Uber and Lyft aren’t immune to racial discrimination by drivers

For a while, ridesharing has been seen as a possible solution to the racial discrimination you sometimes see with taxis. If drivers can’t always see or hear you first, they’re less likely to reject your request, right? Unfortunately, the industry isn’t entirely color-blind. A newly published study reveals that there’s still some bias in the ridesharing world. Uber drivers in Boston were over twice as likely to cancel rides on people with black-sounding names, for example, while black men waiting for rides in Seattle faced tangibly longer wait times for both Lyft and Uber.

The nature of the services makes it difficult to quantify more passive forms of racism. Uber doesn’t show drivers your photo when you request a ride, but Lyft does — a bigoted Lyft driver could simply ignore your request instead of cancelling. The data shows signs of sexism, too. Women occasionally faced overly long rides with drivers who were either flirting or assumed that female passengers wouldn’t notice rip-off routes.

Both Lyft and Uber tell Bloomberg that they don’t tolerate discrimination, and contend that their services ultimately reduce racism. They’re right to a degree: ridesharing reduces the chances of drivers avoiding whole neighborhoods, and it’s much easier to punish drivers who frequently cancel on customers. Also, the semi-entrepreneurial nature of most ridesharing (you’re using a personal car and setting your own hours) means that nearby drivers are more likely to live in the area and feel at home picking up locals.

Much like Airbnb, though, these companies are facing a difficult balancing act between fighting discrimination and maintaining convenience. If you withheld all names and photos from ridesharing services, it’d be harder for drivers to know who they’re picking up. Likewise, harsher penalties for drivers who cancel would be tricky. You don’t always know whether a cancellation is fueled by racism or more innocuous reasons. There are steps that the companies can take without affecting innocents, though, such as reviewing driver behavior. And the ridesharing outfits aren’t necessarily opposed to the study — Uber even says the data is “helpful” in showing how it can improve. You might just see some policy changes that lead to a more egalitarian experience.

Source: Bloomberg

New 13-Inch MacBook Pro Sans Touch Bar is Marginally Faster But More Efficient Than Last Year’s Base Model

Benchmarks for Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar are beginning to collect on Geekbench, providing a closer look at the notebook’s performance improvements and energy efficiency.

The entry-level model, powered by a Skylake-based 2.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, currently has an average multi-core score of 6,970, indicating the notebook is only up to 7% faster than the early 2015 base model 13-inch MacBook Pro. Last year’s comparable model, equipped with a Broadwell-based 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, currently has an average multi-core score of 6,497.

The late 2016 model is also slightly faster than last year’s mid-range 13-inch MacBook Pro, while slightly outperformed by the higher-end model.

The notebooks are each calibrated against a baseline score of 4,000, which is the score of Intel’s high-end Core i7-6600U processor.

While the performance improvements are negligible, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro sans Touch Bar’s 15-watt chip is more energy efficient than the 28-watt chip in last year’s entry-level model. The lower power consumption gives the 2016 base model comparable battery life to last year’s model despite having a smaller 54.5-watt-hour battery versus the 74.9-watt-hour battery in last year’s comparable.

Given that the non-Touch Bar model’s 6360U chip would typically be appropriate for the MacBook Air, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar should be a more accurate comparable to last year’s base 13-inch model. However, it is also $500 more expensive. Benchmarks for that model should be available next month when Apple begins shipping the Touch Bar notebooks to customers.

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Sony A6500 preview: Compact, powerful and now with touch

Sony has made a quickstep through some of its Alpha models, with the A6500 following the A6300 that was announced at the beginning of 2016.

This new E-mount model offers much the same design of the A6300 and A6000 that came before and in many cases adopts much of the specification too, but in many cases makes a number of tweaks to boost the performance. 

We got our hands on a prototype of the new model at Sony’s UK launch. Sadly, as this wasn’t a final device, we weren’t able to keep or share any of the photos we took with it. 

