Corporations, Recommendations

Mitsubishi’s 25 Years of Lies

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Not even a year has passed since Volkswagen was caught cheating emission tests. The scandal that followed pummeled the company’s stock value and profits. But now, the German automaker has to stand aside for a bit, because we have a new champion of deception. Mitsubishi has been at it for 25 years:

http://time.com/4308223/mitsubishi-motors-fuel-testing-cheating/^

It’s almost impossible to estimate how much damage this has done to human health in Japan, but it’s probably a lot. By doctoring emission tests, there was less pressure for the company to improve its cars. Those cars are still out there on the streets and they won’t be going anywhere for some time.

Studies regarding how many people die yearly due to air pollution are inconclusive. This one puts the figure at three million, yearly^. What is certain is that pollution will shorten and decrease the quality of life for everybody. What’s even scarier is that, by now, it’s pretty obvious that most vehicles on our streets today have been sold with understated pollution records (other companies have been caught cheating or admitted that this is a wide-spread practice). Exactly on the day when I published this article, Suzuki was in the news^ regarding their fuel economy lies.

I’ve said a while back that we’re partially to blame for the behavior of companies in the past decades. I don’t want to defend Mitsubishi, but the company has an additional excuse in the fact that it’s from Japan. Their culture is one of extreme performance. There’s even a special word for people who die from being over-worked^.

Under these conditions, I am not entirely surprised that a bunch of engineers decided to lie to their superiors in order to look well at the salary review. In more ways than one, Japan is one of the worst cases of mixing Western values with another culture.

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Analysis, Technology

Smart Contact Lenses Will Soon Be upon Us

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After Google experimented with integrating a glucose level sensor^ on a contact lens, it was only a matter of time before we would see more innovation in this field. A recent patent filing from Sony describes the intention of putting a camera inside a contact lens^.

Privacy concerns

While this toy won’t exactly be invisible –at least not at first – the privacy implications are quite serious. We’re still at least a few years away from market availability, but I imagine that after several product cycles, such a camera could reach a pretty good recording resolution. Coupled with wireless transmission to a storage device, people will eventually be able to record everything they see, everywhere they go.

To be sure, there are many advantages to having this sort of camera hidden in plain sight – pun intended. For example, it could be used as a self-defense mechanism because it would give the possibility to apprehend criminals and present irrefutable evidence against them in court. There’s also the enormous convenience of being able to record important moments or useful information at the blink of an eye.

When it comes to privacy, as our technology progresses, it will be increasingly difficult to detect and prohibit the use of this sort of devices. Evidently, in the wrong hands, such gizmos can also do a lot of harm. We will likely have to adapt to these changes and hope that the path they lead us on will be a good one.

All this reminds me of an episode^ from the fascinating “Black Mirror” series, where people use a similar technology to record and relive any part of their lives. Such discoveries will drastically change our culture and society.

Potential

There are quite a few challenges that will have to be overcome, such as powering the contact lens. We are already able to wirelessly power devices, but let’s also not forget that the human body itself is also capable of generating and conducting electricity and therefore even data.

The potential of the contact lens as a carrier for various technologies is enormous. When manufacturers will finally be able to integrate even a half-decent display on a contact lens, we’ll witness the birth of an extremely lucrative business segment. The first steps towards this breakthrough have already been taken^.

So far, all our experiments regarding augmented reality have involved clunky glasses. In seven to fifteen years, we might be able to have our smartphones implanted in our eyes and ears. Many will find this prospect rather scary, but many also consider their grandparents to be woefully out of touch with technology. It might soon be our turn to be out of touch.

Conclusion

I think that we can say with a fair degree of certainty that smart contact lenses will flourish in the years to come. At least until we’re able to feed information directly to the optic nerve, their form factor makes them the holy grail of augmented reality. Perhaps they’ll never reach the high performance of larger devices, but I imagine contact lenses will become one of the most important “wearable” technologies of the 20s.

