Wes Craiglow, a city planner for Conway, Arkansas, describes the small college town where he grew up and now works as “young and progressive.” But last year he’d noticed that Conway—home to about 60,000 residents in the Little Rock metro area—was overbuilding a lot of its residential streets. So he found an example of an overbuilt street, and another of a “right-sized” street, and patched them together into the above meme.
Craiglow’s point is that the design of a street, more so than any posted speed limit sign, invites drivers to go fast or slow. It’s a critical message at a time when cities around the U.S. and the world are turning to Vision Zero and 20’s Plenty campaigns that stress the safety advantages of slower traffic. As the Strong Towns blog noted in picking up the meme: “We can't regulate our way to safety.”
“Regulation may not be the best means to the end,” Craiglow, who originally posted the image to his Tumblr page in August 2014 and recently reposted it to social media, tells CityLab. “In fact design—the actual framework—is probably a more responsible, cost-effective, and meaningful method to get the same end.”
The top street in Craiglow’s meme is Remington Road. The street, located in a new suburban development, is an incredibly wide 36 feet curb-to-curb—the same dimensions as Conway’s minor arterials, which have two 12-foot travel lanes and 12-foot turn lane. “We built a minor arterial in a single-family residential area,” he says. The block is a full quarter-mile between intersections, inviting cars to speed from end to end, and the driveways hold about four cars each, meaning there’s no street parking to calm traffic.
”People’s normal reaction is to drive faster,” he says. “You take away the trees, you take away the sidewalks, and you have created a racetrack environment.”
In contrast, the bottom image shows Hunter Street, located in what Craiglow calls “one of our oldest neighborhoods.” Hunter is 20 feet edge to edge—just wide enough for two 10-foot lanes, which are considered far safer than 12-foot lanes. It has short blocks of 300 feet and no curb; instead, cars and trees line the street edges. The combination of parked cars, a tree canopy, and more pedestrians sends drivers a “wonderful psychological message” to slow down, he says.
Craiglow takes motivation from the Jane Jacobs’s line: “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.” He says that for too long now urban planners have provided only one choice, and that it’s time for them to show city residents the full “buffet” of living options. Some people will choose to live in the top photo, sure. But many will choose to live in the bottom photo. Still others will prefer a dense, mixed-use environment downtown.
“We need to create that,” he says. “And everything in between.”
As for how to improve the street-planning process, Craiglow suggests it’s time for traffic engineers, who tend to put car movement above all else, to share the stage with smart designers. “We have to drive home design, and what design means to our community,” he says. “We have to tell the engineers: You have to ride shotgun for a little while. You’re still in the front seat. You’re going to navigate. We’re going to do it together. But you can’t drive all the time.”
It's understandable why so many people are concerned about advertising directed at children — the average kid will see 25,000 TV ads a year before they turn 12, and that doesn't even include internet ads or product placement. Companies spend about $17 billion a year on advertising directed at children,...More »
Okay, damn it, fine, let's talk about Harris Faulkner and her insane likeness rights lawsuit against Hasbro over a toy hamster. I've been avoiding this stupidity since September, when the lawsuit was filed, because how do you even broach a topic like a cable news anchor suing a toy company over a tiny little inanimate hamster? In any case, Harris Faulkner, an award winning Fox News anchor, sued Hasbro over its "Harris Faulkner" hamster, alleging that the toy not only shared her name, but was an appropriation of her "unique and valuable name and distinctive persona." Her lawsuit, in fact, spends a great deal of time making sweet love to Faulkner's awesomeness for reasons I can't even begin to understand.
In her time at FNC, Faulkner has covered many major news stories. She has anchored key moments of FNC’s political coverage, including the 2013 government shutdown, the 2013 State of the Union Address, the 2012 vice presidential debate, and the 2012 election night. She has also reported on significant international news events, including the fall of Tripoli in 2011 and the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, as well as some of the most significant domestic news in recent memory, from the death of Whitney Houston, to the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, and the Emanuel A.M.E. Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hopefully lawyers for Hasbro will be willing to stipulate that Harris Faulkner is indeed the cat's pajamas. The problem is that, other than sharing the not-really-super-unique name Harris Faulkner, the tiny toy hamster doesn't share any of the likenesses that Faulkner has alleged.
Yeah, one of them is a lovely looking woman news anchor and the other is a hamster. That, combined with the absurdity of the idea that Hasbro was somehow marketing toy hamsters to Fox News loving tots really should be all that's necessary to understand how silly this all is. We don't really need to write out a blow by blow explanation of how Faulkner and this toy hamster aren't similar, do we? No, we don't, because Hasbro chose to do it for us in their response.
"First, Ms. Faulkner is an adult, African-American, human, female newscaster; the Hamster Toy is an inch-tall, cartoon-like plastic animal, which has no apparent gender or profession, or even clothing that might identify its gender or profession," Hasbro responds. "Second, contrary to Plaintiff’s allegation, the Hamster Toy does not have the same 'complexion' as Ms. Faulkner," continues Hasbro. "The animal depicted by the Hamster Toy has 'fur' (not skin), which is golden yellow, a wisp of 'hair' that is medium-brown, a pink nose,and a muzzle that is white. Third, despite Plaintiff’s claim, neither the 'shape' of the Hamster Toy’s eyes, nor the 'design of its eye makeup' misappropriate Ms. Faulkner’s likeness," Hasbro puts forth. "Ms. Faulkner has brown, almond-shaped eyes; the Hamster Toy has large, circular blue eyes."
Hasbro also asked the court to note that identical names aren't enough on their own to cause a valid publicity rights violation, so this whole thing comes down to whether Faulkner and the hamster are similar in appearance. Which they aren't. At all. As lovingly detailed above in one of the most absurdly awesome court rebuttals I've ever seen. However, Faulkner gets a chance to respond to Hasbro's response, which at this point I sincerely hope she does, because I want to see what her legal team comes up with next.
Publicity rights, man. They provide such entertainment.
A cyclist uses the Chrystie Street bike lane in lower Manhattan. (Streetfilms)
They showed up on the street on the morning of October 7—25 orange traffic cones marking the bike lane that runs northbound on Chrystie Street in lower Manhattan. Several had sunflowers poking up out of their necks.
The cones were the work of an anonymous group that announced its intentions on Twitter, calling itself the “Transformation Department.” Later they performed a similar action on Carlton Avenue in Brooklyn. This week, they were on Bleecker Street in the Village. They are posting pictures of the effects of the cones with the hashtag #demandmore.
