Voice-Activated In-Car Systems Are Called Risky

These systems let drivers use voice commands to dictate a text, send an e-mail and even update a Facebook page. Automakers say the systems not only address safety concerns, but also cater to consumers who increasingly want to stay connected on the Internet while driving.

“What we really have on our hands is a looming public safety crisis with the proliferation of these vehicles,” said Yolanda Cade, a spokeswoman for AAA, whose Foundation for Traffic Safety released the study on Wednesday. She characterized the rush to equip cars with Internet-enabled systems as “an arms race.”

The study is among the most exhaustive look to date at the new in-car technology and sets up a potential clash between safety advocates and the auto industry, given that automakers increasingly see profit potential in the new systems.

In some high-end luxury cars, like the BMW 7-series sedan, drivers can dictate e-mails or text messages. And some mainstream models are equipped with options that can translate voice messages into text. The Chevrolet Sonic compact car, for example, has a system that allows drivers to compose texts verbally on an iPhone connected in the vehicle.

More than half of all new cars will integrate some type of voice recognition by 2019, according to the electronics consulting firm IMS Research. The auto companies argue that these systems are safer because they are hands-free.

“We are concerned about any study that suggests that hand-held phones are comparably risky to the hands-free systems we are putting in our vehicles,” said Gloria Bergquist, the vice president for public affairs at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington, adding that carmakers are trying to keep consumers connected without them having to use their hand-held phones while driving.

“It is a connected society, and people want to be connected in their car just as they are in their home or wherever they may be,” she said.

In April, the federal government recommended that automakers voluntarily limit the technology in their cars to keep drivers focused. The federal agency that made the recommendation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said it would review the latest research .

What makes the use of these speech-to-text systems so risky is that they create a significant cognitive distraction, the researchers found. The brain is so taxed interacting with the system that, even with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, the driver’s reaction time and ability to process what is happening on the road are impaired.

The research was led by David Strayer, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah who for two decades has applied the principles of attention science to driver behavior. His research has showed, for example, that talking on a phone while driving creates the same level of crash risk as someone with a 0.08 blood-alcohol level, the legal level for intoxication across the country.

In this latest study, he and a team of researchers compared the impact on drivers of different activities, including listening to a book on tape or the radio, and talking on a hand-held phone or hands-free phone.

The researchers compared how the subjects performed when they were not driving with two other conditions: when using a driver simulator and in a car equipped with tools aimed at measuring how well they drove. The researchers used eye-scanning technology to see where driver attention was focused and also measured the electrical activity in the brain.

Mr. Strayer said the results were consistent across all the tests in finding that speech-to-text technology caused a higher level of cognitive distraction than any of the other activities. The research showed, for instance, that the person interacting with speech to text was less likely than in other activities to scan a crosswalk for pedestrians. And that driver showed lowered activity in networks of the brain associated with driving, indicating that those networks were impaired by the interaction with the technology.

Mr. Strayer said that the reason for the heavy load created by the technology was not totally clear. One reason appears to be the amount of effort required to talk to the dashboard, which is greater than talking to a person, who can interrupt and ask for clarification.

With a passenger or even on a phone, the other person says “wait, wait, I didn’t understand,” Mr. Strayer said. “That stuff is gone when you’re trying to compose an e-mail. You have to get your thought in order and lay it out in order.”

Mr. Strayer said the research should give automakers pause. “Look at new cars; they’re enabling sending e-mails, sending text, tweeting, updating Facebook, making movie or dinner reservations with voice commands,” he said. “The assumption is if you’re doing those things with speech-based technology, they’ll be safe. But they’re not.”

But the automakers are not likely to slow down development of the technology unless the law forbids it, said Ronald Montoya, consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com, a research firm.

“They’re not going to pause based on this research,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 14, 2013

An article on Thursday about a new study showing that voice-activated systems in cars pose a risk of driver distraction misstated part of the name of the AAA unit that released the study. It is the Foundation for Traffic Safety, not the Foundation for Highway Safety.

State of the Art: Drobo Offers RAID Array Systems to Back Up Top-Heavy Files - Review

Did you answer “yes?” Congratulations, you statistical freak. Skip to the next article.

If you’re like the huge majority, however, your backup is out of date or nonexistent.

And that situation is getting more dire every day. The world wants us to snap more pictures, download more movies, play more music, shoot more video. Well, great. But if something’s worth snapping, downloading, playing or shooting, then it’s also worth backing up.

So you buy an external hard drive. And another. And another. After a while, your desk looks like mine, festooned with a hideous archipelago of mismatched drives, each with a cable and a power cord.

And by the way, those drives are not, themselves, backed up. Most contain the original files I’ve offloaded from the computer for long-term storage. If one of those drives dies, I’m out of luck.

