Category Archives: Technology

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday he thinks rapidly advancing technology poses one of the biggest challenges for the high court.

Speaking at an event at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, Roberts also repeated his concern that the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices has become too politicized. And he advised that having a written constitution, which some in New Zealand favor for their country, imposed constraints on judges.

Roberts answered questions posed by the university's law dean, Mark Hickford, for about an hour.

Hickford did not ask any questions about U.S. President Donald Trump, who has criticized judges including Roberts and imposed a travel ban on people from six mostly Muslim countries that has been challenged in the courts.

The Supreme Court said last week the Trump administration can enforce a ban on refugees but also left in place a weakened travel ban that allows more relatives of Americans to visit.

At the New Zealand event, Roberts said technology was a real concern.

"There are devices now that can allow law enforcement to see through walls. Heat imaging and all this kind of thing," he said. "Well, what does that do to a body of law that's developed from common law days in England about when you can search a house?"

He said the court had correctly determined that accessing an iPhone was problematic under the constitution's Fourth Amendment.

"I'll say it here: would you rather have law enforcement rummaging through your desk drawer at home, or rummaging through your iPhone?" Roberts said. "I mean, there's much more private information on the iPhone than in most desk drawers."

He said none of the Supreme Court justices are experts in the area and it is going to be a particular challenge for them to make sure they understand the issues and for lawyers to explain them.

Asked about the benefits of a written constitution, Roberts said he didn't want to offer advice to New Zealand but that the U.S. Constitution had a constraining purpose and affect.

"The framers of the constitution hoped they were drafting a document that would withstand the test of time, and they used, in many instances, very broad and capacious terms," he said. "But on the other hand, they can be specific guides as to what we are supposed to look at, and in some cases quite narrowly confining."

New Zealand's constitution is not contained in any one document but is derived from laws, legal documents, court decisions and conventions.

Roberts said the U.S. judicial process has become overly politicized, particularly when it comes to the confirmation of Supreme Court justices.

"Judges are not politicians, and they shouldn't be scrutinized as if they were," he said. "You're not electing a representative, so you're not entitled to know what their views on political issues are."

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Chief Justice Roberts: Technology poses challenge for court - ABC News

A US judge ruled that Apple must pay the University of Wisconsin-Madison $506 million for infringing on its patent. This amount is more than double the amount originally decided on by a jury, according to Reuters. The ruling continues a two-year-old patent-infringement battle, which may not be over.

In October 2015, a jury ruled that Apple committed patent infringement when creating mobile chips used in its iPhone, iPad Mini, and iPad Air. The A7, A8, and A8X processors used in the iPhone 5S, 6, and 6 Plus were found to have benefited from the universitys patented technology. Apple was ordered to pay $234 million in damages, although the company maintained its innocence and claimed that it had its own patent for the technology in question.

The increased amount of $506 million is punishment for Apples continual infringement of the patent following the 2015 ruling, said district judge William Conley. Apple was found to continue to use these processors and continue infringing until the patent expired in 2016. Originally, the judge set the maximum damages for the trial to be $862 million, but the damages were then limited as Apples infringement was found to be without intent.

Apple is appealing the new ruling in the federal circuit and declined to comment.

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Apple has to pay $506 million for using processor technology patented by a school - The Verge

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MANHATTAN Every day in New York, commuters cram onto city buses for what often is a slow, gridlocked, frustrating trip. But thats slowly been improving with technology being used along a handful of routes, and its being promised a greater deployment to speed things up. The technology has already sped up travel times from five to 30 percent.

Now, the Department of Transportation is announcing 10 more bus routes are getting GPS technology, known as Transit Signal Priority or TSP, to make red lights shorter and green lights longer as busses approach intersections.It's being promised for lines in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island.

The MTA is promising that the average improvement of 18 percent faster commute times will roll out on the routes, including theM60 from Manhattan to LaGuardia and the Q44 from Flushing to Jamaica.

This is not exactly new, though. It's already been used very successfully elsewhere. London has a dozen times as many buses using the technology; Los Angeles three times as many. New York, though, dwarfs those transit systems.

