Jordan Weissman:

Has the United States passed peak car? It’s one of the more tantalizing questions that energy and urban-planning nerds are pondering these days. Ever since the recession, Americans have been driving less, getting fewer licenses, and using less gas. But is that just the work of the recession, or something more permanent?
 
 Over the past several months, Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute has released a series of short papers chipping away at the peak-car issue. They don’t give us a definitive answer. But his findings, collected in a third study released this week, do a marvelous job illustrating the post-bubble decline of car buying, driving, and fuel consumption in the U.S. Here are what I think are his most interesting take-aways.

Via Steven Sinofsky.

Charlie Stross:

Fabrican is a unlikely-sounding spin-off of the Department of Chemical Engineering, at Imperial College (which in case you’re not familiar with it is one of the top engineering/science colleges in the UK; formerly part of the University of London)—at least, it’s unlikely until you begin thinking in terms of emulsions, colloids, and the physical chemistry of nanoscale objects. It’s basically fabric in a spray can. Tiny fibres suspended in liquid are ejected through a fine nozzle and, as the supernatant evaporates, they adhere to one another. If at this point you’re thinking The Jetsons and spray-on clothing, have a cigar: you’ve fallen for the obvious marketing angle, because if you’re trying to market a new product and raise brand awareness among the public, what works better than photographs of serious-faced scientists with paint guns spray-painting hot-looking models with skin-tight instant leotards? (Note: the technical term for this sort of marketing gambit is, or really ought to be, bukake couture.)
 
 The real marketing value pitch is less ambitious, and buried further down the page. Fabrican currently amounts to spray-on felt; a loose mat of unwoven fibres that adhere to one another and naturally entangle. This is brilliant if you’re an auto manufacturer, who wants to do away with the laborious hand-fitting of carpets in your cars (just have the paint shop spray the carpet on the floor panels), or a furniture manufacturer who wants to soften the image of those cheap plastic chairs you sell for lecture theatres or buses and commuter rail.
 
 But the implications go much further, because this is just step one. What we’re looking at is the first sign of the shift to 3D printing of clothing (and no, Victoria’s Secret doesn’t count, other than for novelty value, any more than the Honeywell 316/Nieman Marcus Kitchen Computer of 1969 was a sign of the personal computer revolution to come).

Techdirt:

The problems with DRM for videos, music, ebooks and games are well known. Despite those issues for the purchasers of digital goods, companies love DRM because it gives them control over how their products are used — something that has been much harder to achieve in the analog world. The risk is that as digital technologies begin to permeate traditional physical products, they will bring with them new forms of DRM, as this post by Karsten Gerloff about Zoe, one of Renault’s electric cars, makes clear:

Lee Vinsel:

But here’s the thing.
 
 Notice how NHTSA’s recent decision to add rearview cameras to the New Car Assessment Program totally inverts the original logic of that program. Again, the program was meant to push design beyond what was currently required by federal standards or was in federal law. In the case of rearview cameras, exactly the opposite is true. Congress has handed NHTSA a mandate to build rearview cameras and the like into the federal code. Meanwhile, the agency has shunted those technologies into a consumer information program. Instead of being a tool for progressive change, the New Car Assessment Program has become a tool for regressive retrenchment. This inverted use of the New Car Assessment Program is nauseatingly ironic. (My bet is that long-time NHTSA-watchers, like Nader and Claybrook, would tell me that this perversion of NCAP happened long ago.)
 
 NHTSA is nearly three years behind on issuing a Congressionally-mandated rule that would save the lives of hundreds of lives per year. As KidsandCars.org notes, “Since [Cameron’s] law was passed . . . there have been over 1,100 deaths and 85,000 injuries in backover crashes.” As I have made perfectly clear, I believe that NHTSA’s use of the New Car Assessment Program in this case adds insult to injuries. Many of those injuries will be grievous, many of them will be fatal. Let me enumerate them one more time. This year, there will be “approximately 228 fatalities and 17,000 injuries” from “backover incidents.”
 
 For no good reason.

Will Knight:

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Putting your life in the hands of a robot chauffeur offers an unnerving glimpse into how driving is about to be upended. The automobile, which has followed a path of steady but slow technological evolution for the past 130 years, is on course to change dramatically in the next few years, in ways that could have radical economic, environmental, and social impacts.

The first autonomous systems, which are able to control steering, braking, and accelerating, are already starting to appear in cars; these systems require drivers to keep an eye on the road and hands on the wheel. But the next generation, such as BMW’s self-driving prototype, could be available in less than a decade and free drivers to work, text, or just relax. Ford, GM, Toyota, Nissan, Volvo, and Audi have all shown off cars that can drive themselves, and they have all declared that within a decade they plan to sell some form of advanced automation—cars able to take over driving on highways or to park themselves in a garage. Google, meanwhile, is investing millions in autonomous driving software, and its driverless cars have become a familiar sight on the highways around Silicon Valley over the last several years.

