Ben Guild:

I recently had the opportunity to spend a day (24 hours) with an all-electric BMW ActiveE sedan. After having had the chance to also drive a friend’s Tesla Model S a few weeks prior, I must say that these electric vehicles the most comfortable and quiet cars that I have ever been in. I am definitely excited to see where “EV’s” are in 10-20 years, and if it weren’t for their current limited travel range (due to energy storage constraints), I feel like I could recommend them to everyone.

I rented this BMW ActiveE through a new service here in San Francisco called Drive Now, which is offered by BMW directly and provides cars that are billed to the users by the minute. It costs just $39 USD to join for a lifetime membership, and because they do not accept advance reservations, there are usually plenty of cars available. You can grab any one of their available cars, drive it, end the reservation, and only be billed for the exact usage in between at their published rates. Cool, right? — The vehicles are equipped with a built-in Android smartphone (mounted behind the gear lever) that handles all of the vehicle’s reservation details and its connection with your Drive Now account. Enter your 4-digit passcode, and begin your driving experience!

Damon Lavrinc:

I put the car in park, unplug the phone, and put Google Glass on my face. Within seconds, I’ve got step-by-step directions to a coffee shop down the street beamed directly to my eyeballs. This is what Mercedes-Benz has planned for the future, and not only do they have a functioning prototype, they’re working with Google to make it a reality.

It’s called “Door-to-Door Navigation,” and it’s just the latest in a string of high-tech pushes the automaker has made in the past few years. It started with Mercedes doubling its resources and employees at its Silicon Valley research center, which allowed the automaker to work on a thoroughly revised infotainment platform and develop one of the first comprehensive integrations of Apple’s iPhone into its entry level and youth-focused CLA.

Via Ben Thompson.

Bruce Schneier:

In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype — owned by Microsoft — was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it.

Turns out that wasn’t quite true.

Or at least he — or the company’s lawyers — carefully crafted a statement that could be defended as true while completely deceiving the reader. You see, Skype wasn’t changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users.

At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn’t even pass the laugh test.

As Edward Snowden’s documents reveal more about the NSA’s activities, it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs.
Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.

Gillian Tett:

How can America cut its healthcare costs? The question is generating political heat in Washington right now. No wonder. Healthcare spending now stands at an eye-popping 17 per cent of US gross domestic product. And next year, President Barack Obama’s divisive “Obamacare” reforms will take effect, extending insurance to a much wider part of the population than ever before.

But as politicians trade ideas (and insults) about cutting costs – with proposals ranging from better use of information technology through to insurance exchanges – there is another issue that needs to be discussed: doctors’ pay.

In recent years, doctors in America have received relatively high levels of remuneration, running about 60 per cent higher than the industrialised world average, according to data from the Paris-based OECD. But the absolute pay level is not the key issue at stake. What really needs to be debated is the system of incentives.

Most notably, in recent years about two-thirds of US doctors have been paid according to a “fee-for-service” system, meaning that they receive remuneration every time they see a patient or provide a treatment.

Joel Kotkin:

Once, we saw the potential unsurpassed human liberation available through information technology. However, Silicon Valley, as shown in the NSA scandal, increasingly has become intimately tied to the surveillance state. Technology has enabled powerful firms – including Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google – to channel everyone’s email and cellphone calls to the national security apparatus.

“It’s as bad as reading your diary,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, recently told the Associated Press, adding, “It’s far worse than reading your diary. Because you don’t write everything in your diary.”

Nor does the snooping relate only to national security. If my emails to friends and family arguably constitute a potential threat to national security, that’s one thing. The massive monitoring and largely unapproved tapping into our data for profit is quite another.

Google, which, in the first half of 2012, took in more advertising dollars than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined, has amassed an impressive list of privacy violations, notes the Huffington Post. Even the innocent-seeming Gmail service is used to collect and sell information; Google’s crew in Palo Alto may know more about the casual user than most of us suspect.

Even Apple, arguably the most iconic Silicon Valley firm, has been hauled in front of courts for alleged privacy violations. For its part, Consumer Reports recently detailed Facebook’s pervasive privacy breaches, including misuse of information as detailed as health conditions, details an insurer could use against you, when someone is going out of town (convenient for burglars), as well as information pertaining to everything from sexual orientation to religious and ethnic affiliation.

