Month: October 2018

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address at the Google I/O 2018 Conference at Shoreline Amphitheater on May 8, 2018 in Mountain View, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

On Tuesday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an email to employees apologizing for the company’s inadequate response in the wake of a recent report in The New York Times. The newspaper chronicled three top executives who have received massive payouts over the past decade despite being credibly accused of sexual misconduct.

In the five-paragraph message, which was obtained by Ars, Pichai wrote that the company’s apology "wasn’t enough."

As he continued:

Enlarge / London's Millennium Bridge had issues with excessive shaking and swaying when it first opened in June 2000. (credit: Alberto Pezzali/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

When London's Millennium Bridge first opened in June 2000, the city was alarmed to discover that the motion of crowds of pedestrians crossing it gave rise to significant shaking and swaying. Londoners nicknamed it "Wobbly Bridge." Officials shut it down after just two days, and the bridge remained closed for the next two years until appropriate modifications could be made to stop the swaying.

It's not an entirely unknown phenomenon: there's a sign dating back to 1873 on London's Albert Bridge warning military troops to break their usual lock-step motion when crossing. The culprit was not Millennium Bridge's design. Rather, it was due to a weird synchronicity between the bridge's lateral (sideways) sway and pedestrians' gaits.

A new paper in Biology Letters sheds further light on this by simulating the biomechanics of large crowds of people walking on a bridge. While there have been many different approaches to studying these fascinating dynamics over the years—including a lab-based treadmill recreation of people walking across Millennium Bridge by Cambridge University engineer Allan McRobie—this is a significantly improved model of how people adjust their gait when walking on a wobbly surface, according to co-author Varun Joshi of Ohio State University. It suggests that one might not even need synchronization to cause the shaking.

Valentina Palladino

Apple already had the best tablet on the market with the iPad Pro, but for the company's target audience of creative and tech-y professionals and hobbyists, that wasn't always enough. Even the iPad "Pro" had limitations that made it hard to see it as a true laptop replacement. So, Apple has introduced new iPad Pro models that address some of those limitations while bringing in many of the company's biggest ideas from the newer iPhones.

I handled both of the new models at Apple's event in Brooklyn earlier today, and I was surprised how different they felt and looked compared to last year's models or even to this year's iPad. But what really matters is what's inside, and that's intriguing, too.

Enlarge / This is the sixth type of vehicle Waymo has added its self-driving technology to. The company has also ordered thousands of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans for its fleet. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo and the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced Tuesday that the Golden State had approved a permit for the self-driving-car company to drive in a handful of Silicon Valley cities.

Those cities include Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Sunnyvale, and Alphabet's home city of Mountain View.

Waymo, which was formerly a division of Alphabet subsidiary Google, has been allowed under state law to operate autonomous cars since 2014. The new permit, the DMV says, "allows the company to test a fleet of about three dozen test vehicles without drivers behind the wheel."

Enlarge / Giving online symptom checkers the hairy eyeball. (credit: Carol Munro / Flickr)

In 2015, The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) did a thorough audit of online symptom checkers. It found that, on average, the sites listed the correct diagnosis first only about a third of the time. Carl Shen, an ophthalmology resident at McMaster University, has led a team of researchers in a small-scale follow-up looking specifically at eye health and got equally concerning results: the correct diagnoses popped up first only a quarter of the time.

The results, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology this week, are early and provisional, but Dr. Shen and his team are planning a larger follow-up study. In the meantime, WebMD has done an update of its algorithm.

Vignettes of unpleasantries

To assess WebMD’s accuracy, Shen and his colleagues compiled 42 eye-health “clinical vignettes” based on the medical literature. A decidedly unpleasant vignette of someone suffering from acute angle-closure glaucoma, for instance, describes a “44-year-old woman present[ing] to ER... with severe pain around her right eye of four-hour duration... She is also nauseated and has thrown up once... Intraocular pressure is extremely elevated.”