If the car senses erratic steering and rapid corrections, the telltales of fatigue, the Attention Assist will advise you to get some rest as it displays a big coffee cup icon in the instrument panel (this is my favorite ISO 9000 icon, by the way). Attention Assist is just one of a dozen or more marquee safety systems Mercedes has piled onto the E-class for 2010, and it’s clear at the outset that Mercedes is returning to safety as a transcendent brand value after years of marketing itself as the spoils of well-paying bad behavior, the glittery metal floss under Britney Spears’ untrussed derriere.
Suddenly, the E-class is, again, the car for grown-ups.
I won’t parrot the company line about the E-class being the heart and soul of the brand, except that it is. The E-class is a “business saloon,” the standard-issue Mercedes — stout, reliable, comfortable and enduring. This is the stainless-steel Rolex of cars, steadily elegant and appropriate for any occasion, and you have to admire the alacrity with which the E-class can go from being a tan airport taxi drone in Berlin to being a valet-park star in Beverly Hills.
To save you the suspense, I’ll tell you now: The new E-class is a fantastic car but for one huge, agonizing, inexcusable error that baffles me like a Rubik’s Cube the size of the Seagrams Building. More on that in a moment. For now, consider a short list of some of the more fun safety systems available on the E-class as standard or options.
Category: Technology
The Machinery Behind Health-Care ReformHow an Industry Lobby Scored a Swift, Unexpected Victory by Channeling Billions to Electronic Records
When President Obama won approval for his $787 billion stimulus package in February, large sections of the 407-page bill focused on a push for new technology that would not stimulate the economy for years.
The inclusion of as much as $36.5 billion in spending to create a nationwide network of electronic health records fulfilled one of Obama’s key campaign promises — to launch the reform of America’s costly health-care system.
But it was more than a political victory for the new administration. It also represented a triumph for an influential trade group whose members now stand to gain billions in taxpayer dollars.
A Washington Post review found that the trade group, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, had worked closely with technology vendors, researchers and other allies in a sophisticated, decade-long campaign to shape public opinion and win over Washington’s political machinery.
Automation certainly makes sense, but we taxpayers should not be subsidizing it….
SOLAR TRANSIT OF ATLANTIS AND THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE
Only image ever taken of a transit of a space shuttle (Atlantis) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in front of the Sun, during the last repair mission of Hubble, obtained from Florida at 100 km south of the Kennedy Space Center on May 13th 2009 12:17 local time, several minutes before grapple of Hubble by Atlantis.
Bangle Bids Adieu
When it comes time to chart designer Chris Bangle’s contribution to the BMW brand’s aesthetic, few pundits will praise his pulchritudinous perversion of pistonhead passion, or thank him for the aesthetic affectations for which BMW is now known. In other words, the “Bangle Butt” will be Chris’ lasting legacy. Of course, this is also the man who removed the words “flame surfacing” from art school and placed them on the tip of his detractors’ tongues. That and Axis of White Power. (Oh! How we laughed!) Equally improbably, the Buckeye State native helped the expression “Dame Edna glasses” cross into the automotive lexicon. Yup. It’s been a wild ride. Literally.
CAR:
BMW design boss Chris Bangle is to leave the car industry, it was announced today. In a statement, BMW said Bangle was quitting ‘to pursue his own design-related endeavors beyond the auto industry.’
Bangle, 52, was the architect of the often controversial flame surfacing look that transformed BMW design from the Russian doll mentality of the 1990s to the edgy – some would say radical and divisive – styling of today.
The cars Bangle spannered
The outgoing design chief has overseen the launch of the current 1-, 3-, 5- and 7-series saloons and hatchbacks, as well as the raft of niche models that have seen BMW’s model range explode in recent years: the Z3, Z4, Z8, X3, X5, X6 and 6-series were all conceived on his watch.
Bangle grew up in Wausau, WI.
I give him a great deal of credit for dramatically changing what is often a very conservative business: car design.
I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle
I’m baffled by WhosHere. And I’m no newbie. I built my first Web page in 1994, wrote my first blog entry in 1999, and sent my first tweet in October 2006. My user number on Yahoo’s event site, Upcoming.org: 14. I love tinkering with new gadgets and diving into new applications. But WhosHere had me stumped. It’s an iPhone app that knows where you are, shows you other users nearby, and lets you chat with them. Once it was installed and running, I drew a blank. What was I going to do with this thing?
So I asked for some help. I started messaging random people within a mile of my location (37.781641 °N, 122.393835 °W), asking what they used WhosHere for.
“Counter Blog”
Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don’t be surprised. They’re just following the service’s new “counter-blogging” flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force’s public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle “trolls,” “ragers” — and even well-informed online writers, too. It’s all part of an Air Force push to “counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force,” Captain David Faggard says.
