The post Oops! Self-driving Google car may have caused its first accident appeared first on Cult of Android.
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Senin, 29 Februari 2016
Oops! Self-driving Google car may have caused its first accident
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‘Monotune’ Android ad results in free monotune album
You may remember the Android "Monotune" ad that recently came out. It featured a pianist playing songs on a regular piano, then playing the same songs on a piano modified to only play the middle C note. It had the tagline "Be together. Not the same.", which showed off Android's variety of devices that all work together, in contrast to everyone using the same phone.
For some reason, Google decided to release an album based on the ad with the same name. It's an album full of songs played on the piano that only has the middle C note, so it's quite a monotonous album. Thankfully it's free, so you can give it a listen for fun. At least it's funny.
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Google self-driving car gets in first at-fault crash
Google's self-driving cars have had a spotless driving record so far. After over a million miles of driving in some tough cities (let's be fair, California drivers aren't exactly great), there hasn't been a single crash where the car was at fault. The few times a self driving car has been damaged is either someone running into it or a human was driving it.
Well, that was true until now. A Google self-driving car has gotten into its first crash in which it was at fault. The details are below:
"A Google Lexus-model autonomous vehicle ("Google AV") was traveling in autonomous mode eastbound on El Camino Real in Mountain View in the far right-hand lane approaching the Castro St. intersection. As the Google AV approached the intersection, it signaled its intent to make a right turn on red onto Castro St. The Google AV then moved to the right-hand side of the lane to pass traffic in the same lane that was stopped at the intersection and proceeding straight. However, the Google AV had to come to a stop and go around sandbags positioned around a storm drain that were blocking its path. When the light turned green, traffic in the lane continued past the Google AV. After a few cars had passed, the Google AV began to proceed back into the center of the lane to pass the sand bags. A public transit bus was approaching from behind. The Google AV test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue. Approximately three seconds later, as the Google AV was reentering the center of the lane it made contact with the side of the bus. The Google AV was operating in autonomous mode and traveling at less than 2 mph, and the bus was travelling at about 15 mph at the time of contact. The Google AV sustained body damage to the left front fender, the left front wheel and one of its driver's -side sensors. There were no injuries reported at the scene."
It's kind of a mixed bag. On one hand, it would have been nice if the bus had yielded to a car trying to get around an obstacle. But legally, the bus had the right of way, and the self-driving car should have yielded to a bus coming. Human intuition is one thing, and expecting the bus to yield is reasonable, but the self-driving car should have been more careful.
Thankfully, one crash in the history of the many Google self-driving cars out there still means the cars are far safer than human drivers. This bug can be fixed, and hope in these cars should not be lost.
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Motorola offering 16GB Moto G (3rd Gen) for $199
Today is Leap Day, which means that all sorts of deals are available. But Motorola is offering a sale that goes longer than just one day. Until March 7, Motorola is offering the 16GB Moto G (3rd Gen) for just $199. This is $20 off the regular price, which already offers immense bang for your buck. At just under $200, the Moto G (3rd Gen) is a steal, packing in a combination of useful and respectable features.
If you pick up the device, you can expect to find a 5-inch 720p display with Gorilla Glass, 1.4GHz quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage plus microSD card slot, 13-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera, 2470mAh battery, 4G LTE support and Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, which has already been update to Android 6.0 Marhsmallow in Europe, with the rest of the world following soon.
The Moto G (3rd Gen) is a fantastic phone with a price that's easy on the wallet. It's definitely worth owning if you're on a budget or if you simply want to have a backup phone in case something happens to your daily driver. Remember, this sale only lasts through March 7, so don't take more than a couple of days to think on it.
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LEAGUE is the app that’s changing healthcare
Healthcare is a controversial subject in many countries, notably so in the US, which is dealing with a healthcare system that's proven to be inefficient and costly. Alternate solutions have been proposed, suggesting everything from state-run healthcare to nearly non-existent regulation. But a new solution for the healthcare system is emerging in a different way than many expected.
LEAGUE is a new app-based service that aims to change the healthcare system in both the US and Canada. The service was founded by a team led by Mike Serbinis, the founder and former CEO of Kobo, the e-reader company. I was able to chat with Serbinis last week about LEAGUE, learning more about the service and how it aims to solve parts of the complex issue surrounding healthcare.
Essentially, LEAGUE is a service that aims to personalize healthcare for each user. It began with a focus on prevention, going after the everyday issues that lead to chronic diseases and other health issues. With many health issues stemming from lifestyle diseases, it was shocking to find out that an average of just one percent of spending goes towards prevention of these diseases, with the rest simply going to treatment.
I asked Serbinis about the founding of LEAGUE and whether there was a specific event that began the process. Unfolding from that was an remarkable story, in which Serbinis recounted a trip to Los Angeles where he met two extremely important people: Bill Clinton and Patrick Soon-Shiong. Clinton and Soon-Shiong were engaged in a discussion about "the future of medicine, and in particular, how it would be genomics-based and more personalized."
Serbinis' attention was caught, however, by how little discussion there was about prevention and everyday health. There was also little talk of the issues in the healthcare system regarding insurance and how consumers deal with medical providers. From this, Serbinis saw an opportunity to improve and thus, the concept for LEAGUE was born.
What was that initial concept? Serbinis describes it as "extremely broad, transforming the consumer experience so that people could be empowered to be healthy every day."
