2.24.19 SB_Q by stltoday.com

SPRING 2019

BEST REVIEWS

BEST WIRELESS KEYBOARDS

E XC L U S I V E

BEST OF THE BEST

BEST STREAMING DEVICES

It makes a noticeable clicking sound when you type, and it’s not bluetooth.

The keys are not back-lit, and the spacing could prove difficult for those who type frequently

Magic Keyboard

This affordable keyboard is smaller and more compact than a regular keyboard but has problems with the keys.

Instead of batteries, this keyboard charges with a lightning cable — an intriguing yet pricey option.

It’s easy to pair up this keyboard through Bluetooth, and the keys have a great feel to them.

Amazon

Responsive back-lit keys light up in 7 colors. Easily pair and connects.

The connection can experience a lag, and there is a tendency for random k

Keys sometimes have a tendency to stick or pop off.

Charge lasts a long time. Operates within a good range, with smaller keys lend themselves to faster typing.

Smaller keys can be difficult for those with larger hands/finger

BOTTOM LINE

A lightweight, low-priced keyboard with a few known flaws.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

Apple

HB030B Universal Slim

BOTTOM LINE

A lower-priced option from a wellknown brand. It’s small and easy to store, but it could be difficult to use for those with larger hands/fingers.

Quick setup and long battery life. Keys are responsive and have a great movement to them. Comes with a mouse.

Arteck

Ultra-Slim Bluetooth Keyboard

NVIDIA

Fire Stick

Shield TV

You won’t find a better streaming device at this price point. Without question the best value for your money.

PROS

Lightweight ergonomic keyboard/ mouse combo. Wave design has a natural feel and shape for the hands.

Many programmable buttons and added functions. Wrist rest and kickstand to elevate. Auto-shutoff.

K360 Wireless USB Desktop Keyboard

OMOTON

PROS

BOTTOM LINE PROS

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Logitech

Streaming services offer higher quality video and audio, they offer content with few — if any — commercials, and subscribing to multiple services still is cheaper than paying a single cable TV bill. There’s no other way to say it: streaming is the future.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

BEST OF THE BEST

Logitech

Wireless Wave Combo MK550

CONS

INSIDE

BEST REVIEWS

For the professional on the go or the neatnik, a wireless keyboard does away with cords and keeps your workspace clean and free of clutter. You can sit comfortably without worrying about cable length, and type from your desktop, lap or the couch.

Incredibly easy to set up and use. Works perfectly with Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, HBO and Pandora. Comes with a handy controller.

An all-in-one device — streaming, gaming, smart home hub and media player.

4K ultra HD. Controlled via voice command to Alexa or Google Home. Works with all the popular apps. Uses Silk and Firefox browsers. Dolby Atmos sound quality

Roku

Streaming Stick

A great value, though it has a shorter lifespan than other streaming devices.

Great search functionality within thousands of apps. Controller is user-friendly.

Apple TV

Roku

Premiere - HD and 4K UHD Streaming Media Player

A suitable choice if you are a Mac aficionado and need to connect all your Apple devices. Otherwise, you might prefer a different choice.

A complete package: excellent performance, features and overall user experience.

Airplay capability allows you to stream music, videos, games — just about anything, really — from any Apple device in your home.

Extremely fast and powerful due to dual-core processor. Audio jack easily connects to stereo system.

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VIRTUAL A HOME

BY GEORGIA FRANCES KING

In the future, moving houses will be just a matter of uploading and downloading furniture

home meets the same basic needs as a cave did 10,000 years ago: a safe place protected from the elements, enemies and predators. It also provides privacy; a place to eat, sleep, and rest; and a location to call your own and store your belongings. Technology hasn’t changed those needs signiﬁcantly. It’s just changed the ways in which they are met. A number of social and technological developments are converging to change what we want from our homes. One trend among recent generations is that they are more experience-focused and less materialistic than previous generations. Many of them will be restricted from home ownership because of price disparities, and they also will live more nomadic lifestyles. They therefore won’t want to accumulate lots of possessions that need to be moved when they rent a new place or move to a new city. Instead, they’d prefer to spend any spare money on going out, holidaying, having fun and making memories. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2

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SIMPLIFY SPENDING PARENT LIKE A PRO A case study on the pitfalls of too much screen time and the need to set logical boundaries. PAGE 8

Three ways to save when purchasing new tech. PAGE 19

MORE WAYS TO BE MOBILE Your mobile device can make you healthier and more active. PAGE 6

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

COVER STORY

SPENDING

The lure of virtual reality

emember the View-Master you had as a child that let you see images in 3-D? A virtual reality headset is like a View-Master for the 21st century. But instead of inserting a wheel of images, you use a phone, PC or other device to stream content. The magic isn’t just in the headset. VR content is created either by stitching a series of images KAITLIN into a 360-degree PITSKER video or by presenting slightly different images to each eye and creating the illusion of depth. Both aim to trick your brain into believing that you’ve been transported to a different place than the space your body currently occupies. Video gamers already are using the technology to enhance their experience of games such as Minecraft. But you don’t have to be a gamer to take advantage of VR. With a headset and apps such as Google Street View and YouVisit, you can sneak a peek at the site of an upcoming vacation. There also are apps that let you see places you won’t be visiting anytime soon — say, Mars or the ocean floor. You even can help an aging family member visit or revisit a place of their dreams. Want to make some DIY home improvements? Lowe’s has started rolling out in-store VR demo areas to teach you how to make, say, a redo of your shower tile a reality. VR headsets range from large, clunky and pricey models to lightweight, affordable versions powered by your smartphone. But with virtual reality still firmly in its youth, it makes sense to hold off spending hundreds of dollars for one of the high-end models, such as the Oculus Rift ($500) or HTC Vive ($800). The easiest and cheapest way to try out VR is Google Cardboard ($15 in the Google Store). To use Cardboard, you insert an Android phone or iPhone into the box and secure it with the Velcro strips. Using Google Cardboard’s app (or search Google Play or the Apple App Store for “Google Cardboard” to find other compatible apps), you’ll be able to choose from thousands of options that let you, for example, play Pong in space. The Samsung Gear VR ($130) is a solid option if you already own one of the latest Samsung phones, such as the Galaxy S8 or S7 Edge. You can select from a variety of apps, such as Polyrunner VR for racing, NextVR for sports, concerts and other live events, and Discovery VR for immersive documentaries. Kaitlin Pitsker is a staff writer at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Combine this with the rising costs of housing and an ever-increasing urban sprawl, and our current notion of home as an intimate, unique sanctuary becomes harder and harder to attain. As more people move to urban areas, more homogenized skyscraping apartment buildings are built and fewer people are able to afford to create a personalized home that feels truly theirs, society will need to ﬁnd ways to reinvent our emotional connection to the four walls in which we live. Community housing may ﬁnd its solution in a new technology: augmented reality. Advancements in AR already are being used in our homes in smaller ways. People now can use AR to see how a new extension might look or how new kitchen units, bathroom suites or even furniture and curtains might look in situ before they commit to buying them. In this way, we are able to visualize our ideal interiors without the actual presence of furniture and paint jobs. But what if instead of actually buying a new couch, you could just upload an image of it onto your old one? In the near future, visors that appear to superimpose data or computer imagery onto

anything you’re looking at will become commonplace. Some will use lenses and conventional displays (such as Microsoft’s Hololens) and others will use direct retinal projection (such as Magic Leap). Why own a fancy, expensive wall hanging when you could just project it? By using AR, we will be able to superimpose digital architecture and design onto any surface, then add a few pets, plants, aliens, zombies or whatever else you like roaming around your living room. AR visors will provide virtual TVs without the need for a physical screen, so you wouldn’t even need to buy those: You could lie in bed and watch Netflix on your ceiling instead. This would change the way that we live. With minimal possessions and our home’s “skin” loaded in the cloud, you could rent a very small flat, put your small collection of essential furniture and gadgets in it, and use AR to make the rest look like a super luxurious penthouse suite. Combining virtual and physical worlds means you don’t even need windows: Instead of looking out onto a run-down street, you could make a virtual window that projects a beautiful forest, beach or exciting cityscape. Whenever you move, you could simply reconfigure your settings to the param-

eters of your new space and feel right at home again. With high housing demand, rapid population growth and a low supply of cheap accommodation, this could help solve a major problem. Small, cheap flats that only need simple architecture already are being 3D printed cheaply and easily, and this demand will go up as costs continue to plummet. Soon we also could have residential buildings that act like vertical cities, with hundreds of floors for recreation, business, keeping fit, eating out, socializing and hundreds more for administrative and support functions. When we’re living in mass-residence buildings where we can personalize our boxes using AR headsets, residents might rarely need-or want-to leave and tribal bonds may form that separate them from those in other mega-buildings. It is in areas such as this that we need to show great care. Technology can deliver some very exciting possibilities for future buildings, but without appropriate thought, new social problems could result that are straight out of sci-fi dystopias. And we can’t simply take our headsets off Quartz to make them go away.

BY USING AR, WE WILL BE ABLE TO SUPERIMPOSE DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN ONTO ANY SURFACE, THEN ADD A FEW PETS, PLANTS, ALIENS, ZOMBIES OR WHATEVER ELSE YOU LIKE ROAMING AROUND YOUR LIVING ROOM.

Seize the future of typing without a keyboard

BY CASSIE WERBER

There will come a time when sitting in front of a screen and tapping keys with your ﬁngers will seem impossibly clunky and laughably old-fashioned. Instead, researchers say, the most likely next phase of human-computer interaction will be typing in “thin air” while gazing, for example, at the ocean. As computers become smaller and largely virtual, researchers are having to think of other ways for us to interact with them. The current generation of smartphone users may be willing to learn to type with just two thumbs; some of us have carried around bluetooth keyboards for train journeys and conferences. But no one wants to connect a keyboard to a smart watch, and while voice recognition software is improving, users are highly resistant to talking to computers in public. If the future of screens is augmented reality — as Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO has predicted — a virtual space where the user sees both what’s really in front of them and the “objects” on the screen, how are we going to interact with it? The question is not just a philosophical one but has major commercial applications. Per Ola Kristensson, a professor in Interactive Systems Engineering at the University of Cambridge, said desks in the future likely will be almost entirely free from hardware: No laptop, no phone and certainly no keyboard. A move away from restrictive unergonomic keyboards would help those affected by problems like carpal tunnel

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syndrome, repetitive strain injury, back pain and eye strain, which have become some of the modern worker’s most troublesome physical problems, and they can be debilitating. There are two big challenges to designing human-computer interaction in this reality, Kristensson explained. Designers no longer control what the user is looking at (what he calls the “pixel-space” of the traditional screen); and if someone’s work takes place in a space without traditional limits — no buttons being pressed or screens swiped — there’s an added challenge of working out what it is the user wants to do. Kristensson presents a possible solution to this challenge. His researchers used a head-mounted piece of hardware to project a virtual screen and a virtual keyboard, on which users “typed.” The ﬁngers don’t touch anything; their movement was detected by a depth-sensor, which tracked both where the ﬁngers typed and how “deep” they pressed into the virtual surface. The problem with the resultant data was that the imprecision of hitting a virtual key rather than a real one meant lots of errors. To correct for this, the researchers created a model of what humans were most likely to type. Working from a dataset of billions of words from Twitter, blogs and other online sources, they used machine learning to train a program to recognize the most-common letter combinations. (The technology, which currently exists in English and German, is similar

PUBLISHER John M. Humenik, Vice President/News and CCO, Lee Enterprises

to that used in predictive text on a traditional smartphone.) The speed at which users learned to type virtually was fascinating. After users had practiced on the visible keyboard, they removed all the letters. Users’ typing speed barely altered. “It turns out people remember the QWERTY keyboard very well,” Kristensson said. “So you can actually not show the keys at all. It can be completely blank, and people can still type.” Rather than screensavers of beautiful views, we could be staring at the views themselves. But wait: If we’re removing the keyboard, shouldn’t we be removing the need to move the fingers as if they’re touching a keyboard? Indeed, technology allowing people to type simply by looking at the letters does exist. Early eye-gaze typing, developed for adults with cognitive function but reduced mobility, was once slow and straining, but it now has come a long way. At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Cambridge, Kristensson presented a method for typing which combines eye-tracking with prediction, meaning that a user can slide their gaze from letter to letter, not dwelling and not worrying if their gaze “touches” intervening letters. (It’s somewhat similar to the Android keyboards that allow a user to slide their finger from letter to letter; Kristensson was one of the inventors of that technology back in 2002.) The Tobii-Dynavox, a robust tablet-like computer that can be controlled with only the gaze, is one example of

EDITOR Ben Cunningham, Director of News Presentation, Lee Enterprises

“dwell-free” eye technology being marketed to people with decreased motor function. All these solutions, of course, maintain at least the idea of a keyboard. Is it necessary? Interacting with a computer via thought alone is a tantalizing prospect. In fact, thought-only typing is technically possible, but as previous experiments have shown, it’s still a laborious process. Facebook was for a time seriously researching brain-only interaction, though the head of its moonshot division at the time, Regina Dugan, has since left. Mind-typing, Kristensson said, had engendered a lot of interest, but relies on signals too faint and imprecise to lead to real outcomes — or as he puts it: “the equivalent of being outside a concert house and trying to listen for the flute.” To make it actually efficient, he said, you’d need to drill a port in your head. There are those who want to take that step. Elon Musk has said he sees the future of AI as necessarily involving the implantation of hardware in the human brain, and he has suggested a fine mesh of electrodes that can knit, over time, with brain cells. How soon until it’s normal to see someone lying on a comfortable sofa, gazing at the ceiling and using a pair of glasses or nearby eye-tracker to compose an email or write a novel? Tech companies are secretive, but “everybody’s racing to figure out how to do this and how to make it deployQuartz able,” Kristensson said.

