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(credit: Parkmerced)

Uber has announced a partnership with Parkmerced, an expanding townhome and apartment complex adjacent to San Francisco State University, which gives new residents who don't have cars a monthly $100 stipend as a way to encourage “car-free living.”

Residents must use at least $30 of the subsidy toward Uber rides, and they’ll pay a flat fee of $5 to travel from the residence to the nearby BART and MUNI stops. The remaining $70 will be auto-loaded to a Clipper Card, which can be used on nearly all of the Bay Area’s transit systems. The subsidy will last for the duration of the lease, up to two years.

“The immediate benefits to residents will be to decrease or eliminate the need for private car ownership, facilitate a more efficient commute, reduce transportation costs, and minimize the need for parking,” Rob Rosania, founder of Maximus Real Estate Partners, the developer of Parkmerced, said in a statement. Parkmerced is paying for the subsidy, not Uber.

(credit: Flickr user Scott Jones)

Intelligent design, the argument that life is so complex that it must have needed a sophisticated designer, was formulated to get around court rulings that banned creationism from being taught in science classes. For a while, there was an effort to get intelligent design into schools, but that came crashing down after a court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, recognized it as inherently religious. That court case is now more than a decade old, and it looks like some school districts have a short memory.

Zack Kopplin, an activist who has tracked attempts to sneak religious teachings into science classrooms, found a bit of sneaking going on in Youngstown, Ohio. There, a document hosted by the city schools includes a lesson plan that openly endorses intelligent design and suggests the students should be taught that there's a scientific controversy between it and evolution.

The document focuses on the "Diversity of Life" and is a bizarre mix of normal science and promotion of intelligent design. Most of the first page, for example, is taken up by evolution standards that have language that echoes that of the Next Generation Science Standards. But the discussion is preceded by a statement that's straight out of the "teach the controversy" approach: "The students examine the content of evolution and intelligent design and consider the merits and flaws of both sides of the argument." In fact, elsewhere in the document, teachers are told to host a debate where students take turns arguing for evolution and intelligent design.

It's not the first time that Google has been sued for its search rankings, but it's among the first in which the company's First Amendment defense is failing.

For the moment, a federal judge in Florida is allowing a search-censorship lawsuit to proceed against Google. Search engine optimization company E-ventures Worldwide claims (PDF) that Google wrongfully removed hundreds of its websites from Google search. E-ventures claims that it did not breach any of Google's terms of service but instead was hit in September 2014 because of "economic" and "anti-competitive" reasons. According to the ruling (PDF) by US District Judge John Steele of Florida:

While a claim based upon Google’s PageRanks or order of websites on Google’s search results may be barred by the First Amendment, plaintiff has not based its claims on the PageRanks or order assigned to its websites. Rather, plaintiff is alleging that as a result of its pages being removed from Google’s search results, Google falsely stated that e-ventures’ websites failed to comply with Google’s policies. Google is in fact defending on the basis that e-ventures’ websites were removed due to e-ventures’ failure to comply with Google’s policies. The Court finds that this speech is capable of being proven true or false since one can determine whether e-ventures did in fact violate Google’s policies. This makes this case distinguishable from the PageRanks situation. Therefore, this case does not involve protected pure opinion speech, and the First Amendment does not bar the claims as pled in the Second Amended Complaint.

Essentially, E-ventures is claiming that because its business focuses on getting websites higher rankings in Google's unpaid search listings, Google removed it and its affiliates so that companies will instead pay Google for higher rankings. "Google hopes that third parties read Google's publications and pay Google to be ranked higher in Google's search results," E-ventures said. "E-ventures hopes that third parties read E-ventures' publications and pay a SEO provider instead of Google to achieve the same result. In sum, Google has an anti-competitive, economic motivation to eliminate the visibility of E-ventures' websites on its search engine."

Example of Android Pay in PaymentRequest.

Today at Alphabet's annual developer's conference, the company announced a host of new tools for developers working with Android Pay—including support for Android Instant Apps, a new feature called PaymentRequest, and improvements to the Save To Android Pay API.

In a call with Ars on Tuesday, Senior Director of Product Management for Android Pay Pali Bhat said that the Android Pay team has been working to increase user signups and encourage continued use of the platform, something that all mobile payment platforms have struggled with in the last five years. “We have to deliver more utility and value," Bhat said.

The new Android Pay features announced today are a means to that end. For instance, Instant Apps—Android's new name for creating an app-like experience without having to download an app—will come with support for an Android Pay checkout feature. If users tap an Instant App URL, the app will run without installing or taking up valuable space on the user's phone. With an Android Pay button, an Instant App from a parking garage could speed along the checkout process, for example.

With Instant Apps, clicking a link can give you an app-like experience even if you don't have the app installed already. (credit: Google)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Mobile websites are often more convenient than their desktop counterparts when you're on your phone, but they're also usually missing some important functionality that's available (or just easier to find) on the desktop. Apps can help solve the problem, but only if you have the foresight and/or bandwidth to install them when you need them.

Android's just-announced Instant Apps feature, which should be available to all phones running Android 4.2 or later and via an update to the Google Play Services software coming "later this year," will attempt to bridge that gap. Instant Apps are designed to provide the richer, Android-native experience of an app combined with the convenience and the lower data and storage usage of a mobile website.

When users tap an Instant App URL, they are taken directly to an app that runs without installing. Developers who want to offer Instant Apps will have to modularize their apps so that users don't have to install the entire app just to use certain features of it—this is where most of the data savings come from. Google's examples included museum or resort apps with maps and schedules, along with apps that help you pay for parking. These are the kinds of rarely-used apps that are useful in the moment, though you wouldn't necessarily want to install them on your phone beforehand or keep them around afterward. Developers can, however, can provide "call to action" links that encourage users to download and install apps that they find particularly useful.