An anonymous spokesperson for the group told Gothamist that its goal was simple:
Our mission is to show how easy it is to transform streets to make them better and safer for everyone. In less than a half hour, and with about $500 worth of cones and flowers, we were able to achieve something that often gets delayed by Department of Transportation bureaucracy or political fear.
The Chrystie Street bike lanes—one on the northbound side of the street and one on the southbound—are one of the city’s main commuter routes, providing key access to and from the Manhattan Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan. Thousands of people ride the route everyday, and that number has been growing steadily over the past several years.
But the infrastructure remains painfully inadequate in the eyes of many advocates for safer streets. Vehicles regularly park in the bike lanes on both sides of the two-way street, forcing cyclists into traffic (you can see that clearly in this short video from Streetfilms). Dangerous hummocks on the southbound side haven’t been repaired for years, because the street is scheduled to be repaved at some point in the future. That lane is frequently strewn with debris as well. Much of the paint on both sides had faded away until the lanes were recently repainted—after months of complaints.
David “Paco” Abraham, an advocate and frequent bike commuter, says that the way the New York City Department of Transportation has handled Chrystie Street raises questions about the city’s commitment to its Vision Zero policy. Launched with great fanfare at the beginning of Bill de Blasio’s administration, this push to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries seems to be languishing nearly two years into the mayor’s tenure.
“If it’s about truly changing the mode share and really making Vision Zero a priority, it makes sense to focus on where people are going,” says Abraham. “Chrystie Street could be a perfect spot for truly robust infrastructure. It’s kind of depressing that it takes so much efforts to get DOT to re-stripe, just to do basic maintenance.”
Installing flexible bollards to keep cars out of the bike lane would be one example of an improvement that would not require a street redesign and that could be implemented relatively quickly, says Abraham. Instead, even maintaining the status quo has proven difficult.
An NYC DOT spokesperson said in an email that a proposal for a two-way bike lane where the northbound lane is under review. “In terms of safety measures for bike lanes citywide, we favor a comprehensive approach,” the spokesperson wrote. “Once we determine a project that addresses the needs of all road users, we move forward with a plan that addresses the entire bike lane corridor. DOT repaints, replaces flexible delineators, repaves, and performs maintenance in its bike network citywide regularly.”
Thanks to initiatives that were started under the Bloomberg administration by then-DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, New York has become a much-touted national model for building a bike culture, installing hundreds of miles of new bike lanes and winning acclaim for the design of some of its infrastructure. The number of bike commuters doubled just between 2007 and 2011, and the advent of CitiBike, the country’s largest bike-share program, only solidified the place of bikes on the city’s streets.
As a result, people who bike have become a real constituency, and calls for better infrastructure are becoming a more mainstream idea. Earlier this year, Abraham brought a proposal for a separated two-way Chrystie Street bike lane to the local community board, and it received unanimous approval from the board’s transportation committee, as well as other neighborhood groups and elected officials. All the elected leaders representing the area signed on as well.
Nine months later, though, DOT has yet to say whether it is going to move forward with a Chrystie redesign, and the ongoing problems with the existing lane remain unaddressed.
Mayor Bill de Blasio discusses New York’s Vision Zero policy in January 2015. (NYC DOT / Flickr)
The makeshift safety cone installations are the most visible manifestation of the frustration that advocates and bike commuters like Abraham feel over the disconnect between the city’s stated policies and its actions on the street. “We’re tired of seeing people injured,” says Abraham. “We don’t want to see Vision Zero just be a bumper sticker. Things that are as obvious as Chrystie Street need to happen. It needed to happen yesterday.”
The Department of Transformation has clearly captured the imagination of some New Yorkers with its efforts. This week they set up a GoFundMe page to pay for more cones and raised $1,000 in a single day. Abraham says the ever-growing community of people who ride bikes—and more broadly, of New Yorkers who want the streets to be safe for all users—no longer will be satisfied with a minimalist approach to bike infrastructure.
“I have the utmost respect for the people at DOT, but there’s something broken in the system when it takes a year or two years of complaining to get paint back on the ground that’s already been approved,” says Abraham. “We expect DOT to do more. It’s 2015. They’re not going to win us over with presentations that could have been made in 2007.”
Whether you’re chatting with friends, streaming music or video calling family, Wi-Fi matters. You should have more router options that don’t involve spotty connections, messy cords and complicated settings. That’s why we introduced the first OnHub router this summer, designed to be fast, secure and easy to use—not to mention attractive enough to put out in the open, where Wi-Fi works best. Now, with our partner ASUS, we’re introducing the second member of our growing OnHub family.
OnHub routers are meant to be displayed proudly, and to get rid of the headaches you usually associate with home Wi-Fi. That makes ASUS a great partner, since they design intuitive products that focus on the ways real people use them. Like our first router, the ASUS OnHub comes with faster Wi-Fi, easy set-up, and simple management with the Google On app.
With the ASUS OnHub, we’re also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device by simply waving your hand over the top of the ASUS OnHub—great for busy houses.
OnHub routers are designed to stay fresh and get better over time. So in addition to the new ASUS router, in the coming week we’re rolling out our first software update with several performance improvements, including a new smart antenna algorithm. Phone in the kitchen? Laptop in the living room? OnHub will intelligently select the best combination of antennas to direct Wi-Fi to your devices, based on their location and orientation. The best part is, if you already have an OnHub, your router will automatically update when your network is quiet so it won’t interrupt your connection. Learn more about OnHub's platform:
Beginning this week, select retailers will open pre-orders for the ASUS OnHub for $219.99. Visit our website to pre-order the ASUS OnHub—available in the U.S.—or purchase the TP-LINK OnHub, available in the U.S. and in Canada.
Posted by Trond Wuellner, Group Product Manager, OnHub
With our partner ASUS, we’re introducing the second member of our growing OnHub family.
Ukraine’s move to dismantle symbols of its communist past has taken a turn to the dark side. The city of Odessa has transformed a statue of Vladimir Lenin into a monument honoring Star Wars antihero Darth Vader:
The statue—complete with Vader’s infamous mask and flowing cape—also sports a Wi-Fi hookup that emits beams from his head, reports local news site Dumskaya.
Ukraine’s lawmakers passed a law that bans communist propaganda in April, resulting in the removal of countless Lenin statues across the country. Workers at the factory where the statue stands have asked that the statue be redesigned, and not destroyed outright.