DESIGNERS Matt Arroyo and April Burford, Lee Design Center

Content featured in this section was gathered from resources associated with the Tribune Content Agency, including Inc., Quartz, New Scientist and The Atlantic Online.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

COVER STORY

EMBRACE VIRTUAL

RETIREMENT Old age shouldn’t just be about survival — it should be about fun

BY GEORGIA FRANCES KING

o look at Albert is to stare the untapped possibilities of later life in the face. He is physically fit, lives on his own and, as a member of the Lifestyle Leaders group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, he works with students and researchers seeking to chart the future of life after 85. Unfortunately, however, his time at the lab only occupies a single day of his week. He is long since retired, lost his wife years ago and finds it a constant struggle to fill his days with more than television. Three days a week are accounted for with activities, he said, “but there are four more days.” He looked down, exhaling softly. “I just never realized just how much time there would be”. “Old age” as we currently know it is just a fictional story we tell ourselves. We’ve inherited a narrative of what is normal in later life: that old age is a time to relax, rest and retire. These are fine pursuits, to be sure, but they don’t necessarily add up to a full life. People over the age of 65 have a lot of time to fill. That story isn’t an immutable law of nature. It was rather written by humans surprisingly recently to serve the purpose of an economy that was built around manual labor. In this narrative, a ready and endless supply of youth was necessary to keep factories humming and farms productive. Despite changes in industry, this outdated story continues in our minds today, perpetuating a mental image of a time when older workers need to simply retire — or, more to the point, get out of the way to make room for countless young people eager to take their place at the head of the line. But the physical capacity of an individual worker is far less important in today’s knowledge economy. Even manufacturing, farming and construction environments are increasingly automated, making physical labor less demanding at any age. As the work has changed, so too should our outdated story of old age. If it was written once, it can be rewritten again. In fact, it must be rewritten, because it now is hamstringing what is possible for up to a third of our adult lives. In most industrialized countries, the 85-plus comprise the fastest-growing part of the population. If you assume a typical retirement starts between ages 60 and 65, and you live to 85 or more, that’s two or more decades of passivity. That’s a lot of time to fill. In the United States, adults over age 65 report that they spend more time pursuing

leisure activities than any other age group. While that may sound relaxing — troublingly — most leisure time for older people consists of solitary activities, such as reading or watching television. Add to that the fact that as many as half of older people in some nations likely are to live alone, and you have a recipe for social isolation and loneliness. This takes both a mental and physical toll; research suggests that social isolation may have the deleterious physical impact of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. So instead of solely focusing the future of aging on care and compassion, let’s address an overlooked element that could have an outsized impact: the question of fun.

WHY CAN’T IT BE ALL FUN AND GAMES?

For businesses seeking a piece of the fast-growing longevity economy, reinventing the future of fun in old age is perhaps the most promising option of all. After all, today’s older adults have more money and education than any previous generation of older adults — and, of course, lots and lots of time. Our notions of permissible fun remain stuck in the 1950s, however, inextricably coupled with the norm of retirement not just from work, but from society at large. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The market for new sources of socially connected fun in the longevity economy could provide lucrative business opportunities for the groups serving it up, and, more importantly, crucial social beneﬁts for the fun-havers themselves.

BEYOND BINGO: GROUP EXERCISE

Exercise has been described as the wonder drug for many physical and mental health conditions. Organizations therefore are investing in group exercise activities for older adults. In the United Kingdom, Age UK offers a host of innovative, age-adapted opportunities, such as walking football matches and Zumba Gold. Singapore’s Health Promotion Board sponsors a group exercise program named Sundays@ThePark: The mass workouts are held at 50 parks across Singapore, engaging older adults in intergenerational exercise ranging from kickboxing to stretching set to Korean pop songs. As one 66 year-old said in a Singapore Ministry of Health interview, while the program is a convenient way to stay ﬁt, “the sessions have also allowed me to get to know my

neighbors and make new friends.” In this way, group exercise has social beneﬁts, too. In the US, a recent MIT AgeLab study showed that membership in group exercise programs had direct physical activity and health beneﬁts — as predicted — but also reduced social isolation. For example, an older woman who had been a longtime member of Tivity Health’s Silver Sneakers program, which engages millions of older adults in group exercise, described the group as a social lifeline. Once, when she became ill for a protracted period and unable to attend her group exercises, her “exercise buddies” regularly visited her at home and kept her refrigerator stocked with food.

HERE COME THE SILVER GAMERS

You’re never too late to start. That said, disability or the absence of transportation can relegate many older adults to lives of solitude in their homes. For people who spend most of their day in chairs of one sort or another, it’s essential to build routes to social fun that are accessible from a seated position. Here, the rise of virtual reality headsets holds real promise. Take for instance the startup Rendever, which offers VR tours to such destinations as the streets of Paris and even up to the highest elevations of Macchu Picchu. Importantly, users often “travel” in groups, which provides a social outlet for those physically unable to socialize in that way. Demonstration studies conducted in senior housing settings, such as a pilot program at Benchmark Senior Living, have shown that VR can brighten a person’s day with a novel experience and spark spirited chatter among fellow travelers in a guided virtual tour. A new generation of older gamers — called silver gamers — also has arrived. As 84-year-old Doris Oram told The Guardian, her favorite way to wind down in the evening is by playing video games on her Kindle Fire. And in community centers and senior housing, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox consoles have made video golf and bowling not just a way of having fun but building camaraderie: Today, the National Senior League collects and reports schedules for older-adult Wii Bowling leagues across the United States.

••• The future of aging is not about older people: It’s about all of us. As you look toward your own future, it’s worth asking yourself what you see. It’s worth thinking about how young people can build a world where more will be possible in their later years: more social connections, more interaction and more fun. By investing in such uncharted aspects of the longevity economy now, we may pave the way for ourselves to live longer, better — and perhaps Quartz with a smile.

Motion sickness is likely to get worse in VR age BY ROSIE SPINKS

The word nausea comes from the Greek word naus, which means ship. And indeed, ever since humans ﬁgured out how to traverse the earth by boat — and then train, car and plane — they’ve also had to contend with the nausea, vomiting and queasiness that tends to afflict us when our bodies are in constant, jostling motion. But just because it’s been around forever doesn’t mean we understand why it happens. Indeed despite years of research, nobody has deﬁnitively explained why being shaken around on a ship or while strapped into an airplane seat causes such digestive system distress. In a globalized world, with more people than ever traveling by air and ship, there’s plenty of motivation to get to the bottom of it. And it’s a problem Silicon Valley is applying itself to also, as motion sickness is acknowledged as a growing problem in virtual reality settings. And yet it’s a question that still confounds scientists. Lawrence Hettinger, a retired consultant who worked on systems theory for the US Navy, Army and NASA said it best: “What earthly purpose does that serve, to throw up in response to motion?”

VR SICKNESS

“There’s a Nobel Prize in there for someone who ﬁgures that out,” said Dr. Thomas Stoffregen, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Minnesota and someone who has been studying the causes and effects of motion sickness for the bulk of his career. (He wanted to be an astronaut, but he ended up pondering why astronauts get sick instead.) Stoffregen and some other researchers take issue with one of the most prominent theories, the neurotoxin response. The theory goes that being on a moving boat, car or plane causes a sensory conﬂict. In other words, the way your body is moving and what your senses are observing the world don’t match what your body is used to on stable ground. This confusion of inputs upsets your vestibular system, which is the body’s internal balance system. Your body’s adaptive response to that confusion is to assume it’s being poisoned, and therefore to eject the contents of your stomach. The theory dates back to a 1977 paper in the journal “Science,” and despite being believed widely, Stoffregen said it’s not only not been proven — it’s not testable. Stoffregen’s research points to another idea. It’s not sensory disruption that upsets our bodies, it’s postural imbalance — the way your body has to work a little harder to keep you upright and walking on a ship or plane. This, he said, explains the fact that some people get sick and some people don’t — something for which the poison adaptation theory doesn’t account. His research has shown that “individual variations in the way people move their bodies naturally exist and are, in fact, related to who is susceptible to sickness and who is not.” The people on board a ship who “learn this changed pattern of motor control quickly will regain stable control of their body quickly. People who learn it slowly will be walking around in wobbly unstable manner.” But as for why this unstable posture triggers vomiting and nausea? “Why doesn’t it give you a headache? Why doesn’t it make you tired? Or dizzy? I just plain don’t know,” Stroffregen said.

WANNA GET SICK? TRY A FLIGHT SIMULATOR.

Hettinger, whose work involved trying to solve the sickness that occurred in ﬂight simulators, agrees that the poison theory has little evidence to back it. But he notes that people who lack a vestibular system — something that can happen through disease — simply don’t get sick, indicating that there might be a multi-variate, context-dependent cause. Research has shown that women and migraine sufferers are more likely to get motion sickness, and both Stoffregen and Hettinger said they come across people who either age out of their suffering or all of a sudden develop motion sickness despite never having had it before. As technology evolves, motion sickness is a problem that’s likely to get worse, not better. Hettinger said that sizeable amounts of investment from companies like Oculus Rift have gone into ﬁguring out not only how to reduce sickness while using virtual reality mounted headsets, but also the “perceptual after effects” that can affect your spatial judgment when emerging from a virtual world. “It’s not just being moved,” Hettinger said. “It can happen in response to head motion just sitting there looking at a virtual environment.” That’s a big problem as VR becomes more widespread in work and other environments beyond gaming. And technology aside, we’re still left with the ancient problem: What can the sick seafarer do to feel better? Stoffregen said there is evidence that ginger candy and cookies can help settle the stomach of sick passengers (just don’t ask him why). Anti-histamines are only likely to work because the drowsiness they cause makes you put your head down and go to sleep — thereby removing the postural disturbance problem. Your best bet, he said, is simply to close your eyes and stabilize your Quartz head on something.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

COVER STORY

Embrace a new reality in 2019 with mixed reality BY ELIZABETH KIEHNER

In December 2018, Lego launched their Playgrounds AR app for children of all ages. Weeks later, Tesla revealed their patent around augmented reality glasses for factory workers. In the healthcare space, surgeons in Poland demonstrated how Google Glass could be used to help plan heart procedures, and NHS clinicians are using Microsoft’s HoloLens to help surgeons plan operations in Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool. Will 2019 finally be the year where we see AR and VR scale? With all of the recent hype surrounding the promise of 5G, AR’s infrastructure will be enabled and the implications for businesses of all sizes are profound. Take Adobe’s Project Aero, which will be an AR authoring tool that connects with other platforms like Photoshop, Illustrator and Dimension. Designers will be able to author AR experiences without learning to code, and they can use existing Creative Cloud tools in new ways to bring their work to life in AR. Imagine placing 2D and 3D artwork, client projects and more in the real world around you. According to global research and advisory firm Gartner, by 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in AR and this year International Data Corporation, a provider of market intelligence, predicts 20 percent of mobile apps will have AR features embedded. But what are these features and how do they impact your business? Let’s focus on three areas, and going forward let’s use the term mixed reality. In customer experience, mixed reality empowers consumers to: Try before you buy Enable virtual browsing Offer digital contextual guidance Provide personalized fan experiences For the enterprise, the primary benefit is in training with things like: Virtual operating room, virtual aircraft Just-in-time training Decision support — cognitive guidance Finally there’s business insights to help get ahead of issues before they occur: Data visualization and decision support Preventive maintenance Where is this happening in real life? Last fall, Macy’s expanded its partnership with virtual reality startup Marxent Labs to help the retailer reduce return rates on furniture. Marxent soon will operate at Macy’s in 70 stores nationwide, and they plans to spread to 20 more locations through early 2019. After pilot tests at three stores, Macy’s reports product returns decreased to under 2 percent for VR-influenced furniture sales. New robust experiences like these can drive profitability for businesses of all sizes by offering customers a test drive, demo or way to visualize a product in their space and on their terms. While extended reality offers myriad benefits to retailers, high upfront costs remain a barrier to adoption for some. That said, new devices like the Oculus Go may make the experience more accessible and attainable for all audiences, while low code developing environments should pave the way for broader accessibility and adoption. For AR to truly prove its worth, we’ll need to see companies move beyond proof of concepts and usher in an era of broad and consistent AR deployInc. ment across multiple sectors.

