Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Google Fiber equipment boxes in a Kansas City home in 2012. (credit: Google Fiber | Bloomberg)

One day last month, Kansas City resident Victoria Tane's Google Fiber Internet service stopped working.

It turned out that Google Fiber cut off her Internet access because she owed 12 cents after an odd series of events involving an unused e-mail address, automated customer account systems, and a sales tax increase. Google Fiber quickly restored her connection and forgave the 12-cent balance after she called customer service, but the incident highlights a problem that Google Fiber may need to fix in order to prevent other customers from losing service over similarly trivial amounts.

The Kansas City Star of Missouri detailed what happened in a story yesterday. Tane has Google Fiber's basic 5Mbps Internet service which has no monthly payment and required only a $300 construction fee. Google Fiber no longer offers that package to new customers, but those who signed up for it and paid the construction fee can use the service with no further payments for a total of seven years.

It turns out Mini had more up its sleeve for this year's Frankfurt Auto Show than just the Electric Concept we showed you last week. It's unwrapping another concept, one that looks suspiciously production-ready. It's called the John Cooper Works GP Concept, and it has me all hot and bothered. It's meant to be a pure expression of Mini-flavored driving fun. Or, as head of BMW Group design Adrian van Hooydonk says, "[what] we're looking at here is maximum performance, maximum Mini."

Who’s this John Cooper then?

Alec Issigonis was the designer responsible for the original mini. But would it have been quite the success it was without the influence of another engineer named John Cooper? He was a successful builder of racing cars in the 1950s and the man to realize that smaller, lighter, mid-engined cars were more than a match for the big front-engined competition in Formula 1 and at Indianapolis. When BMC wanted to polish its then-new Mini with a racing halo, it was to Cooper that it reached out.

Enlarge / Hurricane Irma creates enough uncertainty on its own. Don't add to it by sharing spaghetti plots. (credit: NOAA)

Nate Silver, the statistician and editor of FiveThirtyEight, is unquestionably a smart guy with an exceptionally good grasp of numbers and probability. But he's not a meteorologist. So when he shared a spaghetti plot of models for Hurricane Irma on Tuesday night, I had to shake my head. Just another social mediarologist.

Still some uncertainty in the Hurricane Irma forecast but more and more projections are converging on Florida. https://t.co/Tk8G06vz0g pic.twitter.com/ADFYTHTsdG

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 6, 2017

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not some kind of meteorologist elitist. Honestly, it doesn't take that much education to have a basic understanding of weather forecasting. And I don't have any problem with people looking at all of the available forecast data to draw their own conclusions about hurricane forecasts, and make decisions for their families in the face of a natural disaster.

But spaghetti plots are not good decision-making tools. Sorry, they're just not. To understand why, let's take a look at the models on Nate Silver's plot, which he shared with his 2.5 million followers at 7:34pm ET Tuesday:

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

YouTube announced some new features for its mobile apps, with one of the biggest being more livestream support. Now you can livestream content from apps on iOS that support ReplayKit, Apple's screen-casting framework. YouTube Gaming has supported ReplayKit since June, but this update brings the support to the main app and lets users livestream content other than games.

To livestream a ReplayKit app, you'll need to be running iOS 10.2 or later on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and you need the latest version of the YouTube app. Your account also needs 100 subscribers, which is YouTube's milestone that unlocks livestreaming for mobile creators. That number has been lowered over the past few months: in February the threshold was 10,000, in April it was lowered to 1,000, and recently it was lowered again to 100.

In a supported app, a "live" icon will appear on the screen while you're gaming, creating, or otherwise using the app, and you can tap that to bring up your livestreaming options. Choose the YouTube app from the list, give your livestream a title and a thumbnail image, and immediately you'll start livestreaming. The stream will show what's happening in the app along with the feed from your front-facing camera, including sound from your device's mic.