The factory’s manager said, according to a translation by Meduza, that “everything flows, everything changes, old figures give way to new ones, and so the world turns.”
Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov
This is not the first time Darth Vader appears as an element of Ukraine’s political landscape. A man registered as Darth Vader to run for prime minister in last year’s elections, but could not even vote himself after he refused to take off his mask.
But as Vader proudly stands on his pedestal overlooking the Black Sea port city, the force is clearly with him once again.
This post originally appeared on Quartz, an Atlantic partner site.
You probably recall that during the recent and ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, Petra Laszlo, a camera woman for Hungarian news outlet N1, was recorded tripping refugees and kicking their children as they ran for their lives across the Hungarian border. Laszlo was ultimately fired by her employer, and initially "apologized" for her behavior by trying to claim that she wasn't an unnecessarily angry racist, she simply tripped and kicked refugees because she thought she was being attacked:
"The camera was shooting, hundreds of migrants broke through the police cordon, one of them rushed to me and I was scared,” she wrote. Then something snapped in me … I just thought that I was attacked and I have to protect myself. It’s hard to make good decisions at a time when people are in a panic."
Except in this new video-crazed era, we're all simply more accountable, and all of the photos and videos taken of her that day pretty clearly show her being an absolutely legendary, insufferable asshole: Apparently not content to quietly go down in history as arguably one of the worst people currently on the planet, Laszlo has now declared that she intends to file two lawsuits once her trial is over (Hungarian authorities have taken her to court for disturbing the peace). Laszlo says one lawsuit will be filed against Facebook for failing to take down the oceans of well-deserved criticism she received after the incident, and one will be filed against the refugee she kicked who has since started a new life in Italy:
"Laszlo told Izvestia that she plans to sue Facebook for allegedly refusing to remove threatening groups on the site while deleting groups that supported her. She has also directed her anger towards Osama Abdul Mohsen, one of the Syrian refugees she kicked, and says she plans to sue him. "He changed his testimony, because he initially blamed the police," Laszlo said, though she can be clearly seen in two different videos kicking him. "My husband wants to prove my innocence. For him, it is now a matter of honor. It is now a matter of honor."
And really, what's more honorable than kicking and tripping children, then suing their families for good measure?
For much of the year, Facebook has been at the center of a global net neutrality controversy regarding its Internet.org initiative. Internet.org provides developing nations free, limited access to certain services, provided they're Facebook approved and not encrypted. Facebook is hungry to get in at the ground floor of an absolute explosion in developing nation ad revenue, but net neutrality critics have worried that giving so much control to one company sets a horrible precedent. It would, they argue, be far more helpful to simply deliver a subsidized version of the real Internet, encrypted warts and all.
Concerns about a single company creating an easily-tapped, AOL-esque version of the Internet aren't particularly outlandish and, if you've studied history, are quite justified. Yet Facebook's response to these concerns so far has been to claim critics are "extremists" who are hurting the poor with all of their pesky questions. And indeed, even here in Techdirt's comment section, I'll often see arguments that go something like this:
Why, oh why must you hate the poor? Isn't a limited version of the Internet better than no Internet at all?
The problem is that's a false, bullshit choice. Facebook isn't operating in a vacuum; countless companies and individuals are working hard to bring the full Internet to the poorer corners of the developing world, whether its Google's deployment of free Wi-Fi in India, or Microsoft's experiments with white space broadband. The world is simply discussing the best approach. Suggesting that the health of these nations might be better off with solutions that provide access to the full, uncensored Internet isn't depriving the poor of anything; it's just a conversation that requires thinking beyond the end of your nose.
And it's a little something Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the very thing Facebook's been trying to bastardize, has been thinking a little about. When recently asked to comment on the recent Facebook fracas, Berners-Lee channeled Nancy Reagan and argued that it's best to just say no:
"In the particular case of somebody who’s offering … something which is branded internet, it’s not internet, then you just say no. No it isn’t free, no it isn’t in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something … [Only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards."
Why must you hate the poor so, Tim Berners-Lee? Why? Isn't lemonade with a little bit of dead otter in it better than no lemonade at all? Etc.
But as Facebook continues to try and defend its gated community world plan, company boss Mark Zuckerburg just keeps on pretending he can't see the potential pitfalls of his dangerously centralized vision. Last week, Business Insider breathlessly declared that Zuckerburg "nailed" his latest defense of Internet.org at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. How was said nailing accomplished? With an adorable little story about apples:
"If you want to sell apples and sell them to white men for a dollar and black women for $2, that is wrong and is rightfully banned," he said. "And net neutrality is kind of like that. If an operator wants to advantage their own video program and not Netflix, for example, that is bad. It’s good that regulation protects against that. But if the person selling apples wants to donate some to a food bank for free, there’s never a law against that. It’s really hard to see how what we’re doing is hurting anyone."
Is it really that hard, Mark? Nobody cares if you give away apples. Give away actual apples all you want. But as Mozilla and many others have complained, Facebook isn't giving away apples (the Internet). It's giving away what is, to follow this stupid metaphor further down nitwit lane, parts of sour-tasting, genetically-modified apples stamped with a giant Facebook logo. Not only that, accepting these not-really apples comes with plenty of apple-distribution strings: not only more power for Facebook, but more, uh, apple-watching power for your local government.
Ok, so that's still stupid and overly complicated. Point being, if you really want to help, just give away some fucking apples. And while you're at it, stop trying to dress up your attempts to corner the world's apple...err...advertising market as selfless altruism. The thing is, Facebook is fairly sure most people won't be smart enough to see the company's real intentions here, and judging from many peoples' response, the company is quite right. Indeed, Zuckerburg proceeds to argue that Facebook's shitty version of the Internet is going to actually be great, because it will wind up with more people using the real Internet:
"If you ask these people, who didn’t grow up with a computer and have never used the internet, do you want to buy a data plan, their answer is going to be ‘Why?’ They actually have enough money to afford it, but they’re not sure why they would want it," Zuckerberg says. "So, the answer to that requires a business model innovation, which is making the internet something where you can use some basic services that don’t consume a lot of bandwidth for free. Within a month, more than half of the people who get access to those services realize why the internet is valuable and become paying customers."
