US Fuel Economy Hits Six-Year High

As reported by the NY Times: The average fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States hit a new high of 24.9 miles per gallon in August, according to a University of Michigan study released Tuesday.

The results indicate that automakers are producing more fuel-efficient models and consumers are continuing a trend of buying vehicles that use less gasoline. The industry is not only producing more hybrid and electric vehicles, but reducing the fuel consumption of traditional gas-guzzlers, like pickup trucks and large S.U.V.'s.

The study, prepared by the university’s Transportation Research Institute, said that the average fuel economy increased one-tenth of a gallon from the July results.

Fuel economy for new vehicles has been steadily increasing since the monthly study began in October 2007, when the average was 20.1 miles per gallon.

“The 4.8 m.p.g. improvement in the course of the past six years is significant both by itself and in comparison to the change in vehicle fuel economy over the past 90 years,” said Michael Sivak, director of the sustainable transportation program at the university.

Automakers are under pressure to further improve the fuel efficiency of new models to meet stringent new government standards enacted a year ago.

The Obama administration has set a target of increasing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, also known as CAFE, to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 and 54.5 m.p.g. by 2025.

The government estimates that the 54.5 m.p.g. standard will result in average fuel savings of $8,000 over the lifetime of a vehicle and dramatically reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The University of Michigan report said that such emissions for new vehicles have been reduced by 19 percent over the last six years.

Automakers are stepping up their development of greener cars, like hybrids that alternate between gasoline and battery power, plug-in hybrids that run primarily on batteries, and purely electric vehicles that use no gasoline.

Smart Watch Links Car and Driver

Like tech from a cyberpunk novel, Nissan announced a new smart
watch that will link drivers intimately with their cars, showing both
driving telemetry such as speed, and driver heart rate.

As reported by CNET: The link between man and machine drove car enthusiasts for decades, unwitting adherents to Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, yet until now that link lacked coherence. Nissan's Nismo smart watch takes the first step in using technology to quantify the connection between car and driver.

Smart watches have only gained momentum in the last couple of years, and Nissan is first to jump on the bandwagon, today announcing its Nismo Watch Concept.

The watch is designed for drivers of Nissan Nismo model variants, currently encompassing the 370Z, Juke, and upcoming GT-R. Photos Nissan released ahead of the unveil at the Frankfurt auto show this week show the watch in traditional Nismo black and red, but the company says it will also offer it in black or white.

Using a Bluetooth Low Energy connection, the watch gathers telemetry data from the car, including speed, along with efficiency information, such as fuel consumption. Nissan says the telemetry data will show drivers their track-record performance.

The watch shows driver heart rate and vehicle speed,
but does it tell time?

At the same time, the watch will also monitor driver health, such as heart rate. In Nissan's photo, the watch gives its wearer a warning after noting an excessive heart rate.

The watch band appears to connect around the wrist in one, solid piece, encasing the actual watch mechanism. That style looks designed to prevent damage. Charged through a micro-USB port, Nissan notes the battery will last for seven days.

Nissan is considering future additions to its smart watch technology, including electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, and skin temperature monitoring.

The Nissan Nismo Watch Concept will be on display at the Frankfurt auto show. Nissan offered no information on availability or pricing.

MIT's "Hot or Not" Site for Neighborhoods Could Help Shape the Design of Future Cities

As reported by Motherboard:When you walk around a city, there are things you can just sense, like if you've wandered into a dodgy neighborhood, or where the new happening spot is. Intuitively, we know that a city's more intangible characteristics, like class or uniqueness, play a big role in what it’s like to live there, but until now there was no way to actually quantify that idea.

Researchers from MIT Media Lab may have found a way to measure this "aesthetic capital" of cities, with their website Place Pulse, a tool to crowdsource people’s perception of cities by judging digital snapshots—a sort of “hot or not” for urban neighborhoods.

Some 4,000 geotagged Google Streetview images and 8,000 participants later, the team found that by using digital images and crowdsourced feedback, they can accurately quantify the diverse vibes within a city, which in turn can help us better understand issues like inequality and safety. The results were published in the journal PloS One.

The results could be used to someday map the intangible uniqueness of neighborhoods around the world, which could help improve neighborhoods and design future cities.

The data could also add some weight to the controversial “Broken Windows Theory,” which suggests that physical signs of disorder in a neighborhood—like broken windows—can lead to crime, causing a vicious cycle. The theory has been hotly debated since it came out of Harvard in the 80s, partly because it’s hard to actually measure and quantify “disorder.”

