Solar-Powered Plane Faces the Human Factor

The solution, they say, is more technology.

Solar Impulse stands out among airplanes partly because its range is limited not by fuel but the stamina of the pilot.

The single-seat airplane’s cabin is unpressurized, so the pilot must wear an oxygen mask. It has no bathroom. With a grand total of 40 horsepower, the average cruising speed is 38 knots, or about 44 miles an hour, so progress is slow. Even if a pilot can tolerate 26 hours in the tiny cockpit — the record so far — an oceanic flight is hard to imagine.

“The seat is like a really bad economy seat on an airliner,” said Gregory Blatt, a managing director of the company, which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. “The next version will be like a good business-class seat.”

That version, which is supposed to be able to fly five or six days at a time, will have a bigger seat, a cabin large enough to move around in, some plumbing and various other upgrades, like an autopilot. But that means a heavier plane that will require more efficient solar cells, electric motors and other improvements.

A Solar Impulse plane, an eye-catching proof-of-concept vehicle, arrived at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s branch at Dulles Airport over the weekend from St. Louis, part of a photovoltaic barnstorming tour. The plane’s designers say the successor airplane, already under development, needs crucial but incremental improvements.

The four motors on the existing model, for example, are 90 percent efficient in turning current into torque, far better than most motors on the ground. But the new ones are 94 percent efficient, said Bertrand Piccard, chairman of the company and one of the two pilots. (Some inefficiency is desirable, because the energy that does not go into turning the propellers instead becomes heat, which is needed to keep the motors and the batteries warm at cruising altitude, around 29,000 feet. The batteries are tucked into the pods under the wings that hold the motors.)

The solar cells on the wings and the horizontal tail, from the SunPower Corporation of San Jose, Calif., are about 22.7 percent efficient, Mr. Blatt said. New cells will be better than that, he added. The existing plane carries 11,628 solar cells.

The existing cells are of a type already in use, but they are used in Solar Impulse in a new way. They do not cover the skin of the wing, but rather are the skin of the wing: thin monocrystalline cells, given a slight bend so the wing creates lift. The wingspan is huge, about the same as a Boeing 747. The whole plane weighs only about 3,500 pounds, so what aeronautical engineers call “wing loading,” or force of the air on the wing, is low.

The lithium-polymer batteries, from Kokam, a Korean company, are also a commercial product.

Ernest Moniz, the Energy secretary, who visited the hangar on Monday to look at the plane, praised it not only for using new technology but for integrating it into a useful package.

“Energy efficiency and system integration are enormously important areas,” he said. Efficiency is crucial because the propulsion system is not quite as big as one on a large motorcycle.

One innovation is the foam used in the structure of the plane, which has unusually small pores. Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy now at Stanford Law School, said that the foam had already found its way into refrigerators, because it is a better insulator.

The plane is scheduled to end its tour at Kennedy International Airport in New York early next month, depending on weather. Because it is so light and has such a large wingspan, it is vulnerable to gusts at low altitude, said André Borschberg, the company chief executive and the other pilot.

As a result, it takes off and lands at night, when there is no solar warming of the earth, which produces wind. And landing is an elaborate problem. Its main landing gear is a single wheel, and to keep its wing tips from scraping on the ground, the team deploys two people on electric bicycles to sweep in and hold the wings up as the plane touches down.

With a touchdown speed of 26 knots, about 30 m.p.h., this is not difficult. But it requires a runway without much other traffic, or it becomes like riding a bicycle on an interstate highway. At Kennedy, the plan is to circle at low altitude near the runway until there is a big gap in the traffic, Mr. Piccard said.

Bits Blog: Today’s Scuttlebot: Planetary Destruction Survivors, and Rubber-Band Faces

Here are some of the more interesting items that the tech reporters and editors of The New York Times found on the Web recently. More Scuttlebot can be found here.

