Month: May 2018

Just a few more months...

First, the good news: Nintendo will finally begin offering a way for Nintendo Switch owners to back up their currently vulnerable game save data starting in September. Now, the bad news: that feature will only be offered to players who spend $20 a year for Nintendo's first-ever paid online subscription service.

"Nintendo Switch Online," which the company has been teasing for well over a year, will include an unexpected "Save Data Cloud Backup" feature, the company announced Monday evening. A Nintendo PR e-mail promises the feature will be "great for people who want to retrieve their data if they lose, break or purchase an additional Nintendo Switch system." But it also warns that cloud saves will only be available "for most games," with no details of which ones will be left out. More details of how cloud saves will work will be available at a later date.

The subscription service will be required to play any Nintendo Switch games' online modes from September onward. Games like Splatoon 2 and ARMS can currently be played online for free; that will change once Switch Online launches later this year.

On Monday, Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash posted this image of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testing something at what was formerly known as Oculus Research. Now, these tests take place at Facebook Reality Labs. (credit: Oculus)

Nearly four years ago, Facebook paid roughly $2 billion to acquire the virtual reality company Oculus, yet since then, Oculus has continued operating as a formal, separate entity. All of the shared companies' VR hardware and software have been sold and marketed under the "Oculus" brand, though sometimes with a "from Facebook" disclaimer.

That's still the case, but Monday marked the first notable divergence from this trend. That's when Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash announced a pretty significant pivot. "Oculus Research has a new name—starting today, we will be known as Facebook Reality Labs (FRL)," he wrote (using Facebook, no less).

His announcement immediately assured readers that "our focus on the future hasn't changed." Abrash used the post to point out that FRL had already been "helping Oculus and all of Facebook create trailblazing AR [augmented reality] and VR experiences, from what's most affordable to leading edge." He then described a future in which mixed-reality technologies will usher in "the second great wave of human-oriented computing." Abrash did not lean into his division's new name and describe any upcoming products as "FR" or "Facebook Reality" experiences.

Enlarge / NTSB officials inspecting the vehicle that killed Elaine Herzberg. (credit: NTSB)

The fatal crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, in March occurred because of a software bug in Uber's self-driving car technology, The Information's Amir Efrati reported on Monday. According to two anonymous sources who talked to Efrati, Uber's sensors did, in fact, detect Herzberg as she crossed the street with her bicycle. Unfortunately, the software classified her as a "false positive" and decided it didn't need to stop for her.

Distinguishing between real objects and illusory ones is one of the most basic challenges of developing self-driving car software. Software needs to detect objects like cars, pedestrians, and large rocks in its path and stop or swerve to avoid them. However, there may be other objects—like a plastic bag in the road or a trash can on the sidewalk—that a car can safely ignore. Sensor anomalies may also cause software to detect apparent objects where no objects actually exist.

Software designers face a basic tradeoff here. If the software is programmed to be too cautious, the ride will be slow and jerky, as the car constantly slows down for objects that pose no threat to the car or aren't there at all. Tuning the software in the opposite direction will produce a smooth ride most of the time—but at the risk that the software will occasionally ignore a real object. According to Efrati, that's what happened in Tempe in March—and unfortunately the "real object" was a human being.

Enlarge / Two spaces are better. Well, at least to me. (credit: Nora Karol Photography/Getty Images)

In what may be one of the most controversial studies of the year, researchers at Skidmore College—clearly triggered by a change in the American Psychological Association (APA) style book—sought to quantify the benefits of two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. After conducting an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students, Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay L. Schmitt found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading. The research was trumpeted by some press outlets as a vindication of two-spacers' superiority.

For anyone who learned their keyboarding skills on a typewriter rather than a computer—and for the many who developed their keyboard muscle memory using software packages such as Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing—the double-space after the period is a deeply ingrained truth. While modern style, based on the fallacy that computer typography makes such double-spaces redundant and Paleolithic, has demanded the deprecation of the second tap of the space bar after a punctuation full-stop, many have openly resisted this heresy, believing that the extra space is a courtesy to the reader and enhances the legibility of the text.

Previous cognitive science research has been divided on the issue. Some research has suggested closer spacing of the beginning of a new sentence may allow a reader to capture more characters in their parafoveal vision—the area of the retina just outside the area of focus, or fovea—and thus start processing the information sooner (though experimental evidence of that was not very strong). Other prior research has inferred that an extra space prevents lateral interference in processing text, making it easier for the reader to identify the word in focus. But no prior research found by Johnson, Bui, and Schmitt actually measured reader performance with each typographic scheme.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Hawk / Flickr)

On Monday, Google announced that it will no longer allow ads from bail-bond companies.

This isn't the first time Google has singled out an entire industry. In 2016, it banned ads from payday lenders.

In a blog post, the company suggested that such ads constitute a "deceptive or harmful product," citing a 2016 study concluding that minority and low-income communities are typically most affected by such services. "For-profit bail-bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low-income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years," Google wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | ljhimages)

AT&T will appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to avoid a government lawsuit over its throttling of unlimited data plans.

The Federal Trade Commission sued AT&T in October 2014 in US District Court in Northern California, alleging that AT&T promised unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttled their speeds by as much as 90 percent. In response, AT&T argues that the FTC has no jurisdiction over any aspect of AT&T's business because the FTC lacks authority to regulate common carriers.

AT&T won a key ruling in the case in August 2016, but the most recent federal appeals court decision went in favor of the FTC. That's why AT&T is headed to the nation's top court.

Enlarge / Demonstrators protest outside of a speech by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who popularized the term "alt-right," at Michigan State University on March 5, 2018. (credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Domain registrar GoDaddy has stopped providing domain-registration service to altright.com, knocking the hate site offline. The site was the brainchild of Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who coined the term "alt right" to describe white nationalist beliefs. GoDaddy made the decision last Thursday, days after the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights sent GoDaddy a letter asking for the site to be shut down.

"Altright.com is in clear violation of GoDaddy's terms of service as it includes content actively inciting violence, particularly against racial and ethnic minorities," the group wrote in a late April letter.

The group cited GoDaddy's 2017 decision to blacklist the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer as a precedent. GoDaddy banned the Stormer after its editor wrote a vulgar post mocking Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed during last year's white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Enlarge (credit: Breakthrough Initiative)

It has been about two years since Yuri Milner announced his most audacious piece of science-focused philanthropy: Breakthrough Starshot, an attempt to send hardware to Alpha Centauri by mid-century. Although the technology involved is a reasonable extrapolation of things we already know how to make, being able to create materials and technology that create that extrapolation is a serious challenge. So much of Breakthrough Starshot's early funding has gone to figuring out what improvements on current technology are needed.

Perhaps the least well-understood developments we need come in the form of the light sail that will be needed to accelerate the starshots to 20 percent of the speed of light. We've only put two examples of light-driven sails into space, and they aren't anything close to what is necessary for Breakthrough Starshot. So, in this week's edition of Nature Materials, a team of Caltech scientists looks at what we'd need to do to go from those examples to something capable of interstellar travel.

The size of the problem

One of our best examples of a light sail was put into space on the IKAROS craft, which was capable of accelerating up to speeds of 400 meters/second. Breakthrough Starshot's craft are expected to travel in the area of 60,000 kilometers/second and accelerate to that speed before leaving the Solar System. So the amount we can learn from the existing craft is fairly limited.