Sony A6500 preview: Design

These E-mount models offer a compact APS-C interchangeable lens design, with a familiar look. Put the A6000, A6300 and the A6500 side-by-side and there’s very little difference.

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Over the past few years of this camera’s life, Sony hasn’t changed a huge amount. However, when we reviewed the A6000 in 2014, we instantly liked the compact nature and the high build quality in this camera that evolved out of the NEX line.

For the A6500, there’s little difference in size or weight from the former models, although Sony was keen to point out that there as a little more grip, so your fingers have a little more purchase, for better control. It’s a small detail, but should aid those who find this smaller body a bit difficult to manage, especially with a weighty lens on the front.

The A6500 retains that magnesium body, and water and dust resistant, pitched very much as a camera for those serious about their photography. 

Sony A6500 preview: Getting touchy

One of the big omissions from the A6300 was touch. With a cracking new AF system, covering some 425 points, 84 per cent of the imaging area, there was no easy way of manually selecting the precise point of focus.

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Sony is being rather choosy with which models gets touch, as the new Sony RX100 V, its champion high-end compact, still doesn’t offer this handy feature which is something of a surprise given how useful it is on these compact models.

• Sony Cyber-shot RX100 V preview: Adding quality, speed and accuracy

With the same focusing system in the A6500 as the A6300, a hybrid AF system using phase and contrast detection that works at incredible speed, Sony has now added a touch panel to the 3-inch display on the rear. 

As before, this is a display that you can move into a wide range of positions to give you composition options, but adding touch means you can do a whole lot more. Not only do you get direct interaction with menu options, but you get those tap focusing options too. 

There’s some clever stuff going on here, as you can use the viewfinder, half press the button and see where the camera focuses, and then use your thumb on the screen to move that focal point where you want it.

It might sound fiddly, but it’s a natural movement as you’re already gripping the camera and that thumb falls into just about the right position to swipe across the screen and move the AF point.

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Those who are left-handed (or use your left eye) will know that your nose can trigger touchscreen devices when using the viewfinder because the camera is next to your face, your nose often against the back of the camera. Sure, you can, with practice, move the focal point with the tip of your nose – we tried it and it works – although we’re not confident that’s a long-term solution. 

What you can do, however, is reduce the area of the touchscreen used for focus select. You can opt for half or a quarter of the screen and again, this is easy enough to find with a thumb and move focal point when using the viewfinder, while avoiding any nasal activation.

There are some other advantages too: touch can be used in playback, giving you instant zoom, so you can get into the details easily. 

The viewfinder on the A6500 is the same OLED viewfinder we’ve seen before, which is bright, crisp and sharp, giving you loads of information. Some might prefer the natural look that you get from an optical viewfinder, but Sony is making it very difficult to not like the A6500 viewfinder.

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Sony A6500 preview: Faster in capture

Not only does the A6500 offer fast focusing, but it also adopts one of the skills of the RX100 V and that’s the front-end LSI that been transported from the A99. 

What this does is put more power up front, meaning that the A6500 can shoot faster and capture continuously, offering up to 269 shots in RAW, without slowing down. 

That’s something that might appeal to those wanting to capture fast action, and rattling off 11 frames a second, it won’t take you long to fill a card. Of course, capturing is one thing, writing to the card is another and as we didn’t have final sample models of the camera, it’s difficult to judge exactly how this might work out in real life. 

We also can’t judge how the performance is lifted by the new hardware. The sensor is the same 24.2-megapixel APS-C sensor as the A6300, paired with the Bionz X engine, and Sony is promising better performance at higher ISOs, thanks to having more power available. 

First Impressions

This family of Sony cameras was a little slow to update from the A6000, now quicksteps through to a new model. There’s a lot on offer in the A6300 and the A6500 takes things up a step, but at the same time, you’re being asked to pay £1500 for it, a lift of about £300.