It all started with a pilot program along Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island more than ten years ago. Then, it started rolling out across the city in 2012.

Transit Signal Priority is a GPS-type interface between buses and lights at intersections, where buses signal to the lights as they approach; it then speeds up the red light or extends a green to keep a bus moving along its route.

The MTA claims car commuters see very little impact, but bus riders are enjoying commutes that have been sped up by a third.

We talked to commuters along the B44 route in Brooklyn, which already uses the technology.

"Its just too slow most of the time, Annilyah Esprit said. I just take the train!"

Commuters who want to give the bus another chance can check out the technology in action by riding the lines that already have it, including:

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MTA to speed up more bus commutes with green-light technology - New York's PIX11 / WPIX-TV

Robotic devices such as Roomba are meant to scour your floor, cleaning your home while youre away but what if they were gathering more than just dust?

The creator of Roomba, iRobot, is toying with idea of using the mini vacuums to include mapping technology that would generate a complete picture of the rooms it cleans.

According to Reuters, this technology could be used to start the process of making smart homes a thing of the future.

Smart homes as a concept would allow homeowners to talk with an artificial intelligence voice.

Companies such as Apple, Xfinity and Nest already offer a variation of this idea. Those companies allow users to access their air conditioning systems, wireless lighting and even home security but iRobot would take it one step further.

Sound familiar? Thats because there was Disney channel original movie that aired in 1999 that explored the reality of this idea but to a much a larger scale. It was called Smart House.

The technology used by Roomba not only uses infrared or laser sensors to detect and avoid obstacles but it utilizes slam technology combining localization and mapping to give the device the ability to keep track of where it is in the room and to map out the entire room.

Some are concerned about potential privacy issues that could arise if larger companies were to gain access to the information gathered. The terms and services for iRobot allow for the company to share any information gathered to third party vendors and affiliates, the government and "any company transaction, such as a merger, sale of all or a portion of company assets or shares."

Colin Angle, iRobots CEO, has reportedly said iRobot would not sell any data without consulting the customers first.

While the concept is said to still be in the works, there are whispers of a possible deal taking place between iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazons voice assistant Alexa, and three companies, Amazon, Google or even Apple, in the next couple of years.

Despite the claims, all three companies have declined to comment.

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Smart vacuum technology raises privacy concerns - KCRA Sacramento

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Health) - When an endurance runner with a history of heart failure felt under the weather, he brought his activity tracker data from a workout to his cardiologist.

Dr. Michael Blum examined the runners heart rate readings. The cardiologist could see when his patient was pushing to climb a hill or to increase his speed, and when he was slowing down.

I could tell how hard he was working, said Blum, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. I had this amazing data.

Ultimately, though, he had to inform his worried patient: This is all really interesting, but I cant tell you what it means.

Blum joined three other doctors who spoke last week on the promise and the reality of technology in a San Francisco paneldiscussion sponsored by Medscape and titled Technology, Patients and the Art of Medicine.

Technology in the form of diagnostic software helped one of the panelists, Dr. Abraham Verghese, conclude that a patient was suffering from neurosarcoidosis a diagnosis the Stanford University professor didnt initially consider but one a software program immediately recognized given the patients symptoms.

Technology offers doctors a view inside patients hearts, brains and bowels. And technology may speed the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness, said panelist Dr. Jessica Mega, who leads the healthcare team at Verily, formerly Google Life.

Nonetheless, 69 percent of the 100 doctors in the audience said increased reliance on technology and electronic health records only served to separate them from their patients.

As evidence of the problem, the panelists cited apps that claim to do things they dont really do, like accurately measure blood pressure.

But the biggest problem stemming from technology for the doctors, and the bane of many doctors existence, is the electronic health record, also known as an EHR.

The U.S. government has touted electronic records, initially designed for billing, as a way to dramatically improve patient care and has used financial incentives to speed their adoption. The hope was that the widespread use of EHRs would reduce medical errors, inefficiencies and inappropriate care.

The effort has failed, according to Dr. Eric Topol, editor-in-chief of Medscape and the panel moderator.