As nanotechnology progresses, humans are bound to integrate more and more devices with their bodies. I don’t know if this is good or bad. It’s up to us as a society to correctly negotiate this upcoming technological leap.

[ax_meta fbimgurl=’http://mentatul.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/00580-SonyWantsToPutCameraOnEyeballs-Share.jpg’ lnimgurl=’http://mentatul.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/00580-SonyWantsToPutCameraOnEyeballs-Thumb.jpg’ fbimgw=’1170′ fbimgh=’350′ lnimgw=’250′ lnimgh=’250′ title=’Smart Contact Lenses Will Soon Be upon Us’ desc=’A recent patent filing from Sony describes the intention of putting a camera inside a contact lens.’]

Conflict, Recommendations

Best War Buddies Australia & France

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Fans of the military industrial complex, rejoice. There is a new romance on the block. Australia and France are deepening their military relationship, under the auspices of a fat ship-building contract:

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2016/05/02/turnbull-meets-french-pm-in-canberra.html^

Contemplating world peace, the Australian decision-makers thought that a dozen submarines are totally worth $50 billion of their people’s work. On the other side of the world, the failing French economy is in dire need of a stimulus. After relations soured between NATO and Russia, France had to cancel a profitable warships-building contract, although the Russians will probably be getting the ships anyway by using Egypt^ as a proxy.

Fifty billion dollars; it’s hard not to wonder what a different type of government could have done with this amount of money. Such an investment would be a game changer in any vital government branch such as education, healthcare, social services or research.

For example, a country could offer a salary of $4000 per month, for ten years to a hundred thousand people. In other words, a country could allow a hundred thousand entrepreneurs experiment with ideas for ten years. I think that after a decade, the products and technologies coming from even a tiny fraction of those entrepreneurs would help Australia more than a dozen chunks of metal thrown in the ocean to pollute it.

Unfortunately for its citizens (and fortunately for the French ones), Australia decided that it’s jolly time to protect its oceans from the legion of enemy ships swarming in it and around its shores. Except wait, the only serious threat to man around Australia are sharks. This makes me wonder what exactly is at play here. Is NATO cultivating an ally that might one day assist in the power struggle with a resurgent China?

[ax_meta lnimgurl=’http://mentatul.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/00556-FranceAustraliaWarBuddies-Thumb.jpg’ lnimgw=’250′ lnimgh=’250′ title=’Best War Buddies Australia & France’ desc=’Fans of the military industrial complex, rejoice. There is a new romance on the block.’]

Recommendations, Technology

The Vehicles of the Future and Our Security

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As the world becomes increasingly connected, so are all the devices that we’re using. Vehicles, of course, are no exception. But while a hacked phone or refrigerator won’t be immediately life-threatening, a compromised vehicle can endanger the lives of many.

Nissan found itself in hot water after security researchers managed to hack its electric cars through a web link:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nissan-leaf-hacked-web-link,31275.html^

The auto-maker shuttered the faulty software application^, but according to the article above, this might not have been enough since “attackers don’t even need to use the NissanConnect app, because they can deliver the attack through a web browser by spoofing the app.”

With self-driving cars heading our way fast, this is not my idea of a software ecosystem that I would trust with my life. In addition to all the immense challenges that companies involved in researching automated driving will have to overcome, the security aspect will have to be handled in an extremely careful way. Check what they did to this jeep^.

Self-driving vehicles will, through their very nature, rely on a wealth of external information. When they will go mainstream, we will already be talking about automatically negotiating traffic lights, combining more vehicles into trains for optimal fuel efficiency or tragedy-prevention ethics^ (I highly recommend reading the linked article).

Companies have proved time and again that they care about little else than their profit margins. There is very little regard for safety and quality. In a recent posting^, I wrote that we’re perhaps partially to blame for this. Unless the situation changes both we and our environment will suffer because of these companies’ neglect.

At least some sort of relief comes from the fact that some governments will make hacking vehicles a very serious criminal offense. Michigan, for example, proposes to go as far as life in prison^. But what about the companies that allow their applications to be hacked (due to rushing the development process)? I believe those entities should face equally serious punishments.