WE LOVE VR

Virtual reality and augmented reality have a lot of skeptics, but they’re here to stay

BY TOM POPOMARONIS

irtual reality continues to defy expectations and expand, with adoption levels higher than ever before, but the technology still boasts its fair share of skeptics. For many observers, VR merely is another video game peripheral, which severely limits its appeal. Critics tend to respond to any defense of VR with the usual talking points. It’s for kids’ games. It’s not for business. It’s just a “fad.” It’s merely a novelty. Even so, the breadth of users and markets that use VR — and similarly augmented reality — expand far beyond what most skeptics would like to believe. The industry slowly is changing its public perception, not simply by refuting doubters’ criticisms but by demonstrating its versatility, diverse use cases and game-changing potential.

REMOTE EDUCATION IS NO LONGER REMOTE

One of the key areas where VR can and already is making a big impact is all levels of education. In its most basic form, this means providing students the ability to attend lectures and classes from their own homes in a completely new manner. While Massive Open Online Courses have failed to live up to their promise as a way of breaking down physical barriers in the field, VR offers a completely immersive experience that is more conducive to learning.

Even for more advanced fields like medicine, VR offers a unique opportunity for students to simulate medical procedures, different scenarios and other important lessons in a safe and risk-free environment. Yondr, a VR production shop that specializes in creating immersive employee training experiences for corporations, has been able to warm up sales prospects simply by demonstrating the power of its VR solutions in remote webinar presentations. “We want to show people how to integrate VR within their companies as a new tool and a medium to become more sustainable,” Yondr Marketing and Events Manager Niels Waem said in a case study for ClickMeeting, the platform his team uses. “We have received some really great feedback. No matter what subject of the webinar is or what type of audience, the feedback is always positive.”

CONNECTING BUSINESS WORLDS

Even the world of urban planning and architecture has started to embrace VR, albeit in more targeted ways, making use of the technology to build more detailed and precise renderings and decisions. Robert Allen, who handles marketing for carbon-neutral home design firm Citu, noted that “if you put someone in a VR experience, they can walk around the house just as they would in reality. They can poke their head around a door or look up to see things that they would have missed in any other format — even though the real house doesn’t yet exist.” When getting stakeholders on board with an initiative requires leaps of imagination, VR tech can help the conceptual to feel material.

CREATING EXPERIENTIAL ENTERTAINMENT

Finally, VR can open the world of entertainment to whole new markets. The current reality of ticket prices for attending sporting events and concerts means that a wide demographic is priced out of these activities. VR is changing this paradigm by giving people shared remote attendance experiences. Facebook’s new “Oculus Venues” initiative, for example, allows groups of friends to convene at a Golden State Warriors game, a screening of American Psycho or a New Orleans jazz jam session — and that’s just a fraction of regular programming. Wearing headsets allows participants to talk with friends and strangers seated virtually nearby. This creates a whole new industry for VR and provides a much more realistic use case than even video games, which, booming as they may be in popularity, have less mass appeal. It’s a deeply immersive way to consume content.

BREAKING DOWN [VIRTUAL] WALLS

The VR industry isn’t as mature as we thought it would be by now, but it does seem to be moving in the right directions. More of the industry’s innovators and proponents need to help demonstrate why the technology possesses so much potential. As TECHnalysis Research Founder Bob O’Donnell noted, “the enthusiasm in today’s consumers will only grow. The opportunities may be a bit slow in coming, and the technology is unquestionably in its early days, but there’s little doubt that both will likely surpass our current expectations.” Inc. Time will tell.

THIS SURPRISING TECHNOLOGY MAY BE THE KEY TO ENCOURAGING EMPATHY AND KINDNESS

BY PETER ECONOMY

“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another.” - Alfred Adler As a tech-obsessed society, do we now have less empathy? Do we have less kindness? With the rise of technology, many of us are spending hours and hours on social media and online platforms — communicating through screens. We have less face-to-face interaction with our peers — interaction that is crucial for learning how to read and express emotion. And we often see viral content and news coverage that may have a hand in desensitizing us. Our ability to share and understand others’ emotions, which can foster helpful and altruistic behavior, is more important now than ever. But is technology doomed to destroy our empathy and compassion? According to new research, now may be the time that technology actually encourages and builds empathy and compassion. A study published this month in the

journal “PLOS ONE” suggests that virtual reality could be a “useful tool to encourage empathy, helpful behavior, and positive attitudes towards marginalized groups.” This study, led by Fernanda Herrera from Stanford University, investigated if VR systems could

aid “perspective-taking” — that is, if participants could successfully imagine what it would be like to be someone else under specific circumstances. In the study, one control group of participants only read information about homelessness. Meanwhile, other groups experienced the narratives interactively on a computer or by experiencing the narrative in 3D using VR. The results? In comparison to narrative-reading or computer-based task participants, VR participants were more likely to sign petitions to support homeless populations when asked. Follow-up surveys also showed participation in the VR task has longer-lasting positive effects on empathy when compared to those in the narrative-reading task. When we work to truly understand the perspective of others, we work toward removing judgment and hate from this world. Technology may have made building empathy difficult in the last few decades, but it may now be the solution we have been needing all along Inc. — hiding in plain sight.

VR CAN EASE FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING Hate public speaking? Practicing in front of a virtual crowd may help you conquer your fears. One third of people feel excessive anxiety when they have to speak in front of others. Philip Lindner at Stockholm University in Sweden and his colleagues wanted to see if virtual reality could provide a safe environment in which people can face these fears. They recruited 50 adults with public speaking anxiety to try a training app. It works via a VR headset that allows them to pretend to address a large hall of people, a small office meeting or a wedding party. After 3 hours, the participants reported feeling significantly more confident. They also felt less nervous, shaky and sweaty when they were given real-life exercises to try like asking questions in meetings or giving presentations. New Scientist

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ENVISIONING AI’S FUTURE

IBM UNVEILS ITS NEXT STEPS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

E BY GREG SATELL

ver since IBM’s Watson system defeated the best human champions at the game show Jeopardy!, artificial intelligence has been the buzzword of choice. More than just hype, intelligent systems are revolutionizing fields from medicine and manufacturing to changing fundamental assumptions about how science is done. Yet for all the progress, it appears that we are closer to the beginning of the AI revolution than the end. Intelligent systems still are limited in many ways. They depend on massive amounts of data to learn accurately, have trouble understanding context and their susceptibility to bias makes them ripe targets for sabotage. IBM, which has been working on artificial intelligence since the 1950s, is not only keenly aware of these shortcomings, it is investing heavily to improve the basic technology.

IMPROVING LEARNING

Smarter, sleeker AI will continue to evolve in 2019

BY JARED ATCHISON

rtiﬁcial intelligence is invading our everyday lives, but it’s not as scary a concept as people once thought. AI has shown it can make our personal lives much easier, but it doesn’t stop in our homes. Businesses constantly are coming up with new ways to use AI to engage with customers, make processes easier and drive sales. We’ve already seen the popularity and effectiveness of AI-powered chatbots in recent years and how Facebook uses AI to improve the results of ad campaigns. But what’s next for AI and how can it further boost the success of businesses? Here are key trends to watch in 2019:

SPEECH RECOGNITION

Amazon’s Alexa was a big hit with consumers in 2018, making it easier for people to search for information on the web and do things around the home. In fact, 66.6 million Americans are projected to be using speech or voice recognition technology in 2019. This year, Sony, TiVo and Hisense unveiled TVs that can be controlled by voice. Even home appliance makers such as Delta, Whirlpool and LG have added Alexa’s voice recognition skills to help people control everything in their homes from microwaves to faucets.

What makes AI different from earlier technologies is its ability to learn. Before AI, a group of engineers would embed logic into a system based on previously held assumptions. When conditions changed, the system would need to be reprogrammed to be effective. AI systems, however, are designed to adapt as events in the real world evolve. This means that AI systems aren’t born intelligent. We must train them to do certain tasks, much like we would a new employee. Systems often need to be fed thousands or even millions of examples before they can perform at anything near an acceptable level. So far, that’s been an important limiting factor for how effective AI systems can be. “A big challenge now is being able to learn more from less,” said Dr. John Smith, manager of AI Tech at IBM Research. Improving a system’s ability to learn is key to improving how it will perform.

UNDERSTANDING CONTEXT

One of the most frustrating things about AI systems is their inability to understand context. This flaw can get extremely frustrating when we’re trying to converse with a system that takes each statement as a separate query and ignores everything that came before. IBM made some important headway on this problem with its Project Debater, a system designed to debate with humans in real time. Rather than merely respond to simple, factual questions, Debater is able to take complex, ambiguous issues and make a clear, cogent argument based on nuanced distinctions that even highly educated humans find difficult. A related problem is the inability to understand causality. A human who continues to encounter a problem would start to wonder where it’s coming from, but machines generally don’t. “A lot of the AI research has been focused on correlations, but there is a big difference between correlations and causality,” Smith said. “We’re increasingly focused on researching how to infer causality from a large sets of data. That will help us do more than diagnose a problem in say, a medical or industrial setting, but help determine where the problem is coming from and how to approach fixing it.”

THE FUTURE OF AI

When IBM announced its System 360 mainframe computer in 1964 at a cost of $5 billion (or more than $30 billion in today’s dollars), it was considered a major breakthrough. The launch of the PC in the early 80s had a similar impact. Today’s smartphones, however, are inﬁnitely more powerful and cost a small fraction of the price. We need to look at AI in the same way. We’re basically working with an early version of the PC, with barely enough power to run a word processing program. In the years and decades to come, we expect vast improvements in hardware, software and our understanding of how to apply AI to problems. One obvious shortcoming is that although many AI applications perform tasks in the analog world, the computations are done on digital computers. Inevitably, information gets lost. A challenge ahead is to develop new architectures, such as quantum and neuromorphic computers, to run AI algorithms. “We’re only at the beginning of the journey” IBM’s Smith said, “but when we get to the point that quantum and other technologies become mature, our ability to build intelligent models of extremely comInc. plex data is just enormous.

SMARTER RETAIL RECOMMENDATIONS

When you shop online, many companies give you product recommendations based on items you’ve previously purchased or browsed. In 2019, retail recommendations will be even smarter. AI will be able to better recommend products based on tone and sentiment as well as browsing history. Similar to what 1-800-Flowers did with their AI gift concierge, Gifts When You Need or GWYN, more companies will be providing more personalized and guided shopping experiences overall. Even shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores will be able to get product recommendations from AI-powered store displays like the one offered by Mystore-E.

IMAGE RECOGNITION

AI, Amazon are changing the retail industry

BY MICHELLE CHENG

rtiﬁcial intelligence is making its way into the retail industry in a big way. From 2013 to 2018, retail AI startups raised $1.8 billion across 374 deals, according to a recent report by CB Insights. The ﬂurry of activity is largely thanks to Amazon, which is forcing retailers to reconsider both their e-commerce and their physical store strategies to stay competitive. So how exactly is AI changing the retail environment? Here are some of the most fascinating trends to watch.

BETTER SHELF INTELLIGENCE

CB Insights reports that Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, considered charging its top vendors around $300,000 for several weeks of prime shelf space. Even if you can pay for top billing in Whole Foods and elsewhere, you’re still competing with many other brands for visibility. That’s left an opening for a slew of startups to develop technology to track metrics like share-of-shelf and distribution. Computer vision platform Trax Retail analyzes what happens on shelves using images from in-store cameras, robots or mobile phones to create a digital version of the physical store. Walmart already is using Bossa Nova robots to monitor price tags and missing items on shelves.

SMARTER BEAUTY PRODUCTS

Last year, L’Oral acquired augmented reality startup Modiface, which helped L’Oral launch its Style My Hair mobile app — letting users virtually try on different hairstyles. L’Oral also partnered with Facebook to let customers show off their looks — and then click to the website to make a purchase. Brands like Sephora and Este Lauder also use AR apps that “We can virtually eliminate glo bal poverty, allow customers to try on different massively reduce disease, an d provide virtual makeup looks. Retailers then better education to almost eve can analyze the data collected on face ryone on the planet. That said, AI also shape, wrinkles and skin tone to betca to increasingly concentrate we n be used ter predict inventory needs.

WHAT THE EXPERTS ARE SAYING ABOUT AI BY ERIC MACK

To try and bring some clarity to the issue of artiﬁcial intelligence, the Pew Research Center surveyed almost 1,000 smart people with salient thoughts on thinking machines. In their responses, many of the experts elaborated on their vision of our future with AI and some of the quotes make for the most fascinating parts of a rather lengthy report.

