Ethan Zuckerman:

I have an excellent job at a great university. I have a home that I love in a community I’ve lived in for two decades where I have deep ties of family and friendship. Unfortunately, that university and that hometown are about 250 kilometers from one another. And so, I’ve become an extreme commuter, traveling three or four hours each way once or twice a week so I can spend time with my students 3-4 days a week and with my wife and young son the rest of the time.
 
 America is a commuter culture. Averaged out over a week, my commute is near the median American experience. Spend forty minutes driving each way to your job and you’ve got a longer commute than I in the weeks I make one trip to Cambridge. But, of course, I don’t get to go home every night. I stay two to three nights a week at a bed and breakfast in Cambridge, where my “ludicrously frequent guest” status gets me a break on a room. I spend less this way than I did my first year at MIT, when I rented an apartment that I never used on weekends or during school vacations.
 
 This is not how I would choose to live if I could bend space and time, and I spend a decent amount of time trying to optimise my travel through audiobooks, podcasts, and phone calls made while driving. I also gripe about the commute probably far too often to my friends, who are considerate if not entirely sympathetic. (It’s hard to be sympathetic to a guy who has the job he wants, lives in a beautiful place, and simply has a long drive a few times a week.)

Boris Sofman:

Thank you for your question — this is a very important one.
 
 The cars in Anki Drive are characters in a video game brought to life in the physical world.
 
 Anki Drive cars are extremely different from other types of cars (plastic, RC, etc.). They are very complex and capable robotic systems that can bring the characters they represent to life in a way that has never been possible outside of a video game: with intelligence, personality, and true interaction. For the first time, you can play a game where whatever cars you don’t control come to life and are controlled by the AI, reacting autonomously to what you’re doing and what the other cars are doing. The have a lot of sensors, motors, and computation internally (50 MHz microcontroller in each car) to make this possible.
 
 In terms of their capabilities, there are 3 key challenges of robotics that we had to solve to make Anki Drive, and the capabilities of the cars within, possible:
 
 Positioning — every car needs to understand precisely where it is, and where the other cars are relative to it. To do this, each car scans its environment 500 times per second to know with exact precision where it is located on the track, and wirelessly communicates that back to the mobile devices running the game.
 
 Reasoning — Once the cars know where they are, we use that information to make intelligent decisions and plans for the cars that are controlled by the game. We use mobile devices as the ‘brains’ behind the real-world game, thinking about thousands of potential actions every second for each car.

Dan Neil:

TOYOTA, RESTORED AS the world’s largest auto maker by sales in 2013, produces lots of amazing vehicles. It makes the world’s most durable small pickup, the Hilux. On the other side of the vehicular universe, there is the Lexus LFA, a carbon-bodied apparition with a naturally aspirated V10 engine and a spine-tingling 9,000 rpm redline. Me want.
 
 Toyota 7203.TO -0.47% builds the best-selling sedan in America, the Camry; it builds full-size, steak-eating trucks in Texas (more than 1 million at last count). This company has bandwidth.

Soren Anderson, Ryan Kellogg, James Sallee & Ashley Langer:

We document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In our preferred estimates, children are 46% more likely to choose an automobile brand if their parents also chose that brand. Correlation in intrafamily brand choice could represent a causal trans- mission of brand preference, or it could be due to correlated family characteristics that determine brand choice. We present a variety of empirical specifications that lend support to the causal interpretation. We then discuss implications of intergenerational brand pref- erence transmission for automakers and market outcomes, focusing on a model of Bertrand competition in the presence of brand loyalty that is transmitted across generations. We find that intergenerational transmission of brand preferences should lower equilibrium prices for vehicles targeted at parents and raise equilibrium prices for vehicles targeted at children. We further show that firms have a unilateral incentive to instill a sense of brand loyalty in their consumers, even though equilibrium profits may decrease when all firms do so.

Tom Foremski:

Historians will look back at the past 20 years as a unique period, a time when there was great opportunity to see deep into the collective soul of entire societies because people’s online behavior was largely naked of any fears of being judged or monitored.

Novelist Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez wrote: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” We once had insight into that secret world.

People now go “dark” — ditching their natures, becoming self-monitored, self-critical, and second guessing themselves and everything around them, in the wake of the NSA disclosures and the enormous amount of corporate spying on individuals, so that they will buy more products. We lose far more than we gain.

