Cars do not belong in cities. A standard American sedan can comfortably hold 4+ adults w/ luggage, can travel in excess of 100 miles per hour, and can travel 300+ miles at a time without stopping to refuel. These are all great things if you are traveling long distances between cities. If you are going by yourself to pickup your dry cleaning, then cars are insanely over-engineered for the task. It’s like hammering in a nail with a diesel-powered pile driver. To achieve all these feats (high capacity, high speed, and long range driving), cars must be large and powered by fossil fuels. So when you get a few hundred (or thousand) cars squeezed onto narrow city streets, you are left with snarled traffic and stifling smog.
Even if you ignore the pollution, cars simply take up too much space. Next time you are stuck in traffic behind what seems like a million cars, try to imagine if all those cars where replaced by pedestrians or bike riders. Suddenly, the congestion is gone.
Computer-Controlled Anesthesia Could Be Safer for Patients
By tracking brain activity through electroencephalography, or EEG, software may be able to maintain a patient in a medically induced coma more safely than a human expert can.
Anesthesiologists use EEG to monitor a patient’s level of sedation through sensors placed on the scalp. When a patient is deeply sedated in a medical coma—a technique sometimes used to reduce brain swelling after a traumatic injury or to treat uncontrolled seizures—a nurse or doctor must currently monitor the patient’s brain activity and adjust the rate of anesthetic delivery around the clock, sometimes for days.
Emery Brown, an MIT neuroscientist and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, thinks the computer-controlled anesthetic system he has developed could do a better job. In a study published on Thursday in PLoS Computational Biology, Brown and colleagues demonstrate the technology in rats as a step toward developing it for human patients.
Map Showing Fall in Car Ownership Across London
Flip Chart Rick, via Leigh Turner.
The Gen Y revolution that may never come
It is always irritating to be stereotyped, but it must be particularly galling for cash-strapped, educated members of “Generation Y” to be told by demographers, marketers and futurologists that they have to get out and shake up management and the world of work.
Globally, under-30s may be “irreverent, change-seeking, challenging, better informed, mobile, and connected”, as Moisés Naím describes them in his new book, The End of Power. But the FT’s “Class of the Crunch” series has underlined that, in Britain at least, recent graduates are paying more for education and housing and earning less than their predecessors. Changing the world of work is the last thing on most of their minds: they have to get into it first.
Once there, new recruits find the reality of long hours at lean organisations that make few concessions to inexperience a shock, after years of cosseting by their baby boomer parents. London Business School’s Lynda Gratton details the challenges ahead in her book The Shift. She reprimanded an audience of older executives at the recent FT Innovate conference for giving young employees such “crap-awful work”.
Small Business Owner Analyzes Health Insurance Costs
I can assemble a roster of plans at different price points and model the effect of offering various employer/employee premium cost splits. I can also see what happens if I offer a defined contribution instead of a percentage split — and what it would cost me to fund health savings accounts for workers who choose a bronze-level plan. Of course, I will have to confirm that I can actually purchase my preferred configuration with my agent or insurer, but the estimates I make should at least be good enough to narrow my options.
To do my projections, I created an Excel sheet that allows me to analyze up to 20 plans at once. I’ve been playing around with different plans and incentives, and I’m finding ways to save tens of thousands of dollars from the cost of the first plan my broker recommended. Would you like to try it? I put extra time into making it easy to use, and you can try it free. All you need is your roster of employees, with their ages, and a quote from any source. Spend some time messing around with numbers and you, too, might save significant money. The sheet and the instructions for how to use it are on my website. Be sure to read the instructions!
Applebees automates, and brings a new world of jobs one step closer
Automation need not be feared. Many of the dooms we fear will disappear along with the lost jobs. Automation improves productivity, giving us more national wealth and income. We need only adapt our society to gain its benefits, minimize the trauma of the transition, and share the benefits (which we have failed to do with the gains from the last 30 years). We want to succeed like Britain did in the 1760 – 1840 period, with internal peace and prosperity. We do not want to follow France’s path during that period.
Planning for success requires reassessment of America’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, economists consider as strengths our relatively high fertility and attractiveness to immigrants. Not so as automation destroys jobs by the millions during the next few decades.