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Recommendations, Science

Yet Another Battery Technology Discovery to Forget

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Rejoice, for scientists have accidentally found a way to prolong battery life with up to 400%:

http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-accidentally-made-batteries-that-last-400-times-longer^

Now rejoice less, because in the past decade we’ve learned about at least twenty such discoveries. Not a single one made it to the market yet. I don’t know if this is some sort of commercial strategy or if these discoveries are just very difficult to implement for mass production and thus, unfeasible.

Our frustration with battery technology has been simmering for many years, which is why it is probably quite easy for any University to obtain funding for addressing this concern. Perhaps this is the reason why these “discoveries” keep popping up – the researchers need to publish something to justify their work and the press is eager to disseminate it because we all want to charge our devices faster and have them last longer on a single charge.

I wish they’d finally bring at least a minor improvement to market, because energy storage technology has been advancing at a snail’s pace for many decades now. The only major advancement was the switch to lithium and that happened a long time ago (even though it’s true that lithium technology has progressed a lot). For now, I’ll just forget I read about this recent discovery and get back to being resigned regarding this entire affair.

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Recommendations, Technology

The next Step after the Reuse of Space Launch Vehicles

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After several failed attempts, SpaceX made history when it managed to successfully land its reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster on a (robotic) ship stationed off the Florida coast:

http://www.space.com/32517-spacex-sticks-rocket-landing-sea-dragon-launch.html^

SpaceX has been planning and trying to reuse launch vehicles for quite a few years now. This success is a milestone for reducing the cost of our ventures into space. The road towards efficient space exploration and development is, however, a long one.

Let’s think bigger. Let’s think about large space stations, asteroid mining, colonies on the Moon and Mars. Many of these projects will need an initial investment originating from Earth, probably consisting of pre-manufactured goods. As a species, we have to think long-term.

Returning the boosters back to Earth is a costly business. The immediate costs are the fuel and support operations. The long term cost is that we might deprive ourselves of an important head-start when it comes to building in outer space. This potentially has a much greater impact than the immediate costs. So should we really bother so much about returning our launch vehicles? What if we take the reuse concept one step further?

A booster is essentially a huge fuel tank coupled to a propulsion system. In the coming decades, advancements in robotics will make it increasingly feasible for us to consider asteroid mining or building large extraterrestrial habitats, either in Earth’s orbit or on other planets. Hopefully, we will soon find ways to re-use everything we struggle so hard to escape Earth’s gravity with.

Updated on May 6, 2016: SpaceX did it again^. Congratulations to them!

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Lifeforms, Recommendations

Isn’t It Cute When Animals Escape the Zoo?

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In the past few weeks the news has been abuzz with several stories coming from zoos around the world. These articles tend to attract quite a few readers it seems, mostly because people seem to think it’s kinda cute when animals prove us they’re smart, or that they can take initiative in a given situation.

There was this octopus^ that managed to escape its prison through some pipe, much to the delight of its human wardens. Then, a bit less funny was this chimp^ who had to be tranquillized while doing what it knew best – having fun above the ground. After the chemical did its job, during some not particularly dignifying minutes, the chimp fell and was skillfully saved from hitting the pavement.

Then, things turned nasty when a tiger killed^ its keeper at yet another location. It is now when humans finally start showing compassion. Of course, its towards their fellow, a keeper, which apparently had a good bond with the tiger. And let’s not forget the deaths at SeaWorld^, a place where patrons used to eat lunch while trainers did tricks with killer whales, one of the most intelligent mammals in the world.

I deeply regret that humans have died while “working” with animals. I think that this can be prevented if we start treating these beings with the respect they deserve. This doesn’t mean that we should stop hunting animals if it is in our nature, but it does mean that we should start treating them with respect.

So then it should be of no surprise when I’m going to write that: no, it’s not cute at all when animals escape the zoo. These creatures do not belong in the zoo. Even though a zoo has the side effect of educating people about animals, it also spreads a terrible message about the way we’re running things on this planet.

