Mariah Blake:

hen Thomas Shaw gets worked up, he twists in his chair and kneads his hand. Or he paces about in his tube socks grumbling, “They’re trying to destroy us,” and “The whole thing is a giant scam.” And Shaw, the founder of a medical device maker called Retractable Technologies, spends a lot of time being agitated.

One of the topics that gets him most riled up these days is bloodstream infections. And with good reason—while most people rarely think about them, these are the most dangerous of the hospital-acquired bugs that afflict one in ten patients in the United States. Their spread has helped to make contact with our health care system the fifth leading cause of death in this country.

A few years ago, Shaw, an engineer by training, decided he wanted to do something to help solve this problem and quickly homed in on the mechanics of needle-less IV catheters. Rather than using needles to inject drugs into IV systems, most hospitals have moved to a new design, which involves screwing the threaded tip of a needle-less syringe into a specially designed port. The problem is that if the tip brushes against a nurse’s scrubs, or a counter, or the railing of a hospital bed, it can pick up bacteria. And the rugged threaded surface makes it difficult to get rid of the germs once they’re there. Often, the bacteria go straight into the patients’ bloodstream—which explains why, according to some studies, the rate of bloodstream infections is three times higher with needle-less systems than with their needle-based counterparts.

Frederic Lardinois:

So where is the real disruption in real estate? Startups are taking on commercial real estate and apartment rentals all the time, but when it comes to private properties, we’re still basically stuck with the same sales model today as somebody who bought a house in the 60s. We’re still working with agents and pay them fees (directly as least as sellers – and indirectly as buyers), even though we often know more about a house and neighborhood then they do. They do, however, have the key to the house we want to see and unless there’s an open house, there is basically no other way to get into a place that’s for sale.

Real estate transactions are big and complicated (and you can bet your agent will often remind you that it’s the biggest financial decision you’ll ever make), but where is the startup that tries to change this or at least tries to make some aspects easier and more transparent? Sure, it’s a well-regulated industry with plenty of (local) quirks, but the same could be said for taxis and it looks like some companies have been able to change that landscape pretty effectively. If Airbnb can rent out houses, there sure must be a way to at least make home showings easier in the age of Lockitron (once it starts shipping) and internet-connected surveillance.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of good real estate agents out there, but I can’t help but think that in the long run, real estate agents will go the way of travel agents. There will also be a need for a few good ones that can help you out in special circumstances and some people will always want to rely on them instead of handling things themselves. It took some ambitious startups to change how we book our travel today and it’ll take even more ambitious startups to change real estate as we know it.

There is a huge opportunity here, however, and I’m looking forward to seeing somebody try to really shake things up.

Adam Lesser:

Similar to Apple’s strategy, Tesla has been creating a closed ecosystem, and in Tesla’s case it’s around electric car charging. And that’s not so great for the electric car drivers of the future.

Now that’s all well and good for Tesla, but what about the entire EV landscape? Tesla’s supercharger utilizes a proprietary plug, and although the stations its planning to build will have four to six EV spots servicing any vehicle, four will be dedicated to Tesla. Imagine going to the gas station, and four of the pumps were reserved for BMWs. When the automakers get a say in the powering of their EVs, they are choosing to create closed systems that exclude their competition.

auto alliance:

According to Alliance poll results, consumers are still cool to automated or “self-driving” cars with 33 percent indicating that such cars are a good idea, 42 percent saying they are a bad idea, and 24 percent unsure. Many consumers are unsure about the importance of self-driving cars:

40 percent of respondents believe self-driving cars do not enhance safety.

24 percent say they enhance safety by limiting human error.

12 percent see them as important to allow elderly and disabled people to drive.

8 percent believe they liberate people to do other things in the vehicle.

16 percent are unsure of the importance of self-driving cars.

Today, the driver is responsible for controlling the vehicle, and consumers expect the same laws to apply for self-driving cars.

Polling shows strong consumer support for requiring the driver or operator of a self-driving vehicle to have a driver’s license (86 percent), for prohibiting the driver from texting/surfing the internet (72 percent), for not allowing the driver to be under 16 years old (86 percent) and for banning alcohol consumption while operating the vehicle (88 percent).

If a self-driving car were in an accident, who should be liable for the damage? About one third of respondents (31 percent) were unsure. According to the poll, 30 percent said the software company controlling the vehicle, 22 percent said the vehicle owner, 7 percent said the company that installed the equipment and 7 percent said the vehicle manufacturer.

I have been unable to find the raw poll information.

