Riding faster while commuting increases inhalation of pollutants, UBC study finds

Active commuters beware: Pushing yourself hard while walking orbiking on city streets can dramatically increase the amount ofairborne pollutants you take in, according to a new study from theUniversity of British Columbia.

Cyclists who maintain speeds near 30 kmh may absorb three to four times the toxicants of a cyclistpedalling at a moderate 13 kmh, said lead author Alex Bigazzi, a transportation expert in thedepartment of civil engineering.

Active commuters are exposed to a cocktail of pollutants, which includes carbon monoxide, volatileorganic compounds (VOCs), particulates and soot. But exerting yourself to minimize your time onthe road — and presumably your exposure to toxic pollutants — is a losing strategy, said Bigazzi.

The researchers built a computer model of 10,000 people using census data to find the optimalspeeds pedestrians and cyclists of different ages and sexes should maintain to reduce pollutantintake while enjoying the well-documented benefits of exercise.

“There is a trade-off between the time you spend travelling and how much air you take in,” hesaid. “The faster you move, the harder you breathe and the more pollution you could potentiallyinhale, but you also are exposed to traffic for a shorter period of time.”

“This analysis shows where the sweet spot is and it’s right in the middle,” he said. “You don’t wantto go real slow and you don’t want to power through.”

The optimal speed for cyclists is around 13 kmh on a flat road, but maintaining speeds up to 20 kmhdidn’t make a huge difference in pollutant intake.

“But when you get 10 kilometres per hour above your optimal speed it pretty quickly goes to two,three or four times the total pollution inhaled over a trip,” he said. “The highest risk is to people whoare cycling for exercise on polluted streets.”

The optimal speed for adult walkers is around 4.5 kmh, but the best speed for children is closer tothree kmh, because they have to exert themselves more to keep an adult pace.

“The same principle would apply to families cycling together,” Bigazzi said.

Runners take in about double the pollutants compared with walkers. The optimal speed for joggersis about 10 kmh.

“We don’t know whether the extra exercise is worth the risk, but there are certainly cardiovascularbenefits from running,” he said.

The study, published in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, builds on Bigazzi’searlier work, which found that exposure to airborne VOCs was 100 to 200-per-cent higher on high-traffic arterial routes and roads through industrial areas.

Blood levels of toxicants were 40 to 100-per-cent higher than normal in cyclists after riding just sixto nine kilometres on heavily used urban streets. No difference in toxicant levels was detected incyclists that used low-traffic streets.

“When I talk to cyclists, they are worried about air pollution and they want to know what theyshould do to reduce their pollution risk,” said Bigazzi. “This begins to answer that question.”

The next stage of the research will involve taking breath samples from walkers and cyclists usingcity streets to determine the levels of pollutants in their bodies after different levels of exertion.

New Generation of MacBooks Are Here

apple unveiled long-awaited updates to its Mac computers today, Oct. 28, aiming to spark consumer interest in a product line often overshadowed by newer gadgets like the iPad and iPhone.

The breakout feature is, as widely speculated, a new touch-sensitive panel on the MacBook Pro, Apple’s top-of-the-line laptop. The touch bar will offer functionality that’s familiar to many iPhone users. It shows word suggestions as you type and lets you scroll through libraries of emojis. When watching movies, the touch bar can offer playback controls. When editing photos, the touch bar changes to offer options to lighten or rotate. It adapts and offers different controls for whatever app or website you’re using.

The Pro will also come with a fingerprint sensor, similar to one in the iPhone, to unlock the device. It can recognize different users and offer quick switching based on the fingerprint. The new Macs will also offer a dedicated key for the Siri voice assistant, a feature added with the MacOS Sierra update last month.

In keeping with recent updates to other Apple products, the company will replace some computer ports with a new USB-C outlet. Connectors using USB-C technology can transmit data faster than older USB jacks. They’re also smaller and have a uniform shape, which means the USB-C jack can be inserted with either side facing up.

