from which scores of controversial Twitter posts had been launched. Based on Twitter metadata, Trump retired the Android device after expressing outrage over the DNC's failure to let the FBI search its servers and taunting Arnold Schwarzenegger on March 5. The next day, he replaced it with an iPhone.

According to a report from Axios' Mike Allen, Twitter is the only application running on Trump's new iPhone. And on his current overseas trip, staff have tried to limit his screen time in order to reduce the volume of his 140-character missives, Allen wrote:

Enlarge (credit: Pool Olortiga Ramirez)

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may seem like taking responsibility for the sake of future generations. But the pace of climate change is certainly meaningful within a single lifetime.

One way to think about climate change, as explored in a new study led by Victoria University of Wellington’s Dave Frame, is that temperature patterns eventually move out of the range you’re accustomed to. Weather and climate are naturally variable, but if the climate shifts, unusual conditions can become the new normal. The “unusual” end of the spectrum gets replaced with more extreme conditions than before.

Defining the unknown

In this case, the researchers focus on the ratio of signal to noise—the warming change versus the normal range of variability. Specifically, starting with a bell curve distribution defined by the mean and the standard deviation, the researchers defined changes based on the average annual temperature by a standard deviation.