There’s lot on offer in the A6500. The have the in-body 5-axis stabilisation, meaning that you can use your E, A or any other lenses you have via adapters and still benefit from that stabilisation. 

Touch means this is more fully-featured model than those it sits alongside, and should still offer those high quality images. We’re yet to see what the final performance of this camera will be, but first impressions are good.

We can’t wait to give it a thorough workout in a full review as soon as we can.

Volvo’s self-driving cars will hide from UK ‘bullies’

If you could see that the car in front of you was being driven autonomously and therefore navigating in an ultra-safe manner, how would you react? Would you treat it as you would any other road user or be more inclined to torment it, knowing it would yield to your advances? It’s a very real question that car makers and insurance companies are wrestling with and one that has prompted Swedish automotive giant Volvo to take preemptive action. The Guardian reports that it’s decided that when the first 100 self-driving 4x4s hit London’s streets in 2018, they’ll look no different to any other Volvo of the same model so that other road users aren’t tempted to “take them on.”

Those are the words of Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars: “From the outside you won’t see that it’s a self-driving car. From a purely scientific perspective it would be interesting to have some cars that are marked as self-driving cars and some that are not and see whether other road users react in a different way,” he told the newspaper. “I would expect they will, but I don’t know how and to what extent. So just to be on the safe side they will all be unmarked cars. I’m pretty sure that people will challenge them if they are marked by doing really harsh braking in front of a self-driving car or putting themselves in the way.”

Coelingh’s words echo sentiments from a recent London School of Economics study that polled European road users on their attitudes towards autonomous vehicles. The inquiry found that drivers would be tempted to drive aggressively around or “bully” driverless cars. One Brit went as far to say: “[The AVs are] going to stop. So you’re going to mug them right off. They’re going to stop and you’re just going to nip round.”

The UK government is already taking its first steps to modernize road laws, opening a consultation on whether it’s fair to blame drivers for improper use of autonomous driving features and ensuring that car makers are on the hook should their technology fail to operate in the desired manner. Some UK self-driving car projects are already navigating public roads, but the vehicles are covered with stickers and branding to identify the fact that they’re driving on their own.

Volvo is already taking to Transport for London (TfL) and Highways England to safely integrate its first SUVs, which will be deployed on certain UK roads, including the M4 motorway from Heathrow into London. Drivers will given the choice to deploy autonomous features on traffic-heavy routes, allowing Volvo to see how its vehicles operate in typical, if not stereotypical, conditions.

Source: The Guardian

MIT taught a machine to give you nightmares

Robots are learning to create zombie faces and apocalyptic landscapes, and with your help, they can make them even more terrifying. Researchers from MIT and Australia’s CSIRO have created the Nightmare Machine, an AI algorithm that can transform a normal face or landscape into nightmare fuel. The AI analyzed 200,000 normal human faces and was soon able to generate its own, but the team wanted to take it in another, freakier direction.

“We want to produce scary faces,” Dr. Manuel Cebrian told the Sydney Morning Herald. “So we take a zombie face –- a really scary one –- and feed it into the neural network.” From just a single heavily weighted image, the algorithm was able to produce scary images on its own. At least, sometimes — it also produced images that were more goofy than scary, and that’s where you come in.

The team asked humans to vote on which faces are scariest, then fed the data back into the AI. After 200,000 votes and counting, it was able to refine the algorithms and produce scarier images more consistently. (You can vote yourself on faces and landscapes in various styles, including “slaughterhouse,” “toxic city” and “alien invasion.”)

You might wonder why you would help create your own personal hell, but researchers from MIT and Australia’s CSIRO think their work could actually aid humanity. The idea is to teach machines what humans don’t like, then apply the opposite to help them. “The same technology we are using in this silly project could actually be used to comfort, to invite humans to co-operate with machines,” Dr. Cebrian says. Let’s hope like hell he’s right about that, because teaching machines exactly what we’re afraid of sounds like a … scary idea.

Via: Sidney Morning Herald

Source: CSIRO