The Place Pulse experiment could change that. From the study:

Cities are not just collections of demographics, but places that people experience. Urban environments are known to elicit strong evaluative responses, and there is evidence and theories suggesting that these responses may affect criminal and health behaviors. Yet, we lack good quantitative data on the responses elicited by urban environments. Place Pulse is an effort to help collect quantitative data of urban perception to help advance these research efforts and open new avenues of research.

In other words, there's more to measure in a city than just demographics and income. Things like energy level, architecture, beauty, and so on can impact people’s social behavior. While Place Pulse 1.0 was a small experiment—it looked at images from just four cities, Boston and New York in the US and Salzburg and Linz in Austria—the method proved effective enough to be worth exploring further, according to the report.

Now MIT has expanded the study out to 56 cities around the world, with more than 100,000 geotagged images. Place Pulse 2.0 also measures more characteristics, looking at how boring, depressing, lively, safe, and wealthy the cities seem.

The team wants to use this second, larger dataset to train machine learning algorithms to understand what kind of features in the photos lead humans to answer the way they do—in a sense, to teach computers intuition, so the research could scale.

The Place Pulse experiment is simple. Like Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous pre-Facebook FaceMash site, it shows two images side by side and asks people to answer questions like "which place looks safer?" or "which place looks more upper-class?"

The first experiment found that the US cities, Boston and New York, were more unequal than the Austrian cities. There was a wider gap between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. The researchers compared the results with actual statistics on homicides in New York and found a strong correlation between their data on how safe neighborhoods seem, and the existing data on how safe neighborhoods are.

With a larger dataset, being analyzed by learning machines, the findings could be used to design the city of tomorrow. "Ultimately, the goal of this study,” researchers wrote, “is to contribute to our understanding of the urban environments that we have built, with the goal of improving them, and their ability to include their citizens, while also informing the construction of future cities.” 

Walking the Galapagos with Google

The next exotic locale for Street View: the Galapagos Islands,
land of giant tortoises and other unique species.

As reported by SlashDot: In the early days, Street View must have been a relatively easy project for Google to execute, considering the financial resources and employees at its disposal: strap a set of high-tech cameras to a fleet of vehicles and drive the latter around urban areas all over the world, recording every inch for viewers’ clicking-and-dragging pleasure.

But there’s only so much of the world accessible via well-paved roads (or close to gas stations, for that matter), which meant Google had to regress a bit: instead of cars, it began strapping all that fancy camera equipment to human beings, who are a little bit maneuverable over rough terrain and narrow dirt paths than a four-door sedan. Google sent its Street View cyborgs into the Grand Canyon, where they recorded the craggy pathways and steep cliffs. Then it sent them to some of the world’s highest peaks.

Now comes the next exotic locale: the Galapagos Islands, land of giant tortoises and other unique species, where Charles Darwin researched his famous theory of evolution.

“It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity,” read a May 23 note on the Google Lat Long blog. “Today we’re honored to announce, in partnership with Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate (GNPD), that we've collected panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker.”

The Street View effort extends to the waters surrounding the Galapagos Islands, where Google collaborated with the Catlin Seaview Survey to record undersea images.

The reason for Google’s Street View efforts goes beyond simply wanting to show off cool places. The battles around digital cartography have intensified over the past several quarters, especially after Apple decided to abandon Google’s mapping data in favor of generating its own. Larger IT firms have snatched up independent mapping firms left and right, hoping for an influx of new data and features that will give them some sort of edge.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: a mapping platform with millions of loyal users can extend a “halo effect” of sorts to the company’s other products; after Apple brought its own mapping data to iOS, any number of bloggers publicly mused over whether to switch to Android in order to keep using Google Maps (the early wonkiness of Apple’s revamped Maps app probably fueled a lot of those musings). That alone could keep Google innovating its Maps at a rapid pace. But the Galapagos tortoises are pretty cool, besides.

GPS That Lets You Keep Your Phone In Your Pocket To Foil Would-Be Muggers

As reported by Tech Crunch: When walking through a sketchy neighborhood that you don’t know well, it doesn't always feel like a good idea to have your phone out. Disrupt Hackathon entrant Kovert is an app that allows you to keep your phone tucked away out of sight while giving you walking directions through buzz signals.