In the 21st century population growth will not be necessary for economic growth. Perhaps the 21st century will reverse that, making Japan is the nation best prepared for the next wave of automation — as seen in the below graph from “Japan Meanderings”, Christopher Woods, CLSA, 5 December 2013:
Big Automakers Won’t Build the Car of the Future, Small Inventors Will
Why do major leaps forward come so rarely in the auto industry? There are of course the usual suspects: crash test standards, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requirements, European pedestrian safety protections; entrenched capital investment in infrastructure and manufacturing methods; long vehicle development cycles — the whole legacy kaboodle of a mature and highly regulated industry. But I spent four years researching, interviewing, and writing about inventors who aren’t limited to thinking like the auto companies, and who made cars that are drastic departures from the ones we’re driving now. They did this as part of a grand-challenges approach to innovation — a $10 million X Prize that pushed inventors to build the super-efficient car of the future.
Auto companies like to sneer at legitimately futuristic cars, calling them “science projects” and saying consumers will never buy them. I believe this is a mistake. Because ultimately, they don’t really know. They’ve never tried to make and sell cars like the ones that ended up excelling in the X Prize contest. And they’re awfully good at blaming consumer timidity for their own engineering fears and failures.
Announced in 2007 and staged in 2010, the Progressive Insurance Auto X Prize attracted diverse interest — not from big automakers but from lone inventors, garage hackers, students, entrepreneurs, and startup companies all over the world, all with different ideas about how to shape the future of the automobile. To win a piece of the $10 million prize pot, teams had to build a safe, practical car that could travel 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas (MPGe) and emit 200 grams per mile or less of CO2 (a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming).
Arguments Fly During FTC Workshop on Native Advertising
The workshop, called “Blurred Lines: Advertising or Content,” focused on whether publishers and advertisers are doing enough to keep consumers from mistaking native ads — which are meant to closely resemble non-sponsored content — from the content itself.
“As consumers, we started seeing, when we went online, things we that weren’t sure what they were,” said Mary Engle, the FTC’s associate director for advertising practices, in reference to native ads’ resemblance to editorial content. Concerns about deception, she said, sparked the FTC’s interest.
Trying to make money
Fearful the federal government would meddle with the hottest new form of advertising, leaders from across the spectrum came together in its defense. Executives from Procter & Gamble, Hearst, Mashable,The Huffington Post, Outbrain, Sharethrough and more participated in the standing-room only workshop that ran all day. Over the course of it, every imaginable defense of the medium surfaced, from the standard “native advertising is transparent enough” argument to a claim that consumers want more native ads.
How Crazy is the Auto Financing Frenzy?
Average loans for new cars jumped by $756 to $26,719 in the third quarter from a year ago, the highest increase in five years, according to Experian Automotive, which collects registration data from motor vehicle departments and financing data from lenders – an essential cog in the perfect surveillance society. Despite the jump in loan balances, the average monthly payment rose only 1.3% to $458, due to two factors:
Magically lower interest rates. Though interest rates elsewhere in the economy rocketed higher in Q3, auto lenders just ignored them, and average rates actually dropped to 4.27% from 4.53% a year earlier.
Dizzyingly long terms. The average term grew by one month to 65 months. A stunning 19% of all new-car loans were stretched to over 72 months, up from 16% last year.
Used vehicles saw similar dynamics. The average amount financed rose 1.8% to $17,900, but the average monthly payment remained flat at $350, thanks lower interest rates and longer terms.
Leasing – a fancy word for “long-term renting,” something dealers, lenders, and automakers love because they get to extract more money out of you, and you don’t even know it because the monthly payments are deceptively low – made up 27.2% of all new financing in Q3, up from 24.4% a year ago, up from 14.2% in 2009, and up from the mid-single digits back when I was still in the business (and we loved, loved, loved leases!).
The dirty secrets of clean cars
WHEREVER automotive engineers gather, some wag will sooner or later announce that hydrogen is the fuel of the future—and always will be. The hydrogen-powered car has been just around the corner for decades. However, judging from announcements by Honda, Hyundai and Toyota at last week’s motor shows in Los Angeles and Tokyo, hydrogen cars will be hitting the showrooms from spring 2014 onwards. It seems the future is about to arrive.
Hydrogen’s attraction as a transport fuel is that, unlike petrol, diesel, kerosene, natural gas and every other hydrocarbon fuel, it contains, well, no carbon. Burning it therefore creates no carbon-based greenhouse gases—at least, not in the engine. However, if air is used as the oxidiser instead of pure oxygen, burning hydrogen produces all the noxious oxides of nitrogen that fossil fuels generate. These are an even bigger curse than carbon dioxide as far as damaging greenhouse gases are concerned.
That is why work on using hydrogen as a fuel for a modified internal-combustion engine has been more or less abandoned, even though getting such a power unit into production was considered cheaper than any of the clean alternatives. BMW built a couple of hydrogen-powered supercars, only to find them no cleaner than clunkers from the days before catalytic converters.