Distorted Portraits Using Rubber Bands
Wired.com |  Not very flattering portraits of people wrapped in rubber bands. Actually, these photos are rather disturbing. — Nick Bilton

Characters Who Survived Their Planets’ Destruction
Visualnews.com |  From “Star Wars” to “Doctor Who,” a fun graphic showing which science-fiction characters have survived earth’s destruction. — Nick Bilton

Redesigning Everything Apple-Style
wired.com | Here’s what Star Wars, Dark Side of the Moon would look like if they got the iOS 7 treatment from Jonathan Ive. —Nick Wingfield

Jony Ive Redesigns Things
jonyiveredesignsthings.tumblr.com | Great parodies of the Apple designer’s unique aesthetic. Love the ‘Star Wars’ poster. — Vindu Goel

Online Betting Site Intrade Faces Liquidation

The online betting Web site Intrade, which gained widespread notice for serving as a predictions platform for elections and events not related to sports, is facing liquidation because of a $700,000 cash shortfall, a development that comes a month after it halted trading and froze its customer accounts.

Intrade’s director, Ronald Bernstein, said in a statement that the shortfall resulted from unspecified actions by two other parties, whom he did not name. The potential liquidation was first reported late Friday by Business Insider.

“We are now very confident about the reasons which caused the current circumstance of the company; however, for legal reasons we are not yet at liberty to document them to you,” the statement said. “I can confirm that the company, if it is able, intends to vigorously pursue two substantial monetary claims against two distinct parties for an aggregate amount greater than $3,500,000.”

“If the company is not able to rectify this cash shortfall position very quickly, the company will become insolvent and therefore is very likely to go into liquidation,” the statement said.

The 14-year-old company’s Web site functioned as a gambling hub for professional and amateur investors, letting customers buy and sell contracts tied to the outcome of a future event. It had often been cited for its predictive abilities on matters including the outcomes of American presidential elections and the probability of developments like an Israeli airstrike against Iran.

Last month, the company announced that it had halted trading after auditors found potential financial irregularities involving more than $1.5 million in payments to Intrade’s founder, John Delaney, and other unnamed third parties. Mr. Delaney died in 2011 as he tried to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

The move to halt trading came just months after Intrade shut its Web site to United States residents after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a complaint accusing the company of offering contracts outside traditional exchanges and without regulatory approval. The commission also accused the company of filing false forms with regulators.

In its statement Friday, the company asked for “forbearance” from its remaining account holders so that it could resume “limited operations” as it tries to sort out its finances and recover money through its claims.

“If sufficient forbearance has not been achieved, it seems extremely likely that the company will be forced into liquidation,” the statement said.

With New Tablet, Microsoft Faces a Balancing Act

The delicate balancing act Microsoft must perform was apparent at two events it held on Thursday in New York to introduce two major products. At the first event, it showcased devices made by Samsung, Dell and other hardware partners that run Windows 8, a version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system redesigned to accommodate touch-based devices like tablets.

An hour later, in a different area of the same location, a pier on the Hudson River, Microsoft focused entirely on Surface, a Windows tablet of its own design and the first computer the company has made in its 37-year history.

The separate events allowed Microsoft to spotlight devices made by others without awkwardly upstaging them with Surface. But executives left little doubt as to which computer was their favorite. At the Surface event, Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, described the product as the best tablet and laptop he had ever used. (The company is selling a magnetically attached cover for Surface that doubles as a notebook-size keyboard.)

“We decided to do Surface because it’s the ultimate expression of Windows,” Mr. Sinofsky said. “It’s a stage.”

Microsoft saw a need for a major change in both the design of Windows and its strategy for delivering it to customers after the huge success of Apple in the tablet market. The iPad is already stealing sales from laptop computers, and Apple’s chief executive has predicted that the tablets will one day outsell PCs.

But Microsoft’s move into hardware has perturbed many of its traditional partners, with implications that are still unclear. The company was to start selling Surface at midnight on Friday at about 60 Microsoft-operated stores in North America, a move that has annoyed retailers who will be deprived of a high-profile electronics device backed by a big marketing campaign. Prices start at $500.

There is grumbling, too, a lot of it private, from Microsoft’s hardware partners about the company competing with them for sales. But there aren’t many compelling software alternatives to which these partners can turn.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, said Windows 8 was too important for the company to leave to its partners, who often churn out uninspired designs. “This is Windows the way Microsoft wants you to see it,” he said of Surface, which has an eye-catching magnesium case. (The first version of Surface will run a variation of Windows 8 called Windows RT that cannot run older Windows applications.)

Things could get even trickier in the future. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has left open the possibility of making more hardware products, with analyst speculation focusing on a possible smartphone.