Boy, does Drobo have a suggestion for people like me.

See, corporations don’t go buying external drives from Best Buy. They use RAID arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). That’s a passel of drives congregated inside a single metal box; clever software makes them look to a computer like one big drive. Or three smaller ones, or 50 little ones — however the highly paid system administrator decides to chop them up.

As a bonus, thanks to a fancy encoding scheme, the files on a RAID system can be recovered even if one of the participating hard drives goes to the great junk drawer in the sky. (That’s why it’s R for “redundant.”)

For several years now, a company that calls itself Drobo (short for “data robotics”) has been pursuing a single dream: make RAID arrays for noncorporate people. High-end types, small businesses and creative professionals with little technical expertise and no technical staff.

And next week, it will offer two new models: the Drobo 5D ($850 list) and the Drobo Mini ($650).

A Drobo is just a sleek, glossy, black empty shell. You have to buy internal hard drives to insert like cartridges. Online, for example, you can snag a couple of 2-terabyte drives for $110 each. That ought to hold a few baby pictures.

Once the drives arrive, you start to understand the nosebleed Drobo price tag — because there’s no setup or configuration. You don’t even have to attach the drives to rails or caddies or fiddle with screws, as you do with professional RAID systems; you just shove them in like frozen waffles going into a vertical toaster. The Drobo automatically assimilates them into your increasingly large virtual drive.

Also unlike most RAID systems, the drives you buy can be different brands, speeds and capacities; Drobo is an equal-opportunity enclosure.

The Drobo 5D has slots for five drives — standard 3.5-inch, SATA internal drives, which these days come in capacities up to 4 terabytes each. The new Mini, the first Drobo that could be called portable (7 x 7 x 2 inches, suitable for peripatetic video editors and photographers), has four slots. They accept 2.5-inch laptop drives, which, these days, offer a maximum of 1 terabyte each (about $80).

Here’s the big payoff: As your life fills with files, you can fill your empty slots with more drives. Once you’ve filled them all, you can eject one of your smaller drives and replace it with a more capacious one. None of that requires copying files, reformatting a drive or managing anything. The Drobo system automatically recognizes new drives and makes them, too, part of the suddenly larger virtual hard drive. This breezy, suit-yourself flexibility is unheard-of in traditional RAID systems.

Here’s the other payoff: Drives die. When that happens, you don’t lose any data. In its RAID-y way, the Drobo auto-reconstructs everything that was on the corpse drive. You keep using all your files as if nothing had happened, even as the Drobo starts redistributing your files so that they’re protected against another drive failure, which can take hours or days.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about a data storage system for corporate users that is known as RAID arrays (redundant array of independent disks), misstated what Drobo, the company that is introducing the system for non-corporate users, based its name on. It is data robotics, not disk robot.

Battery Maker A123 Systems Files for Bankruptcy

The company’s bankruptcy filing was unexpected, since it struck a deal in August to sell a majority stake to a Chinese auto parts manufacturer. That agreement, with the Wanxiang Group, provided an apparent lifeline to the company. But A123, which has received federal grant money, said the Wanxiang deal was never completed, and on Monday, it failed to make a debt payment due on $75 million it had borrowed from Wanxiang.

In announcing its bankruptcy filing, A123 said it had agreed to sell its automotive assets and factories to Johnson Controls, another American battery producer that has benefited from federal assistance, in a deal it valued at $125 million.

A123, based in Waltham, Mass., was once considered one of the most promising grant recipients under the administration’s $2 billion stimulus program for electric car development. The Department of Energy awarded the company a $249 million grant to establish battery manufacturing operations in Michigan, although A123 had received only about $132 million of the grant before its bankruptcy.

The company’s failure may well become a political football in the presidential campaign, in which energy policy has been a leading topic. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, has repeatedly criticized President Obama for his heavy spending on green-energy programs, including a $528 million loan to Solyndra, a solar module maker that went bankrupt last year.

“A123’s bankruptcy is yet another failure for the president’s disastrous strategy of gambling away billions of taxpayer dollars on a strategy of government-led growth that simply does not work,” said Andrea Saul, Mr. Romney’s press secretary, in a statement on Tuesday.

The Energy Department defended the federal grant to A123 as one of many bipartisan efforts to support American manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. A department official, Dan Leistikow, said in a blog post that the administration had awarded $2 billion in grants to 29 companies involved in the electrification of vehicles, creating thousands of jobs.

A123 has used about $132 million of its grant to date, plus another $6 million given in 2007 by the Bush administration, said Mr. Leistikow, the agency’s director of public affairs. Michigan has also given A123 a $9 million grant, plus various tax breaks.