AI has made it possible to teach computers how to understand speech, but did you know that we also can teach computers how to see? Image recognition refers to the ability of computers to acquire, process and analyze data from visual sources. “AI will drive a vast range of efficiency There are many uses for image optimizations, but also will enable recognition including the ability to diagnose diseases, detect license hidden discrimination and arbitrary plates and allow for photo analysis penalization of individuals in areas for veriﬁcation. It also can help like insurance, job seeking and businesses improve their marketing. performance assessment.” Gum Gum uses its vision technology tor of the Andrew McLaughlin, executive direc to scan millions of pages across the Yale University at king Thin e vativ Inno for ter Cen web, allowing brands to place relevant ads where users are most Inc. likely to see them.

alth and power, leaving many people behind.”

Erik Brynjolfsson, directo r of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

“The developed world faces an unprecedented productivity slowdown that promises to limit advances in living standards. AI has the potential to play an important role in boosting productivity and living standards.” Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

CASHIERLESS STORES

Since debuting its ﬁrst cashierless store in Seattle in 2016, Amazon Go has encouraged other startups, such as San Francisco-based AiFi, to develop cashierless store technology, using artiﬁcial intelligence, cameras, and sensors. According to the National Retail Federation, shoplifting and paperwork error cost U.S. retailers around $47 billion. CB Insights suggests that these new cashierless store models reduce the likelihood of stealing — they’re loaded with cameras and automatically charge customers. Plus, the Go stores, which are a fraction of the size of a traditional supermarket, are currently restricted Inc. to Prime members only.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

HEALTH

Why rich people won’t be addicted to tech (but the rest of us will) BY JEREMY GOLDMAN

An entrepreneur can rarely afford to unplug. If you want the best opportunities at your fingertips, you need to build credibility and connections online. Also, you can’t afford to stop checking your inbox, media feed or calendar and project management apps, lest an important opportunity slip through. Is it OK to use technology 24/7, though? Apps are designed to be addictive — think of YouTube’s endless stream of recommendations, LinkedIn and Twitter’s notifications systems, Netflix’s uninterrupted streaming. But tech overuse causes unhappiness for kids and adults alike.

TECHNOLOGY ADDICTION 101

Modern technology makes use of an age-long human weakness: behavioral addictions. Instead of injecting a substance, you directly get a pleasurable feeling every time you plug in. This is your brain’s reward for repeating a low-cost activity that brings you a lot of value. Modern technology makes it easier for people to engage in traditionally addicting activity — gambling, compulsive shopping — while also introducing new habits such as binge-watching, browsing on your smartphone or keeping close tabs on your social media likes, each of which generates a rush of pure dopamine. Innovative apps and websites are useful. But a lot of people get hooked, especially to social media. Some experts, like former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, are alarmed that technology is going to keep demanding more attention from us. “Every time you open an app, there are 1,000 engineers behind it trying to keep you using it,” he said. Dorie Clark, the author of “Stand Out,” compares this issue to alcohol companies’ marketing strategies a century ago. To maximize proﬁt, they had to get people addicted. Over time, the dangers to public health became clear. Alcohol brands ﬁnally resolved the issue by taking a socially responsible stance and keeping their product away from minors. “I think that’s probably an analogy of the type of dance the social media companies are going to have to do,” Clark said.

WAYS YOUR MOBILE APPS CAN MAKE YOU HEALTHIER (AND MORE EFFICIENT)

A BY ILYA POZIN

mounting body of evidence indicates that some of our favorite digital distractions aren’t very good for us. Smartphones are a major culprit: In their ﬁrst ﬁve years of use, the percentage of Americans who reported the internet was getting in the way of family time spiked from 11 percent to 28 percent. Still, there’s a time and a place for technology. It has the ability to help you form healthier habits, and in the workplace, it has the capacity to enhance our productivity rather than distract us from it. When it comes to making a business successful, efficiency is key. As employees, it’s helpful to view your own efficiency in the same way. Are there ways technology distracts you at work rather than boosting your productivity? Here are just a few ways to turn the problem into the solution.

THE NEW DIGITAL DIVIDE

Up until now, unequal access to technology and information has been a big problem. But this so-called Digital Divide gap is closing quickly in Western cultures: as of 2017, more than 70 percent of low-income families in the U.S. report having a computer at home. Almost half of American children aged up to 8 have their own tablet (as opposed to 1 percent in 2011). Nowadays, the question is more of how technology is being used. Wealthy business owners continuously outsource their work overseas because it’s cheaper, and they are able to let others do the screen work for them so they may unplug from technology on their days off. Clark addressed the issue succinctly. “I actually think that in some ways this is going to be the next frontier, sort of like if we think about class-based divisions,” she said, “where the rich people are eating really healthy organic food from Whole Foods and the poor people are eating Big Macs.” Addiction is nothing new for people; it’s been hardwired into our brains for millennia. However, modern technologies are providing us with brilliantly designed distractions at a pace we’ve never seen before. It’s not just media hype; it’s a danger to our society. The only question is how good of a job we’ll do at reining this addiction in Inc. before it gets much worse.

GAMES TO TRAIN YOUR BRAIN Having games readily available on your phone can be a tempting distraction from work, and mobile phone addiction is all too real. While some games and apps may be little more than a temporary distraction, though, there are others that aim to keep your brain healthy and your focus sharp. For example, Pariveda Solutions, an IT

and management consulting ﬁrm, and the Center for Brain Health recently created a mobile app that measures your brain’s speed and ability to focus. As users play the game, the center gains more data to improve what its tech can do. Other software such as RescueTime track how you spend time on your computer and mobile devices. RescueTime then generates a report so you can see where you tend to lose your focus. Once you know what’s causing you to drift away, you can more easily address it. TECH TO STRAIGHTEN POSTURE It’s probably not a surprise that your level of physical comfort affects your focus and productivity, and the tech you’re required to use at work is likely causing you some discomfort. The American Optometric Association reports that we spend seven hours each day on the computer. While many of us recognize that this is not good for our eyes, you may not know that it also has debilitating effects on posture. Bad posture can negatively impact your breathing, circulation and even your mood. But while tech has the potential to make you physically uncomfortable and distracted at work, it also offers many solutions to this problem. For instance, if you’ve noticed your posture suffers after hours at the computer or phone, check out Posture Man Pat, which uses your webcam to keep tabs on your head height. When your head drops a

certain distance because of slouching, the app will make your screen flash or give an audio notification. PREVENT MULTITASKING I know you’ve been there: You’re sitting at your computer focusing on one task, but then your smartphone dings with an email or a text. You probably cave to the distraction without a second thought. After all, it’s probably work-related, so you tell yourself you’re “multitasking.” In reality, you’re doing what some brain researchers have called “rapid toggling” from task to task. When you switch between tasks, your brain has to quickly focus on one topic then switch to another. When your brain switches gears, you lose time because you have to ease into a different topic or mindset. Wouldn’t it be great if you could limit or mute these distractions and discourage yourself from “toggling”? Fortunately, there’s a setting — and an app — for that. Your phone allows you to set do not disturb times, and commonly used workplace apps like Slack also offer “snooze notifications” mode. If you require even more saving from yourself, the Freedom app will block you from certain apps, websites or even the entire internet for the length of time you select. That means you can hunker down and focus on the task at hand rather than continuously being distracted and having to refocus on Inc. your work after each ding.

Want a healthier relationship with technology? Try these simple resolutions BY JEFF BERCOVICI

e love our technology. But we also resent it. It comes into our lives and makes them better, but, eventually, it changes us in ways we don’t anticipate and don’t like. By the time we appreciate those changes, though, it feels like it’s too late. Going back to a life before Facebook/iPhone/Amazon/Netflix/Gmail/fill-inthe-blank seems unimaginable. Very few of us want all the tech gone from our lives, but most of us crave a healthier relationship with it. We want a reset. Since the average American spends nearly 11 hours a day interacting with some type of screen, establishing a more mindful approach to one’s devices is arguably of more benefit than other common resolutions. If you’re looking to reboot your tech behaviors, here are a few ways to use your smartphones, laptops, apps and feeds without getting used by them.

TAKE A SOCIAL MEDIA VACATION. Many of us feel like social media has become a drain on our well-being, yet still ﬁnd it hard to walk away. That’s partly because Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are addictive by design, but it’s also because they’re free. Paying for them with our time and attention makes it hard to understand the value we’d recoup by quitting. One simple way around this problem is a temporary hiatus. Psychologically, it’s easier to contemplate giving something up for a few weeks than doing it forever

— even if you’re likely to arrive at the end of that break feeling like quitting for good would be surprisingly painless. Facebook knows the only thing more addictive than time spent on Facebook is time spent off Facebook, which is why it bombards inactive users with increasingly desperate notiﬁcations begging them to come back.

TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS FOR BASICALLY EVERYTHING. Speaking of those notiﬁcations, you don’t need any of them. Shutting off alerts from all of your apps is the simplest and

most regret-free ways to restore a large measure of your digital sanity. Even calling them “notiﬁcations” is buying into the ﬁction that they exist for your convenience rather than the app makers’. Call them what they are: engagement prompts and growth-hacking tricks. Social media apps are plenty addictive enough without dings, buzzes and badges demanding your attention every few minutes. You might feel like you need to know about new emails or messages as soon as they come in, but you’re better off checking your various in-boxes on a schedule that allows for uninterrupted spans of focused work in between.

STOP WEARING YOUR WEARABLES. Wearable fitness trackers are not unlike social media: When you first start using one, it’s easy to grasp the benefits, from more physical activity to better sleep. The problem is when they become a daily habit. If you’re going to be giving a company vast amounts of data about your personal behaviors, you should be accruing proportionately large benefits

over time, and that’s simply not the case with most wearables that exist now. Plus, you have to charge them all the time. Save the wearables for when you have a speciﬁc purpose for them, like losing weight or training for a race.

ESTABLISH NO-PHONE ZONES. Without question, smartphones are the world-changing invention of the 21st century so far. The quality that makes them so indispensable is also what makes them so nefarious: They do everything. It’s hard to think of an activity you can’t use a smartphone for or at least in conjunction with. But in 2018, even the smartphone makers acknowledged we should all be looking for ways to reduce our screen time. The new iOS and Android features designed to help users monitor how often they’re interacting with their devices are nice, but a simpler and more effective remedy is to pick a couple places where you often ﬁnd yourself falling into a scroll hole and designate them Inc. phone-free zones.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

HEALTH

SMART LEARNING FOR THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE

BY DOUGLAS HEAVEN

n the five steps from the door to the reception desk, my photo has been taken, my face saved in the system and an ID number assigned. For the rest of my time at this new hightech unit in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, I am followed by artificial intelligence. Video screens that will be visible only to staff show my head in a red box, annotated with a score showing how confident the computer is that I am who it thinks I am. Tracking systems like this are just one of the technologies being tested at GOSH’s DRIVE (Digital, Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments) unit, which opened last October. The

unit is a collaboration between the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, University College London and several tech companies, including Microsoft, Samsung and UK chipmaker Arm. Although the unit is part of GOSH, it doesn’t provide clinical care. Instead, it is a place where engineers can interact with patients, doctors and nurses — sometimes role playing actual scenarios — to ﬁnd out what new tech can and can’t do before it is rolled out in clinical settings across the NHS. “It’s a digital sandpit,” said Noel Hurley at Arm. “It lets us experiment and play and build and break things in a safe environment.” Arm’s chips power most of the world’s smartphones, but it also is

involved in healthcare, providing the hardware for many medical devices. The company now wants to embed AI in those devices so they can make quick, automated decisions. Medical AI has made great strides in diagnosing certain conditions, such as cancer and eye disease. But Arm is more interested in the smaller tasks. By streamlining the simple actions that are performed in hospitals thousands of times a day, such as registering patients and tracking people’s movements, it hopes to free up more staff time for patient care. Since GOSH is a children’s hospital, there will be a focus on how tech can improve the care of younger people. Several projects are under way, including a blue whale in the main entrance

THREE BEST BLOOD PRESSURE MONITORS BEST REVIEWS RECOMMENDS

BY KAREN ROTH RIDDER

An at-home blood pressure monitor can be an important health maintenance item for people trying to make healthy choices. Keeping your blood pressure in check can help shield your arteries from damage that could lead to major health incidents like heart attack or stroke. The best at-home blood pressure monitors are easy to operate and read. While a wrist monitor may seem more convenient, doctors advise that the best readings come from a cuff on your upper arm. If you need a convenient way to track and share your blood pressure information with your doctor, you can ﬁnd products with the ability to store and send data.

CONSIDERATIONS WHEN CHOOSING

Accuracy is the most important factor when choosing an at-home blood pressure monitoring system. Many people prefer monitors with large LED displays that are easy to read and understand. Some displays include color-coded information to warn you if your readings are reaching dangerous levels. Unless you are medically trained to take blood pressure readings manually, an automatic monitor with a digital readout is a wise choice. Consider the speed of the readings, which can appear on an automatic screen quite quickly on some models.