Last year I’ve visited a place where they had various animals in a covered enclosure that only had two sets of windows. Three monkeys were gathered in front one of the windows, looking at the world outside. I didn’t have to be an expert in animal body language to understand that those monkeys felt miserable. Maybe I’d feel better if I could unsee that image, but I prefer to have it burned into my brain, because such a memory will help me keep my energy when advocating animal rights on this planet.

Try imagining living your entire life in a space equivalent to a football stadium and perhaps you’ll partially understand what most animals feel like in a zoo. In one place, I’ve seen three different species of felines being crammed between five glass walls. What we’re doing to our fellow life-forms is degrading and unfair.

Education about animals can happen in a myriad of ways. Television has been around for many decades. With the advent of Virtual Reality, we’ll soon be able to visit natural habitats from the comfort of our homes. It’s time to say goodbye to the concept of a prison for animals. Let’s not forget in what period of our civilization these places have been invented.

I’ll close this off with this cute series about how things would look if the roles of humans and animals would be reversed:

http://www.boredpanda.com/satirical-animal-rights-illustrations-parallel-universe^

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Updated on April 30, 2016: no later than three days after publishing this, I’ve learned about this plan to create a dolphin park in the Arizona desert^. The builders fended off criticism with the usual claims of such entrepreneurs – that the animals will be well taken care of and that the place will offer “education” to our young. You can be well taken care of in prison, but it’s still a prison. As for education, what sort of example are we offering children when their parents cage animals for money?

Recommendations, Technology

Microsoft’s New Direction Is Not Surprising

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Together with its new CEO, the software giant is embracing the inevitable: transforming its users into a data product. Google is, arguably, the company that has done this with the greatest degree of success. Jealous, Microsoft ran the “Scroogled”^ smear campaign against its competitor. It dropped it in 2014, probably when somebody decided that, after all, Google’s strategy is more in tune with the times.

Two years later and Windows 10 is phoning home hundreds of time every day, even when told not to^. The company said it will provide a “fix” for this, but as the article I linked cleverly points out: as operating systems start to increasingly rely on their companies’ cloud infrastructure, especially when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, we will be forced into all sorts of privacy trade-offs.

But what worries me the most is the fact that Microsoft is moving towards transforming Windows into a closed ecosystem, emulating the model established by Apple and, later, Google. For better or for worse, Windows’ popularity has ensured that developers have a popular platform that they can deliver products on, with few intermediaries.

However, with the upcoming Universal Windows Platform, Microsoft is taking its first steps into placing itself as a leech between developers and customers, charging not only for the operating system but also taking a profit share from producers – just like pretty much all other “app stores”. If this comes to pass, it will be particularly harmful for game developers, with games being one of the most profitable products sold in the Microsoft ecosystem.

No wonder Tim Sweeney of Epic Games is upset (while Gabe Newell of Valve started a long time ago to heavily invest in the Linux ecosystem):

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/4/11160104/tim-sweeney-microsoft-walled-garden-criticism^

In all fairness, Microsoft is making the right moves to stay profitable. Each year, there’s fewer people willing to renew their Windows licenses, so it’s no wonder that the company ponders offering updates to Windows 10 for free, while in the same time devising new ways to turn a profit. The App Store model has been implemented successfully by many companies, why should Microsoft remain behind?

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Economy, Recommendations

Why the Panama Papers Are a Big Deal

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Last week, the first results of a masterpiece in investigative journalism, civic attitude and international collaboration started to show up. Lots of people owning great fortunes ran into the misfortune of having not only their hidden wealth, but also their tax-avoiding ways exposed to the world at large, thanks to a massive document leak.

The Panama Papers consist of 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, including the identities of shareholders and directors of the companies. The documents were made available to the Süddeutsche Zeitung beginning in early 2015 by an anonymous source, an unremunerated whistle-blower using the pseudonym “John Doe”. We will probably hear about the Panama Papers^ quite often in the weeks to come.