American doctors continue to make 12 million diagnosis errors a year; one in four patients in U.S. hospitals continue to be harmed; and healthcare costs continue to soar, he said.

Topol called electronic health records a complete mess.

Why do we just put up with pathetic technology? he asked.

The panelists, as well as the doctors in attendance, bemoaned the time it took them to complete electronic records, time they longed to spend with patients.

Verghese credited electronic records with billing well, with reducing medical errors and with keeping him out of dusty basements in search of patient files. At the same time, he blamed EHRs for tying doctors to their computers and at least partially for his colleagues unprecedented suicide rates, depression, burnout and disillusionment.

I find it pretty incredible, he said, that with all the wonderful, sophisticated imaging technology, we still have this dinosaur of an electronic medical record.

Verghese, a best-selling author, is vice chair for the theory and practice of medicine at Stanford University and has championed the return of what he considers the lost art of the physical exam. He questioned how physicians allowed EHRs to take over medical practices without physician input on how to make them work.

We allowed this to happen on our watch, he said. How did we let this happen?

My sense is that the current dysphoria in medicine revolves to a great degree around the electronic medical record but not solely. I think the other piece of it is everything moving much faster, so many more patients, so much more information per patient, he said.

Blum had nothing good to say about electronic health records. But he refused to blame them for all medicines ills.

High rates of physician burnout, depression and suicide predate the governments relatively recent push for electronic records, he said. He traced the problem back at least 10 years to increased government regulations that turned doctors notes into billing documents.

Then you throw the electronic health record on top of that, Blum said. That just took a bad situation and made it horribly worse.

Blum, who leads the Center for Digital Health Innovation at the University of California, San Francisco, considers electronic health records separate from technology.

He believes technology has transformed medicine in a positive way and will continue to do so.

The office visit and the experience of the bonding has clearly been disrupted by doctors having to type into electronic records, Blum said. On the other hand, he said, patients can send me a note whenever they want, and within a day, Ill get back to them.

As further evidence of technologys benefits, he cited a study showing that patients expressed more satisfaction following a video visit with their doctors than visits to the office.

Its going to explode, he said, when we see the next generation of technology.

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Doctors view technology as largely problematic - Reuters

The Guardian

Adobe to kill off Flash plug-in by 2020 BBC News Adobe Systems has said that it plans to phase out its Flash Player plug-in by the end of 2020. The technology was once one of the most widely used ways for people to watch video clips and play games online. But it also attracted much criticism ... Adobe to pull plug on Flash after years of waning popularityThe Guardian Flash loses final appeal: Adobe sentences its web tech to deathCNET all 122 news articles »

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Adobe to kill off Flash plug-in by 2020 - BBC News

Sam Bengtson, a software engineer, said it was pretty much 100 percent yes right from the get-go for me.

Mr Bengston added: In the next five to 10 years, this is going to be something that isnt scoffed at so much, or is more normal. So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just to say that I have it.

But Melissa Timmins, the companys sales director, was more hesitant.

Because its new, I dont know enough about it yet. Im a little nervous about implanting something into my body.

Privacy experts also raised the alarm and questioned how secure the chip really was.

Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Heinz College, said that the microchip could be use for something more invasive later on.

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Technology company microchips staff so they can clock in without IDs - Telegraph.co.uk

By Alicia Matsuura, Deseret News

Livia Weinstein didnt know what to expect when she created a Facebook account almost 10 years ago.

The now 79-year-old from Washington, D.C., said her reason for joining the online world was due more to her desire to keep up with the times than a means for socialization. To the former school counselor, nothing could replace the value of face-to-face communication with all its inflections and tones, a characteristic absent from instant messaging and texting.

She didnt appreciate the powerful impact of social media until one day she was overcome with curiosity and typed her maiden name, Morpurgo, into her Facebook search bar. Not expecting to find anything, it surprised her when she discovered distant family members whom she had never met.

After connecting with each other, they eventually created a "Morpurgo family" group page to organize online communication. The page has since grown and now consists of over 150 members. Two years after making initial contact, the family organized a gathering in Trieste, Italy, the land of their roots. They shared family stories, visited cemeteries, explored historical sites and even the Morpurgo Museum. These visits helped them trace the family line back to the 16th century. It was a special experience for Weinstein, who lost contact with her Italian relatives after immigrating to the United States in 1939.