The individual and their search box was almost as private and sacrosanct as the communion box — and exhibited the same honesty. You can see this in the search data that AOL released in 2006 as part of a research project. It anonymized 658,000 users but for the first time we got to see a narrative from each user that pointed to great sorrow and drama within ordinary peoples’ lives that could not be revealed in any other way.

Here is a list of searches by user “005315”:

Mary Reid, Kohler’s VP Industrial Design gave a worthwhile presentation on “Design Thinking” this evening at Monona Terrace.

This image was taken with my iPhone 5s in relatively low light. Rather impressive.

Mary’s presentation included a brief discussion on technology & plumbing, including wifi and bluetooth equipped toilets along with a shower head that includes a bluetooth speaker.

Somewhat related: Consumer DSLRs “dead in 5 years” and my comments on the rapidly expanding world of iPhone photography.

Asymcar

Steve Crandall brings a new perspective as a guest. Steve’s analysis of complex systems has given him a huge pool of wisdom into which we dip our dainty spoons.

We survey the interlopers seeking to replace many jobs that cars have traditionally done, from horses to bicycles, planes, trains and buses.

We dive deeper into a few earlier Asymcar topics including energy, regulation, infrastructure, power train evolution, societal changes, distribution networks, urbanization and consider the promise of electric bicycles.

Several innovation timing lessons temper our expectations for immediate improvements.

Finally, we revisit the emerging transportation information layer and how such services may change public behavior and the auto-ecosystem.

Jonathan Blaustein:

It has now been five years since the global economic system nearly collapsed into ruin, and the ensuing half-decade has been difficult for most — apart from the infamous 1 percent — including professional photographers. The ease and accessibility of digital technology combined with the rise of the mostly free Internet have eliminated many of the ways photographers eked out a middle-class living. Even university jobs — once a stable and comfortable perch — have been replaced by cheap and benefits-free adjuncts.
 
 What’s a struggling photographer to do?
 
 The burgeoning model requires a Malcolm X “By Any Means Necessary” attitude. Photographers are encouraged to write, blog, teach workshops, engage in social media, secure sponsorships, develop exterior passions and basically do anything and everything to put food on the table. One blogger has called the phenomenon the “21st century hustle.” (O.K., that blogger is me.) But as much as this feels new and different, we can trace the Renaissance-man lineage back to the most famous American photographer in history: Ansel Adams.
 
 Mr. Adams, ever the optimist, once proclaimed: “The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.” That sums up his future-embracing outlook, because when Mr. Adams committed himself to his career, there were few examples of successful professional photographic artists whom he could emulate. Ansel Adams’s career provides a road map to potential success while also serving as a reminder that everything old will be new again.

Human interaction is one of the many gifts that travel bestows. Random, unplanned conversations are truly a blessing with wisdom as a dessert.

And so it was while changing planes recently, that I happened upon a 60+ year young shoeshine expert. This man had been through a difficult job change and recently returned to work shining shoes.

Beginning to work on my 24 year old Allen Edmonds wing tips (great value), he looked up and asked how I became “successful”? I could only reply that God has blessed me with abundance. I have been given a fabulous family, health and wonderful smart colleagues.

Continuing to work diligently on my shoes, he added “most people say that they are lucky.”

“But, I know, that God gives it all to us. We may not always understand why, but “every good and perfect thing comes from above“.”

He continued that after this unplanned job change, he went back to several former shoe shine customers who gladly gave him their business again.

I had a similar conversation with a shoeshine family several years ago. They were some of the most friendly and generous people I’ve encountered while on travel.

This brief conversation came streaming back into my mind after chatting with a friend who is fully recovered from heart difficulties. I replied to this good news with a “Thank God”. My friend thanked medicine. To me, it all originates with God’s grace.

What a blessing it is to travel.

Shawn Knight:

Driver error is the number one cause of automobile crashes so what would happen if you removed humans from the equation? According to independent research by the Eno Center for Transportation, vehicle-related injuries would drop by 90 percent and save the US economy roughly $450 billion each year.

The group discovered that 40 percent of fatal crashes in the US involved alcohol, drugs, fatigue or distraction – all metrics that wouldn’t affect an autonomous vehicle. Even in cases where a vehicle is primarily responsible for an accident, human elements like not paying attention and speeding often contributed to the occurrence of crashes and / or the severity of injuries.

The adoption rate of self-driving vehicles among consumers will of course play a big role in how many accidents can be avoided and how much money the economy could save. For example, if one in every 10 car was replaced with an autonomous vehicle, it would reduce crashes and subsequent injuries by roughly half and save around $25 billion each year.