The allure of automation for car companies is huge. In a fiercely competitive market, in which the makers of luxury cars race to indulge customers with the latest technology, it would be commercial suicide not to invest heavily in an automated future. “It’s the most impressive experience we can offer,” Werner Huber, the man in charge of BMW’s autonomous driving project, told me at the company’s headquarters in Munich. He said the company aims to be “one of the first in the world” to introduce highway autonomy.

Lacy Plache

After years of lackluster performance, car buyers aged 18 to 34 bought relatively more cars than older buyers in 2012, gaining share even as the overall market grew 13 percent. But the pace of sales by these Millennials slowed again in 2013, reversing nearly all 2012 share gains. A slowdown in new jobs for young adults, while the job market for older workers expanded, contributed to the turn around. Plus, the weaker labor market, combined with higher prices and tight supply in the housing market, meant many fewer Millennials formed new households this year, minimizing another key factor from 2012’s car sales growth. Meanwhile, wealth effects from a strong stock market and rising home values — a key growth driver for the market overall — likely contributed less to motivating new car purchases by Millennials than by older buyers.

From 2007 to 2011, the share of sales to car buyers aged 18 to 34 fell nearly 30 percent. Then, when many industry observers verged on writing off this generation as uninterested in cars and driving, the economic tide turned in 2012 and Millennials flocked to buy new cars, recovering over a quarter of their share losses and doing so in a rapidly expanding auto sales market. This surge was short-lived, however. In the first eight months of 2013, the share of new car sales to Millennials dipped almost to 2011 levels. Although the breakdown of sales by income among Millennials remained fairly stable, Millennial buyers retreated at all income levels, with higher-earning households posting the largest share losses.

I recently put together a 25 minute video using iMovie on iPad Air. The movie included a number of video clips, audio and still images.

Adding and editing media is trivial. Multi-touch events make quick work of moving and modifying assets, transitions and audio effects.

Moving about 2GB of media assets to the iPad air required the very nice Photosync app.

One less task for the MacBook Air and perhaps another challenge for the traditional camera manufacturers. I plan to give iMovie a try on my iPhone as well.

Charles Arthur:

Here’s the image for the seven days to 1 November 2013, showing what version of Android was used by devices connecting to Google Play. Among them is “Froyo” (2.2) and “Honeycomb” (3.0). You can’t actually buy new Android devices running either of those. Yet both make up a notable proportion. The newest software, “Jelly Bean” (which actually covers three different numbering versions), accounts for 52.1% of the devices. Yet Jelly Bean is the software powering all those new Android phones – the ones that were the 80% in the past quarter. Clearly, the installed base doesn’t reflect the market share number.
 
 Fine. But look, I saw some figures which said that last year Apple’s market share in tablets was 50%, and now it’s 30%. So Apple’s selling fewer tablets, right?
 No, that’s not what that data tells you. What if the total number of tablets being sold has doubled? If last year there were 100m tablets sold in total, and this year 200m, then last year the figures would be 50m tablets and this year 60m. (Those aren’t the numbers. They’re just for illustration.)
 
 So if you don’t have the absolute numbers, you don’t know what’s happening. Those sort of year-to-year comparisons can be helpful to visualise changes in the market landscape, but in fast-changing markets it’s not enough just to quote a single number. In some ways it obscures more than it reveals.
 
 (Note that Google’s diagram above doesn’t have any numbers beyond the “share”; we don’t know if more devices connected to Google Play, and if they did, how many more that was compared to a month or year ago.)
 
 Here’s an example, from YouGov in 2013, which showed Apple losing market share. Its share of the installed base had fallen, YouGov said, from 73% to 63% (note that unusually, this was an “installed base share”, not a “sales market share”).
 
 And yet putting in the figures for how many units were bought showed that Apple had increased its installed base and increased its lead in that installed base. That’s counterintuitive. Yet it emerges directly from the calculation: the iPad installed base had gone from 2m to 5.3m; it had gone from having 0.6m more tablets than all its rivals combined, to having 3.1m more.
 
 This doesn’t mean there won’t be more non-iPad tablets than iPads at some point. But it does mean that you need to enquire more carefully about absolute numbers when you’re presented with the word “share”. It’s absolute numbers that tend to matter.

Marshall Alan:

Patients don’t always know when their doctor has made a medical error. But other doctors do.
 
 A few years ago I called a Las Vegas surgeon because I had hospital data showing which of his peers had high rates of surgical injuries – things like removing a healthy kidney, accidentally puncturing a young girl’s aorta during an appendectomy and mistakenly removing part of a woman’s pancreas.
 
 I wanted to see if he could help me investigate what happened. But the surgeon surprised me.
 
 Before I could get a question out, he started rattling off the names of surgeons he considered the worst in town. He and his partners often had to correct their mistakes — “cleanup” surgeries, he said. He didn’t need a database to tell him which surgeons made the most mistakes.

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