Its nice to know you have other relatives, more family than just the immediate family here, Weinstein said. Just finding people with the same background, same name is amazing. It was a very interesting thing that would have never happened if it wasnt for the internet and Facebook.

Older adults across the United States are adjusting to a world of advancing technology. Not only are they accepting the changes, but some, like Weinstein, are actively implementing technology in their daily lives.

According to a May 2017 study conducted by Pew Research Center, 67 percent of adults age 65 and older in the United States were active online users in 2016 a big jump from 2000 when only 14 percent of seniors claimed to be internet users.

Over the next decade as the baby boomer generation continues to age, the number of seniors using the internet is expected to increase, highlighting benefits and challenges of its impact on a large aging population including both positive and negative effects on the brain.

Positive effects

Along with visiting family members in Italy, social media has also helped Weinstein connect with a long-lost cousin in Florida, with whom she formed a relationship.

Connecting with family members and friends is just one way the internet has positively impacted the lives of older adults. Getting online also gives seniors a tool for managing and researching health issues and a way to increase brain activity.

Heather Young, associate vice chancellor for nursing at UC Davis, has witnessed the many benefits of e-health throughout her career. "E-health" is a broad term for health care activities supported by technology and online communication. It includes anything from connecting with health care providers online and collaborating with other patients in chat rooms to doing web research.

According to Young, chat rooms such as patientslikeme.com are an effective way for people with similar health conditions to give each other advice and resources.

"Being able to connect with other people is very useful, especially if youre dealing with a chronic condition that has a lot of emotional aspects to it, Young said. It can be very isolating and frightening to live with a difficult health problem and think youre the only one suffering from this. Being able to hear from other people and their experiences can be comforting and very helpful.

Web research is also helpful, especially for individuals living in remote areas who have limited access to immediate on-site information. Plus, it saves patients from the hassle of leaving their homes and traveling to a doctors office.

Internet use has also been shown to improve brain activity in older adults. Gary Small, a geriatric psychiatrist and alzheimers expert from UCLA, has seen how technology can enhance daily living by increasing effectiveness and helping seniors function longer.

Small and his colleagues conducted a study called Your Brain on Google, discovering that neural activity increases when an individual searches online. For this study, they observed adults between the ages of 55-76. Findings revealed that even those with older brains had more neural activity when using the internet compared to those who didnt.

Just a little practice searching online for an hour a day, a week, resulted in a significant increase of brain activity, Small said.

Challenges and solutions

The adoption of social media and internet usage among older adults also has its downsides, including distraction, difficulty finding trusted resources and technology usability.

In addition to the benefits of online usage, Small has also studied how it distracts people and how it affects memory.

If youre always on your account and looking at your phone, youre not noticing whats going on in the world. It distracts you and your memory isnt that good, Small said. Memory has two components: paying attention so you can learn things and paying attention so you can pull it out of your memory when you need to.

Small's concern is the weakening of face-to face communication skills, a problem he became interested in when his teenage kids werent looking him in the eye during a conversation. The distracting effects of technology are often associated with younger people who tend to be high-frequency users; however, people of any age can be affected. Distraction can affect safety, for example, while driving. It can also hamper thought processes and limit the brain's thinking capabilities.

(Technology) trains our brains to be in some ways less creative as we jump from idea to idea, just the way we jump from website to website, Small said. To really solve complex problems, you need quiet time to be thoughtful. You need to delve into things and not be distracted.

Its all about finding balance. Small encourages people to train and not strain their brains. Mental stimulation is beneficial for any age, but there exists a sweet spot where mental activity is fun and engaging before it becomes too stressful.

Another challenge is finding trusted sources online. With the troves of data and information on the web, it can be difficult for seniors to identify reliable sites. Unreliable sites can lead to potential misdiagnosis or being scammed. When it comes to researching health information, Young advises avoiding sites that are sponsored by products or unofficial personnel and looking for sites with information that is current, unbiased and based on the search.