Apple unveiled the new Macs at an event at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. During the event, Apple also said it wants to unify television viewing on its streaming TV device with a new app simply called “TV.”

Laptops vs. Tablets

The changes to the Mac are the first significant ones in years. Sales of the Mac have been in a slump this year, after a streak of growth in 2014 and 2015 that seemed to defy global trends. Consumers generally are buying fewer PCs and using smartphones or tablets instead.

Apple itself has promoted its latest iPad tablet, the iPad Pro, as a device capable of replacing the laptop for many users. And in contrast with the Mac’s earlier years — when Apple marketed its computers to people who saw themselves as creative professionals or just independent thinkers — Apple has begun promoting the Mac as a computer for business users, too.

Microsoft, traditionally a software company, has begun selling its own line of high-end Surface laptops and this week introduced its first Surface desktop PC. Like the iMac in years past, analysts say the new Surface machine has a premium price and features that will most likely appeal to visual designers and other creative professionals.

For Apple, the Mac line has been eclipsed financially by other products — first the iPod and now the iPhone — that have made far more money in recent years.

Apple sold $22.8 billion worth of Macs in its past fiscal year, although that was just 11 percent of the company’s total revenue. It sold $136 billion worth of iPhones. In the most recent quarter, Apple sold 9.3 million iPads and 4.9 million Macs, although the iPads accounted for just $4.3 billion in sales while the Macs contributed $5.7 billion.

But the Mac has remained a significant product for Apple, and one that’s important to intensely loyal fans. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh in 1984 with the famous commercial of a woman hurling a hammer at a dystopian overlord, setting the tone for Apple’s corporate marketing strategy in the years to come.

Baby Steps in TV

Apple TV is a newer endeavor, and the new TV app could make it easier for viewers to find shows to watch, as it means they don’t have to check individual apps. Amazon’s Fire TV is taking a similar approach with a software update, though the unified experience will be part of the home screen, not an app.

The app, though, is short of a full-fledged streaming-TV service, which reports say Apple has been pursuing. Rather, it brings together TV shows and movies viewers already get through individual subscriptions. The TV app will be synced with iPhones and iPads, so viewers can catch the next episode regardless of device. Apple said its Siri voice assistant will also direct viewers to live events, such as streaming sports.

Apple said Apple TV already has 8,000 apps, including more than 2,000 games. The addictive building game “Minecraft” will come later this year.

Separately, Apple said it’s delaying shipment of its wireless AirPod earphones, which had been scheduled for late October. In a statement, the company said, “We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers.” Apple didn’t elaborate. A Nike edition of Apple Watch for runners will still go on sale on Friday as planned.

Researchers aim to make digital assistants like Siri less annoying

Driven by artificial intelligence, these voice assistants can navigate for us, set reminders and prod us awake with alarms. But for many consumers, frustrations with the technology can outweigh its benefits. Have you ever asked Siri what time your appointment is on Sunday, and heard her say, “How about a web search for it?”

There’s a lot of money at stake right now in developing “smarter” digital assistants, and experts say the technology is only going to expand. So how can our relationships with these digital helpers be improved?

Justine Cassell, an artificial intelligence researcher and associate dean at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, says that speech recognition is one area for development (accents in particular are still difficult for the technology). But for her, the crux of the matter is social: Our digital assistants need to be able to read our conversational cues — not just our words — and draw on an ongoing relationship for context.

“Siri or Cortana or M or Alexa, they all talk to us as if it’s the first time they’ve met us,” Cassell says. “And it’s no fun to have a personal assistant with amnesia. That’s not what we want from our assistant. We want them to say, ‘You remember that thing you were looking at online last week? Well, the price has gone down. And [I] know what trouble you got in last year when you forgot your husband’s birthday, so I suggest you look it up today and you buy it now, while the price is low.’

“That’s the kind of not just context, but also the kind of pushy conversation you might expect from someone you’ve known for a long time.”