In a rare joint interview on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer and Michael Dell, the chief executive of Dell, one of Microsoft’s oldest partners in the PC business, played down any fallout from Microsoft’s move into hardware. Mr. Ballmer said Mr. Dell was the first person he showed a Surface device to before announcing the product in June. He said he flew to Chicago with one of the devices to meet Mr. Dell, who was on his way to Lagos, Nigeria.

Mr. Ballmer said it was important for him to explain the device to Mr. Dell in person because he expected his initial reaction to be: “What the heck? This is different.”

Mr. Dell, for his part, said he did not have a problem with Microsoft making Surface. “As I’ve understood Steve’s plans here, if Surface helps Windows 8 succeed, that’s going to be good for Windows, good for Dell and good for our customers,” he said.

Of course, if Surface flops, Microsoft’s partners will probably find it easier to ignore. The company still has to convince customers, including businesses, that the product is as compelling and reliable as Apple’s iPad, which has had several years to develop.

Rich Adduci, chief information officer of Boston Scientific, a medical device company, has more than 20,000 PCs at his company using older Windows. But he has also deployed more than 5,500 iPads to sales representatives and other employees.

“Candidly, Surface is going to have a long, hard road ahead of it, given the marketplace and how it has matured with iPad and Android devices,” Mr. Adduci said. “There’s a very high bar for Surface that it’s going to have to hit initially for it to have a real chance.”

Affective Programming Grows in Effort to Read Faces

At Cambridge University, an eerily realistic robotic head named Charles sits in a driving simulator, furrowing its brows, looking interested or confused.

And in a handful of American middle school classrooms this fall, computers will monitor students’ emotions in an effort to track when they are losing interest and when they are getting excited about lessons.

All three are examples of an emerging approach to technology called affective computing, which aims to give computers the ability to read users’ emotions, or “affect.”

People are good at understanding one another’s emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled.

Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window. The online class keeps going even when half the students are lost in confusion. The airport security system can’t tell whether someone is behaving as if he were concealing something or is just anxious about flying.

Technology that masters these skills could also help people who struggle to read the emotions of others, like those on the autism spectrum, or provide companionship and encouragement for nursing home residents. Without a grasp of emotions, some researchers argue, computers will never reach their full potential to support people.

“Our digital world is for the most part devoid of rich ways of expressing our emotions,” said Rosalind Picard, director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

She has been working for more than two decades to translate emotions into 1’s and 0’s, the language of machines. One early project, with a collaborator, Rana el Kaliouby, was to design glasses for people with Asperger syndrome, a mild variant of autism, that warned them when they were boring someone. People with Asperger’s often fixate on particular topics and find it hard to read the social cues, like yawning, fidgeting and looking away, that indicate the listener is bored.

The prototype included a tiny traffic light, visible only to the wearer, that flashed yellow when the conversation was starting to drag and red when facial cues suggested the listener had completely tuned out.

More recently, Dr. Picard and Dr. el Kaliouby have been developing software that maps 24 points on the face to intuit an emotion. In the past, computer algorithms have had trouble distinguishing among genuine smiles, smirks and the gritted teeth that come with frustration, Dr. el Kaliouby said, because they are often fleeting and result in only very small changes to the overall configuration of the face.

To capture these subtleties, webcams needed to have high frame rates and resolutions not possible until recently. The software also requires thousands of examples of each facial expression, labeled by humans — hence the women in Cairo coding recorded expressions.

“If we don’t have enough examples, across cultures and age ranges, the machine won’t be able to discriminate these subtle expressions,” Dr. el Kaliouby said.

Affective technology one day may help online education programs provide better learning experiences. Now, when a student makes a mistake, a program can’t tell if it’s because the student is bored or befuddled. A program that distinguishes this, Dr. el Kaliouby said, could offer more challenging problems to the bored students and simpler exercises to the struggling ones.

Dr. el Kaliouby and Dr. Picard also are working to develop something called Q Sensors, bands worn on the wrist that measure emotional arousal through the skin’s electrical conductance and temperature, as well as activity level. For people with autism, many of whom can’t speak or can’t articulate their feelings — or for anyone else — the sensors provide insights into emotional state that the users may not be able to articulate themselves.