BLOOD PRESSURE MONITOR PRICES

Budget-priced blood pressure monitors cost between $20 and $40. For this money, you should be able to get a monitor that provides accu-

Best of the best: Omron/10 Series Wireless Bluetooth Upper Arm Blood Pressure Monitor Our take: A top-notch at-home blood pressure monitor with the ability to wirelessly communicate with an app on your phone. What we like: When calibrated correctly, this monitor is very accurate. It has large numbers that are easy to read, and it allows for the storage of information from two different users. An app allows you to email information directly to your doctor. What we dislike: The phone app does not automatically sync.

More reviews starting on page 13

For accurate readings, try to take your blood pressure at the same time every day. Place the cuff at the same point on your arm each time, and try to be still while the monitor takes your reading. These consistent practices will help with longterm tracking.

Best bang for your buck: LotFancy/Blood Pressure Monitor Our take: This low-cost digital blood pressure monitor can track up to four people at a time. What we like: An easy-to-understand color-coded range is included on the readout. The device also checks for an irregular heartbeat and shows your last three readings. What we dislike: Does not have the included app to communicate wirelessly with your doctor. It may wear out sooner than some other models.

rate readings and is easy to operate. If you’re looking for a cuff that’s larger or smaller than the standard size, or if you need to track more than one person’s blood pressure at a time, expect to pay between $40 and $80. A blood pressure monitor with the ability to send information through an app to your doctor could cost as much as $150.

Choice 3: Panasonic/Portable Upper Arm Blood Pressure Monitor Our take: This is a simple, easyto-use choice that provides decent value and longevity. What we like: Easy to store. Large readout. Can hold up to 90 readings in memory. Very accurate readings. What we dislike: Doesn’t have as many readout options as some others. Can’t track more than one set of readings.

HEALTH TIPS

and rabbits hopping about the wards — visible only to those with an augmented reality app. One project already up and running is Project Fizzyo, which helps children with cystic ﬁbrosis put up with their physiotherapy by making the physio device they have to squeeze into a game controller. The better you get at doing physio, the better you are at the game, said Neil Sebire, managing director at DRIVE. Hospital staff also are asking young patients what they would like in a hospital. “Most of them want robots,” Sebire said. Two robots now are being developed that can tell stories inspired by nearby objects. “Children are not limited by what they think tech New Scientist can do,” he said.

Ghostly X-rays could lower radiation risk BY CHELSEA WHYTE

An excess of X-rays is bad for your health — which is why radiographers step out of the room before they zap you. Now a ghostly physics trick could reduce the dose needed for a clear image, because it requires only a small portion of the X-rays to pass through the object being imaged. “Ghost imaging has several benefits: reduced dose, super resolution, cheap and faster data collection,” said Andrew Kingston at the Australian National University. Ghost imaging has been done with visible light rays, but Kingston and his colleagues have shown for the first time how it could be done with X-rays. They started with a series of X-ray beams, each in a unique, checkerboard-like pattern. Most of the rays in each beam reach a digital camera that records the precise details of the patterns. A small portion of the X-rays are reflected toward the object that is being imaged. They pass through the object and enter a camera with one large pixel that measures only the total brightness of the light. By combining the data from both cameras, you can compute a full 3D image of the interior of the object. “The ‘ghostly’ thing is that most of the X-rays never pass through the object, yet all of the X-rays are used to construct the 3D ghost image,” said David Paganin at Monash University in Australia, also part of the team. This is similar to computed tomography (CT) scans, Kingston said, but it has the potential to provide higher-resolution images with lower doses of X-rays. The more you know about the object being ghost imaged, the fewer X-rays you need to find an anomaly. That means that it could lower the dose for cancer screening, assuming we can get a decent model of what healthy tissue should look like in a person of a particular age and gender, Paganin said. New Scientist

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

SOCIETY

VIEWPOINT

Information overload? We’re just beginning

BY HOWARD TULLMAN

e keep hearing new statistics about the accelerating rate at which new information — content of all kinds — is being created both by humans and machines. The latter is accelerating at an exponentially greater pace, one that has been driven by machines exchanging data with other machines. There’s no end in sight to this growth, and absolutely no slowdown is even imaginable at this point. One of the most interesting challenges for the next few years will be “throughput” — how will we keep the enormous flow of data from the machines and zillions of sensors from clogging or breaking the whole internet? And, if the nonstop output from the machines isn’t bad enough, the explosive growth of big, slow and clunky videos on the web continues to increase congestion, impose constraints and raise complex questions about prejudicial pricing, inequitable throttling and other anti-competitive and anti-consumer conduct by the gatekeepers. Companies like Xaptum, one of the first Internet of Things startups at 1871, the Chicago-based tech incubator, have been addressing the machine volume concern for some time. Xaptum is talking specifically about a separate edge pathway or an entirely new network devoted exclusively to M2M transactions. But today, no one has any good ideas about what to do with the equally problematic video situation. Because, in all fairness, no one expected that everyone in the world would become a consumer and creator of video. The current statistics are interesting and demonstrate that, while we are clicking on more and more videos, we’re watching fewer and fewer of them from start to finish. Our patience these days is non-existent, and our attention spans continue to shrink. It’s clear that this isn’t especially good news for anyone, and in most instances, no one would even be tempted to describe this glut of infojunk as a source of pride. In fact, to call this flood of facts, factoids and fake news a mixed blessing is an understatement of a magnitude comparable to those old Vietnam-era military reports where we were assured that “to save the town, it became necessary to destroy it.” It’s getting harder and harder every day to effectively connect to anyone as our attention becomes an even scarcer and a more precious commodity in our lives than our time, which is increasingly and wastefully consumed by slogging our way through all this stuff. If I’m not listening to what you’re trying to say, you’re just wasting your breath. And keep in mind that this is a two-sided problem, where the pain is shared by both the companies and the consumers. It’s an enormous problem for each of us as individuals and an equally sizeable and critical problem for every business, as well. If we can’t figure out how to manage the overwhelming influx, to filter and focus the flow, and to create some tools to help infuse some meaning and value into the mess, the emergent digital communiInc. cation channels soon will resemble all the third class mail and catalogs that never even make it into the house. And “meaning” in this context includes an appreciation of the context in which all this new material is being created. Today the context of most communications is more critical to successful reach, reaction and response than the content of the materials themselves. In the same way, “metrics” don’t mean anything when there’s no one on Inc. the other end of the line.

BY EPHRAT LIVNI

f you are like pretty much everyone, you probably have a to-do list ﬁlled with seemingly simple tasks that somehow never get done. Instead of tackling the list, items linger and ﬁll you with guilt. Technology promised to simplify our lives, but errands seem to overwhelm us now. Automation, “smart technologies,” and “virtual assistants” haven’t magically made tedious tasks easier, but rather replaced old steps with new ones. You don’t necessarily have to go places to get things done, but you do have to recall old passwords or reset new ones, deal with infuriating bots that take your calls but can’t answer questions, and manage a slew of accounts. And because we change jobs more often and lead increasingly hectic lives, we experience a kind of “errand paralysis,” as Anne Helen Petersen writes in BuzzFeed. Peterson posits that the inability to deal with

life’s mundane tasks is a symptom of burnout, something she diagnoses as “the millennial condition.” She argues that millennials — loosely deﬁned as those born between 1981 and 1996 — face unique challenges. And while she’s right that many people today feel paralyzed in the face of simple tasks, she’s wrong to imagine that this burnout is unique to her generation. The disease that Peterson correctly and eloquently diagnoses is not limited to a set of arbitrarily constructed and often meaningless generational lines. What she describes is true of anyone who participates in the global, digital economy. After all, 45 year-olds also have to go to the dentist, do their taxes and sign up for health insurance. Burnout is a ubiquitous symptom of living in these times. No generation is immune to the effects of a transforming global economy and ever-changing technologies. If anything, millennials should be best-equipped to manage postmodern life, given that they were born into it. But we’re all struggling to adjust to existence in a world that’s more connected and yet more alienating, than ever before.

HAS TECHNOLOGY MADE US MORE EFFICIENT?

As Judy Shapiro wrote in Ad Age in 2009, already expressing skepticism about the iPhone 3G, “The seduction of new technology belies the reality that technology is often neither a time saver nor even more efficient.” All this technology was supposed to help people “hack” life. Apple’s 2009 iPhone ad campaign

PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR ARGUES

BY JENNY ANDERSON

f you’re a parent, you’ve probably despaired more than once at the sight of your kid indelibly glued to their smartphone. Philosophy professor Jordan Shapiro has a radical proposal: Don’t despair, rejoice. Better yet, join in. Kids aren’t losing themselves in their devices but potentially finding themselves. What’s more, they’re doing exactly what generations of kids have long done: Immersing themselves in the toys and objects of the moment that reflect the society they inhabit, and which will help prepare them for the future. Shapiro, an assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University and a respected thinker on education, childhood and technology, presents his case in his book “The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World.” He encourages parents to dive into technology headlong with their kids, be it video games or social media. On one level, parent participation is just common sense: Technology is a major part of their lives, and if you aren’t there to mentor and contextualize it for them, they will find guidance elsewhere. But Shapiro also folds in developmental psychology, philosophy and history, unpacking why people have defaulted to thinking every major technological innovation — from the printing press to television — would

isolate people, compromise their ability to communicate and destroy society. “Your job as a parent is not to stop unfamiliar tools from disrupting your nostalgic image of the ideal childhood, nor to preserve the impeccable tidiness of the Victorian era’s home/work split. Instead, it’s to prepare your kids to live in an ethical, meaningful and fulﬁlled life in an ever-changing world,” he writes. To do this, he argues, families and schools must embrace technology, including gaming, to prepare kids for an uncertain but determinedly digital future. “The New Childhood” arrives at the perfect moment, when the pendulum has swung so far against tech that it almost feels dangerous to put technology and kids in the same sentence. “We are attached to our digital devices,” Shapiro acknowledges. “But that is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, life is always lived through the tools of the times. Digital tools act like a bridge between individual and common experiences. They help us to mediate our relationship with the world around us. They ease the strain between inner and outer realities. They do this exceptionally well.”

THE PITFALLS OF SCREEN TIME

Digital tools may help us mediate our experiences of the world, but there’s good reason for parents to be concerned about their effects. Apps, video games and social media platforms are

designed by adults who work for commercial entities that exist to profit from maximizing every customer’s attention — kids included. Children do not have the self-regulation or executive function to resist the lure of such powerful persuasive design. Adults don’t either — what does that tell you? A generation of children who grew up on tech are showing us the results of their experience. They are more anxious and more medicated. Work is 24/7, in part because of the nature of jobs, and in part because they find it increasingly hard to divorce themselves from their devices. Part of my job involves speaking to parents, teachers, psychologists and pediatricians. Nearly all are alarmed at rising levels of anxiety among all children, and they see social media as part of the problem. The research linking smartphone use and mental health problems is tenuous; a 2017 report from the UK’s Education Policy Institute concluded that there is “evidence of a beneficial impact of social media on young people’s emotional well being,” while simultaneously noting that 37 percent of kids are extreme internet users and extreme internet use may have harmful effects. One thing we do seem to know is that kids need sleep — and devices mess with it. “If we wanted to invent something to undermine thriving, we would invent something to undermine sleep,” said Lisa

Damour, a psychologist and author of the forthcoming book “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.” Phones may qualify, she says, pointing to a longitudinal study that showed that kids whose phones disturbed their sleep went onto have greater mental health issues.

AUTHOR’S PERSPECTIVE: THE BEAUTY OF BOUNDARIES

It would be hard to prove that most children are addicted to technology, going by the deﬁnition from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But they certainly are distracted by it, just as we grown-ups are. I have to put limits on myself. I leave my phone upstairs when I get home from work because the pull of reading one more thread on Slack, editing that last story or reading one more study is too great. My kids need my attention, and I can only fully give it to them when I am not distracted. In this, I am modeling exactly what I want them to learn: Technology is amazing, and we should embrace all it has to offer. But we also should know its perils and recognize its power. I am not longing for the nostalgic days of yore. My kids engage plenty with technology. But as with education, I try to scaffold it; Everything builds on what comes ﬁrst. They practice using Instagram and YouTube with me, using them in short stints. Soon enough, they will be on their own with their own devices.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

SOCIETY

OUR DIGITAL MALAISE The life-draining tedium of errands is even worse in this age of digital convenience

WHEN TECHNOLOGY WORKS, IT CAN HELP SAVE A LOT OF TIME. BUT IT DOESN’T ALWAYS WORK lives wisely. The present self isn’t always inclined to follow through on those plans. One reason for that is because the present self and the planning self can feel disconnected. If you can’t see the “you” of the future, the one who will beneﬁt from dealing with today’s tedium, then it’s difficult to get the present “you” motivated. These theories apply to all aspects of our lives, not just retirement planning. Admittedly, it’s difﬁcult to see the future in a turbulent world where your circumstances keep changing. But you can impose some controls. To tackle your to-do list you have to be able to see beyond the present, which can feel overwhelming when you’re already checking all your social media feeds and responding to emails and are steeped in the needs of the moment.

SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE

centered around the idea that “there’s an app for that” — namely, that smartphones would help humans do everything they needed to do faster, better and with the tips of their ﬁngers. Instead, for many people, omnipresent technology turned life into an endless and insurmountable to-do list. And a lot of technology actually makes accomplishing a task less efficient. Take customer service lines. To set up or cancel most services today, you have to call a customer service number that often is understaffed and overwhelmed. Marchex, an advertising analytics company, found in 2016 that Americans wasted more than 900 million hours waiting on hold. An older survey, conducted in 2013 by the texting app TalkTo, found that over half of US respondents reported spending between 10 to 20 minutes a week on hold, which totals about 13 hours a year. When technology works, it can help save a lot of time. But it doesn’t always work. Passport scanners at airports, for example, are meant to cut down waiting times at customs and make traveling more seamless. But when the machines are broken, lines get longer. And there are no immigration agents there to help; they’ve been sent to do other tasks because the machines were meant to replace them.

LEARNING TO DEAL

It was once taken as a given that people act rationally — we do what we should because we know it’s good for us. Or at least that’s what economists thought when they built their models. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler introduced the notion that this isn’t true. Thaler pointed to a slew of cognitive biases and strange behaviors to prove that humans often avoid choices that would serve them well — like opting into a 401K — because they just don’t want to deal with decisions. He proposed that governments and institutions nudge people in the right direction, making it easier to choose wisely, and incentivizing rational choices by forcing workers to opt out of a pension plan rather than opt-in, for example. In Thaler’s view, each of us is two people. We encompass a present self and a planning self. The planning self wants to pay taxes on time, tick things off of our to-do lists and manage our

HALF THE WORLD IS NOW CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET This year will prove to be a transformative moment for the internet. For the ﬁrst time ever, more than half of the world’s population will be using the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Much of that progress was seen in Africa, which recorded the highest growth globally in just over a decade. But while internet penetration continues to increase, affordability continues to remain an issue, especially in Africa. Here’s a look at the numbers:

3.9 billion

The number of people who will gain access to the internet by the end of the year, according to United Nations estimates.

The percentage of the global population who live within range of a mobile network.

The percentage of Africans who had internet connections in 2018, up from 2.1% in 2005.

45.3

The percentage of people in developing countries who now have internet access, up from 7.7% in 2005.

One approach to becoming more efficient about what must be done is to simplify your life by having fewer demands on your time. We’re not as busy as we think — we spend a lot of time gratifying the present self with activities that don’t advance our future self. We would beneﬁt from heeding Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s advice: “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.” In practical terms this might mean taking measures to break our screen addictions; developing systems that help us prioritize our commitments such as the Bullet Journal or Eisenhower Box; or on a more fundamental level by understanding time better by reading up on chronemics, the study of time. Another option is to accept the current condition. This isn’t exactly giving up, more like adjusting mentally. In the beginning of her Buzzfeed feature, Peterson beats herself up for not taking her shoes to the cobbler, for example, all the while noting that she is writing books and exercising regularly and managing a cross-country move at the same time. She ends up in a place of self-acceptance: “I don’t have a plan of action, other than to be more honest with myself about what I am and am not doing and why,” she writes. “This isn’t a task to complete or a line on a to-do list, or even a New Year’s resolution. It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.” If we learn to accept that, in order for us to keep our sanity and fully participate in society and our lives, some things will have to slip through the cracks, we can stop feeling guilty when they do. Less time spent lamenting would free up the energy to get this tedious task done — or just to have more fun. One reason so many of us feel burnt out is because we put excessive pressure on ourselves. We imagine success involves doing it all — while looking good, too. Some of this pressure is real, and some of it is invented. As Thaler points out, no one is perfect. And we don’t have to be. It’s liberating to learn to distinguish between the idealized lives presented on Instagram and the reality that existence is messy and complicated and that we have limits. Your to-do list could ﬁll you with pleasure if you connect to your future self, knowing that tackling certain tasks will make you happier later (or zapping them like you’re playing Space Invaders). But part of that process is simultaneously letting go of the bits that don’t matter as much. Perhaps what we are missing most now is a sense of perspective. There’s no app for that, Quartz but it is worth your time.

CHILDREN MUST USE MORE TECH They will have a model of time management to draw from; they will likely ignore it. But it’s there as a tool. Shapiro and I agree on many things, including on the need for schools to better use technology in the classroom. And his context is different than mine in many ways: I am raising my kids in Britain, where I am constantly struck how much younger kids seem compared to their US peers. Culture and context matter: Our kids are the same age, but none of their friends have phones, which makes it easier to be resolute that mine won’t either. Shapiro grew up loving gaming; I grew up loving

sports. Not surprisingly, my kids love sports; his, gaming. We are creating contexts for our kids that makes sense to us. We’d both probably argue that the tools we are giving them will prepare them for the future (though his may be more employable). But we diverge on plenty of points. Shapiro says he doesn’t impose limits on his kids’ screen time, pointing out that children often are using their digital devices for educational or creative purposes. “Balance and boundaries no longer makes sense as the organizing principle of child-rearing,” Shapiro writes in reference to a conversation he had with NPR education correspondent Anya Kamentez, who suggests a sort of Goldilocks approach to screens: not too little, not too much, mostly with others. I enthusiastically set limits on my kids’ tech use. Everything I have learned about parenting suggests that kids thrive with boundaries. We remove these boundaries as they get older because our goal is not to make clones but to let them develop into fully actualized and independent humans. But for a brief time, we have a big role in showing what we value and what constitutes fun. That said, Shapiro has set plenty of rules around what his kids do need to do: Read books before bed, allow themselves to feel bored on short car rides, get exercise, and, like many families, no devices at his dinner table.

“The New Childhood” opened my mind to the context in which technology exists. Historical perspective is useful when confronting raising kids with devices we did not have. Adulthood, he writes, “is about one’s capacity to creatively adapt the pillars of human wisdom so that our collective values remain meaningful even when situated in new contexts.” After reading his book, I am not convinced that our collective values are best reflected in video games, but I understand my own fears a bit better and am more convinced of some of the benefits technology can offer. But if humans have forever been resistant to change, we also have managed to change anyway. Maybe my parents worried TV would fry my brain; now I spend 10 hours a day on a screen. Were they right or wrong? The change came, resistance be damned. Childhood is shockingly short, and parents are stars in it for a fleeting moment. What makes parenting hard is that we design that role with a million different decisions every day, from what values we model to what snacks we pick. Also, how we approach tech. I’m still sticking with the digital-light path, an approach that’s more board games and bike rides than Minecraft. Maybe that means my kids will be ill-prepared for an uncertain future. Or maybe they’ll have just the tools they need Quartz to work it out.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

SOCIAL MEDIA

WHO’S TO BLAME FOR FAKE NEWS?

BABY BOOMERS

M BY JESSICA STILLMAN

alevolent foreign governments, morals-challenged party hacks and click-hungry opportunists produce fake news, but their misleading posts wouldn’t do any damage if no one actually shared them. And when you go looking for who spreads divisive nonsense on Facebook, you find a culprit much close to home. When a team of researchers out of New York and Princeton Universities dug into the data recently in an effort to get a handle on just who spreads fake news, their investigation led them straight to ... the baby-boom generation. In general, a Boomer might be a politically and technologically savvy person. But the detailed analysis of the posting histories of 1,300 Americans from the period around the 2016 election did reveal that older folks are nearly four times as likely to share fake news as Millennials. Who’s to blame for spreading fake news? Mostly Boomers. The good news from the study, recently published in “Sciences Advances,” is that sharing fake news actually is less common than you might imagine given the political firestorm around the issue. “According to our data, fewer than 1 in 10, or 8.5 percent, of our respondents shared links from fake news domains,” report the researchers behind the study: Andy Guess, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker. That small amount of sharing wasn’t equally distributed among the population, however. One group did wildly more to spread fake news than any other.

WHATSAPP TRYING TO BEAT ITS FAKE NEWS PROBLEM Rumors, hoaxes and misinformation find fertile breeding ground on social media. But as Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms increasingly crack down on misinformation, the purveyors of false stories are seeking refuge on direct messaging apps such as WhatsApp. In developed countries, WhatsApp is primarily used as a personal messaging app. But in developing countries many people rely on it as a social network. Here, it’s not uncommon to join groups with hundreds of members. People follow groups dedicated to topics ranging from interests in sports and entertainment to media and politics. The problem is that WhatsApp is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. Because its messages are encrypted, the app provides a safe haven from snooping individuals and governments. This, combined with a mistrust of government, often prompts people to use WhatsApp to exchange private information that they feel hasn’t been “contaminated” with pro-government or corporate bias. But as the encryption stops WhatsApp from moderating messages, it’s difficult for the company to fact-check or delete misleading messages or links.

“More than 1 in 10, or 11.3 percent, of people over age 65 shared links from a fake news site, while only 3 percent of those age 18 to 29 did so,” report the authors. “No other demographic characteristic we examined — gender, income, education — had any consistent relationship with the likelihood of sharing fake news.” If you’ve ever been bombarded by non-

WhatsApp itself isn’t at the root of misinformation. Political polarisation, ethnic tensions, the rise of instant communications and a growing mistrust of politicians contribute to the current environment in which fake news has flourished. But because misinformation on WhatsApp is so difficult to debunk, fake stories about politics can quickly spread to others. WhatsApp maintains that it neither can nor wants to access any of the messages that are sent on the platform. So content moderation, as Facebook and Twitter are carrying out, isn’t an option. Intead, WhatsApp has commissioned several research groups to investigate the problem of misinformation on the app and look for alternative ways to address it. The University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab has had some success with a psychological intervention in the form of an online game, Bad News. The idea is that when people play this game, they will learn more about the various techniques of misinformation and how they often are deployed. The lab now plans to develop a new adaptation of the game that can educate players about the complex spread of misinformation on WhatsApp and its potential Quartz social consequences.

sense posts from that one crazy uncle or older acquaintance, this might not come as a huge shock to you, but it did surprise Guess, who told The Verge: “For me, what is pretty striking is that the relationship holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology. The fact that it’s independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to me. It’s not just being driven by older people being more conservative.”

Which isn’t to say that conservatives and liberals were equally likely to share fake news. Older folks of either political persuasion were more likely to spread misinformation than their younger counterparts, but conservative seniors spread by far the most. “While 18 percent of Republicans in our sample shared links from fake news sites, only 3.5 percent of Democrats did,” the authors report (self-identified independents shared as much as Republicans). But the authors note that most of the fake news produced before the election was pro-Trump, so conservatives may just have had more options to be misled. Whatever the explanation for conservative older folks being the most prone to sharing misinformation, share they did. “Republicans over the age of 65 were seven times more likely to share fake news than respondents of any political leaning aged between 18 and 29,” NewScientist’s write-up of the study highlights.

FIXING THE PROBLEM

These numbers pretty conclusively prove that Boomers are the main culprits when it comes to spreading fake news, so clearly the next question to ask is, why? Does an aging brain tend to make it harder to tell the difference between a genuine news story and a hoax? Or is the main problem digital literacy? Perhaps less technologically experienced seniors just aren’t as good at reading the clues that help people tell dubious from dependable sources online. This research didn’t weigh in on that question, but the scientists behind it hope to study the issue further this year with the aim of devising more effective strategies to beat back Inc. fake news.

Prolific Instagrammer is second-oldest U.S. senator BY HANNA KOZLOWSKA,

While social media generally might be seen as a younger person’s game, with Congressional newcomers using Instagram to shed a new light on the daily lives of lawmakers, the most prolific Instagram user in the US Senate is Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, who runs his own account, according to his staff. Grassley, 85, has served in the Senate for nearly four decades, making him the second-oldest Senator behind Dianne Feinstein. He likes to post photos of himself with his constituents and political friends, almost always posing in the same way, often with the classic arm-around-the-shoulder pose. The feed might be repetitive and quotidian, but Grassley is taking advantage of a political tool that is becoming more powerful than ever. Grassley led the senatorial pack for a second year in a row, posting more than 585 times in 2018, according to a new report from public affairs software company Quorum. That’s more than

any of his Senate colleagues, even though his account is far from the most popular, with only about 18,000 followers compared to Bernie Sanders’ 2.8 million. “From meeting with Iowans visiting Washington to weighing in on the important issues of the day to sharing a bit of history from the Capitol and to chronicling how corn grows, Sen. Grassley uses Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to be as transparent, accessible and informative as possible,” Michael Zona, Grassley’s communications director, told Quartz by email. Grassley’s Facebook page is run by his staffers, where they share items more related to the news, while Instagram and Twitter updates come from the senator himself, Zona said. He’ll often post his Instagram photos on Twitter. Many Senate Instagram accounts appear to be carefully curated by staffers, including polished, professional shots and photos with text overlays of issues the politicians care about.