As makers Scott Jones and Andrew Askedall pointed out onstage, following a GPS app with your phone in hand says a few things: I have no idea where I am, and I have money and expensive electronics.

“We were at the bar down the street trying to think of ideas,” Jones said. “This is literally because the hostel we’re staying at for Disrupt is in the Tenderloin district.”

Kovert is super simple. Plug in your end address, and your phone will guide you by buzzing when you reach intersections: once for a left, twice to go straight, three times to turn right, and ten times when you’ve reached your destination. All you have to do is remember which buzzes mean what (but let’s be real, it’s way easier than Morse code.) If you miss the mark, Kovert will loop you back around.

Jones and Askedall, who are currently raising a seed round for another app called Kronicle, said they would like to build out Kovert to include a compass calculation feature in which it vibrates when you are pointing in the right direction.

Not only of use to hipsters trying to find their way to a warehouse party, the app also has the potential to be used as a tool for visually impaired people. Either way, this would definitely be a useful app to have on hand. But not in hand.

Net Neutrality In Court: Here's What You Need To Know

As reported by NPR: The beauty of the Internet — and the reason for its ubiquitous place in our lives — is that just about anyone can use it to offer services, products or information. But the link between what's out there on the Internet, how fast it gets to us and how much data can get to us is dependent on Internet service providers and the rules that govern them. That's where things get thorny for the principle of net neutrality.

If your eyes are already glazing over, consider this: This debate could affect the speed, quality and cost of your Hulu or Netflix binge-viewing.

Net neutrality is back in the news Monday because a landmark case is getting its day in a D.C. federal court. The case challenges whether the federal government can enforce net neutrality rules. Here's a primer to get you up to speed:

What Is Net Neutrality?

Net neutrality refers to the notion that's governed the Internet since the beginning — all Internet users deserve equal access to online information, no matter whether you use Verizon or Comcast. Internet service providers should be "neutral" to the content their customers consume.

The Way Things Are Now

As things are now, the Federal Communications Commission regulates net neutrality by "policing" an open Internet. The current rules, passed in 2010, prevent broadband Internet service providers from blocking lawful content and other Internet services. Time magazine sums up the three rules:

"First, the order requires ISPs to be transparent about how they handle network congestion; second, the ISPs are prohibited from blocking traffic such as Skype or Netflix on wired networks; third, the order outlaws 'unreasonable' discrimination, meaning the ISPs can't put such services into an Internet 'slow lane' in order to benefit their own competing services."

 The regulations don't fully cover wireless carriers, something that Internet rights groups aren't pleased with. The FCC says the exemption recognizes that the wireless Internet gets overused because of new customers constantly signing up and that carriers, therefore, need flexibility to put limits on use.

The Politics
President Obama supported net neutrality in his 2008 campaign, and then after he was sworn in, he appointed Julius Genachowski, a net neutrality supporter, as chairman of the FCC.

In December 2010, when the FCC approved a plan to implement the net neutrality regulations, the vote was 3-2, along party lines. Congressional Republicans argue that net neutrality is unnecessary government involvement that stifles innovation; the GOP-controlled House has even voted to strip the FCC of funding for net neutrality enforcement.

The Recent History
For nearly a decade, companies have challenged the net neutrality principle, a move they say better serves their customers.

In 2007, customers accused Comcast of "throttling," or purposely slowing down downloads. Comcast and other companies argued that they needed to discriminate between the bits of information being shared to conserve bandwidth given the growing number of customers on the Web. The FCC cited Comcast, Comcast appealed, and the same court hearing Monday's case decided the FCC didn't prove it had the authority to regulate broadband Internet.

Here's a full timeline from GigaOm.

The Case Before Judges
It's an understatement to say communications companies aren't pleased with existing FCC regulations. Verizon filed suit in federal court to overturn the rules, arguing the FCC overstepped its regulatory authority and that the rules are unnecessary. Verizon points out that the FCC has documented only four examples in the past six years of ISPs' possibly blocking content.

Verizon also said that net neutrality rules violate the First Amendment, since broadband companies transmit the speech of others. That gives the providers "editorial discretion," according to Verizon.

The FCC argues that it has the authority to enforce net neutrality under provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Communications Act of 1934.