Except forcing a new bastardized version of AOL down the throat of the developing world isn't innovation, it's regression. Especially for nations that live under tyrannical rule and desperately need not only access to a full, non-corporate sanctioned internet, but one that supports encryption and websites critical of government and Facebook. But Zuckerburg knows that once Facebook has developing nations hooked on its free, bastardized version of the Internet, most poor people will likely stick with it, not understanding why they need to pay for broader access. As a result, Facebook will have locked themselves into a long-term contract to be the all-powerful "not-quite Internet" nanny for decades to come.
So as Mr. Berners-Lee suggests: see the bigger picture here and just say no, kids. Just say no.
The line between reality and fiction has always been somewhat porous when it comes to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, between its ripped-from-the-headlines plots and its star Mariska Hargitay’s advocacy efforts on behalf of victims of sexual assault. The show has been accused of exploiting real-life tragedies for ratings, of making “rape a spectator sport,” and of descending into paranoid alarmism from time to time. But as a recent study conducted by Washington State University reveals, the Law & Order franchise might also be educating viewers about rape.
The study, published in the Journal of Health Communication, took 313 college freshmen and surveyed them on whether they watched the three main procedural franchises on network television: Law & Order, CSI, and NCIS. Students were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with statements that explored rape-myth acceptance (“If a woman is raped she is at least somewhat responsible for letting things get out of control”), intentions to seek consent for sexual activity (“I would stop and ask if everything is okay if my partner doesn’t respond to my sexual advances”), and intentions to refuse unwanted sexual activity (“I would refuse unwanted sexual activity from my date even if it may destroy the romantic atmosphere”).
The surveys found that exposure to Law & Order was associated with “lower rape-myth acceptance,” greater intentions to seek consent for sexual activity, greater intentions to refuse unwanted sexual activity, and greater intentions to adhere to decisions related to sexual consent. By contrast, exposure to CSI was associated with lowered intentions to seek consent and a greater acceptance of rape myths. There were fewer significant findings related to NCIS, although exposure to the show was associated with lower intentions to refuse sexual activity. “Our results indicate that specific crime-drama franchises are associated with decreased rape-myth acceptance,” the study states.
The authors acknowledge that causality is hard to infer: People who are more informed about rape myths and issues of consent might choose to watch Law & Order over other shows because it affirms their pre-existing beliefs. Nevertheless, they conclude that watching Law & Order might indeed have a positive effect on viewers:
Given the Law & Order producers’ conscientious efforts to not glamorize rape and to portray punishment of the crime, they have essentially created a program that could be used to reduce sexual assault. In contrast, the CSI franchise frequently depicts sexual assault in ways that objectify the victim and reinforce common rape myths. This study’s findings indicate that depicting sexual assault in this manner may promote behaviors that are not conducive to healthy sexual relationships. This has significant implications, given that the CSI franchise has enjoyed much greater popularity than the Law & Order franchise.
The research is by no means the first academic attempt to draw conclusions about how television influences popular understanding of sexual assault. A 2006 studyconducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara found that watching a television movie featuring a character who was raped by an acquaintance “increased awareness of date rape as a social problem across all demographic groups” who were surveyed. And in 2007, research found that the acceptance of rape myths among female college students was associated with watching television generally.
In her 1999 book Rape on Prime-Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence, the women’s studies professor Lisa M. Cuklanz writes that prime-time episodic portrayals of rape on television between 1976 and 1990 offer insight into how advocacy affects television and how television affects public opinion. “By 1990,” Cuklanz writes, “prime-time episodes were offering complex depictions of date/acquaintance rape and other issues more often than the highly formulaic depictions of violent stranger rape commonly found in the earlier years. Thus, this 15-year period encompasses a remarkable adaptation in television’s treatment of rape.”
Law & Order: SVU, the only show in the franchise still in production, certainly isn’t perfect, and the way in which it shows police officers doggedly investigating sex crimes and handling victims with the utmost care and attention certainly defies the real-life experiences of many survivors. But that it offers such explicit and incontrovertible definitions of what constitutes sexual assault, the study suggests, might nevertheless make it a valuable and productive show for cultural consumers.
Dystopian truth is stranger than dystopian fiction.
In New York City, the police now maintain an unknown number of military-grade vans outfitted with X-ray radiation, enabling cops to look through the walls of buildings or the sides of trucks. The technology was used in Afghanistan before being loosed on U.S. streets. Each X-ray van costs an estimated $729,000 to $825,000.
The NYPD will not reveal when, where, or how often they are used.
“I will not talk about anything at all about this,” New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told a journalist for the New York Post who pressed for details on the vans. “It falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.”
He added that “they’re not used to scan people for weapons.”
Here are some specific questions that New York City refuses to answer:
How is the NYPD ensuring that innocent New Yorkers are not subject to harmful X-ray radiation?
How long is the NYPD keeping the images that it takes and who can look at them?
Is the NYPD obtaining judicial authorization prior to taking images, and if so, what type of authorization?
Is the technology funded by taxpayer money, and has the use of the vans justified the price tag?
Those specifics are taken from a New York Civil Liberties Union court filing. The legal organization is seeking to assist a lawsuit filed by Pro Publica journalist Michael Grabell, who has been fighting New York City for answers about X-ray vans for 3 years.
“ProPublica filed the request as part of its investigation into the proliferation of security equipment, including airport body scanners, that expose people to ionizing radiation, which can mutate DNA and increase the risk of cancer,” he explained. (For fear of a terrorist “dirty bomb,” America’s security apparatus is exposing its population to radiation as a matter of course.)
A state court has already ruled that the NYPD has to turn over policies, procedures, and training manuals that shape uses of X-rays; reports on past deployments; information on the costs of the X-ray devices and the number of vans purchased; and information on the health and safety effects of the technology. But New York City is fighting on appeal to suppress that information and more, as if it is some kind of spy agency rather than a municipal police department operating on domestic soil, ostensibly at the pleasure of city residents.
Its insistence on extreme secrecy is part of an alarming trend. The people of New York City are effectively being denied the ability to decide how they want to be policed.
“Technologies—from X-ray scanners to drones, automatic license plate readers that record license plates of cars passing by, and ‘Stingrays’ that spy on nearby cell phones by imitating cell phone towers—have brought rapid advances to law enforcement capacity to monitor citizens,” the NYCLU notes. “Some of these new technologies have filtered in from the battlefields into the hands of local law enforcement with little notice to the public and with little oversight. These technologies raise legitimate questions about cost, effectiveness, and the impact on the rights of everyday people to live in a society free of unwarranted government surveillance.”