“With this technology in the future, we’ll be able to understand things about our loved ones that we weren’t able to see before, things that calm them, things that stress them,” Dr. Picard said, adding that it will be true even for people without communication challenges.

“I’ve always thought of the skin as a covering, hiding what goes on inside our body,” she said. “Who would have ever thought of our skin as a peephole?”

Dead Trigger Faces Rampant Piracy on Android

It's been said many times that Android developers find it hard to make money on Google's mobile platform, and this sad tale is further proof of that.

Developer Madfinger Games announced via Facebook on Monday that it's making its zombie first-person shooter Dead Trigger free on the Android platform, down from the lowly price of only 99 cents.

 

But it's not a new "freemium" model that drove Madfinger's decision: It's what they refer to as the "unbelievably high" piracy rate on Android.

"At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible -- that's why it was for as little as buck," the developer explained on Facebook. "However, even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant, that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free.

"Anyway, DEAD TRIGGER is not FREEMIUM, it always was and still remains FREE-TO-PLAY, that means, all players are able to play it without IAP (in-app purchase)!" the statement concludes.

While recent hacks have compromised in-app purchases on iOS, such a move would still be almost laughable on Apple's mobile platforms, where the App Store enjoys a much higher level of security for all but a select few jailbreakers. But it's a sad statement on the Android platform, when users aren't willing to part with even a buck to indulge in a quality game.

Meanwhile, Madfinger still offers Dead Trigger for 99 cents on Apple's mobile platform, and apparently has no plans to change its pricing scheme there.

Media Decoder Blog: YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos

To help protect dissidents using video to tell their stories in countries with repressive government regimes, YouTube made available a new tool on Wednesday allowing people to obscure faces within videos uploaded onto its platform.

Protecting the identity of activists using social media has become a growing concern among human rights groups as authoritarian governments in some countries, including Syria, have been turning to citizen-generated videos of protests and other user-generated content on social media sites to identify and jail dissidents.

“Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not,” Amanda Conway, a YouTube policy associate, wrote in a statement about the new tool. She pointed out that “human rights footage, in particular, opens up new risks to the people posting videos and to those filmed.”

Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.org, the leading human rights video advocacy and training organization, praised the move. Witness.org recently began collaborating with YouTube on a new human rights channel.

Mr. Gregory has been trying to raise awareness among dissidents and operators of social media sites about the importance of anonymity for activists when speaking out can put them at risk of retaliation.

In recent years, Mr. Gregory said, government officials in places like Myanmar, Iran and Syria have used videos of protests to identify dissidents. “There have been clear attempts to use citizen-shot footage to target people and punish them for speaking out against the regime,” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory said the tool would help more people than the activists involved in protests. He said that it would also protect the identity of people who want to use video to speak out about subjects like sexual assault and abuse.

YouTube said that the technology could be used for happier situations, too. Its statement points out that it could be used before sharing “the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game” so that the child’s face would not be broadcast to the world.

Media Decoder Blog: YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos

To help protect dissidents using video to tell their stories in countries with repressive government regimes, YouTube made available a new tool on Wednesday allowing people to obscure faces within videos uploaded onto its platform.

Protecting the identity of activists using social media has become a growing concern among human rights groups as authoritarian governments in some countries, including Syria, have been turning to citizen-generated videos of protests and other user-generated content on social media sites to identify and jail dissidents.

“Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not,” Amanda Conway, a YouTube policy associate, wrote in a statement about the new tool. She pointed out that “human rights footage, in particular, opens up new risks to the people posting videos and to those filmed.”

Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.org, the leading human rights video advocacy and training organization, praised the move. Witness.org recently began collaborating with YouTube on a new human rights channel.

Mr. Gregory has been trying to raise awareness among dissidents and operators of social media sites about the importance of anonymity for activists when speaking out can put them at risk of retaliation.

In recent years, Mr. Gregory said, government officials in places like Myanmar, Iran and Syria have used videos of protests to identify dissidents. “There have been clear attempts to use citizen-shot footage to target people and punish them for speaking out against the regime,” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory said the tool would help more people than the activists involved in protests. He said that it would also protect the identity of people who want to use video to speak out about subjects like sexual assault and abuse.