Cassell is working with a team to build “socially aware” artificial intelligence that can respond to us the way a friend or colleague does. As part of their research, they videotaped pairs of people doing tasks together for an hour each week, noting the differences between the pairs as time passed.

“We found, for example, that teasing went up from week to week,” she says. “And referring to shared experience went up from week to week. … But positivity and praise went down from week to week.”

Cassell’s team built those findings into Sara — their “socially aware robot assistant.” Right now, Sara helps attendees at conferences get introduced to other participants and find the sessions that best fit their interests.

“We find that people are surprisingly engaged — surprisingly because they themselves are surprised by how engaged they are and by, how compelling they find the experience,” she says.

But if digital assistants can become better conversationalists — more like a person — who do we want them to be most like? A friend? A colleague? A butler?

“I talk about it in Jarvis and Mary Poppins terms,” says Carolina Milanesi, a tech analyst at Creative Strategies in San Jose. “From a family perspective, you see a lot of advertising for Google Home, of these things that come in, and they are your Mary Poppins in the home and helping out and reminding everybody of everything.”

But Milanesi says that at the moment, many of these caretaker assistants operate on just one family member’s account.

“And that’s not really, you know, what Mary Poppins does,” she adds. “She needs to know everything about everybody to be able to help the family.”

In contrast, Milanesi says that assistants like Siri are more suited for a Jarvis, or butler, experience. (Edwin Jarvis being the butler character in several Marvel Comic titles.)

“They are my assistant,” she says. “You know, with what Apple is doing with AirPods, adding in Siri’s whisper in your ear like you see in the movies for the ambassador, [where] that person behind their shoulder is just saying, ‘Oh, this is so and so, you met him two years ago, he has a daughter, and that’s what he does.’ That is a little bit the idea, but it’s not clear how are we going to get there.”

For now, Milanesi says, “advertising is way overselling what, in general … these assistants do.” But that may be experienced differently in the next generation of digital assistants — or by the next generation of humans.

When Milanesi was setting up Amazon’s Echo speaker in her home, a device powered by Alexa that is “this kind of jar-looking thing that you have on your shelf,” her 8-year-old checked in to see what was going on.

“And I said well, ‘This is Echo, there’s Alexa,’” Milanesi says. “And she goes, ‘Well, is she like Siri?’ And she used ‘she.’ So it was, ‘Is she like Siri?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she asked the question, and she got her answer, and she said, ‘Well, if she’s smarter than Siri, can we keep her?’”

“Five minutes in, there was that emotional connection that she created with this thing.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday.

iPad Air 3 Hardware Specs, Release Date, Retail Price Rumors: Apple Planning To Cancel iPad Air Series? [VIDEO]

Apple is reportedly planning to scrap the iPad Air series which means no more iPad 3. However, in case that’s not true, here are some of the likely specs including the rumored release date and retail price.

Is Apple Canceling the iPad Air Series?

These rumors are getting stronger every time Apple makes a product presentation that doesn’t include the iPad Air 3. The current model is now two years old and should have been replaced with a newer model, according to devoted iPad Air fans. However, the absence of any confirmation from the Cupertino Company may also indicate that it’s not prepared to put the iPad Air series to rest. It may simply mean that Apple is not ready to launch a new iPad Air 3 just yet. Currently, the Apple official site is still selling the iPad 2 model.

Expected Hardware Specs For The iPad Air 3

Many believed that the iPad Air series is finished when Apple launched the new iPad Pro (9.7 inches). Its light and thin feature has convinced many iPad enthusiasts that the Pro and Air has somewhat been merged.

If an iPad Air 3 is really coming, it would have to be thinnest of all them all. That would not be an easy feat to pull off. Apple may have to sacrifice a number of features including decreasing the size of the batteries. This would relegate the iPad Air 3 with very little computing power compared to the iPad Pro models.

When And How Much Will An iPad Air 3 Cost?

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