For all we know, the NYPD might be bombarding apartment houses with radiation while people are inside or peering inside vehicles on the street as unwitting passersby are exposed to radiation. The city’s position—that New Yorkers have no right to know if that is happening or not—is so absurd that one can hardly believe they’re taking it. These are properly political questions. And it’s unlikely a target would ever notice. “Once equipped, the van—which looks like a standard delivery van—takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle,” Fox News reported after looking at X-ray vans owned by the federal government. “It can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.”
In her ruling, Judge Doris Ling-Cohan highlights the fact that beyond the privacy questions raised by the technology are very real health and safety concerns. She writes:
Petitioner states in his affidavit, and respondent does not dispute, that: backscatter technology, previously deployed in European Union airports, was banned in 2011, because of health concerns; an internal presentation from American Science and Engineering, Inc., the company that manufactures the vans, determined that the vans deliver a radiation dose 40 percent larger than delivered by a backscatter airport scanner; bystanders present when the van is in use are exposed to the radiation that the van emits… moreover, petitioner maintains, and it is not disputed by the NYPD, that ‘there may be significant health risks associated with the use of backscatter x-ray devices as these machines use ionizing radiation, a type of radiation long known to mutate DNA and cause cancer.
Finally, petitioner states, again without dispute, that, on August 2011, the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency, which used the vans to scan vehicles crossing into and out of the United States, despite repeated testing and analysis of the amount of radiation emitted by such devices, nevertheless, prohibited continued use of the vans to scan occupied vehicles, until approval was granted by the United States Custom and Border Protection Radiation and Safety Committee...
And since the technology can see through clothing, it is easy to imagine a misbehaving NYPD officer abusing it if there are not sufficient safeguards in place. Trusting the NYPD to choose prudent, sufficient safeguards under cover of secrecy is folly. This is the same department that spent 6 years conducting surveillance on innocent Muslims Americans in a program so unfocused that it produced zero leads—and that has brutalized New York City protestors on numerous occasions. Time and again it’s shown that outside oversight is needed.
Lest readers outside New York City presume that their walls still stand between them and their local law enforcement agency, that isn’t necessarily the case. Back in January, in an article that got remarkably little attention, USA Todayreported the following:
At least 50 U.S. law enforcementagencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant. The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.
The overarching theme here is a law enforcement community that has never seen a technology that causes it to say, “We’d better ask if the public wants us to use this or not.”
Instead, the usual protocol is not only to adopt new technology without permission—regardless of the privacy, health and safety, or moral questions that it raises—but to keep having done so a secret as long as possible, and to hide the true nature of the technology in question even after the public has been alerted to its existence. The fact that this pattern has held in regards to a device that can look through walls while emitting radiation on the streets of New York City raises questions including “What’s next?” “What else don’t we know about?” and “Will any technology on the military-to-police pipeline ever cause cops to ask permission first?”
The unfortunate history of racial bias in photography. Subscribe today: http://goo.gl/0bsAjO For decades, the color film available to consumers was built for...
San Francisco has a well-deserved reputation as a city that’s willing to experiment with urban policy. Now that reputation is being put to the test, as legislation that would change the way police deal with cyclists and stop signs makes its way through the city’s Board of Supervisors.
The ordinance, known as the Bike Yield Law, would instruct cops to treat cyclists who roll slowly and cautiously through stop signs as their lowest enforcement priority. It would, in essence, permit the so-called Idaho stop, in which a person on a bike is allowed to approach a stop sign, check for conflicts with drivers and people on foot, then roll through without coming to a complete halt—essentially treating it as a yield sign.
The Idaho stop is called that because it’s been the law in that state since 1982. Idaho, including its largest city, Boise (population 214,000), has served as a large, ongoing experiment in how well this practice works, at least in places with relatively low density. The answer is, apparently, quite well.
A 2010 study showed that bike-injury rates declined by 14.5 percent the year after the law was passed, then remained flat. Comparisons of Boise to comparable cities without the Idaho stop, such as Sacramento, showed that Boise was significantly safer for people on bikes, with collision rates for bike commuters up to 60 percent lower. (The law in Idaho also allows a cyclist to proceed through a red light after coming to a full stop and checking for conflicts, and to make a yielding right on red lights.)
When a similar law was proposed in Oregon, supporters made a video to explain why the Idaho stop is a safe and sensible policy, if followed as intended. Rolling stops, even at very low speeds, allows bicyclists to maintain momentum and increase efficiency. Blowing through stop signs at speed is not part of the program.
Thirty-three years after its passage, the Idaho stop remains uncontroversial in Idaho. Yet it’s been adopted since in relatively few places around the country, and meets with heated opposition almost everywhere it is proposed; that Oregon law, for instance, didn’t pass. To date, just three Colorado counties have local stop-as-yield ordinances, and only a few other states have laws that allow cyclists to proceed through malfunctioning red lights, or lights that don’t change in response to the presence of a cyclist because their vehicle-detection systems are not sensitive enough.
Setting a precedent
San Francisco, then, would be the first major city in the United States to allow bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs (there is no red-light provision in the San Francisco legislation). But the ordinance, which is co-sponsored by six of the 11 members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, faces an obstacle in the form of Mayor Ed Lee, who has vowed to veto it if it reaches his desk.
“I’m not willing to trade away safety for convenience, and any new law that reaches my desk has to enhance public safety, not create potential conflicts that can harm our residents,” the mayor told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Supporters of the legislation would need eight votes to override his veto, a goal that is potentially attainable, as four of the five non-sponsoring supervisors have not declared themselves one way or the other.
Chris Cassidy, communications director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, emphasizes that the legislation is intended to free up police officers so they can, in the words of the city’s Vision Zero traffic safety campaign, “Focus on the Five”—concentrate on issuing citations for the traffic violations that most frequently injure and kill pedestrians. Those include speeding, running red lights, running stop signs, failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and failing to yield to pedestrians when turning.
But as Mayor Lee’s opposition to the new ordinance suggests, there’s still deep skepticism among many people about what such a policy would mean for pedestrians. Advocates for the elderly and disabled are especially concerned. “People with mobility disabilities, blind people, seniors, and people with baby strollers would feel less safe. This is difficult to quantify, but it is real,” wrote one disability advocate in an email to the Board of Supervisors obtained by the San Francisco Examiner.