Mr. Leistikow said the federal money would not be wasted because A123’s two Michigan factories would now be operated by Johnson Controls.

“In an emerging industry, it’s very common to see some firms consolidate with others as the industry grows and matures,” he said.

The department previously gave Johnson Controls, based in Wisconsin, its own $299 million federal grant for an electric-car battery project.

The Solyndra bankruptcy, which became the subject of Congressional hearings, stoked concerns about oversight of government-backed energy programs.

Another battery manufacturer that received federal help, Ener1, went bankrupt in January. It had approval for $118.5 million in grants from the Energy Department but had received only about half of that when it entered bankruptcy.

A123 was a centerpiece of the government’s electric-vehicle program, opening two factories in Michigan and securing contracts to supply batteries to automakers including General Motors and the start-up firm Fisker Automotive.

But its financial stability has been in question for more than a year. The company suffered a major setback when it had to recall defective batteries in Fisker cars. And despite orders from carmakers, A123 could not generate sufficient revenue or profit from the slowly growing market for electric vehicles.

In August, A123 surprised industry experts by agreeing to sell up to 80 percent of the company to the American arm of the Wanxiang Group, China’s largest auto parts manufacturer.

Political opponents of the Wanxiang deal asserted that the Chinese company would get access to technology and products made possible by the support of American taxpayers.

One of the critics, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the sale of A123’s factories to Johnson Controls was “something positive” because it kept the company’s assets out of Chinese hands.

But Mr. Grassley and Senator John Thune, Republican from South Dakota, criticized the Energy Department, saying it ignored warning signs that A123 was faltering.

“The bankruptcy raises the prospect that the taxpayers will get little or no return on their investment in A123 and will lose millions of dollars,” Mr. Grassley said.

The Energy Department countered that A123’s employees and customers would be absorbed by a larger, stronger competitor in Johnson Controls.

“A123’s manufacturing facilities and technology will continue to be a vital part of America’s advanced battery industry,” said Mr. Leistikow.

Wanxiang, which has its United States headquarters outside Chicago, pledged in August to invest up to $465 million in A123, but the deal fell apart for undisclosed reasons.

“We determined not to move forward with the previously announced Wanxiang agreement as a result of unanticipated and significant challenges to its completion,” said David Vieau, A123’s chief executive, in a statement.

Instead, the company found a new suitor in Johnson Controls, which analysts say is now in position to be the dominant American battery manufacturer.

A123 said filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection would ease the sale of its automotive assets to Johnson Controls. The deal includes Michigan plants in the Detroit suburbs in Livonia and Romulus, as well as A123’s equity interest in battery facilities in China.

Johnson Controls said it would provide $72.5 million in financing for A123’s reorganization in bankruptcy.

“We believe that A123’s automotive capabilities are a good complement to our existing portfolio and will further advance Johnson Controls’ position as a market leader in this industry,” said Alex Molinaroli, head of the power systems unit of Johnson Controls.

Brian Johnson, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said in a research note that the deal would help Johnson Controls become “the U.S.-based player” in the market for lithium-ion batteries.

A123 has also received “significant interest” for its remaining assets, primarily its electric-grid technology and products for commercial and government entities, said Mr. Vieau, the company’s chief executive

Whether Wanxiang will bid on those assets during bankruptcy is not known. The head of the Chinese firm’s United States operations, Pin Ni, said in an e-mail on Tuesday, “Our interest and commitment has not changed” regarding A123.

Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington.

Battery Maker A123 Systems Files for Bankruptcy

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DealBook: Roper Industries to Buy Sunquest Information Systems for $1.4 Billion

Roper Industries, an industrial manufacturer, has agreed to purchase Sunquest Information Systems, a maker of diagnostic and laboratory software for $1.42 billion in cash.

The acquisition comes amid increasing consolidation in the medical diagnostics industry.

Sunquest, which specializes in patient management and diagnostics software, will complement Roper’s existing medical business. Sunquest’s products are used in more than 1,700 hospitals.

“Sunquest meets all of Roper’s key acquisition criteria and is an ideal fit with both our medical and software platforms,” Brian Jellison, Roper’s chief executive, said in a statement. ”The business is the market leader in software solutions for the critically important healthcare provider laboratory market.”

Sunquest, which is owned by private equity firms Huntsman Gay Global Capital and Vista Equity Partners, will continue to market its products under its own brand.

Roper, which also operates in the energy and transportation industries, announced on Monday that it generated $115 million in profit on $724.9 million in revenue for the second quarter. It upped its full-year earnings outlook to a range of $4.84 to $5 per share, from $4.75 to $4.91 per share.

Roper Industries hired Barclays to serve as its  financial adviser, while Sunquest was advised by Jefferies & Company.