Trusted sites that generally provide evidence-based information on treatments and conditions include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Healthfinder.gov and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Websites ending in .edu, .gov and .org tend to be more reliable and up-to-date than sites ending in .com and .net.

Technology and products that fail to address the debilitating factors of age have also been problematic for seniors. According to Young, designing technological devices customized for older adults includes using fonts big enough for people to read and upping the contrast in display screens for those with low vision. Without these customized adjustments, it can be difficult for seniors to read information online or use their smartphones. Luckily, industrial engineers are working to solve these problems.

"People realize its a huge market, and more older people are using the internet so theyre trying to make it more user friendly, more intuitive and simpler to use, Young said.

Chaiwoo Lee, a research scientist at the MIT AgeLab and an industrial engineer, has studied technology adoption among the older population. Shes worked on developing technology with bigger text and buttons to work around the physical limitations that come with aging. Shes noticed that the increase of technology adoption among seniors correlates with the growth of technological products.

As they look at what others are using, theyre becoming more aware and more likely to adopt new technology, said Lee. Theyre independent. Theyre willing to explore.

Don Weinstein, Livia Weinsteins husband, isn't afraid to explore. At 80 years old, the former electronics engineer helps tutor a computer class for individuals who want to develop their online skills. He said he has always been fascinated by technology and followed its advancements over the past several decades.

I learned from the beginning and its been a continuous learning situation because the technology and platforms keep changing, Don Weinstein said. It started out with analog and digital computers. Now anything you pick up you dont think of it as a computer, but as a communication device.

Olga Ojeva, a 69-year-old active social media user from Maryland, attends computer classes at the Jewish Council for Aging where Don Weinstein teaches. She was initially intimidated by the challenges of navigating online. Now, she is an active user and logs on every day to connect with friends and her younger nieces and nephews.

The more you do it the more comfortable you will feel about it, Ojeva said. I am not a master, but I have become more knowledgeable.

Keeping up with the changes in technology is a continuous endeavor for individuals both young and old. According to Livia Weinstein, age has little to do with it.

Sometimes older people are scared to try because they think theyre too old to learn, she said. Its all about your attitude and how you feel.

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How social media and technology are changing the lives of the elderly - WRAL.com

PARIS, FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 08: Kids show the screen of their smartphone with Nintendo Co.'s Pokemon Go augmented-reality game at the Trocadero in front of the Eiffel tower on September 8, 2016 in Paris, France. ChesnotGetty Images

If you talk to the engineers and dreamers in Silicon Valley, especially anyone over 35, they'll probably admit to being into science fiction. This genre of movies, comic books and novels was huge in the first half of the last century and remained strong through its second half, when most of today's engineers were born. That's not to say science fiction's allure has faded if anything, the popularity of shows like Westworld and Stranger Things suggests we're as fascinated as ever but to point out that it had a great influence on those creating todays technology.

I was born in the latter part of the last century, and like many of my geek friends, was into science fiction at all levels. We loved its heady futuristic ideas and reveled in its high-minded prophesies. But there is one theme in science fiction that always troubled me: when technology runs amok and subverts its creators. Usually when this happens, the story becomes a dramatic puzzle, whose solution involves the protagonists expending tons of creative energy in an effort to either destroy their mutinous creation or contain it. I had nightmares for months after I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein .

I've been involved in dozens of technology projects, but I have to admit that seldom in our design or business discussions do we spend much time on the potential negative impact of our work on the world. Instead, we abide by an engineering mantra often embodied in the concept "We create it because we can." Indeed, in most cases we create technology because we see a need, or to solve a problem. But sometimes in hindsight it seems we wind up creating new ones.

I recently spent time with key execs in the security and cybersecurity space. Perhaps no other area in our digital world underlines the flip side of technological progress. IT execs tell me that security is now about 25% of their IT budget spend. Each day we hear of hackers targeting user identities, financial networks and power grids, and malware routinely targets PCs, laptops and smartphones, holding them hostage till users pay a ransom fee to recover their data.

