Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Don't hunt for Pokémon and drive, kids... (credit: SOPHIA KEMBOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Since Pokémon Go's launch last summer, there have been plenty of anecdotal news reports and social media mentions of players being hurt or even killed while playing the game. A new study from Purdue University, though, uses detailed local traffic accident reports to suggest that Pokémon Go caused a marked increase in vehicular damage, injuries, and even deaths due to people playing the game while driving.

In the provocatively titled "Death by Pokémon Go" (which has been shared online but has yet to be peer-reviewed), Purdue professors Mara Faccio and John J. McConnell studied nearly 12,000 accident reports in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, in the months before and after Pokémon Go's July 6, 2016 launch. The authors then cross-referenced those reports with the locations of Pokéstops in the county (where players visit frequently to obtain necessary in-game items) to determine whether the introduction of a Pokéstop correlated with an increase in accident frequency, relative to intersections that didn't have them.

Getting at causation

While the incidence of traffic accidents increased across the county after Pokémon Go's introduction, that increase was a statistically significant 26.5 percent greater at intersections within 100 meters of a Pokéstop, compared to those farther away. All told, across the county, the authors estimate 134 extra accidents occurred near Pokéstops in the 148-day period immediately after the game came out, compared to the baseline where those Pokéstops didn't exist. That adds up to nearly $500,000 in vehicle damage, 31 additional injuries, and two additional deaths across the county, based on extrapolation from the accident reports.

Microsoft

Through the magic of the Play Store, the official Microsoft Office apps have arrived on Chromebooks. It has been a long journey to get here, with random individual Chromebook models gaining and losing Office support for the past year, but now, according to a report from Chrome Unboxed, the Office suite is live on all Chromebooks. You need an Office 365 subscription to actually save and edit a document, but if you're paying the $7-per-month fee, you can now fire up the apps on a Chromebook.

The Play Store on Chromebooks brings Android apps to the formerly "Web only" platform. For Microsoft Office, this means Chromebook users get the Android tablet version of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. Unlike nearly every other Android tablet app in existence, Microsoft's tablet apps are actually great! They offer a big-screen optimized interface that looks a lot like the Windows apps but with a smaller feature set. The Office apps are actually way better than Google's own Drive apps on a tablet, which are just stretched-out phone apps (although on Chromebooks, you'd use the Drive website.)

Enlarge

On Sunday, the 2017 Formula 1 season drew to a close with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It was a deathly boring end to a season that started with so much promise back in March. The series had a new owner, Liberty Media, which promised to stop ignoring things like the Internet and 21st century. The cars were wider and had more grip than seasons past. And there was the threat of actual competition between Mercedes-AMG and Ferrari as opposed to starting each race weekend knowing that a win by the three-pointed star was a foregone conclusion.

But repeated missteps by Ferrari after the summer break saw Lewis Hamilton clinch his fourth championship weeks ago, and the sad fact remains that technical rules changes meant to improve the racing didn't deliver anything of the sort. Indeed, so boring was the final race of the season (and to be honest, the two that preceded it) that the biggest story from Abu Dhabi was about the series' underwhelming new logo. But the weekend did actually deliver a rather thrilling race on the Yas Marina circuit; it's just that it happened the night before the main event and took place within F1 2017. Yes, it was the final race of F1's inaugural e-sports series.

As I've noted on a few occasions now, e-sports is finally getting some legitimacy from the motorsports world. At the end of last year, Formula E held a big-money rFactor 2 race in Las Vegas, pitching professional drivers against some of the world's best sim racers. A decade after Nissan and Sony started using Gran Turismo to find new racing talent, the FIA (which organizes global motorsport) officially sanctioned the latest version of that game. Just last week, the McLaren F1 team concluded a massive online competition to find its new simulator test driver. And then there was the F1 e-sports series, which was open to anyone with a copy of Codemasters' F1 game—in total 63,827 players took part in the online qualifying races earlier this year.

Enlarge / Concept image of the WFIRST space telescope. (credit: NASA)

First came the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, NASA is finalizing development of the James Webb Space Telescope for launch in 2019. And finally, the space agency is beginning to design and develop its next great space telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST.

This instrument will have a primary mirror of 2.4 meters, the same size as the Hubble's, and be designed to hunt for dark energy and spy on exoplanets. Although similar in size to Hubble, the WFIRST telescope's infrared instrument would have a field of view that is 100 times greater than the Hubble, allowing it to observe much more of the sky in less time. It was also supposed to carry a special coronagraph, which could block the light of stars and allow astronomers to observe exoplanets directly.

But a new report—released without fanfare on the Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holiday—calls into question the viability of the project. "The risks to the primary mission of WFIRST are significant and therefore the mission is not executable without adjustments and/or additional resources," the report states. It estimated the cost of the project at $3.9 billion to $4.2 billion, significantly above the project's $3.6 billion budget.