Joseph White:

A more clear-cut worry surfaced in the poll: Privacy. About 75% of respondents said they were concerned that companies would use the software that controls a self-driving car to collect personal data, and 70% were worried that data would be shared with the government. Asked whether they were worried that hackers could gain control of a self-driving vehicle, 81% of the respondents replied they were either very or somewhat concerned about that threat, the Alliance says.

A summary of Cisco’s recent self driving car survey can be found here.

Ryan Lundquist:

It’s usually good to stand out in real estate – but not for odd reasons. Here are some of the fun things I’ve seen during the business day on appraisal inspections. These are probably things to avoid doing to your house.

NFL Driveway: I am a huge sports fan and diehard sports talk radio listener, but spray painting a dozen stencils of your favorite team’s logo on your concrete driveway doesn’t make the neighborhood look good.

Julius Genachowski:

Colorado is currently considering proposals to outlaw Uber and other services that enable passengers to book a car service from their smartphones. Uber and its competitors face similar challenges from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Washington, DC.

In May, the North Carolina State Senate voted unanimously to prohibit Tesla Motors, the innovative electric car company, from selling cars directly to consumers, including via the Internet. The Texas legislature recently retained similar prohibitions until at least 2015.

Bruce Sterling:

When you’re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They’re a drag.

See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it’s all good. Then all of a sudden he’s like: you know what? The noble science of physics shouldn’t harm mankind!

What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat: why was the public’s money given to you, if not to “harm mankind”? If physics was harmless, you wouldn’t have a damn salary!

That’s what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden laced on their foot. If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all!

Libby Copeland:

For a variety of reasons, women are not as good at negotiating as men. For one thing, we’re not as practiced at it. Several studies have shown that women tend to negotiate less often, in part because the assertiveness required for the task gets socialized out of us. After all, nice girls aren’t supposed to cause conflict, and there are real-world implications for those who buck the rules. In one study, both men and women pronounced female job applicants less hirable when they asked for more compensation than when male applicants did the same thing. (Male subjects in particular were less likely to want to work with women who tried to negotiate.) So it’s not surprising that negotiating causes women more anxiety than it causes men and that women are less likely to realize they can negotiate in a given situation. You have to do all sorts of tricky things to get them to haggle, like describe it as “asking” instead of “negotiating” or explicitly tell them that they’re allowed to do it. It’s no wonder that women were said to flock to the defunct car company Saturn, which was known for its no-haggle policy.

Part of what’s so crazy about buying a car the traditional way is that the Wild West pricing means there’s no way to know whether the deck is stacked against you from the outset merely because you’re a woman. Studies conducted in the ’90s by economist Ian Ayres showed that Chicago-area dealerships routinely quoted blacks and women higher initial offers than white men, so that even after haggling they wound up with higher prices. Data from auto repair shops shows something more nuanced: Women are quoted higher prices unless they break gender stereotypes, either by showing they know the market rate for a repair or by insisting on a discount. All of which is why, when women buy a car, we first research the bejesus out of it. We know that certain salesmen will be inclined to treat us as easy marks, and we’ll need to defy their expectations. So we prep and prep and then show up, hoping we don’t get a jerk. Sure, we can request a different salesman or hit another dealership, but we’ll pay for it in wasted time.

AAA:

Graduated driver licensing (GDL) systems are designed to protect new drivers by limiting their exposure to risk initially and gradually phasing in additional driving privileges as they gain experience. Although numerous studies have shown that GDL has significantly reduced the numbers of 16- and 17-year-old drivers involved, injured, and killed in motor vehicle crashes, the few studies of its effects on 18- and 19-year-olds have produced conflicting results. Some researchers suspect that because most states’ GDL systems only apply to new drivers younger than 18, GDL might encourage young people to wait until age 18 to obtain a license to avoid the requirements and restrictions associated with GDL, resulting in older teenagers having less driving experience and higher crash risk than they would without GDL.

Via Syeven Sinofsky

The Economist:

The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal. The materials used to make cars are getting lighter and stronger. The growing popularity of electric and hybrid cars, as well as vehicles powered by natural gas or hydrogen fuel cells, will also have an effect on demand for oil.

Analysts at Citi, a bank, calculate that if the fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks improves by an average of 2.5% a year it will be enough to constrain oil demand; they predict that a peak of less than 92m b/d will come in the next few years. Ricardo, a big automotive engineer, has come to a similar conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the oil “supermajors” and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America.
But it would be foolish to extrapolate from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sort of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies. China recently introduced its own set of fuel-economy measures. If, as a result of its determination to reduce its dependence on imported oil, the regime imposes policies designed to “leapfrog” the country’s transport system to hybrids, oil demand will come under even more pressure.