Advocates for the new law recognize how important it is that pedestrians not feel endangered by the change. “First and foremost, it’s important that everyone recognize that everyone always has to yield to people walking,” says the SFBC’s Cassidy. “For people to feel unsafe walking is something we really want to avoid.”
Public perception remains a problem
The truth is that the bad behavior of a small minority of people on bicycles has a disproportionate effect on pubic perception of risk. Take the terrible 2012 case in which a San Francisco man—after apparently blowing through several stop signs on his bike—struck and killed a 71-year-old man on foot in a crosswalk. The case received intense press coverage and scrutiny, more than many, if not most, of the numerous fatalities caused by drivers. Outrage over the case was understandable. As the victim lay dying in the hospital, the cyclist posted a detailed account of the crash to a local message board that included these utterly callous words:
I wrecked on the way home today from the bi-weekly Headlands Raid today. Short story: I'm fine. The pedestrian I clobbered? Not so much.
Fair or not, when people who don’t ride bikes themselves hear about the Idaho stop concept, many think of this worst-case scenario—and of the cyclists they see who break the rules with flagrant disregard for safety. This is in part because many more people drive cars than ride bikes, so they relate less to people on bikes than they do to people behind the wheel. It’s also, perhaps, because people on bikes are much more visible as humans than people who are cocooned in the metal shells of cars, and thus easier to see as individual bad actors.
If San Francisco does go ahead with the Idaho stop, it would be a big step forward for those who maintain that this can be the most appropriate way to treat bicycles in cities, and that it would actually create a more law-abiding cycling culture. But the question remains if it will work in relatively dense neighborhoods. Doug Gordon, who blogs at Brooklyn Spoke, has suggested that what may be best for a city like New York would be ”a surgical approach to Idaho stops” targeting low-traffic intersections.
If San Francisco is going to be in the vanguard on this matter, the ordinance’s advocates will have to make a convincing case that it’s not just about cyclist convenience and comfort, but instead about street safety for all users.
When scientists recently re-examined the ancient remains of people killed in the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, they were surprised by two findings in particular. For one thing, the ancient people of Pompeii seemed to have had perfect teeth, perhaps a product of a healthy diet and the high-fluorine air and water of their environment.
And, for another, it seems they didn't die in the manner researchers long suspected. Instead of being choked by a sudden blanket of ash and hot gas, Pompeii’s doomed residents sustained fatal head injuries, likely from collapsing structures and volcanic rocks that rained from the sky.
How they died has long been a fascination among historians and archaeologists. This curiosity is understandable. The eruption of Vesuvius was so devastating it is practically unimaginable. (To the people who lived in Pompeii at the time, it must have been beyond stunning: The volcano had gone generations without so much as a puff of steam, and it was believed to be dead.)
The death toll is uncertain but scholars believe as many as 25,000 people were killed. “With the eruption of Vesuvius, scholars, thinkers, and moralizers for centuries have been scrutinizing the death of all those victims,” said Roger Macfarlane, a classics professor at Brigham Young University. And over the centuries, scholars have pieced together astounding details about the circumstances of their deaths. We know, from ancient documents, that some people tied pillows to their heads. Plaster body-casts of victims, their remains preserved in volcanic ash, reveal the outlines of tunic fabric covering mouths trying to escape the sulphuric air. But implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the search for answers over mass casualty, is a much more troublesome question: Why?
“Judgmental moralizers,” Macfarlane told me, “have had a heyday with Pompeii over the years.”
The idea that victims of natural disasters are to blame for their fate is common in the aftermath of any tragedy. This tendency often reveals ugly underlying prejudices. After a tsunami killed nearly 16,000 people in Japan in 2011, some Americans made headlines for shrugging off the enormity of the loss as karmic payback for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in 2005, a congressman representing Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did.”
In the case of Pompeii, these sorts of projections span centuries. Comparisons to Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities God destroys in the book of Genesis, still come up frequently. The question of whether Pompeii’s destruction was divine punishment has been explored in paintings, plays, films, and novels. One such story is The Last Days of Pompeii, by the popular 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Widely read in his time, Bulwer-Lytton is credited with bringing the story of Pompeii into mainstream Western culture, which underscores the prominence of the idea that Pompeii was cursed for the sins of its people.
“Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not the first thinker to explain how somehow the volcano destroyed a people that were ripened in iniquity,” Macfarlane said. “The Last Days of Pompeii features the melodramatically dastardly villain, Arbaces, who is essentially blown to smithereens in the eruption, even as the noble protagonist Glaucus survives. Likewise Robert Harris’s vulcanologically savvy (and highly readable) novel Pompeii (2003) rumbles up a good yarn until the exploding mountain blows away the highly deserving Ampliatus in an ‘incandescent sandstorm… blast[ing] him, burst[ing] his eardrums, ignit[ing] his hair, bl[owing] his clothes and shoes off, and whirl[ing] him upside down, slamming him against the side of a building.’ Harris gives this villain what the novel shows he deserves.”
As historians have pieced together a rich narrative of the real lives and deaths of those who lived at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, cultural narratives about why the disaster wiped out an entire people have persisted. Maybe, the idea seems to be, the inhabitants of Pompeii deserved the terror they experienced. “I honestly wonder about the sometimes pervasive human impulse to judge victims of natural disasters,” Macfarlane said. “Did they get what was coming to them? Many a moralizer has stated that the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum must have been steeped in wickedness to have been obliterated in such a horrifying instant.”
It is cruel to blame the victims of an epic volcanic eruption for their demise. But understandable, too. It is human nature, after all, to seek higher meaning, even justice, in events that are otherwise impossibly tragic—even though, and perhaps precisely because, it is rare to find it. There is fear in this way of thinking: Maybe if those people deserved to die, I will be safe.
“Such moralization heads to a set of questions we perhaps can never answer about the victims of Pompeii,” Macfarlane said. “Did innocence or guilt play any role in the natural selection of victims? Surely not. What, then, did determine the fatal choices of certain victims? Careful forensics will bring intriguing clues, to be sure. However, answers that depend upon interpretation of motive are always going to be the hardest to achieve.”
Why is the refugee crisis all over the news? How is this related to Syria? Why should we care at all? Donate to the United Nations Refugee Agency: http://don...