Over the last couple of years, the armed forces have tried, in fits and starts, to connect more with bloggers. The Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense now hold regular “bloggers’ roundatbles” with generals, colonels, and key civilian leaders. The Navy invited a group of bloggers to embed with them on a humanitarian mission to Central and South America, last summer. Military blogger Michael Yon recently traveled to Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
In contrast, the Air Force has largely kept the blogosphere at arms’ length. Most of the sites are banned from Air Force networks. And the service has mostly stayed away from the Pentagon’s blog outreach efforts. Captain Faggard, who’s become the Air Force Public Affairs Agency’s designated social media guru, has made strides in shifting that attitude. The air service now has a Twitter feed, a blog of its own — and marching orders, for how to comment on other sites. “We’re trying to get people to understand that they can do this,” he tells Danger Room.
Flight at 100; The Next 100 Years
Flight’s first editor Stanley Spooner had little trouble deciding what story would be the lead in our inaugural issue 100 years ago – “A Second Englishman Flies” was our first headline. But back in those pioneering early days, what would Spooner have predicted for the top aerospace story a century later?
Even the most enthusiastic aeronauts and aviators in 1909 would have struggled to believe the way in which powered flight would evolve during the magazine’s first 100 years: that the aeroplane would be “going to war” within five years that passengers would be travelling in shirtsleeve comfort across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound within 70 years or that within 80 years a winged spaceplane would be regularly blasting into orbit and returning to earth as a glider.
Predicting what lies in store over the next 100 years of aviation is just as challenging. The framework for the near term (the next 20 or 30 years) is already in place, with new airliner programmes such as the Airbus A350, A380 and Boeing 787 and military aircraft like the Lockheed Martin F-22, F-35A Joint Strike Fighter and Eurofighter Typhoon set to be with us well into the first half of the century. But surely some of the exciting new technology currently in the minds of the industry’s boffins will lead to more imaginative creations appearing in the longer term?
There are some fundamental questions that must be answered when examining likely scenarios 50 to 100 years from now: how much oil will be left and how much will it cost? Will the green lobby – and any increasing evidence of serious climate change – have forced the way we travel by air to have to be reinvented? How will the threats to world security/peace influence military aircraft design? And how much of the space exploration dream will have become a reality?
The Marshfield Clinic’s Electronic Medical Records System in the News
Joseph Calderaro, 67, is one of health care’s quiet success stories. Over the last four years, he has carefully managed his diabetes by lowering his blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol with diet, exercise and medication.
To keep on track, Mr. Calderaro visits his doctor, attends meetings for diabetes patients and gets frequent calls from a health counselor. It is a team effort, orchestrated by the Marshfield Clinic here. And it is animated by technology, starting with Mr. Calderaro’s computerized patient record — a continuously updated document that includes his health history, medications, lab tests, treatment guidelines and doctors’ and nurses’ notes.
To visit the Marshfield Clinic, a longtime innovator in health information technology, is to glimpse medicine’s digital future. Across the national spectrum of health care politics there is broad agreement that moving patient records into the computer age, the way Marshfield and some other health systems have already done, is essential to improving care and curbing costs.
There has been some loose talk about the Obama administration providing “incentives” for health care automation. These investments should be made on their merits, rather than funded by yet another taxpayer give-away.
Marshfield apparently built their own system, a competitor to Verona based Epic Systems.
Might this article be part of their initial marketing efforts to other health care organizations?
iPod Breathalyzer
Now the iPod can answer the question: Am iDrunk?
A new product called the iBreath turns Apple Inc.’s iPod into an alcohol breathalyzer.
The $79 accessory plugs into the base of the iPod and functions like a field sobriety test. The person using the iBreath exhales into a retractable “blow wand” and the internal sensor measures the blood-alcohol content. Within two seconds, it displays the results on an LED screen. A reading of 0.08 or above sets off an alarm, signaling a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit in all 50 states.
“We are absolutely not advocating drinking and driving, but we know that people just don’t observe that,” said Don Bassler, chief executive and founder of David Steele Enterprises Inc. in Newport Beach, an online retailer and creator of the iBreath. “We don’t want people to think that this makes it all OK, but it’s a safety device that we hope people will use, and it may save lives.”
The iBreath is among a growing number of products for the iPod and iPhone designed to combat excessive holiday reveling. Last Call, a new application for the iPhone, provides a tool for estimating blood-alcohol content (as well as a list of attorneys who specialize in DUI arrests).
Fascinating.
Does Google Know Too Much?
Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one critic says some state intelligence bureaus look “like child protection services” in comparison. A few German government bodies have mounted a resistance.
The little town of Molfsee, near Kiel in northern Germany, has three lakes, an idyllic open-air museum and a population just under 5,000. It’s not the likeliest place to declare war against a global power. Yet Molfsee has won the first round of a battle against a powerful digital age opponent.