From that, the team began to look at the problems that were standing in the way of everyday health. Using the problems that it identified, the team began to solve them and quickly found itself involved in something much bigger than it'd ever anticipated.
Serbinis and team began to build LEAGUE in 2014, with the first launch of the service in Toronto in June 2015. Since then, the company rolled out to its first US city of Seattle with a launch in November 2015. As of the writing of this article, LEAGUE has expanded to Vancouver and will continue to roll out across the US and Canada over the coming year.
Mike Serbinis, Founder and CEO of LEAGUE
What the company recently realized is that it had built something far more expansive than it had ever anticipated. In Serbinis's words, LEAGUE "built a provider network, a marketplace, an Amazon-like place to go find health and wellness providers, services and products that were rated, reviewed and geo-specific, a consumer experience to discover, schedule and pay, and an employer experience so that employers can easily on-board their employees to use [LEAGUE]."
"When you put all those things together, what you've got is an end-to-end way to move money that is far more efficient."
This sentence strikes at the heart of what LEAGUE is about: efficiency. The service is essentially designed to trim off all of the excess offerings and inefficiency of traditional insurance and healthcare, rather allowing individuals to pick and choose their own personal health needs and then giving them the power to seek out solutions to those needs, without having to go through the complicated and often frustrating experience of using a middleman insurance provider.
LEAGUE is designed to make healthcare "consumer-centric," which involves removing the system that's been used by traditional insurance companies. Rather than offering a swath of benefits to employees, most of which are never used, LEAGUE instead allows employers to offer employees an array of choices that they can pick and choose from, ensuring that the benefits package is only offering benefits that are useful to each individual.
By cutting out the other inefficiencies in the process, LEAGUE is able to offer this enormous benefit in a way that offers substantial savings for both employers and employees, while also improving overall long-term health of users by gearing many services towards prevention.
Think of it this way. Perhaps you're carrying too much weight and you recognize that it's due, in large part, to a lack of exercise. You don't know where to start with exercising and you'd like to have a few sessions with a personal trainer to help you get started. Unfortunately, your insurance package from work doesn't cover personal training or exercise classes, and the cost is too high for you to sign up otherwise.
LEAGUE solves this, because rather than employers telling employees what benefits they have and don't have, it allows employers to offer spending accounts for employees, who can then use LEAGUE to find and purchase the service that they need. If you need personal training sessions, you can simply find a provider through LEAGUE and purchase it through your employer-provided spending account, no hassle involved.
This ties in to the way in which LEAGUE saves money. With traditional insurance, it requires several rounds of communication, transfers of information and multiple channels all trying to accomplish something as simple as paying for a dental appointment. LEAGUE eliminates all of those excessive channels, and by doing so, saves the immense amounts of money that are needlessly spent during that process.
Serbinis put the process into a good example:
With LEAGUE, what you do is you go to the LEAGUE app, pick your dentist, you say, 'I'll take Tuesday at two o'clock for a cleaning,' and it's $130. You schedule the appointment, you go in for the appointment and at the end of the appointment, there's another $20 charge, so now it's $150. It's like the first time you walk out of an Uber cab and you have that funny feeling of, 'Wow, I guess I don't have to pay,' because you paid through the app. You walk out of the dental office and your 'claim' has automatically been handled and you get a debit against your health spending account for $150 and that's it. LEAGUE pays the provider and you're done.Mike SerbinisLEAGUE
Part of the beauty of LEAGUE is that it offers advancements for both employees and employers. An employer can sign up for LEAGUE in as little as 10 minutes, and by the end of that time, it can already begin offering health benefits to its employees through LEAGUE.
Not only is it fast, but it's also very useful for employers, as LEAGUE offers data and analytics to employers on what services employees are actually using, allowing employers to see how those services tie in to employee performance and wellness. With LEAGUE, employers can find out the best ways to motivate and improve the health and wellness of employees. These improvements in health will, in turn, likely improve employee performance and in a larger scope, company performance.
The question is, will LEAGUE replace traditional insurance companies? Serbinis says that it depends on the customer. For some customers, LEAGUE will take the place of traditional insurance companies. The company has expanded beyond just health and wellness and now offers a full array of dental, vision and medical benefits, allowing it to cover all of the same categories as traditional health insurance.
For other customers, LEAGUE functions as an add-on to insurance policies that don't offer health and wellness benefits. With the flexibility of LEAGUE spending accounts, the service doesn't need to be the exclusive provider for a company, and as such, it can function as an add-on, offering extra benefits that employees can choose to use if they so desire.
LEAGUE is a company that's been founded to help consumers, which is the base on which all successful companies must be founded. After finishing our chat, I came away enlightened and excited about the future of LEAGUE. Serbinis and his team have struck into something incredible, and if the company's growth is any indicator of success, LEAGUE is going to forever change the way we think about healthcare.
For more information about LEAGUE, click here.
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Rocking Ball – web slinging adventure game will make Spider-man proud
Rocking Ball takes a concept from the web-slinger comic book hero but in more simpler format. It's an addictive arcade game to get the rocking ball to the end exit by slinging a grappling hook to the walls. Swing, jump or bounce off walls… collect yellow rings to add seconds to your adventure as time runs... View Article
Rocking Ball – web slinging adventure game will make Spider-man proud is a post from: AndroidTapp
The post Rocking Ball – web slinging adventure game will make Spider-man proud appeared first on AndroidTapp.
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