On a rainy day, the only thing worse than lugging an umbrella around is being caught without one. Now a Canadian startup has the solution, by way of the bike-share model of on-the-go pickups and drop-offs. Earlier this month, UmbraCity teamed up with the University of British Columbia to offer free umbrella rentals on campus—just in time for Vancouver’s rainy season.
The process is simple: Sign up at one of UmbraCity’s four automated kiosks by using your email address and credit card or student ID. Scan your card to pick up an umbrella and get going. If you return the umbrella within 48 hours, it’s completely free; after that, you’ll be charged $2 a day up to the maximum of $20, at which point you’ve bought it. If your rental breaks, simply report it, return it to a kiosk, and UmbraCity will recycle it for you.
The bright yellow umbrellas are designed to withstand strong winds, enhance pedestrian visibility, and function as eye-popping advertisements at the same time. UmbraCity hopes to expand to greater Vancouver in the coming year, with other cities to follow.
Sure, umbrella rentals might seem a little silly compared to, say, trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and urban congestion by promoting a cycling culture. But next time you find yourself caught in a downpour, desperate enough to buy another throwaway drugstore umbrella, you might wish you could get your hands on a sturdy rental instead.
Fingerprint sensors on phones are the newest form of mobile security, but they open up questions about personal identity security. If our phones can recognize us by our fingerprints, that means our fingerprints are being stored somewhere. What happens to those fingerprints? A user on Reddit asked this question to the Google team responsible for the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P during an AMA.
Fingerprint features are securely encrypted on the device, and processed in the secure Trustzone protected area of memory. The Android 6.0 fingerprint APIs do not provide any access to the fingerprint material to apps. Fingerprint features never leave the device and are not shared with Google (so for example if you setup a new phone, you need to re-enroll your fingers). If your phone is ever lost or stolen you can easily find, lock, and erase your phone using Android Device Manager.
That should put your mind at ease. Your fingerprint will only be on your device. The bit about setting up a new phone and re-entering your fingerprint is important. That means your fingerprint will never be uploaded to the cloud. It stays on your device at all times. It’s still possible for someone to hack your device, but if that happens you’re going to lose more than just fingerprint data. Always make sure to use Android Device Manager.
We eat apple peels and peach skin — why not banana peels, too? According to Business Insider, banana peels contain some really great vitamins and nutrients that we're just throwing in the compost. Blend them up in smoothies! Bake until crispy! Or heck, just eat them along with the banana.
If driverless cars deliver on their promise to eliminate the vast majority of fatal traffic accidents, the technology will rank among the most transformative public-health initiatives in human history. But how many lives, realistically, will be saved?
By the end of this century, there’s good reason to believe that tens of millions of traffic fatalities will be prevented around the world.
This is not merely theoretical. There’s already some precedent for change of this magnitude in the realms of car culture and automotive safety. In 1970, about 60,000 people died in traffic accidents in the United States. A dramatic shift toward safety—including required seat belts and ubiquitous airbags—helped vastly improve a person’s chance of surviving the American roadways in the decades that followed. By 2013, 32,719 people died in traffic crashes, a historic low.
Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that's nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.
The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth cohort, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.
Even a machine with a sterling driving record can’t account entirely for human error.
“By midcentury, the penetration of [autonomous vehicles] and other [advanced driver-assistance systems] could ultimately cause vehicle crashes in the United States to fall from second to ninth place in terms of their lethality ranking among accident types,” wrote Michele Bertoncello and Dominik Wee in a paper for the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. Bertoncello and Wee further estimate that better road safety will save as much as $190 billion a year in health-care costs associated with accidents.
Of course, all this relies on widespread adoption of driverless cars, which is as much a cultural hurdle as a technological one. As Andrew Moore, the computer science dean at Carnegie Mellon recently told me, “No one is going to want to realize autonomous driving into the world until there’s proof that it’s much safer, like a factor of 100 safer, than having a human drive.”
And even then, there are complex questions to consider. People are still establishing frameworks for how to think about responsibility in a driverless world. Even with cars that are a factor of 100 safer than their manned predecessors, fatal accidents will happen.
“There will be situations where a car knows that it's about to crash and will be planning how it crashes,” Moore said. “There will be incredible scrutiny on the engineers who wrote the code to deal with the crash. Was it trying to save its occupant? Was it trying to save someone else?”
Moore suggests the driverless car revolution will hit a snag—setting it back at least a few years—after the first high-profile fatalities. Others have made similar predictions. It may be during the transition to wider-spread driverless adoption that autonomous vehicles are least trusted and roads are most dangerous.
“During the transition period when conventional and self-driving vehicles would share the road, safety might actually worsen, at least for the conventional vehicles,” wrote Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, transportation researchers at the University of Michigan, in a paper earlier this year.
After all, even a machine with a sterling driving record can’t account entirely for human error. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has learned this lesson first hand. Its cars have driven in autonomous mode for more than 1 million miles since 2009. In all that time, they’ve been involved in 16 accidents through August—none of which were caused by the self-driving car.
All this suggests that, despite the growing pains ahead, the promise of driverless cars remains enormous—and within reach.
Boxes of cereal and a menu board are seen at the "Cereal Killer Cafe" in East London. (REUTERS/Luke MacGregor)
London’s gentrification debate has taken a bizarre turn in the past week. On Saturday night, demonstrators staging an impromptu anti-displacement protest in heavily gentrified East London cut loose and attacked a local landmark, daubing it with paint. Curiously, their chosen target wasn’t a new skyscraper or luxury apartment development. It was a café. One that specializes in selling cereal.
The choice of the Cereal Killer Café as target might seem odd, but the protest has clearly struck a chord. The U.K. media has been debating it furiously all week, while as a Londoner my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been so dominated by the story I’ve honestly been a little reluctant to go near my computer. So how did a small business become the center of such a passionate debate?
To be fair, the café is no standard corner coffee shop, and it’s not in just any location. When Londoners talk about regeneration, gentrification and the supposed cascade of bars, beards and real estate bubbles they bring in their wake, they typically talk about the café’s home neighborhood of Shoreditch. They do this so much that this inner city district, considered poor until the 1990s, has coined its own local term for urban transformation—Shoreditchification. In this ongoing discussion, Cereal Killer has provided a handily located Exhibit A, a place whose novelty theme and high(ish) prices have been widely damned as the ultimate in hipster excess.