From time to time, some senators will include photos from when they are at home, cooking and spending time with family, or behind-the-scenes shapshots. Grassley’s account, on the other hand, frequently is sprinkled with badly-lit photos of office plants, ancient vacuum cleaners or grandatherly pictures of himself by a pile of chopped up wood at home. His feed may be dull, but these moments show the senator in a more genuine, uncontrived way. That’s where Instagram is at its best: More than on any other social platform, it’s where politicians can reach younger constituents, who use Instagram more than other networks, and de-mystify the life of a politician. The new guard in Congress is very well aware of this, particularly those that grew up as digital natives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, is especially adept at making her Instagram a glimpse into the life in Washington, through the eyes of a new-

comer. Her account could be a signal of what’s to come from US politicians: a radically transparent Instagram as a megaphone used to speak directly to constituents in ways that previously just weren’t possible. An unsuccessful Senate candidate from Texas, Beto O’Rourke fills his feed with posed photos, but he’s taken to Stories to document his daily life. His account was the most prolific on the House side, which is unsurprising, considering his Senate campaign’s strong presence on social media overall. Overall, 70 percent of senators posted on Instagram, and only 50 percent of House members did. (Twitter is the most-updated platform for both sides of the aisle and both houses of Congress, with Senate octogenarians like Grassley and Democrat Dianne Feinstein as frequent posters.) This could be because Senate offices have more staff and resources to dedicate toward a digital communications than their House counterparts, Kevin King, head of communications at Quorum, told Quartz Quartz.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

SECURITY

MORE WAYS TO PREVENT CREDIT CARD THEFT BY JOHN DISCALA

Although new technology is constantly emerging to fight against credit card theft, hackers also are constantly crafting more elaborate schemes. For frequent business travelers, the chance of going somewhere and having your information stolen vastly increases since you are constantly flying and moving through different networks. That doesn’t mean we can’t prevent it from occurring by taking additional steps to ensure it’s protected. Here are a few ways to protect credit card information and stay safe from malicious attacks.

ENABLE TWO-STEP AUTHENTICATION

BEWARE OF

HACKERS More than 2.5 billion accounts have been hacked this year alone. Here are 4 things you can do to protect yourself

BY HEATHER WILDE

t hasn’t been great time recently for companies having to disclose their data breaches. In just one week, both Marriott and Quora disclosed breaches totaling 600 million consumers. The compromised data is similar — and staggering. For some users, partial bank account information was compromised, including name, bank name, country, currency type, last 4 digits of their account number, routing number, and transaction times and amounts. While these are disturbing, they’re only the latest in a string of megabreaches that have become commonplace. Just last year, Facebook, UnderArmour, Exactis, British Airways, Air Canada, T-Mobile, TimeHop, MyHeritage, Ticketfly and Aadhaar had incidents affecting nearly two billion people combined — and while those are the most sensational, they are by no means all of them. What’s worse, these are happening so frequently, there’s a fear that people are becoming desensitized to them. Here are four things you should do right now to protect yourself from harm from these digital pirates.

START MONITORING YOUR IDENTITY.

There’s an entire new industry of identity theft protection services that has risen precisely because of these breaches, as the standard solution most companies employ after a breach is to offer one year of free credit and identity monitoring. In fact, research shows that individuals affected by a breach who receive free credit monitoring or identity theft protection are six times less likely to file a lawsuit against the breached company. While they can’t protect your accounts from being compromised, they will let you know as soon as they are, so you can alert

the bank, credit agency and authorities immediately — reducing your liability.

CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF.

If you’re anything like me, when you see a new website that interests you, you’ll sign up for an account to test it out. And then you’ll promptly forget about it when you’re done. The best way to protect yourself from breaches is to sign up for accounts only that you really need — use guest accounts wherever possible, and delete your account on sites you no longer use.

USE A PASSWORD 3 MANAGER

When all 50 million Evernote users’ passwords were reset after a 2013 data breach, the most common support request was from users to be able to change their password back to the one they had before. The common reason was that it was the same password they used everywhere else, and they didn’t want to have to remember a new one. Reusing passwords is something a lot of people do. Hackers know this. If you use 1Password, LastPass or another password manager, you can use just a single password and still have unique, secure passwords on every site.

FREEZE YOUR CREDIT.

The most extreme but effective way to keep anyone from opening a new account in your name is to set up a credit freeze or lock with each credit agency. If you don’t want to go that far, you can set a free fraud alert that requires lenders to verify your identity before issuing new credit. No matter what you do, whenever a new breach is announced, check the affected site, change your password, and check any associated accounts for unusual transactions. This problem isn’t going away, so the more proactive you Inc. are the safer you’ll be.

HACKERS WILL INCREASINGLY TARGET VIDEO GAME PLAYERS In the online gaming world, it’s normal to play with or against strangers — and this is presenting an important security threat as the value of the industry grows. A new forecast report by Experian, the credit and identity theft protection firm, predicts that videogame data breaches will be a major issue in 2019. Cybercriminals can “easily pose as a gamer, build trust within a particular game or community, and gain access to privileged inside information,” the report said. While video-game hacks are nothing new, it is now more lucrative because of the industry’s growth and shift towards selling in-game assets. According to Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm, the industry is worth about $138 billion worldwide. Young gamers, Experian’s report notes, are particularly at risk, especially if they do not fully understand security practices or believe they are in a trusted community. And with the growth of games like Fortnite, which has 80 million monthly players and is popular with kids and teens, more minors are playing games. Some companies, like Xbox, have parental controls in place to monitor activities, and the US Federal Trade Commission has agreed to investigate whether children are being lured into gambling via video games. Until the industry is more regulated, however, players can take added security measures like downloading a password manager or enabling twostep authentication. — Aisha Hassan, Quartz

Saving your credit card information on your digital device does make it easy and convenient to make purchases. But even if your password is complex, it shouldn’t be your only line of defense between your personal information and the dark web. To ensure that your information has the highest level of protection, enable two-step authentication. Instead of using just your password to log into an account, you’ll have a time-sensitive code you’ll need to enter to confirm that it’s you.

TURN OFF AUTO-PAY

Auto-pay is a convenient and useful option, especially when you have multiple credit cards. However, it’s wise to check your credit card statements each month. This way if something is suspicious, you can catch it before things escalate. In addition to turning off auto-pay, check credit card statements at least every two weeks.

FREQUENTLY MONITOR YOUR CREDIT SCORES

Keeping an eye on your credit score and any new activity can help resolve problems that you didn’t catch. Besides worrying about hackers attacking you directly, they also breach consumer’s data from companies. By the end of the summer of last year, there were 864 data breaches and over 34 million records were compromised, according to Rippelshot. Thirty percent of the data stolen was credit card numbers. Make sure that you have safeguards in place from all angles. You may also be able to get free credit reports and credit card monitoring from your credit card issuer.

CONSIDER USING CONTACTLESS PAYMENT

Similar to Apple Pay and Google Pay, contactless payment is when you can tap your card in front of payment systems and in seconds, your payment is processed. Besides the fact that it’s so fast, most users enjoy contactless payment because it’s a lot easier than fiddling with your mobile wallet, it’s travel-friendly, and most importantly, it’s secure. It’s accommodated with a one-time security code so a hacker can’t copy it and get your credit card information. Although chips have reduced this type of fraud, it still helps to know that you have a payment option that’s both secure and fast.

WATCH OUT FOR PHONY EMAILS

Full disclosure: A few years ago, I almost fell prey to a phishing email. It was a ‘Delta’ flight itinerary asking me to confirm my ticket. Besides the fact that everything in the email looked legitimate, it also had a route from JFK-SFO that I previously took. If I’d been extremely preoccupied when I checked my email, assumed it was real, and entered my account information, I would’ve been telling a different story. Most of the time, their targets are people who travel frequently or those who have frequent flyer accounts. If you ever have an email from a credit card company, an airline, or even a hotel that wasn’t prompted by you, don’t click any links in the email. Instead go directly to their website and Inc. inquire there.

FAMILY FINANCES: KEEP DATA SAFE IN THE CLOUD

BY KAITLIN PITSKER

You probably got the memo ages ago that you need to back up your computer’s files religiously. Otherwise, they could disappear into the void should your computer’s hard drive implode or your machine fall victim to hackers. Today, much of what you do on your computer, tablet and smartphone — from accessing email to streaming music and movies — relies on the cloud. Experts still recommend regularly backing up files on an external hard drive and disconnecting it from your computer when you’re done. But you also should use an internet-based service to save, sync or back up your files. In recent years, space in the cloud has gotten cheaper, and many cloud storage providers have expanded their menus to offer a wider variety of plans and features. Keeping your documents and other files in the cloud will lighten the load on your computer’s hard drive and allow

you to access your files from anywhere. Most cloud services offer a limited amount of storage free, then they charge monthly or annual fees for additional space. For example, Amazon Drive for Prime members, Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s OneDrive provide 5 gigabytes of free storage; Box offers 10GB, and Dropbox provides 2GB. One terabyte of data storage — enough to hold tens of thousands of digital images, plus files and documents — typically costs $100 to $120 a year. That’s plenty of memory if you’re sharing the space or using it to store movies or lots of photos. The service that’s right for you will depend on the types of files you store,

how much space you need and whether you plan to edit or access the files regularly or share them with others. Before signing up for a larger, paid storage plan, use a service’s tools to upload and view a handful of files to make sure you find the process straightforward and convenient. Consider keeping documents with sensitive information on your computer’s hard drive or encrypting the files before uploading them to the cloud. It’s hard to beat Google’s offerings, including 15GB of free storage if you have a Google account. Need more space? Upgrade to a paid storage plan and share your storage space with up to five family members. A 2TB storage plan costs $100 a year. And regardless

of how much storage space you have, Google provides a robust workbench of tools that allow you to edit documents, spreadsheets and other files on the go and share them with others. Or, if photos from your smartphone are gobbling up space, stash the images in Google Photos. Other solid options include Dropbox and iCloud. Dropbox’s meager 2GB of free storage won’t hold many files, but the company’s Plus plan ($99 a year) includes 1TB of space and makes sharing files between devices a breeze. Apple devotees are best served by iCloud. The service works with both Apple and Windows devices, but iCloud already is baked into Apple devices and is an easy way to back up your smartphone. You’ll get 5GB of free storage, and a 2TB storage plan — which can be shared with up to five family members — costs $10 a month. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

WORKPLACE

HERE’S WHY YOU NEED TO HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT BY AMANDA PRESSNER KREUSER

ENJOY THE END OF

INBOX ZERO E

BY WANDA THIBODEAUX

mail is one of those things you can’t help but love to hate. While it’s a great communication tool, it also is nasty like dirty laundry, growing back and smothering you with dark, overwhelming feelings of deja vu. But don’t be fooled. Inbox zero isn’t something you need to achieve. The real problem is in our perception of “done.” We often associate the empty inbox with having taken care of current issues and, therefore, effective leadership. So if there’s even one little digital message in our email, we feel like we have to attack it. If we don’t, we feel like we’re missing something. And that’s before you add in the fear of getting overwhelmed — we rush to respond because we’re afraid that we won’t catch up later. But here’s the reality. Much of what comes into the inbox doesn’t need you. Don’t let your ego trick you into thinking otherwise. More than two thirds of email is spam. A lot of the rest is non-urgent material, such as simple acknowledgments of receipts or even blank emails sent just for the attachment you’ll need later. Assuming you’re not able to hand 100 percent of your email off to someone else, here’s what you should do. At the beginning of your workday, instead of starting at the top of your inbox and working your way down each message, scan through your inbox for urgent-looking subject lines that match your objectives, or do a ﬁltered search by keyword or sender if you’re expecting something critical. Move those emails

to a folder labeled “Mail That Matters” or flag them. Mass select everything that’s left and move it to a folder called “Non-Urgent Unread”. Now go back to “Mail That Matters”. Visually, now you see only what’s truly important. This simple technique helps you visually distinguish between what likely doesn’t deserve your attention and the small percentage of messages that probably do. It puts your attention back on the message content, rather than on message quantity, so it’s easier not to get distracted from the goals of your business. The reduction in stress you get from seeing fewer communications can help you concentrate well and make better decisions. You always can go to the “Non-Urgent Unread” folder when you get a few extra moments, and since most people expect you to reply to an email within 24-48 hours, a good rule of thumb is that you probably can delete what’s left in the “Non-Urgent Unread” at the end of each week. Trust that people will send a new message or phone you if you make a mistake and a critical email gets misfiled. This divide-and-conquer trick also doesn’t mean you can’t use all the other email strategies out there. Go ahead and keep using filters and clear email policies. The idea is just get to the point where, as those strategies help you out, you can look at your inbox based on your goals and objectives and not worry about the rest. Judge your success by whether you’re communicating on issues that relate to the company vision, because that’s where real leaders allocate their Inc. time.