Heads already started to roll. The highest profile resignation so far is that of Iceland’s prime minister:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/europe/panama-papers-iceland.html^

And of course, it is just lovely when the leader of a superpower declares that this is a plot by another superpower. Nothing says “I’m guilty” louder than this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/world/europe/vladimir-putin-panama-papers-american-plot.html^

It’s not the first time we’ve seen such leaks, but this is one of the largest yet. Stashing money in tax havens is an ancient practice of the super-rich. It’s known how and why it is done. However, the Panama Papers go a long way towards illuminating the details of these affairs – we have numbers, names of people, dates and connections.

Of course, it’s all legal, but it’s the wrong kind of legal; the cowardly kind – the kind that says “my fortune has too many zeros to afford paying taxes in my country” or “I don’t want you to know how filthy rich I am, because then you’ll start suspecting that I’m a politician on the payroll of corporations, a puppet that will do their bidding and sell my people’s country to them”.

Indeed, the Panama Papers are a big deal and I think it would be great if you start reading more about this subject. Find people from your country that are involved in the scandal and raise awareness about this. I believe that these discoveries will help us on our way towards economic and political reform.

I wanted to say that “perhaps some of these wealthy tax-dodgers will learn from this scandal and change their ways”. Then, I observed the sad joke hidden in that phrase. Of course they’ll change their ways: they’ll find other ways to hide their wealth instead of using it to improve our world and to ensure a better future for our followers.

Still, I’m ever the optimist, so I harbor the hope that the truths we uncover go towards advancing our society’s self-knowledge and therefore lead towards evolutionary steps forwards. In time, these people will realize that it is far more satisfying to invest in our future rather than stressing out to hide their insubstantial wealth, numbers in a computer.

Updated on May 9, 2016: the Panama Papers are now searchable online. Here’s how to navigate them^. And this is where you can find them^.

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Recommendations, Technology

Ready or Not, Here Comes Virtual Reality!

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Finally, the first Virtual Reality HMD (Head Mounted Display) – the Oculus Rift – has reached retail availability. The first reviews have started pouring in – here’s a pretty good one from The Verge^. Things are pretty much as I expected, with the majority of reviews being positive and the rest being rather neutral. So far I haven’t read anything seriously bad and although this is very encouraging, it is not a surprise given the fact that all companies involved have been preparing for this launch for plenty of time.

In the meantime, VR as a technology continues to promise growth in the most unexpected of areas. For example there are these guys who propose giving HMDs to roller coaster^ riders. Combining high quality computer graphics with a roller coaster experience is indeed something that I’d love to try one day.

On the other hand, there are companies whose VR content is not exactly top notch. Take for example AltspaceVR. Even though their VR client now supports Samsung’s Gear^, the graphical quality is below what could be achieved even with the limitation of having to run on weaker, mobile graphical processors. AltspaceVR’s “games”^ are not much to look at either. I’m worried about half–baked products ruining the reception of VR. This is one of the most important technological revolutions of the past few decades and I believe a proper, polished launch is very important. Let’s not forget the debacle that was Google Glass.

Luckily, there are plenty of companies that have amazing products lined up. The Oculus launched with some really good titles such as “Eve Valkyrie”, “Elite: Dangerous” and “Lucky’s Tale”. However, I believe the best is yet to come, especially when “No Man’s Sky”^ shows up, which, I believe, is the title that will truly make VR. I hope Oculus can have its controllers ready as soon as possible. And if not, there’s always the Vive^, which will also hit retail availability very soon.

So, ready or not, VR is coming to town. I think that the companies that are at the forefront of this new technological revolution will have a lot to gain from their investment. I’m looking at you, FaceBook, Samsung, Valve, HTC and Microsoft. Plenty of big names are still missing in action, especially Google and Apple. Regarding Apple, they don’t even have decent hardware support for VR^, as recently pointed out by Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey. The coming twelve months will certainly be very, very interesting. Let’s watch and enjoy the show.

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