Alan Keery (center) serves cereal at the "Cereal Killer Cafe" in East London, which he co-owns with his twin brother, Gary Keery. The cafe was the victim of a recent anti-gentrification attack. (REUTERS/Luke MacGregor)
It first grabbed attention on opening last year thanks partly to an unusually hostile interview with the owners by Britain’s Channel Four News. The idea of charging up to $6 a bowl for cereal in an area that not so long ago was synonymous with poverty was too much for some. The café became yet another vehicle for that brand of middle class urban guilt that often expresses itself through anti-hipsterism—the sneering at the younger, more self-consciously cool type of gentrifier as if their clothes and pretensions were in themselves the motors of urban transformation. The fact that the café’s owners, Irish twin brothers, were so luxuriantly bearded that they looked like they’d dressed up as hipsters for Halloween only helped this further.
But actually attacking the place? That has gone too far for almost everyone, and everyone seems to have an opinion. From people deploring the attack on property to others noting how the protest missed the true agents of gentrification, the condemnation has been broad and loud. There’s been debate as to whether the protestors were just middle class poseurs or genuinely working class local residents. Elsewhere, there’s been some (actually quite constructive) whataboutism going on, with people flagging up better sites to protest. The café’s owners themselves have also waded in, pointing out how many better targets there are, and playing to type by saying of their business that it’s “more than cereal, it’s a cereal experience.” And finally, the protesters themselves have emerged, defending their actions and, not afraid of using a pun, accusing the café’s owners of “milking” the publicity to boost their profits.
If a justification could be made for the protest (not itself so destructive that the café couldn’t open the following day) it’s that it has at least gained major coverage for gentrification debates. The thing is, this debate has so far mainly involved scorn or ridicule for the protestors, or sympathy for people seeing their business sullied—hardly the sort of thing to galvanize support. Local residents who have been or risk being displaced remain noticeably absent from the discussion, while Cereal Killer itself is so obvious a straw man target that debating its culpability in gentrification hardly seems worth bothering with.
Protests like this may still be inevitable. London’s equality gap is becoming a chasm and many residents are hurting. The city actually has a committed, passionate network of activists fighting on many fronts on displacement issues, such as people being unfairly evicted from social housing to make way for redevelopment. Compared to Cereal Killer’s attackers, however, these people work in relative media obscurity and alone are not managing to halt the eviction of vulnerable tenants. In this pressure cooker atmosphere, where lawful protest can sometimes seem futile, it’s not surprising that tensions bubble over into apparently wanton public fracas, just as they did during England’s 2011 riots.
In fact, Saturday’s protest could just be one episode of a long, unruly autumn. This week, the protestors announced a second target, a controversial new museum celebrating Victorian East London serial killer Jack the Ripper that critics see as celebrating violence against women. It may create little in the way of change, but East London’s anti-gentrification protests could still be grabbing headlines for a while yet.
To check tomorrow’s weather, you could open an app or turn on the local news. For something less boring, you could also consult a Tempescope, a caged atmosphere that simulates looming clouds, thunderstorms, and pouring rain.
Tokyo-based software engineer Ken Kawamoto dreamed up this strange artifact a couple years ago after visiting the Mariana Islands and thinking “how great it would be if he could just take the skies home with him,” according to a new Indiegogo campaign. His first prototype was crafted from shampoo bottles. With the help an LED, an ultrasonic diffuser, and water and air pumps, it could whip up sunrises and tiny storms on his bookshelf.
Soon after, Kawamoto and friends released open-source plans for hobbyists who wished to make their own Tempescopes. The schematics are thorough, but require significant cash and electronics skill. So now they’re taking it to the next level with an ambitious crowd-funding effort ($398,000!), hoping to ship simple-to-build, $199 kits all over the world by next spring. Here’s more from their campaign:
Introducing the tempescope… [a] physical display that reproduces various weather conditions according to the weather forecast. It’s like having a window that lets you look outside at tomorrow’s sky.
It can produce conditions like rain… clouds… lightning… and of course sunshine....
With a tempescope, you don't have to open an app to find out if it’s going to rain today—just take a glance as you leave the house!
The device syncs with your phone to model weather in your ‘hood or, if you have friends and family around the globe, the weather where they live. You can also set it to drip water or fill up with fog at your whim, as you zone out and pretend you’re a storm-making god. The current iteration mimics purple lightning, but not thunder, snow, or the almighty firenado—though Kawamoto and company promise to look into such things in a “few years.”
While I love pumpkin in all its sweet applications — pie, ice cream, cookies, cake — I always forget it has a savory side, too. Maybe that's because I've been missing out on one very crucial way to use pumpkin in a savory capacity: baked pumpkin fries.
Permeable pavement is one of those super-wonky infrastructure items—incredibly important but not always easy to care about. Thanks to the mesmerizing video above, however, a new and improved variety of concrete developed in the U.K. called Topmix Permeable has been turning heads. The video shows a parking lot paved with Topmix absorbing 4,000 liters of water in a minute, and it’s kind of magical to watch it disappear.
This new concrete, from Lafarge Tarmac, could potentially be a very useful tool in combating urban flash flooding from sudden, heavy storms—the type that are likely to become increasingly common because of climate change. In its promotional materials, the company uses the example of the 2007 floods that devastated Great Britain, costing the economy some $4.8 billion. Of the 57,000 homes affected by the floods, two-thirds were damaged not by rivers that overflowed but by stormwater runoff.
In the U.S., stormwater routinely overwhelms antiquated wastewater systems, causing untreated sewage to be dumped into local waterways and befouling public beaches. Storm runoff is also a significant source of pollution for rivers, streams, and reservoirs around the globe. Topmix pavement filters pollutants such as motor oil residue, even as it allows water to drain into the ground below.
There are some caveats to the technology, which works the way it does because there are empty spaces between particles that allow water to flow through. Topmix concrete, which is applied over a base layer of gravel that further filters water, is less able to handle heavy vehicle loads and intense traffic than conventional paving materials. So while it’s appropriate for driveways, many parking lots, quiet residential streets, bike paths, and the like, it isn’t going to be right for highways and heavily traveled streets.
Also its ability to absorb water can be compromised by dirt and other particulate waste, such as sawdust or silt. Damage from freezing water is a potential concern with permeable pavement, although Lafarge Tarmac says its product has “excellent freeze-thaw resistance.”
Still, as more and more of the world gets paved over, the need to reduce the amount of impermeable surface we create, however we can, becomes more urgent. Parking lots that soak up rainwater like sponges are part of the solution. And pretty fun to watch in action.