DON’T REPLY TO YOUR EMAILS

The day after Christmas, I spent seven hours sifting through more than 2,700 unread emails. Like many other people, I intended to begin 2019 with a fresh inbox and zero unread messages. Since the idea of “Inbox Zero” was first coined in 2007 by Merlin Mann, a blogger who championed “finding the time and attention to do your best creative work,” it has become what many people consider the pinnacle of digital organization. Products such as Polymail, Mailstrom and Superhuman were built to help make our inboxes more manageable. And a growing number of offices have instituted chat systems such as Slack to help minimize interoffice emails. Despite all these developments, we receive more email than ever. According to a recent study by the Radicati Group, a market-research firm, people across the globe sent and received 269 billion emails a day in 2017. By 2021, that number is projected to reach more than 333 billion. There simply is no way for anyone with a full-time job and multiple inboxes to keep up with the current email climate. Even after deleting and sorting my 2,700 unread messages, I awoke the next day to more than 400 more. In 2019, I suggest you let it all go.

— Amanda Pressner Kreuser, The Atlantic Online

Ever wish you could clone yourself so you could get more done in a day? Then you’d force “other you” to do the boring grunt work so you can do the fun parts you enjoy the most or those that increase your bottom line? (At least, that’s my own not-so-secret plan!) Whether you’re a small business owner, freelancer or an independent contractor, the idea of hiring someone else, like a virtual assistant, to work for you might seem ludicrous. Who can afford it? The reality it, offloading a few time-consuming, lower-level projects can actually free you up to earn more money by doing the higher-level work that you do best. Many of us were ﬁrst introduced to the idea of a virtual assistant after reading Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek,” where he “outsources work and life” to virtual assistants so he can pursue other passions. Now, with an estimated 25,000 virtual office assistants worldwide helping others grow their business, it’s a role you can’t ignore when you’re not ready to hire an employee but need more hands on deck to help you get work done. But before you decide to siphon off your hard-earned freelance dollars for a VA, read on to learn more about their services and how they can help you grow your business.

WHAT DOES A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT DO?

Think of a VA as someone who is an employee that does hourly work for you remotely. Some virtual assistants do research on behalf of a writer, others can help you set up calls for phone interviews and meetings or help you with accounting, while others can work on your website, to name just a few. Common skills among VAs include data entry, internet research, emailing, customer service support, email services, bookkeeping and administrative support. If you ﬁnd that you need help scheduling and juggling your personal life and work life, a company like FancyHands. com can help you research services — doctors, beauty, dog walkers — and complete tasks that take less than 20 minutes.

THE BENEFITS OF HIRING A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT

When you’re considering leveraging this type of worker, it’s because you want to free up your time to make more money for your business. Freelance writer Diana Kelly Levey uses a virtual production assistant to help her build articles on her site’s portfolio section. It’s something she says she can do but it’s not the best use of her time and Levey can spend that hour working for a higher-paying client instead of doing the production work herself. Know your limitations. You could hire a VA pro to help with video editing, adding SEO to your website so clients can ﬁnd you, starting a blog for your business or helping you plan a business trip. Freelance content marketing writer, Jennifer Goforth Gregory, cites outsourcing more work to her virtual assistant as one of the reasons why she made over $100,000 freelance writing one year. Outsource help for tasks others can do, which leaves you more time for the work that only you can do for your clients.

FINDING A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT

Check with your freelance network and ask on social media if anyone has a great virtual assistant they’d refer to you or a friend who does this kind of work. Some websites to peruse for virtual assistant services include: VirtualGirlFriday.com, Guru.com, VirtualAssistUSA. com, Freelancer.com, Upwork Inc. and Fiverr.

The remote workforce: Creating productivity outside the office BY RHETT POWER

What if the best way to improve the office were to eliminate it? A 2017 Gallup study found that 43 percent of Americans worked from home at least part of the time, and many more would like to. Working remotely offers the advantages of no commute, chooseyour-own attire, and more organic scheduling. Overall, it’s just a lot more comfortable and convenient. There’s no reason employers should cling to the idea that people must be on-site. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to encourage remote work. Letting employees work remotely, at least for part of their workweek, can save your company money. One study found that companies can save $1 million on expenses each year by letting at least 100 employees work remote at least half of the workweek. Less expectedly, going remote also might help with recruiting. Fully 90 percent of people who currently work remotely say they plan to continue doing so for the rest of their career. A remote workforce, in whole or in part, is the logical future of employ-

ment. Preparing for this future now will make the transition easier overall.

USE TECHNOLOGY TO KEEP TEAMS ENGAGED

A remote workforce can become disconnected and uncoordinated if you’re not careful. Technology ensures that ideas and information — formal and informal — ﬂow throughout the organization. Videoconferencing, group chats, online training modules and digital recognition platforms are great tools for keeping employees engaged. There’s no doubt you need the technology necessary to support your remote team, but your distributed tech also creates cyber risks. Robin Hau, founder and CEO of SimplyClouds, warns that lax security could create regulatory compliance concerns as well. “Small businesses and IT managers face many complex data management issues, not least of which is security,” he says. Before sending all your employees to work from home full-time, make sure you have the cybersecurity safeguards in place to protect the data your company holds.

EQUIP MANAGERS FOR THE TRANSITION

Working remotely can feel liberating to team members but overwhelming to team leaders. The simple fact is that leading remotely is not as easy. It’s important to prepare managers even more extensively than employees. Managers must become adept at treating fully remote and on-site workers equally. Most importantly, managers have to continue to fulﬁll their core role — assigning responsibilities and setting expectations — without face-to-face contact. Developing a new mindset around productivity is important during this process. Donald Hatter, a business development consultant, recommends focusing on the big picture rather than the minutiae of task management. “Don’t worry as much about what is being done. Instead, concentrate on what is being accomplished,” he notes. The writing is on the wall, and it says that the traditional office is on the wane. If you start preparing now, the transition will be seamless. Better still, the advantages will be Inc. immediate.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

BEST REVIEWS

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO BestReviews is the site to turn to when you’re about to buy something. From heated blankets to trampolines to cordless drills, we compare the top products in thousands of categories to give you the most reliable purchasing advice. Our goal is to make it easy for you to pick the best product and be conﬁdent in your decision.

SIMPLIFY YOUR TECH SHOPPING WITH INSIGHT FROM OUR EXPERTS WHY TRUST BEST REVIEWS?

BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers. We make money only if you purchase a product through our links, and we never accept free products from manufacturers.

HOW WE DO IT

When you’re getting ready to buy a product, you have options. There may be hundreds of products to choose from, dozens of them with user reviews that make them sound great. It can be confusing and time-consuming to cut through the data to ﬁnd the best product for you.

THAT’S WHERE WE COME IN

Our reviewers and subject-matter experts evaluate the dozens (or hundreds) of available products in each category, and from them, select the shortlist of the most promising and best-selling products. When we decide you, the consumer, would beneﬁt from additional product insight, we buy these products, just like you would, and subject them to independent evaluation and tests.

ALL ABOUT ALEXA

New Alexa devices and what they can do for you

W BY JAIME VAZQUEZ

hen Amazon first announced the Amazon Echo and introduced us to Alexa, one of the first mainstream digital assistants, everything changed — but the world had no idea that that was the tip of the iceberg. As users began to rely on Alexa’s ever-growing list of digital services, Amazon responded by creating more platforms for Alexa. Soon after the original Echo came the smaller Echo Dot — and now there’s an entire product line of devices that include Alexa’s digital assistant services. Here are a few of our favorite new places to find Alexa.

THE ECHO AUTO

The Echo Auto takes everything you love about Alexa and brings it to the comfort of your car. It connects to your smartphone for web access and listens for voice commands. You can ask for anything from the latest sports scores to directions to your favorite haunts, all while you’re driving. Here’s what you

need to know before buying. The good: The Echo Auto is a fantastic road trip companion, and it’s best-inclass voice recognition means you can always keep your hands on the wheel. Having a digital assistant in the car giving you turn-by-turn directions feels like a new level of luxury. The bad: The Echo Auto will rely on your phone’s internet connection, so depending on what type of data plan you’re on, it can increase the risk of monthly overages.

THE VECTOR ROBOT BY ANKI

If you’ve ever wanted a voice-controlled, real-life version of WALL-E, you’re in luck. The Vector is a robot companion that’s only a few inches high, but it can be easily controlled with the included smartphone app or with voice commands to Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa. With more than a little artiﬁcial intelligence under the hood, the Vector can even respond with emotional faces. The good: The Vector is a capable smart companion for all ages. Whether you want it to tell you the time, set an alarm or even play games with you, it’s as close as you can get to having a pet you don’t have to clean up after. The bad: It uses 2.4GHz WiFi connectivity, which is an older, slower standard. It can take pictures, but it requires a lot of light for the pictures to come out well.

SECOND-GENERATION ECHO SHOW

When Amazon released the first-generation Echo Show, its first smart speaker with a screen, it was a bit underwhelming. It had a seven-inch screen, text that looked good but not great, and a built-in speaker that produced audio with the quality of an FM radio. Thankfully, they’ve learned from their mistakes and surpassed expectations with the second-generation Echo Show. The new model has a 10-inch screen, vastly improved audio, and a plastic and fabric casing that’s perfect for any setting. If you’re into making video calls or you just want a kitchen companion to walk you through your favorite recipes, the new Echo Show is a slam dunk. The good: The second-generation Echo Show looks and sounds significantly better than its predecessor. In comparison, the first version feels like a toy. It’s got new functionality, too: with a built-in Zigbee controller, it now can work with a host of new smart home devices, so you don’t have to buy any separate hubs to use them. The bad: It often can struggle with streaming video, even from Amazon Prime Video. It’s not currently possible to customize the home screen, which means you’re stuck with the options that come with the Tribune Content Agency hardware.

ECHO DEVICE FUNCTIONS

When using Echo, you issue voice commands to the device. Just ask a question in a conversational tone, preceded by the wake word, “Alexa,” and the software will attempt to fulﬁll your request. Some functions you perform with Alexa and Echo are informative, some result in physical functionality and some are just fun. Ask questions Looking for a bit of entertainment from Echo? Feel free to ask Alexa any silly questions you can think of, and you may receive some funny answers. Obtain information You can ask Alexa for a weather report, information on your personal calendar, or for sports scores. Control smart home devices As long as your Smart Home hardware — like thermostats and lights — are compatible with Echo, you can control the devices through voice commands. The simplest way to control your home devices is to use an Echo-compatible outlet converter.

BEST AMAZON ECHO DEVICES

CONS

PROS

BOTTOM LINE

Personal assistant devices are one of the next steps toward the self-aware home and car. The family of Amazon Echo devices ranks among the most well-rounded personal assistant device hardware available.

BEST OF THE BEST

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

Amazon Echo

Amazon Echo Dot

Amazon Echo Plus

Amazon Echo Spot

Amazon Echo Show

The original and still the best, most well-rounded device on Amazon’s Alexa Voice service. Amazon is focusing on constantly improving it and it gets regular updates.

A great starter Echo.

If you need the built-in hub, this is a good pick. But if that’s not a necessary feature, the original Echo is just as good and more affordable.

Choose it if you are an Echo fan and like to stay current on the latest state-of-the-art smart technology.

While many users love the technology this intuitive device offers, the high price and known issues may deter some consumers.

A fun and surprisingly practical voice assistant for your family. Plays music, helps in the kitchen, and even controls lights and other devices.

Reasonable price. Tiny. Does 99 percent of what the original Echo does. Bonus feature: You can plug it into an external speaker for excellent audio quality.

Tech lovers who want to connect all of their home’s smart devices will love this Alexa-friendly Echo’s built-in hub. Compatible with Phillips hue and even comes with a bulb. Has Bluetooth.

A promising new release with exciting features, including video, Bluetooth connectivity, slim design and Alexa function. Very smart — adapts to individual preferences, requests and even speech patterns.

An Alexa-compatible device that sports a vivid 7-inch screen that’s ideal for video streaming. Easy to use once set up. Bluetooth connectivity.

Expensive. Doesn’t work on batteries.

Not very good audio quality by itself, but simple to connect to a Bluetooth speaker.

A bit more costly than the basic Echo, but has more features. If you have other hubs, it may not be practical. Design is bulky compared to the ﬁrst-gen Echo.

On the higher end of the price range. It’s a new release, so any bugs and quirks are yet to be discovered.

Pricey. It takes some tech-savvy to set up the device. Has some technology issues — some users have commented that it’s “not ready for prime time” yet.

THE DIGITAL USER

SPRING 2019

BEST REVIEWS

BEST WIRELESS KEYBOARDS For the professional on the go or the neatnik, a wireless keyboard does away with cords and keeps your workspace clean and free of clutter. You can sit comfortably without worrying about cable length, and type from your desktop, lap or the couch.