When the folks at DARPA and other agencies blueprinted the Internet in the 1960s, the idea was to have a medium in which to share scientific data and other information quickly and on a global scale. But as the Internet has evolved, it's become the de facto medium for just about any type of communication, commercial transactions, and yes, hacking that impacts us for better and worse.

It's also been responsible for an unprecedented age of distraction. I was recently in New York and had to drive from northern New York City to the Elmira area on the state's freeways. For the first time, I saw signs that said "Next texting stop is 3 miles ahead. Dont text and drive." Most states have already outlawed texting while driving, and yet we hear almost weekly of traffic accidents cased by oblivious drivers tapping blithely on smartphones.

The level of distraction caused by technology (driving or no) is at an all-time high. While on vacation in Maui, Hawaii last month, I was stunned to see people pulling out their smartphones and checking them while walking around beautiful Lahaina and other areas of the island. The gravitational pull of these devices is ubiquitous. During a dinner with my wife, my son and his wife and our two granddaughters at a beachside restaurant, I caught all of us looking at our phones as we waited for our food, paying no heed to the gorgeous scenery right in front of us.

I dont believe Steve Jobs and Apple dreamed the iPhone or smartphones in general would engender this level of diversion. I dont think Mark Zuckerberg, when he created Facebook , foresaw how distracting and addictive Facebook would become. And I dont think Niantic, the creators of Pokmon Go , fully thought through the tectonic fantasy-reality collisions of their augmented reality app (shortly after its launch in early July 2016, two people playing the game walked off a cliff ). My wife has had close encounters with trees and light posts herself while chasing down some of the game's secretive critters.

In a recent Harvard Business Review piece titled "Liberal Arts in the Data Age," author JM Olejarz writes about the importance of reconnecting a lateral, liberal arts mindset with the sort of rote engineering approach that can lead to myopic creativity. Today's engineers have been so focused on creating new technologies that their short term goals risk obscuring unintended longterm outcomes. While a few companies, say Intel , are forward-thinking enough to include ethics professionals on staff, they remain exceptions. At this point all tech companies serious about ethical grounding need to be hiring folks with backgrounds in areas like anthropology, psychology and philosophy.

I have no illusions about the cat being out of the bag (it's hence shacked up with YouTube), and as a parent and grandparent, admit I need to be more proactive about self-policing. My hope is that we can all move a little more in that direction, creating technology that is both impactful and thoughtful in its engagement with our lives and the world.

Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists, covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin is the President of Creative Strategies, Inc and has been with the company since 1981 where he has served as a consultant providing analysis to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry.

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Why We Need the Liberal Arts in Technology's Age of Distraction - TIME

The new group of 23 badges takes a progressive approach to STEM and also nudges girls to become citizen scientists using the great outdoors as their laboratory. Patrick Semansky / AP

Next year, another initiative will allow Girl Scouts to earn "Cybersecurity" badges. One study cited by the scouts showed women remain vastly underrepresented in that industry, holding 11 percent of such jobs globally. Another study, done by the Computing Technology Industry Association, found that 69 percent of women who have not pursued careers in information technology attribute their choice to not knowing what opportunities are available to them.

As for STEM overall, Acevedo said, a lot of girls remain vulnerable to a crisis of confidence in pursuing education and careers in those fields.

"A lot of girls haven't made that shift from using technology to, 'You can actually be a programmer,'" she said. "That you're the one who can make that coding. For a lot of girls, they need to have that hands-on experience so they feel confident."

The scouts, which are 1.8 million strong in the U.S., has offered such opportunities in the past but consider the new badges and related programming a major push.

"It's really all about how do we capture that interest in science and technology," Acevedo said. "The other thing is the girls are learning not just how to do a specific skill but also how to think, how to think like an inventor, how to think like a creator, how to think like a maker. Those are the types of things that we want to ignite in the girls."

Jennifer Allenbach, the scouting group's vice president for "girl experience," oversaw development of the new badges. Exposing girls to STEM by second grade is crucial in motivating them to continue, she said. As for the outdoors, the strategy is to move girls forward to dig deeper into such issues as conservation.

"Girls had a say in this," she said. "We reached out and asked what they were interested in and this is it."

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Girl Scouts Offer New Badges for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - NBCNews.com