Category: Uncategorised

(credit: Pearl)

There have been a lot of rumors over the past year or so about Apple secretly working on a car. While we don't have anything concrete to report on that front, we do know that some former Apple employees have left the mothership to work on car-related tech. Their company is called Pearl, and it just emerged from stealth mode with a rather cool wireless backup camera system, called RearVision.

As you might know, Congress has mandated that all cars from 2019 have a backup camera installed. And indeed, many new cars come with backup cameras already, with varying quality (some of them are truly horrible). But with about 260 million cars already on the road, the vast majority have to rely on old-fashioned mirrors to see behind them. Enter RearVision. We spoke with company cofounder and CEO Bryson Gardner ahead of the launch to find out a bit more.

"At Apple we loved taking the very latest technology and getting it into the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible," Gardner told Ars. "We wanted to find something that was infused with technology but ripe for change—we started looking at how technology gets into cars, and it's quite an extended timeline. There's a long design cycle, and it only appears in some makes and models; it can take 10 to 20 years to appear across the production line. The other challenge is the technology in new cars is designed to be stagnant, so it stays the same throughout the lifetime of the car, which is over 17 years now."

(credit: Erik (HASH) Hersman)

Reproducibility of findings has been a hot-button issue in social science over the last year, and as the election approaches, the reproducibility of findings related to voting is especially relevant. A recent study published in PNAS reassesses previously published data about ways to increase voter turnout and finds that language cues actually don’t have a significant effect on voter behavior.

The study revisits some field experiments conducted by Bryan et. al., which were also published in PNAS. These earlier experiments looked at voter behavior during the 2008 presidential election in California and the 2009 gubernatorial election in New Jersey. Using online surveys to prime voters, the previous study had shown that use of nouns or verbs affected whether voters went to the polls—verbs did better at getting out the vote.

This new study follows up on that work, looking at how subtle language manipulations can prime the behavior of voters.

Comparing racing sims to real cars driving on real race tracks has been a thing for a while now. Way back in 2006, Jeremy Clarkson went head-to-head against himself at Laguna Seca in real life versus Gran Turismo 4. And I've been known to use Forza as a way of doing some training ahead of going racing for real. Now, courtesy of Castrol Edge you can watch two of the world's best racing drivers pit themselves against, well, themselves, in a pair of jaw-dropping hypercars at the Ascari Race Resort in Spain.

If you saw Top Gear this past weekend you'll know about the Aston Martin Vulcan. It's a track-only hypercar (i.e. it's not road-legal), made from beautifully crafted carbon fiber and powered by an 800hp V12 engine. Just 24 Vulcans will ever be built, and if you wanted one you needed to stump up more than $2.6 million. Exclusive stuff!

Darren Turner was behind the wheel of the real and digital Vulcans. Turner has a long background racing for Aston Martin's works team, having won Le Mans twice for the marque. And he's no stranger to simulators either; when he's not racing for Aston Martin, he runs a professional simulator business that racing drivers use to hone their skills away from the track.

(credit: Magic Pony)

Twitter has bought London-based machine learning outfit Magic Pony Technology, as it moves to bolster its video and image-sharing output.

The micro-blogging site has reportedly dropped $150 million (~£102 million) on Magic Pony, which offers tech that apparently improves low-quality pictures and videos on the fly by recognising patterns and textures.

Twitter's latest buyout represents its third machine-learning acquisition in two years: it scooped up Madbits in 2014, and Whetlab a year later.