Google and Lionsgate celebrate Mad Men’s last episode with an interactive web experience and free episode

If you’ve been watching the TV program, Mad Men, then you probably already know that its last episode will air on Sunday, May 17th. To celebrate this, Google has teamed up with the show’s production company, Lionsgate, to showcase ‘The Mad Men Experience‘, an interactive website documenting the program’s characters, themes and storyline. You can relive some of your favourite moments from the program while taking in some of the behind-the-scenes action and interviews with the actors.

If you haven’t actually watched Mad Men before, Google is making it easy for you to get started by offering the very first episode of the first season free of charge on Google Play in the US, Uk, Australia and Canada. As you would expect, you can also purchase all the other episodes via the Play Store as well. All you have to do to get your hands on the first ever episode is either scan the QR code or just click the Play Store link below. To visit  ‘The Mad Men Experience’, just click the source link below.

Source: TheMadMenExperience

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Google’s self-driving vehicles have only been involved in 11 accidents over 6 years

Google’s self-driving cars are a big focus point for the company, but drivers and manufacturers alike are keeping their eyes on the safety of those autonomous vehicles. Fortunately for everyone (except maybe insurance companies) Google’s self-driving car program hasn’t caused any accidents over the 6 years and 1.7 million miles since it took to the road.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been any accidents where a Google car was involved, but none of the 11 recorded accidents were Google’s fault. To top that off, all 11 accidents that the self-driving cars were involved in were minor, so no one was injured. That’s pretty impressive, and seems far safer than what most human drivers can typically pull off.

Google’s research has also given a little insight into when crashes are most likely to happen. Out of the 11 times one of their cars was hit, 8 times were on city streets, while only 3 accidents happened on the freeway. Dealing with things like stop signs, intersections, and typical distractions seem to be the biggest culprit of minor vehicle accidents, and Google notes that. Too many people are distracted on their phones or by other things in their vehicles, which leads to drivers not paying attention at four-way stops or trying to rush to beat a red light. Google has developed some interesting ways to tackle those problems, like forcing their car to take a second pause when a light turns green to avoid getting hit by someone speeding through a red light.

Google also captured some pretty ridiculous things some drivers do, like driving on the wrong side of the road (seriously), sharply cutting across lanes to make a turn, and veering into other lanes in the middle of a turn. Google’s cars typically handle those situations very cautiously and probably much better than most human drivers, which explains the extremely low accident rate.

At the end of the day, this information really sums up how dangerous the human element is to driving. It’s much easier for a computer to make calculated, safe decisions, especially in a high-speed environment, especially compared to how people drive. It’ll be very interesting to see how Google plans to take this program further in the next few years.

source: Medium

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Want to Help Google Improve Chrome? There’s an Extension for That

Ever ready to listen to user feedback and then ponder whether or not to include said feedback in subsequent product releases, Google announced today a new Chrome User Experience Surveys extension that collects user experience data on Chrome. So it’s not just a clever name.

The tiny extension will pop up sometimes at random, or more often, when something unusual happens to Chrome, like bugs or malware warnings. Google says a user will get a maximum of two notifications per day, capped at four per week, with the average user seeing a survey once a month. Surveys are roughly 2-3 minutes in length.

Keenly aware of user trepidation when it comes to data harvesting, the third question answered in Google’s announcement of the extension (after “What?” and “Where?”) pertains to the information Google will collect from the extension. The answer: nothing personal. The only data collected will be that directly related to the extension.

Unlike Google’s awesome, if totally data-collection-obvious, Google Opinion Rewards app, which pays users a few dozen cents here and there for answering surveys, Chrome User Experience Surveys offer no remunerative benefits other than the satisfaction that comes from making everyone’s browsing experience just that much better.

Now aside from the fact that apparently Google requires an extension to fully ascertain the incredible resource drain that is Chrome on a Mac, this could be a useful and simple way for everyday users to help Google improve the world’s overwhelmingly dominant browser. (As an aside, remember when Chrome felt like this light little rebel browser up against the IE monolith?)

The feedback period only lasts 120 days, and Google dissuades you from uninstalling the extension before then. After 120 days, the extension will uninstall itself. Skynet once promised the same thing.

Source: Google

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Self-driving cars involved minor accidents, but don’t blame the tech

Since California began issuing permits for self-driving car tests on public roads last fall, four out of nearly 50 vehicles had minor accidents. According to an Associated Press report, three of the four were Google’s Lexus SUVs outfitted with Delphi’s autonomous technology. The fourth was a test vehicle owned by Delphi. In half of the fender benders, the cars were in control when the accident occurred, and all of them happened at speeds of under 10 MPH. Most importantly, all four cases resulted in minor damage and no injuries. Due to the state’s privacy laws, the report doesn’t indicate any further details — like if they happened while backing out of a parking space, for example.

In a blog post today, Google’s self-driving project head Chris Urmson explained that in its six years, the project has seen 11 accidents — all of them with light damage and no injuries. What’s more, Urmson notes none of the accidents were caused by the self-driving technology that has piloted nearly a million miles. “If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car,” Urmson said. As you may recall, Florida, Michigan and Nevada also license companies to test self-driving cars on publish highways. Thus far, no accidents have been reported in those states.

[Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images]

Filed under: Transportation, Google

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Via: Autoblog

Source: CNBC

Google is temporarily shutting down Map Maker

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a discovery on Google Maps that many believed was an Easter Egg hidden and planted by the search engine giant. Just in case you missed it, Facebook user Ahmad Babar posted a picture from a location just north of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in which a Droid could be seen urinating on the Apple logo.

As soon as Google became aware of the uncouth artwork, it removed it from the Map. In an exclusive statement sent to The Washington Post, Google blamed the appearance of the graphic on an unidentified individual who was manipulating Map Maker to create audacious designs.

It would appear that Google is still having a bit of trouble filtering all of the bad edits, though, as earlier today it announced that it would be temporarily shutting down the Map Maker service until a more reliable moderation system could be created.

The full statement can be seen below:

As some of you know already, we have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months. The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate – a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.

All of our edits are currently going through a manual review process.

We have been analyzing the problem and have made several changes. However, it is becoming clear that fixing some of this is actually going to take longer than a few days. As you can imagine, turning automated and user moderation off has the direct implication of very large backlogs of edits requiring manual review. This in turn means your edits will take a long time to get published.

Given the current state of the system, we have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to any of our users to let them continue to spend time editing. Every edit you make is essentially going to a backlog that is growing very fast. We believe that it is more fair to only say that if we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a pause.

We have hence decided to temporarily disable editing across all countries starting Tuesday, May 12, 2015, till we have our moderation system back in action. This will be a temporary situation and one that we hope to come out of as soon as possible.

While this is a very difficult, short term decision, we think this will help us get to a better state faster. More importantly, we believe it is simply the right thing to do to all of you, our valued users who continue to edit with the hope that your changes might go live as fast as you’ve been used to.

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