YouTube said that the technology could be used for happier situations, too. Its statement points out that it could be used before sharing “the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game” so that the child’s face would not be broadcast to the world.

Yahoo Quarterly Results Show Challenge Mayer Faces

Revenue and net income were stalled at last year’s levels. Although Yahoo has amassed an enormous audience, some advertisers are looking elsewhere.

But on Tuesday, for the first time in a long time, people took an interest in Yahoo. The day before, Ms. Mayer left a senior post at Google to lead the company that Google had left in its wake.

Analysts and shareholders — desperate for signs of life from the moribund company — are eager to see whether Ms. Mayer, 37, can lure back advertisers, reinvigorate a muddled brand and improve morale at a company marred by executive churn, constant cost-cutting initiatives and mass layoffs.

“Bringing in Marissa Mayer gets people’s attention,” said David Hallerman, a principal analyst at eMarketer. “The sheer attention that they are getting because of hiring her will be helpful for a while. But it will only carry them so far,” he warned.

The first problem she faces is Yahoo’s identity crisis.

Previous chief executives — and there have been four of them in the last five years, plus two interim chiefs — have had a difficult time trying to define what Yahoo actually does. Most people cannot explain the company in a single simple sentence. “The age-old question with Yahoo has been: Is it technology first or is it media or content first?” said David Cohen, the chief media officer at Universal McCann.

Most recently, under Ross Levinsohn, who has been the acting chief since May, Yahoo seemed focused on content. It announced a number of prominent deals with ABC News, including a new weekly Web video show starring Katie Couric called “Katie’s Take.” During a presentation made to a room full of advertisers in April in Manhattan, Mr. Levinsohn highlighted Yahoo’s own coverage of sports, finance, the presidential campaign and the coming Summer Olympics.

With 700 million users, Yahoo still draws one of the largest audiences on the Web. More people use Yahoo’s e-mail service than any other service. Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Flickr, the photo site, are the most popular destinations in their categories.

But over the last few years advertising technology has grown more sophisticated and advertisers themselves have come under financial pressures, prompting many of them to buy ads more cheaply and more quickly through ad networks and auction-based sales. Yahoo’s advertisers are now experimenting with new platforms, most notably Facebook.

To challenge Google’s ad dominance, Yahoo formed a partnership with Microsoft and AOL last year on a deal to sell advertising for one another. And in January, Yahoo bought the online advertising company Interclick, which allows marketers to tailor ads to specific demographics.

The two moves led to the creation of Genome, Yahoo’s new digital advertising product, which offers advertisers data about their users and crunches that data so marketers can create custom ad campaigns. But Yahoo’s revenue from online display ads rose just 2 percent in the second quarter compared with a year ago, and it continues to lose market share.

The choice of Ms. Mayer, who oversaw some of Google’s most successful products — the search engine business, Gmail and Google Maps among them — suggests that Yahoo may turn its focus to new products, like mobile technologies. “Yahoo has a very healthy search advertising and display advertising business,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview on Monday. “I’m interested in what Yahoo can do with video and mobile, both of which are very promising.”

Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said advertisers had grown largely indifferent toward Yahoo. “What would get them more money is if they have a sexier brand,” he said. That’s where Ms. Mayer’s Google sheen could help the company. “We don’t know that she’s not the next Steve Jobs,” Mr. Wieser said.

Ms. Mayer may have the hardest time taking Yahoo into the mobile advertising arena, a market dominated by her former employer. Unlike Yahoo, Google and Apple dominate the mobile advertising space with hardware and software options.

And that’s where it runs headlong into its identity problem. “Yahoo is still mainly a media company. It doesn’t have an operating system. It doesn’t have the devices,” Mr. Hallerman, of eMarketer, said. “I don’t know if there’s room in the market for a fourth mobile platform.”

Asked whether she plans to run Yahoo as a media company or a technology company, Ms. Mayer said, “It’s not the right question. The most important thing is to give end users something valuable, inspiring and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”

Ms. Mayer skipped Yahoo’s earnings call Tuesday. Thanks to cost-cutting initiatives and restructuring, Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings beat analysts’ expectations, but revenue was flat at $1.22 billion. The company reported Tuesday that net income in the second quarter fell 4.2 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to $228.5 million, or 18 cents a share.

Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco and Tanzina Vega from New York.