Despite ritual denials about such invasions of privacy, the new communications moguls have little reason to stop, and lots of financial reasons to continue. As for concerns over privacy, the new oligarchs take something of a blasé attitude. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, in 2009 responded to concerns over privacy with this gem: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac:

The biggest problem for Palantir’s business may be just how well its software works: It helps its customers see too much. In the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations of the agency’s mass surveillance, Palantir’s tools have come to represent privacy advocates’ greatest fears of data-mining technology — Google-level engineering applied directly to government spying. That combination of Big Brother and Big Data has come into focus just as Palantir is emerging as one of the fastest-growing startups in the Valley, threatening to contaminate its first public impressions and render the firm toxic in the eyes of customers and investors just when it needs them most.

“They’re in a scary business,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien. ACLU analyst Jay Stanley has written that Palantir’s software could enable a “true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.”

Karp, a social theory Ph.D., doesn’t dodge those concerns. He sees Palantir as the company that can rewrite the rules of the zero-sum game of privacy and security. “I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair,” he acknowledges. In a company address he stated, “We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.”

MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI:

Boston is a city perennially self-conscious about public art. A 2012 Boston Phoenix cover story examined why such an alarming number of young artists leave a city ranked in the top 10 for national arts funding. (The Boston Phoenix itself folded not long after that publication.) When it comes to large-scale works in the public domain, the city tends to favor exogenous creations rather than the homegrown. The accusation that the city is risk-averse and WASP-y descends from what Michael Braithwaite called an “age-old attitude central to the very culture of Boston itself: a city where philanthropy as historically been dedicated to institutions and fine art, rather than to visual art and artists that push boundaries.” More important, the elimination of rent control by voter referendum in 1994 ensured that tenable housing for artists, the vast majority of whom piece together low wages, would be dispiritingly low.This essay appears in TNI Vol. 19: “Art,” out now. Subscribe for $2 and get it.

The most publicly discussed artwork on the heels of that 2012 report was “The Giant of Boston,” a large mural by Os Gêmeos (Portuguese for “the twins”). Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo are Brazilian brothers from São Paulo who co-produce all their work, both sanctioned and illicit, as the eponymous twins, signing their entire jointly bred oeuvre as a single artist. Os Gêmeos’ local work comprised three murals around the city and an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the most prominent artistic institution in Boston.

Emily Badger:

It is unquestionably true that Americans are driving less today than we did just a few years ago. Sometime around 2004, our addiction to driving – expressed on a graph in the decades-long steep expansion of “vehicle miles traveled” – took a turn in the opposite direction. Per capita, we began to drive fewer miles each year than we had the year before. As the U.S. population has continued to grow, our collective miles traveled by car has begun to stagnate.

Michael Brooks:

Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.

Let’s be honest, a bit of the pleasure at Chris Froome’s victory in the Tour de France is down to this being our second victory in a row and to the thought that the French haven’t won it since 1985. What must be worse for them, though, is that when it comes to the science of team cycling, even the Belgians are in front.

At the University of Mons, researchers are developing something called the Anaconda. It’s never going to be much of a speed machine because it is, in effect, a chain of monocycles with handlebars. These units are connected, by means of hinges that allow them to snake along, to a normal two-wheeled bike at the front. Every rider in the chain can be going in a slightly different direction, which means it takes an enormous amount of control and collaboration to move the thing forward. According to Olivier Verlinden, chief engineer on the project, the main qualification for riders is to be unafraid of falling off.

It’s fun, apparently. The idea is to unleash it as a beach-resort bike, the kind of thing that stag and hen parties will use to terrorise seaside towns across the world. But it is also scientifically interesting. Why? Because we still don’t really know how bicycles work.

The Economist:

THERE was something surreal, in a Kafkaesque sort of way, about Barack Obama’s press conference on August 9th. Aiming to ease concern over the government’s surveillance programmes, the president announced reforms that seem both obvious and overdue. Then he criticised the man whose actions set those reforms in motion.

The president’s proposals include creating a group of outside experts to assess the government’s balancing of security and privacy. (When in doubt, create a task force.) More substantially, Mr Obama said he would like to change the proceedings of the secret court that approves electronic spying and interprets counterterrorism laws. Whereas now the court only hear’s the government’s side of any argument, the president wants to see an opposing viewpoint represented.