Internet rights groups believe the open Internet is what lets companies like Twitter, Facebook and Skype flourish. Supporters say net neutrality prevented existing market players from slowing down or blocking the connections of Skype calls, for instance, to protect their businesses. As The New York Times lays out:

"The F.C.C. ... believes that Internet service providers must keep their pipelines free and open, giving the creators of any type of legal content — movies, shopping sites, medical services, or even pornography — an equal ability to reach consumers. If certain players are able to buy greater access to Internet users, regulators believe, the playing field will tilt in the direction of the richest companies, possibly preventing the next Google or Facebook from getting off the ground."

 The three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are hearing the case now.

The Implications

Advocates of net neutrality fear that if the federal government stops enforcing rules to keep the pipelines free and open, then certain companies will be able to get greater access to Internet users. That, they say, creates a system of haves and have nots — the richest companies could get access to a wider swath of Internet users, for example, and that could prevent the next Google from getting off the ground. GigaOm explains:

"If the courts decide the FCC doesn't have the legal authority to enforce the network neutrality rules, it not only could gut the rules, but it also gives ISPs a free pass to start making decisions about the information aspects of their service — and in today's non-competitive broadband environment — that could mean throttling Netflix or charging Google more money to deliver a clean YouTube stream. It also neuters the agency moving forward when all content will flow as information over broadband pipes — from TV to your doctor visits."

Judges aren't expected to issue a ruling for months. But now you're up to speed.

How Effective Fleet Management can Reduce Costs

As reported by Smart Business Online: Fleet tracking and management, if correctly implemented, can provide a business with a number of procedural, safety and cost efficiencies, says Noah Goodwin, CPCU, a commercial risk manager at RiskSOURCE® Clark-Theders.

“Fleet management can improve driving safety habits, which can reduce auto and workers’ compensation claims, and subsequently lower insurance costs. Morale can also be improved through increased safety,” Goodwin says. “Fleet tracking can help reduce fuel costs by increasing route efficiency, reducing idling time and impermissible usage.”

Smart Business spoke with Goodwin about how to effectively manage your fleet.

What exactly is fleet tracking, and how does it work?
The industry term for fleet tracking is vehicle telematics. In most cases, the system plugs in to your vehicles’ computers and provides a company with real-time data regarding each vehicle’s usage. Not only does it provide satellite vehicle positioning, but also it can provide instant notices for excessive acceleration or braking, or if someone is speeding. The GPS system will route the drivers in the most efficient manner and alert the company — the owner of the company or whoever is deemed responsible for the system — if its drivers are going out of the acceptable routes. You can identify which alerts you want to receive and set the threshold limits.

If you have a driver who tends to drive too fast or brake too hard, you can require additional training for that driver. If the poor habits continue, you could move him or her into a nondriving position.

Illustrating the effectiveness of such a system, a company installed vehicle telematics in its fleet and discovered one of its senior operators was 20 miles away from the job site where he was supposed to be. It turned out he was doing a side job with the company’s equipment and vehicles. Making employees aware of your ability to monitor their use of company vehicles can prevent this sort of behavior.

What are the keys for effective fleet management?
While it’s important to have a written program, the key is enforcement. Many companies will develop the program and not enforce it. By not enforcing the program you are incurring costs without realizing the potential benefits.

It can also get sticky in a couple areas. First, for human resources purposes, if you don’t follow the disciplinary procedures for one person but try to enforce them for another, you’re going to have a lawsuit. You need to be consistent.

Second, if your procedures say a driver who gets two speeding tickets within three years must be moved to a non-driving position, but you let that driver back on the road and he or she has an accident in a company vehicle that results in someone’s death, the company is going to be held liable. That’s not going to look favorable for your company in the eyes of a jury because the driver shouldn't have been on the road per the company’s own procedures.

What are some common fleet management mistakes? 
One persistent fleet management mistake is not following a maintenance program. If a vehicle isn't being maintained properly, it’s more prone to loss. Without good brakes or tread on the tires, there’s an increased likelihood a driver could rear-end another vehicle.

Personal usage of company vehicles is a problem area because many contractors have a truck that is their main mode of transportation. Insurance rates and job bidding are based in part on how far your employees drive every day. Allowing extra driving increases your fuel and maintenance costs, as well as your liability exposure.

Pre-screen drivers before you hire them. It costs just a few dollars to run a motor vehicle report, but it’s not always done prior to hiring. If you've hired a driver then find out he or she doesn't have an acceptable driving record, you may need to find the person a different job in your organization or terminate his or her employment.